Brian Kurtz 9:33
Who’s the guy on the right? Who’s the guy on the right?
Chris Haddad 9:36
That’s Jeff Paul there.
Brian Kurtz 9:37
Oh, Jeff Paul, no I mean on the past slide.
Chris Haddad 9:40
Oh, that’s David Garfinkel.
Brian Kurtz 9:41
Oh, David Garfinkel I didn’t recognize him though.
Chris Haddad 9:43
Oh yeah. He’s got quite a look on his face. He was one of my early mentors as well. And somebody who I kind of stopped to teach me way back in the day.
Brian Kurtz 9:51
Yeah, Garfinkel is a great guy.
Chris Haddad 9:51
Yeah, so I think these three guys punch Jeff Walker are probably the main people that kind of helped me learn about this stuff and kind of get going more than anything else, they took a lot of my money but I got a lot more back out of it and exchange that led to me, I went to underground five. So Harlan said to me, I was like, How do I get clients and Harlan said to me, you get clients by going to events and I said what dimension I go to and he said, You should go to Big Seminar five and Florida or Atlanta, I think it was whatever and it was 2000 bucks, but I bit the bullet and I paid the $2,000 and I got on a plane.
And Harvard had said to me, what you do is you just take your business cards and give them to everybody. So at one point I got up and I went around the entire room on a break. And I put my business card on every single place setting throughout the entire place, probably a couple 100 of them. And then afterwards Armand Morin got up on stage that whoever put their cards everywhere don’t do that you’re not allowed to but it did lead to me getting some phone calls and it did lead to me getting some clients including Jeff Paul. And Jim quick here I think is his name is a quick Jim something. Either way, they hired me fresh out of something. They gave me 10,000 bucks to write a package for them.
And I was incredibly nervous because I’ve never really written anything in direct response marketing before but I stayed up all night for like three days to get it done. They were happy with it even though they didn’t end up actually using the copy I wrote them for legal reasons, but they were happy and that got me started and started getting me kind of a reputation in direct marketing world and having you know, Jeff Paul, look at some of my copy when I was just getting started and say hey, this is really good and want to hire me because he was a pretty big deal at the time and the make money from home kind of kind of niche before he didn’t get arrested or something poor guy.
Brian Kurtz 11:24
I know. A lot of guys in that group got arrested.
Chris Haddad 11:29
Yeah, they were pretty hard nosed and pretty over the line, I think they all got in a lot of trouble. But from learning how to hype things and learning copy at an early age, it was a pretty good way to go from there to start to kind of build my business and start getting a pretty good reputation. This man here, Joe Barton, hired me early on. He’s actually the guy that gave me the Mister Money fingers name at one point because I made him a lot of money. I wrote, I think five or six different kinds of letters for him back to back, he only only paid me five grand at the time for each one. And I thought that was so much money. And then I found out later how much he was making off of them, hey, whatever.
Anyway, you know, Joe became one of my first clients and I kind of use I talked a minute ago about kind of using your own pain and your own tragedies in order to actually, you know in your copy and you’ll see here one of the first letters I did for Joe was actually a back pain letter. Because as you know, I spent many many years in back pain and I was able to really identify with and empathize with that market. I also did a heart attack for him, a heart attack heart health kind of offer for him. And when writing that I used my own experiences with my dad because my dad died of a heart attack at 47 years old. I’m 44 Now that is getting closer and closer by the way and just use the exact story I just told you a few minutes ago about my father’s dead honey. Get your things in that actual letter.
From there I you know, my career kind of went on for a little while. I was up to making like 20 grand a month or something which seemed like an impossible amount of money. I was still in tremendous pain all the time. I was sicker than I knew at the time. I was kind of crumbling, you know going forward couldn’t dream any bigger than that. I somehow ended up getting associated with Jeff Walker. I actually saw him at a seminar and just walked right up to him and said Hey, my name is Chris Nice to meet you. I hear you’re doing some kind of product launch manager group or something like that. If there’s anything I can do to help please let me know.
