Black Friday report

Time to round up the results from Black Friday 2023.

💵 Revenue highlights

• Launched 40% discount for Black Friday 2023 sale on my website on 14 Nov till 30 Nov, but quietly extended to 10 Dec.
• Sold 19 plugins at Black Friday discounts, earning $464.16.
  • 2 randomizer, 2 testimonial, 1 mobile navbar, 4 mega navbar, 7 listings (including 1 unlimited license), 1 floating button, 1 video button, 1 dark mode pro plugins.
• Also sold 8 plugins sold at normal prices during the same period, earning $166.71.
  • 2 mega navbar, 4 mobile navbar, 1 randomizer, 1 dark mode pro plugins.

TOTAL revenue = 27 (↑7) plugins sold, $630.87 (↑$277.97) revenue

• For comparison, the total revenue from Black Friday 2022 at 34% discount = 20 plugins sold, $352.90 revenue.
• So I roughly doubled the sales this year! But granted, the number got kind of skewed because someone purchased an unlimited license at $180 for a listings plugin. Could be luck, so I wouldn’t harp too much on the doubled sales aspect.

📣 Marketing highlights

• Ran 40% Black Friday discount on 3 platforms – Payhip, Lemon Squeezy, Gumroad, Carrd itself.
• Following last years marketing hack, I also offered 50% discount for folks who RT my BF launch tweet.
• This year, tried something more shameless – pinned the Black Friday sale tweet to Twitter profile page, to milk it.
• With everyone launching BF directories, I got inspired and collected all the Black Friday deals and discounts that’s related to Carrd, picked Template #215, designed, and launched Blacck Friday, all in 2h! It ended up being a smart move because I was able to more ‘legitimately’ market my own BF sales by offering a valuable tool. This was something new that I’ve never done before, and I’m most proud of this.
• Sent a newsletter to all 102 Substack subscribers about Blacck Friday directory.
• Launched Blacck Friday Carrd directory on 33 channels.
• Launched my BF sale in a total 48 channels.
• To milk more earnings, I added referral/affiliate links to Blacck Friday site and offered both normal links and affiliate links to give users a choice.
• I always aim to try something new w.r.t. marketing every BF. Last year in 2022, I created my very first Carrd plugins bundle for launch on Black Friday - the Startup bundle ($65, BF price $39). This year, it’s a bundle too but with another Carrd maker Gregor from Zite Design. We launched Carrd Mega Pack bundle deal - 50% off for 3 Carrd templates and 3 plugins at $75, with lots of freebies thrown in. As part of this partnership, we experimented with using Zylvie.com, a ecommerce platform similar to Gumroad, but with a great new trustless, escrow-like feature to collaborations. Partners could collaborate on a product/bundle, and backend the platform would split the profits and send to our respective Stripe accounts without any manual routing. But alas, we didn’t sell anything…
• I also continued my monthly plugin launch streak and launched the timeline diagram Carrd plugin template on 21 channels. It’s my 11th consecutive monthly plugin launch, and by December this month after launching my next plugin, I would have completed my 12 plugins in 12 months campaign!
• Also upgraded my Carrd plan from Pro Plus 100 to Pro Plus 250 for $209 (after 40% Carrd discount) - now I can build even more sites! All 250 of them!

🏁 Conclusion

As always, going all in on hyper-commercialism and getting into marketing overdrive for Black Friday was fun. It’s super intense but also a great learning opportunity to try new marketing experiments. I find that with every BF, I learn new tricks, and grow thicker skin.

It’s a shame the bundle deal partnership with Zite didn’t work out. We should have posted the bundle on our own respective sites for more views. Maybe the bundle would have sold more if it was scoped smaller and cheaper, like 1 template and 1 plugin.

Overall I’m happy that the BF sales doubled, but this is also in the backdrop of an overall decrease in consumption, probably due to the recession. Maybe the sales could be even higher, if not for recession, who knows…

Onwards!