Predictable Prospecting
Teaching Startups How to Write Compelling Web Copy
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Episode Highlights:
- What were Joanna’s first thoughts about the title of “copywriter”?
- How did Joanna’s education in Humanities influence her teaching?
- When should a startup begin considering copy?
- The emotional “journey” of a/b testing
- How does Joanna keep her skills sharp?
- What does Copyhackers future look like?
Resources: CopyHackers CopyHackers for Hire Airstory Contact Joanna with questions and feedback at: joanna@copyhackers.com. Follow Joanna on Twitter Thanks for listening! (**include Marylou’s contact info, iTunes review link, website, etc.)
Episode Transcript
Marylou: Joanna helps startups and other small businesses write irresistible copy. You need great copy but either can’t afford it or don’t have the time to write it yourself. Joanna is on the program today to give you some help writing your own compelling words. She founded Copy Hackers, a website that educates startups and anyone else to write words that sell products and services. If you don’t have the time to learn, you can find some of the best copywriters on the internet there as well. In this podcast, Joanna reveals why copywriting is one of the most important aspects of sales, the ideal timing and first steps to writing great copy, and tips for AB testing and keeping your skills sharp. I’ve been at Mastermind for few months now. I kind of understand your business model and kind of don’t, so can you tell me where did it all start, were you always focused on the direction you are and what is your main goal? Joanna: Yeah. It’s so big. I’m happy to talk about it. Going way back to four and a half years ago when Copy Hackers came out of nowhere for me and decided it was going to be a business whether I wanted it or not which thankfully I now do want it. For me, I feel, you and I have talked about my aversion to frameworks or my skepticism around frameworks. This is part of it where that comes from. I’ve got major issues, clearly let’s just start with that. I’ve a lot of crap that I need to work through. One of the things that I found in my professional life is that I, this is bad and good, I think that any success that I have had with Copy Hackers in particular, it’s happened in spite of me, honestly. It is something that I feel I have followed a lead rather than led. I haven’t built Copy Hackers, Copy Hackers just decided to build itself around me and I found myself in it managing the building of it which really means just watching it happen in wonder, what are you doing business, how are you building yourself? It’s because of the fact that I fell into copywriting initially. I didn’t intend to do it. I was in law school two months before I became a copywriter. I had this plan, we all have these plans, right. I had this plan, I was going to finish undergrad, went to Japan for a year, came home to do law school, and then I would be a lawyer and when I was in my 30’s I would write a novel or two. In my 40’s, I would stop being a lawyer and go on and be a novelist or something like that. That was the plan. First day of law school is coming at September 6. Its midnight, September 6, just like 12:06, law school starts that morning. I got a call that my Dad had died, that same day. He died, and how do you go to law school now and start this other life. I was kind of thrown off this path with this major event and from there I floundered for a couple months just figuring things out but I’m a very practical person, I couldn’t flounder eternally. I’m not someone who can travel the world because I didn’t have any savings. I couldn’t go wander around. I had student loans to pay off. I had to get into something. There were a couple paths I could take to do something while I took a year away from law school. I deferred my admission instead of dropping out, I just deferred. I’ll come back to it, so I decided to go. I had a friend who was working in a marketing agency and she was like, “We’re looking for a writer so maybe you want to apply for that.” I was like, “I don’t even know what marketing is, what are you talking about? Explain this marketing thing to me.” I legitimately had no idea what it was or how it worked. I was an English major, we were very proud of being far, far removed from like the business side of campus. Marylou: Right. Joanna: We’re in our own little philosophy world, right? The humanities. We don’t care about making a living so I said, “Okay fine, I’ll try this thing.” I applied for it. I got the job to my stunning amazement and so I decided to do this thing. I was a “creative writer” at the agency, that’s what I started as, I should have started as copywriter. That’s what I was doing but I didn’t like the title copywriter. I thought that was boring sounding. I did that and decided not to go back to law school because it just didn’t feel alright, it just wasn’t there. Years later, I found myself still copywriting into it at that point. Huge software company, learning a ton about business and marketing. Social media was just starting up at the time too. I got to lead the Intuit Global Business Division Social Media Team, which was awesome. It really exposed me to all of this stuff and I started to pay attention to Hacker News which is a popular sort of forum. It’s like inbound but it’s for developers that came well before inbound and Growth Hackers came along. I was hanging out there where all these startups hang out. I helped some people out with some copy