REVEALING Black Friday Secrets That Will Make You Money (feat. Shopify’s President)

Summary

• Having an offline presence can be a game-changer for online companies. Running a pop-up store for longer periods, like Gymshark's 12-week holiday pop-up, can help gather data and pre-test products.
• It's crucial to weave intrigue into your brand strategy. Use tactics like Easter eggs in marketing to engage your audience and keep them curious.
• Optimal conversion involves finding the right focus. Highlight the best-selling products and create urgency with banners and special seasonal tweaks to your website.
• Use interactive, challenge-based strategies to engage customers, like BarkBox's quizzes that collect data for future personalized marketing.
• When pleasure meets practicality—like QVC's integration of shopping directly in video streams—it leads to frictionless, high-conversion shopping experiences.
• Partnerships can be more effective than trying to outspend big competitors. Collaborate with larger brands like BK Beauty did using TikTok promotions.
• Ordinary but creative marketing, such as Burger King’s Advent calendar or cheeky app deals, can significantly boost brand perception and engagement.
• Offering extensive value without a direct sale pitch, as ButcherBox did with its cooking classes, can build trust and relationships with your audience.
• Consider acquiring media assets that align with your business to create content that drives conversions passively, much like ButcherBox’s acquisition strategy.
• Personalized touches, especially those small businesses can implement easily, can strongly differentiate a brand in competitive markets.
• Entrepreneurs should seize the expanded market opportunity enabled by globalization and democratized online sales channels. This can also involve niche specialization.
• Industry newcomers can challenge big players by focusing on innovation and exploiting their agility for faster market adaptability.
• Adopt an open and experimental approach. Creating a customer-centric and adaptable business helps meet shifting consumer preferences.
• Reducing friction in the purchase process is critical. Meet your audience where they are—be that physical, online, or a mix of both.
• The true value of entrepreneurship lies in the ability to self-actualize. Entrepreneurs need to see failure as a stepping stone rather than a setback.
• Successful branding and marketing aren't about hard selling; it's about storytelling and emotional connections that lead to long-term loyalty.
• Never underestimate the power of small markets and niche focuses. These can be expanded upon to create significant business success.

Video

How To Take Action

I would suggest implementing a few strategies straight away to boost your business based on the lessons from the transcript.

First, think about running pop-up events if your business is primarily online. You don't need to spend a lot; even a small local event can create buzz. This can help you gather data and test new ideas without committing to a permanent storefront.

Next, add intrigue to your brand by including Easter eggs or small surprises in your marketing content. These can be small hidden elements in an ad or a website that engage and create curiosity among your customers.

Try focusing on a few top-selling products during special promotions like Black Friday. Highlight these with banners and special deals on your website to drive urgency. This can streamline the buying process for your customers, leading to higher conversions.

You can also look into interactive, challenge-based marketing, like quizzes that collect customer data. By doing this, you can offer personalized promotions which make your customers feel special and increase engagement.

Consider exploring partnerships with bigger brands. You don’t always have to outspend them; collaborate creatively. Find larger companies that could use your expertise in a platform they're new to, like TikTok or YouTube integrations.

Lastly, focus on storytelling over hard selling. Engage your customers with stories about your products, why they're special, and how they solve problems. This creates emotional connections and long-term loyalty, expanding your market reach naturally over time.

Quotes by Alex Hormozi

"Getting their whole audience, the most engaged audience to pay attention"

– Alex Hormozi

"The best entrepreneurs play into the brand, the strength of their brand"

– Alex Hormozi

"All businesses…data is so powerful when it comes to weaponizing resources"

– Alex Hormozi

"Consumers actually prefer to buy direct with people that they believe are behind the product"

– Alex Hormozi

"If you put a seasonal wrapper…it's so timely that you need to check out right now"

