A Single DM, A Polite Rejection
It started with a simple direct message. UK-based graphic designer and podcaster Liz Mosley saw an opening and took it. It was two years ago at Adobe MAX. She bought a book from The Futur’s founder, Chris Do, and posted about it on Instagram.
Do replied with a polite thank you. Seeing the message pop up in her priority inbox, Mosley felt emboldened. A mutual friend, PR expert Lucy Werner, had just been invited onto Do’s podcast. The timing felt right.
“I'm going to invite him to be on my podcast,” she decided. She quickly typed out a message and hit send.
The reply was almost instant. “How many downloads does it have?”
Mosley told him the number. The response that came back was kind, logical, and a clear rejection. Do explained that her podcast’s audience was a bit small for what he was aiming for at the time and gave her a target number to hit before reaching out again.
“It was actually like the nicest rejection really that I could have received,” Mosley admits. “It wasn't a forever no, it was very polite, you know, you explained your reasons why.”
But the politeness didn't erase the feeling. The immediate emotion was embarrassment, quickly followed by a sense of shame. “Who was I to ask Chris Do to be on my podcast?” she thought. The internal narrative began spinning, a familiar cycle for any creative who has ever put themselves out there.
Her brain’s immediate, self-protective response was swift and absolute: “I'm not going to do that again. Because this doesn't feel good.”
The Decision to Fail Deliberately
The feeling lingered. Mosley found the intensity of her emotional reaction fascinating. It seemed disproportionate to the actual event, which was a private, polite, and well-reasoned “no.”
If such a gentle rejection could trigger this self-preservation instinct, how many other opportunities was this fear silently killing? The realization dawned on her. This fear was a hidden ceiling on her career and business.
“My brain really quickly went to okay, I'm not going to do that again because this doesn't feel good,” she recalls. “And then it just kind of like dawned on me all the ways that this was probably holding me back.”
Mosley knew something about herself: she performs well when a challenge is turned into a game. This is the essence of gamification, a powerful tool for changing behavior. So she decided to turn her biggest fear into a game she could win.
She had heard of the concept before. It’s known as Rejection Therapy, an idea originally conceived by Canadian entrepreneur Jason Comely as a card game to help people overcome their fear of asking. It was later popularized by Jia Jiang, whose TED Talk, “What I learned from 100 days of rejection,” documented his own quest to desensitize himself to the word “no.”
Mosley set her own rules. The challenge would be professional, not personal. She wasn’t interested in asking strangers for a duet on the street. This was about business.
The parameters were clear:
- The Goal: Secure 100 rejections.
- The Timeline: Six months.
- The Arena: Professional opportunities only.
“I'm going to try and get a hundred rejections in a professional capacity in six months,” she declared. By making rejection the goal, “no” became a win. Suddenly, the entire emotional landscape of pitching shifted.
Building the Rejection Machine
The moment Mosley made the decision, her mindset changed. The fear didn't vanish, but it was repurposed. Failure was now the objective, and every “no” was a point on the scoreboard.
She began by compiling a list, a backlog of at least 100 things she could pitch for. This wasn't about sending spam; it was about identifying genuine opportunities she wanted but was too afraid to pursue.
- Podcast sponsorships for her show, Building Your Brand.
- Dream guests for her podcast.
- Speaking opportunities at conferences.
- Industry awards she wanted to enter.
With the list of targets in hand, the next phase was operational. She needed contact information. Using LinkedIn Premium, she began tracking down the right people. She researched corporate email conventions, learning to guess addresses when they weren't publicly available. It was a systematic process of intelligence gathering before the first shot was even fired.
Her pitching strategy was twofold. For most pitches, she would carefully construct a compelling email. Having a podcast of her own gave her an advantage; she knew firsthand what a terrible pitch looked like. “I get so many pitches for that and they range from the absolutely incredible to the absolutely abysmal,” she says. This insight, a key part of developing a strong personal brand, informed her approach. You can learn just as much from bad examples as you can from good ones, a concept Chris Do often explores when discussing how to find and get your dream clients.
But sometimes, opportunity wouldn’t wait for a perfectly crafted email. Like her initial message to Do, some pitches were spontaneous, fired off in a moment of inspiration. The key was consistent action.
As she documented the process on social media, people were intrigued, if a little confused. “Why on Earth would I be going out pursuing rejection?” they would ask. But the answer would soon become clear.
The Neo Moment: When 'No' Becomes 'Yes'
Mosley’s first major target for sponsorship was at the top of her dream list: the email marketing platform Flowdesk. She was already a top affiliate, a fact she discovered when they sent her a semi-targeted email update.
This was her opening.
She replied spontaneously. “Thanks for letting me know I'm one of your top affiliates. I've been thinking for a while it would be great... Flowdesk would be the perfect fit for my podcast. What do you think?”
The response was not the rejection she was hunting for. They replied, “Yeah, we've listened to your podcast, send us your deck, we think we'd be a great fit.”
The first company she pitched, her dream sponsor, said yes. “I couldn't believe it,” Mosley says. “And so that... was amazing. This isn't going to play out quite how I expected it to play out.”
This was what Chris Do calls her Neo moment. It’s the scene in The Matrix where the hero, Neo, stops running from his enemies and realizes he controls the rules of the world he inhabits. The bullets he once feared now stop in mid-air. The fear is gone, replaced by an understanding of the system.
As Do explains, “All of a sudden it just clicks. You realize you are the one.”
