A 27-minute breakdown of the waitlist-driven organic launch system behind one $418,470.91 launch.
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Big Idea
The argument in one line.
An organic product launch is decided almost entirely before the cart opens, by the size of the waitlist and the volume of email sent to it, not by the content posted during the open-cart window.
Who This Is For
Read if. Skip if.
READ IF YOU ARE…
You're planning to launch a digital product, course, or coaching program without relying on paid ads.
You already have some audience and want a repeatable formula for waitlist size, email cadence, and pricing.
You've run a launch before that fizzled in the middle and want to understand why that's normal, not a failure signal.
You want a concrete backward-planned timeline instead of guessing how long to keep the cart open.
SKIP IF…
You're running a paid-ads-driven launch where retargeting replaces the waitlist-and-email mechanics described here.
You're selling a low-ticket, evergreen product with no launch window at all.
TL;DR
The full version, fast.
Tom Noske's organic launch framework starts with a waitlist sized at 10x the number of spots you want to sell, since roughly 90% of sales come from that list and each signup is worth about 10% of your price. Launch emails split three ways, sales, value, and urgency, with urgency emails dominating the final 24 hours. Genuine urgency and a real supply ceiling have to be honestly enforced or the audience learns your deadlines mean nothing. Pre-sale pricing sits below open-cart pricing so the average lands at your target LTV, and the whole thing runs on a 45-day backward-planned timeline: a waitlist-building period, a private pre-sale, then a 10-day open cart. Expect a half-pipe sales curve, heavy at the open and the final 48 hours, dead in the middle, and don't panic in the dead zone.
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Credibility claim, then the thesis: a waitlist is the single most important piece of an organic launch.
00:58 – 03:31
02 · Waitlist math and psychology
The 10x rule (sell 100, need 1,000 on the waitlist), reading waitlist velocity to predict launch size, and the $200-per-signup mental model.
03:31 – 07:18
03 · Launch emails: three types and the cadence
Sales, value, and urgency emails defined by the CTA test; the 35/25/50 split across a 10-day open cart and 6-10 emails in the final 24 hours.
07:18 – 09:00
04 · Genuine urgency
Urgency has to be real: a true start date, a true close, or a true limited-capacity reason, illustrated with cohort start dates and workshop pricing increases.
09:00 – 12:48
05 · Limited supply and holding the ceiling
Scarcity vs urgency distinguished; the supply ceiling formula (waitlist x 0.1); why breaking your own stated cap destroys trust for future launches.
12:48 – 14:47
06 · Pre-sale vs open-cart pricing and desired LTV
Pre-sale priced modestly below target, open cart above it; desired LTV formula (yearly revenue goal divided by realistic customer volume).
14:47 – 16:52
07 · Pre-made content and the optional webinar
Batch all social content before the cart opens; an optional free webinar taps a second, mostly non-overlapping skeptical audience.
16:52 – 22:47
08 · The 45-day backward-planned timeline
Working backward from close: 10-day open cart, 3-day private pre-sale, and a waitlist-building period that starts 45 days out.
22:47 – 27:04
09 · What to expect: the half-pipe and the recap
The universal half-pipe sales curve, the dead middle stretch, final stats recap (10% of waitlist buys, 1-2% of webinar attendees buy, email drives 90% of sales), and the next-video CTA.
Atomic Insights
Lines worth screenshotting.
A waitlist needs to be 10x the number of spots you want to sell, so selling 100 spots requires 1,000 people on the waitlist.
Roughly 90% of a launch's sales come from the waitlist, not from public open-cart traffic.
Every waitlist signup is worth about 10% of your product's price, so a $2,000 offer makes each signup worth $200 in expected future revenue.
A sales email is one that becomes worthless if you strip the call-to-action; a value email reads fine either way.
Across a 10-day open cart with 20 total emails, the split should be roughly 35% sales, 25% value, and 50% urgency.
In the final 24 hours, send 6 to 10 emails, since organic launches have no retargeting ads and email has to do that job instead.
Fake urgency trains an audience to ignore future deadlines, which permanently lowers the conversion rate of every subsequent launch.
The supply ceiling should equal waitlist size times 0.1, which means it is better to cap a launch at 50 spots and sell out than open 100 and fall short.
If you announce a supply cap and sell past it, the only acceptable move is to close, not to quietly keep selling.
