The 5 Phase Launch Timeline for Course Creators in 2025: How to Launch Your Education With Confidence
Successfully launching education doesn't start when you announce. It starts in a few intentional phases surrounding that moment. And when you understand what those phases are and what each one is responsible for, launching stops feeling so mysterious and starts feeling a lot more grounded and repeatable.
Whether you've launched education before with varying results, or you're gearing up to launch something for the first time, thinking about it in these different phases makes everything clearer. The content ideas start to flow. The systems you need become a lot more apparent. And honestly? It just feels less overwhelming.
I want to walk you through the launch timeline from start to finish and explain what's actually happening in each phase. This is the structure underneath a launch, from audience building to pre-launch messaging to the moment you open the cart and all the way through to delivery. Not as a formula, but as a walkthrough so you can focus on the right things at the right time.
What You'll Learn
The 5 phases of a successful launch and what each one is actually responsible for
Why audience building before you announce can make or break your conversions
How pre-launch content builds brand equity (hint: repetition equals reputation)
What your launch event or opt-in is really doing for your business
Why open cart feels so much easier when the earlier phases are solid
How delivery feeds into your next launch and creates long-term momentum
Why Do Some Launches Flop While Others Feel Easy?
Here's the thing. Most people associate "launching" with that moment when you open the cart. You announce, you sell, you close. But if you skip straight to that part, you may have had some varying experiences. And I've seen this happen a lot.
Sometimes you can skip to the open cart phase the very first time you launch an offer because you've probably accidentally been doing a lot of this other stuff already. The people who are most interested, who didn't need to know anything other than the fact you were launching something? They love you, they trust you, and they were excited about your program.
But the second time you launch? That's where we wanna make sure we're doing the audience growth and the audience activation too. If you've had a launch that didn't work out, this might give you a little bit of an aha moment.
What Is Phase One of a Launch? (Audience Building)
I wanna start well before anything goes live, because this is where launches are either supported or strained later on. It can make a massive difference in your conversions, of course, but also in the amount of people that you're actually launching to.
Audience building in advance is where the context gets created. Even the most successful course creators I've seen in the past couple years have started to really dial in the audience building well before that two week period before the launch event.
This is where people start recognizing your voice, your perspective, and the type of problems that you speak to.
If you're building recognition around what you do, that's the difference between launching something that feels inevitable for your audience and something that feels totally out of left field.
Over time, recognition becomes association, and that is what builds trust. Your audience begins connecting you with a specific lane, a specific outcome, or a specific way of thinking. That association does not happen all at once. It's built through repetition.
Repetition equals reputation.
This phase answers some quiet but important questions in your audience's mind:
Who is this for?
What does this person actually help with?
Do they understand my world?
What is their story?
It also gives you time for them to be in your world long enough to start to understand: yes, this is a real person. They're not a flash in the pan. They're not here just to scam me. I can trust them to help me with my problem.
Audience building is not about collecting as many eyes as possible necessarily. Even with a small audience, if you're consistently showing up with the same core ideas, the right people start paying attention and staying. That's where the magic happens.
This phase does not need to feel like a giant thing. It just needs to be steady.
What Happens During Pre-Launch? (Brand Building)
This is the backbone of a successful launch, in my opinion, because this is where brand equity gets built.
I cannot say this enough, and ironically it's kind of meta: you need to repeat. The more consistently you repeat those same core ideas, the more your audience is gonna start to understand your message, your areas of impact, your way of solving problems.
This phase is about bringing forward the overlap between what you're uniquely good at and what your audience actually needs. Not as a campaign format, but as a pattern. Essentially, you wanna build a bridge.
You're making sure in the pre-launch that you're addressing the things that the people in your world need to understand in order to fully get the benefit of your work.
This phase is closing the gap between how you're currently perceived and how you want to be known.
That gap does not close by deciding. It closes through experience. You want to create a perception shift. That's what branding is, essentially.
Most people don't experience you the way you experience your own work, right? You're in it. You understand every single thing you do and why you do it. The people outside of your paid work only know what you show them.
So each piece of content becomes part of a bridge. Brick by brick, you're walking your audience closer to understanding the depth of your work, the impact you create, and why it matters.
How to Apply This If You Have Multiple Offers
If you have multiple areas of impact or multiple offers, this phase helps you gently emphasize the one you're leading with next.
For example, if you have a balayage in-person class coming up and then a few months down the line you're gonna be teaching hair photography, you want to spend that pre-launch time emphasizing and building awareness around the thing that you will be launching next.
