How To Use Ethical Scarcity And Deadlines To Spur Sales With Jack Born

All right, welcome back to Bacon Wrapped Business. This is Brad Costanzo, and I am very happy to be with you fine folks. Today. I've got a interview with a guy that I became familiar with years ago because of some brilliance that he had put together. And I stumbled across him through another upcoming guest named Perry Marshall. But a few years back, I. I was introduced by Perry to this concept of a tactical triangle. And if you're watching on video, I've got it in my hand. If you're listening on YouTube or, I mean, on podcasts or Apple or Android, I'll have a link to where you can see what this is. And it's just a really good way to strategically understand how to solve problems in your business. And this tactical triangle was developed by today's guest named Jack Bourne. And Jack is.

A very experienced entrepreneur, marketer, software developer, and just a brilliant mind who has agreed to come on the show to not only talk about some of his story and business success, but also one of the things that I've been really looking forward to getting into, which is how to use scarcity and urgency in an ethical way. In marketing, as we all know, it's one of the most powerful drivers to get people to act on something you're trying to sell them, but.

It'S also highly abused by unethical marketers and people who are just going for conversion for throwing all the tricks at the wall to just basically trick people into buying. And Jack is the founder of a software called Deadline Funnel that helps creators and online entrepreneurs maximize their sales through marketing automation, but doing it in a very ethical way. Jack and I have been talking for about the past 45 minutes offline, and it's been a very entertaining and fun topic. But we're going to continue on for your benefit, and I want to learn a little bit more about Jack's story. So, Jack, welcome to Bacon.

It's great to be here.

Thank you.

Yeah, it's great to have you. As I said, I mean, just going back to where I stumbled across you.

Right.

Years ago, I was either just on Perry Marshall's newsletter, where he probably talked about it. I've been to some of his seminars, and he talked about this cool tactical triangle and how to use it. I would love to hear from you. What is it, how you created it and kind of how you've used this, both in your own business, maybe with some clients, et cetera.

Yeah. So the model that you're holding in.

Your hand is very, very detailed. And I got to give Perry credit for taking the seed of the idea, which did come from me, and he not just embraced it in every level of his marketing, from.

$99 introductory courses all the way up to his hands and coaching packages. He really, really adopted it, saw the brilliance in it that comes from the simplicity, but he took it and really delved much, much more deeper. You know, Perry's mind, when you have.

Him on the call, you'll see that he's.

His mind thinks and he draws connections in ways that have always really amazed and astounded me. And he also sees the world in terms of a very fractal sense. So in other words, quick example. And this will be a quick aha for anyone who's heard of the 8020 concept. So.

Perry wrote a book, 8020 Sales and Marketing. It's one of his many books, and if you don't have it, you definitely should get it on Amazon. Chapter six of that talks about the tactical triangle. And so if you want to know more about that, it goes really deep into that. But one of the big first aha's that I had from Perry was I thought, okay, I've heard of this 8020 concept. You know, what else is there about it? And I think most people, when they come in contact with Pareto's principle 80 20, like, that's it. Like, you don't go any deeper. Like, 80% of your results come 20% of your efforts. But one of the big ahas that I learned from Perry was that it's actually fractal, which, if that word doesn't click for you, what it means is that you can take that top 20% of your, say, your activities, like your most effective activities, and you can even.

Go into that and dive deeper than.

That and say, okay, out of those activities, what are the 20% of those activities that generate the 80% of those results?

And so what ends up happening in.

This example that I've given is that you can figure out that over the course of a month or a year, that there's only one or two little activities that really drive something like 85, 90% of the actual results that you're getting. And so the reason why I bring this up, to bring it back to the technical triangles that the model that you.

Very, very detailed model. I didn't come up with that detailed model. What I came up with was a very simple concept, but powerful concept of three. Imagine it. Just imagine a triangle or draw a triangle. And the bottom left hand corner, I put traffic. In the top corner, I put conversion. And the real sort of Discovery for me was the other angle was economics. And then in the middle sat 8020. That's something that Perry and I kind of added together because 8020 fits into everything that Perry thinks about. So.

Before I, before I describe how I think it might be insightful to talk about how I came up with that concept. And I'll try to keep that short. But first, like the power of that model is that it can really someone who is stuck in their business trying to figure out, okay, how do I, how do I scale my business, how do I, how do I grow it, how do I get more audience, how do I get more attention? A lot of people will.

Focused on traffic side of things and this is not as prevalent as it used to be. But it wasn't that long ago that a lot of people would just focus on, hey, where do I go and get the cheapest traffic? I want the cheapest clicks, the cheapest video views, like how can I get the cheapest traffic? Well, in general, you get what you pay for, right? And so one of the things that I learned from Dan Kennedy is that the person in business who can afford to spend the most to acquire clients is going to outperform the other businesses, right? So that really comes down to your economics. And so that was a big influence in me coming up with this because I was trying to figure out, I was really stuck on trying to figure out the interplay between traffic and conversion because at the time the leading thought leaders in marketing were saying traffic times conversion equals money. Like that was the concept. And to me that just didn't seem right.

Well, what if you're selling something? It doesn't matter what your conversion rate is with reality, that's not going to be a successful business. I went on a run, I've been pondering this and pondering this and I went on a run, I used to run back in those days and I came back and just it popped into my head this triangle of traffic conversion. And, and the missing corner was economics. And so what this means is that as entrepreneurs, as marketers, that if we want to solve our traffic problem, you don't solve it by focusing on the traffic corner first. You focus on the other two corners, which would be how can I increase my conversion rate? Or and how can I improve the economics? Which could be charging more, it could be having bumps and upsells and other things, back end offers, affiliate offers for people that don't convert. But basically the economics side of the business.

