Burn Your Ships: Sifu Edward & Sifu Julliana Armstrong Sit Down With E-Commerce Veteran John Cornetta

Adapted from the recorded conversation; the guest's words are verbatim. The questions are reconstructed and voiced by Sifu Edward and Sifu Julliana Armstrong.

🎥 Video podcast coming soon. The complete interview will play here once published. The full conversation is transcribed below, and the audio edition will be available on sifuarmstrong.tv.

In a new Sifu Armstrong interview, the GrooveDigital co-founder and self-described “grandfather of solo ads” argues that no growth tactic beats simply being the one person who reliably delivers.

John Cornetta built a career on a single, unglamorous habit: send the value first, and never ask what’s in it for him. That’s the thread running through his conversation with Sifu Edward and Sifu Julliana Armstrong for the Warrior Intelligence Series, a wide-ranging talk that moves from the birth of email marketing to two brushes with death that reordered his priorities.

Cornetta, a Florida-based entrepreneur and co-founder of GrooveDigital, walked away from twelve retail stores, a nightclub, and 300 employees in the mid-2000s to start over online. He built one of the earliest large email lists of the “list building” era and became known, by his own account and others', as the grandfather of solo ads. But the real engine, he says, wasn’t the traffic. It was trust. “I never asked for a thing,” he told the Armstrongs. “How can I serve you? How can I help you?... I never asked, 'What can you do for me?'” When it came to selling clicks to other marketers, he removed the risk himself: “No, no, I’ll send first. Don’t even pay me.”

That reliability built him relationships with some of the biggest names in online marketing, and eventually a partnership with Mike Filsaime that became GrooveDigital, the software company behind GroovePages and GrooveSell. But Cornetta’s chapter with Groove was interrupted twice by his own body. An exploded appendix nearly killed him, doctors gave him a 30 percent chance of dying on the operating table. Then a dangerous brain aneurysm sent him to a specialist in Manhattan for a stent procedure with even steeper odds. Both times, he treated the crisis like a business problem: find the single best person on earth to handle it, and go to them.

The health scares didn’t just spare his life. They clarified it. He scaled back, rebuilt his health, and eventually resolved a strained partnership with Filsaime by asking to be bought out entirely, restoring the friendship in the process. Today he’s back to what he started with: driving traffic, this time through SMS and email for clients in industries like insurance, plus a new venture with longtime collaborator Chris Reif built around pooled, vetted traffic for smaller marketers.

For anyone starting from zero today, his advice hasn’t softened with age. “Burn your ships, and use that metaphor to where you don’t have any other option. You got to go all in,” he said, invoking Cortés’s decision to burn his fleet in the New World. Success, in his telling, comes down to two unglamorous disciplines: build a real network by showing up at events, and learn to drive your own traffic rather than outsourcing the one skill that actually moves a business.

Underneath the tactics is a more personal story, the “skinny, bullied kid voted least likely to succeed” who decided, in his words, this is not how the story ends. That line, and the two medical scares that could have ended it for real, gave the conversation its weight: a man who built an empire on reliability, then had to relearn what was actually worth being reliable for.

It’s the same standard the Armstrongs hold their own operators to. Serve before you ask, and commit so completely that retreat stops being an option.

In This Conversation

How Cornetta built a 400,000-subscriber email list in his first 14 months using early “email swaps”
The moment Mike Filsaime bought traffic from him, and how it opened the door to GrooveDigital
Co-founding GrooveDigital with Filsaime and the software’s rise to over a million users
Surviving a ruptured appendix and a dangerous brain aneurysm, and treating both like business problems
The bullied-kid backstory behind “this is not how the story ends”
His “burn your ships” philosophy for anyone starting online today

The Full Conversation

Sifu Edward Armstrong: The operators I respect most share one trait: they serve before they ask, and they burn the boats behind them so retreat isn't an option. When I found a man who walked away from twelve retail stores to start over online, became the "grandfather of solo ads" by sending traffic before anyone paid him a cent, and then survived not one but two brushes with death that reordered his entire life. I knew our operators had to hear him.

Sifu Julliana Armstrong: And what got me is that he was the skinny, bullied kid voted "least likely to succeed," who got angry one day and decided this is not how the story ends. Every competitor I admire has that exact moment in their past. I wanted to talk to the fire underneath the business.

