How I Lost a $6K/mo Brand Deal With Perplexity

I just lost a $6,000 a month brand deal with perplexity. I'm still kind of shell-shocked about the whole thing, but I thought it would be helpful to do an episode where I talk through the entire story. How they reached out to me, what they said, how the negotiation started. We even got all the way to the contract stage before it fell apart.

I'm even gonna show you the proposal with actual pricing that I put together so you can see everything that went down. So this whole thing started when I got a random LinkedIn connection request and message and said, Hey, Justin, I'm with the Perplexity community and corporate development team. Would love to connect and explore an ongoing partnership with Perplexity computer and its AI capabilities for your audience. I was super excited about this because I literally taught a workshop not that long ago.

And I was using Perplexity and showing everyone who attended the workshop. how, you know, how I'm using its AI capabilities in my workflow to help land more brand deals. And so this was like a shoe in sponsorship, I got super excited. And so instead of just like responding to that message with, you know, like, Oh, yeah, this is interesting, let's hop on a call.

I actually recorded a video. And I want to show you this because I think it's kind of next level. Yo, what's going on? Great to connect with you.

Super excited at the prospect of a partnership with Perplexity. I have, I switched over to Comet as my daily driver maybe six months ago and have been absolutely loving it. In fact, I actually recently taught an entire bootcamp called the AI Brand Deal Blueprint a couple months ago. And as you can see here in my like explanatory video, I was like straight up showing people why they need to be using perplexity for all the prompts that we developed for them.

So this is already something that I've been recommending to my community. And I think there's a lot of other opportunities for us to partner, whether it's in the newsletter. I've got about close to 30,000 creators in there, my YouTube channel. you know, socials, LinkedIn, et cetera.

So yeah, let me know if you might be free to hop on a call sometime this week or early next week. I would love to chat through what you're thinking. Thanks, man. And so I sent that video over LinkedIn DM and they said, hey, Justin, thanks for the video.

Appreciate it. Def a new one. Would love to schedule some time to discuss here on my calendar. And then he sent his email.

So I went ahead, I booked a call, and it went amazingly. So if you've read my book, Sponsor Magnet, you know that one of my biggest pieces of advice when you're getting on a phone call with a brand is to make it all about them. Don't waste a bunch of time talking about yourself. No, like research questions ahead of time about what's going on in their universe.

So for perplexity in particular, it seems like perplexity computer is... Right. Which is kind of their their agentic AI solution is a big thing that they want to to focus on. So I went and I did some research.

I saw what types of campaigns they're releasing, other creators that they're sponsoring to talk about this. And I came to that that call with them armed with a bunch of really like interesting questions that I was able to ask him. And he was super impressed. And so I then.

you know, walked away from that meeting basically saying, hey, I would love to put together a custom kind of bespoke proposal for you for us to consider a partnership. Now, I've never done this before in the many years that I've been posting on my YouTube channel and on my podcast and things like that. But I'm going to show you the actual proposal that I sent to Perplexity, including the numbers. I'm not going to redact anything.

I've decided at this point in my creator journey, like I'm a complete open book. I mean, heck, I open source all of my knowledge in the book because I truly want to help you. And this is like a big question that I get is like, what do I actually put in this proposal? So I'm just going to show you.

OK. And so page one of this proposal is what I heard. What were the goals that I heard on this call? And it was basically threefold.

The first was visibility and awareness for Perplexity Computer, right? Helping them reach solopreneurs, knowledge workers, and creator business owners who are actively looking for AI-powered tools and establish Perplexity Computer, the product that they want to promote, as the go-to agentic solution for non-technical users. That was the big thing is like, you know, there's a lot of people who are like really technically savvy who use AI products. But they really want to figure out how to reach people who are non-technical, right?

And show how easy it can be to use. The second goal was an authentic use case content. So they wanted like real workflow-driven demonstration of it in action. helping people see exactly how it can save time and automate tasks in their business.

Okay. The third goal was an ongoing partnership and community integration. So actually like a sustained, consistent presence within my community. That was a big thing that they emphasize is like, we don't want this to be just like a one-off thing where we like work with you.

