A few years ago somebody on my email list replied to a newsletter with two words, set in what must have been 72 point type. The second word was “off.”
Ten years earlier that would have ruined my week. Instead I laughed, and then I did something with it that worked better than the newsletter ever did.
The email that caused it
Nothing remarkable, which is the part worth saying out loud.
It was an invitation to a free LinkedIn training session. No hard sell, no countdown timer, no manufactured scarcity. The usual mix of a joke, something useful, and an offer at the end.
I have always worked on the basis that content is currency, and that you have to earn the right to somebody’s time or money by first proving you can actually help them. That is why there is a free book on the front page of the site and why the playbooks are free.
So: a free invitation to a free thing, sent to somebody who had signed up to receive exactly that.
The reply
Two words. Enormous type. Not printable here.
I am not going to reproduce it or screenshot it, and I want to be clear about why, because it is the whole ethical hinge of this post. That was one person having a bad day in what he assumed was a private message. He does not deserve to be identifiable in an article that has outlived his temper by years.
You can picture it. That is enough.
What I would have done ten years earlier
Spiralled.
I would have read it eleven times. I would have decided my marketing was intrusive, that I was one of the pests, that the whole approach was wrong. I would have questioned the offer, the email, the business and, given a long enough evening, the career.
One stranger, two words, and I would have handed him the steering wheel for a fortnight.
The reason that did not happen is not that I got tougher. It is that at some point I did the unglamorous internal work, and it turns out that matters far more to your business than any tactic I could teach you.
Why I could laugh instead
Because I know what my work does for people.
Not in a chest thumping way. In a boring, evidence based way. I have years of case studies and client results sitting behind me, and they mean I am not guessing about whether the thing I offered was worth offering.
That is the actual armour. When you know you are genuinely trying to help, and you have proof that you can, an offer stops feeling like an imposition. You do not need to apologise for making one. You do not need to soften it into meaninglessness. And when somebody reacts badly, the obvious explanation is that it was not for them, which is fine, because nothing is for everybody.
Rejection stops being a verdict on you and becomes information about fit. That single reframe is worth more than any script.
Then I made it into content
Here is the part that surprised me.
I posted about it on LinkedIn. Not the screenshot as a trophy, and not a rant about how rude people are online. I wrote about the reaction itself: what it feels like to get one, what I used to do with it, what I do now, and what it tells you about selling something you actually believe in.
It did better than anything else I published that month. Every comment on it was positive. And a handful of complete strangers sent me connection requests off the back of it, because they had watched somebody handle a small public humiliation without losing his composure, and they wanted to know what he did for a living.
That is the trade. A private moment of hostility became the most human piece of marketing I produced all quarter, and it cost me nothing but the willingness to be honest about it.
It is the same mechanism behind why my biggest business nightmare turned into my best marketing. The uncomfortable material is almost always the material that connects.
How to do this without it backfiring
Four rules. I would not skip any of them.
Wait a day. Anything you write in the first hour is a counterattack wearing a content costume. Everyone can tell. If it still seems worth writing tomorrow, write it tomorrow.
Strip every identifying detail. No name, no company, no screenshot, no “you know who you are.” The moment your audience could work out who it was, you have stopped teaching and started prosecuting, and the sympathy flips to them instantly.
Make yourself the subject, not them. The post is about what the moment did to you and what you learned. Their behaviour is the setup. Your response is the story. Get that backwards and you are just a person complaining in public.
Never do it with a client. Prospects, subscribers and strangers are fair game when properly anonymised. A paying client is not, ever, under any framing. Everyone else you work with is reading and quietly asking whether they are next.
How the story ended
I wrote back. Politely, in a normal font, telling him I would take the courtesy of removing him from the list, and then I did.
He got what he wanted. I got a post that outperformed my newsletter and several new conversations with people I would never otherwise have met.
Reasonable outcome for everybody.
What to do with this
Go and find the worst piece of feedback you have received in the last year. The one you still think about.
Ask what it would take to write two hundred words about what it taught you, with every identifying detail removed and yourself as the subject. If you can answer that, you have a post, and it will do more for you than another set of five tips.
And if the reason you cannot laugh at hostility yet is that you are quietly unsure whether your offer is worth making, fix that first. Everything else follows from it, including knowing what is actually worth posting.
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