– Alex Hormozi

Full Transcript

all right we are here Black Friday I have a special edition today with uh the man the myth the legend Harley who is president of shopy we're going to go over five to seven stores that are absolutely crushing it now here's the advantage that Harley has and that we can share that no one else can he knows what's going on in every single store across the world in Shopify so he knows who's killing it by how much and what they're doing and then we're going to highlight some of the things that they're doing specifically well so that you can either buying us to your you know Shopify if you're if you have a Shopify store or just how you how you sell whatever it is that you sell we're we're effectively turning on the camera for conversations and you I usually have private right like over text or F calls or whatever I'm like hey check this out this is really cool and so now we're just going to kind of like open up the Kona for it before we do that we you check this out yeah let's go so we so Black Friday sat Monday weekend uh is sort of Super Bowl we have millions of sources on Shopify and so what we want to do is is project in real time literally like minute to a minute how things are going and uh we I think we hit Peak a little earlier today brand new EST on Friday but we're now at a 3.4 75 million doll in sales every single minute minute every single minute 28,000 orders per minute and almost 30,000 unique Shoppers what is amazing though okay so we're about to North America is about to come here can I stand up yeah so what you're about to see is this North America right here so you see where the orders originating from where it's going to but there you may also there these little fireworks oh okay so those fireworks every one of those fireworks is a brand new entrepreneur getting their very first sale that is a brand new entrepreneur being created the common threat of what we're going to we're going to talk about today is that they're doing things that I think are unobvious incredibly effective well let's kick this off with gym shark I was just texting null before this like hey is there anything uh that n is is is the best I think with gym shark because obviously we're going to look at the site we're about to break all like the little details down but there's also the things that they do prior to getting into the site right which is what is the brand what is the brand context that this sits within and so I think Jim shark does such a good job of building the brand and giving and providing value and making positive associations with the right people the right athletes at the right time um that when they give when they need to give and they did like Reps for mental health like they give when they need to give but when it's time to ask they ask if they mean it and so Black Friday is the best time to ask and so let's dive into it they also know Their audience really really well so remember there's a couple things let's start high level and we'll go into actual Tac High Jim shark is the quintessential online retailer started online Ben Francis starts this he's literally a pizza delivery guy in 2012 starts jym shark and they build this amazing online business it's an online brand phenomenally but actually right now one of the most interesting things about them is they have a massive physical store popup in New York city so they are not necessarily staying within the confines of one particular Channel they're expanding well beyond that as well this offline presence is going well now now they will still do the majority of their sales I suspect they haven't told me this I suspect will be online it doesn't matter this idea of having a 12we popup for the holidays is amazing that's one second is it's a 12we holiday popup right it's not four days it's 12 weeks and so the fact that they're doing a three-month popup about holidays means not only are they starting before their comp competition they're also ending after their competition yeah right so they're expanding that that's something that's really cool they did this really cool social media Campaign which was sort of like quote there will be signs and no one knew what their will be signs meant well what it meant was in all their advertising there would actually be Easter XG these little of what they were doing now it wasn't obvious it was super unobvious but because Jim shark is so creative and their community and fans are so creative their fans kind of understood something there so people started going doing a deep dive into every marketing campaign every new product so they actually convinced people to spend more time on the site to look at look at what is actually doing It's Kind like the super when people are like oh I just want to watch the ads it's like they're actually they're getting their whole audience the most engaged audience to pay attention to it but not only that but also make content about their marketing that's exactly right which then gives them this whole extra you know lift to uh their their Impressions and so I I thought that was really really cool so a couple things so I'm just put that what is is Easter eggs a lot of Easter eggs they did really really well all right cool so let's start with the uh let's start with the site so what's the what's the if if we're talking pure conv look like look at like this site is a effectively a giant coupon yeah now one of the little this is me getting s ttic so if we look here there's a couple things that I I want to point out to to to my folks which is number one is they talk about lowest prices on top sellers which is nice because number one it's like okay we're not just doing it on the crap we're doing it on the good stuff all right so it's point one number two is now this is a little bit of um again this is just tactics notice that it's with the code and so I know this sounds like a small thing but sometimes basically getting people to I think you maintain the retail value from a brand perception perspective and then only at the checkout people then realize the savings and I think it I think it feels different as as it's closer to the purchase now that I don't have a a double blind Placebo split test to back it up that's just me as a well actually what I would suggest though is that in this particular case they're being incredi like they're giving it to you in a silver platter they're saying effectively go by right now now traditionally if you look at this site in 3 weeks from now it's very slick oh yeah black incredible imagery great product photography this is different I don't know what like this is a completely different thing that you've never seen before I also want to point something out also look at the order on top there's only three things in the top header yeah women's sale men's sale accessory sale they don't have any of their other product categories this is deliberately designed for this particular week so if we're thinking about when you're when you're making offers for whatever it is that you're selling it's it's it's narrowing focuses right or F fol folks ey right so we've seen that yeah F the um so they did this experiment there's 24 jars of gem and then six jars of gem at the Super Market and they had people try them out and the 24 jars of gy had more people try them but less people buy and then the six got way more buyers like two or three times more buyers and so the same thing happens is that we have to focus as entrepreneurs and say okay I'm going to have a disproportion amount of attention my customers are going to have their wallets out at this moment what am I going to prioritize yeah yeah and it's a parox of choice yeah give people too much choice and they're going to get lost so this I think is very very effective because they are they are giving you breadcrumbs leading you exactly to where they want you to go I'm say focused product Suite is another one and I'll add in the uh the conversion conversion coupon uh emphasis all right so there is one other thing that before we move on from them that I I thought was interesting so I was curious about why would they do a longer popup and one of the things that I think they did didn't tell me this but I is at the early stage of their popup again this was a holiday popup that was three months in in in in duration is I believe they figured out very quickly what was going to be the hottest items for the action season so they pretested again this is only my hypothesis they're very smart I think the fact that they were able to get in in in October 1st they knew what was going to sell at the end of November no one else was able to do that I think that type of I don't know like like crystal ball yeah I think I like I think that is very effective and I'm certain that's in some marketing meeting or some meeting at that company or even in other companies they said why would gy to a three- Monon popup for the holidays and I think they were thinking themselves we're g to get so much data soer so what's your later this is such a so all businesses I like this big generalization but like data is so powerful when it comes to weaponizing resources right and so for us for example like I'll just completely different perspective but like the content that we know performs the best tends to be when we look at past content that has done well and then we combine just winners and so it's like we create you know 450 pie of content a week but we only make one or two Longs and the Longs do really well but it's because we have 438 shots on goal that we say okay we're just going to take the top 20 of the you don't have to make any assumptions right you can see right away we know this before that's exactly right awesome those are some of the things I think for Jim shark that that work really well all right rock and roll let's let's move on to uh let's actually let's go to let's go to let's go to the let's go to bark Buck you have it up here let's rock it okay okay box okay Bark Box if you have a pet you likely know you want to move this I'm going to this guy we'll recap at go all right Bark Box this is like a you know an Alex size posted note this how I good um okay so BarkBox if you don't know it is this incredible Pet Food business pet company um and one of the things that I think they do really really well is that they have a deep understanding of their customer not just disimilar from gym shark but one of the things they did was they actually created challenges to get discounts so rather than simply give up the discount they created these pet quizzes they've been doing this for a couple weeks now but it also it created this interactive gameification it wasn't simply here's a coupon go buy it and they have competition I mean there's a lot of shoes that there's a lot of other companies out there but I think one of the reason that bbx is winning is because it doesn't feel like a simp a simple transaction it feels like you're actually doing something a lot different it's like customer it's like and you're also challenging people to say like if you do this and you do it well you get this reward right it's almost pav yeah and and I think um so I just I think they did it really well I also think thing they did is they created um a very personalized experience because one of the things they got from the quiz they got a lot of great information about the customer notice common theme on the data here side not yes oh yeah exactly I mean all these people are yeah they're retailers I guess primarily but they're incredibly smart um business innovators they look at data there they're they're scientific about how they run these promotions and so here's a great idea because they did this challenge based coupon so you got this gamification piece of it but you also they