Communities

2 facts about throwing good email parties

by

Yesterday, I announced a new campaign inside my Daily Email House community. My goal is to get existing members to promote the group and help me grow it.

I appreciate all referrals.

At the same time, I’m not letting just anyone join.

To help me vet people, I have a few sphinx-like riddles set up at the front door.

I look at a potential new member’s profile and history on Skool.

I use my intuition to decide if he or she has something to get from and contribute to the group beyond trolling or whining.

Many I’ve allowed in. Some I have not.

Unfortunately, I only started keeping record last week of the colorful reasons why some people have found the doors to Daily Email House closed. Here are a few from the past week:

#1. In answer to “What’s your #1 goal right now?”: [entered his email address]

#2. In answer “What’s your #1 goal right now?”: “learn em”

#3. Bio: “sfd sfsfsf”

#4. In answer to “What’s your #1 goal right now?”: “邮件太多不知如何使用?” [ChatGPT translates this as “Too many emails and don’t know how to use them?” which would not pass muster even if it were written in English]

I recently read an article titled “21 Facts About Throwing Good Parties.” Fact #1:

“1) Prioritize your ease of being over any other consideration: parties are like babies, if you’re stressed while holding them they’ll get stressed too. Every other decision is downstream of your serenity: e.g. it’s better to have mediocre pizza from a happy host than fabulous hors d’oeuvres from a frazzled one.”

… and fact #20:

“20) Let me repeat that: Parties are a public service, you’re doing people a favor by throwing them. Someone might meet their new best friend or future lover at your gathering. In the short term, lovely people may feel less lonely, and that’s thanks to you. In the long term, whole new children may ultimately exist in the world because you bothered to throw a party. Throwing parties is stressful for most people, but a great kindness to the community, so genuinely pat yourself on the back for doing this.”

An online community should feel and work like something like a house party… as should an email newsletter. It should deliver value. It should be fun and the people participating — the members or readers — should feel like they can participate and express themselves more or less freely.

At the same time, you are still the one whose house it is, and you set the tone and the rules, and the #1 rule, and the #20 rule, is to make it convenient and fun for yourself first and foremost…

… and if that means not allowing people inside just because their vibe strikes you as off, then that’s ok.

So much for the long-term mindset.

If you want more practical, day-to-day advice on how to make your email list feel like an online party, you can find that inside my Daily Email Habit service.

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 reap the benefits tomorrow:

https://bejakovic.com/deh

Announcing: My new old Skool group

by

About 6 weeks ago, I closed down my Skool group, at that time called Daily Email House.

I wanted to see if this group could be useful to people writing dailyish emails, and have a life of its own, as a kind of meeting point or social club, even without me at the center of it.

That concept did not work out. And so, in a moment of laziness and shortsightedness, I shut the group down.

But maybe the group could work well in some other way?

That question has been rattling around my head the past few weeks.

I reactivated the group this morning.

It turns out that since I had let the group lapse, I have lost my custom URL, which is actually a good thing.

It will allow me to change the URL and the name and even the concept of the group going forward.

I don’t know what that new concept will be yet.

The group members and I work it out as we go along.

One change so far is that I’ve decided to open this group up to other people on my list.

Another change is that I’ll give some sort of central mission to the group, where there wasn’t one before.

Again, I don’t know what that will be.

For now, as a placeholder, and a play on the group’s old name, I’ve set the group’s mission as “Use your email list to pay for a house. Or a car. Or a trip to Spain.”

But that mission is likely to change.

In fact, you can influence it, and make it useful and relevant to you.

You’re invited to join me inside this group. If you’d like to do so:

https://bejakovic.com/house

If you cannot persuade yourself to act however hard you try

by

This morning, a private detective I know here in Barcelona sent me a screenshot of a trending social media story:

“Couple Who Met On Dating App Rob Bank On First Date”

Can this really be true? I decided to do my own sleuthing.

It turns out yes, the story is roughly true, but with an important detail that’s missing in the headline above.

The man, Christopher Castillo, age 33, and the woman, Shelby Sampson, age 40, agreed to meet for a date.

Castillo asked Sampson to pick him up in her car. Once in the car, Castillo started drinking wine, presumably red. He then asked Sampson to pull over at a bank.

Castillo was gone for a few minutes. He came back sweating, wearing sunglasses and a hat (!), and holding an antique gun and a wad of cash.

He told Sampson to drive, which she did, for a bit, until the cops pulled them over and put the date to an end.

