The contributor form is due tomorrow so you grab the checklist you built two years ago for something else. That's where the chain breaks, and it takes the rest of the funnel down with it.

Four hundred people opted in and by week three they've forgotten which summit they found you at. The buyers from a speaking spot mostly show up in month three, and only if somebody planned for them.

You teach the workshop, a few hundred people opt in, and three months later you're trying to work out whether the spot was worth it. A speaking spot can produce three things, and the list bump is the smallest of them.

Teach too broad and the room fills with people who will never buy. Teach too close to your paid offer and you just gave it away. There's a narrow band in between, and one question tells you whether your topic is in it.

Somebody watches your workshop, grabs your gift, lands on your page, and right at the moment they're the most interested in you they'll ever be, there's nothing to buy. Here's what goes there.

A tripwire opt-in, a webinar registrant, and a quiz taker just joined your list, and all three are getting the same five emails. Here are the seven welcome journeys, mapped by the door people actually came through, and the one to build first.

Zuckerberg wrote 6,500 words predicting that small teams will run real companies with AI. He's right about the shape of it and wrong about the timing. Here's what a one-person company actually looks like from inside one, including which work I stopped doing and what stayed with me.

Of all the ways to get in front of someone else's audience, this one asks the least of you. No live session, no scheduling, no camera. Here's how contributors actually get picked, from the host's side.

Most swap advice stops at how to find a partner, which is the easy part. The hard part is that plenty of swaps run fine and bring almost nobody, and it's usually the copy rather than the size of the list.