Business Ideas – Page 8

The next step

January 20, 2026 by John Bejakovic

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

January 19, 2026 by John Bejakovic

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

January 11, 2026 by John Bejakovic

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?

January 2, 2026 by John Bejakovic

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”?

January 1, 2026 by John Bejakovic

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.

Drive X: Why people online are such brutes

December 29, 2025 by John Bejakovic

Following my email yesterday about a new 2-star review of my 10 Commandments book, a bit of a discussion developed inside my community, Daily Email House, around the topic of:

“How do you deal with trolls, critics, and know-it-alls in your audience?”

One House member replied that she “stopped caring and installed a ‘mean’ part of me that can trigger people.”

To which another House member replied with some interesting historical context:

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The Internet has been like this since the age of the dinosaurs (the 1990s) when all we had were chat room and Usenet lists to abuse each other.

Back when everything was anonymous I did the same thing: develop a “mean” persona to play online because that’s the only way to survive a forest of predators.

After online turned social [sic] and we gave up on privacy, the urge to be a jerk behind a screen never went away.

It’s convinced me that a good portion of the public suffers from some kind of mental or emotional disturbance.

===

But if a good portion of the public has a mental or emotional disturbance… is it a disturbance any longer?

I’m not trying to be cute or contrary.

Rather, I think the House member above is on to a key insight about human nature.

It’s not that people are brutes by nature. But they do have a core human drive — let’s call it Drive X for the sake of mystery — which can turn them brutish.

Drive X is not the drive for sex, the way that Sigmund Freud taught.

It’s also not the drive for meaning in life, the way Victor Frankl taught.

Rather, Drive X is something entirely different, which permeates all our interactions with other human beings, online as well as offline.

When left unsatisfied, Drive X gives rise to brutish behavior.

But when Drive X is satisfied, people become open and relaxed and even compliant.

Which is why the world’s top influence professionals — from con men to copywriters to screenwriters — appeal to this Drive X and promise to satisfy it in their marks, prospects, and audiences, first and foremost, above all other considerations.

And that’s why, in my 10 Commandments book, I make Drive X the topic of the very first commandment, because it is PARAMOUNT.

If you have my 10 Commandments book already, you know what Drive X is, or you can look it up easily, at the end of Commandment I.

And if you don’t have my 10 Commandments book yet, you can find it below, and catch up to everyone who is clued in already:

https://bejakovic.com/new10commandments

Mmeh!

December 28, 2025 by John Bejakovic

I’m back to Barcelona, I slept well last night, and I just went for a bike ride along the sea, where the Sunday morning weather couldn’t be more beautiful.

That’s why I was thrilled — well, at least not very put off — by a new and glowing 2-star review of my new 10 Commandments book.

An old, experienced, and spelling-challenged reader writes on Amazon:

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Mmeh!

Not sure why I both this book. It has lots of anicdotes and examples of what magicians, marketers and sales people do to convince or con audiences but nothing really eye opening. While it may offer something unique to someone with no experience, I maybe too old and experienced for this crap.

===

To this reviewer, I say Mmeh!

It’s never fun or exciting to be told how a magic trick is done.

And the same really goes for learning the magic of copywriting, or comedy, or even pickup.

Persuading other humans to have a certain experience, or to do something you want them to do, is ultimately about putting on a show, an effect, a presentation for the audience to see.

Discovering the technique that goes into that cannot compare to the excitement and emotional stimulation that you feel as an unwitting participant or audience member.

Discovering those behind-the-scenes tricks can only become fun or exciting once again in case you become so obsessed and deeply enmeshed in the craft that good technique and ways to improve it become sexy to you on their own.

My reviewer above says he is too old and experienced. I imagine that means he has dabbled a lot, constantly buying more stuff in search of something novel and stimulating, but putting little of what he’s been exposed to into practice.

It’s hard to please an audience like that, and frankly, I don’t try to do it.

On the other hand, if you are new to the topic of influencing and persuading others…

… or if you are old and experienced, in the sense of having put a lot of what you’ve learned about human psychology into practice — whether selling, or making people laugh, or making girls say yes to you — then you are likely to find something unique, fun, and even valuable in my book.

For more info, or if you’d like to both this book right now:

https://bejakovic.com/new10commandments

What do I write about NOW?

December 24, 2025 by John Bejakovic

I woke up this morning to find out that, after about 8 years of this daily email newsletter, my dad finally found me online and signed up to hear from me every day.

“Oh God,” I said to myself, “what do I write about NOW?”

This always happens whenever somebody from my real life signs up for my newsletter. I suddenly get in my head and start thinking what people will think. It lasts a day or two. Then I gradually relax and get back to writing for myself.

To date, as far as I know, this newsletter counts among its readers my mom… my dad… friends I have had for 20+ years… girls I’ve known or dated or been in long-term relationships with… a mom of an ex-gf… several people I have only met in real life after being in contact with them via this newsletter… a motley collection of people I have never met in real life but that I have surprisingly fun and even important relationships with online, entirely via typing and maybe occasionally by Zoom… and then of course the large and mostly silent majority who sometimes read, sometimes reply, and sometimes buy from me and make my life, the way it is, possible.

I really struggled to write today’s email.

For one thing, because I’m in my head, like I said at the start.

For another thing, Christmas Eve is not very inspiring or exciting where I’m at right now.

It’s rainy and gray in Zagreb today. I’m currently at an Airbnb and getting ready to go for a Christmas Eve gym session, before heading for the Christmas Eve suckling pig roast at my mom’s and grandma’s.

In terms of email fodder, nothing much is going on compared with years past. (I checked my email from December 24 2024. I found the Holy Grail on Christmas Eve last year, and I wrote an email about it).

A final thing is that, though I’m no believer and frankly I have zero tradition of Christmas from when I was a kid (New Year’s was the big holiday then, with presents and a tree and a commie version of Santa Claus), I still feel some reluctance to go into my usual full-salesman mode on Christmas Eve. (I will reserve that for tomorrow.)

So lemme just say how strange and in a way miraculous it is to be able to do what I’m doing.

I wanna say thanks that you’re reading these emails, including presumably today, on Christmas Eve.

If you celebrate, enjoy your own version of suckling pig or however it is you feast today. If you don’t celebrate, I hope you’re doing well wherever you are in the world. In the words of my spirit animal, Ebenezer Scrooge, “A Merry Christmas to everybody!”