The Attention War Between Email, TikTok, and Netflix with Alin Dragu

[Igor Kheifets] 

[0:06]

I’m Igor Kheifets and this is The List Building Lifestyle, the podcast for anyone who wants to build a wildly profitable email list working from home. If you’d like to make six figures, travel the world and help people improve their lives in the process, this podcast is for you. I also invite you to claim a free copy of my best-selling book, The List Building Lifestyle Confessions of an Email Millionaire at igorsbook.com .

Get the free book plus $3,000 bonus package that includes my best capture page templates, email swipe files, and traffic blueprints. Visit www.igorsbook.com for details. And now, it’s time to claim your list building lifestyle.

Welcome back to The List Building Lifestyle, I’m your host Igor Kheifets and today I’m having a chat with Alin Dragu. He quit his copywriting business working for Fortune 500 companies serving high-profile clients and just said to help with it and became a creator. What is a creator?

A creator is somebody who produces content for a living, doesn’t work for a client, and is able to work on their own schedule, on their own terms. After his health took a weird turn during one Christmas Eve, Alin decided to move into that direction and since then created the Copy Creator Club. So now, he sends one email at 5.15 in the morning and that’s how he runs his business. It kind of revolves around that. He is the epitome of the school of thought of our mutual friend, Ben Settle, and he basically gave up a big paycheck, a big income, but also that came with a lot of stress and changed it up and opted in for a much simpler, much, I’m not going to say easier, I’m sure it has its own quirks and features, but definitely a much simpler life and business. So that’s what we’re going to explore today.

He’s also the author of Meaningful Marketing, a book that helps you build a business and a marketing message that better aligns with your values. So Alin, welcome to The List Building Lifestyle.

[Alin Dragu] 

[2:41]

Man, what an intro. What an intro. You’re the first person to say my name in my native language, Alin.

[Igor Kheifets] 

[2:48]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I couldn’t help it, man.

[Alin Dragu] 

[2:51]

I couldn’t help it. That’s perfect. No, I love it.

Fantastic. I’m glad to be here. Thank you so much, man.

Cheers.

[Igor Kheifets] 

[2:57 – 3:08]

Cheers. Yeah. So tell us about that Christmas Eve, or is it the 26th, not Christmas Eve?

[Alin Dragu] 

[3:08 – 3:59]

Yeah, technically, what does it do to the UK? They call it Boxing Day. Oh, the Boxing Day.

That’s right. Okay. So what happened on Boxing Day?

That’s a great, man. That’s a great question. You dug for this story.

I was, I don’t know if I’ve told this story super publicly. I think, oh, it might be on one of my sales letters, actually. Maybe that’s where it was.

I was like, you dug for this. Yeah. So Boxing Day, this was four or five years ago.

At the time, I was actually working as a director of marketing at one of the largest churches in America. I’d worked there for five or six years. And I’ve had multiple agency positions throughout my 20s and things like that.

This was towards the end of my 20s, it was 28 or 29. And I don’t know if you did, but when I was 28 or 29, I started having my first, what I would consider, semi-midlife crisis.

[Igor Kheifets] 

[3:59 – 4:00]

Yeah, kind of.

[Alin Dragu] 

[4:00 – 5:30]

Not to the highest degree, but to a degree that I had to stop and be like, okay, what’s going on? But it wasn’t more so intentional. It was that Boxing Day, I was hanging out with my kids in the backyard.

I always took two weeks off from Christmas to New Year, just like the 23rd to January 3rd. I always took two weeks off to chill and hang out with my family. And after Christmas, I was sitting in the backyard.

We were sitting around the fire, just kind of hanging out, roasting s’mores, throwing a football around, hanging out with the kids. And for whatever reason, I could not relax. In fact, I actually felt like I had really big, thick rubber bands on my head, like if I had strapped a bunch of rubber bands, this tension was pushing on my head.

And candidly, I got really scared because I was like, okay, this can’t be normal, right? Like, this cannot be normal. I even turned to my wife and I told her, I try not to tell her because I don’t want to freak her out.

I try not to tell her if I got something going on or whatever. We may talk, we’ll talk transparently about other things, but I try not to burn it and lie. I’m like, oh, it’s going to burn my wife.

She’s going to freak out. But I honestly, I was kind of scared. So I was like, do you think I need to go to a doctor or check it out?

Which I don’t even believe in doctors to be honest, but that’s a different kind.

[Igor Kheifets] 

[5:31 – 5:47]

So I’m like, I’m with you. I was just seeing a doctor for a stomach thing. I mean, I don’t understand.

It’s like, oh, what stomach? Here’s a pill. Maybe, you know, that some test, no, no, no, no, no pill.

Let’s do pills.

[Alin Dragu] 

[5:47 – 6:14]

Yeah, that. So I don’t. So I don’t like that whole thing because I’m like, I know what this is.

This is an upsell. This is a subscription. I’m currently in your funnel.

You’re going to move me to another specialist that’s going to upsell me. I do this for a living. Okay.

You just got, you guys do it pharmaceutically. Like I, I know your whole scheme. Okay.

And so when you know, when you know the world and you see it and I’m like, oh, this is like a pharmaceutical funnel. This is, this is what it is.

[Igor Kheifets] 

[6:14 – 6:17]

That’s the question. Do they really want to help?

[Alin Dragu] 

[6:18 – 9:24]

If they would, they would ask me, how’s your sleep? How’s your exercise regime? What are you eating?

How’s your stress? Where do you work? Like they would ask me lifestyle questions before they prescribe.

Like I don’t write copy prescribing a solution to somebody. I haven’t deeply understood their problem. Right.

You don’t do that. But, but that is that whole industry is like, oh, your head’s not feeling good. Here’s a pill.

I’m like, how do you know it’s this? How do you, you don’t even know. You don’t know my problem.

You haven’t asked me anything. So I did. That’s how scared I was in the sense.

I was like, do you, do I need to go get this checked out or something? And and I decided I’m like, let me, let me see, you know, maybe I could just relax a little bit. Let me give it another day or two.

You know, it’s Christmas. Let me just relax. And I started writing to myself.

I just got like, you know, my, my typewriter, my computer, whatever I was writing on at the time. And I was just journaling and trying to think, I was like, man, what is wrong with me? And one of the things that I had realized is I had been running so hard, so fast for so long that I had not let my my body and my mind get out of this parasympathetic stress mode for probably a decade, probably a decade, because I had just been running so hard since since I was 19.

I just I just kept going. I mean, I literally remember graduating at 18 and the next morning after graduation, I started my career. I jumped straight into working at Procter & Gamble and the next morning I didn’t celebrate my graduation.

I didn’t go out with friends and party or anything. I went to sleep because I started my career the next day. And I did that for 10 years and got married at 19 and had a kid at 22, had a kid at 24 and then had a kid at 27 and bought a house and, you know, moved up and moved up and worked 50, 60, 70 hour weeks for a decade.

And then it kind of all started to culminate when I realized I I’ve not relaxed in 10 years and my brain and my body doesn’t know what to do. And it wasn’t like I solved that problem on that week. I had just realized the problem that week.

