Jonathan Courtney
91 statements across 18 episodes · 43 bullish · 5 bearish · 2 people on the record · first statement May 1, 2024 by Jonathan Courtney · said 1 times in 1 episodes since 2025 · across every show →
On the record as a speaker too: Jonathan Courtney's record, appearances and statements → this page counts the times other people say the name.
Mentions by year
brought up most by Greg Isenberg (1)
tap a year for its mentions
2025 1 mention in 1 episode
Everything said about Jonathan Courtney, oldest first
May 1, 2024
May 1, 2024 positive
Courtney: Mastermind advice led AJ&Smart to triple product price and sell out
“The current mastermind I'm in is actually one of the members of the, of Sam ovens mastermind, a guy called Blake Lagrange and the product we just launched the full stack facilitator. We wanted to launch this for 3000 or 4000 euro or something like that. 1:30 m…”
May 1, 2024 positive
Courtney: Product built in Sam Ovens' mastermind remains our top earner
“Previously I was in Sam Ovens Mastermind for three years. And Sam Ovens, maybe within the first or second day of being in the Mastermind changed literally. Like I joined in like, let's say on a Tuesday, the following Tuesday, I completely rethought everything …”
May 12, 2024 positive
May 20, 2024 positive
Courtney: Framing meeting requests as 'on your way' lowers outreach pressure
“But if you already say that the important thing is you're kind of like, I am there. That is something I already do. And it would be something that is just on my way. It's on my journey. That makes it seem less intense for people.”
May 20, 2024 neutral
May 20, 2024
Courtney: High-profile people often prefer last-minute scheduling over booking ahead
“Often I noticed that people like this tend to like to do things sort of last minute because it doesn't have to add on to their really chaotic schedule. It's just, oh, I'll just put it in right now as it was today with you, right? We were chatting, we were mess…”
May 20, 2024
Jun 5, 2024
Courtney: Cultural nostalgia peaks between the ages of 10 and 20
“Basically the best stuff, the best movies, the best everything happens, happened sometimes between Sometime between when people are, like, 10 years old and 20 years old. So, nostalgia peaks somewhere in between 10 and 20. I think they, did they, like, bring it…”
Jul 3, 2024 negative
Jul 3, 2024 neutral
Jul 3, 2024 positive
Jul 3, 2024 neutral
Jul 3, 2024 positive
Jul 3, 2024 negative
Jul 29, 2024 neutral
Courtney shut down his holding company to avoid cognitive noise
“I actually shut down my holding company after realizing that
Even though it makes sense from a financial perspective, the noise and complexity, even though it wouldn't, for example, be a problem for you, for me, that overwhelms me massively.”
Jul 29, 2024
Jul 29, 2024 neutral
Founders with under $20M revenue should avoid devil's advocates
“You mostly don't want to be surrounded by people who are questioning everything and being the devil devil's advocates and telling you all the ways things can go wrong when your business is just starting out and you're still under twenty million. You want to be…”
Sep 16, 2024
Courtney: Marketing should emphasize avoiding pain in downturns and pleasure in booms
“When the economy is really bad and things are going to shit, then you want to make copy or, and especially if you're selling like some sort of education service, you want to talk about moving away from pain. So during COVID a lot of market, a lot of marketing …”
Sep 16, 2024
Sep 16, 2024 positive
Sep 16, 2024 neutral
Sep 16, 2024 positive
Courtney: AJ&Smart generated $270K on $86K ad spend in June
“We spent 80,000 dollars on ads in What month is this in June? So this is just a June page that's open right now. 80,000 dollars in June on Facebook ads 6000 dollars in June on Google and YouTube ads. So total ads. Oh yeah. Sorry. Total ad spend. So total ad sp…”
Sep 16, 2024 positive
Courtney: AJ&Smart hit $10M from one sales funnel
“We go to this very cheesy, but fun event called Funnel Hacking Live, which I've told people about before, and this year, I hope I'm not over, I hope it actually happens, or else this will be kind of embarrassing, but we're picking up an award for having our fi…”
Oct 28, 2024
Oct 28, 2024 positive
Courtney: Use Facebook Ad Library to reverse-engineer competitor sales funnels
“Go to Facebook ad library, type in your competitors names and click on their ads and see if they're running funnels. Seriously. That's one of the best ways to learn what funnels to run for your industry. See what other people are running for their industry.”
