What My Last Launch Taught Me About Building a Kingdom Business Online in 2026

#028 // FOR THE KINGDOM WOMAN WHO'S BUILDING (OR ABOUT TO BUILD) A BUSINESS ONLINE AND TRYING TO FIGURE OUT WHAT'S ACTUALLY WORKING IN 2026.

Have you noticed how much HARDER it's gotten to launch an online business this year?

You're doing all the things. The strategies that used to work. The content cadence. The funnels everyone teaches. And it's just not landing the way it used to.

If that's been your experience, you're not imagining it. Something has shifted. The internet has changed. AI has changed how buyers think and decide. Your audience is deliberating WAY differently than they were even six months ago.

I just wrapped a 12-day launch of my workshop, The Jesus Girl's Business Launch Lab, and pulled four lessons out of the experience that every Kingdom woman building online in 2026 needs to hear.

Not too heavy on metrics and dollars. Just the transparent observations, the strategic shifts I'm taking forward, and what you can apply right now to your own Kingdom business build.

Here's what we get into:

→ LESSON 1: Why "praying about it longer" might be the thing keeping you stuck (and what scripture actually says about discernment vs. "righteous delay")

→ LESSON 2: The 80% launched wall is a pattern, not a personal failure — and the biblical reason "doing it alone" was never the plan (yes, even for Noah)

→ LESSON 3: Why the urgency-driven 4-to-7 day cart everyone teaches was built for the wrong buyer — and what I'm doing differently in my next launch

→ LESSON 4: You cannot delegate discernment, not even to a smart algorithm. What happened when I trusted Meta's AI for three launches in a row

📖 Scriptures Referenced: James 2:26 · Genesis 7

🔗 Resources + Links:
 → Grab Kingdom Builder's Mindset Toolkit + get on the list: ericapyle.com/toolkit
→ Jesus Girl Gang BUILD with Faith Mentorship: jesusgirlgang.com/mentorship
→ Show Notes + Blog Post: ericapyle.com/ep28
→ Watch on YouTube: youtube.com/@ericapyle
→ Instagram: instagram.com/ericapyle
→ Subscribe on Apple Podcasts: ericapyle.com/KBPapple
→ Subscribe on Spotify: ericapyle.com/KBPspotify

