Speaker 1 00:00:04 Welcome to Subscription Heroes. I'm your host, Scott Hear, co-founder and c p O of turnkey. In this episode, I sit down with Joanna Weeb. She's the OG conversion copywriter and creator of Copy Hackers. Joanna is an incredible teacher through her great content in many courses and has worked with companies like Canva, Intuit, and Meadow Lab to up their conversion game. We'll discuss the role of AI and copywriting, what you need, need to be doing to convert more leads into clients with your writing, and the most ridiculous tactic within conversion copywriting that works, but really shouldn't. Thanks and enjoy the show. All right, so you have a superpower, and I love to start out by talking about conversion copywriting. Would you mind defining that for audiences you know, that know you and maybe don't know you yet?
Speaker 2 00:00:53 Sure. Yeah, totally. So conversion copywriting is very simply copy or words that get the yes. So copy that gets the yes where the yes is whatever you're trying to get people to do. So are they trying to, you want 'em to buy something that's the yes you're looking for your copy should help make that possible. Is it a lead? Whatever it might be that yes, you wanna get conversion copywriting exists to have a more direct line to that thing.
Speaker 1 00:01:26 And I feel like this is a bit of a leading question, but <laugh> it is actually. So I think in some circles there are negative associations for to writing copy that's meant to close founders, operators, marketers who maybe haven't studied copywriting. And I just, I still wonder why that exists and have you found any answers out there in, in the field doing this for so long?
Speaker 2 00:01:50 I don't know what you're talking about. I'm just kidding. <laugh>.
Speaker 2 00:01:53 Um, you know, there's the, I'm in a good mood answer and I'm in a bad mood answer, <laugh>, I'm in a good mood. However, I, I can't help thinking of the reason that I think that's true, that there's a negative association there is because people who think that haven't actually seen copy work, except for that one time they bought that crappy thing that they didn't mean to buy, but for some reason they felt compelled to buy it. And they're like, that's, that's what copy does, makes me buy things I don't want. And there's this fear, you know, this prevailing notion that good salespeople are meant to separate fools from their money. I think there's like just, there's ugliness around the idea of sales in some cases for good reasons. Some people have abused things and it's awful. But I look at all of the founders I know who wanna get great results and marketers who wanna get great results, product leads, who want all of these things, you can tell them exactly what to do. But there's still this sense of like, no <laugh>, I'll do it my way and then it doesn't work. And I think it just goes back to a fear of looking like you're a salesperson and a lack of experience actually seeing people convert when you write copy that converts and isn't skeezy.
Speaker 1 00:03:20 And by not being deliberate in that, you're doing yourself a disservice and potential customers as well. You know, they're, they're not getting a full story.
Speaker 2 00:03:29 Yeah, that's the thing. I, I don't understand that. Like, I, I had a lot of pushback from UX people in particular, and I love UX people. I was in UX copywriting for a good chunk of my time at Intuit until I discovered like, oh wait, <laugh>, wait, we can really get people to like convert. Like we can actually tap into something. But there's this idea, I think around ux at UX and persuasion don't meet, and that UX should always prevail, and UX is the voice of the user. And I'm like, okay, fair. But that doesn't, like if you are the voice of the user, the user has arrived on your website or has opened your email or gone into your app, even not because they're hoping nothing will change in their lives and they'll stay exactly as they are. Maybe things will get worse. Like, they're not hoping for that.
Speaker 2 00:04:21 They're hoping for something better. And if you're, you've got visitors coming to your site, you owe it to them to help connect them with the solution that they're looking for. Most of us, B2B SaaS in particular, which is almost all SaaS, you have almost like no excuse if you have a user focused approach. If you're user-centric, then your job is to give users what they're there for, knowing that they haven't arrived on whatever website you have.com in order to browse. Like they can go to TikTok for that man. Like, you don't have to worry about that <laugh>. So yeah, it's up to us to convert people and I'm just worried that, or I have seen at least that there's pushback for everybody who's like, users just wanna come here and do X and stop getting in their way. And I'm like, we're not getting in their way. We're absolutely helping them. Um, but there's just that conflict there, right. Which shouldn't be because we're both operating with the best interest for the user in mind. Yeah,
Speaker 1 00:05:19 I, I do, uh, shamefully admit Yeah. As a dad of three tired at night, I have been caught browsing B2B SaaS websites, uh, over TikTok. So there
Speaker 2 00:05:30 Just like, like we're fun. There's
Speaker 1 00:05:32 That fun.
