Issue 074: Learnings from a recently bankrupt unicorn. 🦄

PLUS: Importing from 🇨🇳? This will save you 💵.

November 23, 2023

Boom! Tomorrow is it!

*cue the black friday entrance music and pyrotechnics*

It doesn’t get any better than this, does it fam? Amid the chaos of the BFCM sale period, it can feel a bit sweet and a bit psycho.

Kind of like Robert Duvall in Apocalypse Now.

“Smells like… victory.”

| TWEET O’ THE WEEK

No, it’s not the Tweet o’ the Week, but there are some interesting learnings in this thread by Benjamin Smith, the founder of bankrupt skincare unicorn Disco.

| YOUTUBE UNIVERSITY

How to Run Instagram Ads for Clothing Brands

| TOGETHER WITH CHARGEFLOW

Increase your chargeback win rate by 200%-300% without lifting a finger.

Fact you probably already feel even if you don’t cognitively know it:

Brands experience 2x higher chargebacks during the BFCM period.

Handling chargebacks and disputes can be overwhelming and complicated, and if not done professionally, its outcomes can hurt your business bottom line significantly.

Chargeflow combines years of experience handling more than $10M worth of Chargebacks, to perfect the dispute cycle and deploy it at scale. Chargeflow has developed Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence algorithms with huge data sets to create the first science-based Chargeback Response.

So much so that Chargeflow is trusted by Obvi, Huel, and 5,000+ other brands to handle their chargeback game.

“Just by installing their app, we have added $7,820 to our bottom-line revenue without doing anything. That's an annual saving of $21,508 with $15,640 added in revenue. Not too bad for an app that we installed in less than two minutes.”

Ron Shah | Co-founder & CEO of Obvi

Chargeflow achieves the highest win rate in the industry, surpassing every other chargeback management service, especially non-experienced in-house teams that respond to disputes.

And the best part is, that you can now try their services for free, as they have opened up their platform for new merchants, meaning that if you install Chargeflow now - you will get your chargebacks handled absolutely free until the end of Q4.

| QUICK HITS

  • Alex Cooper: How to onboard and train up a new creative strategist 👉️ [SLIDES]

  • @ritzfit: Don’t keep sleeping on them memberships. YTD cohort comparison of member vs subscribe and save customer vs those who carry both a subscription and membership. [CHART]

  • Shane B. James: Quick little tip to increase 🆙📈 your vid avg. watch time. ⏱️👉️ 

  • @andreilunev: Split-screen layout in the hook works really great.

    This one has a TSR (thumb-stop-rate) of 60%. [VIDEO]

  • @sourfraser: Your customers are your best salespeople. Use real reviews in your ads to boost trust & conversions. [EXAMPLE]

| HERE FOR THE MEMES

| AND IN OTHER NEWS…

  • BBC: How OpenAI created the perfect conditions for chaos

  • MarketingWeek: Effectiveness ignorance has left American marketing lagging behind the rest of the world

  • Bloomberg: Tech Giants Roar as Nasdaq 100 Hits 22-Month High: Markets Wrap

  • Social Media Today: Meta’s Ad-Free Subscription Package Restricts Capacity To Run Ads in Its Apps

  • TechCrunch: A timeline of Sam Altman’s firing from OpenAI — and the fallout

| SOUND UP 🔊

| GET LINKED

This month was an insane good and bad month for drinkbrez.com

Wayyyy too many orders on pre-order but we hit our next benchmark and we can MAYBE pull through to the 250k spot. Very interesting feeling now KNOWING that we have product market fit.

A big learning has been on the subscription side of things and we moved completely away from Recharge and using a better more custom app so far called Stay.

Was able to sit in on a call with Aaron Nosbisch as he was working some inventory magic and was able to connect with a former team that might be the calling we need if we get stuck in this pickle again.

For a product like ours, the ingredients are so so unique as it’s a very “new” and custom combination of THC CBD lions mane and a few others.

He was able to negotiate a bridge inventory order to get us into a better spot before our 300k cans PO that has been delayed that pushed out about 2ish 3ish mill worth of product to be sold.

Even more shocking is that we wouldn’t have hit this if it weren’t for the conversion tactic we added to PDP. (image in the first comment)

That came from Twitter
That came from sharing our problems
That came from being open
That came from sharing like this.

The best thing about all of this is that we were both brand side first then we went agency side and without that perspective - we wouldn't have understood the growth, the paid media and the roles needed to actually grow this fast this way.

That allllll came from the agency learnings.

Thank you for everyone who’s gotten high off our supply.

| THE OUTRO

As we say in the Commonwealth, by this point it’s all over bar the shouting. Your promos are either pumping already or they’re in place to launch, if you’re a latecomer.

Here’s hoping your brand crushes it harder than it has ever crushed it before, but not as hard as it will crush it in the future.

Godspeed! 🫡 

Workspace6