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

This is the Jesus Girl Gang Kingdom Business Podcast, where faith finally meets real strategy to launch your online business. Well, hey there. Welcome back to the Jesus Girl Gang Kingdom Business Podcast. I'm your host, Erica File. And today I want to talk to you about, I just finished up a launch and I want to talk to you about the lessons that I learned in that launch as someone who is building a kingdom business online in 2026. And so as we get into this, I just want to let you know that this episode is for two very specific kind of subsets of people. So number one, if you are a Kingdom woman who is building a business online or wanting to launch a business online right now, and you are in the process of getting that going, then this episode is for you. Because I believe that these four lessons that I'm going to talk to you about that I learned during this past lunch, um, I think that these speak directly to my ideal customer, my ideal member who is a kingdom woman who is looking to build and launch a business online right now. And I also think that this episode is for anybody out there who is themselves a kingdom woman who's building a business and your ideal customer. So let's say you are a coach, you are a course creator, you are a membership or community leader, um, or you are a services provider online and your ideal customer is Kingdom Women. Okay. If that's you, if you have that kind of a business and that and a Kingdom Woman is your, is your ideal customer, then this episode is for you too, because these four lessons speak specifically to the Christian woman consumer online. Okay. And it's it kind of has blown my mind because if you think about it, just in the last year, two years, business running a business online has completely changed, and specifically when it comes to marketing. And so that's kind of what I want to talk about today. But if you're just coming upon this podcast and you don't know who I am, hi, I'm Erica Pyle. I am a Christian business coach. I'm also a pastor alongside my husband of a local church here in Tapo, Florida. So I'm a pastor. I have a women's ministry that I lead, that I founded and I and I lead. And every single day I'm inside of a community and a mentorship program that I set up called the Jesus Girl Gang, the Build with Faith Mentorship, where I am helping women, Christian women, to build and launch their businesses online every single day. So I build builders. I have a background in process engineering and in process implementation. Um, it's something that I have done for over 20 years and got paid the big bucks in the marketplace to do. And then about 10 years ago, I said, nope, I want to do it as a small business, as a solopreneur when I got started. And over the last few years, I've grown a little bit. I now have a very small but mighty team. And I get to help other women out here in this online space to build and launch their businesses to impact and income. So that's who I am. So I want to get into this. So as I was just mentioning, I just wrapped a launch of a program. So I have an intro intro program, like a kind of come and see what I'm all about program. It's called the Jesus Girls Business Launch Lab. It is a three-day online workshop and it is very interactive. And truth be told, it really is more like five days from the training perspective because I have a little kickoff at the beginning, which happens the day before day one, obviously. And then we do have something on the back end, a bonus day on the back end with respect to tech and systems and platform. And so if you really think about it, it's it is a five-day kind of like module. And then I wrap around the whole thing a 10-day coaching experience. So even though this is like an intro to launching your business online, five-day training experience, I do include this 10-day coaching experience wrapped around it. Because one of the things that I learned in my launches last year is that people do not just want a course anymore. Like if you're just selling a course and it's anything significant, like if it's something that's really going to help them to build out anything significant or to uh break through any significant like mindset hurdle or any kind of a hurdle that they're experiencing, and you want to get them to a significant transformation, courses aren't doing it anymore because people are like, nope, I want immediate results. I want the fastest results I can get, and I don't want to do it alone. And remember, I'm speaking for as someone who serves online Christian women. So, like that is that is a big part of this. And this is part of what I learned in this launch, is very specific to Christian women consumers here online. Um, but for me, that was what I just launched. I launched this three-day, which was really like a bonus with bonuses, a five-day training situation. And then it had 10 days of coaching. And then it also had AI prompts that will blow your mind, would totally blow your mind. Like every time I release these prompts and I go through with people, the the quotes that I get from people in this community, like, oh my goodness, I cannot believe what I just got. And so it's a really um, you know, value-packed situation. And I I charged 33 bucks for it. So that was the workshop. And then there was also an upgrade that you could do, a VIP upgrade, so that you could get a one-on-one strategy session with me for 45 minutes. You also got an implementation workbook, you got extra prompts, VIP prompts if you joined the VIP. You got a VIP group coaching session with hot seats on the Friday of the workshop, and you got unlimited time replays. So you got lifetime replays. So all of that, if you added 66 bucks. Now, I'm telling you this because I want you to understand the base workshop, which included all those trainings, 10 days of group coaching in a Voxer coaching community thread, um, prompts, okay, and limited time replays, I was selling that for $33. To me, that is like a no-brainer. When I did the value stack on my website on the sales page for that, I've actually stacked that to almost $1,000 of value. Okay. Like knowing what the value that I was giving in that coaching thread for 10 days, all the trainings, the limited time replays, all the prompts. Like I compared it to what other people in the market were doing. And I also know what my time is worth and what my product is worth. And