Episode #54 – Terry Dunlap On How A Hacker Makes $88,312 with Autoresponders

It’s John McIntyre here, the Autoresponder Guy. I’m here with Terry Dunlap. Now, Terry isn’t an email marketing expert that you might have heard of. Terry sent me an email, it must have been, I think, six weeks ago, maybe two months ago, right before I was due for a trip to Sydney to catch up with the family.

This email, I was reading this out, I remember cracking up when I got at the subject line. He’s dropping f-bombs in the subject line, and then throughout his email it’s great, mentioning numbers and talking about his business, and we’re going to talk about that today.

The reason I got him on was that the results he’s gotten, which I’ll let him tell the story, mostly, from what I understand, from just applying what he’s learned from the Email Marketing Podcast, so I thought, instead of just go back and forth with a few emails, why not get him on the podcast and get him to share what he’s done, what’s worked for him, what he’s applied, how he’s applied and all those kind of things, so then you as the listener can think and get really, really, really fucking inspired and then go and apply the same in your business and make a whole ton of money just like Terry? We’ll get into that.

Terry, how are you today?

Terry: I’m doing outstanding, man. How are you doing?

John: Fantastic. Absolutely fantastic.

Terry: That is cool. I want to say, before we get into the meat of this stuff, that you are absolutely right. I am not an email marketer, I have never done any of this stuff before, and I have to say that when I listen to your podcast or anybody’s podcast about internet business and marketing and things of that nature, when I read reviews, I look for people that have actually implemented this stuff and what the results have been.

I thought it was worthwhile for me to come on here and tell your audience, just by listening to your podcast, and I subscribe to your emails, too, once I got a feel for how you operate and everything you and your guests have provided, I implemented and had fantastic results, and I mean it’s a money-making machine, my friend.

Now we’re not talking the likes of a John McIntyre himself or somebody like Amy Porterfield or David Siteman Garland or those types of people, but it’s starting. I had to start somewhere. I started back in October, and things are just taking off. What I basically did was I had a physical product that I wanted to sell. It’s basically a product, now I can describe it here later, but the product is tailored to the hacking community. It’s a very nichey product that hackers love.

I followed your advice. I basically put up a landing page and I announced that this product was coming out. I did a very simple Google AdWords campaign because I don’t have a blog, I don’t have a podcast. I’m a nobody when it comes to this internet stuff, so the only way I knew to build traffic was to actually start building my list with paid traffic. Anytime these hackers would look for certain keywords, our ad was the only one that ever popped up, so we’re getting people added to the email list.

While I’m doing this, I’m listening to you, I’m following your emails, I’m listening to what you’re giving as advice, and so I start to implement an autoresponder into my campaign as these people are joining the list. I think I did seven or 10 emails that basically kept people intrigued, gave them tidbits of information, kept them always on the hook at the end, made it a story.

When it came time to launch, this thing just exploded. Let me give you some numbers here. I actually launched this online live October 1st of just last year, so we’re talking six months ago barely. In total sales, $88,312.88. If you break it out, that’s roughly 15 grand a month, my friend, from selling a physical product.

It’s killer. To be honest, I owe this success to you. Seriously. There’s no doubt about it. In fact, the whole autoresponder series thing works, the email marketing works. I’ve actually now launched a completely online training class for people that want to learn how to hack wireless networks.

It’s a seven-day boot camp class and I’m doing the exact same thing. I have a landing page up basically that says “Registration is currently closed. If you want to get on the waiting list, you can join,” and then as people join the waiting list, I’m actually writing the email responder series now, but I’ve learned from the first set of autoresponders that I created to be a little more enticing with the subject line and to do a little more tease in the content, say, “Here’s something you need to know,” but I don’t show them the ‘how’ unless they actually join the boot camp. I give them the information they need, but I don’t show them the ‘how,’ unless they join the boot camp.

Dude, this shit works.

John: All right, just that right there, that last bit that you tapped on, which is the tell the ‘what’ and sell the ‘how,’ this is such a classic marketing thing, and so simple, but it works.