The crucial bit is that Sampson was not charged with anything, because, so the state believes, she had absolutely no knowledge of or participation in any criminal aspect of this first date.

This missing detail is what I found most interesting in the whole story.

I’ve never robbed a bank, but I imagine it’s hard.

The stock joke is that a typical man is unwilling to pull over and ask for directions while driving. Can you imagine how much more unwilling a typical man is to pull over, walk into a bank, hold up a gun, and ask for $1,000 in cash (and five years in prison, it turns out)?

No wonder Castillo was drinking in the car. And no wonder he felt he needed somebody “in his corner,” even if that was an unwitting and unwilling non-accomplice he had met on Tinder.

I found this interesting because, while I’ve never robbed a bank, I have done other, legal, things in my life. Some of these things I found personally very difficult to do, because they challenged my own identity.

There were times when no amount of auto-suggestion, willpower, or even red wine would push me over the threshold.

There were times when the only thing that would help me act would be having somebody “in my corner,” having a feeling of a home base I could come back to, even if that was somebody I had met minutes earlier and had no special relationship with.

I imagine this is all a bit waffly without specific examples. I might give those in another email.

My point today is simply that if you have something you know you should be doing (don’t rob a bank), but you cannot persuade yourself to do it no matter how you try, then having some kind of support or community of other people to rely on, however tenuous, can make all the difference.

Ideally, this is other people in real life. Real life seems to make a big difference.

But if you cannot find people in real life to act as a home base, then people online can sometimes act as a substitute. At least that’s the promise of online communities, groups, and memberships.

I am still keen on spinning up a new online community of my own, but I haven’t yet decided which (legal) things I would like to support people in doing.

While that’s going on, I can only recommend once again a community that I myself am part of, Travis Sago’s Royalty Ronin.

If you’re struggling to take the action needed to build your own audience… or to make deals with people who have an audience of their own… or to make your first $5k online… then you might find the support you need within Royalty Ronin. For more info:

https://bejakovic.com/ronin

Why I’ve shuttered my online community

by

Yesterday, I shuttered up Daily Email House, the community I had set up back in December ’24 on the back of my Daily Email Habit service.

The concept for Daily Email House was a “members-only club for business owners and marketers who write (more or less) daily emails.”

I made it clear from the start to all members that this was an experiment.

I didn’t want to have a specific promise behind Daily Email House.

I also didn’t want to be constantly in there, stirring up discussion and sharing new content.

If the community could live without me and still be useful, great. If not, that’s okay.

Daily Email House lived on for a while and served some use. Yesterday, on the post in which I announced I will be closing down the group, a couple of the active members wrote that “signing up was the best decision I made in 2025” and that the group had a “profound effect on me and my business.”

But my laissez-faire vision for this group didn’t have legs, and that’s why Daily Email House is coming to an end.

But, groups, groups, groups…

I am still sold on the promise and opportunity of having and running a group, and it’s something I want to get good at. In fact, I will tell you a secret:

Back in 2013 or so, when I first got addicted to Internet Marketing via the Tim Ferriss gateway drug, I was lucky enough to get convinced that email is where it’s at, and will be at, for a long time to come.

It’s a hunch that’s served me well.

My secret for you is that I have the same hunch about groups/communities.

Clearly, neither email nor online communities are anything new. Plus, communities have in fact been having their moment in the sun over the past couple years.

That’s fine.

Neither email nor communities will be going anywhere any time soon, at least that’s my bet.

My bet is also that, as with email, so with communities.

Most people (such as me above) are not doing a good job with their communities.

The people who do a good job running communities will have the same advantage that, say, a business that emails its customers regularly with interesting emails and desirable offers has over a business that emails stupid coupons at holiday time with nothing else in between, except maybe a ChatGPT-generated listicle.

But I’m running off on a tangent. My real point is that I got a deal for you.

I am looking to set up a new group/community. One that will be based on solving a problem… and one in which I will be more actively involved.

I don’t know yet what that group would be about. But you can influence that, and maybe you can help create a useful and valuable resource for yourself in the process.

Here’s my deal for you:

Hit reply and tell me what problems or frustrations you have — with your email list, with your business, or with your laundry. Anything goes.

I will read all responses, I might reply to you directly, and I will certainly consider what you write me as I work on my next community. And who knows, maybe I will see you inside the resulting group, and maybe one day, you too will say it had a profound effect on you and your business.