charge $33 for it. You would think that that's a no-brainer. I want you to hold that intention because when I tell you the lessons that I learned, it's gonna kind of like blow your mind. And then I added on all those VIP benefits for just 66 bucks. So the whole VIP ticket, $99, but you could get in and get a ton of value, like almost $1,000 worth of value for $33. Okay. Keep that intention. So what lessons did I learn? I ran this cart. I ran it for, I opened registration for the um for the workshop. I traditionally do a two-week registration. I opened up about five days before the two-week and I did a priority registration, which was I gave I offered a $77 ticket for the all-in experience, which included the VIP. So $99 was the normal price when we I opened up registration. But in this five days prior to opening up the regular cart of registration, I ran a promo and I gave people um 77 bucks. Okay. So my cart, my registration period for this workshop was two weeks and five days, almost three weeks. Okay. So just keep that intention. So I open up this cart and I launch it. There are four things that I learned as a result of running this launch this year. Okay. Here's this this time around. The first one was this I already knew this. So here's the principle. This is a kingdom principle. Clarity doesn't come from thinking about it more. Clarity doesn't come from praying about it more. Clarity comes from action. You might be like, Erica bless me. I should be able to get clarity from from from prayer. No, no, no. You'll get revelation, but you might even get a promise from God. But you're not gonna get clarity until you start moving your feet in accordance with what God said, in accordance with the promise. And I can show you Bible story after Bible story after Bible story, like the scripture that I'm gonna hold to first and foremost is faith without works is dead. So you will not be able to actually see your faith produced until you start moving. And I know, I know based on doing this stuff out here in these internet streets for years, that clarity is what breeds action, action is what bleeds clarity. And so I can work with you on mindset, I can work with you on planning, I can work with you on process, but until you start actioning what it is that we've put together as a plan, you will not get clarity. And I can prove that every single day, all day long, all week long. And so, and this launch for me, it it proved it because here's the subheading kingdom women, kingdom building women think and pray on every decision a lot, a lot. And I actually have data, launch data that show me that it's probably too much. And you're like, Erica, how could you say that? How could you say that we could think and pray too much? Well, here's the reason it's because we think that all of that thinking and all of that praying is wisdom and discernment when really what it is is it's just doubt dressed up in delay, and we're calling it discernment and wisdom. Because at the end of the day, you need to move in order to see, you need to act in order to see the thing come to pass. Like you can't just pray and think about something and then wait for it to fall out of the sky. It's just it's just not how it works. And so what I saw, I watched this play out in my launch. And the way that I did this is I was I was wondering because in the last few launches, it seemed like it was taking my person a little while to get going on the decision-making process of joining. Remember, I told you that the ticket was $33? It should feel like a no-brainer to me. I thought $33 is a no-brainer. I'm buying things for $27, $47 all day long online if I want to learn something. So I was like, why is this such a difficulty to just decide that you want to pay $33 for something? And I didn't actually know for certain. I could see from my uh platform metrics that people were landing on my website, my sales page, and that they it wasn't converting in the beginning. And I was like, what is happening that I'm not seeing the conversion? And so I went to my AI assistant who helps me with uh looking at things and analyzing things, and it suggested that I um that I add something to my my system called Microsoft Clarity. So I don't know if you've ever used something like this before, but if you've used Hotjar, um this also helps you, gives you like heat map information. So it lets you know where people are landing on your page, what they're clicking, how long they're spending on stuff. Well, if you use this, and I'm not affiliated with it, like I'm not, I don't have like a link or anything, but Microsoft Clarity, if you use that, it it is incredible the data that it can give you. So um it will not only tell you people who are landing on the page, like how long they're there, where they came from. So whether they came from an ad or whether they came from an organic source, um, which one they came from. Um, it also tells you how long they were on the page and it tells you like where they clicked, all those kinds of things. But can I tell you something, you guys? It gives you a screenshot recording of their visit to your page. So you can literally see in real time what they lingered on, what they clicked, how long they spent on particular sections. It can tell you if they um like I had a feeling that my girl, my ideal customer, um opens it up from the ad and then is like, oh, this is too much for me to handle right now. So I'm gonna open it in an external browser on my phone and I'm gonna come back to it. And then she never does. I actually proved that that was really happening because I was using Microsoft Clarity and it could show me that, oh, that's exactly what they were doing. They had multiple instances of my sales page open. And so this was, and this was a regular happening, is that they would see my ad and they would open it up, and then they'd be like, okay, I want to read this. I want to give the right amount of time to this to consider it. And then they would open it up in an external browser and then not go back to it. And then they would do it over and over and over again. And so at the beginning of my my registration period, they were doing this a lot. And so I had a lot of people hitting the page. My my ad metrics, like my um click-through rates were like five, six, seven percent. This is incredible click-through rates for an ad. Like, and I had ad experts looking at my ad data and saying, Well, your ads are really