🪄 How Tim Ferriss Came Up With The 4-Hour Work Week

Hey,

The Spells Master is back!

Welcome to the 104th issue.

Today's topics:

1. How Tim Ferriss Came Up With The 4-Hour Work Week

2. A tool to Record Mouse and Keyboard Movements for Automation

3. One recommended video on MASTERING AI PROMPTING: TOP 5 Elements for Reusable Prompts, AI Agents, Agentic Workflows

How Tim Ferriss Came Up With The 4-Hour Work Week

The original title of the semi-autobiographical self-help book "The 4-Hour Work Week" was "Drug Dealing for Fun and Profit."

Tim Ferriss liked the title because it polarized opinion but Walmart disapproved it for obvious reasons.

So Tim Ferriss went back to the drawing board and came up with 12 different title names but everyone had an opinion on the best title, including his agent and distributor but none of them could agree on 1 final name.

Instead of relying on gut feeling, Tim took a data-driven decision.

1. A/B Testing Title using Google Ads

Tim Ferriss took 6 prospective titles that everyone could live with: including "Broadband and White Sand", "Millionaire Chameleon" and "The 4-Hour Work Week" and developed an Google Adwords campaign for each.

He bid on keywords related to the book's content including "401k", "world travel", "retirement", and "language learning"

He was looking for keywords related to lifestyle design, productivity, retirement, travel, and learning new languages as the book covered those concepts.

So if someone searched for keywords like "401k", they would see the 6 rotating titles without bias on the most-clicked one.

The potential titles appeared as headlines in sponsored results and ad text was the subtitle. The URL led to an under-construction page with email.

Here's how the campaign must have been:

Tim Ferriss was interested to see which of the sponsored links would be clicked on the most as he knew that he needed his title to compete with over 200k books published in the US each year.

At the end of the week, he knew that "The 4-Hour Workweek" had the best click-through rate by far and he went with that title.

And he managed to do it for less than $200.

This is minimal viable marketing.

2. A/B Testing Placement IRL

Tim Ferriss didn't stop his experimentation there.

He decided to test various covers by printing variations of them on high quality paper.

He placed the covers on similar sized books in the new non-fiction rack at Borders Bookstore in Palo Alto.

He sat with a coffee and observed visitors to learn which cover was the most appealing one.

He did this to observe pick up rates while pretending to read.

He found the best placement to be just below eye level, left side of the new non-fiction rack.

This small experiment made "The 4-Hour Workweek" an instant best-seller that sold over 2.1 million copies, stayed on The New York Times Best Seller List for 4 years and got translated into 40 languages.

Sources: "The 4-Hour Workweek" Book, Boing Boing, Thulme, Write To Done, Tim & Kevin, and KickStartSideHustle.

A tool to Record Mouse and Keyboard Movements for Automation

Mini Mouse Macro is a free light weight mouse macro that records mouse movements, clicks and keyboard entries.

You can literally scrape Google for emails and let this macro run in the background while you go to the gym and it will collect emails for you and enter into spreadsheet.

Robotic Process Automation will be wild in post-AI world as we get useful robots soon. I've heard they cost $35k but some kid in a garage will probably make it for cheap. Then you can do create click-farms for cheap.

One recommended video on MASTERING AI PROMPTING: TOP 5 Elements for Reusable Prompts, AI Agents, Agentic Workflows

This video blew my mind away. This dude is a phenomenal teacher. If you want to learn about AI, keep an eye on this channel.

I'm blown away by the usefulness. If you want to learn the 80/20 of prompting AI, watch it. He even has videos on AI Programming. We're still early.

Top Tweets of the day

1/

Comfy UI is a node-based solution for Stable Diffusion. One pattern I've seen emerging in AI tools is all of them use Node-Based Visual-Programming Language.

I believe this will be the evolution of AI Tools as they manage to output in JSON format which is useful to connect AI Prompts.

2/

With AI, you can do work a hell of a lot faster. For the love of god, watch the above video to understand how to prompt AI so you can do your work in half the time. Thank me later.

I am trying various AI tools like ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and Claude right now and they all are making my work easy.

No wonder, the person in the Hampton AI Report managed to publish 75 newsletters per week with team of 4 people instead of 30 people.

I've recently learned how to create content using AI for X and LinkedIn that is better than human-written content. I'll unveil it soon after testing it a bit. This is much better than the generic AI content you've seen out there.

Rabbit Holes

1. the strategy i used to go viral on twitter… - If you can provide value while building a community, you are bound to go viral.

2. Valence and Arousal: How To Kindle an Emotional Fire - People make decisions based on emotions and justify it with logic afterwards.

3. Cold DM or Mail? Which one is better - Lots of good tips on doing Cold Outreach.

Until next time,

Your Spells Master!

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Read all the old case studies here.

More Startup Spells 🪄

1. The ChatGPT Plugin that went viral worldwide (LINK)

2. First to Social (LINK)

3. Peak End Rule (with Real Life Examples) (LINK)