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For the past decade, I avoided any sort of discounting in my business like plague.

I was told by my mentors that if I offer a discount, my customers will never buy the product at the full price again.

That I’d only attract bad customers.

That websites like Udemy are places to avoid, as you can’t make any serious money by discounting your products by 80-90%.

That it hurts your brand in ways that you can’t recover from.

So in my previous business, I avoided discounting without a second thought.

But over time, I realized that the mindset of “I shouldn’t do this because someone told me not to” really held me back.

I learned that the assumptions that I made in building my business were often not true.

A great example were Black Friday launches – I used to hate the idea of them, but last year, our $$60,594 Black Friday launch (you can read the full launch report here) ended up being our most profitable launch of the year.

So I said screw it, let me get my own data and see for myself.

Why should I just blindly believe something I was told?

Where would the fun be if I wouldn’t test things by myself?

What if my mentors had blind spots themselves that they never addressed?

What if things weren’t as black and white as I thought?

So, I carefully and strategically implemented discounting in our business in a number of ways, and learned that it wasn’t such a bad thing after all.

Quite the opposite, strategic discounting can be a growth multiplier that can 2x or 3x the annual revenue in your business, if done the right way.

Over the past year, we’ve performed countless discounting tests, with different products, different launch models, through cold advertising and our e-mail lists, of all sizes (we tested everything from 10% to 70% discounts) and different stages of our funnels.

Throughout this process, we debunked the 5 discounting myths that I used to believe in, that held me back from further scaling our business.

Discounting Myth #1: Your customers will only buy if there is a discount

I was told that by offering discounts, your sales will tank when you’re not offering a discount.

We’ve found that to absolutely not be true, at least in our online parenting business.

Because when a parent has a big issue they’re unable to solve by themselves, they’ll happily pay to solve it.

They’ll pay $30, $50, $70 or even $90, if the pain is big enough. They won’t wait another X months until we offer the product at a discounted price.

The pain of sleepless nights, guilt, hopelessness and countless family arguments is bigger than the pain of pulling out the credit card.

Quite the contrary, when the pain is big enough, our customers are happy to pay regardless of the price, and they’re excited to make their pain go away.

I call this “the natural urgency principle”.

Here’s one example of how it works in our niche:

If your kid doesn’t listen to you and follow your instructions when you say something to them once, twice, three times…

When you have to raise your voice and they still ignore you…

And you only get their attention once you start threatening them with punishments…

The underlying pain and guilt is difficult to bear.

You know you don’t want to raise your kids that way. You hated when your parents raised you that way. But you don’t know what else to do.

You’ve read countless parenting books, you tried googling to solve your problems, but all the solutions you’ve found are generic, impractical or simply don’t work.

So, at one point, you hear about our website, you check it out and see that we offer a product that helps you raise your kids without yelling, with a proven framework that has worked for thousands of parents.

You don’t think twice – you pull out your credit card and make the pain go away.

You’re experiencing natural urgency through the pain that keeps bugging you every time you need to yell at your kids, or threaten them with punishments.

I’ve found the natural urgency principle to be present in quite a few niches.

The “damn, I need to get in shape for summer” realization in January…

The upcoming job interview for your dream job…

The exam you’ve failed two times that you have the final chance to pass…

In many niches, people don’t seem to care about a 20% discount that much as they’ll happily buy the product without the slight price reduction.

Of course, when there IS a discount, they’re still more likely to buy – especially if there’s some sort of a deadline that generates additional urgency.

But they won’t NOT buy just because there isn’t one.

Discounting Myth #2: Discounting will hurt your future launches

Another one of our concerns was that if we did a big sale, our next few product launches would tank. This was a much more reasonable concern than the first one.

It was also the #1 concern we had in mind when planning our Black Friday launch.

Since we were planning sales as high as 50-70% (which we’ve never done before), we were afraid of the impact those would have on our business.

What if we do a mediocre launch on Black Friday, but shoot ourselves in the foot for the next few months?

We weren’t as sure about this one, but said to ourselves “If we don’t try it, we’ll never know”.

After the launch, I realized that this concern was also unfounded.

First of all, our launch generated $60,594 revenue, which would already make the launch worth it, even if our sales tanked slightly over the future months.

Second of all, we planned for this and tried to minimize the negative impact of discounting by using strategic discounting.

We took a look at our launch calendar and made sure that we weren’t relaunching the products that were offered during the Black Friday sale over the next few months.

Instead, we decided to launch new products that we’ve never released before and weren’t discounted during Black Friday.

So just a mere week later, we launched a new product.

Coming straight out of a Black Friday launch, I was a bit worried that it would tank, but it didn’t.

It generated $11,464 in revenue, which was a solid launch, and we didn’t notice any red flags on any of our launch metrics.

And the future launches performed just as well. In January, another new product we offered to our audience generated $97,993, which was a new record for us.

By that time, most of our readers completely forgot about Black Friday, as they were thinking about the new year and how they want to be better parents, and the day-to-day issues they experience with their kids.

Of course, things could have gone in a different direction. If we weren’t strategic with our discounting and we simply relaunched the same products over and over again, doing a big discount could make a big negative impact.

But through the strategic rearrangement of the launch calendar, it didn’t.

Discounting Myth #3: Discounting brings bad customers

This is another common argument against discounting, and we’ve actually experienced it first-hand back in 2020.

We were experimenting with building a business in the fitness industry, and did a Black Friday sale for our fitness membership program.

Later on, when we shut down the program, the Black Friday customers were the most vocal, most entitled, and most difficult to deal with. So I’d say that there is some truth to that, and it might be a bit niche-specific.

One thing that we didn’t have in that niche yet were deep relationships with our customers, as we had just started that business a few months ago.

On the flip side, after running the Black Friday sale in our parenting business, we didn’t notice anything out of the ordinary – no problematic customers, no increase in refund requests, nothing. The aftermath of the launch felt like an ordinary launch.

Through our discounted offers, we were able to serve new customers with that launch (overr 50% of our customers during the Black Friday sale haven’t bought from us before), and they were grateful for it.

