Brainstorming New Offers

0:00Welcome to Business Casual. My name is Matt Javanese. I've never done an intro like this before, so I figured I'd try it. And something I haven't done in a while is do a brainstorming episode, an episode where I try to come up with ideas in real time. So before I do, let me give you a little bit of a context of what I'm trying to do and I'll accompany it with a little bit of a story. So staff came to me the other day and she said, I'm trying to come up with an email for the end of January, some sort of email promo to send to our email list. Now for those of you who don't know, I run a site called Sumi University. We teach people how to take care of their pools and hot tubs. And so we were trying to come up with some sort of offer that would have some sort of sale, urgency, scarcity, tactic attached to it. Now here's what happened. In 2025, we made a

1:00decision early in the year that we would stop doing discounts on our products. And this was an interesting decision because it sounds good, but it makes things really hard. You know, you're like, oh, well, good. You're not doing discounts, meaning you're going to make the maximum amount of money on every single product that you sell. And you're not wavering on your price. You're not you're not training your audience to wait for a sale, etc. And the hard part is is that it forces you to come up with interesting offers outside of just the simplest one, which is, hey, 25% off, hey, 5% off, 50% off, whatever. So it's forcing us to be creative with our offers. Now, we don't really run sales. Instead, what we do is that we just send promo emails. We send emails weekly,

2:00dedicated to just one product. And it's not an urgency play. It's not a, hey, it's not a flash sale. We don't send follow up emails. We just send one email every single week that has one purpose, which is to tell people that our product exists. And we write copy to try to sell that product. And we do not have any urgency or scarcity tactics tied to it. So it's not like we're running a sale or anything. I hope that makes sense. However, Black Friday cyber Monday is obviously a thing. And so because we couldn't do discounts, we had to figure out, all right, what are we going to do for Black Friday? And I actually planned to do this episode. And I actually never recorded it. So it's too late to do it now. I'll have to wait till next year. But we decided to send Black Friday cyber

3:01Monday emails. But we just didn't have any sort of sale. There was no discount. We just told people that our products exist with one caveat. When we sell our products and we sell two of them, we were, we've been promoting all year our two big products, which are our pool care book and our hot tub handbook. So the names respectively are the pool care handbook and the hot tub handbook. And these are physical books that we send out. They both cost $49. And you get free shipping with that. On top of getting that book in the mail, we also send a free digital download of the book immediately to every buyer. But we actually have never promoted this idea. So what we did was we just sent out emails that said, Hey, it's Black Friday. And we have this deal.

4:10Which is if you buy the book, you'll get the digital version for free. Now that's always the case. We didn't say you have to act now. We just sent emails along with everybody else and got caught up in the marketing buying frenzy. And the result was that we sold a lot more books during that time than any other time of the year. Interesting. So we actually didn't even have a sale. We just sent more emails during that time because everyone else is sending emails. So we figured, you know what? People are not going to mind the emails that much because they know what's happening. And we also promoted is like, Hey, you know, it's a good gift as well. So we had a couple of pitches. These are just general offers, right? They weren't again, no sales, no discounts. There was no final day. You had to act now. It was, we just sent four emails, Black Friday, Saturday,

5:14Sunday and Cyber Monday. And we sold a lot, no discounts. Now we did send an offer, which was for a free thing. But again, that's always been the case. That's always been the offer. So we thought, huh, pretty, we're, feel pretty good about that. So then we thought, well, what are we going to do for December? So staff just came up with, Hey, maybe the angle was no offer. It was just, this would make a great gift for anybody that you know who has a pull or a hot tub. So that was the, the offer. Not even that you got anything free with it. I think we didn't mention that, of course, and you know, we always mention free shipping, free digital download, comes with the book, all of that makes sense. But no discount. And we just have different little offers or different little ways to sell it.

