John Bejakovic

Which year?

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I opened up Hacker News today to find a trending website, Which Year, that shows you a photo and then you try to guess what year the photo was taken.

“Ok,” I thought, “but why so popular?”

For reference, Hacker News is a kind of link-sharing site where thousands of nerds congregate every day and upvote for the links they like best and downvote the rest.

Most links shared on Hacker news get a few dozen summed-up points, some get up to 100. Which Year, which was posted just 9 hours ago, currently has 349 points, which is by far the most of any link posted today.

I clicked through to Which Year out of idle curiosity, and it was immediately obvious to me why this simple concept has proven so popular. Right up top, it says:

“Which Year DAILY CHALLENGE”

In other words, whoever made this site took a page out of Wordle’s playbook.

While the core idea of Which Year — see picture, guess year — is fine but nothing groundbreaking, limiting how often you can play to once a day, and serving up the same puzzle to everyone in the world at the same time, immediately ups the desirability, coolness, and engagement factor of this puzzle game.

(That’s a page I’ve taken out of Wordle’s playbook myself, and applied to my Daily Email Habit service.)

Anyways, there’s clearly a marketing lesson in there, but rather than hit you over the head with that on this Easter Sunday, let’s play a game.

Today being April 20, I thought we could play a game called, Which Year, Email Edition.

Can you guess in which years the following curiosities happened?

Of course, you can get ChatGPT to answer for ya. Or you can simply wait 24 hours, when I will reveal the answers and give you a new round of puzzles. Here are your puzzles:

1. A killer swamp rabbit attacked a U.S. president (won’t say which one) while the man was trying to fish and relax

2. Nutella was first introduced in stores

3. The price of oil turned negative for the first time in history

Again, come up with your best guesses for which years these events happened, and I’ll share the answers tomorrow.

Oh, and if you want to play another daily challenge, one which isn’t just fun but can also make you money, then you can still sign up to get the next Daily Email Habit puzzle. Here’s the link:

https://bejakovic.com/deh

Do you know anybody who needs referrals?

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I’ve just prepared a little report about a tweak to get referrals. It works for getting referrals for services, but it can be adapted for products, too.

If you know anybody who needs referrals, write me an email (hit reply or write me at john@bejakovic.com) and I’ll get you a copy of this report so you can give it to them.

A question I’ve been dreading

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Last week I got a question, one I’ve been dreading, from long-time reader Neil Sutton.

Neil is an architect by day and by night, he puts on his copywriting pajamas and works as a copywriter helping businesses who want architects as clients…. which I have to say is kind of brilliant. Anyways, Neil wrote:

===

Hey John,

Here’s a picture of me eating a PopTart and scrolling through my Bejako emails, trying to find where I missed the email about your new 10 Commandments book launch.

[Neil included a gif here, showing a small monkey, possible a rhesus macaque, eating a pop tart and scrolling on a phone]

Did I miss it?

===

The back story is that, some time in February, I had the bright idea to publicly announce a deadline — March 24,2025 — by which I will finish and publish my new book, titled:

“10 Commandments of Con Men, Pick Up Artists, Magicians, Door-to-Door Salesmen, Hypnotists, Copywriters, Professional Negotiators, Political Propagandists, Stand Up Comedians, and Oscar-Winning Screenwriters”

Well, the deadline came, the deadline passed, no emails went out announcing the book because the book is still not finished or published.

I failed with my self-assigned public deadline, and a few people, Neil among them, have spotted something off.

I can only tell you that just this morning, I finished the introduction to the new book, which was the last part waiting to be written. The book just has to go out to a few folks for edits + suggestions. The cover is already done.

All of which means the book will be finished and published…

Who knows when. I’ve burned myself already by setting and publicly announcing a deadline I failed to meet. I won’t be repeating that mistake again.

Two things are for sure:

One, I am working on it. And two, I will get it done.

In the meantime, if you haven’t read my original 10 Commandments book, you might find that interesting and valuable.

The original 10 commandments book was successful enuff that I decided to copy the core concept, the structure, and even the cover style for the new 10 Commandments book.

If you’re looking for ideas to help you influence others, or just to better understand your own mind, then take a look here:

https://bejakovic.com/10commandments

My new personal best: 2,030 days

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Yesterday, I got a notification from Gumroad to report on a new sale of Gasper Crepinsek’s ChatGPT Mastery program, which I’ve been promoting for the past few days.

(The deadline for ChatGPT Mastery is tonight, in less than 12 hours, at 12 midnight EST.)

A bit of behind the scenes:

I have an “LTV” spreadsheet, in which I write down every bit of money that comes in via my newsletter, so I can keep track of which of my readers are responsible for my income.

