Today: PIP Challenge kickoff

This morning I chuckled as I prepared the SOP for my PIP Challenge kickoff call.

In case that’s too many acronyms for you, “PIP” in this case stands for Price Increase Promo.

Starting later today, and lasting the next 3 weeks, I’ll be running a challenge with a group of list and offer owners.

I’ll personally help them run a promo to increase the price of one of their offers in a way that 1) makes them look good to their audience and 2) maybe even makes them money.

An “SOP” I imagine you know. Just in case, it stands for “standard operating procedure,” a corporate term that basically means, “how to”.

Like I said, I chuckled today while preparing the PIP SOP. That’s because, along with dutiful sections like “Which product,” “Which price,” “Which occasion,” “Which emails to send,” I also included several examples of price increase promos I’ve run, like:

* The time a broke and unmotivated reader asked for a discount, and I used that as the occasion of finally raising the price of an underpriced offer

* The “MVE 2: Judgment Day” promo I used to re-launch (and increase the price of) my Most Valuable Email program

* The time the FTC asked a federal judge to hold “Pharma Bro” Martin Shkreli in contempt of court, and I did a quick (and extremely lucrative) price increase promo on the back of it

At this point, my PIP SOP is pretty simple. But I still found myself asking questions and articulating answers that I hadn’t thought of before.

I know I’ll be using this SOP myself for future price increase promos I run to my own list. And as I’m going through this Price Increase Challenge, and working directly with people on their live price increase promos, I will be filling it out with more examples, more detailed answers, more templates, etc.

The PIP SOP is only available to the folks who join me for the Price Increase Promo Challenge, a select group I’ve named the Email Promo Pioneers, Class 1.

My Price Increase Challenge kicks off later today, Wednesday, at 8pm CET/3pm EST/12 noon PST. In case you are interested, here are the details:

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Here’s my offer to you today:

* Magically boost the overall value of your business…

* Manifest an asset you can use to make easier future sales of all your offers…

* Raise your status in the eyes of your audience…

* Make yourself more interesting to affiliates…

… and maybe even make some money!

About that make money part, master copywriter Robert Collier once wrote that the most sales-making headline he ever found was:

“Before The Price Goes Up!”

That’s is precisely how I’m offering to help you achieve all the outcomes above.

Specifically, over the next 3 weeks, I’m offering to personally help you plan, run, and profit from a “Before The Price Goes Up!” promo to your email list.

Like Collier says, a price increase is a great way to make some sales.

But it has lots of other knock-on benefits, such as a boost in status… a higher-value asset that you can use to sell other offers more easily (via bonuses, or simple anchoring)… and creating something that affiliates might suddenly become interested in.

If you decide to join me over the next few weeks, I’ll help you overcome such insurmountable hurdles as:

* “But I don’t know which offer I should increase the price of! I don’t want to shoot myself in the foot or worse yet in the knee!”

* “But what will people think! How can I possibly increase the price in a way that doesn’t make me look stupid, greedy, or both? Surely there is no way to increase price in a way that makes me come out looking solid to my audience… right? Right???”

* “But what new price should I choose? It’s impossible to decide. The options are infinite…”

In case you didn’t pick up on it, I’m being a little bit sarcastic.

Yes, there are some questions you should ask yourself before running a price increase promo. But a promo like this is not tremendously complex, and there’s not all that much you need to know in advance.

Yes, I will help you make decisions about the questions above, and give you my advice and input and encouragement along the way. (I’ve run a bunch of price increase promos, some very successful, some less so.)

But that’s the smaller reason why you might want to join me now.

The bigger reason is simply to make sure you actually do this price increase now, instead of putting it off indefinitely… because you’re scared of making a mistake, or in the words of Joe Karbo, because you’re too busy making a living to make any money.

Speaking of money:

I’m calling this the Price Increase Challenge.

And I’m charging a sky-high, one-time fee, with an asterisk, to participate in this Price Increase Challenge:

$250*.

Two hundred and fifty dollars.

That’s a quarter of a thousand dollars.

A lot of money.