You do like one campaign and then we never talk to you again. We're actually looking to build partnerships where you're doing it like every month you're posting consistent content. And this is like music to my ears. I was like, OK, let's go.

The third page is I love including what I call kind of like a merit based approach to like what what you can expect when you collaborate with with me. You know, I said, you know, working with key partners like perplexity is a core priority for my business. Here's what you can expect when you collaborate with me. I said a less than 48 hour response time on all email communications, right?

I'm going to give you concepts in advance of production. So I want your feedback so you can tell me, you know, is this hitting the mark in terms of how I'm going to bring this to life? If you have any, you know, feedback on the draft content that I send you less than 72 hours turnaround time on all those revisions and then ample flexibility when things arrive. Like, look.

Brands are so used to dealing with creators who are kind of a nightmare when it gets into the actual execution phase of the partnership, right? They don't provide concepts and then they bring them draft content that sucks and, you know, completely misses the mark. It's not on brief. You know, when a brand comes back with feedback, a lot of creators are like, no, I'm never going to do that.

Like, that's a stupid idea. I'm not going to do that. And then it just becomes this nightmare. It's like super contentious.

And so I'm literally proactively saying I'm the opposite of all those things. This is going to be a collaboration in the truest sense of the word, right? Goal alignment. I mentioned, oh yeah, I'm about to show you a bunch of packages and everything that I'm going to show you is completely aligned and kind of customized for what I heard with those goals on the previous page, right?

And then why creator wizard? I talk about some of my street cred, right? I've done a. ton of, you know, 500 plus sponsorships.

I ran an agency for many years. I already use it, you know, use this product daily. And, and I, you know, I showed in that video how authentic and how my audience has existing affinity for, for this tool. Right.

And so I think this is like a really important positioning page before you jump into the packages. Okay. So now here we go. Package one, I called this the LinkedIn essentials package.

Cause they mentioned that was a platform that was important to them. One newsletter blast, a dedicated blast to my 27,000 creator audience and two LinkedIn posts featuring kind of an authentic use case. Here's what I said that achieves consistent, credible visibility for perplexity computer among, you know, solopreneurs, creator, Jason, etc. And you notice here at the top where I'm saying this package specifically achieves goal one.

The investment here would be $4,000 a month with a minimum of a three-month commitment. Package two is what I call the amplified package, right? This one's going to achieve goals one and two. And you get everything in package one, including a YouTube and podcast integration, and a and a short form video that goes out across LinkedIn reels and shorts.

You're also going to get organic repurposing rights for all this content during the partnership term. And what this achieves is broader reach across both video and short form platforms. This investment is going to be 7.5k a month with a minimum three month commitment.

And I also noted at the bottom here that paid usage rights can be added for an additional 1.8k per month. That was something that they kind of said that might be interesting to them. And so I just wanted to I'll add it on there as an optional deliverable.

Also, you'll notice here on the right side of this slide that I include, you could actually click on these. And so this is a partnership that I did with Circle a ways back where I showed them what, how I could do a native short form content for them. In addition to a slightly different version of that same asset where I do a different CTA. So if I say, you know, in the, in the native video that I post on my platform, like, you know, what's your biggest obstacle to, you know, launching a community this year or something like that?

That's what I would say natively. But then the ad version of that asset that they would use to run ad said something like, you know, click below to sign up for a free trial of Circle or something. So something more overt, a more overt CTA. So that's absolutely something that you can offer.

And I'm showing them examples of that. Moving on to package three, which I call the community builder package. This now achieves goals one, two, and three. And this is multi-platform live content and creator recruitment pipeline.

So they get everything in package too. In addition to that, they get a LinkedIn live stream every other month, multi-stream to YouTube ad backs. And I'm going to walk through some workflows for them. Featured placement in the Creator Wizard Sponsorship Opportunities Digest.