6:18And then January hits. And we're like, all right, we want to do a promo this month. What's the offer? And boy, that, that was tough. Because even if I think back toward the summer, we were like, Hey, you know, we can, we can sell our hot tub book like, Hey, hot tub seasons coming, which we kind of figure is like October, October is like, you know, people start to like, if they've come back from vacation, they fire up their hot tubs when it's getting a little chilly. It's a great time to use a hot tub, right? So we call October kind of hot tub season. So we can just say, Hey, get your book, you know, get your book and get your hot tub ready. And for in August and September, we can say, Hey, our, our pool book has these chapters all about closing your pool. And you know, we always have some sort of sales angle, but never an offer. So this, so in January, we're like, what are we going to do? We've already said that it's a

7:23buy one, you know, not a buy one, get one free, but a, you know, buy the book and we'll send you the free version of the book. We've done that and we'll continue to do that. You know, we've offered free shipping. That's off. That's also an offer. But we're like, kind of running out of steam. So here's what's interesting. And this is for context. We used to all, all of 2025, for the most, for most of 2025, Stephanie packed and shipped every single book that we sold. We had a spot in our house with a bunch of bookshelves, which very rarely did we end up putting the books on the shelves. But we would get the boxes of books shipped to our house. We'd store them in the garage, you know, 25 books per box. We'd open them up, pack them up, ship them, slap a label on it from a, you know, not a, what is it called, a label printer. We would

8:25drive into the post office or schedule a pickup. We did this three sometimes five times a week. And we bought a bunch of books. And then in September, we ended up hiring or, or yeah, we ended up, I guess hiring. Yeah, we ended up finding a third party logistics company, a company that would ship the books for us and connect with our Shopify account. And instead of taking all the books that we had an inventory at our house and shipping it to this new company and saying, hey, start with this inventory. We just ordered a bunch of new books from our printing service and had it shipped directly to them. And so here we are for the last, what, four months or so with inventory of books at our house that are not counted in our system. A lot of the books that we have are damaged because over the course of a year, you know, the company

9:32would send these boxes of books and some of the books ultimately would be, would be damaged. And so we would call the, you know, we would, for, for every damage book, we took pictures, we sent it back to the company, we said, hey, these books came in damaged. They would send us a new batch of books. So we got, you know, we got our good books from it, but we still have this massive collection of damaged books. And I say massive, probably talking 25 books. So almost 50 damaged books because 25 for each copy. That's a lot of books. And so we thought, okay, in January, this is when we will discount, we're going to have a damaged book sale and we'll just ship them out ourselves. And we'll just give, you know, hey, damaged book 50% off. Now I said no discounts, but this is not the same product. You can't, you can't sell a damaged book for the exact same

10:38prices of regular book like that's not going to fly. So you, the only thing you really can do in that situation is discounted, but it's a special offer because it's, we're not going to be, once we sell the damaged books, we're done. So it's a one time thing. But we have damaged books and we have undamaged books. And we probably have about 60 undamaged books. So we're like, well, yeah, I think running a sale to our massive list that says, hey, 50% off damaged books, like we're going to sell those 25 damaged books instantly. And there's going to be people who are not going to get a book. And that kind of sucks. So we thought, well, let's just get rid of everything and just say it's damaged. But if you, hey, if you get a book that's damaged, cool, that's what you bought. If you get a book that's not damaged, well, great, you win. But you're, you know, you're still paying damage book pricing. So that's what we're going to do

11:43in January. The problem with that offer is one time. We can only do it once. Now, of course, we could do it in the future. If more damaged books come in, I'll know that from our shipping company, they may end up, you know, well, we have a new printing company now. So my hope is that we won't get as many damaged books. But I think it happens. And so we'll probably do it again. We'll probably do it once a year where the company will just, hey, we got, you know, 50 damaged books here. What do you want us to do with it? And it's like, hey, send it to us and we'll just run a sale. You know, a small sale. But again, I'm saying all this because, yeah, once we're done that, we're done that. And I feel like we need more offers for our books, for our courses, for our app. And we can't discount it. That's the caveat. So what do you do? Now, you're probably already thinking

12:47some stuff. I've thought of a few things. I thought, okay, well, you know, I think the most obvious thing would be to craft an offer where you gave bonuses. So you gave free things outside of the book. So for example, let's say, you know, for a limited time only, you get signed copies of the book. Who wants that? I don't know. We can't do that because we're not at the warehouse where the books are. So we can't sign copies. So that's out of the question. And you're like, well, maybe we throw something in with the book. Maybe we throw in, you know, a free gift of some kind, right? So you're still paying full price for the book, but you may get a little bonus. That's another problem is is we can't do that. One, we're shipping these books media mail, which means we can't add any additional stuff to the package because then it wouldn't classify itself as media mail.