there. That was turned into case studies and a couple of people on Hacker News said, “Since you can’t help all of us, why don’t you write an ebook to teach copywriting?” I was like okay, sure, I can do that, so I did. I spent about a year writing what turned into a huge book. I sent that out to some data readers and they were all like, “Too long, it is way too long. It’s an ebook.” Ebooks were still pretty new, this was about five years ago, they weren’t everywhere. People are like, “I don’t like reading on my screen. If you’re going to give me an ebook, it has to be a short ebook.” I cut off this big 250 page ebook into four little fifty page books and I discarded some of those pages leaving behind this four books of fifty pages each. I launched that to the Hacker News community, actually. That’s how Copy Hackers launched as a business. I just said, “Hey, I quit.” I had just quit my job and Intuit. I wrote this post and said, “I left my job at Intuit to start a startup for startups.” It took off on Hacker News and the book sold like crazy. I had people like Dharmesh Shah whose HubSpot’s founder buying the book. I was like, “What is happening here?” Suddenly people are paying attention. Cool people that I had only been following forever are emailing me to ask me to like do whatever might be, like all of these cool opportunities are to present themselves to me. These ebooks are selling. I find myself blogging to talk more about the things that I couldn’t cover in those short ebooks. It just kept kind of rolling, this thing kept rolling and getting bigger. People kept reaching out to me and I kept having cool opportunities. I got to a point in the past, that was about four and a half years ago that that started. About two and a half years past and so the last two years I’ve been like, “Holy crap, what is Copy Hackers? What is this thing? What is it?” That’s part of the problem that I’ve had as someone who’s implemented the sort of lean, startup methodology which is not to say that I did it absolutely right. I probably did some things wrong and that’s led to my current-ish state of confusion around where my business is and what it is because with lean startup, it’s like okay. this is the experiment. That’s all Copy Hackers was, it was an experiment. Let’s put together, do everything for as cheaply as we possibly can. I wrote the books in Word. I went to 99designs to get somebody to design a book cover for me. Cool, I think I paid $700 which I was stunned that I had to pay that much. I was like I can’t do a business if it costs this much money which is very little money in these kind of things. But everything else has been so cheap, I had a WordPress site with like $20 theme installed on it, through commerce which was like basically free so I could sell my books online. Everything was really cheap which is part of the lean startup idea is do things affordably so you can see if it works and then not have lost your shirts when it’s time to pivot or shut down. Because it was lean from the get go, I didn’t have a business plan in place. I didn’t know what the model was. I was like, let’s just see. Two and a half years after that, it’s like holy crap, I’m seeing but now I’m so deep in it. I’m so caught up in the wave that I can’t find my footing. I had to kind of pause and reset. The last two years have been me trying to do that work of resetting and figuring out what we are but I feel today that I know what Copy Hackers is. Marylou: And? Joanna: But do you? Marylou: So share with us what your definition of Copy Hackers. Joanna: I think, I think, I think. I allow myself to make mistakes. I think that’s been a good thing too. Copy Hackers is and has been since the beginning a place for startups in particular. By that, that really does get to the point of startup marketers is really what it comes down to, to learn how to grow their online businesses. That’s it. A lot of people can say that. We do it with a focus first and foremost on copy. Secondly, which is related to copy, on things that are affordable and achievable. Because you’re a startup, you’re doing a lot of stuff yourself. You don’t have a lot of money. You also don’t have a lot of time, that’s tough. But you have to have one or the other. You can’t have no time and no money. I can’t help you if that’s your situation. You have to have one or the other and we can help you in both cases. If Copy Hackers is a place where startups go to learn how to grow their businesses affordably and by achievable means, so things that you can actually do. How do we do that? We do that with a lot of free content, a lot of it. Basically, 90% of our time is spent on producing “content” but content process is bigger than that terrible word content. It’s about the real stuff, like not a list of six ways to write a headline which you could find actually, probably a million of those posts online, but rather things you haven’t thought about before, a test that we’ve been running to see. Are those six ways that people have been teaching you, are those actually right, are they legit, let’s test them and see it will tell you what we learn. That’s the core of the Copy Hackers business. But how do we make money, well we have courses where we teach people, startups in particular, how to write copy that will help them grow their businesses. That’s what our business is. Marylou: A lot of times when you’re in a startup environment and you mention the lean protocol that you follow, it’s the minimum viable product. A lot of times, the CEO founder is the one