First 20 days of using @sideshift_app for a client
Biggest lesson: don't be a bottleneck for the creators
If your creators need your approval for everything, you'll overthink and slow down your progress
UGC is evolution (variation and selection)
Let evolution happen organically
Creating viral TikTok videos requires you to maintain a balance between being smart and dumb
Very Smart in the overall strategy and dumbing it down in the specifics
Once you find an angle that you think will hit, you need to dumb it down to its simplest form for maximum reach
Creating viral TikTok videos requires you to maintain a balance between being smart and dumb
Very Smart in the overall strategy and dumbing it down in the specifics
Once you find an angle that you think will hit, you need to dumb it down to its simplest form for maximum reach
When you do UGC right
First week of posting with just 4 creators from @sideshift_app
Any B2C AI app not using TikTok organic as their primary distribution channel is playing the game on hard mode
The most important thing in crypto is momentum.
Never trade against it. All your analyses will fail and you’ll get wrecked.
Or have figured out that 90% of crypto participants rotate out each cycle.
So, you can scam on every meta because 90% won’t know you scammed on the previous meta.
OVERALL STRATEGY
Offer a ‘crazy discount’ on a complementary item (gourmet cheese) to bring people to your wine store.
He’s using gourmet cheese as a loss leader to acquire customers.
No one’s gonna drive to the store just to get the discounted cheese and drive back. (Maybe some)
Most of them will buy a bottle of wine at least, once they see their massive collection.
Plus, you’re getting discovery from many people who didn’t consider going to the store.
You might ask - why not offer a discounted wine if that’s their core product?
They don’t want to set a precedent that this is where you only go to get super-discounted wine.
Also, if you’re giving away wine as a loss leader, they will just buy that and walk away.
They leave the wine sale still on the table by ‘giving away' gourmet cheese.
DETAILED BREAKDOWN OF AD
‘My dad and I have been fighting’
This is the hook. And what a strong hook.
Who doesn’t fight with their dad?
It’s relatable and makes you nosey to discover what they’ve been fighting over.
It does a great job of stopping the viewer than a hook like - ‘Here’s a great deal on gourmet cheese.’
It disarms the viewer from being constantly sold to. He/She is no longer being sold. They’re told a story.
‘One of the greatest deals in cheese history…this Saturday only.’
He’s set up an expectation of a great offer for the viewer.
The viewer is now alert because of the scarcity of the offer. (this Saturday only)
‘Fresh. Fresh.’
Dispels the objection that they might be selling old cheese close to expiry.
(As a side note, this is the job of a good piece of advertising - to work as a great salesman fighting objections from the customer.)
‘Normally $15.99/lb in our store’ with video proof of higher prices on e-stores
Make it apparent how good the offer is.
Make the customers know exactly how much they’ll save by availing of this offer.
‘The reason we’re doing this is simple…’
People easily accept a sale or discount when a reason is provided. Otherwise, they’re skeptical of the quality.
Same reason why clearance sales work much better than regular sales.
When a store has a sign that says ‘70% off’, your first reaction is to think that the product quality must be so bad or maybe there’s a catch.
But if it says ‘70% off - clearance sale’, you can now justify that discount in your head.
‘The single best gourmet cheese deal in the history of NJ…the world.’
Re-iterate how great the deal is.
You’d be stupid to not take advantage of it.
‘Screenshot the QR code at the end of this’
Two reasons for this: (one technical, one psychological)
👉 Each pause on the video to take a screenshot counts as an engagement/click.
The algo will give better reach to an ad if it has more clicks.
👉 Once he’s got you to screenshot the QR code, he’s all but confirmed that you’re coming.
You’ve already ‘committed’ or ‘said yes’ by taking the screenshot.
If I’ve already taken a screenshot of the QR code, I might as well use it.
That’s what a successful local marketing ad looks like.
It might appear simple but that’s the artistry of a great marketer - they can hide their craft in plain sight.
Anyone who owns a local store can copy this exact strategy (overall and detailed) and run their ad in a 10-mile radius.
It can be tailored to your store with some craft.
But I don’t work with my father. How can I use the hook?
My boss and I have been fighting. Everyone has a boss.
Fruit
P.S. Whose ads do you like the most? Send them my way so that I can figure out why they work.
Fruit 💜 retweeted
What Makes You A Good Trader?
Most people think it’s market analysis.
If I just study the market hard enough, I’ll print money.
It’s not. It’s regret minimization.
I know most of you don’t agree with me, mainly because of our training.
We step into school at the age of 3-4 and are trained for the next 20 years of our education that if you study something more, you’ll get better at it. 🧑🎓
The more knowledge you extract about a subject, the better you’ll be at it.
