Last Week the Mafia Took My Money šŸ˜Ø - Issue #4

Art Lapinsch -

Hey friends šŸ‘‹

Question for you: Have you been vaccinated against Covid?

...

This issue is a bit longer, since I want you to avoid my costly mistake. šŸ‘‡

The Mafia Took My Money

TL;DR

Last week I made my first online course sale at full price. šŸŽ‰

$99 for the piggy bank... or so I thought.

Since I was excited, I checked my dashboard.

I saw this šŸ‘‡

WTF is this charge?!

šŸ˜Ž ** Mafia enters the room ** šŸ˜Ž

Let me introduce you to the Paypal mafia.

They charged me 37% on top-line revenue.

What the actual fuck.

For what?

That's like Wonga or Western Union.

šŸ„’ How I Got Into this Pickle šŸ„’

As a creator you need a way to sell your products.

You can build your own website OR you can use one of the many SaaS platforms for creators.

I chose Gumroad.

Gumroad offers 2 payout methods:

  1. Bank transfer: Only for US; Canada; UK; Australia
  2. Paypal: Rest of the world
PayPal's fee* ... It just "varies"

It gets better: in their documentation Gumroad has an example calculation where Paypal takes 22.5%

How is that acceptable? In short: it isn't.

Ok, 22.5% is already a lot of dough, but then they increase that by a cool 50% and we have PayPal taking 37% of a creator's revenues.

Na-ah.

Lesson Learned: International Freelancers Get Boned

I'm actively looking into:

  1. Applying for Estonian e-residency
  2. Incorporate a remote business in Estonia
  3. Get a business bank account
  4. Move away from Gumroad to a tailored SaaS for online education/courses

Two things: [1] please don't repeat my mistake, [2] please help me in with recommendations; pointers; etc. if you can.

āœŒļø

I'm In Everyone's Feed

Last week I announced that I wanted to fix my top-of-funnel problem by creating and distributing content every single day.

translation: "your content production on twitter is totally insane :D"

Turns out it worked.

  • I got my full-price sale through LinkedIn. Source: they saw my content
  • 4 separate people have told me that every single time they open twitter or LinkedIn they see my content

I published 11 posts on Brand Strategy.

The content was entirely repurposed from my online course and turned into 300-word pieces each.

Little additional effort.

āœ… Can recommend.

Ship30for30 Challenge

The content flywheel continues.

I joined an online writing challenge called Ship30for30.

The goal is to write 30 essays in 30 days.

The constraint: 1 hour per day and max. 250 words.

Here are my first 3 essays:

  1. Don't Trust Gurus. Trust Your Guides Instead.
  2. Forget MBAs! Learn in Public.
  3. Wasting Eternity

Let me know if you want to hear more about this challenge.

Happy to chat via email reply.

...

As always, stay healthy, stay safe.

And don't get f*cked over by the mafia.

šŸ™Œ