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The Importance Of Saying Fuck It

Woody Allen famously said that eighty percent of success is showing up. Often times the most effective way to consistently get yourself to show up is to simply say “fuck it”. This means putting insecurities and doubts aside. It means ignoring the voice inside your head that incessantly tells you why something might not work out. It means removing all expectations and letting things simply play out.

In this episode we talk about how we were able to get fast and incredibly impactful results for our business by acting without fear. From following up with famed podcaster Jordan Harbinger after briefly running into him at a conference and getting him to feature us on his podcast which gets millions of monthly listens, to building relationships with Goalcast and Forbes to become contributing authors, helping us grow our audience. We also talk about how we were able to close the first deal for our software startup by changing our approach and saying “fuck it – why not try something new.”

If you have your own story of when you said “fuck it” and got results, send us an email at vadim@thementors.co or sergei@thementors.co and we’ll feature it in a 5 Minute Pick Me Up episode.

Show Notes

1:00 Today we’re going to talk about the important of saying fu*k it.

1:30 All successful people that you admire, be they actors, chefs, race car drivers – they’re successful not only because of their talent, but because they’re willing to take risks.

2:17 If you want to create, at a certain point you have to be willing to say Fu*k it, I’m going to put it out there and I don’t care what people think.

4:41 Our first story is about a recent time where we said fu*k it and emailed someone we admire, asking them for something. That person was Jordan Harbinger of the Jordan Harbinger Podcast

4:55 We met him at Podcast Movement and made a loose connection, and wanted to follow up with him.

5:50 I gave him my business card and he ended up emailing us following up after the conference.

6:20 We almost left it at that, because we thought we’re not ready yet to reach out to Jordan.

6:33 He actually said at the event that you could get podcast hosts to give you a shout out in “post roll” at the end of a show because advertisers don’t care about that ad spot.

7:13 That’s when we said fu*k it and emailed him asking to be mentioned on his show. But we did want to offer him some value before asking, so we offered to write an article featuring him.

8:15 To our surprise he said yes! Then we didn’t hear from him for a week and decided we need to make it very easy for him to do this favor for us. So we wrote a few versions of a script he could use of different lengths.

8:47 At first I was going to ask him how long the shout out should be, but we decided that he didn’t have enough time for a back and forth, so we sent a script with 3 different versions.

9:06 He did an even better thing for us, he did the shout out in the middle of the episode instead of the end, so more people heard it!

9:50 Because we decided to say fu*k it since we had nothing to lose, we got this great benefit and a chance to build a relationship. Even though initially we were talking ourselves out of it

10:20 The next story we want to tell you happened when we were first starting our podcast. To grow we decided to start writing for other publications.

11:50 It happened when Vadim saw that Goalcast, the successful Facebook video page, also had a written publication and a column

12:10 Vadim cold emailed the director of marketing there asking if we could write a better column. Instead they offered us to start writing for them first.

14:00 They didn’t pay us, but we didn’t care because we could use the articles to link to relevant episodes of our podcast.

14:34 Then when we decided to reach out to Forbes to be contributing authors, we already had a bunch of content written that we could show their editors as examples.

15:30 This all happened from cold emails. We don’t want to say it’s easy. We clearly had established credibility and by this time were expert at writing compelling cold emails, but we got good at it by taking risks earlier on in our careers.

15:42 The next story has to do with sales. This story came from when we were building our first software business

16:06 This is a story of how we got our first paying customer for that business even though he had been using the product for months without agreeing to pay.

16:20 We were ok with him using it for free in the beginning, but he kept leading us on, promising a big contract but not paying.

16:56 He kept giving us different reasons why he couldn’t buy yet

17:10 Meanwhile he was telling us he loved the product

17:55 One morning he emailed yet again asking to extend the trial

18:18 At this point Sergei started thinking of how to force his hand to pay. That’s when he said said fu*k it, I don’t care about losing him as a customer, I’m going to go for a wild card move.

19:29 He called Sergei back that morning and yet again said he was going to pitch it to his whole team, but wasn’t ready yet. This is a quick lesson that often customers are leading you on when they’re really just kicking the tires.

20:20 Sergei said to him, listen, are you getting value from this product? He said absolutely. Then Sergei said, look I have a board meeting this Friday, and they’re going to ask me, if your customer likes it so much why isn’t he paying?

20:30 He put his credit card in our system later that day.

20:42 Sergei used this external party as an excuse to say we need him to pay. By saying fu’k it and being willing to lose him as a customer and going for the wild card move, we got him to pay.

21:34 Vadim asks if Sergei took a pause after asking him this question. Long pauses are a good way to get someone to talk, even if you desperately want to fill the void of silence, force yourself not to.

22:11 Sometimes to get what you want you have to be willing to just try something new that you thought might be risky.

22:33 This is how we’re saying fu*k it going forward.

23:10 Vadim was listening to an episode of Joe Rogan with Kevin Smith. Turned out he has his own network of podcasts

24:14 Vadim notes that our show, The Mentors, is really a show about creators not just entrepreneurs. He figured we want to have really cool guests on our show and we’re good at digging into how people get things done.

24:51 He figured why not try to reach out to him directly?

25:05 Now we’re saying fu*k it and we’re going to reach out to celebrity creators who also have their own podcasts.

26:15 At first Vadim thought he might email him directly. But of course he couldn’t find his email address so he sent him a note on Instagram. Vadim did this just a few days ago, and we’re waiting to hear back and we’ll follow up.

27:28 We don’t know if anything will come of this, but hey, it’s worth a shot. We gotta keep saying fu*k it.

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