So when you focus on two things, your traffic problem either is eliminated or is greatly reduced because you can afford to pay a lot more to bring someone in. You can suddenly ads you couldn't afford before now are affordable. YouTube ads that you couldn't afford affordable. And then you can even go even further than that. And if you solve the traffic and conversion well enough, then you can get to the point where it's not even a matter of buying those ads, it's hiring someone, like hiring the copywriter, hiring the person who's going to actually ads. And so you don't even need to become the master of that skill now. You can bring someone onto your team who actually is going to help do that. And so in those ways, when you fix, you fix your traffic problem by focusing on the other two corners of the triangle. So I went, that wasn't a short explanation, but hopefully it was an in depth one.

No, I love it because it's one of those things that, and I've, it's been a cornerstone of a lot of the consulting that I do. But also the way that, you know, on the business and businesses that I personally either own or have stakes in is it gives a place, it's a great place to kind of troubleshoot and start to find. All right, well, what are we trying to accomplish? Well, let's first remove the constraints. Well, what is our biggest constraint? Everybody says, well, you know, we're buying a bunch of traffic and that traffic's just, just not working. So they just focus constantly on traffic as opposed to saying, well, maybe it's the conversion, or maybe if you just add a new, a different price on there, maybe it's lowering, maybe it's higher, you know, raising it, maybe it's adding some upsells, maybe it's something else. You just change the economics. The traffic can stay the same, the conversion can stay the same, but the economics makes it work. And I love how like economics, it sounds like that was.

That was almost the forgotten about thing. Like everybody thought about that, but they didn't really give it equal weighting. And I like, what I really liked is how it's like, no, it has equal weighting to traffic and conversion. It's not a subset of either one. But it is. Because when you mentioned fractals, there is an economics of traffic, there's an economics of conversion. And that's where you go deep. And I know that Perry's taken this to another level, but.

I love it. I've got this, I've always got it sitting on my desk. Number one, it's just kind of Cool looking, but it always reminds me if I'm trying to solve a problem, it's almost like going back to first principles of, well, where is the issue? Is it, is it this? Is it that, is it the other. You know, I recently invested in a company, a supplement company called Vitamin Patch Club. Oh yeah, I forgot to say today's episode is sponsored by vitaminpatchclub.com where are your vitamins? But anyway, it's one of these. It's a business that we're growing, but like any business, there's some issues. And the very first thing I did is I said, okay, well, are we getting traffic? Yeah, we are. Is it converting? Well, it is, but could it convert better? Yes, but so we're focusing on the conversion and the economics of it and it's. I may have normally known to go and do that just intuitively, but having something like this makes it also much more of a, of a good framework. And I love working from frameworks. So I think that. Yeah, I think that's amazing. I want to segue into some of the stuff that you're doing now because I find it really fascinating when, you know, talking about conversion. Right. So scarcity and urgency and deadlines, etcetera, have always been a very powerful way to convince somebody to get off their butt and give you their credit, make.

A decision, make off the fence.

Yeah, right. And that obviously falls squarely in the conversion area of the tactical triangle. At the same time, marketers ruin everything. Was that Seth Godin? Was that the name of his.

I think his book was All Marketers are Liars.

Oh yeah.

All Marketers are Liars. I've heard other people say marketers ruin everything. We do. We've ruined social media, we've ruined everything. But you know, they've also, to a large degree, marketers have ruined deadline, scarcity, urgency because it's so fake and a lot of times it's so blatantly obviously fake that done poorly, it can ruin your reputation. Done well, it can transform a business because you can get people to take action. Let's go into the story about how you started to work with Deadline Funnel and just try to reimagine the way this.

Yeah, so when I started with Perry, I was already, I had already had several online businesses, but I joined Perry's team and as you can tell, the years that I spent with Perry and also before as I was in his audience.

He was one of the main influences on my thinking in terms of marketing. And so along those lines today, it just seems so Obvious. But back then it wasn't as obvious because traffic was so cheap back then that most people were sending traffic to directly to sales pages or to checkout pages. Why would you send people to an opt in page? Why would you try to get a lead? Like why would you spend the time to do that? And so Perry measured this and in his somewhat unscientific mini experiment he found that it's pretty clear, pretty obvious to us now, but the value of the leads that he was getting were much more than if he just sent people straight to a sales page because he would follow up using autoresponders. And again, I know that this is now direct Response Marketing Online 101. This is really super basic stuff, but it wasn't always that way. And so because of Perry, I was a big believer in the power of writing story based emails.

Emails that add values, but having an automated email sequence. Okay, so that's the ground work. I'm also a student of Cialdini and I'm a big fan of looking at what social psychologists have figured out works and how we make decisions. So as you mentioned in the intro, one of the most powerful and reliable triggers to get someone to make a decision is having a deadline. And people don't make decisions in logical ways. People make them decisions based on emotions. And lots and lots of studies have been done on this. And so one of the things that people have discovered is that, for example, people put more value on what they already own. We should probably come back to this. But anyways, what they already own and they're at risk of losing has a higher perceived value than something that they might be gaining.

Yeah, fear of loss is always a bigger motivator than desire and gain.

Yeah, exactly. So I'll go ahead and say that there was a study done. I think it's been repeated a few times where imagine an auditorium full of students and half the room gets coffee mugs and the other half, okay, and so then they hand out a slip of paper. The half of the room that has the coffee mug says, hey, if someone on the other side of the room wanted to buy this from you, how much would they need to pay you in order for you to trade for you to sell it to them? And then the other half of the room gets the opposite question. How much would you be willing to buy those coffee mugs for? And so it's roughly double. It's a little bit more than double. So in other words, the people who have the coffee mug value it at say, five bucks. Like I would have to get paid five bucks for me to trade this coffee mug that I was just given a few minutes ago. And then the other half of the room is willing to pay like 250, 225to actually buy it, same coffee mug. So if we were logical.