Perhaps some of they will even buy more products at the regular price in the future, now that they were able to experience our products first-hand.

My conclusion is that “discounting brings bad customers” is niche-dependent.

If you don’t use discounts as your MAIN business strategy right off the bat… If you take the time to build a customer base of raving fans… If you only do big discounts strategically, at specific times of the year…

Then you likely won’t build a bad customer base. But you might just be able to help hundreds or thousands of people for whom your products were out of budget outside of sale periods.

Discounting Myth #4: Discounting can’t generate any decent revenue

For a long time, I believed that selling low-priced products makes it hard to build a sizable online business.

And I still agree that if you have a business where you can sell your products for $500, $1k, $2k or more, it’s a lot easier to build a 6-7 figure online business, than by selling $20 products.

But this false belief held us back when we initially started our parenting business.

We sold our courses for $200 as that’s what we believed they were worth. However, after our launch to the initial email base of raving fans of the expert we worked with, the sales tanked.

When we turned on Facebook ads, we got practically no sales. So we decided to run an A/B test: We sold the same course for $50 and $100, and spent a few hundred dollars on ads.

The results were astonishing:

At $100, we got zero sales.

At $50, we got 20.

This helped us realize that we shouldn’t aim for prices that we thought were right – instead, we should create a pricing strategy that works best for our customers.

By the way, there’s a great 200-page e-book on strategic pricing that you can download here.

For a long time, we sold our courses at around $50, as we really didn’t want to go any lower than that.

We were afraid that by selling products at $10 or $20, the math just wouldn’t be in our favour.

Then, over the last quarter, we smashed that limiting belief…

It all started when we sold an e-book with 137 ways to spend quality time with your kids for just $10 (reduced from $20) during the fall school break. At the time, we already had a solid upsell strategy in place, so we were able to increase our average order value by 72%.

That launch generated over $8k. We sold 500+ copies of our e-book and our upsells drove the AOV to $17?. This made us realize that it was possible to bring in decent revenue even with a lower priced product.

The pivotal moment that really helped us see the value of discounting came a few weeks later, during our Black Friday Sale.

Even though we used discounts of 40-70%, we sold such a large volume of our courses that we ended up generating over $60k, making it our biggest launch to date.

Finally, in January, we had a $97k launch selling a $31 product to our audience (which is lower than the $50 minimum price of our products we used to stick with).

Just like that, our limiting belief that discounting and low-priced offers can’t generate decent revenue was absolutely smashed.

Discounting Myth #5: Discounting is worse than closing the cart

Our final hypothesis that we wanted to test was that discounting is worse for urgency than closing the cart.

For a few months in our business, once Facebook advertising started performing worse than it used to, we decided to close the enrollment to our products, as that’s another thing I was taught to do – it’s supposed to generate a lot more urgency.

But to be honest, when I look back through the launch reports for the past year, I can’t really say that either way of generating urgency worked better or close.

The benefit of closing the cart was definitely that the AOV during our launches was higher, but in turn, we got less sales, so it all evened out.

Additionally, by closing our products for enrollment, we couldn’t really take advantage of selling our products through Facebook or Google Ads (we tried a waitlist funnel, which didn’t really work out).

And the customers that felt their “natural urgency” – that had a big fat problem that they wanted to solve – came to our website and didn’t end up buying anything.

In the end, we realized it’s better for our business to keep all of our products open at all times and use discounts during our launches of new courses and relaunches (typically a 20% discount).

This way, the urgency still worked exceptionally well, AND we could profitably start advertising and serve potential buyers with urgent issues.

Bottom line: Discounting can be a great growth multiplier for your business, if used strategically.

So don’t be afraid to play around with it. Try a 20% discount at your next launch instead of closing the cart and see how it goes. Or, try a 24-48 hour sale of one of your products. Give that Black Friday sale a shot this year if you haven’t yet.

Because after all the testing I’ve done over the last year, I have no good data that would show me that discounting hurts your business – and a ton of data that says it can help you grow it tremendously.

-Primoz

We started our 7-figure digital marketing agency with just a handful of employees.

We had a designer, a developer, the lead of operations, and two founders that drove the business forward. It was a small team that was clicking extremely well.

But after our initial explosive growth we decided to reinvest a lot of our profits into growing our team (as it’s recommended to do). It’s only natural for a company to start employing more people as the business grows.

At one point this year, we had a team of 15 full-time employees – a videographer, an illustrator, a CRO expert, two copywriters, an in-house Facebook Advertiser, a Senior Facebook Ads consultant…

And more.

In theory, this would help us scale our business faster. It should make things easier and everything should run smoothly. We could do more in less time.

But in reality, it was one of the most expensive mistakes we’ve made, both in terms of time and money.

You see…

Running a company with 15 employees is very different from managing 3-4 employees that we have right now. You need to have company-wide meetings that take a few hours a week.

And are completely unnecessary most of the time.

Then, a senior member of the company needs to manage and mentor the more junior employees – taking their focus away from their work.

Which can all work well… IF the company continues to grow.

Unfortunately, ours didn’t.

One of our early employees once said to me that “it now takes us a month to do something we used to do in a few days”, and deep down, I knew he was right.

The overall productivity dropped, and the profit didn’t go up. Because we executed more slowly and spent a ton of time in unnecessary meetings, we moved slower, and our company grew slower.

Even if we had a record revenue month, we could be in the red after all the advertising spend and salaries.

In the end, we had to let go of most of our team, and ended up with a developer, an operations lead, a copywriter (which, by the way, was the single most valuable hire we’ve ever made), and a part-time customer support rep.

Everything else (design, editing work, etc.) would be outsourced from now on.

As I look back, we’re doing 3 things much differently than we used to, which is helping us scale our company faster than ever (over the past 4 months, we had our most profitable quarter in our business, by a long mile).

Today, I’d like to share my Hiring Trident with you.

Hiring Trident Part 1: You should ONLY hire A+ players

We hired a lot of young talent with a lot of potential, but in truth, most of them weren’t A+ players. They were B or A players.