Our guest is John Cornetta, Florida-based entrepreneur, e-commerce and traffic authority, and co-founder of GrooveDigital. John, a pleasure.

John Cornetta: My pleasure. Thank you. And we've finally got together.

Sifu Edward Armstrong: You've started over more than once. Take us to the beginning of the online chapter. How did it all begin?

John Cornetta: I was in another industry completely, and I saw the writing on the wall. It was offline. I had 12 retail stores and a nightclub and some other things, a publishing company, and I had 300 employees and I sold it all. I was thinking, do I wind it down or not? And then I was asked to help promote a network marketing company. That was one of the first that was going to try to do it all online, no belly to belly. And I did, and I was working on it a little bit, and I had a friend of mine named Scott Stamper, who I recruited to help me. And he was just doing incredible. And I kept asking him, "What are you doing?" And he said, "Well, I'm not using any of the stuff that they've provided. I'm building my own squeeze pages." And I said, "What's a squeeze page?"

And that started everything. That was 2009, I think. Now, I had already done obviously marketing, and I'd been in business since I was 19 years old. I've been on my own. I've started over 40 successful companies, and I learned about it and I figured I'm going to be out of this other company now. I've sold it. I've got money. I was living in a huge 12,000 square foot mansion in Atlanta, and I had just recently had gotten divorced, and I set 18 hours at the desk trying to figure out what this was. I remember Scott had said to me, then he says, "Oh, look at this other guy. Here's a guy that you want to look at. He's incredible. His name is Mike Filsaime," he goes. It was something like, he said, "Oh, don't set your sights that high. You'll never even meet that guy." And I was like, "Watch me."

And so that's how I got started. I got started in Atlanta, 2009, and I came down to South Florida in late 2010 and continued. And what I got started in was I found a knack for list building, and I realised very quickly that the money was in the list. That's what everyone was saying, especially in 2010. If you remember, it was just the list. There wasn't really social media. I mean, in fact, I think Facebook might've been there, but Myspace was there and it wasn't the big focus. And I took it to heart and I didn't know what I was doing, but I knew I was going to get it done. And the claim to fame was I all of a sudden I built a huge list. And there was a site back then called Safe-Swaps, and it was in the day, people don't do it much anymore, they should, but where there were email swaps.

So instead of buying a solo ad or selling a solo ad or whatever, you would say, "Listen, I'll send out your email to my list, and then you send out my email to your list and I'll keep the money from mine, and you keep the money from yours and the subscribers." So that was a swap. And very quickly, I rose to the number one person on their board that could deliver the most clicks. And I had built a list of I think it was 400 or 450,000 subscribers in my first 14 months. And I could deliver at the time between five and 7,000 clicks in a day. And I had all these very interesting ways to build a list, just really from iteration marketing to doing long swaps to actually, while I'm not the inventor of solo ads, people kind of think I'm the grandfather of it.

I really perfected how that should have worked and how to use the extra clicks that were being wasted back then and getting money for them. So what happened is I caught the attention of a guy named David Eisner, and David said, "Hey, listen, I'd like to know, John, can I interview you about how you built that list?" And I said, "Sure." And he said, "I don't really believe you." And I said, "Well, David, I tell you what, I have complete trust. Here's my logins to my GetResponse, my AWeber, my InicaMail." And he goes, "You're going to give me your logins?" I said, "Absolutely." And we weren't even on Zoom. I said, "Just go check it out." And he went and he came back and he goes, "I can't believe it. You're not lying." I said, "I'm not." And so we did this interview and he says at the very end of it, he goes, "This is so good."

It was like five hours. And he says, "Can I make this into a warrior product?" And I said, "David, I don't even know what a warrior product is, but go ahead and do it." And he made it into a product on the Warrior Forum, and it was the number one commented and talked about thread that year. And one of the comments I'll never forget, a person said, "I just listened to the interview with John Cornetta and holy shit me doodle, this stuff is amazing." So that started and then everyone knew who I was. And one night, late night, I'm up, I'm working on Skype, and I see a little PayPal notification, you got paid or whatever it was back then, and it was around $750 from Mike Filsaime. And I went, "What? Somebody's pulling my leg." This is going on. I had bought all his products and all this sort of stuff.