So, you know, if you've been on my newsletter for a while, you know that every week I share like this digest of brands that are actively looking for creators to partner with. By the way, it's shameless plug here. You can go to creator wizard dot com slash join if you're not on the newsletter already. And I basically said to them, like, hey, you're looking to grow the creators that you work with to talk about perplexity.

we can help you do that. Like we could put a featured placement of like this, you know, recruit an application where creators can apply through our newsletter to collaborate with you. Right. And basically what I, what I tell brands who are interested in doing this is like, we do not take a cut of these deals.

That's like a big line in the sand. You probably know this about us that we, we're, we're never going to take a cut of your deals. And so we said like, we'll just serve as a conduit for you to like, find more people to talk about your, your brand. And, And then the final thing here was a dynamic ad read in our audio podcast.

So if you have a podcast, you may not know that you have this capability, but basically you can do like an ad read and apply it to your entire back catalog. So if you have 100 podcast episodes, you could say, hey, for the next 30 days, I can we can do a pre roll on the podcast or a mid roll on the podcast talking about perplexity computer. Right. And so you're going to get your share of voice across all my, you know, because I'm getting, you know, yes, my new podcast episodes get, let's say, 10,000 listens in the first 30 days, but I'm doing 100,000 downloads a month on my podcast.

across all of the episodes in the back cut out because people are listening to historical episodes. So why not run an ad for a brand, offer this as a deliverable to them? And so this is something that I offered in this package. And what this achieves is live proof of product content that builds real-time credibility and a creator recruitment engine that multiplies perplexities reach beyond this partnership.

The investment there was 12K a month. Now package four. Now let me take a quick pause here. If you're someone who's only ever spit back one number to a brand, right?

You know, they come back to you and they say, how much for a podcast integration? How much for a newsletter or a YouTube or a short form or whatever? You go, uh, 2,000 or whatever. You might be thinking here, like, this is crazy.

I've never offered packages to a brand. And so that's one of the reasons why I'm showing you this is that, like... Does it start to become obvious that like the only way for perplexity to achieve all of their goals is to pick these higher packages, packages three and four. And even if they don't pick that, it's now anchoring them to show them all of the things that were possible.

Because, again, remember, they came inbound not even knowing that I had the podcast, not even knowing that I had an in-person event. But. By providing them packages, I get to give them this surface area exposure, a broader surface area of all the different ways that we could help them amplify their messages. Make sense?

Okay, so package four, I'm calling the full funnel and community builder. This achieves goals one, two, and three. They get everything in package three. They're featured as a key partner in my private community, which has 3,300 members.

One live webinar with the Perplexity team showing use cases. How cool would that be? I get their head of community or their head of marketing, head of partnerships to come in and answer real questions from either current Perplexity users or people who have never used the tool before. And they get direct access there.

And I serve as the conduit for that. That's kind of a cool idea, right? And then another dedicated newsletter blast featuring the brand. What this achieves?

Deep community integration and direct access to engage audience of solopreneurs who influence other builders and creators. This is the investment here. 16.5K a month with a minimum three-month commitment.

All right. So this page is super important. And I reckon that you've never included a page like this in a proposal. And it's called measuring success.

So again. When I submit this proposal to a brand, the person that reached out to me from that brand likely has a boss or they have some weekly meeting where they're meeting with a group of, let's say, three or four other people. And they're discussing that month's partnerships or whatever. And so let's say it's like three other people on that call.

They have no idea who I am. They were not on the call with me. Only one person was. And so if the only thing that your contact has to go off of is pricing, like, oh, I had this conversation with this person.

Here's their pricing. All of a sudden now the decision is entirely a price based conversation has nothing to do with all the merit based stuff that I was talking about earlier has nothing to do with the, you know, achieving the goals that the brand outlined of like what they're trying to accomplish. And so this measuring success page is so important because now... The person's boss or their colleagues have a really good understanding that like this partner, like me, investing $16,500 a month in me is going to be a good investment because it's going to get them closer to their goals.

And so remember, by the way, these goals, these metrics, success metrics are tied to the goals that I mentioned on page one about what I heard. How are we going to actually measure this? Right. And you need to have be very low ego about this.

