Jason Fladlien Interview

Editor:

Today, I'm thrilled to be chatting to Jason Fladlien, a trailblazer in internet marketing, webinars, and so much more. With product sales in excess of 250 million, Jason's journey from humble beginnings to becoming a global influencer in internet marketing is nothing short of inspiring.

Editor:

Now alongside Wil Mattos, he co-founded Rapid Crush Inc., a company that has revolutionised digital marketing strategies and set records in the internet marketing space. And he's also the author of the influential book, One to Many, which delves deep into the secrets of successful webinars.

Editor:

His achievements really do speak for themselves, but I guess we should speak to the man himself.

Editor:

Jason, welcome.

Jason Fladlien:

Pleasure to be here.

Editor:

Now could we start by asking a little bit more about your early days and what led you from being a rapper and a monk to a leading figure in internet marketing?

Jason Fladlien:

Yeah, you could really start anywhere in this business. That's the good news.

Jason Fladlien:

I was always interested in music and specifically hip hop, and I started rapping in front of audiences at seven years old, seven or eight, somewhere along there. So it felt very natural to me.

Jason Fladlien:

And I always thought music would be where I would end up. So I tried that off and on throughout the years.

Jason Fladlien:

But I had a lot of trauma that went through my life when I was growing up. I was in a household that there was a lot of drug abuse and a lot of chaos.

Jason Fladlien:

And I ended up being about 18 years old and just so depressed. I had all these panic attacks all the time. I ended up having agoraphobia, which is afraid of open spaces, meaning you really don't go outside much. And I'm just sitting there just lost.

Jason Fladlien:

And a friend of mine who was in the music space, he had went and he travelled with the Hare Krishnas for a little bit and he came back and he was telling me about that.

Jason Fladlien:

So I was intellectually curious, always was, still am. So I started Googling around and looking at it and I started reading it and I'm like, "Okay, I'm at my lowest point in my life. I can't focus, I can't do anything. I'm staying up till 7:00 in the morning, sleeping until 3:00 or 4:00 in the afternoon. That was my life living with my dad in this little tiny apartment." And so I said, "I'll try it and see what happens." So really saved my life.

Jason Fladlien:

I eventually got rid of all my panic attacks in a few months and I just felt really invigorated to go out and do something boldly. And so I tried that with the music.

Jason Fladlien:

The music, unfortunately though, it was at about the worst time you could launch a music career because CD sales were dying out, but streaming hadn't been figured out yet.

Jason Fladlien:

And I wasn't frankly very good at it. I had have to work eight or nine hours to do something that talented musicians could do in one to two hours.

Jason Fladlien:

I'm not one to give up though. I was trying really hard this, that, and the other. And so I started looking at the business and marketing side of the music and I started trying to apply those methods to the music that I was putting out there and it wasn't working well.

Jason Fladlien:

And out of desperation, I said, "You know what? I need capital. That's the answer to the music business." Because I didn't have any money. So let me make some money online and then I'll pour that into the music business.

Jason Fladlien:

That was about 2006. And now here we are going on in 2024, still haven't circled back around to the music, got into the internet space and just kept going.

Editor:

And what a success that has been. Did you regret perhaps leaving the rapping behind or is that something that actually-

Jason Fladlien:

No.

Jason Fladlien:

I always thought that the music would be the thing that switch me on, and I didn't find anything else as attractive to me. But the marketing very quickly became as attractive if not more attractive to me. So I had the passion for it, but I also had the skill set to it. Whereas music, I had the passion for it, but I lacked on the skill set side.

Jason Fladlien:

So you really want both. You want something that you're passionate about that also comes naturally to you, and it still will be hard, don't get me wrong, but at least you're predisposed to getting it and you can do something with it.

Jason Fladlien:

And that's what I really saw with the marketing was, "Wow, I like it. It's very interesting to me. It motivates me, it gets me excited and I can get it right away. I don't have to practise extra hard for many, many more hours just to be barely competent at it. I can pick it up in a decent timeframe so therefore maybe I can get some traction and some momentum." And that's why I don't think I ever came back to the music.

Editor:

You mentioned that it was at the time when CDs were dying out and streaming hadn't been figured out yet. That's probably around the same time, I guess, as the internet was really finding its feet. We've been through the dot-com boom and bust and the internet was really starting to come into it. So when did you first get online?

Jason Fladlien:

Way long ago.

Jason Fladlien:

So I was actually 14 when I first got online. So this was 1997. And I remember I bought a little 286 computer. So this was not a tower. You laid it flat on the desk and I painted houses for a month just trying to make some money to save up. And I bought this computer and I got the internet.