working. They're getting them to the page, but they're just not converting at the page. So I was working on hook and headline. I was, I was working on anything that these people were telling me like this could be make the difference. But a little while into the launch, what I started to realize was, no, no, no, no, this isn't my messaging necessarily. It's definitely not the structure of my page, it's definitely not my ads. What I'm dealing with is I was learning that my Kingdom Woman builder, the one who wants to launch that business, and she's stuck and she's been, you know, hitting a certain amount of work done, and then it peters out. There is there is a commonality in that person. And what I found based on the data is that she just thinks about things a whole lot. And she prays and thinks and prays and thinks and prays and thinks. And sometimes she'll even let the cart close. And the reason why I know that this is the case is because I did a little experiment. So, quite frankly, I told, you know, the AI that I was working with, like, let's wait and see, because I have a feeling that when we get closer to the end and I start using urgency ads and I start, you know, giving certain messaging in my ads, she's gonna know that the cart's about to close and she's gonna start to move. Sure enough, in the last five days of the launch is when everyone just started to move and they jumped in. And it was just crazy because you could see that it was these returning people who had been there a few times. And they finally were like, okay, I'm gonna take the time to do this now. Okay. But here was the most interesting piece. I decided to do a little experiment and leave my sales page open even after I started the launch lab, even after I started the workshop. Keep in mind that these uh replays were limited. I gave 10 days of replay. Okay. So I gave from the open of the workshop until 10 days later. And if you bought the base ticket, you could get those replays up until 10 days after I started the program. Okay. Well, I left the page open. And wouldn't you know it? I had four people buy into the workshop after I was done. Like there were only a few days left of the replays on the workshop and they still bought anyway. Why? Because we have an epidemic level of thinking and praying and praying and thinking and thinking and praying and praying and thinking. Sister, we have got to be people who move. Like it's 33 bucks. Like, I was like, I want to do an ad where I'm like, sister, is $33. Like, you spend $33 on lunch out with your girlfriends, like serious with the tip, like seriously, and this could change your life. And this isn't just like a little bit of information. This is me getting into the trenches with you for 10 days to help you build out your offer, your messaging to your audience so that you gather the right audience and your sales page. We're gonna do this all together over the course of 10 days and it's gonna cost you $33. And even when I gave ads like that, they still didn't move until some of them after the cart was technically closed. So here's what I want you to know if you are the kingdom building woman who is listening to this, sister, you've got to start taking more risk on the front end. I get it that you are like, I gotta talk to my husband. I've got to, and I'm not like, I am not giving shade about the fact that you want to talk to your husband about a $33 purchase. That is not what I'm saying here. What I'm saying here is you've got to make the decision for yourself in the beginning, even before you go to have the conversation. Is this something that you're meant to do? Is this something that, is this the way that you're meant to step into breaking through that roadblock of what's keeping you stuck from launching your business? And there's something there about, I think that if I just pray and think about it a little bit more, it'll become more clear. No, you're gonna have to make some $27, $33, $47 mistakes. I think that's really the answer. You're gonna have to just start chucking some darts and let's see what works and what moves the needle. Because, like an entrepreneur who's willing to sow some seed, and even those mistakes, like I can tell you, I I've bought certain programs that have not been everything that I thought that they would be for 27, 33, 47 bucks. But can I tell you something? I learned something from every single one of them, even if it was don't do it like this. So I just really want to encourage you like this is gonna cost you a little bit of money to get going and to get moving. So clarity comes from action, not from thinking and praying about it more. Okay. So that was lesson number one. Lesson number two the 80% launched wall is real, it's a real pattern. So, what am I talking about? Like a few launches ago, I started realizing that because I wanted to help women to get their business built and launched online. Like, I love working with the newer woman who has this idea. She knows she's called of God to do it, she wants to build it, but maybe she's in that phase of going, okay, I know I'm the girl for the job. I know I'm supposed to build this thing. However, I don't know how to do it. And I don't know what strategy to follow necessarily. I don't know how to put the tech together to do it. I don't have any sales training. So I'm not good at sales and at messaging. So I've got a whole lot of things that I need to figure out how to do. But I, but first and foremost, I know I'm convicted that I'm supposed to build this thing. That's my girl. I love working with you because as long as you know that you like you know that you heard God and you have that promise from him and you are willing to step out and do the work, girl, I got you. I got you all day long. Now I can teach you how to write an offer that will sell. I can teach you how to craft messaging that will speak just to your ideal customer, nobody else, and will lock in on them and gather them to you. And I can teach you how to set up a sales page that will convert. I can do that because not only have I done it for myself, but I've done it with other women and I've shown them how to do it. So we're just like, we're just a community of women, kingdom-building women, and we do this together all day long. Okay. Like you're my girl. Okay. But what I needed to realize for real, for real, is that we are girls who think I can do it by myself. I can, I can do it by myself. And all I