THE FOLLOWING EMAIL IS CONTROVERSIAL AND MAY BE OFFENSIVE TO SOME AUDIENCES
READER DISCRETION IS ADVISED
You might be familiar with Max Sackheim’s famous ad, “Do you make these mistakes in English?”
The ad ran for decades, unchanged, and kept bringing in profitable business better than any contender.
Thousands of pages of analysis have been written about the 7-word headline of this ad and the copy that followed.
But what about the actual product this ad was ultimately selling? What about the means by which a prospect could hope to correct his or her mistakes in English? What were prospects actually exchanging their money for?
Sackheim’s copy only teases you about the product, and calls it a “remarkable invention” and a “100% self-correcting device.”
As far as I know, nobody today actually has this remarkable invention stashed away in their garage. Whatever it was, it’s clear it was sold as some kind of tool, a device, and not just information.
This is a well-known direct marketing truth that’s been around since Sackheim’s days and before, back into the age of patent medicines.
A real, tangible, external mechanism — a fat-loss potion, a dog seatbelt, a “100% self-correcting device” — sells much easier than just good info — how to lose weight, how to be a less negligent dog owner, how to speak gooder English.
Smart modern-day info marketers have gotten hep to this fact. That’s why people like Russell Brunson and Ben Settle and Sam Ovens have put their reputation and audience to work behind tools like ClickFunnels and Berserker Mail and Skool.
The thing is, creating a tool, whether physical or software, has traditionally been an expensive, complicated, and risky business.
Take a look at Groove Funnels, another tool created a few years ago by another experienced info marketer, Mike Filsaime. Groove Funnels is a bloated, buggy, frankly unusable product. I say that as somebody who invested into a lifelong subscription in Groove Funnels.
I have a couple degrees in computer science. I also have about a decade’s worth amateur and pro software development experience. But after I quit my IT job 10+ years ago, I never once considered putting this experience to use in order to develop any kind of tool I could sell.
Until now.
Because things are changing. Today even a monkey, working alone, can create and deploy a valuable app simply by querying ChatGPT persistently enough. And there are plenty of shovels available for such would-be gold miners, tools to build tools, which will do much of the in-between work for you. Just say what you will to happen, and it will be done.
Decades ago, master direct marketer Gary Halbert said that the best best product of all is… information!
But I bet if Gary were alive today, he’d be hard at work (or maybe easy at work) creating some kind of high-margin tool to sell, in the broadest sense of the word — a thing to do some or all of the work for an audience with a problem. A few reasons why:
* Again, tools are easy to sell. They fit with innate human psychology of how we want to solve problems.
* Tools can make for natural continuity income if you license them out instead of sell them outright.
* Tools can create their own moat over time. There can be lock-in or switching cost if your users build on top of your tool.
* And now, thanks to the most remarkable invention of AI, it’s possible to create tools quickly, cheaply, and with great margins.
All that’s to say, best product of all… information? I don’t think so. Not any more. Best start adapting now.
Speaking of which, I got an offer for you:
Would you say that there are any tech issues that are keeping you from starting your own email list?
If there are, write in and let me know about them.
In turn, I’ll have something for you that you might like.