By creating a win-win situation where both “yes” and “no” were positive outcomes, Mosley had fundamentally altered her own reality. A “no” was a point for the challenge. A “yes” was a business victory. With no downside, her confidence soared.
This new energy was palpable. “Maybe I came across less desperate or something,” she muses. “But I think that confidence impacted how I came across when I was pitching for things.”
The principle is simple. Desperation is repulsive. Abundance is attractive. When your pipeline is full and you don’t need the next client to survive, you negotiate differently. You carry yourself differently. People can sense it. This is a core tenet of effective sales and positioning, as it allows you to price the client, not the job.
The yeses kept coming. Mosley utterly failed her rejection challenge. She never got close to pitching 100 things because she couldn’t keep up with delivering on the opportunities people were accepting. Podcasts on her dream pitch list started reaching out to her before she could even ask them.
She had designed a system to get rejected, but instead, she built a machine for generating opportunities.
The Business of Saying No
The journey from fear to fearlessness came with its own set of challenges. While most rejections were polite or simply ghosting, one hit a nerve. Mosley pitched a well-known figure, mentioning her rejection challenge as a hook. The reply was snarky and dismissive of the entire concept.
“That one did hit me right, that one did hurt,” she admits. For about an hour, she spiraled, questioning her entire project. But the recovery was astoundingly fast. Before, an email like that would have derailed her for weeks. Now, she processed it and moved on. The system was working. The resilience was real.
“I know that this is working for me,” she decided. “This is a personal project and it's doing amazing things for me. So actually, it's okay if this guy doesn't like what I'm doing.”
This ability to detach from negative feedback is a superpower for any creator or entrepreneur. It is not about ignoring criticism but about processing it without letting it dismantle your self-worth, a difficult skill discussed in-depth when dealing with negative feedback.
The success of the challenge also raised practical business questions, particularly around sponsorships. This is an area many creators find opaque. How do you price a podcast sponsorship?
Mosley sought advice from Frankie, a fellow UK podcaster from Doing It For The Kids, who generously shared her own pitch deck, numbers, and rates. This act of paying it forward became a core philosophy for Mosley.
Her pricing strategy was based on a few key factors:
- Market Research: Seeing what a slightly larger podcast was charging gave her a benchmark.
- Cost Neutrality: At a minimum, she wanted the sponsorships to cover her podcast editing costs.
- A Comfortable Number: She started with a rate that felt right for her, ultimately landing between $100 and $200 per episode for her initial sponsors.
She also played the long game. With Flowdesk, she negotiated a lower upfront fee in exchange for using her affiliate link, creating a potential for uncapped upside. She understood that landing a sponsor of that caliber was an asset in itself. “Once I had a company of that... caliber as a sponsor, then that goes into my deck of past sponsors and that is going to help me going forward.” Getting your first anything is always the hardest part.
The Full Circle
Mosley’s experiment created ripples she never anticipated. Sharing her story publicly inspired others to face their own fears. She received messages from people who, inspired by her, pitched for something and got it. Her “no” from Chris Do had become a catalyst for dozens of other people’s “yes.”
But the story wasn't over. A conference organizer who heard her speak about the experience insisted she close the loop. “Either you have to get Chris on your podcast or you have to be on his,” he told her. “Somehow there needs to be some conclusion to this story.”
So Mosley pitched again. This time, not for Chris to be on her show, but for her to be on his. She filled out the form on The Futur's website and sent it in August. She didn’t hear back until December.
This taught her another lesson: patience. Sometimes a “no” isn’t a no. It’s just a “not yet.”
She had a similar experience with another dream guest, acclaimed lettering artist Jessica Hische. After an initial positive signal, Mosley sent her pitch and heard nothing for nearly a year. Then, an email arrived with a booking link. What looked like a rejection was just a long delay.
The original rejections on her list were starting to turn into acceptances.
For Chris Do, the exchange was a distant memory. He sends and receives thousands of messages. He has to be selective to serve his mission of teaching a billion people. “Am I going to reach a billion people 42 people at a time? Probably not,” he explains. Having a filter is a necessity for anyone operating at scale.
But hearing Mosley’s story revealed the hidden universe behind a seemingly inconsequential interaction. “So many times in our lives we meet people, we can say something that feels pretty inconsequential to us, and what we don't know is there's a whole another universe of a story,” Do reflects.
The story that started with a “no” had come full circle, leading Mosley to a platform far larger than the one she was originally pitching for. What started as a quest for 100 rejections became a masterclass in building a business. She failed to get rejected, and in doing so, achieved more than she ever thought possible.
The goal was never really about the rejections. It was about what happens when you stop being afraid of them.
She failed the challenge. And it was the best thing that ever happened to her.
