The Sold-Out Playbook: How Our Brand (Neat) Sold-Out in 30 Days (#178)
If you too would like to solve the problem of having too many people wanting to buy your product, then I think the sold out playbook might just be right for you.
Speaker 2:I'm Jim Huffman and this is If I Was Starting Today, a collection of conversations about half baked startup ideas, growth tactics, and stories from founders, including my own journey as a business owner. All of the content is centered around 1 question. What would you do if you were starting today?
Speaker 1:Today on the podcast. I thought I'd do something kind of fun. I did a talk earlier and I called it this hold out playbook and it's about our brand, neat, that we acquired, mixed wet proof shirts. I talk about how we were really nervous. We're sitting on inventory.
Speaker 1:We'd launch. We stand up our funnel, and it kinda worked. We actually sold out of products. So why let a good problem go to waste? Let's turn it to a marketing moment.
Speaker 1:So I created some content around how we sold out of the products, and so I call it the sold out playbook. This is a talk I did on it. We're actually gonna probably turn this into a course because a lot of people have been asking about what what we did and how we pulled it off, and I wanna do this right. But just for fun, I thought I'd throw out the talk to see if this is helpful. So I think you'll be able to get a lot from this.
Speaker 1:But I basically talk about how we went from sitting on all this inventory to selling out, you know, figuring out, are we even ready to grow and launch? What we did before we launched to talk about honing in on our positioning and some tweaks I made to the website to get our conversion rate up and get our average order value up. I go pretty specific on how we stood up ads, the copy, the creative, how we ran those tests, and how we did a scrappy launch strategy as well. And I also even get into the numbers on how we modeled out what is success and what is failure as far as how we sell these products, but in a way that works for our business model. So I hope this is helpful.
Speaker 1:So let me know what you think. But if you really like it, shoot me a note on LinkedIn or Twitter, and we'll go forward with turning this into an e product. Again, thank you so much for listening and being along on this this journey as we're trying to build this company in public, been some highs and lows, but this 1 is a fun 1. Okay. Today, I wanna talk about a problem that I have, and it's the fact that we are now sold out of all of our products, and I call it the sold out playbook.
Speaker 1:When I invested in meat, we we bought a company. We bought this apparel brand, and we had warehouses filled with products, which created a great opportunity. However, they hadn't figured out the marketing side. So we decided to apply this 5 point system that I've learned running my own growth agency for the past 8 years and how we face different challenges because we are sold out of all of our products. If you too would like to solve the problem of having too many people wanting to buy your product, then I think the sold out playbook might just be right for you.
Speaker 1:So I wanna get into this, and hopefully, you can learn something that can help you with your business to go from idea to sold out. So some other notes on the success behind it to kinda tease this system. We did some things to the website that took the conversion rate from 0.6 to 3.8%. We increased the average order value from $58 to a $100 with 3 simple tactics. We're able to get ads to have a return on ad spend of over 350% and to be sold out in, basically, 30 days?
Speaker 1:How do you go from this this, thing of having this idea of, you know, how do I turn this idea into something that is real and selling out? How do you take a warehouse full of products that no 1 wants to buy to a warehouse empty where you're like, hey. How fast can we refill? So we're gonna get into this. But if you're like me, you've probably made some mistakes in the past.
Speaker 1:You try and grow too soon. Right? You're sending traffic to a website site that doesn't actually convert. Or second, you're you're growing if we look at the top line, but it's not profitable. And it's only if you spend money on ads, but you don't have the profits to reinvest in inventory.
Speaker 1:Or maybe you get some small wins from 1 off campaigns or launches, but it's not sustainable. When you stop, the traffic stops or the sales stop. So I've seen this problem time and time again, and I was like, how can I crack the code? So for the past 8 years, my agency, we've helped generate $250, 000, 000 across a 150 companies. And as we've seen companies go well, we decided to figure out what are the common denominators, and we broke it down into this 5 step process.
Speaker 1:And, again, this is after learning from brands that have gone on Shark Tank. This is after learning for brands that have raised a $100, 000, 000 in funding. We've seen brands go from idea to getting acquired by private equity. And these learnings, we've even taught to venture capital firms like Techstars and LinkedIn. But my goal is to keep it simple and to give you what you need to do it yourself and in a cost effective way.
