Jason Fladlien / Webinar GOAT. Author. Creator of a $57million webinar

From writing articles for $3.25 to $57.9 million webinar record-holder!

Jason Fladlien, known as the quarter billion dollar webinar man, joins Paul Povolni to share his remarkable journey from Iowa rapper to monk to creating record-breaking pitch webinars. Jason reveals the strategies, mindset, and pivotal moments that propelled him to generate over $250 million in sales.

Most people struggle to sell effectively online because they're using manipulative tactics that destroy trust and create resistance, making it harder to generate sustainable revenue.

Imagine being able to sell confidently online while building trust and providing real value, creating a win-win situation where your audience is excited to buy from you.

Today's guest, Jason Fladlien, reveals his revolutionary approach to webinars that has generated over a quarter billion dollars by focusing on value first. Stick around to discover how making your goals "so small you can't fail" can lead to massive success.

Key Takeaways:

1. Build momentum with small wins.
2. Structure webinars that solve problems and inspire trust.
3. Create irresistible, high-value offers.
4. Reinvest in your audience to scale effectively.
5. Address limiting beliefs to unlock success.

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Jason Fladlien is a renowned webinar expert, earning the nickname “quarter billion dollar webinar man” for generating over $250 million in sales through innovative pitch webinars. A former rapper and monk, Jason has mastered sales in the information, coaching, affiliate, and software sectors. He’s the author of One to Many, the highest-rated book on webinars, and a sought-after consultant, even training Zoom’s team on webinar strategies.

Link: JasonFladien.com
Book: One To Many

Paul Povolni, the founder of Voppa Creative, has been a creative leader for over 30 years, with clients around the world. He’s led teams in creating award-winning branding and design as well as equipping his clients to lead with Clarity, Creativity and Culture.

Headsmack Website

Transcript

Paul Povolni (01:58.532)
All right. Hey, welcome to the Headsmack podcast. My name is Paul Povolni and I'm excited to have another misfit with me and to have a great conversation. I have Jason Fladlien with me and he is known as the quarter billion dollar webinar man. His pitch webinars have set records in the information coaching, affiliate and software space. And he is known as the webinar goat. Welcome Jason. How you doing, man?

Jason Fladlien (02:31.015)
I'm doing better than good my friend.

Paul Povolni (02:33.39)
Good, good. Well, so glad to have you on. I'm excited about this conversation. Just super impressed with what you've done and I can't wait to hear about one of the best webinars ever. And before we get into that though, I'd like to learn a little bit about you, a little bit about your origin story. I'm kind of, I'm into superheroes and stuff. And so I like origin stories. I like to hear how you became the Jason that you are now.

And so you can go as far back as would be relevant, but let me just hear a little bit about the origin of Jason

Jason Fladlien (03:06.585)
Yeah, it actually started when I was seven. I started rapping in front of like anybody that would listen to me started writing lyrics and I wanted to be a professional rap artist, which is funny because I was in small town in Iowa where it just don't happen, right? But music was my only real passion in my life. And, you know, growing up, I had a really tough upbringing as a child. You know, my mom had a drug problem. She didn't go to prison for it. My dad didn't know how to deal with it. So he kind of just

Paul Povolni (03:19.948)
Yeah.

Jason Fladlien (03:36.679)
You know, stayed out of everything and I was kind of lost. And so I wanted to do this music, but had a lot of trauma, a lot of challenge. So I kind of found myself in this weird spot where I couldn't focus. I was depressed. I was having panic attacks. A friend that I was doing music with, he went and he traveled with the Hare Krishnas for a while and he came back with that. So I said, let me try that out. I'm desperate. So I kind of became a monk at 20. This is insane story. I know it's crazy, but

There's proof. have photographs of me in newspapers because once I became a monk, like my life got stabilized. I got impassioned. I got excited to go out and do something in the world and leave a mark. And so I combined the music with the monks. It was a good story, good PR story. And I went out there. tried to like make the music successful and it wasn't successful no matter how hard I worked. And I worked pretty hard. I worked really hard.

Paul Povolni (04:03.903)
Wow.

Paul Povolni (04:22.563)
Wow.

Paul Povolni (04:29.71)
Yeah.

Jason Fladlien (04:30.639)
So I started studying everything I could to make it successful. And I got into this idea of the marketing of the music. And I'm like, wow, marketing is so fascinating to me. Prior to that, really only music got me excited and my spirituality got me excited. But now marketing is like, it's even cooler to me than music ever was. And so I'm like, okay, let me do the marketing for the music. Okay, that didn't work. Let me do marketing to then make money to then support the music career.

Paul Povolni (04:54.788)
Hahaha

Jason Fladlien (04:59.557)
And that was 17 years ago and I never got back to the music part, Paul, because I got into the marketing one year of struggle. And then the second year I turned the corner on that and I got a little bit of success and then compounded it and then just blew it up.

Paul Povolni (05:16.484)
So what in marketing, like what was that marketing? Was it a person? Was it a seminar? Was it a book? Was it like, what got you into marketing?

Jason Fladlien (05:26.023)
I started with affiliate marketing. liked the idea of it was like, I don't have to create the product. I don't have to create the sales pitch. I just have to get people to go through my affiliate link and then make a purchase. And it was a, it's funny, Paul, cause I was living with my dad at the time. I was like 24 years old, so poor, you know, we had to share a tiny little apartment together. And my dad who was divorced from my mom, he'd bought an info product.

Advanced Dating Secrets by David D'Angelo, who's Evan Pagan, who's a pretty famous marketer who I've worked with afterwards and even advised on his own webinars, small world as it is. at the time I knew of David D'Angelo, who was his pen name, because he had this ebook on the front end called Double Your Dating, which paid 200 % affiliate commissions, which was unheard of at the time, still is unheard of. So I'm like, I got this material.

I know this affiliate program, so let me study it. Not because I want to pick up women. I want to make money. I don't want to pick up women. Let me study it and then let me put it into practice. I'd write articles. And I was using a site. This is 2006, 2007. I was using a site called Easy and Articles, which was like Google's love child back then. If you write an article, put 3 % keyword density in a 400 word article, put your bio at the bottom, which could link to your website. You get some traffic that way. A couple hundred clicks, maybe a couple thousand if you wrote a good

Paul Povolni (06:26.99)
You

Paul Povolni (06:46.019)
Yeah.

Jason Fladlien (06:49.223)
piece of copy. So I would write these articles, send them to an email autoresponder, and then I would promote products on ClickBank, like dating products on ClickBank. I mean, yeah, I mean, I would study everybody I could. I bought a lot of ebooks with what little money I had, and I would then implement what I learned. And so I started making like 100 to 200 bucks a month. But here's the problem. Paul, I had ran out of money from the music. It had eaten up all my money.

Paul Povolni (06:59.448)
Wow. And this is all self-taught?

Jason Fladlien (07:18.769)
So I was back, I was painting houses, making 12 bucks an hour and it was hard work and it was long hours. So I was stuck in this issue where I couldn't build my own business because I was building somebody else's business. So the affiliate marketing wasn't going to work. I knew over time if I built it up, I could get it there, but I was like, I had to do something sooner. So what I did was pivoted. started because I wrote all these articles, right? I knew I could write articles fast and they were pretty good quality. So

I went to this forum on the internet called the Warrior Forum and I answered some posts. So people would communicate back then this before Facebook, all this other stuff. And I would answer a post and then I had a forum signature as they called it. And the forum signature was like, do you want an article written for you? I write them for $3.25 an hour or per article, should say, sorry. So, you know, and I write them fast. And so I, that day I got three clients who hired me each

Paul Povolni (07:56.846)
Yeah, yeah.

Paul Povolni (08:07.652)
wow.

