This article teaches freelancers how to reverse-engineer winning product launches using existing campaigns so they can stop guessing and start building funnels that actually sell. By the end, you will know how to position yourself as a launch specialist brands trust when it’s time to go live.
Table of Contents
Previously in AI-Powered Communication…
Raja, Savitha, and Harsh built a complete AI-powered email system from cold lead to daily sales using Russell Brunson’s frameworks. They learned how to turn chaotic email tasks into a repeatable machine.
In this article, Neel trusts the trio with something bigger: cracking the code behind blockbuster barefoot shoe launches. With Raghunandan’s help, they uncover how to steal proven campaign ideas and become launch experts without starting from scratch.
(Continued…)
Swathi and Raghunandan were finally doing nothing. No calls. No Slack pings. Just tea, rain, and the sound of some neighbour’s pressure cooker going off every few minutes.
Swathi leaned back on the sofa. “I could get used to this,” she said.
Raghunandan just sipped quietly, like if he spoke, he’d jinx it.
Then her phone buzzed. Loud. Sharp. Violent.
She groaned. “Should I throw it out the window or see who it is?”
Raghunandan shrugged. “Window’s cheaper.”
She answered anyway.
“SWATHI! YOU WON’T BELIEVE THIS!” Harsh was yelling like he’d just won a radio contest. Raja and Savitha were screaming in the background.
She yanked the phone away from her ear. “Jesus. One at a time.”
Raghunandan raised an eyebrow. She put the call on speaker.
“Neel liked our pitch!” Raja blurted.
“He said we’re the team,” Savitha added. “He wants us to do the whole launch. Funnel. Ads. Everything.”
“No backup. No second team. Just us,” Harsh said. “Which is great. Except, we have no clue what we’re doing.”
Swathi’s eyebrows shot up. She looked at Raghunandan, mouthing, Neel?
He nodded. That name was enough. Neel Marathe didn’t hand out responsibility. He dropped it on you like a sandbag and expected you to sprint.
Swathi exhaled. “What do you need?”
A beat of silence. Then Harsh admitted, “A miracle?”
Swathi stood. “Get over here.”
Two minutes later, there was a knock. She opened the door to find Raja holding a laptop, Savitha with her notebook already open, and Harsh juggling two energy drinks and a half-eaten granola bar. They didn’t walk in, they spilled in.
“Barefoot shoes,” Raja started. “Neel’s dropping a new line next month.”
“He’s launching fast, obviously, and he wants full funnel strategy done yesterday,” said Savitha.
“Top to bottom,” Harsh added. “We’re talking landing pages, upsells, retargeting… the whole thing. Except none of us has ever done the whole thing.”
Swathi rubbed her temples. “So your plan is to stress eat in our living room until a funnel builds itself?”
Harsh nodded solemnly. “It’s worked before.”
They gathered around the dining table. Someone knocked over a coaster, Raja spilled some chai, no one cleaned it up. Raghunandan stayed quiet, listening. He’d built funnels before. Never with this much chaos. Never for a founder like Neel, who treated deadlines like grenades with pulled pins.
Swathi sat cross-legged on a chair, eyes scanning the three of them. “You know he’s not gonna give you time to ‘figure it out’.”
Raja ran a hand through his hair. “Yeah. We kinda noticed.”
Savitha looked up from her notes. “We have the creative. What we don’t have is… order. Structure.”
“Basically,” Harsh said, “we’ve got a Ferrari engine and zero idea how to build the rest of the car.”
Raghunandan stood. Cracked his knuckles. Looked like a man about to rearrange a war room.
“Okay,” he said. “Then let’s start with this. No new ideas. No brainstorming. You’re not here to invent anything.”
Harsh blinked. “But…”
“You’re here to model. To copy. To steal what’s working. You earn the right to be original after you’ve earned the right to be profitable.”
No one argued. Even Harsh just nodded and took a sip of his second Red Bull.
Raghunandan walked over to the whiteboard, grabbed a marker. Swathi smiled. He was in it now.
The peaceful evening was dead. Buried. Cremated.
