đ The keys to copywriting
#4 Best of this week in BUSINESS
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What you need to know
đ The keys to copywriting
đđťListen more than you talk
đ¸ Avoid over hiring
đ The treat yourself budget
Write like a pro
My First Million, Episode 298, Writing Your Way to Millions with Neville Medhora
You saved 1 hour 8 mins
Copywriting is a dark art. Most people are awful at it. Why? Because school teaches you to write like a poet. And sonnets arenât written for the average Joe. Whether youâre writing text to be read or text to be said, you need to communicate clearly and concisely. Neville opens up to Sam and Ben with his best copywriting secrets.
Actionable takeaways:
Writing formally is the most common mistake you can make
In English class they teach you to write Dear Sirs and To Whom It May Concern and thatâs fine if youâre writing a letter 900 years ago
Writing like you speak is better
Using smaller, shorter, easier words is better
Getting to the point is better
I get people to work next to me or share my screen, thatâs a secret weapon
Thereâs something about other people seeing it where youâre like: Iâve got to keep powering through, I canât let my brain stop
Write long copy, not long winded copy
If youâre selling a basic yo-yo for $5 you probably donât need a lot of copy, youâll probably just make it long winded
Neville Medhora
Learn from others:
Double your dating was an ebook for $29 and was about how to talk to girls. Youâd sign up and over the course of a week that were literally 5K to 10K words. All it was was a text based email and it made 10s of millions of dollars.
Golden Hippo owns 8 or 9 different brands. Now they sell literally $1B a year of products. Itâs probiotics, vitamins, and itâs just one long sales page.
Go to Amazon and type in Kindle or an Amazon product or Echo. The Kindle listing is like 3K or 4K words. Long copy will almost always outperform short copy.Â
Iâve seen a lot of good selling on Instagram. People sell through stories now. This is the evolution of how to sell. I see a guy named Chris Do. Itâs visually appealing, itâs fun, and I can go through it in 10 seconds.
Neville Medhora and Sam Parr
Why it matters:Â Copywriting is just communicating with a fancy name. The golden rule: âTreat others how you want to be treatedâ can also be applied to writing: âWrite for others how you want to readâ. You need to unlearn most of what you were taught in school and rewire your brain to write how you speak: colloquial, no fluff, and no words youâd have to open a dictionary to understand.Â
Between the lines:Â Anyone can be a good writer. All you need to do is practice. Donât shy away from taking notes during a meeting or putting your thoughts down on paper (or a Google Doc). Youâll be 80% of the way to a better writer if you adopt Nevilleâs techniques and study these pages:
Listen here:Â https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/my-first-million/id1469759170?i=1000556290394
Ask the right questions
WHATâS YOUR PROBLEM, Episode 5, Delivering Everything Right Now
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Thank you Matt from Tennessee, one of Podupâs first subscribers. He recommended WHATâS YOUR PROBLEM, a new podcast from Jacob Goldstein. Jacob talks to entrepreneurs and engineers about the future theyâre trying to build â and the problems they have to solve to get there. Enjoy this new roundup.
Rafael and his cofounder started goPuff back in 2013
They were college students delivering munchies to their friends
Today, you can go to the goPuff app and order most of the things youâd find at the drugstore: snacks, diapers, Advil
The number of problems that the company has to solve boggles the mind
Competition, technology, logistics, hiring, politics, itâs all hereÂ
Jacob Goldstein
Whatâs an example of something that went wrong with the $350M BevMo acquisition?
We have an active inventory count thatâs integrated between BevMo and goPuff
Letâs say a customer wants one bottle of something left. They take it and itâs physically in their cart
The inventory system is saying there is one of these bottles that exists on the shelf
If someone else is looking to order the same bottle on the app, someone who works there would go to the shelf and see that thereâs no bottle there
Thatâs what we call an inventory defect
The way we solve that problem is that anything under a certain amount, weâre going to mark it out of stock
We thought there was something wrong with the system, our engineers and product managers looked at it
We laugh about it all the time, the best person to fix a packing problem is the person thatâs packing the order
It took us speaking to the people on the ground to see what was wrong
Rafael Ilishayev
Why it matters:Â Rafael and goPuff pioneered the race to own last-mile delivery. He navigated problem after problem to achieve a $10B+ valuation, so heâs one to pay attention to when he dishes out advice. If youâre facing a hard problem right now, his best advice is to listen more than you talk.
