This tactic is about the juxtaposition of the absurd and the normal.

As Dan Nelken calls them:

1. Twisted visual. Straight line.
2. Twisted line. Straight visual.

When creating ads or promos, maximize the absurdity of either one or the other.

Making both the visual and text absurd makes the ad overwhelming and less powerful. It also ruins your ability to control how they experience the ad.

Let’s illustrate this with examples of both:

Twisted visual. Straight line.

Hook with an absurd visual. One that takes your core idea and takes it to 1,000.

Then, state the core idea plainly with unassuming text.

For example:

The unique leaf catches your eye. You focus on it to discern what it is. You then scan for the text to explain it. You then have the “aha” moment.

Or this eye-catching ad from Sirius:

The basketball-playing punk nun catches your eye. The headline contextualizes it. The footnotes explain it.

Or this hilarious ad for Nicotinell

The old woman lighting a cigarette with a candle is shocking. Your eye then goes to the 42. You’re momentarily confused. You scan the ad, looking for an explanation. The text snaps it all into clarity and makes you laugh.

This tactic is powerful:

1. The visual grabs their attention and piques their curiosity.
2. They scan the rest of the ad for an explanation.
3. The text then contextualizes the image, causing them to close the curiosity loop.
4. Ideally, it makes them feel something, like a laugh.

Now, let’s explore the inverse.

Twisted line. Straight visual.

These ads let the absurdity of the words do the work.

For example, this viral ad from fiverr:

This ad was perfectly timed in 2023, when everyone feared AI replacing jobs.

The gigantic text makes you think it's a warning about the horrors of AI... but the juxtaposition with the smile on her face confuses you.

You then read the smaller text, and it makes you chuckle.

Then there’s this hilarious and beautiful storytelling ad from Mount Sinai Hospital:

This is one of my favorite ads. It again makes you think it’s going one way, and leaves you with a laugh. The simple image of a child on a beach enhances the emotion of the mini-story.

Then there’s this classic ad from Porsche:

I love that this ad starts with a fact that makes you say, “Okay, so what?” and then leaves you with a funny twist. You then notice that the car has a tire lifted.

Remember: It’s key for these ads to have fairly simple images because you want the words to be the star of the show. The image contextualizes them.

Okay, so what?

The next time you’re creating an ad, a social post, or even a section of a landing page, try both:

1. Twisted visual. Straight line.
2. Twisted line. Straight visual.

Set a timer and create a few variations for #1. Then do it again for #2.

Play with the design, fonts, and placements to control how the person experiences the ad.

For more ad inspo, check out our ever-growing Ad Vault. And for more creative advice on writing great headlines, check out A Self-Help Guide for Copywriting by Dan Nelken.

Ironically, I won't waste time jumping into an example.

Guinness needs to be poured slower than every other beer (here’s why). Instead of figuring out a way to pour it faster, they’ve leaned into this slogan:

My personal favorite is how Stella Artois leans into a powerful psychological bias:

The more something costs, the more people value it.

This is why I love their slogan, “Reassuringly expensive,” and the clever ads that go along with it:

We all know Buckley’s famous line: “It tastes awful, but it works.”

This is clever because people are more likely to believe its claims of potency. After all, it tastes so weird and medicinal. (I’ve written previously about how Red Bull uses both the price and taste to its advantage.)

And lastly, Avis was famous for reframing their “number 2” position as a positive with “We try harder.”

They know people default to the market leader, so they decided to address that head-on and turn it into a benefit.

Here’s a swipe file of a bunch of their ads leaning into that concept.

To do this, you need to decide what you’re not

• Stella decided they’re not a budget beer for the everyman.
• Buckley’s decided to keep their product tasting terrible.
• Nintendo decided to make the Switch portable (and slower), instead of competing directly with Xbox and Playstation on performance.
• Tesla decided only to make electric vehicles. No hybrids. No gas cars. No fuel cell vehicles.

The framework here is:

1. Decide/figure out what you aren’t.
2. Use that to figure out what you are (it’s easier to invert).
3. What are the downsides of that?
4. How do you flip that on its head?

We all suck at something.

You might as well make it work for you.

It’s human nature.

Very few people (and companies) are willing to:

• Admit their flaws
• Turn people away
• Upset people

It’s part of why being extremely candid with your flaws can be so powerful.

Because others aren’t.

Be willing to insult yourself

It’s incredibly bold to insult your product on a quality many consider important.

Like this classic VW ad calling their cars ugly:

Or this one calling their cars slow:

I love the old VW because they were brave enough to draw a line in the sand:

“We focus on reliability and practicality. We’ll let all the other brands fight over the fastest, the prettiest, and the most advanced.”

Side note: Today, nearly all car companies sell all kinds of cars. Lamborghini sells an SUV. Volkswagen sells luxury models. Hyundai sells trucks. I suspect this is why their advertisements are all so boring and similar now.

Being candid with your flaws works for a few reasons:

1. It builds trust. If you’re willing to be candid about your product’s flaws, people trust you’re telling them the truth about its strengths.
2. It tells you who it’s for. We all want a product that’s tailored to our specific needs. Yet most companies try to be all things to all people.
3. A flaw is also a strength. There are always trade offs. When you make something better at one thing, it gets worse at others. If your car is pretty, it’s probably expensive. If your car is fast, it probably uses a lot of gas. If you car has room for 7, it probably will be filled with kids.

