Neville's Digital Surrogate Brain
One of my favorite books EVER is How To Get Rich by Felix Dennis.
Towards the end of the book in chapter 19 he attempts to summarize the entire book into eight very-condensed bullet points.
I have written them out verbatim in order to remember them better:
Two quick background stories then I’ll show how some clever writing made AppSumo an ass-ton of money:
———QUICK BACKGROUND STORY 1———
This guy, Noah Kagan is one of my close friends. He was something like employee number 30 at Facebook and employee number 3 at Mint.com, then started a bunch of other companies.
His new thaang is AppSumo.com which is like “Daily Deals for Geeks”. It’s like Groupon but for nerds like me.
Well recently Noah moved back to Austin, and he gets bored running his $(he-won’t-let-me-release-his-revenue-but-it’s-really-good) company from home, so he scooters on over to my place to work.
We sit around, work, geek out….and for some reason on Fridays we have a weekly tradition of drinking while we work. It’s nerd heaven.
Whatever.
On to the next piece of this puzzle:
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———QUICK BACKGROUND STORY 2———
Roughly 9 or 12 months ago I started taking a deep interest in copy writing.
Copy writing is the “art” of writing…..copy (aka WORDS).
Basically copy writing is used to “sell stuff better”.
Naturally this interests me since I:
1.) Write a lot (hence this blog).
2.) Own an online rave company that persuades people to buy stuff.
It was weird because I was staying up sometimes till 6am reading about this stuff and taking notes. It somehow just….gelled with me. I started reading everything I could about copy writing…and essentially bought every book I could about it.
I took notes.
I re-read things.
I re-read my own notes.
All the concepts all the gurus talked about were the EXACT OPPOSITE of what I was doing in my own business…so this angered and intrigued me.
I quickly remembered a sort-of-relatable quote about why so many people fail at losing weight:
“Reading about sit-ups, is not DOING sit-ups”
So with this guilt trip in my head, I decided to implement some of this copy writing junk…even though it was 100% the opposite thing I’d been doing with HouseOfRave.com.
To my utter-shock-surprise the first time I implemented all the copy writing rules I learned….the email blast I sent out pretty much sold out my inventory in two hours.
You can see the exact email I sent out that did this (warning: it’s password protected, so follow the instructions to get the el passwordo).
Fan-freakin-tastic for me eh?
Now let’s move on……
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———LET’S TIE THOSE TWO STORIES TOGETHER———
So one day Noah’s geeking out at my place, and I get an email from AppSumo for some deal they were running.
It was a Grasshopper.com $100 credit or something like that…and I wanted it.
However I was blatantly disappointed by the email saying simply:
“$100 Credit for GrassHopper.com, the phone system for entrepreneurs!”
AppSumo was still selling a TON of the deals with this format…but after all my intensive copy writing studying, this type of short email seemed like an egregious injustice to AppSumo AND the email reader.
Naturally I yelled at Noah saying, “Dude….I bet a lot of people don’t realize the true value of Grasshopper….why don’t you EXPLAIN what it can DO FOR THE USER, then offer them the $100 off?”
Noah agreed.
I further started showing him the structure of good sales copy, and “How I could TOOOTTALLY do better.”
He put me up to it.
I actually WANTED to do some of the emails in exchange for collecting the performance data. Where else could I test out several emails a week to 50,000 people?
Anywhozit….I started preparing the emails 2 days before each deal came out, and….
The first deal was something of a crappy deal. Now I don’t mean it was a BAD deal….but it was going to SELL CRAPPY because it was extremely niche based. It was a deal for a service that sends you 4 sets of matched fonts per month.
Now NO ONE BUT HARDCORE DESIGN NERDS would buy this….in fact, they all know you can get thousands of fonts online for free. This was a carefully curated collection of fonts, and only hardcore graphics designers would buy something like that….to make it an even harder sell, it was a lifetime membership costing something like $125.
With the old AppSumo email style, this deal had no chance of stellar sales.
But then Enter Copy-Writing-Minded-Neville:
I quickly realized a VERY specific deal would exclude tens of thousands of people in this case…so I tried applying copy writing techniques to neutralize that. Basically, being open and honest about it.
It started out like this:
If the names “Lucida Sans Unicode” or “Courier New” don’t mean anything to you, go ahead and close this message.
You see my friend, today we’re reaching out only to the community of people known as font whores.
You know who you are!
If your knees go weak when I whisper, “GARAMOND.”
…you might be one of em.
Right off the bat this doesn’t necessarily sound like a typical marketing message. In fact, it’s mildly offensive and quite sexually suggestive.
But you know what….PEOPLE READ IT.
