1. Domain and email sending.

2. One pipeline.

3. Waitlist page

If you did those three things, you’re already ahead of most people who finish the challenge and then stall for a month (or more!) deciding what to build first.

This week is where it gets real, and we do the last two steps.

4. First funnel, sales page live — even if it’s ugly.

This is the step people sit on longest. Not because it’s hard — because it’s the first thing with your name and your price on it, visible to strangers. That’s a different kind of scary than a waitlist page.

Here’s the reframe: your sales page doesn’t need to convert at scale yet. It needs to exist so real people can respond to it — buy, ask a question, tell you what’s confusing. You can’t get any of that feedback from a page that’s still in your head. A live ugly page outsells a beautiful one still in drafts, because a beautiful one still in drafts sells nothing.

Ship the page! Send the link to the people on your waitlist so that they can experience what you’ve been leading them toward.

5. One automation to fulfill the purchase.

You’ll be tempted to build a complex set of emails and the next offer.

Just get the automation to do the one thing you need: fulfill whatever you just sold. Confirmation email, link to the product you just sold, tag the buyer.

Steps 4 and 5 can be daunting, but they don’t have to be. If you want some help, check out https://michellelarue.com/fgf-builds.

Haven’t signed up for FGF yet? I’d love it if you used my affiliate link: https://www.fgfunnels.com/offer?fpr=michelle26

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The Yap Challenge is over. You showed up daily for 40 days, built the habit, and probably picked FGF to build on because that’s what Jessi builds on. Good call. Now comes the part nobody warns you about: showing up daily is one skill. Building the actual thing is another.

I recommend FG Funnels for someone fresh out of YAP because you need to validate your offer before you over-invest in building it.

So here’s the order I’d build in, if I were starting FGF this week.

Week 1, “Side A”:

1. Domain and email sending. Not glamorous, has to exist before literally anything else works. Get it out of the way first. (And because FGF has stellar customer service, they will actually set this up for you!)

2. One pipeline. Not five. Pick the single path a lead takes from “found you” to “bought from you,” and build that one. You can add more later. You can’t un-confuse yourself by building four half-finished ones now.

3. Waitlist page — before the course itself. Build interest before you build the product. (This is the model Jessi Jean used for her launch — waitlist first bought her the runway to build her audience and the challenge materials.)

Here’s what trips people up. The challenge trained you to publish something small every day. Building a funnel trains you to create an end-to-end system. Those are different muscles. Apply challenge-brain to build-work and you’ll either freeze or build five things badly instead of one thing that works.

The mistake I see most in FGF cleanups isn’t a bad decision — it’s trying to build the whole system before launching any of it. Perfect membership area, four automations, three upsells, and nothing live yet. Meanwhile the imperfect version that’s actually live is already making money for someone else in your niche.

Done is better than perfect. Not because perfect doesn’t matter — because perfect doesn’t exist yet, and live does.

One honest note on when to stop doing this yourself: if you get stuck after step two or three — that may be the signal to hire it out, not a sign you failed. I build FGF assets on a fixed-fee basis, start to finish, for people who’d rather spend their two weeks on their offer course content than on their delivery funnel.

If that’s you: michellelarue.com/fgf-builds.

If it’s not — go build your waitlist page. It’s the highest-leverage 30 minutes you’ll spend this week.

Need an FGF account? Use my affiliate link.

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Has anyone else noticed that as a culture AI is rewiring our expectations for how long it should take to complete a project? It used to take a day and a half for a good copywriter to produce a sales page (and a week or more for the less skilled writer), and now it can be done in as little as 20 minutes. The result might not be as good, but maybe it’s good enough.

The hit of speed we get with AI makes us impatient. Impatient to finish projects and optimize every daily task so that we are PRODUCTIVE or else we’ll fall behind … and never catch up. Too impatient to read, we turn to AI summaries. Too impatient to learn, we ask Claude to show us how without really understanding why something works. In itself, this isn’t inherently bad. I can drive a car without understanding how it works under the hood, but I do know it needs fuel, oil, air in the tires.

The speed fix that AI gives us creates the illusion that everything should happen faster. But what is the speed costing us? A disconnect in understanding and expectations.