The difference for me is:

A B-player is someone who does their job well, but not excellent. You need to spend a lot of time fixing their mistakes, they aren’t proactive, they only do what’s expected of them, instead of going above and beyond. They aren’t a core driver of the company, and if you have an employee like that in your team, you’ll constantly think about how they could be performing better.

An A-player is someone who does their job in line with my (high) expectations. This means they put in the hours (and extra hours). They’re driven, they finish their work on time, and generally, there are few issues with them. But on the other hand, if you have an A-player on your team, you keep thinking about how they could (and should) be doing better. When you give them a difficult challenge that’s outside of their comfort zone or ability, they often hit a wall. There’s something that they’re missing, which brings us to…

An A+ player is someone who works with the same drive and work ethic as a founder of the company. They constantly think about how to drive revenue and save time, they get better at their job every day, they take on more and more responsibilities and nothing is “too difficult” for them to do. They just get it done. They’re the people you WANT to have in your company when the times get tough, as you know they’ll work even harder to turn the boat around). As a friend of mine says, they’re like a unicorn. It’s extremely difficult to find them, but once you do, you just know it.

Unfortunately, our hires weren’t as proactive as we wanted them to be. They weren’t improving as fast as expected. They didn’t put in their 120% every week.

Instead, they coasted at 80% of their capabilities. Still, for a few months, we hoped it would get better. We thought that maybe they just needed more time…

That we could help them improve…

That things would get better…

But they didn’t – even though we invested many hours and thousands of dollars into their development. We spent countless of hours mentoring them and coaching them, we gave them access to other coaches and experts that we hoped would helped them improve, but they did so slower than we expected.

To this day, I’m yet to hear a story of someone who turned from a B player to an A+ player. It just doesn’t happen. You can teach someone all the marketing, all the tech details, all the systems we use at the company…

But you can’t teach them work ethic, drive, commitment and the fire in the belly (at least I haven’t found a way to do it, yet).

Now, when we hire someone, we have a rule: They should blow us out of the water within the first few weeks, and there should never be any doubt that they’re a great fit for our company or that they can perform on the level we want them to.

If there’s doubt, we’re shooting ourselves in the foot – as in a few months, we’ll have to let them go. It will cost us valuable time and money we could invest into our existing employees or into moving our business forward.

All of the above leads me to the second takeaway…

Hiring Trident Part 2: Your employees should pay for themselves from day 1

It’s not difficult to invest time and money into an employee if they immediately pay for themselves with their work.

As a rule, for marketing-based roles, they should generate at least 5-10x more revenue than their salary within their first 1-2 months of work. If we pay them $2k/month, they should generate at least $10k/month.

By the way, I’m not being overly harsh here. I use the exact same standard when I work with entrepreneurs who hire me for consulting – if they pay me $1000, our work together should generate at least $5-$10k for them.

With marketing roles, the revenue impact will be shown on black and white. The numbers don’t lie.

But it gets trickier when it comes to non-marketing roles as they might not have the direct impact on revenue.

Although..

From my experience, A+ employees will usually still figure out a way to increase the revenue even in a non-marketing role.

A great example is a good customer support rep.

A B-level customer support rep will struggle with getting all the tasks done.

An A-level customer support rep will get everything done on time, every time, but they won’t go the extra mile in figuring out how to drive additional revenue for the business, or save time for the company.

An A+ level customer support rep will get their work done on time, and then research customer support systems and best-practices that other rapidly growing companies use. They’ll read every book on customer support. They’ll try out all the software tools and figure out which ones would make the most sense in our business. They’ll think about how they could upsell products to our new customers as they interact with them.

Then, they’ll implement what they learned in our business and set up systems that will help us generate more revenue or drastically cut down the customer support time – and make their role pay for itself.

Hiring Trident Part 3: Let go of B-players sooner, rather than later

In a way, you can look at your team members in the same way as business ideas. When you have a D-level business idea that doesn’t get any traction, it’s easy to kill it off and move to the new idea.

It’s easy to fire a D-level employee that drastically underperforms.

When you have an A+ business idea that drives a ton of traction, it’s easy to keep working on it, as you know it will only get better in the future.

Just like that, It’s easy to keep A+ players around in your company. You know they’ll continue to drive the company’s growth forward.

The hardest to let go are the B-level business ideas.

They’re promising… but not quite best-sellers. They get some traction… But not a lot. Working on them often feels like an uphill battle, but some of the traction they do generate gives you hope. It’s the hardest to let go of them, but as with employees, it’s unlikely you’ll turn a mediocre idea into a blockbuster.

It’s more likely you’ll spend months (or even years) trying to make it perform better, until eventually, you’ll kill it off (we learned this the hard way as we spent tens of thousands of dollars that generated $2-$3k in revenue every month, but never really took off).

So if you DO unintentionally find yourself with a B-player…

Let go of them and find a new replacement sooner rather than later – no matter how hard it will be. It sucks at the moment, but once you have an A+ player, you’ll be glad you’ve done it and wonder why you haven’t done it earlier.

One final note on this topic.

Finding A+ players often feels like digging for diamonds. It takes time. It usually doesn’t happen in a few days or weeks.

For one role, we had to interview 70 candidates in order to find an A-player. So don’t be discouraged if the first few candidates (or even your first few hires) don’t turn out to be as stellar as you hoped.

Keep looking – because when you see a diamond, you’ll know it.

Primoz

I used to absolutely resent Black Friday launches. The discounting, the materialism, the hype… I always wondered… was it really all necessary?

But then, I flipped the script and started seeing what positive things could come out of a Black Friday Launch.

What would happen if I went all out on a Black Friday launch? How many people could we help, that otherwise couldn’t afford our courses?

After all, isn’t it better that they invest in world-class education, rather than just another gadget?

Let’s find out.

The context

Today, I’ll break down a product launch that we did for our parenting platform where we sell online courses on different parenting topics.

