#133 - Sam's Black Friday Email Results, Lean Media Businesses That Make Millions, and Celebrity Death Match for Tik-Tok

**Shaan Puri** (0:00)
All right, everyone, we have a quick ad for HubSpot. But I want to let you know, I actually use HubSpot and I use their sales tool, which is what this ad is for. HubSpot sales platform, it makes it just easier to sell stuff, to do it faster, to look at your pipeline, to see what sales are gonna happen. Just prospect to cold outreach and get more customers faster and easier. Plus, it's easy to learn and free to start. So you guys can check it out, hubspot.com/sales.

**Sam Parr** (0:45)
We're here. What up, Sam, how are you doing?

**Shaan Puri** (0:47)
Hi, you wanna talk about what transpired on Wednesday?

**Sam Parr** (0:50)
On Wednesday? Oh yeah, after our podcast recording about the Black Friday tactic that I was telling you about, then you were like, I'm gonna do it. And then what happened?

**Shaan Puri** (1:00)
I did it, and I got all the credit. So I first wanna say, I stole from Sean.
Sean stole from Brooklyn.

**Sam Parr** (1:09)
Actually, technically, I stole from my friend, Ben, who works with me, my partner, Ben. Ben was like, stole it from Brooklyn, and Brooklyn and stole it from Chubby's. Chubby stole it from probably, it all goes back to like Sugarman, you know?

**Shaan Puri** (1:20)
So I wanna say, I wanna give a 90% thank you to you for giving me the idea. I got all the credit, but you should get the credit.
And then you could give like a 90% thank you to all your people. So it kind of like trickles down.

**Sam Parr** (1:32)
Yeah, exactly.

**Shaan Puri** (1:33)
So I sent it out and it worked so good. It, I got a text from Andrew Wilkinson. I got a text from coworkers and they're like, dude, you just sent this out to the whole list.

**Sam Parr** (1:45)
That's hilarious. The people actually believe it because this year I saw, so we did it, like I was saying last time, we did it with our e-comm business, but I saw three or four different companies try this, including you guys. So, you know, I think the jig is up.
It still will probably work again next year, one more year, and I think it's like everybody's burnt on this tactic.

**Shaan Puri** (2:02)
I think you could keep doing a different iteration of it.

**Sam Parr** (2:05)
The principle will still work.

**Shaan Puri** (2:06)
So I sent mine to like 250,000 people, and we made, I'll just say, seven figures.
So here's a few things I learned. The first thing is that we normally discount trends, and we actually discount it way too much. We need to raise the prices. This needs to be way more expensive, but we did it at this one time, and shockingly, not really anyone was angry that they didn't get a discount prior, which that was my biggest reason for not ever wanting to do this kind of thing. I didn't want to be disrespectful to old people. They didn't care, but I got literally 1,000 emails of people saying either this email is awesome, you're a piece of shit, this is a scam, why are you scamming people? And my reply was like, dude, jokes aren't scams. This is clearly a joke. And then the third one was like, oh my gosh, Sam, this is not meant for me, people who are concerned.
What type of reply did you get? Actually, Sean, should we give the background of this?

**Sam Parr** (2:51)
Yeah, let's do it, because we can't assume everyone follows every episode.

**Shaan Puri** (2:55)
So, on Wednesday, Sean has an e-comm business, and he told me about this sales tactic that he was gonna do, where he was going to email his list, this thing, and where the subject says, needs approval, and the body of the text said, hey team, our Black Friday sale's ready to roll, the email's below, can you please click through and make sure all the links work fine? Let me know, Sean.
And it was supposed to be an internal email, and it was like a mistake, as if it was sent to the entire list. Sean told me about that, and immediately we were like, oh, we gotta do that, so that's what we did. So how'd it go for you?

**Sam Parr** (3:30)
For us, it was great, it was our biggest sales day, and it was like two weeks before Black Friday, so you get to double dip Black Friday, basically.
And I did it a little bit differently, so you did it like the exact Brooklynan tactic, like needs approval, blah, blah, blah. We changed it up, like the text at least, but the same result, same effect, because it's the same principle in play. And what we did was we followed up with, oh my God, this discount isn't supposed to be live. We over-engineered it, we didn't need to do this. We sent it to a handful of people that we knew are chatterboxes. They're always super active everywhere in the community. And so we sent it to just a few of them. They immediately ran and said, oh my God, guys, did you see this?