Speaker 2 00:05:32 What's new in project management software?
Speaker 1 00:05:35 Yeah. You know, like what's, uh, what's the latest, uh, we've moved past intercom, you know, blue, what's the latest, uh, in, in fashion here? Right.
Speaker 2 00:05:42 Fascinating
Speaker 1 00:05:44 <laugh>. Yeah. To that point, you don't wanna waste people's time, but by not moving them to the Yes. Moving them to the completion step or whatever, fulfilling your promise Yeah. You are wasting their time.
Speaker 2 00:05:56 Yeah. That's the greater waste of time. Yeah. That they came to you looking for something and you were so sure that they didn't want anything you have. And that if you even tried to give them that thing, they would retaliate, <laugh> that you just didn't give them the thing. You're so sure you are going to waste their time that you just don't do anything. And it's like, well, maybe you shouldn't be in charge of this then, because if you are gonna waste their time, then no, you don't belong there. But they're, they've got time or they wouldn't be on your site. They may not have a million years, but good copy isn't tasking them to spend a million years, but it will actually cause them generally to spend a little more time in order to take the right action.
Speaker 1 00:06:37 Right, right. And I wonder if part of it too is this tendency to kind of be hands off. I wonder if it's because tech has become so, so insular and, and you know, everyone's copying each other and everyone takes cues from, from big companies like Apple and Google and how they copyright, you know, apple is very terse and clever and you know, I looked at the past and I look at what's that
Speaker 2 00:07:03 Apple writes long copy. Like, I, that's my biggest shocker is the things people are willing to ignore in or because of their own confirmation bias. So they're around, they're looking, oh, I wanna do what Apple does. Go do a word count on any Apple product page, and it it goes and it goes and they've done good things like with, you know, the interactivity in order to reveal messages to you as you're scrolling and in like combination with the design with the product you're looking at. But that's some long copy and it always has been. Yeah. It's shocking to me. Yeah. Anyway, I didn't mean to interrupt you, but I, I always, people say Apple, apple does it this way, I wanna do it like Apple, and they never wanna do it like Apple in the end. Well, it's,
Speaker 1 00:07:46 Uh, and, and maybe that wasn't the best example, but you prove a point though, where Apple has a reputation for being minimalist and clever and punchy and, and all these things, but they're, they're actually not. They just distract you from it. But yeah, I was just gonna bring up, I mean, I personally love when I get the chance to doing landing pages or emails or whatever and you know, like kinda like the, the sales letter style potentially seen as longer winded. But you know, I think of like the old ads like the, the Beatle, the Lemon Volkswagen ad from the sixties. Um, and, and it feels like that sort of thing is frowned upon and, and they, they had the chance to tell a story. They had the chance and they had to target in mind always. Right. But you have equal the classic, you know, pain, dream fix structure and all that, and you don't get a, a lot of room to do that in two sentences. So I, I mean, do you think, do you think there's a reason why the industry has moved away from that? Or it's falling out of favor? Or is it alive and well in certain areas?
Speaker 2 00:08:44 I think it's alive and well with companies, and this might sound bad, but companies that really believe in their story, I think they're willing to talk all day long. The, if I, I've met a lot of people who are writing for brands that they don't believe in, and you can tell when you read the copy, but there was one, oh gosh, I meant to recall it before we started talking, and then it's in my inbox. But, um, there's a brand that does denim, denim like for jeans, and they send these emails that are not long copy, but they're long and they're telling the story of the particular denim in question. So, hey, we've just released 250 new pairs of jeans that use this denim. And then they tell you about it, the history of it, where it was made, why it's so interesting. And they don't go on ad nauseum.
Speaker 2 00:09:40 They actually just like put a single short sentence, then a line break, then another single short sentence. But it keeps you reading down the page in an old school, like long copy sort of way. And that's like kind of breakthrough, right? It's more interesting now, I know like there's a history to my jeans, like there's more to denim than stretchy versus like not stretchy. And so I'm like, I feel more educated, I feel more thoughtful as a consumer, and then when I buy them, I feel like really proud of it. And it feels like those people are excited about their product. Yeah. And they believe they've got an audience out there where there are customers waiting to happen or already happened in that audience that care about this stuff. And you can tell, right? And so the companies that don't really care or don't really get excited about their own work, I think that ends up being the stuff that gets really chopped down.
