Our Step-By-Step Playbook For Launching New Products @ Obvi

Acquisition costs are rising, all while your profits are shrinking. What used to look like hockey-stick growth has now turned into wave-like growth. Up, down, up, down.

Meanwhile, everybody on D2C twitter is constantly talking about “Costumer-life-time value is the most important metric for D2C brands ” & “You need to build a community in 2023” So you rush to your retention department and tell them they need to increase CLTV… and then you rush over to social department and tell them they need to build better community engagement.

But the same response keeps appearing: “Okay boss, but how?”

”The How” is what they don’t tell you on Twitter. Because, who wants to share their secret sauce anyway?

Luckily for you, we’re the guys who will actually share our secret sauce with you. In fact, we’ve been doing it for the last 12 months on our podcast Chew On This.

Today, we will teach you how you can use product launches to increase your CLTV, and how you can use your app to create yeezy-like hype for your product launch and sell out in minutes.

So get your notepad out and buckle up, because in this newsletter - we will share our exact roadmap for how we

• Increased our CLTV by double-digit % over the last 18 months

• Leveraged our community of 60,000 raving fans who are sitting ready with their credit cards out every time we launch a new product

• Used our App to build Yeezy-like hype around our product launches without burning holes in our pockets.

Give your customers a damn good reason to buy again.

In today's environment, there is almost no loyalty left among consumers. New brands are popping up left and right, and the number of options available to consumers is endless. So why would they be loyal to your brand if you don't have anything new and exciting to offer them when every other brand presents them with new and exciting products?

That's why the first step to increasing your CLTV and repurchase rate is to focus on giving your customers a good reason to buy from you again. And guess how you do that… You launch something new and exciting for your customers.

At Obvi, we've launched 26 new products over the last 12 months. That means we've given our customers 26 reasons to come back and buy from us again. That's literally a new reason to come back and buy from us every second week.

"...Okay, that sounds great, but how do I go about finding the products that my customers will be excited about?" you may think. Good question; let's dive into it.

Ask, and you shall receive

Everybody has heard this old saying, yet only few make an effort to actually ask their customers and listen to them. Step 1 to researching new product ideas is to ask your customers what they want. What products would they like to spend their hard-earned money on? What are the products that they would wish you'd create for them?

To do this, we use Typeform to send out surveys to our existing customer base and then analyze our responses (Typeform makes it super fast and easy to do this). Then we take the top 3 answers and go out and build the products.

To make this process easier for you, here are three critical lessons we learned from sending out +30 surveys;

1. Always ask open-ended questions
   

2. Never ask more than 4-5 questions
   

3. Give your customers an incentive to answer the survey if you don't have super-loyal fans who'll do it for free.

So hyped they can't ignore you.

Okay, so you've figured out what to launch next, and now you are ready to go out there and tell everybody about your new products. That's great. Now, let's dive into the tactics that have allowed us to create so much hype around our new product launches that we've literally sold out within minutes. Your ability to create hype is literally what's going to make or break your product launch.

The first thing you have to do is make sure to prepare properly for the launch. That means working with your supplier to get 4-6 mockup variations of the coming product as soon as possible - so that you can get it out to your photo studio, prepare all the banners for the website, create all the ads, and get some samples out to your pool of content creators to get a lot of UGC before you go live.

Secondly, you must get your community excited about the new product launch. Let them know something new is coming, and most importantly, make them feel heard. Give them the feeling of "You've asked for it, and now we are giving it to you".

Thirdly, once the product is on its way and you are ready to rock and roll, what you have to do is invest in marketing the product launch everywhere. That means going live on Facebook/TikTok, creating a Facebook event where people can RSVP to get reminded, sending out emails and SMS' where people can get notified when it drops, and if you have an app - then giving people the opportunity to get early access to the product by downloading the app.

… and hey, speaking of apps. Do you want to know our biggest cheat code for making 26 successful product launches (and also building a community of +60,000 raving fans)?

Build an app and push those push notifications like crazy.

We used Tapcart to build an app in basically one week, and every time we had something new coming out, we sent push notifications like there was no tomorrow. "72 hours left", "48 hours left", "24 hours left",... you get the point.

Attention is basically the oil of the modern world, and with an app - you can get people's attention without having to worry about landing in spam folders, opt-outs, lost tracking, and the best part… It's absolutely free to send out push notifications.

If you don't have an app yet, your brand is literally missing out on millions of profits. Luckily, it's not that hard to build one using TapCart (we did it in one week), and as a reader of this newsletter, you can get your first month completely free.

Bottom line

There are many ways to Rome, and this is how we've gotten there. To summarize, these are the steps you can take today to increase your back-end profitability and CLTV tomorrow.

1. Talk to your customers to find out which products they would be excited to buy from you
   

2. Analyze the answers you get from your customers using Typeform and build the products they want
   

3. Market the product launch as aggressively as possible on every channel to create hype and essentially give your customers the feeling of "These guys are landing on Mars, and we don't want to be missing out on this"

That's the steps. Now go out and implement it, and see your profits increasing daily.

Questions of the week

If you found this newsletter valuable, feel free to send it to your partners, employees, colleagues, friends - or whoever you think could benefit from it.

Till’ next week.

Yours truly
Ron & Ash