The email address of the person who bought yesterday was familiar to me… but I didn’t know their name.

I searched in Gmail. It turned out this person signed up to my list back in 2019.

(That’s why I remembered the email address. I probably had 5 people on my list total at that time, and I was obsessively checking who opened my email each day.)

Since then, this person (whose name I still don’t know) never replied to any of my emails, and never bought anything that I promoted.

Until now, almost 6 years later.

I previously had a case study — a previous personal best — of 775 days from the time somebody signed up to my list to the first time they bought something I was promoting.

2,030 days definitely beats it, and makes for a new personal best.

I’m telling you this for two reasons.

First reason is a bit of kick, if you still need it, to start or stick with daily emailing. Maybe you haven’t gotten started yet. Or maybe you are now, like I was then, checking your email opens, and finding that, yeah, maybe people read, but they never reply, and they certainly don’t buy nothing.

They will, in time, if you only keep at it.

Second reason is that I shared this new personal best inside my Daily Email House community yesterday. And Maliha Mannan, who writes over at The Side Blogger, and who is also promoting Gasper’s ChatGPT Mastery, wrote:

===

Funny coincidence: yesterday I made a sale and the person who bought has been a subscriber since 2021 and never bought anything from me until yesterday 🤘

===

Coincidence… or maybe not?

Maybe ChatGPT Mastery is just an exciting offer at the right time, which is attracting even people who have been quiet for a long time?

You can decide for yourself, if you like. (If you don’t, the deadline will decide for you.) To help you do that, here’s my original email, explaining why I’m endorsing and promoting ChatGPT Mastery:

===

Today I’d like to recommend to you a 30-day program called ChatGPT Mastery, which is about… mastering ChatGPT, with the goal of having a kind of large and fast horse to ride on.

Here’s a list of exciting facts I’ve prepared for you about this new offer:

#1. ChatGPT Mastery is a cohort course — it kicks off and ends on a specific date — that helps you actually integrate and benefit from AI.

The idea being, things in the AI space are changing so fast that anything that came out even a few months ago is likely to be out of date.

And rather than saying “Oh let me spend a few dozen hours every quarter researching the latest advice on how to actually use this stuff” — because you won’t, just like I won’t – you can just get somebody else to do the work of cutting a path for you through the quickly regenerating AI jungle.

#2. I myself have gone through through ChatGPT Mastery, from A-Z, all 30 days, during the last cohort.

I didn’t pay for it because I was offered to get in for free.

I did go through it first and foremost for my own selfish interests — I feel a constant sense of guilt over not using AI enough in what I do — and only then with a secondary goal of promoting it if I benefited from it enough. So here I am.

#3. ChatGPT Mastery is created and run by Gasper Crepinsek. Gasper is an ex-Boston Consulting Group guy and from what I can tell, one of those hardworking and productive consulting types, the kind I look upon with a mixture of wonder and green envy.

But to hear Gasper tell it, he quit his consulting job to have more freedom, started creating info products online like everybody else, realized he had just bought himself another 70 hr/week job, and then had the idea to automate as much of it as he could with AI.

He’s largely succeeded — he now spends his mornings eating croissants and sipping coffee while strolling around Paris, because most of his work of content creation and social media and even his trip planning have been automated in large part or in full.

#4. Before I went through the 30 days of ChatGPT Mastery, I had already been using ChatGPT daily for a couple years. Inevitably, that means a good part of what Gasper teaches was familiar to me.

Other stuff he teaches was simply not relevant (I won’t be using ChatGPT to write my daily emails, thank you). The way I still benefited from ChatGPT Mastery was:

– By having my mind opened to using ChatGPT for things for things I hadn’t thought of before (just one example: I did a “dopamine reset” protocol over 4 weeks, which was frankly wonderful, and which ChatGPT designed for me, and which I got the idea for while doing ChatGPT Mastery)

– By seeing Gasper’s very structured, consulting-minded approach to automating various aspects of his business, and being inspired to port some of that to my own specific situation

– With several valuable meta-prompts that I continue to use, such as the prompt for generating custom GPTs

#5. The way you could benefit from ChatGPT Mastery is likely to be highly specific to what you do and who you are.

The program focuses on a different use case every day. Some days will be more relevant to you than others. The previous cohort covered topics like competitor analysis, insights based on customer calls or testimonials, and of course the usual stuff like content and idea generation, plus hobuncha more.

If you do any of the specific things that Gasper covers, and if you do them on at least an occasional basis, then odds are you will get a great return on both the time and money and that ChatGPT Mastery requires of you, before the 30 days are out.

