Business Models

The most ironic, hypocritical, and ridiculous business model of all time?

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Here’s a fun 3-act parable for you:

ACT 1: A guy starts a business to help you cancel subscriptions to services you don’t use any more. Think AOL, or the home security at you old house, or getting milk delivered to your doorstep.

ACT 2: The guy gets a bunch of users interested in the service he is offering, but he struggles to make money with it. He tries charging a one-time fee. He tries doing affiliate deals. He briefly considers selling user data. All of it is no-go.

ACT 3: Wrestling against the irony of it all, the seeming hypocrisy, the sheer ridiculousness, he finally decides to change his business model and starts to charge… a monthly subscription. For a service that helps you cancel subscriptions.

EPILOGUE:

The guy’s company takes off. I mean, takes OFF.

Several years later, it is sold for over $1B.

ONE BILLION SHINING AND CRINKLING DOLLARS.

(True story, by the way. Look it up. The guy’s name is Haroon Mokhtarzada and the company was called TrueBill.)

Lots of lessons in this little parable I think.

I want to highlight just one today, because it is the core of the entire direct marketing business. It’s this:

Sell people more of what they have already bought, preferably earlier this month.

Seems crazy at first, but the best prospect for a tennis racket is someone who has bought a bunch of tennis rackets already, maybe even yesterday.

Same is true for books… supplements… courses… sneakers… coaching… and apparently, subscription services.

Which gets me to wondering.

It’s January 2nd. I mean, just the second day of the year.

What significant purchases have you made already this year? Write in and let me know. I’m… curious.

The “magazine model” for your paid membership or continuity offer

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A couple days ago marked the 1-year anniversary that my Daily Email Habit service has been going out, day after day after day, to members all around the world.

Following that announcement, a new subscriber to Daily Email Habit wrote in and asked:

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Wow. Happy Bday to your DEH!

I am curious to see the first seven. Any chance to send them to me?

===

My response was some icy staring across the Internet, a bit of finger tapping on my desk, followed finally by a cold hard NO.

Like I’ve been telling people since I launched Daily Email Habit:

I don’t send out previous puzzles to new subscribers. The idea is Daily Email Habit works like a magazine subscription — you get the issues that go out from the time you subscribed, and not before. It’s a way to encourage people to sign up now rather than later.

After hearing my cold hard no, the DEH subscriber above replied to say:

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I know. I was just curious to see how it started. I respect your answer. It sounds fair and smart.

===

I’m a-telling you this because this week, I launched a new 1:1 coaching program.

On Tuesday, I got on the first call with one of the coaching clients who already signed up. Let’s call her Ms. X.

Ms. X runs a paid membership and wants to increase the number of paying subscribers and reduce churn.

But like lots of other people who run memberships, she has so far been promising new subscribers access to everything inside her membership, including all the stuff that happened before they subscribed.

But what’s the incentive to join today… when joining tomorrow will give you everything you get if you join today, plus some more stuff… plus you get to hold on to your money for an extra 24 hours?

Not much incentive.

Fortunately, Ms. X already came to that conclusion before she even got on this coaching call with me.

At this point, her bottleneck is technical. Her membership software makes it hard to restrict/allow access to different members like this.

My Yoda-like suggestion was, “Many simple option you fail to see.”

I suggested some low-tech ways to deliver content that’s only available to current members. Ways that make it easy to test out this idea for impact. If this magazine model makes a difference, as it most likely will, then Ms. X can worry about the long-term tech later.

A magazine model is something to think about if you too are running or are thinking of launching a paid membership, or really any kind of continuity offer.

Not only will treating your membership like a magazine give people a legit reason to sign up today rather than tomorrow… but it will give them a reason to stay signed up instead of churning (thinking they can always come back later and get everything they missed in the meantime)…

… and if your subscribers are anything like my subscribers, when you introduce and stick to this “magazine” rule, you might hear them say, “I respect your answer. It sounds fair and smart.”

In other news, I have already signed up a few coaching students since launching this coaching program a few days ago. I am also looking for a few more.

The coaching I’m offering is specifically about list monetization, or as I say, about using your email list to pay for a house.

The coaching is 1:1, and runs for a year.

It’s also reasonably low-cost, because accountability and whip-cracking are not a part of it.

