Story
Micro1 offered Hampton $800K for its Slack, Notion and Gmail data
Micro1, a data lab that reached about a $1B run rate in 8 months, pays private companies for internal data and resells it to frontier labs. It offered Sam's Hampton $800K plus $50K for each referral. Sam declined because Hampton is a confidential community, but he says it can make sense for e-commerce brands.
“And basically what they've been doing is they've been going to privately held companies like my company Hampton, and they say, hey, if you plug in your Notion, your Slack, your Gmail, your Drive, and a bunch of other information, and they will give you $800,000. They offered us $800,000 for our data. We said no because— part of the whole thing of Hampton is like, it's a private community. We're not gonna do that. But they offered me $800,000 to do this.”
Tactic
Sam's temper fix: one 45-minute, written-in-advance complaint slot a week
Sam argues you rarely turn a weakness into a strength, so you build a system where it can't show. With his co-founder and CEO Joe, he can only raise business complaints or suggestions in one 45-minute weekly meeting, written out in advance, and by then most of the anger has faded.
“So with me, I've got a CEO, my co-founder Joe, And so we have set it up to where we only talk mostly about personal stuff throughout the day. But there's only one day of the week where I can come and complain to him or suggest improvements for the business. And that one day a week, it's only 45 minutes and I have to write it out in advance. And so because of that, I'll like see something and get pissed off and I'll be like, 6 days later when we talk about it, I'm like, I'm not actually that angry.”
Steal thisBatch your complaints to your team into one short weekly slot and write them down first; whatever still matters six days later is worth raising.
Idea
Hyper-personalized gift mail was Hampton's best channel; productize it
To fill local Hampton core groups, Sam paid a researcher $100 a person to study about 200 prospects and send each a custom gift with a handwritten letter, like artisanal honey to a firm called Honey Bookkeeping. It became one of Hampton's best marketing channels, so Sam wants a product where you upload a lead list and it builds gifts from each person's social media or website.
“And it's taken about 6 or 7 months in order to get the ROI data on this. But it was one of our best marketing channels where we like made this super customized gifts. The problem was that I had to find a kid who like kind of knew how to do this, but we were just making it up as we went. And so I think that someone can truly make this a product where you upload your lead list and you make heavily, heavily customized gifts based off the person's social media or their website.”
Steal thisSend high-LTV prospects a cheap but hyper-relevant gift with a handwritten note; relevance, not price, drives the response.