Yes, the usual arguments apply. If you have an email list and an underpriced offer, it will very likely be worth it to you to pay $250, and much more, to run a price increase promo now instead of in 6 months from now, or never. I listed all the reason why at the top.

But there’s also the asterisk.

The asterisk is there because I don’t really want your money.

What I really want is for you to run this price increase promo and to reap the benefits of it.

That’s why, if you join me for this challenge, and if you pay me $250 upfront, I will refund you the entire $250 if you actually run your price increase promo within 3 weeks of this Wednesday, when this challenge will kick off.

In other words… get my personal help and advice… get accountability… get the benefits of a price increase, including possibly making some money… and win all your money back. Recoup 100% of your capital, and make some nice interest too.

Oh, and you get the coveted title of Email Promo Pioneer, Class 1.

If you’d like to join me for this Price Increase Challenge, hit reply to this email, tell me you want in, and I’ll get you started.

Announcing: Email Promo Pioneers, Class 1

Here’s my offer to you today:

* Magically boost the overall value of your business…

* Manifest an asset you can use to make easier future sales of all your offers…

* Raise your status in the eyes of your audience…

* Make yourself more interesting to affiliates…

… and maybe even make some money!

About that make money part, master copywriter Robert Collier once wrote that the most sales-making headline he ever found was:

“Before The Price Goes Up!”

That’s is precisely how I’m offering to help you achieve all the outcomes above.

Specifically, over the next 3 weeks, I’m offering to personally help you plan, run, and profit from a “Before The Price Goes Up!” promo to your email list.

Like Collier says, a price increase is a great way to make some sales.

But it has lots of other knock-on benefits, such as a boost in status… a higher-value asset that you can use to sell other offers more easily (via bonuses, or simple anchoring)… and creating something that affiliates might suddenly become interested in.

If you decide to join me over the next few weeks, I’ll help you overcome such insurmountable hurdles as:

* “But I don’t know which offer I should increase the price of! I don’t want to shoot myself in the foot or worse yet in the knee!”

* “But what will people think! How can I possibly increase the price in a way that doesn’t make me look stupid, greedy, or both? Surely there is no way to increase price in a way that makes me come out looking solid to my audience… right? Right???”

* “But what new price should I choose? It’s impossible to decide. The options are infinite…”

In case you didn’t pick up on it, I’m being a little bit sarcastic.

Yes, there are some questions you should ask yourself before running a price increase promo. But a promo like this is not tremendously complex, and there’s not all that much you need to know in advance.

Yes, I will help you make decisions about the questions above, and give you my advice and input and encouragement along the way. (I’ve run a bunch of price increase promos, some very successful, some less so.)

But that’s the smaller reason why you might want to join me now.

The bigger reason is simply to make sure you actually do this price increase now, instead of putting it off indefinitely… because you’re scared of making a mistake, or in the words of Joe Karbo, because you’re too busy making a living to make any money.

Speaking of money:

I’m calling this the Price Increase Challenge.

And I’m charging a sky-high, one-time fee, with an asterisk, to participate in this Price Increase Challenge:

$250*.

Two hundred and fifty dollars.

That’s a quarter of a thousand dollars.

A lot of money.

Yes, the usual arguments apply. If you have an email list and an underpriced offer, it will very likely be worth it to you to pay $250, and much more, to run a price increase promo now instead of in 6 months from now, or never. I listed all the reason why at the top.

But there’s also the asterisk.

The asterisk is there because I don’t really want your money.

What I really want is for you to run this price increase promo and to reap the benefits of it.

That’s why, if you join me for this challenge, and if you pay me $250 upfront, I will refund you the entire $250 if you actually run your price increase promo within 3 weeks of this Wednesday, when this challenge will kick off.

In other words… get my personal help and advice… get accountability… get the benefits of a price increase, including possibly making some money… and win all your money back. Recoup 100% of your capital, and make some nice interest too.

Oh, and you get the coveted title of Email Promo Pioneer, Class 1.

If you’d like to join me for this Price Increase Challenge, hit reply to this email, and I’ll get you started.

Pirates, waddya gonna do

Last week, Mercure and Svet Dimitrov, both members of my Monetization Mastermind group, ran a course launch.

