Monday, November 20th.
3:11 am.
*BEEP-BEEP-BEEP-BEEP*
A sharp alarm cut through the building.
“Red alert, red alert. THIS IS NOT A DRILL.”
Hundreds.
No, thousands of engineers rushed into the battleroom. Coffee in mouths. Manual in hands. And panic on faces.
This cannot be happening.
The Amazon AWS servers — the backbone of half the Internet — were down. Amazon, Reddit, Robinhood, United Airlines, and even the McDonald’s app were offline.
Along with half the online tools and software, including…
…a tiny little tool
…that’s kinda important for e-commerces
…called KLAVIO.
Yup. Klaviyo was showing “Bad Gateway 502” for the better part of the day.
It took the AWS team over 15 hours until an innocent note at 6:53 p.m:
“All AWS services returned to normal operations.”
Just like that.
~16 hours
Potentially billions of dollars lost.
(and I’m STILL fixing hidden segment glitches due to Klaviyo’s reset yesterday)
(because Klaviyo messed up the segments, causing flows to go haywire)
YET –
Just this week, I saw a marketer claiming that BFCM success comes down to…
Setting up the right automation so that you can “sit on the beach and make it rain with over 50 percent automated sales.”
You’ve got to be kidding me…
…and judging from the comments
PEOPLE ARE BELIEVING THIS 💩
Look. I get the appeal. Who wouldn’t want to spend one single investment, set up a bunch of automations, and make it rain — week after week after week — with zero additional effort in email marketing?
Sounds like a dream…
Almost too good to be true.
Because maybe… just maybe…
It is too good to be true.
But imagine one little hiccup from AWS (which you’re even using… because you’re using Klaviyo for God’s sake) –
And your whole BFCM promotion (maybe 25 percent of your annual sales) goes down the drain.
Oopsy?
Or perhaps you find a better way…
Like the way I’m about to show you in the following weeks.
(but to get the most out of this, make sure you read and reply to the last 2 emails. SL: quick favor AND follow up)
To be continued…
– WYH