How This Guy Makes His Entire Year's Revenue in Black Friday WEEK

0:01Jay ice cream what what is this episode about so it is as of as of recording this it is Black Friday week it is one of the biggest uh weeks of the year in terms of sales for e-commerce companies for product companies for info product companies uh we are running multiple Black Friday sales for companies this week and I thought what I've been surprised about is that a lot of companies who sell things uh not just services but like a lot of people who sell like sell products don't take part in Black Friday and if they do they don't really understand the different types of deals and different types of

0:39sales they can do and so I thought it would be cool to look at some really cool examples of sales that are running right now as this week goes on and look at the different ways you can run Black Friday sales but also any type of sale [Music] it's sipping time baby and there's it's not just oh I'm going to do a discount that's like really lowlevel running a sale campaign thing um just to give you a feeling like a company that's making let's say uh 500k a month or 200k a month could make1 to2 million do in just this week and a company that's making like 10 million

1:26per month or 20 million per month could make like all of their yearly Revenue combined in just this one week as well and so it's not and and a lot of people don't understand that you know sometimes I talk to entrepreneurs and they're like oh I don't want to take part in that I don't want to take part in like it's too you know we're prestigious brand and like we want to stay away from that kind of stuff and I'm like let me show you all the prestigious brands that are more prestigious than you running sales like this and you just don't understand how to actually do it in a way that's maybe

1:59you know on brand so I think a lot of people are not thinking about Black Friday as a sales opportunity and people who do think of it as a sales opportunity often completely flub it because they don't know the different types of sales that they can do we run a Black Friday sale every year we run Black Friday sales for our customers and they make millions of dollars and I think we can show you I I'd like to show you like some of my favorite examples that are out there right now and teach people a few things they can learn for their own things that they're selling that's my idea for today

2:35anyway so a few things number one I like the way you say prestigious prestigious you say PR prestig what do I say prestigious you say prestigious do I say prestigious or do I say prestigious no no you say prestigious let the record show that you say prestigious that's number one number two you said the word flub flub which which I thought was an incredible word flubby write write flub in the comments if if you agree with me and uh number three I think you know the saying if you make it in New York you can make it anywhere yes well I think if you can do

3:17a great Black Friday sale you could sell anything on the internet so I'm excited to dive in with you I I have an alternative way of saying that if you can do a great Black Friday sale you can literally up everything for the rest of the year and still have a great year there we go you could have your your worst year ever full of the worst strategic business decisions and still nail back Friday and still make it all back like I'll tell you we've had some you know at 2023 we didn't have a great year like we I made some strategic decisions at AJ and smart that I don't

3:52think were very clever um and Black Friday was Black Friday and kind of like summer sale those made up for some of the sillier decisions or or larger expenses um so yeah that would be my really messy alternative uh quote for that so should we have a look at a couple of these Black Friday sales and kind of look at what they're doing like I haven't broken it down into different types yet but I I think there's like there's companies that do discounts there's companies that do free bonuses and no discount there's companies that do bundles with discounts and free bonuses and there's companies who do

4:28sort of like if you if you've got like a subscription software service there's really interesting things people do to get you to renew as well so I think there's a mixture of everything in here from physical products to SAS products to just like services and stuff like that so I think I've got a big L I've got a big overview of some nice things well I show you the first one because I can literally just open it on my phone right now so do you know the product endle uh is it a sleeping type thing yeah so they basically do um I'm sorry that this is not really focusing so

5:05endle basically does uh different types of noise and soundscapes which help with stress and sleeping and they have like ADHD Focus whatever and it's I personally think it's a really nice product um and my renewal is coming up but I chose an annual non-automatic renewal last year and so what's coming up on my screen year and I'll tell you what they did last year as well to get me in they are showing me this 50% off if I renew and when I tap into it and obviously I Got a notification about that and if I tap into it I'm essentially given a mini landing page within the endel app which is showing me

5:51all of the benefits that I might have forgotten about and this sale this like this is kind of something that evolves throughout the Black Friday week where they might add in a bonus towards the end of the week last week last year they added in a really nice nicely designed endle bag um whoever designed that endle bag I know you guys are based in Berlin that bag convinced me um but yeah so this this is something where if you have a software product or if you have a service where there's an annual renewal doing something around Black Friday even if that's not exactly the time where

6:27people are renewing so for example with the PlayStation or Sony this week are doing their Black Friday sale they started it last Friday and they have this PSN service which is you pay for that service to play multiplayer on PlayStation and even if you're already a subscriber to PSN which I am they'll say hey if you want to like extend for another year if you want to add more on you can do it at a discount during this week and so that's something which is like a you're already locked into the system you're already part of the subscription but now during Black Friday week when people are expecting things to