were able to ingest a ton of data from their customers so now you know like I I didn't take the quiz but I assume one of the quiz questions was name of your pet um tell me about the age of your pet now you actually have a wonderful datab they know they're remarketing what they're going to be precisely now you have this wonderful database breed right sure um but I think this idea that like the best entrepreneurs play into the brand the strength of their brand they're not trying to be at some point we're going to talk about butcher box not be box you make that mistake it may be awkward um but they're not trying to be like a high-end Meat Company they're just trying to be who they are and I think they have a really good understanding of that um so lowkey personalized experience that was delivered through this gamification I think they did really well and Mar box is been phenomenal and I'll talk about uh one one really big one so on jym shark I didn't mention it but it was there they had a top banner and so one of the one of the best and most valuable pieces of real estate on on any online story is going to be the top banner I think when I was scrolling this guy there it is yep so you can see they have their top banner and they're they're making like that is especially on mobile which you probably know the percentage of traffic but a huge percentage of traffic more than right now across the internet more for online retail more than half the traffic is on mobile historically the actual check out was lower that's changed with things like shot pay ah like shopay I'm not not this isn't a shop pitch it's true because even though you may browse on a mobile device you didn't want to have to put in your credit card number on a mobile device annoying but now it's we're to Checker whether it's chop or or appay makes much easier so conversions have gone dramatically up on a mobile device because of acceler J which is great because that's where a lot of impressions are served precisely so uh BarkBox also has this but I want to double click into not actually double click but like let's zoom into uh the they wanted to make it easy for firsttime buyers and so they're going you know obviously they have all this marketing theyve all these people are sharing stuff and get your first box for $7 right so they know obviously they're going to they're going to do things for their repeat customers they're going to take care of their existing audience but you have this opportunity where you have a disproportionate amount of eyeballs with new customers and so if you can double down and make a crazy offer because you know what your LTV is on that customer it's a great time to do it now when paired with and this is again we're going to mix and match here but with gy shar's iners emphasis it's like you can get this deep relationship now they're approximating that by getting tons of information on them but in the IRL setting so in real life you also get the this test for in a clothing store right and they're like wow and it it becomes a totally different shopping experience it becomes an identity shift you say you know I'm a gym shark fan I'm a gym shark athlete whatever and look products that are on there they are their top I don't know I I can't really see if there's light there I those are top four selling products likely right they're just making it all the here's what we sell do you want these things you can buy them right now we have so first-time buyer incentives uh and they did the same thing as as uh Jim shark which is prioritize the buy box right they know what people want and they're making sure that it's clear and evident uh and it's look it's timely what look what the banner says bark Friday that web this page is created for today it is Black Friday it is not it is not like the weekend or holiday special this is a deal for right now in hyper real time and if you don't get it by midnight yep you know as I say in French safey need yeah safing makes so but yeah so Banner urgency and firsttime offer prioritizing the best products using data to it to create deeper relationships for remarketing the future people are going to have lower action thresholds uh now so they're going to it's easier to get people to take that first step and give you a little bit more information we' did something like that this morning as well which is like okay we're going to make this big for acquisition. comom uh we have our scaling road map that came out but people had to fill out all this information for their business now obviously that's going to help tailor the thing that we're going to give them but it also helps you it's going to be useful for meix and actually that's a great quit proo cow because most people don't want to give information for free but if I can give you information and return for that information you're going to give me a discount you're going to give me money back person that's right and also bottom left corner of the screen this is what they want they want you to Bas up for their subscription yeah right so they like it like yes you can buy things alak cart are up there as well but it's ultimately they want a multi-on subscription from you and they're giving you an incentive to do it on bark Friday now also to to to bark back to Har back to Harley's Point earlier notice the top we've got there's only three three or four things that that they had there and I'm sure that um their site probably has a more in-depth navigation uh course I mean we this is the trend we're seeing right now right these sites are built for today yeah built for today I mean when you have when you when you that sounds cheesy but I mean like literally built for Black Friday yeah because you you might be able to do a month like think about the amount of work that you do for a month if you can do that amount of sales in 3 days then you should allocate the same amount of re basically you should respect that time as an additional month of year yeah yeah all right so look like you know 12 hours ago Shopify you know if you looked at that counter when it first came live Thursday night it was about $800,000 a minute now it's $35 million a minute like this isn't just some random thing this is the day the consumers are purchasing and these people have begin to prare how many minutes would we going rough 10 15 I was going to do the simple math just to say while we've been on there's been probably another 50 million in sales that we we got we got a lot to cover here yeah let's do it let's uh let's go to QVC back because this is not unobvious when I told you I was going to talk about QBC you told me you're like are you sure I was like yes trust me on this one and I was like save it for the live because everything you started getting into was like everyone's gonna want to hear this so if you remember if you like me you remember QVC is like what your mom was watching on TV for like the 17th pair of fake jewelry uh that's not fake it's a stone from Africa that was mined in you know whatever right uh and so this is a totally different QVC from what uh I grew up with and probably you grew up with and so yeah Harley take it away okay so QVC the the the way that it used to work is actually very very it used to it was it's a very simple process you had it was a channel that ran like basically indefinitely it was like always on and they had these people coming and presenting these beautiful things check out this if you want this call us now then it evolved and it became if you want this go to this particular web page so actually QVC came to Shopify and they said we actually want to build video on demand they wanted to build something where concurrently with the actual ad the video you can actually purchase right then and there like oneclick checkout and so the way it works is you actually see these product thumbnails show up in the video on demand and it's under like the the hottest holiday host gift Channel um but the thumbnail link over it's guilt on hydrogen which is Shopify is headless product and you can actually check out while you're watching the video the reason this is interesting is because there are way too many ads videos out there where you effectively have to leave the video to go make the purchase meet people where they are if they're watching the video make allow them to continue to watch the video Don't Stop the flow of information don't stop the entertainment value because that's not what they want there's a very high likely of chance if you if you get them to leave the video and go into a checkup like a four page checkup or even a onepage checkup yeah too much friction and so the fact that QVC which is I don't know how how long they've been around someone can probably figure that out but they've been around for many many decades the fact that they've created a seamless like concurrent shopping experience tells me that even older companies are able to innovate and use technology some really cool stuff and I would bet dollars to Donuts that the people who buy once are more likely to buy a second time while they continue to tune in and so it's like we don't want to break this moment so we talk about this in our stuff like we have hyper buying Cycles like there are these moments where buyers will enter so like let's say you you decide you want to start doing a Turkey Trot or you want to do some 5K or whatever well as soon as you make that decision all of a sudden you're like well I want I want new shoes and I want some shorts and I want one of those iPod you know armbands yeah and so if you if you immediately sell the shorts and then they have to leave they are they might forget about that and then they'll remember again but with a different retailer and so it's like when they're in that window a lot of a lot of business owners are afraid to like kind of lean in it's like that's when the when the when the iron is hot strike whatever the saying is um yeah go the other thing I was goingon to say is you know when I was last when I was on your your your your podcast you talked about that you know a lot of people that you you meet with sort of own more traditional businesses gyms there is this this I don't know this thing that I hear a lot which is well this is the way it's done right like I've inherited this business where I bought this company and this is how we do sales This Is How We Do you know are we business I don't believe like if QVC is able to innovate entirely on the process there's no reason that every one of you watching that has a more traditional business is not able to do so um and and I I just I have to give credit credit credit is due it's an amazing experience and the fact that they came to Shopify which is not it's not the traditional Shopify Merchant um I I think is great so I like the idea of reducing friction and common themes here so boom we've got a a top Banner for right now with the code same thing look at say Black Friday right so everybody knows they're in the right place at the right time for them and I will bet you again dollars to Donas that those four boxes that are the first thing that you see underneath those those deals are probably the things that they know are the things that that were getting this this page has already been optimized for conversion they know that these items that they have in each of these categories are the things that people are wanting to buy right now and look at the products right the products are amazing products these are things they want to buy right now they also have this game Spin to Win but they like I don't know just I like the fact that it's it's a clean site it's very obvious what they want to do and it doesn't look like a 50-year-old company not at all yeah the cool thing that QVC has is they probably have more data