"How Growth Pilots Helped Glowforge Raise $28 Million In Pre-Orders In 30 Days"

Good one! Reminds me of a book by Edwin Newman (“Strictly Speaking: Will America Be The Death Of English?”). It was written in 1974 but still rings true; he devoted a chapter to exactly this.

I just checked my inbox - we first called them two weeks into the campaign.

No, Will Smith introduced me to Norman. :slight_smile: I met Will playing http://www.keeptalkinggame.com/ at a conference in Chicago.

So the short version of my perspective is that we planned to do zero ads and focus our energy on the referral program, posting updates, answering questions, etc. A friend introduced me to Soso in the middle of the campaign. Having run just enough Google Adwords for Robot Turtles to know that I wasn’t good enough to spend time on it, I gave Soso $1k and asked him to see what he could do. He spent it and it worked pretty well so we upped the budget. By the time he hit his stride his spend was capped by Facebook & Google (they don’t let new advertisers spend that much).

His work was very good; it’s hard to run campaigns cost-effectively. All in all Facebook ads were responsible for somewhere around 10% of our sales, if I remember correctly.

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You captured my purchase from a friend sharing the video on Facebook.

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Yes - people sharing on their own was 10x as big as paid ads.

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My contact came in the form of a G+ post from a person who must have purchased right after you opened the campaign, I purchased later the same (1st) day.

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I purchased after seeing the ad on YouTube in November; I’d never heard of Glowforge before then (wish I had).

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A couple of us made our own Facebook pages with videos and coupon codes and a few bucks in paid ads. It made getting referrals easy. I highly doubt you’ll see any other products ever get a marketing push like that: customers paying to take out ads. Haha

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I seen glowforge on TESTED and ordered that weekend

According to recent rants on the Facebook Laser Engraver group… the ads on Facebook are responsible for 90% of the vitriol from them.

Not like that has cost you many sales though.

10% of total sales in the last two weeks is pretty impressive work.

You would be surprised. People who know how to do that effectively often do so for any recruitment/referral bonus. I have seen people do it in mobile device freemium games, when the “big prize” for 50 referrals is something clearly not end-game valuable.

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It happens so often that it’s the reason we made the campaign available to owners only (so it wouldn’t attract people looking to make a buck) & capped the referral bonus at $1000 (half the price of a basic) - so even the worst spammers would quickly run out of reward.

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