The Microwave-in-the-Trunk Stunt That Built $28M in Sales
The Story
In 2014-2015, while running his dad’s small Philadelphia used-car lot, Yossi noticed no other dealers were running Facebook ads. “Period.” (Source 1).
He had been videotaping customers buying cars and posting clips to Facebook. One night at dinner with three friends, two of whom went on to found Gopuff, the conversation turned to differentiation.
“One of the guys was like, ‘Hey, what if you just put a gift in people’s trunks and just see what happens?’ The second I heard that, I was like, ‘Wow, that’s interesting.‘” (Source 1).
He got connected to an electronics supplier in New York and ordered three pallets of closeout electronics. Headphones, microwaves, “shit retailers didn’t want, or maybe there was overstock” (Source 1).
The choreography: customer buys a car, the whole dealership comes out, “we’re all going to clap and say pop that trunk, pop that trunk.” Customer opens the trunk, sees a microwave, and reacts. The reactions were filmed and posted to Facebook (Source 1).
“I think Snoop Dogg shared this on Facebook. I think some other rappers. It was all over the country, it went viral.” (Source 1).
He trademarked “Pop That Trunk” and built the dealership identity around it (Source 1).
The family lot grew “from nothing to a couple million dollar a year business” and was eventually scaled to “$28 million a year, bootstrapped, fully profitable” with a 25-27 person team (Source 1).
Lesson for Creators
A status moment beats a sales pitch. The microwave wasn’t valuable enough to change the buying decision, but the social moment was valuable enough to change the story the customer told their friends. Yossi was selling cars indistinguishable from 40,000 competitors’ cars. The differentiator wasn’t the product, it was the 30-second video. The lesson generalizes: when your product is a commodity, manufacture a moment worth filming, and let the customer be the distribution.
Related
- Yeezy Dating - Viral With No Plan — another low-budget stunt that produced disproportionate reach
- Headlines that target both a niche and a broad audience — making local content travel everywhere
- Three Ugly Graphics Got 480K Impressions — breaking the polished-content pattern to win attention
- The Failed Not Boring Club That Became Not Boring — experimental stunt that became the foundation
- The Wiz Drops Playbook — Tom Orbach: stunt-as-marketing scaled into a B2B drop strategy
- Viral Post Generator Sold in One Week — Tom Orbach: a different audacious attention hack
- The Sprinter Van That Got Pickleball to Notice The Dink — Thomas Shields: same logic — manufacture a moment unmissable enough to bypass paid distribution