Beyond that, ChatGPT Mastery can open your mind to what’s possible, give you confidence and a bunch of examples to get you spotting what could be automated in what you do, plus the techniques for how to do it (I’ve already automated a handful of things in what I do, and I have a list of next things to do).

#6. The time required for ChatGPT Mastery is about 15-20 minutes per day for 30 days. The money required is an upfront payment of $199.

I can imagine that one or the other of these is not easy for you to eke out in the current moment.

All I can say is that it’s an investment that’s likely to pay you back many times over, in terms of both time and money. And the sooner you make that investment, the greater and quicker the returns will come.

#7. If you’d like to find out the full details about ChatGPT Mastery, or even to sign up before the cohort kicks off:

https://bejakovic.com/gasper

Bombarded by water

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A-list copywriter Richard Armstrong once gave a talk in which he said how stupid it is to claim that we are “bombarded by information.” Says Richard:

“It makes no more sense to say we are bombarded with information than it would be to say that a fish is bombarded with water.”

A fish lives in water. It swims in water. It breathes water. In fact, it’s largely made up of water. And so it is with us and information.

I’m telling you this in case you are still on the fence about joining ChatGPT Mastery, which I’ve been promoting since Monday, and which will close to new members tonight, Thursday, at 12 midnight EST.

ChatGPT Mastery is about, well, mastering ChatGPT. And you may feel that info about ChatGPT is as abundant as ocean water. So why pay for it, and why pay the hefty $199 that ChatGPT Mastery asks of you?

The fact is, none of us have any hope of putting our arms, or fins, around the ocean. It’s too immense a body of water.

But there are small, local currents in the ocean which flow in the direction you want to go, and which take you there in less time and with less effort than it might take otherwise.

First, you either have to find these currents or have somebody else point them out. Second, and critically, you have to give these currents a chance to carry you along.

ChatGPT Mastery is one such forward-moving current, at least if your desired destination is automating parts of your business, freeing up your time, even (gasp!) increasing your productivity while working less.

I’ve pointed out this current for you. But you still have to give it a chance to carry you along.

Mind you, I’m not saying that paying for information guarantees you will benefit from it. I’d be a billionaire had I implemented and benefited from every info product I ever bought. And I’d be President of the U.S., due to sheer popularity, if all the people who bought stuff from me implemented and benefited from it. (Not really — The U.S. Constitution prohibits me from ever becoming president, since I wasn’t born in the U.S., but you get my point.)

That said, paying for info on how to master ChatGPT does make it more likely you will take this information for real and benefit from it.

As does the cohort nature of ChatGPT Mastery, with its start and end dates.

As does the fact that ChatGPT Mastery is delivered to your inbox daily, where you can’t ignore it as easily, and where it can keep nudging you to get some value from it.

You might think it’s silly of me to harp on these things. But I have been selling information online long enough that I know what a difference irrational things like these make to the value of information and teaching.

It’s these kinds of difference that actually allow you to slip inside that forward-moving current, so you can get carried along to your desired destination more quickly and easily.

Like I said, ChatGPT Mastery closes tonight at 12 midnight EST. If you’d like to find out more about it, specifically why I am endorsing it, here’s my original email from Monday:

===

Today I’d like to recommend to you a 30-day program called ChatGPT Mastery, which is about… mastering ChatGPT, with the goal of having a kind of large and fast horse to ride on.

Here’s a list of exciting facts I’ve prepared for you about this new offer:

#1. ChatGPT Mastery is a cohort course — it kicks off and ends on a specific date — that helps you actually integrate and benefit from AI.

The idea being, things in the AI space are changing so fast that anything that came out even a few months ago is likely to be out of date.

And rather than saying “Oh let me spend a few dozen hours every quarter researching the latest advice on how to actually use this stuff” — because you won’t, just like I won’t – you can just get somebody else to do the work of cutting a path for you through the quickly regenerating AI jungle.

#2. I myself have gone through through ChatGPT Mastery, from A-Z, all 30 days, during the last cohort.

I didn’t pay for it because I was offered to get in for free.

I did go through it first and foremost for my own selfish interests — I feel a constant sense of guilt over not using AI enough in what I do — and only then with a secondary goal of promoting it if I benefited from it enough. So here I am.

#3. ChatGPT Mastery is created and run by Gasper Crepinsek. Gasper is an ex-Boston Consulting Group guy and from what I can tell, one of those hardworking and productive consulting types, the kind I look upon with a mixture of wonder and green envy.

But to hear Gasper tell it, he quit his consulting job to have more freedom, started creating info products online like everybody else, realized he had just bought himself another 70 hr/week job, and then had the idea to automate as much of it as he could with AI.