We generated over $600,000 in revenue with this brand over the past year and a half, built an e-mail list of 42,000 e-mail subscribers, 12,000 of which are our paying customers.

With this launch, we decided to go all out and see what we were capable of doing.

Our Black Friday launch strategy

Our game plan for this launch was to advertise only by email marketing. We had a sizeable list so we decided to focus on profitability, not revenue – because at the end of the day, I’d rather earn $50k with zero advertising spend than $100k with $50k spend.

At our brand, we have 13 different parenting products. For Black Friday, we decided to focus on selling our best-selling products. Our hypothesis was that the best-selling products would drive the most sales during the launch.

We sold a different best-selling product every day from Monday to Thursday at 50% off, with a one-day sale period.

On Friday, we did a larger sale at 70% off (this was a $113 product, so we could justify a larger discount).

Over the weekend, we extended our sale due to technical server issues early on in the launch, and offered 40% off all products, including a bundle that we would typically only offer as an upsell.

With this launch, we didn’t run any ads. We only relied on our email list of 42,000 e-mail subscribers.

Our Black Friday marketing plan

We decided to send 2 emails every day of the launch: The announcement email and the reminder e-mail.

We sent the announcement e-mail each morning (around 8-9am).

The structure of this email was essentially a summary of the sales page. It was a simple offer email where we explained:

• What today’s offer is (meaning which product they can buy and the price) + reminder that this offer is only available today
• Primary promise of the product (some sort of the headline)
• The problem(s) they can solve with this product (pain points)
• The unique methodology our product uses to solve the problems in a unique way
• What the offer includes (all the modules of the course, with benefits for each module, in bullet point format)
• Who should join this course (quotes of customers who joined this program with reasons why they joined / testimonials)
• Mention the 30-day money-back guarantee
• Reminder – this offer is only available tonight, until midnight

The purpose of the announcement e-mail was to introduce the offer, explain who it’s best for, and use a problem/solution lead (make it very clear what problem this product solves and what the result of using this product will be).

The reminder e-mail was sent every evening (between 5-7pm).

This was a 1-page reminder email, designed to gently remind our readers that the offer is only available for a few more hours and increase urgency.

• We reiterated the primary promise again and used future pacing (tomorrow, you can already solve this problem), which creates additional urgency.
• The email was relatively short, with a handful of bullet points summarizing what they will get in the product and how it will help them.
• In the end, we reiterated the 30-day money-back guarantee

These e-mails generated the second wave of sales in the evening, accounting for roughly 50% of the launch revenue.

All of the emails linked to our sales pages. Each of the sales pages had a “hello bar” with a countdown timer on top, counting down to midnight (creating additional urgency and scarcity).

Our Black Friday upsells

Each of the products we sold had 3 one-click upsells that were triggered as soon as the customer bought the product, to increase AOV (average order value).

• Offer #1: A bundle of our best-selling products
• Offer #2: A 28-day e-mail parenting challenge
• Offer #3: A vault of 220 answers to the most common parenting questions

These upsells increased our AOV (average order value) by 30.83%.

The day-by-day breakdown of our Black Friday launch

Here’s the breakdown of how our launch went:

• Monday: $19,847 revenue, 628 sales of a $21 product (50% off from $43)
• Tuesday: $10,790 revenue, 313 sales of a $27 product (50% off from $55)
• Wednesday: $5,062 revenue, 132 sales of a $39 product (50% off from $78)
• Thursday: $5,775 revenue, 152 sales of a $27 product (50% off from $55)
• Friday: $11,832 revenue, 304 sales of a $34 product (70% off from $113)
• Saturday-Sunday: $7,286 revenue, 129 sales of various products, including a $169 bundle (40% off all products)

Overall, this was an amazing launch.

We projected about $15k for this launch (which is our typical “good launch”), and we didn’t have high hopes for generating a ton of revenue since the price points of our products were so low.

However, it seemed like the mass buying craze made a big impact, and helped us 4x our launch goal.

The great thing was that about 50% of our customers from this launch were brand new customers who never bought from us before, which helped us serve a new segment of our audience that we didn’t reach with our offers before.

Here are the overall numbers of the launch:

• Overall revenue: $60,594
• Base product revenue: $46,221
• Upsell revenue: $14,250
• Upsell AOV increase: 30.83%
• Sales: 1658
• Percentage of new customers: 50%
• AOV: $35

In retrospect, I’m glad we went all out on this launch, as it became our biggest and most profitable launch of the year.

The 10 major takeaways from our Black Friday Launch

Takeaway #1: Start Early

Starting on Monday was a great decision, as we avoided some of the Black Friday craze.

If you’re doing a Black Friday sale next year, make sure you start earlier than on the actual Black Friday, as you’ll beat a lot of your competition and get more undivided attention from your customers.

Case in point: With nearly $20k in revenue, Monday was actually the biggest day of our launch.

Takeaway #2: Don’t let upsells be an afterthought

The second key takeaway were the upsells. Many online entrepreneurs aren’t aware of the power of upsells, which is a real shame. We made the same mistake in our business.

Last year, we had no active upsells, despite the $170,000 in revenue that we generated in the first 6 months of our business.

In Q1 of 2021, our upsells generated 10% additional revenue – better, but not great.

Then, over the summer, we made it a point to optimize our upsell strategy and copy, ran a bunch of tests, and ended up with a strategy that reliably increased our launch revenue by 27-72%.

During the Black Friday launch, the upsells alone generated $14,250 and brought in 30% additional revenue.

This takeaway goes for all the launches, not just the Black Friday launch.

Over the past 5 months, we generated $43,683 upsell revenue on top of $117,499 launch revenue – that’s an average AOV increase of 37% over the course of 5 months.

I’ll write another post shortly that will go in-depth into our upsell strategy and lessons.

Takeaway #3: One-day sales windows perform extremely well

On a typical launch with an open-cart window of 3-7 days, we’ve found that we consistently generate at least 50% of the sales on the last day, when we send 2 reminder e-mails.