Jason Fladlien (08:16.551)
to write articles for them. And I was like, okay, cool. Cause I knew I could make more money per hour writing articles than I could painting houses. So within seven days I'd quit painting houses and I was writing articles full time. So I would ghost write articles. I would write articles for other people. They would pay me for it. They would put their name on it. And I did that for the next six months. And I made like $40,000 doing that. It was pretty good.

Paul Povolni (08:41.198)
Well, a three-something article.

Jason Fladlien (08:43.911)
I started raising my prices, you know, I got, got bulled. I went to three 50 and I went to $4. I think if I had, I was, I was charging six, seven bucks an article. I mean, I hit the big time.

Paul Povolni (08:45.57)
Okay. I was like, that's a lot of articles.

Paul Povolni (08:55.458)
Wow, that's a lot of articles to make $40,000.

Jason Fladlien (08:59.023)
It was a lot of articles, is why after six months I was like, okay, this is a different kind of hell. It's not painting houses, but it's Groundhog's Day. But here's what was cool. I had a system for writing articles. I could write an article on anything right now. I could write it very fast and it was pretty high quality. And so I was like, I wanna create an ebook detailing the system. So I tried for months and I couldn't do it. I just kept screwing up every time.

Paul Povolni (09:04.706)
Yeah, yeah.

Jason Fladlien (09:26.023)
So I got super desperate and one day I said, it's gonna be done when I stand up. I'm gonna sit down with a blank sheet of paper or a word processor. And when I stand up, I'm gonna sell whatever's done. So I did that. So I sat down and wrote a little six page ebook. And then I went back to the Warrior Forum and you could take out classified ads there for 20 whopping dollars. It was its own little section. And as long as you made it a special offer just to that forum that was better than any offer anywhere else, you could run these things.

Paul Povolni (09:33.634)
Yeah, yeah.

Jason Fladlien (09:53.959)
And I didn't know how to write a sales letter because I'd never written one. So I wrote this sales letter. It was great looking back because I was just like, I was like, hey, listen, I'm, I can't find it. I've searched high and low for it was a forum post. It wasn't like on a web page. It was a forum post. But the gist of it was this, Paul. It was like, I am so confident that the first time you read this guide, I'll cut your article writing time in half. And I'm only going to charge you $4 for you to learn this. And if you don't like it,

Paul Povolni (10:01.444)
Do you still have it?

Paul Povolni (10:07.555)
Yeah.

Jason Fladlien (10:23.655)
I will give you your $4 back. And that was almost all of it. I mean, I think there was a couple bullet points of like, here's what's in the guide. I think there was a couple of proof elements. Here's are the articles I've written in my profile on EZ Articles. You know, are you willing to risk $4? That was the punchline. And here's what was cool, Paul, because social media wasn't a thing. This is before 2.0. This was social media 1.0. People bought the course for $4. It was so stupidly cheap because I was scared out of my mind. I was like,

Paul Povolni (10:52.516)
Yeah.

Jason Fladlien (10:53.447)
I had no confidence in my ability and I was so afraid people would buy it and not like it that I said, let me just price it super low. People bought it, they liked it and they commented. So there was a, it was like a forum post, even though it was an advertisement and I got a lot of social proof and people were saying all these good things and I sold about 2000 copies of that thing within a couple of weeks.

Paul Povolni (11:17.122)
Wow. Wow. So this, this lack of confidence that it would work was that you think that was a result of your, your rap career, your like, what, what, what drove that, that not believing in yourself at that point, do you think?

Jason Fladlien (11:30.127)
I mean, I had no results, so I never had done it before. And every time I tried to do it, I quit and I failed. So it was pure desperation. And it was a lesson that later on I learned, I captured and now I teach is if you make the goal so small, you can't fail. Then the only option is to succeed. And that is really important, especially when you're starting out. So I made it so I couldn't fail without realizing it. I did it in one sitting. I sold it for a really small price. The product was really basic. It wasn't

Paul Povolni (11:32.195)
Yeah.

Jason Fladlien (11:59.665)
how to make money, it was how to write articles fast. I didn't even teach people where to post them. I didn't teach them how to market them. I taught one specific narrow tiny little skill. And I was like, that I think is great because you get momentum. The biggest problem people have is, you know, an object at rest stays at rest. An object in motion stays in motion. This is, you know, basic Newtonian physics. So many people can't get their first win. So then they never win. But if you can get a small win, you get the ball rolling.

Paul Povolni (12:16.196)
Right, right.

Jason Fladlien (12:29.669)
you can add to it and you can add to it and you can add to it. And that's essentially what I did for the next year. I just repeated that process. I said, let me find one thing people are complaining about. Mostly it was time. This takes too long. X takes too long. How could I find a system just to save time? That's it. And then let me document it and then let me sell it at a really low price.

Paul Povolni (12:32.259)
Right.

Paul Povolni (12:37.08)
of-

Jason Fladlien (12:54.279)
Because I just made $8,000, dude, in two weeks for me back then, Iowa boy. I thought I hit the jackpot.

Paul Povolni (12:54.658)
Wow. Yeah. Right.

Yeah. Well, it's kind of, it's interesting what you said there about the small wins, because I think when you have those small wins, it gives you hope. And I think when you have hope, when you have a, an idea that, know what, I can do better. can win. can succeed because I've done this small win. also, gives you, like you said, that momentum to then go on to the next thing. And so you, so after this, after this win, you started finding.

people's problems. Was it stuff that you were, you knew anything about, or was this something that you were just like, sometimes? Okay. So tell me about that.

Jason Fladlien (13:38.503)
Sometimes, yeah. Sometimes, but not always, right? My biggest win that year. So membership sites were all the rage in 2008. So in 2007 in November is when I published my first ebook. So less than a year, but it's 2008. All the rage was membership sites. Like everybody fell in love with this site. It was the AI of its day, right? Like everybody fell in love with this idea. I create a membership site.

people pay me forever, I do the work one time and that's what the market wanted. But here's the problem, Paul. All the software that did it was like 300 bucks per software to buy it and it was unbelievably complicated. It took like six PhDs to zip the thing up. So people would buy the software, get upset at it because they wasted this money and wasted their time and never get it done. So I can't, I remember waking up one morning, I had no solution, but I said, I'm gonna find by the end of the day,

a free plugin solution somewhere on the internet. I am going that that was fully functional, meaning it would create password protected content with individual passwords for individual users. And you had control over it almost as good as a $300 software, but something you could set up as fast as possible. And that was my mission. And it took me all day. I went 12 hours that day researching, testing, trying trial and error.

But by the end of the day, I had found a solution using free resources where you could set up a fully functional membership site in less than seven minutes. I could demo it and show it from start to finish. And you know, I had to find resources that weren't easy to find, that took hours, and then they had no documentation. So I had to document them. So I created this little membership site guide and I sold it for $17. Because you know, again, got...

Paul Povolni (15:04.888)
Wow, wow.

Jason Fladlien (15:22.727)
got the confidence to raise the price up. So I'm at the big ticket $17 now, right? And that thing hit. It hit and people picked it up and started promoting it as affiliates. And so then all of a sudden I was everywhere all at once and I solved this major problem. But that was a problem that that morning, Paul, I had no idea how to do. I didn't know how to do it. I didn't have a membership site set up myself that did that. But by the end of the day,

Paul Povolni (15:24.47)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Right, you had momentum,

Paul Povolni (15:46.755)
Wow.

Jason Fladlien (15:51.867)
I just solved that one major problem and people went nuts with it. What was cool, Paul, and this is why small wins lead to big wins, I had a great reputation at that time because I had released like six products and all of them were really good. People liked them. People had good experience with me. They would say really good things about me. And so either people who knew who I was bought that product and then they told their friends or when people would ask, hey, is this Jason Flavling guy legit? Like people would say, yeah, that guy's really good.