I ended up paying Jeff like $5,000 to get into his group. I became good friends with him. I learned a lot from him and then at one point he had his Product Launch Formula. Oh I should do that one wait wait, I got rid of that one. Okay. Anyway, talking to Jeff for a while started doing launch management and started doing pretty well with it, ran some seven-figure launches but was still working for other people and was still starting every month pretty much at zero right? I didn’t have any of my own kind of offers. I didn’t have any kind of passive or semi passive income of any kind. Then at one point, this guy J D bolt and Alan Saltanat called me up. All these guys were in the kind of like hard nosed Clickbank magic software making money kind of niche. They’re all big fans of mine, which is funny, because I don’t like some of them.
But I do like J. Anyway, J at one point, he hired me to do an offer called Mobile Money machines. And they paid me 25 grand to do that letter 25 grand up front, no problem. It only took me I think two days to do the letter because I write really fast and they really had their hook and their idea down. And I gave it over to them. And a few weeks later, they ended up launching the offer and I called Jay up and I’m like, Hey, dude, how’s it doing? How’s it working? How’s it going? And he said to me, dude, we’re crushing it and like, That’s fucking awesome. And he said, Yeah, we made like, I think like $10 million in sales or something like that. The refund rate was insane, but still $10,000 in sales. And I said to Jay, I said, Well, why don’t you send me a bonus or something? That’s awesome, you know, I made all this money. And he said, Yeah, man, I’m gonna send you a bonus. And he did.
He sent me a bonus and it was a check for $5,000 which is a lot of money. But when you just made somebody $10 million, and you get a $5,000 bonus, I think it changes a little bit about how you look at these things. And to me at least, after having spent so much time running seven figure launches and writing letters, people that went out and did became Clickbank number ones and all that kind of stuff. That’s kind of what finally broke me from the idea of wanting to be a freelance cop. Being a writer, I still think being a freelance copywriter long term is not a great way to make a living. You have to have some of your own stuff in your back pocket, relying on clients all the time, I just wouldn’t want to do it. And also, if I had still been a freelance copywriter when the show about to tell you about started to happen I would there’s no way in hell I would have survived that would have gone completely bankrupt and probably would be dead.
From there though I decided I want to start doing my own stuff. So I was on the phone with Mike Hill at one point saying hey, I want to do some kind of clickbank products. I didn’t know anything about Clickbank at that point at that time actually about how it all worked. I didn’t know anything about things like EP C’s or how to run a mailing list or anything like that. I only really knew how to write sales letters. But Mike and I were on the phone at one point. And I was single at the time and pretty good at texting girls because I’m a writer. And Mike said oh, you should do an offer called like, text your wife into bed. And I’m like, That’s a great idea to text your wife into bed about teaching guys in marriages, how to have more sex with their wives by using text messages seems like a cool idea.
Again, I had no idea what I was doing. But I started to put the offer together. I wrote a sales video. I paid my friend Cory too much money to kind of put it up. I was going on Clickbank just trying to kind of copy whatever people were doing. Because I had no idea how the psychology of these things actually worked. I remember I put texture wise in the bed. I had no connections in that niche. But I put it up and I walked away. And the next day I woke up and I made $700 overnight on that offer. And I had no idea who it was from, but that $700 was some of the most powerful, potent, amazing money I’ve ever made in my life.
And it kind of got me thinking, hey, maybe there’s something to this, actually owning your own offers, as opposed to just writing for other people all the time. From there, I ended up starting to speak a little bit. I spoke at Ryan Lee’s event in Connecticut at one point, which was hilarious because he actually took my VSL, which has got how to get head.com is the URL if you want to check it out. But it’s an offer called oral fixation, which is about getting a woman to want to give you a blowjob. And Ryan took it and put it up on the screen in front of 600 people and had it play. It was pretty amazing. I sold a lot of stuff that day. It was great.
Brian Kurtz 16:58
Right? Ryan’s become a monk. I don’t know if you know that. No, no. Yeah, after doing that he became deeply religious. I’m kidding.
Chris Haddad 17:06
No, I don’t think so either. It’s really funny, because we showed that was the first time I ever pitched from stage. And he showed that and I actually outsold the six or seven other people that were selling that weekend. So that felt pretty good. From there, I actually had talked to Jeff Walker at one point and said that I wanted to speak at his product launch formula, which he had not ever thought of before. But I went to Jeff, he had at one point said hey, I had talent, he was really telling me that I need to move away from just being a freelance copywriter and try to do something else. I went to him at one point and I said, Hey, Jeff, what would make it a no brainer for you to have me speak on your stage at PLF live. And he never actually came back to me.