And so I tried to relax and enjoy the rest of my vacation, which was almost damn near impossible because I just I’ve never like that’s a skill, right? That like chilling is a skill. Relaxation is a stillness is a skill that I hadn’t built up at that point.

And so the culmination of being 28, 29, getting close to the end of my 20s, being a dad of three, having a career like this for 10 years, which I don’t think you’ve you’ve never worked at a church. Have you ever worked at a church?

[Igor Kheifets] 

[9:25 – 10:31]

No, but I went to a religious school in Israel. So, yeah, yeah. Israel is very I mean, I can’t say that it’s extremely religious country, but it’s a it’s a it’s there.

It’s in the DNA of course. And, you know, a lot of people go in and out of faith as well. You know, they may start sort of being sort of out of it.

Then, you know, a relative would die. That would actually go hard into religion. But I’m familiar with what it’s like to be part of the church, part of part of the movement.

Right. And I’ve I’ve since then stepped away from it, but I can appreciate the marketing one has to do to lead people and to hurt people around them, you know, and to ensure they continue. Because that’s part of what we do as marketers every single day.

We are building communities, we’re building audiences. And, you know, there’s lots of, you know, lots of principles crossover from from religion.

[Alin Dragu] 

[10:32 – 11:42]

Yeah, no, you’re definitely right. It is lots of principles do crossover. And I think one of the things that makes it incredibly interesting that if you like if you work at what I would consider like a very purpose driven organization, your life and your work tend to blend so deeply in a sense that you almost can’t tell the difference between the two, which a lot of people, you know, a lot of people think like, oh, make your work play.

And once it’s play, it doesn’t feel like work. And then you have this gray area, which which is one way to look at it. But which I don’t think it’s a bad thing, by the way, sometimes it’s a really good thing.

But in that sense, I had been working so hard for the last five, six years at the church. And you really don’t separate your work from your life in any whatsoever because it’s so purpose driven. It’s like, oh, man, you’re helping people, you’re serving this and that.

And it’s almost like an excuse to work 60, 70 hours a week to keep going. It’s like almost this like like if you don’t do this, you’re a bad person, which there’s a lot of guilt around tons of guilt doing nothing.

[Igor Kheifets] 

[11:43 – 11:43]

Right.

[Alin Dragu] 

[11:43 – 14:43]

Right. But you don’t get that from you don’t necessarily get that from every job. Right.

You you could sell a lot of things. You can go work at a lot of places where you don’t necessarily get the guilt that if you don’t do this job, you are morally a bad person where that was some of the things that I was unpacking. That was some of the thing.

Ironically enough, I never I never questioned my my faith or anything like that during during the time I very much was like, oh, I love Jesus. I love hanging out. I love reading my Bible.

I love understanding Christianity and all those things. I love all those things. Never even questioned it once.

But I did go through a phase where I was like, man, I don’t think I like Christians very much. I was like I became very bitter in that sense and very burnt out. And around that 28, 29, I after after that, within the next like three, four months after that Christmas, I was like, OK, I have to do like I have to do something about this.

So I ended up I ended up leaving the job. I ended up quitting that job. Which which was very hard for me because I attached a lot of my identity for the last five, six years to that job, because I thought this is what I was going to do forever.

I really wanted to serve, you know, the church and grow that and help people. And and then I was like, you know what? It’s just like I’m going to die like I don’t I don’t think this is going to work out for me.

And so when I left the church, I had no idea what I was going to do next. To be honest, I was like, I’m just going to take a couple weeks off and figure it out. And I ended up, you know, talking to some friends and picking up some, you know, great contract work as a as a marketer and, you know, creating ads and things like that for a while because I’ve been doing marketing for a long time.

But at this point, I had not really dove deep into copywriting at all. It was most I was mostly doing like social media marketing and and like ads, just like meta ads and Instagram ads. So a lot of just social media stuff.

And I ended up taking some some contract work and doing some gigs. And during that time, though, before I actually jumped into before I jumped into, you know, taking some of that contract work, I found writing. I found like the art of writing because I was just really starting to write for myself because I realized on that Christmas break, I was like, man, that helped me feel better.

Not only did it help me feel better, actually writing those things out while I was writing, I started learning about myself like I wasn’t just writing my thoughts. My thoughts were kind of like reading me. It was it was very it was very ethereal.

It’s all very ethereal. I know people are like, how do you sell more stuff? But this is all very ethereal.

When I was writing those things, I was like, man, I’m learning while I’m doing this. And so I started I just kept writing and then I found this to learn, though.

[Igor Kheifets] [14:44 – 15:17]

It is right before we started recording. We spoke about the school system. You were telling me how it was invented back in Prussia.

Yeah, I think the one bad byproduct of installing the school system all around the world. And, you know, I’m really shocked how the concept took off. You know what I mean?

Like everyone adopted it. What the downside to it is that at some point it reframed learning as sitting down with a textbook or listening to a lecture.

[Alin Dragu] 

[15:17 – 15:17]

Yeah.

[Igor Kheifets] 

[15:18 – 16:51]

Now, as somebody who who like makes money, part of what I do is selling information products. I’m grateful for that, in a sense. But after doing that for a long time, I now realize that true learning after working with lots of people and kind of, you know, observing, let’s say, taking two clients both receive the same coaching or information or blueprint or strategy, and one succeeds and one does not.

And not only that, the one that doesn’t succeed, they can barely, you know, get moving. They can’t even get started. I’m starting to realize that at some point we really bought into the idea that learning means listening to someone talk about a subject matter or reading about it in a book because book is synonymous to learning.

A textbook in school is where you learn and then you do like an exam on it or whatever, or a test. But the real learning, especially when you’re starting your own business, it’s happening in the field. Like you learn to be a great doctor by, you know, opening up corpses and studying the organs and, you know, kind of working with patients.

You learn to be a great lawyer. Sure, you got to have access to the law book, but you go to court and you actually get experience in the courtroom. You learn to be a great copywriter by actually writing copy for clients.

You know, clients are the ones who pay for your education effectively.

[Alin Dragu] 

[16:51 – 16:52]

Or write for yourself.

[Igor Kheifets] 

[16:52 – 17:26]

Or that. We’ll get to that for sure. So I guess what I’m saying is the kind of learning you started, you engaged in at that point is the only learning, I think, that exists.

You can only truly learn by doing the thing you’re trying to learn, kind of like riding a bicycle. You can’t learn to ride a bicycle by reading a book about it or attending, you know, a high ticket seminar where a lecturer who’s been, you know, riding a bicycle for 100 years and taught 15,000 people how to ride a bicycle will teach you how to ride a bicycle. Just get on a freaking bicycle.

[Alin Dragu] 

[17:27 – 18:17]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I 100 percent agree with this, you know, and we’ll talk about I think we should talk about this a little bit more later because it’s one of the reasons. It’s one of the reasons you brought up my club, Copy Creator Club, which is a community that almost was a course.

And I think like, but it wasn’t because of exactly what you just said. I feel like we’ll come back to that a little bit later. But I agree.

I was learning myself. I was learning about me by writing. And that got very therapeutic effect.

Yeah, just a lot cheaper. A lot, a lot cheaper. And they don’t judge me.