Jason Fladlien:

And I was really just so fascinated with how the internet worked. And this was in '97 when it was just... Nobody even... Barely anybody had the internet.

Jason Fladlien:

And I started learning how to build websites back then. And that was really cool.

Jason Fladlien:

We were doing music back then. I was working on music, so I was trying to produce albums even when I was 14 and I was building websites around anything and everything because really to put anything online back then...

Jason Fladlien:

I had a lot of different interests and passions. And in order to put anything online, you had no code. It's not like these days where you just go to Twitter and type it on your phone.

Jason Fladlien:

So starting when I was 14, I really got onto the internet and then I didn't look at it as a way to make money until maybe seven years later with the music.

Jason Fladlien:

So I'd always really been a child of the internet. Nowadays, every kid is a child of the internet, but back then it was very, very rare that somebody that was young was into the internet.

Jason Fladlien:

So that also was a huge advantage for me. So I was able to see a lot of things as they came out of their infancy and see what worked and see what didn't work and get this awareness and be fresh about it too because a lot of people in the time that were starting to get in the space, they are as old as I am now, 40.

Jason Fladlien:

I've learned at 40 you have a lot of biases that you've accrued along the way that are hard to set aside. So it makes you very resistant to new emerging technologies.

Jason Fladlien:

And I didn't have that back then, so I was a rare breed that I could get it on the ground floor.

Editor:

That's great. So you decided then that the music for now was going to be put on pause and that you're going to focus mainly on the internet and the marketing side of things. So what happened? What was your first product and when did you get the inspiration to create that?

Jason Fladlien:

Yeah. I first started to try to be an affiliate marketer.

Jason Fladlien:

And it is an interesting story because my dad and my mom got a divorce and I'm living with my dad now and I'm 20 some years old, and my dad wanted to get back in the dating scene.

Jason Fladlien:

So he bought a product from a guy named David DeAngelo, a well respected marketer, goes by the name of Eben Pagan, who I've later given advice and consulted with him and his wife on a project. It's a small world, but at that time it was like... "Okay, I had heard about Eben because he was the first guy I've ever offered 200% affiliate commission. So you saw my $40 eBook and I'll pay you 80 bucks," something like that.

Jason Fladlien:

And so my dad had his back end because my dad must've bought the book and then bought his $200 advanced dating secrets or what have you and...

Jason Fladlien:

We didn't have much space. We lived in this tiny little apartment right next to a pawn shop, a cash for gold place, and a redneck bar, so not a very good area to live in.

Jason Fladlien:

And I found this one day and I just got into a marketing and I'm like, "Oh, I got source material so I can write these articles to pre-sell this programme and then make 200% affiliate commission."

Jason Fladlien:

So I tried for about two months writing article after article after article. My model was really simple. There was a site called EzineArticles back then, and if you wrote the right keywords into those articles with the right density, you could get some traffic. So you'd write an article and get a hundred or 200 clicks in some instances, maybe even more.

Jason Fladlien:

So I would pick this different keyword focused dating concepts, write articles about them, put a little bio box. So you had 25, 50 words you could put at the end of every article, and it would be like, "Hey, if you want my free eBook on blah blah, blah, go here."

Jason Fladlien:

So I wrote an eBook and then I wrote 50 articles. I was writing an article every day pretty much for 60 days and did not make any money. I think I made a total of $160.

Jason Fladlien:

And then I was like, "Well, hold on a second. This ain't going to work because then I don't get paid until two months after that," because there's a 45 or 60-day holding period. So A, I'm not making any money. And, B, if I make money, I don't even see it for a long period of time, and I'm so damn broke, I need money quicker.

Jason Fladlien:

So because I had learned how to write these articles, I get this brilliant idea one day that I go, "I'm going to write articles for other people as a ghostwriter."

Jason Fladlien:

Now keep in mind, and I left this part of the story out, I was painting houses full time during the day just to try to make some money to just keep my article or my music business going. So I could only work an hour or two before I went to go paint houses and an hour or two after that, work a full-time job and then sandwich two hours before and two hours after into trying to build my business.

Jason Fladlien:

And we worked a lot in the painting business. I worked with this crew and we would typically work six to seven days a week, and I had to drive an hour to and from each day to go to most of the job sites that we were at. That's why when I say I was working two hours before and two hours after, that was literally my whole day. I didn't have much else I could do back then.

Jason Fladlien:

So I said, "You know what? I want to write articles for other people because at least I can replace this painting job that I have right now so I could work from home and move one step closer."

Jason Fladlien:

So the first day that we had a rainout from painting houses, it was raining outside and we were working on an exterior job. I went home and I said, "This is the day I'm going to do it."