13:51And I'd rather have the cheaper shipping because we're offering free shipping. So, okay, if we do offer something free, it has to be digital. It has to be something that, okay, they're going to get a book in the mail. But we can send them something digitally for free immediately. So that's interesting. We can do that all day. We can send downloadables, right? PDFs. But I'm like, all right, we're sending them the book. The book has the book is essentially a giant PDF. We want to send more PDFs. Yeah. So, all right, this is where the brainstorming has to come into play. What are we going to do? So it's interesting because I'm thinking a lot about we're not allowed to offer discounts, meaning we can't take the price of something and slash it,

14:53but we can offer it for free. So an obvious one for me would be like, hey, if you bought our course, you'll get our book for free. Okay, that is something we could do. It's not a bad idea. It's not a bad offer. We can offer that short term. And again, it doesn't discount the book. It just says, hey, get the course and we'll send you the book for free. Okay, we can do that. Obviously, because we're sending a physical object as the free thing, it's going to eat into the profit margin of the course itself. But that's okay. Because the course is much higher priced. We haven't sold that many courses and we make more money on the courses anyway. And plus we could sell this to people who haven't bought the book yet. Like we could only pitch it to them. This would be pitches that I would put into emails, by the way. I know that we could probably do this with Facebook ads and maybe even organic stuff. But I'm going to stick to just email in this case

15:59is how we how we would promote these. One one idea I had. So we have an app and the app is paid for. We have a seven day free trial for the app. We could. I don't know how to do this automatically. And because the app is we don't we're not in charge of the payment system. So how do you like, how would you offer? Let's say, you know, get get one year free of the app. How would you do that? Like with when you subscribe with Apple or with Android, you have to enter your credit card. So it's like, I wish that wasn't the case. Because I would love to be able to say, Hey, you know, you buy our book. And we'll give you, you know, six months, three months, one year, free of the of our app. And I know that we can offer like we can offer discount codes through Apple

17:04and probably through Android as well. But then it's like, how do you know? So if somebody buys a book, it's not like, Oh, here's your custom discount code. By the way, which which phone do you have? Do you have an Apple? Do you have an Android? Like, what do you have? So not really the best, not really the best idea, but we'd love to be able to do it. Another thought I had was, you know, I, man, this might be harder than I thought. I know a lot of people will do like a one on one consultation. So it's like, Hey, join my membership program. And for a limited time, only I will do a one on one 30 minute coaching call or one on one, you know, one on one 30 minute intro call for like the first 100 people or something like that. It's an offer. It's a little labor intensive. So I don't know about that one.

18:19I'm just trying to think of what other people would do in this scenario. We could. So we can't send. So let's say we're just talking about the book. Let's just let's just start with one product because I kind of feel like I can go all over the place. Let's start with we're just selling the book. And this would obviously be what's what's nice about whatever this what I'm trying to do here is I'm trying to incorporate some sort of urgency or scarcity tactic within our offer because we are cons. We are always offering free shipping. We are always offering the free digital download with every book sale. Can we do something where we could run a legit flash sale where it's like, Hey, from a from a urgency perspective, we can say this sale ends Monday, right? Starts on Friday ends Monday. Maybe it's a 72 hour flash sale. Maybe it's a 24 hour

