I asked, “What’s up?”.

“Oh, I’m on a 7 day fast, ” Charlie said.

“WTF. Fer reals,” I said.

“Yea, while I was going through some things last year this was one of the few experiences that really helped make my life better,” Charlie said.

It also gave him mental clarity like nothing else which made me curious to try.

I decided that since I’ve done a 24 hour fast before, going for 60 hours would be pushing myself to the limit.

So for 60 hours I was in. Queue weekend…

For the first hours of the fast I was gold. This will be cake I thought (pun-intended).

I did a 14 mile bike ride and then some light walking.

Bad idea.

“The wall” hit me around 4pm.

Tired, low energy, just low everything!

Towards night time I could feel my stomach rumbling but it wasn’t unbearable.

Sunday is where it got really challenging.

Stupid me decided a 4 mile hike and 3 hours of disc golf were a great idea. They weren’t.

My energy was very low and I got extremely light headed whenever I tried to stand up.

This was a rough day, I’d go in-and-out of hunger and got weak very quickly throughout the day when I normally wouldn’t.

As night began I was extremely productive with work and creative with my writing. Maybe cause it was hard for me to move so typing on my couch seemed easier than usual.

The day was near done but I couldn’t sleep…

And I couldn’t sleep and it continued. Shit.

Then my heart started acting a bit crazy. Beating extremely slowly but very strong like I’ve never felt before.

It scared me. I searched online for what a normal heart beat should be which is 60-100.

Checked my pulse which was 68 and then tried to rest.. Finally around 2:30am I passed out.

BUT woke up again at 3:42am.

My heart was going all zany again. WTF is going on. I got a bit scared.

Internally I was debating: “No way I can break my fast. I committed to myself, my fasting partner (very helpful) and others that I’d see this through to the end.”

Most of us think we are stubborn and I’m no exception.

I had to ponder if it was worth it to potential damage myself long-term vs the ego that was challenging me at that moment.

I also struggled with maybe this is just the hard part I have to get past and suck it up.

My heart kept throbbing…

So I made the executive decision to make some oatmeal.

The downside risk of dying was not worth trying to reach an arbitrary goal.

…I still feel some guilt today for not going all the way.

Noah’s famous oatmeal

I felt better nearly instantly.

Lost 7 pounds (149) after not eating for 50 hours.

What can YOU learn from this?

Discipline is good. I’m super glad I had the self control to not eat and reinforced that I can do this in other parts of my life. Short term not having discipline is okay but the long-term reward from it will make you much more likely to get what you want.

Reading is shit. Experience is gold. You can read about how to start a business or a diet or anything you’ve been avoiding doing forever. The best way I’ve found to truly internalize knowledge is to experience it yourself.

Food = Energy. I never looked at food like gas to a car. When you give your body food it’s basically converted to energy so you can do the things you want it to do. Better food = better energy.

Question your habits. I’m SO used to just eating at put-food-in-my-mouth o’clock. Know what I mean?? It’s getting dark so that must mean it’s dinner time. But are you really hungry? This experience reset my expectations to really question if I’m hungry at that moment or not. (Back in 2008 I wrote a book review on Mindless Eating. Check it out for some healthy eating tips.)

Simplify your decisions. Yesterday, I realized while snacking that it’s easier to not have to decide with food. With fasting, I knew I wouldn’t eat but snacking on jerky yesterday I had to figure out how much I wanted to eat. This made me realize why the 100 calorie Almond packs are so powerful. If you know the decision will be hard or uncertain, figure out how you can pre-commit or reduce having to decide when you don’t want to.

Would I recommend this for you to do?

HELL no, if you want to do it as a diet. It’s not a bad kickstarter to a diet but it’s definitely not sustainable.

Yes, if you want to explore how far you can go, become more aware of when you actually need to eat, and want a challenge.

Would I do this again?

Yes, I plan on fasting for only 24 hours once a month. Less for the challenge and more for the reminder that I don’t really need to eat as much and bring my  awareness of food to the front of my mind. It was amazing how much food consumed my thoughts when I didn’t have it for only 2 days…

Okay, action time. Leave a comment committing to fast for 24 hours. ANYONE who posts that they do it and what they learned about themselves I’ll personally mail you something. International people too!

What is it?

…Rubs hands together while I use my mind reading skills….

You go look for other books by that author.

Why do you think I have bought 5 of Seth Godin’s books?