The day after the launch ended, somebody who “bought” the course pirated the content and made it available for sale online.

Svet and Mercure investigated the offender!

And they found who done it!

“Now I got you, you son of a bitch!”

It turned out to be some girl in Illinois who had her credit card info stolen and who had no idea about the course.

In other words, nothing to do, nowhere to go.

I had almost the identical thing happen to me during a promo of Copy Riddles back in 2023.

The only difference was that I didn’t find Copy Riddles immediately for sale online. Instead, I found out about it when I got a chargeback a couple weeks after the promo.

Also some clueless girl from the heartland of America who had never heard of me or my Copy Riddles course.

I went to check the account associated with the name on my website, where the course is delivered. I saw a Ukrainian IP and all course pages cleanly swiped within 2 minutes after login, I’m guessing by a bot.

Waddya gonna do? I know what I did. I shrugged and put it out of my mind.

For this and many other reasons, I have long ago decided to avoid sailing where the pirates are, and to take harbor where pirates aren’t willing to follow me.

Specifically, I’ve decided to sail as little as possible on the risky, turbulent, pirate-infested Ocean Of Secrets, and to instead spend most my days cruising the safe, rich, and comfortable Sea Of Getting People Results.

That’s a metaphorical and philosophical shift, but it’s more than that. It’s also a matter of deliverables, and of the offers I’m making as well.

If you’d like an example, keep an eye out for my email tomorrow.

I will tell you about my Price Increase Challenge, which I will be launching next week, not with the goal of selling you hot and exclusive tactical info (“Raise your price exactly 18.2%!”)… but with the goal of getting you to actually run a promo to your list that boosts your positioning, and maybe even wins you a treasure chest of doubloons.

The lifesaving value of charging more

It’s Saturday today. I’ve forbidden myself from doing any work on the weekends except writing this email.

But what the hell am I gonna do if I don’t work?

I sat on the couch. I looked around. I waited.

Eventually, I picked up a book.

Good thing.

Because I came across the following fun yet instructive story, which goes back to ancient Greece:

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A stranger publicly said that he could teach Dionysius, the tyrant of Syracuse, an infallible way to find out and discover all the conspiracies his subjects could contrive against him, if Dionysius would give him a good sum of money for his pains.

Dionysius hearing of it, caused the man to be brought to him, that he might learn an art so necessary to his preservation.

The man made answer, that all the art he knew was that Dionysius should give him a talent [eg. 25kg of silver], and afterwards boast that he had obtained a singular secret from him.

Dionysius liked the invention, and accordingly caused six hundred crowns to be counted out to the stranger.

===

If you so choose, you can extract many lessons from this story. Today, I will extract just one for you. It be this:

A higher price can be better for both you as the seller AND for your audience as the buyers… even if the deliverables stay exactly the same (or if the deliverables are nothing at all, as in the story above).

Paying a high price can literally be lifesaving for the buyer (again, as in the story above).

But even when it’s not a matter of life and death, paying a high price can be a boost to your buyers’ ego, reputation, and peace of mind. And what’s more important than those things?

I’m telling you this because a few days ago, in my Daily Email House community, I asked folks whether they are interested in running a price increase promo.

That was motivated by the fact that, as I’ve found out recently, a bunch of my readers who sell courses and ebooks and templates charge very little for what they sell.

That’s not good for them… and it’s not good for their buyers either, at least if the stuff being sold is lifesaving or at least potentially life-changing.

So I offered to help folks run a price increase promo over the next few weeks, as a challenge, in a group, to avoid feeling alone, or feeling like they’re going to screw things up, or feeling paralyzed from overthinking.

I will have more details on that “Price Increase Challenge” soon — the when, the where, and of course, the how much. And I will apply my own lesson. I’ll make the price VERY high, but in a way that’s good for you, if you choose to join me for this Price Increase Challenge.

What’s up with my hiring

Last week I wrote an email saying that I’m hiring an assistant. I got a buncha replies to that, some encouraging, others frustrating.

I wrote back to everyone to say I’m working my way through the replies, and that I will be in touch if I think there’s a possible fit there.

