The Substack Is Cool, but It's Helping People Make Bad Mistakes

Listen to the Nathan Barry show: https://nathanbarry.com/030-sam-parr-growing-2m-subscribers-selling-newsletter/ 50mins in

Sam Parr's $800k email: https://twitter.com/theSamParr/status/1332018614367645697?s=20
https://twitter.com/theSamParr/status/1331759376433115140?s=20
300k views: https://twitter.com/theSamParr/status/1332024062919503875?s=20
3k subscribers - max 1% conversion rate

Transcript
 

[00:00:00] swyx: Today, we're talking about email from two of its biggest practitioners, Nathan Barry from convert kit and Sam Parr from the hustle and sandbar par recently sends a email that converted into $800,000 worth of sales in one day. And this is.  

[00:00:19] Sam Parr: You want to know something funny that, that tactic of emailing the wrong link and then emailing them again to let people know that you've created. 

[00:00:27] Always gets more sales.  

[00:00:29] Nathan Barry: Oh, it does. Okay. You should tell everyone about your black Friday  

[00:00:33] Sam Parr: promotion. Okay. So I've done this twice. Most people don't know I did this twice. I actually did this in 2014. When we first started, when we only had about 40,000 subscribers. So back then in 14, what I did or 15? Well, no, when did we launch? 

[00:00:46] No, we lost at 16, so I didn't tell him 60. I'll tell you what I did black Friday. And I'll tell you what I did now or back then. So back then I, we accidentally sent, like, it was, the day was Thursday morning. We accidentally sent the previous Wednesday's email on Thursday. And so people got like the same one over and then we immediately send a reply and it was a screenshot of my slack, where it was me slacking to our writers saying. 

[00:01:13] You really screwed up, you know, this right. And then being like, oh my God, I can't believe I did that. It's like, and she's saying like, well, what do I do? And I'm saying, you better fix this or you're out of here. And she was being like, well, you got to give me some suggestions. I go, I don't know, just take a screenshot of this and put it in the email. 

[00:01:29] And if it gets a lot of opens, you're gonna keep your job. If it doesn't you're outta here. And we just screenshot of that and put it in the email and it got the highest open rate. Uh, some people didn't get the joke and they got mad at me, but I was whatever. Um, but the other day we made like $800,000 in one day. 

[00:01:47] And what we did was, um, this, this is like what I'm saying, like you, you convert kit creates the Lego pieces and, and it's fun for us to manipulate it, to create cool stuff. We, um, made an email, which is actually really hard to make an email look like a Gmail email. Um, It's like not intuitive. And you've got to like, kind of do weird stuff, but we made an email look like a Gmail email and we made it look exactly like I was having a conversation with the team and I sent them an email. 

[00:02:17] It said art, everyone are big black Friday sale. It's totally ready. Can you guys please make sure all the links work? Um, this is going to go live and it's actually like our biggest discount ever. I'm kind of think that we're giving too big of a discount, but, uh, whatever, I guess we'll see what happens. 

[00:02:33] Just, uh, let me know if it works and then we'll, and we'll hit send tomorrow morning and then they reply. And so that email was sent to a million plus people or something like. And we made it look like it was, it was an accident. You know, I accidentally sent it to our whole list as opposed to our company. 

[00:02:51] Right. And we got so much traction so much. There was tens of thousands of people on the website buying. And I got literally 10,000 emails and we send it from Sam at the hustle, my personal email. I got so many subscribers people saying, including my friends like Nathan, um, or, uh, Andrew Wilkinson, like smart techie, entrepreneurial friends. 

[00:03:13] They called me and they go, yeah, they go, dude, you just sent this out to your whole list. This was not meant for, this was you were not meaning to send this to me. And my reply was like, oh no, really? And, uh, it just crushed it. Yeah. It was like the biggest sales day ever. I think we, I think we stole that idea by the way. 

[00:03:32] I I'll give credit. I think it was Chubbies who I stole it or Brooklyn and we stole it from someone, but it was really effective. Yeah.  

[00:03:39] Nathan Barry: That's amazing. I just love the idea that someone receiving that email. That like, there's another email address of like entire list@:.com or whatever, they've you send to that? 

[00:03:49] It, like, I love that someone thinks that's a mistake that could act  

[00:03:53] Sam Parr: the people at HubSpot emailed me. This was during our due diligence and they're like, Hey, like they called me or texted me. They're like, I don't think this meant to go to everyone. And I was like, oh my God. I know it was a joke. It was a hit, it was a huge hit. 

[00:04:07] It was great. That's amazing. I'd  

[00:04:10] Nathan Barry: love to talk to just for a few minutes about monetization and, and any of that since you have this split between sponsored revenue and, and the paid revenue and all that, um, maybe share some of the numbers behind trends, at least at the highest level that you can. And then, um, I'm curious why, why you keep those two models. 

[00:04:30] Sam Parr: So, um, we were, we were probably going to do 20 million in revenue in 2021. Trends has over 15,000 subs. How many of those  

[00:04:41] Nathan Barry: were from, uh, black Friday in particular? I  

[00:04:44] Sam Parr: don't remember exactly. But that day or that like campaign drove, like he got a thousand, uh, probably 3000 customers. 

[00:04:54] That's amazing. Yeah, because 3000 times 300 is nine. Yeah. We, we drove. Yeah, we drove about $800,000 in sales that day. So whatever that divided by, I think it was 200. It was the price, whatever that divided by 200 is how many we got. So what's like,  

[00:05:11] Nathan Barry: what's the breakdown between, um, sponsorship revenue and, you know, the trends revenue as a percentage of  

[00:05:19] Sam Parr: the company. 

[00:05:20] By the time we sold advertising it was over a million a month in sales. Wow. Um, and trends was going to be close to eight figures this year. Um, but we counted our revenue a little bit odd. Like we want it to have like cash in the bank, like 20 to 22 million in 2021. 

[00:05:42] Okay. I think advertising could have been about 14, 15.  

[00:05:47] Nathan Barry: The majority is still at is advertising, but trends.  

[00:05:51] Sam Parr: Uh, kick-ass business. Yeah, because the renewal rates so freaking high. Yeah. Like our renewal it's really high. And I think w...