This Atoms’ ad tackles these trade offs head on:

Be willing to alienate people

This old SAAB ad takes #2 (telling you who it’s for) to the next level:

Instead of insulting the product, they insulted people who buy their competitor’s product—which candidly, is a small pool of people that can afford to buy a sports car.

The beauty of this ad copy is that it implicitly admits that the SAAB is nobody’s dream car.

That’s a brave thing to admit.

SAAB didn’t even trying to compete with the Ferraris and Corvettes of the world. 

Instead, they put their car in its own category: A practical and affordable car that’s also sporty.

Be willing to turn people away

Do what nearly all other brands are not willing to do:

• Admit your flaws.
• Turn people away
• Upset people who aren’t your target customer

It'll attract the right people to you.

By the way, I’ve been curating and analyzing some of the world’s best ads on my LinkedIn. I’m now starting to use that to fill up our Ad Vault.

The goal is to make it a comprehensive, searchable, filterable resource for the best ads in the world—with quick explanations of the tactics they’re using.

It’s a work in progress, so keep checking back as we fill it up.

Every copywriter will tell you to be as clear as possible.

Today, I’m telling you to be the opposite.

Being cryptic can be powerful.

For example:

The beauty and hilarity of this ad/public service announcement is in its lack of clarity.

It’s not saying: “Don’t drink and drive or else you’ll be arrested, go to the hospital, or maybe even die.”

If it did, it would have elicited an eyeroll.

Instead, the unusual sight of the 4 cars and 4 people hooks and intrigues you.

You read the line. 

You look at them again. 

A light bulb goes off. 

You get it. 

Dopamine surges through your brain. 

You chuckle.

All because they didn’t tell you everything you needed to know. Instead, they presented all the information, left some key things unsaid, and let you bridge the gap.

Some examples of this done well

This is one of my favorite ads from The Economist:

This ad cleverly nods to the horrors of smartphones/watches:

This ad leverages the familiar image of the Hulk’s hand to shortcut understanding:

And lastly, this ad makes you put two and two together to explain the weird scene:

Don’t always be crystal clear

As Charlie Munger said in his 1996 Stanford commencement speech about a lesson his father taught him:

Instead of just pounding it in, he told it to me in a way that required a slight mental reach. I had to make the reach myself in order to get the idea that I should behave like Grant McFayden. And because I had to reach for it, he figured I’d hold it better. And, indeed, I’ve held it all the way through until today, through all of these decades.

These types of ads are intriguing, memorable, and funny. 

Which is hard to say about 99+% of ads.

But hopefully, now, I'll be able to say it about yours 😉

Let’s play a game.

I’ll share 3 ads, and you tell me why I think they're clever.

Okay, here they are (click for high-res):

Figure it out?

That’s right. They each reuse an absurdly common interface: Texts, Calendar, and right-click tooltip.

These ads are clever and effective for a few reasons:

1. Familiarity Bias: We gravitate to familiar things.
2. Peculiarity: They’re completely unignorable. They stand out, demand closer inspection, and are shareworthy:
   1. You don't expect to see a message thread on a sign. You’d walk up to it.
   2. You don’t expect to see a calendar at a bus stop. You’d stop to read it.
   3. You don’t expect to see a tooltip on a photo of a woman’s face. You’d assume it was a mistake, pause to take a closer look, or take a picture of their mistake, and then you’d notice it’s intentional.
3. Memorable: Most people don’t need the product when they see an advertisement. It’s critical that your ads are so memorable that they think of you when they do need it.
4. They’re funny: Each leaves you with a smile.

Why does that all matter?

Consumer neuroscience research has found that highly successful ads score well on three key dimensions:

1. Attention (familiarity + peculiarity),
2. Conversion to long-term memory (peculiarity + humor),
3. Emotional engagement (humor)

These ads hit the mark for all 3.

Here are a few more examples of ads that leverage this tactic

These ads all mimic apps that every Apple user knows:

And these two mimic Instagram DMs and stories:

Here’s McDonald’s using their classic format of replicating their BigMac with color symbols, but doing it in a calendar interface that tells a story:

There are infinite ways you can do this.

The key is to find interfaces or environments that your ideal customer is intimately familiar with then to use them in a completely unexpected context:

• For accountants: Quickbooks, Xero, or Excel.
• For salespeople: Salesforce, HubSpot, Gmail, Spam, or Zoom.
• For gamers: Twitch, Discord, Steam, or Fortnite.
• For lawyers: a golf course.

Or you can leverage the classics that everyone knows: texts, calendars, calls, Windows, email, excel, and PowerPoint.

PS: I couldn't resist an opportunity for a Rick Roll.

It’s a hot day. Your kids bounce off the walls, and you scroll Instagram to de-stress.

You’re hit with an ad for a Springfree trampoline. The ad shows kids double bouncing each other into the air and off the enclosed walls.

Your eyes gloss over, and you start to scroll past.

And then the ad says:

“They’ll be distracted for hours while you lounge peacefully inside.”

You perk up. Now you’re interested.

Finally a way to get some peace and quiet.

When someone buys a trampoline, what they're really buying is peace.

Find the benefit of the benefit

When you write copy to sell your product, sometimes it’s helpful to look at the “benefit of a benefit.”

