Business Ideas

How to charge more by selling treats

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Long-time readers know I am a fan of the podcast What It’s Like To Be. I only know about this podcast because it’s hosted by Dan Heath, author of the book Made to Stick, which I believe is one of the best texts about crafting persuasive messages.

In the What It’s Like To Be podcast, Dan Heath interviews people who make their living doing different jobs.

Sometimes it’s inherently interesting — a speech writer, a baseball player.

This week though, it was… a baker. I had to force myself to listen to it. I’m glad I did.

It turned out that this interview about what it’s like to be a baker is very relevant for folks who have or want to have a small online biz, maybe writing or teaching or coaching or having an audience.

There are lots of parallels and business insights from the baker, someone who works in a surprisingly similar to what I do, but in a different sphere.

I’ll include the link to the whole podcast at the end here if you wanna check it out. For now though, lemme share one specific and interesting thing I heard.

Dan Heath asked the baker, how do you price your bread?

This led the baker into a discussion of what would be reasonable in theory:

Figure out her cost of ingredients… put in margin on top of that to cover fixed expenses like rent and employees… and add an extra margin on top of that for profit.

In reality, the baker said, what she does is she looks at what other bakeries are charging, and charges something similar. When margins get too tight, she raises prices.

And then came the really interesting and insightful part wanted to share with you:

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And and then if like our overall margins are starting to feel too tight, then I try to put more of our price increases on our pastry because I feel like pastry is a luxury good, and bread is like a staple food and should be as affordable as possible.

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Dan Heath asked if this a commie-like desire to make sure everyone can afford the staples of life? Well, yes. But it’s also a capitalist calculation about what people are willing to pay. The baker explained:

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It also lines up with how people spend money. Like, people are going to balk at spending $12 or $15 on a loaf of bread in a way that they won’t at spending, like, $7 on a slice of cake or, like, $3 on a cup of coffee. People’s mental calculation is so different for things that feel like treats, whether it’s like sugar or alcohol or snacks than it is for something that feels like grocery, that feels like a staple good.

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My point today is exactly what the baker says in this second block.

There’s one mental calculus for things that feel like necessities and staples. There’s a different mental calculus for things that feel like treats or splurges.

You can apply this insight the way the baker did, by simply offering two lines of products, one staple-y and one treat-y, and using the treats to be able to charge more, and to support the other parts of your business.

You can also benefit from this insight without launching a new line of products, simply by repackaging your dutiful and reasonable products in a new gift box that suggests indulgence, enjoyment, or fun to your prospects.

I’ll have more to say about that “fun” element tomorrow.

For now, if you wanna hear what other business insights the baker had to share, you can find the link below. Highly recommended, even if you have no interest in baking, and only want to run an online four-hour-workweek-style business:

https://www.whatitsliketobe.com/2246914/episodes/18563714-a-baker

Free welcome sequence for small businesses

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I recently met Liz Wilcox, and I’m gonna spend the rest of this email selling her to you.

Liz is fond of wearing large glasses, where the frame is of different colors for the left and the right eye.

She was once a contestant on the TV show Survivor (Survivor 46).

Today, Liz runs a paid membership for small business owners who want to do something with email marketing, but don’t really know what to to do.

Inside her paid membership, Liz teaches email marketing, has expert speakers come in and teach also (I will be speaking in May), plus, as the the main selling point, she gives members weekly templates and swipes for their business’s email newsletter, so they can get it out in minutes instead of hours or never.

Like I said, Liz’s membership is for business owners who have heard of the power of email marketing, but don’t really wanna write themselves… don’t wanna hire a copywriter either… don’t wanna entrust this to a VA… and yet want to get the benefit of regular communication with their prospects and clients and customers.

So how much would you pay for such an incredible and spectacular email marketing membership, which slices, and dices, and makes julienne fries?

$999/month?

NO!

$99/month??

NO!!!

$19/month???

NO! NO! NO!

Liz charges 9 whole bucks per month for her email marketing membership. And get this. She has… 4,000 members of her $9/month membership. At those numbers, she has the margin to make sure she can provide and deliver great templates, great trainings, and great everything.

But I’m not here to sell you on Liz’s membership. Not really, not yet at least.

All I really wanna do is just point you to Liz’s “Swipe Swipe Baby” lead magnet. It’s an entire templatized welcome sequence, plus three weekly newsletters, which you can plug into your business right now if you want.

When I initially talked to Liz, I asked her what lead magnet of hers I should send folks to.

