48: My Burnout & Why I created the Micro-Launch Method©

Today I am going to share with you more about my story. The story of my burnout and about a series of coincidences that resulted in me creating The Micro Launch Method©.

My Business beginning

I started my business right after I graduated with a Masters of Science and Marketing Strategy. Unfortunately, I graduated in the middle of one of the worst economic recessions ever, where everyone and their dog were getting a marketing degree.

On top of that, two weeks after I graduated, my husband and I moved from Amsterdam to Frankfurt. Frankfurt is the financial capital of Europe, and I was there as a fresh grad with a marketing degree who didn’t speak German. Great combination!

I started applying for jobs. I spent six months applying for jobs and didn’t get a single interview. Actually, I was rejected from a graduate program from a big company literally less than 30 minutes after I applied. I’m not going to lie, after I got rejected, I cried. I cried and then I got pissed. I said to myself: “Okay, this job is not working, I need to do things differently”.

I started learning how to code websites. I was freelancing, I was editing articles, creating websites, designing logos, things like that. Soon, I realized I had actually been working with a lot of my clients on the marketing strategy along the way and that they were doubling their newsletter subscribers, they were hitting the highest month of revenue of the year, the month after they worked with me. That was the transition process that got me thinking that this could be my thing, that I could actually get people to pay me for marketing consulting and business strategy!

I’m not stress, I’m just busy

I started my business. But because I had zero confidence and I grew up in Singapore, which is very hierarchical (“the older you are, the more experienced you are, the better you are at what you do”), I was watching two, three webinars a week, signing up for all the free coaching calls, and obviously all the freebies. I was trying to absorb as much knowledge and information as I could. I would fixate on certain things; I listen to an interview with someone who said that she had a successful business without having a website purely from giving value in a Facebook group so I thought: “Oh, I must go do that”. I was trying to blog, I had 55 unpublished posts because I was so scared and thought they all sucked.

My Burnout

I would wake up in the middle of the night to check Facebook and try to reply to as many comments as I could because you know, giving value. Long story short, this wasn’t working. And it culminated on King’s Day five years ago where I started getting dizzy. I started getting so dizzy that three days into this I couldn’t walk. My mom took me to the emergency room and after five hours of doing all these tests, the conclusion was: nothing physically wrong with me, it is just stress. And my response was: “That’s bullshit. I’m not stressed, I’m just busy.” It took about four months for me to recover. Four months before I could walk again without feeling dizzy before I could have a conversation on Zoom or Skype that was longer than 15 minutes.

Make things easier, simpler, quicker

As things went on and I had this experience of burnout. I knew that I never want to go through that again. I wanted to make things easier, simpler, and quicker for me. I started, as I saw it, taking shortcuts. I’m impatient, I have ADD, I don’t want to spend too much time on a project. I’m just going to cheat the system and I’m going to do this a certain way. 

Masterminds, International Retreat

First I sold my mastermind really easily. Then I sold an international retreat in 15 days with one email. I sold out another mastermind with a Google Doc. And a year ago I had just finished running a retreat in Florida, The Get Shit Done Adventure, with one of my best friends Monica Delgado, and the plan was I would come back to Europe and we would start promoting the next retreat which is going to be six months later. The day our sales pitch was ready, our marketing was ready, the day that we were gonna hit live on that sales page, we went into lockdown with COVID.

So I had to pivot really, really quickly because my 2020 has been built around events. I was supposed to run three international retreats, I was planning a conference, it was all built around events. What I ended up doing was something called The CEO Quest, where I repurposed my two-minute audio notes from my previous mastermind. I put that together, did my “lazy marketing” and made $1500 that weekend. Three weeks later I realized I actually made $5,500 because I started getting bookings due to that visibility. I told a friend of mine Suzy Gray: “I just did a micro-launch over a weekend and I made $5,000.”

Your Magical Micro-launch

Suzy texted me for three days straight to get me to talk about micro-launching. That is when I started breadcrumbing about micro-launch because up until then I just thought this was my lazy, cutting corner way of marketing and it wasn’t proper. And then I realized, proper is relative and this is a very simple and targeted way to market and sell an offer.

I’ve used it for $37 products and I’ve used it for $4,000 products and everything in between. Not only have I inadvertently created something that I didn’t even know I created and people were asking me for, but it was also a very, very good way of simplifying things. A couple of weeks later I put together the first micro-launch method called Your Magical Micro-launch and people got amazing results. 

With the micro-launch method that I teach, it’s not just about financial results; you will not only sell the core offering that you are focusing on but you’re going to get all these residual results of visibility coming your way. 

So, that’s my story. I believe in pushing ourselves but I don’t believe in burnout. I believe in simplicity, I believe that there is a shorter route to where you want to go and it doesn’t have to be this crazy, stressful battle. I believe that there are a purpose and reason behind what we do, and that “why” is really powerful. The “why” behind my micro-launch method is that I saw the success it brought me and the success it brought to other micro-launchers in a way that is so much easier for them!

If you haven’t already, make sure you go and find out your launch personality by taking The 60-sec Quiz. Send me a message to let me know what your result is so that I can give you custom tips!

Love + Magic

Maggie