Why Your First Strategy Works and Then Suddenly Doesn’t

There is a moment almost every entrepreneur experiences. Something works incredibly well the first time you do it. You get sign ups, comments, engagement, or sales. You feel excited. You feel confident. You feel like you finally found the strategy you can repeat indefinitely. You believe you have unlocked a formula you can use again and again.

Then you try the exact same thing a second time, and the response is completely different. You do not get the same outcome. The energy feels flat. People do not interact. You feel confused. You feel discouraged. You start questioning what you did wrong. You start wondering if something changed in you or in your business.

This experience is not a sign that you failed. It is not proof that you need to start over. It is not an indication that something is broken in your strategy or your ability. What you are experiencing is a normal and predictable stage of business growth.

Let’s break down why the first strategy works, why it stops working, and what you can do to move forward without creating unnecessary stress or rebuilding everything from scratch.

The First Time Works Because It Is New

When you try something for the first time, your audience is seeing it with curiosity and interest. It is fresh. It is unexpected. People respond to novelty because they enjoy new experiences. Their attention is naturally higher. Their interest is naturally stronger. This creates the initial success that feels exciting and validating.

This also means that the response you get the first time is not only about the strategy itself. It is also about the audience seeing something they have not seen from you before. The novelty creates a surge of engagement that cannot be replicated in the same way the second time.

This is why the first round of a campaign often performs extremely well. Your audience is reacting to the newness of the experience in addition to the quality of your offer or message.

Why It Stops Working the Second Time

The second time you run the same strategy, most of your audience has already been through that experience. They already know what you are about to do. They have already participated or decided not to participate. They have already learned whether that offer or message is for them.

Your warm audience cannot give you the same response twice because they cannot experience something for the first time again.

This has nothing to do with your talent, your energy, or your skill. It has everything to do with human behavior. Once a person has seen or experienced something, it does not produce the same level of curiosity or urgency.

This is why your second attempt does not replicate the results of the first. It is not a decline in your ability. It is simply a decline in novelty.

Why Nothing Is Wrong With You

This is the part that matters most. When a strategy stops working, many entrepreneurs assume something is wrong with them. They believe they lost momentum, talent, or clarity. They assume they are doing something incorrectly. They wonder if their business is falling apart.

None of that is true.

Your strategy stops working because your audience has already seen it. That is the only reason. The decline is not personal. It is not a reflection of your worth. It is not a sign that you need to start over.

You were given a strategy that can work depending on the size of the audience it reaches and the specific message you delivered. Once those people went through it, the strategy reached its natural limit. This is why you feel like your results suddenly collapsed. The audience simply completed the experience you offered.

You did not fail. Your audience reached saturation.

You Do Not Need To Burn Everything Down

When results decline, many entrepreneurs make the mistake of rebuilding their entire business. They change their messaging. They change their offer. They change their website. They rewrite their marketing. They restart everything from zero.

This is exhausting and unnecessary. You do not need to destroy what you built because one strategy stopped working. You only need to understand why it stopped and what it requires next.

Your strategy is not broken. Your business is not broken. You simply ran out of people who were seeing the strategy for the first time.

This is where most entrepreneurs make their biggest mistake. They focus on reinventing instead of expanding.

Your Business Needs New People

For your strategy to work again, it needs new eyes. New attention. New reach. New humans who have never seen your content, your campaign, or your offer before.

Every strategy has a lifespan that matches the number of people who experience it for the first time. Once your warm audience goes through it, the strategy can only continue if you bring new people into your world.

This is why audience growth is not optional. It is essential. If you want your strategies to continue performing, you need new people entering your ecosystem consistently.

This might mean more visibility.
It might mean more collaborations.
It might mean more paid reach.
It might mean more organic reach.

The exact method depends on your goals, but the concept is the same. Your business needs a steady inflow of people who are experiencing your work for the first time.

You Can Grow Without Reinventing Everything

One of the most freeing realizations in business is understanding that you do not need a new strategy. You do not need a new offer. You do not need a new business model. You do not need a new identity.

You need new people.

Once you understand this, you can focus your energy on growth instead of rewriting the same things repeatedly. You can bring fresh audiences into the strategies you already know how to run. You can create consistency without burnout. You can scale without rebuilding.