In order for me to be useful to you at all with this coaching program, I need to see you have some runway already.

In case you’re interested, hit reply and tell me a bit about your situation with your list.

Specifically, I’m interested in things like how many people you have on your list… how many new people you’re getting in an average week… what kinds of offers you’ve made so far… and how that’s gone for you.

If you move your tail for clients, but they don’t appreciate it enough

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Yesterday, because I am thorough in my research, I was watching old TV commercials from the 1970s, including one for the long-gone Continental Airlines.

It featured a bouncy jingle that’s still playing in my head:

We live to make you happy

We’re out to make you pleased

You’re flying Continental

Your flight will be a breeze

We’ll hop to make you happy

We’ll skip to prove it’s true

On Continental Airlines

We MOVE OUR TAIL FOR YOU…

… and then the refrain comes in, with a cross-section of all Continental employees — pilots, stewardesses, luggage handlers, admin personal, even the chefs who prepare the delectable meals — bleating “WE MOVE OUR TAIL FOR YOUUUU” over and over.

I looked it up, and back in 60s and 70s Continental really moved their tail to make their customers happy —  larger, cushier seats, full meals (the commercial shows a chef preparing a giant salad), and complimentary drinks (alcoholic and soft), as well as additional perks like amenity kits, pillows, and blankets, all for free, all at no extra cost.

Today, of course, that’s unimaginable. So many of the things that airlines offered for free back in the 60s and 70s are now available and then some on a flight – but you gotta pay:

– checked baggage

– meals

– alcoholic drinks

– seat selection

– pillows and blankets

Continental Airlines no longer exists, at least under its own name (it was gradually absorbed into United). I guess Continental’s customers didn’t sufficiently appreciate all the tail moving to make this a viable long-term strategy.

Maybe there’s a lesson there? Maybe? In any case, I will share my idea, and you can decide if it could possibly be useful:

You can charge for what you offer for free now, or for what everybody else offers for free.

This doesn’t mean offering worse customer service, or turning yourself into the RyanAir of your industry.

But the fact is, “FREE” is a norm — whether it’s checked baggage or “free strategy sessions” or simple “let’s talk and see if we can benefit each other calls.”

Maybe that norm is one that’s working out for you. But if not, it’s one you can change, because norms are not rules of nature, but simply habitual ways of doing things.

I’m gonna write a new book one day, expanding on this idea.

For now though, I’ll just point you to my latest book, the “10 Commandments of Con Men, Pickup artists, Magicians, etc.” This book is not free, but I really did move my tail to make it both fun and valuable for you. If you haven’t read it yet:

https://bejakovic.com/new10commandments

Info publishing lesson from A24 Films

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I like to look at creative industries — where people are churning out and packaging up ideas and turning them into real world value. Maybe they can teach me something about the info publishing world as well.

Today, I wanna tell you about the movie industry, or rather, a different perspective that’s emerged in the movie industry over the past decade.

As you might know, the classic 20th century Hollywood movie studio is a home-run business.

A movie studio experiences lots and lots of strikeouts, which are offset and then some by one big hit, which can gross $100M or $1B or $100B (ok, maybe not $100B, not yet).

But there’s a subtle cost to this way of doing business, as you’ve probably seen at the local theater:

All Hollywood movies eventually become comic book movies.

The reason is both that comic book franchises already have proven stories and characters, with a built-in fan base that can be sold to…

… and that comic book movies make low demands on the viewer, and therefore have mass-market potential (this comes from someone who has spent 6 hours of his past 2 evenings rewatching two of Christopher Nolan’s Batman movies).

But there’s another way to make movies.

Perhaps you have heard of A24 Films. A24 is a film and TV production company that got started in 2012. They are best known for making arty, creative movies, often with very small budgets. Some A24 movies have become hits. Some barely managed to recoup their small budgets. But all are cool, unique, and beloved by fans and critics alike.

I read an article about A24 recently. A top executive was quoted in the article with something that struck me:

“To use a baseball metaphor, we hit singles and doubles. And when you set up movies to hit singles and doubles you can let your partner—in the best version of this—really take creative risks. We don’t need to gross a hundred million dollars. We don’t need to gross forty million dollars to actually have a successful financial outcome.”

