GrooveFunnels

The end of info products

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THE FOLLOWING EMAIL IS CONTROVERSIAL AND MAY BE OFFENSIVE TO SOME AUDIENCES

READER DISCRETION IS ADVISED

You might be familiar with Max Sackheim’s famous ad, “Do you make these mistakes in English?”

The ad ran for decades, unchanged, and kept bringing in profitable business better than any contender.

Thousands of pages of analysis have been written about the 7-word headline of this ad and the copy that followed.

But what about the actual product this ad was ultimately selling? What about the means by which a prospect could hope to correct his or her mistakes in English? What were prospects actually exchanging their money for?

Sackheim’s copy only teases you about the product, and calls it a “remarkable invention” and a “100% self-correcting device.”

As far as I know, nobody today actually has this remarkable invention stashed away in their garage. Whatever it was, it’s clear it was sold as some kind of tool, a device, and not just information.

This is a well-known direct marketing truth that’s been around since Sackheim’s days and before, back into the age of patent medicines.

A real, tangible, external mechanism — a fat-loss potion, a dog seatbelt, a “100% self-correcting device” — sells much easier than just good info — how to lose weight, how to be a less negligent dog owner, how to speak gooder English.

Smart modern-day info marketers have gotten hep to this fact. That’s why people like Russell Brunson and Ben Settle and Sam Ovens have put their reputation and audience to work behind tools like ClickFunnels and Berserker Mail and Skool.

The thing is, creating a tool, whether physical or software, has traditionally been an expensive, complicated, and risky business.

Take a look at Groove Funnels, another tool created a few years ago by another experienced info marketer, Mike Filsaime. Groove Funnels is a bloated, buggy, frankly unusable product. I say that as somebody who invested into a lifelong subscription in Groove Funnels.

I have a couple degrees in computer science. I also have about a decade’s worth amateur and pro software development experience. But after I quit my IT job 10+ years ago, I never once considered putting this experience to use in order to develop any kind of tool I could sell.

Until now.

Because things are changing. Today even a monkey, working alone, can create and deploy a valuable app simply by querying ChatGPT persistently enough. And there are plenty of shovels available for such would-be gold miners, tools to build tools, which will do much of the in-between work for you. Just say what you will to happen, and it will be done.

Decades ago, master direct marketer Gary Halbert said that the best best product of all is… information!

But I bet if Gary were alive today, he’d be hard at work (or maybe easy at work) creating some kind of high-margin tool to sell, in the broadest sense of the word — a thing to do some or all of the work for an audience with a problem. A few reasons why:

* Again, tools are easy to sell. They fit with innate human psychology of how we want to solve problems.

* Tools can make for natural continuity income if you license them out instead of sell them outright.

* Tools can create their own moat over time. There can be lock-in or switching cost if your users build on top of your tool.

* And now, thanks to the most remarkable invention of AI, it’s possible to create tools quickly, cheaply, and with great margins.

All that’s to say, best product of all… information? I don’t think so. Not any more. Best start adapting now.

Speaking of which, I got an offer for you:

Would you say that there are any tech issues that are keeping you from starting your own email list?

If there are, write in and let me know about them.

In turn, I’ll have something for you that you might like.

A-ha moment that makes millionaires out of creative workers

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HER: Started at age 28 with a net worth of $88k. Worked first as a writer. Then as a photographer. Each year, managed to save a bit more. Now, 10 years in, makes a steady six-figure income, still doing consumer photography. Net worth is $1M+.

HIM: Started at age 34 as a freelance artist. Net worth of -$39k. (Yes, $39k in debt. Lots of fancy trips and partying, and not a lot of income.) Switched to a salaried position while continuing to freelance. Now, five years in, has a net worth of $673k.

A few days ago, I read the financial independence journey of a husband and wife team. Their stats are above.

How did a photographer make a million in 10 years? And how did an artist go from -$39k to +$673k in 5 years?

Well, it was some of the usual. Work and budgeting and avoiding foolish financial bloodlettings.

How depressing. Was there anything else? Anything more inspiring? Yes. From the wife:

“I was exercising the same skill set, but applying it to an industry where they valued it and paid much more for it. This was the a-ha moment that really helped propel my professional life forward, (and later helped my husband as well).”

I’m telling you about this a-ha for two reasons:

First, because I think this idea is genuinely powerful.

I once heard marketer Greg Rollett say how he sold Internet marketing advice to broke musicians… $27 at a time. Then Greg took the same information, repackaged it so he was selling it to lawyers. He made $2700 now, for the same product. And my guess is he actually sold more units at $2700 than at $27.