need is a strategy. This is what we honestly believe for weeks and months and sometimes even years. Can I tell you that this is the testimonial that I get the most? The testimonial that I get the most from people who come into my programs and eventually into my mentorship, it's it's this. I was doing this for X number of years on my own, starting and stopping, starting and stopping. I'd quit like two, three, four times. I swore I was not going to do it anymore. But the call of God just kept on coming on my life, kept on coming on my life, and I knew that I couldn't quit, but I couldn't make it work. I kept on hitting 80% launched, and something would break, something would crack, I would make an excuse. I never got to. Fully launched. And then I joined Erica's program and everything changed. What was that? What was that? First of all, I I knew based on this launch alone, because I talked to the people who were coming in, and I know this over and over and over again. This is a real thing. The 80% launched wall is a real thing. You're not imagining it. But here's the thing you need to hear. It is not a personal failure. This is a wall that every one of us as kingdom-building entrepreneurs, this is a wall that we all hit. And here's why. Because we believe that there's only one piece to the breakthrough strategy for that wall. And for most of us, we think it's if I have the right strategy. If I have the right strategy, if I follow the right pattern or framework, then I will be able to do this on my own. I'll be able to figure it out. And that could not be further from the truth. It's not biblical, first of all. There are like virtually no big build-out plans in the Bible where God said, you, as only one person, can have to do this whole thing. And before you point to Noah, I want to remind you, there were eight people on that boat, sister. Okay. So the whole plan wasn't just to build a boat. The whole plan was to have a boat that contained the remainder of humanity that could then multiply the earth again. And that required more than just Noah. It wasn't gonna work with just Noah. So understand, even that building plan, even though his hands were the ones that built the entire boat, the full promise was built through Noah and seven other people in that boat. Come on, somebody. So you need to understand that when you hit that 80% wall, which we all do, and it's normal, and it doesn't mean that you're not the girl for the job. It doesn't mean that you're never gonna figure this out or that you can't do this. What it means is you you've probably not realized that it's not just a one-piece pattern that you need to be building by. It's a four-piece pattern. You need a framework, you need a coach, you need or a guide, you need a community, and you need a platform to build on. You need all four things. You need all of those pieces. Now you can argue with me and be like, no, I should be able to do this on my own. I'm a real high capacity, high-performing, get it done kind of girl. Cool. But how's that working for you? Because here's what you need to hear. In the Bible, the way that we learn how to do something that we've never done before, especially in the workspace, is something called apprenticeship. So there ain't no shame in the game to get a coach, to get a guide. There ain't no shame in the game. People who are trying to scale Mount Everest, that's sheer stupidity to try and figure that out on your own. Sheer stupid stupidity, you'll die. So everybody who's going up to that mountain, every single one of them has taken courses, has done training, and probably and has has a guide, someone that they're following who's done it before them and knows how to do it so they don't, so they don't get dead on the side of a mountain. Okay. So we've got to lose that part of us that says, no, I have to do it on my own. It's not mine and it's not successful if I didn't figure it all out on my own. It's not even biblical. Okay. So yes, you do need a good strategy. You need a framework to build by. Okay. But I believe that we also need guy, a guide and a community because there is something about getting into a room with other women who are like-minded, like-spirited, and moving in the same direction as you. There is something about the encouragement and the sharpening. And um, you know, like my dad was a race car driver and um, and I went to a lot of racing. And so I had to learn a lot of lessons about the physics of drag and draft, drag and draft, because this is how you win races, is understanding the physics of how this works. And drafting off of someone is you actually get into their momentum and you can slingshot past them and you can wind up winning based on that. So when you get into a community with other women who have momentum and they're moving in the same direction, you can use that concept of drafting and we do it together. And so we win together. And then finally, the platform, the tech stack. Like one of the things that's causing you a lot of friction probably is how do all these things work together? Where do I build out this offer? How do I create a sales page? Where do I host that? Do I need a website? Like, it's not working that I'm just trying to do the influencer thing on social media. Yeah, no joke. Because you need a framework, a coach, a community, and a platform. And if you're missing any of those, it's very likely that you keep on hitting that 80% launched wall. Am I talking to anybody? So, you know, for those of you who are trying to launch your business online and you keep hitting that 80% wall, this lesson that I learned, it was basically just a confirmation. I already knew this is what I, it's what I base the launch lab on is these four components. I give you all four of these components for that 10 days. And it's amazing how people go, I just got so much more done in 10 days than I got done in 10 months. How'd that happen? It's because you had all four pieces of the pattern. Make sense? So that was confirmed for me. Lesson number three. The right buyer doesn't always buy right on time. And I, this is just an echoing of what I started to talk about in lesson number one. If you serve Kingdom Women online, Kingdom Women consumers, you need to understand the amount of prayer and thought and consulting other people and other options and going back to the sales page over and over and over again is actually happening in the mind of your consumer and in the heart