Just robotic decision makers, it should have the same value, but because our brains work in these strange ways, but predictable ways. So coming back to how this idea was born was that I knew from having been a student of social psychology that deadlines are really, really effective. What I was seeing at the time was that people were using them in inauthentic ways. I would go to sales pages and I would see the countdown timer, I would forget to purchase, I would come back the next day and boom, the thing would reset. And I didn't want to do that. I didn't want to lie to my audience because I truly believe that how the relationship begins really determines how it's going to develop. If it starts on a lie, it's really going to poison the relationship and just ruin your reputation. But I wanted to use urgency. I wanted to maximize conversions. So I started thinking, well, how could we do this if we were going to take everything that we know works with autoresponders and email sequences, set it up so that when people came into that sequence, whether they were a new subscriber or an existing subscriber, but they start in this multi day sequence, how can we have it so that at the end of that sequence there was a deadline, but the deadline wasn't bullshit, I hope I can say that it wasn't. Yes, it was real. And if they skipped it, if they waited too long, they were not going to be able to purchase after that and everything. And I started to envision how this could all be tied into their record in the email database. So my next thought was, well, obviously someone has figured this out. So I thought it would just be a matter of doing enough Google research to find out where this thing existed. And what it turned out was that no one had actually tackled this problem. No one had solved this. And so I decided to solve it for myself because I was selling my own things on the side.

I still had my own businesses on the side, and I wanted to solve this for myself. And it turned out that other people had the same issue. They wanted to be able to use urgency, but they didn't want to be dishonest with their clients. And so that was really how Deadline Funnel was born, out of a desire to be able to automate, use marketing automation, which Obviously is incredibly powerful, gives us the ability to scale our business to use deadlines, which is one of the most effective and reliable ways to increase conversions. But remove any sort of line, like just make it real.

So walk me through and walk us through a. Maybe a case study or a use case of specific. Because I mean it's very easy to throw up. This is the more static way that people do say, okay, you've got up until this time or there's only this many copies of the downloadable PDF, right?

Yeah. So.

So let's start static. Cheesy way to put a timer on something. Yours is not just throwing a timer up there.

No. And, and let me say, you know, I don't see this as often anymore, but saying like there's only so many downloads of the.

Yeah, I haven't seen that yet.

The digital PDF don't do that.

But as an example, so you might have. And there's so many to choose from. I'll pick one like. So you might have just what we call lead magnet now. So someone is signing up for something they're getting on your email list because they want to download something. And then you're going to take them through say a seven day email sequence where you're going to educate them, you're going to build some authority, show your expertise and then make an offer towards the end of it. Okay, and this is a simplified version of it. Now your. To maximize conversion, you're going to want to have a deadline at the end of it. Now what could be your reason why? Your reason why could be very simply because you're a new subscriber to my email list and it's a new subscriber discount, but special offer ends on fill in the blank. Now, the fill in the blank part is taken over by our platform. So if your deadline happens to be on a Thursday and my deadline happens to be on a Friday, like all of that is taken care of behind the scenes automatically. But it ties in with. So we track people through five different data points and so our system is able to make sure that even if you change to a different device, even if you go to a different country, you know your.

You could.

In fact, I did a demo where I purchased. Sorry, let me start over. I started a demo where I recorded myself in a Jacksonville, Florida airport before I got on the plane to come to Australia. I started myself in an email sequence. I flew to Australia. A few days later, I get over the jet lag and go with my daughter to the local iPad store.

An iPad wrapped it loaded it up, opened up my email and there was one day left instead of five days left. So everything work, like synchronizes across new devices, all this sort of stuff. So our system is able to track someone even under those extreme circumstances, to be able to keep that deadline completely real and legitimate. And it's personalized based on when they entered that funnel. Now there, there's a whole bunch. Yeah, there's a whole bunch of other ways to do that, but that's like version.

Yeah. So let me. Okay, so it's obviously it integrates with the CRM. So is deadline funnel.com the, you know, the software, is that a CRM or it integrates with CRMs you already have?

No, I call, I call ourselves sort of the zapier of urgency and scarcity. So one of the things that's super complex for our team to solve, but we've done a really good job through hiring excellent team members and also putting a lot of time into constantly improving how the user interface works. Also improve documentation is helping people understand how to integrate with all these hundreds, sometimes thousands of different platforms. Because every single person who shows up on our doorstep has a slightly different version of the funnel that they want to build. And, and they've got their own unique technology stack of different software that they're using for their funnel. So that poses a really significant challenge, but one that we really rise to the occasion to handle.

Okay, so use case.

I sign up for a, like you mentioned lead magnet or something like this. It gets me into the CRM, right? And then it offers me a. Maybe it's a discount on a product, 25% off for the next five days. So.

Now if that is the only way that somebody could see, like if they remember what the URL is and they go check it, check it out. Like without clicking on a link. Like, if you would have went to that page on the iPad just from memory because it's not integrating with something, it wouldn't have known who you were. But most people don't do that, right? It's like they're going back to their email. You're clicking that, you're going to look and it's like, hey, one day left.

Our system will remember. Like, even if you keep the URL open or you bookmark it, like, our system will recognize if you're past your deadline and there's a feature in there. If you said, well, what if someone. What if Brad is in the funnel and he shares it with his buddy Joe and Joe hasn't signed up for anything. And Brad's just passed along the URL.

Well, yeah, I just texted him.

Yeah, you can set it up so that our system says, wait a second, we don't recognize this guy Joe or whoever this person is, so send them to the opt in page or send them somewhere else.

That's exactly what I was talking about. Right. So keeps you, it keeps you from being like, found out.

So it's not, I don't even like the. I have to jump in and say I don't like the phrase found out. Because we're not, we're not tricking people.

This is so the user specific deadline. And there's nothing wrong with having users.

Yes, it's a user specific deadline.

Yeah, yeah, which I like. And it's, it's, it's, it's very effective. Unless you're doing it without, you know, without the technology that makes it. Because the minute you're trying to do a user specific deadline, but then people go, well, it's not. If I just open up a Safari browser instead of a Chrome, I can, I can, you know, reset it. Then it just, it loses a lot of the effectiveness. Because I've seen marketers do that in the past. But legitimate deadlines, there is nothing like it. I'm very familiar with the concept and it still gets me to act on stuff and go, damn it, I'm going to, I got to buy this because I don't want to miss out.