And as it turns out, Mike had found me on that site, Safe-Swap, saw that I was the number one provider and bought 3,000 clicks from me, and they might've been 30 cents or 40 cents or something back then it was low. And so maybe it was 900. And I just was like, "Mike Filsaime just bought something." And then an email came in from Mike and then a Skype name. And the next day we were on Skype and we were chit-chatting and a friendship took off and I delivered the clicks. And he was really like, "Wow, that was amazing." I'm now selling traffic to Mike. And Mike is speaking at Frank Kern's nephew, or a cousin, was a Trey, at his event in San Diego, a partner of mine at the time to Frank Salinas is in the audience, and my cell phone rings and he says, "Dude, dude."

I go, "What?" He goes, Mike Filsaime is talking about you from stage. And I said, "What?" And he goes, "He's telling everyone right now that he buys his traffic from you and how he kills it with the traffic." And I think at the time, and he said he thinks he's paying around 50 cents a click. Maybe it was 55 cents. And I was at the time, probably 45 cents or 30 cents or something. So he's telling me this. And I go, "I got to go." And I immediately went and I changed all my PayPal buttons to the new price that Mike had mentioned on stage and orders started coming in. And I met Tom Beale after that because Tom had spoken in a mantini at that same event. And then I was selling to Rich Schefren, to Matt Bacak, to Russell Brunson. They all started coming to me because Mike had opened up the door and I was doing swaps with and or providing traffic for those guys.

And the advantage that I had, I think that the lesson here is I had 20 plus years in business at the time. And so I knew what a business owner wanted. And if you take anyone in this industry or any other industry that's at the top of their game, they are businessmen or businesswomen at the base of it. And there's things that they want. They want reliability. They want to be served, they want to be appreciated. They want to be helped. And so what I did was I went to anyone and everyone, and I never asked for a thing, "How can I serve you? How can I help you? What can I do for you?" I never asked, "What can you do for me?" I never asked Mike that, but in the beginning, I was always like, "No way." And because of those things, they quickly realised, "Man, he's reliable. This is a real guy. It's not one flake."

And in this industry, especially in the beginning for me, everyone was a little flaky. It was like, "Who are they? Are they going to rob me? Are you going to send money and not get what you promised to be delivered?" And so I killed that right away and said, "No, no, I'll send first. Don't even pay me. Don't worry about it. You want to stick me? You only can stick me one time and it's okay. I'd like you to get it out of the way." And I think that's the lesson to be learned there. So very quickly, I was on par with guys who had come in 2002 and three and four, and the key is I became friends with them. If you asked Mike, if you asked Matt Bacak, they'll say we're buddies. They've been to my house. And that's how I started in the business in selling traffic, and I was selling a tonne of it.

Sifu Edward Armstrong: "I'll send first. Don't even pay me." That single sentence is the whole standard we hold our operators to. Reliability isn't a marketing tactic. It's the reputation you can't fake and can't buy.

Sifu Julliana Armstrong: You came in years after the established players. You could have told yourself you were too late. What do you say to someone standing at that same start line today?

John Cornetta: It doesn't matter. Quality, doing the right thing, putting in the hours, getting the job done, you quickly rise to the top. If you're not faking it, they say fake it till you make it. I just say, no, just go do the right thing and plough forward. And you will quickly, you come in to the top, you can be known as one of the top, there are hundreds of thousands of people each year that are coming online with a credit card. They turn 18 or they turn 21, they get a job, they have a credit card. Now they're shopping. They have no idea who I am. They have no idea who Mike is or Matt or anybody else. They have to constantly retell people who they are. Yes, they have an older fan base, let's call them, or an older customer base that known them for years or that know me for years.

But the fact is, that's as much as a liability as it is an asset. One mistake that you don't make can ruin it all. So I would say to anybody that's just starting out, do the right thing. Do it well, give more than you could ever expect back. Now it sounds so cliche, but it's just why, does it sound cliché? Because it's the truth. And then why does everybody say it all the time? Because it's the truth. Jim Rohn, one of my favourite, favourite mentors, says, "An apple a day keeps the doctor away." What if that's true? Everyone's saying like, "Eat an apple. Let's find out."

Sifu Julliana Armstrong: You've touched so many people. Apart from the money (which I'm sure is welcome) what actually drives you?