during this season than maybe like anyone and so they know exactly what people want to buy right now and they and so like also for a smaller retailer or like any kind of smaller business a lot of times we like to think about things as David and Goliath and we're going to talk about a David and goath story in a minute but we have this idea that like we want to like beat the big guys one of the best things you can do is look at what they're doing like if they have a certain different categories that are put up there it's for a reason they've got a team of people that did a ton of research for six months and the cool thing is is that you can use someone else's team in research and basically take the inferences and then still use them for your business yep let's talk about the David and K thing because there there is one store BK Beauty do we have that those up here can you pull pull up BK Beauty there we go okay so um first of all BK Beauty um yeah look like you me yeah uh so fairly simple in terms of the look clean great imagery they you know they give you their endorsements of of like why you should buy from them very simple you know value statements here but here's what's really neat some of the people that at BK Beauty they are actually I think they're the top selling like at all brands on Tik Tok shops which which we power they are the top selling shop bkb I'm not kidding it is unbelievable and most people don't haven't heard of them but here's the thing about BK Beauty they are um they're not glossier they're not Kylie Cosmetics I know I know glossier and Kylie well because they're on shop like Fenty as well they're not like that they're more of a a startup brand and so when you talk about startups you often end up in this like David versus Goliath thing the thing that I think was so genius about what they've done recently is they said look there's Mass like the Cosmetics industry is littered with hedonic like you know uh incumbents big companies out there instead of going head-to-head with them they went actually created Partnerships with them so listen to this they created Partnerships with Maybelline L'Oreal and other major Beauty Brands that were just getting started on Tik Tok they went to them and said look we actually know how to do Tik Tok ads better than you do instead of us competing with you why don't we do collaboration and actually this idea of David Goliath they said it's actually going to be D David actually partners with Goliath and it's amazing to see a startup partner with these very large Brands and uh and and they've done some really cool stuff they've also native migrations I said Tik Tok but they've also used Shopify to Native integrate into YouTube as well so right from a YouTube cosmetic tutorial you're able to buy BK Beauty but they just seem to be doing things completely different um and um and and and so speaking of the different thing so I said that there one of the biggest stores the biggest store in Tik Tok shops they also do traditional marketing usually you see these merchants or these brands that do one of the other they're either the Insurgent or they the incumbent if they're the Insurgent and social media they're doing things that like you know that the big companies can't or they're they're incumbent in the nut traditional marketing yeah BK Beauty you can find them on Tik Tok and you can also find them on The View for example right so they actually they don't they have no um specific biases towards different marketing channels agnostic exactly show me the return on ad spend what is the RAS where can I get my CA to a particular point that it makes sense for me relative to my my lifetime value so that's a company that I just think is doing things completely different they they haven't emulated anybody else and I love the idea of collaboration versus competition and um I'll just say as a as a personal different side note on this is that this direct native integration so this is actually kind of a similar SC to the uh the QVC uh story earlier but um if you have the opportunity it's one of those High leverage things that's worth investing in which like I'll give you a very a simple example like I have uh on Twitter this little box that's inter now I'm sorry Jesus yeah so on X there's uh there's this little box it's like a buy box for people of products but for me I just made it a$ Z product that then just goes to my email list and so because it's so native to to the platform it outperforms relative to my view count compared to other platforms I have because it's so native well same with Tik to like Tik Tok really wants to make Tik Tok shops a thing I don't know how long that's going to last but if you were early on that you did well same thing with YouTube and Spotify when Spotify wanted to get into the podcast business those early podcasts generate a lot of sales because you were actually a your growth with some other company's macro Mission or or you know objective for that particular and they're and they're flooding and so like the David and goli thing is that if you're one of those early uh podcasts it's like spot you get to basically tap into their resources and their distribution and their kind of track record where they get to tap into your Innovation your adaptability and so uh a lot of these big guys like real talk for all the the smaller entrepreneurs here um you are a dangerous player on the board right because they know that given the size of their infrastructure it's so difficult for them to make big bets and everyone's afraid of losing their job and having the bad idea that a lot of these bigger companies just kind of stay relatively stagnant they just let's just stick with the Playbook it's worked for five years it's worked for 10 years don't don't mess and the big companies you know just to say it like they don't have the found they don't have the founder energy right you know I I've often said and I Ben has heard me say this on the gymstar at I was like I bet you there has been some board meeting where someone on the Nike board went up to the the white board said some of our you know major risks is jib shark yeah um that is unbelievable that that a 10-year-old company is an exal threat to a company like Nike but it's true these you know a lot of the small businesses that are that are watching you think that the big companies like you're worried about the big companies eating your lunch they actually are way more worried about you eating their lunch and the reason is they have way more resource they have way more Capital to deployed and invested in their ads so if you use creativity and they're using capital and you beat them well you can with a new idea they can't spend unlimited amounts of money and you can do things as a small business that they can which is things that don't scale so for example I I bought this so my I I bought this this is um if you really like coffee and you're not price sensitive there's a coffee machine called X blue okay X blue um and letter X and blue and it's this beautiful you know the pourover method for coffee do you drink coffee uh probably not so I drink coffee in the morning I have a machine so the like the way to drink coffee is like the Hipster Brooklyn style T of right I don't have the patience for it so X has actually figured out how to actually do that what I loved about it so I bought this coffee machine I found it on on the shop app it was really great but I got a hadn't written note from the CEO from the B of it and the note was like Hey Harley thanks for buying it I love Shopify I watch your have this podcast called Big Shot he's like I like all these things there is no way that any major Coffee Company could have ever done that that doesn't scale yeah so actually you know the X was probably thinking about how Breville is going to eat their lunch but brille should be way more worried about them because xlum can do things that that don't scale and that's where you can get those crazy BR at like basically you can compensate for their lack of capital by having Superior row I'm talking about them right now yeah right I'm talking that like it took them eight minutes or or five minutes do some research on me write that letter and now I've told that story 10 times and that'll probably sell 10 machines yeah it is a great cment it is expensive um okay let's keep going here because there's a lot going on I want to talk about one that is super um which one we Burger King for let's do Burger King okay so this is weird Burger King Size up for Shopify um not our typical Merchant by any means they also don't sell a lot of like physical product that would ship to you their burger restaurant but they created this thing it's called the most Whopper full time of the year and it's a freaking Advent calendar and I was like this thing it's weird and and do you see it there there you go yeah pull it up there okay there it is there we go this thing sells out instantaneously okay um it was 12 items ranging from figurines to Brandon sunglasses um it started on November 22nd uh it was uh it cost $19 54 cents they were created 1954 um and you had $100 worth of of product in it um it was unbelievable it sold it immediately the reason this so interesting is because McDonald's doesn't doing things like none of the competition like this but they were able to create these things that actually are Collectibles it's not for people that like the burgers there it's for people that like pop culture right and they expanded their brand well beyond that but it was this like the thing about Advent calendars even though there's oldest time is it's a it's a consistent reminder but the brand and actually uh Brew dog did one um vages did one fly by Jing did one a lot of great Brands did Advent calendars this year I haven't seen Advent calendars come in in a long time but the reason I think Advent calendars actually could work if you have the right type of product and brand is because it's not a oneand done can you toine admin yeah it's it's basically uh it's it's a scheduled release okay so you you you you buy it could be 30 days in this case we're burking was 12 days but it's it's effectively um something you get um multiple times okay and it's it could be delivered to you all in once or you actually can get it every couple of days for a period of time so you buy it once now there's an element of surprise there's an element of Discovery and mystery about these ADV calor you don't always know what you're getting um and it worked really well one of them so fly by Jing which is um sort of a sauce company very popular sauce company um I don't know if you can pull up fly by Jan they're they're really fascinating um if you can find it it's worthwhile just while they pulled it up this is also the same like Easter egg energy vibe from gyar it's the same idea so look at this and these cheap things this is their Advent calendar it's beautiful but here's the thing they're testing sauce this year for 2025 this is entirely I mean it's a cool product they made money with it but it's also a test of what they should make next year so one of their sauces I'm going to pronounce this wrong but it's not San but Sichuan sauce um was in this and they wanted to know whether or not their fan base was going to like this and and the the presumption was use this like have your your best sellers you know as couple as a couple of these releases but have a couple demos there and see what the crowd thinks of the demos and in fact this completely sold out so this was sold out in 2024 and all they did it strictly by email social media and by text messaging and this is a way for them to test things that they're considering launching next year and they're able to do it through the Advent site and so one of the