By having one-day sales windows, we essentially made every day the last day of the launch and drove a ton of sales day in and day out. In some cases, this meant that we generated more revenue in a single day than we would with a typical 1-week launch of the product.

This approach also kept our subscribers on their toes, as they weren’t bombarded with the same offer every day – there was always something new and exciting waiting for them as they opened their e-mails.

Takeaway #4: Double-check your hosting before a big launch

Hosting is one of the things that continues to be the Achilles heel of our company. Over the past year and a half, our servers often failed to keep up with the demand of our buyers – especially when we had a big launch or drove a lot of paid traffic to our website.

We’ve tried all the major hosting providers, from local to worldwide ones, from bigger to smaller providers… And for the most part, we thought we had solved that issue.

That was until we sent out the first Black Friday e-mail: Our server was down within 20 minutes, and our customer support team was flooded with e-mails and phone calls from our readers, asking what’s going on.

After doing some digging, we noticed that we’ve had some issues with our hosting reliability for the past few months, but since it didn’t seem as urgent as other things on our to-do list, we kept putting it off.

Well, this ended up costing us a few thousand dollars and 10+ hours of customer support time during the launch, so it’s a mistake we won’t repeat again.

Now we have a protocol in place that ensures that our hosting is bulletproof before a big launch – so that everything runs as smoothly as possible.

Takeaway #5: Send those reminder e-mails!

Before the launch, we decided to send two daily e-mails (announcement and reminder e-mails).

At first, we were worried that this would be too aggressive and that we would receive a ton of lash back. Our backup plan was to stop sending reminder e-mails in case that happened and the e-mails didn’t perform well.

However, that didn’t seem to be the case. Yes, we got a handful of angry e-mails and a bunch of unsubscribes, but you’ll get that in any case if you have an e-mail list of 40,000+ subscribers.

When we saw how many sales the reminder e-mails consistently drove, it was easy to keep sending them. Had we not sent them, we’d likely hurt our launch revenue by 30% or so.

NOTE: I would only use the two e-mails a day strategy on a launch like this where we had a different offer every day – so that your subscribers don’t feel like you’re bombarding them by saying the same thing over and over again.

Takeaway #6: Extend the cart during big launches

I used to have a rule that a deadline that we put in our e-mails is a hard deadline and to make no exceptions when people miss the deadline to join.

However, once you have a business that gets over a thousand orders every month, that quickly becomes a logistical customer support nightmare – AND it doesn’t feel great.

When you receive tens of e-mails from young moms telling you they were busy at work and didn’t see the e-mails the previous day begging you to join your programs, you come off as a bit of an asshole for saying “no, you should check your e-mail every day”.

That’s why, on big launches, we tend to extend the cart by 1-2 days, so the late purchasers can still join our programs. Sometimes we announce this via e-mail, sometimes we just leave the cart open for a day or two on our website.

We’ve found that this saves us a ton of customer support time and brings in many new customers, while we haven’t found that it would decrease the effectiveness of our deadlines.

For this launch, we knew that a lot of people would be writing to us, which is why we decided to reinstate a (slightly smaller) 40% discount over the weekend, which brought in over $7k of additional revenue.

Takeaway #7: You can reach a new segment of your audience with discounts

With this launch, we got over 50% of new customers that never bought from us before. Therefore, it seems like we were able to serve a new audience that we weren’t reaching with our offers before.

These didn’t seem to be low-quality customers as we received no immediate refunds out of 1600+ orders, and the new customers happily bought our upsells, so it didn’t seem like they were “cheap” or “low quality”.

A month later, we still haven’t encountered any problematic customers or a mass of refunds – so the concern of attracting a low quality customer base was largely unfounded.

Takeaway #8: The more products you have, the easier you can have a successful Black Friday Launch

I always say that creating more products is one of the key growth levers you can pull in your business.

What I’ve found is that having a large suite of products can set you up for a really successful Black Friday launch.

If we only had 1 or 2 products available, we wouldn’t be able to put together a launch like this (we tried it last year, and only generated $12k with a 20% offer off the 3 products that we offered).

If you have a large suite of products, you’ll cannibalize your sales less (because you can rotate the products and offer new products after the Black Friday sale, and repeat selling the same product too many times one after the other).

For example, just one week after our Black Friday launch, we released a brand new product. The new launch generated $11,464 in revenue, which was a solid launch, and we didn’t notice any red flags on any of our launch metrics.

Takeaway #9: Don’t be afraid to experiment

On Friday, we did an experiment with a $110 product that we discounted by 70%.

We weren’t sure how this would go, but we thought that a really good deal would be the best fit for Friday, and we wanted to put out an accessible product ($55 didn’t feel like a great price for Friday).

This turned out great, as it ended up being the second biggest day of the launch.

Takeaway #10: We’re definitely doing this again

This launch turned out far beyond our expectations – we beat the projected $15k launch revenue by 4x.

So next year, we’ll be putting a lot more thought into the Black Friday launch.

We’ll reorganize our launch calendar to make sure we’re setting up this launch for success, and we’ll think about how we can further improve the numbers.

Who knows, perhaps we’ll make it a $100k launch next year.

However, we won’t be doing big sales like this outside the Black Friday promotion, as we do want to make it the one big event of the year that nobody should miss.

Well, that’s it for now. Hopefully, you’ve found this report as insightful as we have, and you’ll implement some of these insights in your next (Black Friday) launch.

Have questions about our launch? Leave a comment below, and I’ll do my best to answer them.

Primoz

P.S. Need help with scaling your online business to 7 figures and beyond? Click here to work with me.

From my experience, strategic entrepreneurs tend to earn at least 2-3x more than tactical entrepreneurs.

To demonstrate the difference between them, let’s look at a practical example of two hypothetical entrepreneurs which closely resemble thousands of entrepreneurs I’ve worked with over the past decade.

Let’s call them Tactical Tom and Strategic Sean.

Both of them currently make $30k in revenue a year, they both have an email list of 5k e-mail subscribers, they both sell only one product, and both spend 40 hours a week working on their business.

