Business Ideas

Can you digest this little and big lesson?

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I got a little lesson and a big lesson for you today. Let’s see if you can digest them.

Little lesson:

Yesterday I heard a story told by Joe Polish, the marketer who runs $100k/year mastermind groups and puts on 3-day events that cost $10k to attend.

Joe’s story was about a curious consult he did with an entrepreneur who wanted to grow her biz.

Joe said, he could tell this entrepreneur was so tightly wound that she would soon crack. Instead of marketing advice, Joe got her to come up with and schedule a “Super Happy Fun Day,” which is just what it sounds like, both so she would enjoy life a bit and to recharge her batteries.

My reaction to this little lesson:

“Super Happy Fun Day? Not my kinda thing.” If that’s what you think as well, then read on for the big lesson. Joe said:

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I’ve got a giant list right now of people who are trying to schedule things with me. One of my team members put up “cup of genius dot com” and it’s a 20-minute conversation with me for $2,000.

And it’s so funny. Because I can share some of the best insights for free to someone. They won’t do jack shit with it.

They pay me $2,000 for 20 minutes and there’s that focus, completely different level of digestion, that takes place.

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I’ve heard this idea before. Frankly I don’t like it, or at least I don’t like to think it applies to me.

Joe’s little and big lessons nagged at me yesterday as I was at the gym (1, on the stupid elliptical) while listening to this podcast with Joe (2), and getting ready to go back to work (3). (The numbers, by the way, represent instances of overscheduling my life.)

So even though Supper Happy Fun Days don’t sound like my thing, yesterday throughout the day, I gradually filled out a slow and timid list of things I actually enjoy (dogs and fried calamari were on the list).

And then, as the day wound down, at about 11:30pm, perhaps because this was all bubbling in my brain, I on a whim bought a ticket to go to Lisbon today. I fly out at 4pm this afternoon, and I get back on Monday evening.

I still have a bit of time before I have to stuff my two black tshirts into my backpack, so let me remind you of the free live training that mentalist-turned-marketer Kennedy is putting on, exclusive for folks on my list, this coming Monday, September 22, 2025, at 9pm CET/3pm EST/12 noon PST.

Kennedy will share email copywriting and marketing secrets that took him from selling $27k of his flagship info product… to selling $544k of the same, to the same audience.

And yes, there will be something for sale at the end of Kennedy’s training.

But Kennedy’s training will be valuable in itself, even though you don’t have to pay for it. (I know, because I’ve seen the training myself, two years ago, at a live event that cost $450 to attend.)

Maybe if my email today opened up your mind to anything, it’s that there’s value, often great value, in the free pearls that people like Joe Polish and Kennedy and sometimes even myself hand out each day.

To sign up for Kennedy’s free training, and maybe to profit, whether you pay or not:

https://bejakovic.com/kennedy

How to stop making your job “five times more difficult”

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Yesterday, I was listening to a podcast by Joe Polish and Dean Jackson — not one of their “I Love Marketing” podcasts, but a new one that Dean recorded for his More Cheese Less Whiskers brand.

By the way, if you don’t know Joe and Dean, both are direct marketers with decades of experience, who have taught and brought up generations of other marketers, including some famous names.

For example, yesterday on the podcast, Joe and Dean reminisced about a podcast guest they’d had on a long time ago, a young man named Tim Ferriss, and how after the interview, they spent 40 minutes trying to convince Tim to start his own podcast.

Tim in the end became convinced. As a result, he now has over 1 billion podcast downloads, and 800 interviews with people like Jerry Seinfeld, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Mark Zuckerberg.

Anyways, Joe and Dean were talking yesterday about events, as in, promotional events, but also specific physical events, with chairs and a podium and dessert:

How to make such events work… how to make them good so people get what they paid for and more… how to get people to actually buy tickets.

Joe talked about the first event he ever put on, about mindset, and the following lesson learned, which he has applied to every event since:

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What I learned is it is a lot easier to run an event where people perceive it’s gonna teach them how to make more money and build their business than it is how to fix their head. This one was about mindset. It was about psychology. And it was an amazing event! It was really transformative to everyone there. But it was five times more difficult to put people in the room than it was if you’re selling “money at a discount,” as they call it.

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The key thing here is where Joe says “where people perceive.”

Fact is, mindset matters for making more money, and making more money content often talks about mindset. The two aren’t entirely interchangeable, but there’s a lot of overlap.