Jason Fladlien:

And the problem was I didn't have a portfolio with a lot of different articles. I only had dating articles. So I used one of those. And then I wrote nine other articles on nine other topics just to show that I had this portfolio that was a variety of different topics I could write on. And then I built a one-page website that basically said, "Hey, I'll write articles for you. It's $3 and 25 cents an article. I guarantee 24-hour turnaround time." I was that desperate.

Editor:

Wow.

Jason Fladlien:

Yeah. And there was a website back then the biggest forum for internet marketers it was called the Warrior Forum. And just like that bio box on an article, if you posted on the forum, you could have a little one or two sentence bio box.

Jason Fladlien:

All I did was went through and found different popular threads that were happening right now and responded with my 2 cents for whatever that was worth. And then they would see the bio box, "Need a high quality article done cheaply, fast, click here," and then they go to the website.

Jason Fladlien:

And after posting just on a few different replies, I had three different clients that wanted to hire me to write articles. And I said, "Oh my God, this is awesome."

Jason Fladlien:

And then seven days later, I quit painting houses because I was making a little bit more money because I'm making about 12 bucks an hour painting houses. I was making about 15 bucks an hour writing these articles. And I knew I was way under price and I knew I could increase the price.

Jason Fladlien:

And I started to have clients that I had to turn down because I had too much demand, so they were willing to pay me more money. And so in seven days, I started working for myself.

Jason Fladlien:

And that was what changed everything. I now had proof that I could make money online, which is everything. I was trying to do things without any proof behind them. So it's really hard. Writing articles on dating, but I wasn't interested in being a pickup artist or anything like that. There's no proof associated with that. There's no authority. So that's why it's really hard. In internet marketing space, there's no authority.

Jason Fladlien:

But now I had authority. I could show people that I could make money online and I had a system in order to do that, and that's really the game changer.

Jason Fladlien:

So after about six months of writing articles, I decided to publish an eBook on the topic and I wrote a little eBook about six pages. It wasn't that long on my article writing system because I could write an article on any topic, and I could write it fast and it would be high quality.

Jason Fladlien:

And so I taught this article writing system and showed people how to do it. And I sold the thing for $4 because I was so... I didn't think anybody would pay me any amount of money. I was so scared to take money from other people for an eBook. I didn't want them to get a bad deal. I didn't have any confidence. I didn't know what I was doing.

Jason Fladlien:

So I sold this little eBook for four bucks and I took out a classified ad on the Warrior Forum, 20 bucks to take the thing out. And I basically...

Jason Fladlien:

The pitch is brilliant. I didn't know what I was doing, but it worked really well. The pitch was essentially like, "I am confident I could cut your article writing time in half the first time you read my eBook, and it's only $4 for you to find out. And if you don't like it, I'll give you your four bucks back."

Editor:

Wow.

Jason Fladlien:

That was almost the whole pitch. I think I threw in a couple other bullet points and then I said, "Go here and buy." And that was it.

Jason Fladlien:

I made more money in two days selling an eBook than I did all week writing articles. And I'm like, "Hmm, this is really cool."

Jason Fladlien:

And something happened that I wasn't really tuned into consciously, but I recognised when I saw it, people were buying this product and they were reporting back, "Oh my God." And 30 minutes after they bought, they were seeing a benefit in telling other people about it. And that's very uncommon even now. But back then, it was very uncommon in the info space that somebody could buy a product and within 30 minutes already got more than their money back because they're like, "Jesus, this is already improving my life instantaneously almost."

Jason Fladlien:

So I saw that and like a Neanderthal, I was just like, "I'll just do more of that. I'll just find one little thing that I can improve upon for people that the first time they understand it, they could apply it so they could obviously see they got a good deal and I'll sell really cheap products and I'll just make them really short eBooks very down to the second, do this, do this, do this, do that, do that, do that, done. All step-by-step without much else in between." And then the pitch is basically like, "It's not much money, even if all it does is save you time, it will be worth it for you. Try me out."

Jason Fladlien:

And people really responded back. So I did that for a few months straight where I was just going out trying to find these one little problems, one little solution type of products I could create, and I developed a reputation very fast as somebody that was up and coming, somebody that really had some value to offer out there, and that got me really pumped up.

Jason Fladlien:

But it also... What was cool is building these products. They say the best way to learn something is to teach it. So I would teach these topics that were not connected, but there was some overlap to them. So then I was able to connect them. So then that made me what I call trade up so I could trade up a skill set that was small and make it larger.

Jason Fladlien:

So for example, there's not a whole lot of difference between writing articles and writing emails, so email content that people needed for their autoresponders. So I started teaching people how to do that. I had clients that had hired me to do that during my article writing days. So I could teach that.