Pre-sale pricing should sit modestly below the target price and open-cart pricing modestly above it, so the average revenue per customer lands on the intended LTV.
Desired LTV per client is calculated as desired yearly earnings divided by realistic annual customer volume for that offer.
A launch webinar converts only 1-2% of live attendees and typically has under 10% overlap with the waitlist, making it a genuine second audience rather than a duplicate one.
An organic launch should be compressed into roughly a 45-day window: a waitlist-building period, a 3-day private pre-sale, then a 10-day public open cart.
Every organic launch follows a half-pipe sales curve: about 50% of sales land in the first 20 minutes, then a dead middle, then 30-50% in the final 48 hours.
Social content reminds an audience a launch is happening; email is what actually converts, so under-investing in email to over-invest in content content is a common and costly mistake.
Takeaway
A launch is won before the cart opens.
WHAT TO LEARN
Organic launch results come almost entirely from waitlist size and email volume sent before and during open cart, not from the content posted while the cart is live.
01The $418K launch and the core ingredient
Size your waitlist at 10 times your sales goal, since roughly 90% of launch sales come from that list, not from public traffic.
Treat the waitlist-building period as more important than the open cart itself, since that's where the hype and the eventual buyers both get made.
02Waitlist math and psychology
Size your waitlist at 10 times your sales goal, since roughly 90% of launch sales come from that list, not from public traffic.
Treat the waitlist-building period as more important than the open cart itself, since that's where the hype and the eventual buyers both get made.
03Launch emails: three types and the cadence
Split launch emails into sales, value, and urgency, and weight urgency emails heavily into the final 24 to 48 hours of the open cart.
04Genuine urgency
Only use urgency that's real, a genuine start date, a genuine close, or a genuine capacity limit, because fake deadlines teach your audience to ignore future ones.
05Limited supply and holding the ceiling
Set your supply ceiling at 10% of waitlist size rather than your true desired volume so the launch reliably sells out and compounds into the next one.
If you announce a cap and blow past it, close anyway. Protecting your word is worth more than one extra sale.
06Pre-sale vs open-cart pricing and desired LTV
Price the pre-sale below your target and the open cart above it, so the blended average lands on your desired lifetime value per customer.
Calculate desired LTV by dividing your yearly revenue goal by a realistic estimate of how many customers you can actually get that year.
07Pre-made content and the optional webinar
Finish all content, emails, and scheduling before the open cart starts, so the open cart period is just watching the plan play out.
A free launch webinar is optional but converts a largely separate, more skeptical segment of your audience from the one already on your waitlist.
08The 45-day backward-planned timeline
Plan the whole launch backward from the close date across roughly 45 days: a waitlist-growth period, a short private pre-sale, then a compressed public open cart.
09What to expect: the half-pipe and the recap
Expect a half-pipe sales curve, heavy at the very start and the very end with a dead middle, and keep promoting through the dead zone instead of giving up on it.
Glossary
Terms worth knowing.
Organic launch
A product launch that relies on an email waitlist and existing audience instead of paid advertising to generate sales.
Open cart
The public window during which anyone, not just waitlist members, can buy the offer.
Pre-sale
A private purchase window, before the public open cart, available only to people who joined the waitlist.
LTV (lifetime value)
The average amount of revenue a business expects to collect per customer, used here to set pricing targets.
One-time offer (OTO)
A limited-window discount or bonus made available only to a specific group, such as webinar attendees, that expires before the next stage of the launch.
“My record launch was $418,470.91 in total revenue collected for that particular launch.”
concrete, specific number up front→ TikTok hook↗ Tweet quote
02:33
“Imagine if every single time someone joined your waitlist, $200 showed up in your bank account. You'd probably promote it pretty hard.”
vivid reframe of a dry math point→ IG reel cold open↗ Tweet quote
02:56
“If someone says a waitlist launch, and then a public launch, the public launch is like none of the spots, all of their spots are getting sold with the waitlist.”
contrarian claim about launch structure→ newsletter pull-quote↗ Tweet quote
09:27
“Limited supply is scarcity. Limited time is urgency.”
“Your launch will always look like a half pipe where 50% of your customers will come at the start, 50 to 40% will come at the end, and you'll have long periods in the middle where no one is buying.”
names the exact emotional low point of a launch→ newsletter pull-quote↗ Tweet quote
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I've ran multiple multi six -figure fully organic launches over the last few years. In fact, my record launch was $418 ,470 .91 in total revenue collected for that particular launch. And so I really know what I'm talking about.