But I ended up speaking on his stage doing a speech called seven laws of launch offers that are crushing it right now. And got a really, really good response from the audience. I tend to do pretty well on stage. Afterwards, this woman you see on your right called Mr. Wagner came up to me and she said, I want to put you on TV. And I said, Who are you and why? She told me that she was a PR agent who’s worked with a lot of people in the personal development space. And I told her Okay, well, the only thing that I have offered was this texture wife into bed thing. She said, That’s too dirty. We can’t do that. My sister at the time said, what if we did something called text, the romance back instead? And I said, Yeah, let’s do that. So that was in like December or November, I think and Valentine’s Day was coming up. So all of a sudden the mom got to work doing her magic PR wise. And I wrote a little free report that was like three magic texts to send to your spouse, and started doing all this PR stuff. All of a sudden I was flying around the country going to do local television, doing blogs, doing radio shows, all this stuff.
And then at one point, Rachael ray’s people actually texted or got in touch with them all. This was right when Tiger Woods was getting into a lot of trouble for texting porn stars. So sexting was really out in the ether at that point. And they said, Hey, we want to have Michael Furey come out to New York City for our Valentine’s Day episode, and talk about texting, talk about romantic texting. So I told my family that they were all shocked. My brother was like, What the fuck is my little brother doing on television, I ended up writing the entire product for Text The Romance back in two days, I think it was 20,000 words, got it done in two days, flew out to New York City in pain the entire time because my back was really screwed up. Ended up going on the show. We were in the greenroom before actually going out there. And the mall was like pinning my jacket to me because I hadn’t worn an undershirt. And I was sweating through my shirt because there was no air conditioning in the back. Eventually, they take me out there and I walk out and it’s air conditioned. And that’s, that’s great. And I go to sit down and there’s this warm up guy in the audience.
They always have a comedian in the audience to keep the audience warm between segments. And he immediately sees me and just starts giving me shit and making fun of me and I’m from Massachusetts. So all of a sudden I felt incredibly comfortable, right? I was just like, okay, so I gave him a little bit back. This incredibly flaming league game makeup guy comes rushing out and he’s like patting the powder on my head because it’s too shiny. Rachel is sitting right next to me looking at her notes and I’m like, oh my god, this is my life. This is fucking hilarious. My brother and his wife are up in the back because they live in New York City. I have been told by the producer, this isn’t gonna be about sexting. This is going to be about romantic texting. It’s about romantic texting. We went over the segment all six minutes of it, I knew exactly what I was gonna say. The light turns on and the camera starts going, it’s going to be romantic texting, all of a sudden Rachael rays. There she goes, Okay, let’s talk about sexting to the entire audience and all 200 or 300 women in the audience are kind of spooning in some way.
And I’m like, fuck yeah, Rachel, let’s talk about sexting, the entire segment gets changed from what it is I have to improv the whole thing more or less. And it goes really, really well. And I’m really happy about it. We didn’t make a lot of sales off that because they only showed the URL at the beginning of the segment, which is insane. Why would you do that, but it did give me a tremendous amount of credibility in the market. And from there, I was able to start building my Michael Fiore brand, and my relationship advice business pretty damn quickly. I think that was 2010. And then within a few years, I had created text, the romance back at first which became a Clickbank top 10 for a while then we did text your ex back, which was in the top 10 For Clickbank for like six years or something. I did one called Capture, it’s hard to make them love you forever.
That was, you know, again, over and over again for several years there every single offer I did ended up crushing it, we had all these affiliates pushing we were making, I think 233 and a half million dollars net a year basically, or something like that, on that stuff. It was going really hard. It was going really great. My career was going off in this amazing direction. I even had a puppet of myself made to us in the VSL. And it was great. But at the same time, I was tired all the time. And my skin was kind of gray. And I just was angry all the time and couldn’t think straight. And it took me months and months while my business was kind of going off in this rocket of a direction to figure out what’s going on. And eventually I went to a doctor who took some tests and said, Well, Chris, you have Lyme disease. I was like why the fuck would I have Lyme disease but I’m from Massachusetts, I was a boy scout when I was a kid. I got bit by ticks a few times. And eventually we figured out I had had Lyme disease since I was about 14 or so.