I’ve had a few people proactively follow up with me since. “Do you have an update regarding my application?”

The update is that on Friday I hired somebody. I’m also interviewing a second person to hire on Monday. I figure, now that I’ve decided on hiring, why not go big?

The guy I hired yesterday, marketer and computer programmer GC Tsalamagkakis, is somebody I’ve known for a good while.

He has been active in my Daily Email House community for over a year. He was one of the top bidders in my “I endorse YOU” auction. We’ve talked on multiple occasions previously. I know he’s worked with and gotten results for other people I know and respect.

GC wrote me flat out saying that he’s not applying to be my assistant, but that maybe he can help me automate some of the stuff I’m doing or want to do?

We talked and defined an easy test project.

GC wanted to do it for free.

I told him I appreciate the sentiment but I insist on paying him, both for his sake and for mine.

He quoted me a price.

I thought it was too low. So I decided to pay him 4x what he had asked me.

Do you think that makes me a good guy? Or a creep who’s trying to virtue signal by writing about it here?

You can think what you like, but I can tell you I’m neither very good nor am I trying to signal whatever goodness I have here.

This is simply me working myself mentally into this hiring game.

A couple days ago, I mentioned a discussion I’d listened to between Frank Kern and Dean Jackson, about sticking to what you’re irreplaceable at, and hiring out for everything else. Said Frank:

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There’s three ways to get rich. You can invent something. You can inherit something. Or you could invest. And I think all business people are ultimately investors.

That’s all we do. So if you think about that, and you think about the hiring of a “who,” it’s not an expense, but a means to multiply capital.

I pay my “who” that does the automation stuff close to 300 grand a year.

And people are like, “My God, you could get it so much cheaper.”

And I say, “Well I might-could, but assuming I’m getting about a 20% annual return on my investment in a ‘who,’ would I rather get 20% of 50 grand, or 300?”

===

That 20% return is pretty much how the math will work out for the test task that GC did for me.

He’s automated some stuff for me that was previously spread out across a couple software subscriptions.

As a result, I will be able to shut those subscriptions down, and save enough over the coming year to make back what I paid GC, and make about a 20% return on top of that.

There is a bigger point here, and it applies to you also. I’ve heard it stated in different ways:

“Turn costs into a profit center.”

“Find a way to make it work for you.”

Or, like Frank Kern says above, “Think of it like an investment.”

This applies if you’re hiring, yes. But it also applies if you’re buying courses, paying for subscriptions, running ads, or simply spending your money and time. All these could simply be costs. Or, with a change of perspective and bit of determination, they could be opportunities to multiply capital. It’s your call.

How business owners can stop chasing every shiny object like a dog chasing soap bubbles

I have a new plan. I’m trying to get in shape. I’m walking walk two hours a day as part of my plan. I’m listening to podcasts and courses to keep myself occupied while I walk.

I want to share a good idea with you that I just heard while walking around Barcelona in the rain, getting in shape, and getting wise at the same time.

The idea came up in a discussion between Dean Jackson and Frank Kern.

Both Dean and Frank are successful, influential, long-tenured Internet marketers who have made, I’m guessing, tens of millions of dollars for themselves and prolly hundreds of millions for clients and partners.

The discussion I listened to today was about focusing on what you’re irreplaceable at, and getting others to do the rest. Familiar enough stuff.

(It’s the “who not how” distinction, which Dean originated, and which his partner Dan Sullivan then turned into a best-selling book.)

At some point, Frank Kern threw out the following, less familiar thought experiment.

Imagine, says Frank, that you are a typical small business owner who has gotten to a certain level of success by working hard, and who is trying to get to the next level by working even harder.

The classic “10 million irons in the fire.”

And then imagine, in Frank’s words, that:

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… you are personally enjoined — legal term there — you are personally enjoined from doing any of this stuff yourself, except coming up with ideas.

Which means now you have to pay for the “who.”

What that would bring — and I know the listener is probably like, “okay don’t tell me I have to do this, this is horrible” — what that would bring is incredible clarity and purpose in the execution of the ideas.

