Selling $3,000 worth of product in < 1 Min

On Monday, we released 50 limited edition Ugly Duckling kicking tees at Rugby Bricks, and they sold out in under a minute.

Here is the process of how we made it happen.

- 14 days before the release: Pete (our founder) ran a poll on Instagram asking customers what new colour of our product they wanted to see - we gave them three options because they were the cheapest for us to make

- 13 days before the release: Pete went and shot content from the factory where our products are made in Dunedin that showed how the colours were produced - they were shared on our social stories

- 6 days before the release: Pete released an Insta reel that showed the product, the unique colour and a call to action that said one person could win one of the 50 tees if they commented with a 🦆

- 5 days before the release: Pete threw up an Instagram story each day with a countdown timer that showed the time and date of the release product, teasing what the limited edition product looked like

- On the day of the release: Pete put up a YouTube video that showed the product in hand, him signing all 50 of the limited edition products and the story the Rugby Bricks values

- 2 hours before the release: We sent out an email with a countdown timer of the product drop to our most engaged customers (people who had bought more than one product from us)

- 2 minutes before the release: Pete went live on IG and discussed the drop of the product and what to expect - we sold out in under a minute

We had 190 active carts and 230+ people on site.

Demand can be created for genuinely unique things that add value to your customers.

You’ve just got to tell a great story first and put some sharp marketing tactics behind the story telling.

Launching New Products

Athletic Greens has had one product for 10+ years, and they're a $100mil+ company. They haven't introduced new products or services because they don't need to.

My gym hasn't been so fortunate. Our membership numbers have been flat. So flat that we’ve introduced a new service to increase revenue—group courses.

We launched them two months back. And so far, they've generated $3,000 in revenue. Hardly something to call home about; however, with a few tweaks, we see them bringing in $50,000 annually.

We could have launched all manner of different things, like merch, events, new membership types and so on. But we chose courses.

Why? Demand.

It's so stupidly obvious that it gets overlooked.

With $30, some Facebook ads, and an hour of work, we were able to prove that people wanted our courses.

It just so happens that courses were the first idea we tested. If the course test had failed, we'd have moved on to other ideas until we found something people wanted.

Generally, "expansion" doesn't work. Off the top of my head, Apple (iPhone) and Amazon (AWS) are the only companies I can think of that have been more successful with their secondary product than their first. Some secondary products have even sunk companies entirely. New Coke almost killed Coke.

I wouldn't be surprised if the main reason why they don't work is because someone got too excited and forgot to test demand first.