Note: this is more obvious when the buyer is different than the user, but that's not a requirement. Use this exercise to uncover clever ways to pitch your product.

Step 1:

Write a list of your product’s benefits AND its downsides.

You’ll see why in a second.

Step 2:

Analyze each and ask, “what’s a unexpected / obvious / helpful / interesting / funny / convenient / comforting / amazing / wild / beautiful / exciting / weird… benefit of this benefit/downside?”

In other words, what’s a second-order benefit of that benefit/downside?

It can either be directly for the user (kids on a trampoline) or for the real buyer/user (relaxed parent).

A bunch of examples:

Trampoline → fun for multiple kids → parents get some time off

Sports car → no back seats (drawback) → no room for kids (there's a theme here)

Dog bed → dog will have a place to sleep → he won’t sleep in your bed

Electric car → no visiting gas stations → not caring when gas prices go up

Durex → no unexpected pregnancies → no kids stuff (Durex = cheaper than baby)

Jeep → amazing off road vehicle → can park anywhere

McDonald’s → open 24/7 → only food available on a late party night → good at interpreting drunk people (note this is a benefit of a benefit of a benefit).

You get the point.

Do this simple exercise the next time you write copy for your site, an ad, an email, or a piece of content. List all the benefits and downsides of your product. Then find the second (or third) order benefit of each.

A lot will be rubbish. But you might strike gold.

Shoutout to Dan Nelken’s great book, A Self-Help Guide for Copywriters, for this insight. I highly recommend its process for generating a bunch of great copy ideas.

Harry Dry is my favorite copywriter. 

He obsesses over brevity and clarity. 

And leverages visuals to enhance both.

Here are Harry’s three fundamental rules to good copy:

1. Can you visualize it?
2. Can you falsify it?
3. Can nodody else say this?

As Harry says: 

“If you have three no’s, you’ve probably written a lot of rubbish. If you have three yes’s, you’re on to something”

Let’s dive into each. 

But first, here’s an ad that does all three:

Rule #1: Can you visualize it? 

If you can’t visualize it, you won’t remember it.

The more concrete and specific the visual, the better.

For example, most companies write copy like this:

• Worn by everybody
• Get fit again
• 32GB storage capacity 

You can’t visualize the first. The second is ambiguous. The third is too broad.

Here are better examples of each:

• Worn by supermodels in London and dads in Ohio
• Couch to 5K
• 1,000 songs in your pocket

Rule #2: Can you falsify it?

Can your words be proven to be true or false? 

This weeds out meaningless copy like this:

• Revolutionize an industry
• Quality you can trust
• Next-generation technology
• World-class service

To do this, point at concrete facts and examples. Don’t just describe. 

Let’s illustrate with an example: 

You’re setting up a date for your best guy friend. Most people say things like:

• Smart
• Funny
• Good values
• Tall and attractive

Those are all subjective descriptions that don’t tell you anything about him. But instead if you say:

• Reads every day
• Has made me pee myself laughing
• Volunteers with seniors
• 6’2” and looks like Ryan Gosling

Now they have a real idea of who this person is, what they’d be like to be around, and whether they might be someone they’d be interested in.

And Heinz can prove that people put competitor’s ketchups in Heinz bottles:

Rule #3: Can nobody else say it?

Draw a line in the sand and say something unique to you

That makes someone buy your product instead of your competitors.

For example, Volvo points out that their odometers have more numbers than everyone else:

Note: Volvo used “speedometer” because at the time “odometer” was an uncommon word. They define it in the body copy.

Chevrolet points out that Corvettes are the fuel for countless songs:

Next time you’re writing copy, pass it through this test

1. Can you visualize it?
2. Can you falsify it?
3. Can nodody else say this?

Keep re-writing until you get three yes’s.

I highly recommend watching the entire interview with Harry Dry on How I Write. 

And if you want to get more of Harry’s copywriting tips directly from the man himself, subscribe to his newsletter, Marketing Examples. It’s one of my faves.

It’s a hot day. Your kids bounce off the walls, and you scroll Instagram to de-stress.

You’re hit with an ad for a Springfree trampoline. The ad shows kids double bouncing each other into the air and off the enclosed walls.

Your eyes gloss over, and you start to scroll past.

And then the ad says:

“They’ll be distracted for hours while you lounge peacefully inside.”

You perk up. Now you’re interested.

Finally a way to get some peace and quiet.

When someone buys a trampoline, what they're really buying is peace.

Find the benefit of the benefit

When you write copy to sell your product, sometimes it’s helpful to look at the “benefit of a benefit.”

Note: this is more obvious when the buyer is different than the user, but that's not a requirement. Use this exercise to uncover clever ways to pitch your product.

Step 1:

Write a list of your product’s benefits AND its downsides.

You’ll see why in a second.

Step 2:

Analyze each and ask, “what’s a unexpected / obvious / helpful / interesting / funny / convenient / comforting / amazing / wild / beautiful / exciting / weird… benefit of this benefit/downside?”

In other words, what’s a second-order benefit of that benefit/downside?

It can either be directly for the user (kids on a trampoline) or for the real buyer/user (relaxed parent).