If you had to pay to execute on every idea, you would immediately get yourself out of the “I’ve got 10 million irons in the fire” thing. Because you’re paying for it, right? So it’s like, well crap, if I’m paying all that…

===

Maybe I found this insightful because I’m actually in the process of hiring an assistant, and maybe I’ll even end up hiring two. Always insightful hearing what you want to believe.

In any case, if you’re running your own business, particularly if you’re a “solopreneur,” one-man band, one-woman show, this might be a worthwhile thought experiment to put to yourself the next time you come across a hot new opportunity you cannot wait to jump on.

“What if I were enjoined to not do any of this myself, and I could only pay somebody to implement this for me?”

If your answer is a shudder, then consider whether this hot new opportunity, which you don’t find worth paying money to implement, is worth paying for in a different, much scarcer currency, namely your own time and energy.

On the other hand, if you find that you are okay hiring, then you’ve got options. You can still do it yourself. Or you can hire. Or you can even hire two people.

Anyways, I gotta go make popcorn and drink a beer. That is not part of my getting in shape plan. But it is important.

Meanwhile, if you want to hear Dean and Frank’s full discussion — recommended if you are more busy and less productive than you like — here’s where to go:

https://www.morecheeselesswhiskers.com/podcast/147

I finally get a nice review

For the past 10 months or so, I’ve been running ads on Amazon for my new 10 Commandments book.

Over the past month or so, it seems like Amazon is finally running out of people who are passionately interested in the connections between con men and pick up artists and Hollywood screenwriters.

To wit:

My sales have gone down… my cost of sale has gone up… and for what seemed like a stretch of months, all I got were carping reviews from disgruntled readers, who I guess should not have been reading the book in the first place.

Fortunately, with the coming of spring, it seems my luck is changing.

A few days ago, I got a nice 5-star review by a hypnotist and copywriter, Manuel Herrera Carillo. Manuel’s review is long but I will reprint it in full, for one because it strokes my ego, for another because it may convince you to give my book an open-minded read. Says Manuel:

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I am a hypnotist and also copywriter. Sometimes the mind thinks that it cannot be impressed or amazed anymore, and a book like this tells you otherwise.

We live in an age of cognitive calluses. We scroll. We skim. We assume we have seen every trick. The brain folds its arms like a bored aristocrat. Then along comes John Bejakovic with a lantern and a grin, and suddenly the room rearranges itself.

This is not a book about scams.

It is a book about gravity.

The gravity of attention.

The gravity of desire.

The gravity that pulls a thought from maybe into yes.

Bejakovic gathers an unlikely council: con men, pickup artists, magicians, salesmen, propagandists, stand up comedians, Oscar winning screenwriters. On paper, they look like strangers forced to share a train compartment. In practice, they are all fluent in the same ancient language: influence.

The ten commandments are not moral instructions. They are psychological pressure points. Each chapter peels back another layer of the theater curtain and shows you the machinery. Not in a clinical tone, not with academic frost, but with stories. And stories are the original hypnosis.

As a hypnotist, I recognized the rhythm immediately. Pattern interrupt. Authority. Framing. Tension. Release. The subtle dance between certainty and suggestion. He does not describe persuasion as manipulation in a dark alley. He describes it as choreography. If you understand timing, you can lead. If you understand expectation, you can bend it.

As a copywriter, I found something even more unsettling.

The principles are transferable.

The same mechanics that allow a magician to misdirect a crowd allow a headline to seize a wandering eye. An so and so and so on.

Combine this principles with AI and you obtain a nuclear bomb of influence.

===

I don’t know how to what Manuel suggests, to combine the principles in my book with AI, in order to obtain a nuclear bomb of influence.

But maybe you can tell me, if you know more about AI than I do, and if you’ve read my book?

And if you know more about AI than me but you haven’t read my book:

https://bejakovic.com/new10commandments

Two kinds of starving crowd

Around age 15, a short time after I had learned to read, I started going through the books of Henry Miller because his books were 1) banned upon publication in the U.S. and 2) had sex in them, and those two things are all the endorsement a 15-year-old boy needs.