He’s largely succeeded — he now spends his mornings eating croissants and sipping coffee while strolling around Paris, because most of his work of content creation and social media and even his trip planning have been automated in large part or in full.

#4. Before I went through the 30 days of ChatGPT Mastery, I had already been using ChatGPT daily for a couple years. Inevitably, that means a good part of what Gasper teaches was familiar to me.

Other stuff he teaches was simply not relevant (I won’t be using ChatGPT to write my daily emails, thank you). The way I still benefited from ChatGPT Mastery was:

– By having my mind opened to using ChatGPT for things for things I hadn’t thought of before (just one example: I did a “dopamine reset” protocol over 4 weeks, which was frankly wonderful, and which ChatGPT designed for me, and which I got the idea for while doing ChatGPT Mastery)

– By seeing Gasper’s very structured, consulting-minded approach to automating various aspects of his business, and being inspired to port some of that to my own specific situation

– With several valuable meta-prompts that I continue to use, such as the prompt for generating custom GPTs

#5. The way you could benefit from ChatGPT Mastery is likely to be highly specific to what you do and who you are.

The program focuses on a different use case every day. Some days will be more relevant to you than others. The previous cohort covered topics like competitor analysis, insights based on customer calls or testimonials, and of course the usual stuff like content and idea generation, plus hobuncha more.

If you do any of the specific things that Gasper covers, and if you do them on at least an occasional basis, then odds are you will get a great return on both the time and money and that ChatGPT Mastery requires of you, before the 30 days are out.

Beyond that, ChatGPT Mastery can open your mind to what’s possible, give you confidence and a bunch of examples to get you spotting what could be automated in what you do, plus the techniques for how to do it (I’ve already automated a handful of things in what I do, and I have a list of next things to do).

#6. The time required for ChatGPT Mastery is about 15-20 minutes per day for 30 days. The money required is an upfront payment of $199.

I can imagine that one or the other of these is not easy for you to eke out in the current moment.

All I can say is that it’s an investment that’s likely to pay you back many times over, in terms of both time and money. And the sooner you make that investment, the greater and quicker the returns will come.

#7. If you’d like to find out the full details about ChatGPT Mastery, or even to sign up before the cohort kicks off:

https://bejakovic.com/gasper

How to get a one-time course to maintain its value

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Dr. Kiran Agarwal, who is both a practicing GP in London and a stress-management coach, writes in with a legit question (or actually 3) about my ongoing promo of ChatGPT Mastery:

===

Thanks for introducing Gasper – I am interested as you are supporting him.

A couple of quick questions- is this specific for chatGPT? or prompts can be used for any other AIs?

And why would you not let it write your daily emails? Is it because you like writing them or anything else?

As things are changing so fast in AI space, how will this one time course maintain its value after a couple of months?

===

Kiran’s third question is really the most interesting, but let me answer the first two quickly:

1. ChatGPT Mastery is specific to ChatGPT. That said, I imagine the prompts would work in any other chat-like AI tool like Claude or Gemini.

2. I get value out of writing emails beyond just the money I make from them, or the fact that they’re sent out. Plus, I don’t think that anybody or anything can get my own tone and ideas exactly right.

That’s why I wouldn’t let AI write my emails, and why I wouldn’t hire a copywriter to write my emails either.

3. Like I said, this question is the most interesting. Sure, it’s fine to find out how to get the most out of ChatGPT today… but what about in July? Or August? Or next year?

I checked the sales page for ChatGPT Mastery, and there was nothing about this question. So I wrote to Gasper Crepinsek, the guy behind ChatGPT Mastery, to find out what he has to say.

Gasper got back to me with the exact response I was hoping for:

===

If someone wants to take the course again, I will simply add them in the future run.

I want to build long-term customers. My whole goal is to keep adding to the course and people who put the trust early will get everything I add locked in at the initial price they paid.

===

I think what Gasper is doing is super smart. I say that having done the same with my Copy Riddles course back when I ran it as a cohort course.

I allowed people who joined Copy Riddles in previous runs to join future runs for free. It bought me a bunch of goodwill, created customers who are still with me years later, plus it produced some great case studies and testimonials from people who got more on the 2nd or 3rd run than they did the first time around. He who has ears, let him hear.

Also, let him hear this:

The deadline to join ChatGPT Mastery is tomorrow, Thursday, at 12 midnight EST (not PST, the way I do).

If you’re on the fence, it’s time to make up your mind one way or the other, otherwise the deadline will make up your mind for you.

If you want more info to help you make up your mind, here’s my initial email, detailing why I’m endorsing and promoting ChatGPT Mastery:

===

Today I’d like to recommend to you a 30-day program called ChatGPT Mastery, which is about… mastering ChatGPT, with the goal of having a kind of large and fast horse to ride on.