Or maybe you have a branding program and you also have a social media program. Same thing applies.
You don't need to announce it at this point, but if you do have multiple things that you do, it's going to help shape the expectation for what's next and start the conversations happening around it.
By the time you move out of this phase, your audience should already feel familiar with the ideas and the context of what you are about to sell.
One Thing to Watch Out For
A mistake I've seen is people doing list building, utilizing ads to build their audience before a launch, using a lead magnet or something that's not connected enough to what they're about to launch.
If you're building an audience of people who are interested in one thing and that one thing is not related to your paid work, there is a solid chance that you're attracting a massive audience of people who aren't actually gonna benefit from your work.
Something to be mindful of.
What Is a Launch Event and Why Does It Matter?
Once your audience has context and familiarity, the next phase is inviting them to take action. It's creating a clear moment of engagement. This is where people step a little closer.
They spend focused time with you, the experience, how you teach, how you explain things, and how you think.
This could be:
A workshop
A training
A private podcast
A challenge
A paid or free experience
The format is more about what you wanna shift and how you wanna do it. I don't believe there's one superior format. It depends on your offer, it depends on your audience, the level of what you wanna put into it, whether that be time or money. There's so many different factors.
What's important to understand is that this is the phase that's gonna create movement.
You're giving people an opportunity to say yes. They can opt in, they can raise their hand, and they can decide whether they want more. This is where you're gonna bring the people who are the most interested in what it is that you do and get them into a space where you're able to have a lot more focused engagement and time with them.
Because the groundwork has already been laid, this next step feels natural. It fits into the story that your audience is already familiar with.
This phase also helps people self-select. Some will move forward. Others will decide it's not the right time. Both outcomes are useful because they're gonna bring clarity. You don't want people that you can't actually help getting into your programs. We wanna operate with integrity and make sure that the people who come work with us are people who can actually benefit from our work.
How Do You Sell During Open Cart Without Feeling Pushy?
Open cart is the moment that most people associate with launching. But by the time you've reached this phase, a lot of the work has already been done.
You've nurtured, you've warmed people up, they understand you. And now you have one job during open cart: selling.
This is your sales window. This is where decisions get made. Timing gets considered. Priorities get weighed. Questions get asked.
Your role here is clarity and answering as many questions as possible through your sales emails, through your content. Everything you put out should be doing the job of explaining whether or not this is a good fit for people and showing them the cost of staying stuck where they are.
When these earlier phases are solid, this part feels calmer and more direct.
It just is so much easier because A, you're gonna have more people that you're in conversation with, and B, you're gonna have the clarity because you've worked through so much of it.
You don't wanna spend your launch phase educating people about your work AND then selling. You want to have already educated them in the lead up so that you can just sell during this phase.
Why Is Delivery Part of the Launch Timeline?
Delivery is one of the most underestimated parts of the launch timeline because this phase shapes how confident you feel selling again.
It's gonna help you get great testimonials, great stories to tell. It's also gonna show you language to use in the future because as soon as you start delivering, you're gonna start having conversations and you are going to really start to understand your people on a deeper level.
Delivery feeds into brand equity and reputation.
It sharpens your message. It creates proof. It gives you real world insight into what's landing and what needs refinement.
Strong delivery makes future launches easier because the foundation keeps getting reinforced. This is where you carry forward momentum and get all the information you need so that your next launch can be even more successful.
Key Takeaways
A launch isn't just one moment. It's a sequence. It's a client journey.
When you understand what each phase is responsible for, you just need to focus on the phase you're in and build around it.
The 5 Phases:
Audience Building - Build recognition and trust before you need it
Pre-Launch/Brand Building - Create the bridge between where your audience is and what you're offering
Launch Event/Opt-In - Give people a moment to engage and self-select
Open Cart - Focus solely on selling (the education has already happened)
Delivery - Build proof, testimonials, and insights for your next launch
I know we love to think about putting stuff out there and having overnight success, but honestly, this is the stuff that goes into a sustainable long-term business.
If this post gave you an idea or a new perspective, send me a DM on Instagram @itsJodiebrown. I'd love to hear your thoughts.
And if you’d like to listen in on the exact podcast episode that accompanies this blog post, you can do that here, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Xo Jodie
Ps. Don't forget to subscribe to the Sought After Educator Podcast to get more insights like this delivered to your phone every week.
See you next time.