TRANSCRIPT
I had a list almost like an order of who I would my dream you know podcast sponsors I don't have a single sponsor to the show no you're I'm just kidding I'm just kidding about the whole story that was quite a rude response and it was from someone you know who I looked
up to someone that was like very this is your Neo moment I don't want to give too many spoilers away this podcast is going to be a little unusual for me because there's a whole backstory to this and my podcast Pand said hey L send me this email what do you think I
think we should have her and it's a super interesting story so rather than me try to introduce it and set it up Liz for people who don't know who you are please introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about who you are and what you do I am a graphic designer I'm
based in the UK I now sort of specialize in branding for small businesses um and I'm also a podcast host and my podcast is called building your brand and I I think everything that I currently do sits of the umbrella of helping small businesses with their branding and their marketing so whether that's
I do it for them like do their branding for them or they learn something from my podcast or I also do a lot of partnering with Adobe doing Adobe lives you know like educational content basically two years ago I was at Adobe Max and I came past your stand and I bought your
book and I think that know worri that evening I you know did the classic thing I did a an Instagram story I shared the book that I'd bought I tagged you in it and at around the same time you had been chatting with Lucy Werner who is a friend of mine and you
had invited her to be on your podcast so I post this Instagram story and you replied you know very polite saying thank you for the share and so I was like oh okay he sent me a DM if I reply now he's probably going to see it because it'll be like you know
in the priority bit of his inbox so I thought on a whim and sort of emboldened by you just asking Lucy to be on your podcast I was like I'm going to invite him to be on my podcast so I sent you a message and I was like oh hey Chris I've got
this podcast would you be interested in being a guest and so you messaged me back really quickly and said how many downloads does it have so I messaged you told you the number of downloads and you were like okay it's a bit small for what I'm aiming for at the moment but you
know get this is this is the kind of number get back to me you know when you get to that point and I what a jerk right I mean come on no but this is the thing that's what I find so funny about this story is it was actually like the nicest rejection
really that I could have received because it wasn't a forever no it was very polite you know you explained your reasons why like it was really good but I still had all these like emotions about it and I think that was what was so interesting to me so my initial reaction was like
embarrassment oh I shouldn't have asked him I I think there was like a bit of Shame like this is on reflecting about it after the you know after the fact but I think there was like a bit of shame in there you know like oh who was I to ask Chris do to
be on my podcast you know all that all of the kind of things that just come up automatically when you feel those sort of like raw emotions anyway so I was like I mean it's fine again it wasn't and it's not even like it was a humiliating rejection because it's not like nobody
nobody else knew that I dm'd you to ask you so that was all fine and I just sort of like sat with that for a while but it was really intriguing to me I think how my response just did not seem to marry up to the rejection that I'd received right so it
like I you know like I've already said it was a really nice Rejection it wasn't a forever no all this kind of stuff and I was like why did I have such a strong you know emotional reaction to not emot it's not like I was sitting there crying but you know like I
was sort of processing tell the truth come on I was like processing these feelings that I had about it and I think what was interesting to me was that my brain brain really quickly went to okay I'm not going to do that again because this doesn't feel good and so as I was
kind of over the coming months I started to think about that and I was like if that is my response to such a nice reaction what is like my sorry such a nice rejection what is my fear of rejection like hold me back from I init I immediately went to I'm not going
to do that again you know I went into self-preservation mode like these feelings didn't feel good I don't want to feel that again so I'm not going to do this again and then it just kind of like dawned on me all the ways that this was probably holding me back in my career
in my business and so one of the things that I have found since starting my own business is that I've had to I guess like confront a lot of aspects about myself what I'm like you know the the positives and the negatives and one of the things I have learned is that I'm
quite good if I set myself a challenge or I like gamify something and so I was like okay I know what I'm going to do I've heard of a few people doing this before I'm going to set myself a rejection challenge so I was like I'm going to try and get a hundred
rejections in a professional capacity in six months and I've seen like people do this on Tik Tok on Tik Tok they kind of do it in a weird way where it's not to do with work and they'll just like go up to random people in the street and be like will you sing
a duet with me and the person will be like no thanks um and there's also a really good Ted Talk by a guy I'm probably going to say his name wrong but G Yang and he did a talk what I learned from 100 days of rejection and then a friend of mine who's
an illustrator had done something a few years previously where she you know did a similar challenge so I was like great I'm going to do this Challenge and so I started it and I started documenting it and I you know everything's content right so I started sharing about it on social media and
people were interested a lot of people were quite confused like why on Earth would I be going out pursuing VI in rejection um and it's honestly had a profound impact on my life and my career and my mindset and it's been amazing and it's all thanks to you saying no to being on
my podcast so in summary you're saying even my nose are powerful in coaching yeah that's what I'm getting from this okay people need to know I'm kidding around cuz they're like oh my God the ego on this guy is just ridiculous not that I have to defend myself but I'm just going to
tell our audiences in case they're like you know what you freaking jerk Chris why would you do this to people here's something you need to know I used to say yes to almost every person who asked me to be on a podcast and then I started to realize a I have no time
for work all I'm doing is doing podcast interviews and different podcasters bring different levels of production experience and questions and I was finding my God there's a lot of inexperienced people are not going to produce a good podcast I'm going to get all of 44 views is that a really good use of
my time one of the things I tell people about our mission to to teach a billion people how to make a living doing what they love means I have to consistently think and act according to that really big mission am I going to reach a billion people 42 people at a time probably
not there's not enough time in the day for me to do that so I have to kind of be a little bit more selective as to where I go and and be a guest on it just came out of that and so that helped me at least set some kind of Benchmark in
