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Lessons from Running a Sale That Earned 3 Month's Profit in a Week

coryzue.com

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Re: Lessons from Running a Sale That Earned 3 Month's Profit in a Week

#21

Post by czue »

darsoli wrote: post #14

The product seems to hit a really important use case (I have created my own SaaS products in the past, and subs, authenticaation, and permissions are huge PITAs). One suggestion - your homepage copy is very developer oriented and 'feature' oriented, whereas it could be less technical and more benefit-oriented. I think changing the copy / adjusting the focus could go a long way. See Outseta.com (I have no affiliation…

Thanks for the suggestion!

I agree with you re: the copy and being more benefit oriented. As is probably obvious I am a developer-first and a marketer a distant second.

Also appreciate the pointer to outseta

Re: Lessons from Running a Sale That Earned 3 Month's Profit in a Week

#22

Post by czue »

forgingahead wrote: post #11
czue wrote: post #2

Hey HN. Author here. I wrote this up because I very hesitant to run a black friday sale for my product and was blown away by how much it impacted the business. Hopefully sharing the story (and lessons learned) might encourage others who are worried about the "ickiness" of sales to try them out. Also happy to answer any questions anyone has.

Nice writeup, and congrats on the success with the sale. I especially liked your graphic on the 4 buckets someone can be in when they encounter your sales pitch. Very cleverly presented, and definitely puts into context how little it matters if you happen to pitch someone who isn't interested. The trick is exactly as you write, find out whether they're interested first, and then only move forward if they are. Move on…

Thanks, yeah that "try to be a bit more markety than you are comfortable with" advice for engineers is probably my biggest takeaway and something I hope people get from the story.

Re: Lessons from Running a Sale That Earned 3 Month's Profit in a Week

#23

Post by afauxuser »

hombre_fatal wrote: post #13
huhtenberg wrote: post #7

Re: Promoting through /r/django - enjoy it while it lasts, but you are playing with fire. Reddit subs are notorious for very quickly developing severe allergic reaction to anything of a self-promotion nature. A reaction that will go far beyond Reddit's standard 10% cap on self-promo posts [1] (which you are already in violation of [2]) and all the way to a permanent domain-based ban. [1] https://www.reddit.com/wiki/s…

You can circumvent Reddit's genius heuristic by changing "look what I made" to "look what I found" so that it matches all of Reddit's other content. Boom, now you can do it across infinite accounts whereas when you were honest, you were limited to one account. Those rules are so juvenile. Why shouldn't a website have an official reddit account from which they post? Especially when the circumvention is so trivial?

> Why shouldn't a website have an official reddit account from which they post? Especially when the circumvention is so trivial?

Because it would remove ad revenue from Reddit if any company could just post ads without paying.

Re: Lessons from Running a Sale That Earned 3 Month's Profit in a Week

#24

Post by duxup »

CamelCaseName wrote: post #18
duxup wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Reddit's standard 10% cap on self-promo posts I'm surprised to hear that's a rule considering the scale of 'every single post is someone's youtube channel or news site' I see from users on reddit lately. I assumed they gave up on that rule.

It used to be a hard rule that would trigger a shadowban, now it's just "reddiquette".

Yeah I thought that was the case too.

It's strange, I'm seeing a lot of very low tech spam on reddit now. They (the spammer) are not even trying to hide it and reddit doesn't seem to care.

Like it's not hard to script out "check if user submitted a bazillion posts to the same youtube channel" and flag ... at least a good chunk of those.

Reddit doesn't even seem to bother now.

I'm even seeing wholesale just offensive image spam go on for ages like the old days of internet forums, reddit doesn't seem to bother with them...

Re: Lessons from Running a Sale That Earned 3 Month's Profit in a Week

#25

Post by data4lyfe »

For Black Friday this year we tried A/B testing our digital product and saw a huge difference in conversion rates just on the subject line alone.

It's pretty crazy how much a few words make a difference when it comes to people's inboxes getting pummeled with sales.

[1] https://www.interviewquery.com/blog-ab-testing-black-friday/

Re: Lessons from Running a Sale That Earned 3 Month's Profit in a Week

#26

Post by gday2020 »

duxup wrote: post #24
CamelCaseName wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It used to be a hard rule that would trigger a shadowban, now it's just "reddiquette".