19:24flash sale. I want to be able to offer these without discounting because if we offer these too many times, if we offer the same thing. So for example, let's say I do come up with something interesting. And we pitch that every month. Well, the same is true for the the discount, which is we just end up training our audience to just wait for the sale. Wait for the free thing, knowing they're going to get the free thing. And so they won't purchase all month when we're soft pitching our product all month, they'll wait for the sale. But if we're constantly switching that switching up the sale, if we're saying, Hey, this month, you get this, right? And they're like, Oh, shit, everyone who wants that's going to want to jump on that. And they know they have a limited

20:26time to do so. But then they don't know what's coming the next month or one might not even come at all. And maybe we don't do it every month. It's like every other month. And it's like, I don't I want to be able to not I don't want bottom line is I don't want to train the audience to expect there's always some bonus that comes with this. So some offers are obviously bundling, right? You can like I tried to bundle the app. It's going to be near impossible to do so. So the app is always paid for and people ask us like, Hey, can I get a discount on the app? Can I get I'm like, I wish I wish Apple let us do that. No, like we can offer trials free trials. And we can do things with it's very manual. And I'm sure someone's figured this out. I just haven't

21:27looked into it. So if you know of anybody who's done some sort of app promo, because I know you can do promos within the app store. And again, we are Android and Apple. So it's like, how do you unify those campaigns, et cetera? It's like kind of hard to do. And yeah, we have just less control over it overall. So I don't I don't really want to do that, although I wish we could. So obviously there's bundling, right? We can bundle the course in the book. That's an easy one. But I feel like there needs to be some kind of bonus. So here's an idea. But we're kind of already doing this. One idea I had was, well, maybe I'll offer a free live pool school event for anybody who purchases the book. So for example, it's kind of the one-on-one thing, except instead, it's one to many. It's like, hey, anybody who buys a book within

22:35the next 72 hours will get an exclusive ticket to this live webinar with me where you can ask questions about your pool or blah, blah. The reason that I so I like this idea, it doesn't personally like that kind of feels lame because webinars are usually free. And so it feels lame that that's the offer. Like I would do it if somebody offered me like, hey, buy my course and I'll do a live event. I'm like, do the live event. I don't like that's not going to make me want to buy your course or your book or your sponge. I don't know. I mean, okay. This is a stupid idea. And by the way, with the webinar thing, we are, and I haven't really talked about this. I mean, I have talked about it, but I haven't done an episode about it. Dedicated to it because I want to

23:40wait until we actually do it to report back. But I have decided to do a partnership with a company called Swimpley, which is basically Airbnb for pools to run a live pool school, swimming university, live type of thing. That's kind of going to act like a lead magnet for the both of us. And they're going to handle all of the webinar stuff. All I have to do is show up and perform. And I've done this before. We're going to try it, see how it plays out, see if we like it. And if it works and I enjoy myself, we're going to put more effort and yeah, just put more into it. But again, that's like, that's a free thing. And it's mainly to get leads to buy the book as opposed to a bonus for the book. Okay. So here's a stupid idea. I don't know, you buy a book,

24:47we'll send you a free packet test trips. Why is that stupid? Well, we can't put the test trips in the book because it's media mail. And we don't actually have the books here. So we would have to have the book be shipped separately. And then Steph and I would have to pack and ship the test strips separately. The amount of money that it would cost to do that is probably, we'll probably wipe out our profit margins on the book or just make them very low and put a ton of work on our plate to do this. So sending out physical products kind of doesn't really make any sense. And I really don't even have any ideas because we don't really have any other physical products. So, you know, maybe it's, if it is digital, what kind of options do we have for digital?

25:53Truthfully, like we have PDFs and downloads. That kind of, that feels kind of lame to me. You know, we could do a course, a crash course, that also feels kind of lame. So could it be a video, could it be a PDF, could it be, you know, we, one idea, I guess I had this idea and I'm not really sure how I feel about it is turning, I don't know if anybody wants this to be to be honest, but turning the books into audiobooks. One, that is an absolute ton of work. I have to read the book and and get it right. That sounds miserable. I can do it, but I don't want to do it. Also, who's going to listen to an audiobook of a reference book? You know, like our book is color coded