And in today's video, I just wanted to make a quick video kind of breaking down my entire system that I've used for my own launches, but then the same system that I teach for clients if they're gonna run an organic launch. And so hopefully by the end of the video, you will be ready to have a six or potentially multi six.
six -figure launch depending on the size of your audience and the price of your offer. And so what are the ingredients of a six -figure launch? Well, the first one and arguably the most important is a waitlist.
You have to have a waitlist. Do not underestimate how important building a waitlist is. It's important for a few reasons.
Number one is it's the most accurate way for you to know in advance how your launch is going to do. There is no other way that you can reasonably predict how your launch is going to do in terms of customers and value. in terms of revenue upfront without a wait list.
And so my rule, my blanket rule, and you can convert higher or lower than this, but my blanket rule for myself and for my customers. is that you need 10x your goal number of customers on your waitlist. And so if you want to sell 100 spots, you need 1000 people on your waitlist.
If you want to sell 1000 spots, you need 10 ,000 people on your waitlist. And so generally across the board, you will consistently find this to be true. This is a little bit black hat, I probably shouldn't be saying this because I think the marketers might be a bit mad at me.
But if anyone says, hey, we have 1000 people on the waitlist. what that actually means is they're going to sell 100 spots. Don't get worried when someone says we have 1000 people on the waitlist and there's only 50 spots.
You've probably got a pretty good chance of getting one of those 50 spots, but you are going to have to act. Whereas if someone says we've got 500 people on the waitlist and we have 400 spots, there is zero chance that those 400 spots are going to be taken by the 500 person waitlist. And so you can start to tell because if you're a month out and suddenly you have a spike in waitlist members and you thought you were only going to sell 20 spots and suddenly you've got 200 170 people on your waitlist a month out from the launch, you can probably raise the number of people that you want to sell into the launch or what you predict you're going to be able to sell into the launch.
Whereas if you're a little bit soft and maybe you want to get 100 spots and you've only got 200 people on your waitlist a month out from the launch, you probably have to start pushing a little bit harder. I find that building the waitlist, the actual period leading up to the launch is arguably more important than the launch itself because that's where you're actually building the hype.
That's where people are going to learn about what you're because you should be actively promoting your waitlist as hard as you would sell spots into the program. And an easy little mathematical thing that you can do in your mind is take whatever your price is and times it by 0 .1.
And that's the amount of money you make per waitlist member. And so every single time someone joins your waitlist, you are getting paid that amount of money. And so if your product costs $2 ,000, that means Every waitlist person is actually worth $200 each.
And so imagine if every single time someone joined your waitlist, $200 showed up in your bank account. You'd probably promote it pretty hard. That's the level of commitment you need to have to building your waitlist.
Because most of your spots, 90 % of your sales are gonna come from the people on the waitlist. This is why I find it funny whenever anyone has like a strong marketing push around the public launch versus the waitlist launch. Brother, most of your sales are coming in the waitlist.
The public launch is... basically the last few spots of people that only followed you in the last few days. And so never fall for this shit.
If someone says a waitlist launch, and then a public launch, the public launch is like none of the spots, all of their spots are getting sold with the waitlist. And so that applies to you to 90 % of your customers are going to come from your waitlist. And so promote your waitlist as if your life depends on it, because your launch literally depends on it.
Number two is your launch emails, because now that you have your waitlist, the easiest way to actually get in contact with that waitlist is with emails. And so Email is actually going to be your biggest driver of success.
In fact, my biggest launch, that $418 ,000 launch, I think I only posted two dedicated pieces of content and maybe two story sequences across the entire 10 days. But in those 10 days, I sent... two to four emails every single day, plus four to six emails in the last two days.
And so I sent significantly more emails than I posted content because I knew that 90 % of my sales are gonna come from the people who gave me their email address wanting to be notified when the launch happened. So I split this up into three different types of emails. You have sales emails, which are basically case studies, testimonials, about the program, FAQs, basically anything where the body of the email, the purpose of the body of the email is to convert people.
Then you have value emails and these are basically storytelling emails and normal email broadcast where at the end you have a strong CTA. The easiest way to know if it's a sales email or a story email is if you got rid of the CTA, is it still a good email that people would read? If you removing the CTA makes no difference to the readability of the email, it's a story email.