Anyways, in one Henry Miller book, I forget which, Henry Miller, who was a kind of joyous social parasite, furiously writes about some cousins of his, who (it being the Great Depression) are starving.

The part that made Miller furious was his cousins’ patiently accepting their fate and subsisting on a leaf of cabbage a day, because, from I can remember, they are too proud or too feckless to ask for help in their starvation.

Henry Miller, who was living in Paris at the time, and was surviving on borrowed food, drinking borrowed wine, and sleeping in borrowed beds, couldn’t understand this.

Whenever he was starving, he would simply beat down his friends’ and enemies’ doors and beg and scream and complain until they fed him.

You’ve probably heard of direct marketing legend Gary Halbert. Halbert used to give talks in which he’d play the “hot dog stand” game with his audience.

“You and I have competing hot dog stands,” Halbert would say. “I’ll give you every advantage you want. I’ll just ask for one thing. Take whatever you want, give me this one thing, and my hot dog stand will whoop yours.”

Halbert’s one thing was a “starving crowd.”

Except, I’d like to suggest to you today there are two kinds of starving crowd.

There’s the “Henry Miller” starving crowd, people who cannot and will not accept their starvation, and who demand that the problem be fixed, and now.

And then there’s the “Cabbage Cousins” starving crowd.

Whether through pride, weakness resulting from starvation, or simply the fact that there’s a pound of bacon stashed somewhere in their house, which they secretly reach for late at night, the “Cabbage Cousins” starving crow accepts what to everybody else looks like unbearable starvation.

And if you wanna play the “hot dog stand” game with me, I’ll give you as big of a starving crowd as you like, provided that it’s the “Cabbage Cousins” kind.

Just give me a few Henry Millers instead, and I bet you I’ll push more hot dogs than you.

(You know what I mean. Don’t give me Henry Miller the broke social parasite. But do give me people who have some money, and a problem, and have shown that they are intent on getting that problem solved, and now.)

Anyways, I’m not sure if this was illuminating. But it is a distinction I had to draw for myself, and I figured it might be useful to you as well.

Maybe you’re wondering how you can know that somebody is intent on getting a problem solved, so you can distinguish the Henry Millers from the Cabbage Cousins in real life.

Fortunately, Gary Halbert has written up the answer for you. In case you’re curious:

https://thegaryhalbertletter.com/newsletters/direct_marketing_to_a_starving_crowd.htm

I’m hiring an assistant

At the start of this month, on Feb 1, I got on the train and choo-chooed my way from Barcelona down to Valencia.

My motivation was that 1) I like Valencia and 2) for a few days only, Jordan Parker and his wife Diana would be there.

I’d gotten connected to Jordan some months earlier, through channels I can no longer remember.

Jordan and Diana — as far as I can explain it — are a kind of back-end operations and scaling team for creators. They’ve worked with a small but select list of clients, including creators you are sure to know (just check Jordan’s site, parkerlabs.co).

At the end of our time together, Jordan and Diana asked if I have any team members?

No, I said. I don’t wanna hire or manage anybody.

Ever since I quit my office job 12 years ago and started doing stuff for myself, not managing anybody has been a nonnegotiable tenet of what I do and what I want to do.

Jordan and Diana nodded, in a way that I felt was forgiving, but that seemed to suggest that I will learn my lesson in good time.

Maybe I’m just oversensitive. Maybe they didn’t mean anything like that. In any case, it stuck in my head.

When I got back to Barcelona, I started keeping a list of things I could outsource to an assistant.

I told myself I will hire somebody if I can get the list up to 20 items.

Well, just yesterday, I got up to 20. So I’m hiring an assistant. And the first place I will look is here, inside my email list.

Because an email list is not just a way of making sales or getting clients. It’s also a way of solving problems, answering questions cannot get a good answer to, finding partners, getting cool stuff for free, and yes, even hiring people.

First off, let me say who this job is not a good fit for:

If you think of yourself as either a copywriter or online creator, if you have ambitions of being either a copywriter or online creator, if you’ve done copywriting (or online creation?) in the past and found that it’s something you’re good at, chances are excellent you are a terrible fit for this job.