She said, “I only have one. It’s six years old, and I’ll never create a new one, because it just works.”

And why not? Liz’s lead magnet is in fact the perfect magnet for prospective leads for $9/month membership.

So if you want Liz’s free welcome sequence templates… if you wanna know more about Liz (lots of Vanilla Ice references on her site)… or if you’ve been intrigued by her $9/month membership… here’s the front door, fully free to walk through:

https://bejakovic.com/lizwilcox

PSA: Lock your laptop

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I’ve just came home from the Drassanes, Barcelona’s 13th-century-Gothic-shipyard-turned-maritime-museum.

I go there to work sometimes instead of sitting at home. The museum cafe attracts idle foreigners with laptops, like me, because it’s huge, old, beautiful, quiet, and free.

Until a few days ago, I was super casual with my stuff when working at the Drassanes. I’d leave my laptop, screen open, no password set, as I went to investigate the bathroom around the corner from the cafe.

I mean, it’s a museum, right? And just a bunch of other digital nomads sitting there, deep in their own worlds. Who’s gonna take my stuff?

Probably nobody.

Probably.

Even so, I’ve recently become paranoid.

My paranoia set in after I read Kieran Drew’s latest email, about the ordeal which followed after Kieran’s laptop and phone were stolen a few weeks ago, in Buenos Aires, where Kieran has been living lately (he is English).

As a result of the theft, Kieran has had his personal accounts hijacked, his money taken from his bank, and his half-finished book, which was only saved locally to his laptop, disappear in smoke.

Plus there was and is just a bunch of stress and fear… plus endless hours on the phone trying to recover what could be recovered… plus, I imagine, a feeling like you’ve been lobotomized, since all the stuff you rely on being there is simply not.

So yeah.

I finally put a password on my laptop. I’ve been keeping an eye on all those shifty nomads who pretend to work around me. And I’ll start being a little more diligent about backing things up, and security in general. In my paranoid state, I’m advising you to do the same.

And now, to the business end of this email:

Kieran, as you might know, is a guy who writes online.

Unlike many others who write online, Kieran makes a lot of money from it, over $1.4 million over the past four years.

Pretty magically, he does it by writing an email only once a week, and only about stuff that interests him (or that befalls him, like the recent theft).

Kieran has now put together a new guide about how to write online, about what you like, and make a living at it, even a very good living.

Spoiler alert:

Kieran’s guide is not filled with the newest and hottest tactical info. If you’ve seen it all before, and if you can only get aroused by the latest gimmick, you won’t find it in Kieran’s guide, or, for that matter, in Kieran’s other content.

What you will find is exactly what Kieran has done and found to work over the years, and the principled 4-step process he now teaches to others whom he has helped to succeed as well. If you’re interested:

https://bejakovic.com/writeonline

Justifying your existence

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Over the past couple months, I’ve been invited to join, for free, a mastermind that normally costs $50k/year.

The mastermind meets weekly on Thursdays.

I have been dutifully attending every week… until this last Thursday.

I didn’t really have anything new to crow about. I had made no progress on what I was working on the Thursday prior. I felt reluctant to go on the call and maybe have to admit that.

So I told myself I’m tired and I deserve a break, and I simply skipped the mastermind call, even though it’s a warm & welcoming environment, even though it’s filled with big-time marketers, and even though I have learned crazy things each time had I attended, and it seemed crazy to miss the opportunity to learn more.

I know this same feeling from when I had hired A-lister Dan Ferrari as a copywriting coach back in 2019-2020.

I felt pressure each week to come and show some sort of progress. It didn’t really impact what I did — I was doing my work already, and an additional weekly deadline couldn’t change that — but it definitely created extra stress for days in advance of each week’s call.

The weird thing is, I know this same feeling from the other side too.

I have in the past offered 1-1 coaching to people and charging them multiple thousands of dollars per month.

I ended up working with a few folks who already had successful email-based businesses. They were convinced that better email copy would help their business grow even more. They hired me to critique their emails regularly.

After two weeks of this, it inevitably came to pass that I had pointed out any technical issues with their emails, and they had plugged up these few copywriting holes.

But my coaching clients had hired me, liked me, and wanted ongoing feedback from me, or so I assumed. And so we kept getting on weekly hour-long calls, where I kept looking over their really very good emails, because I felt I had to justify my existence, because they had paid me.

It doesn’t have to be like this.

I don’t do copy critiques any more, and I don’t get on weekly coaching calls with people just because they paid me.