Speaker 2 00:10:34 Now. That's not the only reason I think that some people don't use long copy. Some brands, a lot of brands don't use long copy. I think there's also the problem of like your C M O who are the final approver on copy has a crisis of confidence and thinks, oh shit, we better keep it short because we really don't ha again, this goes back to do you really believe in your product? We don't really have anything cool that we're selling here. Like no one would care about this enough to read it, is what you're really saying when you're saying nobody reads online. So I feel like top at the top, you have to have leadership in place that's like, this is our brand, this is, we are amazing. Our customers of course, are amazing and they're gonna be the real hero in the stories that we tell. Um, but we have to believe that we are awesome. And, uh, when you do, I think you're more willing to tell the story and spend more words on it because people should be as excited as you are.
Speaker 1 00:11:29 I love how you put that. And it's a reminder too, that you're, you're never really done telling your story as a brand or or about your products. And when you were telling the story about the jeans, I was just thinking, uh, you know, I mean, if you're around your friends, that's maybe a point of conversation at one point and you've just become an evangelist for that brand, right? Yeah. Just because they told you, you know, the denim came from this mill or whatever, you know,
Speaker 1 00:11:57 Let's take a little break to tell you about turnkey, the ones making this podcast happen. Now, I think turnkey's awesome, but I am super biased because I'm a co-founder. But I love what we're doing for subscription companies. You might look at your churn numbers and think there's gotta be a way to turn this around. There's gotta be someone who can improve retention and help us track down why people are leaving your product. And that's why Turnkey's here, Turnkey's the only platform that fixes every type of churn for you. We handle retention for customer obsessed teams like Jasper Fair Drop, AI, dungeon and Casto. We lower cancellations by up to 42%, recover up to 89% of fail payments and even increase customer LTV by 28%. And we do it with our user-friendly, customer-centric, cancel flows, modern failed payment recovery and AI-driven feedback analysis. So if you want run a healthier subscription business, head to turnkey.co to get started. I remember, um, you had a project back in 2017, and this was, if this is too outta date, feel free to to, you know, realign me here. But you had a similar project or tasked with Sias onboarding emails where you went in and and punched 'em up a bit, rounded out the story, a lot of disbelief that they worked, but they found greater engagement and and were successful, right?
Speaker 2 00:13:20 Yeah, yeah. And engagement, yes, but like 3.5 times the paid conversions by the end. And we weren't their internal C R o Andrew, um, Kaplan, who's moved on since then, but stayed there for a couple years after. Anyway, he ran the test. So there's nothing but good significance and confidence all around it. But yeah, this, the WIA emails, in this case, the wia, I'll just quickly give some background on the story. WIA video hosting platform, which we love and use, have used for I think since, I think since they basically launched on Hacker News 10 years ago or something, maybe longer. So we love them. We got a chance to, I got a chance to just go in and rewrite some of their co uh, their emails. They had this, their onboarding sequence at the time was three parts. So it was like your initial signup. Then you, once you, once you reach a certain point, then the new, the second flow triggers and once you're ready, you're basically a sales qualified lead, but without, but with like product led growth. So you're a hyper marketing qualified lead, then you'd go into this third flow. So I worked on that third flow, the one that's closely tied to the, where the yes is. Let's get some money <laugh> today, let's actually make money out of these emails. And so I love working on those. Who doesn't love to work closest to, uh, carton checkout
Speaker 1 00:14:40 For sure.
Speaker 2 00:14:41 So I went in, I worked with them on these, they had their control, I think had eight emails. I tested a new set, uh, eight emails as well. Mine covered in some cases different things, uh, but largely covered the same stuff, just ordered a little differently. So we don't have to get into all the details, but copy conversion, copywriters follow, uh, this idea of stages of awareness. A lot of marketers talk about something similar, but for us, we talk in terms of stages of awareness. So I was reorganizing the emails to move people from low product awareness to high product awareness to most aware. So they'd be decently product aware when they started this flow. They had to in order to become this level of lead, um, or user. So I reorganized things to make sure that we were moving them through that process. And really, like, when you're most aware, that's when you're ready to be sold to, right?
Speaker 2 00:15:29 Yeah. So that's where we were laying on sales. Emails a little thicker, but uh, yeah, my emails were all longer <laugh> and not, and I'm not talking about long, I'm talking like the original email was two sentences and mine was four. So it wasn't like it was going on like crazy, like stop talking. It was, it was fine. But yeah, it, uh, they beat the control by, uh, 350% more paid conversions in the end. And it was funny, uh, Chris Savage, we were at an event at, um, I think it was business of software, um, that we were at a couple years later and we were talking about those emails at like the speakers thing and he was like, uh, my team hates them <laugh>. We really wanna get rid of them, but um, we keep looking at results and we can't. And so I, I think by now I think they're gone and have been replaced by something else, sadly.