Jason Fladlien:

If you think about it too, if you take three info products that are on one specific topic, if you found three related topics, you could combine those three together. So I was able to combine different elements together or add a little bit extra on top of a foundation.

Jason Fladlien:

So membership sites are very popular back then. So I'm like, "Okay, I already know how to create information and package it, so let me make the small leap to selling it with a subscription basis instead of a one-off basis because I had to write sales letters for all of these products I was launching, let me teach people how I write sales letters."

Jason Fladlien:

And then it was, "Let me teach people how I create products because I'm creating all these products."

Jason Fladlien:

So I would do something, it would create proof and experience that I could then publish on the next thing. And so within 12 months, I was really cooking and I was always looking to trade up my skills. "Now that I can do this, what can I build on top of that?"

Jason Fladlien:

And that's when my world forever changed because I did my first webinar ever, and man, I never looked back. That's when I really found my edge.

Editor:

I think I may have been on for that first webinar, if I'm not mistaken, or at least it may be your third or fourth webinar.

Jason Fladlien:

Yeah, we go way back.

Editor:

We do. We really do.

Editor:

And Product eClass was one of the next, I guess, membership style sites that you started to work on. Did you do traffic first and then copy and then Product eClass [inaudible 00:17:57]?

Jason Fladlien:

Yeah. So here's the story. It's really interesting.

Jason Fladlien:

One day, and this is a technique I still use to this very day, I run a... It's a $30,000 mastermind now per year. It's called Driven. And I run it with Perry Belcher and Kasim Aslam. And I instruct these multi-million dollar business owners the same strategy that I've used myself. And then I first stumbled upon many years ago with this first webinar that I ever did, and I call it the I don't know if this will work or not strategy.

Jason Fladlien:

I saw webinars as a thing and I was looking for an edge to get into them. So I go to my list one day, it says, "Hey, listen, you've seen me be super productive because I'm publishing all these products and creating all this content all the time. I want to teach you how to create what I do for my time management. Now, I've never done a webinar before, so I don't know how it'll work. It could be a complete train wreck. I could mess the whole thing up. So if you'll indulge me, you come to the webinar and you show up, I'll give you the recording of the product for free because I'm going to create my next product live on a webinar."

Jason Fladlien:

And that was a time management system for internet marketers. That was the name of the product, terrible name, but whatever you learn.

Jason Fladlien:

And I was all jazzed up thinking everybody and their brother was going to show up to this thing because who wouldn't want a free product? These are people that are buying products from me constantly.

Jason Fladlien:

Only 17 people showed up. Now, I didn't know that that was a small number. I was super excited. I was like, "Cool, 17 people. Awesome. I'm excited." This is September 7th, 2008, by the way. I just looked it up. That's the first webinar that I ever did on this time management system, and I taught it, and a lot of people liked it. Out of 17, six left me a really good testimonial.

Jason Fladlien:

I go back to my list the next day and I say, "Hey, you screwed up, but I'll give you a second chance. I plan on selling this product for $37. The next 48 hours, you can get it for 27 bucks." And I watch more people buy that product than any product I'd launched previous because they missed out. They could have got it free the day before they screwed up. I'm giving them a second chance so they better make good on it. But I noticed that I could feed back from the results of the live webinar we just did.

Jason Fladlien:

Now, that was a pure training webinar in the sense of, "You come for free, you get the product. If not, I'll sell the product later," which is a great model to this very day. Very effective model.

Jason Fladlien:

So then I started thinking, I'm like, "Okay, that worked out well to fulfil. What could I use it for next?"

Jason Fladlien:

So I had this little product called Three Hour Ad, and it was how to write near world-class copy in less than three hours.

Jason Fladlien:

So everybody back then taught this really complicated copywriting system that would take hours and hours and hours of research and then days and days of toiling over every single word. And I never wrote copy like that. I would just sit down and say, "Okay, I've noticed that there's four ways to basically write a headline." So I've studied all these different sales letters and there's five categories I could put them into. And the fifth one was miscellaneous.

Jason Fladlien:

So there was typically four ways that I would write a headline and then a lead. There's basically five ways to open the sales copy and then bullet points. Well, there's a really easy system to write bullet points if you're not trying to be creative.

Jason Fladlien:

So I was creating templatized type of copy and spitting it out there. So I wrote a little book on it, a little eBook. People really liked it. They liked it so much in fact that they would write into me asking for more examples, asking if I could expound on a certain point, so on and so forth.