Here’s how I interpret this translates into the info publishing world:

If you’re only creating a few offers a year, each needs to be a big hit if you’re gonna be a long-term successful as a business.

And that means that over time, you will experience “audience capture” the way that Hollywood has experienced with comic book movies. In other words, you will find that you’re forced to create stuff because the mass mind of your audience dictates it, whether you genuinely believe in it or not, whether you enjoy creating it or not.

This can be fine — you might care about other things in life and get your kicks there.

But if creating cool stuff you’re proud of is something that matters to you, then there’s a lesson in what that A24 exec says. That lesson is to work on hitting lots of doubles and singles, both to cover your nut, and to give you the freedom to keep doing what you want, how you want, when you want.

So much for cross-pollination.

Now I’d like to remind you of my Daily Email Habit service, which gives you a daily email “puzzle” to help you start and stick with sending daily emails.

Daily Email Habit currently sells for $30/month, which means you can get a daily email prompt and ongoing education in how to expand that prompt into a fun and valuable email for just $1/day.

In a few days, I will be jacking up the price of Daily Email Habit to Martin Shkreli levels. If you want to get in before the price increases, or better yet, if you simply want to start writing your own daily email habit today, so you can start hitting singles and doubles regularly:

https://bejakovic.com/deh

Do I have an affiliate relationship with all these big names?

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A couple days ago, I opened the most recent Exploding Topics newsletter, which tracks topics and brands that are surging online.

The top Exploding Topic was Scandinavian Biolabs, “a hair growth startup” that raised $5M in funding last year.

“Hello,” I said, “this sounds familiar.”

I had a sense that I know the head copywriter at Scandinavian Biolabs. I suspected it might be one Liza Schermann, the original Crazy Email Lady, who also acted as a cohost of the Age of Insight and Influential Emails trainings I ran several years ago.

I forwarded the Exploding Topics email to Liza to confirm this is indeed the place where she works. Liza wrote back:

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Haha look at that, I’m back at work and growth is skyrocketing! That’s the place indeed. I remember the celebration party for that $5M funding vividly.

I was just typing a reply when you forwarded it so I might as well do it here.

Did you have an affiliate or some kind of other partnership with Chris Orzechowski? Or did you just promote his workshop because you found it interesting? I was wondering that every time you promoted a big name.

Anyway, it seems like it’s been an eventful year in Bejako Land business-wise with lots of different offers (at least from what I could keep up with). I’m looking forward to your annual summary email if you’re planning to send one!

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In answer to Liza’s question:

Yes, I promoted Chris Orzechowski’s training (“5 steps to a million-dollar list”) as an affiliate.

I also promoted Derek Johanson’s CopyHour and Email Delivered Courses as an affiliate.

I promoted Thom Benny’s 1-Person Advertorial Agency as an affiliate.

I promoted Justin Blackman’s Different On Purpose as an affiliate.

I promoted Igor Kheifets’s Click Send Earn as an affiliate.

I promoted Kennedy’s “$27k to $544k” training as an affiliate.

And in a couple weeks from now, when I promote Gasper Crepinsek’s ChatGPT Mastery, I will do so as an affiliate.

I have in the past promoted people’s things simply because I thought they were cool and valuable, without getting paid.

I still do that sometimes.

But if I can promote something I think is cool and valuable AND get paid for it at the same time, well, I like to have my cake and lick it too.

The fact is, I have been feeling burned out this year about creating new offers.

I have created a lot of courses, trainings, reports, and even books over the 6+ years of running this newsletter.

Some have stuck around and become evergreen offers (Copy Riddles, Most Valuable Email, my new 10 Commandments book). Others were exotic one-time events (like the Age of Insight and Influential Emails workshops).

One thing’s for sure:

Even when I’m in full offer-creation mode, the appetite of my audience for cool and valuable new solutions to existing problems is much much bigger than what I can personally satisfy.

That’s one reason I’ve been building up a little invite-only group of list and offer owners.

I’ve been quietly pitching this group to people as a place to connect and partner and share ideas.

It’s proven to be that — it’s led to list swaps, podcast appearances, and affiliate promos, and not just involving me, either.

It so happens that Chris, Derek, Thom, Justin, Igor, Kennedy, and Gasper are all in my little invite-only group.