Speaker 2 00:16:22 But that's the reality, right? A lot of marketers, it doesn't even matter if it works and if it sounds on brand, like these didn't sound like, you know, row a tree or anything like that might feel a little off brand. It, they sounded like the whiskey of brand. But even still, if it feels like it's working, it's gonna convince me it's gonna make me do something. A lot of marketers have, you know, a bit of an allergic reaction to that. I'm not, not saying the whiskey marketers absolutely did, but we do know that there was like Yeah. Resistance to those emails. Yeah. Even though they worked like a charm.
Speaker 1 00:16:52 That's amazing. 350% also, did you just say bro tree? Because I, I might, I might start using that now.
Speaker 2 00:16:59 <laugh>, yes. I thought it was a term. I think it's a term.
Speaker 1 00:17:03 It's now it's awesome. <laugh>. It's beautiful. Nice. I think that's a good segue to, you know, if you're, if you are a, a subscription business operator at B2B SAS operator, and you are, so this is kind of a, uh, a fun question for you too, and operating experience. But where have you found the most abundance or or r o ROI when you're looking to improve conversion rates with copy? Are there like journeys or functions or processes that you usually go to?
Speaker 2 00:17:33 So there are two kind of foundational principles in copywriting, like old school copywriting, which is what conversion copywriting is based on. They're complimentary. They're basically the same thing, just said differently. Uh, one goes list offer copy, and the other one is the rule of one, which is one reader, one offer, one big idea and one promise. You'd be like, isn't that the rule of four? Doesn't matter. It's like the rule of one is what we call it, but list offer copy is saying the same thing. List is your reader offer is your one offer, and then copy is your big idea and your promise. So how do you express your offer to your reader in a way that sounds that that makes them convert? And so what they're all leading with is, I mean, copy is the third note in list offer copy. Like that's the order of operations for a good reason.
Speaker 2 00:18:25 Cuz copy can only do so much. Now it can do a lot when you get list and offer, right? But a lot of people don't work on list and offer. That's been happening, not just recently. It's not like, oh, I'm just burned out. No, people haven't been working on their list or their offer for like ever back. Like when you think about how many Google ads you've seen run that all drive to the exact same landing page, which is the homepage <laugh>, which is not a landing page. People are just like kind of hoping that it doesn't matter that you care about who your list or your visitor or your reader or your, uh, user is. Let's just, we'll just change the words. But the thing is that the best copywriting techniques to actually get more lift have very little to do with copy. It is your list first it is who are you talking to?
Speaker 2 00:19:17 Like who are you actually talking to? And there's rules around like, or guidance at least around that. So some principles and things to keep in mind, such as the person you're talking to should be someone who's actually enthusiastic about your product. So keep that in mind whenever like the naysayers slip into your head like, oh, but we heard from customer support that nobody likes X. Like don't just don't, just don't put that person in your head <laugh>. Um, but it comes down to that. That's like the number one way to make your copy perform better is to first start with a really good clear understanding of who your reader is. And that means like strong empathy for them where empathy doesn't have to mean, oh, I'm in a rush, <laugh> no, empathy means I'm here to solve something. Can you help me please? Having that in mind.
Speaker 2 00:20:09 And then when you're asking about like the real thing, so list, I think everybody knows, and again, by list I mean readers, users, whatever list is just the old direct response idea because of mailers where you'd have a list, right? Offer. It's, it's your offer. It is your offer hands down. And that offer doesn't mean sale. People hear that often and think like, oh, but there's no offer, there's no promotion, there's no discount. I'm not, I'm not even talking about that. I'm talking about the parts that go into your offer, the things that you think people understand that they don't understand at all. They don't know what's in your product. So we want to help them. And this was one of the Wistia emails, a couple of the Wistia emails, but one of them had a mega list in it. And I actually did <laugh> bring that up?
Speaker 2 00:20:55 Uh, one of the sales emails, this was email number five in this eight part sequence had a list of the powerful features inside Wtia. And I think there are 22 bullets in this list where the idea is to make people go, holy crap, there's a lot of stuff in here. Like this thing does a lot, even if they don't read them all, but some people will read them all and they will be like moved by how good, uh, this product is. So product is a big part of offer. Do people really get your product not just the value proposition that you spent 90% of your marketing time working on, which could be okay if you ended up with a good one, but like the actual, what's the product And sure there's also price as part of that promotion as part of that too, right? Not necessarily the four Ps, but at least those three ones.