But how do you present such a shifting and moving bundle of information, products, or services? What single aspect of it do you trumpet for all the world to hear… and what do you quietly deliver in addition, without any fanfare, just because you are trying to do right for your customers or clients?

Getting that right or wrong means the difference between regular work, on the one hand, and making your job “five times more difficult,” on the other.

And on that note, I would like to remind you of the offer I shared yesterday, Justin Blackman’s Different On Purpose. This is an 8-week cohort to spread into the world new and different positioning for your service- or client-based businesses, if you happen to be a copywriter, coach, or agency owner.

Justin doesn’t have big income claims on his sales page for this offer. That’s because it’s the first time he’s running Different On Purpose, and big income claims are hard to make credibly before you have had the first batch of people go through the program and report on their results.

But if you are selling something woolly like “copywriting services” or “coaching” or “consulting,” there’s no doubt that a different client perception of what you do could help you work drastically less and yet make drastically more money.

If you’re curious about Justin’s Different On Purpose, I wrote up a summary of the offer yesterday, including why you might want to join now, in this very first-ever cohort. If you’d like to read that:

https://bejakovic.com/announcing-live-personal-positioning-cohort/

Announcing: Live personal positioning cohort

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Yesterday, inside a small group of list owners that I have set up to help with affiliate deals, marketer Justin Blackman posted, as a kind of afterthought, that he has an exciting and cool new offer, that, by the way, it’s live now, and, oh, that it’s only available until the end of this week, or maybe not even that long.

The offer is called Different On Purpose.

You can find the full details of it at the sales page below. But in the interest of getting you to click through to that sales page, here are some intriguing facts about Justin’s “now you see me, now you don’t” new offer:

# Who it’s for

Freelancers, coaches, and service-based business owners who feel they’ve lost their mojo — thanks to AI, competition, and simply stuff that used to work not working any more.

(No judgment here, by the way. As Justin says on sales page, he himself has been wrestling with these issues for the past year and a half.)

# What it is

A live cohort that runs from September 25 – November 19. Small groups that Justin will be heading, with frankly a crazy list of 15 guest trainers to add in unique expertise, including Todd Herman, Daniel Throssell, and Chris Orzechowski.

Deliverables and outcomes are both new and different personal positioning… plus assets to support and communicate that… and, thanks to the guest trainers, strategy to get those assets and message out into the world, so as to regain that lost mojo.

# Why you might wanna sign up now

Two reasons:

First is that this is the first time Justin is offering Different On Purpose, and his strategy is to underprice it and overdeliver on it. (See the complete list of 15 guest trainers if you don’t believe the “overdeliver” bit.)

Second is that, this being a live cohort which Justin will head, it’s limited to 30 people.

I don’t know how many of those spots are already taken.

I do know Justin is promoting Different On Purpose to his list… I’m guessing at least some of the guest speakers who have lists totaling hundreds of thousands of names will promote it as well to their lists… and maybe others in that group I set up will promote it too.

All that’s to say, if you worry about where your service or client business is going… if you feel like your personal positioning is taking on the nice ochre color of a brick in the wall… and if you wanna do something about it now rather than in 2035… then Different On Purpose is something to consider.

To find out more about it, before those 30 spots are filled and the decision is no longer yours:

https://bejakovic.com/different

Why I’ve shuttered my online community

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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.

Tired of experimenting?

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Last year, I started snooping on people.

Specifically, I started snooping on 3-4 online business owners, who have businesses that are doing well, and who I was frankly jealous of, because I wanted something similar.

I won’t tell you all the folks I snooped on, but I will tell you one was a guy named Olly Richards.

I’m not here to hype up Olly — if you wanna find out more about the guy, the Internet’s your friend.

I simply want to share a testimonial I saw on Olly’s site, or rather a video confessional, by one of Olly’s coaching students.

This coaching student runs a 6-figure online education business. In other words, he has an audience. He’s making good money. He’s unlikely to respond to typical promises made in the “creator” economy.

So why did this student decide to work with Olly, and pay Olly tens of thousands of dollars? From the video, in the student’s words:

“You can do things by experimenting and doing things yourself. You learn that way. That is one way of doing things. But in my opinion, I’ve just found it’s extremely exhausting after a certain point. I’m really tired of experimenting. Just give it to me. Just tell me what to do, tell me what not to do.”

