“Hi Rob, Here’s the invoice for May. Take a look and see if everything looks kosher on your end. Thanks, John”
I sent that email out in June 2021.
I had been working with a dropshipping syndicate. When I say “syndicate,” I mean it was a few young American guys, living in Thailand, who had decided to band together to do dropshipping on an industrial scale.
They were running a dozen funnels for a dozen products, bringing in at the high point 2,000 new buyers per day, and I’m guessing making millions for themselves per year.
Starting in 2019, these guys had hired me to write copy for all the front-end stuff for all their funnels — ads, video scripts, advertorials, landing pages.
For the previous year or so, since early 2020, I was also writing daily emails to their list of about 200,000 buyers, on comission only.
The front-end copy paid me a paltry $150/hr. The back-end emails, after I finally convinced the guys to let me write them for free, on comission only, paid me much much more, the most money I’ve ever gottne paid as a freelance copywriter, money that’s stil sitting in my bank today.
“Hey Rob, Following up on this, not sure you saw it. I checked my account just now and didn’t see this invoice paid. Thanks”
That was a bit later in June 2021. Rob never replied to me. He also never paid my invoice.
I did in the end manage to get paid one last time, by writing to one of his partners, who informed me that the business was shutting down. I never found out why.
I did hear from Rob years later. He wasn’t doing dropshipping any more. He now had a new low-footprint business, buying and flipping land. He wanted to know if I was interested in writing copy for him again. I wasn’t. Also, I checked just now. That new business has also shut down in the meantime.
Here’s my point:
If somebody has no employees, no office, no expensive and custom equipment, no contracts to fulfill, and in general no obligations, what’s keeping them going if things ever get bad, sad, or even just boring? The answer is, nothing.
That’s why it’s a better long-term bet to sell to, say, dentists, who are tethered by a million hooks to their businesses, than to, say, dropshippers, who can decide from today to tomorrow to close their laptops and go work as a land flipper or to maybe roast coffee for a living.
Of course, it’s nice to make a quick cash grab by working where the money is churning right now. (It’s what I was able to do with the dropshipping guys while it still lasted.)
But isn’t it nicer to have a long-running cash grab, one that doesn’t just last for a few months or a year, but one that lasts for three years… five years… 15 years?
I’m telling you this because I’m now promoting an offer by Doberman Dan Gallapoo. I wrote about the full details yesterday. In a nutshell:
Dan is putting together a small group of copywriters and helping them profit from the confusion, uncertainty, and chaos in the market right now.
Dan’s system involves working with profitable businesses, which have been around for years and have large customer database, employees, and often, physical stores.
You can call these “Lindy” clients, as in “Lindy Effect,” which says that things that have been around for a while are likely to stick around.
Dan’s method of finding such clients, and delivering sales for them, is equally Lindy:
Direct mail.
I won’t try to sell you on direct mail or Dan’s system in this email.
Instead, I suggested to Dan that we create a free pop-up group to share more info about this opportunity.
The idea being, this free pop-up group would be a place for a few good folks to get to know Dan… to find out more about how he gets clients and delivers results with direct mail… and see if it’s something they would want to take on with Dan’s guidance, mentorship, and help.
Dan agreed with me. So we are creating this free pop-up group.
Would you like to join us?