I once told an interviewer, maybe around 2008, that I didn’t have an entrepreneurial bone in my body.

And at the time I said it, I sincerely believed that.

After years of lecturing and writing books I had built up an audience of people who liked what I produced and were interested in what I had to say. But since I had no product to offer them, from a business point of view I may as well not have built that audience at all.

Around 2011, a friend with a marketing background asked me what I was doing with that audience to make a living for myself. There is no moral problem with making a living, obviously, and yet I wasn’t doing much of anything.

I had the good fortune of having someone tell me exactly what I should do. He suggested that I create what eventually became Liberty Classroom, my adult-enrichment site that teaches people the kind of history and economics that they didn’t learn in school.

I spent a chunk of 2011 creating the content for that site, and launched it in April 2012.

I had never done anything like this before. I was accustomed to doing what I was told and collecting a paycheck in return. I had never created something entirely on my own, with absolutely no guarantee that it would generate any income at all.

I poured about $50,000 of my own money into the project, so I really needed it to succeed.

And it did – thank God.

I launched it and the sales instantly began coming in, one after the other.

I couldn’t peel myself away from my phone, where I obsessively checked the sales notifications, in awe of what was happening.

There was no guarantee this would be a success. In fact, when years later I told my friend Daniel Levis, a famous email marketer, about this product and the success it had had, he couldn’t believe it. He couldn't perceive a traditional “pain point” that the product solved for people, and yet it sold like crazy anyway.

And in fact, when you launch something and it bombs, it’s an awful feeling. You were so sure this thing would work, and yet after all the effort and the dough you poured into it, it tanked. Your mind starts racing. You’d placed all your eggs in this basket. What are you supposed to do now?

I don’t want any of my readers getting that awful feeling in the pit of their stomachs. If that's happened to you, you know what I'm talking about. If it hasn't, then trust me: you don't want to experience it.

That's why I have been so insistent that you attend Jeff Walker’s masterclass, starting tomorrow. Jeff is the undisputed expert when it comes to launching something new to the world. He will maximize the chances that your book, your product, your service – whatever it turns out to be – is the success you hope for.

Having a good launch strategy can’t guarantee success, obviously, but not having one means a much lower chance of success. I don’t think that’s even debatable.

Jeff’s masterclass this week doesn’t cost anything. He does it once a year, and every year people demand to have the recordings. I urge you to make your best effort to clear your schedule to attend live.

Register here right now, while you’re thinking about it:

http://www.tomwoods.com/walkermasterclass

Tom Woods