Here’s a list of exciting facts I’ve prepared for you about this new offer:

#1. ChatGPT Mastery is a cohort course — it kicks off and ends on a specific date — that helps you actually integrate and benefit from AI.

The idea being, things in the AI space are changing so fast that anything that came out even a few months ago is likely to be out of date.

And rather than saying “Oh let me spend a few dozen hours every quarter researching the latest advice on how to actually use this stuff” — because you won’t, just like I won’t – you can just get somebody else to do the work of cutting a path for you through the quickly regenerating AI jungle.

#2. I myself have gone through through ChatGPT Mastery, from A-Z, all 30 days, during the last cohort.

I didn’t pay for it because I was offered to get in for free.

I did go through it first and foremost for my own selfish interests — I feel a constant sense of guilt over not using AI enough in what I do — and only then with a secondary goal of promoting it if I benefited from it enough. So here I am.

#3. ChatGPT Mastery is created and run by Gasper Crepinsek. Gasper is an ex-Boston Consulting Group guy and from what I can tell, one of those hardworking and productive consulting types, the kind I look upon with a mixture of wonder and green envy.

But to hear Gasper tell it, he quit his consulting job to have more freedom, started creating info products online like everybody else, realized he had just bought himself another 70 hr/week job, and then had the idea to automate as much of it as he could with AI.

He’s largely succeeded — he now spends his mornings eating croissants and sipping coffee while strolling around Paris, because most of his work of content creation and social media and even his trip planning have been automated in large part or in full.

#4. Before I went through the 30 days of ChatGPT Mastery, I had already been using ChatGPT daily for a couple years. Inevitably, that means a good part of what Gasper teaches was familiar to me.

Other stuff he teaches was simply not relevant (I won’t be using ChatGPT to write my daily emails, thank you). The way I still benefited from ChatGPT Mastery was:

– By having my mind opened to using ChatGPT for things for things I hadn’t thought of before (just one example: I did a “dopamine reset” protocol over 4 weeks, which was frankly wonderful, and which ChatGPT designed for me, and which I got the idea for while doing ChatGPT Mastery)

– By seeing Gasper’s very structured, consulting-minded approach to automating various aspects of his business, and being inspired to port some of that to my own specific situation

– With several valuable meta-prompts that I continue to use, such as the prompt for generating custom GPTs

#5. The way you could benefit from ChatGPT Mastery is likely to be highly specific to what you do and who you are.

The program focuses on a different use case every day. Some days will be more relevant to you than others. The previous cohort covered topics like competitor analysis, insights based on customer calls or testimonials, and of course the usual stuff like content and idea generation, plus hobuncha more.

If you do any of the specific things that Gasper covers, and if you do them on at least an occasional basis, then odds are you will get a great return on both the time and money and that ChatGPT Mastery requires of you, before the 30 days are out.

Beyond that, ChatGPT Mastery can open your mind to what’s possible, give you confidence and a bunch of examples to get you spotting what could be automated in what you do, plus the techniques for how to do it (I’ve already automated a handful of things in what I do, and I have a list of next things to do).

#6. The time required for ChatGPT Mastery is about 15-20 minutes per day for 30 days. The money required is an upfront payment of $199.

I can imagine that one or the other of these is not easy for you to eke out in the current moment.

All I can say is that it’s an investment that’s likely to pay you back many times over, in terms of both time and money. And the sooner you make that investment, the greater and quicker the returns will come.

#7. If you’d like to find out the full details about ChatGPT Mastery, or even to sign up before the cohort kicks off:

https://bejakovic.com/gasper

Bitter prediction

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Derek Johanson is apparently running a launch of CopyHour this week. I say “apparently” because there was some mixup with Derek’s emails, and they only arrived to my inbox today. I opened one this morning to read the following bitter prediction:

===

Back in the 1960s, researchers were looking at the productivity improvements computers were about to bring – and sounded the alarm because it looked like humans were soon going to only be working 2 hours a day with the same output.

What would we do with all that free time!? What will happen to the economy!?

Obviously that’s not what happened. Instead of working less, we just started outputting a lot more in the same amount of time.

I have a feeling we’re going through a similar cycle now.

AI is about to replace a lot of the work we’re doing now – not just copywriting, but everything. But, instead of not working, we’re likely just all going to start outputting 10x-100x what we used to because of those advances in AI.

===

If you wanna lose money, put your chips on “But this time it’s different!” In other words, the Lindy Effect backs up Derek’s bitter prediction.

We’ve had breakthroughs in labor-saving technology for hundreds of years. At each point, the Powers That Be started worrying, “If people aren’t working, what the hell are we gonna do with them?”