People emailed us back saying the email had NOTHING to do with their line of work, but they still enjoyed reading the email.
We also got people saying they HATED the email and that it was misogynistic and (insert more whiny-bitch-complainer examples)…..you get the point.
To Noah’s surprise, this particular deal TOOK OFF! It was like one of those movies where the ugly girl puts on some makeup, let’s her hair down and wears a gown and is suddenly hot.
So what did this mean?
It means I just made AppSumo a bunch of MONAAAY!!:
Hooray right? I just made SOMEONE ELSE a bunch of money!
So that was pretty damn cool. We turned the ugly girl into the “belle of the ball” with the power of of the pen.
Naturally the Chief Sumo wanted me to do the next email, then the next, then the next etc….
Some funny things happened in the next few email send-outs:
So that’s how I made AppSumo a ton of moolah….and learned something in the process.
I should teach a class on this stuff…..
God I’ve heard that question so many times before.
A good deal of people I know see my lifestyle:
….and they think it’s great. And I got admit…it ain’t bad!
Many of them realize that working 9-5 is not just 9-5, but also the night before, the morning of….so it consumes and dictates nearly your entire day, what you can do, when you go on vacation etc.
If you like your job…this isn’t really a problem, but if you don’t….yeesh.
So back to the question I get from someone who’s never started a business and now wants to after years of working:
“I want to start a business but don’t know where to start”
To burst most bubbles quickly: It’s doubtful it will happen. I’ve seen long-term working people start successful businesses only a few times. Usually the longer someone’s worked, the more likely they will not succeed. Most people trying this are in the wrong frame of mind almost immediately. They just want to “make some money” without doing much work.
Anyhow, for this question I will try to assume the role of how I’D PERSONALLY go about starting a business with no particular business acumen.
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First and foremost I’d GET MY LEARN ON. That’s right….prepare to READ A SHIT LOAD OF STUFF. And TAKE NOTES. It’s like school.
Then I would try to implement what I’ve learned and make $100 from it.
That’s it.
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I think those three short sentences above can teach you an immense deal about business.
The benefit of this is:
1.) It’s easy to make $100 in just about anything.
2.) Simply DOING something will very quickly show if you like it or not.
3.) Your desire to learn will be way more intense if you’re currently DOING something real….not just thinking about a hypothetical business you might build.
It is ABSOLUTELY GRATIFYING to destroy the dreams of people who say, “I want to start a business but can’t think of anything”.
Me: “What business books have you read?”
Them: “Ummmm, none.”
Me: “Have you ever written down what you like to do, what skills you have etc. on a piece of paper? Spent a couple of hours on it?”
Them: “Hmmmmm…..not really.”
Me: “Have you sought out business people you admire and asked them to show you how their business works”
Them: “I once saw YouTube video of Bill Gates.”
Me: “So basically you’ve done NOTHING to realize your dream of starting a business?”
Sincerely,
Neville (destroyer of dreams)
P.S. Here’s some motivation to consume if you fall in that camp.
Earl Nightingale’s The Strangest Secret
I own a business called House Of Rave.com.
It’s a drop shipping business, which means I don’t physically handle the products myself.
PRO’S:
CON’S:
House Of Rave is what Tim Ferriss refers to as a “Muse”…a small business that you can run from anywhere which pays for your lifestyle.
However I’m no fool (well, at least not completely).
I am a middle man. And as technology improves, manufacturers get more sophisticated, and consumers get more educated….I will be phased out with my current model.
I don’t foresee this happening anytime soon, and I do have time, but it will eventually happen. Fortunately I’ve found ways to overcome that for now, but looking at a 5 or 10 year forecast, it will move in that direction. If someone else took over, they could make the business BIG and sustainable in the long run, but it’s never really been a passion of mine. It was one of many side-projects that made enough money not to pull the plug.
I’m really grateful I’ve had House Of Rave all these years. I’ve started a lot of small businesses here and there, but HoR has been around the longest (first live order was placed in 2001).
But there’s a yearning to branch out even further.
I’m getting hungry.
I currently now have FIVE different methods of getting around:
1.) Walking
2.) Riding my bike
3.) Riding my scooter
4.) Driving my car
…and now the newest addition to my fleet of transportation…
5.) Snagging a Car2Go!
But wait…I get to drive around this sexy beast, but I didn’t BUY it.
Car2Go’s are an experimental transportation system that are available in 3 places:
Basically it’s 400 Smart Cars scattered randomly through the city. If I see one, I can freely hop in, drive away, then leave it wherever I want! EVERYTHING is included in the price….gas, insurance, parking etc. All you need is a little member ship credit card thingy to access all the cars.