You don’t have to promise weekly 1-hour calls either… or offer 24/7 access to you over WhatsApp… or give away a year of your life to anybody just because you’re out of better ideas for what to offer.

You don’t have to justify your existence, or crack the whip to “motivate” people who are already stressed that they are not doing enough.

You can go from telling yourself you are good at what you do and you like the work, and that money is secondary… to telling yourself that you help motivated and resourceful people in your audience reach an outcome they want, and that you get paid accordingly.

Over the past couple weeks, I have been talking indirectly about repackaging your “coaching,” which you might be struggling to sell, into a $1k+ offer which is both easier to sell and deliver.

It’s time to get more direct.

Would you like to use your knowledge and skill to help people in your audience get results?

Would you like to have a $1k+ offer, which you can sell 3-5 times a month, and which you can deliver in 6 or fewer hours to start, and in less and less time with each subsequent sale?

Would you like my help in getting there?

If you would, hit reply. No pressure, and no commitment. We can simply see if it makes sense to work together, and if it does, you can make your decision then.

Really great price on coaching

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I talked to a dude recently who has made a new coaching offer to his list, with 1-1 access to him, in various formats, for a full year, at a really great price.

Nobody bought.

Now here’s a marketing and psychology truth that took me embarrassingly long to learn:

If you offer people a really great price on something they don’t want to buy, the really great price won’t make them want to buy it either.

That’s why discounting fails to drive sales in so many situations. Discounting only works when people want the thing being sold, and they value it at the full price you claim for it.

But back to coaching.

As I’ve been croaking about for a few weeks now, nobody really wants “coaching.”

Yes, some people manage to sell “coaching” because they have so much status, authority, and relationship with their audience. In those situations, their coaching clients are effectively buying the coach, and the relationship with that coach, rather than the coaching itself.

That’s definitely a nice position to be in.

But what if you don’t have that level of status, authority, and relationship with your audience yet?

The fix is simple, and can be executed quickly. It’s to sell people something they actually want to buy, and which they value at the price you ask for it.

This is how you go from trying and failing to sell “coaching,” which people don’t want even at a really great price… to having a $1k+ offer, which you can make 3-5 sales of each month, and which is both easier to sell and deliver than “coaching.”

Maybe you’re interested in how to implement this fix, which I claim is “simple, and can be executed quickly.”

I’ve prepared a 1-page overview of how to do it, a process I’ve guided a few people through already.

I’m begrudgingly willing to share this 1-page overview with you.

If you like what you read, you’ll have the opportunity to work with me directly in February, to implement this for yourself and your own list.

Or of course, you can just run with it yourself.

In case you’re interested in the 1-page overview, hit reply, tell me you want it, and I’ll get it to you.

The next step

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A couple days ago, I heard a very smart marketer share a story from the trenches:

Back in the day, during the ClickBank wars, this marketer used to do webinars to promote offers from other offer owners.

The owner of one such offer told this marketer, “My upsells are sucking. Don’t be mad if you promote and nobody buys the upsells.”

The very smart marketer said, “We’ll fix that.”

He spent most of the webinar talking, not about the offer on sale, but about why folks need the upsells that will be available if they buy the front-end offer.

In a way, he flipped the script, or reversed the normal order of selling. He talked past the actual thing on sale, and focused entirely on the step after.

Result:

60% upsell take, and though it wasn’t mentioned when I heard the story, I imagine higher front-end conversions also.

In case you’re tempted to file this away in your mental folder of “interesting but useless factoids about webinar selling”:

This isn’t about just upsells, and it’s certainly not just about webinars.

As the very smart marketer put it:

“Any step that you know is coming, you want to presell or preframe that first.”

In entirely unrelated news, let me tell you about my own plans for the rest of this month.

This February, starting February 3, I will be going for a ride. I will also be taking a few folks along with me. You have the opportunity to come with.

The destination is a $1k+ offer, which you can sell 3-5 copies of per month, and which you can deliver in 5-6 hours total to start and then faster and faster each time you sell it.

You don’t need a lot in case you want to go for this ride with me.

I’ll provide the car (well, minivan), the route planning, the music, and maybe some snacks and drinks along the way.

What you will need:

A pair of sunglasses (to look cool), a small but dedicated audience, and knowledge or experience you can pass on to people.

(If you’ve previously thought of or tried selling “coaching” or “mentoring” to your audience, you are most likely ready to go, even if nobody took you up on your offer. We’ll fix that.)

For the rest of this month, I’ll be talking about this ride, and seeing who would like to come with me. I already have people who have expressed interest in various ways, and I will be starting with them.