John Cornetta: Legacy, philanthropy. My family. I have three children and a grandson, and I'm getting a little emotional. I was raised in a business in family, and my parents were both children of immigrants. My mother Irish, my father Italian, and they worked very, very hard at giving me and my three sisters a better life. And I saw what they did for their family. So I took that on. And for me, that is so important. And I decided a long time ago that, one, I was going to do something and do things that lived longer than I did, that I would set the bar for my family's history before me and for those that come after me that I would be the one that they chase. I would give back as much as I could and that I would prove people wrong.

I was a skinny little kid with upper middle-class parents in a poor New York suburb. And so I was picked on and bullied, and I tell people I was voted least likely to succeed in high school, and I'm not lying. It was like I was a floundering around. I didn't have a direction. And then just, I remember getting mad and saying, this is not how the story ends. I'm going to go, go, go. And today in anything I do, I'm going to drive. I'm sorry to say, it sounds really cocky, but you're not going to beat me that I a lot work anybody. I'm just going to drive, drive, drive, drive. And now thank God I have more tools and brain than energy at my age where I can do that in an easier way.

Sifu Julliana Armstrong: "This is not how the story ends." I've said that exact sentence to myself before stepping onto a competition floor. The bullied kid and the champion are the same person, one just decided to author the ending.

Sifu Julliana Armstrong: You mentioned legacy, and it's the right moment to ask. You had a very serious health scare recently. Walk us through it, and how it changed your outlook.

John Cornetta: So there was a very large company that I am one of the co-founders of. And I had stepped away, I guess is a good word, for a while and at the time I'd recently just taken it back over. And I'm not saying this caused my illness because I checked with the doctors and I said, "Was there anything I did or anything that I didn't do that caused this?" They said, "Absolutely not. You hit the worst lottery ever, and it just happens." So that wasn't a cause of it, but I was putting in tremendous amount of hours and I was back and I was going full bore ahead. I mean, I was doing video updates for hundreds of thousands of people every single day, talking to them, coming to them, things like that. I miss that.

But I was in New York at my grandson's baptism. I had a little pain on my side. I flew back to South Florida. My daughter and my grandson live in New Jersey, and it got worse the next day. I should have probably went to the hospital. Then it got worse the following day and I couldn't take it anymore. And I went to see a doctor of mine and he pointed across the street to the emergency room, he's right across from the emergency from the hospital. And he says, "Don't move your car. Walk over there right now and hand him this." And I did. And they triaged me. And within hours I was having emergency appendectomy surgery. My appendix had exploded a few days earlier, and I was walking around with it. They said they don't know how I was walking around. It was very angry and it was destroyed, tucked into a corner.

And I had that surgery. There was a 30% chance of dying. So what that did was remind me that certain things in business aren't important. What's most important? What are my priorities? What are my goals? What are my vision? What are my boundaries? Do all of those align? Are they congruent? And why am I waiting for an appendix to blow up and me think I'm dying in order to evaluate them that this is something that you need to do at least once a year? Lock the door. Bible says, "Go in and shut the door behind you, and there you'll find me."

And it is true. Go into your office, turn the computer off, turn the phones off. And what's important to me? Why am I doing this? What am I willing to accept? What am I not willing to accept? And so since then, I'm on a crazy health quest again. I had had the goal of living forever, and with Mike Filsaime again when he and I both talking about that, saying I had some children later on in life that goes back on the table. And with business, I've cut some things out and kept the ones that are making me happy and making the most money. So it affected me and affects me to this day.

Sifu Edward Armstrong: Two things, first, how are you now? And second, you keep circling back to Mike Filsaime and a company you co-founded. I think we're talking about GrooveDigital, and it sounds like a pivotal chapter. Loop us back.

John Cornetta: Yeah, so I'm fine. Thank you so much. I feel great. I've got 25 pounds to go still, 30 pounds to lose, but I walk 10 to 15,000 steps every day. I train three to four days a week in the gym. I eat very, very good, clean. My supplementation is amazing, and I take certain peptides and whatnot, and I'm red lights and cold plunges and saunas. And so I really take care of myself, and thank you for asking. Yeah, so GrooveDigital, I was one of the original founders of a Groove, and that was in 2018.

I had gotten a call from Frank Salinas about a company that Frank wanted to buy and couldn't round up the funds for, and did I want to buy it. And I looked at it and I thought, man, maybe I do want to buy this because it has a good list and I can redo this and let me think about it. And I was in the parking lot of a public shopping centre, and I picked up the phone and I called Mike and I said, "Hey, I want to talk to you about this thing and just get your opinion." And I started talking to him about it. And about halfway through the conversation, Mike says to me, "John, are you asking me to be your partner in this?" And I wasn't, but it dawned on me. I was talking to him like a partner.

