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It has been quite an eventful week at the Daily Writer. This past week, I did an official public launch of the Daily Writer Community. I know that I have mentioned it several times already here on the podcast, and I even did a full episode a couple of weeks ago sharing all about it.

But this past week was the first time I really put it out there on social media and shared it more widely than I ever have. On this episode, I wanted to dive into the behind the scenes of creating this group and what I have learned from it.

The Daily Writer Community is a membership program for writers. The purpose of the community is to help writers develop the habits and mindset to be more successful in their writing. It’s for writers of every kind, whether you do blogging, books, client work, screenwriting, sermons, copywriting, or anything else. This is a generous, positive, group of writers who inspire and encourage one another and take action toward their goals.

The group is intentionally small, and is capped at 100 people total. The idea is that we not growing huge in numbers, but we are growing deeper in our skills and community, and going higher and higher as we reach bigger goals. You can find out more about how to apply via this link.

Here are 5 surprising lessons I’ve learned from launching the Daily Writer Community:

1. Do your market research before you launch something.

This is a surprise because when you do your market research, you will learn things that are unexpected. Just to give you some context for how I created the daily writer community: I had an idea of what I wanted this group to be and the type of features I wanted to include. However, I also felt it was important to ask some other people what they thought and get some input.

I had probably 25-30 conversations with people, just asking what they would include in a community like this. I learned a lot of valuable things. Then when I went to do a private beta launch in early December, I went back to many of those people and offered an invitation to join the group because I had used many of those ideas.

This applies to books or anything else you are launching. It’s important to make sure there is some kind of market for the product you are creating. This is step many of us creative types like to skip because it’s time consuming and it doesn’t feel very creative. But I really encourage you to dig into this and put your business owner hat on when you are thinking about offering something for sale.

2. When you launch, you will be surprised by the people who will ignore you and support you.

This has surprised me on both fronts the last couple of months. I have honestly been surprised at the people who have come out of the woodwork and either been interested in the DW community, or they have shared posts about it and expressed interest.

On the flip side, here is what is even more interesting. There have been some people who I assumed would want to join, based on what they said they want. A number of people who have talked to me about writing over the years, and who I assume would be a natural shoe-in, didn’t respond to messages or emails. I don’t take this personally. A lot of this has to do with money. It creates a clear dividing line between support and non-support.

If you have built something worthwhile, and you are charging a fair price for it, and you do your marketing the right way, over time people will sign up for it. But it will be surprising who will be interested, and who won’t. I find it all very fascinating because there are constant surprises.

3. You must put in the work to build something meaningful.

Now I offer this lesson here as a surprising one because the amount of work it takes to create something worthwhile is always probably surprising. I was just telling someone today that success is about 10% talent and 90% pure effort and stubbornness, and persisting until you have finished. And I really believe that.

In order to put this community together and launch, here are some of the things I needed to do:

• Get clarity who it’s for and not for.
• Talk to a couple dozen people to get pre-feedback. These were extensive conversations, not just short ones.
• Decide on the features I was going to offer and what each of those would look like.
• Have graphics designed.
• Decide on price points, which was very tricky
• Set up the FB group and Membervault, where the resources and courses are stored. Then I integrated that into ConvertKit (email marketing) and Stripe (payment processing).fore.
• Build a sales page and create a video.
• Send out personal emails to a couple dozen people with an invite to join the private beta launch group.
• Craft an email to my list about the launch
• Engage with the group for several weeks before the launch. This included community calls, writing sprints, and other things.
• Figure out my marketing copy and launch strategy for the podcast and social media.

Those are some things that were involved in building this.  Whatever big project you’re working on, you have to embrace that it’s going to be a long haul and just commit to doing the work.

4. You will never feel ready to launch, but do it anyway.

So I’m just going to be flat out honest with you. I was supposed to do a public launch the week that I released the podcast episode about the DW community. The podcast episode came out on Sunday, two weeks ago. Then on Tuesday and Thursday of that week, I was going to do social media posts and send an email to my list about it.

However, I didn’t pull the trigger on putting it out there on social media that week. I delayed it by a week for no good reason. I started to really doubt whether people would embrace it. It was a classic moment of doubting yourself and being a little afraid of what people would think.

Well, I finally got my ducks in a row and got a little more organized that week, so it all turned out just fine. And then I decided that even though I felt intimidated by really putting this out there on social media, I was going to practice what I preach and do the courageous thing.

Here is the lesson I took away from this: you are never ready for the bigger challenges. You prepare and do your best, but you aren’t ready, really. If you felt totally ready, that means the challenge is not big enough. instead, we grow into those challenges. They force us to expand and grow, and then we can take on something even bigger.

Now that I’m on the other side of this launch, I know that I have grown in my courage and I have learned a lot from this experience. And I think that’s the way it goes for anybody who attempts something you don’t feel ready for. So I encourage you to keep pushing ahead with big goals.

5. Don’t take anything personally.

This is a surprising lesson because it feels like one I’m constantly learning. When you put your heart and soul into something like launching a membership community, or writing a book, or anything else, it feels very personal to you. But it’s important to step back and remember that this is also a business. When someone isn’t interested in what you’re offering, or when they join and then decide to cancel, or when they don’t have the response you think they might have had … none of that is personal.

One thing I have to keep reminding myself is that people do things for their own reasons. We have reasons we present to the world, and then we have our own internal reasons for doing things. I remember something I read in a Robert Greene book a while back (either that, or I heard it in an interview he was doing). He said that our actions are often designed to conceal our true thoughts or intentions. In other words, we sometimes don’t want people to know what we really think about something, so in order to avoid confrontation or hurt feelings, we pretend to be excited about it.

Now you can easily say this is a cynical or a pessimistic view of human nature, but I think it’s pretty much accurate. It doesn’t mean that everybody hates you, it just means that people are complicated, including you and me. We all have our own reasons for doing things. And despite what we say or project to the world, the real proof of the pudding lies in our actions. Some people who pretend to support you, won’t actually do it when the time comes to put it into action. Other people who are completely silent will step up to the plate and really support you.

Remember, none of this is personal. I think it’s a good philosophy of life to just let people be and let people support what they want to support. My job, and your job, is to create the very best community or book or whatever that we can, and then add so much value to people that the right ones will want to support us.

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