Yeah, well, I mean, look, the simple fact is that deadlines work. And you know, one of the things that I'd like to bring up is some people will say, well, I know that deadlines work, but I just don't want to, I don't want to feel pushy about it. Like, I feel like if I use a deadline that I'm being pushy. And what I would say to that.

Is.

I would really say that you need to think about how much you actually believe in what it is that you're selling. And let me explain that by telling a quick story. So I currently live in Australia.

But up until a few years ago, I lived in Florida, very close to the beach. And I would see these people kite surfing and I would think, man, that looks like so much fun. And I would see this over and over and over again. But I just never pulled the trigger because it looked like, ah, you know, it's going to take some time. I'm kind of busy building my business right now. All of which was true, but I.

Still wanted to do it.

So fast forward in Australia and the short version of the story is that a buddy of mine named Michael Maidens is having his family, is having dinner with my family. And it comes out during dinner that he's super excited to be going on this trip to Fiji in slightly over two weeks. And some people had dropped out. And my wife picked up on this and said, could Jack have that spot? So he texted the guy who's running.

The week, and I've got goosebumps just even thinking about it. And he said, yeah, actually there was available, but we leave in, what is it, like 20 days. So immediately I started booking my ticket. Now, the cool thing was that this wasn't just a trip to Fiji. This was a surf and kite surface trip to Fiji. So I was just out of my mind excited. So immediately, as soon as, like the very next day, what did I do? I looked up kite surfing lessons. And I went and took surfing lessons that weekend. And I wanted to be prepared as much as I could be when I went on this trip that completely changed my life. Like, I am fully, fully addicted to kite surfing. And I do it every, every time that the wind is blowing hard enough. And it's just completely changed my life. Now, what's the reason why I tell that story? The reason why I tell that story is because my life has improved substantially. It's a great, great addiction to have to be addicted to this really thrilling sport that's constantly challenging me and making me think to grow and learn.

It looks amazing, and it looks insanely hard. Like I live on the beach, see people out there doing it all the time. I'm like, that looks amazing. But oh, my God, the learning curve has to be huge.

Yeah, but it's so much fun. But it wasn't until I had the deadline that I actually pulled the trigger and got off my ass. And so in the same way, do you see what you're selling as life changing for the people who are going through, who are clicking your video links, clicking your email links, attending your webinars, getting on the phone with your team is what you're offering. Do you believe that it has the potential to change your life like that? Because sometimes people need that little push. You know, I wish we lived in a world where we didn't need that little push. But we are dealing with human beings. And if you're selling to humans, deadlines are what people need to get off the fence. And so don't use deadlines in an unethical way. And certainly don't sell things to people where it's Not a good fit. But if it's a good fit and your stuff can change their life for the positive, then I, I say that you owe it to them and yourself to really pull out all the stops and get them off the fence and they'll thank you for it.

Yeah, no, I actually couldn't agree more. I mean it's a. There's an art to doing scarcity and urgency and when you do it right.

Helps everybody. As long as you're selling something you believe in and that's going to help somebody else. I mean, yeah, we all need a kick in the pants sometimes because you know, you know, making those decisions, a lot of us, you know, we're sitting on the other side of a computer screen, we're not actually selling and things get in the way and it's like, well, I'll come back to this tomorrow. And how many times have we said I'll come back to it tomorrow. And we never do because something else kind of gets up. So it's definitely a way to say look and I'll reward you. You know the deadline is you get a 50% discount if you act in the next 36 hours. Like I'm rewarding you for taking action. So I love that has it. How long have you been doing deadline funnel?

Over five years. So yeah. How to slow start? Because I was just scratching my own age. Like when you go from software that will solve your own problem to okay, now I need someone who is not tech savvy to be able to log in and be able to use the software. That is a huge chasm and one that we're constantly trying to make that.

Can shorter. But yes, I would say about five or six years ago is when I fully started. Beautiful. And then yeah bringing on talented team members to help see that vision through and take it to the next level and constantly improve it. Where one of the things that I think people have a misconception about software, software as a service platforms is that okay, this must be a machine that just prints money because once you build it, you're done. The truth is that if you're doing it right, you're actually never done.

Our expenditures on our team and on our infrastructure are constantly going up because we're constantly, constantly, constantly improving the platform.

Yeah.

Has starting and running a software program or software service, has that been. Were you. Did you ever do software before this? Was this your first one?

Yeah.

There'S.

So probably the one that I would talk would be AW Pro Tools, which was really my first entrance into the Software as a service. So AW Pro Tools.

Oh, that was you? Yeah, yeah, I'm familiar with that. I think I use that way back in the day when I was using AWeber.

Yeah, so it would connect with AWeber and help give AWeber more performance, be able to do more segmented marketing, more trigger based logic.

They were one of the first autoresponder companies.

To exist. But when things like Infusionsoft and Ontraport and ActiveCampaign came on the market, AWeber really fell behind in terms of their capabilities but they always had a really good deliverability rate and so I just saw an opportunity to be able to tie into AWeber's platform and to be able to at least bring them closer to being what say activecampaign.

Yeah, yeah. You know, have you. One of the things I've always, I've acquired some businesses and sold some businesses and I've yet to do anything in the software space, although I love the software space for a lot of things. One of the things that's always intimidated me and I'd love to hear just you as an owner is that is how hyper competitive it is and needing to stay ahead of the curve because you know somebody comes out with a new feature and they, you know, a software business can, can be.

What I want to say just like overtaken by like a really smart and or well funded competitor really quickly. So it always feels like you've got to be constantly monitoring that, making sure that you know you're, you're not getting gobbled up by you know, a competitor. A good example, and this isn't a perfect example but I remember when LeadPages came out and it was the very first like Visual Page Builder et cetera and then, but they had a very glaring.

Hole which was limited customization and then Russell and clickfunnels came out and they're like well we're a better version of LeadPages. And I didn't see. I know LeadPages did pretty well but they were heavily venture funded and whatnot. But I know that ClickFunnels and then a lot of the other page builders that came out after him, everybody's like trying to one up somebody else.