Jason Fladlien:

So I get this brilliant idea. I say, "Hey, listen," and this is a twelve-step copywriting process. That's how many steps I had in it. So I'm thinking, "Wow. Webinars are great to teach on. I'll just do one session a week." So a 12-week eClass.

Jason Fladlien:

And I told the audience, I say, "Hey, you bought the book, but some of you want go further. So I'm going to try this new group coaching programme. I've never done it before, so I don't really know what I'm doing, so I don't want to open it up to too many people. I want to be hands-on with the people and then we'll sell the recordings later. But I want to make sure everybody who joins gets the best experience possible. That's why I'm limiting."

Jason Fladlien:

I think I limit to 14 people and I charged either 200 or 300 bucks. I can't remember now.

Jason Fladlien:

What I do remember is this is the first time I hit triple digits on a price point because before that it was forty-seven bucks was the highest price point I think I'd ever sold at.

Jason Fladlien:

And so I took in all these people, 14 people for 300 bucks. So it was a lot of work to do this product, but I was able to do training on a webinar, so I got better at it because each session would be about two hours. So 24 hours of experience on the webinar. So this is the second webinar that I ever did was a series of webinars packaged up as a group coaching programme.

Jason Fladlien:

So then the third webinar that I ever did was a fulfilment for Product eClass. So I thought, "Well, that worked for copywriting. Let me teach people the same stuff I put in an eBook, but put it in motion, had more depth, had more interaction," and then that became Product eClass. And so that was the third webinar that I ever did.

Jason Fladlien:

And then after that... Well, this is the greatest thing that I made the leap towards. I thought, "If I'm fulfilling on webinars, then I should use a webinar to sell the series of webinars that I'm offering." Because then the pitch is simple, isn't it? "Hey, did you enjoy this free webinar that we did one time here? Would you like X number more or the same where we can go even more depth over a period of time? Would you be willing to pay something for it? Okay, here's the deal." And so this is a nice free preview of what they could pay for, and that's how I did it.

Jason Fladlien:

So I went from a class that if you attended free, you'd get the recorded product of, so I was recording the product on the webinar, then I went to, "Pay me money, and you'll get a series of live webinars that you also get the recordings of to a webinar to sell a series of live webinars that you would get the recordings to."

Jason Fladlien:

And then only after that, after doing that several times, then we decided to use a webinar to sell things that weren't fulfilled by webinars, but that's the progression.

Jason Fladlien:

A lot of people want to skip that. They want to fight the black belt the first day they take karate, and that's no wonder that they fail.

Jason Fladlien:

I stair stepped my way up there by getting comfortable in this setting and then trading up and then trading up and then trading up.

Jason Fladlien:

And that's when it really hit, man, because nobody knew how to do webinars back then. It was a new emerging technology, and I was making the rules up as I went because I didn't have any previous experience to draw from. I didn't know how to sell on stage, I didn't know how to do teleseminars. So I was able to organically build it from the ground up.

Jason Fladlien:

Very much like Tesla built their vehicle from the ground up. They weren't like Ford or GM that had a hundred years of "experience," but couldn't apply it in a new paradigm as easily.

Jason Fladlien:

So I was able to really get an edge in that business, and that's what took it over for me. I said, "Man, let's just figure out everything we can about webinars." And here I am 16 years later, still trying to figure it out.

Editor:

Well, you've just released the book about this as well, One to Many. How did that come about? Is that just another extension of what you've already done, or is it something that you've always had a burning desire to do?

Jason Fladlien:

Yeah. So that's an interesting story.

Jason Fladlien:

So that book, I think we released it on 2017 or 2018, somewhere around there. So it's a relatively old book.

Jason Fladlien:

I joke that it's probably perfect for the market now because I have the curse of expertise. I'm so far ahead of... I'm so unconsciously competent at the thing that there's a challenge for me to bring it back to people who are just learning to be consciously competent with it. So the book is perfect timing for 2024 in my opinion.

Jason Fladlien:

But this is a lesson. And this is how I always think very strategically. So I had wanted to create a training programme on webinars forever, but the first time I did it, I think I did in 2011, the market wasn't ready for it yet.

Jason Fladlien:

So I tried it again in 2014 and the market still wasn't ready for it yet. So I'm like, "People don't want to learn how to do webinars because think about it, man, you got to be a good public speaker. That's hard. That's like the thing people are afraid of the most. Then you have to be a good educator. So that's hard. Then you have to be a good salesperson, and that's hard." And there's a lot of moving parts. So the technology is also challenging when it comes to webinars too.

Jason Fladlien:

So I was using webinars to sell other things to my audiences. So I was not selling shovels. I was using the shovel to dig for the gold. And so I didn't even have an audience that came to me to learn how to do webinars, so I just pushed it away and my initial attempts to be successful with it, I was too ahead of the market.