cool things with this is you can drive huge amounts of scarcity huge amounts of PR around some crazy unscalable thing right like fundamentally you don't know which of these sauces are going to be good hypothetically now every business has their own sauce right their own products there and whatever and so for them they get to say okay well we don't want everyone to try off because might suck right and so but they get their hardcore fans with lots of scarcity lots of urgency tons of earned media that comes as a result of that and then the the big cookie for them is like not only do they get all that stuff they get the data that's right now let's go back for a second to Burger King because the other thing that Burger King did is Burger King typically has their total adress Market is it's large but it's fairly shallow okay I think what they were able to do with this particular calendar this Advent calendar was they were able to create a different relationship to the brand very few Brands can possibly do that a lot of the race car companies do so you may drive a Porsche for example there's a lot of wearing Porsche jackets not not my style like that stuff but that now they're able to like you only you only may drive that car once and a lot of people can't afford the Porsche but a lot of people that cannot afford a Porsche are walking around in Porche merchandise right or Ferrari or Ferrari Ferrari is probably even a greater example of that so that's kind of what Burger King did they're like look the transaction is typically you buy a burger or fries but now actually we're going to create a limited edition product that is going to be super cool and I think that they created a new type of relationship with an um an unobvious um constituency of of their of their of their brand and I I I'll I'll pck you back on two other things I think burer King did really well that we were talking about before this um is that they've been very Nimble and like they're dare I say like becoming almost cool they're almost cool well they're like in fact their their tagline now is forget the forget the clown McDonald's go with the King and then they they did this this massive uh I don't know if you guys saw this but they did this National deal where it was like you could get a a Whopper if you were within 500t of the McDonald's and located it yes yes and so but they so this is how they got this massive adoption of their app was but it's like think about how many different ways could I get adoption of an app it's like but not only did they do it they did it in a fun cheeky way uh so people would drive to McDonald's to then buy the the walk I always thought like uber should do that with push notifications at a particular hour um near bars like near like sixth stade Austin Texas or like you know in in downtown in Vegas or something where you know someone is around is is probably out at a club or a bar they probably had a few drinks why not just say would you like a car right now push it as opposed to have them pull it right and I I I think there's a lot of opportunities or or you know um Uber eat even can kind of do that hey it's late night hungry you just got out of the car yeah right we know you went from the club District to your home you probably want like a snack or something like that when they get into the car you're driving by the time you get home can guarantee that's where you sort of like forget the this is actually I'll take a like we has been public now for 10 years yeah um we're about to celebrate our 10 year anniversary May in May 2024 um this this will be sort of the May 2025 will be our 10 year anniversary we un public May in May 2015 the we did this road show where you meet all these investors we did 93 meetings on the road show I I absolutely loved it data company public I think From aler perspective is like one of the coolest things I was able you know our team rang devel to New York Stock Exchange it was a very special moment but the number one question we got when we were on the road for Shopify was we like the company we like the product but your Tam feels very small your total j market and the reason that that was an annoying question for me or annoying point was they were sort of looking at us taking a bigger piece of the pie rather than growing the P itself and at the time the pie was retail smbs right if you think about shop today a lot of people like that you shop we have B2B business a lot of them are not snbs anymore they weren't able to properly predict what we were going to sell to I think that's what a lot of people do wrong they look at I own a gym therefore the people that I'm going to Target are going to be people that go to other gyms and that's you taking a bigger piece of existing pie instead of thinking about like what if I Target a people that have never been to the gym before how do I grow the pie itself that's how you build real billion dollar companies I think so one of the really interesting so it's obviously I'll jump on the galy but one of the things that we used to talk about is your biggest competition is the couch and so G right exactly it's the couch right and so one of the really cool things is we like to sell in a vacuum in every business you have right because you don't want to price compete you want to be able to have your own unique message that's going to resonate with specific audience and so with when you when you create your Market they don't you're you're everyone's first love they don't know they're not like well you know the other guy down like of course you're going to have some people who price shop but the vast majority of people if you're kind of activating going from 0 to one one the market is a gazillion times bigger and so um it yeah go ahead used to say I I know read a little bit and he used to say the Netflix biggest competition is sleep kind like and I I think that's sort of how you have to think about it that your total deal market for what you're selling is the same Tam as oxygen it just doesn't matter of how do you find your way into it and Burger King is now like again are they going to change their entire business no but they've created this new way for customers to engage with them and I think that's really really cool let's go a butcher boss let's do it okay so um not to be confused with bark Bo yes yes that's right um also beautiful site yeah beautiful photography um are you are you a carnivore oh yeah okay so like so am I like just my mouth is water just kind of looking at this right it's just spectacular so here's the thing so first of all their Black Friday thing in advance of of Thanksgiving was they want to sell as many turkeys as possible okay that was their thing they're like they want to sell turkey now it's it's gone now cuz was last night they've already changed the site but if you would have looked at this two days ago it would have been all about turkeys but here's what they did there is they acquired a company called Truffle Shuffle okay Truffle Shuffle is a really cool company but it's it's it's live cooking classes they acquired them and they did this thing called go gobble paloa and it was all these amazing cooking classes okay they over delivered free information like in an insane way not gimmicky not social like sure like actual incredible things here here you go um and and they gave a this amazing class this class could have been you ever seing like those amazing documentaries on like Netflix about like Chef's tabl it was so beautifully done and there was only like the logical step would be to have a call to action for the class to go directly to you know uh to the brand they didn't do that they simply overd delivered and didn't ask for anything in return knowing that by creating more value than than people expected they would come back the next time and eventually to your point they will say now it's time like like you said about Jim shark eventually they're going to say if you want to actually do this with us next time go buy your own ingredients and here's where you buy it so here's what's really so I love I I like anybody in my world knows that I love this strategy a ton right so one is they went after a media asset first and so they're like okay well we have a superior monetization vehicle than you know this this media company does right they can sell sponsorships or whatever and the thing is that when you when you buy into a media I'm not going to super deep on the m&a side but like whenever you buy media their monetization mechanism is sponsorships right so they run it's and so basically if every one of your competitors and maybe you're running ads in a specific channel it's like well wouldn't it be cool have I got those ads for free yeah right it says fun what did they basically bought all of the ad space forever for one price yeah be the content yes right and so obviously with what we do we do the same I mean I love the strategy is what I um that's why I want to end with this yeah and so we're so I saw a different company do this really well um it was actually Levis and so it was so funny so I was uh I was I was looking for a pair of jeans or something I can't remember it was and they they said how to how to dress this pair of jeans now it's become a little bit more commonplace but the first time I saw it was years ago and they had one guy basically wear this pair of jeans in like six different settings and basically when the video he like would walk in and then it would like freeze for a second so it would it would show all the different things and then it walked out and then another version with the same jeans and so it very subtly cross sold a ton of other things well also say Okay jeans work for a lot because I mean jeans are so like you've got hipsters and jeans you've got working men like it's such a broad category so it's like how do you know even because like even the way that they put the model together is going to automatically only convert a specific type of the audience and so they showed basically four or five different avatars who you're like oh I don't resonate with the Hipster but that one's mine right they basically took a shopping cart and added to their Tam right they're just like they're going down the eye like Tam Tam Tam I I love that stuff also I also think what it does do it makes it invites you in let's say you're not as cool as a hipster but maybe you want to be but you're but you you do you do self-identify one of those other characters you believe oh that's this is for me right and I think that's I think that's really great I also like the fact that you do this well but what I loved about butcher box is they didn't actually ask for there was no call to action to buy during the actual class just check it out just check it out yeah and I think that that is that is remarkable because I don't think that is how traditional marketing typically worked and I think the best companies you don't know that you're being sold to and people want to buy they don't want to be sold that's right and so I had so I had I had a conversation with um Chris Davis who's uh New Balance at CMO and so we had a really good conversation the other day you guys will you guys will get access to it uh my notes from it and one of the most amazing things they did was he basically went all in on this concept and so if you guys have seen the big re you know boom of New Balance he came in and said okay 70% of our advertising budget is going towards bottom of funnel so me meaning like direct asks go buy shoes whatever right and only 30% is dedicated to storytelling kind of value creation emotional kind of you know identification for an audience whatever and so what he did was he said let's flip that and then for 18 months it basically didn't pay off at all and