You Had a Silent Launch… Now What? with Amy Traugh
- Amy Traugh
- 19 minutes ago
- 13 min read
🎧 The Metrics Maven: Data Driven Business Growth Strategy for Solopreneurs is streaming on all platforms. Listen here. Also streaming on YouTube.
You Had a Silent Launch… Now What?
Silent launches feel discouraging, but they’re not a verdict on your business. They’re simply information. When you learn how to interpret that information, you’ll see exactly what needs support so you can grow your business with far less stress.
Why Silent Launches Happen More Often Than You Think
If you’ve ever wrapped up a launch, checked your phone obsessively, waited for those Stripe notifications, and heard nothing but crickets, you are absolutely not alone. Silent launches happen far more often than the online world admits.
And no, a silent launch doesn’t mean your offer is bad or your business is broken. It’s simply a data point. When you approach it with curiosity instead of judgment, you start seeing the real opportunities inside your launch.
A big reason silent launches feel so heavy is something called survivorship bias. In the online space, you mostly see the success stories: the 100K month, the sold-out launch, the viral creator. What you don’t see are the thousands of entrepreneurs who ran the same strategies and didn’t get those results.
Because only the “wins” get amplified, your brain makes it mean something is wrong with you. But here’s the truth of the industry:
Standard digital product conversions are often only 1 to 3 percent.
A strong sales page converts around 3 to 5 percent.
A 10 percent conversion rate is exceptional, not normal.
More than 40 percent of coaches make under $30,000 per year.
So if your launch didn’t explode, you’re probably performing closer to industry norms than you think.
Your metrics keep you grounded in reality instead of hype.
The Four Most Common Areas Where Launches Lose Momentum
Silent launches usually point back to one of four places in your sales system. These aren’t signs of failure. They’re simply the parts of your pipeline that need support.
1. Visibility
This tells you whether people even knew your launch happened.
If your reach was low, your audience may not have seen enough of your launch to make a decision. Maybe your pre-launch runway was too short. Maybe your list wasn’t warmed up. If people don’t know an offer exists, they can’t buy it.
2. Lead Quality
Even if people saw your launch, were they the right people?
Viral content can bring in curious onlookers who aren’t ready to invest. If your list or audience isn’t aligned with your offer, conversions will naturally be lower.
3. Messaging
This is where your sales page and pre-launch content do the heavy lifting.
Your messaging might make sense to you, but does your buyer see themselves in it? If your content leans too heavily on features rather than outcomes, interest drops off quickly.
4. Conversion
Even with aligned traffic and solid messaging, friction slows sales.
Clunky checkout flows, unclear calls to action, slow load times, or misplaced buttons can cause people to click away. These small technical details have a big impact.
Each of these areas is fully fixable with simple, strategic adjustments.
A Real Client Example That Shows What’s Actually Happening
One of my clients, Katie, experienced a silent launch that left her feeling embarrassed and confused. She had been in business for three years, she did everything “right,” and still… nothing.
When we pulled her metrics, the story became clear:
About 200 people viewed her sales page
Only two clicked the buy button
Her strongest pre-launch content wasn’t warming up her email list
A big chunk of her audience came from reels, but they weren’t aligned buyers
Her sales page focused heavily on features instead of outcomes
This launch wasn’t a failure. It was simply a launch with opportunities.
We made small adjustments to her messaging and pre-launch warm-up sequence, streamlined the sales page, and four weeks later she relaunched.
She sold six spots in 48 hours.
Not because she burned everything down. Just because she finally had clarity.
What To Do After a Silent Launch
Let’s walk through the four steps you can follow to use your silent launch as strategic fuel for your next one.
Step 1: Review Your Metrics
I know this can feel uncomfortable, especially when emotions are high. But your numbers are neutral. They’re simply showing you where the system lost momentum.
Look at:
Email open rates
New subscribers
Sales page views
Button clicks
Checkout completions
Cart abandonment
These numbers give you the full story.
Step 2: Identify the Disconnect
Ask yourself:
Did enough people see the offer?
Were they aligned with the offer?
Did they understand the transformation?
Did they click but not buy?
Did they abandon checkout?
When you shift from “What’s wrong with me?” to “What is the system telling me?” everything feels lighter.
Step 3: Make Small, Strategic Adjustments
A few examples:
If visibility was low:Add warm-up content, send more emails, create educational content, use segmentation.
If lead quality was low:Shift your lead magnet so it attracts buyers, not browsers.
If messaging was unclear:Strengthen the transformation, clarify the fit, simplify your sales page.
If conversion was the issue:Fix checkout friction, shorten the path to purchase, adjust button placement.
None of these require a full rebuild. They’re simple refinements.
Step 4: Run the Experiment Again
Once you’ve made your adjustments, relaunch. Compare the data from your next launch to your previous one. Now you’re comparing apples to apples.
This is how you grow your business strategically instead of reactively.
The Most Important Reframe You Can Make
A silent launch is not a failure.It’s a clue.