If removing the CTA makes the email worthless because because all you did was talk about a case study from one of your clients, it is a sales email. That's the difference between the two.
And then urgency emails are just exactly what they sound like. It's a simple, small body email that just goes, hey, there's 24 hours left. If you wanna get your spot, click here.
And that's the entire email. Now, for most launches, you're gonna be floating somewhere around... five to 10 days for your open cart period.
And I'll talk about the open cart period a little bit later. So you're going to need somewhere around 20 total emails for your launch. And so if you split this across, 35 % of your emails should be sales emails, 25 % should be value emails, and 50 % of your emails should be urgency emails.
And so splitting that across a 10... day open cart and 20 emails, you'll have six sales emails, you'll have five value emails, and you'll have nine urgency emails. Now the way that you split this across the launch is day zero, day 10, you'll send two emails on day one, day two, day three, day four, day five, day six.
And then three days out, you'll send three emails. So two normal emails plus an urgency email. Then you'll send five emails.
And then in the last 24 hours, you should send anywhere between six to 10 emails. And again, this might seem extreme. Because you're organic, you have to make up for the fact that you can't just pepper people with retargeting ads.
And so your email is essentially doing that retargeting. And so in the last 24 hours, you should be sending 24 hours left 12 hours left 6 hours left 2 hours left 1 hour left 45 minutes left 20 minutes left 15 minutes left.
Final chance. This is it. Your last chance.
There should be so many emails in that last little bit because that is where the majority of your sales are going to happen. And again, if you're worried about overwhelming your list, need I remind you that the entire point of email marketing is to get people to buy your product. And so if you are shy about selling to your email list, you probably have a useless email list.
The next thing you need in your launch. is genuine urgency. You cannot just say we're open and then I'm closing at the end of the week, except there's no reason that you're closing at the end of the week.
As a really good example, my launches back in the day when I was running cohorts, there was a genuine start date and our open carts at the period that we were launching. ended about 30 minutes before the first lesson of the actual cohort. And so there was a genuine reason for urgency.
Now, when I run the membership business, it's a bit trickier. So what we do is we run workshops and then the workshop has a one -time offer and that one -time offer ends before the next call starts. And so the call acts as the urgency moment where it's like, hey, if you want to join before our next masterclass, you need to do it before this date.
We're increasing our prices at the end of this year. Once we hit 500 members or if the end of the year comes, we're increasing our prices.
That is genuine urgency. We're doing that because we've realized that, hey, we thought we could have thousands of members. I actually think we would like to have maybe around 1 ,000 members.
And so as soon as we hit 500 members, we're gonna raise our prices so we can hit the levels that we wanna hit whilst also maintaining a level of quality for our clients. That is a genuine point of urgency. Hey, by the way, if you're watching this video and you want my help running this launch and you want all the associated systems, email writers, copywriters AI workflows that I use with my clients to help them run this exact system.
There's a link in the top line of description, it'll take you to my program time to build, have a read. And if it's for you, I'll see you on the inside. Now genuine urgency is there's a start date, genuine urgency is there's a time where you're actually going to close and a legitimate reason for actually closing, or there's limited capacity, which brings me on to the next point, which is limited supply.
Now, limited supply is scarcity. Limited time is urgency. In terms of urgency, the feeling you want to create for your clients is what happens if I don't do this right now?
And then the feeling of scarcity is will I lose my spot? And so the second point of this is you want to set limited supply. Now, the easiest way to do this is as you get closer to your launch, you just want to take whatever your waitlist size.
times it by 0 .1, and that is now the cap on your supply. Now, you might be thinking, hold on, Tom, I wanna have much more people than that. And you can in the future, but for now, that is the ceiling of demand for your business.
And your business will grow faster if you set a ceiling of demand, even if it's lower than what you wanna achieve right now. Because let's be realistic, having more supply is not gonna magically make more people buy. And so if you've got 500 people on your wait list and you wanted 100 people to buy, you're probably - more realistically gonna get 50 and so even though you want a hundred I would set the limit for this launch at 50 people that way you'll sell out and then next time you launch you can say hey guys last time we sold out in 24 hours if you want to get in this time you need to act even faster which will increase your conversion rate from waitlist to buyers whereas if you have fake urgency and it's just open and then the waitlist didn't really mean anything you'll have diminishing returns for your waitlist meaning that your conversion rate will actually get worse with each subsequent launch.