then at month 19 it just and then it just started taking off like a rocket and there's a couple of like I think meaningful lessons from that it was probably my it was probably my most significant story that I heard this year at least for me and so number one is given the amount of spend that those guys have it still took a year and a half and so if you were and they're New Balance right yeah they're like people know who they are already and so I think it's like the patience game of this is so big especially when it comes to Brand because I think one of the things that uh obviously we broke down the sites we should you know there's banners there's specific coupons everybody optimized their page for the day there was specific urgency there was clear three offers or four offers that they knew they streamlined the top part this one didn't have one it just has Banner um but the stuff that's happening outside of this is the stuff that really dictates how well well this is going to go right how much give has happened prior to this ask um is almost directly proportional to the amount of sales that they're generating um can we put up the the globe for a second because I want there's one more thing I want to sort of point out here which I think is interesting so you know you're looking at millions of stores it's great we're about to go to North America when you see these stores there's this often most people have this assumption that those are well that's Alo yoga and those are like the big ones on to that's not those are like millions of different stores the one thing though that I think that is remarkable now is if you sort of think the consumer side of it my my big takeaway from like Black Friday 2024 is that consumers actually prefer to buy direct with people that that they believe are behind the product that this idea of dis mediation isn't just a fat direct to Consumers on a fat that ultimately if you want someone to come to your gym don't put some model up on the ad put you up on the ad people actually want to buy from other people so one is I think consumers are voting with their wallets to buy the directly from the people behind it and even larger Brands like you know with Fenty it's right like like my favorite shirt is is James purse and I think he makes the best black t-shirts like J James puts himself out there to the extent that I feel like he cares more about black tach than anybody else right there's this there's this inherent personal personalization and personality to it that's the first thing the second thing is we talked about this a bit today but there is no online versus offline there is no Channel you sort of use a great term I think you said uh advertising agnostic it's ALS we're all Channel agnostic now oh yeah like there is no I buy a line I pick up in store it is literally just about consumer choice and if you think back you know 30 years 300 years I don't know maybe 3,000 years how retail was done the retailer the the the merchant dictated the consumer how to buy if you want to buy bread at the you know at a At This Town Square 300 years ago you go to the baker the baker would say here's my hours of operation here's how you pay wait in line here the one major thing that is clear clear to me through this is that things have been flipped in their head now the consumer is saying no no I'm going to purchase in the most convenient way for me which means I'm going to buy it online if I want or Buy in Tik Tok or Instagram or the online store buy a mobile app or buy a Marketplace but I think if you have an opportunity you're watching this right now to sell across different channels even though that's not what I'm I'm not a physical retailer Ben Francis Jim shark was not a physical retailer they're an online retailer and they're killing it in physical retail right now because they don't give a [ __ ] it doesn't matter where you B and I swear they don't care where you buy they care that you buy they care you have a great experience that is a future of retail and one of the reasons that I think that it's reflected here is because this is like this is means that entrepreneurship is becoming so democratized that companies didn't exist five years ago are now beating the [ __ ] out of the biggest companies in the world I don't know how Macy is doing today I don't know how Best Buy is doing today but I assume they're not doing as well as these people are doing because they simply are are too removed from the transaction from the value creation and I think like your point like value first right like soft ask give people more than they expect and then eventually they'll they'll give you what you they'll give you their their hard dollars so I'm GNA go I'm go super historical because you said 3,000 years Sor no it's good and so you think about the Roman Empire right and so there was this period of time before Shopify before social media where a lot of things got democratized by technology right um where but what defeated the Roman Empire it wasn't another massive Empire it was lots of Barbarians nibbling at the sides and then eventually obviously no silver bullets yeah hundreds of golden BB's that's theame right and so the thing is is that we as entrepreneurs represent those golden BBS and so that market share is these are gold BS literally literally is that market share is up for grabs and you can out the thing is it's like you can always out compete so I'm just going to draw here so it's like you're not going to beat somebody at the world right it's it's very tough to do that if you're starting out but you can be the absolute mayor of this tiny little duck and say like in this world if if you if you were an entrepreneur who uh likes black t-shirts I am obsessed with black t-shirts and people are like you know what there's these other brands that I like but I'm gonna black my I'm gonna buy my black t-shirts from this guy James James Pierce right and it's because like well I'm sure they have this whole catalog at for wori or whatever but like this guy just loves black I have a black T-shirt guy that's all I want to wear that's exact and actually so I just actually I pulled up I want so uh the top trending products right now across the world these are millions of Stores um it is an Alpine waffle beanie from viori it is a two-piece pajam set from Little sleepies it's a blanket from Lola blankets it's a lip liner from Victoria Beckham it's a peptide lip treatment I don't know what that is from Road and it's hair Ser from Olex these are not like other than viori I haven't bought anything in any of these stores yeah but there's a there's a massive business called Lola blankets that sells blankets and I'm willing to bet given that they're trending right now now across millions of stores they probably really give a [ __ ] about blanket and I'm pretty sure that little sleepies really cares about sleep wear and pajamas so this idea of taking a niche and blowing it up and inviting more people to participate you can build these multi-million dollar I mean or billion dollar companies in your Niche if you do that one thing really really well and this is where the Tam expands right and so you you think about like okay well sleep wear pajamas well the traditional person would look at that be like well okay what's the what's the number of pajamas sold every year or sleepware that sold every year and be like all right why think I can capture 5% or 10% but the thing is is like what we don't take into consideration is like can I make sleepware cooler than being naked yes tough on that one but like can I make it cooler than maybe a Mumu or a big t-shirt or whatever and so it's like okay that's what that's I'm I'm fighting the couch I'm fighting sleep and I think that's where these new categories can emerge and then you can so quickly with online now scale like to the Moon well I was actually going to say that as well so the percentage of crossb orders right now is is getting to 20% Which is quite remarkable because what that really means is that in 2024 the businesses that I admire the most they are default Global now again if you run a gym in a particular City that may be more difficult I understand that but if you were able to sell to a larger audience let's say you're based in Las Vegas I mean Canada's not that far that's where I come from like it's a three-hour flight there's 40 million people there and the average household income is pretty much the same as United States so you have another 40 million people right there yeah most shipping companies will go there uh at least for now we have free trade agreements so it's not that difficult for you to ship there so this idea of saying well I'm I'm a I'm a us-based or I'm a Canadian based company like the fact that jym shark is based in the UK I think most people don't even know that fact that Shopify is based in Canada I assume most people don't know that because it doesn't matter it's 2024 right we are all default Global and I think that is also an amazing opportunity that if it's working in this geography it's very easy to expand if you do it well and that is where this little dot over here just starts just starts being this little this little this little dot that could right and realistically what happens is it actually grows outside of the original town right is that there's whole other group of people and maybe you capture this little bit here that says you know what this I do like their pajamas better than someone else's but all these people are like man I like this just better than than whatever I was doing before I I'll personalize it so um one of my best friends in the world is a guy named David seagull David seagull created a company called David's te David T I met David in 2015 he was taking David's Tea public I was taking shop light public so he he built a billion dollar I like he took the company public it was an $800 million market cap company and it was I think there were 350 David te retail locations all over North America amazing T entrepr he ends up leaving the company and we're it's it's during the pandemic we're sitting around I'm like what do you want to do next he's like I don't really know I'm thinking about doing this or that I was like you're obsessed with tea he's like yeah I know I was like how you thought about doing high-end tea like really great well cuz I was like I drink I I drink tea but I have no idea what I'm drinking right I'm like green tea please or mint tea I'm like what about teaching the world about really highend tea great product exactly right teach people about it and he's like well the problem is we tried to do the David's Tea and it was too it was too highend it didn't work for that audience David was a mass audience a lot of flavors a lot of like you know like tropical flavors very sweet and so they're like it was too small of an audience I was like but what if we do it if if we just do it the two of us we built this thing called Firebelly t.com it's small company but we have one particular demographic it's for people that love high in and even though it's a small little dot in a larger T Market because we're the best of what we do in that particular Market it's actually real business it makes real money so I think that there is like you may be working in a company right now you I don't I don't like this term but like you know like entrepreneur an entrepreneur working in a big company and there may be something right now in that company that you think is a great idea but that compan is like it's too small of an opportunity it's priority seven and we're only the top three you may be able to start that thing and it may be big enough for you and 10 people to work on together even though the Fortune 500 thinks it's not that big of a deal sure and I