In this case, I suggest you do not apply, even if you might want to take the job simply because you would like to work with me, or because you think you might learn something.

The reason is that, if you are anything like me by temperament or want to do what I do, then you probably get bored quickly, need new projects and stimulation all the time, are not renowned for your diligence and attention to detail.

(Unfun fact: The morning of my trip to Valencia, I wrote a demanding email to my Airbnb host asking when I would get the promised checkin instructions. It turned out I had booked an apartment for March 1, not February 1.)

On the other hand, if you are present, diligent, happy, and get your kicks out of completing tasks rather than being constantly driven to jump to the next thing, then this job I’m offering might be for you.

What’s actually the job to be done?

Well, if you join Bejako Enterprises, your primary responsibilities will include helping me grow my Monetization Mastermind group.

There will be a mix of online research (read: snooping on people), sending and replying to emails using a pretty templated approach, getting people inside the group, and updating some internal documents with their data, etc.

There will be other tasks too (fiddling with my cart software, email software, Skool, all according to processes I will lay out and am doing myself now).

But those will be less frequent.

The stuff with helping me grow my Monetization Mastermind group, in all its repetitive, chirpy, detail-oriented glory, is what you will mainly be engaged in to start, should you apply for and win this position.

What about pay? What about hours? What about vacation time, dental insurance, and team retreats?

I don’t know. I’m winging it here, as I do for most everything. That’s why I need you.

If you are reading this email, if you suspect, based on what I’ve written above, that you might be a fit for this job, then hit reply. Tell me things about you to give me a clear idea that you might be a fit, and why.

If you do that, we can talk in more detail, and we can see if we can come up with a deal that works for both of us.

Will you witness your own Moose Murders?

Today being February 22, it makes for the 33rd anniversary of the one and only performance of the Moose Murders, said to be the most notorious flop that Broadway has ever seen, which opened and was shut down on the same night, February 22, 1983.

The Moose Murders was a slapstick murder mystery that featured plot elements such as:

* Attempted incest between son and mother

* A coffin, corpse, and a taxidermied moose head on stage for most of the play

* A mummified paraplegic who gets up from his wheelchair to kick a man dressed as a moose in the crotch

A New York Times theater critic who was present at that one and only performance wrote:

“The season’s most stupefying flop — a show so preposterous that it made minor celebrities out of everyone who witnessed it, whether from on stage or in the audience.”

I’m telling you this because, as two time Oscar-winning screenwriter William Goldman once put it, nobody knows anything.

Goldman was talking about Hollywood, but same applies to Broadway and elsewhere.

A bunch of people, typically trained pros and maybe even talented, putting their maybe-talented heads together… putting in a lot of effort… putting their reputations and emotional well-being on the line… only to produce a complete and embarrassing flop, one that will hopefully soon be forgotten, or worse, that will be remembered for years to come and held up as an example of BAD.

And now, a chance to witness your own Moose Murders?

As I announced in my email yesterday, I will be running a “behind the scenes” auction — auctioning off the offers, sales numbers, DM sales conversations, insights, and private conclusions, present and future, from auctions I will run in the coming weeks and months with partners and for myself.

An auction about auctions? Too meta?

I floated the idea in an email a few days ago to see if there is interest. There seems to be.

But the Moose Murders had 13 preview performances before that fateful February 22 1983 opening.

The writer, the director, and the actors still had no real idea this is gonna be a disaster. Like Goldman said, nobody knows anything, not until the stakes get real.

So let’s see what will happen with my “behind the scenes” auction.

Maybe it will go off well.

In this case, it might be a fun show and maybe you learn something and even get your hands on some private and behind-the-scenes data and insights.

Or maybe it will turn into the Moose Murders of auctions.

In other words, maybe this is your chance to witness a stupefying flop in real time, and become a bit of minor celebrity, and have a story you can tell your Internet Marketing grandchildren for years to come.

My “behind the scenes” auction will have its one and only performance this Tuesday, February 24.

The curtain goes up at 7pm CET/1 pm EST/10am EST.

If you’d like to grab your seat in time for the spectacle and possibly legendary flop:

https://t.me/+_qLpIllO2IZlM2Q0