Tactical Tom acts on every idea he gets. He keeps tweaking his branding, website design, does a branded photoshoot, tries Facebook ads…

He’s working all the time, but then a year later, when he takes a look at his business report, his business still generates only $30k in revenue.

Despite his consistent effort, he burned through most of his revenue with “improvements” that he thought were necessary for his business – and now he feels like he’s stuck in the same place as a year ago.

This story repeats year after year, until he meets a fellow entrepreneur – Strategic Sean

Strategic Sean takes a deep look at his business every week, identifies the key Growth Multipliers that move the needle for his business, and says no to everything else.

He focuses 100% of his efforts on Growth Multipliers like creating new products, increasing average order value through upsells and launching more frequently.

He creates two new products that year, adds upsells to cross-sell the products and launches one of his products every month (previously, he launched his one product 3-4 times a year).

At the end of the year, he looks at the business report and sees he made $90k in revenue – he 3x-ed the revenue from last year.

This is exactly what I do when I work with my 1on1 clients.

We continuously study their business, identify the key Growth Multipliers that they should focus on and say no to everything else.

This way, they aren’t mindlessly jumping from one tactic to another, they aren’t wasting valuable time by overthinking what to do next, or by focusing on things that won’t actually grow their business.

Whenever a question like this pops up in their mind:

• “Should I hire a copywriter or a virtual assistant?”
• “Should I start Facebook ads?”
• “Should I go on podcasts?”
• “Should I develop a $27 dollar product or a $1997 product?”
• “Which product should I develop next?”
• “Should I upgrade my website or sales page design?”
• “Should I get sponsors for my Youtube channel?”
• “Should I start a membership program?”
• “Should I focus on growing my e-mail list?”
• “Should I write more blog posts?”
• Etc.

We find an answer to it – FAST – and move on to execution, knowing that the work they put in their business will bring the biggest possible bang for their buck.

As an entrepreneur, you likely have hundreds of thoughts like this every single month.

Don’t worry, you are not alone, all of us have been there.

And now, I’ll share with you how you can navigate through them without wasting any valuable time, and create a bulletproof strategy for your online business that will set you up for exponential growth in the future.

Earlier this year, I discovered a framework that changes everything.

It’s called The ICE Framework.

It was first popularized by Sean Ellis, the “godfather of Growth Hacking”.

The ICE Framework is my go-to framework for working through the hundreds of things I could do to grow my businesses and deciding which ones I will do to unlock future growth.

Sean’s framework includes 3 key metrics for evaluating each of the ideas in your business:

• Impact – Will this new feature positively impact our company and if so, by what degree?
• Confidence – How confident are you that this feature or initiative will be well received?
• Ease – How easy will it be to develop, test and launch this feature?

You rate each of the initiatives you have planned in your company through these metrics, with the scores from 1-10.

Then, you sum up the scores, and execute the ideas with the highest scores while ignoring the ones with the lowest scores.

Since we started using this framework, we 3x-ed the profit margin of our 7-figure online business (a brand with parenting courses that we sell in Slovenia).

We let go of many unprofitable projects and initiatives that drained hundreds of hours of our time and ate into the hard-earned profit.

Over the past year, I also started using this framework with a handful of my private coaching clients.

Many of them have already seen 2-3x growth in their businesses because of it, without putting in more effort, hiring a bigger team or spending tens of thousands of dollars on advertising.

This framework is frequently used in tech startups, but hasn’t really been discovered or talked about in the online entrepreneurship world.

As you start using it in your business, you’ll quickly gain a competitive edge in your niche.

When we started using this framework at our company early this year, we saw that it was promising, but not perfect.

Working through it felt like a chore and resulted in many headaches.

The process of scoring the ideas from 1-10 literally made our brains hurt. We spent way too much time trying to estimate if an idea had an impact score of 5 or 7, and mostly just “guessed”, which wasn’t great either.

We wanted to make this framework work and turn it into something we could use in our business every week, by looking at it for just a few minutes.

So I sat down and quantified the framework.

I created new scores that were easily measurable, instead of vague.

It worked – and that’s how ICE 2.0 was born.

Here are the scores I came up with:

The New Impact Score

For Impact, the metric I used was revenue – as that would be the easiest way to measure impact in our business.

So instead of “Will this new feature positively impact our company and if so, by what degree”, the question for Impact became: “If this works, how much revenue can it generate for our business over the next year?”

With a new question, estimating impact became easier. I created an exponential Impact Scale that would help us easily estimate the impact of an initiative:

• 10 = 1m+
• 9 = 500k
• 8 = 250k
• 7 =100k
• 6 = 50k
• 5 = 25k
• 4 = 10k
• 3 = 5k
• 2 = 3k
• 1 = 1k

NOTE: I’ve found that this scale works well for a business that earns roughly $200k/year. If you have a smaller/bigger business, feel free to multiply or divide the numbers accordingly.

As a benchmark:

• 9-10 Impact should 2-5x your business
• 5 Impact should be equivalent to 1-2 months of revenue
• 1 Impact should be the bare minimum that makes an initiative “worth it” for your business

The New Confidence Score

For confidence, I changed the question from “How confident are you that this feature or initiative will be well received?” to “How confident am I that we will actually reach the PROJECTED REVENUE NUMBER (Impact Score) of this initiative?”

The Confidence Scale is much simpler:

• 10 = 100%
• 9 = 90%
• 8 = 80%
• 7 = 70%
• 6 = 60%
• 5 = 50%
• 4 = 40%
• 3 = 30%
• 2 = 20%
• 1 = 10%

As a benchmark:

• 10 Confidence should be something that you are 100% certain will make that impact in your business (for example, relaunching an existing best-selling product).
• 5 Confidence should me something you’re fairly confident will work, but there’s also a good chance that it won’t (for example: running Facebook advertising)
• 1 Confidence should be something that’s a long shot that you have no previous data on (for example, doing TikTok advertising)

The New Ease Score

Finally, for ease, we changed the question from “How easy will it be to develop, test, and launch this feature? “ to “How much time will this take our team to develop?”.