Speaker 1:So let me break it down for you, the sold out playbook. So here are the 5 key steps. And the first step is actually not even a step. It's let's validate. Are you ready to grow?
Speaker 1:Is your company ready to grow? I'm gonna give you the checklist to figure out how to do that. Now to get started, it's really around crafting your unique value proposition and allows you to beat the competition. Now this isn't about being better. It's actually about being different.
Speaker 1:The second part, we need to create an activation offer that will get sales. We're gonna get into how you create urgency, FOMO, and scarcity to get people to take action when they're in a busy, crazy world. 3rd, how can you stand up a funnel that converts and do it in a cost effective way? I wanna talk about some horror stories I've seen with brands where that did not go well. 4th, how do you build the growth model to maximize your limited budget?
Speaker 1:Right? Because a lot of times you wanna do these tactics that big brands do, but you don't have the budget. I'm gonna show you how to be efficient with that. And then finally, a on strategy when you don't have money to go big, but you have money to go smart or resources to go smart. And then finally, as a bonus, after launch, after you sell through your 1st buy of inventory, I'm gonna give you the 12 month growth engine as far as how to think through calendaring out growth.
Speaker 1:Okay. Let's dive in. Are you even ready for growth? That is the question. Look at your website.
Speaker 1:Do you have a website that converts? You have a healthy conversion rate, where if you send cold traffic on mobile, they will buy. 2nd, do you have a scalable channel that's been validated when you get that scalable channel that can grow and get you to that next level of selling through your products? And then finally, do you have your position dialed in? And what's the test for that?
Speaker 1:Talk to your customers. How would they describe your product to someone? And is that what you want it to be? Now, Lohrny, if you're not ready, then investing in growth too soon will actually accelerate your failure. We say this all the times with companies that wanna hire a growth agency when they're not ready.
Speaker 1:If you hire us, we will accelerate how fast you burn cash. So do not focus on growth until you are ready. 90% of startups failed because they wanna grow when they're not ready. They don't wanna do the hard work. I know this because my growth agencies worked with a 150 brands.
Speaker 1:We've seen the good and the bad of this. Alright. The first part, your value proposition. Now there's a lot of value proposition exercises out there you could fit give this as, how do we write copy on ads, landing pages, and emails that speaks to your customer? And that's what I care about.
Speaker 1:So there's a couple exercises we're gonna do to extract that out of you. And it's simply around why customers should care. So this formula I have, that's the pitch formula. And there's a couple key call outs here. When you're figuring how to talk to customers, there's 3 core things.
Speaker 1:1, who are your target customers? Now be specific. A mistake I see so many companies make in their early days is they go too broad. The more specific, the better. The second call out after you're specific on the persona is what is the key benefit to the customer?
Speaker 1:Are you a pain killer or are you a vitamin? Why should they care? Why should they stop what they're doing, go on your website, and actually buy what you're offering? Okay. The next thing.
Speaker 1:Now this one's really hard. I wanna know who are we competing against, and what's your point of differentiation? Now notice I'm not saying why you're better. Why are you different? And if you nail your target persona, this will make it much easier.
Speaker 1:Right? And by by your competition, it might not be a direct competitor. It could be an indirect competitor. Your competition could be indifference. Your competition could be urgency.
Speaker 1:So something to think about as we go down this. So after you've gone through this kind of exercise of those 3 things in this formula, you're gonna do something second. I want you to think through, how do we package that up to speak to your customers? You know who your customers are. You know the benefit.
Speaker 1:You know the point of differentiation. And I'm gonna give you 5 tools on how you speak to your potential customers. 1st, do you speak to them with features? A lot of times, early adopt adopters wanna nerd out, and you can get technical with them. 2nd, benefits.
Speaker 1:How do we speak to them? Not in features, but in benefits, why they should care. 3rd, may we speak to them in a problem solution format to get their attention. Don't lead with the benefits. Lead with the problem that you're solving.