The result was that, with each new labor-saving technology, some way was devised to keep people as busy are before, or busier, while simply making their output 100x greater.

But, and I realize I’m most likely going to shoot myself in the foot here, this time it’s different, at least the way I see it.

It’s not so much because the latest crop of AI is such a powerful labor-saving tool, though that’s certainly a requirement.

Rather, I think it’s because other parts of society have changed from the days of mainframe computers and rotary presses and spinning jennies.

Maybe I’m biased, but I see more and more people working for themselves, or with a range of clients or customers or followers, rather than with one single boss. This makes it more likely that people can work from where they want, as much or as little as they want, rather than 40+ hours, take it or leave it, from our office in downtown Baltimore, exclusively on the employer’s terms.

Or if you want to get more dark, I also think the Powers That Be are fine to let us have our leisure today because they now have other ways of controlling the world that they didn’t have before. That could be monetary, technological, or simply via TikTok propaganda.

All that’s to say, my prediction is that this time it really is different.

We genuinely are entering an era where unprecedented numbers of people free up leisure time for themselves, and work only on things they choose to do, in moderation, rather than obsessively running on the hamster wheel because it’s either run or die.

AI is an inevitable part of this transformation. And you can get started with it today. Which brings me to the offer I am promoting nowadays, ChatGPT Mastery.

I wrote an email about ChatGPT Mastery yesterday that did surprisingly well.

Direct marketing dogma says if something is working, don’t touch it.

So here is my email from yesterday, reprinted word for word, in case you want to automate some of your work and free up some of your time:

===

Today I’d like to recommend to you a 30-day program called ChatGPT Mastery, which is about… mastering ChatGPT, with the goal of having a kind of large and fast horse to ride on.

Here’s a list of exciting facts I’ve prepared for you about this new offer:

#1. ChatGPT Mastery is a cohort course — it kicks off and ends on a specific date — that helps you actually integrate and benefit from AI.

The idea being, things in the AI space are changing so fast that anything that came out even a few months ago is likely to be out of date.

And rather than saying “Oh let me spend a few dozen hours every quarter researching the latest advice on how to actually use this stuff” — because you won’t, just like I won’t – you can just get somebody else to do the work of cutting a path for you through the quickly regenerating AI jungle.

#2. I myself have gone through through ChatGPT Mastery, from A-Z, all 30 days, during the last cohort.

I didn’t pay for it because I was offered to get in for free.

I did go through it first and foremost for my own selfish interests — I feel a constant sense of guilt over not using AI enough in what I do — and only then with a secondary goal of promoting it if I benefited from it enough. So here I am.

#3. ChatGPT Mastery is created and run by Gasper Crepinsek. Gasper is an ex-Boston Consulting Group guy and from what I can tell, one of those hardworking and productive consulting types, the kind I look upon with a mixture of wonder and green envy.

But to hear Gasper tell it, he quit his consulting job to have more freedom, started creating info products online like everybody else, realized he had just bought himself another 70 hr/week job, and then had the idea to automate as much of it as he could with AI.

He’s largely succeeded — he now spends his mornings eating croissants and sipping coffee while strolling around Paris, because most of his work of content creation and social media and even his trip planning have been automated in large part or in full.

#4. Before I went through the 30 days of ChatGPT Mastery, I had already been using ChatGPT daily for a couple years. Inevitably, that means a good part of what Gasper teaches was familiar to me.

Other stuff he teaches was simply not relevant (I won’t be using ChatGPT to write my daily emails, thank you). The way I still benefited from ChatGPT Mastery was:

– By having my mind opened to using ChatGPT for things for things I hadn’t thought of before (just one example: I did a “dopamine reset” protocol over 4 weeks, which was frankly wonderful, and which ChatGPT designed for me, and which I got the idea for while doing ChatGPT Mastery)

– By seeing Gasper’s very structured, consulting-minded approach to automating various aspects of his business, and being inspired to port some of that to my own specific situation

– With several valuable meta-prompts that I continue to use, such as the prompt for generating custom GPTs

#5. The way you could benefit from ChatGPT Mastery is likely to be highly specific to what you do and who you are.

The program focuses on a different use case every day. Some days will be more relevant to you than others. The previous cohort covered topics like competitor analysis, insights based on customer calls or testimonials, and of course the usual stuff like content and idea generation, plus hobuncha more.

If you do any of the specific things that Gasper covers, and if you do them on at least an occasional basis, then odds are you will get a great return on both the time and money and that ChatGPT Mastery requires of you, before the 30 days are out.

Beyond that, ChatGPT Mastery can open your mind to what’s possible, give you confidence and a bunch of examples to get you spotting what could be automated in what you do, plus the techniques for how to do it (I’ve already automated a handful of things in what I do, and I have a list of next things to do).