Here’s the Ease scale:

• 10 = an hour of less
• 9 = a few hours
• 8 = a day
• 7 = a few days
• 6 = a week
• 5 = a few weeks
• 4 = a month
• 3 = a few months
• 2 = a year
• 1 = a few years

As a benchmark:

• 1 Ease is a quick and easy experiment
• 5 Ease is a major initiative that you and your team will have to invest a lot of time in over the next few weeks
• 10 Ease is a long-term, multiple-year project

With this new and improved framework, we could work through tens of ideas in under 30 minutes (it used to take us hours). It’s quick, easy and effective.

By making this framework easy and simple to use, we could work through it every week, during our Monday Strategic Meetings.

This allows us to confidently start new initiatives in our business every week, knowing that the vast majority of them will impact our business in a positive way.

We also have a clear idea of how we can take our business from $500k/year to $1m/year or even $5m+/year. It’s all written in ICE.

This framework also made it easy for our employees from different departments to contribute to the growth of our company.

They no longer have to send e-mail suggestions to our Leadership Team, they simply add the ideas to our ICE spreadsheet.

Then, every Monday, we work through the ideas, rate the ICE scores and decide which projects we’ll put into action. It’s a well-oiled machine.

To make this process effortless, we created the ICE 2.0 spreadsheet, which includes all the metrics and automatically calculates the ICE scores.

I decided to share this spreadsheet with you, to make it as easy as possible for you to implement the ICE framework in your business.

You can make your own copy of the ICE template here.

The template will help you make strategic decisions like “what should I focus on in my business next?” much faster and help you build a much more profitable business.

Hopefully, you’ll find it as useful as we have.

Now, If you feel like working through ICE by yourself is challenging, or if you’d like to get a second set of eyes on it, I can help.

You can book a 30-minute 1on1 Strategy Call with me, where:

• I’ll ask you to fill out a quick questionnaire about your business and send me your ICE Framework with ideas. I’ll review these before our call.
• Based on the information you share with me, I’ll help you identify new Growth Multipliers that you might not have considered yet.
• Then, during our call, we’ll work through these ideas and create a 3-6 month strategic plan for your business that will help you get on track to 2x your monthly revenue.

The price of the call is $250, and you can book a call with me here.

P.S. If there are no slots available that would work for you, simply send me an e-mail to primoz@primozbozic.com with a few times that do (and the timezone) and we’ll make it work.

-Primoz

“Primoz, we really like your ideas and we want to work with you. Just tell us how we can work together and give us your terms, and we’ll find the budget for it.” – what a CEO of a company that’s never heard of me before said to me last week.

Today, I’ll teach you how to get an infinite stream of new, high-value clients, without pitching, by investing only 1-2 hours. I’ll teach you how to get CEOs of companies (or your dream clients) to WANT to work with you, and send you messages like the one above. 

There’s no strings attached, it’s all here in this e-mail.

I’ll share my formula with you with two specific goals in mind – so you can get more clients and drink as many caipirinhas as you wish.

You can use the formula I’ll share with you today – I call it The Infinite Clients Formula – if you’re a consultant, coach or a freelancer – for contract or full time work.

You see, there’s a way to land high-value clients that I’ve found to be much more effective than anything else out there.

I used this same formula to land clients that generated $5,000, $10,000 or even $200,000+ in revenue – from a single client.

This exact formula is used by consultants and coaches that charge $1,000/hour (or more). It’s a well-kept secret of people who “get” how client-acquisition really works, and it will become your new-found unfair advantage.

You can use this formula even if nobody knows who you are yet…

Even if you’re reaching out to a cold audience…

Even if you’ve never had a paying client before…

Even if the client you’d like to work with isn’t actively looking for extra help…

And what’s most important – with it, you can land long-term, high-value clients that you’ll love working with, who will become your best clients and happily pay you premium rates.

This formula will only take you 1-2 hours per client.

I’ve been using and perfecting this formula for the past 10 years. 

I used it to land clients that I loved working with, and get mentors and opportunities that were otherwise accessible only to the 1%. With this formula, you’ll join the 1%.

And the best bit? 

Practically nobody uses this formula, so you’ll be 3 steps ahead of your competition.

Now, before I share it with you, let me warn you.

There IS a single requirement for using this formula. Without it, it won’t work.

This is the same requirement that I consider a foundation for starting any sort of a business.

You have to be good at what you do.

First, get good at what you do. Don’t use paid clients as a playground to get good. Don’t make big promises without the ability to back them up. 

If you don’t do this, you’ll struggle with implementing the formula, and it could even backfire and give you a bad rep. So really, get good at what you do. Then use this formula.

The exception? If you’re NOT good at what you do yet, you could use this approach to land free clients or internships, where you’re open to the fact that you’re still learning, but eager to learn.

So, what’s this Infinite Clients Formula all about?

It’s best if I SHOW you how it works in action, from a practical example that happened to me last week.

Yes, that’s the exact example that got the CEO of a company that never heard of me to say “we want to work with you, we’ll find the budget – just tell us how you want to work together”.

The context:

One of my free-time obsessions is rock climbing (indoor and outdoor). It’s something I do to stay in shape, challenge myself, meet like-minded people and put my mind off of work.

One of my long-term goals is to own an indoor climbing centre myself, since climbing is a booming industry right now and it’d be a whole lot of fun to do that.

But since I don’t want to wait until I have a few million dollars saved up to build one of my own, I had an idea.

There’s a climbing centre that I go to regularly that is the best in town. It has great facilities, great people and decent marketing. It’s doing well on it’s own.

But since I can’t help but analyze the marketing of anyone and anything I see, I’ve secretly been thinking about how I’d run the marketing for it differently if I was the CMO.

And then, last week, I saw that this climbing centre was looking for feedback on their website.

I opened their email, and saw that they had a quick survey that they were asking their members to fill out. That’s already a great sign – since they’re already listening to their customers and want to improve their marketing.

And, just for fun, since I had an hour available, I thought to myself: “let me have some fun with this”.