who’s writing the copy to start. Joanna: Yeah. Marylou: I know you mentioned before you have a background in humanities? Joanna: Yes. Marylou: How much does that play in the way you teach what I will call right now none writers? Joanna: Oh, it’s definitely a really good question. It’s hard to say because the humanities are like part of my DNA. I didn’t go into the humanities to learn about that kind of stuff. I went in there because it was a natural fit, because it felt like it was drawing me there, philosophy. I want to talk about things. I want to explore. I don’t want to spend my time putting together widgets, as much I love building things. I was a Lego enthusiast until my teen years, like embarrassingly long time. I love building things but I also love the thinking part of things. The critical thinking. How does that play in, I don’t know. I have a lot of thoughts waiting through my head right now about it. It’s hard for me to say oh, it’s because my humanities background that I want to teach or that I teach in this certain way. I don’t know, I think I’ve always also wanted to be a teacher. That was what I wanted to do when I was a little girl. I plan architect and teacher, those are the two things I wanted which couldn’t actually happen together, sadly. I wanted to be that. I went and taught in Japan for a year. My dad was a teacher. I feel like I’ve always really respected teaching as well as learning. I loved being a student, I loved the teachers that really made me think and didn’t accept my okay work, where they would like punish me for doing poor or decent work. I love that movie Whiplash where some character says that the worst thing you can say to somebody is good job. I feel that resonates with me. I don’t want to hear that, I don’t want to say it. I want to be a part of growing cool people, things, and businesses that push harder, that try a hell of a lot of harder than anything you’ve seen before to really push for that excellence, to not look for shortcuts. That’s actually where I have a hard time teaching is because I want to get into the thinly side of stuff because you need to think about what you’re working on. Of course before you think, you need to read. Read first then think, then act. It’s hard for me when people want a checklist. They want a shortcut to do X, Y or Z. I think that there are good checklists and shortcuts and I think they’re very good frameworks too. Don’t get me wrong with frameworks but it is not the same thing for me as sitting and talking through an idea at length. I think that’s kind of tension around having a humanities background and then trying to teach especially honestly to teach people in business which is a different group of people entirely. Marylou: Specifically in startup because it’s almost a duality, right? Because in English, my daughter brings home papers and she’s organizing over paragraphs for hours and hours and hours. In startup world, it’s the minimum viable, get it up now and we’ll test it and improve it. How do you marry that art, and love, and just beauty of writing with needing to deliver a response so that you can get sales for a startup? Joanna: I think that’s interesting. They’re probably close, there’s probably something there, some great overlap. I do think that of the things that make me who I am, this goes back to how I feel like I’ve been led down a path and I have been smart enough to just quietly follow that path for a while. We’ll see what comes of it. It leaves me in alert because I don’t know what’s next all of the time and that’s hard for me as a planner. Growing up, we had very little money, very little. I’ve heard people talk about the very little, I don’t mean to compare anything. My stepmother talked about we didn’t have much. She had pictures of beautiful dolls she had growing up. I was like you don’t know what not much is. We were raised with very little and my stepmother came along much later in my life, that’s why she didn’t quite get a picture of where we were before my Dad went back to school and became a teacher. Of course, those very difficult years while he went back to school and we found ourselves hungry a lot to his huge dismay, right? He was a provider. There was a lot of not having money for anything. The things that I look now at my two step sons and they gets to have a lot of things, we feel detached from that world we came from where you didn’t have anything. The things that you didn’t have are embarrassing to even think about. Marylou: Or sometimes you don’t know what you don’t have either too, right? Joanna: Sometimes you absolutely do. You know you don’t have lunch today, right? Marylou: Right. Joanna: You know you’ll probably have lunch tomorrow. I would never change myself, that definitely made me who I was, who I am. It did give me a hunger like nothing else, like a hunger to make sure that I’m always going to be providing for myself and my family. That I’ll have my education earlier on in life so that should I have children or in this case step children, I won’t have to go back to school at that point. All of those things, even though it was extremely brave of my dad to do that. All of that stuff gives you this hunger and in turn that hunger goes everywhere in my life. I’m not a raging capitalist by any stretch of the imagination but I do like making money. I like seeing businesses make money, I like being responsible for businesses doubling the revenue. For a business having a product launch that has three Xs or five Xs and knowing that I was critical to making