Terry: It works. I think the other thing that I’ve learned from you, too, and I’m applying not only in email marketing, but when I need to communicate with someone I may not have a connection with, like I did with you, I had a very intriguing subject line, did I not?

John: Absolutely.

Terry: Now, you’re familiar with Chris Ducker, right?

John: Yeah.

Terry: I listen to his podcast as well. He gives some really valuable content, too. Unfortunately, I’m usually listening to him while I’m driving to work in the morning, and so I have to re-listen and then take notes and stuff after the fact.

I sent him an email, and I didn’t expect him to actually talk about it on his show, but the subject line of the email I sent to him was, “I HATE Chris Ducker!” exclamation point and “hate” in all caps. I told him in the email, I said, “You know? I really hate your show because it has such valuable content that when I’m listening to it driving, it pisses me off that I can’t write anything down because I’m driving.”

He even admitted that he was hesitant on actually opening and reading the contents of that email based on the subject line, but it got his attention and it got a mention on his show, which I never intended.

John: This is great. I love this. He replied to your email?

Terry: Your stuff works. It is the subject line and it is the content, the hook, you get them, and like you said, give them the ‘what,’ ‘where’, ‘when’ but not the ‘how.’ If they want the ‘how,’ they can pay for it.

John: Let me back up. Let’s just recap a little bit. You’ve got this product for wireless networks. This is the Reaver Systems, right, the original product?

Terry: Yeah.

John: You set up a Google AdWords campaign basically to build who is searching for terms related to this. You drove them to a landing page which offered them something. What did it offer them, by the way?

Terry: It actually didn’t offer them anything. I wasn’t giving anything away. It was basically a description of what the product was and that we were going to be launching soon, and if you wanted to get in on special pricing and be one of the first people to get your hands on this limited release edition, add your name to the email list.

John: So a bit of suspense, and they join your email list. What do you from there? What were you doing with Email 1? Was there anything special going on?

Terry: Email 1, some of your listeners in the States who are tech-savvy might know this conference. Have you ever heard of DEF CON?

John: I have, but that’s an electro dance music festival in Sydney, but you’re not talking about that one, are you?

Terry: It’s not that “def con.” Every year in the U.S. out in Las Vegas, there’s a hacker conference. The first one is Black Hat, which is where all your professional security pentesters and stuff show up at.

Then after that is where all your hardcore hackers show up. They’re the people that are wearing their black and white and their piercings and all that kind of stuff and show up and hang out at the scene. There’s talks about hacking the latest and great, GSM phones and hacking Android devices and television sets and all that kind of stuff. Some of our people actually go out there and either give talks or we have a booth and talk about what our company does.

There was a rumor, before we launched this, that someone had said, “Hey, I heard that there’s a new Reaver Pro coming out,” because prior to this physical product, all it was was a software download that we had for some of our customers. We started getting a brand-new target audience out of DEF CON, and when they started signing up on the mailing list, the very first email that went out was simply titled “Rumors.”

I’ll quickly run through this. I’ll read the first one. You open up the email entitled “Rumors” and it begins this way: “Many of you have emailed me asking if rumors are true. ‘Is it true that a new Reaver Pro was seen at DEF CON last week?’ Well, I don’t know. I wasn’t there, so I can’t speak about what was or was not at DEF CON, but what I do know is that our guys in the lab who’ve been hacking up some Reaver Pro goodness all summer long, it’s a tasty treat that is cooking to near perfection.”

“I can’t go into many details now simply because I let our hackers do whatever they want, when they want. Our deal is this: partners don’t ask questions and the hackers in the lab will crank out awesome stuff. Think I’m joking? Then see what happens when I leave Craig Heffner to do what he wants to do. Here’s his talk at Black Hat last week,” and it’s a link to his actual talk that he gave how he actually hacks IP cameras Hollywood-style, where he can literally take over an IP camera …

John: What’s an IP camera?

Terry: … increase the image, and then be able to do whatever you want without the image actually being seen.