Have you really experienced much of that headache with the SaaS?

So with AW going back to AW Pro Tools which by the way I sold off to another investor several years ago.

But going back to that there was someone who came out a few years behind us and they were copying every single thing that we did.

With Deadline Funnel. Knock on wood. We haven't had that. And platforms like, say, ClickFunnels, LeadPages, they've got built in countdown timers. And every so often someone will say like, hey, why do I need Deadline Funnel? Instead of what's already built into clickfunnels leadpages? And the answer comes back to, you know, do you want to. With.

Authenticity? Do you want to be completely honest? You want to have the ability to have all these different integrations and have it all work seamlessly the way that you, you know, so that your automated marketing is telling the truth, then you need us. If that doesn't matter to you, then, yeah, you can use whatever you want.

And it comes down to, like, the bigger they are, they're just, they're just throwing features at it where it's okay. This is a minimally viable feature. Where sometimes minimally viable feature will make your funnel minimally viable. Right. If you screw around too much as opposed to going, well, okay, if we're going to build this, let's build it. Right?

Yeah. But back to your actual question, which I kind of veered from, is that I think it's really, really important to always, what's the basis thing? Today is day one. To always be thinking about, if I were going to be the person who takes down Deadline Funnel, what would I do? What would I create? I actually posed, I called this a red cell experiment. I posed this thought experiment to my team. Okay.

You work for a new startup and you're going to do something that completely knocks us off a map, pulls your body out from under. It's like, how would you do it? And so we went through that process and really tried to come up with all the different ideas and the ways that that could happen. And we're constantly innovating. And by innovating, what I mean, I think it's really important to say that it's not always about throwing in additional features. And that's the thing with software, is that you'll get a lot of requests from clients, which some are amazing, brilliant ideas and some are things that are distractions. And it's really tough sometimes to figure out which ones you should pay attention to and which ones you should not pay attention to. Because if you start throwing everything but the kitchen sink into your product, that's one way that you can really shoot yourself in the foot. So a lot of the innovation that we do has to do with continually improving what we're already doing. And so we're constantly revamping the underlying code library and platforms that we're using. This gets a little bit techie, but adding it. We've gone through probably five different cloud providers and now we're on Amazon Web Services.

And that was a whole journey of.

Being able to figure out how to do that without breaking the bank.

Things like that, where the uptime, the reliability, the speed, all of those things are improved. Improving the user interface. So it's not like, hey, we have this new feature that came out, but it's continuing to improve the user interface, continuing to improve in customer service and really continue like never resting on your laurels. Now we are coming out with a big brand new feature which is a huge new development. So in the coming probably a month we'll be releasing that. But it's not always a new feature.

Yeah, sometimes it's just making it simpler and easier and better UX user experience and user interface and simplifying a lot of that stuff that just makes it. I mean, these days something that's just easy and works and it's like, oh, I got it. I don't have to be a rocket scientist to figure this stuff out. Is some of my favorite stuff. Like one of my favorite tools, one of my favorite software tools, which, I mean, it's for most people, it's free. I ended up taking a paid version. Is Workflowy. You familiar with Workflowy?

Oh, yeah, yeah.

Collapsible outline. I mean it's so simple, but it's just, it's so easy and elegant to use. It does one thing, it does it really well. And I've used it for years until I left it for a competitor who is much more advanced. But it's similar. Are you familiar with Rome Research?

Yeah, I was just about to guess it was Rome.

Yeah. Have you used it yet?

I started playing around with it and I really haven't dove deep into it. You know, actually my, my buddy Andre Chaperone is like, I basically follow whatever.

He's got a great personal knowledge management.

Yeah. But he's constantly changing like. Like it'll be. I shouldn't say constantly, but like I'd say every year. So I've got. There's a huge switching cost for me to go from Workflowy to then load everything into. Into roam.

So I did that too though, and it wasn't as big of a switching cost as you would think. Actually, when we're done here, we'll stay on it if you want. I'll show you. I'll give you a screen share of how I do it, but I just wanted to kind of talk about just bring that up where like workflow is one of my favorite examples of just make it easy, streamline it, simplify it. Like, you know, another good example is Trello. Trello doesn't, Trello doesn't have as many bells and whistles as a lot of like asanas and things like that. But it's just, I mean, it's just easy to use.

It does really, really well.

Yeah, I love that with Deadline Funnel. And this is, I, I was familiar with it, but I never went too down the rabbit hole to just really figure out exactly how it worked and some of the nuances of that. But I love the explanation you gave of how to really kind of give good, ethical, user based deadlines that spur people into action. Because I know how powerful that is. You know, the only difference between people who use deadlines and not is an extra zero at the end of your, you know, paycheck at the end of the month.

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. If you like. A special offer without a deadline truly.

Is not a special offer.

I mean, in my, in my free email series, one of the things that I teach over a series of days is all the different ways that you can, all the different levers that you can use to create and craft more powerful offers. But one of those levers is definitely having a deadline.

But.

If you have a special offer within a deadline, you really don't have a special offer. Because if I can get it anytime, then what's the point? It's not special anymore.

Well, I mean, next week is Black Friday, right? And Black Friday has an inherent deadline in it. Granted, it keeps getting pushed. Like I'm seeing people now going, hey, our Black Friday special is open right now. And then, you know, goes to Cyber Monday, et cetera. But still, we all know that there's that, that window of like Thanksgiving through Monday or Tuesday where if you don't go get your stuff right now, you're going to miss out on an incredible deal. And it's, you know, it's only the biggest holiday shopping days in the year. So.

So along those lines, let me get, let me give out a tip that might be useful to your audience when it comes to Friday Cyber Monday. So first of all, yeah, you should definitely have your own Black Friday Cyber Monday deal. But also think about. So one tip would be to think about other times during the year you could run your own promotion. So for example.