This is how entrepreneurs move from reaction to strategy. Instead of treating every decline as a crisis, they recognize it as a signal to expand their reach.

Your Business Is Ready for More

If your strategy suddenly stopped working, take it as a sign of growth, not failure. Your business is showing you that it is time to reach a larger audience and share your work with more people.

You do not need to doubt yourself.
You do not need to question your ability.
You do not need to start over.

You are heading into a new stage of growth, and this stage requires a new level of reach.

Your first strategy worked because it was new.
It stopped working because your audience has seen it.
Your next step is expansion.

Your business is not broken.
It is ready for more.

Chapter List:

00:00 Why Your Strategy Works the First Time

01:12 The Power of Novelty in Marketing

02:48 Why Your Campaign Falls Flat the Second Time

04:10 What Happens When Your Audience Has Already Seen It

05:33 Why Nothing Is Wrong With You

07:05 The Real Reason Your Results Drop

08:44 Why You Do Not Need a New Strategy

10:02 Why You Need New People, Not New Ideas

11:39 How to Think About Audience Saturation

13:10 What to Do When Your Strategy Stops Working

14:56 The Mindset That Keeps You Growing

Full Transcript:

Amanda Kaufman (00:01)

If you are going for a new level in your life, then you get to encounter a new devil, new level, new devil. So this week in this episode, I'm going to talk to you a little bit about some of the surprising things that came about when I decided to leave my corporate job and become an entrepreneur.

If we haven't met yet, my name is Amanda Kaufman and I help coaches to launch and scale their successful coaching businesses. And my goodness, the world that we find ourselves in today. You know, I started this podcast probably five years ago. I've been doing the business thing and spending at least all my weekends and evenings and mornings on it for close to a decade. And I'm always re-anchored or surprised

as new people are joining every single day, tens of thousands of coaches join the industry every single year. But I'm often reminded of some of those things I thought early on and how I've had to change my mind. number one, the number one thing is around your perfectionism. So I used to say, I am such a perfectionist and I would be very dramatic about it. You know, that's just sort of my way.

But I would get really stuck on what is the one best way to do the thing. I think some of it comes from being an oldest child, being somebody who really appreciated, you know, grades and stuff in school. So I think the thing is, is like when you're earning a grade, usually there is a right answer. You know, there's this mathematical certain outcome that you can follow to get the big results.

And here's the rude truth. You can be successful so many different ways. So many different ways. Nowadays, everybody thinks, oh, I have to post to social media, then I'll be a famous coach. Or I need to start a podcast or a show, and then I'll be a great coach. Or I need to earn my fame somehow. I need to get onto stages, and I need to have a big social following, or I need to write a book, and then I will be an amazing

know, coach, expert, somebody who will want to hire me. And here's the radical truth of it all. And this is after me like trying so many different paths, trying so many different ways to market, so many different ways to do this thing. They all work. They all work, right? The question is, which one are you feeling the most pulled to struggle through? Because

Although they all work, whether you're becoming an author first or a speaker first or a coach first or a course creator first or a freelancer first, whatever your thing is as an expert, whatever you lead with, that's just the thing you chose. There is no one right answer and best way. And you know, when I very first started out, I was hearing such, was almost like being caught in a fight all the time.

because there would be people screaming, it's better to work your way up from the bottom. And then there would be people screaming, no, no, you're worth, you need to have premium, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And for a minute there, I thought that I was doing everything right. I had very, very premium coaching packages. I was doing everything offline. I actually shunned online. I shunned doing videos like this. And I was wrong.

I was wrong. Conviction was the thing that helped me to actually do it. So the conviction that I was gonna use higher ticket, the conviction that it was better to meet people offline than online, that's what made it work. It was the conviction behind it. It wasn't necessarily the strategy. And let me tell you how I knew I was wrong. I was hustling, you know, like a lot of entrepreneurs do, and I would go to a lot of events.

a lot of seminars, I'd go to a lot of conferences, and that's where I would meet people who I would then invite into conversation and then we would escalate into a consult and bada bing bada boom I've got a nice full coaching practice which is just like awesome. Except I got onto a bit of a burnout rhythm with it you know I was I was traveling almost as much as I had been for my prior corporate job

and I was recently a mother of now four kids and I got to the end of the year and I had forgotten to book a ticket to a seminar that I planned to go to and not only that I forgot to book the seminar ticket so it's like I was running so hard I was just burnt to a crisp

So for that month, like my major opportunity for generating new business just vaporized, it disappeared. And I had to do something about it. So I decided to choose a different strategy. So the different strategy that I chose at that time was to do a webinar. Now again, webinars work, VSLs work, DM setting works, organic content works, it all works. All of it works.