Speaker 1:4th, and this is probably my most favorite, is use case. We need to talk about when they should use this and why. The more specific you can get for their persona, the better. 1 of my favorite examples is Spanx shapewear. If they would have launched on benefits or features, it wouldn't have made sense, but they got to 8 figures on the back of 2 use cases.
Speaker 1:1 is you wanna wear a silk dress and not feel self conscious and wear and and have roles, wear Spanx. The other was around wearing, pants and not having panty lines. And then finally, maybe you speak to your customer about the aspiration or transformation they're gonna have for your product. So what I wanna do is show you with neat what we did. So with our pitch, it was very specific.
Speaker 1:We're going after affluent males 25 to 55 that have a problem that they sweat too much. They're self conscious about it and goes through their shirts. And who we competing against? We're competing against other really comfy, soft cotton shirts, your favorite shirt in your closet. That is great.
Speaker 1:But when you're going out on a hot summer day or you're going to do a presentation, you don't want to wear that shirt. You want to wear our shirt. So that's our pitch. How do we speak to customers? For us?
Speaker 1:It's use case and problem solution. There's a really fun quote from Ogilby that says, if you wanna sell fire extinguishers, talk about fire. And I am a huge proponent of that with our product is talking about the use case, talking about the problem we solve. So we've got the value prop. We've got the positioning.
Speaker 1:We have it in a way where we can, you know, communicate it out to the world. But here's the truth. That is not enough. You need to have an irresistible activation offer. What's the point of the activation offer?
Speaker 1:It's very simple. It's creating urgency. Think of the last time you saw something that was so good but had an offer that matched it, that you were busy. You were maybe in transit. You were traveling, but you're on your phone.
Speaker 1:You're like, I gotta buy this now. You need to be that. And so to do that, I wanna give you a few tools in your tool belt to pull that off. So we're gonna start first with the irresistible offer formula. There's 4 core components to that.
Speaker 1:1st is the dream outcome. What is the dream outcome they want? The aspiration on the transformation. 2nd, what's the likelihood of achievement that you will pull this off for your your brand or for your customer? 3rd, this one's maybe the most important, time delay.
Speaker 1:How fast can you get them to this transformation or magic moment? And then effort or sacrifice. Hey. How much effort do they have to put in to to get this? Another component to put to that is a guarantee.
Speaker 1:And by the way, there's more about this from Alex Rosie book, a $100, 000, 000 offer. Okay. So as you think through that offer and talk to people, the second thing I wanna do for you is think about how do we package this offer up? So we have this activation offer spectrum where we have, like, the least aggressive offers to the most aggressive offers. So I wanna give you a few examples of those.
Speaker 1:We'll go from least aggressive to most aggressive. So first, content or quiz. Maybe you can get them engaged by taking a quiz or giving them a download to learn more about what you're gonna offer. That's the activation point. 2nd is early access.
Speaker 1:This is something if you're truly a pain killer than a vitamin, you could do. 3rd is you can do discounts. You can do buy 1, get ones. You can do bundles and create a little urgency because, hey, you only have a limited amount of products that you can give them. 4th is giveaway products in exchange for them sharing it.
Speaker 1:So you're turning customers into marketers. And then finally, you can actually pay people to use your product or to become customers. And there's some amazing examples of all of these. I mean, guilt did that, whatever you would share it with the front, they would give you $25 in credit from giving away free products. Harry just did this as a referral mechanism when giving away our razors.
Speaker 1:Discounts and bundles, true classic, went on a tear because of the massive shirt bundle that they did. So just some things to think about. And as far as a quiz example goes, 3rd love, which makes women's undergarments, was going after Victoria's Secret and competing on fit, and they did it with the fit quiz. They're like, hey, 80% of bras don't fit right. Take our quiz to see what's right for you.
Speaker 1:So with all of those, what's right for you? So let me talk about what we did with meat. We actually tested this. Now that what what I want you to take away from that is don't put pressure on yourself. You have to come up with a silver bullet of an offer.
