This is the 3rd year I run Black Friday deals. This year, I also curated a list of 300+ deals across 30 categories for you.

(sharing some learnings about running Black Friday deals in the 2nd part of this email)

But first, here are my deals:

• TypingMind.com – 40% off

• DevUtils.com – 50% off

• Xnapper.com – 50% off

• BlackMagic.so – 40% off the first year on the annual plan.

Other than that, I also curated a list of 300+ Black Friday deals in this GitHub repo. You’ll likely find something interesting there. Enjoy!

Why I run Black Friday deals

Some people don’t like running promotions because it makes your product look cheap. I don’t think so.

Here are the reasons I always do Black Friday deals every year (and maybe you should, too).

• I normally don’t do a lot of marketing activities, and I feel guilty about it. So, Black Friday seems like a cheat code for me to do some real marketing with very little effort.

• People are used to getting deals around this time of the year, so I don’t think it makes your product cheap to follow the tradition and offer discounts for your product just this time of the year.

• Extra revenue for November is nice! Last year, I made ~$50K of revenue across all products.

• It’s an opportunity to test your price at a lower tier. What I always do is to silently run the discount one month early. During this one month, I won’t advertise or announce the discount. Just add the discount code automatically for all purchases. This has several benefits:

  • You can test to see if a lower price (~40% less than your normal price) will make you more revenue. If it does, maybe just use that as your official price later on!

  • By running the discount silently early, you avoid people who ask for refunds because they “just bought yesterday, and now the price is lower”. This reduces a lot of headaches, especially when the sales start coming in and you get busy.

• Another benefit is that more customers will usually bring more future customers. When I started selling DevUtils, my customer base was very small. Running a Black Friday deal is a perfect excuse for me to “distribute” DevUtils to a lot more customers (while still having some revenue). These early customers are the seed for future customers via word of mouth and their reviews. And remember, you can always upsell these customers later!

• Lastly, running a Black Friday deal so you have something to post on social media, creating engagements!

I should also mention that these reasons are mostly related to software businesses. You should do your own research to avoid falling into some common traps:

• Don’t run a discount at a loss!

• Be aware of the extra load on customer support when you onboard many new customers in a short time.

That’s all for now!

This started as a promotional email, but I wrote a lot longer than I thought!

Hope some of this is helpful for you.

Thank you for reading, and see you in the next updates!

Best,

- Tony