We now expect to understand things as quickly as we can generate the information. Understanding takes depth of attention, repetition. Learning patterns and then recognizing how to use them.

AI can generate information but not the discernment of what to do with it.

It’s ok not to understand something and to ask for help. But the audacity I see from people wanting someone else to fix their AI mess - without compensation or even appreciation - is astonishing.

Problem-solving plus strategy is valuable. The judgment and wisdom of experienced people in the age of AI is even more valuable than ever. It definitely costs more than a $20 AI Subscription.

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If I may... Um, I’ll tell you the problem with the scientific power that you’re using here, it didn’t require any discipline to attain it. You read what others had done and you took the next step. You didn’t earn the knowledge for yourselves, so you don’t take any responsibility for it. You stood on the shoulders of geniuses to accomplish something as fast as you could, and before you even knew what you had, you patented it, and packaged it, and slapped it on a plastic lunchbox, and now [bangs on the table]...your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could that they didn’t stop to think if they should.

This is where AI stands today.

As much as I use AI as a thinking partner, researcher, and summarizer (is that even a word?!), I’m not a huge fan of using it for content. Four years into ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, etc. we can tell when someone is posting AI slop.

If you don’t want to make the effort to give me YOUR original thoughts and use a machine to generate generic ideas, why should I read them?

Where AI shines is as a tool builder. Automating repetitive tasks. Summarizing long form content. Troubleshooting workflows. Recognizing patterns. Closing skills gaps.

The last one is tricky. I recently took a vibecoding class, and I’m still absorbing what to do with it all. I see the potential…create skills, build/borrow databases of knowledge, and deploy agents to do tasks. Oh, the potential!!! I’m determined to master this new skillset, and I’m confident I can. I’m a systems girlie, and when this all clicks, watch out!

The thing I see that makes me concerned and frankly kind of irritated is the use of AI without any foundation (see: Ian Malcom, aka Jeff Goldblum). I see business owners using AI to gin up a gorgeous website…and then have no idea how to make the backend work. They bring a page full of html code and “just need a button to take customers to a payment form and then deliver a digital product.”

Pretty is awesome…but it also has to work.

The ease of creating a beautiful frontend page quickly leads people to think that there is also a magic button to create the backend equally quickly, in whatever software they are using. And that if they ask AI, it will magically give them the solution in 3 sentences, and tell them exactly how to do it.

If AI miraculously understands the question (most people don’t know what to ask for) how will the user know how to do what AI tells them?

Your brain is bigger than a dinosaur’s brain. Don’t stop using it.

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At some point, I outgrow them. I don’t mean to…and I usually don’t want to, but there comes a time when their advice doesn’t fit anymore.

In one case it might be that they are teaching something that doesn’t align with what they are doing themselves. Or they push hard on strategies that work for them - probably because they have a big warm audience - that don’t work for those of us who don’t have that.

What’s a girl to do next? IMPLEMENT.

I don’t regret the dollars I’ve invested in coaching, but now I am far more interested in implementation. It’s easy to spend so much of your business budget on coaching and then have no money left to actually implement the ideas you are learning and have a business to run.

What could you accomplish if you took the $2000 you were going to spend on the next shiny object, magic sales script, brand shoot or fancy logo, and instead…hired a strategist who could help you build the lead generation machine that works for YOUR business, not a “7-figure business coach?”

That’s a question worth asking.

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“Mixtape?? What’s that? There’s a bar in my town called Mixtape.”

“It’s meant to be a collection of tracks that make me happy. It also signals to the GenX crowd that they might enjoy sticking around to read why I have to say. It’s fun and a little quirky and memorable.”

“I guess I don’t get it…I just think of a bar.”

Dear Reader, if I have piqued your interest, I’m delighted to hang out with the 3 of you reading this. Open Bar privileges for everyone, whether you fancy sparkling water, a vat of coffee, diet Coke (which might be why I didn’t sleep until 4 am last night), or something a bit stronger.

I talk about books, wine, marketing, transitioning out of a corporate engineering career, pop culture, single life on the edge of the empty nest, and lots of Star Trek and Buffy the Vampire Slayer references. I will be using double spaces after sentences and the Oxford Comma rules.

You’ve been warned

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