7:04be happening and discounts to be happening they're offering you a way to extend uh whoop is doing the same thing you'll probably see these boys here um along with doing a lot of like little bonuses with their bands and everything but yeah SAS products are doing like renewal pushes around this time of the year and if you're not a member they're obviously doing their subscription pushes at this time of the year so that's one example that I really like if you're running some sort of digital product some sort of SAS thing uh this is the time of year where you can push people on some sort of nice juicy

7:40renewal plan you should check out endle it's nice quick ad break let me tell you about a business I invested in it's called boring marketing.com so a few years ago I met this group of people that were some of the best SEO experts in the world they were behind getting some of the biggest compan compies found on Google and the secret sauce is they've got a set of technology and AI that could help you out rank your competition so for my own businesses I wanted that I didn't want to have to rely on Mark Zuckerberg I didn't want to depend on ads to drive customers to my

8:17businesses I wanted to rank high in Google that's why I like SEO and that's why I use boring marketing.com and that's why I invested in it they're so confident in their approach that they offer a 30-day Sprint with 100% money back guarantee who does that nowadays so check it out highly recommend boring marketing.com is there anything you would do differently uh if you were running marketing at endle so we I think that uh they are doing a great job first of all I think they they really put it front and center um I think I would probably take the uh approach that mind uh Magic mind and AG one are taking this week

9:01which is I would include the free gifts upfront so free gift the free gift strategy I think I spoke about it the last time I was on but if we maybe open up do you mind if I just share my screen and open up magic mind just in case this is gone I don't mind at all I don't you know what you know what that that's the equivalent of is what when you get like I don't know maybe you get some oysters or you get a fish and someone says do you mind if I let it you know like put some lemon on it it's like

9:33obviously we don't mind if you put lemon on it like no one is going to go no one is gonna get mad at you for sharing your screen right now no one's gonna get mad at you for putting lemon on the oysters I just don't want you to get mad at me okay so I think what magic mind has done in my opinion is like a master class in a Black Friday sale uh we're emulating a lot of this for the Black Friday sales we're running um first of all you obviously get your discount upfront second of all you get welcome gifts and welcome gifts are things that you're

10:04only going to get as part of this sale and so the welcome gifts are you get 90 days access to this open app I don't know if you've ever used this open app it's really nice um you know it's usually $60 now it's free you get the Beyond coffee book which teaches you how to become more productive but without without coffee and you also get free shipping as part of a welcome gift um I think they have the same gifts for both so this is something where not only are they saying okay if you just come back to us and subscribe we'll give you 50% off uh Magic mind plus free gifts that's

10:42the thing that actually gets you it like sweetens the deal um ag1 are doing the exact same thing I don't know if you've seen how many gifts they're adding to their thing but it's been building up for the entire Black Friday month I'll show you let's see if they're presenting this publicly yeah they're calling it their welcome pack oh there oh there's some of some of this stuff's only happening in email so it depends how far how long you've been in their funnel I guess but they're currently doing this I'm just going to actually switch it to English because it's on German no we're gonna have to do we're gonna have to do

11:22German I'm sorry I'm very sorry do you mind if we do this in German that's where I draw the line so you can see that ag1 right now for Black Friday is doing um two travel packs vitamin D the container and the Shaker all for the price of what you usually just get the the bag and and the initial Shaker for um if you look at their Black Friday email campaign they've also added in a hat so sometimes what you can do and that's what we also do is you start with a set of free gifts and as the campaign goes on you add more free gifts which obviously you give to

12:03the people who joined early but it convinces people towards the end of the sale to jump in and there sometimes you can call these Miffy most incredible free gifts ever sometimes you can call these one like one-time welcome gifts but it's like a way to a lot of people do merch like a one-time merch which you can only get during this period of time um I just think it's a really people don't realize how powerful it is to just give someone something to sweeten the deal and discounts are often not enough there's another way do you want to see like the more Prestige way to do it what

12:40is it prestigious prestigious um so this is so what people will say to me is like yeah but like like you know premium Brands like apple doesn't do that and blah blah blah I'm like all right all right let's take a look at what Apple's doing yes they do something very different but they still really push Black Friday and Cyber Monday so let me show you how Apple make this happen um apple and this is something that's also effective and more you know high brow this is you buy a product from Apple during this period of time a non-discounted product and you get a $200 gift voucher that you can spend on