You'll train your audience to know, hey, Alex's wait lists mean fuck all. So you can kind of just do whatever you want and you don't have to join it. The other option is if you have a genuinely limited supply.
And so this is if you're selling one -on -one coaching, this is if you're selling some kind of group coaching, because let's be honest with each other, there is a maximum number of people that you could work with. And the way that I'll prove this to you is imagine that tomorrow I gifted you a thousand customers. Something probably breaks in your business, right?
Whether it's your ability to deliver, whether it's just the amount of time that you have to work, it's a mathematical impossibility, or whether it's just the value of the community diminishes with more and more people. Well... Your supply is lower than a thousand.
And so you would do better off if you were honest about that supply rather than just ignoring it because you think you can have an unlimited amount of people join your program. It is better to set a supply ceiling than not have one at all. And you have to be upfront about this.
And the second part of this is once you set a supply ceiling, even if you blow past it, close. If you launch, do not launch, sell out, and then pretend there was no ceiling. If you announce you've got 20 spots and you sell all 20 spots in the first 10 minutes, the worst thing you can possibly do is just go, oh my God, this is amazing.
I'm just going to pretend that the ceiling never existed because you are again training your audience to know that your word means fuck all. You are training your audience to know, hey, this person said 20. And they didn't actually mean it.
So next time I'll know that what they said is worthless. And that is awful for your ability to continue growing a launch -based business. This is why some creators get burnt so quickly because they just fucking lie.
And then they have an amazing launch, but everyone learned that, oh, your waitlist meant fuck all. And then your total capacity meant fuck all. And then everything that you said throughout the entire launch was a complete lie.
And so next time I'm not going to join your waitlist. And next time I'm - not going to listen to your marketing and I'm just going to do whatever I want because I know I can do that.
And that is awful for your ability to launch. And so if you set a supply ceiling, hold your supply ceiling. Even if that means making less money for this launch, it means you'll make more money in the next launch.
Then you need pre -sale and open cart pricing. Pre -sale pricing and open cart pricing. Now, the tricky thing here is I think your pre -sale pricing should be your actual pricing and your open cart pricing should be raised.
don't do the thing where your presale pricing is actually a severe discount because the economics of your offer might become non -viable. And so don't do this thing where you're just like, hey, it's presale pricing, it's 50 % off. Set your presale pricing or at least set it somewhere in between where maybe your presale pricing is here, your actual price you want is here and your open cart price is here, meaning that your average earning per customer is at the amount that you wanna be making per customer, not below or above.
And so the easiest way you can do this is just, go desired LTV so what amount of money do you want to make per client let's say your desired LTV per client is $2 ,000 you want to make $2 ,000 per client that means I would put your pre -sale pricing somewhere around maybe $1 ,800.
That's a discount, but it's not so severe. And then your open cart pricing, because you will get a couple sales in your open cart pricing, I would put around $2 ,400. Meaning that the average that you might fall in is somewhere in the middle.
So you end up with the desired LTV that you want to make per client. So figure out what your desired LTV is. The way that you figure out desired LTV is just take your desired earnings per year.
So what are you to make per year out of this offer and then divide that by your audience yield. Now your audience yield is how many customers do you think you could reasonably get per year for this offer.
Now I can't make this decision for you. Some people pull out bullshit math like 1 % of clients per year or 1 % of followers per year. It's untrue.
You need to decide and you know this better than I do. you know how many customers you could reasonably get per year for this particular offer. And so once you know that number, take your desired earnings per year divided by the audience yield, that is your LTV you need to make per client.
And then once you've got the desired LTV, then you can figure out your pre -sale and your open cart pricing. Again, the pre -sale pricing is designed to get people to join the waitlist because there's a genuine point of value. And the open cart pricing is to maximize profit on the people that didn't join the waitlist.
Then you wanna create five to six. pre -made social posts. These are carousel posts, story sequences, Instagram reels, whatever you post, YouTube videos, whatever you need to make in advance.
Because once you make these in advance, it makes the open cart period so much less stressful. You should genuinely get to your open cart period and everything's done. All the work is done.
The waitlist is built. The content is made. Everything's scheduled.