of your consumer. And part of it is because she believes that to do this is good stewardship. She doesn't realize that this is distraction and disruption and delay that is being sewn into her field by the enemy. And so, as people who, as as, as sellers online who are looking to help that kind of a person, help that kingdom uh woman consumer, we have to think about what does this mean for our messaging and what does this mean for our offer structuring, right? So, like I told you, I left my sales page open on the Launch Lab for heck, it's still open. I still left it open. I haven't moved it to a wait list. I'm about to, okay? And then when I opened up the next offer, which off the back of the launch lab, I offer women to come into my build with faith mentorship inside the Jesus Girl Gang community. And I opened that up and I had women move from the launch lab into the community. And then normally I shut that page. Guess what? That page is still open because of what I learned here. What I learned was it's not gonna be the right time for every woman all the time. Like what I'm learning about my ideal customer and the one who ultimately comes into the mentorship is that she goes through about two or three of my programs before she commits to my mentorship sense because my programs are like 27, 33, 47. Okay. So that seems like an easier price point. And it's like I could try it on if I if I don't learn a lot, I'm not out a lot, right? But honestly, they are really taking this $33 seriously. And I've had repeaters, people who've come through launch lab two, three, four times, and it's those people that are then seriously considering. But even after two times, they may not come into the mentorship. So one of the things that I learned this time is that even though an old strategy was so two years ago, I would say the strategy was short carts, four to seven days. And also, you only open your membership a certain number of times a year. Okay. What I've learned through the launch that I just did is that absolutely not, my workshop launches are gonna be three weeks long. Like a thousand percent, I'm blowing it open, and I'm gonna create an evergreen model of the offer so that it's always available no matter what. Because I proved that when I left the cart open, even when the replay window is short, people are still buying the offer. And they can only be buying it organic because I'm not running ads. So, what would happen then if I'm running ads to it and it's evergreen and you don't lose the replays? Like now you're like, yeah, give it to me because I'll put it, I'll put it there and I will decide on when I'm gonna run it. So, one of the things that I've learned about this is the the right time, like you can you can ramp up the urgency all you want on a Kingdom Woman consumer, and she ain't gonna move. She's gonna move when she moves. And so you've got to create offers that are available to her when she's ready to move. And this is kind of like a counterpoint to what I told you in lesson one, which is we've got to figure out messaging that does move our Kingdom Woman consumer. But at the same time, we also have to build components into the offer that meet her where she is. So it's both and it's not either or. And for this reason, I just left my mentorship page up. You can go to Jesus Girlgang.com slash mentorship right now, and you could learn about the mentorship right now, and you could even join if you wanted to. Like previously, I only left it open for eight days after a launch lab, and then I closed it because it was exclusive. Because I was like, you can only get in now. It's urgency. Guess what? My girl don't move like that right now. She does not. And she's like, You want to know something? If you're gonna force me into that box and not give me the time that I need to be able to consider, then I'm just not gonna do it. And I listen, I'm with you. I am with you. So I'm starting to rethink these urgency moves when it comes to these larger ticket sales because my mentorship, $247 a month or $2470 for the year. And I do not bat an eye and I don't offer discounts because I know what is offered in there. We've got a platform in there where you build out your entire business, email, sales pages, um, you know, all the things, uh, text services, um, automations, um, your CRM, everything is in this platform. And we have support for it and training for how to use it and how to build it out. That is all done with you. That that right there. And then you get coaching, weekly group coaching with me. Every single Friday, I am with you on Zoom, doing hot seats. I'm doing asset reviews in the community. We are in there together. We've got a community in there of women that are all building, all running in the same direction. We've got all the components. And then I've got the signature course that teaches you my framework, the build with faith framework, the five steps to get your business built and launched online in eight weeks. So I've got all the components in there. I know that it's worth what I'm offering it at. So I don't run sales and I'm clearly now based on this on this um data that I'm learning, I don't know if I'm gonna put that urgency on it anymore. Like you got to get in here in these eight days or you can't get in. Because that it's not serving my buyer. And if you have a kingdom female consumer as your ideal customer, you've got to start to think about this because she's tired of it. She just she just done with us trying to play the urgency play. She's done. She's done. She's like, you're gonna either give it to me the way that I want it and the way that I need it, or I'm not gonna do business with you. And so we really do have to adjust ourselves to that reality right now in 2026. Last thing that I want to share with you, the last lesson that I learned in this launch, and it's actually was a longer lesson that I was learning, because I've run ads on my launches for the last three years. So, like hardcore. I'd I had done ads before then, but I would say that three years ago, a little more than three years ago, I started running ads as a primary vehicle to getting the word out about my offers. And and it worked. And I had profitable uh launches from the time I started doing that. I think the first launch, I was actually no. The first launch, I I covered and made money on the back end. So I always look at my launch profitability from front end. So I spend the ads on the