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Power Your Launch, 2020 to 2023Power Your Launch teaches small business owners, most of them women and women of color, to market their businesses with Facebook and Instagram ads. I spent three years on the team as it scaled, first in customer success and product and later leading marketing.
This is the story of a program that grew ten times in a year, and what it took to keep ten thousand people feeling like one person was talking to them.
Abu Fofanah launched the first Power Your Launch Marketing Accelerator cohort in January 2019. His belief was that running your own ads should not be a skill locked behind an agency retainer. If a baker or a coach could learn to reach her own customers, she would never have to hand that power to someone else again.
By December of that first year, the program had crossed one million dollars in sales.
When storefronts closed, thousands of owners needed to learn online marketing quickly. The accelerator went from serving 500 students a year to 5,000, and brought in more than three million dollars in its first twelve months of scaling.
This is the year I joined. Growth like that is exciting, and it is also where people start to fall through the cracks. My first job was making sure every new student felt helped, not processed.
Forbes profiled the program as it approached ten thousand students, more than nine out of ten of them women-owned businesses. Abu was also invited to guest lecture at Harvard Business School.
How Abu Fofanah has helped nearly 10,000 entrepreneurs gain visibilityForbes, November 2021
By 2023 the accelerator had grown a community most brands would envy. It also had an audience under real pressure: inflation, tight cash flow, and technology that changed faster than anyone could learn it.
Leading marketing that year, I made one decision that shaped everything else. We would stop treating marketing as a way to sell the program and start treating it as a way to be useful.
We rewrote the landing pages in our students' own words. We rebuilt the email journey around their goals instead of our calendar. Webinars became working sessions, and the in-person event let us sit across the table from the people we served.
SMS, sales calls and emails started to sound like one warm, consistent voice. That consistency is what makes a big program feel small in the best way.
Thank you, Abu, and the whole Power Your Launch team.
Three years inside this program shaped how I see marketing. I watched a founder put real marketing skills in the hands of thousands of business owners, most of them women, and I got to help.
I'm grateful for the trust, the live rooms and every student who showed up and asked the brave question. This case study is my way of saying that it mattered.
Nicole
Ten thousand founders is a big number, but every one of them arrived as one person with one business and one hope. The campaigns that worked best at Power Your Launch were the ones that never forgot that.
It's the belief behind everything I build at The Social Charlotte. The audience research, the 7-Stage Creative Method and the launch planning I use with clients all started here.
If you're building something people need, let's make sure they can find it.
Building something people need
Whether you're launching a program or growing one, it starts with knowing exactly who it's for.
Have a question first? Write to nicole@thesocialcharlotte.com