It’s like using a car only when you need it….but without having to return it to a rental place. The cars are tiny, and you can park them pretty much anywhere, even nose-first style. I’m nearly as big as the whole car!
I can easily wrap my arms around the width of the Smart car:
This is how I parked one night…no parallel parking needed!
Big pimpin’ in one of the Car2Go’s laying around on the street before a quick spin:
Now it’s cool to just stumble around and find one of these, but if you need help, there’s a free Car2Go iPhone app that locates every available Car2Go around you. It will even tell you fuel levels, how clean it is or if it has any damage. There’s roughly 400 of them humming around the city:
The test drive was fun, and I know several friends who’ve essentially stopped using their cars because they use these so often. What a useful concept!
Something like one month ago I put up the now-famous “Facebook Like Button” on a business I run called HouseOfRave.com.
House Of Rave is an eEommerce company that sells light up and glow stuff. Simple enough (see how it works).
The Facebook Like Button is a simple button people can press, and it will automatically “Like” a particular web address on their Facebook Feed. It puts a small sentence saying, “Neville Medhora likes WhateverTheLinkIs” on your Facebook.
I did a little poking around and found the Like Button was really easy to install on the Shopsite shopping cart software I use. To install it on your site, simply Google the term:
“How to install the Facebook Like Button on (insert your platform here)”
…and you’ll surely find a solution. It took me about 3 minutes to install, and 2 minutes to test if everything was working correctly. It turned out looking like this on every product of HoR:
Obviously the number of “Likes” varies from page to page.
Now this was just a simple test to see what would happen….and I was surprised to see that some of my product pages already had several “Likes” on Facebook. Off to a good start!
Now a month later, some of the more prominent products on HoR have been gaining traction. The Finger Lights above currently have 100+ Likes!…meaning somewhere on Facebook exist 100+ links to this product (most likely buried in the archives of people’s news feeds).
So the results of the inflow of traffic were as follows (there was already a small amount of traffic coming from Facebook, so the numbers aren’t that skewed:
WHAT I FOUND INTERESTING was that Facebook users clicking on their friends links to House Of Rave were pretty decent traffic.
The traffic had slightly higher bounce rates than the average visitor, fewer pages per visit and spent less time on the site than average, but….
It’s FREE traffic I didn’t do a DAMN thing to acquire!
Sweet :-)
The cool thing is, even if the conversion rate is much lower than the site average…SOME of the visits do convert, and in the first few weeks I noticed hundreds of extra dollars in revenue due to that completely free traffic.
That was revenue that didn’t exist before, but does now.
Those were customers who didn’t exist before, but do now.
This is a new channel of free traffic that didn’t exist before, but does now.
…all for 5 minutes of work!
As people start using Like buttons more and more, it could even become more profitable.
So Facebook Like Button…for making me free money while I do NOTHING….I LIKE you!
P.S. An unexpected benefit I noticed is that products with lots of “Likes” are getting slightly better conversion rates now. It seems people trust the Like button because the website owner cannot manipulate the numbers themselves.
I’m rummaging through my old Gmail records looking for traces of “Silverback Apparel” and found several emails dating back to 2007 and 2008.
The next instance was pretty recent, when Jonathan Oullet contacted me saying I kind of helped inspire him to start a company.
However I’d like to tell you another quick story before we proceed (don’t worry, it all goes together):
My Downtown roommate kept talking about manufacturer high end and sweat proof undershirts as a business….and I immediately raised a crooked eyebrow at the idea. However he CONSTANTLY talked about it and researched getting shirts made with silver thread (or something like that) which reduces bacteria, smells, sweat etc etc…and even “double fabric armpits” and all sorts of odd features. (This is seriously a true story).
So one day I sat down with him and did some quick competitive research (aka I Google’d it). We came across very few places that had anything like he wanted to make, except one: Silverback Apparel. It was kind of an “Awww-shit” moment for my roommate who realized someone had beat him to the punch.
Nevertheless he was glad such a product existed and wanted to buy some.
I still thought anyone so interested in sweat-proof undershirts was INSANE.
Annnnyyywaaysss….
About one week after we realized some guy had already made these shirts, Jonathan Oullet left some comments on NevBlog and contacted me via email about his company I “partially” inspired…SILVERBACK APPAREL! He designed and manufactured these super-high-end undershirts and was selling them to really high end stores.
I was flabbergasted I had TWO nutjobs in my life that were obsessed with sweat proof undershirts! <— awww…link love.
A few emails later and Jonathan sent me some samples of these undershirts. I honestly didn’t think I’d be impressed.
I WAS WRONG!!
I’m LOVING THESE SHIRTS! You see, I live in Austin, TX. and it’s hot as hell during the summer. On some days, even just walking around my back tends to sweat through my shirt. In fact I don’t wear colors like blue so I don’t get massive sweat stains all over my shirt.
