It’s a conspiracy.
Here’s the secret everyone out there knows: The experts are keeping all their best ideas from you.
You know this. That’s why you’d give your left elbow to spend just an hour in the company of the entrepreneur you most admire, even though you’ve already read every last one of their blog posts and own all their products.
You just know they’ve got some extra stuff they’re holding back. Really savvy business ideas they haven’t put on the blog. Insights into what would make a killer product, or a brilliant marketing strategy no one is doing yet and that would be perfect for you.
You can just picture them, chatting away with their other successful friends, throwing around thousand-dollar ideas like confetti. And not telling you any of them.
Those bastards.
We’re Charlie Gilkey and Johnny B. Truant, and we’re not bastards (Charlie is a philosopher and Johnny is a humorist, but no matter what anyone tells you, those things are not inherently bastardish).
How do you know we’re not bastards? We decided jam sessions between successful professionals shouldn’t be private parties. We decided we should invite you (yeah, you) so you could get ideas that make your business more awesome. We decided you should get some thousand-dollar confetti, damn it.
We also decided they should be capitalized, and named after us. Charlie and Johnny’s Jam Sessions. Yeah.
Just to prove our devotion to being non-exclusive and getting lots of people in on the party, we’ve got two free hour-long recordings on secrets of the trade sitting right there at the bottom of this page. They’re just lying there waiting for you to reap crazy benefits from them. No bouncer. No ropes. Just walk in and enjoy the jams.
Why would we do such a thing? Well, for online entrepreneurs, we hold some unusual opinions. For example:
- We think you should totally get to hear the stuff that successful entrepreneurs talk about amongst themselves, the ideas that are still in the baby stages but will grow up to be big, strapping lumberjacks of marketing awesomeness.
- We think you shouldn’t have to fall into the giant gaping holes in the floor when you could have a guy who’s been there before saying, “Dude, watch out, there’s a hole right there. Right where your foot is. No, seriously, back up and go around.”
- We think that big money-making ideas shouldn’t be held hostage at thousand-dollar conferences when we would totally give them to you for the price of a couple lattes. (Johnny has a habit. And Charlie is an enabler.)
- We think it would be way better if you could just hang out with some cool, smart people who know what’s up and want you to be in on it, too.
We’ve made a lot of money and almost an equal number of mistakes figuring out how to make that money. At the end of the day, we just want to sit down and jam with other smart entrepreneurs like you about what mistakes we’ve made and which ones we’ve avoided. We want to talk with you about good ideas, good business, and how to blend them together in a giant success smoothie that tastes like victory and paid rent.
Because victory and paid rent are delicious.
Who Are You Guys and How Do I Know Your Ideas Are Worthwhile?
Good question. With an entertaining answer.
Johnny B. Truant, who began his online life as a humorist, started his first for-profit venture by making $3,000 in his first month through the magic of ethical sales and win-win-win business thinking. Within nine months, that business had grown to five figures monthly and had become his sole source of income. Johnny’s ideas were deemed worthy of frequent contributions to the ridiculously popular and notoriously difficult-to-impress small business marketing blog Ittybiz.com, as well as mega-blogs Copyblogger and Problogger. Copyblogger and Problogger, for the record, don’t question your manhood when your ideas aren’t fantastic as Ittybiz does, but they are equally difficult to impress. Johnny impresses them.
Charlie Gilkey is a specialist in the “art of meaningful action,” which is his philosopher’s way of saying that he’s very good at finding the dumb things you do and getting you to stop doing them. Lest that endorsement of his skills not be Zen enough for you, he is also pretty excellent at finding the cool things you should be doing, and getting you to start doing them instead. Charlie knows that you’re not able to press pause on your life while you figure this stuff out, so he teaches folks to fix the plane while it’s flying. (Disclaimer: not recommended if you are actually on a plane. Particularly if Charlie is on said plane.)
That’s separately. By our powers combined, we were named to Problogger’s list of the top 30 bloggers to watch in 2010, launched 9 products in the last 2 years, and learned to stop introducing ourselves in the third person.
