Ready, Fire, Panic!
On launching things, crying about it, and doing it anyway
If I’m honest about how I work, it goes something like this.
I have a great idea. I get wildly excited. I do all the hard, boring, unglamorous work to make it real. I push it live into the world. And then I sit on the edge of a hotel bed somewhere between Salvador and Bogotá and quietly lose the plot.
Ready. Fire. Panic.
That’s my modus operandi.
Forget Ready, Fire, Aim, or even Ready, Aim, Fire. Aim for me is a fear induced tearful meltdown
The good news is I usually fail forward, or sometimes succeed sideways, but every single time the panic arrives on schedule like a bad houseguest.
My Most Recent Meltdown
Last year I came across a brand selling beautiful bucket-list maps & towels. Really gorgeous things, covered in adventures and places you’re meant to tick off as you go. I thought they were excellent.
Around the same time I’d bought my husband some scratch off ‘date night’ cards for his birthday, which I also thought were a super creative and fun idea.
I’d been looking for a great product idea to start a travel based e-commerce brand and my brain linked the two products together to come up with scratch off style bucket list travel cards.
What really struck me was the scaleability of the product. I started to envision, couples sets, hiking sets, scuba diving sets, destination specific sets, solo adventurer sets. A whole family of products stretching out in front of me like a buffet.
I was excited!
Without too much strategising, planning or research to ensure there was a market for this product, I decided they were a great idea and I should forge ahead! (Seriously as I’m writing this, I’m sighing at myself).
I decided to start with a general travel challenge set. A simple, deck of scratch-off cards to spice up anyone’s travels. I spent a month negotiating with suppliers and another 2 months slogged through artwork rounds, packaging, listings, Amazon setup, the lot.
I was hoping for a Black Friday launch date, then a Christmas launch date, but I missed both (more on that later).
But then, just like that the cards arrived in the warehouses and went live on Amazon. As in, buyable by actual humans with actual credit cards.
And that’s when it hit.
I’d been ready, I’d fired, and here was the panic, washing over me like a tsunami!
“I can’t do this” I cried to my husband sitting in the lounge of the house we were sitting in London.
“Nobody’s going to want these”
“What on earth made me think this was a good idea”
“I’m a terrible entrepreneur”
“I’m going to fail publicly”
As ever hubby was gentle and sympathetic;
“Well, you’ve got 4000 of them sitting in a warehouse so you better bloody sell them”.
Ok then….
Not My First Rodeo…
Unfortunately this wasn’t my first rodeo with my crisis of confidence. I’d done something similar a couple of years earlier with a set of planners.
Great idea. Big vision. All the work. Launched them. Overcome by fear.
Without really admitting to myself what I was doing, I didn’t promote them. Barely posted about them. I just left them sitting quietly on the listing like a dinner party nobody RSVP’d to.
We sold a few, and got some great reviews, but unfortunately products don’t sell themselves, even the brilliant ones. They need someone banging a drum for them, and I’d decided the drum was too loud and too scary.
So this time I made myself a deal.
This time, I said to myself. You are going to feel all the fear and you’re going to promote the thing anyway Jo. You are going to keep showing up for it even when your hands are shaking. You are not allowed to abandon this one because of your fragile ego! 😳
Where I Am Right Now
As of writing, I’ve done just over 260 sales. My profit margin is sitting around 27%, which for an Amazon ecommerce product is pretty impressive.
PPC is ticking along and the reviews are slowly coming in, almost all of them glowing! (Only one meanie 😂)
(I mentioned above I missed Black Friday and Christmas. That was because I chose the slowest supplier as they had the best quality cards. Short term it cost me Q4 2025, long term, many of the reviews mention the great quality of the cards so next Q4 I should do very well!)
But it’s been a slow start due to launching a giftable travel product at the end of December which is akin to opening an ice cream van in February. But I’m in the game!
And with every sale my fear has faded, my confidence has grown and I’ve become very excited and proud to promote my product.