my mind in terms of hey if you've done the work then I'll do the work with you and every once in a while somebody asked me I'm like uh they caught me in a weak moment and I let my guard down and then of course we get on dogs are barking it's just
like internet connection is poor they're not prepared to do this and I was thinking yeah that's why I have to have some kind of gate but I love that there's a whole other side of the story so many times in our lives we meet people we can say something that feels pretty inconsequential
to us and what we don't know is there's a whole another Universe of a story there's a Multiverse of events that's happening and every once in a while we're very fortunate to hear what happens on the other side so I want to dive a little bit deeper with you about what you learned
this exact process of embracing rejection as a form of growing so growth through rejection who would subject themselves to that well I know at least one person you know and it's this concept uh it's fairly modern concept it's called rejection therapy and I don't know if you know this but the originator of
this concept was I think a guy in Australia who made the rejection therapy deck and then the person that you mentioned who I can't pronounce his name either bought this from him and then built something much bigger through the Ted Talk and then now it's become its own thing but I do remember
the originator of this and I think those videos have been stripped off the internet now for whatever reason and so here we we are you're inspired you're like you know what this sucks I feel bad why am I feeling bad and how do I overcome this how do I become desensitized to rejection
so let's take it from there I mean you're dealing with and processing lots of things first of all you're like those videos on Tik Tok where people do silly things like will you sing a song with me have nothing to do with their career so tell me the setup how you would engineer
this such that it was related to what you do so I well one of the things that was really interesting to me was that the minute I made the decision my mindset shifted completely and I wasn't expecting it to be that fast um so I basically set myself some parameters so I set
a time parameter of six months I set a number that I wanted to reach and I set I guess the boundary that it was going to be work related and not P personal related you know like personal life related because I wasn't really interested in that it was very much about pursuing things
that I wanted to in my career and I think I mean this is a whole other backstory but since having kids and starting my own career I've uh my own business I've become very ambitious and this is only in the last sort of six years prior to that I wasn't very ambitious at
all so that's so that's quite interesting and I think feeds into you know why this kind of came at the right time for me so I started off on the challenge I like I did a bit of research before I started so I made I wanted to make sure that I had a
hundred of things that I wanted to pitch for you know that I could actually keep this going so I made a long list of things at that particular time like growing my podcast was a really um big part of it for me so a lot of them were getting sponsors for the podcast
I thought the sponsors were going to HP me over the edge easily you know I thought I would fire out loads of emails and get loads of projections um a lot of them was guests as well for the podcast so those those took up a lot of the list there was um you
know speaking opportunities Awards I wanted to enter so I made this really long list and was like okay I can I've definitely got enough to work with here and then the next thing I started doing was trying to find who I needed to contact for all of those things so that was like
a big one and I tried to like batch almost like batch the different activities so you know I made the list and then I started before I even approached anyone started to try to find all the contact details almost like in one go so I at the time had LinkedIn premium and I
was like perfect I can you know this is going to help me find the names of the people that I need to contact um I'd heard someone talk about how you can often guess a person's email address so if you know the company they work for and their name then you can Google
what the sort of naming conven you know the email convention is of that company so if I couldn't find their exact email you know like I wrote a list of what I thought it might be because that might work out for me um so that was like my next step and then I
just started going for it and most of the time I you know would spend a not loads of time because I wanted to this to you know like not take over my life but I would spend a decent amount of time constructing what I thought was a really good pitch I felt like
I had um some good Intel on that in that because I have a podcast I get so many pitches for that and they range from the absolutely incredible to the absolutely abysmal and so I felt like I'd learn a lot about what I like in a pitch and that really informed how I
then pitch to others um but also sometimes I would just quite like what I did with you I would quite spontaneously pitch someone so if an opportunity arose where I was like okay this is my moment I've got to go for it now you know I would quickly write a DM or quickly
write an email while I was feeling inspired and I just started sending them out um and yeah to see what would happen so your challenge was to pitch to 100 people to sponsor your podcast is that oh no they weren't all um podcast sponsorship like that was just some of the ideas of
things that I would pitch for you know like that I was I thought that that one would probably get me a whole load of projections because at that point my podcast you know wasn't that big or anything uh the hilarious story with that specific area of pitching is that um I had a
list almost like an order of who I would my dream you know podcast sponsors and at the top of the list was flowes and one day they emailed me completely out of the it I mean it was a email that had gone out to a few different people but it didn't seem like
it was a mass email that had gone out to their whole mailing list being like Oh you're one of our top Affiliates um here's you know like some information about what's coming up and I was like oh okay this is my in they've you know they've identified me as one of their top
Affiliates and so I that was one of the ones that was a bit more spontaneous for me where I replied and I was like oh thanks for letting me know I'm one of your top Affiliates you know I've been thinking for a while it would be great you know the flow desk would
be the perfect fit for my podcast um what do you think and they replied and were like yeah we've listened to your podcast send us your deck we think we'd be a great fit um just tell us the terms kind of thing and I couldn't believe it because basically the first company that
I'd pitched to my dream company to be a podcast sponsor said yes so then I was like oh okay hang on this isn't going to play out quite how I expected it to play out um and so that yeah that was amazing and what I mean I well I don't want to give
too many spoilers away before the end of the episode but basically I utterly failed my rejection challenge because people kept saying just Doo good that's the problem well no but like people kept saying yes and I guess like i' I've got like numbers that I can share but what was interesting is I
didn't get anywhere near pitching for a hundred things um and yeah it was interesting how many people people said yes and I think what was interesting about it is because I I was emboldened effectively like I had this confidence that I didn't have before because I'd created myself a win-win situation and I