Meanwhile, you might be interested in my Daily Email Habit service.

It makes it easier to email daily, which is key to being able to sell 3-5 copies of a $1k+ offer even with a small audience. For more info:

https://bejakovic.com/deh

How to sell a $1k+ coaching program without testimonials

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I’ll tell you in a a sec how to sell a $1k+ coaching offer without testimonials. But first lemme tell you a related and intriguing list-building tactic.

It comes courtesy of marketer Kevin Hood, who shared it inside my Daily Email House community a couple days ago. It goes like this:

1. Come up with a list of “mutually exclusive, collectively exhaustive buyer personas” who could potentially be interested in what you offer (Kevin used AI, but you can use… other methods also)

2. Come up with a list of “pain points, desires, beliefs, thoughts, and feelings” those people might have

3. Go on social media and write 100s of tweets or threads or stories or whatever and combine one item from list 1 and one item from list 2 in a statement that looks like:

“If you spent your 20s or 30s digging yourself into debt but deep down you desperately want to become financially free, I hope you find my page.”

Says Kevin:

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Where most posts get 500-1000 views.

These get thousands.

No matter your follower count.

This is a real post from one of my clients who teaches Financial Independence and investing, and it got 189,000 views while generating 1,600 new followers for his account. And while we can’t be 100% precise on measuring email subscribers according to individual posts, the estimate is around 100 new email subscribers from this post alone.

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I don’t know what Kevin client’s “my page” looks like. Maybe it has some testimonials. Maybe it has a unique mechanism for how he financially frees 20- and 30-somethings from debt. Maybe it features risk-reversal copy such as, “Sign up to my newsletter and if you don’t like my emails, you get to come to my house and kick me in the shin.”

Whatever. All those things are nice addons.

But the fact remains, specificity, and in particular double-specificity like Kevin is using, is a powerful way of drawing attention… creating interest and desire… and providing proof. Even if you have nothing else going on.

Now back to coaching programs.

Q: How do you sell a $1k+ coaching program without testimonials?

A: You rely on other forms of proof.

There’s many, beyond testimonials. In particular, there’s specificity. I’ll leave you with a riddle related to that:

If you’re looking to monetize your list with a $1k+ offer… if you tried offering “coaching” or “mentoring” to your list before but got zero takers… then how do you figure out what specific or double-specific segment of your audience to appeal to in order to actually make some sales?

I’ll give you a hint about my thinking.

My recommendation is not to do what Kevin did, and use AI to come up with a bunch of stuff that you throw at the wall to see if it sticks.

My recommendation is also not to use your own creativity and brainpower, to sit and introspect what specific segment you could appeal to.

If you eliminate both of those options… then what’s left as a means of determining which specific people you could help with your $1k+ coaching offer?

If you like, guess what I have in mind, write in and tell me so, and I’ll tell you quick whether you got it or no.

Taking credit for your rock star clients’ results

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A few days ago, I was on a call with “Rebelpreneur” Gasper Crepinsek.

Over the past couple years, Gasper built an online brand teaching people AI. He’s still doing that, but this year he is going broader, using his background as an ex-Boston Consulting guy to help people build actual and sustainable businesses online.

I helped Gasper launch a $1k+ offer last month.

We worked on it together for a couple weeks, then Gasper went out and sold it to three people in his audience in a matter of days. He then started delivering the actual offer.

Result: One of Gasper’s clients already closed his own sales and is making money as a result of working just a few weeks with Gasper.

About that, Gasper said, “He’s attributing it to me, but I told him, ‘It’s all you.'”

My message to Gasper on our call, and maybe to you now, is to take credit where you’ve earned it.

Sure, it’s smart to sell to people who would succeed with or without you. When they do inevitably succeed, there’s a glow on you as well.

That doesn’t mean you can’t take some of the credit, and legitimately.

Even if somebody is an absolute rock star, you can inspire them… you can push them a bit… you can guide them through a process so they get results faster, sooner, easier, more enjoyably than they might have done otherwise.

In Gasper’s case, his client might have done something similar in another 3 or 6 months. But because of working with Gasper, he’s got another, say, $5k in the bank, today.

That’s pretty much what my situation is with Gasper as well.

The dude was succeeding and would have succeeded more, one way or another, with or without me.

But I helped him come up with a simple, attractive offer that, from the looks of it, will be his main, high-ticket, backend money-maker for the coming year. (Gasper says, “It’s crazy how much people like it,” meaning the offer).