Okay, You Sound Legit. What About These Jam Sessions of Yours?
Here’s what you really need to know about the jam sessions:
- We don’t have an agenda, a script, or much in the way of shame.
- We do, however, know how to build lucrative businesses that we love running. And we’ll share.
The Jam Sessions are conversations between smart people about how to create more successful businesses. Most weeks, we’ll invite you to kick back and have a drink with us while we talk business and how to make money and living your truth and why you don’t know what the hell you’re doing and why that’s okay and how to be lazy and how not to be lazy and SEO and how to do blogging conferences and possibly fairy dust.
Okay, definitely fairy dust. There’s nothing un-manly about fairy dust. We are two guys who are very secure in our fairy dust.
In addition to the two of us (as if the two of us weren’t enough) now and then we’ll invite you to kick back and jam with one or more of the money-makin’, trash-talking, no-longer-secret-keeping folks below:
- Tim Brownson, kick-ass life coach
- Naomi Dunford, micro-business marketing pioneer but NOT the head of a cult no matter what anyone says
- Pace & Kyeli, refreshingly awesome nonconformists who are redefining how and by whom the world will be changed
- Dave Navarro, launch coach extraordinaire who can help you sell your stuff without it driving you crazy or making you feel dirty
- Elizabeth Potts Weinstein, who is awesome at helping people “live their truth” by transforming their hobbies and passions into real businesses
- Michael Martine, search engine Samurai capable of making Google come to your door on bended knees
- Colleen Wainwright, ex-commercial writer, actor, and TV show writer who now uses her crazy powers for the good of creative people. Also known as the Communicatrix.
Want to know what a great Jam Session sounds like? You’re in luck. We promised you free Jam Sessions and dang it, you are going to get free Jam Sessions, if we have to move heaven and earth and/or imbed audio on this website to make it happen.
Tending the Golden Goose – Sort of about getting overwhelmed by trying to do too many things at once. Sort of about how that’s hamstringing you from making money because you can’t do everything at once. Sort of about how to fix that. And sort of about geese. This one is pretty much the essence of all our jam sessions – complete randomness wrapped around really smart things you need to know as an entrepreneur. And then dipped in butter.
The Real Deal Behind Launches – It’s really easy to look at successful entrepreneurs’ launches and think, “Well, I could never do that – I don’t have eight million subscribers or a list or a price for my product or, um, a product.” Of course, it’s even easier to listen to this jam session we did with Launch Coach Dave Navarro and find out how launches really work, and why you totally could do one, and what to do so yours works the way you want it to work.
Jam #15 - Tending The Golden Goose: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download Jam #11 - The Real Deal Behind Launches: Play Now | Play in Popup | DownloadAll of the Jam Sessions look just like this: audio files that you can download so you can listen to them in car or in the bath or while doing yoga, if that’s your thing. You could also have that aforementioned beer. That’s probably what Johnny’s doing.
You get two new ones every month, along with the ever-growing cache of Jam Sessions we’ve already done and the two freebies you got above. That’s two hours of infotainment and smart business ideas, plus access to the blog where you can talk with other entrepreneurs (and Charlie and Johnny) about how to apply those ideas specifically to your business if you have questions or want clarification.
To give you an idea of what that’s really worth, let’s take a random name off of the guest list of people who have agreed to jam with us: Naomi Dunford. If you want to get into her secret stock of business ideas that make you money anywhere else but the Jam Sessions, two hours with her is gonna cost you $1,000.
In the Jam Sessions, two hours of smart business ideas costs you $25.
We think that’s a pretty great price for what you’re getting. Of course, you could go out to dinner and a movie instead. A cheap meal, and by yourself, which makes you the weirdo eating his burrito all alone at the 5:30 showing of a Will Farrell movie. But here’s what that contest looks like:
A burrito and a bad comedy
vs.
A better business that freaks you out less, makes you more money, and lets you do something you love for a living. Oh, and good comedy.
We think you know who wins that showdown.
Forget the burrito. Embrace the business. And click the button already.