So whether you’re a copywriter or a marketer, evaluate whether there aren’t people who would pay you 5x, 10x, or 100x for the exact same work you’re doing now.

That’s reason one.

Reason two is that the above story, about the husband and wife team, was part of presentation I gave last night.

The background is that, over past year, I wrote daily emails to two large lists. With each email, I promoted various affiliate offers and in-house products of the ecommerce company I’ve been working with.

Our best month in terms of email profit (not revenue) was over $70k. Typical days were between $1k and $2k. It all came from sending an email a day to each of these two lists.

And because this was secondary work, and there was a bunch of other copy to write as well, I had to make these emails as easy and quick as possible. Which is why I came up with a very streamlined process to stamp out these emails each day.

And when marketer Igor Kheifets asked me to speak to members of his mastermind, it was this process that I went through in detail. That was the presentation I gave last night.

So here’s the deal:

I’ll share the recording of this presentation with you, if you like, and if you take me up on my free GrooveFunnels offer.

In case you haven’t been reading my emails over past two days:

I’m trying to get you to sign up for free account to GrooveFunnels.

And if you don’t know GrooveFunnels, it’s a marketing funnel software like ClickFunnels. Except if ClickFunnels is an iPhone, then GrooveFunnels is a tin can with a length of string coming out the bottom.

So why am I pushing you to try it out? And why am I even willing to bribe you into signing up?

Well, I’m counting on some reckless person out there going one step further, either today or in the future.

Because GrooveFunnels is free for three sites if you sign up right now. But a premium lifetime license, for an unlimited number of sites, is not free.

In fact, the premium license is expensive. I know, because I bought one myself last week.

You might say I’m reckless or even foolish. After all, Groove is still a half-baked product, full of glitches and bugs.

It’s a gamble I am willing to take. My reasoning is that GrooveFunnels, while only functional now, will get good soon. And a premium lifetime license to Groove, at the price I got it at, is still a fraction of what just a year of ClickFunnels would cost me. But it’s not clear how much longer this will last.

Anyways, you don’t have to make the decision about a premium license now. Or ever.

Because you can sign up to GrooveFunnels for free, without a credit card. So look at it this way:

In the worst case, you do nothing with your free GrooveFunnels account.

In the best case, you get at least a 3-website license for a service that will one day rival ClickFunnels. This is potentially worth hundreds of dollars a month to you, when Groove starts charging a monthly fee.

And maybe you can use your free Groove sites to test offering your products or services to entirely new niches… ones that might pay you 10x or 100x what you’re getting paid now.

Or maybe you can use the simple email system in my presentation to promote some affiliate stuff in a new niche. (Groove will soon have an email service also, and you will get it if you sign up for the free account today.)

So that’s my pitch. Nothing to lose, and maybe something good to gain.

If you’re in, sign up for the free Groove account at the link below. Then forward me your confirmation email, and I’ll send you the email marketing presentation. Here’s the link:

https://bejakovic.com/groove

A red hot deal on a pain in the ass product

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At the start of this month, a few days before I launched my Copy Riddles program, I naively decided to make some changes to the sales page.

I’d gotten testimonials back from people who had gone through the test round. I just wanted to paste those in.

So I opened up my page builder and —

It looked like the fridge scene in Ghostbusters. The one where Sigourney Weaver opens her fridge, and instead of shelves with salami and cheese, she sees a vortex of evil energy and a demon hound growling, “Zuuuul.”

I immediately closed down the page builder and pretended like nothing happened.

After a few moments, I carefully opened it up again. I peaked in.

“Zuuuul,” I heard the hound say again.

My sales page had completely collapsed. All the text, supposed to flow from top to bottom, had gotten crushed down and was running to the right, off the page. The images were piled on top of each other. It was unreadable and unusable.

Yesterday, I mentioned GrooveFunnels. That’s the new marketing funnel software looking to compete with ClickFunnels.

Well, I built the sales page for Copy Riddles using GrooveFunnels.

My reasoning was this:

I know how to build a webpage. That’s easy.

But what I don’t know is how to build an order page and upsell pages… how to connect to payment processors like Stripe and PayPal… how to integrate all this with affiliate tracking so I can get other people to promote my stuff and become a millionaire in the process.

I’m sure there are tech solutions for all these problems. But I didn’t feel like researching them. And I didn’t feel like paying hundreds of dollars a month to try them out, especially since Copy Riddles is still a small and experimental project for me.