A bunch of examples:

Trampoline → fun for multiple kids → parents get some time off

Sports car → no back seats (drawback) → no room for kids (there's a theme here)

Dog bed → dog will have a place to sleep → he won’t sleep in your bed

Electric car → no visiting gas stations → not caring when gas prices go up

Durex → no unexpected pregnancies → no kids stuff (Durex = cheaper than baby)

Jeep → amazing off road vehicle → can park anywhere

McDonald’s → open 24/7 → only food available on a late party night → good at interpreting drunk people (note this is a benefit of a benefit of a benefit).

You get the point.

Do this simple exercise the next time you write copy for your site, an ad, an email, or a piece of content. List all the benefits and downsides of your product. Then find the second (or third) order benefit of each.

A lot will be rubbish. But you might strike gold.

Shoutout to Dan Nelken’s great book, A Self-Help Guide for Copywriters, for this insight. I highly recommend its process for generating a bunch of great copy ideas.

This is one of my favorite tweets about startups:

Clearly, it resonated with quite a lot of other people, too.

Why?

It summarizes a truth that I immediately got but failed to articulate previously:

Every successful person got lucky, and their success is near impossible to replicate.

Note: Paul Graham says that a founder’s best way to replicate this is to increase their luck surface area by meeting people, writing online, building an audience, living in a major city, etc.

This tweet taps into one of the most powerful ideas behind impactful marketing: relatable truths.

Tapping into relatable truths makes your message more powerful and memorable.

In the book A Self-Help Guide for Copywriters, Dan gives examples of relatable truths you can tap into during Christmas holidays:

Notice how you felt after each of them. Did you find yourself nodding along?

I know I did.

Let’s dive into the different types of relatable truths.

Here are a few ways to categorize relatable truths:

• Context: Truths related to where the message is seen. For example, an ad in LA:

• Holidays/events: Truths related to the current or recurring events such as advertising your product during Valentine’s Day, Christmas, a US election, a recession, or a global pandemic. 
• Industry: Truths related to the specific industry you operate in. For example, startups/business (like Andrew’s tweet), kids toys, dating, clothing, and for marketers:

• Cultural: Truths related to social, societal, or cultural trends. Ranging from:
  • Hype trends: AI, crypto, Clubhouse, BeReal, and Squid Game.
  • Culture shifts: Sustainability, remote work, DEI, personal brands, creator economy, urban diaspora, video > books, anon accounts, and mental health awareness.
  • Technological shifts: Internet, mobile, AI, blockchain, virtual reality/metaverse, 3d printing, quantum computing, and nuclear fusion.
  • Memes: rick rolling, ok boomer… too many to list.

• Human: Truths related to core human behavior and psychology. This is the most broad-reaching and hardest to categorize. For example, how people act in an embarrassing moment:

Spend time brainstorming relatable truths for your product, industry, culture, and context. And add to this list whenever you come across one.

They’ll help your marketing resonate.

Your marketing efforts are wasted if the landing page sucks.

Luckily, it's a good idea to use a proven template rather than get too creative.

Wait, don’t I constantly tell you to be creative?

Yes, 100%, your marketing needs to be creative to stand out.

But creative layouts confuse people.

So, be creative with marketing (ads/content/email) and practical with conversion.

Here's a checklist for nailing the perfect landing page (high-res version):

Thanks to our friends at Tuff Growth for creating this A+ infographic—particularly Sean Tremaine, the genius writer and designer behind it.Let’s dive into each of these sections some more.

✔️ Hero Section:

The hook is everything:

• Header: Clearly state what you do and why it matters.
• Subheader: Expand your headline. How do you do it?
• Image/Video: Visually communicate your product.
• Call-to-Action (CTA): Place an OBVIOUS button that guides the user to the next step.
• Navbar: Key conversion pages/sections only (Pricing, FAQ, Features)—and make it sticky.

✔️ Social Proof #1

Social proof is one of the biggest motivators:

• Display usage numbers or logos of well-known customers to build credibility and trust.

✔️ Benefits/Features Sections:

Features = talking about yourself.Benefits = talking about them.

• Benefit Headers: Clearly state your product or service's main benefits.
• Feature Subheaders: Explain how they get that benefit with your product’s features.
• Image: Use visuals to reinforce the benefits and show your product in action.
• Use bullet points & icons for easy reading.
• Repeat your CTA button for each section.

✔️ Social Proof #2

There’s no such thing as too much social proof.

Go deeper with testimonials/case studies/reviews.

• Testimonials: Include quotes from satisfied customers, ideally with names and photos, to add authenticity.
• Case Studies: Highlight the results your customers have had.

I dove deep into the science of using reviews here.

✔️ FAQ Section:

• Don’t assume they read the page. Repeat key details.
• Handle the most common objection.
• Don't lay on the marketing speak, just give the facts.

Tip: Ask support and sales for common customer questions and objections.

✔️ Final CTA Section:

Make it glaringly obvious how you can help and how they can take action:

• Hammer in the top value prop.
• Make the CTA clear and persuasive.
• If a form, use as few form fields as possible.

✔️ Footer Section:

• Only link to key conversion pages.
• Make it painfully obvious how to contact you.
• Privacy and Cookies Policies and Terms are mandatory.

Note: Of course, you can layer additional sections as appropriate for your startup. You can add pricing sections. Problem agitation. How it works. Product gallery. Your mission. And so on.

This is a purely skeleton to build on top of.