You got to remember Paul, in 2007, people were selling eBooks for $97. In the first 25 % of those eBook was their life story. It was all fluff. It was a history lesson with know how to. So I was doing quality that was multiple times most eBooks for one 20th of the price in some instances. So I really got a reputation real quick, which served me well. But yeah, that hit. So sometimes I would do things I could document. So for example, like

Paul Povolni (16:30.83)
Yeah, yeah.

Jason Fladlien (16:50.243)
guys started to hire me to write emails for them. Here's what I like about emails, Paul. At the time, they were like the wedding photography. Like they were the same work as writing an article, but you could charge five times as much. I don't know why, but people would offer you a lot more money because it's emails now. It's not articles. Just like, know, it's a wedding photographer. It's not a normal photography session. So somehow it's five times as much. And these guys are paying me more.

Paul Povolni (17:01.998)
Yeah, yeah.

Paul Povolni (17:07.235)
right.

Paul Povolni (17:13.732)
Well, do you think that because it was measurable, you can, you can like a, an article is one thing, but an email, you can have a call to action. You could have, you know, different things about it that actually produce something from it. Yeah.

Jason Fladlien (17:25.925)
Yeah, yeah, I think these guys were making money that were creating autoresponders and they wanted to make more money. Whereas people writing article, a lot of these guys were creating what was called made for AdSense sites back then. So they would publish the articles on their site, put AdSense on them and hope the arbitrage from what they paid for the article was less than what they would make in AdSense. So they were playing the game on a low level. These email guys are playing the game on a higher level. So they would pay me more. So, you know, I created an email marketing system.

Paul Povolni (17:47.15)
Yeah.

Jason Fladlien (17:55.279)
documentation on how to write emails. They were not the same as articles. There was a slight difference, but 80 % of the system still applied. And then after I published five ebooks, I wrote an ebook system because like I did it five times, right? And then the next product I liked this fall was how to write sales letters because I had written six sales letters. They were all very successful. So like the derivative of your past success can create the next success. So but I've just in my mind, it was all like, find one problem.

Paul Povolni (18:01.176)
Right.

Jason Fladlien (18:23.663)
solve it one very specific way and try to create the product in one sitting. And I did that for a year. And then just like writing articles, I got burned out and I said, let's do the next thing.

Paul Povolni (18:34.792)
What were some of the other, you mentioned that you did a series of eBooks before you got to the one about the membership. What were some of those like, were those things that you were interested in or was that once again, you saw a problem and you researched it and you created something around it?

Jason Fladlien (18:49.703)
So it would be one of two things. So I would always have an ear to the market. What's something people are complaining about that they would pay money to solve? Like simple things that would be so easy for them to pay money. So like an article writer, if they can save 15 minutes per article and they're writing 10 articles a week, that's a lot of time. Anybody will risk seven bucks to try that out. Easy sell. And so I would look for those problems where people would be like, okay, I'll gamble a couple bucks on the off chance that this might work.

Paul Povolni (19:08.674)
Yeah.

Jason Fladlien (19:19.079)
But I had committed myself to a pace where I would create at least one product a month. So, hey, if I didn't hear that, then I would have to find other things to create. And so I'd always try to go into my leverageable assets. What are proof elements that I have that I could leverage? What are resources or assets I've created along the way that I could utilize, slightly change cosmetically, adjust a little bit, and then put them into a product form?

And that's what I would do to create it. Like one month I created a product called Double Your Productivity, because I could say, here's what I've done over the last seven months and then list everything I've done. And I go, this is my attitude, my philosophy and my approach to be ultra productive. Would you like to know what it is? And then I created a little ebook on how to be productive. And this is just leveraging other results to create new results.

Paul Povolni (19:55.63)
Yeah. Right, right, yeah.

Paul Povolni (20:13.314)
Yeah. What's interesting about that too is, you you said that you were, know, you would have five successes and then you'd write about that success right afterwards. And I think a lot of people feel that, I've got to have years and years and years. I've got to, you know, be in, I've got to be in this thing. I've got to have the history of this thing. I've got, I've got to, you know, just dedicate forever for it, but you were finding that you were just a few steps of other, ahead of others.

And so you provided the information to just kind of help them along. You went miles ahead. You were just a couple of steps ahead, right?

Jason Fladlien (20:50.983)
I had been I remember so like Stomper Net was like the biggest launch of its day way back in the day They did a launch that was just insane and it was so well done and I remember watching it at the time I'd have to go to the Iowa City Library because I didn't have internet at the house that I was staying at this apartment that I was sharing So I'd go down the Iowa City Library. I would watch the videos there. I would go back to the apartment I slept on the floor. I didn't have a bed

And I would just say, God, those guys have it all figured out. If I could do even one one-tenth they did, my life would be perfect, right? You know, and then I ended up, ended up paying me $25,000 to consult with him for Webinar Jam and for Cartra when he created those. We ended up doing the biggest webinar Andy had ever done when we did a webinar for him in 2015. So these guys who were in the game longer than me,

who had been way established, way farther than me and were sitting records in 2006. And I had, you I was driving an 89 Toyota Celica back and forth to the Iowa City Library sleeping on the floor, right? It didn't take me long to catch up to him. And I did it my way. I did it a different way. But if you can give people results and then you can keep doing that, you can go as far as you can. You will not even imagine how far you can go.

as long as you are providing results, people will take you places so incredibly fast that it will blow your mind. you know, either got lucky Paul or combination of skill and luck, I hit upon a way to find and get results for people, very tangible results very quickly. And that's just, I try to live in that zone my whole life and still do.

Paul Povolni (22:38.52)
Yeah. And so, so with these, you know, with these books that you were doing, what was the next big thing that you, that gave you hope for something bigger? Cause you know, you, the, books were great and, know, brought you a lot of success, brought you great income. What was the next thing that kind of took you to the next level?

Jason Fladlien (22:56.655)
Yeah, so was very fortunate after a year of doing all these ebooks. And I started doing audio programs and video programs too, but it was still kind of in the same category. I said, I want to take it to another level. And so I saw a webinar one day as an attendee and I thought, man, this is really cool. It was at the perfect stage where like the technology was just there and the internet connections were just fast enough that this could be the next big thing.

And I said, hmm, maybe there's something here. So I had a follow, I had like 3000, 4000 customers at the time. I emailed my customers and I said, hey, listen, I want to try this new thing out. It's called a webinar. I've never done it before, but if you're willing to entertain me, here's what I'm willing to do, right? I'm going to create a product live on a webinar. So if you show up, I'll give you the recording of that product for free. If you don't, then I'll, if the product's good, I'll sell it to you later, right? Your choice. So I'm like,

Paul Povolni (23:49.593)
Bye.

Jason Fladlien (23:51.495)
Cause I said to the audience, my email list, said, I think this is a way where I can give you more value and give you even better results. But I don't know, I've never done it before. So 17 people joined this webinar. I thought I'd get a lot more, but you can't even give away the secrets of success. Like you gotta like sell it, even if it's free, it's hard to sell. So I had 17 people show up, but hey, 17 souls. That's a lot of souls. So I trained for about.

four hours and people loved it. And here's what was crazy, Paul, is the next day I emailed this list and I said, hey, listen, you missed it. Of the 17 people that showed up, here's what they said. Seven of them or eight of them or nine of them left like the greatest remarks. I said, I'm gonna sell this thing for $47. I'll give you one last chance to get it. It ain't free no more, but it is only $27 for the next 48 hours.

best-selling product ever in terms of conversion for the first 48 hours of a launch. Something people could have got free the day before that they missed, they paid for. So I was feeling good. So my first webinar was purely value and people that showed up got the best deal on it. So 29 days later, and I remember very clearly, I'm like, I had a go-to webinar trial and I had to pay the bill the next day. So I'm like, do I cancel it or do I justify it? I said, let me do something. I,

Paul Povolni (24:52.281)
Wow.

Paul Povolni (24:57.934)
Yeah.