Speaker 2 00:21:45 That's all part of the offer. If you can sit down every time you write something and really just think about like, what am I actually offering my prospect here? Like what, what's going on here? And that's like a webinar too. It's any other thing. An e-book that you write, are you making that offer sound like, and I'm, I feel like so old school direct response when I say it because it's like pounded into your head when you like learn the traditional ways of writing copy. But are, do you have an irresistible offer? Like is it irresistible? And that doesn't have to mean you hear that and go like there's no way to make a QuickBooks 14 day trial sound irresistible <laugh>. But there is, that's the job. That's the job that we do. That's the job that's hard to do. That's the job that when someone in marketing says, okay product, you go do it, then they can't do it.
Speaker 2 00:22:32 We can do it, we can not, the product can't, but we are the ones who are supposed to focus on this stuff. We're supposed to be good at this stuff. You have to do that work. Copywriting is not just, oh, I'm gonna make my headline sound awesome, <laugh>, or I've got a really good friend voice. It's not just that. It's so much more than that. And the really hard stuff that is like the small hinge that swings giant bank vault doors, it's list and it's offer. And if you can't deal, if you can't do anything about list, you can't do anything about traffic, you can always do something about offer. So I'd say work on that. I get passionate about it. I get like mad about it.
Speaker 1 00:23:08 I mean a as one does, right, as one should, that is something I actually struggle with myself is remembering that offer is not just the product or the price or the proposition, it's everything combined to make something just feel inevitable, right?
Speaker 2 00:23:24 It's the thing that I want right now. Just give it to me. Stop making it hard. Don't make me guess or connect the dots or figure it out myself. Don't assume that I know, I don't know. I dunno anything. I'm busy <laugh>, I'm lazy. Exactly. I resist work. Uh, so no, tell me, tell me what the offer is. Make it sound good.
Speaker 1 00:23:45 I'm wondering what the most ridiculous tactic or principle within conversion copywriting you've seen that works, but just doesn't seem like it should.
Speaker 2 00:23:54 So the number one thing that always shocks me and that I hate to promote with my clients, but like you can't help it because it works isn't copy again, I'll get into a couple copy ones though. It's images. A photo of a woman will outperform a photo of a guy. Every single test I've ever done of it with like ever. And we've done a lot. Always <laugh>. Wow. Always. If you want people to pay attention in your hero section, put an image of a woman in there. Wow. That's that's it shouldn't work, but it does. It just does. But that's, that's design stuff, right? Yeah. It's all part of creative, which copy is part of, so it works together. But um, the kind of interesting things that do work but shouldn't, I guess, I don't know if it shouldn't, but it might be surprising to people, is to put your headline in the first person and in quotation marks also put your button in the first person.
Speaker 2 00:24:50 A little bit surprising and it feels like weird when you first do it. Like, is this actually allowed? Can I actually you can, it's allowed, you should do this. Um, so quotation marks and first person in headlines, I think that has a lot to do with people being curious about other people, the possible revelation of a secret or something I didn't know in dialogue. So that's something. Another one is tapping into the idea of a secret, but a secret, uh, that shouldn't work. It does, if you can find a secret <laugh> and bake if you can, yeah, you're good. If you have no idea what to do or if you have every idea what to do, still try a secret. And you don't even have to call it a secret, but if you can suggest that there's something secret and you're about to get insider access, people lose their minds over it.
Speaker 2 00:25:42 And then one other thing is, uh, extremely short copy works if you're just trying to get a click. And I think this is part of the reason that there's like always going to be a lot of interest in short copy is so many marketers now who are far along in their careers, who kind of grew up with all this talk about Google's homepage being like so protected. Uh, they will never put a line of copy on it. Um, there's this like great desire to get your page down to the shortest possible version. And the reality is that yeah, if you put your logo and a button on your homepage, you're gonna get really high clicks. Like your clicks are gonna go through the roof
Speaker 1 00:26:27 <laugh>. Yeah. There's nothing else to do, <laugh>.
Speaker 2 00:26:28 Exactly right. People love clicking things, it's there, there's nothing else to do. So that's like, it shouldn't work, but it does, right? You will get more clicks and possibly in the end more engagement too if you just keep moving people through really short, short, short, short, short copy. But you'll need a lot of different pages to get them there. So yeah, those are, those are the things that freak me out.