The emails are already written. Everything's already done. The actual open cart period, the only stressful part should be the fact that you have to now sit and hope that it works.
But you shouldn't be making content. You shouldn't be writing emails. Everything should be done.
In fact, most of my launches, as I got towards the end of doing my launch -based business, I wrote and scheduled the emails. weeks in advance. And so the actual launch was kind of a bit of a holiday where I was just like, not selling, barely promoting and just waiting to start the launch.
It was obviously stressful because I was making all of my income in 10 days for the quarter. But it wasn't a hard work. It wasn't difficult for me to do during that time.
The only other thing I'll say as an optional is a launch webinar. Now The reason why I say this is because this allows you to double dip a little bit because there are going to be people who join your waitlist because they've seen enough, they value your product, they know what it is, they're ready to buy, but then there's going to be a group of skeptics in your audience.
And by running a launch webinar, you essentially get to tap into both groups. You can capture the warmest people who are on the waitlist and they're ready to buy, but you can then also capture the people that are skeptical and they just need to be proven that you're the person that you say you are. And so you can build this list by having a free webinar and you'll probably see sell one or 2 % of the people that show up live to the webinar, plus you'll sell 10 % of these people on the waitlist.
And together, it just means you've got a higher volume or higher opportunity to sell out for your launch because this group plus this group combined means that you've got a big group of people. But again, this is totally optional. And it adds a lot of complexity to your launch that you don't necessarily need.
All right, let's talk about actually running the launch. Now, because you're running an organic launch strategy, your launch period is going to be 45 days.
This 45 day period is kind of the entire process from actually announcing the waitlist all the way through to closing the cart. And the reason why I have this is because I think some people are a bit unrealistic. They go, oh, my open cart is only 10 days and my cohort's only four weeks.
I'll run eight cohorts a year. When in reality, you need a pre -period, a period of time where you're just promoting your waitlist because organic, you can't rely on massive ad spend. And so there's going to be a period of time where you have to slowly build your waitlist.
That's the main advantage of paid versus organic. Paid, you can speed this process up. You could essentially sell out a launch back to back to back to back because it's relying on ad spend.
But with a waitlist, you have to actually have a period of time that is dedicated to just building the waitlist. And so this is day negative 45. And I'll call this day zero because this is the day where you actually finish.
This is the day where the entire launch is done. And we're gonna work backwards from that day. The first period of time between closing the cart, and opening is your open cart.
And this is totally up to you. I've done launches as long as three weeks. I've done launches as short as 10 days.
The main thing you need to understand is your launch will always look exactly the same regardless of how long it is. And so if you run a three week launch, there's gonna be two and a half weeks in the middle where you're barely getting anyone. And so just know that going in that stretching out your launch will not lead to more sales.
In fact, compressing your launch will probably lead to more sales because your energy can be higher. you can send more emails, the writing's better, everything's just more compressed, it's easier. It's like, think about it like this.
It's easier to sprint than it is to sustain. And so a long launch is quite exhausting, whereas a short sprint is quite easy to do. And so this open cart is day negative 10 to day zero.
Then you have your pre -sale period. And this is usually what I would say day negative 13 to day negative 10. And this is your, again, your pre -sale.
This is where you open only for the waitlist. And so this is where you're only sending emails to the people that have opted into the waitlist. And this is your opportunity to sell most of the spots before it goes to the open cart period.
You wanna have this period because again, you've got your pre -sale pricing and your open cart pricing. And so you have to have an opportunity where it is private. Now I've tested actually building a private launch where it's like password gated and I've tested just opening it via email only.
I think email only is secure enough. Just send the private link, like the checkout link or whatever you want to do to your waitlist. Yes, there's going to be people who maybe leak it and get in without being on the waitlist.
But if anything, if they're that devoted to buying, they probably deserve to get the pre -sale pricing. And so I wouldn't worry about any complicated system for keeping it private. Just launch it.
It's totally fine. People can join if they leak the. code or whatever.
But most of the time, all you need to do is just privately keep it contained within your emails to the people on the waitlist. So segment your email list. So you're only sending these emails to the waitlist, then you have essentially your pre launch period, which is day negative 45 to day negative 30, which again is your waitlist period.
And this is the time that you are devoted 100 % to building your waitlist. Now, if you're gonna do the optional extra and you wanna run a webinar. I want to run this maybe a day or two before the pre -sale just because I've tried running this during the open cart before.