I was born a leap year. And so every February 29th or 28th, like, it's either, poor me, I don't have a birthday this year or yay, I have a birthday this year, I have a promotion or around that time. So that's my own time where I'm doing my own promotion. I'm not competing with anyone else. And it's a real simple reason why, like why am I doing it? Well, just because it's my birthday and I want to. So come up with your own date on the calendar that you're not competing with everyone else. But the other thing specific to Black Friday Cyber Monday is you can actually, and I've done this several times and it's super, super successful, is that you can actually approach people that are selling something that is related to what you sell. And you could say, hey, how about if I gave your audience to bundle into what you're doing a free trial or maybe.

It'S module from your training course. You're going to modify this based on what it is that you're actually selling. But basically you're getting a ride into someone else's audience by letting someone use your offering as a way to boost up the value. So I did this one time with James Wedmore where it wasn't for Black Friday, but he was doing a promotion. I think it was kind of based around him getting married. But I was on his newsletter and I saw that he was doing this promotion and I reached out to him and I said, hey, I know that you use Deadline Funnel. Would you like to offer this extended free trial that's not publicly available to your audience as part of the bundle and it has a value of X number of dollars? And so that was a way for me to get to know James better and also got access to a significant portion of his audience. Now some people cancel, but it's a great way to get enforcement from someone and get introduced to their audience.

Nice. So yeah, so you did a JV affiliate promotion, but you threw a deadline on there to where for only a specific amount of time could they get the either the discount on it is that.

Yeah, so he was doing his own launch. So I forget the details, but let's say it was a seven day long. He's setting the deadline for when you're able to get into his program. His XYZ program is probably business by design. And so as one of the extra bonuses that you would get for signing up would be X number of weeks of free Deadline Funnel access and some free training that Jack created. And so he had additional bundles. I think he also bundled in samcart, like you know, an extra long trial of samcart and things like that. And so by doing that, you just take, okay.

How many weeks or months of this software do you get? Times what it normally costs. And that's the value.

You go to the website. This is the actual value. You add those things up and, you know, can quickly become several hundred or several thousands of dollars worth of bonuses that come with his core product, which you're going to use. Like if you go through business by design, you're going to need a way to do checkout pages. You're going to need a way to. So there was probably either lead pages or click funnels, like bundled in there. So he, he added in these extra bonuses. And I had reached out to him and got him to include deadline funnel.

That's great. Yeah, I love that. I love that.

And that led to. And that was really. I mean, you and I were talking about chain reaction, the chain reaction concept before we got on the call. I mean, that was one of those chain reaction conversations that led to additional opportunities to know James and to. I went. He invited me to speak at a Mastermind event that he had in South Carolina. I met Rick Mulready from that. So there was a lot of things that came from that, including additional opportunities to. In front of James audience. Actually, he and I ended up going to. On that trip to Fiji that I mentioned before.

Beautiful.

So it was.

Yeah, it was a weird sequence of coincidences. But yeah, but even if it doesn't turn into that, that's a great way for you to capitalize on someone else's Black Friday promotion. Because if you think about it, they're going to do as much as they can to promote their product to their audience. And if you can hitch a ride as a bonus offering, it could be a free trial or, you know, maybe a, you know, maybe. Maybe you have something that's normally a bonus that you give away when they buy another course or product of yours and you say, hey, look, why don't you give this away to your audience?

And.

But there's a high probability that the people that look at that bonus are going to come back and buy your main course. You know, it's a, it's a way for you to start up a relationship with someone that you may not normally have, but also to get someone else's audience.

Yeah, I couldn't agree more. I'm a big fan of that integration, marketing and creating all types of opportunities to. You can serve other people's audiences. I remember my very first info product way back in the day, like 12 years ago. Or so that was the way like it was in the dating advice niche. And I had a course teaching magic tricks to all the guys trying to pick up girls because a best selling book called the Game by Neil Strauss was talking about that, but he wasn't teaching it. And so business partner of mine and I created a little course on how to do just basic bar tricks to pick up girls because we saw the opportunity that oh, people are teaching this and there people are, somebody big is already talking about magic tricks. People are out there teaching guys how to pick up girls. We didn't create a course on that, we just created a course on magic tricks then. So one, we were able to get a lot of people to promote us because it was just non competitive but cool. But then what we did is we would both do a thing where I would go to some of these biggest big dating gurus and get them to include either little micro products bonuses in my offer. So when people are learning magic tricks, they can also learn all these different ways to, you know, meet and talk to girls that I wasn't teaching. But at the same time I could easily offer, hey, here's two or three tricks you could do at any bar and just, hey, throw this in your, throw this in your. As one of your bonuses. I didn't use any deadlines, et cetera, which would have been genius. Granted this was like 12 years ago, but it generated so much more business just by, you know, piggybacking on, you know, other people and integrating your product into theirs. So it's a win, win for everybody. Probably a great episode, you know, content for another.

Yeah, it's one, it's one of my favorite marketing, marketing methods. I mean, it doesn't give, yeah, it doesn't, it doesn't give you necessarily a huge, huge win like, like doing a launch, you know, but it, it's, it's this constant drip, you know, you, you plant the seed.

When it builds a relationship too, it's.

Like it creates a real different locations.

Yeah, absolutely.

Yeah. So, okay, so besides, besides just trying to get, you know, more users and introduce deadline funnel to more people, are there any specific nuts you're trying to crack in your business right now? And that could be. Or in your life, I mean, that could be. This is our opportunity for myself or my listeners. You know, maybe you strike a thing like, oh, wow, I know a guy or I've got an idea that might be able to help you. Is there anything at the top of your head that.

Yeah, so I had a feeling that you were going to ask this, so I was.

You've heard my episodes before, so I.

Wanted to hear from you, actually. If you were starting over in podcasting, like, what would you like, Knowing what you know now, what would you. How would you do it to give yourself the highest odds of success? And the reason why I'm asking is because I've toyed with the idea of podcasting, but as you and I were discussing before this call, it's one of those things I'm like, oh, should I. Should I actually.

All the way. Because it's one of those things that would be easy for me to start, have high energy, but would I actually be able to see it, see it all the way through.