wasn't as afraid of the ejection anymore and so maybe you know like maybe I came across less desperate or something but I think that confidence like impacted how I came across when I was pitching for things um yeah this is your Neo moment you know this right yeah yeah when you realize you're
in The Matrix and this these agents you've been running from like when when keran M says when you see an agent you run Neo and you're Neo and you're in that Corridor and you're like fighting this person and all of a sudden it just clicks you realize you are the one the chosen
one yeah the one who's going to rewrite the rules of the world and then the punch is like you just see them everything's moving slow motion and you're blocking and then you block one-handed and then now you can stop bullets with your hands and you can resuscitate people just by thinking about it
it's just yeah you're Neo and so they're like I've never seen this before I'm just talking about the Matrix one forget about two three and resurrection and reboots and all that kind of stuff just the first one so when you realize when you went to the depths of the feelings that you had
in terms of like God this sucks Chris said no and now what I'm do with my life I'm a total failure object you know and then you're like no you know what this didn't hurt that bad and I never want to feel this way again so it's like you flicking the bullets away
they cannot do you harm anymore so you're almost Invincible now yeah and I think I so I did have one like most of the rejections that I had in this whole process have been either like very polite and nice or I've been ghosted and I like some people really hate that that doesn't
actually bother me because you know that's fine you know that's one you know one form of rejection I did have one that was quite a rude response and it was from someone you know who I looked up to someone that was like very well no I'm not dropping the name I'm not I'll
tell you runs with this yeah it runs with no I'm not going to say it but but it was like basically the mistake that I made so most of the time when I was pitching I haven't mentioned the challenge at all in this one I was like I need to think I almost
need to think of a hook that's going to get this guy to open my email in the first place and so I mentioned the rejection Challenge and it turned out he thought it was a terrible idea and he didn't like the concept at all and so his like his reply was just like
a bit snarky really and and that one that one did hit me right that one did hurt and this was very early on in the process and it threw me a bit because then I was like oh my goodness this guy thinks that what I'm doing is terrible um okay maybe I've done
the wrong thing maybe I shouldn't be doing you know it started me questioning what I decided to do but what was amazing about it was how much quicker I recovered than I ever would have done before so like before that sort of email would have sent me into a spiral and it would
have taken me quite a long time to sort of get out of that spiral and this time I sort of molded it over for like an hour and was a bit like oh that was a bit harsh and then I was like you know what I know that this is working for me
you know like this is such this is a personal project and it's doing amazing things for me so actually it's okay if this guy doesn't like what I'm doing you know that's not although I'm a bit sort of like gutted that he doesn't like the idea or he doesn't think it's a good
thing to do I'm okay I'm fine I can still carry on with this it can still be like a valid and legitimate thing to do because it's working for me and I you know I started it as a very personal thing and what was really interesting to me and that I hadn't really
considered is what the impact would be of sharing it so I shared about it because I was like you know everything's content All That Jazz and the number of messages I've had from people saying I saw you talking about your rejection challenge it inspired me I pitched for this and they said yes
and now it's happening thank you so much and I think like sometimes we underestimate you know in the same way that you're you had no idea that you're know like the impact and the ripples it had for me you know like I didn't realize what the ripples would be for other people me
sharing this process of what I was going through and that was like so encouraging and so amazing and you know like incredible stories you know like people pitching to speak at things that they never would have done normally and I think what it made me realize is so much of us have this
um kind of attitude of I I want to sit here I want to do my work and I want other people to know notice it and that's the only legitimate way of me getting opportunities you know if other people notice how good I am and then get in touch with me and I
think and this might be a cultural thing you know I'm from the UK like the Brits have a particular way about them I think you know there's some some of it might be cultural but I just think there's this real reluctance to go out and ask for what we want and just say
you know this is what I want please can I have it and yeah sometimes people will be like no but sometimes people will say yes and I think the other thing that's interesting is like when they say no it's usually not anything to do with me so for example you know I pitched
to be on a podcast and it's actually they've just had someone else on recently talking about that exact topic or um you know like I may be just not quite the right fit for Their audience but it doesn't mean that what I'm saying isn't good and I think you know that was another
huge lesson for myself is we start to allow rejections to you know to tell a story about ourselves we construct this narrative in our head heads well so and so said no to this so this must mean I am XY Z and again like this whole process helped me to nip that in
the bud so much earlier so I could be like okay I see the thought pattern here this isn't just because they've said no it doesn't mean this it could be many other things that have resulted in this rejection um and actually that's fine now I can just Market move on and move on
to the next thing because I've got this whole long list of things you know that I'd love to do and another thing that was kind of crazy wait wait can can I interrupt here before you tell me the other thing just also gave you a chance to breathe here um I I'm just
blown away that you were able to get sponsors because I looked at the message that you sent to Stewart and I was like she got flowes she got marketing magic I don't have a single sponsor to the show I just want to can we talk shop a little bit yeah let's talk shop
okay I'm going to ask you a couple of questions feel free to answer or not it based on your level of comfort here uh so you reached out to a couple companies I love this thing that you're an affiliate a top affiliate so there's an implied relationship even though it's probably mass email
you're like hey I'm a top affiliate would you be interested in going this others step I'm just going to ask you currently how many downloads do you get so I'm per episode yeah per episode so like my my top episodes just over a thousand okay and my and I would say that I'm
averaging between three and 4,000 downloads a month um and I publish an episode weekly how did you determine how much to charge because this is always a challenge right like great question and I think what's so hard about this is that this information isn't available anywhere right you can't well I mean some