Paul Povolni (25:10.542)
You

Jason Fladlien (25:16.059)
don't cancel this and I can feel good about paying the bill for GoToWebinar. So I emailed my list and I said, hey, listen, one of these products that I sold them, it was a product on how to create products. So, you when I told you earlier, like I had launched five products and then I created a product on how to create products, it was that system, okay? But it was, copywriting. It was my copywriting system. So after I launched, you know, five products, the six products was how I'm writing all these sales letters, right?

Paul Povolni (25:43.47)
Yeah.

Jason Fladlien (25:44.327)
And it was a 12 step process. So I taught people this 12 step process of how I write sales letters. So I told the email list, you know, that book that I sold, whether you bought it or not, I said, I'm going to do the same training as was in that book. The only difference is I'm going to do them over a series of 12 webinars. I'm going to give more depth, more examples. I'm going to be there with you live to answer Q &A with you. But essentially it's a series of 12 webinars and I'm going to charge a whopping hundred and

$47 like I had never charged more than $47 for something at the time Paul. I was nervous And I limited the number of seats and we I sold out in about 40 minutes I was like, okay I'm on to something here, right and then I trained for 12 weeks on a webinar So by the time I was done average webinars about two hours long I had 24 hours of webinar training experience under my belt and a nice little pile of cash from from the launch of it, so

Paul Povolni (26:19.299)
Wow.

Paul Povolni (26:29.922)
Yeah.

Paul Povolni (26:41.721)
Yeah.

Jason Fladlien (26:43.473)
But I sold it from a sales letter, which is interesting. The next go round, so the next one that I did, the next webinar series I did, I did it from a webinar. So I trained on a webinar for 60 minutes and I said, hey, if you like this one session, I'm gonna do eight more on this topic. It's $197. I'd love for you to join me. Special offer, 48 hours, yada, yada, yada. And people bought that like crazy.

Paul Povolni (26:46.38)
Yeah, yeah.

Jason Fladlien (27:09.329)
So I started, I called these E-Classes. I would take a topic, usually the same topic that I sold a $17 book on, transform it into a series of webinars and use a webinar to sell it, which is the easiest sell in the world. Hey, did you like what we just did? Would you like to do it more often? We could go way more in depth. We can't do it all in one session, but we can do it all over a series of sessions. And it just took over for me. And I made my first million dollars running these E-Classes, using a webinar to sell a series of webinars.

Paul Povolni (27:24.748)
You

Jason Fladlien (27:38.629)
And that's where I really started to get good at using webinars. And I did that for like the next two years.

Paul Povolni (27:39.47)
Wow.

Paul Povolni (27:46.05)
Well, let me just backtrack a little bit on something that you said that I think would be very helpful for somebody. First of all, you mentioned that you had an email list. You started collecting that pretty early on, right? Was that from the very first thing you did? You started collecting email addresses.

Jason Fladlien (28:01.703)
I got so lucky, Paul, because there was a way, technically, that I knew through PayPal when you sold the product that would automatically add that person's email to an email list, but I didn't know how to do that. So all I did was on the thank you page say, hey, you bought, I would really love it if you join my email list. And if I ever update the product, I don't know if I will, but if I do, I'll give you the updates on the email list. And I would get about 78 % of people who bought my product to be added to the email list.

Paul Povolni (28:21.901)
Yeah.

Jason Fladlien (28:31.365)
And that's how I built it. I didn't build any email list any other way for the first two years I was in business. You had to buy a product to get on my email list and you had to actively opt in on the thank you page. Like you weren't automatically added to it. Now I will tell you it's better to automatically add it. And these days the kids have got it good Paul because it's like a click of a button. You don't even know what you got. Like we had a program this stuff back in the day and I didn't.

Paul Povolni (28:50.616)
Ha

Paul Povolni (28:55.104)
Right,

Jason Fladlien (28:58.055)
But I still, hey, sometimes, you know, 80 % of the way is better than 0 % of the way, right? Done is better than better. So I was building my list that way. I wasn't doing free lead generation stuff. I wasn't doing any squeeze page style stuff. It was all buy a product to get on my list. So I only had, like I said, 4,000 subscribers, but the responsiveness of that list was greater than people that I knew at the time that had 50 or 100,000 subscribers.

And man, they would keep buying products from me. And we got to go on this journey together. So they got to see me grow. They got to go around for the ride. And it was like a conversation that was unfolding in real time. And it was some of the most powerful marketing that I was ever witness to. None of it was done strategically. But hey, know, the harder you work, the luckier you get,

Paul Povolni (29:39.588)
Yeah, yeah.

Paul Povolni (29:47.876)
Right. Well, and you learned the value of the email list because that was really what kind of set you on the right path and started giving you the people to be a part of these webinars that you're doing. The other thing that I want to talk about is you mentioned you told people you're going to do this 12 week webinar series. Where did the, how did you prepare for that? Because that was something new to you, right? So were you, you know, it was

Jason Fladlien (30:12.806)
Yeah.

Paul Povolni (30:15.14)
You know, did you have 12 weeks of content? How did you prepare for a webinar that's 12 weeks like that early on in your career?

Jason Fladlien (30:23.191)
Yep. So, you know, it was great because I just took the ebook. So I had the 12 step process in it and I put it into a mind map. Nothing high tech, very low tech, right? And then I just padded it out. So instead of giving one example in the ebook, I would give three examples. One of the things, the way my mind works, Paul, I've just been very blessed to have a mind. It's a blessing and it's a curse. So it's not all good, but in this particular aspect, it's really good.

Paul Povolni (30:31.412)
Hahaha.

Jason Fladlien (30:50.031)
I have to break things down into step by step. If I don't have a step by step, I can't do it. And so my mind works, I build a system. And so if I'm gonna write copy, which is very creative and you know, it's something that people say it's like formless and you wait for divine inspiration and yeah, you can. And sometimes I get that, not often, not as often as I would like, but it's like, here's an example of how I would write a headline back in the day.

Paul Povolni (30:56.077)
Yeah.

Paul Povolni (31:11.332)
Yeah.

Jason Fladlien (31:19.417)
I would say, what are the five most common formats of a headline that I see out there? And I would go and I would search it and I would categorize it. And it would fall into one of six categories, six being other. But I discovered there was five things over and over again that were filling the blanks. was like chat GPT is today, only I was doing it in my mind, right? I'm like, every headline I'm going to write is going to be one of these five styles. And there was one style that I could write with if every other style failed. And it was how to do

Paul Povolni (31:41.987)
Yeah.

Jason Fladlien (31:48.951)
something the audience desired in very specific time frame with or without. So either with something cool or without a normal pain point. Right. So it'd be like how to write it, how to write a 400 word article in seven minutes or less, including proofreading and research. That was the headline that I used to sell the article writing product. Right. When I was writing this, the sales letter product, it was how to write a near world class ad in three hours.

Paul Povolni (32:01.731)
Right.

Jason Fladlien (32:18.919)
or less. So it was like, it wasn't perfect. It was good enough, but in this specific time frame. So that was all I was doing. So how to set up a membership site in six minutes and 22 seconds using completely free resources, something like that, right? 80 % of the time, that was the only headline I would write. So I would teach people, hey, if all else fails, write this headline, but here are the five types. And then the opening paragraph.

Paul Povolni (32:37.57)
Yeah, yeah.

Paul Povolni (32:41.71)
Yeah.

Jason Fladlien (32:48.491)
what they call the leading copy. I found there was like six different ways to open that lead. So I taught all six, but I would give one example when I would teach it in the ebook. When I would do it on the webinar, I would give like three examples. And even better, Paul, I would have people bring me their examples and I would teach on their examples. So give me your headlines. And then I would help them with the headline. Give me your leads, bullet points. Give me your bullet points. I'll show you the techniques of how I write bullet points.