Yeah I thought that was the case too. It's strange, I'm seeing a lot of very low tech spam on reddit now. They (the spammer) are not even trying to hide it and reddit doesn't seem to care. Like it's not hard to script out "check if user submitted a bazillion posts to the same youtube channel" and flag ... at least a good chunk of those. Reddit doesn't even seem to bother now. I'm even seeing wholesale just offensive…

You are right. I am a mod of a fairly big subreddit (over 2 million). Reddit really doesn't care.

If the account is new enough and links are spammed within a short amount of time, they are getting auto banned/flagged.

Accounts that are a bit older can get away with it. Sometimes those posts get removed automatically, but that's pretty unlikely. At our sub, we do flag every post that contains a link automatically. In 80% of the cases, this is spam and we delete it.

We have had spammers that kept coming back with new accounts. We have reported it numerous times to Reddit, but we highly doubt that any action has been taken. Especially accounts that try to promote youtube videos are hard to block.

It's generally up to the mods to take action. I do not believe that the 10% rule is enforced in any way.

Re: Lessons from Running a Sale That Earned 3 Month's Profit in a Week

#27

Post by duxup »

gday2020 wrote: post #26
duxup wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah I thought that was the case too. It's strange, I'm seeing a lot of very low tech spam on reddit now. They (the spammer) are not even trying to hide it and reddit doesn't seem to care. Like it's not hard to script out "check if user submitted a bazillion posts to the same youtube channel" and flag ... at least a good chunk of those. Reddit doesn't even seem to bother now. I'm even seeing wholesale just offensive…

You are right. I am a mod of a fairly big subreddit (over 2 million). Reddit really doesn't care. If the account is new enough and links are spammed within a short amount of time, they are getting auto banned/flagged. Accounts that are a bit older can get away with it. Sometimes those posts get removed automatically, but that's pretty unlikely. At our sub, we do flag every post that contains a link automatically. In…

There used to be a spam subreddit where you could submit a username and describe the pattern of their spam (particularity if it was sneaky).

Bans actually seemed to be really consistent from those reports.

That got shutdown and now the FAQ says use their typical contact admin / black hole that doesn't do that thing...

Re: Lessons from Running a Sale That Earned 3 Month's Profit in a Week

#28

Post by jamestimmins »

Udemy is a great example of a company that devalues their product by offering so many sales. They constantly advertise that for a short time, courses that cost > $100 are selling for $12.99.

But anyone who has visited their site more than once knows it's trivially easy to always pay $12.99, regardless of popularity/rating/length. The result is that instead of seeing them as a great deal, I view all Udemy courses as lower quality (whether deserved or not).

Which is a shame, because some of their creators do a fantastic job and have a high quality products that could sell for Wes Bos-level prices.

Re: Lessons from Running a Sale That Earned 3 Month's Profit in a Week

#29

Post by dlkinney »

jamestimmins wrote: post #28

Udemy is a great example of a company that devalues their product by offering so many sales. They constantly advertise that for a short time, courses that cost > $100 are selling for $12.99. But anyone who has visited their site more than once knows it's trivially easy to always pay $12.99, regardless of popularity/rating/length. The result is that instead of seeing them as a great deal, I view all Udemy courses as l…

JCPenney, Macy's, and Kohl's were sued (successfully) for the same kind of perpetual sale racket.

A "sale" is a "misleading advertisement" if the product never actually sells at the "original" price.

Note that this is distinct from Amazon's stricken price, which is the suggested price. You'll see that none of Amazon's own products have a stricken price unless it's actually on sale. Since Udemy defines their own pricing, this forgiveness does not apply.

They're ripe for a lawsuit, frankly.

Re: Lessons from Running a Sale That Earned 3 Month's Profit in a Week

#30

Post by pc86 »

czue wrote: post #8
huhtenberg wrote: post #7

Re: Promoting through /r/django - enjoy it while it lasts, but you are playing with fire. Reddit subs are notorious for very quickly developing severe allergic reaction to anything of a self-promotion nature. A reaction that will go far beyond Reddit's standard 10% cap on self-promo posts [1] (which you are already in violation of [2]) and all the way to a permanent domain-based ban. [1] https://www.reddit.com/wiki/s…

Yeah, good point and definitely agree with this. I don't actually promote my product on Reddit, I just promote useful content I've created. My posts pretty consistently reach #1 on /r/django because (I suspect) I put substantially more time and effort into them than the average Django guide. I also try quite hard to be a good citizen and give back in a non-promotional way. Edit: I didn't know about those numbers/term…

I tend to agree with you, but posting your own content is by definition self-promotion if it's content marketing (which the vast majority of your blog posts are). At the very least that's how a power-hungry Reddit mod with a bug up their butt will treat it.
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