So so what did Anne Frank say? Anne Frank said paper is more patient than people. And so, yeah, the paper.

[Igor Kheifets] 

[18:17 – 18:28]

I know what you would what you would say in the right now in today’s day and age, you would say Chad GPT is more patient than people. Because that’s that’s the one that’s getting all of my frustration lately.

[Alin Dragu] 

[18:29 – 18:55]

Dude, there is. Chad GPT is the ultimate yes, man. If you tell Chad GPT like I did some I was writing some stupid email just to show this off the other day, I was like, if I told Chad GPT, I wanted to start a business where I was selling poop on a stick.

Chad GPT is the greatest business idea you’ve ever had. This is unbelievable. Like we could sell it to so many people.

Like I’d be like, all right, that’s enough for you, Chad GPT. So, yeah, it’s the old.

[Igor Kheifets] 

[18:55 – 19:39]

I like it when you catch it where you’re where it’s giving you advice. But it comes, you know, and it’s telling you like, oh, if your body is like accumulating water, you shouldn’t eat or you should eat more nuts. Right.

Or something like that. And then, you know, you scroll back up in the same chat with Chad GPT and earlier, like three hours early, it tells you to not eat more nuts because they actually hold water in your system. And then you say, but, you know, three hours ago you said the opposite.

It’s like, oh, yeah, you’re right. You’re right. So everything is.

Yeah, you’re right. Great idea. Absolutely.

Yeah, you’re absolutely right. It just doesn’t it just doesn’t have a module to just tell it like it is. And I don’t appreciate it because you can’t trust it.

[Alin Dragu] 

[19:40 – 19:56]

No, no, you need to you need to prompt it to be. I don’t use Chad GPT nearly as much as I use Claude. I like Claude for just like tasks.

But I’ve told Claude, you are Dan Kennedy. You are my this is Dan Kennedy. This is how he talks.

This is how he reacts.

[Igor Kheifets] 

[19:56 – 19:56]

Right.

[Alin Dragu] 

[19:58 – 23:04]

I’m like, this is OK. I want you to read all of Dan Kennedy’s stuff. You need to talk to me like this, OK?

If you can’t talk to me like Dan Kennedy, you are useless to me. And some it’s still a yes man to a degree, because like Dan Kennedy would would put up with none of that. But this is how it is.

That’s this whole thing, right? I’m like, this is why you’re Dan Kennedy to me. Yeah, none of that.

But yeah, it did. It ended up so I ended up writing a ton and I fell deep into a rabbit hole because not only did I learn about myself, I had this epitome where I was. I started like because I was writing more.

I started writing tweets and I started. I was like, well, I’ve got a bunch of ideas that I can enjoy writing down. That’s even how I actually I wrote my book before I even wrote the tweets because I was like, I got a whole decade of ideas I could write down.

And I was writing in the thing that really stuck with me. I was like, nobody revised this. Nobody told me I couldn’t write this idea down.

Nobody told me to change it. Nobody. And I had just come out of a decade of, you know, Fortune 500 companies, large organizations.

Every idea that I ever had had to be pitched in this perfect, sexy deck with a cost analysis and ROI and and how the idea is going to work, how we’re going to implement it. Operations, directions, marketing strategy, ICP started all of the I had. Dude, if I tell you how many pitches I had, ask my wife, ask my wife.

I three a week and they took 20 hours each to prepare for. And I was pitching two to three ideas a week exhaust. And when I started writing for myself and I realized I was like, I don’t have to pitch anybody.

I can write. This is my own shit. I can I can say anything I want on this tweet and hit publish.

And it just goes out. And I know that sounds stupid, like some of you are like, yeah, duh. But like coming out of 10 years of pitching ideas and never building my own per se world outside of I’m serving agencies or I’m serving clients or I’m serving my boss or I’m serving stockholders or anything like that, you’re always doing something for someone else until you just start tweeting or writing your own articles or write your own book.

And I didn’t even get an editor for my book. I was like, I don’t want anybody to touch it. I’ll edit my own crap.

And and that’s how I just got sucked into this whole world of writing online, and then eventually I found Ben Settle and then copywriting and then email copywriting and then daily emails. And then all and then it just led down a deep rabbit hole that I was like, this is the coolest thing since sliced bread. I love this.

I love this. And all of that came from what I would consider a very weird health scare and a midlife crisis. So here we are.

[Igor Kheifets] 

[23:04 – 23:07]

Yeah, midlife crisis to start early these days.

[Alin Dragu] 

[23:08 – 23:09]

You think so?

[Igor Kheifets] 

[23:09 – 24:15]

Yeah, I think they shifted like 10 years because we’ve become more educated and we question we learn. We kind of like now it’s almost like it’s a cool thing to question everything. Hmm.

Like there’s some things that are true throughout the centuries and, you know, all the throughout the whole of history of humankind that don’t change. But I guess we’re so addicted to novelty now that we will question pretty much every norm. And so give me an example.

I don’t know. You start questioning whether, you know, like a lot of people question whether they should have kids or not. All right.

So when I when I go out in Toronto, for example, with my kids, I notice that it’s like it’s unusual, like a lot of my friends in Toronto, those who are not immigrants. You know, those who live there for a long time, you know, they don’t they don’t aren’t having kids until they’re 40. Maybe they’ll have one.

Maybe, you know, a lot of them just don’t don’t see the point. But this norm would was never questioned before. Yeah.

[Alin Dragu] 

[24:16 – 24:21]

Very interesting. I didn’t know that. I didn’t know that people were having less kids per se.

[Igor Kheifets] 

[24:22 – 24:25]

Yeah, yeah, for sure. And now they have more dogs.

[Alin Dragu] 

[24:25 – 24:25]

They just have dogs.

[Igor Kheifets] 

[24:26 – 25:13]

They’re having more dogs. They’re having more cats. They’re, you know, so but yeah, it’s I’m not saying it’s a problem, but it’s definitely a norm that got questioned quite a bit.

So let’s talk about what you ended up settling on, because you basically now have a list. Your community and you send a daily email at 515 a.m. telling a micro story in the macro lesson. So it’s a one email a day business.

Yep. So walk us through that. I mean, this is the list building lifestyle.

So why, why, why an email list? Why not a Twitter following or an exfoliant?

[Alin Dragu] 

[25:14 – 26:16]

That’s a good question. Well, there’s a, you know, I am definitely from the Ben Settle School of Thought. I would consider him probably my closest.

I would consider myself an apprentice of Ben Settle, which I think is vastly underrated. Have you ever read Mastery by Robert Greene? Yes.

Oh, yeah. So very I very much took the idea and the philosophy of Robert Greene’s mastery, and I have applied it to very few people in my life. Ben Settle being the business model that I adopted.

And I adopted that business model of one email a day because I personally experienced it myself just by reading his daily emails where I realized I was like, man. I know this guy. I feel like I know this guy really well.

I’m building this relationship with him. These are highly entertaining, and I’m spending a lot of money with him, like an enormous amount of money.