Maybe this group could be a good fit for you too?

If you’re interested, write in and let me know who you are and what you do.

A list is a mandatory requirement, as is the fact that you are writing that list regularly, and that you’ve made money from your list.

If have your own proven offers, that’s definitely a bonus.

Beyond that, I’m curious to hear who you are and what you do. If it’s a fit with the group, I’ll know it when I see it.

If more sales from your list with less work sounds sexy to you, write in and let’s talk.

Free training by million-dollar list owner

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This Monday, October 6, at 6pm CET/12 noon EST/9am PST, Chris Orzechowski is putting on a training called “5 Steps To A Million Dollar List.”

In case you don’t know Chris, he himself is the owner of a million-dollar list. He’s built a 7-figure list-based business selling offers around copywriting and email marketing, both to copywriters and big ecom businesses.

For the record, Chris’s list is currently under 13k people.

A few years ago, back in 2021, Chris made $996k with a list of just 6k people. Business Insider wrote up a profile of him because of this.

All that’s to say, Chris knows what he’s talking about — and the stuff he’s talking about is doable for others too.

I haven’t seen Chris’s training yet, but I know his philosophy of email marketing. It’s to email daily, sending out emails pretty much like the one you’re reading now.

Chris is gonna be kicking off an 8-week coaching program in October, guiding a group of people who wanna build the kind of profitable list business he himself has.

Monday’s “Million Dollar List” training is gonna be a kind of appetizer for that.

Chris says it will be a deep dive into list growth and monetization strategies that have worked for him.

So if you attend Chris’s training on Monday, you might learn something valuable and lucrative, maybe something you apply to your own list and your own biz starting Tuesday morning.

And if you’re interested in getting outside help and guidance in building the same kind of lean, profitable, list-based business Chris has, then Monday’s training will also be a chance to see if Chris is the guy for you.

If you’d like to attend, here’s the link to sign up:

https://bejakovic.com/mdl

How I conceived and delivered my first online course

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Four score and six months ago, I brought forth on the Internet a new offer, conceived in Columbia but delivered back in Europe, for what I called my “bullets course.”

I sold this new offer to a group of about 20 “beta-testers” who came via my email list. These beta-testers were willing to pay me for up front for this course, based simply on the info I shared in an email, without a sales page, sight unseen.

That’s just as well, because the course didn’t exist at that point yet. I only had the idea for it.

Since I managed to get the number of beta-testers I was looking for, I delivered the course over the next 8 or so weeks — via an email each workday, which I was writing day-for-day.

This way of creating a course turned out to be very low pressure and yet very productive for me. Meanwhile, it also provided accountability and a cohort feeling for the participants.

During those 8 weeks, I got feedback, corrections, and testimonials from that first group of students. I collected all that, integrated it into the second iteration of the course, which was largely the same, except it now had a higher price tag, and a new name, Copy Riddles.

I have been selling Copy Riddles ever since and have made — well, I won’t say exactly how much, but enough to buy several metric tons of glazed donuts.

That in a nutshell, is how you create value out of thin air.

If the way I told that story makes me sound like some kind of agile and entrepreneurial wizard, that’s not my intent.

The fact is, the only reason Copy Riddles was a success was that pretty much nothing I did was my original idea.

As I’ve written many times, the core idea for Copy Riddles content came from direct marketer Gary Halbert, and was drilled into my head via a training I had heard from A-list copywriter Parris Lampropoulos.

As for the structure of Copy Riddles — the fact I presold it and then delivered it via email, one day at a time — that came from me spying on course creator Derek Johanson, specifically, the way Derek created and delivered his CopyHour course.

I’m telling you this because Derek is currently launching a course, delivered daily by email, that gets you to launch, sell, and deliver a course that people want to pay for, in 30 days, all via email.

Derek’s course is creatively called “Email Delivered Courses” and it gets you to do what Derek did with CopyHour.

You certainly don’t need to buy Email Delivered Courses to launch your own email delivered course. Derek lays out the high-level process on his EDC sales page, which I’ve conveniently linked to below. And like I wrote already, I reverse-engineered and hacked many of the details myself, and that’s how I did Copy Riddles.