And so I said, "Sure. Yeah, well, of course, man, great." He was the guy I idolised when I first came online. So I mean, why not? That would be great. And we looked at it and Mike was going to do it, and then he changed his mind and he said, "I can't do it. It's just too old." I'm just coming off of what he was doing with Andy, which is Kartra. And he was consulting for Kartra at the time. He had an agreement to consult with him. He'd already been bought out at Kartra. And I was like, "This is winning at them" And if Mike is not going to buy it, I'm not going to buy it. He doesn't want to partner on it. I don't want to buy it. And about a year earlier, I had already shifted to e-comm in 2014 or 15, while I was still list building and selling traffic, I had shifted over to e-commerce and I was doing just bang up, phenomenal.

I was selling print on demand mostly. I started with Teespring and then went to a store with Shopify, and then I found pillowcases and sneakers and clark seat covers and all that stuff. And I thought, I'm going to try this. And I started selling sneakers to such an extent that I had stores doing $50,000 a day in sales in sneakers. I was selling 500 pair of sneakers a day on Facebook, running Facebook ads. I was spending five, $10,000 on Facebook ads every day. I had three ad accounts. I had maybe 300 to 400 campaigns running at a time. Nobody managing it but me. No outsourcing, no ad companies that were doing the advertising. I just did it.

And I did it in about two hours a day max. I would wake up, I'd work for 45 minutes, I'd work 45 minutes at night, I'd go to the beach all day, come back, 50 grand. And so Mike knew that too. And I just started developing some software to try and help me. The person that I was using I knew was making about 30 or 40% of the money that I was making. So I was trying to duplicate their software and to take that 30% for myself, kind of never got there. But I met a guy, Matt Serralta, through that, who was doing some software, and Matt had this e-commerce software to compete with Shopify.

And I was advising him and helping him on that a little bit. I said, "Hey, Mike, I had the software that's e-commerce." And he went, "I want to see it." So I told Matt, Matt demoed it for me and Mike. And when the call was over, Mike called me and said, "This is it." He says, "I want to do e-comm. That software, we can build on that, but Matt's going to have to give up 66%. I want you to have 33 and me to have 33. And the reason that I never got into e-comm was I had no credibility, I didn't know how to e-comm, but you're doing $50,000 a day, you have stores doing a half a million dollars a month, I mean a million dollars, million and half a month. It's not an issue anymore. You can do the training, you have the credibility. I'm the software guy."

And so long story short, Groove was born, Groove went on. We had phenomenal years. We did GroovePages, we did GrooveSell. And about two years ago, two and a half years ago, I put this, yeah. So I was asked to step aside a couple of years ago and semi-retire. In all fairness to Groove, I had injured my back and I had a couple of other health scares. So I found a new doctor, and the doctor said, "Let's go get an exam." But what they did find is they found a very dangerous brain aneurysm. So by the time I got home from the scan, I was sitting at this desk and he called me and says, "John, yeah, we found a brain aneurysm." And my life was almost over, and that was shock. And I said, "Okay, we're going to treat this like I would treat anything in business."

I want to know who's the best, where is he or she at? They will be the ones that handle this for me. And I found out a doctor at NYU in Manhattan, New York, his name is Dr. Peter Nelson, and he invented a stent that instead of cutting your head open and putting a clamp over the aneurysm, they have this stent and they go and they insert it through your groin. And from your groin, they go all the way up into your brain. They go into the artery that has the aneurysm and they insert that stent to the middle of it, and then it's a flow diverter, so there's no more blood going to the aneurysm. And eventually the aneurysm shrivels up like a grape or raisin and you're fine. So he actually invented the stent. He invented the procedure. I got ahold of his office and he personally called me back within two hours.

And I told him my situation and he said, "How did you find me? Why?" And I told him the whole thing I'd gone through. And he goes, "Wow." He goes, "FedEx me all your stuff." I FedExed him the next day he says, "Can I share this with a group of people I'm meeting with tomorrow? We have lunch. There's a dozen of us top brain surgeons in New York City." I said, "Yes, you can." Calls me a few days later and says, "They all agree my way to do it is the best way for yours. You have a very complicated, dangerous aneurysm. If it erupts, I have to tell you, a 50% chance you're going to die and 50% chance you'll never be the same again."