Paul Povolni (32:57.102)
Yeah.

Paul Povolni (33:10.521)
Yeah.

Jason Fladlien (33:18.311)
guarantees. I'll show you how I write guarantees. So that's how I did it. And that's how I did everything. So no matter what I was doing, I had a system and the system was step by step and each step had like you do it one of these three ways and end out, you know, flip a coin, throw a dart at the wall, just grab something and keep going. I did that for years. Now, Paul, when you become unconsciously competent, then you can take it to a deeper level because I don't have systems.

Paul Povolni (33:36.205)
Yeah.

Jason Fladlien (33:44.135)
like that anymore that I follow consciously for most things, new things that I'm learning I still do. But until you get to that level of unconscious competence, this is the best way to do it. And so that's how I was teaching it. So it's really easy actually. The hardest part is, and this is something I didn't know until later, is 80 % of the people that pay you money for a course like this quit showing up by the third session.

Paul Povolni (34:07.78)
Wow. Wow. And so, did you find also that in doing, you know, say day one of this, this, series of webinars that you would have people ask questions, which would then fuel day two, you know, or, or give you, know, and so, so, you know, because I want, I want this to be a big head smack moment for somebody when it comes to doing webinars. And I want to talk about your million dollar first million dollar thing that you did.

Jason Fladlien (34:22.937)
yeah.

Paul Povolni (34:34.936)
But they get nervous about the idea of doing a webinar. And webinars, guess, now we sometimes do, I guess, challenges and they're similar to webinars, I guess, in a way. But people get nervous about having enough content or having enough stuff to put in it. And it sounds like what you were doing is you were taking this ebook that you created, this knowledge base, this stuff that you had already had a good understanding about, and then just

filled it in with more details. What else can you, how else can you encourage the person that has never done a webinar or maybe did a webinar and they feel they failed, how would you encourage them to take the right next steps?

Jason Fladlien (35:18.471)
Yeah, so I think what happens is people want to fight the black belt in the karate dojo on their first lesson, right? And then they get they get humbled very quickly. So they jump straight to I'm going to do a sales webinar. I'm going to sell an audience that I don't have, by the way. So cold audience that I'm going to sell on a webinar, a product that maybe not as even proven in the marketplace yet. Yeah, congratulations. You're a fellow 100 % of the time if you're going to do that. Well, 99.9 % of the time somebody is going to invent a pet rock and get lucky. But

Paul Povolni (35:46.073)
Yeah.

Jason Fladlien (35:48.879)
mostly you're gonna fail. So if you listen to my story, my first webinar was to a warm audience, people who knew me. So it's like telling your mom, asking your mom, hey mom, am I good looking? She's gonna say, yeah, of course you are. Every woman's gonna love you, right? She's your mom. So I was like, do your webinar in front of an audience who thinks you're already awesome and then that's like, you can't fail. Second, make the stakes really low.

Paul Povolni (36:01.71)
Ha ha.

Jason Fladlien (36:14.521)
My stakes were if you show up, I'll give you something for free that other people will have to pay for. So prove your value. And this is no wonder, Paul, people struggle so much because they're trying to be something they aren't. Only a psychopath can do that comfortably. So be who you are as authentically as possible. And so I showed up and said, can I provide value? I didn't know if I could. So let me see if I could.

But I set up the situation so the audience knew going in, hey, if this works, great. If it doesn't work, it'll be entertaining to watch me fail. And are you willing to risk an hour of your time or a half an hour of your time? And 17 beautiful, wonderful souls were, but the rest of my customers were not. So I didn't focus on who I wasn't serving. I focused on who I was serving.

Paul Povolni (36:50.157)
You

Right, right.

Jason Fladlien (37:06.437)
And the way you get to a million people is to first get to one person. That's the same way you get to a million dollars is first get to one dollar. You can't, no matter what you multiply zero by, it's still zero. And you know, one multiplied by anything is at least that thing. But if you get two, then it doubles. That's insane. And so people, most people aren't gonna care about your webinar. So you're not gonna succeed or fail. You're gonna be ignored by the marketplace. That's almost an inevitability.

So you say, okay, the stakes are low anyway, so there's no possible way I can get hurt. And let me set it up so I can provide value. Because if I can provide a little bit of value, we can compound that. But if I can't provide any value, then I'm not ready to be in the big time yet. But I will tell you, your sincerity to serve and a little bit of extra research than the person you're teaching to will provide value. If for no other reason you get on a webinar and just encourage them. If you said, hey, listen,

Paul Povolni (38:00.056)
Yeah.

Jason Fladlien (38:04.027)
You got this, I'm here for you. If you try this and struggle, drop me an email. I'll take a look at it. I'll cheerlead you on from the side. And people listening, Paul, right now, some of them gonna get nervous. They're like, that sounds like it's gonna take up a lot of time. I hope you have so many people that hit you up and look to you for advice that is the best problem in the world you can have. Because the worst problem in the world you can have is nobody cares to hear what you have to say and offer.

You probably won't have that many at first, but you know what happens? Say you get three people, Paul, and you completely change their life because you're there for them and you support them. You are going to get a reputation and then you are going to feel compelled to get on that webinar because you know, every minute that you're not on that webinar, that's future people that will not have the impact that these people you just gave the impact to have.

Paul Povolni (38:35.46)
Yeah.

Paul Povolni (38:58.2)
Yeah, that's amazing. And so I love that you're saying providing value because I have been on webinars that really all they do is they. Agitate the watt or the problem. And then you end the webinar and you're like, do know what I have really don't have a whole lot of actionable stuff to go from there. It is.

Is that a trend that you're seeing or is that a strategy? Do you like that strategy? Do you agree with it or do you think there's better strategies?

Jason Fladlien (39:28.377)
I hate it. It's like the way I call it, Paul, is they hit you over the head with a mallet and they sell you the Tylenol, right? Does it work? It works pretty damn good, unfortunately. It works in the sense of once you burn down an audience, if you can find another audience, it can continue to work, which you have to turn and burn. I don't like that as a business model, even ethics aside, I think it's unethical, but let's just say ethics aside, it's pragmatically a terrible business strategy.

to burn your customers, trick them into buying from you, and then hope either they don't find out or by the time they find out you can replace them with new customers. I don't think it's a very good long-term strategy. So, you know, this is taught by many people. It was taught back when I first started and I was so glad I was not of that generation because I could start from scratch. You know how Tesla came into the automotive industry and then they took it over because they weren't Ford who'd been in the game for a hundred years.

Ford was like, this thing has to have handles on it. You can't open a car door without a handle. And Tesla's like, why not? I don't have these biases. I'm the new kid. So that was me in webinars. I was like, I don't have to get people all dressed up with no place to go and then sell them the map. Instead, I could try different ways that I felt could convert justice good without being deceptive. So by the way, Paul, the first webinars I ever did, this was the intro to them.

Paul Povolni (40:25.336)
Yeah, yeah.

Paul Povolni (40:29.7)
Right.

Paul Povolni (40:35.342)
Yeah.

Paul Povolni (40:42.178)
Right.

Jason Fladlien (40:53.125)
I would say something along these lines. said, I have two agendas here today. My first is to give you the best experience you've ever had when it comes to X, Y, Z, whatever the topic was. And then I'd say, my second agenda here is to sell you something. I have an offer and I'd love for you if you're the right person to buy it at the end of the webinar. However, here's the deal. If I first don't make good on my promise to teach you how to do X, Y, and Z, then I do not want you to buy what I'm going to sell at the end of the webinar. However, if by some small miracle,

Paul Povolni (41:05.964)
You

Jason Fladlien (41:21.991)
I'm able to actually show you and you agree with me that this is the best lesson you've ever had on XYZ, then will you at least do me the favor of listening to my offer with an open mind and then if it makes sense, purchasing it. Do we have a deal? And 99.9 % of people in the first two minutes of my webinar would say, yeah, that sounds great. You blow my mind with the best lesson I've ever had on XYZ and I'll be more than happy to be pitched to. And I'm like, great.