You need to know, OK, how many signups am I generating? Is that free trials? Are people actually upgrading to paid plans? Right.

A lot of times people, creators, they like, you know, they cover their hands, they cover their eyes, they stick their head in the sand and they think, I don't want to know how many sales I drove or how many whatever, you know, whatever happened, because then the brand is going to be mad at me. No, you need to you need to know this stuff, because if you're not driving, Like sales, if you're not driving signups, what are we even doing here? You need to have the humility to go back and see, like, it seems like, you know, the first months of content didn't go so well.

Let's pivot for month two. Instead of LinkedIn, let's do podcasts and more podcasts. Or instead of the podcast, let's do more short form content or whatever. You need to be agile and flexible because that is what makes them want to collaborate with you on an ongoing basis.

Now you turn from a commodity into a true partner. This is making sense. And so I submitted this proposal. I was super excited about it.

Remember, they reached out to me. So right. Vibes are already at an all time high. So I went ahead and I submitted the proposal along with a video.

walkthrough explaining all of the different packages, all the different pages, kind of as I just did to you. And I said at the bottom of this email, hey, the big theme here is that my audience of solopreneurs, creators, and knowledge workers is already looking for non-technical AI tools to automate their workflows. Perplexity Computer is exactly what they need. They just don't know it yet.

Huge awareness opportunity. Looking forward to your feedback. And they literally responded the same day. And they said, thanks for the video and walkthrough.

You're definitely a one of one when it comes to the depth of your work. I would love to discuss a mix of package one and two, perhaps one short form video and three LinkedIn posts a month and the corresponding rate. So this would be a lesser lift on the podcasting and long form content, but a bit more when it comes to text and LinkedIn content. Let me know what you think about that.

I want to quickly pause here and tell you what I was thinking when I got this email. I'm going to go ahead and go ahead and go ahead and go ahead and go ahead and go ahead. At first, I was bummed. I was like, man, I thought they were going to go for some of the higher packages, right?

The 12K, 16K a month, like my eyes were getting big when I was thinking about that. But again, they're talking about a mix between packages one and two, which is still still awesome. I'm not disappointed, right? But Now I have to think, okay, how can I create kind of a hybrid package here that still achieves the goals that they're looking for, right?

So here's what I said. Easy enough. Here's what I'm thinking for a custom package that fits what you described. Package 1.

5. I called it LinkedIn Plus. Monthly deliverables. Three LinkedIn posts featuring a perplexity computer workflow or use case.

That would be one text-only post, one carousel or graphic post, and one landscape video showcasing a workflow or demo. And then one short-form vertical video distributed to LinkedIn Reels TikTok X. Okay. Usage rights, organic during the term, but paid usage rights could be added for 1.

5K a month. And I said that the investment was 6K a month with a three-month minimum. And they very quickly came back and said, this looks great. I will forward this to our contracts team to get the documents drafted properly.

When you say paid usage rights, is this talking about running your posts as LinkedIn ads? And I said, yeah, exactly. And then a few days later, I got the contract. And overall, it looked actually really good.

There was just like maybe four or five clauses that I wanted to address some language. And so I sent that back to them. And then I didn't hear anything. I was like, oh, OK.

Like at this point, I think a lot of you have experienced this where you're like, oh, man, I scared them off. Like they no longer they were assuming that I was just going to sign the contract without any feedback. Um, but I, I, I've done this enough times to know that like, that's pretty standard. Like they will send my, my notes to the legal team and then they'll come back and they're either say, okay, these are fine.

Here's the clean agreement or no, we can't, we can accept this, this, and this, but we can't accept this and this. And like, that's a very normal back and forth. Um, but then I didn't hear from them for a while. Uh, I followed up and still didn't hear anything.

And so I started getting worried. And then on my third followup, I finally got a response and my stomach dropped when I read it. Hey, Justin, is no longer at perplexity due to changes. We'll have to put this on hold for now.