Between the lines:Â Think about it. On the face of it, thatâs very broad, very high level advice. If you unpack it further and look at how he solved the problem with their inventory management system, youâll see two themes come to light.
The first and most obvious is youâve got to have a bottoms up approach. You should crowdsource insights and solutions from your customer facing staff and the people who experience the problem.
The second is that simple fixes are often the best. Donât always follow the loudest or the smartest person in the room. You should encourage others to share their perspective. In goPuffâs case, a complex algorithm or technology fix wouldnât have effectively solved their inventory issue. It took a prudent approach of marking items as out of stock to save the day.
Listen here:Â https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/whats-your-problem/id1602541473?i=1000556488741
Hire with care
ALL-IN, Episode 75, Fast shuts down, board culpability, Elon buys 9% of Twitter, deplatformingâs evolution & more
You saved 1 hour 17 mins
Billy Howard Snr is 95 years old. He founded Howard Industries and he still goes to work every day. Heâs hired thousands of people throughout his career and he gave me the most important advice Iâve received in business. Hire with care:
Letâs start with a few assumptions. Your company makes a healthy 20% net profit margin. You want to hire an email marketing manager for $80K. To break even on your new shiny hire, you need an extra $400K/year in revenue (80,000/0.2=400,000).
Update the formula with your own net margin and salary. Youâll find it to be a prudent and enlightening exercise.
Fast announced they were shutting down
The company had grown to 450 employees
At its peak, Fast was burning $10M/mo according to reports from The Information while only generating about $50K/mo in revenue
Their $102M Series B was led by Stripe in January of 2021
Jason Calacanis
In the case of Fast you had a founder who was on Twitter everyday tweeting about how good the company was and giving startup adviceÂ
He was taking none of his own advice and shouldnât have been giving any of it because they didnât even have product market fit
His background is a little colourful. They didnât do any diligence on him. Apparently he had two companies that were major red flags
Jason Calacanis
Why it matters: It doesnât matter how much cash you have in the bank. You can run your business into the ground in less than a year. Weâre going to see a lot more startups follow the same fate as Fast over the next 12 months. Make sure yours isnât one of them.
Between the lines:Â Before hiring, take a couple of hours to
1) List out the main projects this person will leadÂ
2) Review what is must-do versus nice-to-doÂ
3) Ask yourself: âCan the existing team reprioritise and focus on the must-doâs?âÂ
4) Ask yourself: âIs this a hire I know Iâll need in 12 months time?âÂ
5) Run the back of the napkin ROI of the must-do projects
TL;DR, sense check yourself before making a new hire. Number of staff is a deadly vanity metric. I solve for this by building the right culture and stretching the team before hiring someone new.
Listen here:Â https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/all-in-with-chamath-jason-sacks-friedberg/id1502871393?i=1000556741682
Up your team building game
My First Million, Episode 299, The âGenius or Idiotâ Game, The Fast Implosion, and More
You saved 1 hour 6 mins
This is a Shaan Puri special. Shaan is undoubtedly my favourite podcast host. Heâs funny, down to earth and repeatedly shares nuggets of wisdom week after week. If youâre mildly interested in crypto and havenât yet signed up for the Milk Road newsletter, then do so now. Anyway, thatâs enough unsolicited promotion. Back to his framework:
I believe everyone should have a treat yourself budget
Spending Iâve learned is actually a skill. One way you can get better at the skill like anything else is to practice
At my last startup, we created a bonus program at Bebo. It was $1K/mo at the low end
The only strings attached with the bonus is you have to spend it on something interesting that you werenât going to buy yourself anyway
You canât just pay rent, groceries, student debt
Then youâve got to come and tell the story after you buy it
It will give you some new experience or take you in a slightly different direction in life
Shaan Puri
Why it matters:Â Youâre not born onto this planet to work. Youâre born to live. Thatâs not to say go and be irresponsible and dump your life savings on a weekend in Vegas. But, lifeâs an adventure and itâs important to broaden your horizons by trying new things.
Between the lines:Â Sam ran a similar program at The Hustle. He gave one person $1K every month to spend on a team activity. They ended up running team building activities like all you can eat contests and blind taste tests - pretty fun, right?
These types of experiences really matter to people, particularly in remote or hybrid work settings where you donât meet your colleagues regularly. The framework puts the onus on your team to co-create a âhave fun and deliverâ kind of culture - whilst saving you time organising the perfect team building events.
Listen here:Â https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/my-first-million/id1469759170?i=1000556513142
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