The first time I wore one of these undershirts, I just wore it around as a t-shirt to do errands. I got in my car (which had been parked in the blazing sun) the whole day and did all my errands. I noticed something weird: My back wasn’t sweating like it normally does. My (under)shirt also didn’t feel dirty like most shirts do after walking around on a hot day.
Maybe all the bamboo and silver thread the shirt was made of actually worked? I also noticed the armpits were double-fabric, as well as the entire back of the shirt (so even when I did sweat I couldn’t feel it AT ALL on the back of the shirt)! I didn’t realize at first how many “extra features” this shirt had. It also just felt really damn comfortable. I also would brag to friends, “I’m wearing a $60 undershirt!” ($50 plus shipping for the high end stuff).
This post wasn’t a paid post, I just genuinely like the product Jonathan created.
This is why I risk posting biz information on this blog even though some people might copy it. I think it’s hella cool he got at least SOME inspiration to start a business from me. Kind of makes me feel all warm inside (but NOT sweaty!) <–wow…that was a lame joke.
Here’s a question I’ve been getting more and more geared towards my business House Of Rave:
Have your sales gone down in the poor economy?
It’s actually a fantastic question and relatively interesting to hear different answers from different business owners.
So, have your sales gone down in the poor economy?
MY ANSWER:
YES…..but not in the traditional sense. Let me explain:
Most people expect that sales simply stopped coming in after the economic downturn, this hasn’t been true even though House Of Rave sells things people buy only on disposable income. In fact, if you never told me there was a “recession” going on, I probably wouldn’t have noticed too much….people still order all the time (although I’ve seen a very significant drop in big orders from large corporations).
The MAIN problem I’ve had which takes a DIRECT shot at lowering my sales is all the cool products are out of stock. Almost all of my previous best sellers are no longer being manufactured.
HouseOfRave sells “hard to find” and “unique” products….which often means “they don’t sell it in big stores”. This has been great so far, but a problem I’m seeing now is manufacturers are on tight budgets and don’t have the capital required to mass produce slower selling items. I may be able to sell 10 per day of an item, but a manufacturer might need to sell 10,000 of them per day to keep cash flow moving.
….so unless an item can move HUGE quantities quick, the product might be discontinued.
This has been the predominate way that my business has been affected. The cool part is, with more marketing and more effort I’ve been able to maintain and grow both the profit and sales of the business, but it’s required more effort than in the past (keep in mind I used to put NO effort into it at all). Before, I would just slap products on the site and they sold….it doesn’t seem to be quite as easy anymore.
Many smaller manufacturers and product patent holders are going out of business now. Think about it, to manufacture just ONE simple product you must spend hundreds of thousands of dollars for materials and labor, store them, then find people to buy them. Before you make even one CENT from the product, you could blow through a half-million dollars on credit. If the product is a flop (note the importance of beforehand PRODUCT RESEARCH) you’re screwed…..and I’m just using the example of small-scale manufacturing of novelty products.
While my business doesn’t have the extreme overhead of these manufacturers, I feel their pain indirectly when a cool product of theirs goes out of stock.
At the beginning of this month one of my goals was to make a blog post every 2 days on this blog…well my last one was THREE days ago, so I need to make up (Carnaval in Austin definitely got in the way)!
I have 12 minutes to write/edit/publish this post before the security guard at the library kicks me out, so here goes:
I just read a post by Dave (brought my attention by Adam’s Twitter stream) about his transition from having a job to owning a business. I always like it when people take that leap, even if it doesn’t work out, I’m sure they will learn a massive amount.
It made me reflect on my own experience with this. I’ve never had a job except one in college where I did NOTHING but work on my own businesses then promptly quit when they made me do work.
After college I never got a job…I didn’t (still don’t) even have a resume. I simply continued running my businesses I had already started. It’s really the only way of working I’ve ever known, and I must say…I like it. Judging by the way most people talk about their jobs, it seems I’ve made the correct choice.
One thing I really like about owning a business, aside from all the fun stuff like being able to label your own role or change what you do by starting a new business….all your success depends entirely on you.
In ten years if I’m homeless and living on the side of the road, you can point directly at the person whose fault that was. I like that responsibility because it puts you in charge of your destiny a little more than working for someone else. In a sense, they control your future. If they go out of business, you do too.
I know people who worked for Dell at the right time in history who made millions on stock options, and people who worked the same jobs a few years later who weren’t quite as fortunate. That irks me. It’s kind of a lottery you play. You COULD get successful, but your involvement doesn’t dictate it.
Ok, the guard is giving me the stink-eye, time to jet!