Point being is that if people like your stuff they want more.

At the exact moment your customer is interacting with or just found your biz, they are MOST excited!

So you want to funnel them into other FUN experiences with you instead of letting them go.

They WANT IT.

Create a funnel marketing plan to connect them to other fun activities (and beneficial to you).

Let me show you a real example so that you can use this in your business!

While at Mint.com, people signed up to find out when we would launch:

(Click here to check out the other original landing pages for Mint)

Imagine what a visitor is thinking:

“Damn this is tight. I can’t wait to find out when this goes live…”

After someone submits their email, most companies just ask them to confirm their email and go about their day.

The customer leaves with an online version of “blue balls.”

Not at Mint.com…

1. After submitting your email, we asked you to take a survey. This helped us better craft our marketing and the customer got to help us figure out the product.

2. Then we had a 2nd section of the survey called “VIP”. The person could refer friends and answer even more questions. This gave them earlier access to Mint.

3. Then we asked them to post a badge on their site to show ‘I want Mint.’ This is one of the key ways we ranked for keywords like “personal finance tool”. We had more traffic than all of our competitors combined…before we even launched.

We could have done more but do you see what I’m getting at?

People wanted more and we needed help too, both parties won.

As you are creating your funnel marketing plan, the key thing is WHAT DO YOU WANT TO GET OUT OF IT?

For Okdork I have a few objectives:
1- Get more Twitter & YouTube Followers
2- Figure out which topics to write about
3- Find the sites I should get traffic from

So let’s see how I set that up.

After you subscribe to the Okdork newsletter, I realize you may want to learn more about me, so I send you here: http://okdork.com/bonus

I added a 1-4 simple checklist so people can be more involved.

1- Follow me on Twitter
2- Subscribe to me on YouTube.
3- Take this BRIEF survey
4- Email me with the word i love tacos as your subject line.

(If you do it then I’ll send you my never before published and written years ago story of life at Facebook)

Feel free to copy!

Imagine seeing a billboard for some new website while you’re driving home.

You have to remember the website, drive home, not get hit by a car, cook dinner, listen to your significant other nag you about bills, then get to the computer…and what was that website again?

The BEST time to get customers to go deeper with you is when their interest is high.

For this post, I wanted you to read it… but here’s my funnel:

1. You read this post. Done

2. I want you to comment so I know people are reading. Leave a comment here.

3. Now maybe a few of you will create your own funnel marketing plan which was my objective in the first place.

Congrats Yael on winning the awesome Dropcam Wireless Video Camera that was generously hooked by the guys at Dropcam for her comment!

But I figured it was worth seeing if that was the case or not.

With marketing / business / life, it’s helpful to test your assumptions to see for yourself. 

So I posted this one tweet:

…Got me over 50 new subscribers (daily average is 15) to Okdork.

Since it worked on Twitter, I tried posting on Facebook:

Can you tell below which day I posted this??

Good guess

Okay, let’s check out what I did with My YouTube Channel.

I have been hacking with YouTube to grow my readership which I’ll share in FULL detail in a few weeks. 

Stupidly, I NEVER asked people to subscribe to my channel. Do it now : )

So I added an annotation to a few videos asking the viewers to subscribe.

And the results in subscribers…

Yea…So… You work so hard to get that one customer. Create multiple ways to remind them so you don’t lose them. 

You likely have more people (than you realize) available to you but you are completely forgetting to ask them to subscribe.

Key take-aways for you:

1- People need multiple touch points to take an action. It’s good to ask them to subscribe in multiple places (YouTube, Twitter, email, etc…). Don’t assume your audience prefers only one point of contact.

2- Figure out which subscription channel is the most effective in accomplishing what you want. For AppSumo we’ve found it to be via email, for others YouTube may be the most effective. Spend time encouraging people to go to the channel you find most effective.

3- Don’t forget every opportunity to get subscribers. Look at commenters on your blog or if you’re at a meetup bust out a piece of paper. And did you know you can mass message every single person you’re connected to on Linkedin

4- Incentivization works. We ran ads for AppSumo and said, come sign up for our newsletter. About 100 people signed up, then we offered them a free video on Google Analytics and with the same audience we were able to get 600 signups.

5- Auto-Schedule your “subscribe requests” on Twitter and Facebook. There’s a lot of noise so it’s okay to do it repeatedly (within reason). I’ve set it up as a monthly repeating event on my calendar.