#6. The time required for ChatGPT Mastery is about 15-20 minutes per day for 30 days. The money required is an upfront payment of $199.

I can imagine that one or the other of these is not easy for you to eke out in the current moment.

All I can say is that it’s an investment that’s likely to pay you back many times over, in terms of both time and money. And the sooner you make that investment, the greater and quicker the returns will come.

#7. If you’d like to find out the full details about ChatGPT Mastery, or even to sign up before the cohort kicks off:

https://bejakovic.com/gasper

Announcing: ChatGPT Mastery

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Today I’d like to recommend to you a 30-day program called ChatGPT Mastery, which is about… mastering ChatGPT, with the goal of having a kind of large and fast horse to ride on.

Here’s a list of exciting facts I’ve prepared for you about this new offer:

#1. ChatGPT Mastery is a cohort course — it kicks off and ends on a specific date — that helps you actually integrate and benefit from AI.

The idea being, things in the AI space are changing so fast that anything that came out even a few months ago is likely to be out of date.

And rather than saying “Oh let me spend a few dozen hours every quarter researching the latest advice on how to actually use this stuff” — because you won’t, just like I won’t – you can just get somebody else to do the work of cutting a path for you through the quickly regenerating AI jungle.

#2. I myself have gone through through ChatGPT Mastery, from A-Z, all 30 days, during the last cohort.

I didn’t pay for it because I was offered to get in for free.

I did go through it first and foremost for my own selfish interests — I feel a constant sense of guilt over not using AI enough in what I do — and only then with a secondary goal of promoting it if I benefited from it enough. So here I am.

#3. ChatGPT Mastery is created and run by Gasper Crepinsek. Gasper is an ex-Boston Consulting Group guy and from what I can tell, one of those hardworking and productive consulting types, the kind I look upon with a mixture of wonder and green envy.

But to hear Gasper tell it, he quit his consulting job to have more freedom, started creating info products online like everybody else, realized he had just bought himself another 70 hr/week job, and then had the idea to automate as much of it as he could with AI.

He’s largely succeeded — he now spends his mornings eating croissants and sipping coffee while strolling around Paris, because most of his work of content creation and social media and even his trip planning have been automated in large part or in full.

#4. Before I went through the 30 days of ChatGPT Mastery, I had already been using ChatGPT daily for a couple years. Inevitably, that means a good part of what Gasper teaches was familiar to me.

Other stuff he teaches was simply not relevant (I won’t be using ChatGPT to write my daily emails, thank you). The way I still benefited from ChatGPT Mastery was:

– By having my mind opened to using ChatGPT for things for things I hadn’t thought of before (just one example: I did a “dopamine reset” protocol over 4 weeks, which was frankly wonderful, and which ChatGPT designed for me, and which I got the idea for while doing ChatGPT Mastery)

– By seeing Gasper’s very structured, consulting-minded approach to automating various aspects of his business, and being inspired to port some of that to my own specific situation

– With several valuable meta-prompts that I continue to use, such as the prompt for generating custom GPTs

#5. The way you could benefit from ChatGPT Mastery is likely to be highly specific to what you do and who you are.

The program focuses on a different use case every day. Some days will be more relevant to you than others. The previous cohort covered topics like competitor analysis, insights based on customer calls or testimonials, and of course the usual stuff like content and idea generation, plus hobuncha more.

If you do any of the specific things that Gasper covers, and if you do them on at least an occasional basis, then odds are you will get a great return on both the time and money and that ChatGPT Mastery requires of you, before the 30 days are out.

Beyond that, ChatGPT Mastery can open your mind to what’s possible, give you confidence and a bunch of examples to get you spotting what could be automated in what you do, plus the techniques for how to do it (I’ve already automated a handful of things in what I do, and I have a list of next things to do).

#6. The time required for ChatGPT Mastery is about 15-20 minutes per day for 30 days. The money required is an upfront payment of $199.

I can imagine that one or the other of these is not easy for you to eke out in the current moment.

All I can say is that it’s an investment that’s likely to pay you back many times over, in terms of both time and money. And the sooner you make that investment, the greater and quicker the returns will come.

#7. If you’d like to find out the full details about ChatGPT Mastery, or even to sign up before the cohort kicks off:

https://bejakovic.com/gasper

Last call for MyPeeps bonus offer

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Once upon a time, I saw a one-panel cartoon that showed Pinocchio and his fairy godmother hovering over him, ready to make Pinocchio’s deepest wish come true.

The caption explained what Pinocchio was wishing for:

“It’s not so much that I want to be a real, live human boy as that I’d rather be anything than a terrifying, nightmare-inducing marionette.”

