Hello Hello, 
Wassup, How are you?

Last week, I traveled to Nepal for our anniversary and also, want to experience some cold; Goa being decent hot. And to my amazement, the Thamel Area in Kathmandu is one of the best party places I have been to. Small lanes, amazing rock music, and a decent crowd were a hands-down winner for me.

Amazing polite and humble people and cheap prices were like bonuses. Let me know if you ever travel to Nepal, I would love to share some insider spots.

Now, to today’s main food for thought.

What monthly salary would you be happy at?

This is my favorite question whenever I hire someone to work with us.

Why? If you have ever hired someone, you must know it is the most gruesome, tiring, and costly process. Finding the right person, training them, and building the bond, easily takes someone 2-3 months to come to speed with the business.

And do you know what is the cheapest and easiest reason for someone to switch jobs? It is for 10-20% higher pay.

And that is the most important reason, I like to ask this question upfront.

When I hire someone, I don’t want them to switch or not be enthusiastic about the work they do because of 10-20% of the pay.

You must be wondering why this is more important to me than the business cost. It is mostly because I am building a profitable lifestyle business. My primary goal is not to optimize for profits but moreover optimize for ease of working and happiness. I cannot keep running after people and micromanaging them to complete their tasks. I want them to execute.

And I believe as humans we can only execute securely and happily when we are financially sorted.

I still remember I had significant trust issues on Day 1 at my last job. When I asked them for a laptop, they had a stupid policy that employees have to buy their laptops and the company will pay them the price of the laptop in parts in 30 months. Now, the laptop price was ~6% of my CTC. But, this simple action signaled me that the company had trust issues which eventually surfaced in the next couple of months. I left the job in 6 months.

How much did it cost the company - 6 months of salary + recruiter fees for hiring me and finding my replacement + Relocation bonus + 6 months of laptop cost? On top of it, it took me 3 months to speed up with the work, and in 2 months I was on PIP and 3rd month I was out. I don’t think my effective work did not amount to more than a month there.

On a similar note, a friend of mine, a superstar in her company is considering switching because she wanted CTC more than 20 lakhs and the company gave her an increment of only 17.5 lakhs. She has worked in the company for more than 1 year now and knows everything in and out. I am very sure it will cost the company way more to find her replacement than paying her that Rs. 2.5 lakh rs. extra. That too per annum.

Ironically, money is the cheapest thing in life that you can give to someone and one of the most important things for the person receiving it. For eg., Rs. 5,000 per month won’t break my or your bank but might have a disproportionate impact on the level of happiness of your maid/driver and eventually, they will work better.

And probably that is the reason, I never negotiate on money and give whatever the people ask for. Most times even more. I negotiate on responsibilities and the work they do. If they want more, I am happy to give — they will have to own more responsibilities and deliver.

If you want to launch your newsletter, I have created a free 7-email course with relevant resources and guides. Go out there and tell your story.

PS: Use a different email id than the one you are receiving the email on. Duplicate emails ain’t working with automation - some stupid technical glitch that we are unable to resolve.

What are we up to at Moonshot Media?

• We have just hired another writer for an upcoming newsletter. Should be live in 2 weeks. We are also hiring a growth marketer and media salesperson to join the team in-house.

• We ran multiple ads in January in both Marketing Monk and Product Monk and made a decent revenue from them. We will be scaling up our media sales in the coming months.

• Our content quality and readers’ quality are also 🔥. We have been consistently crossing 30% Opens and 5% CTRs on our emails. The next goal is 40% Opens.

We are also hiring for a Smart Creative Person who can run paid ads as well. The person should be equipped at creating stunning static and video creatives for our Ads. He/She will closely work with me on all our projects and will be directly responsible for the growth of all the newsletters in our kitty.
If you are one or you know anybody, drop me an email with their portfolio at [email protected].

If you are someone who controls marketing budget and decisions and find an alignment with the audience of Marketing Monk, Product Monk, and Adventures of India; do consider sponsoring the newsletter.

We have run some ads in January and have seen great results for our clients. Feel free to reach out to me at [email protected] to explore a partnership.

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