front end, I run the low ticket front end intro offer, and then I pitch my core offer on the back end, and I look at the metrics all the way through. So here's what I spent on ads, here's what I made on the low ticket, here's what I made on the back end, and I take the net of that, and I have been profitable on every single um launch that I've run using ads from the beginning. And the only, the only like variable there was how profitable. And was I profitable just on the front end? Was I profitable when I got into the back end? And that has fluctuated. But what really got wild was about 10 months ago when Meta changed the algorithm and really started accelerating this move towards taking away the advertiser's um ability to be very specific about targeting. So when I started out with ads many, many years ago, I was taught how to target in the ad. And I was taught all the tips and tricks about how to get the right behaviors targeted, how to get the right other accounts targeted, so that you would get in front of your exact right person. And I spent a lot of money and a lot of time learning that strategy. And then last year, with the shifts in the algorithm and the way that Meta was doing its new um ads, it started using Advantage Plus. It started taking away our ability to tell it exactly who we wanted to get this ad in front of. And some people got really excited about that. And I was interested, I was intrigued because what I kept on being told was just make sure that your creative and your copy speak directly to your ideal customer and your golden. And so I spent a lot of time last year learning how to dial in my video, my graphics that I was going to use for my advertising and the copy to do specific call outs to my person, to make sure that I was uh repelling the right people that I did not want in my offer. And I spent a lot of time putting that into my creative and into my copy. But what I didn't realize is that so I put that in there, and then I was also told, well, use the AI um vario options that they're giving you in the headlines or in the copy because they know, they know where to send your ads. Meta knows your ideal customer more than you do, better than you do. And I fell for that for three launch cycles last year. And can I tell you something? I absolutely annihilated my pixel. I annihilated my data set. I went from having the exact right girl in my data set and being served my ads. And within three launches last year, between October and January of this year, I totally torpedoed and wound up finding that the person that Meadow was delivering to me was a course addict, someone who just wanted to spend their money and get a course, but never actually show up and do the work. And unfortunately, a few of people like that got into my mentorship. And for the first time ever, my retention rates and my mentorship are like crazy long, like years long. Like my average, and this is with people who have like been the anomaly, my average on lifetime membership is like over three years. That is unheard of. The real metric for a membership, the average retention is somewhere between two and three months, two and six months. And mine is over three years. But with these launches that I did in the those last three launches, I wound up having three people come into my membership and leave within three months. That happened to me before. Never. And when I started mining the data around what happened with that launch, and what that means is I actually downloaded CSV files of how my ads performed and I loaded them into an AI that I trained to analyze my data and go out and do research and figure it out for me. They were like, you know what happened? When you allowed the AI to tell you, like, we're gonna expand the reach and we're gonna give us a little bit more money here, and let us use these sorts of creatives over here, and let us use this copy over here. It'll give us more range. It actually expanded and went after people that weren't actually your person, Erica. And now you have a what what it called a polluted data set because now you have a whole bunch of people in your data set that are not your ideal customer. And it was like, this is gonna be a problem for you because Meta uses the data set to determine how to get you more people that look like it. So it was like now in this launch, you're gonna have to take the time and spend the money to cleanse your pixel, to actually get the pixel back aligned with who your ideal customer is. And that this was clear right from the beginning, right from the beginning. It was like, let's talk, let's say this, let's add these, because if we add these captions into the mix, into the rotation, we'll get you more people. I was like, no, because I don't want the person who's been dreaming about starting a business. That is not who I work with. I work with the woman who knows that she's called and she has an idea and now she's ready to build it. And that's the only person I want to talk to. And for 15 days in this ad campaign, I was fighting with Meta. And for only the second time ever, I had one of my ad sets get stuck in Learning Limited. I like the last one of those launches at the end of last year was the first time it ever happened. I felt like, because I do pretty good with ads. Like my cost for acquisition, even through all that nonsense, I mean, actually, I think that's what caused it, was my average cost for acquisition was like in the $80 range, $80 to $90 range. And then when that nonsense happened, it fell down to between 30 and 40. And I thought, look at me, I'm doing so well. Well, no, I wasn't because I wasn't getting my ideal customer anymore. And so, yeah, I was getting leads, but they weren't great leads. They weren't the leads that were gonna stick with me. So this time around, I played it right. I actually held in my guns, I used the targeting functions as much as I could inside of that ad set, the other ad set, because the first ad set I did the old school way. And I just went, you know what, let's see what happens. And then I started a new data set and I did targeting and I did all the things in there. And that first ad set, it got in the Learning Limited. That second ad set, I was like, we ain't we ain't going there. And from the get-go, I was able to get ad set B functioning properly to the point where at the end, my entire campaign where I wound up was a cost for acquisition of $133. So not as good as when