Cool. So I love this. And this is actually going to be an. This is going to be an episode I've been planning on doing, you know, six years. I've never done an episode on how to launch and start a successful podcast. So. But the brief part is.

You know, when I launched it, there was still a lot of them, but there was nowhere near as many as there are right now. Right? So it's a lot more crowded of a pool. Everybody can do it, et cetera. One of the best things that you can have is already, sorry, an existing list of people who follow you, whether it's your social media, you know, if you're starting from absolute nothing, it's a lot more challenging. Although I'll throw a tip out there for people that I think will help. But if you've already got a list, if you got customers, if you got, you know, other people like that, that's obviously going to give you a boost and you create kind of an event around that, right? Like, and there can be, like, I would serialize the episodes I would launch with. I would have at least five to 10 episodes ready to go. I would probably launch with five and then drip out the other ones probably every day in the early stages because that launch, that early momentum really helps. And I would make them some episodic or, you know, as our friend Andre Chaperone talks about soap opera, like, serialize them so that they hear, like, today, like, I might start off an episode saying, okay, today on Bacon Wrap Business, I'm going to talk about how to use deadlines in your marketing. And then we talk about it. And then at the end of it, I say, now, tomorrow, we're going to talk about how to launch a podcast, right? And I just threw two topics out there, so stay tuned. And then on tomorrow's episode, I'll Say all right, yesterday, if you paid it. If you listen to yesterday's episode about how to use deadlines and scarcity in your funnel, you're going to love today because we're going to talk about this. So you're, you're always calling back, you're using what TV does, right? It's like, you know, previously on, you know, whatever on 24.

So that, that's one thing to launch with. Is that anything you can do to enlist your existing audience to give it as much share worthy stuff like bonusing it up. You know, there's software like upviral and a lot of different things like that that allow you to say once you opt in for special privileges, you can share on social media, you get certain points that might unlock a, you know, free month or free year of deadline funnel. Right. So it's just kind of creating that little launch thing around it. Episodic content is really good. The other thing I would do is, especially if you're starting from scratch, is I would you, I would.

I would create.

A lead generator, like a tip or a trick or something to do, like how to, for instance.

I might do something like how to use deadlines and urgency to create higher conversions. And I would set up a squeeze page on that and I would maybe buy some traffic to it and share it. I'm sending them to the squeeze page. They opt in, you thank them for that, then you direct them to the actual podcast to consume the material. Now they could have found the. If they already knew the podcast, they could find it on their own. But this, you know, get their email, get them on there, tell them to consume that and then start the conversation to say, oh, and by the way, you know, if you like other things, here's some other things like make sure you subscribe and you just kind of utilize it as a, you know, just another delivery mechanism for the content. Because the hardest part for all podcasters is just getting discovered and, but not even just getting discovered, getting those subscribers and then getting them to kind of come back for more, that can be like the challenging piece. So making it really entertaining for them, making it event, somewhat of an event. There's a big push recently for people to go paid podcasts or like premium, like free and then premium version. There's a, I've been looking into that a little bit.

These are a lot more thought leaders, et cetera, as opposed to like business owners and marketers who are really doing what they're doing. But it's something I'm exploring. There's A, there's a. I think it's called Supercast or Supercaster. Let me look it up while we're talking that are super. Supercast.com is a relatively new software that is built on this premise of adding a paid membership to, to your podcast. I've been kind of exploring this because they recently launched and I'm fascinated by the idea.

Ideally what they say is get guests with big followers to interview you and then that guest will share. I gotta be honest though, that helps, but it's not as big of a needle mover as you would think. And I think it's for two reasons. The biggest reason of which is the bigger the person is that you interview, the less likely they actually are to share your stuff. They're either too busy or whatnot. If they do, it's amazing, but it's kind of rare. One of the strategies though is to find somebody who's big enough that you can get them on the show that.

You can target their audience with. Like on Facebook. This is, this is part one. Like if I interviewed.

I'm just. I know, I know you can target, for instance, Russell Brusson. Russell Brunson of Clickfunnels on, on Facebook. He's an ad like Ryan Dice, Frank Kern, people like that. So I interviewed Russell. I didn't do this. I, looking back, I should have, but I interviewed Russell and I should have started to advertise my interview to his audience. Have an opt in, discover this one thing, like picked apart one little piece, like a clip for what Russell Brunson said, like one idea. Have it play that little short clip on the landing page on the. They opt in, they get it and then say now click here or subscribe for the full thing. So if I can advertise to my guest audience, that's big. The other thing is if you have somebody who you can't advertise directly to their audience as a, like a Facebook interest, but they may have a big audience already, right? Like maybe they have a Facebook page with a hundred thousand people and an email list, et cetera. You could potentially do a deal where you allow me, you can share your pixel and you can say, listen, I'm going to run my ad money to your specific audience. I'm going to need a little bit of access to either your Facebook audience or something like that, right. I mean, there's ways to figure it out. I'm not going to go into all the little micro details, but I could. Like for instance, if you wanted to run advertising to this episode, I Could give you access to, you know, if I have a big audience, pixel, et cetera, even my, you know, I could have a custom audience of all my customers or whatnot. I can give you access to run ads to that and you could run ads to my page.

Right.

So it's all of a sudden it's like, wait a minute, you'll pay money to advertise my stuff to my people? That just helps me. Right. So that's just kind of another unique way to do it. If you have those relationships in place and you can get them to kind of play with that.

It'S not easy to, you know, to build a big like audience who really just fucking sucks this stuff up especially. So I hesitate to say that, but one of the things that I've always talked about as a really good strategy is to pay. This depends on your model. Right. But I actually care more about my guests like yourself than I do about my audience. Sorry folks, but like really these are conversations I would be having if I wasn't recording it and putting it out there. So I'm looking for other opportunities to either learn things or get access to and network. And like I've gotten clients from my podcast, I've bought businesses from my listeners or actually guests and listeners of the podcast. And I look for other ways to utilize this as a catalyst in for business opportunities beyond just how do I have as big of an audience as possible?