So I scheduled on August 16th, 2022, I flew to Manhattan and I had successful aneurysm surgery. So I had had that surgery, I had a bad back, and I was not paying as much attention to Groove as I should. I tell you all that to give cover to the fact that I don't overly blame them for saying step aside, but maybe I do a little bit.

Sifu Edward Armstrong: I love the honesty, and I love that you treated a brain aneurysm exactly like a business problem: find the single best person on earth, and go to them. That's an operator's mind under the ultimate pressure.

John Cornetta: Yeah. So I did. I did. And that was Groove. And then this past January, I hostily took over and became the co-CEO. And that lasted about three months because Groove had some problems, they had some issues. There's no question about it, no one's fault really. And I thought I had a way to fix them, and I did a lot. And also it was tough because Mike's my friend. And we had become not friends during this whole period, and I didn't like that. We started talking. I showed Mike and told him this wasn't about him personally and how I was going to do the right thing. And I got sick and Mike came to visit me in the hospital and I know that he loves Groove and the Groove members more than anybody. And look, he has his detractors. He has people that said, "Oh, he ruined it."

But look, people there that say I ruined the last three weeks or whatever, or three months, so you're never going to win everybody over. But I knew better. I know the kind of man Mike is and I know the kind of software guy he is. And it was at that meeting that way. I basically said, "Look, here's what needs to happen now. You need to come in and in order to do it the right way, you need to never have this over your head again. So you need to buy me out and we need to work on how that looks. This way you have my full support. And you never have to look over your shoulder. You are the majority owner now, not the other partners. No one else that's involved in Groove." Mike was saying, "You are it, you have it. You have those people." They may own a little bit or something, I don't know their internal workings. And we did that. And Mike and I now are back to being good friends and we talk, and Mike advises me when I need advice and I advise him when he needs advice.

So it's all worked out for the best. It was something I'm very proud of that I did. I co-founded and helped build a software as a service company with over a million users. And I was a big, big part of that. And I moved back to what I originally did when I came online, which was driving traffic and selling it basically in other niches, not necessarily in BizOp world, but I did do it now through SMS and email marketing. And I do really extremely crazy well. I had some goals that I'd given up on as a kid saying it was a fantasy. They're not a fantasy anymore. It's definitely top 0.01 or less percent I'm there.

Sifu Julliana Armstrong: If someone wants to start online right now, in 2025, what should they do, and how do they follow your example?

John Cornetta: I think one, you've got to burn your ships. That's like number one. I'll tell people that all the time. Cortes came to the New World. First thing he did was he burned all his ships. Everyone said, "What in the hell are you doing?" And he said, "Well, you're not going back. So you better get to work." Burn your ships, and use that metaphor to where you don't have any other option. You got to go all in. Well, what if I fail? You fail. You got to go all in. I would tell them to just let's go all in. Number one, you got to buy that commitment. I'm going in no matter what anyone else says. In fact, I'm going to do everything that I'm about to tell you to do in spite of what everyone says. Because anyone else besides you who are reading this, they're going to tell you that you're crazy and that you're nuts and that it's a scam and that you shouldn't do it.

And you need to look at the sources of who's telling you that. And if they have a cosy job and they've been working there for 30 years with a pension, of course they're going to tell you that. You have to decide, is that what you want? Or you want to be an entrepreneur? If you want to be an entrepreneur, it comes with risks. And if you know that the risks are inherent and you're prepared for them, then it's not a big deal. A wave's coming, big deal. We know the wave's coming to just ignore it would be the insanity part. So I would say that's number one. It's the mindset. Know why you're doing it, what you're doing it for. And if you say, "Oh, I want money." Well, really let's get a little deeper. What's that money buy you? It gets you out from mommy and daddy, right?

It gets you out of the house. It gets your own place, it gets you the freedom, it gets you those types of things. So get down to that emotion and know that you're going to burn your ships and you're going to fully commit. And then I always tell this to students, coaching students and things like that, I always say, "Bite off more than you can chew and then chew it and chew it and chew it." And what that means is start taking a look at how you can drive your own traffic, your own eyeballs, because that's the key to everything. Whether you are a restaurateur, which I've been, an online marketer, you're going to sell something with e-comm, you're going to sell a digital product and a piece of information. You're going to do interviews like this and then sell that content. It all comes down to who do you know?

