What the Ultra-Spiritual JP Sears appears to be verses what he really is might surprise those of you who just have a causal awareness of his hilarious and satirical YouTube videos on Facebook. 

JP Sears has a large following and has broken ground on YouTube by parodying veganism, gluten-free fads, relationships, new age beliefs, and millennials.  Would it surprise you that in fact, for real, JP Sears is an emotion healing life coach and that is how he made and continues to make a living before he became the persona we now see on Facebook and YouTube?

While these video may eclipse his legitimate business the impact overall to his social media cred is undeniable.

Using satire and parody to poke fun at new age topics while being a new age life coach may seem to blur the lines of reality and even good business sense.  Although he is channeling to some extent the comedic stratagem of Andy Kaufman, his decision to produce these videos was not an easy decision according to a talk given at Wired for Wonder on November 15, 2016. 

“I define my weirdness as a satirical sense of humor.. [that]… expresses itself by the fact that I can be humorous and sincere within the span of the same sentence.”

“For a long time [I thought that if I] expressed my weirdness or my humor that it will be terrible for business.”

That conflict resolved when he decided: “I’m going to make a videos because I want to do that for me and it actually didn’t ruin my life it didn’t ruin my business.”

JP’s subscriber base crew from 2,300 to over 350,000 and his Facebook fan base is now over a million.

Although the intent to make these videos was not done out of a pure strategic business goal, that may be the key to his success and perhaps yours too.

In an interview, author Ryan Holiday outlines how to create something that will sell forever. 

Here is the full list from that interview and I’ll unpack a few of these and link them to JP Sears. 

·         BE COUNTERINTUITIVE

·         DON’T TRY TO COMPETE

·         VALIDATE THE IDEA

·         DON’T GIVE UP IF YOU DON’T WIN ON DAY ONE

·         TELL A STORY THAT IS PERSONAL TO YOU

·         TELL A STORY THAT RESONATES WITH EVERYONE

·         BE OK WITH PEOPLE HATING YOU

·         MARKET YOUR IDEA

·         VALIDATE, REPEAT

 

BE COUNTERINTUITIVE

If you write what everyone else is already thinking, then nobody needs to read your work, or use your product.

There is simply nothing like JP Sears and the work he has created has its own space in social media.

 

DON’T TRY TO COMPETE

The 100th person who writes a “50 Shades of Grey” style book, or a disco pop EMD album can…MAYBE…get 1% of the audience.

If you find an underserved audience, you can get 100% of it.

Given the band of topics that JP parodies it lives within its own hemisphere and thus he owns 100% of the satirical benefits of veganism.

 

VALIDATE THE IDEA

Don’t look for LOTs of fans at first. Look for the hard-core fans. The ones who will stick with you while you go on this crazy ride. The ones who will share.

JP had a user base that he built up before he went weird.  The idea was validated and is still validated. 

 

TELL A STORY THAT IS PERSONAL TO YOU

JP Sears is on target with this strategy.  Emotional healing and his ability to poke fun at his own field is not only easy, but leads to Ryan Holiday next point which is to TELL A STORY THAT RESONATES WITH EVERYONE.  Combing those two skill sets and knowledge base is perhaps how and why JP Sears is successful.

 

THE BEST ART DIVIDES THE AUDIENCE.

I don’t hit publish unless I’m actually feeling physical fear about doing it.

If you don’t want to divide the audience, don’t hit publish.

This in fact happened in June of 2017.  Sears made infomercial parody video called “Welcome to Costa Rica”. Within 36 hours of the video being posted the fall out started.  Costa Ricans were deeply offended, they felt criticized and were hurt by the contents of the video.  JP is of course not for everyone. JP took down the video and issued an apology video.  And yes you can see the banned video here (you haters). 

VALIDATE, REPEAT

Most things fail. The ones who succeed, pick up from their failure, figure out what went wrong, figure out how to validate an idea better with an audience, and then go back and try again.

The bookshelf of parody doesn’t seem have an end for JP Sears.

The impact of JP may have morphed again.  Recently in an homage to JP Sears I created a parody of a parody, by blogging about Iceland, channeling the persona of JP Sears.

 

If you need emotional and spiritual healing or just a good satirical laugh his Enlightenedness, Ultra Spiritual JP Sears is there for you.