Quick Tips

• 90% of the work is done by the hero. Make it hooky.
• Your CTA Button should be the most glaringly obvious thing on the page.
• Be short and clear. Optimize for scannability.
• Mobile friendly is mandatory.
• If you have the traffic volume, A/B test regularly to find the copy and images that convert best. If not, get a lot of feedback from people.

Check this off next time you build an LP, and you'll be ahead of 90+% of folks.

Want to get ahead of the rest?

Get our extremely detailed guide walking you through how to perfect each section.

Hold up, what’s the difference between hard and soft sell ads?

A hard sell is classic direct-response advertising. Think:

• Bold claims
• Coupon codes, offers, trackable links
• Sometimes (though not always) a focus on product features (not benefits)
• The goal is an immediate sale or at least get you into a funnel

For example, this static ad from Vessi:

Can’t get more hard sell than that really.

With soft sells, the goal is to connect with the viewer by showing them you understand their lifestyle, values, and pain points. It’s not about an immediate sale but rather forming trust that you can trade for a sale (or referral) later.

A soft sell looks like this:

• No pushing for clicks
• No discount codes
• Highlighting your product’s benefit to the viewer (not the features)
• Solving a problem the viewer is experiencing
• Gently positioning your product in the context of something the viewer already finds valuable
• Tapping into the user’s identity

Let’s look at three examples: a B2B one curated by me and two B2C ads curated by Nice Ads.

This first one is from Thermacell

What I love:

• Feels like an organic post. The creator walks through a solution to a familiar audience problem: mosquitos. This is the type of content most folks follow this creator for.
• The creator highlights the product's benefit (rather than a feature). We don’t care how the Thermacell works. But we care a lot about a fun evening outdoors without mosquitos.
• It’s a soft sell. There’s no link. No discount code. They’re earning trust and playing the long game (and hopefully increasing branded searches).

This second one’s from Jack Links:

What works?

• It’s goofy and entertaining.
• The entire video is raw. You can’t tell it’s an ad until the creator specifically highlights Jack Links halfway through. Even then, it’s about 2% of the video.
• This is the type of content people follow this creator for. Simple, but that’s what makes the ad engaging.
• Again, it’s a soft sell. The mention of Jack Links is concise and positions the product as a solution to this audience’s known problem. Hungry while out adventuring? Jack Links is for you.

Last one, B2B this time, and an ad for Instantly

Check out the full post here, but here's the opening:

Why I like it:

• It's legitimately useful content for people trying to set up a modern cold outreach practice. It gives free value.
• It shows how Instantly fits into a workflow, removing the confusing guesswork for them.
• In no way does it feel like it's promoting Instantly. They aren't mentioned until tool #4, and there are 4 other tools mentioned.

This organic post is now being promoted by Instantly as an ad to drive leads to their product (using the Thought Leadership ad type on LinkedIn).

Often the best ads are great organic social posts.

Just so we're clear, we don’t hate hard sell ads. Far from it.

They’re valuable and have a place in most solid ad strategies.

The ideal playbook is a combination of hard and soft sell ads, for example:

• Hard-sell ads targeting folks who watched or engaged with soft sell ads.
• Soft-sell when using influencers (as they’ll be concerned about enraging their audience, and a more organic plug will likely perform better).
• Or even soft-sell organic content and promote it if it does well.
• Hard sell for retargeting campaigns.

Use both in your ad strategy to grow fast and far 🙂

The Internet used to be extremely ugly:

• Flashing banner ads
• Under construction signs
• Horrible font and color choices.

To compete, stand out, and build trust, people started making websites look prettier, more trustworthy, and higher production value. 

With each new competitor and campaign, we all kept raising the quality bar.

The problem now? 

Everything is incredibly manicured and over-engineered.

YouTube is all $50k camera and lighting setups. Instagram photos are heavily edited and filtered. Some websites look like pieces of art.

How do you stand out now? By reverting back to the ugly days.

“Ugly ads” and low production value content is on the rise. We talked previously about Sam Sulek’s massive success on YouTube despite (because of?) ugly thumbnails, terrible titles, horrible lighting, and zero production value. 

When taken to an extreme, ugly ads stand out, make you double take, and make you share them.

But they can also masquerade as regular, organic content.

Here are some amazing “ugly,” yet effective, ads

Brand: Surreal

• Screenshot of interface on a billboard, lolwut?
• Hilariously bad graphic design
• Purposely lazy, fourth-wall breaking ad copy

Brand: Wandering Bear

• “In the wild” shot of the product in action
• Looks like your dad took a photo of his fridge and posted it

Brand: Nuts.com

• Excessive close-up with odd cropping
• A+ pun work
• Scribbled ad copy on a box and post-it

Brand: birddogs

• X vs. Y comparison making alternative look bad
• Instagram story aesthetic
• Emojis for familiarity and casualness

Brand: Harry’s

You can find the full video in this collection.

• Low budget phone video of their competitor in store
• Looks completely organic
• Makes you immediately curious

Ugly Ads work for a few reasons:

If they’re over-the-top hideous:

1. They look completely different than everything else in our feeds.
2. It's incomprehensible someone would make an ad that simple or ugly, so it's surprising and delightful.
   • Like when Surreal creates an entire billboard of a screenshot of a horrible, fourth-wall-breaking ad made in PowerPoint.

If they’re just low production value:

1. They look and feel like organic posts.
2. We crave authenticity, simplicity, and rawness.

Next steps

Next time you’re creating ads and content, try taking the opposite approach to what you’re used to. Specifically make an ad that looks low production value.

