Welcome to the 19 new subscribers who joined this week!
Each week I help founders & marketers spark their creativity by sharing a new product idea & how I'd launch it.
Normally I write about products that are still ideas, but today's product - Fast - is already live. However, they've tapped less than 1% of their potential, so I hope someone at Fast is reading & can benefit :)
First, a few updates from me.
I'm at the half-way point of my Ship 30 for 30 challenge where I write 30 short essays in 30 days. Here are my favorites from last week:
- Why I can't remember where I discovered my favorite creators
- How to conquer jealousy, inspired by Naval's podcast with Shane Parrish
- Live your weekdays like weekends
Continuing the theme of "anti-fragility" from last week, my top 2 Internet finds of the week:
A 2016 Commencement Address by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, the author of "Anti-Fragile". My two favorite quotes:
- “Success requires absence of fragility. I’ve seen billionaires terrified of journalists, wealthy people who felt crushed because their brother in law got very rich, academics with Nobel who were scared of comments on the web…For almost all people I’ve met, external success came with increased fragility and a heightened state of insecurity.”
- “I have a single definition of success: you look in the mirror every evening, and wonder if you disappoint the person you were at 18, right before the age when people start getting corrupted by life...If you do not feel ashamed, you are successful.”
An 11-year-old essay from Paul Graham (Founder of Y Combinator) on how keeping your identity small gives you better ideas & better discussions about ideas. My interpretation: it makes you more anti-fragile.
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Have you referred any of your friends to join the Looseleaf Cannon yet? Normally, you get a newsletter shout-out for 5 referrals, but this week only, I'll shout-out anyone who refers 3 friends!
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Now, onto this week's product: Fast - the world's fastest check-out.
Online check-out is messy. Unless you use Amazon for all your purchases, online shopping means filling out dozens of fields. It's no surprise that an estimated 80% of carts get abandoned. Merchants would gladly pay for a solution that helps them better capture revenue.
Remember Amazon's "Buy Now With 1-Click"? Fast is bringing that to the entire Internet.
For customers, Fast makes check-out fast. I recently bought 3 ugly Christmas hoodies with Fast. One click, & order confirmed. Normally, I'd still be in my cart, but Fast has already confirmed the order, & gives me 5 min to make changes.
For merchants, Fast increases revenue. Check-out friction makes customers choose Wal-Mart over online, or decide not to purchase at all.
Fast has already seen great results on dozens of stores. One store, Shark Wheel, saw their conversion rate skyrocket 157% & their average order value 2.5x. 98% of all their purchases now come directly from product pages. The Fast buttons has made Shark Wheel's cart obsolete.
Now, let's talk about marketing & scaling Fast:
Fast has 2 customers: store owners & store shoppers. It'd be tempting to focus on landing stores first to start getting revenue. But if shoppers haven't heard of Fast, they risk performing mediocrely for stores or not landing any stores at all.
Instead, focus on increasing awareness among shoppers. This grows their buyer base, but also their store base, since many buyers are store owners themselves, or know store owners. As hype spreads, Fast will benefit from store owner FOMO. More total eyeballs now equals more store owners in the long-term.
Fast already seems to have latched on to shopper-first path, particularly via Matthew Kobach's lead on organic social media. With 25k combined followers on Instagram & Twitter, here's what Fast is doing right:
- They've leveraged puns on Fast to build name recognition. During launch, they crowned Fastronauts by giving fans Fast helmets in their profile pictures, then launched & sold out of Fast hoodies, before recently dropping Fastronaughty & Falalalalast ugly Christmas hoodies. The more you see their name, the more likely you are to remember Fast come check-out.
- They released their hoodies in limited drops & sold out. This got people to turn Twitter notifications on for them, which equals more engagement & hype. Even if you don't care about Fast, you'd love an ugly Christmas hoodie for a dirt-cheap $5. Even if Fast is losing $10 per hoodie, they're getting more IRL & online impressions from people wearing them to gym or sharing pics on social media than they'd get from other types of advertising.
- They're reaching new eyeballs across platforms. For the ugly Christmas hoodies, they released some codes on Instagram, & others on Twitter, a genius strategy for getting people to follow them on other platforms.
- Fast uses individual brands to show the faces behind their product, while simultaneously reaching more eyeballs. Employees like @domm, @abarrallen, @mkobach, & @KyleTibbitts have a combined reach of over 150k on Twitter alone.
- Even though their main focus is - & should be - on eyeballs broadly, they've also been successful at getting in front of store owners on Twitter. By representing brands with emojis & giving merch to the person that tags the most matching brands, they got their fans to do outbound marketing for them. A bonus is that brands learn about Fast from their own loyal customers, i.e. people whose voice carries weight.
Fast has a powerful flywheel opportunity. The more people that use Fast, the more value stores get from Fast, and the more stores with Fast, the more people that will discover & use Fast.
Currently, stores add Fast because of its fast check-out, rather than customers asking for it. But once they reach an inflection point of customers requesting Fast, Fast will see a tidal wave of stores joining. To start the flywheel & build a sustainable moat, Fast needs to reach that inflection point as quickly as possible.
And I think they're doing exactly what's necessary to get there: creating lifelong fans via an amazing organic social media strategy & carrying that hype over IRL. The final piece of the puzzle is to make it super easy for stores to self-onboard with Fast.
They're starting with one-click payment, but their long-term vision is bolder. Imagine a combo password & payment method manager that would work across devices & browsers. Chrome saves my passwords & credit cards on my laptop, but it doesn't sync to Safari on my phone. With Fast, once you've logged in on a device, you can instantly shop or log-in on any Fast website, even if it's one you've never visited. Oh & Fast wants to disrupt all the other forms we fill out next.
That's all for this issue! As always, respond with the biggest challenge you're facing & I'll try to help if I can.
Cheers,
Luke
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