Jason Fladlien:

But then finally in 2017, I thought, "Man, maybe it's time to do this now."

Jason Fladlien:

So I'm always looking for these elegant solutions. How can we do one thing that gives us many solutions? And so I created a programme that I initially sold for $5000 in person, 70 some odd people could come to this room.

Jason Fladlien:

I partnered with Joe Polish because he had the audience. I'm like, "Dude, you have the audience. I'll do all the work. We split the money, we'll just... You record it and I'll prepare everything and we'll split it fifty-fifty down the line."

Jason Fladlien:

We created a programme called Genius webinars, and the way it was created was people paid $5000 to be in person because there's an interesting market dynamic that a lot of people aren't aware of is to a millionaire, $5000 is... What is that 0.5% of their net worth? It's nothing. To somebody who's worth $50,000, a $5000 offer is 10% of their net worth. It's 20 times as much. Okay?

Jason Fladlien:

Now, people generally will either have too little of time or too little of money, and if they have both too little of time and too little of money, there's one that they'll have even less of.

Jason Fladlien:

And so people that are super successful, they almost always have too little time. It's crazy. They have so little time. It's scary in a way. So they'll buy time.

Jason Fladlien:

And so the way that I'm selling this is if you come in person and we cram it down your throat for two days, that's probably the only way you'll get it. If you're too busy otherwise, I got to force feed it to you.

Jason Fladlien:

The second way successful people buy time is they get the advanced version of the thing. So I pitched it as, "Hey, we're going to do it. We're going to train it in person, and then later on we're going to take it, edit it, record it, put it out there. So if you want to wait a couple months, you could pay less for it." But to the person in the right condition waiting a couple months is far more expensive to them an opportunity cost than it would be to pay a premium on the product.

Jason Fladlien:

So everybody knew going in, "I'm going to create this recording of this product that we're going to sell for $1500. So you can pay 5000 and be in person at the live concert, right? Or you can download the MP3s later for $1500. Your choice."

Jason Fladlien:

I knew we'd sell it out because there's also this concept of scarcity supply and demand. So if there's 73 spots, and if you don't get it, somebody else does, I knew we could find seventy-three people.

Jason Fladlien:

So we created this course, we got paid to create it in advance. I go and I do it in person. We take the training of the programme, and then we package up and we sell it for $1500.

Jason Fladlien:

And the course, we deprecated it now. It's not available anymore because I just finished a new training in October of 2023 called G.O.A.T. Webinars, which I don't even know if we have that live yet and ready to sell. But that's what we were using before G.O.A.T Webinars was Genius Webinars. So we sold the recording for $1500.

Jason Fladlien:

And then from that, I took it and wrote the book off the same exact materials. And everybody knew all along the way, this was all derivative. I never once hid it from the audience. I told everybody up front, because the book, it's two-dimensional, whereas the recordings are three-dimensional. You don't get to see me demonstrate the book in action with the techniques, whereas on the recordings that you do.

Jason Fladlien:

And so we were able to derive from a $5000 product to a $1500 recording of the product to a $10 eBook or a $20 paper book, paperback book from that one activity.

Jason Fladlien:

And I've learned that throughout the years is, man, you can take one thing, put it into three different things, not pretend, and hope people don't find out about it. Just tell them straight up that that's what you're going to do. And different segments of the market will assort themselves accordingly. And so that's what that book ended up being.

Jason Fladlien:

And then what's cool about the book, and I didn't anticipate this, we put a book out there because at the time, we were dabbling with the idea of doing webinars for people as an agency. Did not work at all. Terrible idea.

Jason Fladlien:

But nonetheless, the book is a very effective way to help get lead gen for agencies. It's one of the most effective ways. And if you're speaking and doing podcasts, a book is one of the most effective ways to get clients. So we created the book to do that.

Jason Fladlien:

The good news is, man, the book is also the thing that has the most longevity, has the slowest burn in terms of profitability, but it has the longest longevity, has the most longevity.

Jason Fladlien:

So that book continues to this very day to bring in very high profile clientele to me that start by reading that book. So that's where the book fits into the thing, but it was an afterthought. It was a strategic byproduct that we could also capitalise on from an existing foundation of intellectual property.

Jason Fladlien:

And so this is a lesson, anybody listening, if you can get really unbelievably good at one thing, there's two byproducts to that. One you can trade up like we've talked about, but two, you can also go horizontal. You can create a lot of different variations of that one thing. And that's almost always better than having 10 separate things.

Editor:

And that's one of the key things that I learned from being at Product eClass that actually...