And that's something that very few people talk about. I wrote an article on Digital Marketer a few years ago. I'll link, I'll send you a link and I'll link to it in the show notes. So that's kind of like top of the head stuff. I don't know if any of.

That's great. That's great. I think the part that resonates most with me is the networking opportunities.

That's the best.

Yeah, I mean I've got a good network, but having the ability to do that and really not caring about the outcome.

I mean here's, by the way, here's the secret.

But you would do it anyways even if there was no audience.

Yeah. Here's the secret. And I wrote about this on the digital marketer.com guest post. So.

Itunes specifically or podcasts specifically have a very unique.

A uniquely non transparent metric. So that uniquely non transparent metric is the fact that you don't know how many downloads or subscribers I have. I mean I personally, I personally don't know how many subscribers to the show. Like if you subscribe on Apple Podcasts to my show. I don't know that Apple knows that I know how many downloads I get, but that's not public. Like, if I have a YouTube show, you can see, okay, I've got 1500 subscribers to my YouTube channel, but that's not my primary channel. For this podcast, you cannot see If I have 10 million listeners or 10 that's invisible to everybody but the podcast host. That provides you an immense opportunity to get your foot in the door with some really big players. We've all heard the concept of putting lipstick on a pig, right? Like dress it up, it's still a pig. You can literally do lipstick on a podcast if you, if you approach this methodically. In fact, I've helped a couple of B2B, like sales people who do business development and they were trying to get on, you know, they were trying to do sales calls with some really high level executives at corporations. One of them was in the engineering technical leadership. She was looking for tech CTOs and CIOs of Fortune 1000 companies. And another guy was a hospitality consultant. And I've done this with a few other people where it's like, look in the hospitality space. One of the goals here is to talk to restaurant owners and hotel owners. Well, let's create a podcast around.

You know, this concept of like Heroes of Hospitality. And let's record at least 10 episodes, 10 to 20 episodes, just either by yourself, just getting the IP out there and just get like 10 or 20. What I call this is window dressing episodes. Like just, it's out there. So if I go there, I say, okay, you've got 20 episodes and then get every one of your friends to review it. Now I got like 40 reviews, right? Now. Go out and approach these hotel owners, these restaurant owners, these CTOs or whatever and say, listen, my name's Brad. With this, you know, with the show Heroes of Hospitality, I'm making that up. That doesn't, I don't know if that exists, but. And you know, been following what you guys are doing at your restaurant group or whatnot. And I think my audience would absolutely love to hear what you have to say. And they're like, really? Who's your audience? Now? If they go research me and they see that I got a podcast with 20 episodes and 40 reviews, they don't know that I may have one listener and it's my mom, right? So now.

I discovered this in the very early stages, like six years ago when I launched my podcast and I had like 10 listeners. But I, everybody said yes to the show because they're like, oh, they see it on itunes, they see it everywhere else. And nobody ever asks me, ever, in six years, how many downloads do you get prior to coming on the show? Even since day one, they never asked. So that. And I was blown away. I was like, everybody just says, yes, holy shit.

Granted.

But if I had a YouTube show, and I said, hey, Jack, I'd love to interview on my YouTube show. And you go, man, every one of your YouTube shows gets six views. Like, eh, it's not worth it. So I don't want to. Like, I'm accentuating how powerful this is because you can actually look, you can fake it till you make it. In the world of podcasts, if your goal is to get, you know, tremendous doors opened up.

And I think so few people.

Think of that as an added bonus as opposed to the main reason to do a podcast. Like, I've had billionaires on my show. One of them has been. Became a client of mine, right? A guy named Jesse Itzler. And I ended up working with him for a little over a year as kind of his chief marketing strategist. And it was all because I just reached out and I said, hey, loved your book. I would love to have you on my show. And he said, yeah, let's do it. I was like, I'll be damned. That worked. And then it gave me the opportunity to foster the relationship and move it forward. So I think if you like, when I lead with having really good guests that I want to talk to or build a relationship with, it leads to better interviews and content, and then more people will listen and they'll be like, all right, cool. He cares less about me than his guests, but that makes me like the show more. Right. I think it's. It ends up making a better product.

Yeah.

So, yeah, that's. That's.

And maybe I really got my wheels turning.

Yeah, maybe I'll just take the last 15 minutes of this episode and make this a new podcast episode. There you go.

Or bonus content.

Two birds with one stone, baby.

Well, that brings us to the, you know, the end of this episizzle today. By the way, other podcasts have episodes. Here at Bacon Wrap Business, we have episodes Sizzles. So got to have that, you know, unique little moniker, but hopefully that helps. And man, anytime you're launching it, and if you ever want to, you know, a little more insight on that, I'm more than happy to lend a hand and help you out. And for my listeners, if you're listening right now and you and I struck a chord and you're like, huh, that sounds interesting. Maybe you can help me in one way or another. Just shoot an email to ask bradakenraptedbusiness.com and happy to help you flesh this out and see if it's an opportunity for you. But, Jack, if folks want to get deadline, funnel is deadlinefunnel.com, best way to go.

Yeah, yeah, check out deadlinefunnel.com. you know, one of the things that I mentioned is that, yeah, my team is some of the best in the world. And they, you know, one of the things I keep telling my team is that no one woke up today hoping and praying that there was another software platform that they could. But the reason why I have so many clients is because, you know, we try to help people achieve their goals. Like, the software just happens to be the delivery mechanism. So we're here to help you. You don't have to be a tech genius.

We're here to help.

I love it. Well, Jack, thanks for stopping by and being a guest on the show for all my listeners. Hit the subscribe button if you aren't, because otherwise you'll miss out on a lot of the upcoming episodes we've got here on bacon wrap business. And feel free to reach out to me if you would like to.

You.

Know, get a second opinion on any of the big business problems you've got right now. I'll more than happy to entertain all ideas. Jack, thanks again. And for everybody else, I'll see you on the next episizzle.

Thank you.