26:53and and designed to be referenced, not to be read, covered, a cover. So I'm like, audiobook kind of defeats the purpose. It is a bonus and it is digital. So we could include it. I, all right, I like the one-on-one idea like, I mean, just thinking about it if an author was selling a book and I really wanted to buy that book from that author because I've been following that author, which is basically our audience, and they were like, hey, for the, for the next 25 people or whatever they cap it at, who buy this book, I will call you and we can have a 15 to 30-minute conversation about your pool and I can help you or whatever it is. I'm just trying to think like, who would that, you know, have I read a book recently? I mean, like people do this all the time,

28:00right? It's a consulting services or like, you know, it's like, hey, for the next people who buy my Facebook ads course, I'll do a one-on-one consultation with you if you buy this certain one at this certain time. All right, here's the, so I like that idea except the amount of work it puts on me to fulfill that is insane. I mean, could it be done once a year, sure? But like, I mean, how many books are we really going to sell with that author? I mean, I can only do so many calls. All right, here's what I'm not thinking about. You know what, I probably should go read. I should probably go look in one of Alex Hermosi's books and see what ideas he's got there, but here's something I'm thinking about. What if it's not our product and what if we don't have to ship it? What if we just buy it? So what if we say, you know, let's say, let's say it's the test

29:06trip thing or let's say it's a float, a free toy or something. And I just team up with some other company who sells this direct and I say, hey, for everybody who buys a book, you know, within the next however long, this company will send you a free float. And then all we do is pass that information along to that company, although that's difficult as well. We could create a, you know, slack or some sort of like zappier thing that basically anybody who uses that coupon code or discount code for that time period, it'll get added to a spreadsheet or get added to an email that we just directly send to that company and then we just allow them to do it. And then what we do is just pay up front for the company, fulfill those orders. And so it's like, we still get to offer

30:07something physical, but we, you know, we still eat into our margin, but at least we don't have to ship it. Or, or maybe, I don't know how I would do this or why anybody would want to be a part of this, but maybe they would. Maybe we can offer a digital coupon code for pool chemicals as an example. So if somebody buys our book and we're like, hey, this comes with a $50 gift card. Hold on a second. Hold on a second. Could you do that? Could you do it? Could you, could you do a free gift card? So it's basically discounting, but they have to buy something else from you.

31:12So I know I can't do this, but just thinking out loud, somebody buys a book, we give them a 25% gift card, or sorry, $25 gift card, or even a $10 gift card. So let's say $25 gift card, right? Yes, it eats into our margin, but only if they use the gift card. But chances are they're using a gift card to buy something that's more than $25. Now, that would make sense if we sold other products, where they could use that gift card toward, and no product that we sold was less than $25. So that's basically just a way of discounting your product by creating an up sale. But since we don't have that, it doesn't make sense for us.

32:15So if we were to just like, let's just say I were to send somebody a digital Amazon gift card, it's like, well, I just lose 25. Like, that's just a discount. You're not discounting the product, but you know, we were discounting our profits at the end. I'm not against that idea, because we would be doing that essentially by bundling the course and the book together, but yeah, that's just also that's that's extra work. It's it feels kind of stupid, unless I could get a company who sells pool products through their own website, which I know a few, would they give us an exclusive discount code like $25 off? And then I could say, hey, if you buy our book, we will send you a $25 coupon code that you can use at this other pool place.

33:25Now, what's interesting about that probably makes the most sense, huh? Let me think that through for a second. The reason that makes the most sense is because one, we still get the full profit of the book. We also get to take advantage of the urgency in that we only offer it for a short period of time. To the customer's perspective, if a book costs $49, but they're getting, let's say, $25 or even 25% off another order, that's a discount to them if they think that far ahead. And the incentive for the company is, hey, that's a new customer that all they had to do was just offer the coupon, like all they had to do was offer an exclusive coupon code to just us.