John: What’s an IP camera?

Terry: An internet camera. If you go out and buy some of these cameras …

John: Oh, a webcam? You mean like this webcam on my Mac?

Terry: Like a webcam, yes. Like even security cameras. A lot of corporations have security cameras to monitor the perimeter or industrial control systems, or even nanny cams or something like that.

Our guy had discovered a way to hack these things and presented a talk at DEF CON. What he did on stage was he’d go through his whole technical talk of how to do this, and then the demo was, he’d set a can of beer in front of the camera that was supposed to be protecting and monitoring this can of beer. Then he does his hack. The frame freezes, and then he can take the physical can away, but yet to you and me, it looks like it’s still there.

That was the first email that went out. The second email that went out basically started enticing people about what the new features are going to be, and it was simply titled “Black Box.” I said, “Where do I start? Let’s start with one of the coolest new features of Reaver Pro. Man, is this cool. Once we find the WPA passphrase to the target network, Reaver Pro will automatically connect to the network and then email you the passphrasing keys to an email account that you configure ahead of time. Consider my mind blown. Is that cool or what?” and I go on.

This is the style that I have. Then I have it on boxing video where I actually talk about, ‘Hey, we just got the master copy from the manufacturer’s. Here’s what it looks like,’ and then actually put a YouTube video up there for that, and then how to actually use it. Preorders haven’t even started yet, so I’m getting people, ‘Here’s what it looks like,’ ‘Here’s what it can do,’ ‘Here’s all the cool stuff that you can do with this.’ Then finally I open it up for preorders, and then I announce to people that it’s actually shipping.

Using the landing page and the email autoresponder series, I think we ended up, prior to launch, with about a thousand-plus emails on the list, and I’d say probably 20% of those actually ordered during the preorder. Now it’s getting to the point where it’s actually … It’s self-sustaining. There’s no more mailing list to join. The word has gotten out, people have written blog reviews about it, people have posted their YouTube reviews about it. Now it’s just organic. I don’t have to run the ads anymore. We’re selling probably anywhere, on the low side, five to as many as 15 of these a day at 75 bucks a pop.

John: Damn. Basically, it’s a product launch sequence in this site. If someone goes there now, they will just go through that launch sequence, even though it’s already on [inaudible 00:13:56]? How does it work?

Terry: No, now if you go through it, you just buy it. You just click the “Buy” button. The whole launch sequence for this particular product is done.

Now I’m working on the one for our Wi-Fi boot camp class where I teach you as an end user how you can use a very basic Linux operating system distribution on your laptop and, with built-in tools, be able to sniff wireless networks, collect packets, look for usernames and passwords on those networks, and how to create what’s called a “man in the middle road access point,” where if you’re in a hotel, like Hilton HHonors or whatever is the AP name, I teach you how to create that exact same setup so people think they’re connecting to the hotel but they connect to you, and you sniff all their traffic on your laptop as you tether it to your phone or mobile device for an actual internet connection.

That’s called the TNS Seven-Day WiFi Bootcamp. Registration is currently closed and so we’re adding people to the mailing list there. I’m working on that email sequence right now for the autoresponders. I didn’t wait to get my autoresponder done, because the most important thing I think you could do now is start collecting the email addresses. Don’t wait.

If you have an idea, you think you’ve got something that the market wants, number one, put up a landing page. Number two, if you don’t have an email list, you don’t have a blog, you don’t have a podcast, you don’t have a YouTube channel, then I think the easiest and fastest way is to set up a Google AdWords account. Figure out what keywords you need, and then run it for seven days and see what happens. See if you get people adding names to your email list.

That’s what I’m doing with the boot camp. We’re getting people adding names to the list. It seems to be working out. Let me give you a quick rundown of some of the subject lines that I’m going to use for the boot camp sequence. I’ve got 10 emails here. I’ve got half of them fleshed out already.

