Happy Thursday!

One more from the Q4 Summit stage. Ezra Firestone has been selling online since 2005 (Afro wigs, Elvis wigs, mullet wigs, the whole catalog), and today he runs Boom, Overtone, Smart Marketer, and Zipify at nine figures a year.

His line that stuck with me: "I make more money on early Black Friday than I do actual Black Friday." The rest of the talk explains exactly how.

Vendor of the Week

I got an early look at some of Perplexity's new eCommerce capabilities they’re releasing next month, and the first thing I'd build with it is an advertorial.

When you ask AI to build an advertorial with nothing but a product URL, you're giving it very little to work with. It doesn't know which customer questions the page needs to answer or how your brand should sound.

With Perplexity Computer, you can keep your brand guide and customer research in one project and have it build the page. It chooses from 15+ models depending on the work, and connects to tools like Shopify so it can use your business data too.

That includes Perplexity's research engine. In Perplexity's own published evaluation, Perplexity's research system outperformed the OpenAI and Anthropic systems it tested on four of five benchmarks.

I'd use it for a product where customers need more explanation before they buy. Give it the reviews and the questions your support team keeps getting, and ask it to build an advertorial that addresses those objections in your brand's voice. It can remember your brand for the next task, so you don't have to start the brief from scratch.

Try perplexity today, and keep an eye out for the full launch.

This story is so dreamy

A UK beauty brand launched in the US using the exact ads it was already running at home. They did NOT lease a new warehouse. They did NOT get a new 3PL.

Three months later, revenue was up 104% and orders were up 80%.

Izzy Rosenzweig (CEO, Portless) and I are walking through how they pulled it off, and how to tell if your brand is ready.

Happening Oct 22 at 12pm ET.
I want my revenue to go up 104% →

Beat the Inbox to Black Friday

The average adult gets about 347 emails a day. Over BFCM, that number jumps to somewhere between 1,500 and 3,000. Ezra's answer is to stop fighting for attention on the same four days as everyone else.

Listen here: YouTube | Spotify | Apple

What I pulled from this one:

1. Buy attention in October at a nickel a view. Ezra puts 10% of his total marketing budget into video-view campaigns on Meta, TikTok, and YouTube. $4,500 reached about 800,000 people, and $10K got 25,000 people to watch four and a half minutes of a customer talking about his product. Those viewers become your warmest retargeting pool.

2. Build the early-bird list, then feed it. The week before his early sale, every ad, email, text, and organic post points to one opt-in page that offers first access before things sell out. About 10% of his audience signs up, and that 10% drives roughly half his sales. He started doing this in 2015, and now everyone copies it for good reason.

3. Send all traffic to one holiday page. Build one holiday interstitial page and point every channel at it. It needs a rotating hero for the current offer, a countdown timer, and bundles up top, laid out in two columns on mobile and three on desktop. Bundles alone drive about a sixth of his Q4 revenue, and anyone who hits the page without buying goes straight into retargeting.

4. Merchandise harder than you discount. The average Black Friday discount runs 35 to 50%, and Ezra caps his at 25%. He layers in spend thresholds, a gift with purchase on overstocked high-margin SKUs, and a rotating deal of the day. When he bought Overtone, AOV sat around $40, and nine months of better merchandising pushed it to $64.

That's all for today

Pull up your promo calendar right now. If the first time your customer hears from you this season is the Friday after Thanksgiving, you've handed that sale to everyone who showed up in October. Move one date up this week.

It's Thursday, and it's all downhill from here. Get some rest, drink some water, and I'll see you Sunday.

Nik