Speaker 1:You're gonna have options that you're gonna wanna test, and we did 3. The first was the no sweat guarantee. We don't hide sweat on your shirt, you get your money back, and we'll buy the shirt right off of your back. The second 1 we tested was the no sweat closet upgrade where we're allowing you to get 3 shirts and basically save $30 on it. And then the third 1 that we're testing is the free tea campaign where we give you a free tea to share it with friends.
Speaker 1:And by the way, we tested all of these at lunch. The bundle has proven to be the most successful in the short term in a free tea campaign as we're following up for referrals is working as well, and we'll get more into that with with what we're doing. Okay. You've got your value prop. Check.
Speaker 1:You've got your offer on how to activate people. Now how do we put that into the wild? Right? What does that actually look like? And that's where you take those 2 things and you put it across your funnel.
Speaker 1:And that is your ad funnel, your website funnel, and I want you to do it on a shoestring budget. Right? So let's talk about this and then what that looks like. We're gonna have this big growth marketing machine eventually of doing ads, doing SEO, having custom funnels by personas and products. But to start, let's keep it simple.
Speaker 1:You need 1 ad campaign. You need 1 landing page. And if you do that really well, you can sell through your product. Flatten the funnel to minimize your risk, minimize your workload, and to minimize your startup cost. Too many times I see brands waste money on these huge elaborate websites, and it is overkill.
Speaker 1:Right? Less ads, less pages will make this work out. Okay. So let's start with the website. Let's start with the bottom of the funnel.
Speaker 1:And I'm gonna give you a checklist on how to think through building a website that converts. And when I say website, I'm talking about a 1 to 2 page site. So first, the positioning we just went through in your activation offer should be dripping across all of this. And so as we look at the website, that's where the messaging comes from. The other thing that we need is quality imagery and quality user generated content.
Speaker 1:We spent $25100 on a photo shoot. We spent about $1, 000 on user generated content, which, by the way, half the stuff we got was no good. The other half was pretty good. We also sent the product out so we could get feedback from people. And so that 1 has been huge.
Speaker 1:The next thing after having quality imagery and user generated content is a conversion focused website. So what does that mean? Well, first we want to be mobile first. We also want to be fast. So that means, yes, you can have videos on your website, but be aware of how that loads.
Speaker 1:The other thing is when you go to your website, there needs to be 2 things. So you're thinking through 1, at any point, will they be confused on what is this? Why should I do it? And why should I do it with you? The other thing is ask yourself, what are the natural points of friction in buying something?
Speaker 1:If it's apparel like what we're in, we know that there's gonna be questions on quality of the product, on sizing and fit, and on shipping. So with that in mind, we need to address that. Right? And also, when you're a new brand, there's no trust, which is why social proof is so key. That's why we would give the product out to people in exchange for a review.
Speaker 1:The other component that I wanna hit on is minimizing pages. So we have a home page, collection page, product page, and a cart. And if you're launching with just 1 SKU, you can have a 1 page website. So I really wanna push you to have less. The other thing is revenue expansion opportunities.
Speaker 1:What does that mean? We sell products that are $44. My business model does not work if I just get new customers at at $44. So what we have done to get that card to be not $40, but a $100 are a few different things. 1, we raised the prices by $4.
Speaker 1:2nd, we push bundles over single products. Those bundles have an average order value of a $100. And then the final thing we're doing at the cart is we're giving in incentives. Hey. If you spend $85 free shipping, spend $200, you get a free shirt.
Speaker 1:Those things allowed us to take the average order value from $58 to almost $100 And all of these things have taken the conversion rate from a 0.6% to a 3.8%. So that's step 1, is getting the conversion funnel dialed in. The next component that I wanna hit on is a system that maximizes your ad spend. We're gonna talk about how to set up your ads 1, how to do copy 2, and how to do creative 3. So first, the setup.
Speaker 1:Now the Facebook algorithm is something that is actually getting better and better, which makes your account structure. Can be much simpler. Now there's a 3 step system we do, and this is something we've worked with the Facebook MBA program. We paid 5 figures to be a part of that to understand how the algorithm algorithm works and the the setup and how it should match it. So there's 3 phases to this.
