Make it Hurt

This one is going to be off the cuff.

I was days away from firing off a post telling you about why it doesn’t hurt to “ask for something.”

Well, something happened this Friday that squashed that faster than the CEO of Subway shuts down the idea from the summer intern to use real meat in their sandwiches.

Last week I was having a casual meeting with two of my friends. One has grown multiple social media pages to millions of total followers and the other is grinding away at her seed stage start-up with a big launch coming up at the end of Q3. We’ll call the seed stage founder Ellie and the social media guy Luke in this story.

The topic: the opportunity within the TikTok shop.

Ellie and I both have pretty solid marketing skills. BUT, we have avoided TikTok like the plague. We knew if we got on there we would be sucked into the digital heroin that the CCP is feeding us. Naturally, we avoided it. Recently we noticed people in our spaces whispering about how people are making thousands of dollars a month on TikTok through affiliate links and clever marketing. We dragged Luke into a meeting room at the 26th floor of a WeWork to spill the beans.

Why did Ellie and I care? We both had a burn rate to address to help us focus on the big swings we wanted to take. What we weren’t aware of was the unique point in time we were at where the TikTok shop was becoming what “drop shipping” was on amazon 4-5 years ago.

Luke asked us what our financial targets were. Say $2-3k per month. His response, “wait that’s easy, you could hit that in 2 months with some real focus. I can help too.” He phoned a friend to double check. Confirmed. With our marketing skills we could easily hit that.

I have recently realized on of my biggest challenges is focus. I get distracted by new opportunities. Ellie and I decided if this target was so “do-able” that we should go after it.

Ellie has a framework where life is broken into seasons. Just like how a Lion lives. Lions work ferociously and then take breaks to gather for the next hunt. We were both exiting our season of socialization and into the season of focus. This was our thing to focus on for the next 3 months. In order to keep the other accountable we decided to raise the stakes. We had to make sure we didn’t get distracted.

Well my friend, I did just that. This might hurt a little. But it will make both of us lock in and commit.

The 3 Milestones:

1. Reach 5k followers on TikTok. Get approved as an affiliate/influencer.

2. Collect $1.2K in affiliate commission

3. Collect $10K in a month in affiliate commission

This is how we make losing hurt. There will be a punishment for each person who does not reach each milestone first.

Punishments

1. Complete the San Francisco cross town trail

2. Buy the other person dinner at ANY restaurant they choose in SF

3. IF

   1. If Jared Loses: Buy a community plunge tub

   2. If Ellie Loses: Purchase a year long equinox membership

Here are the KPIs on a whiteboard. We shook on it too. Thanks Luke for taking the pic.

This is called the Roger Bannister effect: when a once seemingly impossible task is accomplished, others quickly follow in accomplishing that once seemingly impossible task.

What I’m going to learn from this is:

• Raise the stakes, urgency will kick in

• How to create good hooks, marketing copy, and CTAs

• How much I do not want to lose in public. Which is why I’m sharing this with you.

• How horrible TikTok really is

Alright. Off I go.

I’m going to run an experiment and create hot garbage. Perhaps learn how marketing works too.

If the Chinese government is going to melt the brains of our youth, let’s see if I can make a buck off it while that happens.

Wish me luck 🤞🏻,

Jared

I Dig So You Don’t Have To

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Gentlemen’s Agreement 🤝🏻

Every week I spend several hours crafting this email to give you entirely for free. Banger, after banger. Except it’s not actually free.

I love doing this, but I also love seeing this grow (You might say I’m flawed. But you’re not my therapist). To keep this free it would mean the world to me, and my ego, if you shared this with just 1 person who you think would also like this.

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