The Weekly Sharpener #104

Understanding at each tranche when we look at our P/L right. I think people just look at revenue and they look at net profit, and everything else is just kind of like this hamburger in the middle. I think it's really under important to understand, I know I talked to so many founders, they don't know their gross margin right off the top of their tongues.

It behooves you to know that because nothing else in your business can move forward without knowing that next piece. A lot of people don't know their shipping in fulfillment costs, you know? They don't understand how that plays into you in economics.

So I think in the P/L, when you break it down, you have cost of goods, shipping + fulfillment, your OPEX, advertising, etc.

At each, I would force founders to be like, can you give me your percentage of margin at each subset? So if I told you to give me your margins after everything and advertising, you should be able to give me that vs your margins after the cost of goods.

If you can understand those percentages, you can be able to make decisions on the fly. So I think those are the few things that I would really focus on.

Look at a platform like TikTok, we're on TikTok, do we need it, is it driving sales?No.

Is it important to be on the world's fastest-growing social media platform of all time? It'd be it's insane not it. And what does it cost us? Very, very little.

I think being part of culture is so important. And to Frances' point about these companies in the zeitgeist. That's what we need to try to do. How do you get into the zeitgeist?Easy-ish if you're like a cool brand,but hard when you're some weird SaaS company called pencil or air, that's hard. That's hard to be in the zeitgeist when we're us. And I think we have to work harder. Find more interesting opportunities, find ideas to play with merch, other partners, dig into podcasts, there are a million ways to do it. You just have to, it's not about throwing more money necessarily. It's just about being more creative.

I think a lot of brands just put a popup up then are like it's done and move on with their lives. Um, but the more that you can achieve incremental gains, even if you're getting a 1% uptick in your submission rate, it can be really huge for audience growth. Um, so really at the end of the day, The contacts that you capture in October are the people who are gonna convert in November.

You're not getting, for the most part, you're not getting new people coming to the site on Black Friday, signing up and converting that day. So it's really important to use October to try to expand your file as much as possible.

Frst of all, five triggers that you need to be using before, and especially Black Friday, Cyber Monday. First of all, extra. Because everybody knows there are certain deals that you can only get during back Friday, every Monday.

So first of all, what you can be doing is show the stock, for example, of an offer or product, just so that they have some anxiety that they're going to miss out on this deal, right?

The second thing that you can be doing is announce it. Announce it publicly, right?

We will only have a certain amount of this offer or this product at Black Friday Cyber Monday.

And then the last really interesting thing in terms of exclusivity things they can only get on Black Friday Cyber weekend.

I think the most successful media buying teams that I, I feel like we've worked with, um, in the past year, they come to us equipped with this knowledge, right? They're like, Okay, so this year we've tested these ad types, these concepts. , this is what we feel like have worked the most for us.And then we're like, perfect. Like let's take this and like make the most of it rather than, um, you know, trying to come up with net new content at this stage.

It's like too far. Yeah. Late in the game. You had all year to validate so much. In terms of what are the key pain points, the target audience, and the messaging you're going for.Of course you always have like campaign specific creatives if you are launching like a holiday edition or a gift set.

But that is so easy to kind of layer on top of creatives or content that has already been proven.

I feel like that's the most valuable advice that I can give now is just to look back at the content that has worked for you, how can you double down on that to extend the lifetime of it and repurpose it, even getting your best ads.

You've gotta start by defining what your objective is, and that objective has gotta be really personal to both you, as you know, like the founder, the MD of the brand, whatever, whatever your job title is.

Um, And personal to the brand, and you can't, you, even though it's very easy to, you know, absorb a lot of content online about what other brands are doing for Black Friday, what they did last year, competitors, you know, affinity brands, you've, you've gotta try and ignore that.

You know, take some learnings into what works, but then ignore that and run your own race because other brands might be discounted by like 40%, but that's because they've got stock or objectives from their investors. Whereas you might not have stock issues, you might not have, you know, the investors breathing down the back of your neck.

So like, run your own race and, and don't try and catch up, you know, run the race that someone else is running because they, they'll be in a different position to you.

People in trouble is driving revenue for the sake of driving revenue and not looking beyond Q4 to understand what is happening. I mean, it's, it's an unfair situation that businesses are in right now cuz you have to be profitable. Your brand has to mean something to people.

Um, And you have to keep driving black friday. So like, how do you do all those things? If you're, if you're in a position where you haven't built up profitable acquisition or this flywheel, um, I hate that word, but everyone, it's like, there's no other way to describe it. It's a flywheel. It's gotta keep feeding into itself.

It's the snake that eats its own tail. If you haven't built that up, um, you're, you're kind of in a, you know, in a poor position. So, Y Yeah. I mean, you, you really can't sacrifice any of those things in, in this coming.

I think, what you said earlier is really important is that black friday marketers have to be data analysts and really understand the data. I see a lot of people making quick decisions without consulting data that can be detrimental to their business. That can be anything from. Percentage of a discount that you use in Black Friday to how many eggs you have in the paid media basket and not, you know, great channel diversification.

Um, to what, what types of customers are you acquiring? What is your pricing like? All of these things are massive questions. People make, uh, because they think we have Black Friday coming up and we're trying to hit some targets, so let's just push scale. And, and then I think we see this hangover in Q1 that a lot of brands, um, experience