[Igor Kheifets] 

[26:16 – 26:22]

He has $800 books. What am I doing? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Alin Dragu] 

[26:22 – 29:26]

I don’t know anyone who sells books that expensive, which I like the dude’s the status and the respect that I’m just like, what gangster gangster? I love that. Yeah, yeah.

And I probably have. Eight of them just sitting over there, not to mention three years of email players, you know, and so I’m sure my LTV and his Contra car is through the roof. So and but all of that willingly, I’m like, I’m like, yeah, happy to.

Happy to. And so when I if I reverse psychology, my own behavior and I look at that, I’m like, OK, I’m going to reverse and see what am I buying? Why am I persuaded?

What is my human behavior towards this and why? And if you look at what you buy, you’ll learn a lot. You’ll learn a lot about yourself and persuasion and selling and all that stuff.

And so I was buying a lot from Ben Settle and I’ve since embedded into the world. I love Throstle and Chris Orzekowski and Brian Kurtz. And all these guys, you know, I’ve gotten to make friends with them.

And it’s been great. So it’s a great people, great people for the most part. There’s a few slimy copywriters out there, but for the most part, all the people I just mentioned are wonderful people.

And I’ve learned so much from Ben that I was like, well, I can do that. I can do that. Right.

And so I did. I was like, well, I’ll send all these people over and have adopted the school of thought, right? Like Twitter and Instagram and all these platforms are rented platforms.

Right. Engagement is a roller coaster. Right.

Engagement is a roller coaster. And I would consider a lower quality version of relationships with your people. Right.

Everything is so mass that people experience it in mass that they don’t actually take the time to spend three freaking minutes with you in the morning to read something, to build a relationship. And so I think it is the ultimate relationship building tool, which, you know, happens to be one of the ultimate persuasion tools is building a great relationship is is one of the deepest forms of persuasion. Right.

Reciprocation, all that stuff from Caldini’s books and everything that’s like one oh one. But I do it because I enjoy it. I found that I’m like, I’m not only do I enjoy it.

I’m fucking good at it. You know, to be honest, you know, when I when I started writing these. Don’t hold back.

Huh? Don’t hold back. Well, no, it’s in the set.

You read my emails, brother. I don’t know anybody else besides maybe the five people I just mentioned that are writing at that level, to be honest. And and so in that sense, I was like, man, this is awesome.

It’s fun. I’m selling stuff. They’re great to read.

And it just it really built into that world of I’m good at it. I’m enjoying it. I’m selling stuff like just passion, purpose, people, problem.

That whole like icky guy vibe just really worked for me, really worked for me.

[Igor Kheifets] 

[29:27 – 29:30]

So, yeah, that’s good to go after copywriters.

[Alin Dragu] 

[29:31 – 30:09]

What? Because they feel like my people. They feel like my people.

Like when I I naturally if I if me and you have a conversation and we start talking about. You know, Eugene Shorts, or we start talking about Ben Savenga in the 80s, we start talking about Halpert, you know, right with John Carlton in the room and the and the and the assistant walks in and the you know, all the people are freaking out about the suppliers and all that. We start telling these old stories of just like classic copywriting.

I get jazzed up. I’m just like, oh, I love this world. Like, it’s just such a cool world.

It is.

[Igor Kheifets] 

[30:10 – 30:24]

And it is like a tiny room at a much bigger party, but only like a few people are allowed to come in and they all know each other. And it’s like an inside club. And it’s cool.

Kids hang out.

[Alin Dragu] 

[30:25 – 30:52]

It definitely feels like have you ever noticed that like there are very few industries that that have like an A-list like Hollywood has an A-list of people. So does copywriting. But like coders don’t have like A-list coders, you know, and like painters don’t have A-list painters.

And even authors like number one best selling authors don’t say like this guy’s A-list. They say, yeah, yeah. New York Times bestseller or whatever.

[Igor Kheifets] 

[30:53 – 30:53]

Yeah.

[Alin Dragu] 

[30:53 – 32:32]

But copywriting, for whatever reason, is like this guy’s an A-list copywriter. Very status driven, very status driven. There are people at the copywriting table who are not great copywriters, but they’re A-list copywriters because of their connections and their personality and things like that.

And and so very much is the cool kids club. And it very much is a small, tiny world. Like once you kind of get in, you’re like.

You know, there’s a lot less people than I thought. Sitting at this table. And it’s very interesting because I think it’s very hard to get in that room.

But once you’re in the room, you kind of know everybody. And and it’s I just love it. I love the world.

So, you know, because I’ve thought about like, oh, man, genuinely, like my content, my ideas and my club could be for a wider range of entrepreneurs. I can I can go after a bigger market that has more money. I could go after all kinds of things.

But I would have less fun because they wouldn’t feel like my people. And so I just kind of stay in the copywriting world because they generally feel like my people, like me. And you start learning about, you know, 70s, 80s, 90s, direct response copywriting.

We’d have a great time. We’d have a great time. And I would have fun.

And I’d rather still just enjoy my business. It’s kind of why I hang out here. So why 515 am?

Because it’s before Ben and Russell and Orzee send their emails. So I’m at the top of the inbox first.

[Igor Kheifets] 

[32:36 – 32:43]

That was my thinking behind it. Wait, could you time it so yours come in at the same time? Isn’t that?

[Alin Dragu] 

[32:44 – 32:52]

Yeah. Yeah. Ben does 915.

Russell does like eight or 830 or something. And and I was like, well, I’m just going to get an inbox first

[Igor Kheifets] 

[32:54 – 32:56]

Interesting. Interesting.

[Alin Dragu] 

[32:56 – 33:15]

If you know, even on my promos, so like I’m in the middle of a promo right now where, you know, I do a deadline once a month to get into my community, to get my newsletter. I’m in the middle of a promo right now. And even on my promos, 515 a.m., 515 p.m., 1215. Like I just I just like keep it static.

[Igor Kheifets] 

[33:16 – 33:22]

Interesting. Have you ever, ever tried changing the the the send times?

[Alin Dragu] 

[33:22 – 34:05]

Not with my personal business, but I have with clients like e-com clients. And and like when I was working at the church, I used to send them at different times, but not with my personal business, because candidly, it doesn’t even matter. Like most people binge my emails.

They’ll read six or seven at a time. Like very few like I’ll have super fans that will read them the minute they come in and reply the minute they come in and all that stuff. But most people binge them.

Most people will catch up to like two or three. And the time doesn’t even matter. They don’t care.

They care who it’s from. And and was it awesome? So, yeah, I could change it all day long.

It doesn’t matter to me. Like, it’s all semantics.

[Igor Kheifets] 

[34:06 – 34:09]

OK, OK. So tell us about tell us about micro stories.

[Alin Dragu] 

[34:11 – 38:21]

Telling the micro stories. So I’ve been using the same email copywriting framework for every email I’ve ever sent for the last whatever, almost four years, three and a half, four years, every email has used the same exact framework. And I call it the slow framework.

And it’s it’s story less than offer. I don’t know if I made it or if I got it from a book. I truly don’t remember.

But it’s or maybe I learned it in a course. I don’t know, but I’ve used it for three, four years. And basically what it is, I’ve broken it down to.

80% of the email is a story. 10% is a lesson extracted from that story. And then the last 10% is is an offer extracted from the lesson.