I was doing the great targeting in the beginning and I was dialed in on my right ideal customer. But I believe, and the AI that I was working with that was doing the analysis for me, um, it was like, look, this is the cost. This is the cost of actually taking back the responsibility of knowing who you want to serve and making sure that Meta serves your ads to the exact right fit person. So I what I learned is we can we cannot say, oh, Meta knows our customer better than we do. It doesn't. It's trying to craft our customer for us based on who will respond. And can I tell you something, sister? If you're a kingdom person like I am, that's not that's not what we're called to do. We're not we're not called to gather the just anybody who um has a pulse, anybody who's willing to respond. What I know about you as a kingdom entrepreneur is that God put a particular people group on your heart. People who have a specific concern, have a specific pain point, have a specific problem. And he's given you the solution to bring to them. You are the right girl for this job to deliver this solution, to deliver this transformation to this particular person. That's how specific it is in kingdom business building. And so we've got to make sure that we maintain mastership even over our ads. Mastership even over when an algorithm says, I can get you, I can get you profitable. It's like, what's the real cost though? Because for me, it meant that I got customers, and then for the first time ever. I lost them in three months. And that was devastating. Not just because I lost a customer, but because I was like, wow, I think I might have failed those people because they came in thinking that they were getting one thing. And then when I came to them with like, all right, let's build. Let's build it now. Let's go. I got everything that we need to get building right now. These people were like, I'm not ready. And so rightfully so, they stepped away from the membership. But that was, I take that responsibility because I didn't retain mastership over who those ads were going to. So that's what I learned. So if you are getting ready to run ads, I think, you know, it's and it maybe you've run them before, maybe you are you're a regular at running them. But I think the real lesson that I learned here is, you know, it was it was an interesting little run over these last six to eight months to think that perhaps if we got the creative and we got the copy just right, that Meta would get those ads where they need to go. But I do think that we need to revisit doing as much targeting as we can in the in the ad creation, right? In the ad set creation. And I also think that, you know, look alike audiences and I'm giving them our audiences for retargeting and really dialing in who we want these ads to get in front of because we want that perfect fit client. Because it's not just good for us, it's also good for the people that we're selling to. So I think that's that's a big lesson that I came away with. So I know that's a lot. And I don't know where you are right now in building your business or launching your business. Maybe that lesson number four is a little bit much for you. But quite frankly, if that was interesting to you and if these four lessons, you're like, okay, that was good to know. I'm just really interested to know, even though I may not be there just yet, I like hearing about that. And sister, you're in the right place because that is what my mentorship is like every day, all day when I'm in the middle of launch. They love, they live for me coming into the group and doing a live and being like, here's what I learned today in Launchland. Here's what, here's what we learned not to do. And quite frankly, I'm constantly spending dollars as investment so that I can learn the hard, hard things so that my my students, my mentorship members don't have to. And that's something that I actually get really lit up by. Because if I can learn it and if I can go in front of you as a guide and I can show you how to do it the right way without having to go through the pitfalls or without having to spend all the money, man, I feel like I've done my job. I feel like I did what I came for. So, so that's what it's like inside of our community. So, what would I suggest that you do from here? Because I don't I don't have anything open necessarily right now, but you can go look at my pages. You can go look and see what I had on offer. Um, the Launch Lab, the page is still there, but um, you can't get the replays anymore. So I don't know if it would be worth it to you unless you bought the VIP level, uh, because then you get lifetime replays. So if Launch Lab looks like something that could be of interest to you, I would encourage you grab the VIP if you want it right now, because that's where the replays are. So you go to Jesus Girl Gang.com slash launch lab. You could see that there. And then if you are interested to see what my mentorship is about, even if you don't want to buy it, even if you're like, I'm not ready for that, if you're just nosy and you want to go see how I set it up, you want to go see what's in what's involved in it, if you want to go look at my messaging, whatever, go to Jesus Girl Gang.com slash mentorship and go go do some research. Because I say that to my mentorship girls all the time. I'm like, look, the best thing that you can do is go look at sales pages and messaging that's actually working, that's actually hitting. Um, and anything that's getting traffic driven to it, anything that's selling, like there's something working there. So I would encourage you do that, not just with my sales pages, but with other sales pages that you know are working. You can learn a lot by looking at other good um copy, other good sales pages that are out there. So that's what I would say. And also, if you're new here or if you haven't done so yet, subscribe. Subscribe to the podcast wherever you're listening or watching. I would love to have you come back next week and we could do it all over again. Sound good? All right, friend. That's what I have for you this week. I hope it was good. I hope it helped you. Let me know. If you want to, come on over to Instagram. I'm at Erica Pyle. Let me know what you got out of this episode. Let me know that you're a listener. I would love to get to know you. Hop into my DMs, okay? All right, friend. Until next time, have a great week. I'll talk to you soon. Bye for now.