actually think that is where those opportunities for entrepreneurs are endless yeah those crumbs on a uh on a hundred billion doll Cookie prom on that cookies enough to set you up for the rest of shop shop app store right we have 13,000 apps in shop Play App Store so if you're an entrepreneur you're a merchant you can find all these amazing apps and often we're asked why don't we build it ourselves well because we can't do that we have millions stores we have to do what most people need most of the time so we leave room for people to build their own companies and through that clavo is a billion dollar company uh aerm is a multi-billion dollar company we partner with stripe companies that were built on the ecosystem we actually encourage them we want you to go build because it's not something that we can do because we're focused on like you know transactions and check out and Order and inventory and Order management the bigger things we have to I think those are huge opportunities and that's all collaboration I'll just say that because I know Harley off camera too and like he collaboration is like in his bloodline totally um it's like I mean he's probably the most gregarious guy I've met like like if I if I like needed to connect with like the president of Zimbabwe I'd probably text you first be like oh yeah so I don't know his name I'm GNA mess something up but um I don't know the president of Zimbabwe I'm sure he's a great person and I think he should be an entrepreneur as well yeah I think he should start some sort of Zimbabwe you know butcher box you know company Bark Box type company and I'll bring this I I think I'll bring this on here but the the list of items that Harley just read as the top the top selling items that are happening across all of Shopify so number one everything that we just went is from the the horse's mouth the man who yeah you're hearing it first now I did like I did CNN I did like ABC I did CBS like I didn't mention some of these on there like this is this is for you and your community you were my people I am an entrepreneur like all of you and so but this is from pulling back the curtain of the things that these guys are doing it and Harley knows the the CMOS and the CEOs of each of these companies and got to I'm sure participate in some of these conversations that led to uh led to the creation I remember when some of these these companies were getting started their mom's kitchen table and they a lot of them had the same question I'm sure you all you all had I think the difference is that one like the head I mean if you're an entrepreneur you got to be you pers right like you know I I I always described as like like they're two types of people big Title Wave is coming and you have the people that run for the towels on the shore and you have the people that go get the surfboard yeah and like uh you know entrepreneurs are the surfboard people yeah and they're the ones that build these massive global companies think it's like a golden age of Entrepreneurship you know one thing we didn't talk about we talked about opportunity but also the cost of failure right now it's about as low as it's ever been so in terms of your you know 100 or 1,000 BBS you can throw out those BBS because if one doesn't work it doesn't mean you're going to lose your house so I I give this analogy of the lottery ticket which is like every entrepreneur has this like ultimate stack of lottery tickets and so you can scratch them off and cash them in and the thing is is that if you lose you're back at the exact same position you are at so you have basically unlimited shots on goal right now for the cost of probably a sub you know a software subscription and if you compare this to the the bakery that you uh have to start you know in 1930 where you have to work for 10 years put up half the money yourself sign away everything so that if for some reason the bakery doesn't work that's it for you that's it for life you'll never have a loan again you'll never yeah that's that's that's that's all you get and so it's like we have so many more shots on goal that the difficulty is so what's the what's the what's the competition for entrepreneurship it's distraction it's your phone it's it's it's never been easier to be successful and it's also never been easier to be distractive it's also hard like you know um I'm Canadian so I don't celebrate us Thanksgiving we have Thanksgiving another time but I suspect last night a bunch of you were sitting around your your dinner table with your family and they're like you know they're going around the table and you got like cousin David who's a doctor and you got like you know cousin Jennifer who's a CPA she's an accountant she works at you know some big accounting firm and they get to you like what are you do you're like oh I'm an entrepreneur they're like oh like how's the Tik Tok guys right exactly so like I I have felt like that my entire life it was I I kid you not we I've been at shop now for almost 16 years I'm 40 so more than the third of my life and I think it was only around like the IPO maybe a year after the IPO that my mom and dad were like okay like now I realized why you'd become legit you are legit so like I feel that too um because it is a little lonely totally right I mean entrepreneurship has a lot of perks and a lot of wonderful benefits but it's also qu quite lonely and unlike I think our our parents and grandparents Generations it's not celebrated like it is now usually people went into entrepreneurship there's this term called forced entrepreneurship that's why most people did for like most people became entrepreneurs in the in the like 30s 40s 50s and 60s because they had no other choices we are now choosing to be entrepreneurs because we're deeply passionate people who really give a [ __ ] want to build cool stuff the older Generations don't understand it as as well I think and I think the the the point you made about legitimacy is something that I I'll just I'll just make my quick statement which is um for everybody who's watching this that that is a struggle that all entrepreneurs go to at at every level and so some people call it impostor syndrome I I've never really resonated with that that term but the idea that you're like no one thinks I'm Legit right but fundamentally if you have a product and you sell it and customers are happy and you exchange goods and services for money you own a business period as long as you're you know abiding by the law right guess you could have an IL legal business but as far as far as I'm concerned I'm encouraging you know legal entrepreneurship um that's it that's legitimacy and if someone has a problem with you doing that [ __ ] them the snide comments at the at the thing oh yeah he's got his little te thing how's that going little guy but the thing is is that no one everyone thinks about today not forever and so like Shopify is celebrating their 10th year but like 10 years as much as that's a long time it also isn't that long to go from what did you guys IPO at a billion a billion so going from a billion to 150 billion in 10 years right and so uh I think I mean Microsoft was I think seven years from from inception to to their IPO and was a you know it took it took us 10 years to get to the billion from right like we were snowboard shop yeah that we were a snowboard shop in Ottawa Canada above a a buffet restaurant right and there's this and the thing is is there's this as you said endurance right there's this perseverance that has to kick in basically business is an infinite game and the only way that you lose is that you give up and so many of the permutations of the biggest companies in the world right now started as as surf jop slack started as something completely different than gam company right completely different and so your first business won't be your last business it's very unlikely that you're Zuckerberg or your BOS most most people have like I have nine nine failures before my first real big one and so like it's just part of the game I know you did t-shirts you did DJ I've done so many other things have not worked out you know the one thing that you and I have to do better and and maybe maybe we should do this maybe you do this better than I do but I often will talk about the Highland reel I don't talk about the bloopers right I talk a lot about t-shirts and DJs DJ which went well for Shopify of course but I don't talk about I had a slipper company I had a poker chip company I had a bunch of stuff that that that failed miserably um but I didn't like this idea that that you can just like have that endurance that the next one has the same motivation as the previous one I think works really well and like we are literally looking at like I pray at the altar of Entrepreneurship and these this is the result of Entrepreneurship you know $2.8 million every single minute this is not coming from like you know this is the longtail shop ofice stor that are generating that are sell to 30 million unique shoers 30 million that's almost that's almost the population in the entire country of Canada where I come from and soil itself I think being able to separate failure from being a failure so basically failing from being a failure and so like failing actually makes you more likely to be successful than not because you don't take any shots right and so it's just making sure that you make that shift um and whether it's also at the higher level whether it's a new product line I mean like we talk about specific businesses but there have been products or features that you rolled out like oh that was shiing we we shop F we bought a company for you know for over a billion dollars and ended up selling it for for you know like because we didn't we needed to get out of it it was it didn't make sense for us we were we sort of called these things like main quest and side quests and we felt that shipping was a side quest and eventually we said we let to go back to our M Quest and so we still make a lot of mistakes but the key is that I'm not make not make that mistake twice and I think you also have to read sort of the the teager in the environment like right now if you're a publicly traded company there is no room I think frankly generally if you're a company at any scale whatsoever there's no room for growth at all costs right like you like you want to grow a business properly but you also want to show that you can be profitable um so like now a couple years ago maybe that was different but I I think you sort of have to react to like what the macro environment dictates from um but more importantly I think entrepreneurship is the greatest thing in the world I think it's the greatest way for humans to self self-actualize I think it it creates it allows people to find their own definition of success whatever that might be and doesn't matter what your last name is or who your father like my father you know is not anyone who would ever know he was a failed entrepreneur he a wonderful man he supported me but he was never able to help me financially and it doesn't make a difference because the value that I am my value as an entrepreneur is how much value I create not who I am and that's sort of where I think entrepreneurship is like this great equalizer yeah it's all based on performance all performance doesn't matter Nothing Else Matters which personally is something that I've always been very attracted to which is like you don't have it's not based on your ability to to to kiss the boss's ass no exactly like how good are you right one more thing this is this is this is how this is how I like to think things all right so we're going to do a Rapid Fire recap of the tactics that we talk we're have to take off my shirt sort of like yeah we're going to do it we're