Speaker 1:So first, I want you to do this brand estimated action rate test. So what does that mean? You're taking specific concept elements, which would be your copy, the headline for the ad and the creative for the ad. That is something that you're going to run a test where the goal is not actually conversions. It's engagement.
Speaker 1:Because you wanna see what content gets blessed by the algorithm. And these are very simple tests you can do within 3 days for a minimal budget. We're talking under a $100 or $50 So once we get content that is blessed by the algorithm, we can go to phase 2, which is a dynamic a dynamic creative test. So what does that mean? We take all this blessed content of the best copy, best headlines and creative.
Speaker 1:We put it in a DCT, and we let the algorithm pick and choose and mix and match the best combinations. And then we see what wins, what starts to get conversions. And then we take those winners, and we put those into another, ad set, and we see if they scale. This is all happening in 1 campaign. And why is that, important?
Speaker 1:It's important because the algorithm gets really good the more data it has. So when you break out multiple campaigns and multiple setups, you're spreading out the learnings. You're spreading out the the intelligence. And so we consolidate it to 1, because once we get over 50 events, the algorithm gets much smarter. It can find people that are aligned with your persona that want your product.
Speaker 1:So that's the first thing we do on the setup. But to pull this off, we need great copy and we need great creative. And so whenever we're doing creative, we have a lot of different formulas that we're working through. Some examples are copy that as a problem solution formula, authority copy where you have a press outlet or a scientist, a PhD talking about the product. We have a bold statement to get their attention.
Speaker 1:We have this breaking news copy format. There's also the sex appeal 1, for example, like warning your girlfriend won't be able to take her hands off of you because you look so good in the shirt. And so with us running through that bear experiment and running through the DCT test, here are some of our top performing headlines and copy. 1st, this 1 was the shirt with superpowers everyone's talking about. The second was a PhD scientist finally made a sweat proof shirt.
Speaker 1:And then another 1 had emojis and said, yes, the shirt really hides sweat. So we take those top performing headlines and pieces of copy, and then we're playing with creative. We tested lots of different types of creative. We did TikTok style creative. We used influencers and user generated content.
Speaker 1:We did stills. We did what we call ugly ads. As we mix and mashed all of this, running the right account, the results were super exciting. We got our return on ad spend, our ROAS to over 350%. Our cost per purchase was $24 Can we hit over a 100 conversions in 2 weeks?
Speaker 1:And for us, we thought this was actually gonna take 60 to 90 days because if this didn't work, we would do it again with more creative and more headlines. And so what you're probably asking yourself is, okay, Jim, that's great. What was your budget? Was that success? What does that look like?
Speaker 1:I wanna go to step 4, which is building your growth model because everyone here is trying to sell through products, but the whole goal there is to buy more products. So where do the numbers check-in and where do they work? So there's a few concepts I wanna arm you with. And 1 is around your cost per acquisition, and the other is your return on ad spend. And with the cost per acquisition, there's this idea of a CAC ceiling.
Speaker 1:And it's basically what's the maximum amount you can spend to acquire a customer. And so to do that, we first need to know the cost of your product. How much is it to make a shirt? How much is it for it to be landed and be in the warehouse, factoring in, like, picking and packing and everything? Are you paying for shipping or not paying for shipping?
Speaker 1:Also factoring in potential returns. What's the average return rate for your category or your industry? The second thing I want you to think through is profit. How much are you making on this shirt factoring in those expenses? And of that profit, how much are you willing to spend on customer acquisition?
Speaker 1:How much needs to go into a rebuy for your next order? How much goes into other initiatives? So what I want you to do is take the difference between the costs and your expected profit to understand what is your range of what you can spend to acquire a customer. The other big call up there is some companies will be more aggressive with this, where they're saying, Hey, I don't need to be on the first purchase, the second purchase or the third purchase. Other companies are less aggressive.
Speaker 1:They're like, actually, I need to make money on the first purchase and your business model can absolutely determine this. If you're selling dining room tables, it's an acquisition based business model where they buy it once in a lifetime or once a year. You've absolutely need to be profitable in the first purchase. But if you're selling a subscription product or supplements or potentially fashion, maybe you can break even on the 1st purchase. Maybe you can lose money.