Paul Povolni (41:37.73)
Wow.

Paul Povolni (41:43.682)
You

Paul Povolni (41:49.698)
Right.

Jason Fladlien (41:50.457)
It made the webinar easier to write, Paul, because I had a target to aim for. I just got to show them the best lesson ever on XYZ and then the one to hear myself pitch. So it was complete transparency. And it was now here's the problem with this, Paul, especially because I didn't have a book to read. Like, you know, I wrote the book later on. It's called One to Many, but I didn't have a book. I didn't have a rule guide. I didn't have anything I could buy. I to make it up. So it was 10 times harder initially to do it this way.

But then it got me a hundred X results. So it ended up being easier, you know, eating healthy is harder at first, but your life gets better over a period of time if you do it. And so this was the equivalent of that. It was harder at first, but it became easier. Now I've developed the systems and I train and teach people on these systems. So it should be just as easy. But that's how I came at it. I'm very happy, Paul, because of things like YouTube and podcasts.

Paul Povolni (42:21.838)
Yeah, yeah.

Jason Fladlien (42:46.499)
Information is no longer nearly as scarce as it used to be. So a lot of these guys doing webinars would hoard the information and people that have a scarcity of information are desperate to buy any information. But these days information is no longer scarce. And so people are being humbled on webinars these days that they're trying that old model because it doesn't work in a new world. Whereas the model I use works even better because with all that free information out there, people are still struggling to take action upon it.

Paul Povolni (43:10.201)
Yeah.

Jason Fladlien (43:15.427)
And so my webinars are designed to remove the gap between information and implementation. So my webinars work better than ever.

Paul Povolni (43:24.004)
And I would imagine too, with starting the webinar with telling them what to expect and that you're going to make an offer at the end. Probably also as somebody teaching a webinar or leading a webinar, it takes that pressure off you thinking to yourself through the entire webinar, I'm going to have to pitch them at the end. I'm going to have to pitch them at the end. Because you've already pitched them. You've already told them that there's going to be an offer at the end. probably I would imagine that it takes a little bit of that pressure.

throughout the thing and you're kind of more relaxed into it.

Jason Fladlien (43:56.667)
Yeah. Yeah. And that's what I needed when I first started, because I was scared out of my mind to sell. I mean, you face rejection. Some people will get mad, like, especially if you use a bait and switch model where they're like, they come not expecting to be sold. And then they're very disappointed when you pull the rug out from under them. not only could you be rejected, you could get yelled at. People might hate you and they might say mean things about you on the internet. So it made me feel very comfortable doing what I was doing.

Paul Povolni (44:17.528)
Yeah.

Jason Fladlien (44:24.997)
I was getting permission immediately from the beginning. then later on, when I trained and taught on this stuff, people also became much more comfortable doing webinars the way I taught. And then they got better results. I would do the same thing on the transition. like, there's a point on a webinar when you're selling where you have to change from, you know, trainer or content provider into salesperson. And a lot of people struggle with that. And so, and I would develop a transition because I didn't know how to do that at first either.

Paul Povolni (44:35.032)
Yeah.

Paul Povolni (44:48.792)
Right, right.

Jason Fladlien (44:53.735)
So I developed this transition which all the biggest marketers in the world now use because they studied and they learned it from me But it was basically what I called the two choices I say we now have two choices to a choice number one I can leave you on your own and then hope and pray that on your own with your own resources That you're gonna succeed with this or the second option I have is I can give you every single thing I've ever developed

to help you and be successful with this and I can support you along the way and I can bring accountability to you and I can be accountable towards your success. That's the second option. Would you like to know what the second option is or would you prefer to do it on your own? And everybody who's reasonable is like, at least give me the option. Let me decide whether I want to pay to get there sooner and easier and quicker or if I want to save money and do it all on my own. Because, you know, I thought about this, I'm like, if I develop

Paul Povolni (45:30.095)
Ha ha ha.

Paul Povolni (45:36.472)
Yeah.

Jason Fladlien (45:45.029)
all these resources which took me say 10 hours to develop. And you had to develop them yourself again and you could and I could teach you how to develop all of those. That's 10 hours of your time if you do it as fast as I do it and assuming you could do it to the level that I could do it at, right? Or if you pay me a little bit of money, I just give you the damn resources, right? It's like, come on. It's like, but I'm not incentivized to develop these resources in some instances, I can't do it.

Paul Povolni (46:03.683)
Right, right.

Yeah.

Jason Fladlien (46:14.247)
because it costs me money to develop it. But if I know I can sell them and recoup some of the cost of development and I'm incentivized because I can make profit from it and therefore I can give you better resources than you could develop on your own, then only the person who has absolutely no money whatsoever will not buy. Anybody else who's qualified, time is more expensive to them than money. So they'll want to at least have the opportunity to spend money to save time.

Paul Povolni (46:40.526)
Right.

Jason Fladlien (46:41.967)
And that's what that transition would do. But the transition was like, it put you in the state of mind to realize what you were doing. You're not taking something from somebody, you're not taking somebody's money. What you're doing is you're giving them an option other than their time and their effort to get the result. You're giving them a resource. And that's like, if done correctly, God bless. Like imagine, Paul, if we didn't have the resource to do a podcast like this, if we had to create our own microphones.

if we had to develop our own streaming platform technology, right? If we had to create the headphones and the laptop, like, thank God we can spend money for these solutions.

Paul Povolni (47:09.334)
Right?

Yeah, yeah.

Paul Povolni (47:19.17)
Right?

So when you did your first webinar, how did you get past or how did you figure out what would happen at the end? Because if you're sharing everything from your latest book and you're augmenting it with additional examples and whatever, the offer at the end for the person that maybe has never done a webinar, they're thinking, well, if I give them everything in the webinar, what am I going to sell them? What's going to be the offer at the end? And so how do you kind of figure out

Jason Fladlien (47:43.621)
Yeah. Yeah. Sure. Yeah. Good question.

Paul Povolni (47:51.778)
the structure of a webinar.

Jason Fladlien (47:53.797)
Yeah. So most things you couldn't give them everything in an hour, even if you tried your hardest, right? Like if I'm to teach them how to do a webinar, like I need about 15 hours really, truly, like to teach them everything. Now, you know, I can get results sooner than that, but if I'm baking on your success, I'm going to give you all the value that I possibly can. And so even if I attempted to do it all in an hour, it'd be impossible, just couldn't do it. So in most instances, even you at your very best,

Paul Povolni (48:02.052)
I'm Ryan.

Jason Fladlien (48:22.213)
couldn't do it in an hour, even if you tried. So that's the first thing. The second thing, and this is even more important than what I just said, is what stops people from a success often isn't anything other than a limiting belief. So I'll give you an example. If I gave you the best strategy in the world, but you didn't feel confident that you could execute upon it, you're not going to. So the limiting belief there is the lack of confidence in your own abilities.

So oftentimes, the first thing we have to train upon in a webinar, and this is what becomes the free webinar, is the removing of the biggest constraint that stops you from going forward. So we spend the most time on transformation, not on information. We work the transformation on the webinar, and then we provide the information as the product once the transformation has occurred. And then the information is basically, if you're going to do it on your own, you now know how to do it.

If you wanna get there easier, sooner, faster with more support, you know the cost of that. So you can compare the two costs to each other. And then there's a third strategy too, Paul, which is this, is once you solve one problem, it can create another problem. And then that problem they could pay for. So I'll give you an example. I can teach somebody manually how to do a process that's highly technical. And now they know how to do it, but the next problem they're gonna have...

is they're going to have to decode and use that tech and follow along. And so I can sell them a software so I can teach them how to do it manually. And that's a value add. It's free. You don't have to pay anything for it. You can get the result. It's 100 % transparent. And then you can buy the software where you push a button or two and you get you get a better result. Like, remember, I was painting houses, right? I could paint it with a brush. It would take five times as long and it would be 150 coverage. Or I could use a spraying machine.