We enter the market, any market, and try to apply this hard-wired principle.
We read books on fundamental analysis, technical analysis, market sentiment, etc…
We think we’re now prepared for the market; we’ve done our homework.
We place a few trades and lose money. 💸
Now, our default setting to a setback is to conclude that we didn’t study enough.
So, we do more market analysis to ‘get better’.
We’re back now with more confidence because we know about ‘head and shoulders’ and ‘falling wedge’ patterns.
💥 Boom. Punch in the face. You lose more.
You continue to stay in this cycle of more market analysis and more losses.
And then one day you say this market is manipulated and leave it. (Or you end up at zero)
This is the most common story of a ‘smart’ person entering a market.
Why? Because their smartness is useless in a speculative market.
In fact, I’d argue, it harms them.
See… what do we regard as being smart?
Someone who can come up with the right answer more often and quicker.
At least, that’s how we’re trained to be smart for our entire life.
And in the process of finding the right answers your whole life, you’ve trained yourself to believe that the right answer exists in the first place.
You’ve trained yourself to look at everything as binary - right and wrong.
When you got 90% on a test, you knew it implicity said that you were right 90% of the time and if you were just 10% more right, you’d be perfect.
This kind of relentless training for years is disastrous in the market.
Because the market is the most non-binary thing in the world.
There is no right or wrong in the market. But you’ve trained yourself for years to look for the right and the wrong.
What does it look like in practice?
Your search for a top and a bottom. Your desire to choose the right answer in the market.
If I can buy something for $10 and then sell it at $100, with it falling to $30 in the next few months, then I’ve found the right answer.
I’ve got the 100% on the test. ✅
No one gets 100% in the market. And even if you do once, it was because of luck, not smartness.
And that is the secret to becoming a successful trader - to train yourself to simply make money, and not to be right.
In your quest to be right, you’d end up making horrendous decisions.
Let me illustrate this with an example:
On April 8th this year, Tut alerted me to a memecoin (OldWif) trading at 200k market cap and rising.
I thought it had momentum and took a position.
I sold half of my position at 440k market cap.
Another 25% at 900k market cap and exited completely at 450k on the round trip down.
It went to ‘near-zero’ soon.
When I write it down like this, it looks very simple.
But not when you’re in the trade. When you’re in the trade you have to act against your decades-old training and emotional response.
When I sold half of my position at 440k, I ‘firmly’ believed that it would go higher.
And it did. It doubled in an hour.
Now, this is the most crucial part - how you train yourself to react now is the entire game.
If you still believe that the ‘right answer’ was to hold the entire position and sell at the top (900k), then there’s no chance you succeed in the market in the long run.
You have to (as I had to) actively fight against regret. To train yourself to minimize regret. To not regret selling lower.
Because ‘lower’ was only apparent after the fact. When it was at 440k, both ‘lower’ and ‘higher’ had equal probabilities.
It is just this. Training yourself daily to stop intrinsically believing in a right answer.
Training yourself to not regret ‘leaving money on the table’.
Training yourself that making money is the only thing you’re here to do.
Not to prove to the market how smart you are. Not to be right.
Let’s imagine if the trade had gone a different way.
Let’s say that after I sold half of my position at 440k, it started tanking.
Should I regret not selling my entire bag at the ‘top’?
Obviously not. Because the top is only apparent after the fact.
Both fear and greed arise because we first believe in right and wrong in the market.
If I believe BTC will go to 250k in the next 12 months, then I’ve assumed that to be the right answer.
I’m not saying don’t speculate. Just don’t act completely out of this belief.
Because when BTC goes to 150k, you’d be sitting on a lot of profit but you won’t book any because you think the right answer is 250k.
Similarly, if BTC starts falling from here and ends up at 50k in 2 months, you won’t cut your losses short because you believe that the market is wrong.
In both cases, selling a portion of your position is important. But it’s more important to not regret when the ‘market proves you right’ after you’ve sold.
If you sell half your position at 150k and BTC goes to 250k, don’t regret selling at 150k. That’s the game.
Those who train regret out of their system have a chance of surviving and thriving in any market for the long haul.
Those who don’t will eventually regret entering the market in the first place.
Fruit
P.S. Who do you think is the best trader in the Crypto market?
What Makes You A Good Trader?
Most people think it’s market analysis.
If I just study the market hard enough, I’ll print money.
It’s not. It’s regret minimization.
I know most of you don’t agree with me, mainly because of our training.