13:28something else from Apple so it's not that you're getting a discount it's not that you're getting a free gift it's that they're giving you a $200 voucher during this per period of time to buy something else from them and I think that's like a really great way to not cheapen these high quality products and like these kind of you know high-end products while still technically giving you a discount they're just not saying it upfront they're giving you a $200 disc gift card so they're theoretically giving you a discount because you have to spend it with them but they're not saying this is a discount can I show you

14:08another really can I show you a cool and really creative one that an e-commerce shop has done wait can I show you can I show you something I'm like yeah we are the biggest nerds on the internet I think dude we've the entire AJ and smart team for the last month we've just been collecting these and obsessing about them show me yours I'll show you mine if you show me yours all right well I'll go for it no yeah go on okay here we go so what I like about this is Black Friday sale you have $763 in store credit so instead of doing like buy something and you get a gift

14:52card I think that if people have credit that is look hello hello Max you've got store credit which is about to expire for good on Sunday they put your account email and they say use your code to apply the credit at checkout uh gainsinbulk dcom um and then you it's just like it feels like no I don't want to lose my credit that's my credit that's really cool I'm I'm just literally I just screenshot that I screenshotted it and add it to our uh Team Black Friday thing that's really cool I love that one so store credit so they're basically telling you you've got this store discount

15:36instead of a discount right everyone thinks of discounts I'll give you 10% off 20% off 30% off if if the average you know order size is $100 and and you were going to give $20 off right instead of saying you have 20% off because everyone is saying you have 20 20% off the whole internet is saying you have 20% off say you have actually don't say you have $20 in credit say you have $21.63 in credit I love that that's really cool that's really nice um I just need to I want to tell my team this for the next email so just give me one sec

16:17can you bring that up on screen again so because my screenshots didn't actually work who's this from um it's from Jordan on my team sent it to me so it's from gains in bulk like what is that I wonder what that's about oh no this is going oh no yeah that's that is so good okay that's it's like a protein company right yeah like creatine workout candy good name athletic digestive formula yeah okay I'll show you one um from my email screenshot Hole uh so this is another concept which is let me see can you see my base camp thing I see I see growth day yeah

17:19look at this yeah so this instead of doing a discount instead of doing uh myth Keys instead of doing anything else it's okay all those things that weren't in one package before are now in one box at like a slightly better price than buying all of them individually so and and creating a branded element a new branded product that's now going on sale during this period of time I think this is a really cool it's a really cool way of not just doing something discount or not just doing something uh like you know free gift it's like I'm just taking all of this stuff you see companies like

18:00asop doing this as well this the the hand soap comp or like the beauty company I don't know they've bundled um like different scents into a box and they're like special things for Christmas which make you want to buy them for friends um I really like that as a simple repackaging of all the things you already have as a bundle to sell for Black Friday I like that one I like that too I think you know you showed it with um who was it magic mind I thought what was really cool about their kind of bundle is they were giving a free digital product that I don't think I

18:42don't think they started that company probably I don't think so either yeah just I think that yeah so if you're looking for something to bundle go reach out to companies that you like and they're happy because they're getting distribution like a digital product is free to distribute um and you're happy because you're adding value and I think like it's such a missed opportunity when I see companies like companies with million dooll Facebook meta budgets and they're just doing straight up discounts or I mean the worst case scenario is they're just ignoring Black Friday because they don't like if you talk to someone and they're running an

19:25e-commerce site or they're selling things online and you ask them like September are you guys getting ready for November and they're like what do you mean November I'm like all right goodbye either you're making too much money or just shit's not working at all because you need to know like from like June we already knew the 29th of uh November was coming up we're already thinking about it and if you're spending like a million dollars already per month and you're just sending people to a straight up discount I think that's crazy especially when this could be your biggest week of the year can I show you

20:00a really cool one like a really creative one I cannot tell you whether this works or not because I don't know anything about it I just think this one's cool so zero data on this but Vibes Positive Vibes I need to reach out to the team and ask them why they decide to do this okay I've always been a fan by the way it's also good for your brand sip more save more sip more baby hell yeah so they're doing something kind of interesting so you can either shop their rated kits which are going to be bundles or you can build your bundle and i' I've

20:33been playing around with this so here's like a whole like little web app for Black Friday and the more you add to the bundle the more you save so there's this checkpoint at $99 after which point so there's a checkpoint at $59 for free shipping and there's a checkpoint at $99 which gets you 40% off this is genius in my opinion and this is something I'm going to steal for any e-commerce clients we work with in future so I'm just going to like add things they add up here what's really cool is you can see the bundle building up and now I have free chipping free shipping I wish there was a check