Paul Povolni (49:54.871)
Right.

Paul Povolni (50:09.666)
Yeah, yeah.

Jason Fladlien (50:13.519)
get five times the code of paint and get it done five times as fast. And so it's like, that's what we sell them. We show them how to do it for free. And then we allow them to compare it to a paid solution. So if you're selling a service, it's the same thing. It's like, here's how to cut your own hair. And now I'm a barber, I'll cut your hair for you. I mean, I'm not saying you really, you don't sell hair cutting over the internet, right? But you get the point.

Paul Povolni (50:19.863)
Right.

Paul Povolni (50:32.701)
Hahaha

Jason Fladlien (50:36.023)
is I can show you how to do it for free and then give you the option where I can just do it for you. It's funny because the more you show somebody how to do it on their own, the more the market would rather pay you to do it for them. So that's another strategy as far as a webinar model goes that people get very excited about. The more I teach people how to do webinars on their own, the more clients come to me with big piles of cash wanting me to do the webinars for them because they can appreciate

Paul Povolni (50:36.366)
Yeah. Yeah.

Jason Fladlien (51:04.337)
just how much effort is involved because I've educated them on everything that goes into the process. But here's what's great. At the same time for the next hungry up-and-comer who hasn't quite made it yet and can't afford my fees, which are large admittedly, I'm still giving him game. He can go out there and make money to afford my fees. He can buy the lower ticket stuff. He can buy the mid ticket stuff. And so there's always room for every section of the market.

Paul Povolni (51:11.396)
Yeah.

Paul Povolni (51:27.074)
Right.

Jason Fladlien (51:31.697)
So the webinar can teach people a value that in and of itself can stand alone, but can also set up the opportunity for them to decide if an investment is an even smarter strategy. And I let the user decide, I just give them more choice.

Paul Povolni (51:48.354)
Yeah. I love, I love what you said about, you know, you, you actually solve a problem within the webinar and then that, you know, they're fine. They're happy. They're glad they pay. They're glad they're attended, but it also then, that they've got a next level problem or next level thing that needs to be solved. And that's what you sell them. Right. Is, is, do I understand that correctly?

Jason Fladlien (52:09.285)
Yep. Yeah, I mean, like if I make you a million dollars, Paul, the problem you have is you got to pay taxes on it, Amongst many other problems that you'll have with a million dollars. Like the biggest problem of having a million dollars is you don't have two million dollars. So it's like not two million dollars is the new goal, right? So like, anytime you solve anything, you create a new series of problems. I can teach you how to source products on Amazon and you can do it on your own. But then the next step is how do I get traffic to those products on Amazon?

Paul Povolni (52:18.86)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Jason Fladlien (52:38.789)
And then after you deal with Amazon, then the next step is how do I do it on my own e-commerce site? Right. And then the next step on that is how do I get it into retail? anything is like that. There's not a thing podcasting. We could teach people for an hour on the perfect podcast topic, like how to come up with your podcast theme and topic and branding.

Paul Povolni (52:42.958)
Right, right.

Jason Fladlien (52:59.983)
We could teach that for an hour if we're lucky, like if we're really lucky, we can maybe get it in an hour, but then that still doesn't solve all the other problems of podcasting. How do you get an audience to the podcast? Do you have, do you get guests on the podcast? How do you market the podcast? How do you monetize the podcast? Right. That's every other problem that you're going to create. But if somebody feels confident, regardless of whether they go and do it, if they feel confident that if everybody who's taught me how to do podcasting, Paul has made me the most comfortable.

then if I'm ever going to invest in any resource to help me with podcasting, I'm going to first turn to you. And hopefully you have something, right? Because if you don't, I've got to cross your name off the list and go to somebody who I'm less interested in spending money with. But I'm going to spend my money anyway, if it's that important to me.

Paul Povolni (53:42.018)
Yeah, yeah.

Paul Povolni (53:51.362)
Yeah, that's, that's pretty powerful. And so I think for some people that's, that's a pretty big, head smack alone is realizing that, you know, the, the offer is more of what you just did, right? It's just the next level. It's the next iteration. It's the next, more of what they've already just heard, but you've actually solved a problem within the webinar and that's what gives you the authority and that's what people trust in. And so, you know, going back to a little bit of your story and so,

You mentioned you did these series of webinars and then you hit your first million. What, what was that from one webinar? that a collection of all the webinars that you were doing? What, what got you to that first, like you were selling $197 per webinar. Like what got you to that next level?

Jason Fladlien (54:38.331)
Yeah. So I did make a million on a series of different webinars. We got it to about a $500 price point. And then what made the difference is when I got into software. So I started selling software, which was easier to sell than anything else on the webinar, to the point I was making is I could show people how to do things manually and then give them the option to push buttons. And that went really well.

And so I got my first million dollar webinar off of software just in and of itself. And then what opened the door for that is this affiliate. Yep. I partnered up with my business partner in 2010 and WordPress back then powered 25 % of the internet. So I had this feeling that if I could create a plugin that would clone WordPress sites, which was very hard to do back then.

Paul Povolni (55:12.408)
Was this a software that you created or was it just an affiliate?

Jason Fladlien (55:31.767)
And then I could show people not just to back it up because that's boring. Like, our entrepreneurs, they want to back stuff up. They want to make money. So I showed them on a webinar five ways to make money by cloning WordPress blogs. And then if they wanted to use my tool to clone them, they could pay us, I think $77 was how much we sold that on a webinar. By the way, nobody was selling software on a webinar back then. We were the first to do it. So my business partner got the software created and I sold it. And so we would develop for the next year multiple different WordPress plugins.

and then we would get on webinars and we would sell them and it was so great because we would teach people, God, if you could only do XYZ one, two, three, wouldn't life be great? Like, you know, here's what you got to do to back up a WordPress site right now. It's really simple. It's only 27 steps, right? And they're all very technical and they're all very manual and people pay people money to back it up because it's that complicated. Or let me show you how we do it. We upload this file here, we push this button and then we grab it and we put it over there. Now that you know how to do this, let me show you five ways you can make money do it.

And then I showed them five ways on the webinar and then I'd sell them the software. What was great about this, Paul, is it gave us the capability. Now that we knew how to develop software, somebody would come up with a product that was really good, but it had a gap in it. So it'd be educational, but lack software. So what I would do is get the software developed, sell it on a webinar, selling their product. So I would be an affiliate saying, hey, this is a really cool system.

I learned it from this guy. Let me break it down to you why it's so powerful. And if you buy it through me for free, you get this software. Can't buy the software on its own. You can get it for free though when you buy this guy's stuff over here. And then that's what we started doing. And that was our biggest win. We did a $9.8 million webinar in eight days where we sold somebody else's product and we stacked a series of bonuses of things that you couldn't buy anywhere you could get for free.

when you bought somebody else's product. But again, Paul, this is just trading up. I took a skill set, learned it, leveraged it, added something to it, learned it, leveraged it, added something to it. And I went from the span in 2007 writing articles for couch cushion money, 2015, $9.8 million in eight days. It's a record that still stands in the affiliate space 10 years later now. But that's to me, the ultimate head smack is.

Paul Povolni (57:50.98)
Wow.

Jason Fladlien (57:55.397)
You take a penny and you double it and you keep doubling it. In 30 days, you got over a million dollars, my friend.

Paul Povolni (58:04.292)
Now you've done a lot more than a million dollars for a webinar. What's your biggest webinar?

