The Campbell Academy Blog | Colin Campbell (71)

The Soft Launch

I/we never pioneered the soft launch.

This was something that was done by many other companies in many different ways over the years in marketing and product launches.

We harness it, though, and use it sometimes in the most effective ways.

To give you an example of the soft launch years ago, I wrote a blog called 'Today we decided on a thing.'

That was the day we decided we would build a practice, but it was years and years before the practice, and it didn't mention building a practice in the blog, although loads of people spoke to me about that and asked me what the thing was.

This year, we launched our Year Three Implant Course as a soft launch without a complete and detailed program to our tribe of people who trust us, who have come back and back for different aspects of education and who know and feel (I believe) that every time we put something on it is of the highest quality.

We filled that course entirely; in fact, we oversubscribed it without even a hard lunch, just teasing out the information about what we might be doing.

Two years ago, I wrote a blog about the Rony Jung Master class and emailed some people who'd been on courses before.

We filled that course, too.

It is one thing to have all your ducks in a row, everything lined up so that you can tell everybody everything exactly about what you are going to do, but it is another thing to have developed and nurtured the trust of a group of people where you can say to them "Do you know what next year we're going to do an extraordinary thing", and they say "I trust you and I'd like to be part of that thing".

On the desk in my office, there is a huge and enormous book, the size of book which would kill you if it dropped from about 5 ft onto your head.

It is one of the Seth Godin blog collection books.

I subscribed to buy that book before it ever existed when Seth wrote a blog and said he was going to do another one of those books.

I wasn't quick enough to get to the first one that he did, and I regretted that, so I knew I wanted the second one.

I put my hand up and subscribed to buy it when I didn't know what it would cost or look like, what would be in it or even when it would be delivered.

I did that because I trust Seth Godin, and I love the work that he does.

As a reward, I got my name inside that book (with hundreds of others), and it will never be published again.

Creating scarcity, trust, value, and quality is very different from just winding out product after product and expecting the market to bite.

The soft lunch is a privilege; it is the reward you get for years of hard work, building connections and building trust (oh, my God, I've even started to sound like Seth Godin).