And I was 3334 at the time. So when I didn’t know for all of those years, but I had been walking around a very sick man for all of those years, I have been exhausted all the time. For all of those years. I was in pain all the time from my back issues. And I remember thinking like I always thought there was something wrong with me because I was like, why is it so easy for other people to work a full 40 hour week but I can’t do it. What’s wrong with me? What’s wrong with me? Then it kind of entered this weird, somewhat awesome, somewhat hellish part of my life where my business was continuing to do really well. We put our offers out twice a year, we’d make a lot of money on it. I had a staff that was really taking care of a lot of things. But at the same time I was insanely horrifyingly sick. I could only work maybe two hours a day, I spent most of my time being a basement troll, as I’ve been told. And just trying to get by eventually, I ended up actually having to go to Florida for seven months to go to a clinic that was down there to get Lyme disease treatment where I was paying, I think, three or $5,000 a week for seven months just to be able to get treatment. Like I said, if I wasn’t rich, I’d be dead, right? That’s a lot of fucking money.
And if I didn’t have hundreds of $1,000 a month coming in at that point, there’s no way I wouldn’t be able to afford it or do it. Even then it took seven months, my marriage, my first marriage fell apart, I was eating 100 pills or more every single day, just to get through the day. The kids you see on the screen right now are a family that ended up helping in Florida because they were a very, very poor Canadian family, all four kids were incredibly sick. They were trying to get help. By doing like mainstream media stuff, they have, like local news come by and do a thing on it. And I saw that and I’m like, that’s not gonna make any money. So instead, I went on Facebook and I posted and I wrote to a couple of groups I’m in with high level entrepreneurs and I managed to raise 25 grand overnight for them.
And they told me that actually gave them the money they needed to be able to get treatment and continue and help the kids and to my to this day, that is probably the most powerful heartwarming thing I’ve ever used copywriting the deal was making that Facebook post while I was in Florida, you know, feeling horrible and whatnot, we were getting ready to launch the Language Of Desire, which ended up being one of our most powerful, profitable products. It’s the letter that bought my house, I always say. So when we first put that offer out, I didn’t really know what’s gonna happen. But this is actually where I first kind of created what eventually ended up kind of becoming what’s called the pig method, which is the course I’m releasing on December 2, because this is the first time that I really started using this very story oriented style and the format that I ended up using.
And so I love this picture here because it’s a picture of me with an IV in my arm in Florida while also running the launch for this offer, which was super duper fun. I really needed the software to do well with the time. It was the only thing that kept me actually going while I was in severe depression, incredibly sick and in a ton of pain. I also while I was in Florida, by the way had to have surgery and have a piece of my ass taken out because I had a problem. So I was in pain and had to ask for surgery at the same time. How pitiful Can you kind of get anyway, that language desire thing we launched it, we did half a million dollars in sales that first week, which at $37 or $47. Pop is pretty tough.
That offer ended up kind of becoming Clickbank number two or three for like two or three years, we never even split tested anything else on it, but it just kind of kept going, which was awesome. And that money is what enabled me to even have any chance whatsoever of recovering from the horrible, horrible disease I was dealing with. So anyway, I went through all of that. I got out of my bad first marriage with a woman who really didn’t like me. I remember at one point, I went to Korea, our couples counselor on my own and I said See, this is not my ex wife. This is my current wife, by the way. But I talked to the counselor and I said I just seem like my ex wife or Ashley doesn’t really like me.
And the counselor said to me, Well, she really doesn’t and I was like then why the hell are we married? So I fired her and fell in love with this incredibly beautiful six foot one copywriter, New Zealand copywriter who works for a friend of mine named Angie will, who is my current and wonderful wife. And that’s it right? Like everything went happily ever after I fell in love with this amazing woman and she loves me and I love her. And I’m kind of getting over my Lyme disease stuff and feeling a little bit better every day. Hey, my career took a real kick in the balls while I was sick for so long. But now that I’m feeling better, I’m going to go out there. I’m going to get back on top. It’s going to be happily ever after. Right because that’s how the movie ends.
Outro 26:49
Thanks for listening to the timeless marketing podcast with Brian Kurtz. Visit briankurtz.net, and click podcast at the top of the page for a full transcript and show notes. If you’re interested in working with Brian personally inside of Titans Xcelerator, go to Briankurtz.net/help to see how Titans can help you grow and scale your business. That’s B-R-I-A-N Kurtz [dot] net [slash] help.