people will share it but it's really hard to go online and find oh this you know this number of downloads this is what you charge so very kindly um someone a podcast that I listen to it's um a UK based podcast called doing it for the kids and it's for freelance parents basically
and the one of the hosts of that podcast called Frankie I'm in a membership that she runs and I messaged her asking her about it cuz they'd had some great podcasts and she was so generous like she sent me her slide deck I could see how much she charged I could see all
her stats like she sent me the deck that she would sent out to sponsors and I was actually really Blown Away by how generous that was because without flinching she just emailed it over to me and I now have made it my philosophy that if people email me and ask me I'm going
to pay it forward and I'm just going to give them the information because actually that's quite rare like people don't often aren't willing to give that information out because you know it's their sort of like stats and their downloads and everything anyway that really helped me because I could see from that what
her like downloads are and what she was charging and so I basically just worked it out from that and mine mine is like quite a bit lower than what she's charging and eventually I just went with something that I felt comfortable with it's like okay this is worth it for me like for
me a big thing was I pay for my podcast to be edited and I wanted to get to my a place where my podcast was affect ly cost neutral you know like I wasn't spending money on it like I didn't mind at this stage that I wasn't making money from it but I
didn't want it to be costing me money so that was another big determiner for me was like okay this is how much my podcast editor costs I want to make it least that um and that's kind of how I worked it out and then I put together a deck and interestingly flowes did
negotiate the cost with me um but they let Meuse Ed my affiliate Link in all the episodes so I had the potential so like the cost that they ended up paying was less than what I originally you know said to them but I could put my affiliate Link in and make money from
the Affiliates and also I knew that once I had a company of that collaborate like that sort of caliber as a sponsor then that goes into my deck of past sponsors and that is going to help me going forward and it took that totally has been the case you know I think once
you have an in then the sort of like ball starts rolling and you have information that you can give other sponsors you know well this is what I did for flow desk kind of thing yeah um getting your first anything's hardest getting your first subscriber getting your first sponsor getting your first client
then you start to figure out systems and you can leverage the experience that you gain from that first experience to then on board new opportunities but you didn't answer my question oh sorry what was your question it's okay I'm gonna come back to it which is a person who has say 4,000 downloads
a month what can they expect to ask for a sponsor to to pay okay you want the exact amount I some people will probably think that this is too low but I for what's worked for me has been between between hundred and $200 per episode so I've just had a new sponsor recently
and it's $200 flow desk was I think 120 maybe I can't remember the exact figure yeah yeah I I I think there are General guidelines based on your demographic and what they call like cost per thousand CPM yeah and they're they're pretty bright and generic and when you when you find out those
numbers you're going to cry because it's it seems like it's pennies per per download it kind of literally is yeah so the best kinds of Partnerships that you can get from sponsors is the ones that feel most aligned with the content that you're creating so I'm trying to do the math here we
get um on average about 20,000 downloads per episode and so if I multiply what you do per episode which is about a thousand so I could ask for maybe two grand an episode yeah would that work have you ever have you ever asked for sponsorship never asked a single person there we go
so here's what I'm going to do I've been thinking about this while you're talking if you're enjoying this episode right now everybody there's a opportunity for you to work with a hungry audience who's interested in growing their business please let me know who you are because we'd love to have you as a
sponsor especially if what you do is aligned with serving the creative community and their entrepreneurial goals another thing I've said it yeah you said it you put it out there who knows what's going to happen who knows um I think think also one of the things as well is um be this is
not related to the rejection challenge but before I approached anyone like flowes I knew that I wanted to get sponsorship and so I started to I started off by offering small businesses in my mailing list spons being the ability to sponsor one episode for like a really affordable amount and that what that
did was I guess like train my audience my listeners to expect and be comfortable with adverts before I got to the point where I was asking people like flowes and even to the point that if I didn't have a sponsor that episode I would still put in the sponsored segment and I would
promote something that I wanted to promote or share an affiliate link um and I mean that this that isn't really related but I think sometimes you just got to start doing the thing that you want to do you know even if you haven't quite got to the stage where the company that you
want to ask is sponsoring your podcast well I think this is such a fascinating thing in that you're you take what most people would consider like a kind of kick in the pants you're like wait a minute I'm GNA turn this into opportunity and you're doing things that I've not even done we
do make some money through sponsorships but it's through an automated sales network so it's about I don't want people to think we're like crying poverty here I think we do about $3,000 a month but that's using two different ads within our in our podcast but if we learned if we were brave enough
like yourself to actually reach out to folks and to begin it from a place like a real relationship so you've given me a couple ideas already I'm G to share with our audience because you know what you're like who cares about rejection or podcasting Chris well here's what I'm thinking number one you
all have a website so you generate some level of traffic and if you're pretty consistent at blogging like we are we write blog posts all the time we get decent amount of views there's this whole space that we don't use on our blog for affiliate links so I'm going to reach out to
my team right now and say hey populate these things with affiliate links to people we'd like to work with I'm pretty certain when the article is aligned with the affiliate link we're going to convert I know another guy and he talks about this his name is Jacob he does a million dollars a
year in affiliate link links and he just employs full-time writers all the time and he he's able to make money that much did you do did an episode with him didn't you I listened to that one I'm did yeah I listened to that episode and I think that's yeah that's the thing and
also I think it's finding like being an affiliate for companies that you use and are excited about because like the reason that flesk was top of my list was because I had already talked about them so many times in my episodes because I love using them and so I knew that it was