The Subject Line 1, of course, is “Welcome to the list,” and that’s pretty generic. Second one is, “I don’t do Windows.” Basically the gist of that email is, ‘In this course, we don’t use the Windows operating system. We use the Linux operating system.’ Then the next one is, “Pick the right wireless card,” because people that are in this community that do wireless penetration testing, wireless hacking, they’re all fixated on one particular brand card that’s out there that’s very popular and I dispel the myth that ‘This is not the card you think that you should be using.’

There’s a couple open source tools that people use called Aircrack and Kismet. In this next email, the subject line says, “But I already use Aircrack and Kismet,” and I basically dispel the myth that ‘Hey, they’re good tools, but you really should know how they work under the hood, because the next email subject line explains why you need to know that.’ This subject line is called “When the excrement hits the oscillator.” ‘When the shit hits the fan.’

That basically talks about a story where I was actually out in the field doing a penetration test one time against a client. I didn’t have an internet connection and my tool shit the bed. I basically needed to open up a terminal, get on a command line and figure out how to do all this stuff just with a black-and-white terminal. No GUIs, nothing. ‘So understanding what you learned in the boot camp will help you when the shit hits the fan.’

Then there’s one called, “Hey, where’s the Easy button?” It talks about a story where I was teaching a class and they saw the power of working on a command line but then they wanted to know, ‘Can’t we create a GUI, an easy button?’ and I talk about the pros and cons of that.

Then there’s one called “How fast can you hop?” There’s a concept in the wireless world that when you’re monitoring wireless networks, you need to channel-hop. Once I show you how to do this, it’s a piece of cake. That one is, ‘Do you have a big or little pipe?’ That one basically talks about, when you’re actually collecting the packets, how much space do you have to store it in basically more efficient ways to store the data that you’re collecting?

Then the final email in this series is, “How to have fun at Starbucks,” which basically goes into detail how you can set up a rogue access point in Starbucks, mimic the Starbucks access point, have people that come in that are sipping on their cappuccinos and lattes connect to you instead of the Starbucks network, and then you see everything that they do, all their web traffic, all their banking, everything.

That’s the series for this particular funnel.

John: I’m going to say it right now. What it looks like you’re doing is you’re just going through each module of this course for each day, and you create an email around it that’s really just preselling that, and then you’re going to link to, say, I’m guessing a sales page where they can sign up and actually purchase the course when it’s ready.

Terry: Yeah. Now what I do is, if you’re on the boot camp page, you should see where it says that “Registration is closed. Add your name to the waiting list” at the very top. What we’ll do is, as people add their name, they will basically get this email series which, you’re right, it corresponds to each of the particular modules.

I’ll tell the ‘what,’ ‘where,’ ‘when,’ ‘why’ but not the ‘how,’ and then I’m going to announce, date yet to be determined, when we’re going to have a webinar. The webinar is going to be one-hour long, so everybody on the mailing list can come and see exactly what the program is all about. I go into a lot more detail, I provide more specific links to open source resources.

Basically it ends by saying, ‘When you leave this webinar, I have literally given you everything that you need to do what I teach you in the boot camp. You have two choices now. You can take the information I gave you and by trial and error figure it out on your own. It’s going to be slow, but you’ll figure it out, and you’ll probably be better educated for it.’

‘Or if you want to learn it quickly, you want your hand held, you want a step-by-step seven-day process to take you from zero to hero, then join the boot camp. I’ve given you everything, the links, the sources, the webpages and all that stuff to go learn this all on your own, or you can join the boot camp and I can teach it to you in seven days.’

John: The thing that’s so badass about this is you’ve done one thing, that’s worked with email marketing. ‘What’s the next thing? Now I’m going to do this seven-day boot camp.’ It sounds like, I can hear it in your voice, you are so excited about it, about email marketing, what the whole thing is going to do. I’m thinking you probably got, what, 10 … How many ideas have you got that you think you could roll out over the next … if you had all the time in the world?

Terry: Jesus. I’d have to go get my book. I have pages. I literally have pages of shit that I want to do. I just don’t have enough time in the day. If you listen to Chris Ducker, his solution is hire all these goddamned VAs. I can’t manage that many people.

