The Facilitation 101 self-paced course: launch day(s)!

Six months of work finally sees the light!

Happy launch week! After six months of work, the Facilitation 101 self-paced course is finally live! This is the fifth and final post in my behind the scenes series about how the whole process went – and honestly, what a journey it's been.

The night before launch day …

Sunday night I couldn’t sleep. I felt much more nervous about this moment than I have for a long time. I didn't really relax until the end of Monday, once I knew all the right buttons had been pressed and people had started signing up. It felt like such a huge moment, with the potential for so many things to go wrong.

But you know what? It also felt incredible. This course has consumed much of my working life for the last six months, and seeing it finally out there in the world was both exhausting and exhilarating.

How launch week unfolded - hour by hour!

• Monday 9am: the early access email landed, and two people signed up within minutes. Relief. Excitement. Try not to obsessively watch my emails and instead go out for a walk with friends (as I’ve smartly decided to launch a course when I’m on holiday!).

• Monday PM: respond to some queries which come in about the course. Quite a few people who are interested in the course have done my in person training before and want to know whether this course will have new content (it does!). Others want to know a bit more about whether it will help them with facilitating their team meetings (again, yes) and others want to know if they can book coaching calls to go along with the course (again, yes).

• Tuesday 9am: the “24 hours left” email prompted another wave of sign-ups.

• Wednesday 9am: full launch—newsletter, LinkedIn post, website updates all went live. We received a flurry of last-minute questions, so I extended the discount for three more hours. It was worth it: another surge followed.

• Thursday–Friday: a second round of social posts, this time highlighting our 30-day money-back guarantee for anyone still unsure.

The numbers (because I know you’re curious!)

Around 15% of our waitlist converted to paying customers, which is apparently higher than average for this kind of launch. We had set a target of at least 5% converting, and that was reached by the end of day 1.

There were clear spikes: one when the course first went live, another with the "24 hours to go" email, and a final rush when we extended the early bird pricing.

After all my many hours researching EU One Stop Shop VAT schemes, no one from the EU bought the course. It was all UK based participants, and two U.S participants.

Honestly, the numbers felt secondary to the relief that everything worked and people were actually excited about what we'd created.

Celebrations …

Here's something I've never done properly in six years of freelancing: celebrating moments of achievement is one of them, and so I wanted to make sure that I actually celebrated this milestone. And it felt GREAT.

I got …

🎂 Branded cupcakes from Rachel's Kitchen – completely indulgent and a bit ridiculous, but I love them and now want to order Facilitation 101 cakes for every big moment!

🌱 Flowers and handmade ceramics for Leanne Parry and Anna Emerson – the two brilliant women who got this over the line with me. The level of care and dedication they brought (including plenty of late nights) has touched and humbled me.

🥂 Celebratory bubbles (okay, fine – more like half a bottle!) on a beach in Cornwall the day we launched to the waitlist.

❤️ Time for reflection – my notebook is looking very full right now with everything I've learned through this process.

I'm definitely going to build celebration into future milestones, big and small. It turns out acknowledging your accomplishments feels pretty wonderful.

What's next? The after-action review

I wouldn’t be a proper facilitator if I didn’t do a process review on the launch day! Tomorrow doing an after action review with the team to capture everything we've learned.

Then of course comes the job of continuing to promote the course. It’s an ‘evergreen’ product, and will stay live on the website for a few years at least. I’ll start collating feedback from the learners who sign up now, and make updates every 6 months or so, but probably won’t re-record the course for a while (if at all! That all depends on how sales go).

The course is now live and welcoming its first cohort of learners. If you're curious about what six months of work looks like, you can check it out here: Facilitation 101 Self-Paced Course.

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This concludes my five-part series on launching a self-paced course. If you missed the earlier posts, you can find them all in my archive. And if you're thinking about creating your own course, I hope these insights help you on your journey.