21:12mark when you actually got that point but whatever we're all good and we're going to turn this up and now I have 40% off everything and you can see your savings here I think that's a little bit hard to see but that's all good and then you proceed the checkout and you can see all your savings I think this is a super super cool one um I love it it's it's really nice and I'm sure you can also add other discount codes I'm sure there's other things you can also add on there um and I'm assuming that as this campaign goes on um there'll just be

21:42more and more stuff but this is actually a pretty sophisticated Black Friday sale uh creating your Black Friday box I think it's like it wins the Sip Award for best or most creative Black Friday sale in my opinion and the Sip award know very big deal it's it's it's huge so I'm just wondering did they build that themselves because startup idea go and just build this and make a Shopify app and it's genius I would assume I would assume that the four sigmatic guys probably did build it themselves um but I don't know no ice I I think they probably did but I mean anyone being out there being able to build

22:34something like that for their clients for Black Friday like it's guys if you're listening to this podcast and you know how to run sales and you have like some proof that you've run sales for yourself or some for some other clients or you could build that for clients you need to be reaching out to them approximately August every year actually a really cool thing happened so we actually brought in a copywriter an extra copywriter for this week and he reached out to us cold um reached out to me cold in August uh with an email which was like is your Black Friday sale planned already something like that um

23:12and he's here now sitting in the office helping us with our campaign just because we have so many campaigns running and so many emails going and I thought that was like a really clever way to reach out to us um like copywriters and people who can build things build little kind of neat little shop ideas for people during Black Friday they are needed everywhere shh don't tell anyone but I've got 30 plus startup ideas that could make you millions and I'm giving them away for free these aren't just random guesses they're validated Concepts from entrepreneurs who built hundred million plus businesses I've compiled them into to a one simple

24:00database compiled from hundreds of conversations I've had on my podcast but the main thing is most of these ideas don't need a single investor some cost nothing to start I'm pretty much handing you a cheat sheet the idea bank is your startup shortcut just click below to get access your next cash flowing business is waiting for you yeah so that's it's like another startup idea which is so you can go and build the software and or you can actually create the Black Friday agency yes oh my God yes yes and then you can that's actually brilliant no it sound like I know there's going to be

24:46people in your audience who are going like yeah whatever but actually that's excellent that's a really good idea like well yeah that's really good I love that that would work it's like because all of the ads are going to be it's your biggest week of the year don't squander it don't flub it you know it oh man that's really good we need to we might have to do that one we might have to find a team and invest in it I mean we help people run their Black Friday campaigns but just from a strategic point of view just like telling them what they should do like and and helping

25:23them with the copy and stuff and we've got all the teams literally sitting here they've flown in for this week and and we're just doing that but an agency that proactively reaches out to companies e-commerce stores and is like by the way like your I can double your sales during this week I will not you don't pay me I'll just take a cut of the just the revenue from this sale come on we're so with with what we're doing just for transparency we're only taking a cut of the money that's made so it's it's kind of like a it's not a no-brainer because we take a big cut but

26:04it is kind of a no-brainer because they these companies weren't going to run these sales in the first place so it's it's like a it's it is a bit of a win-win that dude at Black Friday focused agency which in general campaigns right so what is Black Friday Black Friday is a campaign and all of these campaigns so we run every year we run a summer sale campaign we run a Black Friday Campa campaign we've now started to piggy back on the prime day campaign the prime day sale and we're looking for other like times of the year to piggyback for example like back to school things like this piggy

26:42piggybacking on events that happened throughout the year and running campaigns during these events a lot of like SAS people um because as you know a lot of SAS people are like anti- ads and AD SU and all marketing sucks it all has to be organic that's fine but there there are massive opportunities we just looked at a lot of companies now who are running these types of things including Apple oh the big great Apple are running Black Friday sales there's just a massive opportunity out there to grow your business by piggybacking on these things and running campaigns during these times where people are expecting to be

27:24receiving campaigns um it feels like a no to me if you can do it in a way that's aligned with your brand in you know what I mean you know what I mean I don't know if I asked for your life story over there you got me with my own you got me with my own poison okay so can I show you one last really cool Black Friday sale please so you got me thinking about it because for sigmatic uh the one that you just showed is kind of like a game and let me share my screen so I got this email from Bodega Bodega is a retail

28:06shop and they sell Street Wear so I opened it up they send me like an email a week I never open it up but I I I got got with this one because they say there's a $200 Bodega gift code in this email like okay you're giving me $200 let's go Gotta open so she's open then I say oh oh yeah this code right here is worth $200 side note I I actually like I love how their their copy is right it feels like they're writing me a personal email problem is it's missing a few characters could be numbers or letters whoever can solve it and check out with

