KING OF NEW YORK HACKS
6 HN recommenders · recommended in 7 months, 2009–2014
5:47 · 1.5M views · Nov 4, 2008
A short street-level clip of Joe Ades, the New York pitchman who sold vegetable peelers to crowds on the sidewalk. It shows his patter, showmanship and crowd handling in action.
HN treats him as a master class in salesmanship and live presentation, where how you sell matters more than what you sell.
8 comments from Hacker News
You seem to have been terribly misled. Only very rarely do products sell themselves. 99% of the time, the product is largely incidental to the sales process. Your idea doesn't matter one jot, what matters is how well you can connect to customers and really sell to them. Let me tell you about a fine English gentleman by the name of Joe Ades, now sadly no longer with us. Joe wore Savile Row suits and lived in a three-bedroomed apartment on Park Avenue. He spent most nights at the Café Pierre with his wife, sharing a bottle of his usual - Veuve Clicquot champagne. You might assume that Joe was a banker or an executive, but in fact Joe sold potato peelers on the street for $5 each, four for $20. I urge you, I implore you, I beg you, stop what you're doing and watch Joe in action - this video That is what business looks like. Sometimes, once in a million, you luck upon a product so amazing the world beats a path to your door. For most of us, the best we can hope for is to be some chump with a thousand boxes of vegetable peelers. Anybody can sit out on the street with a box of peelers, but Joe sold them. Joe made his peelers sing, he made them seem like magic. He took a humble piece of stamped metal and created theatre. He did something so simple and strange and wonderful that people would buy a fistful of his peelers, just so they could tell their friends about this little Englishman they saw in Union Square. Look at the Fortune 500, tell me what you see. I see grocery stores, drugst
I don't think Steve Jobs is that great a presenter, Ballmer is (much) worse though. A good presentation and a good presenter are two different things. A good presenter can give a presentation about essentially boring material and make it live, be memorable. A bad presenter can turn a great presentation in to an ordeal. I've linked here once to a youtube video of Joe Ades, have a look at it: this video The subject is 'potato peelers', from a street vendor no less. That man has more feeling for presentation in his little finger than any amount of high flying consultants that lecture on the subject. Watch the crowd he draws and how well he interacts with the people. Of course he's had years to hone his 'patter', but still, I can't imagine watching someone trying to sell a car, much less a potato peeler, and presenting is essentially a sales job. He manages to turn the mundane in to something interesting and engaging.
I heard about this gentleman on HN a few years ago. You have to watch him work: it's a performance, in every sense of the word: this video
See the guy in action at this video A really fantastic pitchman, great to watch and made an absolute craft out of his work.
Sell experiences. I'm not sure if you've heard of Joe Ades. He used to sell potato peelers in NY and has been mentioned on HN a few times: [LINK] [LINK] this video I don't think it really matters what you sell, especially in this case where you just want to improve your sales technique. The main thing is that you sell an experience, not a product.