The launch sequence

#1. Where this terminology comes from, and what it's actually for

The cart-open/cart-close and pre-launch vocabulary used throughout the course-selling industry traces to Jeff Walker's Product Launch Formula, first sold in 2005. [Established] — the 2005 origin and the terminology itself are well-documented industry history, independent of any effectiveness claim attached to them. The mechanism Walker's framework describes is real and worth separating from the marketing built on top of it: rather than selling continuously, a launch concentrates a cohort's worth of attention, content, and persuasion into a short window, then closes the cart entirely — no purchase possible outside that window — which manufactures genuine scarcity (the deadline is real, not fake) rather than the manufactured-artificial-scarcity pattern ("only 3 spots left!" on a page that's been "closing soon" for a year) that Sales' mechanism library catalogs and, where the scarcity is fabricated rather than real, flags as the kind of claim that erodes trust once a buyer notices the deadline was never real.

#2. The three sequence types

Pre-sell / waitlist: the course doesn't exist yet, or exists only as an outline. A creator collects a waitlist, sometimes with a refundable deposit or a discounted early-bird price, before building the full curriculum — validating demand and, in the seed-launch variant Walker's own framework describes, using the first cohort's actual questions and outcomes to build the marketing (and sometimes the content) for the version sold to a wider audience later. This is the lowest-risk sequence for a first course, because it tests willingness-to-pay before the full production-time investment, and it directly operationalizes the audience-first argument from module 1: a pre-sell only works if enough people already trust your judgment enough to pay before the product exists.

Cart-open / cart-close: the course is built, priced, and sold in a defined window — typically preceded by several days to weeks of free "pre-launch" content (a video series, a challenge, a webinar) that builds anticipation and demonstrates the teaching style before asking for money, then a cart-open period of a few days to two weeks with a hard, real close date. The mechanism this exploits, honestly stated: a genuine deadline concentrates a buyer's decision — the "decide now or lose the chance entirely" framing overcomes the default human tendency to defer a purchase decision indefinitely, which Sales' library covers in more general form under loss aversion and decision-deferral. The persuasion techniques deployed inside the window — testimonials, live Q&A, bonus stacking, countdown timers — are the standard toolkit, and their legitimacy depends entirely on whether the deadline and the bonuses are real; a countdown timer that resets for the next visitor is deception, not urgency, and is the kind of claim the refunds and regulatory lesson covers under FTC unfair-and-deceptive-practices exposure.

Evergreen: the course is always for sale, either at a flat price with no artificial deadline, or through an automated version of the cart-open sequence individually triggered for each new lead (a synthetic, per-visitor "closing in 72 hours" window) rather than a single shared calendar date for everyone. The automated-evergreen variant borrows cart-close's urgency mechanics without the genuine scarcity that makes a real launch's deadline persuasive rather than manipulative — which is precisely why it converts measurably worse per-visitor than a genuine live launch in most practitioner accounts, and why it's typically used to monetize the long tail of traffic between real launches rather than as a primary sales engine on its own. [Speculative] — the "converts worse" comparison is a widely-repeated practitioner claim in this space with no rigorous head-to-head study behind it that this research could locate; treated here as a plausible mechanism-based inference (synthetic urgency being weaker than real urgency), not a sourced finding.

#3. Why most creators end up running a hybrid

In practice, most established course businesses run a small number of real cart-open/cart-close launches per year (two to four is a common practitioner pattern, timed around the audience-first relationship rather than an arbitrary calendar) supplemented by an always-on evergreen or waitlist funnel that captures demand between launches rather than losing it. This hybrid pattern is a direct consequence of the launch-economics numbers in the next lesson: a live launch converts substantially better per-lead than an automated evergreen sequence, but running one continuously is both operationally unsustainable and erodes the genuine-scarcity mechanism that makes a live launch work in the first place — so the real question isn't "which sequence type," it's "how often can a real deadline stay real."

#4. What none of this substitutes for

A launch sequence, however well-run, cannot manufacture demand that doesn't exist — it can only convert existing demand more or less efficiently. This is the exact point where launch-marketing content most often overpromises, and it's the subject of the next lesson: what a launch sequence can actually be expected to convert, at what list size, and why the loudest public claims in this specific niche are the ones most worth discounting.