that happen. For me, that part of my life comes out in business. That’s what makes me hungry as a marketer. I salivate at the idea of running an AB test where we really try to grow revenue or really try to get an X wonderful results working our ass off to make that happen and then seeing in the data either that you did and wow would you actually did something very cool. You kept people employed at this organization that’s your helping out or maybe you matched the people like customers with the product that they need for their lives to be better, or you find out that you lost and that AB test didn’t work and now you get hungry all over again to make sure that never happens again. Where from now on, I refuse to let me and myself have a losing AB test which is impossible, right? But it will keep you hungry, it’s different from the humanity side. If I was raised in a wealthy environment, I might have gone on to do an English Degree and maybe stay in that world and get a PHD in philosophy but that wasn’t the plan for me. I think that the humanity is something different from what I have here. The arts of writing is not something that I think about very often when I’m writing copy. I don’t think, oh William Boughner would be so pleased that I wrote this line of copy. He’s more like really? Did you just do that? But that’s okay because I’m in a different world. This isn’t a world of arts, necessarily. Not that there’s no place for it but for me copy writing is just separate from that other writing that I still love but I keep separate. Marylou: That’s music to the ears of the startups because they don’t have necessarily the staff, the time, where with all the knowledge, the comfort. It’s very scary to try to write an email sequence or to create a landing page because you just also have this imaginary quill behind your ear. Joanna: Yeah, it’s true. Marylou: You know. Joanna: Sadly. It’s hard because I know that. I’ve talked to a lot of startups, thankfully. Along the way, it’s clear that if they’re going to put their time into anything and I get it as somebody who is growing her own business, any time you spend on anything has to have a great return. You can’t keep guessing. Large organizations that are making a lot of money let’s say, or that have a big staff probably because they’re making a lot of money, they get to hire people that have earning positions of luxury a lot where they can say, “Well, what we are going to test today?” We’ll see what learning we get out of it. I believe in testing to learn because that learning will help you grow. I don’t necessarily test to win although I am driven to win. I think the biggest win is the learning that will help us have more wins down the road. That’s a bit of a luxury. For me to say that, “Thank you Joanna, but I don’t actually have any time to sit here and do a test to learn and to see what happens next. I don’t have time to as you say to write a drip sequence that isn’t going to perform, because if that takes me four hours to do,” which is actually really fast to write a trip campaign. But that’s really, that’s a lot of time for the average startup founder, or co-founder, or one of the first hires and they’re, they just don’t have time so they have to work on, they have to make sure that the thing that they’re working on does bear fruit. Like you say, they can’t have that quill behind their ear though. As soon as you look at something and say oh, this is a writing exercise. You’re probably wrong in the business world. It’s not a “writing exercise” so you probably need a better word than writing for things that are related to writing for business but we’ll never get a better word than that. Marylou: Indeed. Yeah, definitely. Why startup versus corporate world? Joanna : Cause I love startups. I love the hunger. I think that’s what it comes back to. You do crazy stuff that would get absolutely kiboshed in a large corporation. I was that into it. I know what a big business looks like, even though Intuit has, they talk about lean startups internally and they have groups of people that try to act like startups, so think like a startup, that kind of philosophy. It’s very different to be in startup, where, especially bootstrap startups. A funded startup has a little bit more wiggle room than a boot-strap. Startup funded, you can hire that first marketer to come in and write stuff for you and then you just do reviews which is extremely problematic, which we can talk about absolutely. When I work with startups, so many of the ones I’ve work with have been self funded. Then maybe they get funding later and most of them don’t end up needing to use that money thankfully because they’ve grown their business to a state and they have good revenue. Seeing the crazy stuff, I have never worked with AirBNB, but knowing what they did, it was one of many startups obviously that has done a lot of cool stuff early on. Knowing that they had to go to like conferences and sell, I think they’re the ones that did the cereal. It was either them or Dropbox. I think it was AirBNB that went to a conference and sold boxes of cereal or something. Anyway, that’s a crazy shit, that’s like stuff that nobody does unless you really passionately believe in the thing that you are trying to get out there. And then, you’ll do just like your own child. You’ll do crazy stuff to make it work and that’s what I love about start-ups. It’s just how willing they are to go and do the crazy thing. The hard thing like getting on the phone and talking to ex customers, people who stop