Now, I’ll give you guys some little backstory here. The company Reaver Systems is actually a subsidiary of my larger company, which is actually a government contracting company here in the United States. We cater a lot our reverse engineering skills and our hacking skills to the military and the intelligence community, but we wanted this to be completely separate.

My partners and I said, ‘Okay, if we want this to be completely separate from this other business, that’s fine,’ because it’s a completely different clientele, completely different mentality, completely different skillset to market to these people, because I remember, when I joined your email list, your very first email says, “Hey, what’s your problem? Reply to this email and let me know what it is.”

I sent you a very detailed explanation that we deal with the intelligence community. Trying to get these people to get in touch in front of the right people is painful, and of course, I didn’t expect you to have an answer, but this is a completely different market.

We made the decision, ‘Hey, let’s spin off the Reaver product, create a company just around that, and then, Terry, you figure out how to market it, you figure out how to sell it,’ and that’s pretty much what I’ve been doing, and thanks to you, John, and all your guests and everybody you’ve had on, I’ve been able to take bits and pieces and adapt it and, goddamn it, the shit’s working.

John: One thing that’d be cool to touch on is what were some of the key light bulb moments or the things you were like, ‘Oh, that’s how it works?’ What were some of those? Maybe challenges that you had, and then you listened to the podcast and you figured something out and it clicked for you?

Terry: To be honest, I think the biggest challenge I had was finding an email provider that had an easy-to-use autoresponder series. I started off with Constant Contact. What a pain in the ass that system was. I dropped it after a while.

On a side note, it’s funny because they followed up with me with a phone call and said, “Hey, why did you cancel? If you give us some feedback, we’ll send you $100 gift cards.” I was like, “Okay, fine.” I laid it on the line, man. I was like no holds barred. At the very end, they said, “Wow, that’s pretty brutal, but hey, thanks for your honesty. We wish everybody would give us feedback like that.”

Then I went to Campaign Monitor, which was my very first autoresponder series that I implemented successfully. Let me back up a second here. It dawned on me about the whole autoresponder series when I first prototyped the boot camp almost a year ago.

What I had done was basically made some very short how-to videos basically along the same content that you see on the website there in the seven different modules, but they were just like private YouTube videos, and I had some beta testers that I wanted to use. I used Campaign Monitor and their autoresponder series.

The idea came from Chris Ducker where he had his new business boot camp series. You’d join his email list and he’d send you three or four things about how to start your online business. I was like, ‘I like that idea. I’m going to steal that idea. I’m going to do it for this how to do Wi-Fi [inaudible 00:24:39] and Wi-Fi hacking with my beta group.’

I would just send out an email in an autoresponder series every 24 hours that linked to the next video. These guys loved it and it’s like, ‘Wow! This is awesome!’ but I didn’t want to do it just strictly delivering videos via email. I wanted to set up a membership site where people could join and interact and I could have live office hours and actually talk to these people.

I think it was the combination of listening to your methodology and following the examples in your email letters, combined with the boot camp concept that Chris Ducker uses over on his site. When those two just combined, it was like, ‘Wow, I could actually do this with anything,’ and then the fact that it actually worked, and dude, fucking made money with a physical product with a bunch of hackers around the globe. Dude, I’m shipping these things everywhere. You name a country, I’ve shipped it.

I did the beta test. That seemed to work. The beta testers loved it. I did it for real with the physical product and we’re making money. Now we’re getting ready to do it with the boot camp, but like I said, if you join the wait list now, you’re not going to get the autoresponders series because I’m still working on it.

John: You know what? I’m going to sign up for it now.

Terry: I like the methodology of where it’s just quick little sentences, because my first responder series was paragraphs of stuff, as I was reading it to you, but now they’re short, quick jabs, just like your emails.

John: By the way, I’ve just signed up to your list. I want to see your emails when they come out.