Is having a $1k+ offer, which you can readily sell to your list, something that interests you?

If so, hit reply and let me know.

You can’t buy anything here. But if you do reply, I’ll give you a 1-page overview of the process that I guided Gasper through, so you can go do it yourself if you like.

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.

Did I live up to my 2025 “themes”?

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Each January 1, I write an email reviewing my (usually failed) goals of the past year, and setting several new goals for the year to come, which I will then… well, let’s take it one step at a time.

Rewind back to January 1 2025. I wrote then that I’m kind of over goal setting, but for the sake of an interesting email, I chose 3 goals, or rather “themes,” for 2025:

#1. Recurring income (it’s clear enough what that means)

#2. Less of me (meaning, getting better at making offers that don’t rely entirely on my personal authority and charm to sell)

#3. Tech (developing software tools that I could sell or give away or use myself)

How did I do?

On the tech front, absolutely nothing. If anything, I’ve become even more of a Luddite than I was a year ago.

Once upon a time, I worked as a software engineer, but I’ve realized dabbling in programming and software development a waste of my time now. Instead, if a good opportunity comes along, I will partner with people who want to fiddle around with code.

As for my other two themes, I actually did pretty good.

I had a good chunk of my income this year in the form of recurring income (both via payment plans on high-ticket offers, and via continuity products like Daily Email Habit).

As for “less of me,” I’ve learned a lot and implemented a good amount about making offers that are attractive even to people who don’t really know me and love me via these emails. Ironically, I think the success of my “I endorse YOU” auction, with the $31k winning bid, was proof of that.

Now fast forward back to the future, specifically, to today. What about the coming year, 2026?

Over the past days and weeks, no clear theme or two or three for 2026 came to my mind. So this morning, I sat down and made a list of 10 things I want to get done with my Bejako Business in 2026. Here they are:

1. Publish a new book

2. Make $1M in auction revenue (selling my stuff and others’ stuff, to my audience and to other audiences)

3. Develop a series of high ticket offers that actually sell, like [censored] etc.

4. Stick to a monthly schedule of 1) newsletter ad or list swap, 2) in-house offer, 3) zero-delivery offer

5. Keep building up Monetization Mastermind (my invite-only group of list owners who want to partner up on various deals)

6. Keep experimenting with Daily Email House

7. Grow the list to 8k

8. Build up my status more

9. Partner with more people

10. Keep uncovering new bubbles of people and connecting them to each other

That’s a lot. Some of it is pretty reachable, or at least has fuzzy enough criteria of success to sound like it.

Some of it is ambitious, or even very ambitious.

Is it all possible to do it all, or a large part?

I believe it is. I’ll tell you how:

Double up and triple up. In other words, make everything do double or triple work, and feed into other things that I want to do.

For example, the new book I want to publish is directly connected to the high-ticket offer I am currently working on. The two will feed off each other.

Having a new book, as well as a high-ticket offer that sells well (inshallah), will be status-boosting.

And all this can feed into more auctions and partners and connections… and and so on.

You might say this sounds like the best-case scenario, and not like the worst- or even likely-case scenario.

I agree. So how to improve my chances?

How to actually double up and triple up, consistently, throughout the year, as I keep working on different projects, and as life starts getting in the way, and I as a person change?

My answer to this, which is the one point of today’s email, finally, which can be relevant to you, is:

More planning and research and preparation.

Specifically, I heard somebody smart and successful recommend recently to schedule “regular thinking time,” and to treat it like a non-negotiable meeting with yourself.

So if there is a theme to my 2026, “thinking time” is it.

And as for whether I will reach my 10 goals… or fail on most or on all counts… stay tuned, and maybe you will have the opportunity to nod and smirk in case you see me struggling… or nod and smile if you see me succeed.

Also, I got an offer for you today:

On the one hand, I believe “thinking time” is best done alone.

On the other hand, it’s inevitably true that other people can help keep us accountable in ways that we cannot keep ourselves (well, most of us, Daniel Throssell is an exception).

Maybe more importantly, other people can immediately spot and point out blind spots in our own thinking that we might never spot.

So here’s my offer to you:

Would some kind of organized and shared “thinking time” be useful to you?

I’m imagining it as a regularly scheduled call with myself and other people, where we can all share what we’re working on and how we’re thinking about proceeding.

But it doesn’t have to be like that, and maybe you have better ideas.

In any case, if organized, structured, regular, and shared “thinking time” might be useful to you, write in and let me know to say so, and what it could help you with, and how you imagine it looking.

Thanks in advance.