Sadness at the SoHo house.

Jason Bender and I were invited to the SoHo house in Austin, TX, to meet with our good friend and former colleague, Sam Garst. Sam is the founder of the wildly popular laser hair removal device company called Nood.

We asked Sam two things when we met: 

1. Do you want to invest? and 

2. Do you want to run an AR campaign for your customers? 

He said no to both 🥴 and we were pretty disappointed 😔 (not in him, but that it wasn't as easy as we'd hoped).

We press on.

We brushed ourselves off and moved on. Some of the questions Sam asked continued to bubble up in my mind: "Does it work?" "How do I know people will do this?" "Is there any data?" etc. Frankly, we didn't know. Geeze, we were like a month old, no customers, no data. Chicken and egg problem.

Instead of giving up or pivoting on that first bit of friction, we decided to find answers. We built a "kiosk" that allowed people to choose a brand they wanted to do our experience for, enter their phone number and get a text with a link to get a reward in AR. We took it to malls and ran the experience in person with anyone who would try it. When they were done we manually handed them a gift card as their reward. This was working ok but it was insanely slow and there's really no better way to humble yourself than to ask a total stranger at a mall to try your app. The "get away from me weirdo" looks were flying.

Instead of giving up or pivoting on that first bit of friction, we decided to find answers.

First test creates an urge.

What that first test did was create a craving for us to get more data and faster. We moved the experience off of a native deployment to entirely web-based. We bought social media ads to drive customers into the experience. The ads simply said "try this experience get a reward." (quite bad). We bought gift cards and annotated all of the numbers and PINs so we could see when there was a redemption. The gift cards were aligned to a reasonably  structured offer amount based on typical AOVs for the businesses in the test (ie: gift card amount was essentially 5%, 10%, 15% off a typical order value).

We figured it'd take several days or weeks to get people to click an ad, enter a US based non-VOIP phone number (we were scared bots would drain us) and do the experience AND THEN complete a CSAT survey at the end. It was finished in 3 hours.

We deployed and observed the spend on the gift cards over the next 15 days. 38.7% of the recipients redeemed the reward within 7 days. The ad CTR was ~8.5% and as high as 12.9% for some brands. The survey data sentiment was extremely positive and compelling.

Breakthrough.

So, we casually mention to Sam what our test resulted in. "No f&%*$ way. Show me." We showed him. A week later (the day after Christmas) we are in agreement to run multiple campaigns with the brand and they are live within 2 weeks. We're so thankful Sam told us no. It really pushed us to try harder and learn something new. It also unlocked the realization for us that New Thing can enhance social media spend, which is a valuation changer.

Don't give up when someone tells you no, it's not a fit, I don't see my customers doing that, etc. A *business* no isn't always a no and each no is one step closer to yes.