Pivoting after failure: what we learned when our workshop offerings

Written by Meg Kant

Pivoting after failure: what we learned when our workshop offerings tanked

Anyone who has joined us for any of our courses knows that we don’t hold anything back. We are happy to share all our successes and tips and tricks we have learned over the years. We are also very forthcoming about our missteps, failure and blunders…. And trust me there have been a lot.

A huge blunder happened at the end of 2021. Our team was trying to find ways to make education as accessible as possible for folks.  Screen fatigue and pandemic stress had made learning online difficult for a lot of people.

Mini-Workshop Launch: Great Idea, Surprising Hurdles

We had (what we thought was) a great idea, we wanted to launch mini-workshops on topics we thought our community would be interested in. We dove head first into getting the workshops all ready for our students to participate in. We made it a relatively low-cost offering, we had over a dozen workshops available, and we created a credit system so people could buy bundles of workshops.

We thought it was going to be a smash hit. It took our team tons of hours to put everything together, and we were so excited to launch.

Great Idea, But the Workshop Launch Flop

Then when the launch happened it was crickets, outside of a few students purchasing workshops we had next to no enrolment. We had already contacted instructors and put together dates and information. We built the website and organized everything. But this time we forgot one key step.

We didn’t look at what purchasing the workshops was like from a user experience.

• With over 12 workshops available people felt bombarded with options.
• The credit system felt confusing.
• Looking at each individual workshop was a hassle.
• The checkout process felt clunky.
• All this led to nobody signing up.

Here we thought we had this brilliant idea, but our execution made it really difficult for our community to engage in it.

Learning from Our Mistakes

Why am I sharing this with you? Because if learning from our mistakes can help you in your business we are HERE for it.

What did we learn from this?

For the next launch, we started with a pre-order/waitlist sign-up. We got a clear idea of the need/desire for what we were putting together before actually completing the project. We also focused significantly on the user experience of our offering. This helped us save so much energy and time because we were able to pivoting if we realized it was not something our community wanted or things needed tweaked.

Tips for Success

Sometimes you might think you have a brilliant idea, but before you spend time/money/energy putting it together here are a couple of things we recommend.

1. Make sure that it is an offering people want. Sometimes things we think are going to be a hit are not what our clients are looking for. Ways to help this could be doing a pre-order of sales, or starting a waitlist and seeing if people sign up.
2. Think of user experience first and foremost. Is your landing page easy to navigate? Do you have a clear flow of what to do? Is checkout simple? Are there too many pages or options? Have people in your life check out the process before launching to make sure it’s user-friendly.

If you loved learning from our failure and want to get other tips and tricks on growing your business, sign up for our Birth Worker Business School! It is a one-of-a-kind program, built specifically to help you start and grow your business. 

Have you had any business blunders that you want to share? Feel free to post in the comments, it might help someone else! ???? 

Pivoting after failure: what we learned when our workshop offerings tanked

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Xoxo,