We step into school at the age of 3-4 and are trained for the next 20 years of our education that if you study something more, you’ll get better at it. 🧑🎓
The more knowledge you extract about a subject, the better you’ll be at it.
We enter the market, any market, and try to apply this hard-wired principle.
We read books on fundamental analysis, technical analysis, market sentiment, etc…
We think we’re now prepared for the market; we’ve done our homework.
We place a few trades and lose money. 💸
Now, our default setting to a setback is to conclude that we didn’t study enough.
So, we do more market analysis to ‘get better’.
We’re back now with more confidence because we know about ‘head and shoulders’ and ‘falling wedge’ patterns.
💥 Boom. Punch in the face. You lose more.
You continue to stay in this cycle of more market analysis and more losses.
And then one day you say this market is manipulated and leave it. (Or you end up at zero)
This is the most common story of a ‘smart’ person entering a market.
Why? Because their smartness is useless in a speculative market.
In fact, I’d argue, it harms them.
See… what do we regard as being smart?
Someone who can come up with the right answer more often and quicker.
At least, that’s how we’re trained to be smart for our entire life.
And in the process of finding the right answers your whole life, you’ve trained yourself to believe that the right answer exists in the first place.
You’ve trained yourself to look at everything as binary - right and wrong.
When you got 90% on a test, you knew it implicity said that you were right 90% of the time and if you were just 10% more right, you’d be perfect.
This kind of relentless training for years is disastrous in the market.
Because the market is the most non-binary thing in the world.
There is no right or wrong in the market. But you’ve trained yourself for years to look for the right and the wrong.
What does it look like in practice?
Your search for a top and a bottom. Your desire to choose the right answer in the market.
If I can buy something for $10 and then sell it at $100, with it falling to $30 in the next few months, then I’ve found the right answer.
I’ve got the 100% on the test. ✅
No one gets 100% in the market. And even if you do once, it was because of luck, not smartness.
And that is the secret to becoming a successful trader - to train yourself to simply make money, and not to be right.
In your quest to be right, you’d end up making horrendous decisions.
Let me illustrate this with an example:
On April 8th this year, Tut alerted me to a memecoin (OldWif) trading at 200k market cap and rising.
I thought it had momentum and took a position.
I sold half of my position at 440k market cap.
Another 25% at 900k market cap and exited completely at 450k on the round trip down.
It went to ‘near-zero’ soon.
When I write it down like this, it looks very simple.
But not when you’re in the trade. When you’re in the trade you have to act against your decades-old training and emotional response.
When I sold half of my position at 440k, I ‘firmly’ believed that it would go higher.
And it did. It doubled in an hour.
Now, this is the most crucial part - how you train yourself to react now is the entire game.
If you still believe that the ‘right answer’ was to hold the entire position and sell at the top (900k), then there’s no chance you succeed in the market in the long run.
You have to (as I had to) actively fight against regret. To train yourself to minimize regret. To not regret selling lower.
Because ‘lower’ was only apparent after the fact. When it was at 440k, both ‘lower’ and ‘higher’ had equal probabilities.
It is just this. Training yourself daily to stop intrinsically believing in a right answer.
Training yourself to not regret ‘leaving money on the table’.
Training yourself that making money is the only thing you’re here to do.
Not to prove to the market how smart you are. Not to be right.
Let’s imagine if the trade had gone a different way.
Let’s say that after I sold half of my position at 440k, it started tanking.
Should I regret not selling my entire bag at the ‘top’?
Obviously not. Because the top is only apparent after the fact.
Both fear and greed arise because we first believe in right and wrong in the market.
If I believe BTC will go to 250k in the next 12 months, then I’ve assumed that to be the right answer.
I’m not saying don’t speculate. Just don’t act completely out of this belief.
Because when BTC goes to 150k, you’d be sitting on a lot of profit but you won’t book any because you think the right answer is 250k.
Similarly, if BTC starts falling from here and ends up at 50k in 2 months, you won’t cut your losses short because you believe that the market is wrong.
In both cases, selling a portion of your position is important. But it’s more important to not regret when the ‘market proves you right’ after you’ve sold.
If you sell half your position at 150k and BTC goes to 250k, don’t regret selling at 150k. That’s the game.
Those who train regret out of their system have a chance of surviving and thriving in any market for the long haul.
Those who don’t will eventually regret entering the market in the first place.
Fruit
P.S. Who do you think is the best trader in the Crypto market?
🚨How I Stole From Gary Vee?🚨
My favourite Gary Vee content series is 4Ds.
If you’re not familiar with it, here’s a quick summary⬇️
7-10 SMB owners visit Vaynermedia HQ for a day to learn how to market the Vayner Way.
