Crashing Up - Imposter Syndrome, Selling Air, and Target Snake
Crashing Up - Imposter Syndrome, Selling Air, and Target Snake
Welcome to all of the new Crashing Up family members who’ve joined since Monday. If you’re reading this but haven’t subscribed, make sure to do so here.
Hi friends,
Greetings from New York!
Here’s what I’d like to share this week:
My podcast interview with Taylor Offer is now available everywhere you listen to podcasts. Taylor is the founder of Feat Clothing and a top influencer on LinkedIn. He’s also the founder of Taylor Parker Agency where he helps small businesses improve their digital marketing. We discussed his decision to enter the competitive apparel space, the benefit of developing proprietary materials, the unglamorous side of entrepreneurship and much more.
🎧Listen here: Apple | Spotify | Anchor | Breaker
Thanks to this weekend’s Gary Vee-fueled hype cycle, NFTs are now all the rage. The newsletter I wrote last month on this topic received over 1,900 views yesterday alone! If you missed this edition or are still struggling to grasp the concept of NFTs, here’s a quick refresher.
Let’s get into it. Here’s a weekly collection of things that I’ve been learning from or enjoying recently.
📕What I’ve Been Reading:
Writing is a skill, but copywriting is an art. Many are well-versed in one of the two, but few are good at both. Thomas Kemeny is great at both. I was gifted his book Junior: Writing Your Way Ahead in Advertising a few months ago and finally got a chance to spend some quality time with it. It dives into the nitty-gritty of copy, providing concise examples of what and what not to do. A struggling copywriter myself, this has completely changed the way I look at my own work. It’s equally as entertaining (and funny) as it is informative with Thomas sharing anecdotes from his own advertising career including the borderline offensive barrage of cold emails he used to land his first gig. Highly recommend.
📺What I’ve Been Watching:
The name Crashing Up came from my realization that even the experts don’t know what they’re doing. Every entrepreneur struggles with imposter syndrome. The successful ones are those who ignore the self-doubt, continue to push forward and figure it out as they go. This video encapsulates this idea perfectly.
💩Stupid Sells
Cards Against Humanity has become known for its Black Friday deals. In 2013, they sold the game for $5 above its usual retail price. In 2014, they stripped their site clean and offered only one product: Bullshit (no, literally). The company sold over $180,000 of actual feces to 30,000+ (happy?) customers with all profits donated to Heifer International.
One year later, they pulled the best stunt of all. They sold over $71,000 worth of nothing from this single email:
Despite the company’s past charitable Black Friday efforts, the founders decided to splurge this time. In the spirit of transparency, all purchases with the profits were released in an itemized list on their website.
Profits aside, the stunts have gone viral each year resulting in millions of earned media impressions and leaving customers itching for Black Fridays to come.
🔑Distribution
I often ask founders what they wished they knew about starting a business earlier on. One of the most common answers is “the importance of distribution.” With content overload, winning over attention is hard and native digital distribution is a massive competitive advantage. This thread is a great primer for anyone looking to improve their digital marketing.
🧰Tool of the Week:
If Facebook were a person, it would be the middle-aged Dad who steals clothes from his teenage son’s closet. Despite Facebook’s struggle to attract and retain younger users, it remains king in one major area.
Community.
“Community Building” has already emerged as a 2021 “Buzzword of the Year” favorite (see previous thread, lol) and despite new pricier community software options like Circle and Memberstack, Facebook Groups are free and accessible to all.
TargetSnake is a tool to help you find and track the fastest growing Facebook groups on the platform. You can search by topic to find groups or scan an existing group to get stats on its growth.
Facebook Groups are prime internet real estate for facilitating discussion and promoting ideas on specific topics. They are perfect places for business owners to market towards their niche and can also act as businesses in themselves for those looking to create a community from scratch.
That’s all for now. Let me know what you thought of this edition by clicking one of the links below. All feedback will be used to make this the best it can be.
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Until next time,
Randy