using your product, persuading them to get on the phone with you without inserting them even, Finding a way to persuade them to go with the phone with you and tell you what was wrong with the product. What didn’t do for you that you thought it will do? This is a thing that in a large corporation, I have found at least, that’s rarely the thing that the person who should be asking those questions does. It’s hard for a marketing manager, senior marketing manager, a C level or VP absolutely to get on the phone with an ex customer and really listen to them and ask them questions and then do something with that. But startups do that every day, all day, all the time. Who doesn’t love that? I love it. Marylou: Now, they love community which means they probably would love to see your face in some of their meetings. Are you taking clients? Do you do client work like that anymore? Joanna: I have a client. Right now it’s a Rain Maker by Copy Blogger and that’s purely, I guess Copy Blogger’s now called Rain Maker but I always follow them as Copy Blogger so it will be hard for me to ever change that, but I’ll try. Brian Clark has become a great friend over the past few years which blows the mind of Joanna Circa 2009. She’s like, “What are you doing talking to Brian Clark on the phone right now?” Brian has become the cool, I’ll call my friend, I hope he’s not like, “What? We’re friends?” I don’t think he would be surprised. He had this thing that he wanted to work on with me. I was like, “Cool, let’s do that.” In that case, I work with clients. But otherwise, we do this thing at Copy Hackers where, because I always want to stay sharp. I don’t ever want to become somebody who teaches about what happened ten years ago, not that it’s not relevant but you can still teach about that but make sure you’re talking about how does that applies today, if at all. I need to stay sharp. To do that, we actually have this program at Copy Hackers it’s called research partners. Our research partners are businesses that we work with 100% for free. We don’t want to get paid. Part of the idea there is that we just want to be allowed to work with organizations that have a culture of experimentation, that have a growing brand which will usually mean enough traffic to test, to run an AB-test to confidence and who are willing to do whatever we want. By that, I mean if we’re going to run an experiment, sometimes we are going to test something really unusual, right? If you were my client and paying me, I’d have to have a big discussion with you about why we want to test a Johnson box on the home page. And you’ll be like “No, no, no, we’re not doing that.” I’d have to have a really good reason. I would expect to have really good reason outside of, “Well, you signed up to be a research partner and we believe it could work for you based on this, this, and this. Let’s go ahead and test it.” Our client is allowed to have different exit. That’s not to say that we test wild stuff that is going to hurt our business. Our goal is always to get a fantastic result for our research partners so that we can go tell people, “Hey, we just got X lift for Buffer and we just did this cool campaign for Wistia because that’s great content that gets shared, that helps people do better things at their business. It makes our life easier because now they’re coming to our site. They’re attending our webinars. They’re doing things to learn more from us which of course in turn leads to more course sales. I don’t do client work but I do research partner experiments. Marylou: If you’re not of the taint of heart variety, you’re not willing to go down that path. What’s the natural course? If I’m a startup and I hear about you, what’s the next best thing that I should do? Joanna: We do “train” copywriters too. We do have a really good network of copywriters that are able to take on work. Of course, a great copywriter, once the work gets out, is extremely hard to keep. To get in front of that copy writer, to get that copy writer to come work for you. Everybody listening, if you find a great copywriter, do not let him or her go. Stay on her calendar, make sure that you’re always like, if that might mean being on retainer just to have access to that person because it’s so hard to find a great one. And when you do, oh my gosh. If copywriting is your online sales person which I firmly believe that it is, and it’s a really affordable sales person too that can do tons of work, doesn’t need time off, doesn’t have weird stuff going on personally, it can constantly bring in money for you. Don’t let a great copywriter go. We have Copy Hackers for hire. It’s a place where we send most people who are looking to get help with let’s say more of a one off project or something like I want to redo my drip campaign and get more sales. Go to Copy Hackers for hire and find an email copy writer on that site. And then if you want something more like we’re redoing our entire site beginning to end including in app messages or whatever might be. Something bigger, then it’s good to just reach out directly to me and I can do my best to match you with somebody who can actually help make that project a big success because there’s so much on the line. Marylou: So not only are you helping the startup company but it sounds like you’ve got an ecosystem in place for copy writers as well. Can you tell us more about that? Joanna: Yeah, sure. Absolutely. We do. I don’t like saying no to things and that has a lot to do with this hunger that I had growing up. The idea of turning away