# I Tried a Strange Marketing Trick and Made $___ Channel: Marc Lou Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r45n3Jsqu6o Duration: 4 min Language: English Words: 934 Transcript page: https://viewrankai.com/tools/youtube-transcript/r45n3Jsqu6o --- [0:00] So, this is the dumbest marketing experiment I've tried. This is my t-shirt. On the back, there is a cure code. When people scan it, they go to my website and if they buy my product, I make money. Well, that's the perfect plan. So, I just wore this t-shirt and travel the world. I wore it in the busy streets of Mumbai. I wore it in shopping malls in Singapore in the plane. People stared, people laugh. One guy took a selfie with me and run away. At some point, I just became a walking ad and the sidewalk was my funnel. The real question is, can this dumb ideal [0:29] actually make money? First, I had to pick the right product. I have built over 30 businesses. Some are SAS, some are marketplaces, and some were built during a personal crisis. But most of them don't make money. So, I picked Codefast, my course that teaches people how to learn how to code. Because it has lots of positive reviews, because it converts well, and because it has a broad audience. A random tourist in Paris is more likely to want to learn how to code than reduce Stripe chargebacks. Then, I had to create the cure code. I made a link that points to my course with a little tracking tag at [0:58] the end. That way, I could use datafast to see exactly who scanned it, how long they stayed, and if they actually bought my course. Datafast is like Google Analytics except that it doesn't require a PhD to understand. I added some text to the cure code because when you tell people not to do something, they usually do it. And then I slap the image on a custom t-shirt. In Indonesia, it only costs $10 to create those custom shirts, but I made a mistake and I just ordered one. At this point, I had the product, I had the funnel, I just had to do marketing. So, I went to Singapore. I [1:26] walked through a mall, train station. I even went to the Apple store because if someone spent $3,000 on the laptop, they might as well spend $200 for a course. And nothing happened. Not a single visitor. Maybe scanning a stranger's back is not a thing after all. So, I went to India. Totally different vibes. People were curious, friendly. Some even asked for selfies. I walked through Lindmark, food markets, pack street, and [1:48] people scanned. A lot of people scanned. And that's when I realized two things. Number one, I should have printed more than one t-shirt, especially in a tropical weather of Mumbai. And number two, the funnel was broken. I wasn't a guy promoting a product anymore. I had become an ad that does not convert. I had to increase the conversion rate. So, I snapped a photo of me, removed the background, and with a little bit of code, I added a pop-up to the site only [2:10] for people who scan with a cure code. The idea was to make people feel like this page was built just for them. I hope this would change that. So I flew to France, walked 20,000 step, got many people scanning me and still no sales. If you want people's attention, pay for it. So I decided to run ads, my kind of ads. I would give people $1 so they can scan my back and I would pitch my product. I made a cardboard and traded my bills for coins. I carried everything [2:36] to the EFL Tower and it felt awkward. People stared, but no one scanned. probably because scam me really looks like scam me or probably because my shirt says the exact opposite of what the cardboard says. So I started talking first, waving the coin and smiling and suddenly people started scanning and for $1, I got to pitch my product. I talked to tourists, families and even a smart kid with this moment and most of them were German. I have no idea why and I watch it happen on real time on data fast. People scanning me and lighting up the globe. After two hours, I gave away all my coins and then suddenly where [3:08] someone what the here yolo yolo I saw one sale $299. Yes, I did it. But then I remembered I tweeted a photo of myself at the EFL Tower earlier that day and the person bought under a company name. So I had no way to trace back to a person I talked to. It could have been Twitter and not the street. Suddenly I felt like the whole challenge was broken. In the taxi to go back home, I had mixed feelings. The driver noticed the cardboards in my hand and asked what we were doing in Paris. We chatted for a bit, and when we arrived home, he asked [3:39] if he could check the course. He scanned my bag, read the landing page, pulled his credit card, and right in front of me, he bought it. He's from Benin, Africa. He drives a taxi in Paris, where running a pork farm back home, and he wants to build a website to sell the meat online. That was the moment. I thought that tweet ruined everything, but I wasted weeks on a challenge that would never work. But the taxi made it real again. Don't wait for everything to be perfect. Just put your work out there. It might be awkward. It might flop. And then out of [4:09] nowhere, it might just work. --- About this transcript Read from YouTube's own caption track and laid out by ViewRank AI (https://viewrankai.com). ViewRank AI finds the videos already beating a creator's own average on Instagram, TikTok and YouTube Shorts, transcribes them from the audio itself in more than 60 languages, and turns what worked into new ideas and scripts. Free transcript tools, no account needed: https://viewrankai.com/tools How to read any video this way: https://viewrankai.com/llms.txt