My 'Failed' Cohort Launch Made $7,773

I launched a cohort-based course last quarter. My goal was 30 students.

I got 9.

Revenue: $7,773. Expenses: $2,750 (platform fees, software, a few ad experiments that went nowhere). Net profit: $5,023. That’s a 64.6% margin on a “failed” launch.

I’m putting “failed” in quotes because this launch taught me more about my business than anything I’ve done in two years. The numbers weren’t what I wanted. The lessons were exactly what I needed.

Let me break down both.

What Worked

Small group, personalized instruction. I expected to feel disappointed with 9 students. Instead it became a feature. I knew every student’s name, their specific challenges, their goals. I could tailor exercises in real time. In a group of 30, that’s impossible.

Attendance was insane. 7 out of 9 students showed up to every single session. If you’ve ever run a cohort or group program, you know that’s unheard of. Most courses have 40-50% attendance by week three. Mine held at nearly 80% throughout.

I think those two things are connected. People showed up because they knew it wasn’t a lecture. It was a room where they’d get called on, get feedback, get pushed. You can’t hide in a group of 9.

Testimonials were the best I’ve ever received. Not the polished “this course changed my life” kind. Specific ones. One student told me he used the framework from session 2 in a board meeting the following week and his CEO pulled him aside afterward to compliment his delivery. Another student said she stopped dreading her weekly all-hands because she finally had a structure for organizing her updates.

Those testimonials are worth more than the tuition. They’re proof that the curriculum works. I can use them for years.

What Failed

Alright. The uncomfortable part.

I buried my email list. My launch strategy was aggressive. Two to three promotional emails per day during the launch window. I thought more touchpoints meant more conversions.

It meant more unsubscribes.

My open rate dropped about 40% during the launch period. Unsubscribe rate spiked 50% above my baseline. I was so focused on converting the people who were interested that I torched goodwill with the people who weren’t. Some of those unsubscribers were longtime readers. People who’d been with me for a year or more. Gone.

In hindsight, one email per day was the maximum. Probably one every other day would have been smarter. You don’t need to shout louder to be heard. You need to say something worth hearing.

Personalized videos were a waste. I recorded 53 personalized video messages. One for every person who showed interest during the pre-launch phase. Each one was 60-90 seconds, addressed to the person by name, referencing something they’d said in a DM or on a call.

They took me 8 hours to make. Three people mentioned receiving them. I have no evidence they moved the needle on a single conversion.

I think personalized outreach works at high price points. If I were selling a $5,000 program, a custom video might be the thing that tips someone over the edge. At the $800-900 price point of this cohort, people were making the decision based on whether the curriculum matched their needs. A personalized video wasn’t the bottleneck.

Short-form alone doesn’t build enough trust for higher-ticket offers. This was the biggest lesson. My audience was built almost entirely on TikTok and Instagram. Short-form content. Sixty-second videos.

Short-form is incredible for awareness. It’s how 500,000+ people found me. But there’s a ceiling on the trust it builds. Someone watches a 45-second video of you explaining a communication framework and thinks “that’s useful.” They don’t think “I should give this person $800.”

That kind of trust requires longer, deeper touchpoints. A YouTube video where someone spends 15 minutes with you. A newsletter they read every week. A podcast interview where they hear you think out loud for an hour.

I had the awareness. I didn’t have enough depth. My short-form audience saw the launch, thought “cool,” and scrolled on. The 9 people who bought were almost all newsletter readers or people I’d had direct conversations with.

The time cost was brutal. I was spending 10+ hours a week on this cohort alongside my full-time job at Lucid. Curriculum creation, session prep, student feedback, launch emails, landing page iterations, ad creative. For three months.

I love teaching. The sessions themselves were the highlight of my week. But the operational overhead nearly broke me. By the last week I was running on four hours of sleep and my performance at my day job was slipping.

A cohort is a live product. It demands your presence and your energy on a fixed schedule. That’s a hard thing to sustain when you already have 40 hours a week committed elsewhere.

What I’m Changing

Based on everything above, here are the adjustments I’m making.

Transition to YouTube. I’m prioritizing long-form content that builds the kind of trust short-form can’t. One YouTube video per month minimum. The goal is to give people a reason to spend 10-20 minutes with me before they ever see a sales email.

One promo email per day, maximum. During future launches, I’ll run shorter, less aggressive email campaigns. Shorter launch window (5 days instead of 10), fewer emails per day, and always lead with value even in the promo emails.

Build a self-serve course. The cohort curriculum works. The testimonials prove it. But it doesn’t need to be live to work. I’m going to package the core frameworks into a self-paced course at a lower price point ($97-197). That removes the time-for-money constraint and lets me serve more people without burning out.

Multiple touchpoints before launch. Next time I sell something at the $500+ price point, I want people to have experienced me through at least three different mediums first. A short-form video, a newsletter issue, a YouTube video, or a live event. The conversion will happen naturally if the trust is already built.

The Real Number

$5,023 profit. That’s what a “failed” launch looks like when you actually run the numbers.

I’m not celebrating it. The goal was $25,000 and I missed by a wide margin. But I’m also not mourning it. Nine students got real value. I got real data. And the next version of this will be sharper because of it.

If you’re thinking about launching something and you’re afraid of failure, consider this: my worst launch still made money, still helped people, and gave me a blueprint for doing it better next time.

The only real failure is the launch you never run.

Preston