I’m still telling you about Email Delivered Courses for two reasons:

1. Maybe you don’t wanna do what I did, and spend weeks stalking Derek and reverse-engineering what he does. Instead, maybe you are happy to pay Derek to simply tell you what to do each day, so you come out 30 days from now with your own completed, desirable, and sales-validated course.

2. The real question is not whether you could figure out what Derek did, but whether you actually will do so, and whether you will then put it into practice in the next 30 days, and have an asset that you can sell ongoing, and buy yourself many metric tons of glazed donuts.

Derek’s launch for Email Delivered Courses closes at the end of this week. If you’d like more info, or to join before the doors close:

https://bejakovic.com/edc

Endless traffic partners for an “info product” funnel factory

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Yesterday, I promised to tell you how I would find endless traffic partners for your “info product” funnel factory, starting from nothing.

But before you spend time reading this long and lionhearted email, let me warn you:

What I’m about to share is speculative rather than proven.

It’s what I would do, but the fact is, the one and only time I tried anything like this, it didn’t produce any results.

I’m guessing that’s because I gave up after just one outreach message… because I prolly picked a bad person to reach out to… plus, my offer wasn’t as tempting as I would know to make it now.

I do still think this process has lots of promise, whether or not you’re starting from nothing. That’s why I’m sharing it with you.

Still with me? If you are, let me open up:

Last year, I read a post inside the Royalty Ronin community with the title:

“I will BRIBE you to do this deal!”

The “deal” was:

Go on YouTube… find people with big audiences in hobby niches like dogs or woodworking… and offer to produce a newsletter for them for free.

The guy making this post was James Foster, one of the more active and successful people inside the Royalty Ronin. James was so confident this would produce good results that, as a joke incentive to get people to try this out, he offered a $2 Dogecoin bill to people who actually put the idea into to action.

James’s reasoning:

1. Most YouTubers live and die with the popularity and reach of their next video

2. Of course, most YouTubers don’t have a newsletter, and depend entirely on the whims of YouTube algorithm

3. You can offer to create a newsletter for such people for them, for free.

The offer is, the YouTube Channel owner drives their viewers to the newsletter, and in turn, you produce emails that drive their own viewers back to their new videos (something that YouTube won’t reliably do).

You profit by also using the newsletter to promote other relevant stuff. (You can even offer to split the profits with the YouTube owner, or you don’t have to.)

I am a bit of a monkey-see-monkey-do kind of monkey. Plus I liked the idea of getting rewarded for running a little experiment.

So when I read James’s idea, I decided to give it a go.

I went on YouTube and, after a bit of snooping, found a YouTube channel with Qigong videos, delivering vague instructions over B-roll footage of mountains.

The channel had hundreds of videos, over a million followers, and of course no newsletter.

Sidebar:

In the past, I’ve experimented with cold outreach. And I’ve learned that cold outreach is drastically more likely to get a response if I put in the work up front to do something for people… instead of simply offering to do so only after gotten a green light from them.

So what to do here?

I set up a new free Beehiiv account… branded it with the branding from the YouTube channel… created an email to simulate how a regular weekly email would look, with a screenshot of their latest video… and signed up the owner of the YouTube account to my newsletter.

All this took like 20-30 minutes, because really I just repurposed stuff from their YouTube channel.

I then wrote the owner a separate email, to explain what’s going on and to make my partner proposition.

And like I said… I never heard back from the guy.

I never followed up or pursued this further, the $2 Dogecoin bill be damned.

The reason is, I had other things that are already bubbling on the stove for me, and this idea, cool and tempting though it sounded, failed to produce an immediate win for me.

That might be because the person I was writing to was a 16-year old Chinese boy who didn’t speak English who was just playing with AI (I don’t know this for a fact, but it is quite possible, based on the email address on the YouTube channel).

Or maybe it was that my offer, no risk and all reward though I tried to make it, still seemed confusing and unattractive. My reasoning:

If you read my emails, you’re likely to know that an email newsletter is immensely valuable. But the majority of the world has never heard of email marketing and cannot believe it is as effective as it actually is.

And so explaining to YouTube channel owners how they will drive traffic to a newsletter I create… and I will drive their viewers back to them… and how this is good for you and for them — that’s already complicated and not clear. And not-clear offers often don’t get takers.

