I’m fresh back from Colorado, where I was giving a talk to educational business owners with some of my friends from Agexa and WhopX and looking at the rapidly shifting models of learning, cohorts and masterclasses in the AI era. Thoughts on the topic in a future newsletter!
This week we’re coming in hot with extensive factory links to vett if you want to get into activewear, home goods and fashion for yourself or your merch. Plus, processes to automate tasks in the (excellent) new, very consumer friendly Grok Bot agent, and a guide to Funnels 101 to help you add another skillset to your marketing toolkit.
Let’s begin, it’s a valuable one.
Oren
Factory Links (and automations)
For those of you who’ve been on this newsletter for a few years, you’ll remember that we used to cover a lot on product development and finding factories across the globe to develop fashion, interiors, branded merchandise and more. I don’t do much like this anymore, after a few trips to China, Premiere Vision in Paris, Milan Unica in Italy etc, I've got partners for what I need for life.
But I do still get asked about factories for this or that quite frequently, and last week I made a bot for it to test the new Grok Bot. It has access to my subscriptions for import records, and I can put in a brand and it
finds their legal names and partners they would import under
finds recent imports and discerns the product types from the listings
goes and finds their information from secondary sources (anyone whose done this before know thats an annoying part)
compiles all this with notes and info in Notion.
It’s… amazing? I compiled 100 or so factories from interiors, beauty, activewear and fashion below on demand as an example, free for you.
Get them here.
How do you make flows like this in Grok Bot?
First you grab the app, and then the cheapest access point ($40) is with a Cursor Teams subscription.
From there… think of it as hiring a person, then teaching them one job. You give them a name, a destination, and a repeatable recipe.
1. Make an agent with one job. New chat, name it after the work (ours was basically “research a brand, log suppliers”). Click the name in the chat header, then the gear, and write a one-line description so it knows what it’s for.
2. Connect the place it writes to. Tell it “add Notion” (or Slack, or whatever the output is). It’ll show a connect card. You sign in, its integrated.
3. Teach the flow once. Either walk it in chat (“I go to this site, search X, copy Y, put it in this database”) or screen-record it. Be picky about the rules: for instance on my factory locator: last 12 months only, skip freight companies, skip self-owned entities, dig deep for company entity names, infer the product from the cargo description.
4. Have it save that as a skill. Ask it to turn the steps into a reusable recipe. Next time you just name the next brand (or customer, or repo).
5. Sign in on the agent’s computer for sites that need a login. For anything behind Cloudflare or an account, say “use my login” and complete sign-in when it hands you the screen. It never needs your password in chat.
6. Split extra work onto another agent if things start to get complex. We had a second one fill public contact details. Tell the original agent: Rule: whenever new rows land, ping that agent with names and links.
Pro-tip: just feedback what you want.
Disclaimer: I’ve done other sponsored with Cursor, but not this, sharing this because it’s useful.
Factory Links (and automations)
This week’s Youtube is second on a series (after my prior video on offers) about skills creatives often ignore that will allow them to make money and be useful in business forever. In this video we cover the basics of funnels.
1. The Lead Magnet Funnel
What it is. Give away something genuinely useful in exchange for an email, and then use the followup pages and email automation to sell the product or service
When to use it— Any business trying to prove that social media does something measurable… push to a lead magnet funnel where you can track the amount of signups and if they convert. If you are getting social media attention for your brand or service and not getting signups, get it in action.
The build:
Squeeze page. Headline (the clear promise), subhead, hero image or video, the form. Three fields maximum.
Thank you page. Deliver the asset, then immediately offer the next step. A consultation. A call. A low-price product.
Email automation. Fires on form submission to sell in a series of emails over time
Related note
Confirmation page. The most underused page in marketing, if a lead books a call, this page preps them: who they’re meeting, what the meeting covers, what to get ready.
Why it works. Not everyone who downloads is your customer, and that’s fine. When we ran the luxury and beauty reports at Vaan we’d pull thousands of signups. A tiny fraction were buyers of six-figure websites. But the sales cycle for a website rebuild is often a year. You capture them at the research stage and stay top of mind until the budget exists.
Where it fails. The thank you page does nothing. You worked to earn attention and then handed them a PDF and let them leave.
2. The Tripwire Funnel
What it is. Sell something at a very low price, then present a higher-value offer immediately after purchase.
When to use it. When you want buyers, not subscribers. When you’re running paid ads and need the economics to work.
The build:
Sales page for the low-price item. $19, $27, $49.
Checkout.
Order bump or upsell page. Presented before the receipt.
Thank you page with the next step in the ladder.
Why it works. A card has already been charged. The psychological barrier is gone and the payment details are in the system. The second purchase is structurally easier than the first. The classic version was free-plus-shipping books in the 2000s: pay $2.99, get the book, then get offered the $79 package on the next screen.
The advertising cheat code. If you sell a $199 product and a $5,000 service, you can advertise the $199 product, attempt to break even on ad spend (that number is adjustable obv) from that sale, and treat every buyer as a lead for the $5,000 service. Now you can spend far more on ads than a competitor selling the $5,000 service cold. Enormous numbers of businesses run on this.
Benchmark. Price and value matter more than raw conversion percentage here. A $27 tripwire converting at 2% often beats a $7 tripwire at 5%. Track earnings per visitor, not conversion rate.
Where it fails. The tripwire is cheap but not valuable. Low price alone sells nothing. People buy because the value-to-price ratio is powerful, not because the number is small.
3. The Webinar Funnel
What it is. Drive people to a registration page, then pitch one-to-many on a live or recorded session.
When to use it. When you don’t have setters and closers or a big sales team but are selling something above $2000 that would likely require a call, or when your offer needs thorough explanation and you’re getting lots of questions. Or importantly - when you or someone on your team is genuinely good live.
The build:
Registration page. Date, time, the promise, the form. Keep it short.
Confirmation page with calendar add.
Reminder sequence. Email plus SMS. This is the highest-leverage part of the entire funnel.
The session. Teach first, pitch at the end.
Replay page with a deadline.
The thing most people miss. Replays now outperform live. Recent data puts replay viewership at roughly 2.4x live unique viewers, with the majority of that watch time landing in the first two weeks.
Where it fails. No reminder sequence. You did all the work to get registrations and then let half the room forget.
4. The VSL Funnel (Video Sales Letter)
What it is. Rather than making people read a long page, you sell in one long video that follows a specific beat structure.
When to use it. Complex or unfamiliar offers. Offers that require belief change. When you have someone who is very good on camera.
The beats:
A specific, named problem
A unique framework or mechanism
Why you are the person qualified to deliver it
Objection handling, one at a time
Call to action
The build. Page with the video, a call to action below it, and a long-form text version underneath for people who won’t watch. Some of your traffic will always scroll and read.
A note on production. Take every pitch, testimonial, and objection you’ve collected, put it into a project in your AI tool of choice, and generate VSL drafts against the beat structure above (you can also search for “VSL outline” and get quite a lot). You edit rather than write from scratch. What used to be a two-week job is now a two-day one.
Another deep dive (on CRM likely) coming before end of year!
Kitchen Sink
The Bloomberg ad covers
Full Cosmos: https://www.cosmos.so/dappboi/businessweek
Reminder about the prominence of paid ads on Meta in the new brands coming out in tech.
Dealing with “Shadowbans”
Resources for making better UI with AI for landing pages/widgets etc
Until next week,
Oren
Want to scale your brand with us? darkroomagency.com
The next Cut30 short form bootcamp starts September 16th: https://cut30.co