The Boring Offer: Free Live Workshop

There are only two ways to get customers online.

One is exciting. One is boring. After 14 years, I'm finally betting on boring, and I'll show you exactly why this week.

The exciting way

Build an audience and hope it pays off

Post content for a year. Chase the algorithm. Grow a following. Build a giant free email list. Maybe go viral. Then, eventually, try to convert all that borrowed attention into sales. It's the path everyone teaches. It's also a slow, enormous, upfront gamble on attention you don't control yet.

The boring way

Build a "boring offer" and get paid up front

Make one small, useful product: the boring offer. Point cheap ads at it. People pay you today. You skip the audience-building gamble entirely and walk away with a small list of people who've already bought from you.

A tiny list of paying customers is worth more than a giant list of free subscribers.

I've spent 14 years on the exciting path. It worked, but it took years, and in 2026 it's getting harder and riskier to start from zero every single month. So this week I'm walking you through the boring way instead. The whole model, start to finish, with the sharpest direct-response mind I know.

What you'll walk away understanding

Not a pep talk. The actual model, clear enough that you could explain it to a friend by Friday.

What a "boring offer" actually is: a cheap little product that doesn't need to be clever or original. It just has to be useful, like the digital version of fixing someone's leaky faucet. (This definition alone frees a lot of stuck people.)
The two ways to get customers online, and why the one nearly everyone teaches is a slow, expensive gamble on attention you don't control yet.
Why a tiny list of buyers beats a giant list of fans: the counterintuitive math that makes 100 people who paid you $7 worth more than 10,000 free subscribers.
Why $7 is the magic number in 2026, and how a tiny price tag is now the lowest-risk way on earth to turn a nervous stranger into a paying customer.
"Launch fast, grow slow," the shape of the whole funnel: how you launch an offer in a weekend, then scale ad spend deliberately so you never risk money you haven't already made back.
Why you buy traffic instead of earning it: the mindset shift that removes the single biggest reason people never start, "how do I get anyone to see this?"
Why this is more doable from zero now than the audience-building path was when I started 14 years ago, even with AI and a noisier market (maybe because of them).
What the whole machine looks like end to end: offer, traffic, and the pieces that multiply your revenue behind the scenes, so the path from "nothing" to "real customers" stops feeling like a mystery.

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Free & live · Thursday, May 28 · 12pm PT / 3pm ET

Why this, why now

In 2026, selling mid- and high-ticket products to cold traffic right off the bat is harder than it was even six months ago. There's economic worry, AI worry, job worry, a lot of fear in the market. People don't hand over $2,000 to a stranger anymore. But they'll spend $7 to test you.

That's the whole point of a small front-end offer. It's the lowest-risk way for a stranger to become a customer, and a customer list is the most valuable asset you can build. Email lists are worth more in 2026 than they've ever been, and a list of buyers is worth more than any list of free subscribers.

Who's teaching this

One bringing the method, one putting it to the test, teaching it together, live.

Derek Johanson

Founder of CopyHour

I've run CopyHour for 14 years and taught copywriting to 5,000+ students, and for all of it, I avoided building cheap front-end offers. This week I stop avoiding it. On the workshop, Ian and I lay out the whole boring-way model and why I'm convinced it's the smartest way to start in 2026.

Ian Stanley

Direct-response copywriter & paid-traffic operator

Ian is currently spending $1,000/day driving cold traffic to a low-ticket offer using the exact framework we'll walk through on this workshop. He also runs a $20k/year coaching program full of operators using this same funnel. He's one of the few people I trust completely on this, which is why I asked him to teach it live instead of figuring it out alone.

Join the free live workshop

Real paying customers without an audience, and the "boring offer" that makes it work. The whole model, explained live, start to finish.

LIVE ONLY: Thursday, May 28 at 12pm Pacific / 3pm Eastern

The "boring offer" that gets you paying customers without an audience