That’s why I think a much better, much clearer offer would be to create NOT a custom newsletter, but a custom info product, along with a sales page, branded with the YouTube channel’s identity, on some topic that their audience already has shown to care about.

I speculate this kind of offer would be much easier for YouTube channel owners to be interested in and to say yes to partnering on. “I made this product that your people want, send them here and we split the profits.” Much clearer, no?

Plus, the nice thing in this case is, you’re still building an email list, except an email list of info product buyers, instead of just random newsletter subs.

So that’s my idea for finding endless traffic partners for all the info product funnels you could stomach to create.

Of course, creating an info product and a surrounding funnel is nowhere as trivial as signing up for Beehiiv and creating a welcome email.

Except… it can be, thanks to the “AI Super Agent” I’ve been talking about the past couple days. This “AI Super Agent” does market research to figure out which info product ideas are likely to be a hit… it creates the product based on the winningest ideas… plus it generates all the sales copy.

I wouldn’t use this “AI Super Agent” for creating info products for personality-based list like my own.

But for partnering with people who already have large audiences… in hobby niches where much of the info is already out there, but just needs to be synthesized and pacakaged up… I think this AI gizmo could be very a very useful and lucrative tool.

If you wanna find out more about this “AI Super Agent,” then the guy who created it has a webinar in which he demoes it and explains how it works:

https://bejakovic.com/aisuperagent

What everybody ought to know… about this online investor business

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This morning, I was sitting in a noisy cafe with music playing and coffee machines steaming away and a lampshade swinging above my head in the breeze. Amid all this confusion, I was trying to focus. I was looking for offers to promote.

I have several new and interesting offers slated for the next days and weeks. But what for today?

One of my go-tos on days like today is Travis Sago’s Royalty Ronin community, which I lurk, learn, and even occasionally participate in.

Being in Ronin and following Travis’s advice has made me tens of thousands of dollars over the past 18 months that I’ve been subscribed to it, via new offers I’ve made, and via making me more money out of offers I already have. That’s why I keep recommending Ronin in my emails whenever I have a bit of a chance.

So this morning, I went to check out the Ronin front page.

In the past, Travis ran a free trial offer for Ronin. It makes sense to do a free trial because Ronin is 1) expensive ($299/month) and 2) a monthly charge (which everyone hates, including people who can afford it).

For a long time, that free trial offer was the norm.

But then, at odd times, including times when I promoted Ronin previously, it turned out that the free trial had disappeared. Then it came back. Then it disappeared again. Then the price dropped. Then it went back to normal. I guess Travis is constantly experimenting with the offer.

Today, when I thought of promoting Ronin, I went to check what the current front page looks like.

At first, I was confused. Then shocked.

It turns out there’s no free trial at the moment. Ok.

It turns out the price is the usual $299/month. Ok.

What had me confused and shocked is that right now, the entire Ronin community is open.

You can see all the members inside, read all their posts, as well as the comments.

You can see the “Welcome! START HERE!” post, which links to the “8-Day New Ronin Action Plan,” which is also currently open to everyone. You can see Travis’s advice on topics like partner getting, licensing, and “coffee dates,” and how to do that in just the next few days.

The only stuff that remains restricted, unless you’re actually a paying Ronin member, is the courses area, which contains about a dozen specialized trainings. Plus you don’t get access to the Royalty Ronin bonuses, which is a library of Travis’s courses that adds up to $12k in real-world value. And of course, you can’t participate or post in the community, but only observe and read.

This extra stuff is definitely worth paying for. But even without it, there’s enough valuable info inside the freely available Ronin community to fill a few airplane hangars with.

At least for the moment.

The current “everything in the open” offer might be a glitch. Maybe it will disappear very soon.

Maybe. Or maybe it’s just old-school marketing.

I remember a long time ago Andre Chaperon talking about lead magnets you didn’t have to sign up for.

Andre would simply lay out the entire, high-value lead magnet on his web site as a web page. He would then have an optin at the end of all that for the people who had gone to the trouble of reading the whole thing, which, unsurprisingly, turned out to be very high-quality leads.

Of course, there’s nothing new under the sun, and Andre didn’t invent this strategy.

It goes back millions of years, back to when brontosauruses ran direct-response weight-loss offers in the Jurrasic Times.