Speaker 1:For us, we absolutely wanted to be profitable in the first purchase. So the next thing is what is the budget? How much should you spend to be able to run this process with creative, with copy, to get enough data, to see if the ads are actually working. So our rule of thumb is around 25100 to 3000 per month. That will allow you to get enough conversion events, enough add to carts, enough impressions to start to let the data learn.
Speaker 1:And so we call that the validation budget. Then as it works, you can go to a group or scale budget. So let's talk about what the CAC was or is for need. So I'm gonna talk about my CAC ceiling in 2 categories. 1 is if we just sell 1 shirt and then if we sell a bundle.
Speaker 1:So I'm gonna give some ballpark numbers here. So if we sell a shirt for $44, let's act like it costs us $10 to buy it and for it to be landed and maybe factoring in some returns. That means that I have a $34 profit margin. So my CAC ceiling, you could say is $34 but that assumes I'm not losing money, but I'm also not gonna have money to do a rebuy. But if we sell bundles where we're making a $100 and we say our cost is 30, then we're at a CAC ceiling of 70.
Speaker 1:That's where it gets a little bit more interesting. And to understand what your ROAS floor would be, meaning return on ad spend, basically take that $100 that you would make divided by the 80, which is the CAC ceiling, or it could be 44 divided by 34. So we're looking at a return on ad spend needs to be over a 130%. So that gives me my guardrails as a business owner. I'm like, okay, why am I losing money?
Speaker 1:Where am I making money? And for us, within 30 days, we're able to get our return on ad spend to 350%, and we were to get a, get our cost per purchase to $24 So we beat both of those goals, which was really exciting. And that tells us, Hey, we've got room to grow. Let's go to the 5th phase, which is the launch. Now this is all around what is the first milestone you wanna hit?
Speaker 1:And it is to sell through your inventory. Right? And so you can get there 2 ways and it already needs to be a combination of 2. And it's through the paint strategy we just went through. And then it's the scrappy marketing strategy and your launch strategy can be that go to market motion that kicks all of this off.
Speaker 1:And it's in 3 phases. It's a pre launch, a launch, and a post launch. So let's talk about that pre launch. The pre launch can start out as long as you have, and that's where you're really starting to build a list. Can you build a wait list of people excited about your product?
Speaker 1:You could have an unfair advantage of already having a list, or maybe you have start building in a scrappy way with your network, friends of friends. You can also do a referral mechanism on top of that. So people can invite others to get on the wait list and you give them a free product for whenever it launches. The other thing that we do is we wanna see the product with the right influencers, with the right people who would be to those early adopters. And factor that into your budget with your first inventory buy.
Speaker 1:How many products can you seed? Is it just 10? Is it 50? Is it a 100? The other thing you can do leading up to the launch is a giveaway.
Speaker 1:Like, hey, you know, sign up because on launch day, we're doing a giveaway for $500 worth of product or a year's worth of product. Ideally, you want that giveaway value to be over $500, sometimes 250 could work. And then you wanna start making that email launch sequence, which should start 2 weeks leading up to the launch. All right. So now we're at the launch phase.
Speaker 1:And as we're launching, we're 2 weeks out, we start to build up the hype and the anticipation to let people know that it's coming with the pre launch emails. And as you're doing that, you're creating engagement. You're also in your social accounts in a more frequent way where you're pushing it out there. And then on launch day, you wanna do this thunderclap where everyone you've been emailing, those people that whether influencers or in your network that you're seeking the product with, you have them ready to help amplify the post that you're putting out there. And then on launch, also doing a reminder after the launch email and announcements.
Speaker 1:And you're really pushing that initial activation offer that we talked about at the start of this. And then the post launch strategy, it's a lot of follow ups. It's a lot of reminders. And then your people are now on this journey with you for what you're selling, what you're bringing to market, they want to know updates. And so you want to do that with regular content, regular posts, think of it as building in public.
Speaker 1:I see a lot of people go on a podcast tour to talk about it. That can be a good way to amplify the launch. Some things I want to call out with need of what we did was teasing the new site 30 days leading up to it. We are teasing out different sections of the website, new imagery from the model, new video content. And we did that at a biweekly cadence.