going to be a really comfortable easy fit for my audience because they already know that I love using them and I think again that helps and that makes it work all around for everybody you know that works for the brand because they know that you are into them and you use them and
it works for the audience because again they know that this is like a genuine fit and they and what was really nice is like people were like oh yes I'm really excited for you because we know how much you love floes right so here here's me I'm going to do this again I'm
like apple Adobe excuse me uh all the companies we love like Road Blackmagic yeah uh a Canon Lumix Sony call call me somebody somebody call me because we we we love you we we spend money on your products and if you're listening to this if you work for any one of these companies
please reach out let's just put that out there okay so number one we're GNA add affiliate links we're going to start to sell or make money for the people that we then hope to take some of that money back and by seeing or moving the needle for them it's like hey we we
start with an act of generosity and then if it were to start to take off then I'm going to follow your game plan I'm G to reach out to them said hey I noticed like we're moving units for you should we consider you guys sponsoring the podcast and this could lead to a
lot of other opportunities I love that yeah but here's the other thing I've been thinking about since you've been talking about it you said without naming names someone said something not so nice to you about this experience that you were on and I just got off a sales coaching call on Instagram live
and I was thinking I think this would make a great opener I'm going to Freestyle this based on what I infer that you've done okay it will start something like this to DM people this and I have to write the letter um and put more thought into this but here here it goes
a hearing no sucks it's why I'm embarking on a personal journey to get 100 NOS there's a high probability that what I'm about to offer you isn't a good fit for you but on the off chance that it might be allow me to and then I'll fill in the blank yeah and that's
it amazing and I think that would kind of be a little bit of a pattern Interruption and it's okay if they say no we're saying I'm here to accept Nos and on the off chance that it's not a no this is a win for me and I would be so much more receptive
to a cold DM like that where you're basically giving me a permission you're giving me permission to say no that would make me way more interested in what you were offering then like the cold DMs I get are like Grim like so not good whereas that aggressive yeah yeah I think so oh
that's awesome I love that I mean is that what you did not I didn't do cold DMs I I mean I did cold emails so it's kind of what I did but I didn't I didn't phrase it like that like I really like that I think I would I I mean mainly because
after I sent that email where I'd mention the challenge I didn't want to overtly mention the challenge going forward I did often give them an out you know like I wrote it in a way where I was like it's okay if you say no or if this isn't the right fit because I
was totally okay with that as an option as well and I think again that probably meant that my style of emailing them I mean I don't think it ever would have been aggressive but it was like less fullon you know like it um yeah I think it it comes across differently when I
think you're less desperate for it basically 100% And I've I've I've talked about this before notice how like when you're a single person no one wants to talk to you no one they're like get away from me creep right or just because you smell of desperation you wreak of it actually and the
minute you're in a relationship people that you're attracted to is like hey so what's going on know a couple different like wait what is going on I'm not different yeah I'm the same scrub you gave zero looks to before zero considerations but all of a sudden now and it was just like oh
my gosh so you walk a little bit differently you conduct yourself a little differently and your language is changes so how does this relate to like business okay so if you're a freelancer and your your pipeline is full and you've got a healthy Runway you got money in the bank all of a
sudden you're going to be much more attractive and it's not that you you're literally doing something different but your your aura your ethos and how you move in the world changes and people can sense that and Desperation is very repulsive everybody this is why I failed the challenge because what happened was and
interestingly right from the start I had made a list of podcasts I wanted to pitch for and I'm not particularly woo but um like they started pitching me to be on their podcast and I was like hang on a minute you're on my list now I can't count you as a rejection because
you've pitched me but I was like actually this is amazing because just by this process I guess I was like more confident more visible they started to approach me and I basically gave a talk about this I was a closing keyot at a conference you know I have been on podcast talking about
this like the whole thing has spiral beyond what started and like and eventually I had to stop I had to really slow down pitching for things because I could couldn't keep up with actually um delivering like what I had pitched for but then I think sort of coming back to what you you
know your your explanation at the beginning as to why you said no to me I had I've had a bit of a lesson about it recently the mindset shift for me also meant that last year I really said yes to a lot of things like in particular particular things that were pitched to
me because I was in this whole mode of like you know getting out there being visible grabbing all the opportunities that have come my way and then sort of at the start of this year doing some reflection I have realized that for that particular time you know that was great but now I
think I need to be a lot more strategic about what I do and so I need to be more focused in what I pitch for and what I said say yes to because what I was Finding and it's very similar to what you described it was like oh someone's asked me to give
a talk in their membership it's like yeah great I'll do it and then it's like actually 10 people saw this and I'm not sure what impact it had for my business and again like I don't want to sound like a jerk but it's just like we've only got a certain number of hours
a day and you know if we want to you know I I I basically did too much last year year and the the way the whole year felt for me was a bit off and so I was like okay well now I'm going to take what I've learned from that process and I'm
going to refine it and I'm going to be more strategic this year and yes I take the mindset shift and I'm going to go and ask for what I want but I'm going to be more selective about what I ask for and so I think that's been the like next level of the
learning process for me there is yet another other side to their story okay okay so I said it's very rare that we get to have this kind of chance encounter with someone and we just think it's just a blip on the radar and then time passes and you find out what has happened
what's transpired and that's I think sometimes why we're oddly curious like how did those people from high school turn out just look Captain football team whatever it's like huh okay that's how that turned out well on my side of it when you asked I was like I rewrote the response like five times
like no I can't and then I'm like you know what this is not right and I feel so guilt Rd and like oh I know what this is like so I'm just trying to get started here and so then I'm like let me just try to say it this way and you're super
