On January 9th, 2024, Will Neff made livestreaming history by selling over 1000 bottles of his own hot sauce in just five minutes.

So… how did Will Neff manage to sell more bottles in 5 minutes than a retail store can in a month? Well, just like crafting a spicy, delectable hot sauce, it’s all about ingredients. This 'recipe' contained community, a quality product, and hype.

Let’s dive into what exactly Will Neff did to have such a successful launch. 

Ingredient #1: Community

Over the course of Will Neff’s career, he’s managed to create a massive following. Currently, his Twitch channel has over 480,000 followers, where he maintains an average of over 5000 active viewers and has over 50,000 total hours watched by viewers.

With a community that large and passionate, your supporters can be your greatest asset. A dedicated community will watch and engage with your content, share your content with others, provide meaningful feedback, give financial support, and trust your recommendations. Trust in particular is a key part of Neff Sauce’s success. 

Ingredient #2: Quality Product

Finding or creating a high quality product that you can vouch for and are proud of is one of the most important steps when selling to your community. 

Will Neff initially decided that he wanted to create his own hot sauce while at a bar in Delaware. He was there on a trip and they served a little product named ‘Speedy’s Hot Sauce’. After tasting just one drop, Will Neff was blown away, and considered it the best hot sauce he’s ever had. He continued to order the sauce online, and would occasionally rave about the sauce to his viewers while he ate on stream. 

The owner and creator of Speedy’s Hot Sauce, Jimmy Miller, would come into his Virginia hot sauce shop and see he had random spikes in online orders. Eventually, he learned that these order spikes were from Will Neff’s community.

These order spikes meant that Speedy’s Hot Sauce was a good product, and that Will’s influence on his community was so strong that his sole recommendation was enough to drive traffic and generate purchases for Jimmy’s business.

Eventually, the two ended up having an idea: Will Neff would create his own version of the hot sauce to sell to his community. 

Ingredient #3: Hype

After a few months of fine-tuning the hot sauce and settling on a zesty blend of peach, habanero, & garlic, Will Neff announced on September 12th, 2023, that his hot sauce was officially moving into production. Just a few days later, Will went on the Fear& podcast to officially unveil the Neff Sauce. This episode featured Will, Hasanabi, Eddy Burback, & AustinShow, all talented creators that have massive platforms of their own. They each reviewed the hot sauce. 

On top of now having the endorsements of 3 huge content creators, Will mentioned that he would be giving away 200 bottles at a meet and greet at Twitchcon. This was a perfect way to build even more hype around the launch.

A few months later, Neff teased a photo shoot that he did with photographer Martin Wong to capture images of the product and further prepare for the launch.

On January 9th 2024, Will Neff officially announced that the first public drop of 1000 bottles would occur the next day on the 10th. He also announced that if you had 250,000 channel points on Twitch, you could redeem them for a bottle of Neff sauce! This was a great move as it rewarded his most engaged supporters and encouraged them to be there for the drop.

A few lessons can be learned from the way Will Neff built the anticipation around this drop:

1. Supporters enjoy when you bring them along for the process of creating your launch

2. From start to finish, you can share teasers with your community

3. Consider asking your friends and fellow creators to vouch for your products on their own channels for some cross-promotional action

4. Plan a giveaway or some sort of deal that will get people waiting on the edge of their seats 

The Drops

Now that all the quality ingredients of a successful launch had been blended together, the rest became history.

To give people a better chance of getting their own bottle of Neff Sauce, Will Neff made another surprise drop during his stream on February 15th, 2024. This time, Neff made use of Fourthwall’s Twitch Gifting feature by allowing supporters to gift other viewers in the stream a bottle of Neff sauce. Even with a surprise drop, viewers had to act quick- because in just an hour and a half, Will Neff had again sold out his stock of over 1000 bottles.

It's your turn to get started

If you feel inspired by Will Neff’s saucy success, check out Fourthwall. This all-in-one creator platform is built specifically to help creators develop their connection with their community. You can build your own unique site, design merch or other products, create your own exciting product drops, and even offer memberships to your community. If you want to know more about how Fourthwall can help, check it out and join over 50,000 creators who are working to grow their communities and revenue. Get started today.