The DO Lectures - Fax Club Reminder.

Hi there,

At 7.26pm the cart opens for the Fax Club.

Best from the shed,

Let me run through my dumbest idea…

The imaginary Fax Club.

I had this dumb idea over three years ago. Everyone within the company I told had the same eye-roll response. In the end, I thought maybe they were right.

But.

Dumb ideas bob back up to the surface like a beach ball held under seawater.

This week it did exactly that.

So, I wrote down all the elements.

1. It was hard to join. You had to go and buy a fax machine. No one has one.
2. It would be a high-ticket price. And it would go up each year. Guaranteed.
3. It was for only 100 founders. Never scale it.
4. It would ask one question each week.
5. The answer MUST be counterintuitive. They would go on our channel. The community would be electric.
6. No one would know each other’s names. Only the allocated number.
7. At the end of the year, we all meet in London for a 1 day ‘How do we launch the book in the most counterintuitive way’ workshop. Of course, we all wear our numbers on the specially made Fax Club badges. We finally get to meet each other.
8. There will be 100 authors. All profits shared equally. An equal share of the treasure.

As dumb as this all was, something felt nervously exciting about it. 

The bit that I loved the most was the power of learning counterintuitive thinking from other founders. A small gathering of pirates coming together to think different.

Who wouldn’t want to join that club?

Maybe it wasn’t so dumb after all.

So I posted something on LinkedIn.

Just sharing that within your dumbest ideas lies some hidden gold.

I wasn’t expecting the reaction that it got.

When we launched howies, we said we had to sell 100 T-shirts for us to go ahead.

We sold 3 in the first month.

We went ahead. 

What does counterintuitive thinking look like?

This is the question I would be asking. And why does it matter?

Let me share some examples to kick things off.

Question.

1. How do you create a culture in a call centre with a high turnover of people and low morale?

The belated Tony Hsieh was faced with this problem at Zappos. So, his counterintuitive thinking was after a month of training, he would devise a quit bonus.

He paid people to leave. The result was the people who stayed wanted to be there.

Morale vastly improved. It is better to get people to leave as quick as you can if they’re not into it. Because they bring the team down.

2. Can you let your customer decide the price?

In 2007, Radiohead made a counterintuitive move when they released the ‘In Rainbows’ album. They let the fans decide what the price they would pay. 

“As a result, according to ComScore data, it showed 1.2 million people visited the website in the first 29 days, itself.

(The research I found is in dollars, but it makes the point.)

If Radiohead had sold this album through a recording company, price of this album would be about $14.99 and Radiohead would receive about 15% of this total ($2.25). Radiohead’s share would be even less ($1.40) if this album was sold via iTunes. 

Since, they opted with a customer decides pricing strategy, 38% who downloaded the album paid something, at an average payment of $6.

This resulted in an average payment of $2.26 across everyone who downloaded this album. 62% people opted to download for free.

Their profit margin increased as there was no middleman. 

(Source: Nidhi Titus)

Radiohead later mentioned that they had made more money through this album as against all prior albums put together.

• This is the kind of thinking that changes things.
• These are dumb ideas until they work.
• Then they become maverick ideas.

52 weeks. 52 questions. 52 world-class answers.

100 pirates.
1 book.
No guarantees. No safety net.
It could flop. It could fly.
 
But that’s the point—this is a real experiment.
Mavericks only.
 
Not for dabblers. Not for the risk-averse.

 
When does it start? Give me the details.

• 7th March 2025. Friday 7.26 pm.
• First question via fax.
• And every Friday at the same time for 52 weeks.

How much does it cost?

£444

This includes

Who is this for?

• Founders who think differently.
• Business owners who play the long game.
• Company of ones who refuse to scale the wrong way.
• Freelancers who want to charge what they’re worth.
• Consultants who challenge the norm.
• Agency owners who attract better clients, not just more.
• Rebels who want to escape the echo chamber of sameness.
• Introverts with ideas too weird to ignore.
• Optimists who know the future belongs to the bold.

Who this is NOT for?

• Dabblers who start things but never finish.
• Risk-averse rule followers. There are no guarantees here.
• Cynics and armchair critics who only see the downside.

The community.