And in its place: launch season.
Reverse engineering successful funnel
“Okay,” Raghunandan said, dragging the whiteboard across the floor with a screech. “I’m going to show you how to cheat.”
Harsh blinked. “Wait. Cheat?”
“Yeah. Hijack. Swipe. Skip the line,” he said, uncapping a marker with his teeth and pointing at the board like it had personally offended him. “Rule one: don’t build anything from scratch.”
Savitha frowned. “But… isn’t that the job? Build a funnel for Neel?”
“No. The job is to sell something for Neel. If someone’s already cracked that code for a similar product, why would you start from zero?”
Harsh leaned forward. “So like… we don’t even come up with an original idea?”
“You come up with an original way through,” Raghunandan said. “Look. Imagine the market like Mount Everest. Most freelancers try to invent a new route up the mountain. I just look for the Sherpa trails.”
Raja, arms folded, wasn’t sold. “But wouldn’t Neel want something… fresh?”
“Neel wants revenue. He wants velocity. If someone else already spent six figures testing ads and emails and it worked? We’re not being lazy. We’re being lethal.”
Swathi raised her eyebrow. “So we’re not launching a funnel. We’re, what, squatting in someone else’s?”
“Squatting with class,” Raghunandan nodded. “Listen. Most people think traffic is something you generate. It’s not. It’s something you intercept. Like a drunk guy walking out of a bar. You don’t build a new bar. You stand outside the old one with an offer.”
He popped open his laptop. A Notion dashboard blinked to life. Teardowns, screenshots, headlines, timestamps.
“Every funnel leaves tracks. Ad headlines. Landing page CTAs. Cart-close countdowns. If you know how to read the tracks, you don’t need to ask for directions.”
Savitha scooted closer, reading over his shoulder. “Wait, this one, ‘The Last Jacket You’ll Ever Need’, that’s not even shoes.”
“Exactly,” he said. “Different product. Same psychology. Identity-based. Finality play. They’re not selling outerwear. They’re selling escape. From clutter. From doubt. From choice.”
Harsh scratched his head. “So we’re not copying the layout. We’re copying the… vibe?”
“Copy the forces, not the format. Think gravitational pull. Not furniture arrangement.”
Raja started opening tabs. “Vivobarefoot. Lems. Xero. All did huge launches last year.”
“Perfect. Step one: map their stuff. What day did the teaser go out? When did they drop the product? What was the offer stack? Was there an affiliate push? Was there a founder video that made people cry?”
Swathi was already making a chart. “So, launch dates. Email rhythms. Upsell flows. Got it.”
“You don’t remix a hit song by writing a new melody. You sample the beat and twist it. Same thing here,” Raghunandan said.
Harsh finally exhaled. “Man. I was stressing about some ‘go-viral-on-TikTok’ strategy.”
“That’s like trying to start a forest fire with a matchstick in the rain,” Raghunandan said. “I’d rather bring gasoline to a campfire someone else already lit.”
There was a pause. The kind where everyone’s thinking but no one wants to admit they’re kind of excited. Or scared. Or both.
Raja cracked his knuckles. “Alright. Let’s steal something.”
“Respectfully,” Swathi added.
“No promises,” Savitha muttered, smirking.
Raghunandan grinned, leaned back, and took a sip of leftover tea. Cold.
Then he pointed at the screen. “Start there. Let’s see what made that one explode.”
And just like that, the evening started slipping sideways into something bigger.
Traffic strategy
The living room looked like a half-raided startup. Laptops open. Notebooks in weird angles. Three mugs, possibly all Harsh’s, sat abandoned, half full and half forgotten.
Harsh had parked himself at one end of the table, tabs breeding like bacteria as he hunted down past launch campaigns. Raja was yanking copy lines into a shared doc, muttering things like “thirsty offer… boring headline…” as he dumped them into buckets. Savitha had taped a sheet of chart paper to the wall and was sketching a funnel so aggressively it looked like a crime scene diagram. Red marker, big circles, angry arrows.
