🪄 Sara Blakely's Billion-Dollar Naming Strategy

PLUS: Find Which Blogs, Content, or Growth Tools To Drive Revenue

Author

Startup Spells 🪄
September 16, 2024

Hey,

The Spells Master is back!

Welcome to the 163rd issue.

Today's topics:

  1. Sara Blakely's Billion-Dollar Naming Strategy

  2. A tool to Find Which Blogs, Content, or Growth Tools To Drive Revenue

  3. One recommended video on Tracking Revenue for Specific Blog Posts

Sara Blakely's Billion-Dollar Naming Strategy

Sara Blakely spent 1.5 years brainstorming names for her shapewear product.

She scribbled ideas on scraps of paper while working her day job selling fax machines. This dedication laid the foundation for what would become a household name "SPANX."

She is the founder of 2 startups with memorable names:

  1. SPANX: A shapewear that smooths and sculpts the body to create a seamless base and help clothes fit better

  2. SNEEX: A luxury shoe that blends the style of a traditional high heel with the performance and comfort of a sneaker.

1. Inspiration from Iconic Brands

Blakely studied successful brands like Coke and Kodak. She noticed both names had a strong 'K' sound.

The secret hack that comedians believe is the "K" sound makes people laugh.

"The best brand names had at most two syllables and at least one “exotic” letter, like an “X” or a “K."

~ Jeff Johnson

2. The SPANX Moment

While stuck in Atlanta traffic, inspiration struck. Blakely immediately pulled over and wrote down "SPANKS" on a scrap of paper.

At home, Blakely visited the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office website. She paid $150 with her credit card to secure the name. Just before submitting, she changed "KS" to "X" after remembering that made-up words often perform better for products.

Blakely had to purchase the trademark for SPANX from someone who was holding out for the porn industry. She paid a couple of hundred dollars to secure it.

This investment became Blakely's greatest asset. The SPANX name proved crucial to the company's success, turning a small fee into a billion-dollar brand.

Sara's second-choice name was "Open-toe Delilah's." She admits she probably wouldn't be where she is today if she had chosen that name.

3. Turning Controversy into Success

The name SPANX sparked controversy. Sara used to receive hate mail. Some stores in Middle America refused to sell the product because they considered the name too racy.

The name gave energy to the previously "boring" shapewear category. It attracted free publicity from radio DJs and news programs. DJs wanted to say SPANX just for laughs and news programs picked up on the funny name.

It drew attention to the shapewear product and made people talk about it.

Now, SPANX is a household name, synonymous with the shapewear category, and achieved all of this without any formal advertising.

A tool to Find Which Blogs, Content, or Growth Tools To Drive Revenue

User Attribution is a powerful tool that helps you track the exact blog posts, content, or growth tools driving your revenue so you can make more of those.

This video explains how to track revenue for specific blog posts.

This method is becoming more important as Google shifts its focus to overall blog quality rather than individual AI-generated content.

While Bottom of Funnel or Conversion Focused blogs typically generate the most revenue, tracking revenue for each blog post allows you to replicate successful content strategies.

Top Tweets of the day

1/

Elon Musk has tackled 5 hard problems and succeeded in each one of them.

Peter Thiel gives a good reason: "Maybe the rest of us are somehow too risk averse or there's something about risk he knows that we don't."

2/

Knowing how to answer is just as crucial as the answer itself. This simple sentence answers people's question without offending them.

3/

Value capture in AI is concentrated in 2 places:

  1. Being the API for everyone. Think OpenAI's ChatGPT, Google's Gemini, Anthropic's Claude, or XAI's Grok (hard)

  2. Being the UI around #1. Think Jasper AI, Copy AI, Photo AI, Headshot Pro, Aragon AI, Lensa AI, Jenni AI, Captions AI. (relatively easy in comparison)

Most entrepreneurs should focus on #2 unless you want to create a trillion-dollar company.

There will be many billion-dollar companies just built on top of #2.

Rabbit Holes

  1. How to Transfer USD out of PayPal without conversion fees - The biggest scam with payment processors are small charges. When you add up all the small charges, they become wildly significant. PayPal is known to offer below-market prices so they make 10s of billions of dollars on these small charges across billions of users. They would make billions if they charged $1 per transaction but instead they charge massive amounts like $23 on $500. PayPal is a monopoly across the world. Stripe is only famous in USA.

  2. My Guide to B2B SaaS Copywriting - Improving your copy is the fastest way to make more sales. It is doubly true in B2B SaaS where most copy is boring.

  3. From NoCode side project to acquisition by Zapier - One sure-shot way to make a lot of money is to build a startup that can be acquired by a big company. Lots of VC-funded startups have money in the bank but little to no traffic.

Until next time,

Your Spells Master!

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More Startup Spells 🪄

  1. Wes Bos' Marketing Playbook (LINK)

  2. Find Top Instagram Influencers using Hashtags (LINK)

  3. Wavve: From $125k MRR To 7-Figure Exit (LINK)

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