Oct 28, 2024
Courtney: AJ&Smart sells training programs for up to $14,000 per participant
“What we sell is we sell Training to corporates, which is, which can be pretty high ticket. We also sell training to individuals, which up to, you know, 14,000 dollars per, per participant joining one of our trainings. We also, of course, sell then digital hybr…”
Oct 28, 2024
Courtney: Restrict sales call bookings to three days to prevent no-shows
“So we only allow people to book calls three days ahead of time. That's because if you allow someone to book a call next week or four days, or like this, basically what happens is you can guess, they'll be like, ah, forget it. And they'll just won't turn up to …”
Oct 28, 2024 positive
Oct 28, 2024 positive
Courtney: Direct all content traffic to one specific funnel, nowhere else
“Your content team's only goal from today on is to send people to this one funnel that we're going to create together. There's no other place where you send people and all of your content, always the CTA is sending them to this one place.”
Nov 27, 2024
Nov 27, 2024
Nov 27, 2024
Courtney: AJ&Smart manages Black Friday campaigns on pure revenue share
“We're so with what we're doing just for transparency, we're only taking a cut of the money that's made. So it's kind of like it's not a no brainer cause we take a big cut, but it is kind of a no brainer because they, these companies weren't going to run these …”
Nov 27, 2024
Courtney: 2023 Black Friday and Summer Sales Rescued AJ&Smart's Financial Year
“At 20, 23, we didn't have a great year. Like we, I made some strategic decisions at AJ and Smart that I don't think were very clever. And Black Friday was, Black Friday and kind of like summer sale, those made up for some of the sillier decisions or larger exp…”
Nov 27, 2024 bullish
Nov 27, 2024 positive
Nov 27, 2024 positive
Courtney: Black Friday service providers should pitch clients starting in August
“Guys, if you're listening to this podcast and you know how to run sales and you have like some proof that you've run sales for yourself or some, for some other clients, or you could build that for clients. You need to be reaching out to them approximately Augu…”
Dec 16, 2024 neutral
Courtney: First step in zero-audience acquisition is mapping existing target containers
“Step one is just Making a list of people or organizations or meetups or like containers where the people you want to work with are already being talked to or already being interacted with and are already gathering essentially.”
Dec 16, 2024 negative
Courtney: Pitching Podcasters for Free Exposure Without Clear Value Is Counterproductive
“Don't just reach out to Greg and be like, Hey, can I come on your podcast? Because Greg can be like, it's almost insulting to do that because he knows you just want to have access to his audience. But for example, what I did when I reached out to you, Greg, ev…”
Dec 16, 2024 positive
Dec 16, 2024 positive
Courtney: Sponsoring Daring Fireball Generated Substantial Early Traffic for AJ&Smart
“Early on in the company, in my company's history, I realized a lot of our audience is reading daring fireball, John Gruber's website. And so I just straight up paid for an ad on his blog and it got us a crap ton of traffic.”
Dec 16, 2024 neutral
Dec 16, 2024 bullish
Dec 16, 2024 neutral
Jan 22, 2025 negative
Courtney: Former CEOs must skip meetings to avoid overriding their successors
“And it's really hard to, if you were the CEO and now you've given the role to someone else, if you get, at least if I'm in the room, it'll default to people feeling like my Opinion maybe has more weight. And so it's better for me to just simply not.”
Jan 22, 2025 positive
Courtney outlines his funnel for securing profit-share advisory deals
“Someone listens to my podcast or reads my blog. They come to a free training. Then some of them come to a paid event. Then some of those people who have companies that are making over a million, End up being part of our partners program where we take a cut of …”
Jan 22, 2025
Courtney: Webinars must highlight and bridge the customer's progress gap
“Webinars are just always about showing this gap between where you think your audience is, where you'd like them to be. And because you're usually there where they want to be, what needs to go into this gap to bring them over there as fast as possible.”
Jan 22, 2025 positive
Courtney: Basic webinar funnels remain a multimillion-dollar playbook in 2025
“Most of the real basics work
So goddamn well today, like 20, 25, we can launch a product using basically just the same webinar.
Just email your list, send them to a webinar in that webinar.
Talk about the product, the end, send loads of follow up emails.
Like …”
Jan 22, 2025
Courtney's prior attempt to delegate his CEO role crashed his business
“I did hand over the corporate side of my business just to a CEO a couple of years ago, and they did eventually sort of lose track of it. And it did pretty much crash and burn and had to be rebuilt. I obviously left it go a little bit too far because I was like…”
Jan 22, 2025 positive
Mar 17, 2025 positive
Mar 17, 2025
Courtney generated $70,000 from a niche blog audience of 2,000 readers
“After one year, there was like 2000 people reading it or something is very tiny. But even with that audience, because my niche in that case was business owners who are making more than a million already. I was able to run an event that brought in like 70,000 d…”
May 12, 2025 positive
May 12, 2025 bullish
Courtney: OpenAI o3 Recreated a $35K, 3-Month Whitepaper in 10 Minutes
“We spent. 35,000 dollars to get a white paper created three years ago, which we used in a lot of marketing. Basically we wanted this company to go and research all of these things that were happening in businesses so that we could have all of these crazy quote…”
May 12, 2025 positive
Courtney: Founders Dismissing AI Usually Suffer From Ineffective Prompting
“A bad prompt gets me really crappy results, and I think that's what kept turning me off using these tools. And I also think that's what, I'm sure there's a lot of people listening to this podcast who've repeatedly tried using these tools, and they're like, tha…”
May 12, 2025 positive
Isenberg: Founders must master AI tasks personally before delegating to teams
“You shouldn't tell your team to do anything until you understand it. So, The thing that you should do is Map out all the boring, repetitive tasks that people do in your business from, by each function, and then try to do those tasks yourself.”