It just becomes incredibly stressful. And so I would keep your webinar if you're going to run one before you open the pre -sale. Now, what you give these people on the webinar is usually either an opportunity to join the pre -sale.
And so you actually offer them the one -time offer. Don't give it to them then and there, offer the opportunity to join the pre -sale. You can do this with like a click to join, just send them an email and go, hey, you enjoyed the webinar.
If you wanna be part of the pre -sale, it's opening tomorrow, click this button, I'll add you to that list. The other option is come up with some kind of one -time offer for the webinar itself. And so an OTO, a one -time offer.
This needs to end before the pre -sale begins. So it needs to be a short window where there's some kind of one. time offer that's exclusive for people that were on the webinar.
This will convert better, but just be cautious because people who are on the pre -sale might get shitty if the one time offer is essentially undercutting what they've been waiting for. Now, really interesting point. I've ran multiple launches with webinars and waitlists.
And what you might expect is that the webinar and the waitlist have lots of overlap. where most of the people who are on the wait list are also on the webinar. But what you might be surprised to hear is that I found there was usually less than a 10 % overlap.
meaning that one in 10 people on the webinar were also on the waitlist. And I think the reason for this is most people who are on the waitlist are so warm, they already know that the webinar is basically just to sell them into the program. So most of the time, people who are on the waitlist will avoid the webinar.
And so that should give you the confidence that this is a worthwhile thing to add. Because again, it allows you to basically double dip in different segments of your audience. Again, your webinar is not going to convert amazingly, it will convert one or 2 % of attendees.
So if you get 1000 people on the webinar, and then or 1000 people to register, and then you get a 40 % show rates of 400 people, you'll only get four sales from that webinar. But again, if you've only got 30 spots, for sales is 10 % of your available spots, that's an amazing way to bump it up and make it more likely that you sell out in the actual launch.
All right, let's rapid fire finish this video with what to expect. The first one that you need to understand, and this will never not be true, there is no way to avoid this reality. If you're running an organic launch, your launch is gonna look like a half pipe.
I've tried incentives, I've tried different points of urgency, I've tried different pricing structures and every... time the launch looks like a half pipe and the reason why I want to tell you this in advance is because I think people get a little bit spooked about halfway through their launch where they launch and this is dollars and this is time they launch and they see most of their sales in the first 20 minutes like 50 % of their sales in the first 20 minutes and then it literally falls off a cliff 20 minutes of sales it's crazy you're feeling excited and then boom nothing and you'll experience basically nothing through the entire middle period of the launch.
In fact, you will have days where you get no sales. And then all of a sudden in the last 48 hours, you'll see it pick back up and you'll probably likely get 50, 40, 30 % of your customers in the final 48, 24 and 12 hours. And it will crescendo.
It hockey sticks at the end. So the more emails you can send in that last little bit, whether it be the 24, 12 hours, six hours, or even two hours, you'll get most of your sales. Again, this happens every single time.
So the key thing here is you do not wanna get discouraged during this valley. It's kind of the valley of despair of a launch. It happens every single time.
You can't avoid it. It's going to happen every time. And so the main thing you need to do is just not get discouraged.
Know it's going to happen. Know and prepare for it. Have all of your emails scheduled.
I'm just going to not promote during this period. Keep promoting because all of that is building the urgency to then hockey stick at the end. And so your launch will always look like a half pipe where 50 % of your customers will come at the start.
50 to 40 % will come at the end and you'll have long periods. long stretches in the middle where no one is buying. And that's totally normal.
The second thing I want to iterate again, like I said earlier, is that 10 % of your waitlist will purchase and one to 2 % of free webinar attendees will buy, not registrants, one to 2 % of attendees, because basically free webinars, no one watches the replay. And so if they're not there in the room, they will not buy. So take whatever your total registrants divided by your shop rate.
divided by one to 2%, that's how many people you can reasonably expect from a webinar. And this is across multiple of my own webinars and my clients' webinars. So I really know, like as recently as this week, I had clients running webinars and converted one to 2%.
So this is true across the board. Now, email will bring 90 % of your customers. So do not underestimate email.
Do not think that email is dead. Do not think that it's not worth it. Do not think that you're gonna make more with content because you have more followers than email lists.