They are your customers in the first place. They like you and want more of you. Give them what they want!

They offered to cover flights and hotels.

I generally don’t ask for speakers fees cause I love sharing my stories and working with people. And I have put on conferences so I know there are always more costs than expected.

…But traveling costs me time, money and I like being at home with my tacos.

Because of the coffee challenge, it encouraged me at the end of the conversation, to ask, “What kind of speaker’s fee can you include?”

She mentioned, “Uh….I’ll have to ask my team about that.”

Noah: “That’s cool. It’d would mean a lot if you can ask.”

That whole extra sentence took me an extra 20 seconds.

(Pro-tip: Whenever you ask for something, don’t say shit afterwards.)

She came back the next morning with this:

If you don’t know AUD to USD is like 100:1. #kidding

Cool. That’ll cover my costs in Australia (Aug 1st).

If you look at just the 30 seconds of me asking for the speakers fee, that’s about:

$7,200,000 / hourly rate I’d be paid!!!!

In our How to Make Your First Dollar course the #1 break-through students have is when they go through Failure Olympics and have to ask for things.

When you’re starting a business or doing marketing you are asking people to use your service or product.

After creating the course myself I’ve noticed I’m way more open minded to asking for things I want.

Think about this in your day-to-day life….

1- Can you ask for a free side-salad (ha!) at the restaurant?

2- Can you ask a customer why they aren’t working with you? Then solve that.

3- What about asking that girl out who you always see in the cafe?

YOU NEVER KNOW WHAT YOU CAN GET unless you ASK.

What’s the worst you can get?

NOTHING. Exactly.

So the upside is super fucking high, the downside is only 0.

You do the math.

Just try to explore what you really want and ask for it. You’ll be surprised what you get…

—————————————————————————————

A few weeks ago I asked Satchel-Paige (http://www.satchel-page.com) for a free bag (worth $250+) to give to one of you.

Guess what? They said cool. Giggity.

Leave a comment of what you’re going to ask for today. One person will win the bag. A few people won bags and travel journals!

Ps. Hi Louisa (the event organizer). Thanks for teaching me a lesson and subscribing to Okdork. I’m looking forward to speaking at Digital Summit.

Lately, I’ve been deleting them because no one takes even a minute to write a well crafted email.

I used to feel guilty but I figure since the person is being selfish, I can be as well.

A few days ago I got a surprising email from Dave Daily.

BLEW MY MIND.

I want to share what an amazing cold email looks like (and dissect WHY it’s so great).

Subject: How I lost your Sperry’s.. and apt. And why you should meet with me.

(He referenced spending money to meet me already. SEE ARTICLE.)

I kept bidding them up.. to $600. Then I stopped with 3 seconds left and the other person won. 

(Relevant to me.)

I didn’t want the apartment. I was going to use it as an expensive excuse to get an App idea in front of you…and we wear the same size shoes. I have since bought a pair of Sperry’s..er Sperries? Size 11 – they fit!

(Okay, $600 just to show me an idea. I’m intrigued. Bonus for wanting to wear my shoes.)

Why you should meet with me:

(Why it’s worth it to me. Not how I’m going to spend 30 minutes giving him free help. I have money so a free lunch just doesn’t appeal to me.)

1. I’m the founder and CEO of Grav . I’ve been running this business for the past nine years. I started it when I was 24. I have 70 employees in Austin and operations in China. I love my business. It’s profitable and I’m really good at it. However, I want to do more.

(Okay, he’s got his shit together and I like meeting ballers.)

2. I’m Jewish – I hate playing that card, but.. what the fuck

(Haha. Self-explanatory. Low blow, but mildly works. He did some homework on me.)

3. This App idea is disruptive. It’s not in my wheelhouse (glass), but I know a good idea when I see one - I get about 3 presentations a week from stoners about their pipe ideas.

(Shows more validation and credibility. I kinda skipped this point.)

4. I have a wireframe ready so you can breeze through it quickly.

(He values my time so I don’t have to hang with him forever – in case he’s creepy)

5. The factory is really close to downtown – on St. Elmo just south of Ben White. 

(Convenient and again more focus on my time)

6. Even if you hate me and my idea, you’ll love the **** factory – it’s insane. 

This Wednesday 4/17 at 10am (or earlier) would be a great time to come by (I know it’s short notice, but what if this is the bestidea you’ve ever heard and I’m the coolest guy you’ve ever met?) 