Jason Fladlien (58:08.561)
So we did a launch a couple of years ago to $57.9 million in 226 days. So day one was idea, day 226 was $57.9 million. And there wasn't a single technique that I invented in that launch. It was a combination of multiple techniques that I had learned, tested and perfected over the series of years before it combined with a lot of luck, right? It was COVID, people were inside.

They had nowhere to go. And I was perfectly poised to take advantage of that. I'm the only marketer to this day, that Zoom has brought in to train its own people on how to do webinars. And so Zoom was an obscure little thing before COVID. And then it became the thing that my kids used for birthday parties during COVID. And we were properly positioned to take advantage of Zoom better than anybody. So everything was timing. So when you combine the best preparation,

Paul Povolni (58:53.081)
Wow.

Right?

Jason Fladlien (59:06.437)
with an opportunity that only happens once in maybe a lifetime, maybe not, I don't know. Yeah, then you can do crazy things regardless of where you come from or who you are. And that's the beauty of it. But again, it's heart centered around value. If you can actually show somebody that you can help them and then leverage that, that's the most rarest thing in this business, my friend. And you get that and then you can go anywhere once you have it.

Paul Povolni (59:36.717)
So what was different apart from COVID between the $57 million webinar to the 17 people that came to your first one?

Jason Fladlien (59:48.729)
I mean, lots of things.

You know, we had affiliates that promoted that. Affiliates promote us because we have a reputation. The reputation is not only will we make you a lot of money if you promote us, but also at the same time, you'll take care of our customers. So we had that. We had the experience of working with affiliates. You know, I have a bunch of employees now, so I can duplicate efforts I couldn't do before when I was on my own. Just even the reputation.

Like if Flatland's attached to it, like it's overstated, Paul. Like some people think I can just look at a PowerPoint and it spits out money. I mean, I wish it was that easy. Like, but the legend is the legend. And so having those things in place certainly helped. And then again, confidence, right? The biggest mistake Paul people make with confidence is they have this if-then fallacy. They say, when I get results, then I'll be confident. That's a conundrum.

Because you need results to be confident. Well, how are you going to get results? You have to be confident before you get the result. That's the problem. But nobody knows how to do that. So confidence is a state of mind. And that's like, it's a state of mind until you have the results. And then when you have the results. So at first I had that state of mind. Well, the state of mind was let me create a situation where I couldn't lose. I could only win. The degree is only of how much. But then after you get the results,

Paul Povolni (01:00:57.378)
Right, right.

Jason Fladlien (01:01:16.569)
Now you're like Michael Jordan, it doesn't matter how many shots he misses, he's confident he's gonna hit the next shot. So now I come in with the attitude of, okay, I know I can do this. And I don't have that friction that slows me down anymore, that slows so many people down. There's no hesitation, there's no questioning or concern or worry, it's just straight up, how are we gonna do this? Also, you we have assets that we can leverage that we've, know, one over here with this thing slightly re...

purpose it, put it over here, we also have money too. So we can put money behind the thing. And that helps, it doesn't help as much as people think it does, but it does help. So one of the things that I learned early on, Paul, is if I could reinvest some of my profits back into my offer, I could engineer a better offer. And so we knew that with this launch that we were doing, we would put money back into it.

Paul Povolni (01:01:57.762)
Yeah.

Jason Fladlien (01:02:11.505)
So we were able to then deliver better results for the customers because we were investing more in the deliveries of the products and the bonuses to those customers. And then that helps too. But at the same time, we also just hit the right trend, right time, right place. If you're always out there, inevitably you'll back in and you'll fall into a pit of money as long as you're always out there because then the time and place will find you. But until then, you're out there making your due.

Paul Povolni (01:02:40.035)
Yeah.

Jason Fladlien (01:02:41.189)
Just being present in the marketplace is my biggest secret. I've been at it for 16 years, going on year 17. 80 % of winning is showing up. I just show up every single day. Some days are better than others and occasionally one day is better than most people's lifetimes, but you just keep going, right?

Paul Povolni (01:02:59.192)
Yeah, yeah.

Wow. So as we wrap this up, and we could probably go for another hour, but I do want to wrap this up. What's a head smack that I haven't asked you about or a question I haven't asked you about that you'd like to share as we wrap this up?

Jason Fladlien (01:03:19.013)
Hmm, I have the perfect one. So here's what webinars have done for me more than anything else. Very early on in my career, I would get on these webinars and I would run out of slides and there would still be like 52 people there and they'd still be asking questions on these live webinars. And I would hang in with them and I'd answer every single question. And sometimes I'd go on for two hours with four people. And I did it, I'm.

I'm a very practical guy. So at first I'm like, if I can sell one of these people a $500 product in two hours, that's 250 bucks an hour, man. That's pretty good. I'm not going to turn that down, especially back in 2010, right? Like I was like, hell yeah, bring it on. So to me, beyond the immediate, I didn't care. But what I discovered was doing this for a year straight, two things. One thing was,

Paul Povolni (01:03:56.846)
Yeah, yeah.

Paul Povolni (01:04:01.898)
You

Jason Fladlien (01:04:11.953)
There's no better way to show your audience you care than to stay with them longer. Like you can't tell them that, you have to show them that. And so I, with my audience, regardless of what I was teaching, showed them that I was willing to hang in with them longer. So I got more business because people saw this guy don't give up on me. So that was the first head smack. It was like, okay, I just got to show I care. How do I show I care? Hang in there longer, right?

Now works well on webinars, because if it's 10 people, it's worth an hour. If it's one person, it's harder to justify that. But here's what's even better. I learn more about why people buy and the objections they truly, absolutely have in hour four of a webinar, when we're working with them and working with them and working with them. That gives me more insight into how people buy than anything I've ever learned anywhere else, from anywhere else or from any book or anything I practiced on my own.

Because in hour four is when you truly have people feel vulnerable and safe enough to reveal to you what's in their heart. And so all the biggest wins I've had in my life have came as a result of being on these webinars and having these conversations with people and saying, that's what really stops people from buying. this is a huge objection that I'm not properly addressing right now. How could I address that?

And then I go to the drawing board and I try something out. It's where I've gained the most empathy, Paul, for my audience. Like I understand their struggles deeper than anybody, because I've been there with them longer than anybody has. And so when I write that webinar, I can reach into the heart and soul of the marketplace and put it on the slides, because I have it in me, because I've had that experience of being there with them. And so to me, that's the ultimate head smack is like, you want to help people? No.

Paul Povolni (01:05:44.793)
Wow.

Jason Fladlien (01:06:07.941)
what their problems are better than anybody else does. And then you can solve them better than anyone else can.

Paul Povolni (01:06:23.48)
You froze up. So man, this has been amazing. you know, before we wrap up, do want to, for you to share about your book, where they can get it. And if they need to get ahold of you or follow your adventures, what's the best way to do that?

Jason Fladlien (01:06:24.676)
Now, now.

Jason Fladlien (01:06:39.153)
Great. So my book's called One to Many. Get it on Amazon. I set you back like nine bucks if you get the Kindle version. It has all the stuff. I worked on the whole strategy of how to do webinars in that book. It's really good. Highest rated book on Amazon on webinars. And then follow me on Instagram, please. I just believe it or not started social media in the last year. I've done all this without social media. It blows my mind. mean, I'm not...

bragging. I feel kind of dumb that I didn't use it yet but hey like you can't be perfect so at Jason Flatlin on Instagram make me very happy we're almost at 10,000 subscribers now Paul so I'm really excited about that.

Paul Povolni (01:07:19.78)
That's awesome. Well, Jason, this has been amazing. Thank you so much for being on and we'll have to do this again and even dig a little deeper into webinars and just a few more strategies that people just appreciate. And I think we'll change their life as it did for you and for those that you've been able to help along the way. Thank you, Jason. You have an amazing day, man. This has been amazing.

Jason Fladlien (01:07:41.637)
You too, Paul. Thank you so much.