Start no-code ecommerce site today

Ah, Monday. The opportunity to start afresh and check things off our to-do list. It's our chance to hit the reset button and slay the workweek ahead. Yesterday brought in the year of the rabbit for many. It's the luckiest of the twelve animals in the Chinese lunar calendar and symbolizes peace, good luck, and fortune. Go rabbits! 🐰Rabbits are not just cute and cuddly, they are known for their quick thinking and adaptability. So channel your inner Bugs Bunny, be one step ahead and don't let anything get you down.

Oh, and xīn nián kuài lè or gōng xǐ fā cái to everyone celebrating! 🎊

Heinz is really stirring things up with its recent campaign. They used the power of the people to get the word out. This genius UGC campaign tapped into consumers' preferences to influence the restaurants they dined at.

It had their competitors seeing red!

Adobe's CPO, Scott Belsky, wants to put the rumors to rest. In an interview with Bloomberg, he said that—no matter what Twitter says—they don't mess around with your personal content stored on Adobe's cloud.

Back in the day, starting a tech-enabled business was like trying to launch a rocket with one astronaut. Developers were the key to success. For non-technical founders, it was like trying to herd cats. The dependency was often a bottleneck to growth.

Hey Rebekah—a tech-enabled startup—is built with mostly no code systems. That was a conscious choice we made after assessing our internal resources. We wanted to ensure that the bulk of the team could do the things they needed to without being at the mercy of our grumpy technical resources.

It's no secret that word-of-mouth marketing is the holy grail of acquisition. So our growth strategy revolves around WOM. We're lucky because we have an existing community of over 300,000 who are huge fans of Rebekah.

Then, there's new acquisition. By default, we know we're going to run ads soon. Typically, just the ad-spend CAC for Instagram or Facebook will range from $1.50-$2.50 per conversion. Anywhere between 50-75% of that outside the US.

However, there's a huge difference in the quality of conversions between WOM and an ad-based referral. According to Nielsen, 92% of people trust recommendations. Think about it, most of you are reading Hey Rebekah today because someone you know recommended it, or Ambreen/Rebekah have guilted you into it.

We use internal and external triggers to delight our readers everyday. So now, if we ask them to spread the word, what could we do to reward them?

After some research, benchmarking, and insider tips from our heroes at Morning Brew, we decided on:

Now for some math. Everything we do for our readers is free. Always will be. So we had to figure out costs and get some figures to estimate value. The trick here is to try and assess the value of a WOM referral in comparison to paid acquisition. Remember, a WOM will typically compound in its ROI. It's a referral that keeps on referring.

Using these numbers, we determined:

Our friends at Beehiiv—the driving force behind the scenes—made asking for Referrals easy. They also made referral tracking and management a piece of cake.

But then there's fulfillment. We'll go into a lot more detail on this in our upcoming playbook, but at a high level here's what you need to know:

Where do we get the jaw-dropping inventory for our Swag? Printful. An on-demand production and fulfillment platform. It costs us $9 a month. They have a huge catalog of stuff to choose from.

For our store front, we chose Shopify. It integrates directly to Printful. There's a one-time configuration to get past, but nothing crazy.

We chose their free theme Craft and applied some basic styles to match our Webflow site. It took us under an hour going slow. By the way, Shopify costs us $19 a month.

To manage the fulfillment of coupon codes that readers use to redeem their reward, we used the Bulk Discount Code Bot on Shopify. It created 80,000 unique codes for our products in about 15 minutes and cost $19.

Pretty cool, high-tech, no-code global fulfillment. It even includes real-time tracking. If you've ever wanted to steal like an artist and start your own business, there's no better time than now! What are you waiting for?

Don't forget, if you have any questions or need any help, we're just a reply away.

Austin Kleon talks about what so many of us already know, nothing is truly original anymore. So how do creatives find inspiration for their craft? Embracing their influences. This week's recommended reading: Steal Like an Artist by Austin Kleon

The gist by ChatGPT: "Steal Like an Artist" by Austin Kleon is a quirky little book that basically says it's totally cool to borrow ideas from others and make them your own. In fact, it's pretty much the only way to come up with new and interesting stuff. Just don't get caught, or you might end up in "art jail" (which is just a regular jail, but with more paint brushes). So go forth, fellow artists, and pilfer like crazy! Just don't forget to give credit where credit is due, otherwise you'll be labeled as a "art thief".

This section is inspired by the legendary Alex Lieberman of Morning Brew.