Coinbase

Bejako goes back to school for a push

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I went back to school today. For the first time in 10+ years, I sat in class, behind a desk. With a bunch of other little idiots next to me, I listened to a smiling teacher as he pointed to his chest and said, “Me llamo Rubén. ¿Cómo te llamas?”

This went on for the better part of four hours, from 9am until 1pm.

For four precious hours, we went through the elementary particles of the Spanish language, presented at a snail’s pace. For four hours, I practiced saying the same damn things a million times to various Italians, Germans, and Greeks who were in the class with me.

You might have your doubts that this is an effective way to learn a language.

I have reasons to believe it will be useful.

And in any case, I’ll only do it for this week. This time investment (and during my most productive hours!) is not sustainable for longer than that. But I figure it’s worth doing at the start to kick things off.

And this brings me to one of the most valuable ideas that has shaped how I have run my career.

For example, I got going as a freelance copywriter by charging $5 for a 7-part email sequence.

Do you think that’s a shockingly low rate? Do you think I allowed myself to be exploited?

Who cares. I did it for a week and then I increased my rates a bit. And then a week later, I increased my rates a bit more. And then a bit more still.

Point being, it’s easy to fix and improve things once you get them going. But in most cases, the getting going is the hard part.

This isn’t my idea or observation, by the way. This is something I was fortunate enough to read a long time ago in an essay by somebody very rich, very successful, and very smart. Here’s what he said:

A lot of would-be founders believe that startups either take off or don’t. You build something, make it available, and if you’ve made a better mousetrap, people beat a path to your door as promised. Or they don’t, in which case the market must not exist.

Actually startups take off because the founders make them take off. There may be a handful that just grew by themselves, but usually it takes some sort of push to get them going. A good metaphor would be the cranks that car engines had before they got electric starters. Once the engine was going, it would keep going, but there was a separate and laborious process to get it going.

The guy who wrote that is Paul Graham, a multimillionaire computer programmer who started the early-stage investing firm Y Combinator (Airbnb, Coinbase, Stripe).

Graham said that one of the most common pieces of advice they give Y Combinator is to Do Things That Don’t Scale.

Now at this point, I had a valuable caution to give my newsletter readers about Graham’s bit of advice. But I’m not including that on this public archived post. I often reserve the most valuable and important ideas for my newsletter readers. I have to reward them somehow. If you’d like to join them, and start getting my daily emails, you can sign up here.

Update on that Super Bowl ad

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Last week, I wrote about the “best” ad from Super Bowl 2022. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, here’s a bit of recap:

The whole ad was a QR code bouncing around for a minute, like an old-school Windows screensaver.

If you scanned the QR code, it took you to a page to sign up for a Coinbase account.

The ad drew a lot of response. So much so that the landing page crashed.

But in spite of the big response, it’s unlikely that Coinbase recouped the $13 million it cost to run this ad.

So that’s the recap. And now for the update:

A few days ago, Brian Armstrong, CEO of Coinbase, wrote a Twitter thread talking about the making of this ad.

It was mostly about how cool and creative his team is, and how he likes to pat them on the back, and how he also enjoys having his own back patted.

But the thing that really caught my eye was— “and of course the production budget was tiny, less then $100k.”

Hmm. A tiny budget, less than $100k, for a QR code bouncing around on the screen… something you could get done for on Fiverr for $30?

This brought to mind something copywriter Dan Ferrari wrote a few years ago. Dan was writing about big changes in the DR world. This bit has stuck with me ever since:

Because I’m not sure you’re aware, but there’s still a HUGE world outside of the digital players I’ve been talking about so far.

They’re now entering our world as well.

Specifically, I mean big direct response TV spenders and “brand” companies.

Why? Because their channels are drying up. Everything is moving digital.

I recently met with one of the top execs for a HUGE direct response TV company.

They make even the $200M per year financial publishers look small.

Guess what they’re doing?

Moving online. TV doesn’t work nearly as well for them anymore.

So watch as companies with products and businesses that don’t really fall into our little world of internet direct response start to require the services of people that know how traffic, copy, and funnels work online, at mega-scale.

Just to be clear:

I’m not suggesting you try to sell direct marketing to clueless brand businesses. If their idea of good advertising is a glossy page in a magazine, showing a man in a rowboat, in the middle of a lake, with the company logo hiding somewhere in the corner… well, you won’t change their mind.

But like Dan says, we might be in the early days of a giant opportunity.

So if you are enterprising, now might be the time. The time to take standard DM insights… and sell them to a virgin direct advertisers like Coinbase. The production budget? A mere trifle — $100k or $300k or maybe just a mil.

But perhaps you don’t know enough about how traffic, copy, and funnels work online.

In that case, sign up to my email newsletter — because these are all things I write about regularly.

Super Bowl 2022 wager update

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I was finishing up my workday today when an email landed in my inbox and made my heart freeze. The subject line read:

“The Best, Funniest, and Cringiest Crypto Ads from the Super Bowl”

“Oh God,” I gasped, “the Super Bowl… I completely forgot!”

Super Bowl 2022 is kind of a big deal in my life. Because last week, I made a wager in this very newsletter.

The bet was for readers to write in and pick this year’s Super Bowl winner.

The prize was a 50% discount on my upcoming Copy Zone offer.

The outcome was being proven wrong twice:

1. Having a stake on the outcome of the game didn’t make me watch the Super Bowl (or even remember that it’s on)

2. People on my list, and therefore me as well, overwhelmingly expected the Bengals to win

It turns out the Rams won, though it was close and tense until the end. (I watched the highlights just now.)

Anyways, if you bet on the Rams, I will send you a separate email with a 50% discount code. You can use this code, if you want to, during the Copy Zone launch later this month.

If you didn’t bet on the Rams, I would like to send you home with a consolation prize. Something in the form of a direct response idea you can profit from.

But unfortunately, since I’m writing this email late in the day… much later than I normally do… I don’t have my usual direct response idea primped and ready.

Fortunately, “the best crypto ad” from this Super Bowl, at least according to that email I got, is actually a direct response ad.

Shocking, right?

Apparently, the response to this ad was so high that the website hosting the landing page crashed.

Even so, according to some back of the envelope math, it’s unlikely the ad recouped the $13M cost of the 1-minute Super Bowl slot.

So can you learn anything from this ad? Perhaps how not to do DR advertising. In case you’re curious:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1zLsUhOCqyU