28:45it gets it first come first serve have fun and good luck and then they give you the discount code so this is taking a promo code and turning it into a game a treasure hunt type thing really cool that's cool I've never seen that before I I've not seen a company do this and it's interesting because that getting a $200 gift voucher for a company that sells stuff that probably is under $200 is almost like we've just got free stuff for you exactly that's very cool while you were showing me that I was thinking of another one but I can't remember what it was so wait while I was showing it to

29:27you you weren't listening you were thinking about your own thing you know on this podcast my only goal is to make sure that your audience is happy and so I'm trying to think of stuff the whole time and uh you know because if they don't get if they don't get what they want yeah they'll they'll just attack that's that's it um are you the actual important question is what are you buying this Black Friday week like what what things are you buying um that's a good question like really boring stuff like the I I I took stock of all the things that I buy repeatedly so I buy

30:04like the same protein powder I started taking creatine by this company called Thorn by the same one so I I I think it's like a good habit to look at the 20 things that you consume on an ongoing basis and just go and buy them at 20 to 50% off yes that's a really good point I mean I do that on Amazon or that's what I did this morning I just woke up and and you know you go into like the settings and it just says the buy again section and I like bought detergent uh I bought like some random really boring stuff but yeah I'll

30:39generally go to like the websites of my favorite clothing companies or I'll I'll go on the eight sleep website see if they've got anything interesting that I don't already have or yeah that that's a really good point just to jump on the things you're using already and just see if you can get like more of it which is why like I think one thing I buy a lot of is video games so for me for me the biggest part of this week is the Steam Sale which starts tomorrow so Wednesday and the Steam Sale is another thing that's kind of cool because they build an entire like theme and brand around their

31:15sale like they get artists to create the art for it it's like really special it looks really cool um I'm really excited to to just even see how the Steam Sale looks this year they like make it into a proper event another thing you can do for Black Friday and I heard this from a guy called Conor who's here with us at at the moment in the office and he said there was these in China for singles day something that's common is to do like almost like a QVC style thing where you have like influencers on video like for 12 hours during Black Friday or during

31:53singles day just selling stuff and talking about them so QVC telemarketing style we've thought about doing that because it would be fun we've done like a onour version of it where we were like you know doing an ironic version of QVC but I think there's definitely something to playing around with this almost like semi ironic semi funny QVC style T telemarketing thing where you're like there's only 20 of these left okay now there's 10 of them left I think that like I recently saw Coldplay Don't Judge Me I recently saw Coldplay on QVC and I was fascinated by how good it actually was like they had

32:33the they had so many little mythies so many little interesting one-off things so many bundles you couldn't get anywhere else um I'm not the biggest I I love their first two albums I have to admit and I'm not going to lie but I there was so many things there where I was like I'm not going to listen to any of this but I kind of want this handwritten thing or I kind of want this poster that no one's going to be able to get after this session I think it's kind of cool somehow it like it just like appeals to something in me yeah I wonder

33:01I wonder you know thinking about the ad strategy for a live stream like could you create a live stream on X and then promote it like I wish there was an ad unit that you can promote I mean of course you can go and do like static images and be like there's a live stream click it opens up the live stream but I wonder if there's an ad Arbitrage here we're running I mean we're going to spend at least 100K on just our own ads this week um I I hope you see our ads they're really silly this year they're they're very very very silly I think

33:33what I would do is I would have ads running three days before I would have ads running on the Monday for an event that's going to happen on the Thursday before Black Friday just so you have some time and the ads would be leading to like a fun waiting page for people to register for the live event and maybe if you register before the live event starts you're given some sort of discount code to use so you can use that discount code on top of whatever it is that you're going to be seeing during this live stream I think that would work really well and I think that would like

34:06get a lot actually I want to do that now that I've said it now I actually want to do it so yeah you have a live event the day before Black Friday and people you're you're sending ads to a landing page which is a waiting list which unlocks a discount code that can be used during the session that would work beautiful keep us posted let us know how it goes Black Friday agency done done all right uh Jonathan Courtney Jada the ice cream J cream the unscheduled CEO for you know the unscheduled j i cream thank you for being here sharing with Alpha we appreciate you thank so much um I saw

34:47maybe I'll I saw in your comments people like uh wondering like why am I sharing all this information um I just find it really enjoyable to be able to nerd out with someone and talk about all the stuff like again I do not have a Black Friday agency although now we we have to create one um and I don't um I also don't really have anything uh like it's really nice that people are reaching out but I don't really have any I can't I'm not we're not doing agency work uh for this kind of stuff so I think just stay tuned to the podcast that's the that's

35:22the way to to find out more cool stuff about this I appreciate you all right my man catch you later thank you we are out [Music]