Just one of the things that people get mixed up with, they think they need to be some copywriter to write a good email, but you’re not a copywriter, you’re a hacker. I read the article that you sent me before we got on the phone, which would be a bit of fun to talk about, but you don’t have to be a writer. You just have to get on there and basically, it’s like you’re having a conversation with a buddy at the bar, you’re three or four beers in and you’re just talking shit.

Terry: Yes. Exactly. That’s exactly it. It works. I cannot envision a scenario where it wouldn’t work.

Now I haven’t used an autoresponder series with other CEOs and stuff of other major companies or anything like that, but given the opportunity, of course, hell, I’m going to try it, because you don’t know if it’s going to work unless you try it. So far, it’s been working for me and I can’t complain. Dude, you’ve been badass.

John: You said it, man. You [inaudible 00:27:26]. You execute it, man.

Terry: That’s true. I personally think a lot of problem that people have when they’re trying to start the business, because there’s so many different ways you can go, to be honest with you, in order for me to concentrate and actually execute like you said, I think that’s the problem. A lot of people have intentions to do this, good intentions, they want to do it, but for some reason they get bogged down at the execution phase.

I’ll tell you right now, one of the things I had to do to concentrate is I had to shit-can a bunch of the podcasts I was listening to and I had to get off of people’s email lists that I was on just so I could concentrate. To be honest, I basically have my podcast down to you, Chris Ducker and the guys that do the Business Growth Podcast or something like that. That’s it.

Otherwise, you’re just overwhelmed. You are just overwhelmed, you don’t know where to start, this guys says to do this, this guy says to do that. You need to focus. Just get rid of the extraneous background noise, find the people that you seem to relate to, like I did with you, and just listen to you and listen to Chris Ducker and one other one, and that’s it, and then implement.

I’ll tell you, the biggest thing that I think helped me execute on this was I actually sat in my garage one day on a nice, warm day with a microbrew beer and I sketched out on a pad of paper what modules do I think I need to cover, how long do I think it’s going to take me to create, and then broke out a calendar and started putting dates on the calendar, and then held myself accountable to make sure everything got done by these certain days. It worked.

John: Absolutely, absolutely. All from a simple autoresponder. What did you have, seven emails, 10 emails in there?

Terry: Yeah, seven, and this next one that I’m working on is 10, but like I said, I only have the bodies of the first four or five already fleshed out, and then I go back and change them, I try and tighten them up.

I’m listening to people like you and others talking about, ‘Hey, go read the classic copywriting books,’ the Gary Halberts of the world in scientific advertising. I grabbed this stuff and I downloaded it on my Kindle and read it when I can.

You read it and it’s like, ‘Wow, this shit hasn’t changed in decades. It’s the same concept. The medium is different.’ Instead of being a direct mail piece, you’re getting the freaking electronic direct mail piece. God, it was outstanding.

John: Yeah. There’s no magic to it. It’s so simple. You can’t package this up. What we’re talking about right here and selling is like a $3,000 product because it’s so, so simple: bit of traffic, bit of people who have a problem that needs solving, and then you need a way to connect them to your product.

You have a product that you need to sell them, and you just need a way to connect them, and the autoresponder is an easy way to connect them. That’s it. That’s not a $3,000 product. That’s the problem. People want that huge, big solution when really, then you sit down, get a bit of traffic, have something to sell, write a few emails.

Terry: I’m telling you, I think a lot of people think that they have to have a huge email list before they can do any of this stuff, and that is simply not true, because when I started the Reaver Pro stuff, granted, we collected a lot of emails over time before we actually launched. That’s fine.

The boot camp, for example, when I did the first iteration of the boot camp, I had maybe 300 email addresses, and then I launched to that list. I got 50 people to sign up and pay anywhere depending on what webinar they went to, I had different price points to see what worked and what didn’t work, it was as low as $47 and as high as $297. I got people all over the board that were paying. I think the sweet spot happens to be right around $97 is where most people seem to be comfortable with.

Here was a list, I just simply put up a landing page, collected email addresses, Google AdWords, had 300 emails, had a webinar, ‘Hey, join me on this particular day. I’m going to go in-depth, talk 60 minutes about this and open up to a Question & Answer session.’