Now the Real Work Begins
And so it’s time for the real work to begin.
I’m about to turn my social media up to eleven.
I’m running Facebook ads to a landing page.
I’ve made my own video ads, which I am absolutely not confident about, but I’m running them anyway because the alternative is doing nothing.
I’m leaning into influencer marketing.
I might do some lives, god help me.
I’m planning on leveraging my 50+ Nomad brand to pull eyes onto the cards,
And I’m framing the whole thing around the giftable angle, because the market has told me very clearly that’s the strongest hook.
And if my pattern holds, I’ll cry again at least once. Probably when I hit publish on the first round of video ads. That’s fine. I’ve factored it in.
The BIG Takeaways For You!
I wanted to write down the lessons from this, because I had a coaching call recently and a lot of the group were stuck in exactly the same place I’ve been stuck a hundred times.
Not strategy, or content or even a product.
Stuck on mindset. Stuck on the fear.
So here’s what my MO (Ready, fire, panic) has taught me.
1. Fear is the default setting when you launch anything.
It’s not a sign that your idea is bad, or that you’re in the wrong room. It’s just what it feels like to do something that matters to you in public.
It’s like you’re suddenly exposing yourself and everyone can see you naked (metaphorically!)
If you wait for the fear to go away before you promote something, you’ll never promote anything, ever.
2. The worst thing you can do post-launch is let the product sit.
I did it with the planners. I’ve done it with videos courses I’ve spent weeks creating and never promoted. I’ve done it with books on Amazon. I nearly did it again with the cards.
You’ve done the hardest part. You’ve got the thing out into the world. Letting it quietly die of neglect because you’re scared is the most expensive mistake in the whole sequence.
3. Impostor syndrome only breaks with evidence.
And evidence only comes from doing. You can’t think your way out of feeling like a fraud.
You can only act your way out, one small piece of evidence at a time.
A like, a follow, a comment, a sale, a review, a repeat buyer.
With every engagement no matter how small, your confidence builds.
4. Momentum matters more than strategy.
For the first few weeks I was refreshing the listing like a maniac, and nothing was happening. Then a sale. Then another. Then a review. And once you’ve got a few sparks, everything becomes a tiny bit easier.
You post the next thing with slightly less dread. You run the next ad. You record the next video.
Momentum is the thing that pulls you forward once you’ve shoved yourself off the starting line.
5. You don’t always know what problem your product solves until people tell you.
When I launched the cards, one of my running worries was that they didn’t really solve a problem. Travel is already fun. Why do you need cards to make it more fun? What was I actually selling?
Turns out the problem the cards solve is one I hadn’t thought too hard about.
The problem is: what on earth do you buy the travel lover in your life?
Because we all know someone who lives for their next trip. Someone impossible to buy for because they don’t want more stuff, they want experiences. And my cards are the rare, genuinely unique gift that fits that person perfectly.
The reviews told me this before I figured it out. People aren’t buying them for themselves. They’re buying them for friends, partners, kids heading off travelling, parents with a cruise booked.
I didn’t design that positioning. I discovered it by shipping the thing and listening.
6. Please, for the love of god, do some market research before you launch a product.
Everything is sellable at the end of the day. My cards will sell, couples cards will probably sell better, family adventurer cards probably even better.
But my cards are a tougher sell because I didn’t research and see where the demand was - what people are already actively searching for, looking for, asking questions about and buying.
Make it easier on yourself and no matter what you’re selling, physical, digital, coaching, services - research your market. What are they searching for, clicking on, buying, asking questions about. There’s your product right there.
Nobody is Watching You!
I mean this with love, but I also mean it quite literally.
Every day, people upload around 720,000 hours of video to YouTube. That’s about 82 years of video added to the platform every single day.
Approximately 23 to 34 million videos are uploaded to TikTok every day - that equates to roughly 16,000 videos uploaded every minute! 😳 Then add Instagram, Facebook, X, Threads, Substack….