Jun 18, 2025
Jun 18, 2025
Courtney: AJ&Smart's $6.99 book funnel feeds $14,300 in-person training
“What I can tell you as the person who's built it is I have built this funnel to generate call bookings for my sales team to sell some of our very high ticket stuff. So let me show you, you're looking at this book, right? And you're like, I'm buying this book f…”
Jun 18, 2025
Jun 18, 2025
Jun 18, 2025 neutral
Jun 18, 2025
Jun 18, 2025
Jun 18, 2025 positive
Jun 18, 2025
Jun 18, 2025 positive
Jun 18, 2025 bearish
Courtney: Book funnels are complex, brittle, and difficult to track
“What I would warn against with a book funnel is it is a complex thing to build and to track. Like we have been building them for years and I, we still struggle. We still have like, what's our actual like return on ad spend today. We still, even though everythi…”
Jun 18, 2025 bullish
Aug 21, 2025
Aug 21, 2025 positive
Courtney: Bundling limited-time bonuses creates urgency better than discounts
“Anybody watching Alex Hermozzi's event, and I think you guys should rewatch it. You'll notice that he talks about the book, maybe Five percent of the time he talks about the free gifts. 95% of the time free gifts, things that are bundled into the product. If y…”
Aug 21, 2025 positive
Oct 20, 2025
Oct 20, 2025
Oct 20, 2025 positive
Courtney launched a $6,000 subscription bundled with a five-day annual meetup
“We also launched a new product a couple of days ago, which also has this thing called campfire where once per year, we all meet up in person for five days. And that was never naturally part of our product. So it's a virtual product. Which has a one, a 12 month…”
Oct 20, 2025 positive
Oct 20, 2025 bullish
Courtney: Physical curation gains massive value as ChatGPT commoditizes digital knowledge
“And also, especially now that you can essentially generate all of that stuff on ChatGPT and knowledge is becoming less and less valuable. The ability to have something curated for you physically, in my opinion, is becoming more and more valuable.”
Oct 20, 2025 neutral
Oct 20, 2025
Oct 20, 2025
Courtney: 1,000 podcast listeners can fill two high-ticket annual retreats
“I only have like 1000 people or 1000 to 2000 people listening to my podcast. And all my podcast is the only audience for the people coming to my other in-person events. And still I can fill, you know, one to two, 35 people events per year and add a high ticket…”
Oct 20, 2025 bullish
Oct 20, 2025 positive
Courtney sold 30 tickets at $6,800 for his mastermind event
“Charged 6800 per ticket and sold 30 tickets. So this was a, and those are the easiest 30 tickets I've ever sold in my life for anything, even though it's a lot more expensive than maybe what the others were charging for the digital version of it. And so I ran …”
Feb 11, 2026 bullish
Feb 11, 2026
Feb 11, 2026
Courtney: 5,000 newsletter signups yield 200 webinar attendees and 12 buyers
“Our biggest holding pattern is our email newsletter. And when I see that an extra 5000 people have joined the newsletter, I can mentally say that means another 200 people will turn up to the next webinar. And that means another 12 people will buy something.”
Feb 11, 2026 bullish
Claude cuts Courtney's lead magnet creation time from 3 days to half-day
“Now this entire process of marketing for me, That maybe it would be a week for us to, okay, let's say a full lead magnet campaign two to three days to get it right. Now we're talking about half a day and it just feels so much faster.”
May 18, 2026 positive
May 18, 2026 neutral
May 18, 2026 positive
May 18, 2026 positive
May 18, 2026 positive
Courtney makes €500k from a 1,000-viewer weekly live stream without ads
“I mean, I can just tell you too, like, so I have only one to two, one to 2000 people tuning into me every Tuesday, and that business alone can make four to 500,000 euro with no ads, with nothing else other than me selling like in-person events or like even mer…”
May 18, 2026 bullish
Courtney: AI sanitization will drive audiences toward unscripted, live content
“So that's something that I think from your list is going to be Bigger and bigger and bigger as AI sanitizes a lot of stuff. I think more people are going to want, want to listen to more authentic people speaking long form, unedited, unscripted, and live.”