cool like okay totally understand and then I was just like just feeling so guilty afterwards because I'm like she's so cool then that night I cried myself to sleep no you're I'm just kidding I'm just kidding about the whole story I was practicing my improv skill to see how how deep I could
pull that hook none of this happened it's just like a blip in the radar for me unfortunately I I'm sorry everybody sorry if this has happened to you I have to say no to like a thousand things a day and oftentimes I just block and delete that's my default action because I'm like
what the freak do you want this is another scam isn't it this is an only fans page isn't it oh gosh okay there we are okay now now I just want to point out something that one moment according to the letter that you wrote was the Catalyst for a lot of things happening
you're able to embrace this new mindset you become much stronger more resilient uh you didn't let the the the idea of rejection overwhelm you with fear and stop you from moving forward you're able to get sponsors which I haven't been able to do you got amazing guests to come on your podcast and
look you survived yeah you Sur survived so you know all I want to say to you at this point is you're welcome thank you no but seriously and that's well that's the thing is like I was like I I when I pitched I found the form on your website and I was like
you know what I can a pitch to be on his like his podcast because I was like this would be such a nice full like Circle ending to the story um and that was inspired by I did yeah exactly I did the closing keynote at this conference about this experience and the guy
who organized um the conferences geel Paul was like either you have to get Chris on your podcast or you have to be on here you know like somehow there needs to be some conclusion to this story and you know when I was like writing the pitch to be on your podcast like it
just made me realize how yeah exactly like you say that one blip of a moment from someone else can be the Catalyst or something and and you had no idea until I wrote the email and sent the pitch in and I just think that's so cool this is a never- Ending Story this
is a you're like a World Builder this is an Inception I'm not sure which level of the dream I'm in right now cuz think about it everybody I mean really I mean I know I'm making movie references left and right but Never Ending Story and now we're on Inception first we're talking about
the Matrix we're all we're everywhere here l king okay look this one moment creates this new timeline and Liz could have chosen lot lot of different paths and she chose to embrace this and then she's telling this story over and over and people are embracing this it's just like hey we want to
be part of this movement with you and then you are able to I don't want to say leverage or monetize this but you've taken the story and you've told it in another way and then that person says well you have to complete the arc but this is not the end of the story
I'm telling you right now because now you're on the podcast and then 10 20,000 people will listen to this and it'll create a new timeline so you'll have a new story to tell and then we'll have to do the 10 year anniversary it's like you're an old lady at this point your children
are like running around crazy and you're like hey here's what happened after that yeah it's a Never Ending Story and the so a couple of things about being on your podcast first it taught me another good lesson because I pitched for it in August and I didn't hear from your podcast producer until
December and actually that was another big lesson for me it was like sometimes you just have to be patient and I had another one this week I pitched I pitched so my my dream one of my dream podcast guests alongside you is I mean come on you're about to insult no is Jessica
his do you know Jessica his she's an amazing yes I know who she is so I have loved her work for the longest time and a similar thing happened like last I think it was March last year I shared a story that tagged her in it and she replied and said thank you
and I was like I'm going to do it again I'm going to ask her and she was like yes email me your pitch and I emailed it to her and I didn't hear anything and I was like that's fine you know I I had a bit of Hope because she'd given me permission
to pitch her but I you know I I knew that like similarly to you I knew that she would be getting a lot of pictures and that she'd have to be selective about what she did but then I got an email this week from her and it was it was an email to
it wasn't to me personally it was like you're getting this email because you have messaged me about you know me being a guest on your podcast I kind of lost track of all my emails here's a calendar book in a slot to record and I was like no way and so I've booked
in a time to record and that was like nearly a year after the fact and so again like and what's really fun is now I documented all of my pitures all of my rejections and I'm now going back to ones at the start and they're turning into acceptances and like bringing it back
to what we were just talking about about me being on your podcast like it is so much better for me to be on your podcast than for you to be on my podcast um for me in you know like from Pur purely sort of selfish perspective and again like that's a different I'm
really glad that that person was like well you should ask to be on his because that was like something that I hadn't really considered and like you say it's it's just this story is just going to keep going around and around yeah you know the the message that Stuart sent me was Chris
I'm so sorry this email fell through the cracks I'm I'm not only uncovering this right now and I realize I think this is a person you should do a podcast with what do you think I'm like book it that was it you know because my podcast producer is like we should do it
I'm like okay I trust you and even read the whole email I'm like just go let's go um so I hate to point out something to you oh yeah I know you failed I did fail you failed in your mission to get 100 rejections because what you chocked up as a rejection was
just a yes waiting to be birth yeah so you're an absolute failure I want you to process that absolute failure but you know what I'm okay with it because the whole point of this yeah wasn't actually about completing the challenge it was about the exposure therapy of getting rejections which I have had
and I have like moved through those emotions and I processed them and also you know there was always the hope that through doing this I was going to get yeses as well which I did and so I was going to be a winner whatever happened BAS basically yeah okay Liz thank you for
sharing your story it's been awesome having you as a guest and helping me to find closure on something I've been staying up late at night thinking about all these months later my guest has been Liz mostly and she's a freelance graphic designer based out of the UK she has an amazing podcast called
building your brand if you'd like to sponsor please reach out to her I'm sure she could use it and she used this moment uh that many of us would be like wounded from and turned it into this powerful thing a story a talk sponsors and just motivation and and a renew sense of
confidence by trying to get 100 rejections in her business and she's it's been it's been a load of fun chatting with you I love your personality and the story is just it's so cool and I just can't wait for us to do this again on whatever format I'm Liz Mosley and you are
listening to the Future [Music]
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