What eyeballs can you drive to that particular product or service? So that leads me to these two things. One, your network. You've got to get out from behind the computer as much as an oxymoron, as that may sound, once you start this process, you've got to go to events. You've got to find the local event or the local meetup, even if that means going to the Rotary Club, you've got to get out and start talking to other entrepreneurs because they're going to protect you and help you. You're going to meet people. My first event I had met Chris Reif, Omar Martin, Bill Walsh, Joe Kissimee, I mean, I met all these guys that my very first JP Moroney first event and I still talk to these guys to this day. Number two, driving the eyeballs. What does that look like at the time that you're reading this?

Funny enough, 2009 for me, it was just simply email. But email is still around, isn't it? So that might be a hint for you to build an email list as number one. Number two, look at perhaps SMS messaging. I'm doing huge right now. I send over a million and a half SMS messages a day working towards 5 million. Social media, Facebook, Instagram, and do you want to do that? But also what's working advertising wise, TikTok, Instagram, what's not, I don't know what it will be when you read this, whether you're reading this today or you're reading this a year from now, you need to find that out and then go and don't go looking to hire someone for this stuff. These are the things that you need to be the expert at. You need to be the expert at networking. You need to become the expert at driving eyeballs to what you want.

So now, when you have these two things in your hand, it's just a matter of what do you want to sell? What passion do you have? In other words, find your passion. I say find the eyeballs first. If you can deliver eyeballs anywhere, the Vatican will hire you. They want people coming in the front door. It's not rocket science. So I would say to you just exactly that, learn advertising yourself. You can always bring people on later. Build a list through Instagram, Facebook followers, TikTok followers, email list, SMS marketing list. That's the key to all of this. And it will be the key moving. And that doesn't matter if you are a baker, a plumber, a candlestick maker, offline or online, what I just said is the exact same truth.

Sifu Julliana Armstrong: "Burn your ships." That's the moment before every fight worth having, the instant you decide there's no retreat and the only way out is through.

Sifu Edward Armstrong: What are you building right now?

John Cornetta: Yeah, I have two things going on. Well, I have a couple things. Let me just tell you this. So I have a friend and business partner. His name is Chris Reif. Chris was a competitor. He was doing e-commerce at the same time as me. We had an argument and it was around the Groove time and this thing fell apart. And anyway, long story short, after Groove, I was playing around on Facebook and I saw one of my old Facebook pages, I have hundreds of them. And I started posting on it. And lo and behold, I was getting hundreds and hundreds of comments just from it was a very active group for grandparents. And I was selling grandparent t-shirts and whatnot. And then my post would get removed, and then I would put up a shirt for sale just to see if it would sell.

It would get removed. And I realised it was Chris's page and I was just landing on it. And it was funny. And I thought, because we were arguing and I said, "I'm going to call him up." And I remember Frank Salinas said, "Don't do it. Don't do it. You guys have been fighting for years." I said, "I don't even know what we're fighting over. It's ridiculous. I'm going to call him up. We can make some money on this stupid site." And so I called him up and it was contentious for 10 minutes and maybe more for Chris. But the funniest thing was I knew he was a good person. We laughed about what had happened. We realised there was other players that were involved at the time. And I had a feeling and I said to Chris, "Look, I'm looking to do some new things here. If you have anything going on, you let me know what it is and maybe we can do something together, you know my assets and what I can bring to the table."

And he said, "What do you know about SMS marketing?" And I said, "I don't know a lot about it, but I've got a lot of contacts and things like that." And he says, "Well, I'm doing some selling clicks, basically like you're doing, but for SMS." I said, "Okay." He goes, "Well, there's a lot of costs involved. We have to buy machines from China and you have to buy this and that, and there's all types of costs involved." And I said, "Let me make this real easy for you because I believe in you." And he didn't have anybody that believed in him at the time for a while, but I did. And I said, "What's your number? What do you need to make that if you were making that you might not jump for joy? Yeah, you would jump for joy. All your bills would be paid. You'd never have to worry about anything at all. Everything."