At the time, as part of the research for my new 10 Commandments book, I was reading the book I’m OK — You’re OK by Thomas Harris. In that book, Harris writes:

“Structure hunger is an outgrowth of recognition hunger, which grew from the initial stroking hunger.”

That sounded profound to me when I read it, and seemed tightly connected with that testimonial for Olly Richards.

Now, after a year has passed, it seems less tightly connected and less profound, but it does describe the core process that people like Olly’s student go through:

1. They start out by just wanting to feel OK, ie. better about themselves and their place in the world.

2. To do that, they seek out recognition — via work, achievement, and the fruits thereof.

3. Getting recognition, and worse yet, keeping recognition, is tiring, and so people start looking for help, shortcuts, and “structure” eg. simply being told what to do.

Maybe you think I’m telling you something super obvious, and that there’s no need to flog such a poor and common horse.

Fine. In that case, let me just share a few simple takeaways:

1. People like Olly’s student, who have already achieved recognition, make for better customers than people who have not, simply by virtue of having money to spend (on your help) and resources (list, offers, team) to profit from your help quickly and effectively.

2. If you want to appeal to such people, try the “Tired of experimenting?” line, because it comes directly from the mouth of a member of that market.

3. If you yourself are personally tired of experimenting, then take a look at the community below.

It’s a place where business owners, marketers, and copywriters follow proven recipes to get more value out of their existing skills and assets, often while working dramatically less, and having a more fun time of it, than they are doing now:

https://bejakovic.com/ronin

“The best cold email ever”

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I hate cold emailing at scale, but here’s an idea that works even if you don’t cold email at scale:

Back in 2017, a company called Ramp sent out 50k cold emails.

They were pitching their “print you a custom tshirt” service to 50k small businesses.

The results of this campaign, according to the Ramp blog:

Open rate: 50%

Click through rate: 25% and above

Total revenue: “Tens of thousands of pounds, dollars and euros!” … which sounds actually kind of miserable, but maybe that’s what you get for printing custom tshirts as a business.

If the revenue numbers don’t turn you off too badly, then here’s the cold email that Ramp sen—

Actually, the copy in the email was pretty irrelevant.

The big idea, “the scheme behind it,” was what mattered.

And the scheme behind it was to include an image in the email, featuring Ramp’s CEO, smiling and wearing a custom tshirt that had the logo of the recepient’s company printed on it.

(As you might suspect, it wasn’t really a real tshirt with a custom logo printed on it. It was just a bit of automated photoshopping magic, but it looked perfectly real.)

Along with the “tens of thousands” in revenue, this email got tons of engagement, positive replies, and free publicity for Ramp as recipients tweeted their custom thsirt images and called Ramp’s campaign “best cold email ever.”

So.

It worked for Ramp.

It can work for you too, even if you don’t print custom tshirts as a business, and even if you’re not trying to cold email 50k or so strangers.

Maybe it’s obvious enough what the underlying psychology here is, what principle made Ramp’s cold email a success.

If so, you can run with it and use it to open up new conversations that can lead to deals and business partnerships.

If it’s not 100% clear, or you simply want me to go into the topic in more detail, then I have a little guide on this that I prepared and sold only once before, last year, called Secret of the Magi.

Secret of The Magi covers just one thing — the biggest lesson I’ve learned about opening up conversations that can lead to business partnerships.

The “secret” inside this guide is simple, but very versatile, and most importantly, it gets results. If you want to find out what it is, you can get it below:

https://bejakovic.com/secret-of-the-magi

If you wanna meet interesting people… charge them

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A while back, read an interesting article by a guy named Phil Eaton.

Eaton is a software developer who also runs a popular blog. He started blogging in 2017, in part with the goal of meeting cool, likeminded people.

Even after his blog and Twitter account took off, and although he made his email publicly available, Eaton found nobody ever reached out to him to talk.

So he got devious. He announced he is now charging $100 for people to talk to him.

Result?

You most likely guessed it. Suddenly there were lots of people, each willing to pay $100, and getting on a call with him.

Eaton’s goal was to connect, and he ended up doing so — with VCs, university professors, and startup founders.

He gave away the money to a charity, and made it publicly known that he is doing so.

The fact was doing this for entirely nice guy reasons made him willing to be much more pushy and promotional about his “$100 to talk to me” offer than he might have been otherwise.

