Have you ever heard of challenges? It's basically an online strategy you can use to find customers and also create communities. Local Miami resident Joschka Strakerjahn is the founder of the Launch Your Challenge Podcast and has built a successful business using launches. I recently spoke with him about the power of challenges and how you can use them to grow your business. Here are some highlights of our conversation.
Joschka’s Story
In 2020, COVID-19 changed everything for Joschka. Over the course of a few days, every one of his clients was gone. He went from running a successful business to having no business at all. A year or so before Joschka lost his work, he discovered challenges. He saw an ad for a challenge. Joscka signed up, and soon was fascinated with how fast he turned from a complete stranger into a fan. And then he realized the potential of a challenge for businesses to grow and scale.
Starting A Challenge
In March of 2020, Joschka decided to do a challenge of his own, using paid ads. In just three weeks, he had 4,500 people sign up. That response completely blew him away, and it sold him on doing challenges as a way to create a business.
When Joschka started doing his challenge, he did not have a real online presence. He just has a very simple website, but he didn’t use it very much. He got all of his clients through personal connections. But for his challenge, he got all 4,500 people for his challenge through paid ads on Facebook and Instagram. So don’t overlook the power of paid advertising.
Challenges Faced And Lessons Learned
When creating a challenge, the first decision is whether it will be a free challenge or a paid challenge. When you run a free challenge, you can run it with a Facebook group. If it is a paid challenge, you need to create a sales funnel of sorts with a landing page. But it can be very simple.
Joschka says that one of his first mistakes was that he actually had nothing to offer the participants of the first challenge. To avoid this mistake, it is important to go to the offer first, then work backwards from there. If you already have an existing business, you want to base the challenge around a specific need your business already serves. This approach will help you create the right call to action.
Another common challenge is in how to structure the lessons you give to challenge attendees. Joschka shares that he learned you want to structure the lessons in a simple way that serves the needs of the attendees. In most cases, you don’t want to have lessons any longer than 20 minutes.
When challenges are executed properly, you can actually create an entire business based on challenges. You can promote the challenge for three weeks and then on the fourth week do some lessons and at the end of the week, you get more customers. Joschka shared with this flexibility and the use of ads, you can even run multiple challenges at once.
Obviously there is a learning curve when you do anything online, but I think there is great potential here because most of these challenges use Facebook groups. So many people are already on Facebook, it is really an easy way to connect with people where they already feel comfortable engaging with others. It takes a lot to get other people to try a new platform altogether. Thanks to Joschka for this great conversation and I hope it encourages you as well.
Would you ever consider doing an online challenge?