I’m in Lisbon. For the second time ever in my life. I’m here for a meetup organized by Sean D’Souza. For the second time ever in my life.
In case you don’t know Sean, he is a marketer who’s been online since before Google went public. And he’s still at it.
Sean and his wife Renuka run Psychotactics, a genuinely unique and genuinely valuable website, blog, email newsletter, and podcast.
Sean and Renuka decided a long while ago that they wanted to cap their income — the last I heard, they make $500k a year and that’s it.
On the flip side, they take three months of vacation a year — work three months, travel for one month.
They normally live in New Zealand, but last year during one of their vacation months they traveled around Spain (the first meetup I went to was in Seville).
This year, they are traveling for a month around Portugal. And that’s how and why I am Lisbon today.
Yesterday was the the meetup. There were six of us:
#1 Sean…
#2 Renuka…
#3 A Portuguese entrepreneur with a miracle household product she is trying to get onto a world market…
#4 A German fitness trainer and app creator…
#5 An English bass guitar teacher who has been selling courses online almost as long as Sean has (and who had actually heard of me, via Kieran Drew, and via my love of the Princess Bride)…
#6 Me.
Not in attendance, but somebody who was supposed to come until the very last minute, was Internet marketer André Chaperon. That would have been a kind of thrill for me, because André was how I got into copywriting, and his AutoResponder Madness was the first email copywriting course I ever went through.
Anyways, let me jump from the intro to the outro:
After three hours of sitting in the cafe of Sean and Runuka’s boutique hotel, and talking about all kinds of things business, marketing, and persuasion, we got up from the cafe and left without paying.
I didn’t know anything about it. I assumed Sean had paid for our coffees, but he didn’t. Instead, we just smiled at the two waitresses who had been serving us, thanked them, and walked out.
The coffees we had consumed didn’t go on any kind of tab. The waitresses knew we didn’t pay. And yet they didn’t complain, and in fact were happy with the situation.
The question then is, how do you get free coffee for six?
I would tell you the answer, but I’m afraid you would groan and say, “Oh come on.” Because the answer is very simple, very obvious, and you’ve probably heard it as advice a million times before.
But maybe you’re still curious, and you really would like to know how to get free coffee for six, even if the answer is simple, obvious, and familiar.
If so, I’ll make you a deal:
Write in and tell me a frustration you’re currently having. It can be big or small. It can have to do with business, marketing, persuasion — or it can have nothing to do with any of those things.
I’m not offering any kind of solution to your frustration. But I am curious, and I am willing to listen. And in exchange, I’ll write you back and I’ll tell you how to get free coffee for six.