And shout out to the king of ugly ads, Barry Hott for making a lot of these. Follow him for inspiration.

To learn more:

• Check out a repository of Barry Hott’s ugly ads
• Check my carousel with 6 more examples of ugly ads and why they work—my top LinkedIn post of all time.

Oatly asked a kind of dumb question.

“How can we sell oat milk to people who don’t drink it or want to drink it?”

Aren’t we supposed to sell to people who actually want your product?

But by doing so, instead of going after the small market of not-milk drinkers, they went after the gigantic market of cow milk drinkers. And they did that with bold branding, going after baristas, and some insane marketing campaigns.

Last week we talked about how companies in boring categories (like oat milk) need to either keep it super simple (puppies on a toilet paper package) or need to make it interesting by being over the top fun/ridiculous. Oatly has taken the over the top route. 

Let’s highlight 3 of their most clever campaigns:

It’s like milk but for humans + F*CK OATLY

This is one of Oatly’s primary marketing messages—subtly reminding people how odd it is that we drink milk intended for baby cows:

These ads got Oatly banned or sued in countries like Ireland and Spain with influential dairy unions.

In response, they created fckoatly.com, pretending to be anti-Oatly:

They didn’t stop there; they made various satirical sites pretending to hate the anti-Oatly or anti-anti-Oatly sites. Here’s fckfckoatly.com:

They go all the way to fckfckfckfckfckoatly.com until they ask you to call a number.

The Dairy Deal

Next, they went after the dairy industry’s climate impact by buying billboards and print ads like this all over the place:

They’re challenging the dairy industry

And if you go to the URL in the corner (oatly.com/DairyDeal), it takes you to a full site pitching the deal to dairy reps (actual deal with up to 140k GBP value):

Note: I think it would have benefitted them if they published the number somewhere in the marketing since otherwise people wouldn’t really know these stats:

Paris cleverness

Paris has some funny laws. 

A mural advertisement can’t contain both text and an image of the product. So they painted a bunch of bold, text-only murals, and then cleverly positioned objects in front of the walls to complete the picture:

To dive more into some of Oatly’s top ads, I’ve compiled them into a carousel.

We want to be the Patagonia of dishwasher tablets.
We want to be the Apple of accounting software.
We want to be the Lululemon of toilet paper.
We want to be the Tesla of bathroom grout.

Being the something of something is attractive because it’s shorthand for a lot of hard to describe elements that make up a brand.

But obviously these above statements are all a bit ridiculous. 

What makes them ridiculous is the total mismatch between the brand's sexiness and the product category's utter lack of sexiness.

In short, as Alex puts it, “the inherent interest level of a category determines how nuanced and complicated the strategy can be.”

• Interesting = nuanced, sophisticated and rich brand strategy
• Boring = simple and to the point strategy

Here’s Alex’s complex graph to illustrate the concept:

Let’s dive into examples to illustrate this.

Examples of inherently interesting categories:

• Cars
• Health
• Beauty
• Fashion
• Investing
• Furniture
• Travelling
• Technology

With all of the above you can think of various examples of interesting brands that spend countless dollars building a rich brand identity. Tesla, Nike, Athletic Greens, Apple, Airbnb, Lululemon, Patagonia, IKEA, LVMH, L’Oréal.

People spend countless hours researching these categories. They’re hobbies. They’re down-right obsessions for some people.

Examples of inherently boring categories:

• Cleaning supplies
• Office supplies
• Toilet paper
• Accounting
• Appliances
• Insurance
• Oat milk
• Taxes
• Paint
• Law

Most people want to spend as little time thinking about these categories as possible—get in, buy something, and get out. Please never mention it again.

If you sell toilet paper, a legitimate strategy is to slap some puppies or kittens on the package to indicate it’s soft. People already know why soft is good. Try to sell people on your brand values and people will roll their eyes.

Here are some examples of brands who have managed to make their boring product more interesting by keeping their strategy simple:

Oatly

Non-dairy milk alternatives is a boring category. So Oatly differentiated with absurd branding, advertisements, and marketing schemes:

Liquid Death

Is there anything more boring than water? 

Liquid Death opted to be the opposite of all other boring water brands by leaning into absurd death metal vibes and wacky advertisements like this:

Who Gives A Crap and Dude Wipes

Toilet paper is one of the most boring and uninteresting categories.

Both Who Gives A Crap and Dude Wipes didn’t try to win you over with complicated brand values, instead they went for “let’s be a fun toilet paper brand” 

Who Gives A Crap relies on its funny name and fun packaging:

Dude Wipes leans in harder with puns (and a more specific audience):

How to determine if your category is interesting

A great test to measure a category's inherent interest level is to look up how many big YouTubers exist in the category and its subcategories.

There are countless YouTubers who just talk about cars. There are even a ton who just talk about Teslas. Therefore, cars are clearly interesting, so you must have an interesting and nuanced strategy to compete.

None exclusively talk about toilet paper. 

Therefore, it’s clearly not interesting, so you must keep it simple.

Check out Alex’s full article for more, or read his book. And otherwise, check out our Growth Vault for more lessons on strategy.

“What you see is all there is.”

– Psychological bias coined by Nobel Prize-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman.