And the idea is you have as much congruency as possible throughout the entire email, which this is the hard part. This is why I don’t change the structure. Everybody tries to do different style emails and things like that.

Dude, it’s already hard enough to write a really good freaking story once a day. And so I take this exact same structure and I use the same structure every day to find a really compelling story that I can extract one tiny lesson. Because one thing that I’ve learned over the last three years is this.

If you like read the typical newsletter where people just dump a bunch of like how to content and information at you, they typically don’t stay long on those lists or they wouldn’t read it every day. They maybe read it once a week, but they don’t care about you. They don’t build a relationship with you.

None of that stuff. Actually, people don’t care about. You’re not competing with other people’s email inboxes.

My emails are competing with TikTok and YouTube and and Netflix. That’s what my emails compete with. And so I have to be able to distill something so entertaining, so fun to read quickly.

In relatively quickly, three to five minutes, right, that you would be willing to read it again tomorrow and nobody, I don’t care who they say they are. Nobody is willing to read educational, informational content every single morning at 515 a.m. They won’t do it. It’s not going to happen.

It’s annoying. You eventually get fatigued. And so but you don’t want to just tick tock them.

I am competing with tick tock, but when you get off tick tock, you feel gross. You’re like, oh, oh, I shouldn’t have spent the last 10 minutes, hour, two hours doing that. You feel gross.

I don’t want someone to get to the bottom of my email and feel gross like I just fed them junk writing. It was funny. It was hilarious, but it didn’t do anything.

So if I extract just one little tiny thing that they can learn from that story. If then you take the gross thing and you make it feel valuable, like, oh, man, that was good. You make them feel like they learned something.

Right. So they walk away not feeling gross. They were entertained like tick tock without the tick tock burnout afterwards where they’re like, oh, it’s nasty.

Right. So you’re you’re basically you’re feeding them junk food. I’m giving them candy.

But at the end of it, it feels like they ate broccoli. And so then you could take that lesson and apply it to your product and say, if this is something you’re trying to solve or if you resonate with this, this is a problem, you should check this out. Right.

And so then you can attach it to a sales pitch. And that, too, doesn’t feel gross. It feels helpful.

It feels generous. It feels like an opportunity because I’m not hard selling unless I’m in a promo. I am hard selling in a promo.

But every day they’re still willing to open your emails, even though you sell in every email, they’re still willing to open them because they can’t wait to be entertained. They can’t wait to enjoy it. And and then, you know, then you just build a relationship from there.

[Igor Kheifets] 

[38:22 – 38:38]

So what do you think makes a compelling story? I mean, I agree with you that it’s hard to write one good story a day. It’s pretty difficult.

So what’s the frame? What’s your framework behind like a good story?

[Alin Dragu] 

[38:40 – 39:56]

I think there’s a couple there’s a couple of things that I have rule wise that if I write if I write a daily email, the my my kind of one dichotomy rule of what I definitely want to happen by the end of the email is I want them to know me more. I want them to know me more from a relationship perspective, less storytelling, but that’s something in my story. If I’m going to inject a story, I want them to somehow know me more, whether it’s my beliefs or my life or my biases, anything like that, because I do want them to build a relationship with me, because I think one compelling part of a storytelling is that the reader has a relationship with the main character, the protagonist.

You want this protagonist to win or escape. Well, you want to cheer them on towards whatever it is they’re chasing. Right.

And so if I help them, if I help my readers like me more or relate to me more, then then the storytelling itself becomes infinitely more compelling because they just want to see what happens to the main character at that point.

[Igor Kheifets] 

[39:56 – 39:56]

Right.

[Alin Dragu] 

[39:56 – 43:00]

You’re writing all your stories about yourself. Not always. I write a lot of stories about me.

But if I tell a different story, like I told you how I how we were talking about the Prussian system and things like that, that was like a historical story that I was telling. But I injected my beliefs into that story. Why?

Why I agree with this or disagree with this, which still builds a relationship with the people, because now they can decide whether they believe what I believe and therefore build a deeper relationship with me because they’re like, oh, yeah, I, too, think that the school system is completely jacked up and it’s a hierarchy and all these things. And so now they build a deeper relationship with me that even though the story wasn’t about me, the way I told it, I injected my perspective. And so now they know me better.

Right. And so they’re not all about me. A lot of them will be about me.

I’ll tell stories about my kids or how I play golf on the weekends with my brother or old clients that I used to work with, or I’ll roast a troll who said something stupid. And I and I do it publicly. And so a lot of them are in that sense.

But the best compelling story that anybody can do is the character arc. They want to see the transformation. They want to see the adaptation.

The most compelling part to storytelling is the transformation of the protagonist. That’s the most compelling part of storytelling. People want to see the main character change while they’re chasing a goal.

It’s the classic like. Hero’s journey, right? Good character living this life.

Bad thing happens to good character. Good character finds Yoda, Mogul and and Chase’s mission to beat bad thing and transform life. Right.

In that sense, hero’s journey, you know, rags to riches, that that type of storytelling. I’m taking that in a much bigger arc to where I’m doing that in a long form sense where I’m building my business publicly. I’m building my clientless copywriting business, my school community, my two hour a day lifestyle, my, you know, all these escapades, all of these stack towards you following this protagonist towards this mission.

And you the goal is to have them cheer you on and say, I want to see what happens. I want to oh, I’m inspired by how this guy goes every single day, does something towards moving towards this mission. And so it’s less about this one story is really transformation.

There’s tactics, right, to writing a great story individually. But I always think more big picture. What’s the story arc that I’m leading my readers through that they want to keep following me the next day and the next day and the next day?

Does that make sense? No, I think it’s flying over my head right now. OK, OK.

[Igor Kheifets] 

[43:03 – 43:13]

Maybe you can tell me like an example story that you would write for the you know, just for our listeners to and we can break it down.

[Alin Dragu] [43:15 – 46:56]

OK, there’s a lot of example stories I could tell in a micro in a micro level. So there’s there’s micro level stories and there’s like macro level stories. I think what I’m explaining is like every one of my individual stories I’m trying to use to to be like bricks towards building a much larger story arc.

So when I come and approach a daily email, I’m taking my readers on a journey that Alan is building a clientless copywriter business where he’s working, you know, two to three hours a day so he can spend more time with his family, enjoy life, have autonomy and all these things. That’s the that’s the ultimate journey I’m taking my readers on. If that’s the case, then an individualized story is going to give you that lifestyle picture that you can follow on, like, for example, I got a I got a billion of these.

But like the other day, I played golf with my brother. I played golf with him once a week. I’m playing with him tomorrow.

It’s a great story. And I might tell a story about how me and my brother, Mike, will go play golf and I’ll intentionally inject like, hey, me and Mike. It’s one 16 p.m. on a Tuesday. We’re playing golf at Boboba. I’ll intentionally inject things like that. Like it’s one 16 p.m. on a Tuesday. Right. And that’s building the dichotomy of my bigger relationship, my bigger mission that I don’t answer to anybody. Right.

Like I do my things on my own time. Autonomy, things like that. And I may tell a very entertaining story about how me and Mike were paired with this really hilarious Asian guy named Lee.