A little more seriously, it goes back at least to the 1940s, and the famous “What everybody ought to know… About This Stock and Bonds Business” ad.

That ad ran in major newspapers across the country. It featured 6,000 densely packed words of info and education about stocks and bonds, and a buried offer at the end, which drew tons of highly qualified leads for Merryl Lynch for over 10 years.

I thought about how to adapt that headline to the currently open Royalty Ronin community.

“What everybody ought to know about…”

I tried out different angles.

Eventually I remembered something Travis repeats over and over in Ronin, about how he really doesn’t have any ambition to be an entrepreneur or business owner. Running a business day after day is not for him, he says.

Rather, his goal is to be an investor, somebody who makes small bets that don’t cost much if they don’t pay off, but that have unlimited upside and the potential to pay him for years to come if they do work out.

Specifically, Travis talks about about how to be an online investor, making small bets on your own online products or audiences, or those of others.

And if you have no money to invest? That’s okay. Travis also talks about how you can invest other things, like your resourcefulness, your willingness to make connections, or your skills and expertise.

In any case, if you want to know what everybody ought to know about this online investor business, here’s an incredible free resource for you:

https://bejakovic.com/ronin

Ben Settle & Dan Kennedy both said it — but who was the original source?

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Here’s the history of the men who influenced me to be where I am today, writing you this email:

Patient readers know my susceptibility and fondness for the phrase, “The only real security is your ability to produce.”

I read that idea in a Ben Settle email back in 2017, which got me to sign up to Ben’s Email Players newsletter, which eventually convinced me to start sending daily emails myself.

As Ben wrote in that email, he himself got the “ability to produce” idea from an even older Dan Kennedy newsletter. I thought it stopped there, even though I always felt that “ability to produce” is an odd phrase for Dan Kennedy to invent. (Perhaps that’s why it stuck in my mind so.)

But, as I found out only last week, this phrase is not a strange Dan Kennedy construction.

The quote about “ability to produce” actually goes back to Douglas MacArthur, one of only five 5-star generals in the history of the United States.

MacArthur’s quote, such as I could trace it, was “Security lies in our ability to produce.” MacArthur was speaking quite literally, about national security and the importance of industry and agriculture to that.

But I’m not here to talk tariffs. I’m telling you this because this is a newsletter about ideas, specifically insightful ideas, even more specifically, insightful ideas that you can apply and bring into reality and profit from.

And on that note, I have a new offer for you. It’s a $3.99 ebook called Click Send Earn.

This book is written by Igor Kheifets. I’ve known Igor for a while. Back in 2021, I gave a presentation inside his List Building Lifestyle mastermind, which eventually turned into my Simple Money Emails course.

I bought Igor’s book last week because, frankly, I was curious about the funnel he was using to sell it.

But I read the book as well. And I was surprised, in a very positive sense.

As Igor said somewhere (in private, not inside this book) he could charge $97-$297 for the info that’s inside. And I believe it. So I reached out to him and asked to promote his book, for the following three reasons:

First off, this book is very clearly written by Igor, not by AI, not a ghostwriter.

Second, it lays out how Igor walked the familiar rags-to-riches route — which in his case was literal, because he used to clean toilets at a hotel once upon a time, and now makes millions a year via email.

The book lays out lessons learned along the way and gives you the business blueprint that Igor uses today, and which he teaches others, for how to build and grow and monetize email lists.

Third, this book has ideas in it that were new and insightful for me. For example, it was early in Igor’s book (p. 11) that I learned that that “ability to produce” quote is not from Ben Settle or even Dan Kennedy, but from Douglas MacArthur.

Like I said, when I bought Igor’s book, I bought it out of curiosity around the marketing.

But I thought my audience — “MY audience is different” — is too sophisticated when it comes to email marketing to profit from a book titled Click Send Earn.

Well, like I said, I’ve since read the book. I’ve learned new things and gotten value from it. I can get behind and endorse everything he teaches inside this book. That’s why I asked Igor to promote it.

And that’s what I’m doing right now, recommending it to you.

If you’re looking for a proven (by Igor, and his students) blueprint for a successful email-based business, then buy this book, read it, apply it, and profit. Here’s the link:

https://bejakovic.com/clicksendearn