When it was over with, I opened it and people started joining. Then after so many days, I closed it down, and now I’m building the second phase of the email list and I think I got maybe, and I just started the email list a few weeks ago, so it’s maybe around 100 people or so right now.

I’ll launch another webinar, invite everybody to join, get all the details, and then I’ll open it up for three days, and then I’ll close it down again. I need to get my autoresponder completed. It’s just me being lazy, I guess. I’ve got other shit going on, but it’s not going to stop me from collecting emails or pimping the product.

The icing on the cake, to make more people convert, I believe, will be the autoresponder. Maybe I won’t implement it during this phase, but it will definitely be implemented in the next one.

John: One thing I wanted to ask, just to play devil’s advocate for a second, is, Facebook is stiff competition. They’re in markets where it’s very, very competitive. I don’t know your market with all this tech stuff where you’re dropping all these industry jargon, and I get most of it, I’m not sure how many people listening do, but how many people …

Terry: Sorry about that.

John: … in … Are you the only guy in this industry offering this kind of stuff? How much is that contributing to the sales, to the success?

Terry: No, there are other people out there. In fact, he’s a friend, but he’s also a competitor because he has a similar product. The name of the group is Hak5, H-A-K 5. They have an internet TV show that talks about hacking and all that kind of stuff, so they have a huge, huge following. Now if you go to their store, the HakShop, which I think is H-A-K S-H-O-P, they sell all kinds of devices like ours, multipurpose devices.

Now here’s the kicker: I get a lot of emails saying, ‘Why should I buy your Reaver Pro over the HakShop’s WiFi Pineapple?’ I’m honest with them. I say, ‘The Pineapple is great if you want a device that does multipurpose things. If you want to do man-in-the-middle attacks, you want to break WEP, if you want to break WPA, it even has our open source version of Reaver built into it.’

‘If you need a multipurpose device that does multiple things and has battery support and all that kind of stuff, then go with that device, but if you want a single-purpose device that goes after Wi-Fi-protected setup, which is on most modern APs today, you need to either test or gain access to those networks and you want an easy-to-use GUI on a very stable platform with awesome customer support, then buy our product.’

People are like, ‘Wow. Thanks for the honesty. Really appreciate that. I just placed my order with you.’ I am customer support, unfortunately, so when people email me with a problem, I’m the one that replies.

What I have heard throughout the months is that our competition’s platform is a little more unstable than ours, so it may have a tendency to crash or not function as properly, and their customer support literally sucks. People will email them and may not hear anything back within weeks.

John: What you have there, what I’m seeing is that you have just a killer USP. You know exactly who you are, you know exactly what part of the market you’re serving and what sort of person is going to buy your product.

Terry: Yes.

John: That’s a killer thing is like, when someone’s going to set up their order or something or someone’s going to do their marketing, they need to get their shit worked out like, who are they, who’s their prospect, who are they trying to talk to, and then exactly why is their product different to everything else out there, why should people buy theirs than the other stuff, because they’re thinking if they can iron out those kinks, everything else will flow over naturally and you can have easy answers to all these questions.

Terry: Yeah. Now let me caveat what you just said by saying, I agree with everything you just said, but I did not have all that information before I launched Reaver Pro. I didn’t know they had an inferior product, I didn’t know that it was unstable, I didn’t know that their customer support was bad, but that didn’t stop me from just getting out there and putting the autoresponder together.

Now, in light of this feedback that I’ve been getting for these past six months is going into my waffling on putting together the current autoresponder, because I want to make sure I address the most common complaints that the competitor has and be able to say why mine is better, so I’ll write it, and then I’ll look at it and let it rest for a day, come back and say, “Nah, I need to rewrite that.”

I just need to fucking stick with it and just pull the trigger and do it, like I did the last time. It was kind of interesting because, when I did it the first time, I didn’t know what the hell I was doing, so I just did it. Now the bad part is, I got a little knowledge, I kind of know how it should work, and now I’m waffling, trying to tweak it too much and I’ve got to slap myself and get out of that and just pull the trigger and just do it.