So I chose the webinar route and I thought, you know what? I've been wanting to do a group program for a while because the great thing about a group program is you can sell the same hour of coaching, the live component, over and over and over again and then you can use a standardized curriculum to kind of have everybody be singing from the same song sheet. So great. So I launched the thing and wouldn't you know it, I succeeded that way too.

So I went from being like hardcore, never go online coach to here, let me try this because the other option was, you know, I was, I was out of the planning to make that thing work and the webinar worked. I couldn't even believe it to be honest. And you know, I tried it again. It didn't really work. Like not as good. I tried it again and it worked. But again, sort of sad results. I was like, what am I doing wrong? So I flipped.

from doing webinars to then doing like challenges. So it's doing like these five day challenges where you invite people into the free challenge and then you're facilitating the challenge through like a free Facebook group, for example, and everybody has activities and we're moving along and we're getting a goal together. And then at the end I would have a presentation with, course, the pitch. Well, wouldn't you know it, the first time I ever did the challenge, it was outstanding.

Right? ROI on the investment of the time and the energy and the spending to be able to like do that particular way, it paid off like 14x. It was amazing. So what did I do? I did it again. Now, again, it wasn't as exciting the second time. was about half as exciting. So exciting. was like half of half as exciting. So I ran it again. And guess what? Half as exciting.

as the previous team, was like watching carbon decay, you know, was like 14x, seven x, three and a half x, right? And every time I ran it, it still worked, but it just worked like a little bit less. I was like, dang, time for another strategy, right? So I've run so many different strategies. I actually kind of skipped over a couple in my storytelling, but.

The theme of it is that it will work until it stops working. In fact, behind me I've got my million dollar group award. That was another strategy where we ran paid ads to a live Facebook group where we did regular weekly lives and we set out of the group, right? We had DM conversations with anybody who joined the group and then we would set appointments out of that group. Which again, when I first started to do it,

It was amazing, it was getting huge ROI out of that strategy. But over time as we kept running it, we had to do more and more and more and more and more work to try to get the same amount of outcome. And eventually I shut that one down too because I was like, it doesn't work. But guess what I learned? They all work. All things work, right?

But first time you do something, your audience is going to respond to that and they're going to go like, whoa, this is novel. This is exciting. This is new. The second time you go and do the thing, people kind of know it's coming. So the crowd or the crew that already went through your campaign the first time, they already had it. They already experienced it. So there's not really like more for them. So you have to have a strategy to meet more new people that can keep up with

the people that are dropping off because they already, you know, they rode the Disneyland ride. They already did it. So I share this all with you because it took me trying several different forms of marketing to realize that there's novelty every time you do it for the first time. And eventually you can actually deplete and exhaust your audience or your list. And so then that means the results you're getting, even though the same, you're following the same exact

process is they're not going have the same outcomes. In the case of the Facebook community strategy, the cost of advertising just kept rising, right? It was rising from the day I started because that's actually a truism in online marketing is that the cost of impressions is always rising. So it's a little bit, a little bit, a little bit at a time, but you're

eventually going to be facing much more expensive ad costs. So you can up that by making your advertising even better. But again, you have to make the investment of the time and the energy to stay in front of that machine. Right. All of this to say, I was driven for a long time by this idea that there's one magical right way to build a business that I really love. And

On the way, I built so many different versions of the same business. You know, I've always been helping people. I've largely been helping coaches and entrepreneurs to succeed. But, you know, it was almost like I was, I was constantly on this hunt for the perfect thing. And that cost me really deeply. You know, I ended up spending like a lot of money learning a lot of different techniques, but you know what I didn't do? I didn't ask where in the process is it broken?