They get a one hour sitdown with Gary in which he answers specific questions pertaining to their business.
You can see Gary’s creative side in full-effect in each video as he has to come up with creative solutions on the spot.
In one such episode, the owner of a car dealership asked him how he could better market his business to the locals.
I was expecting a standard response - create local content or run ads in a 10 mile radius.
Instead he asked the owner if had a few cars that weren’t worth much and that he couldn't sell. 🚗
He then suggested him to go to the local high school and run a contest with that car as the first prize. 🏆
The competition is simple - the high school student who creates the best marketing creative for the dealership in the area wins.
With a single competition and a big enough prize (a car), he’d get a bunch of students marketing for him organically.
His target audience are their parents and that’s a literal ‘closer to home’ way of reaching them.
I don’t know if he ever implemented it but when I heard it, I just muttered ‘Genius’!
I forgot about it for years and didn’t revisit the idea until last year. 🤔
Someone who owns a bunch of student housing units in Delhi came to me with a certain marketing budget.
He wanted me to devise a strategy for him to reach students of 3 colleges.
💡 I started smiling uncontrollably; I knew this is the perfect time to steal.
I told him I have a way to reach them for 1/10th his budget.
All he had to do was START A CONTEST IN THOSE COLLEGES.
This was a better fit for Gary’s idea than the car dealership because, in this case, the target audience and the marketers was the same.
We added a stipulation that we’d have the right to use all creatives produced by them in the competition forever.
You set a big enough prize for 18-21 year olds to be creative, and just watch what happens.
Since all college students followed each other, we reached every single student organically.
And not in a salesy way of ‘buy my shit’ but in dozens of creative ways via their classmates. 🧲
He ended up renting out every last unit. 💥
Why did I add the stipulation for creative use?
This year we’re running the top 3 videos from last year as ads in a one mile radius block around each college.
He’s almost at full capacity for next fall.
The best thing to steal is ideas because they don’t have a limited upside.
And if you want to steal, steal from the best.
Fruit
P.S. Go buy Gary’s latest book ‘Day Trading Attention’. It has hundreds of ideas that you can steal.
Also, what’s an idea that you’ve stolen from someone?
Fruit 💜 retweeted
Netflix paid $650,000 for this promotion.🤯
It might appear to be a lot of money for a ‘digital billboard.’
But this is the best deal in advertising at the moment. Why?
Because it is remarkable. And, in the age of social media, everything remarkable is ‘remarked on’ at scale.
On average, 600,000 people visit Las Vegas in a week.
Even if we assume they all see this, spending so much to reach that many people makes no sense.
In contrast, you’ll need to spend $882,000 to run a 30-second spot during Sunday Night Football.
The potential reach promised on such a spot is 10-20 mn but we all know that number is quite inflated.
We all mute the TV and browse X during a commercial break.
So, actual consumption of the spot would be close to 3-4 mn.
That’s still much bigger than 600,000. So, how is the Sphere such a good deal?
Because it’s new, unique and share-worthy.
Almost everyone who sees this physically will pull out their phone and share it on their socials. 📱
Not because they want to promote stranger things. Oh…we’re not that generous.
We do it because it’s a highlight and isn’t that the point of IG now - curate highlights from our life and display them to everyone? 🤷
So, every time we share a ‘cool’ ad on the sphere, we’re trying to increase our ‘coolness’ among our followers.
Very few things in the world have this built-in shareability. And it doesn’t last forever.
The Sphere won’t be cool forever. But it is now. And ‘coolness’ is always underpriced.
In fact, it’s so cool that people who just see it on the internet share it.
These include big content-producing accounts on X and other platforms.
And why do they do it? Because they know it’ll get views.
Their livelihood is ‘impressions’ and the Sphere is an ‘impression/view’ factory.
The Sphere is the only thing in the world that lies in this rare territory of being cool and magnetic.
What’s the end result?
A billboard that should get a few hundred thousand views ends up getting 10s of millions of organic views.
Moreover, all views are not the same. ‘Unforgettable views’ leave a bigger imprint than a TV commercial playing in the background.
If done properly, a big brand can make something so remarkable that just the memes of it end up getting 10s of millions of views.
Every major brand that doesn’t have a small team working on its Sphere strategy is missing out on the biggest opportunity in large-scale advertising.
They’re missing out on Super Bowl adjacent reach/views at 1/10th the cost.
And the smartest ones aren’t just creating for the Sphere but for the viral clips of their commercial on the Sphere.
Fruit 🙏
P.S. Which brand/company would you love to see advertise on the Sphere? What will look the coolest?