The internet is a bottomless churn of people making stuff, and the vast majority of it is never seen by more than a handful of people.
That sounds depressing until you flip it. It means nobody is sitting there waiting to mock your launch.
Nobody is compiling a dossier of your awkward first video ad.
Nobody is reading your first article, laughing at your terrible IG reel or judging your bad hair day.
Nobody cares enough to care, because they’re all too busy making their own stuff and panicking about their own launches.
You’re not being judged. You’re being ignored. And ignored is the starting line, not the finish line.
Once you understand that you’re a grain of sand on the beach of online content, your fear should dissipate.
Put the blinkers on. Close your eyes. Leap.
You Don’t Need a Mel Robbins Audience
I have no intention of trying to become Mel Robbins. I’m fifty-something, I’ve done my hustle years, and I have precisely zero desire (time, money, attention, brass balls) to build a stadium-sized personal brand.
That’s not my game.
My game is this.
I want my corner of the internet. My little 50+ Nomad patch. My books on Kindle. My products on Shopify. My ecommerce brand on Amazon. A handful of platforms that together fund the freedom to live the way I want.
99.999% of the internet will never know who I am.
Thank goodness right?
But the 0.001% who do, will subscribe, buy, come back, tell their friend at a dinner party in Leamington Spa, and be a part of my world.
That 0.001% is more than enough to build a 7-figure business, even an 8-figure one, and to fund every trip, project, book, and quiet act of philanthropy I want for the rest of my life.
The world is that big now.
You can build something extraordinary while being invisible to almost everyone on Earth.
The Only Way Through is Through
If you’re reading this and you’ve got something sitting on a shelf that you made and haven’t promoted, or an idea you keep editing in your head instead of launching, or a product you’ve soft-launched and quietly abandoned because the fear got too loud, I see you. I am you. I’ve been you multiple times.
There is no clever shortcut. There is no neat reframe that takes the fear away. The only way out is to pick the smallest possible next thing, do it, and then pick the next smallest thing.
Write the post. Record the video. Press publish. Run the ad. Send the email.
Cry if you need to. I certainly will. Then do it anyway.
Take Massive Action
Go and buy a pack of travel challenge cards. Seriously! Either for yourself or as a gift for a friend or loved one. They’re awesome, you’re supporting a fellow freedompreneur and you’ll love them! Here’s a 20% off discount code you can use at checkout - BIGWORLD20 - Thanks in advance 😁🙏
Before you close this article do something you’ve been putting off. Post that article, send that email, write a note promoting your latest product, launch the thing! Whatever it is take massive action today!
Comment below and let me know what you’ve done, feel free to link to anything you’re working on, I’d love to hear from you! And if you buy a set of cards do let me know, I might have something extra special to send you… 😁
I hope this article has helped. The biggest challenge we have is our minds. Not our talent, experience, ideas or knowledge. Just our crazy brains always getting in the way.
If you’re reading this, you’re so worth the 0.001% of the world’s attention, so make it happen my friend. 😍 I look forward to chatting in the comments.
Jo 😊
For less than a questionable airport sandwich, you can unlock the members-only Funding Freedom articles, full access to The Backpack ($500+ value), and our monthly live calls. Everything you need to start building portable income and making these your best years yet.
About Jo
Hey there! I’m Jo Barnes, a 53-year-old British digital nomad who’s spent 16 years building online businesses across 45+ countries.
I write about funding your freedom, nomadic life after 50, and ageing disgracefully.
Occasionally I also write about Wi-Fi disasters and questionable food choices, but that’s less intentional.
Browse The Backpack for guides, courses, templates, and tools to help you fund your freedom.
Find me on Facebook or Instagram if you want to see what I’m up to between posts.
If this resonated, a like, comment, or share helps more people find this newsletter. And I genuinely appreciate it.
I love your candor humor and inspiration! Just do the damned thing - but for the love of god do your research first! 🙌