Editor:

And I was there live for all of the sessions. I remember being online. And the great thing about being there, of course, is you can ask questions. And I think that's the big thing about being in a live seminar, being as you say at the concert or just getting the recordings, there's a huge difference and there's a value difference as well in that.

Editor:

You have achieved sales, as I mentioned in the introduction of over $250 million, a quarter of a billion dollars. That's seriously impressive. And also, I guess my question is a very simple one, how?

Jason Fladlien:

Yeah. I'm still trying to figure that one out.

Jason Fladlien:

So mostly with strategic partnerships.

Jason Fladlien:

Nobody can do everything excellently. So if you look at and you break down, there's really four elements to any online business. So you got to drive the traffic, you got to have conversion, you got to have fulfilment, and then you got to have support. Okay?

Jason Fladlien:

So traffic, how do we get people to come to the thing? Conversion, how do we get as many of them as possible to buy the thing? Fulfilment, how do we make the thing as excellent as it possibly could be? Because then that not only obviously increases the brand affinity, but it also increases the backend potential.

Jason Fladlien:

The easiest thing to sell to somebody is, "Hey, you just bought something from me and it was awesome, wasn't it?" "Yes." "You also need this thing, don't you?" "Yes." "Would you like to buy it?" "Yes, because the last thing I bought from you was excellent, and because I bought that thing, you know something about me that most other people don't know."

Jason Fladlien:

And so this is what you want to do. You want to create excellent products so that way people can come back and buy more from you so people can get a better result so they can brag about you, and so they can refer other people.

Jason Fladlien:

And then the support is the glue that holds all that together. So support pre-sale, support during the sell, support after the sell really sets that thing up.

Jason Fladlien:

It's almost impossible for you to be a 10 out of 10 in all of those categories. And there's a significant difference between being a 10 out of 10 and a nine out of 10. In every market that matures, there's usually one or two, almost always just one, occasionally two dominant players in that space.

Jason Fladlien:

So in the tablet space, there's iPad, and then there's who? Right? Surface? Maybe, kind of, right?

Jason Fladlien:

There's Coca-Cola, there's Pepsi, and then there's who? There's nobody.

Jason Fladlien:

The electric car market, there's Tesla and then there's Prius. I don't know, man, it's not that... It's hard to figure that out afterwards.

Jason Fladlien:

So most markets, they can only manage one person. If you break through, then you get all the attention. But if you don't break through, you're in obscurity. You see the same thing on algorithms.

Jason Fladlien:

So on YouTube, if you can tip the algorithm, you can get millions of views, but if you can't tip it, you're lucky to get hundreds of views.

Jason Fladlien:

So being a 10 out of 10 is often the difference. Nine out of tens fight for crumbs, but the 10 out of 10 takes everything. It's just how markets work.

Jason Fladlien:

So you want to be a 10 out of 10, but in order to be a 10 out of 10, it's something you almost have to sacrifice everything else. So you can be like a 10 out of 10 in one category, you can be an eight out of 10 at best in another category, then you can be a five out 10 at best in a third category, and then you're a three out of 10 in the fourth category. Over time, maybe you can improve upon it, but it's unlikely.

Jason Fladlien:

So Amazon, biggest company on the internet for many, many years had the worst customer support for their vendors that you could ever possibly imagine. Now, they had good customer support for their users, but at the expense of their vendors, it was terrible.

Jason Fladlien:

And by the way, that's a lesson in itself. Their vendors are these third party sellers. Amazon couldn't create all the products, so they had to partner with people that could create all the products.

Jason Fladlien:

So this is what we look at. We say, "Okay, if we're really excellent at conversion, which is where I spend all my time, and we can focus on that, then we'd need to partner with people who have the best products." Because I can't always create the best product and if I can create the best product for only a segment of a market, not for every segment of the market, so we got to find the best product. So there's a partnership there.

Jason Fladlien:

And then we have to drive traffic. So we do it with affiliates. So that's another partnership there.

Jason Fladlien:

And then we just try to be excellent because over time you can be a 10 out of 10 at two things, but it takes a while. So 10 out of 10 in the first decade, then 10 out of 10 in the second decade. So we have the support that glues all that together. So we're good at conversion, we're good at support.

Jason Fladlien:

I'm very good at fulfilment, but I can't do excellent fulfilment and simultaneously do excellent selling. I can't do both at the same time. So either got to find somebody to sell the thing, and then I can spend all my time on fulfilment, or I can spend all my time selling it and then partner with somebody who has all the fulfilment.

Jason Fladlien:

So a lot of our big successes came through strategic partnerships. Taking their very best thing...

