👋 Hey, I’m Jaryd. I share one stealable idea with you a week on product, growth, AI, marketing, or strategy. My goal is to help with the hard part—growing the thing you’re trying to build. For more: Explore the top ideas | Watch me yap
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We’ve all seen that video of the Tesla Roadster “flying”. Well, thrusting itself—like I imagine a ship does in space—over a Cybercab, a Cybertruck, a Semi, a Model Y and a Model 3.
It’s very cool but nobody is going to be flying in their Tesla. It’s not for sale.
What Tesla did is an engineering show off. And that showoff, in one 6s video posted by Elon alone, passed 26 million views by the next morning.
The clip really shows just one thing. The car nobody can buy jumping over every car Tesla needs to sell.
Simply, Tesla didn't build a commercial flying car to sell, they built a toy flying car for a free commercial. And it made the internet want a non-flying Roadster more than ever.
There’s a few interesting things going on here.
btw, I’ll be at App Growth Annual for some events today. I’m attending from my couch because the virtual sessions are free, and there are some incredible keynotes and agenda items. If you want to hear from icons on how to grow apps and crack distribution, it’s not too late to register. Just drop your email even if you can’t make it and you get recordings. Come say hi.
Firstly, why did Tesla need a commercial?
The Roadster has been having its issues for almost a decade. We were told about it first in 2017 with promised for delivery in 2020, and has since missed every date. Sam Altman cancelled his deposit last year after waiting almost 8 years, and he made a public bit out of getting his money back.
Plus, the cars Tesla does sell are slowing. Q3 deliveries came in down 2.1% year over year, and US sales are down after that EV tax credit thing ended.
So, Tesla had a lagging delivery issue and a core business losing some steam. Then this happened to search.
red = “Tesla Roadster” ; blue = “Tesla”
Interest in an almost 10-year delayed car spiked.
No ad budget buys that.
But this is the least interesting part of the the stunt, because as I said, the stunt was for something you can’t buy
The showoff anchor and the actual product
Look at how the Roadster is actually sold. There are three versions:
Rocket, the one that flies. Invite only, no price. Not approved for public roads and the FAA says it isn’t an aircraft either. Basically it’s an insanely expensive toy for the boys that has rocket thrusters.
Thrust, the SpaceX-thruster version. $250,000 to reserve. Actual price isn’t listed yet.
Performance, the one that just drives. $50,000 to reserve. Again we don’t know the actual price. No thrusters, AKA it’s drivable.
Almost nobody will own the Rocket. The thing we all watched and that’s gained over 1 billion views; you can’t even click on it on their site.
So, it does two things very very well
It gets watched. Millions of people saw a car float down from a ramp. Everyone spoke about it and shared it and got messages from their dad asking if it was real or AI. No ad could have bought that attention.
It moves the anchor. Next to a car that flies, $50,000 for one that drives starts to sound reasonable—perhaps even a bargain? You’re still getting the Roadster, right, from the same company and engineers that made it fly? Must be good!
This isn’t the classic decoy price we’ve all heard about where you slip in a slightly worse option so the middle one wins. The show-off is a real product, and it may well be worth its price tag. It’s just so far from what most people want or can afford, that the thing they can buy looks way better.
Simply, your bestseller needs a crazy show-off standing next to it that also gives YouTubers/TikTokers a reason to post about you.
And it works across industries
The $1,000 sundae. Serendipity 3 in New York has sold its Golden Opulence sundae (gold leaf, a crystal goblet you get to keep) for years. It sells about one a month. Everyone else buys the regular sundae and tells their friends about the gold one.
The $2,000 pizza. Industry Kitchen in Manhattan made one with gold leaf, caviar and truffle, ordered 48 hours ahead. Suddenly a $40 pie from them feels like a bargain.
A $100,000-a-night suite. The Palms in Vegas opened a Damien Hirst suite with sharks in formaldehyde and a two-night minimum. At least for a period, the most expensive room in America. The $6,000 suites down the hall starts to look like a deal
A winery where the founder drives the bottle to your door, opens it and has a glass with you. Priced to be outrageous. Hardly anyone wants that. Everyone wants to tell someone about it.
A coach’s “by application only” and SQ program that makes the $500 course next to it feel accessible.
And just playing around with an idea here, but bringing this to software which is what most of us are building…imagine Claude launched a $20,000/mo “God mode”, which has some special-access model only a handful of people could get.
People would talk. People would switch. And plenty would upgrade to the $200 plan if it came with, say, two hours of God mode a month.
That’s the idea—the show-off sells the bestseller by proximity. And ideally, the show-off thing is “The most X” in your category. The most expensive, the most ridiculous, the most powerful, etc.
The flip side to this idea is an insane reward
Instead of a price almost nobody pays, offer a prize almost nobody wins.
On Lake Taupō in New Zealand there’s a driving range with a green floating about 104 metres out on the water. Sink it and they pay you $10,000. About 1,200 people have done it in 30 years, so roughly one a week. Almost nobody wins. But why hit balls at your local range when you could drive to Taupō and take a shot at ten grand? The business is a basket of balls that the idea of going home with $10k sells way more of.
Software has done this too. Netflix once offered $1 million to anyone who could make its recommendations 10% better. Thousands of teams spent three years trying and everyone wrote about it.
Again, some fictional examples in software:
Wispr Flow: $10,000 to anyone who can dictate 5,000 words in under 5 minutes. Every attempt is a demo of the product.
Claude: $50k to anyone whose monthly token count lands on one exact number—say 19,367,432. Hard to hit because its like a lotto, but I’d bet people would post their totals at the end of every month showing how close they got and people would switch to have a shot.
Insane price or insane reward, the move is the same: give people one ridiculous but real thing to talk about and sell them the normal thing.
What makes a good show-off (or prize)
✅ It’s real and it delivers on its price (or actually pays out)
✅ It’s so far from your core buyer that almost nobody picks it or wins it
✅ It’s ridiculous enough to talk about (the sundae, the backflip, the floating green)
✅ It sits right next to your bestseller
✅ People can see someone has actually won it or bought it
✅ Bonus: your main product/tier gets a small taste of it
Nobody bought a flying car last Thursday, but 1 billion views saw one parked right next to the cars they might actually buy.
So, what’s the flying car in your business?
—Jaryd
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