Speaker 1:I also was starting to see the product with about 25 people and sending out messages to my personal network of around a hundred people. So on launch day, we did social post email blast, manually texted out to a 100 people in our network and gave away 70 shirts on that day for people to share it with their friends. And then on the follow-up to that, we've been doing weekly updates on how it's going, where we're showing the website stats. We're showing how many orders we're getting. We're showing reviews from customers.
Speaker 1:That way, people that maybe didn't activate on launch day, they'll have a little bit of FOMO and wanna activate after that. This is how we sold through product, and we're able to just submit a purchase order for $50, 000 to do our next buy of product. So the the big question is, what do we do next? And this is something I wanna put in here as a bonus, and it's this idea of your growth calendar. How do you calendar out your growth plan?
Speaker 1:Look at your 12 months from January to December and ask yourself, what are going to be the natural peaks in my industry? And what are the natural troughs? Maybe Q4 is going to be huge because you have a very giftable item or maybe you sell swim trunks. So summer is huge for you, but then there's gonna be these troughs. If you're in the swimwear category, January might be really tough and maybe back to school is really tough as well.
Speaker 1:So knowing that you have a time of, you know, peak season, which is demand capture and a sign of of weakness where you're more about demand creation, you need to factor that into your growth strategy. The companies that do that really well are the ones that kind of go to that next level. So what I wanna show here is the the growth calendar. And think of this as you've got that 12 month time frame from January to February, and you wanna start to calendar out everything that you're doing and think of the things you counted 2 simple categories. The first is you're always on growth channels.
Speaker 1:What are you always doing? You're always doing social ads. You're always doing Google ads. You're always doing SEO content. You're always doing a referral mechanism.
Speaker 1:You're always doing outbound, but then there's another category and it's what are your marketing moments or growth events? And so how many times are you launching a new product? How many times are you doing pre orders? How many times are you doing an influencer launch campaign or giveaways or a partnership collaboration? How often are you doing a podcast tour or what trends are coming up because it's back to school or it's the super bowl where you can ride that wave.
Speaker 1:Can you do engineering as marketing like Jolie, the shower head company that did this kind of a water test to see the water that goes into the showerhead, how good it is for your body. And so as you think of calendaring out your growth ideas, ask yourself, does this idea align with the peak season or is it about afternoon demand or is line with the trough season where it's about creating demand is in those trough seasons. That's when you can be more experimental and think outside the box on how to grow. I hope this was helpful for anyone out there that was like me, where you're sitting on inventory, you've got this new product, this new brand, this new idea. And you're like, how in the world am I gonna sell through this?
Speaker 1:Hopefully, this can be helpful on your journey to selling out.
Speaker 2:I'll give a few plugs. 1st, I send a weekly newsletter each Thursday featuring 5 articles or tools that have helped me. You can sign up for these weekly updates at jimwhuffman.com. 2nd, for anyone running a start up, if you need help growing your business, check out Growth Hit. Growth Hit serves as your external growth team.
Speaker 2:After working with over a 100 startups and generating a quarter 1, 000, 000, 000 in sales for clients, Growthit has perfected a growth process that's hell bent on driving ROI through rapid experiments. Plus, you'll get to work with yours truly.
Speaker 1:So if you wanna work with
Speaker 2:a team that's worked with startups that have been funded by Andreessen Horowitz or featured on Shark Tank, then check out growthhit.com. And finally, I wrote a book called The Growth Marketer's Playbook that takes everything I've learned as a growth mentor for venture backed startups, and I've distilled it down to a 140 pages. So instead of hiring a growth team, save yourself some money, get the book, and you can just do it yourself. I hope you enjoyed this episode, and I'd love to hear feedback. I'm on Twitter at jimwhuffman.
Speaker 1:Hey, everyone. Jim here, and I wanna share something really neat with all of you. And, yes, that pun was absolutely intended. I'm sorry. If you're like me, you're always on the go from meetings to dinners, and you know how important it is to stay comfortable yet look a little professional.
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Speaker 1:Now let's get back to the episode. Okay.