Raghunandan stood watching for a second. Then walked up to the funnel and drew a fat, dark circle around the top.
“This,” he said, “is where most freelancers freak out. Traffic.”
Harsh didn’t look up. “Yeah, was wondering. Are we paying for ads? Reels? SEO? What’s the plan?”
Raghunandan shook his head. “You’re asking the wrong question.”
Harsh blinked. “Okay… what’s the right one?”
“Don’t ask where to send the message. Ask: where are people already listening?”
He grabbed the remote, pulled up the TV, and opened YouTube.
“Watch this.”
A video titled “Why You’re Still Bloated Even After Fixing Your Diet” filled the screen. One of those lo-fi podcasts. A guy in a brown hoodie ranting about gut flora and hidden inflammation. The comments section was on fire. 600K views in a week.
“Three days after this blew up,” Raghunandan said, “a wellness brand dropped a launch for something called the Happy Belly Enzyme Pack. Sold out in four days. Didn’t even run paid ads.”
Savitha looked up. “Coincidence?”
“Nope. The founder tweeted later they were sitting on that launch for two weeks. Saw the podcast take off and just… went for it.”
Harsh frowned. “So… they got lucky.”
“No, man,” Raja said, suddenly animated. “They watched the market. They didn’t build a fire. They poured oil on someone else’s.”
Harsh leaned back. “Okay but wait, how the hell are we supposed to find this stuff in real time? We’re not fortune tellers.”
“You don’t need to be,” Raghunandan said. He pointed at the YouTube sidebar. Ten more bloating videos. Same titles. Same faces.
“This is a crowd already moving. Your job isn’t to make them care. Your job is to intercept.”
Savitha grinned, tapping her pen against the table. “So we don’t hunt for traffic. We catch it mid-flight.”
“Exactly,” Raghunandan said. “You find the current. And you float the message right into it.”
Swathi pulled up her phone. “And Insta’s no different. Every third reel is some dude on a yoga mat yelling about gut reset protocols.”
Harsh scratched his head. “Still feels… messy. Like, sure, you can spot trends. But it’s not a playbook. It’s luck plus timing.”
Savitha jumped in. “Maybe. But if ten people are screaming about bloating, and you show up with enzymes that actually work, that’s not luck. That’s alignment.”
Harsh raised an eyebrow. “Yeah, till the algorithm buries you and nobody sees shit.”
Silence. Raghunandan let it hang.
Then: “That’s the risk. But the alternative? Spend three lakhs on Meta ads that nobody clicks?”
Raja cracked his knuckles. “Okay so let’s say we do find a crowd. What next? What’s the… I don’t know, entry move?”
Raghunandan didn’t answer right away. He walked to the whiteboard. Started scribbling:
- Go where the noise already is
- Speak their language
- Slide into the conversation
But he didn’t say it out loud.
Savitha read it and said, “That third one. What does that mean? Like comment? DM? What are we talking?”
“Yeah,” Raghunandan said, turning around. “Exactly that. You reply in the comments. You run pre-rolls on these videos. You DM the guy who posted that bloating reel and ask if he wants to try your enzymes for free. You pitch it in the same breath they’re already exhaling.”
Swathi clicked her tongue. “Okay but that’s work. Like… scrappy, manual work.”
Raja smiled. “Yeah. That’s why it works.”
Raghunandan looked at them. His voice lower now. “The myth is that you need to generate traffic. But real launch people? They just redirect it.”
They sat there for a beat. The room quiet.
Then Harsh’s laptop dinged.
“Okay wait,” he said, pointing at his screen. “This gut health subreddit? 400 comments arguing over probiotics vs enzymes. Live thread.”
Savitha stood up. “Send the link. I’ll skim. Let’s see what language they’re using.”
Swathi muttered, “God, this is gonna mess up my algorithm for weeks.”
Raja laughed. “You’ll survive.”
Raghunandan didn’t say anything. He was staring at the board.
Then, quietly: “Once we find where they’re looking… we figure out what to show them.”
But he didn’t sound certain. He sounded like someone still thinking it through.
