I know this is highly unorthodox for normal corporate / customer communication… But I think you guys will be cool with it.
Dangerous Things is a strange business. We are trying to convince people it would be totally awesome to buy a thing in a sharp needle from some guy who named his company Dangerous Things and has operated that business out of one garage or another over the years, and then put that thing under their skin.
Marketing has always been a challenge… Not just because of what we are trying to sell… and not just because of the name of the business… But mostly because it’s not something I really understand all that well. I mean I post things here and there and maybe I try boosting things to pay for eyeballs but by and large the vast majority of new customers come from word of mouth and media coverage.
The thing is… over the last many months we haven’t really seen much change to traffic reaching the site… The same number of eyeballs on average are coming to check out just what the heck we’re doing over here calling ourselves dangerous things and selling sharp needles with stuff inside… But the actual number of purchases has been steadily going down to the point where I’m getting pretty concerned actually.
What I am curious about here is how everyone is feeling. The economy is kind of like the stock market and that it is purely an emotional and emotionally driven thing. No matter what kind of logical algorithms economists want to put onto something as clearly socially charged as the global economy, it’s driven by people’s wants and desires and hopes and yes their fears.
We’ve already discovered that the idea of buying a chip implant is driven primarily by an overall sense of hope about the future. This was made crystal clear when sales completely stopped on November 7th 2016. On a good day we would make a few sales, and on a bad day we would make maybe one sale. But pretty much we averaged at least one sale a day and that was caused for celebration. After November 7th, when Trump won the presidency, all sales stopped. Global sales stopped. Everyone collectively took a deep breath in and lost hope. We didn’t get our next sale for almost a week… then things slowly trickled in.
The business nearly did not survive that nightmare of a time. Now we are facing something similar, but a bit more nebulous. It’s been a long pandemic. There’s a war on that is affecting prices all across the board. China is going into lockdowns again because covid cases there are soaring. This a lot going on other than thinking about cool projects you could do with a microchip implant… and I think we are seeing the results of this.
What I’m curious about is how everyone is feeling in general. Are prices increasing for people? Is the cost of living going up while jobs and wages are in turmoil? Is there a sense that the future is bright or are there other concerns taking precedence right now? I really want to try to understand the general confidence a typical Dangerous Things biohacker has in the future right now, not just consider my own subjective perspective.
How can I help?
If you are wondering what the best way to help Dangerous Things right now would be, well first of all that’s amazing. Secondly, probably the most important thing for us is making new people aware of our products, what you can do with them, and the fact that this amazing community exists and can support them in their biohacking projects and endeavors.
The best way to do that I think would be for you guys to post images and videos explaining that you have a chip and where you got it and what you’re doing with it and show off basically. Showing off what you can do with your implants on social media platforms that your friends will say and other people will see and be curious enough to go check out… That’s probably the most valuable thing for us to be honest.
Paid ads
Historically, our social media posts and paid ads built around them just don’t really perform all that well and I spend a lot of time batting down stupid mark of the beast comments and other nonsense. It’s hard to quantify the value of those things but I know extremely well how expensive they are. Unfortunately I don’t know enough about quantifying the value of marketing campaigns like this to know if I’m just wasting my time and money… But considering the trend, they’re not effective and I need to stop spending that time and energy and capital on ads. I do think it’s worthwhile posting to social media. I haven’t made videos in a while and I want to get back to making more YouTube videos, that’ll be fun and hopefully educational if I can make something worthwhile.
Social media campaign giveaway
So here’s a bit of a brainstorm. What if we did a social media giveaway campaign where anyone who posts about their implants and maybe what they do with them like showing off a door opening or computer login or something cool like that, as long as the post tags Dangerous Things and offers a link to our technology primer… you’ll be entered into the drawing for each post that qualifies.
If we think this is a good idea as a community then I will construct the campaign and rules and all that and put that up on our announcements. So let me know your thoughts… Not just about the campaign but also what you’re thinking in terms of just general confidence in the future. How’s everyone feeling?