So if you too are trying to build up a network of interesting people, and nobody is responding, then put a price tag on it and watch what happens.

“Yea all right,” I hear you say. “I guess that’s kind of interesting. But my time is valuable, my life is short, and I don’t want to simply open up my calendar to strangers for $100.”

Fine. then here’s a variant that I myself can recommend based on personal experience:

Rather than allowing anybody to pay to talk to you, talk to people who have already paid you. Or at least some of them.

I have a habit — not so strict, and I gotta be more diligent with it — of reaching out to people who have bought offers I’ve made.

I set aside an hour of time, usually on Sundays, to talk to one such person each week.

This has resulted in marketing insights, obviously, but it’s also connected me with some smart, successful, and surprising people — people I never would have guessed to be buying my offers, for reasons I never would have guessed.

In turn, I always make it clear that I’m happy to answer questions, give feeedback and my opinion, or generally offer help, within reason, to make the call worthwhile for the other person as well.

I happen to know that some people have taken the advice I’ve given and run with it to implement in their offers or in their client-getting efforts.

So do you wanna talk to me? Or connect with me? Or get my input or help?

No promises, but your best bet is to take me up on one of my offers.

For example, my most popular course, Simple Money Emails, which shows you how to write simple emails, like this one, to make sales today and readers reading tomorrow. For more info on Simple Money Emails:

https://bejakovic.com/sme/

The (yes, THE) secret of storytelling

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A-list copywriter Parris Lampropoulos likes to tell the story of how he became a copywriter. I’ve heard him tell this story multiple times, mostly online, and once in real life as well.

I forget the details of how it all goes, but there’s one detail that I never forget.

At one point, Parris was working at a real estate office, and the office manager at the time, in a fit of fury and impotence, punched his hand through a window.

And now comes the bit I always remember, which I’ve heard Parris repeat every time I’ve heard him tell this story:

There was a thin trail of blood on the floor, from the broken window to the elevator, as the manager walked out of the office, never to return again.

And that, in a snapshot, is THE secret of storytelling.

In a few more words, from an article I read about Irving Thalberg, a movie producer who was called the “Boy Wonder” of Hollywood, and who invented and popularized many Hollywood tropes that we now take for granted as elements of effective storytelling:

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The real reason for the enduring Thalberg myth has less to do with any of this than with that perennial idea, which fascinated [F. Scott Fitzgerald, who worked as a Hollywood screenwriter in the 1930s, and who wrote a novel with a fictionalized Thalberg as protagonist] as it does us, that there are secrets of storytelling, to which a few are privy.

Yet good Hollywood films have more or less a single story. Raise the stakes, place insuperable obstacles before the protagonist, have the protagonist somehow surmount them while becoming braver and better. What works for Dorothy works for Rocky. In truth, we may follow stories, but we respond to themes; the story is just the tonality in which those themes are played. […]

No one can recall the ins and outs of Salozzo’s drug scheme in “The Godfather,” but we remember Pacino’s face in closeup: we come for the story, stay for the sublimations.

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I don’t really know what the guy behind this article is talking about when he talks about “themes” and “sublimations.”

I do know that few stories are memorable… that the structure of storytelling, hyped up as it is, is often irrelevant… and that what actually makes a story work is not the rags-to-riches, or riches-to-rags, or hero quest skeleton underneath… but a few dramatic and memorable snapshots:

The “kiss of death” that Michael Corleone gives his brother Fredo in the Godfather II; Rocky running up the stairs of the Philadelphia Museum of Art; the thin trail of blood from the broken window to the elevator.

So if it’s not the structure but the memorable snapshot that is the secret of storytelling… then how do you come up with memorable snapshots?

I hate to break it to you, but if that were a knowable secret, then every Hollywood movie would be a forever-beloved blockbuster. Which is clearly not the case.

The best you can do is to come up with the best snapshots you can, and then to test them out on your audience. See if the audience oohs and aahs, if they feed you back the same snapshot days and weeks and months later, and if they come back for more. Then double down on what works, and discard the rest.

And since I gotta sell you something, let me tie this into the topic of writing daily emails, because daily emails make for a particularly easy and fertile way to test out new ideas and ways of presenting those ideas to an audience.

