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Every issue of this newsletter gives you the exact systems, strategies, and principles I’ve used to generate 8 figures (almost entirely) with email marketing. So you can build your own systems that will carry you through the next algorithm change or recession. This is what actually works.

People who’ve been grinding for years say the same thing over and over: "Igor, I finally saved some money. I’ve got $2,000 sitting in my account. I know I need traffic. I know I need a list. I know exactly what to do. But I just... can’t bring myself to spend it."

They're telling the truth. They're fully aware of what they should do. They have a condition.

I call it Post-Traumatic Broke Disorder.

Here's what I've noticed after years of working with people trying to build online businesses. A large chunk of them spent years, sometimes decades, genuinely broke. Counting coins. Choosing between the gas bill and the grocery run. Knowing, with real certainty, that if something went wrong this month, there was no safety net. That kind of experience leaves a mark.

The problem is that the mark doesn't disappear when the money arrives. The brain doesn't get the memo. So even after they've saved up capital, joined a program, started making a little money, the old programming is still running in the background, quietly making decisions on their behalf. Like a virus that survives the antivirus scan.

The symptoms look like this. They pay $97 for a course, then spend six months "going through it" before doing anything. They buy the cheapest hosting available, then wonder why their pages load slowly. They skip the $500 traffic test that would tell them in two weeks whether their offer actually converts. Meanwhile, they'll spend $6 a day on coffee without thinking twice. That's $2,190 a year on something that evaporates in four minutes. The broke brain doesn't calculate like that. It sees the $500 and panics. It sees the $6 and doesn't blink.

Before we go any further…

Building an email list usually takes months of work before you see a dime.

You need a landing page, an autoresponder, a lead magnet, a follow-up sequence, traffic campaigns, and endless testing to get it all dialed in.

My buddy Glenn found a different way.

He's an ex-surveyor from the UK who built a 7.2K per day affiliate system that doesn't require building lists at all. 

Instead of teaching people to build their own system from scratch, he found a way to help them clone his entire setup.

I've spent years teaching people to build email lists because it works… 

So why is a list builder promoting a system that has nothing to do with email lists?

Because it works, and I know not everyone wants to build a list.

This Thursday at 2pm EST, we're hosting a live interactive training where Glenn will show you his exact system and how you can clone it instead of building one from scratch.

You'll be able to ask questions and get real answers during the session.

Now, as I was saying…

I once had a student who'd been trying to build an online business for nine years before he came to me. Nine years. When I started digging into what he'd actually done in that time, it turned out he'd bought courses from every major name in the industry — Russell Brunson, Ben Settle, Perry Belcher, Alex Hormozi. He could have taught a class on email marketing himself. He'd never actually written a single email sequence and sent it live. Every time he was about to pull the trigger, the broke brain kicked in. What if it doesn't work? What if I'm not ready? What if I lose the money? So he'd go buy another course instead. Learning felt safe. Implementing felt like risk. And after nine years, he had absolutely nothing to show for it — except a very expensive education that had produced zero dollars.

I grew up with PTBD too, by the way.

Before I figured any of this out, I was working at Burger King, scrubbing ketchup and mayo off plastic trays. Forty minutes each way on the commute. Miserable work for miserable pay. I graduated from the Israeli Air Force Academy, did my mandatory service, and still couldn't find anything worth calling a career. So I settled. Retail jobs. Security work. Burger King.

When you live like that long enough, money starts feeling fragile — like something that disappears the moment you look away. So you grip it. You protect it. You treat every dollar like it might be the last one. That makes perfect sense when you're genuinely broke. Frugality is a survival tool. The problem is what happens when the survival mode doesn't switch off.

I remember when I first started making real money online — a few thousand a month, then more — I still had this tightening in the chest every time I was about to spend something on the business. Even when I logically knew the investment made sense. Even when I'd seen the math work out before. It took me a while to understand what was going on. I wasn't being prudent. I was being haunted.

Here's the cruel irony: the mindset that developed to protect you from being broke ends up keeping you broke. You won't invest in traffic because traffic "costs money." So you get no leads. No leads means no sales. No sales means no money. Which confirms exactly what the broke brain already believed — this doesn't work. You won't invest in a coach because coaching "is expensive." So you spend three years stumbling through mistakes that a good mentor could have helped you skip in three months. You lose the years. And the years don't come back. You undercharge for your own offers because charging real prices "feels greedy." So you attract low-quality buyers, do more work for less money, and eventually burn out. Then you conclude that online business simply isn't for you.

Meanwhile, the people making it? They weren't smarter. They weren't harder workers. They just stopped treating investment like loss.

You can't think your way out of PTBD. I've seen people understand it intellectually — nod along, agree completely, see themselves in every word — and still not move. Understanding the problem is the cure. The way through is one uncomfortable action at a time. You send the traffic. You hire the coach. You raise the price. You hit send on the email even though it's not perfect. Every time you act in spite of the broke programming, you're laying new wire. Teaching the brain, slowly and through real experience, that investment leads to growth, not danger.

It doesn't happen all at once. It happened for me trade by trade, test by test, year by year.

That student who came to me after nine years of learning and zero results? He started sending emails. Imperfect ones. Short ones. He put up a capture page, bought some traffic, and built his first list of 200 leads. Two of them bought something. He made $188. He messaged me like he'd won the lottery. Because for the first time in nine years, he had done something real. The broke brain had lost a round.

One round at a time. That's how PTBD gets treated.

P.S. If you enjoy these ideas, you’ll love the deeper conversations we have on the List Building Lifestyle podcast.