going to strip down it's it's strip tactics okay so right off the bat we have um this a mess hold on we started here I think right was gym shark yeah okay here we go so gym shark number one so uh they had an offline present so this was big I'll put a little check mark here okay so online company offline presents yes uh they wo in these little Easter eggs into their marketing to get their uh Their audience and their fans excited about their marketing like literally excited about the product and it was like a bit of a secret right it was like an Open Secret of like what what are they going to do next yes exactly now also in terms of products they weren't trying to sell everything they were trying to be more focused on the few products that were going to drive the most Revenue that they because they did a 12we popup probably already knew and will know from next for next year what they're going to do next and crush it yeah I I love it I mean can you imagine the meeting where they're like What's So holiday popup great how longone like let's do it for three months and they're like it's a holiday popup they're like do it for three months and they did it I think they're winning it's a long like a crispy crispy popup I what um also just making sure that the sites that you have during the seasons where people have their credit card out are optimized for conversion so like there is a time for Branding there is a time for making an ask and when the when the going is good go hard now uh we covered the pre-test winner so I'm going to I'm to we're going to go to what do we got we got Bark Box okay so Bark Box did this great great thing which I think every B I mean I'm a huge huge this is a star one for me quizzes challenges in-depth data collection so that you can personalize a discount or personalize an experience I think makes it just it just it you get data they get something back in return everybody wins and then you get all the remarketing on the back end it's just like a super super if you want to see who does challenge based Commerce better than anyone on the planet it's a company called Mischief you heard of Mischief I believe it's spelled like this yeah yeah okay okay Mischief so Mischief does these crazy things where they'll say there is a PT Cruiser remember the PT Cruiser there's a PT Cruiser in this block radius with the door unlocked and the keys in the ignition if you can find it you get to keep the PT Cruiser and they do these crazy Subs all the time but they are the masters of creating these like these gamification and if you're interested in this particular topic go study mischief and so if you're like okay where does that fit in my marketing strategy so when we were talking about the new balance of the 70% this is basically delayed Ras is that you're putting this money in saying okay well instead ofing spending you know again this is scale here but let's say you spend a million dollar a month in advertising if you say you know what we're going to spend 50 Grand on this car and we're going to give it away you will probably get more than just spending 5% more on your ads right so there's this point where you get these trade-offs we having the story and the emotional connection Etc is is Big Time um I like highlighting this which is if if you have when the going is good make sure that you've got something where first-time buyers know what to get now most of these stores had like a keystone offer that they had either it was line with their banner and even on the on the bottom left for desktop where it was just like hey this is the like start here go here um I love directing I mean every every everything that I put on my site says start here like just this is where you start leave the breadcrumbs leave them down the road you want them to take yeah yeah so common theme here obviously prioritize best products making sure that you have urgency in the banner these are super uh super tactical things and authorized for the date it doesn't not every day is Black Friday I get that but there are particular days like you know like New Year's is a day Christmas is a day boxing day whatever it is like there are partic Halloween there are particular days where you can simply just add a very simple new theme or skin your site to make it to make it so it's so timely that you know you need to check out right now because tomorrow you know it's going to be totally different I can virtually guarantee you that if you put a seasonal rapper so in the offers book the last chapter is about the wrapping paper with like how do you change your offer on a consistent basis without changing your business right and so my my theme Here is become a fraternity party player right like if Tom gets his his tooth pulled out it's like Ker wisdom teeth right like you it doesn't matter what the reason why is just that you have a reason so that you can have your promotion and so it could be your daughter's birthday it could be your anniversary of your wedding it doesn't matter uh as long as you say hey I'm celebrating my anniversary and because of that everything that's couples related boom and you can get that information through these challenges right and this is why this is like a super high leverage all right boom so next one is QVC this is low low tech means high tech Okay so oh this one I like because on the video Dem man like QVC this is to me a story of creating the least amount of friction even though QVC has done something for decades a particular Way new technology came out they made it less like again this is concurrent video you don't have to leave the video to buy you can buy write them there through a thumbnail they are if if they can change their way after 50 years because new technology made it easier everyone else can can do that I think it's amazing and so I'm just say like what's the fundamental of this it's frictionless yeah right it's dreamline it's it's meeting the customer where they're at and every single every business can take one step towards your customer what is crazy is that when you take one step it's an order of magnitude Improvement in terms of conversions um BK Beauty I mean this is like you know like you don't have to compete with the biggest companies if you want to you can but also there's T like some of these big companies I kid you not you're sitting up you're watching this right now they they are scared of you and so rather than you going ahead and and competing with them they got a big budgets some of them are worth comp collaborating with not competing with you may actually create something amazing they're going to love it maybe they can pay for your ad budget and you just made you made yourself less of a risk to them and you can sell more product and this is coming from somebody who's in these boardrooms who's talking to these big Brands so I want there to be like credibility behind what car no this is real the biggest brands on the planet are scared of not their their exact competition they're scared of two people in a garage yeah who's going to be the next the next guy to defr them all right so we got Burger Kake so uh having the Advent calendar the promo calendar I can't believe we have Burger King on it's awesome awesome yeah and so uh they you know obviously they were cheeky with their their marketing they're like almost cool now which where like I don't want to say like I think they're almost cool um and using their Advent calter to test I mean this is this emphasis that we talk about gym shark U obviously Burger King did it but I think this is like it's it's a it's a it's a multi- dip right like I I love talking about like how can I get double dip or triple dip or quadruple dip on a one move that I make and so this gets lots of PR it gets lots of earned media it gets lots of shares lots of people paying attention it generates sales it allows you to reward the most hardcore fans and it allows you to collect data so that next year you have a a huge advantage over your competition or at least what you would have done if you didn't have the data to sell more product y love it all right and then butcher box I mean this is sort of this is like this is you this is like like like this is totally it is all about giving give more value provide more value to them that you capture for yourselves and do that over and over again until you're ready to say now it's time for us to share in this upside but this idea of creating classes with no call to action no sales pitch just here's an amazing class here's another amazing class oh by the way this next class if you want to buy if you want to cook like simultaneously here's here's a link to actually buy the ingredients it just creates this different Rel it doesn't feel like you're being sold to I mean this has been my entire marketing strategy and so I'm I'm like I'm super privy to this and the thing that I will I will highlight and that I want to push back on because there's I can hear I can hear the comments saying well must be nice right of well how how they they could acquire something like that right like they can do that but or or this doesn't apply to my business as an accountant or this doesn't apply to my business as a whatever literally so this is my this is Alex's Pro my my true cents on this is that marketing and sales are one Continuum first off all right so they're not like these two separate functions just because of have different people do them does not mean that the actual psychological process is different and as far as I'm concerned all of that acquisition process is a process of education and so all we're so if we Define education as uh a change of behavior with under the same conditions so if same conditions new Behavior someone has learned we have educated and so the point of marketing is to change their behavior under the same conditions of what we of what we put out and so if somebody comes in as a regular T user and then all of a sudden finds out that these te's contain some things that aren't as good and these te's are much better they digest better they they're more cognitive clear they're deeper taste whatever then all of a sudden you you move you're like oh I'm no longer a normal teego or I'm actually I kind of do like these higher you mentioned accountants for example I assume that's one of one of the greatest examples because the tax code changes fairly rapidly in most countries even in the US right if you put every time the tax code change if you put in a 60c video that says here's everything you need to know about section 8722 this new change 60 seconds and you do it again and again if someone is looking for a new accountant yeah they're like who do I actually go to take advice from most oh yeah it's this person on YouTube who whats up these great 60-second videos I'm going to see if he's available or she's available he's obsessed with black t-shirts right like he's obsessed with the tax and specifically okay so we're thinking about C so we'll just let's use this give me the overhead so if this is you're like well I'm not going to compete with PWC or ey or some of the big County it's like yeah but but all we got to do is beat them with plumbers and E by the they are never e all those big firms they're never going to be able to do a 60-second video that's organic like that it'll have to compliance and committees and all that you can out compete them because you can go faster it's amazing and so uh with this this is the back Black Friday wrapup from behind the scenes from the man of the myth the legend the president of Shopify Harley thanks so much for coming up manate so much fun and uh thank you all for joining us this was unhinged and wonderful so me at least appreciate you guys rock and roll enjoy the weekend enjoy the holidays get back to work