Speaker 1 00:26:51 That's wild. I especially struggle with the, um, the first person one cuz I want, I, I write everything in third and I want it to be consistent, but ah, maybe I should just get over it. Yeah.
Speaker 2 00:27:01 And switch quickly from once you're like done quotation marks, then switch quickly into second person, right? Because it should always be you, you, you, you the rest of the way, right?
Speaker 1 00:27:12 Yeah.
Speaker 2 00:27:12 Unless you're talking about yourself for some reason. Oh,
Speaker 1 00:27:16 Good tip. All right, I gotta drop in the inevitable AI questions.
Speaker 2 00:27:21 Oh god.
Speaker 1 00:27:21 <laugh>, here we go. Here we go. You knew they were coming. Okay, so ai, when copywriters are using it, you know, there's that, that line between, you know, the person and the machine. And I'm just thinking though, you know, beyond the, the copyright questions and and ethics of that, I mean there is an opportunity for copywriters to hand off all the stuff that is really annoying idea generation or, or whatever. I mean, what do you think becomes more essential for the copywriter and what do you think is just gonna start being handed off and not even thought about anymore to ai?
Speaker 2 00:27:56 So I love AI also for writing. I gave chat G P T A try in, um, December I think it was. And I asked it to write the opening line. This wasn't copy. I asked it to write the opening line of a novel about two boys who wake up to find themselves on a deserted island, just like dreamed it up and it like took 12 seconds or whatever. And then it produced this like, awesome line. And I was like, I would read this book, like that's a really good line. So I was like, okay, we can work together ai, like you're awesome. And so I'm now a plus or pro or whatever they've released as their paid thing because I was struggling with getting constant access to it. I love it. So I don't know where the limits are. I like kind of having it as my sidekick.
Speaker 2 00:28:50 There are a lot of juniors out there who have a lot to learn and resist learning things and really keep coming to the table with I'm a great writer, I'm a creative writer, this is how you're supposed to do it. And AI doesn't like bring that in my experience so far with it. So I mean as like a, you know, kind of jaded old copywriter, I like that there's no ego. I can just work with this tool. I can give it a prompt and then it will learn and keep learning and keep going. I cannot say that I've got all the prompts sorted out at all, but who does? It's so new, but I think that we'll get there. Yeah. And so, yeah, so the way I'm seeing it, uh, what can be more essential for me, I, if you use it as a sidekick, I think you're gonna be really happy with it if you use it to replace your brain <laugh> when it comes to writing.
Speaker 2 00:29:48 If you're like, I hate writing, I'm going to outsource it to chat g p t, you're gonna get what you put in, right? We all know that. Yeah. Yep. It's only as good as what you enter into it, uh, and the directions that you give it. So I would say you should probably not write your own copy anyway if you were already thinking that. Like if you hate writing, just step away from all the writing tools and hire someone else to do it. But if you hate kind of the tedious stuff, so things like a competitor messaging audit. So I did this the other day. I saw something on Twitter where some guy showed how he used chat G B T to put a table together. And so I was like, oh, have you seen this? No. Oh, it was cool. Um, Joelle, I don't know if you follow him, but he retweeted it and that's how I found it.
Speaker 2 00:30:32 But he put this table together and so I used it to do messaging audit for three project management solutions. And it was cool. It made like this table of it just audited and was able to come up with the different features that these different tools have, what features Asana has that nobody else like, and it did it in like four seconds and it had unreal like produced this massive table. So there's all this research we do as we're like trying to get a sense for what our message should be, where can we fit in the market, how can we differentiate what matters to people, what's like the baseline? And sometimes you already have these going into it, but this is like one example of the many different kinds of research that we have to do in order to get to a place where we're ready to write and it just does it for you so that it produced this table that I could then you could like take it and paste it into a report for your client.
Speaker 2 00:31:24 And it's done. I feel like I get really excited about it. I'm sure there are parts where it's like maybe a year from now copy hackers will be gone because AI is so good. Um, that it just completely eliminated the need for me. There's nothing I can do about that <laugh>. So, ok. Um, if it's gonna get that good, I mean, okay, I have, that's fine. Um, I have no choice but to deal with that. But along the way and in the meantime, and then even afterward I'd still, you can tell it to come up with a list of 10 problems for Hyperhydrosis. When we think about, like, there's an example that I have on copy Hackers of writing, rewriting the homepage for sweatblock.com and it got really great results, et cetera. But I had to go manually review all sorts of product reviews to start coming up with like what the problems are that people have, et cetera.