Email will bring in 90%. 90 % of your customers. Social content will help remind people that the launch is happening, but it's very unlikely to be a contributing factor to your volume of sales.
Don't overdo social content and underdo email. If anything, overdo email and underdo social content. Social content is just designed to consistently remind people, hey, Grace is launching right now, or Jamie is launching right now.
I should go and check his emails that I expected to be sent because I was on the way. And then your waitlist growth phase is more important than the open cart. Like I showed you before, this period of time where you are dedicated to launching your waitlist and promoting your waitlist is arguably more important than the launch itself.
Again, take whatever your amount of money you make per client is, your price. divide it or times it by 0 .1, that's how much money you make every single time someone joins your waitlist. And so I want you to imagine psychologically that every single time someone joins my waitlist, cha -ching, money gets added to my account at $200, $150 per waitlist attendee.
If you can connect your brain. to that association of a waitlist attendee is a value of money in my bank account, it should encourage you to push even harder. The harder you can push during your waitlist period, the easier your launch will be.
If you enjoyed this video and you found it valuable, I really think you should watch this one next. I go into detail around how to convert a greater percentage of your viewers. into customers for your business.
So after everything we spoke about today, I think that's a really good step, especially if you're not someone who's necessarily interested in running launches consistently. These are a bunch of other options that you have available to you. So click here, watch this video, and I'll see you in the next one.
The Hook
The bait, then the rug-pull.
Tom Noske opens by putting a number on the table, a $418,470.91 organic launch, before walking through the exact system behind it: the waitlist math, the email cadence, the urgency rules, and the pricing formula he uses for his own launches and teaches to clients.
Frameworks
Named ideas worth stealing.
01:09concept
The 10x Waitlist Rule
Waitlist size should be 10 times the number of spots you intend to sell; reading how fast the waitlist fills relative to that target tells you whether to raise or lower your sales projection before the cart even opens.
Steal forany launch-planning spreadsheet or pre-launch forecast
03:31list
Three Email Types
Sales emails
Value emails
Urgency emails
Sales emails rely entirely on the CTA to have value (case studies, testimonials, FAQs); value emails read fine with the CTA stripped out (storytelling); urgency emails are short, deadline-only messages.
Steal forany email launch sequence, not just digital products
05:35model
Email Split Formula
35% sales
25% value
50% urgency
Across a 20-email, 10-day open cart, roughly 7 sales emails, 5 value emails, and 9-10 urgency emails, weighted heavily toward the final 24-48 hours.
Steal forany time-boxed sales campaign
09:23model
Supply Ceiling Formula
Waitlist size x 0.1 = supply cap
Set the number of available spots at 10% of waitlist size rather than the true desired volume, so the launch reliably sells out and compounds urgency into the next launch.
Steal forcohort-based or limited-capacity launches
Back into a per-customer revenue target first, then set pre-sale pricing modestly below it and open-cart pricing modestly above it so the blended average lands on target.
Steal forpricing any offer with a pre-sale and public tier
16:52model
The 45-Day Launch Timeline
Day -45 to -30: waitlist growth
Optional webinar 1-2 days before pre-sale
Day -13 to -10: private pre-sale
Day -10 to 0: public open cart
A backward-planned calendar from close date to waitlist launch, built around a compressed 10-day open cart rather than a long drawn-out window.
Steal forscheduling any organic product launch
CTA Breakdown
How they asked for the click.
VERBAL ASK
26:49next-video
“If you enjoyed this video and you found it valuable, I really think you should watch this one next.”
Soft in-video CTA pointing to a related video on converting more viewers into customers; the paid program link only lives in the description, not spoken mid-video except one brief mention at 08:35.
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A ten-year case for treating a personal brand as the one business asset that compounds forever, can't be taxed, and survives the sale of every company built on top of it.
Thirty-four minutes on an iPad whiteboard arguing that a memorable brand is built from associations, context and a delivery system, not better content.
A business coach spends 28 minutes untangling why a client's five rewrites of his offer all failed the same way: they were all still too vague to sell.
Tom Noske breaks down the three-part sequence, holding versus sending, the open home vision, and the Rolex call moment, that took two of his coaching clients from posting weekly to record launches.
A 28-minute case study in why the origin story is the load-bearing structure of every personal brand — delivered by someone who just disclosed his parents were evicted by a sheriff last week.
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