(See how he didn’t say, “When is a good time to meet?” Then I’d have to check my schedule. Instead he suggested something specific so I can easily see if that’s available for you. 

2 improvements he could have done here. a) Make the start time an odd # – meet for 15 minutes.       b) Let me know how much time he’s specifically requesting.)

Feel free to bring anyone from Appsumo. I’m a huge fan. 

(Wow, I can bring the whole team if I want. This dude is good.)

Thanks for your time!

Best,

David Daily

I’m met with Dave yesterday. He said the email took OVER 1 hour to compose.

So how does this help you?

Let me give you a simple frame-work when you are cold emailing or trying to get someone to chat with you:

1- Flattery. Do you compliment them or stroke their ego a bit?

2- Benefit. How will this benefit them (not just you)? Do you spell it out and is it a real benefit?

3- Credibility. How can YOU be the person the other person would enjoy meeting?

4- Call to action (aka the ask). He didn’t ask for a 60 minute phone call but a digestible request that seemed appropriate.

5- Read it out loud. Read your email out loud with a timer. If it’s a longer than a minute, cut it down.

Shameless plug: Appsumo put together 33 email templates with more than 10 years of research behind them. If you’re looking for more templates and guidance (to write like Dave) click here.

Selfishly,
Noah

p.s.  Leave a comment. If YOU can get me to reply I’ll send you a $25 Amazon gift card.

All I Packed for 33 days in India (thanks for the bag Lisa F!)

1- Nice clothes. You can use this at the airport counter to ask for upgrades or do a tuxedo experience like my friend Ikrima: http://youtu.be/dpt2AInCkoE (via Susan Su)

2- Bring $1 bills. Assuming your currency is “more” valuable than another it’s a great tip and souvenir to hand these out to people. An alternative is snacks or candies you can give out to children. (via Nick Gray)

3- Using hotels. If you are ever lost, need a rest or want to have a nice moment to yourself try to find the nearest & nicest hotel. Perfect for directions, using internet and enjoying a fancy drink or buffet while I was going about my day.

4- Say you work for Lonely Planet. I didn’t do this but think it could work wonders while you are traveling. That 1 book has the power to make or break many establishments so I was curious the impact if I said I worked there. If someone tries this, do a write up and I’ll send it out to the okdork.com community.

5- Always visit 2 stores in a new country. While traveling Austria a few years back I got super excited and bought 50 euros worth of dried figs. A minor obsession, don’t ask. Then I went to the next stall and the same amount of figs were 25 Euros. WTF. My expensive lesson, your free knowledge. In new places always check at least 2 prices on more expensive items.

6- Add a reward card to your traveling wallet. My good friend Susan lost her wallet while we were scootering in Goa. She got the wallet back without the cash but with her cards. Always include your information in your travel wallet (phone, email, address) in case someone finds it you have a better chance of getting it back.

7- Subreddits. Go to Reddit.com/r/(country-you-are-traveling-to). I did this with Reddit.com/r/india and was able to read the local news and have the chance to connect with others like me (if need be)

8- Couchsurfing. I forgot about this site and didn’t use it on this trip but being shown around by a local is massively better than just going through a tour book. Couchsurfing is great for finding meet ups of locals and tourists in the places you are going to (not just for finding a couch to crash).

Tom Bihn loves us so they are giving gave away:

• Aeronaut in Steel/Ultraviolet ($250
• Absolute Shoulder Strap ($30)
• Packing Cube Backpack in Iberian ($40)
• 2 Aeronaut Packing Cubes, Small ($17)

After much sake drinking…

Congratulations to Chris who got the goods! Great comments by all and happy travel hacking!

P.S. To read Part 1 about my Trip to India visit http://okdork.com/2013/03/26/trip_to_india_p1/

To give him credit his service is outstanding (I’m a customer) and it’s extremely impressive how he’s created a profitable business.

Okay, back to bashing him.

So I spent the weekend explaining how he sells his product completely wrong.

The easiest way to break it down was that he is speaking French to potential customers who only know Italian.

What makes me qualified to help him?

• Over $30,000,000 in sales in my past 2 companies
• 1.5 years of being the top salesperson at OfficeMax
• Sold over $50,000 of discount cards in 2 years
• Jewish
• My dad was a salesman (fortunately my step-dad is an engineer)
• etc etc

So I know a thing or two about sales.