34:26And that was just one arm of marketing. It's free to them. And if a customer of ours does buy a book and then buys from them, we're just sharing that customer information and we're not in conflict because we don't sell pool products. That's not a terrible idea. I don't have any current relationships with any pool companies where that would, where we could, I mean, I do technically I could email a few people and just offer that and say, like, hey, would anybody be interested in taking us up on this? But the problem is it, and I know this already is they're going to want this to be ongoing. And what we're trying to do is say, no, we're only offering this as a sale and we're only going to do it once. Now that might be what they're interested in, right? But it's only for people who purchase stuff from us. And not everybody

35:32purchases stuff from us. We would definitely get a lot of sales from that, but it is it. And that's, you know, it's like, you have, if you're, if you're buying our book, you have to buy pool chemicals, like you're buying pool chemicals. And what we're essentially saying is like, hey, you know, the next time you buy pool chemicals, you're going to get $25 off if you just purchase it through this company. So like, that's a, that's a, that's a good offer. It's probably not enough money. It would have to be the same price as the book. So we'd say, hey, you know, get $49 off your next order. Who's going to take that deal? I think that's kind of way too much money. But I do like that idea. It's not the worst idea. I don't know who would take us up on that. Because what does the company get out of it? Like, would I do that deal? If, if a, if a company was like, hey, would you offer, let's say a $25 gift card to your, to your business or a $25 coupon

36:38code to your stuff for anybody that purchased this other thing over here. And I would just be like, you're probably not going to, it's like, probably not. It's probably not worth the effort. Man, I don't, I might be coming up short on this one. I, I think the best idea I have, which is really just the, if you buy our course, you get the book for free. And that does feel like, oh, that's a, that is valuable. Because if I was even thinking about the book, then I'm like, all right, if I was thinking about the course, I'm like, well, now I'm getting the book for free. If I buy, yes, so that's a, that I'm pulling that trigger. Because that's a big, that's a big chunk out of the course for them. That's a big chunk out of the price. So I'm like, yeah, yeah, I'm doing that deal.

37:40Man, that's, that's where it gets tricky with the, with the not having that many products, especially one that we can't even create an offer on. Like the fact that we can't do the app offer is a bummer. Now again, maybe I can look into that. I know, however, we can do it in reverse where we can say, if you buy the app, then we can give you one of our other products for free or issue you a discount code for any one of our other products. So we're not discounting any single product. We're just discounting the store or we're saying, hey, if you, if you buy the, if you buy the app, then we will give you a free book. And we can do that if we were to, we have to code that. So I'd have to talk to my developer. And he'd have to, he'd have to somehow

38:46pipe that back into our Shopify system so that it was all automatic. But then it's like, how do you handle people who, you know, buy the app and then cancel a month later? It's like, they just got a free book and all they had to do is just, you know, it's like, there's, there's some trickiness to that. Not everyone's going to do that. I realize, but there's some trickiness to it. So, man, I, you know, if anybody has any ideas on this one, I'd be curious. And, and please, no lame ideas, like no PDFs. I just, I don't think PDFs are, I just don't. Maybe I'm wrong. I don't know. That's, I don't know. Maybe I'm, maybe I'm, maybe I think it's a lame idea, but maybe it works for you. And maybe I'm just not thinking of things, but I'll, I'll give you this. Send me an email or sign up for my newsletter, jivinesi.com, G-I-O-V-A-N-I-S-E-I, then you can respond to any email there.

39:49Uh, if you have any ideas here, because the caveat is I, it can't cost my time. So, it can't be an offer where I, like, I have to monitor every single sale or I have to deliver something completely on my own or my team. If it's digital, I can create an email once that auto sends. That's easy enough to do. And I could do that based on discount code. That's fairly easy. So digital would be the best. Bundling is also the best. Just gotta exclude the app. But yeah, digital bonuses that don't require my ongoing time. I don't mind making something once and then, you know, having it, having it be able to reuse it. And obvious bundles that I'm not maybe I'm just completely missing. No discounting on the products. But yeah, I kind of feel like I

40:53came up short, but I don't know. Maybe there's something there. Maybe it got your brain thinking if I can help in that way. That'd be great. So yeah, uh, go to jivinesi.com, G-I-O-V-A-N-I-S-E-I, dot com, and I will catch you in the next one.