Trying to create your product and the launch with no budget can seem like an impossible task, but don’t worry it isn’t. I’m speaking from experience here, in the early days, I had no budget to launch digital products and found that this can actually make your launches more successful. Having no budget forces you to work a lot harder at each stage of your launch – this can lead to even better results. But here are some specific tips to help you make a budget-less launch a big success.

Look online for people who are interested in your niche.

How do you take the first step to finding people? It’s easier to build an audience once you already have a small one. A great tip is to go to websites like Quora and find people who are asking questions about the subject you want to teach. These people have self-identified as having an interest in your product. By crafting a personalized answer for that person you’ve offered them something and, at the same time, given them a sneak peak of your product.

Go into forums and start conversations, join conversations. Use Twitter and other social media platforms to find out what people are talking about and the questions people are asking – contribute to these discussions too. By offering people something of genuine value like this you’ll be building your tribe – your most valued forever customers.

Do the unscalable

This means doing the things that you just wouldn’t be able to do if your business and your launch were on a larger scale. For example – get on the phone! Create one to one conversations with your customers and other people that you’ve built relationships with. Find out what other people are doing, find out what your customers think. This is incredibly valuable to your product and only works on a small scale. Make the most of these small-scale opportunities.

Replace your budget with hustle

So you’ve got a small audience, but how do you make it grow? Simple. Start hustling. Make the most of all your channels, whether that’s Facebook groups, Twitter followers, and hustle those people to get them onto your email list. This helps you to have an open avenue for conversations. When you’re first building your audience, you need to keep that audience engaged and keep them talking. Facebook groups in particular can be a great tool. You can use them to reach out to people you know in business, and you can ask people who are already members of the group whether they know anybody they can refer – before long, you’ll see your audience numbers snowballing.

I’ve also been asked whether it’s a good idea to work with affiliates during a beta launch. You might think this would be a good way to approach big audiences when you don’t have big budgets, but I definitely wouldn’t recommend this. You can read more about why here.

Do stuff for people, for free

It might seem like a pain to be doing things for free, but this can add incredible value to your product in the long run. Want to build a community? So, approach businesses who have already established their community and ask how you can help them. This might be through offering content that makes them look great, but also exposes you (and what you have to offer) to their big audience. This is a great way to build relationships. If you’ve got no budget, you need relationships.

Drip feed your content

You don’t need a polished perfect product in order to launch. I’ve written about this in another post which you can read here. Essentially, you can launch your product with a small about of content and create as you go. This allows you to adapt and change and means you won’t waste your time and money on a product that might not sell or that needs significant changes.Don’t make the mistake of thinking that you need fancy videos. You don’t. Use something like Zoom to make your videos for free (up to 40 minutes) and record videos live when first launching. Your audience are coming to learn from what you’re saying – you don’t need a video that’s all bells and whistles. Simple is not the same as sloppy.

What tools are best to use?

There are loads of free plug ins that you can use, you don’t need to spend money. You can find great free PowerPoint templates, WordPress has great membership plug ins that are also free. The only thing I do recommend spending on is a checkout cart. But if you don’t have budget for that, just opt for a PayPal button. As long as you’re making the process easy for your customers, you don’t need to spend lots of money on fancy websites with bespoke tools.

You can launch without a launch

Let me explain. The first “launch” I did, which resulted in five-figure sales, wasn’t really a launch at all. There were no ads, no big announcements. I simply reached out to the people on my lists (who I’d carefully fostered and maintained relationships with) talked to them about the product and asked if they were interested. I created a simple PDF broacher about the product, and that was all. No budget on ads at all. When you’ve invested your time in your tribe, you don’t need to spend on things like ads.They say time is money and when you’re launching a product without a budget this is very true. Put in the time to build relationships and you can build a huge engaged audience and launch your product on a shoestring, or even for free.