And Lee kept like doing weird things on the golf course with us, like he kept going in the woods and he kept getting balls from the woods and he kept throwing the balls at us because he’s like he kept making fun of us because we kept losing our balls on the golf course. And he’s like, you guys suck. Like, here’s more balls and bubble.

And this was a true story, like this guy, really good golfer. And I’m telling this story to my email list because it’s funny. It’s funny.

But in that sense, I may tie that to like, hey, sometimes you suck and sometimes somebody else needs to throw some balls at you and tell you you suck. Well, today, this is me. This is me throwing balls at you because maybe you suck at this and maybe you suck at this.

So I’m going to toss you some balls for free. You can grab this bubble by. It’s going to help you a ton.

Exactly how Mr. Lee started throwing some golf balls at me because maybe I suck a little bit at golf or blah, blah, blah. So I may tell that story. And on the smaller picture, the goal was you laughed.

You got to know me a little bit and you pulled out a lesson from it. Sometimes you suck and sometimes you need to accept the gifts around you. Take that gift and go get better.

And then I point them to a product. Overall, individually, you may look at that story and be like, oh, yeah, it’s pretty good story. That’s OK.

It was hilarious. But but at that point. But to me, I’m building a bigger picture.

I’ve now built a relationship of they saw freedom. They saw autonomy. They saw joy in the lifestyle.

They saw not hustle culture 24 seven. They saw relationship. They met that I have a brother.

Right. They saw that I enjoy golf. So that’s so now they know my hobbies.

There’s a lot of relationship building aspects into there that I’m embedding for them to understand the protagonist of the story so that when tomorrow I send an email, it’s another building block and another building block. And eventually they know me so well and they know the journey so well that they can’t help but cheer it on and just show up to see what happens next. Does that make more sense?

[Igor Kheifets] 

[46:57 – 48:39]

You know, it’s it’s not the sort of approach that I’m used to hearing about. Like most people don’t ride like that. They don’t they don’t follow an arc for sure.

Most I guess most people doing email marketing are not novelists or writers in that classic sense where they kind of pre-plan the journey and really focus on the protagonist and the hero’s journey and all that stuff. I’m certainly not not that type. I you know, quite a few emails I write about myself as well.

But I, I, I treat them more as an isolated events or isolated stories, like if I tell a story in an email, which I love doing, I believe it’s pretty much hands down the best kind of persuasion writing you can do. I always try to build it out in a way where it leads people somewhere to a conclusion of some sort or a lesson, as you said, and tie it into what I am promoting. It’s just like I’m trying to kind of walk in the shoes of our listeners and I don’t know if they’d be able to to appreciate what you just said, because it requires like more macro planning, like to have a whole, you know, story arc, a big one that expands over a series of emails.

Do you ever write anything that’s more isolated? Do you have a structure for crafting a story? Like how do you go about actually outlining a story like a story outline?

What does that usually look like for you?

[Alin Dragu] 

[48:40 – 51:31]

If I outline a story, I think all of my stories are actually isolated, but I can inject them into a bigger picture. All of the stories, I mean, each story I do think of as an individual story. And I think the only real structure that I take with storytelling, because there’s a lot of them, the only real structure that I take with storytelling is that it’s either overcoming a problem of some sort or it’s changing the way somebody thinks about something that they truly believe in.

I think those are the two most compelling. Like if I get it, if I get a story and I’m like, oh, this is this, this problem occurred and this is how I overcame it, or this is how I tell a story of how somebody else overcame it. If I can inject a big problem and tell the story of how that problem was absolutely demolished, that’s usually some of my best stories, if I can do that.

Or the other one is if I can say something polarizing enough that it changes somebody’s belief and approach to to how they think through something. That typically is a really good story as well. Like the Prussian story I was telling you about where I talked about Napoleon Bonaparte and how he attacked the Prussians and the Prussians had to reevaluate their entire educational system and things like that.

I told that story. That’s an isolated story, right? I told that story.

But what it does is it polarizes most people’s thinking, which makes that story really interesting, really interesting. So if that story is very… It doesn’t leave them indifferent.

No, no, no, no. They can’t. I don’t want somebody reading a story and nodding along like, interesting, right?

You want somebody either like aggressively agreeing with you or aggressively mad at you for even mentioning that. So a great story to me has what’s a mainstream idea that ninety nine point nine percent of people think. That I think the opposite of.

How could I tell a story that exemplifies that? And so you get a lot more of a polarizing thought, which just makes the storytelling more interesting. Right.

So that is definitely a storytelling tactic that I try and do often with taste or big problem happened, had to overcome it. Right. Like that.

That could be that could be a killer story of I was doing this. Then this thing occurred. Could I had to figure something else totally out?

This is what I figured out. This is how I beat it. Right.

Though that story is always that structure and storytelling is always killer.

[Igor Kheifets] [51:31 – 51:40]

You know, there’s there’s a short YouTube clip that I’ve that I watched by the creators of South Park.

[Alin Dragu] 

[51:41 – 51:41]

Oh, yeah. Yeah.

[Igor Kheifets] 

[51:42 – 51:52]

And they have a great structure that they mentioned that I think works really well. Basically, something happens. Right.

And then this happened.

[Alin Dragu] 

[51:52 – 51:53]

But then.

[Igor Kheifets] 

[51:53 – 52:38]

Yeah. So something happens and then this other thing happens. But then this other thing happens.

Yes. You know, it’s such a simple way to explain every single South Park episode, isn’t it? What would you say are some non-negotiables for a good story for you?

So you mentioned there’s always a protagonist. Yes. Always somebody.

The story cannot be just abstract or a description of of a lake. It has to be someone trying to achieve something or become some kind of problem. What else?

What else is a non-negotiable component to a persuasive story? Just one. What I said, what else?

I didn’t say one.

[Alin Dragu] 

[52:38 – 54:17]

What else? OK, got it. Got it.

Got it. I think I think a non-negotiable to a story that’s persuasive, if it’s actually persuasive, is. I don’t know if this is more of a strat, it is not tactical by any sense.

It’s more philosophical. But I think a story that the reader can see themselves in the story, if the reader can relate to the story and they can see themselves as the protagonist. That makes a really persuasive story because now they’re injecting their own mental model into your story.

So if I tell a story about my boxing day burnout. Oh, that’s a good headline. Boxing day burnout.

If I tell a story about my boxing day burnout, how I’m sitting in the backyard, there’s a fire, I’m hanging out with my kids and there’s rubber bands around my head and I don’t know what to do. And I’m very tired and exhausted. That story in itself to someone may not matter at all.

But to a lot of people, they may see themselves in that story and they put themselves around the fire with my kids, with the rubber bands, because they’re working 60 to 70 hours a week and they feel burnt out. And so now it’s a reflective part of who they are. That story becomes infinitely more persuasive because it’s no longer about me, but it’s about them.

And I just became infinitely more relatable to them. Like, for example, do you read fiction novels? I’m actually just starting out Lord of the Rings.

OK, fantastic.

[Igor Kheifets] 

[54:17 – 54:41]

Have you ever read Lord of the Rings before? No, no. Big, big fan of the movie trilogy.