And he threw out a number and we're talking about six figure number here. And I said, "You know what? I'm glad it's that high because it lets me know you're serious. You're not I'm just playing small. You're playing big. So I'll tell you what I'm going to do. I'll fund the whole thing and I'll pay you. I'll guarantee you what you just said you need to make from day one. You'll never look back and have to worry about if this works or not." It took two and a half months. I have not had to put a dime more in. I've gotten all my money back. Not only did Chris get that number that he wanted those first couple of months from me, I got all my money back. And now we're making two to three times that amount each per week, not per month.

And scaling from there. So I wanted to mention that and how it's really important to find strategic partners sometimes and not get caught up in your head where the ego and to take some gambles. And the reason I also mentioned that is I'm now talking... Me and Chris now in development with another very well-known internet marketer. I can't drop his name yet. He's flying here to South Florida this week to meet with Chris and I. And I have a very good idea to help internet marketers all over the world. And what I'm working on right now, besides the text messaging thing that I do, and I do that for the insurance world, by the way, car insurance, health insurance, life insurance and boring, but pays very well. But Chris and I like to train. We love interacting with people, training, getting on webinars, going live.

And why do people not make money online? Okay, I already told you, but let me just wrap it up. One, they put up an offer, they put up something, they don't even have a buy button sometimes. I coach students and I'm like, where's your buy button? And they're like, "Well, I think that we should email them a few times and get them warmed up." And I'm like, "Listen, man, you got to..." So they have the wrong funnel, if you will, and they have no qualifying traffic. They don't have that list yet that we talked about. They don't have that Instagram following. They don't have that stuff. So I said, "Look, what if we can put all of that to the side and we can make money too?" And so what we have coming out, and not fully completed yet, is a membership where people will get a few digital simple funnels.

They can use anything they want, they can use GrooveFunnels, ClickFunnels. They can use go high level. They can use the things that will provide them, but very, very simple intended to build their list, give out a digital product and have the traffic zero out. That's the only thing. So that there might be a one-time offer for $5 or for $17 or for $18 or for 6.99, nothing huge high-end products. So that when we purchase traffic that the people coming in and opting into the funnel, one out of 10 take that small product and it pays for the traffic, well, we're not going to leave them there.

So it's going to be a traffic co-op where included in this membership price, they will have a 400 or 500. We're not ensuring the number yet clicks every month qualified by us through vendors that we know that are sending into the co-op. And they'll have the option to buy more of this traffic that members outside will not be able to buy. And it's in a co-op so that their risk is spread out. You buy traffic from someone, you stand a chance of they're just a scam. They're just sending you crap. It won't with us. We'll be the buffers. We will be able to mitigate that risk. So people are actually willing to, they're going to build a list, they're going to make sales, and no one else has ever said that because we are going to control it. And then every Saturday they're going to see me and Chris and this other person who you know and other famous marketers that are going to come in and do favours every single weekend and train this group of people on how they can continue to grow their business online.

Sifu Edward Armstrong: Quite a pitch. Where can people find you and follow all of this?

John Cornetta: Johncornetta.com. J-O-H-N C-O-R-N-E-T-T-A.com. I put up something there. And then on Facebook, it's facebook.com, I think slash, I'm not sure how they do it there, John Cornetta. Those two, you can join my list or you can certainly friend me or follow me on Facebook. I post a lot on Facebook.

Sifu Edward Armstrong: John, it's been an absolute pleasure. We wish you the very best of health, and it's inspiring to see the scare push you toward more life, not less. Long may it continue.

John Cornetta: Thank you.

Sifu Julliana's closing word: John was the kid voted least likely to succeed who got angry and said "this is not how the story ends." I have lived inside that sentence. And when his own body tried to end the story twice, he treated it like a fight he intended to win. Find the best in the world, go to them, refuse the retreat. That's not business. That's a warrior's response to mortality.

Sifu Edward's closing word: John's whole life is two lessons an operator can't skip. Serve first. Send the value before anyone pays you, because reliability is the one reputation you can't fake. And burn your ships, a warrior burns the boat the day he decides there's no version of his life where he quits. All in, no retreat, serve on the way up. We don't entertain warriors. We create them.

John Cornetta, Florida-based entrepreneur, e-commerce and traffic authority, and co-founder of GrooveDigital. Find him at johncornetta.com and on Facebook as John Cornetta.

ILLUSTRATIVE RESULTS. Any revenue, enrollment, margin or retention figure in this conversation is either a documented result from one of our own operations, a figure the guest reports about their own business, or an illustrative example, never a projection of your results.

Nothing here is financial, legal or tax advice.

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