This is how it always happens.

You spend time making something. It could be a product, a business, art, an event, etc.

You’re really excited about it. You know it’s got the potential to change people.

You put it out into the world.

You rush to check your stats. Downloads, sales, site visits, they’re all basically the same.

Most likely, those stats are underwhelming. They might even be nonexistent.

This discourages you from doing everything you can to promote your creation and get it in front of new people.

Already you feel like you’ve failed. Like you’ve created something and the market has delivered a resounding referendum on your work.

But here’s the deal. Unless you’ve spent months or even years of building up and grooming an audience for whom your creation was specifically designed, you should go in expecting 100% that no one is going to show up.

At least not immediately.

Choose Your Milestones

Whenever I start a new project, be it some new product, podcast offering for Counterweight Creative, or something personal, like this blog, I set specific milestones at which I’ll evaluate the stats and performance and make decisions about the future direction of the endeavor.

Yes, I’ll check the stats. Maybe even daily. Maybe even more than daily.

But I will not draw any conclusions on the audience reception, make any changes to the original plan, or let myself dwell on the numbers until I reach those set milestone review dates.

For this daily writing experiment, I’ve set those initial markers at days 50 and 100. Assuming that I continue writing past day 100 at the same cadence, I’ll probably continue to assess at 50-day intervals, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves here…

For the podcasters we work with, I often recommend that those with weekly shows seriously review their stats and strategy at 25 and 50 episodes.

Obviously, there are time-limited promotions and events that require a tighter review schedule.

I ran a 5-day bundle sale last year that required near-constant attention and review given the timeframe. (Sadly, no amount of in-the-moment review and tweaking could save that product, but that’s a story for another time…)

Stick To The Schedule

Once you’ve set your milestones and determined your review schedule for yourself, your sole job is to stick to your plan.

Don’t start making tweaks to the way you’re doing things based on the inital numbers.

The point is to collect data, and your data won’t be worth much if it’s a mish-mash of varying techniques and strategies.

Once you’ve reached your first milestone, lay out potential tweaks to the way you’ve been operating to this point and choose one of them to introduce.

Again, you want to be able to define what exactly is working and what’s not, so changing everything isn’t really useful strategically, even if you randomly hit upon a combination that performs better than your current plan.

Keep Emotion Out Of It

At the beginning of a new project, we’re extremely sensitive to the opinions (or perceived opinions) of others.

We’ve spent weeks, months or even years creating something that we’re in love with, and without the equalizing weight of the positive reviews that an offering that’s been out for years has accrued, even the smallest bit of negative reaction can crush us.

Too often, that initial blow causes us to pull our creation back into our cave and hide it, and ourselves, from further hurt, without ever putting in the effort of getting it in front of the people it was actually meant for.

The problem is that when we’re in the middle of a lackluster launch, we conflate no reaction with negative reaction when that’s often not the case.

Many of us don’t start out with an audience of people on hand who would actually appreciate what we’ve made. Instead, we’ve bought into the myth of “build it and they will come.”

Sorry, but it almost never works that way.

That means that releasing what we’ve made is only really the very beginning of the work.

Our job now is to do the not-quite-as-sexy work of continually honing our pitch and systematically getting our creation in front of the right people, the people it was really made for.

This process doesn’t work if you’re taking every bit of feedback as a personal affront and every bit of positive feedback as a world-conquering victory.

It works best when you keep your emotion out of it and take every bit of feedback as neutral data.

Only when you reach your defined review milestones should you draw any conclusions and subsequently dance around your apartment in glee or curl up and cry on the floor in despair.

Once you’ve finished your review, defined any tweaks to your plan and had your chosen dance/sob and the accompanying champagne/entire-pint-of-ice-cream, it’s time to push your emotion back out of it, at least until the next milestone.

There’s so much more to creating anything than the creation itself.

If we can view our projects as living, breathing and constantly evolving, we can understand that there is no definitive failure until we decide ourselves that the work is no longer worth doing.

Just because nobody showed up for the grand opening doesn’t mean our ideal audience isn’t out there.

More likely we just haven’t done the work to find them yet.

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