a great opportunity for a great copywriter. I know that there are great copywriters out there and I know that they don’t always have the same access to great perspective clients as I may have. We’re very fortunate at Copy Hackers to get some nice people that want to work with us and pay us good money and have great stuff happen. We’re lucky to be in that position, we don’t take on client work anymore outside of very, very few cases. Why shouldn’t we, we want to help those business get great copy and we want those copywriters to be able to keep running their business and put in food on the table and make life great for themselves. Let’s connect the two. That’s what we do. We’ve been doing it for a long time but we more recently kind of turned that into a real thing with Copy Hackers for hire. Marylou: Yeah and amped it up for certification and then a lot of educational. I was talking to one of my partners the other day who said pretty soon colleges are going to be challenged by places like what you’re doing because you are certifying people for writing, they’re getting great jobs, they have a long tenure. Joanna: It’s happening fast, too. Marylou: Yes. Joanna: I agree. Obviously you to me is a good example of a place to go and learn a lot of stuff but then there are these other pockets of people that are maybe subject matter experts. Like you say, moving people into certification paths so they absolutely haven’t just finished a course which they could have watched passively like, or listen to while they’re reading blogs but actually have to take exams at the end. The really good thing about these online courses is the very fact that it can happen super fast. Instead of having to wait and apply to get into a university just to take one course that you want to take in your third year which is the most exciting one, you can just go take that right now from people who are actually doing it for a living. I think that the future of education, it’s interesting. Future of everything is interesting. Absolutely. Marylou: A lot of this is going back to, you talked about being a lawyer back in the golden days. You used to be an apprentice with the lawyer. There was no law school. You would go apprentice. You would learn the trade. This is aligned with that, so it feels right. I know from looking at your certification courses, they are not easy. Joanna: I’m not an easy marker. Marylou: There is a lot of red pen going around, right? Joanna: Yes, sadly. Sorry to everybody who strive but no, but in the end yeah you do end up. I think people who pass certification feel like they’ve definitely earned it. And I feel very good about recommending clients their way. It is an interesting point that it hasn’t always been focused on formal education. Is it industrial? When did it started? I had a friend when I was temporarily doing my masters in English before I switched to communications and technology for my masters. He was doing his masters in English on books about Doctors in the 1700. He would talk about the fact that to be a physician was like frowned upon, oh you’re just a doctor? According to some of the stuff that he’s been reading. It’s not what it is today. It didn’t have all the training that it has today. It was passed down and like you say you apprentice under somebody. But now, today, there’s so much to do to make that your career. Anyway, it’s an interesting thought on education. Marylou: Yeah, definitely. Let me ask you a couple more questions. First one is if you could just paint the picture of the perfect Copy Hackers business, what do you see on the horizon for you? Joanna: I see. I do see this in the next two years, by the end of the next two years. Much of it by at the end this year, God willing. I see a multimillion dollar education business that’s well respected as a place for businesses to learn about communication with their audience. Coming out of that as something that works side by side with the Copy Hackers business is a tool, a platform to help people in business write better. We teach people how to write at Copy Hackers and then we have a solution called Air Story which will exist to help those teams at businesses writes better together. Marylou: Perfect. One more question and it’s about your ideal student, really. I’m a startup company, I have my idea, when do I start thinking about Joanna and her offering? Joanna: Stop always thinking of me. Marylou: Early on as I’m designing my product? Or do I think about it? I don’t like the word stage because that’s not the right word. But at what point in the design cycle do I start thinking about what you have to offer? Joanna: Early, I would say. I think most people would say that think about it early but I say it because if you’re building out your startup idea, chances are extremely good and I hope and pray that this is true for you that you are researching, you’re setting up interviews with people that you want to build a solution for, you’re following jobs on methodology to get down to like okay give me the documentary view of a day in the life of you trying to do X job. I’m kind of zooming in on those different parts of their day to find that pain that you can solve. You’re doing these interviews early on. You’re doing a lot of research, different kinds of research early on. You’re doing that in order to find the idea and figure out how to make it work. All of that stuff that you are doing is great for copy. Everything, all those interviews, if you sit there and you’re on the phone interviewing, let’s say I go back to