Brains are lazy. We tend to only evaluate the information that’s currently presented rather than tapping into all our knowledge about the world.

Smart marketers use X vs. Y content to leverage this psychological bias.

For example, this ad for Loop earplugs:

Now, you’re only comparing Loop earplugs to the old foam ones—not the much better custom-molded earplugs.

This comparison causes you to tunnel vision on how they present the options, allowing them to control how you perceive them.

Take note of all the clever things the ad does to make the alternative look unappealing in comparison.

This is called the X vs. Y content type, where you compare two things, situations, or states of being, usually one “good” and one “bad,” with an interesting takeaway.

Usually, the “good” represents the thing you sell, either directly or indirectly.

This is easiest to understand with more examples:

X vs. Y examples

You can use X vs. Y in ads or in organic posts.

And you can either directly compare your product to competitors or indirectly compare two things related to your product.

Let’s dive into what this looks like:

Direct product comparisons:

This healthycell product is a bit odd. People expect to take a pill to help sleep, not use a tube of gel. This ad quickly demonstrates what it’s for and shows the entire pharmacy you’d have to swallow to replace it.

And this Huel ad positions the product and controls the narrative effectively by comparing a Huel meal to just instant noodles (not a home-cooked meal) on metrics it can easily crush it on:

Here I launched our ads agency for startups by comparing how most ads agencies work versus how ours works:

Indirect comparisons:

These examples don’t compare two products. Instead, they compare more complex things, but the goal is still to build intention for their product.

The most famous of course, is Apple’s “Get a Mac” campaign, where instead of comparing a Mac directly with a PC, it compares the type of people who use them:

This optometry company shows how the world view you with and without glasses:

Nikolas Konstantin is a CEO Coach with a focus on mindfulness. He uses this graphic to illustrate people’s errors in how they approach health. His mindfulness coaching services are more attractive when you share that world view:

Rob’s carousel doesn’t directly compare his SEO agency to others. Instead, it sneakily highlights his values and expertise in SEO:

Ways to frame X vs Y ads/posts

• Using your product vs Not using it
• Competitor vs You
• When you do X vs Y (or don’t do X)
• Before vs. After
• Past vs. Present or Present vs. Future
• What people want vs. What they get
• What people think vs. Reality
• Group A vs. Group B
• Perspective X vs Y

There are endless ways to do this. Use the above examples to get started.

Dive into my carousel for 17 examples and their timeless marketing lessons.

Read this ad (forwards and backwards):

Source: @dailyadcoffee

Copywriter Jon Morrow defines power words as “persuasive, descriptive words that trigger a positive or negative emotional response. They can make us feel scared, encouraged, aroused, angry, greedy, safe, amused, or curious.”

These emotions drive action.

What’s remarkable about this ad from Patagonia isn’t that it uses power words. All great copywriting does.

But it taps into different emotions depending on the order you read it.

• Reading from the top down, they cause anger and anxiety: screwed, it’s too late, we don’t trust anyone, we don’t have a choice.
• From the bottom up, the emphasis changes entirely to hope and encouragement: choice, livable, imagine, healthy future.

Brilliant. Read it again to notice how this affects you.

(tbh I also love the hook of "we're all screwed.")

The poem is followed by the tagline, “Buy Less, Demand More.” That’s shocking from a retailer and extremely affecting.

The takeaway? Appeal to your readers’ emotions.

We justify with logic, but emotions drive our actions. Emotions are why we:

• Share things that go viral
• Donate to causes
• Buy what we buy (or don’t buy what we don’t need, in the case of Patagonia).

Let's dive into the data of the viral power of emotions:

The viral power of emotion

Jonah Berger's (author of Contagious and Wharton professor) research shows that activating emotions like anger, excitement, amusement, and awe drive action more than happiness, sadness, and contentment.

Here are the stats from analyzing thousands of New York Times articles:

• Awe inspiring = 30% more likely to share
• Anger = 34% more
• Anxiety = 21% more
• Amusement = 29% more
• Sadness = 16% less

And positive emotions are 13% more likely to lead to being shared. So much for the classic adage, "If it bleeds, it reads."

Consider how your copywriting instills awe, fear, amusement, anxiety, arousal, anger, greed, safety, or curiosity. If, instead of triggering a high-arousal emotion, it makes you feel merely content, a little bit sad, or just kind of bored—rewrite.

Thanks for reading.

Dive into 50+ copywriting tactics in our Growth Vault.

Copywriting is one of the most important skills.

Particularly for founders and marketers.

Here are 6 simple and effective tips to improve your copywriting. 

Use them to rewrite your ads, landing pages, and that email in your drafts asking your boss (or cofounder) for a raise.

1. Make it about them—not you (your product)

People don’t care about your product. They care what your product can do for them.

What problem are you solving for them? And how does their life improve as a result? 

Here are some company examples:

2. Make it relatable

Selling something novel or complex? 

People don’t buy things they don’t understand.

Relate your product to something they already understand perfectly. They’ll get it immediately.

Metaphor example:

• Bad: Portable MP3 player with 8GB of storage
• Good: 1,000 songs in your pocket

Analogy example:

Note: The “no fees” is an example of “objection handling”—preemptlively addressing the most likely objection.

Ask current customers how they explain your product to a friend. Find the analogies and metaphors they use.