So I went all in on Groove. It does everything. Builds your webpages…. creates the sales funnel… processes payments… handles affiliates.

It sounded great.

The reality of course was a mess of supernatural proportions. Lots of glitches, confusing design, and a vortex of evil energy in my fridge.

And yet, like I said yesterday, I’m actually recommending GrooveFunnels. If you are a marketer or copywriter, and you expect to ever need a new site for a project, I believe it makes sense to try GrooveFunnels out. Here’s why:

1. My sales page ended up working just fine. In fact, it fixed itself, or the little Groove elves working behind the scenes fixed it. In fact, whenever I contacted the elves with questions or requests, they were very responsive and helpful.

2. Even though simple stuff (like changing the size of a headline) was almost impossible in Groove, the hard stuff (like handling affiliates across different pages) was instant. All the stuff I didn’t know how to do came ready to go out of the box.

3. Groove is free to use. Did I mention that yet?

Fact is, Groove is a huge project. Along with the page builder and the affiliate stuff and the sales funnels, they are also working on an email service and a shopping cart and membership site software.

And since they are working on a million things in parallel, everything is full of glitches and bugs.

But those bugs are getting worked out. Groove as a project is very hot and growing. Money is being poured into development.

And one day, or so I hope, Groove will be a stable, reliable platform, which actually gives you all you need to run a business online.

So that’s why I say it makes sense to try Groove out. And to do it now.

​​Because Groove won’t always be free, but it still is. There are no restrictions on the free program, except you can only use Groove for three websites max.

The only thing is they put an ugly black bar at the bottom of your site, saying “This site was built with Groove Funnels.” But if you sign up for a free Groove account today, and forward me your confirmation email, I will even tell you how I got rid of the ugly black bar on my site, while still being on the free Groove account.

Oh, and I will give you something else too. But this post is running long, so I’ll tell you about that tomorrow, when I finish my Groove promotion. (Or you can find out today, by sending me your confirmation email.)

​​For now, if you’d like to try out Groove, here’s where to go:

https://bejakovic.com/groove

Name your own price: how about free?

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In 1998, Priceline went from nothing to being worth $23 billion. They did it thanks to radio ads starring William Shatner and ending with the famous appeal:

“Priceline. Name your own price.”

In 2010, Fiverr launched. Their basic appeal was fixed freelance services, all for just $5. No need to haggle, negotiate over scope, or pay a lot. Fiverr went public in 2019, and is worth a little over $7 billion today.

Eventually, both Priceline and Fiverr backed off from their original appeals. You can’t name your own price on Priceline any more. And most services on Fiverr will cost you much more than a fiver today.

But those initial appeals were powerful. They made those companies worth billions of dollars.

Why?

What was so good about those two original appeals?

Direct marketer Fred Catona, who ran those Priceline ads in the 1990s, said that Priceline’s appeal was an “empowering statement.”

People felt in control, Catona argued, because they could name their own price. And so they took action and jumped on the Priceline website.

There might be something to that.

But Fiverr’s appeal was just the opposite. No control. Not only could you not name your own price… but you couldn’t even name the service you wanted. Five dollars. Fixed services off a menu. Take it or leave it.

And like I said, both appeals worked great.

So here’s my feeling:

Both Priceline and Fiverr appealed to simple greed.

“Name my own price? Hell yeah! I’ll take a ticket to Maui for $10, please!”

“$5 for an email sequence? Hell yeah! I’ll become an Internet marketing millionaire without doing any work!”

So my takeaway for you is to come up with new packaging for “cheap.” It might make you a billion dollars. Or 7. Or 23. And you don’t have to keep making the same “cheap” appeal forever.

Speaking of which:

There’s a new marketing funnel company in town, aiming to rival the $2B-valued ClickFunnels. The upstart is called GrooveFunnels.

GrooveFunnels does everything ClickFunnels does… and more. But while ClickFunnels costs hundreds of dollars a month to use… GrooveFunnels is free. For up to three websites… and for now, until they grab their share of the market.

Can you say cheap?

Of course, with cheap comes a whole host of headaches. I’ll tell you about a few of them tomorrow. And I’ll also tell you why it still makes sense to try out GrooveFunnels… and to even pay to get lifetime access for it, for more than three websites. Hell, I’ll even give you an incentive to do it.

But that’s tomorrow. For now, if you want to find out more about (FREE!) GrooveFunnels, here’s the link:

https://bejakovic.com/groove