But man, it’s so hard. I’m just at the part where Gandalf is leaving Frodo with the ring to go, you know, find out what the hell the ring does. But it’s like it’s such a slow.

I mean, I just read it before bed, you know, and then it’s like two pages and I’m done.

[Alin Dragu] 

[54:42 – 54:57]

Bro, bro, the first the first entire book is a drag. The first book is a drag. Book two gets better.

Book three. But it is a slow world building book. But you’re OK, so you’re reading Lord of the Rings.

Name one other fiction novel you’ve read.

[Igor Kheifets] 

[54:58 – 54:59]

Harry Potter.

[Alin Dragu] 

[54:59 – 55:38]

Harry Potter. OK, so Harry Potter and Frodo. Right.

Two young males on the way with the guides. Right. They have it.

Frodo has Gandalf. Harry has Hagrid and Dumbledore and things like that. Part of those part of the reason those stories relate to you is because you see yourself as Harry and you see yourself as Frodo and you have relatability because they’re on a journey and they have a guide and that guide is helping them overcome a problem.

Have you ever read a fiction novel where the main the main protagonist was a female? Novel, no.

[Igor Kheifets] 

[55:38 – 55:42]

My wife read that novel, but the movie Hunger Games.

[Alin Dragu] 

[55:43 – 55:43]

Yeah, right.

[Igor Kheifets] 

[55:44 – 55:55]

So so Katniss, so your your wife read pretty much any any Marvel story resonates with me, whether it’s about a man or a woman. But I understand what the point you’re trying to make.

[Alin Dragu] 

[55:55 – 57:33]

Yeah. To be reflective. It is.

We are more attracted to characters like us. And so even that simulants ask ten people, the stories they’ve read like me, eight out of ten novels that I’ve read has a male protagonist in it. And they typically have gone through something relative that I’ve gone through in a way, in a way.

And two out of ten of the novels are female. But I highly less relate to that, those novels, because typically the story arc and the problems and the things like that. Are less or less relative to me.

Like if I read Hunger Games or if I read Fourth Wing by Rebecca Yaros. Good books really enjoy the writing, but they don’t resonate nearly as much as Harry Potter or Red Rising or anything like that because they’re not as reflective. I take the same concept with my daily emails that the most persuasive ones are the ones that your readers see themselves inside of your shoes.

So when I tell stories and somebody can relate the burnout or the desire for autonomy and freedom or, you know, any sort of world like that or just studying copywriting, just like, oh, man, I’m reading this and I’m reading that. And I’m reading that, too. I’m enjoying that, too.

Oh, I’m I’m doing this. I’m chasing that, too. Whenever they can put themselves inside of your shoes and they see you progressing.

It’s so much more persuasive, so much more persuasive.

[Igor Kheifets] 

[57:34 – 57:53]

So these things that you progress towards in your stories, they have to be. So we say they have to be reflective of the customer. So it starts with the customer.

Like before you can sit down to write a story, you have to have a list of things that you know for sure your customer wants. Right.

[Alin Dragu] 

[57:54 – 59:59]

Yeah, 100 percent, because your story is much more interesting when they are on the same mission as you. So I’ll give you an example. I don’t get I don’t chase clients.

I don’t try and get clients. I don’t try and be a copywriter that is building an agency. I’ve done those things before.

But so my stories don’t chase this building empire, client chasing things. So there are a lot of copywriters who join my list and who no longer resonate with me because I’ll actually throw rocks at my brand enemy, which is like client copywriting, right? Client copywriting is my brand enemy and I’ll throw rocks at it.

Well, they no longer resonate because they’re on a totally different mission. They’re like, oh, dude, I am trying to get clients. I am trying to build an agency.

I am trying to build an empire. So because they’re on a mission over here and I’m on a mission over here, I no longer become their guy. I’m not their guy.

They don’t like my stories nearly as much and they can’t relate to me as a character because they’re on this mission and I’m on this mission. And so because we’re on two different paths, it doesn’t matter how funny and cool my storytelling is. They’ll never have the same relationship with me or you as a reader because they’re on a totally different mission.

But on the other hand, if somebody joins my list and they’re kind of burnt out on the whole client copywriting thing or work in the nine to five and all that stuff, and they realize that my mission is building a clientless business, working a couple hours a day and we’re going to be chilling and I want to hang out with my kids and read books and just chill. Those guys are on the same mission. And they’re like, yo, this guy is fire.

You know, it’s not that my storytelling was better or worse to either person. It’s that they were less relative to the actual mission itself. They’re on a totally different mission.

And so if you can get the same people on the same mission with you and you guys align on that, then your storytelling is infinitely more persuasive to those people.

[Igor Kheifets] 

[1:00:01 – 1:00:39]

But what if, OK, I know somebody might be listening to this and they’re thinking, OK, what if I’m not like you, like I’m not already achieving the whatever the mission was? Do you know what I mean? Like if somebody is getting into the writing, it’s like, oh, I have to tell stories about myself, but I’m a nobody.

I don’t have any credentials. I haven’t I’m not playing golf at one 16, you know, a p.m. in the day on a Tuesday. I don’t have anything fascinating, at least to my audience, to my target audience.

I don’t I don’t do or have anything fascinating worth writing about.

[Alin Dragu] 

[1:00:41 – 1:01:07]

The the fascinating part about storytelling is not winning the mission. It’s chasing the mission. That’s the fascinating part about storytelling.

How you’re reading Lord of the Rings. How many pages does it take for Frodo to throw the ring in Mount Doom and Mordor? How many?

I haven’t gotten that part yet, but based on the movie takes forever. Well, hold on, hold on. How long is the scene where he actually throws the ring in?

[Igor Kheifets] 

[1:01:08 – 1:01:12]

Well, compared to the rest of the movie? Yes. OK, I get I get I get the point.

[Alin Dragu] 

[1:01:13 – 1:05:27]

OK, so ninety nine percent of the movie is chasing the mission and one percent of the movie is accomplishing the mission. OK. The goal of my emails isn’t that I’ve accomplished the mission.

It’s that I’m always chasing another mission. And so the the interesting part of storytelling is the chase, not the accomplishment. The accomplishment gives you expertise and credentials to talk about the things two steps behind you, which, yes, is more persuasive, has more proof, has more authority.

It separates the bullshitters from the not bullshitters. Yes, I have infinitely more credentials in the copywriting world than ninety nine point nine percent of them. That’s OK.

In a sense, what’s interesting from a storyteller is that you did one thing today to progress towards your mission. I’ll give you I’ll give you a great example. Do you I’m sure you know him, Ali Abdaal.

Do you know Ali Abdaal? YouTube YouTuber. What?

Oh, I don’t I don’t really go on social media that much. It’s great. OK, so Ali Abdaal is like the the number one productivity YouTuber.

He’s got like six million followers, whatever, subscribers, anything like that. A big, big productivity YouTuber. When he first started his YouTube channel, his goal was to get into Cambridge University to become a doctor.

So he’s trying to get into Cambridge. And his whole YouTube channel was him teaching what he was learning while trying to get into Cambridge. He hadn’t gotten into Cambridge yet.