I threw out the whole process. And I see coaches do this all the time. The only reason why I can call it out now is because I realized, wait a minute, that's what I'm doing. I'm getting razzle dazzled by the latest marketing ploy or the latest marketing strategy. I would run the playbook and I was so good at running the playbook. But here's the thing. Eventually it made me feel a lot like I felt as I was about to leave my corporate career. You see in corporate, same thing. I started to really feel like I was

this playbook like I was just going through the motions and just checking all these boxes and I was always looking for a better playbook and I would run the playbook but but I never felt like I was reading it you know what I mean like I was the one that was writing what we were going to do and I think it came from an insecurity that like maybe maybe I don't know what I'm doing maybe I don't know maybe I don't know if it's gonna work maybe there's no certainty there

And what I later realized is I'm like, yeah, no one knows. Like those people that are selling you the exact blueprint of exactly what to do, you're going to get initial success and then it's not going to work anymore. And you're going to wonder what the hell is wrong with you. And I'm here to say nothing. Nothing's wrong with you. You were given a recipe that you can use and depending on the size of your audience or depending on your messaging, depending on the appeal that you have.

Your audience is gonna interact with that campaign with those steps that you've been given. And once they've seen it, it's been seen. Once they've seen it, it's been seen. So, you know, I've been really interested in marketing. Thank God, right? Like I wouldn't have figured out what I figured out so much along the way if I didn't have like a deep interest in it. But one of my favorite marketing books is by Bill Glazer. I actually know his daughter, Glazer. She taught me

the foundations of my direct response style copywriting, my email copywriting. Like I can write the way I do because of Meritglazer, but her dad was also like, he was an incredible direct response marketer and his book was called Outrageous Marketing. And like the big main thesis of the thing is do something that's unexpected. So if you're buying marketing programs from people, here's my biggest tip. Do buy the program.

I know that sounds counterintuitive. I was just saying like there's so many different ways that you can market your business and they all work. That being said, there's a skill to the marketing. There's a skill to understanding like here's how much you can ask for at a time and here's how to build a real customer journey and here's how to go, you know, here's how to structure it all. The structural part of your marketing, I recommend that you enroll in some programs. So, and maybe even

Do one that is about maybe something that's running advertising. Do one that's maybe about how to do really good webinars. know, like mix it up, shake it up. Like try the different methods. Learn from different people. But what you're really wanting to know is you're really wanting to know the core skills of marketing. And this idea of outrageous advertising or outrageous marketing.

Okay, now I know the core fundamentals. I've run the playbook. I've done the basics. I see that it works. I believe in it. I understand Now, how can I shake it up? How can I break it up? How can I make this something that is not aligning to a playbook or a perfectionistic standard but rather is something that is creative unexpected and of my own design Right and that that is so freeing in so many ways. Let me let me list

The ways right it's freeing because you're not feeling guilty because you're not perfect right you let go of the idea that there was ever was a perfect because there isn't a perfect I just told you like you can run the playbook It'll work so super well the next time you run it It's gonna work a little less while a little less while a little less while and even if you've got you know paid advertising There's no campaign that I am aware of

Wait, there's one. Generally no campaign that I'm aware of that stays largely the same over time. The one that occurred to me was actually the campaign of like getting people into churches and religion, right? So that one is like, here's your Bible, you know? And that's like the oldest long form sales letter in circulation, I think. But.

Apart from that, know, name a brand that their advertising strategy, their marketing strategy, their visibility strategy hasn't shifted at all. You can't do it, right? Because novelty is a big part of this. And the other thing is that our world has changed so much. You know, with the pandemic, everybody went home and then the number of views that a person consumes, it went up like.

3 to 4x. So people are consuming more, but they are also less patient. they're consuming more, but they're flicking faster through the stuff. And what that means is that your stuff, if it's going to actually survive, to be, it needs to stand out. It's got to be like a little outrageous. So all that to say, welcome to my blog. When it comes to attracting clients, I do recommend that you have a CRM.

I you have an email cadence. I recommend that you have these foundations of marketing in place. But if you're looking for that silver bullet of the perfect way to market your business, there's the one you choose and the one you choose to struggle through learning. I will see you in another episode. Until then, make sure that you share this with a few of your friends and subscribe, and we will see you in a future episode.