the idea of Air Story because we did we followed jobs to be done to come up with the idea for Air story. We had these interviews that we were doing with writers, with editors, with literary agents, with writing teams, VP of content, that kind of thing, people who are hands on and more hands off and just like overseeing it. Tons of people that we spoke with all to get to this idea that there was a problem to be solved about how one assembles ideas into a written document. How do you do that? That’s the pain. There’s all this other stuff. We found this to be an opportunity. If we had just walked away from that, from those interviews and gone on and built the product and then gone on sat down to write the marketing materials for that product, we would be starting all over again to write those marketing materials. But when you think about the fact that in those interviews with those writers, editors, and agents and team, people were saying all of these great stuff. We recorded all of those interviews and then we’re able to go play those recordings, transcribe them, pick out the interesting messages that people were saying, and then use those messages to shape the copy that is on our site today. I don’t believe that a copywriter’s job is to write copy or that a startup founder who is working on his or her own copy, that their job is to write copy. It’s not, the best thing that you can do as a copywriter is to be a great listener and copy editor. If you are starting early on, and interviewing people coming up with that idea, listen well, come up with the idea, record those conversations as you do and then transcribe those, pull out the sticky messages from there, pull out those interesting things. All of that gets placed on your pages and in your emails. It would just be a huge tragedy if you didn’t think of that stuff right out of the gate because you would miss out on all of this extremely valuable copy. Marylou: There are courses on entrepreneurship in colleges and universities all through the US and probably Canada as well. Are they teaching students the value that you add? Joanna: No, just kidding. I don’t know. I haven’t been to school in—seven years ago I think I got my masters. I wish, I think some of the great ones absolutely are. I’m sure there are pockets of people. I know that the University of Iowa, which is a great writer school as any writer knows, they now have a copywriting course or two. I don’t know. I think it’s at the masters level. I was interviewed for that copy writing class last year and then I’m going back I think in two weeks to do it again. They’re teaching copywriting but there’s so many pieces and all of these pieces overlap. People who were talking about entrepreneurship and lean startups should be talking to the guys in economics. We should all be talking to the guys in journalism which is of course not a lot of people are signing up for that anymore. But all of these groups we talk together because we’re all going to be critically intertwined with each other when it comes time to actually go out and do great stuff for business. They might be teaching it in pockets but I don’t know, I haven’t seen evidence after teaching it as like this integrated system of business genius as we call it. Marylou: Yes, a copy writing curriculum. Joanna: Have you seen any evidence of that? Marylou: No, I’m in Iowa. I was actually notified by the University of Northern Iowa. They have an entrepreneurship program. They had heard about the work that I’m doing but it’s too late. You already have to have your products ready to go, you have to have your markets defined. What you’re talking about is getting them at the incubation level or even when they’re ideally when they’re in school. Joanna: Yes. Marylou: Having this curriculum throughout the schools systems and universities, it’s almost as if I tell my kids no one’s taught you guys to do time management. Joanna: Yes, true. Marylou: You come out of school, you don’t know how to manage your time. This is the same thing. It’s a core of how we communicate, why change, why now, and why buy our product. Joanna: Yeah. I mean there’s so much that we don’t learn in school. I guess it’s because maybe it was a felt niche previously but is it, is it today? No. Not at all, right? Marylou: Not at all. Joanna: Maybe it will catch up and if they don’t, they’ll be replaced by online businesses that are teaching the stuff. Marylou: Yeah or maybe you have a piece of your business that goes out and seeks out that before they get into the incubation process. Joanna: Yeah that’s true. Marylou, you always make me think about the things that I should be doing differently. Oh no, now I have more work to do. Marylou: Well as we close, is there anything else that you would like to share other than of course we to know how to go copyhackers.com to learn all this wonderful material that you’re constantly providing. Anything else that you would like to leave us with? Joanna: Well, that’s the thing. We are definitely focused on making Copy Hackers a great resource for people. That’s the place to go. Of course I’d love to hear what people want more of, what I didn’t hit the mark with, things like that by email. I’m joanna@copyhackers.com. I’m happy, completely happy, more than happy to hear from people about what they’re looking for, what their challenges are, if there’s any way I can help or connect them to people who can help. That is what I love doing. Marylou: Thank you so much for your time, we really appreciate it. Joanna: Thanks, Marylou.