John: Yeah, you’re thinking too much.

Terry: Yes, exactly. Yes, I am.

John: I’ve heard of stories, they get successful early, and then it becomes a lot harder the second time because they ask the question, ‘Can I live up to it? Can I get the same results that I just got?’

Terry: Yeah. Dude, it’s been a ride. I’ve been through four different email providers. I finally for now settled on MailChimp. I just think it’s easy to use and it seems to integrate with everything that we have set up e-commerce-wise and what not.

I’m really digging some of these capabilities that some of the bigger things have, and they’re not just emails, like Infusionsoft and Office Auto Pilot, but that’s just too rich for my blood right now. I’m happy with MailChimp. It does what I need to do, it does my autoresponders, I can do my split testing.

Again, I don’t do a lot of fancy graphics or links, right? It’s just plain text emails with links. That’s it.

John: How long are your emails?

Terry: How long are they?

John: Yeah.

Terry: They’re short. Compared to yours, mine are short, because you can pull up the email and you can probably read it within six, seven lines or so. They’re very short, very quick, to the point.

Now the autoresponder series that I’m working on now is going to be a little bit longer, but when I do my broadcast and stuff, it’s usually, ‘Hey, here’s a link to X, Y, Z’ or ‘Here’s a new video I released on Reaver Pro on how to add a Yagi antenna’ or how to set up some certain configuration. I do a lot of broadcasting to the group just to keep it fresh so there’s interesting stuff and I don’t end up in the spam box or the promotions tab.

Most recently with the boot camp, I sent out an email that simply said, “Now that you’ve been through the boot camp, can I get your feedback?” I think I’ve had like a 75% open rate on that email and almost damn near everybody responded with some very, very valuable feedback that most of it I plan to implement in the near term, which is great because now I don’t have to fear going to their spam box or to the promotions tab because now they’ve clicked on the link, they’ve responded to me.

Dude, it’s been a ride. You are solely responsible for all this email bullshit that I’ve gotten myself into.

John: I love it, I love it.

Terry: Dude, my partners think I’m a wackjob getting involved with this stuff, but the numbers work. I show them what our profit margin is on me just running this part of the business and just selling this physical product.

Now we’re at a position where, ‘What do we want to do with it?’ We’ve proven that it works, we’re making good money, the profit margins are usually around the 20%-plus area. Do we want to sell it off? Because it’s a turnkey system right now. Do we want to sell it off or do we want to expand the product line and what not. I don’t know. It’s a decision we have to come to grips with, how much more time we want to put into it or where we want to drive it.

John: Very cool, very cool. Let’s wrap it up around here. Before we go, though, if someone wanted to email you and talk to you more, ask you a few questions about email, do you mind if they get in touch or …?

Terry: No, not at all. I love helping people out. I’ve been to a couple of different networking events where I’ve talked about my methodology about how I go about testing ideas before you even put money into it. It’s our little process, our little funnel that deals everything with setting up the AdWords account, setting up the landing page, setting up the autoresponders, questioning the people, and then deciding whether or not that there’s a market out there for it.

I’ve kind of put together this little funnel that I go around locally talking about other businesses about, whether it’s a physical product, an online product or maybe a class that they want to teach, how you can test it out without spending a lot of money and going down a rabbit hole that you can’t get out of.

Yeah, they can contact me. I’ll give you my personal email address.

John: Sure.

Terry: It’s terry, T-E-R-R-Y, that’s “T” like in tango, E-R-R-Y dot dunlap, D-U-N-L-A-P, @gmail.com.

John: Perfect. I’ll have one of those quickie links to that on the show, and you’ve seen what I do, Terry. You’re a hacker, you should know what I mean, terrydunlap, with a little A-T for “@” so they can’t scrape it. It will be on the show notes at McMethod.com if it’s the list they want to go check out.

Now, Terry, thanks for coming on to share your story.

Terry: No problem. Anytime, man. Keep up the outstanding work.