I’ve written books and created courses that people buy and enjoy and then come back for more of. One secret of how I make such info products is that I repurpose my daily emails, or rather, the emails that worked — ideas and snapshots that I field-tested on my audience, and that I got positive feedback on.

If you want to start writing daily emails of your own, and if you want a field-tested guide for how to do that well:

https://bejakovic.com/sme/

Amazon or your own funnel for selling your book?

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A reader named Dan (not sure he wants me to share his last name) asks:

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Hi John

I bought both your books on my wife Hilary’s Amazon account and rated them 5 stars! Really enjoyed them.

I have just finished writing my second marketing book but avoid Amazon as I want to sell them through my funnel. Do you find there’s enough organic sales through Amazon to build your list?

Very best wishes

Dan (in London)

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I’ve only been selling my books via Amazon and it’s been doing all right for me, 10-15 sales a day on average. But only a fraction of those, maybe one or two a day, turn into subscribers to this newsletter, in part because I hide the optin at the end of the book.

Ideally, I’d be selling my books both via Amazon and via my own funnels. I haven’t done this because of the work involved in building out and managing a funnel that would make selling off Amazon, say via Facebook ads, feasible.

But… maybe we can split the work?

Specifically, I had the following idea:

I could sell my book via ads and my own funnel. And then, as an upsell, to break even with ad costs, I could sell a bundle of other related books from other authors. After all, a book buyer is a book buyer, and a book buyer who bought, say, a book about persuasion or self improvement will buy more such books.

I’m telling you this for two reasons:

1. I am honestly hoping that you will go and create this funnel instead of me, and put your own book (about say, marketing) as the front-end offer, and collect all the email addresses of buyers who come in.

I will gladly contribute either of my 10 Commandments books to be sold in the upsell bundle, and expect no royalties in turn, or even the email addresses you collect.

I will just be happy to get my book into more hands, and hopefully to get some of the owners of those hands to sign up to my list via the optin I have at the back of the book.

2. If you have your own book on a marketing or persuasion topic, but you refuse to do me the kindness of creating a cold traffic funnel and including my book in your upsell flow, then let me know, and maybe I will do the work that you cold heartedly refuse to do.

In other words, maybe I will get that cold traffic funnel created, and put my book as the front-end offer, and sell your book in a bundle as an upsell.

No guarantees. But if you have an interesting and well-written book, and you’re intrigued by the proposition, hit reply, and let’s talk.

And if you haven’t yet read my new 10 Commandments book, about con men and stage magicians and pickup artists and (gulp) copywriters, then you can find that charmer here:

https://bejakovic.com/new10commandments

Free training on client acquisition by half-cow-selling copywriter

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Even in the small world of “dudes who write daily emails about writing daily emails,” you can sometimes miss good people.

And so it was that, a few weeks ago, while putting together a group of people who have email lists and sell stuff related to email marketing and copywriting and course creation, it was for the first time ever that I heard of a guy named Alin Dragu.

I’m telling you this because in the weeks that followed, Alin and I agreed to do a “list swap.” That’s a lurid term for a clean idea. Basically, Alin and I agreed to let our respective lists know the other guy exists, and to coax our readers into joining the other’s list as well.

Alin has a long-form optin page that does a thorough job boosting his status and making the case for why you might want to hear from him daily. In a few words, Alin’s got:

– Endorsements for his daily emails from people like Daniel Throssell and Brian Kurtz

– The title of Vice President of a $2.8M Advertising Agency

– A testimonial from a copywriting client who sold a half cow (yes, it’s exactly what it sounds like) thanks to Alin’s email copy

… and if authority is not enough, Alin also has a legit and exclusive bribe bundle to entice you to sign up to his list, good for only the next 48 hours, just because you happen to be a diligent reader of my newsletter.

The core piece of this is a video training called “Warm-Ish Client Acquisition,” in which Alin lays out a (coldish) outreach strategy that led to two copywriting retainers worth $6k. Alin previously only made this training available inside a $300 product, but it’s yours free.

Also, Alin’s bribe bundle contains a copy of his book, Meaningful Marketing, and Copywriting Catalyst, a collection of copywriting tips.

And it’s all free. Did I mention that? FREE.

But only if you act before the deadline, which, tick-tock, is waiting like the crocodile in Peter Pan to bite the arm off the careless and the tardy.

To get Alin’s bribes and to sign up to the man’s list in time:

https://alindragu.com/john/