So I put on my imaginary CMO hat and pretended to be the CMO of the climbing centre. 

I opened a Google Document, started bashing the keyboard and came up with 3 pages worth of ideas to improve not only their website, but also their business model and their marketing.

I specifically focused on things that I’m good at, like:

• Strategies for increasing the 3 key metrics that every business needs to optimize (number of customers, frequency of purchase and average order value)
• New product opportunities (online climbing courses, training plans, climbing workshops and group trainings)
• Email marketing and copywriting (to collect more e-mail addresses and get more of their e-mail subscribers to come climb, and to climb more often)

Then, for good measure, I threw in a handful of ideas that I came up with based on the cool things I’ve seen Dutch climbing centres do when I lived in The Netherlands.

The first step of my process was to come up with ideas for improvements.

The second step was to “go above and beyond”, create a ton of value and break down my ideas into easy-to-follow, implementable steps.

I didn’t want to just give them ideas – I wanted them to get excited by them, and to actually implement them (for selfish reasons beyond just getting another potential client – I genuinely wanted the climbing centre to offer an even better service to me, their client).

Here’s how I did that:

• Instead of saying “you should get a lead magnet to collect more e-mail addresses”, I gave them concrete examples of what they could offer as a lead magnet (a beginner’s guide to climbing, a discount on their next visit, etc.)
• Instead of saying “you could create online climbing courses”, I gave them a list of the best examples I’ve found online
• Instead of saying “you could host a community climbing competition”, I broke down exactly how the climbing competitions worked in The Netherlands 

Whenever I’m implementing this formula, I want to give potential clients everything I can and leave nothing on the table – just as I want our working relationship to work in the future.

Once I put together this document, I simply e-mailed it to them.

My subject line was simply “Ideas/Feedback for your website and marketing”.

The narrative of the e-mail was “Hey, I noticed you were looking for some ideas… Well, I have plenty of ideas. Here’s a LOOOONG e-mail with them. Feel free to forward this to your marketing department or the CEO. If you have any extra questions for me, I can stop by for coffee – or you can call my cell number that’s included in this e-mail. Here are the ideas…”.

I sent it out directly to their regular, “info” address.

The same afternoon, I got a long thank you e-mail from the social media manager who read the e-mail, thanking me for all the tips.

The next day, I got a call from the CEO, who said that he loves the ideas, and that we should meet for coffee.

A few days later, we did. During our meeting, I mostly listened and asked questions. I wanted to understand which of my ideas were feasible and which weren’t. I wanted to understand what’s already working, their business model, and their vision for the meeting.

I wasn’t pushing my ideas, or pitching anything. I just listened, asked questions, answered their questions and gave a useful tip or two when it felt like the right thing to do.

At the end of the meeting, the CEO told me this:

“Primoz, we really like your ideas and we want to work with you. Just tell us how we can work together and give us your terms, and we’ll find the budget for it.” 

And now we’re working out the details of our arrangement.

To recap: in just a few hours, I went from a completely cold potential client to someone who wants to work with me – by using the Infinite Clients Formula.

 I use this formula whenever there’s a potential client with who I really want to work with:

• If they’re a cold lead, I use this approach through cold e-mail
• If they reach out to me, I do my research and prepare some ideas for them before or during our first meeting – which makes it a lot easier for them to say yes to working with me. I want to SHOW them what working with me looks like before we ever start working together.

Fun fact #1: I used a variation of this formula years ago when I applied to a position to work with Ramit Sethi. Instead of just filling out the application survey, I created a 30-page Google Document with ideas to improve one of his products and a 90-day strategic plan to scale it. This helped me get the position among many other more experienced candidates.

The formula process works because:

• With it, you instantly position yourself as an expert at what you do
• You SHOW people what you’re capable of, rather than just saying you’re good at what you do
• You stand out from everyone else (as not many people know this approach, or put in the work to execute it)
• You show them all the possible growth opportunities and show them how to implement them (though they usually just end up hiring you to lead the implementation)
• You add a ton of value without asking for anything in return – which almost nobody ever does

Fun fact #2: You can use this approach to get any job / freelance gig / coaching client. It’s not limited to any industry or form of working with someone. The principles apply to almost any type of working relationship – even internships and mentorships.

Let’s take this even further.

Here are the exact steps to put the Infinite Clients Formula into action:

• You find a potential client that you really want to work with
• You take 30 min to do the research on them (or their company), so you understand what they’re already doing and what they’re missing
• You take 30min to brainstorm all the possible improvements
• You take 60min to turn these ideas into “value bombs” that blow them away, through examples, deep explanations, strategic plans, resources and implementation steps
• You send the e-mail (if you have the direct e-mail of the client/CEO that’s best, otherwise a marketing department, assistant or their generic info e-mail can work just as well)
• You patiently wait for the e-mail with the meeting invitation, which typically comes
• At the meeting, you ask a lot of questions, try to understand which ideas would fit well with their existing strategies, and continue to add as much value as you can
• You don’t pitch your services, you wait for them to say “we want to work with you, jus tell us how”
• Voila! You have more $$$ so you can go and drink more caipirinhas 😉

Fun fact #3: If you look closely, you’ll notice that this e-mail follows many of the key principles of this formula ;).

In the upcoming weeks, I have many more “value bombs” ready for you – on a variety of different topics related to growing your business. There’s some true gems in there and stories and frameworks that I never shared before, so stay tuned.

At the same time, I have a handful of openings for private coaching clients. If you’d like me to support you in growing your business, you can apply to work with me here. The application takes most serious entrepreneurs about 30 minutes to fill out. If you’re a good fit for us to work together, I’ll reach out within a few business days.

I typically work with ultra-ambitious entrepreneurs who want to be the best at what they do and make a big impact in the world.

Sample results from my clients include:

• Going from a $1,500 launch to a $235,000 launch in 1.5 years
• Scaling a business from $10,000/month to $30,000/month within 6 months
• Generating $500,000 in revenue within 1 year of setting up a website 

Interested? Apply here.

Until next time,

-Primoz