And for once, nobody had a snappy comeback.
5 funnel variables
The walls were now cluttered with post-its. Swathi had cleared the whiteboard twice already. Raja’s laptop fans were screaming for help. But the team had finally locked down traffic sources: Reddit threads, barefoot YouTubers, Instagram reels, a Substack that looked like it was written by a medieval foot doctor. Fire located.
But as they zoomed out and stared at the funnel sketch again, Savitha frowned.
“Even with the traffic flowing, how do we know the funnel will convert?”
Raghunandan picked up a marker and drew five circles on the board.
“Because every funnel that works, every blockbuster launch, gets at least four of these five right,” he said, writing next to each circle.
1. Demographics
2. Offer
3. Landing Page
4. Traffic Source
5. Ad Copy
Harsh leaned back, chewing on a pen cap. “So if we’re missing more than one, it’s a no-go?”
“If two are off or unknown, shut it down. You’re launching blind.”
Swathi raised an eyebrow. “Alright. Show us. Start with the first.”
Raghunandan circled Demographics.
“Be specific. Not ‘men 40+.’ That’s lazy. You want ‘men over 40 with diabetic neuropathy who read survival blogs.’”
Savitha snorted. “That’s… weirdly specific.”
Raja looked up. “What’s our version?”
Harsh pulled up BareMode’s order data. “We’ve got tons of buyers over 35. Into primal movement. Ex-military, CrossFit, trail running types.”
Swathi added, “And a surprising number of women in their 30s buying for their partners.”
“Good,” said Raghunandan. “Our message isn’t for ‘fitness people.’ It’s for biomechanically obsessed minimalists who spend weekends barefoot in the woods.”
He circled the next point: Offer.
“This is where most freelancers get lazy. They reverse-engineer the ad, not the cart.”
Savitha nodded. “So we need to buy competitor funnels?”
“Buy everything. The bait, the upsells, the order bumps, the email flow, even the post-purchase surveys. The money’s never in the front-end. It’s in the stack logic.”
Harsh pulled out a notepad. “I can expense it through Swathi’s account, right?”
Swathi gave him a look.
Next, Landing Page.
“What’s the first thing they see after clicking?” Raghunandan asked. “A VSL? A presell blog? A collection page? You don’t guess. You model the structure of what’s converting.”
Raja recalled a page from a rival brand. “One brand had a long-ass presell story. Looked like a blog. Barely mentioned the product till the end. But the comments were full of people saying they bought it.”
“Because it wasn’t a blog. It was a disguised sales letter,” said Raghunandan. “If that’s working, you clone the structure, not the words.”
He circled the fourth item: Traffic Source.
“Most people say ‘Facebook Ads’ or ‘Google.’ Not enough. You need to know the actual source. Email drop from a newsletter? Influencer shoutout? Banner ad on a random paleo blog?”
Finally, Ad Copy.
Harsh was already scrolling through the competitor’s Facebook Ad Library. “So we just rip the headlines?”
“Not rip. Spy. Collect patterns. What angles are repeated? What emotional triggers pop up again and again? And yes, collect those weirdly specific CTA buttons too. The ones that say ‘Try the 3-Day Barefoot Reset’ instead of just ‘Buy Now.’”
Raja chimed in, “So when do we write our own copy?”
“Only after we’re making money. You split-test once you’re winning. Not while you’re bleeding.”
Swathi looked at the five circles. “If we nail four out of five, we launch?”
Raghunandan nodded. “Four means you’re flying with one engine out. Risky but doable. Three or less? Ground the plane.”
Savitha snapped a photo of the board. “This right here? Worth more than half the launch playbooks on the internet.”
Harsh looked up, suddenly serious. “We have three days till Neel wants a preview. What’s next?”
Raghunandan capped his marker.
Research blueprint
After a long silence, Raja cracked his neck and muttered, “Alright. Funnel theory is solid. But how do we actually start? What’s the fieldwork?”
Raghunandan stood, stretched, and grabbed the marker again. “That’s where most freelancers stall. They understand funnels like a diagram. Not like a hunt. So here’s the field method. Do this, and you won’t be guessing.”