A clue that your business is ready for its next refinement.A clue that your messaging, visibility, or funnel needs support.A clue that your systems have an opportunity waiting to be uncovered.
Growth comes from iteration, not guessing.
Lean into your metrics. Stay curious. And keep moving forward one strategic step at a time.
If you're ready to finally ditch the data drama and create a simple, repeatable process for growth, this is exactly what we do inside Metrics Mastery.
Get started for free at amytraugh.com and let’s build a business that’s backed by strategy, not stress.
Until next time, stop guessing and start growing.
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Transcript for Episode 444. You Had a Silent Launch… Now What?
@0:04 - Amy Traugh (Amy Traugh)
Have you ever wrapped up a launch, checked your email, looked at your phone, all your messages, and then nothing?
You planned this launch out, you created the content, you emailed your list, you warmed up your audience, and still nothing.
If you're nodding along, I want you to know that you are not the only one dealing with this. Silent launches are so much more common than most business owners realize, especially for solopreneurs who are building everything without a team.
And while this can feel really, really disappointing in the moment, a silent launch is not a sign that there is anything wrong with your business.
A silent launch is simply information. And when you approach this with curiosity instead of judgment, you start seeing opportunities right in plain sight.
that you didn't notice before. Today, we are going to dig into why silent launches actually happen, what your numbers are telling you, and the small little adjustments that you can make in order to turn your next launch into your best launch ever.
But before we dig into the metrics and the nitty gritty of it, we need to talk about something that really creates a ton of pressure in this industry.
And it's called the survivorship bias. What the heck do I mean by this? Well, survivorship bias happens when you only see the stories of people who made it, who are crushing it, and none of the people that didn't.
And I will tell you what, the online space is full of it. You see the coach who celebrated that 100K month.
You see the creator who has millions and millions of views and followers. You see the entrepreneur who sold out her program.
without launching. These stories get amplified because they're exciting. But what you don't see are the thousands of business owners who ran the exact same strategies, put in the work, and didn't get those results.
They're not the ones making the Instagram reels or the ad case studies. So what happens is your brain starts telling you that your lack of results must mean that something is wrong with you or your business.
So think about it this way. If 10 business owners launch a program and only one has a successful, quote unquote, successful launch, who gets featured in testimonials?
The one who crushed it, right? The other nine quietly go back to adjust their messaging, nurture their audience, and clean up their checkout flow.
But you don't see that part. So therefore, your perception is skewed. And in fact, the majority of business owners are not hitting these massive numbers that owners
We've been conditioned to believe are normal. A large share of online coaches actually make less than $30,000 per year.
I we're talking about over 40% in this one study that I was reading. Standard digital product conversions are usually only around 1% to 3%.
A good sales page conversion rate is around 3% to 5%. And if you are getting a 10% conversion rate, that is considered exceptional, not average.
So if your launch didn't actually blow up like you thought it would, like all of the statistics you see in the online space, all of this income-based marketing, you're probably actually performing far closer to these industry norms than you think.
And this is why your metrics matter. They keep you grounded in reality, not hype. So there's four main places where these disconnects.
And again, can't stress this enough. None of these mean that your business is failing. None of them mean that you have a bad offer.
They're simply pieces of a system that need support. And the first is visibility. Visibility lets us know whether people even knew that your launch existed.
Sometimes your audience just didn't see enough of your launch. Maybe your content didn't reach enough people. Think about it.
Organic reach is 1-2% at the best. Maybe your list wasn't warmed up. Maybe your pre-launch runway was shorter than it needed to be.
If visibility is low, people can't buy what they don't know exists. So we've got visibility. Next thing we want to look at is league quality.
So even if we're getting eyeballs on our offer, are they actually the right fit? Content attracts curious onlookers rather than people that are actually ready for the transformation that you offer.
So if your lead magnets aren't pulling in qualified buyers, you're going to see lots of interest, but not a lot of conversion.
Next, we have messaging. So this is where we can really dig into your sales page data because it gives us insight into what kind of interest level does your audience have?
Your messaging might make complete sense to you, but does your audience actually see themselves in it? I want you to step back and put yourself in the shoes of an aligned buyer.
And if you aren't speaking to their current reality and the transformation that they desire, or if your content leans too heavily on features instead of outcomes, the interest is going to drop off really fast.
And the fourth piece is conversion. Conversion data tells us how persuasive and friction-free that the offer is. You can have traffic and solid messaging, but if your sales page is confusing, you have a clunky checkout, or people don't even know how to buy from you, they're going to click away.
And even the small little things like slow load times, buried buttons, unclear calls to action, they can completely slow down your sales.
But the good thing is, is that each one of these areas is fixable. It's not about burning everything down.
You just need to make those strategic little adjustments. And despite what you're seeing in the online space, the reality is that silent launches aren't rare.
I almost feel like silent launches are more common than these super gigantic launches that we see in the online space.
But they're not a signal to hide. They're a sign that your business is ready for its next refinement because the most powerful reframe you can do after having a silent launch is shifting your mindset from shame, which yeah, you feel it.