Speaker 2 00:32:13 You can ask it to, to go do that and come up with the 10 key problems with Hyperhydrosis and then dig into the seventh problem and give me x, y, or Z out of that. And just like that, you've got problem agitation and then solution, you can also get it to work with you all, but you have now written at least a really strong outline and you didn't do anything. You just told it to go do it. So I dunno if that's answering your question, but, um, I think it's there as a really strong sidekick and it's only gonna get better as we all know. And currently I'm not scared but excited about that and I hope people are too.
Speaker 1 00:32:46 Yeah. I mean, to be able to do the, the, the manual synthesis and, you know, finding facts and, and to it, when it gets to the point when I trust the citation, that's just gonna be epic. I mean, I know BS doing some stuff there too, but the synthesis too is, but you still have to know the questions to ask. You have to know the why behind it, you know? Exactly.
Speaker 2 00:33:05 Like
Speaker 1 00:33:06 Yeah, in some cases, um, I was, I was listening to a show today where someone used the, uh, the comparison of like handing a toddler or a chainsaw. It's like, oh shit. And that, that could be dangerous, but, um, <laugh>
Speaker 2 00:33:19 Very dangerous.
Speaker 1 00:33:20 Very dangerous. Is
Speaker 2 00:33:21 That a good analogy though? Like,
Speaker 1 00:33:23 Probably not. Is it, it just, it just sounds bombastic, you know? Yeah.
Speaker 2 00:33:27 I was there to freak you out. Um, right. I, I know there's lots of things that could go wrong. I'm not naive, I don't think about it, but I'm also, if I get mad here in British Columbia, we're not allowed to have Uber because the taxi union says absolutely not. So we're going through life without uber pain. It's madness. It's like ridiculous. And it's this fear of change, right? And I get it, it's costly to the group that's being replaced by it. I get it. I'm not minimizing it, but the reality is that the change is, is happening. So I don't know. We can, I should find, I'll just be excited about it. I don't know that it set child with a chainsaw maybe, maybe I'm naive and I don't have kids, so maybe that's part of it. <laugh> just, it doesn't, it doesn't clue in for me when there's that like dangerous signal.
Speaker 1 00:34:12 Yeah. Yeah. I mean I, I just think it's, it's important to, um, to educate people how to use it and which I think has been lacking on open AI side. It's just like, here we go play with this, you know, we don't know what's gonna happen. That's true.
Speaker 2 00:34:25 Yeah. Yeah. But like we're, I think everybody is supposed to be learning how to use it. Right.
Speaker 1 00:34:32 I know we're, we're close to time. So I want to ask you real quick about, about running Copy Hackers over the years and, you know, as building a subscription business of your own, you know, what's, what's the most surprising thing about you've learned about growing that or from growing that?
Speaker 2 00:34:49 Yeah. Um, I've learned you don't need as many tactics as you think you do. My friend Matt Lerner who runs Startup Core Strengths, he wrote an article newsletter thing a couple a year ago, uh, where he talked, he was quoting a podcast, a person who was talking in a podcast about sevens and eights. His line is, sevens kill businesses where anything that, uh, isn't going to perform seven, if anything in your, in your team, in your business is a seven or less, like in terms of performance of seven out of 10, it's going to kill your business. So anything that's a seven has to go. I think that there are loads of sevens that we've had over the years and, um, the eights, nines and tens are, I think, you know, we fall into the same problem that we try to coach our clients out of.
Speaker 2 00:35:40 Like, don't do the sexy thing, just do the work thing. The thing that works is good. You can have more vacations, you can save more money, you can pay your team, your small, small, small team better. So I've learned not to worry about complicated funnels. I'm learning that, um, the hard way I've learned it, I've learned that you don't, I don't need, this is a 3 million a year business. I don't need seven to 10 team members. I'm down to three full-time team members outside of myself and then contractors and freelancers. And by the way, they need the work too. So like go support them, those freelancers who will then turn that work into something else, et cetera. I know employees also need jobs, don't get me wrong. But, um, that's anyway where I'm prioritizing things right now. So yeah, it's stop working on things that someone told you might work.