Oh, man. I was super bummed. Um, I, I followed up and I said like, oh, you know, uh, totally understand. Is there, you know, someone else that I could potentially, you know, connect with, uh, apoplexy to talk about this, um, maybe this person or this person, uh, no response, followed up again, no response.

Um, and I kind of just wanted to chat through, uh, you know, the lessons learned here. Um, the, the first is like an honest, um, admission. Um. Which is that I was super bummed by this.

You know, I was it was a brand I already use. It was going to be an ongoing partnership. So three months was going to be the initial term. But like I always approach this that like this brand is going to want to keep working with me.

Right. Because because I'm. I don't know. I put my all clearly I put my all into these types of partnerships.

And so I was looking at this as like this is now another brand that I'm able to add to kind of my roster of ongoing partners that I work with in in my community. And that was really exciting. And so for that to fall apart, that was that was a bummer. The other thing, too, is that like I don't really feel like I did anything wrong, you know, like it would be one thing if I like bungled the negotiation or I asked for something crazy in terms of like, you know, changes to the contract or something like that.

And but I didn't. And so one of the I think big lessons here is that you can do everything right and a deal still falls apart. For whatever reason, there's some changes that, you know, had to be made internally. Maybe they're reducing their partnership budget on a monthly basis.

Maybe they had to make headcount changes because they hired too quickly. For whatever reason, I don't know what happened. And so instead of like looking inward and instead of blaming myself and relitigating what I could have done differently, I think it's like really important for us as creators to give ourselves grace. There's literally nothing that I could have done to salvage this deal.

Of course, I'm still going to be persistent and like keep following up with them. And like, you know, this is just like, again, you know what I say? It's like, it's not no, it's not yet. Right.

And so, you know, there's a chance that by going by making this video and like saying what happens that maybe I don't get the deal. But like at this point in my career, the lesson learned, I think for you as well is just too worthwhile. The pros outweigh the cons for me to just like tell this whole story. And again, at the end of the day, like I'm not mad at perplexity.

I still use it. It is my day. Their comment browser I use on a daily basis. Like I love their tool.

And so I think it's really easy for something like this to happen and for you to turn into a hater of the brand instead of just an ongoing advocate. This has nothing to do with me. Like I'm not mad at them at all. Like I would be overjoyed if they came back and said like, hey, we got our ducks in a row.

We have a new person in the position. We'd love to proceed with this partnership. I would love to do that. And so I think that there's the other lesson here is that you have to keep your ego in check.

A lot of times when deals fall through like this, they're not the brand is not trying to be malicious. They didn't set out to like waste my time or whatever. I think a lot of creators, I've heard this so many times. They're like, oh, how dare the brand screw them?

They like yanked me around. They wasted my time on a Zoom call. I put this proposal together and they, you know, I have reviewed the contract and like only to pull it away at the last minute. That's never been how I've approached this stuff.

I'm not mad at them whatsoever. I'm disappointed. I'm bummed, of course, but I'm not mad. And I think that that is what I hope is the parting message from this whole experience of why I'm relaying this to you is that if you have a long-term perspective of brand partnerships, know that it all comes back around.

Because I was able to treat this with grace, I didn't fly off the handle and get all pissed off at them. No, like I said, totally understand this. These things happen. I'm keeping the door open.

You know, hopefully there's a chance down the line that we can salvage the deal. So this was a very different type of video for me. And I'm curious if it was useful for you. So if you're watching on YouTube, I would love if you could leave a comment below to hear about what lessons did you learn from this?

Maybe you could share some experiences from deals that have fallen apart for you. If you're listening to this on the podcast, maybe just like DM me, maybe on Instagram or something, creator wizard, at creator wizard. Because I really want to know if this episode was useful for you. I would like to do more of these, like, pulling back the curtain, kind of radically transparent, you know, type episodes, because again, I think it's helpful.

So much of the brand deal process can feel, I think, very mysterious and very enigmatic. And if there's anything that I've tried to do with all of my content in the book and the podcast and the newsletter and all that, it's to just demystify all this. Now, if you're feeling bummed for me after watching this, make sure to check out this episode where I actually landed a deal in real time.