The auction has ended! Congratulations to @Gasper Crepinsek for taking home my very own "Upwork Retirement Proposal" and a big stack of bonuses for the very nice sum of 35,000 pennies! JUST IN CASE YOU MISSED IT, HERE'S WHAT WENT DOWN... Get the exact Upwork proposal template I used to land $159,000 in low-stress retainers while I work 15-hour weeks and travel the world. ⬇️⬇️⬇️ I don't freelance on Upwork anymore. Not because it stopped working. Because ONE proposal template worked so well it retired me. 👉 $159,000 in contracts. 👉 Clients who hired me over 50+ other applicants. 👉 Clients who APOLOGIZED for wasting my time when they couldn't afford me. 👉 $12k retainers from people who'd never met me. Now, I hire people to push the buttons while I look at graphs and tell jokes on Zoom calls. In May, when we go to Japan for 2.5 weeks, other people will keep my machine running while I eat raw fish next to Mt. Fuji. All from Upwork clients. The place everyone says has zero high-paying clients. 🙄 Here’s what we’re gonna do. Grab a walker. Amble on over to the cafeteria and snag a cup of prune juice. Then meet me in the day room and let’s reminisce about the good ol’ days when Upwork was still Elance… 🎉🎉 Welcome to the Upwork Retirement Auction! 🎉🎉 Winner gets the Upwork proposal template that retired me from Upwork—plus, I’ll show you how to “reverse engineer” it for any job your heart desires. Bids start at one cent. Bids can only go UP by one cent. AND... EVERYONE who bids at least one penny in the auction gets a free bonus: The Profile Rescue Kit, which'll fix everything wrong with your profile (that clients actually care about) so you can stop obsessing over which angle to take your next headshot pic. 🤯 But wait, there's more...lol. 🤯 IF... If we get a ton of action on the auction, we'll unlock truckloads of additional hot bonuses for you to stuff in your pockets. One more thing: You're getting the exact proposal structure that pulled six figures out of a platform I no longer compete on.

I don't freelance on Upwork anymore. Not because it stopped working. Because ONE proposal template worked so well it retired me. $147,000 in contracts (well, actually $159,000 now). From one basic structure that paid off over and over...so I rode that horse off into the sunset. Clients who hired me over 50+ other applicants. $12k retainers from people who'd never met me. Now, I hire people to push the buttons while I look at graphs and tell jokes on Zoom calls. In May, when we go to Japan for 2.5 weeks, other people will keep my machine running while I eat raw fish and nod at reports. This Friday, I'm sending over a proposal for another $5k to $15k retainer (depends) from an existing client--again, from Upwork--for 5 to 10 hours a week of extra work. All money from Upwork clients. Now... I've thought about how to sell this thing. I could bundle it into a course. Do a whole launch. But honestly? That sounds exhausting. And I realized most people don't WANT another course. So here's my dumb idea instead: A penny auction. Bids start at one cent. Bids can only go UP by one cent. If it sells for 31 cents, so be it. That's on all of you. Here's the thing though... I'm not doing this for just a handful of people. If I get enough PENNY comments below, we run it. If not, I'll find something else to do with my Tuesday. I'd rather go play on a plastic slide with my daughter than sit here like a sad sack waiting for comments to roll in. One more thing: The person who wins this isn't getting some dusty template from 2012. You're getting the exact proposal structure that pulled six figures out of a platform I no longer compete on. Which means ZERO competition from me using it. You're welcome. So here's what to do: You'd bid a penny? Drop PENNY below 👇 You think this is stupid? Drop BAN ME below 👇 Either way I wanna hear from you. Your acquaintance, Nick P.S. Is a penny auction stupid? We'll find out together.

January we take social media by storm. Post, post, post. Siphon doomscrollers into our loving embrace. Convert them into paying customers. Easy, right? OK...HOW do we do this? I left out that little detail, didn't I? I'm not sharing this strategy with casual observers and civilians. If you're in this to win it, show me you're ready to deploy by dropping "GO" below. One more thing--even though this challenge is free for the time being, I am CLOSING the doors to new combatants before the new year begins. I want everybody on the same page so we can focus.

I'm writing this off the cuff so WHO KNOWS how many lessons we'll get. If you're ever planning on running any contests for yourself or a client, you'll probably want to read this. Here we go... We just finished up a 36-ish hour contest here, which you can check in this post: https://www.skool.com/fun/last-comment-wins With a STUNNING 4 winners and nearly 300 comments, it's clear that Funny Money is the most FUN community on Skool, bar none. Now, let's get this out of the way before we continue: What was the POINT of running this contest? To me, a successful 'Last Comment Wins' contest would do these things for our group: ✅ Encourage wallflowers to participate for the first time (Mission Accomplished) ✅ Give new members a reason to engage with the group, other than "hello my name is NAME." (Mission Accomplished) ✅ Bring out existing "superfans" and IDENTIFY new ones in order to help me maintain Big Fun Energy for the duration of the contest. (Mission Accomplished) ✅ Add some intrigue around the contest prizes, which may or may not be offered again, under different conditions to different people. (Mission Accomplished) ❌ Grow this group to 150 people (Mission FAILED) Right now we're sitting at 76 members...and while that's wayyyy better than the ONE guy we started with two weeks ago, 76 is certainly not 150. Which brings me to... 🧠 Lesson 1: Don't do too many things at once. The rules of this contest were simple: I set a time in the near future, which I didn't reveal until an hour before the deadline. Whoever's comment was LAST when time expired would win. Simple. However, I also introduced what I THOUGHT was a genius incentive for people to invite new members to the group. If you go over to the "invite member" button in Skool (appearance varies depending on your screen size), you get a unique link. If someone signs up for this group using your link, I can see the connection. The genius bonus incentive I mentioned was that if you invite one person to the group...

I've just written perhaps my thousandth email about durian, and it got me thinking... What kind of weird or frowned-upon food do you like to eat? For example: I remember someone who used to drink dill pickle brine from the jar. What about you? Email reproduced below for historical accuracy... ### Subject: How to get kicked out of a taxi Nhu and I have just stepped out of our taxi into a muggy Singaporean afternoon. Trembling with anticipation. The menu plastered to the wall in front of me cheekily declares: “Hold your breath.” I refuse. What should we order? Stinky Bomb? Stinky Roll? Stinky Scoop? 😵 This is heaven. This is… 99 Old Trees—Singapore’s go-to stall for the freshest, most deluxe-est durians in town. “What do you want to eat?” my wife whispers into my ear. “Something that will get us kicked out of our next taxi,” I whisper back. I’ve written about durian so much in this newsletter that you might easily mistake these emails for blog posts from a globetrotting fruit connoisseur. I assure you—this is a very serious business publication. But if you’re new here… Durian is the king of fruit. The size of a football and covered in spikes, durians resemble medieval torture devices on the outside. Let’s just say Isaac Newton was lucky an apple fell on his head. On the inside? They resemble pungent, creamy custard with the faintest BREATH of onions that, once cracked open, releases their enticing and repulsive aroma like a mushroom cloud in a 3-mile radius. For perspective… Every subway car in the city warns: No Eating ($500 Fine) No Explosives ($5,000 Fine) No Durians (Life In Prison) (No fine for the durians, but you’d better not or you’re very naughty.) After stuffing ourselves with an absurd amount of fruit, Nhu and I pile into a black minivan headed back to our hotel. The driver points nervously at the plastic bag in my lap. “That’s…that’s not DURIAN, is it?” “No! It’s just bottled water from 7-11,” I grin. He squints at me in the rear-view mirror a moment before shifting into drive…and pulling a facemask out of his breast pocket.