Speaker 2 00:36:34 I know what things work in my business when I run a webinar, it's a sales webinar, it sells and we make a lot of money when I do a short term promotion, it sells and we make a lot of money. If I just do two of those a year, you can just like rest in between, like legit just rest. But I think you've got like this productivity problem, like, I can't just rest. I have to do something. Let's go build some software. Let's go throw a million dollars at building software like lunatics. So yeah, that's, it's the surprising thing that I've learned about growing Copy Hackers over the years is just to do the things that work and stop filling in all of your well-earned free time with make work projects.
Speaker 1 00:37:18 No, it's such a good point because you do your own thing because you love doing it and also you wanna do it on your own terms, but then you end up making it look like everything else in some cases, you know, like it's the clarity to, to stop and to breathe, you know?
Speaker 2 00:37:32 Yeah. And it's hard when you're like, you can't help but be in competition with others. You get excited when you hear what others have done. Like, whoa, that person did a $20 million chorus launch maybe one day I will. And then you're like, well hold on, I don't even want 20 million. I'm not against it, don't get me wrong. But <laugh>, you don't want a bigger house. I like, I go on nice vacations already. I want more time. That's what I want. So it's hard when you're like kind of out there competing or you see someone that you know really well have this great breakthrough and you think, well I should, you know, try to get there too. And now I think a lot of people are feeling this way though right now, just like the total burnout on like, just forget it, <laugh>, just forget it. Just work on things that make you happy and stop like overthinking everything.
Speaker 1 00:38:21 Exactly. Like there's only so much, so many inputs we can handle at this point. Yeah,
Speaker 2 00:38:27 Exactly.
Speaker 1 00:38:28 Well, you're an abundance of knowledge. I could talk to you for two hours about this stuff, but I'll close with two questions I asked everyone. And the first is, if you're reading a book right now or a long form article that had an effect on you, what is it?
Speaker 2 00:38:43 Oh, the long form article that had an effect on me most recently is really speaking to what I just spoke to click minded.com/complicated. Like I know it well enough that I know the exact URL <laugh> to just like go there. It's about their, like their sevens versus tens. They don't talk about it that way, but that's what it's about. And I have forwarded it, forwarded it to everybody. I know, I'm in a group called, uh, shine Crew, forwarded it to all of them. Like everybody I know is like Got it. Joe, you like this article <laugh>?
Speaker 1 00:39:16 I think that's the first time anyone's given me a direct u r url, which is amazing. You're welcome. Thank you. And then, uh, closing out, if you have a high octane tip you would give other listeners, uh, it could be about anything. Design, leadership, reading, running, who knows.
Speaker 2 00:39:31 So it, I hope it's high octane for me. It's been, the thing that I think has just kept paying off is it's so dull and I apologize. I wish I had a sexy way to say it. Um, <laugh> just keep showing up. I know it's not sexy, but Oh, the people who keep showing up are still here 12 years later and are now like just born authorities on it. Like people just grow up with you. I'm just, I'm saying that because there have been times when I've wanted to stop showing up. Copy Hackers is 12 years old this year. That's the longest I've spent doing like anything other than like living like I don't have 12 years. That's amazing. Doing anything school, I guess. Uh, that's true. That's exactly 12 years for, um, before university. But it's that, and what I've found, what's really interesting is I wrote these e-books, copy Hackers launched on Hacker News 12 years ago with this set of four eBooks.
Speaker 2 00:40:28 And it changed everything for me. But it could have stopped. I could have just like been like, cool, I made some good cash, but I'll go get a job. But I didn't. And now we have people coming to us now who were coordinators or who were just doing their first startup when they read those eBooks and now they're VP of growth at some massive 10,000 person organization. And they're like, we have to work on our messaging. Can you come help us? Can you train my team? Because I was there 12 years ago and because I'm still here now. So for me it's like, it's the easiest thing to stop showing up. It's the easiest thing to turn away just as you're about to have a breakthrough. And also that's, it's high octane for me. Let's just keep showing up.
Speaker 1 00:41:15 I actually, I re I remember that launch and Oh yeah, you know those, that was when eBooks were kind of, you know, this emerging new medium and oh, charging for them and all these things and boom. Yeah. You know, it was, it was massive.
Speaker 2 00:41:29 Uh, Dharma Shaw was one of the first buyers of it and I was like, there might be something here. <laugh>. Oh yeah. That's pretty cool. That Dharmesh was.
Speaker 1 00:41:37 Yeah. That's really cool. Awesome. Thanks. Well appreciate your time Joanna. Thanks for being on.
Speaker 2 00:41:42 Thank you so much, Scott. That was fun.
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