Shut up and Hype

Hello,

I think the hope for this newsletter is that it will eventually be a recap of my actual week every week. Right now, we’re just trying to catch up to the present day. So, one day, this will be about what I actually did that week. But today is not that day.

Today, I want to talk about hype. Not hype in the sense of whether it’s deserved or undeserved. I want to talk about how to generate hype. I’ll stay away from Super Bowl commercials or crafting the perfect ad—this is about the fundamentals.

Generating hype comes down to four steps: finding the right people, getting those people excited, making them an offer, and then giving them an opportunity to act on it.

Last week, I talked about Tactile Turn. Through content and ads, they found me and Nick (pen connoisseurs), posted hype photos of their new pirate pen, announced a launch date, and shipped it to us within a week. The perfect funnel.

The Hero’s Journal

Last week, we left the heroes searching for quality—in both high-quality journals and storytelling. This week, let’s jump back to December 2018. By then, we’d fleshed out enough of the journal to start trying to generate interest.

The problems we faced?

We had no idea who we were looking for—and worse, we didn’t even know who we should be looking for.

So we did what anyone would do: we asked our friend who knew the most about marketing for advice. Technically, Nick did, because I was in Arizona, and our friend was in Seattle (with Nick).

Sidebar: I’m going to share our first marketing plan. This is not me saying it’s the best possible plan. It was 2018—digital advertising was a different world then. If we tried this today, it would probably crash and burn.

Enter Zach. Zach is someone Nick and I both went to college with who worked in marketing. But the best thing about Zach? He loves an idea. Over what I imagine were root beers, Nick and Zach hashed out our first marketing plan: write three blogs. Each of us would write a blog about something we thought potential fans of The Hero’s Journal would enjoy.

The blog I wrote?

7 C.S. Lewis Quotes You’ve Never Heard Before (That Are My Secret Weapon as a Salesperson)

I’ll link it if you’re interested, but fair warning—the real assignment was to spend no more than 15 minutes writing something we thought our audience might like.

Why? We didn’t know who our target audience was yet. Spending hours crafting a masterpiece that missed the mark would cost us both ad spend and, more importantly, hours of our time.

With our blogs in tow and our ad budget burning a hole in our pocket, we started running ads.

To our amazement, people started signing up for our email list. I don’t have access to the exact numbers anymore, but the rough metrics were about $1/email (not bad).

This is when my favorite character in the whole story enters: Linda.

Nick and I created The Hero’s Journal to solve a problem we faced, so we naturally assumed the product would appeal to people like us—young professional males. We didn’t want it to appeal only to that group, but it’s just what we assumed.

Linda was one of the first people to comment on our Instagram posts. She read our blogs, backed our first Kickstarter, and became the matron saint of our audience. Since then, our audience has turned out to be about 70% women—something we never anticipated until we met Linda.

By the end of this phase, we had a lead magnet and a better idea of who we wanted to reach. This marked the end of the first chapter of The Hero’s Journal.

We also filmed a video during this time, which led to the discovery that I’m not great on camera. But overall, this was the conclusion of the early building phase. Before we raised a dollar, we learned about product design, marketing, hiring, and, most importantly, how to explore what this idea could become. The most important part of this era was that we were just brushing up against these ideas for the first time, over the years we have gotten better and better at them, but we wouldn't even known where to start if it weren't for this phase. 

Last thing, I will say when it comes to generating hype this release is a lot less exciting than releases that we did after this launch. BUT we aren’t there yet.

Atypical

Shut up and Hype. Honestly, I thought of this pun and decided to force it in here.

I believe constraints can make things better. Knowing what something can’t be helps define what it can be. Constraints on time, for example, can make the time you have more purposeful. But when you don’t identify the constraints, they can turn all the potential positives into downsides.

For our first Atypical merch launch, we had an aggressive timeline. We wanted to launch the brand a week after Trey got home from winning the Portuguese basketball championship, being in his best friend’s wedding in Italy, and moving into his new house. Naturally, there wasn’t much time to generate hype for the merch launch with everything else going on.

But we launched it anyway, and it went… okay. It didn’t break the internet, and there were probably a lot of shirts left on the table. But it was a learning experience. Here’s what we learned:

• A rough sizing reference for Trey’s audience

• A geographical sense of where his audience is located

• The importance of creating better stories around merch launches

Now, with another launch coming in early January, our planning has been much more purposeful and thoughtful. We’re stocking shirts based on previous demand in the U.S. and EU, skipping pre-orders now that we have sizes in stock, and diving deeper into the story we’re telling about the product.

More to come. If you want to follow along, here’s the new Atypical IG: https://www.instagram.com/live.atypicalll/

Reading

I’m still reading Trillion Dollar Coach. I don’t have much more to report on it yet, but it’s really good.

Coffee

I’m really excited about two coffee-related things this December:

1. Onyx Coffee Advent Calendar: This product is incredible. You get 2 oz of coffee every day for 24 days. The box is beautiful, Onyx makes great coffee, and I love coffee—so it’s a perfect fit. I will talk more about this later, once I actually start using the product. 

2. James Hoffman Decaf Project: James Hoffman is, in my opinion, the leading voice in coffee. When he speaks, we (I) listen. He’s conducting an experiment with raw specialty coffee beans from the same farm. These beans were sent to two different decaffeination facilities, then roasted by different roasters worldwide. I was able to pre-order some of the coffee from one of the roasters. The best part? I sent a set to my stepmom, who only drinks decaf, so we can try it together.

Summary

Happy Thanksgiving!

It’s interesting to reflect on what I was doing six years ago and how some of those methodologies still hold up while others have evolved. Back then, all I cared about was learning and growing, and I made huge strides because of it.

Right now, I feel like I’m entering another season of growth. It’s uncomfortable and not easy, but the results of these periods feel exponential. Here’s to the next wave.

Bye bye,
Kyle