How to get leads from your 404 page ⛓️💥
The best marketing ideas of the past 7 days.
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Monday inspiration time!
Here are 5 genius marketing ideas I found last week ↓
#1
The 404 page that gives you an AirPods case
TestResults is a startup for automating software testing. They built the best error page on the internet:
Instead of apologizing for the broken link → they send you a gift with your name engraved on it 🎁
It’s a perfect flex for their audience. They sell a software testing product to people who love finding bugs. So when one of their users stumbles onto a broken link, that user basically IS their ideal customer. Might as well throw them a prize.
And the form’s final step is actually the smartest part:
You’ll get an extra gift if you tell them what brought you there! 🧠
It’s important because of AI hallucinations:
ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini all invent URLs. Your 404 is getting hit by AI-confused users wayyyyy more than by actual broken-link users now.
How to steal this: Turn your 404 into a gift. Match the gift to your audience (swag for developers, a free product month for SaaS users, etc). Add one bonus question asking where they came from. You’ll learn a ton about AI referral traffic.
#2
The rogue "z" that made Warmly $100K in pipeline
Speaking of mistakes:
Warmly sent an email to 83,000 marketers last week. But their cofounder Alan accidentally left a lowercase “z” floating in the top-left corner.
Marketers HATE typos.
9 of them wrote back → all of them asking about the z, none about the actual content of the email. So Warmly leaned into it. They replied with: “sorry about the z, book a demo and we’ll have more rogue letters for you 😉”. 4 took demos. 3 are in pipeline. $100K from one stray letter.
People love catching brands being slightly imperfect - it’s the strongest signal that there’s a real human on the other end.
How to still this: next time a tiny mistake sneaks into a live campaign, don’t apologize. Reply with humor, double down on the weirdness, and turn it into your CTA. In my experience, a typo will get you more replies than a perfect email ever will.
#3
Every sale needs a reason. Nostalgia is the best one.
I spotted this Pret A Manger sign on a NYC sidewalk last week:
A generic "20% OFF" is meh. But a discount with a REASON attached to it becomes a story people repeat. And nostalgia is one of the best “reasons” you can attach to anything right now.
Justin Bieber just did the same play on the biggest stage in the world, plugging his laptop into the Coachella screen to play "Baby" straight from YouTube, harmonizing with his 2009 self.
It was perfect.
The people yearn for nostalgia. I wrote about why here a while back. Y2K fashion is back and film cameras are selling out because we all want to feel 12 again.
How to steal this: Pick a year your customers loved and tie your product back to it. “Spring sale” → “The menu from the summer you met your girlfriend”
#4
The GitHub trick every product is copying now
Every developer has bragged about their GitHub contribution grid at some point. Each green square = a day they pushed code:
Now everyone is copying the format.
Habit Kit uses the same grid to help users build new habits.
Blackmagic shows it to creators for tracking their social posts.
Claude Code just added a contributions grid to their desktop app yesterday.
Why does this format keep getting stolen?
✅ It’s a screenshot magnet (it gives users social currency).
✅ It rewards consistency over intensity, which is the exact behavior you want in any sticky product.
✅ It triggers completionism.
✅ It’s instantly understood with zero onboarding, zero copy, zero explanation needed.
How to steal this: pick one behavior you want your users to do daily, and ship a contribution map for it. Works for a B2C app (daily usage), a B2B SaaS tool (active days), a newsletter platform (publishing cadence), a CRM (touchpoints logged), etc. Cheap to build, massive retention lever, and almost nobody outside dev tools is using it yet :)
#5
She turned a LinkedIn post into a $0 growth channel
Amanda Zhu took her best-performing LinkedIn post, printed it on a postcard, and mailed it to the home address of Tenali's CEO.
I love it.
The CEO probably got 200 emails that day, 40 LinkedIn DMs, a dozen retargeting ads… and one postcard. Guess which one he’s telling his team about.
And the only thing better than sending your own post printed → sending THEIRS.
How to steal this: print people their own creations and mail them. Their best LinkedIn post from last year, framed. Their top tweet on a magnet. Their most popular Substack issue printed on heavy cardstock. Services like Postpilot, Lob, and Handwrytten make this trivial to run.
See you Thursday ✌️
Tom
"How to still this"... well played Tom!
Loved every one of these. But I'm on the fence about the "z". Might be a turn-off for quite a few, some might prefer quietly unsubscribing over reverting.