Jason Fladlien:

So here's what I try to do, Paul. I look at the market and say, "What is the marketplace need the most right now that if they had the best version of it would make the biggest difference in their life?" And then I say, "Can I create it? And if I can't create it, can I find somebody who's created it?" And if they haven't got there yet, "Can I help them get to there and then partner with them?"

Jason Fladlien:

And then because we have affiliates, here's where conversion drives traffic, people know that when everything aligns right, nobody can now convert me. We hold all the records. We have biggest product launch record in our space. We hold biggest affiliate promotion in our space. So if all the stars and the moon line up, nobody's going to beat Fladlien on a conversion event.

Jason Fladlien:

So affiliates like to promote my stuff because it will make them more money than promoting their own stuff or somebody else's stuff. And so that's the other side of the thing. So that's how we got there.

Jason Fladlien:

But I started by really focusing on being excellent at fulfilment. That was my first thing.

Jason Fladlien:

The cool thing, and this is double dipping it, this doesn't apply to every business, but the lesson applies to every business. I got so good at fulfilment, I could shift fulfilment to the sales pitch.

Jason Fladlien:

So because I could create transformational products in one sitting on my info products, I just had to switch that to the front end. So the things that I would sell for four or five or 10 bucks became the content portion of my webinar that I would then give away for free. And then I would sell other things that were higher ticket on the back of that.

Jason Fladlien:

And I'll tell you one thing, and this is always the truth. It's very hard to do, very easy to understand though, is compounding is the greatest thing you could ever do to your money and your skill set.

Jason Fladlien:

So Warren Buffett says, "Compound interest is the eighth wonder of the world. He who understand it benefits from it. He who doesn't pays it." So everybody pays compound interest on their credit cards and they stay broke, and they pay compound interest on their homes when they take mortgages out on them.

Jason Fladlien:

And it sounds only 4% or whatever, it's way higher these days. But generally, let's just say it's 4%. It's like on a half million dollar home, you're going to pay double that on the interest rate. That's how they get you so they can become richest through compounding.

Jason Fladlien:

Buffet has made all of his money because his favourite holding period is forever. If you take a penny and you double it in 30 days, you will have over a million dollars. Okay? So compounding is the most effective thing you could possibly do.

Jason Fladlien:

And so what I did was compound a skillset repeatedly to the point where I became the very best at it, and then nobody could compete with me and nobody wanted to compete with me, and everybody wanted to learn it from me.

Jason Fladlien:

And that's what you got to do, is you got to stay true to this one skillset. And if you can, you can get in at four bucks, you can start there and then you can end up setting all the records, which is incredible and it's crazy, but that's how you do it. People will overestimate what they can do in a year, but they underestimate what they can do in 10 years.

Jason Fladlien:

And what I'm suggesting is get really good at something and compound it by trading up and finding the strategic byproducts for it, and then you will win.

Jason Fladlien:

This is why I'm struggling so damn hard in the YouTube space these days because I've decided to become more present on social media because I did all this stuff without any social media following, which is insane. It's a whole different topic for a whole different day.

Jason Fladlien:

But now I'm frustrated because I know that I can reach more people if I use social media, but it's very humbling because I have to start over again. And I've struggled for the last year on it.

Jason Fladlien:

I say struggled. We look at the numbers. We had over a million views and grew three times the subscriber base on YouTube and so on and so forth. But I have no idea what I'm doing, and I feel like I'm lost, which is crazy because a lot of stuff seems similar, but it's not.

Jason Fladlien:

And that's the beauty of it. So like an open loop on a webinar, I could do that all damn day long. I could sit nested loops and all kinds of crazy stuff. So the concept of open looping still is important on YouTube, but the application of it, very different, very nuanced and slightly different, but that slight difference is everything.

Jason Fladlien:

And so I'm humbling myself in having to learn it from the scratch again. And now I'm like, "Okay, I got to do it for five or 10 years to become really excellent at it or get lucky." But the harder I work, the luckier I get.

Editor:

You never stop learning, as it were.

Editor:

Jason, for anybody who wants to find out more about you and also your successes and also about Rapid Crush Inc., where do we need to head to?

Jason Fladlien:

Yeah. Get my book. It's on Amazon. It's called One to Many, and then subscribe to the YouTube channel because, man, dude, I am going extra hard on that stuff right now, so there's some really good value there. So Jason Fladlien, just put me in YouTube and you'll find me there.

Editor:

Great stuff. Thank you so much for your time today. It's been an absolute pleasure chatting with you. And good luck as we head into 2024. Thanks again, Jason.

Jason Fladlien:

Oh, you're most welcome.