He was just documenting what he was doing to study and apply for tests. He was documenting his journey, which all the gurus on Twitter now called building in public, which is the thing I just call it working towards your mission. His mission at the time was to get into Cambridge University.

And so all he did was document every thing a day of what he was doing, like he vlogged every day. OK, so I just submitted my application. I did this and this and this.

And it worked. And here’s what. And he just documented his learning towards his mission.

He hadn’t gotten into Cambridge yet. He hadn’t actually been accepted into the university. He was just documenting what he was trying to do.

And he built a following of almost like 500000 subscribers just off that. Off a guy who didn’t get into Cambridge, he was trying to get into Cambridge, but people who want to get into Cambridge were very interested in what he was doing to get into Cambridge, because ninety nine point nine percent of people are not doing one thing a day to progress towards their mission. So if you become somebody who does do one thing a day to progress towards your mission, you become infinitely more interesting than all the other people doing jack squat.

And so if even if you’ve got nothing, if you’ve accomplished nothing, just pick one thing you do want to accomplish and and work towards that one thing and document what you’re doing. Hey, I want to launch a SAS tomorrow. I don’t know anything about coding.

But I’m going to start an email list about how I’m going to code my first SAS product in 90 days. And now I’m going to start telling you what I learned. Hey, yesterday I explored cloud code.

Never used it. Here’s what I did. I downloaded this, tried this, figured out this prompt.

Watch this YouTube video. Figured out that was a terrible waste of time. Then I ordered some Chinese food.

Felt horrible. Got back to my computer, wrote this. And now cloud code does these three things for me.

Pretty sweet. Tomorrow, I’m going to try and figure out how to set up logins on my SAS. It’s going to be sweet.

Let you know, let you guys know what I figure out. You can do it with anything. Just pick a mission and do one thing towards that mission and then write down what the crap you did that day to try and accomplish that mission.

And then once you accomplish it. Pick another mission. OK, I’ve launched my SAS in 90 days.

Now I’m going to scale it to 100 members. I’m going to scale it to a thousand members. Now I’m going to scale it to a million.

And just pick your mission because it’s going to have different problems, different battlefields, you’ll attract different people.

[Igor Kheifets] 

[1:05:27 – 1:07:52]

Does this make sense? This does, actually. You know, I got my start in network marketing, which is very much adjacent to business opportunity marketing.

And on my way, like I did not succeed with MLM. It was it’s a different game. It’s too much person to person communication for me.

But in BizOp, especially around the time when I started my Solids agency, I got to connect on a personal level with lots and lots and lots of influencers in the business opportunity space. And they all did this. Every single one of them was doing exactly what you just described.

They were literally reporting on whatever they were doing at the time. And this was of interest to people. Maybe it was inspiring to people.

And they all started building their followings. Some had smaller followings than others, but some of them built incredible followings, spanning into tens of thousands of people who were tuning in to their webinars and their emails and their social media literally every single day. And there’s one particular influencer, Vic Stryzius, who built downlines in a bunch of different companies, is a super affiliate.

He he’s notorious for this. Like I’ve been on his list for ages and every now and again, he’ll just appear out of nowhere and just, you know, just all of a sudden he’s in your inbox and he’s like, oh, I’m building something cool. I’m doing something cool.

You should come and see this. Let’s do you know, I’m doing a webinar. 9 p.m. Eastern, you know, Friday. And then I log on to the webinar just to see what this guy’s doing, because I’m curious. I’m just like, I mean, I’m the same as all the people out there. And and it’s like 2000 people on that webinar.

And the guy hasn’t emailed in years. He hasn’t done anything publicly in years, nothing. And it’s like he’s like, oh, I’m doing something.

Come check this out. You know, come on. I want to, you know, go on the journey with me, you know, and then he’ll pitch something to be part of the whatever the movement is.

And the whole thing of documenting what you were doing is an incredible strategy. It is foolproof, fail proof. It works every time.

[Alin Dragu] 

[1:07:52 – 1:07:53]

My buddy’s work.

[Igor Kheifets] 

[1:07:54 – 1:09:40]

Yeah, obviously. My buddy, Dean Holland, who built a great company called Internet Profits. He he basically did that many like more than 10 years ago.

He started a blog back when blogs were profitable. And he said, look, I want a journey to make my first dollar online. And I’m going to, you know, post daily about what I’m doing.

And then, you know, he kept doing that until he actually made some money. And again, that’s how he built his initial following. And then he continued.

He became a super affiliate, a ClickBank Platinum vendor and, you know, a multimillionaire. This this sort of documentation approach not only gives you stuff to mail every day, not only, you know, makes it easier for you to just stay active in your business, because now you’re not only doing this for yourself, you’re also doing this for other people to know what you’re doing. I think that’s that’s quite incredible.

You shouldn’t probably document what you had for dinner like people on on on Instagram do. But, you know, as long as you’re moving towards a goal, I agree with you that it’s very compelling. And we will love we love to root for people who love to either watch people crash or watch people win.

You know, that’s why we watch sports. That’s why we watch Formula One and golf and all the all the other stuff. Now, Alan, unfortunately, we have to wrap up because we went a wee over over the the the scheduled cold cold limit.

First, before we wrap up, how can we find out more about you? And who is your who’s your people like who you like to work with?

[Alin Dragu] 

[1:09:42 – 1:09:44]

We mean, who do I like to work with? What does that mean?

[Igor Kheifets] 

[1:09:44 – 1:09:56]

I mean, like, who do you love to get into your universe? Like if they if that person is listening right now, they should definitely go and find your, you know, copy creator club and hop on board.

[Alin Dragu] 

[1:09:56 – 1:11:03]

Oh, that’s a great question. OK, so of your first question, how can people find me? You can find me at Alan Dragoo dot com.

It’s alindragu.com. And I have a heavy, awesome bribe for you to join my email list. It’s very interesting.

You’ll have a ton of fun. Reading my daily emails list is the best way to stay in touch. Alan Dragoo dot com.

The people that I love to talk and the people that love staying in my universe are copywriters, but specifically people who want to build an autonomous lifestyle. People like again, one of the reasons I love your whole list building lifestyle thing, I’m like, yeah, this autonomy, if autonomy resonates with you, you want to enjoy your life, own your life and do life on your own schedule. You don’t want to work for clients.

You don’t want to work a job. Those things sound absolutely miserable to you. You are my people.

You are my people. Those those are those are the right people.

[Igor Kheifets] 

[1:11:04 – 1:11:32]

All right, there you go. So go to alindragu.com and get on the daily email list. You’ll be entertained.

You’ll be educated and it’ll feel like a chocolate cake. So Alan, thank you so much for for hanging out with me. It was a pleasure hosting you on the list building lifestyle.

And until next time we chat, have a good night.

[Alin Dragu] 

[1:11:32 – 1:11:34]

That was great, man. That was so fun.

[1:11:38 – 1:12:14]

Thank you for listening to the list building lifestyle. Get access to the previous episodes transcript of today’s show, as well as other exclusive content at listbuildinglifestyleshow.com. Also, remember to claim your free copy of my best selling book at www.igorsbook.com. 

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