He turned to the whiteboard and scrawled:
Step 1: Find Competitors
“There are two types,” he said, writing as he spoke.
Direct = Same product, same people
Indirect = Different product, same people
He paused, then pointed at Savitha. “What’s that funky-smelling balm your cousin sells to athletes?”
“The anti-chafe thing? For cyclists and golfers?”
“Yeah. She thought her market was other anti-chafe brands. Turns out her biggest threat was a premium foot deodorant line. Same buyers. Different itch.”
Harsh laughed. “Same balm, different butt crack.”
Swathi winced. “Thanks for that visual.”
Raghunandan grinned. “You don’t win by staring at your category. You win by staring at your customer.”
He listed the process:
How to find competitors:
- Google what your buyer would type, not what you would
- Click the top 3 paid ads
- Track which sites keep showing up for 7+ days
- If they’re still spending, they’re still winning
Savitha started typing. Harsh leaned in.
“Once we find ‘em, what then?”
Step 2: Spy Ruthlessly
Raghunandan switched the screen to SimilarWeb. Big-font analytics glared at them.
“This will tell you:
- Where traffic’s coming from
- Which ad networks they use
- What landing pages people stick to
- What devices, what countries, what ages”
Swathi narrowed her eyes. “Feels illegal.”
“It’s not. It’s just… aggressive.”
He clicked through tabs. “You’re not done until you’ve bought through their funnel.”
Harsh started listing, half-sarcastic, half-awed:
- Buy the front-end
- Screenshot every upsell and downsell
- Screen-record the whole flow
- Save every email
- Watch the videos, even the cringe ones
- Archive headlines, buttons, price anchors
- Map it all out like a crime board
Raja tilted his head. “This is corporate stalking with a conscience.”
“And that’s why it works,” said Raghunandan. “Most people want to be creative first. That’s like writing poetry before learning the alphabet.”
Savitha nodded. “So don’t start with a blank page. Start with someone else’s cheat sheet.”
Raghunandan circled a phrase on the board:
Funnels = Plumbing, not painting
“Someone already laid the pipes. Your job is to trace the water, not design the faucet.”
Outside, the city had gone still. But inside, the room buzzed.
Open tabs blinked with traffic stats. Notes piled up with brand names nobody had heard of and ad headlines that actually got clicks. Raja had hijacked one corner of the board with his own sketch, something involving “deodorant for marathoners who hate powder.”
Swathi stretched and stood, brushing hair out of her face.
She gave Raghunandan a look that said: enough.
He got the message.
She turned to the group. “Alright, knowledge junkies. It’s past midnight. I’m going to bed.”
Savitha opened her mouth to push back. Swathi raised a hand.
“No more frameworks. You need sleep and a launch plan. In that order.”
Harsh was still scrolling. “Wait, what about tracking pixels…”
“Tomorrow,” she said, already walking.
Raghunandan stood and waved them toward the door.
“Here’s what matters,” he said, handing Raja his charger. “Don’t try to outsmart the market on Day 1. Just copy the guy already winning.”
Savitha paused. “So… creativity?”
“After conversion,” said Raghunandan. “Not before.”
Raja slipped into his sandals. “So it’s not originality. It’s obedience.”
“Exactly. Model first. Guess later.”
Harsh looked up from his phone. “First time I feel like I’m building something with grip. Not just flinging content at the algorithm.”
Raghunandan smiled. “That’s the line. Hobbyist vs marketer.”
The door clicked shut.
Swathi reappeared with a toothbrush in her mouth.
“If they text you at 2 a.m. about email flows,” she said, “I’m changing the Wi-Fi password.”
Raghunandan sank into the couch, exhaling.
The room was a mess with wires, half-drunk coffee, ad screenshots, and a single headline scrawled across a napkin.
Tonight, they hadn’t launched anything.
They’d just stolen the blueprint.
Tomorrow, they’d build.
Whether it flew or flopped, at least now it was theirs to mess up.
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