It's real, but shift your mindset from shame to curiosity. So instead of asking yourself, what's wrong with my business?
What's wrong with my offer? Ask yourself, okay, what story are my metrics trying to tell me? When you learn to detach emotionally and look at your launch through a different lens, you can adjust things strategically.
You become like a scientist. You're running an experiment, reviewing the results and making your next test. I had a client recently, Katie, love her, adore her.
She is a coach who helps creatives bring their passion projects to life. She's smart, driven, and she deeply believed.
She's been in business for three years, so she's not new to this, but her last launch was silent. She only had a few page views, zero enrollment, and she felt really ashamed and embarrassed when she came to me.
And so what do I do? I do with her what I did with every single client. We pull her numbers and here's what we found.
And she did give me permission to share this. So only around 200 people visited her sales page, which, you know, is a decent amount of people.
put 200 people in a room, holy cow. So 200 people visited her sales page, but only two people clicked the buy button.
So that's about a 1% click through to purchase rate. We looked at her pre-launch content. It was really strong, but it wasn't actually warming up her email list.
And a big chunk of her audience came from reels, and they weren't actually her ideal clients that were ready to invest.
And then leading Looking in further, her sales page really focused a lot on what's inside instead of what that transformation was.
So this wasn't a failed launch. This was a launch with opportunities. So we cleaned up the sales page, simplified her messaging, and really strengthened her pre-launch warm-up sequence.
She really leaned in and relaunched four weeks later. And sold six spots in 48 hours. So it was nothing dramatic.
It was just these small little data-driven adjustments that gave her results. So how can you do this? If you have a silent launch, step one after the launch, take a deep breath and look at your metrics.
I know, I know. It's one of those things that you just get in your head. You don't want to do it.
Thanks for listening. already feel crummy that your launch was silent. So what the heck is looking at your metrics going to do?
Well, we can look at a few key areas because you can't improve what you're not measuring. So I want you to look first at visibility metrics.
Look at your email rates. Who's actually opening up your emails? Are they aligned? Look at your lead metrics. Did you get any new subscribers?
Did you have a wait list? Were there any signups from that wait list? Look at your sales page. How many people actually went to your sales page?
How many people clicked the button to buy? And then look at those conversion metrics. How many completed checkout? How many abandoned their cart?
This information is neutral. It is about identifying where the system lost momentum. So once we've looked at our metrics, then we can really start to see clearly the disconnect.
We can get really curious and start asking ourselves questions to really dig into the objective facts. First up, did enough people even see your offer?
Did the right people see your offer? Did they understand what the offer helps them do? That transformation. Did they click but not buy?
Did they abandon their cart? I want you to really keep in mind, in the back of your mind, those industry statistics.
1% to 3% conversion rate is normal. 3% 5%, awesome. 10%, like you're rocking it. You are like knocking it out of the park.
But most digital product creators, most coaches. Creatives, consultants, they're not exceeding these numbers regularly. And entrepreneurs that have these wild income results aren't sharing the context.
Like the ad spend, like the team support, like the payment plans, like the refund rates. So the reality is you're probably doing so much better than you think.
So after we've gone through those two steps to look at the metrics and identify the disconnect, then we want to adjust using these facts that we've just gathered.
And this is where it gets really, really fun. So for example, if you identified that visibility was low, you can do things like add more warm-up content, send more emails, use personal segmentation, create educational runway content.
If you notice that your lead quality was low, you can improve your lead magnets, shift them slightly to better qualified buyers.
Ask questions that help you segment based on readiness and show more of the pain points your offer solves. We have this stigma around pain points, but all you're doing is shining the light on, hey, this is what your reality is right now.
And then we can fill your offer in as the gap that bridges that gap that your offer is the bridge to the problem they have to the from the problem they have to the solution that they want.
Or say, you know what? I think it was my messaging. You can shift it. You can test new things.
You can do split testing, A to B testing. It is amazing. And really dig into your ideal client to clarify who this is for and who it's not a good fit for.
Because we want those qualified leads. And if conversion was... We can change up those checkout buttons. We can fix those mobile issues.
can really streamline the checkout. Again, none of this is completely burning it down. We're making those small adjustments. That's what can radically improve results.
And then step four, run your experiment again. You get to relaunch. You can test these small adjustments, track how your metrics are changing, and then compare this launch to the last one.
Now you're comparing apples to apples. Track how it changes. See what worked for you. This is why metrics are literally the custom solution, because it shows you what's working in your business for you.
This is how sustainable business growth happens. Not from hype, not from all these flashy tactics, but from these small, simple, strategic refinements.
So at the end of the day, I want you to remember that a silent launch is not a sign that you are failing or doing anything wrong.
It's just a sign that there is a hidden opportunity waiting to be uncovered. You just need to look for the clues.
Sustainable business growth comes through iteration, not guesswork. Lean into your metrics and stay curious. If this episode resonated with you, this is exactly what I love helping clients with inside my signature program, Metrics Mastery, and one-on-one.
You can get started for free at amytraugh.com. And until next time, stop guessing and start growing.
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