George Kao tells an anecdote of a client who unsubscribed from a spiritual teacher's email list because the marketing felt clickbaity and incongruent with the teacher's teachings. He argues that marketing is not a separate, purely instrumental activity but part of one’s ministry and transmits values; poorly aligned marketing can break trust and teach manipulation. He invites solopreneurs to write emails and posts to bless the reader (serve) rather than primarily to acquire clients, framing marketing as an energetic template for audience relationships.
Chapters
A client told me that they unsubscribed from a well known spiritual teacher's email list. Not because the teaching was bad, the teaching was actually very good. They unsubscribed because of the marketing. The email subject lines were clickbaity, pressure induced, anxiety provoking. My client said, I felt betrayed. The marketing didn't feel like the teacher, it felt like a desperate salesperson. The vibe of the marketing didn't match the vibe of the spiritual teacher. So trust was broken. I try to put myself in the teacher's shoes and I'm imagining that the teacher is thinking, oh, the marketing is just to get people in the door and once they're in, then I'll serve them with my real work. But they're missing the point because the marketing is already impacting people. In fact, the marketing touches a lot more people than would ever become one's clients or students. For every one person who becomes a client or a student, hundreds of others, maybe thousands of others, saw the emails or the social media posts. They felt the pressure of the selling. They felt that incongruence. So what was that spiritual teacher actually teaching through their marketing? Manipulation? Desperation. So I want to remind you and all the solopreneurs out there, your marketing isn't separate from your ministry. It is your ministry. It is part of your real work. You are already supporting people's transformation through your marketing, or at least you're transmitting your values, or lack thereof of your values through your marketing. So here's my invitation. The next time you write an email or a social media post, don't do it to get a client. Instead, do it to simply bless the person on the other side who is reading or watching it. Because you're not just building a business, you're setting an energetic template for a relationship with an audience.