That’s my tip for you for today, at least if you are planning on running ads to grow your email list.

If you need more explanation of what I mean by that tip, or if you simply want a much more detailed process for running ads to grow your email list, then I suggest you take a look at the sales page below for Travis Speegle’s MyPeeps course.

I bought Travis’s Mypeeps course myself last year.

I went through it and I was impressed with the content.

I promoted it to my list and even ran a 4-week implementation group on the back of it, in which I followed the process to subscribers at $0.60 a name for a new list I had created (dog owners, see my email yesterday).

Along with Joe Biden, Rafael Nadal, and the Paris Olympics, that implementation group has faded into the 2024 past. But if you get MyPeeps by 12 midnight PST tonight, and forward me your receipt, then I will give you access to:

#1. The recordings of the three calls I put on inside that implementation group

#2. My 8 pages of notes from going through MyPeeps

#3. An interview I did with Travis Speegle, which many people wrote me to say was eye-opening to them, particularly around Travis’s personal positioning as a media buyer

#4. “Do You Make These Mistakes In Paid Ads For Your Personal List?” — a document I’ve written up about the biggest mistake I saw people making in that implementation group, which sabotaged all their other good work, along with my suggestion for how you might be able to avoid this mistake.

Again, the deadline is tonight, Sunday, at 12 midnight PST. After that, these bonuses go back into the darkness of the cupboard, and not even your fairy godmother will be able to get them out.

If you’d like to act before then:

https://bejakovic.com/mypeeps

Why I didn’t build a list in the copywriting/marketing space

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Yesterday I mentioned how a while back, I followed Travis Speegle’s MyPeeps program to build up a new email list of dog owners via paid ads. To which a long-time reader wrote in to ask:

===

Just curious, John, how come you didn’t build a list in the copywriting/marketing space? I’m using a different process myself that will help me build a list with a combo of content + paid ads so curious to hear how come you don’t try to grow your existing list.

===

Good question.

First off, I frankly don’t want to build a “copywriting” list.

I haven’t primarily been writing about copywriting for, I don’t know, the past two+ years, ever since I stopped working with copywriting clients, and maybe before then.

I have been writing about persuasion and influence and psychology on the one hand, and online businesses and marketing on the other hand, and random other stuff that I find funny or interesting on the third hand.

But the real question is why not build up this existing list, and why start a new list instead?

I thought about it. I came up with a few reasons, ranked here from most logical and therefore least likely to be true, to least logical and therefore most likely to be true:

#1. I wanted to do a demonstration for the people inside the implementation group I ran when I first promoted MyPeeps. I didn’t want people who were building up their own lists to throw up their arms and say, “Of course you can do it because you have all these assets I don’t have!” A new list would make the demonstration cleaner and more persuasive.

#2. I was genuinely thinking to do this dog list as a side business of its own (I still think it could be viable). The list building implementation group I ran seemed like a good moment to kick that off.

#3. My simple opportunity-seeking mindset, which lives at the core of my person, and which says it’s more exciting to start something new and risky than to toil away on something familiar and proven.

#4. Because it’s simpler to run ads for a new, impersonal list than an existing, personal list. About that:

Like I said, I ran a 4-week implementation group for the people who bought MyPeeps when I promoted it as an affiliate.

In that group, I could see people running ads to build up their own personal lists.

AND IT DID NOT WORK.

Not because paid ads are a scam, or because Travis Speegle’s MyPeeps course doesn’t deliver.

Travis lays out very simple and yet very proven process to make paid ads work for list building, whether it’s your own personal list or an anonymous list of dog owners.

The reason it didn’t work for many people is because they refused to follow a crucial step in Travis’s process.

In fact, even when I pointed out to people they were skipping this crucial step, they nodded at me, smiled in appreciation of my looking out for them, and then turned around and continued to do exactly what they had been doing, which was skipping this crucial step.

What is this step?

Travis’s MyPeeps course describes is very well in module 1 and again in module 5.

If you would like to build up a new list, or to grow your existing list, you can find full info on Travis’s MyPeeps below:

https://bejakovic.com/mypeeps

P.S. If you have bought MyPeeps, forward me your receipt. I’ll share with you the recordings of the calls and my own notes that I initially did inside the implementation group last year.

And if you’ve already sent me your receipt, check inside the bonuses area that I gave you access to.

I’ve added a “DO YOU MAKE THESE MISTAKES IN PAID ADS FOR YOUR PERSONAL LIST?” document in there (very subtle, I know). It highlights the crucial step so many list owners are skipping when creating ads to promote their existing personal list, and explains how you can maybe avoid doing the same.