I broke down the core concepts for how you can easily sell your service / solution to anyone.

Instead of just giving you something to read (and not do anything) I put it in a video, so if you really want to be better you’ll have to commit the 4:05 minutes to watch it.

Watch it here.

“Is everything okay?”

I guess by default for a white person to go to India we have to:

1. Be facing a quarter life crisis
2. Read Eat Pray Love too many times and wanted to follow in her foot steps
3. Trying to meet the outsourcers we’ve worked with (I almost did this)

Personally, for me it was just to try out something new. I prefer to travel to places unlike my home.

Here’s where I went: http://goo.gl/maps/1rU8k

Name 5 cities in India?

Exactly.

I actually only knew of Bombay which people in India renamed Mumbai (but most locals don’t care about the name change)

For one of the largest and fastest growing countries most people (myself included) don’t know crap about it. I think it’s smart to study countries, businesses or people that are doing things well.

What can we learn from them?

Take Apple for example. So many companies have copied their design style.

India reminds me of Apple after spending a little over a month there.

I asked a friend who works at Apple how he manages their supply chain so well.

His answer, “I don’t. We are inefficient. We don’t have to be optimal since we are making SO much money.”

That’s basically India.

The country has so many people, so much low-hanging opportunity and even with all the chaos the country still works.

In trying to describe India to people the short answer is that it’s undefinable.

Another way to consider it is like a game of Jenga.

At any moment all the pieces could follow over with all the holes in the place but for some reason the structure still stands!

You can’t know India until you’ve gone.

It’s now after being back in the states for 2 weeks do I realize what I took away from India:

1- Stillness

Every Tuesday I look at my weekend plans and get anxiety to have “things” to do. Ever get that?

While in Goa with my good friend Susan I practiced for 10 days not trying to fill up my time but just enjoy what is.

SO MUCH BETTER.

2- Accepting what is

If you’ve ever eaten with me, I make about 10 changes to whatever dish I order.

While traveling this and other things were hard to do….So you know what?

I just accepted. Didn’t try to impose my ways.

Not saying I will always do this but it was fun to just be.

Bottom line: Traveling challenges your normal routine so you can learn more about yourself! This includes staycation, explore your world.

Namaste,
Noah

Ps. Where do you want to go next in the world?

Pps. And here’s me head bobbing for you: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8fcPE1qlfPw

For Part 2 visit http://okdork.com/2013/04/09/tombihn/

Tweet More. Engagement. More Likes. Gimme.

But do they actually make a difference?!?

That’s the question that most people forget to ask.

So, I put out a tweet about my How to Make your First Dollar Course to find out for myself.

Out of 13,090 followers how many would you expect to click after I tweeted?

1,000?

500?

More like 109 clicks, a 0.8% CTR. WTF Twitter?!?

Either most of my followers are bots or something funky is going on.

How many times have you heard someone say “you have to be on YouTube” or brag about how many Facebook fans they have?

It’s distracting with case studies making it appear that social media is the new holy grail.

The real secret is that there is no same way that will work for marketing in all businesses.

So I was curious how many clicks I got via email from my 3,547 subscribers.

882 clicks!!! Holy shit

First off I love you.

Secondly, that’s a 24.8% CTR and 8x improvement over Twitter.

Bottom-line: I’m not saying you must go use email over Twitter but I wanted to plant the seed for you to focus on effectiveness vs hype…

When’s the last time you were surprised?

Hours later and after a few empty sparkling waters I was nearly finished with all 13 episodes.

It got me thinking how the hell did they create such a bad ass show…

If you were going to spend $100 million making a show like that I’m guessing you’d want to know it works before you spend that money.

One of the MOST common mistakes of wantrepreneurs and marketers is to hope that things will work. They usually don’t

They miss out on working backwards from what people want AND using their natural skills to their advantage.

Netflix did both with this show.

But HOW did they guarantee it will be a success?

Netflix has 20 million plus subscribers that watch millions of hours of shows.

1. They KNOW what people love to watch.
2. They KNOW the actors people are really into.
3. They KNOW the plots of shows and what people respond to.

Taking those components and analyzing a bunch of data they came out with House of Cards.

It’s no surprise the show is a massive success.

Netflix didn’t just randomly drop a ton of money to create their own content, they worked backwards from what they know already works.

Before you just start randomly trying to create a business or do marketing, look around to what you already have available.

What’s your favorite tv-show?