3. Cut the fluff

Do free flow writing. Then ruthlessly cut words that don’t add value:

• Adverbs
• Adjectives 
• Filler

Fluff weighs down copy and makes it harder to read. 

4. Use simple words

Even someone with an IQ of 160 enjoys reading at a 5th grade level:

• Avoid industry jargon. 
• Pretend you’re explaining it to your grandma or nephew.

It doesn’t matter how educated your audience is:

Harder to read → less engagement → less growth

Tip: Use the Hemingway Editor to check the readability.

5. Be specific

Don’t make people think—be specific and concise. 

Specificity helps people quickly understand your value.

Numbers and descriptive details work great. But only if they show the value customers get from you.

Remember: Only you think your value is obvious.

x6. Use active voice (not passive)

Active voice results in shorter, sharper sentences that are easier to follow.

But what does that mean exactly? Here’s an example:

The active voice makes your customer the hero of the story, and your product is the supporting character—not the other way around. This makes it far more compelling and easier to imagine.

Copywriting cheatsheet

Which is your favorite? Hit reply and let me know.

Jenny has 1.6B views on 124 YouTube Shorts, averaging ~13M views per video.

Previously, we covered the overall structure she uses for her videos, but she recently shared a teardown line-by-line, second-by-second for one of her videos with 21M+ views, How Many Ice Cream Flavors Can You Get with $1?

Let's dive in!

Note: These tips apply to any short-form video content, including B2B video ads.

The Hook

Here’s the opening Hook:

Hook Takeaways:

• Get right into it. No pre-ample. Just start doing it and explain as you go.
• Don’t waste time saying anything explained visually. She didn’t need to say “of frozen yogurt” because you know that already.
• Use visuals to aid comprehension. The $1 bill on the cup visually reinforces the concept of “she only has $1, and it’s going to be spent on froyo.”

Note: Hook and explain quickly. Check out the 1,3,5+ framework for more.

Foreshadow/Context

Next, she sets the stage with conflict and stakes with the line: “That’s going to be like $20 and it’s only vanilla:”

Takeaways:

• Quickly give context on what they need to watch the video. If a cup with a single flavor costs $20, then it will be hard to get a lot of flavors for $1.
• Her over-the-top facial expressions are to show you how to feel.

Transition

Then, she Transitions into the main action of the video seamlessly: “So I brought a tiny cup to get every flavor without spending more than a dollar.”

Takeaways:

• Transition into the action quickly and seamlessly. Don’t waste time standing in front of the camera intro’ing. Just explain as you’re doing it.
• Recap the concept again. You’re hitting people with a lot of info at once, and you randomly came up in their feed. Keep reminding them and re-hook them.

Body

Then she fills the tiny cup with froyo and does a lot to keep you engaged:

She adds drama to make it interesting:

• The machine spits, and her mom says: “They’re going to kick you out.”
• She introduces the main struggle (with intense music), “I was more concerned that the more flavors I added, the less space I had in my cup.”
• She purposely makes a “mistake” by adding the same flavor twice.
• She eats a bit of the double flavor and asks, “Is this cheating?” and her mom says they’re going to call the cops on her.

She inserts her CTA halfway through the video with a subtle comment from her mom: “All this for one subscriber,” which gets people in the mindset to subscribe.

• Add CTAs in the middle of the video at peak action rather than at the very end. A big virality signal is someone re-watching your video—a boring CTA at the end prevents that.
• But it’s also smart, as many people will bounce right after they get the payoff from watching the video (seeing how many flavors she can fit and if it’ll cost less than a dollar). If you do the CTA first, almost everyone will see it.

She adds a visual reminder of the concept and the progress:

Conclusion

• As she finishes and walks towards the scale, she says: “14 ice cream flavors, is it going to be less than a dollar? This reminds people of the premise, so they’re more invested in the answer.
• Her mom says: “No, I don’t think so,” to add drama.
• She stands there holding $1 and looking stressed to add drama and continue to reinforce the concept.
• She uses intense, crescendoing music and a series of fast cuts between her face and the cup, like a drum roll, to add drama and intensity again.
• She subtly encourages people to watch her other related video by ending the video with her mom saying, " No ice cream for you again!”
• It ends abruptly, as her mom says that, so the video's retention rates are high throughout (if you linger after the high note, people won’t re-watch).
• Again, don’t put the primary CTA here. Put it earlier in the video when everyone is hooked on watching it, or do it subtly as she did.

Want to learn more? Watch Jenny’s full video, her analysis, our previous breakdown of her Short structure, and her interview on Creator Science.

It doesn't matter if you make organic content or ads; this is key info.

Ever heard of this adage?

New problem, new solution.

Old problem, old solution.

Say you’re setting up a Shopify store or trying to grow on LinkedIn. You should probably go to YouTube and blogs for the most up-to-date resources, not consult classic literature.

But if you’re trying to figure out how to eat healthfully? This is an old problem. Humans have been shoving food in their faces for hundreds of thousands of years. Old solutions have stood the test of time. The latest diet trend has likely been tried dozens of times throughout history.

This also applies to marketing. Capturing attention and convincing others to do something are some of the oldest problems. 

Today, we’ll show you three old newspaper print ads, and how you can use the principles in your copywriting today to grow.

Let’s dive in.

Sandtex show don’t tell

These ads from 1984 are smart:

What they do well:

• They’re visually interesting and grab attention. Extreme close-ups of two objects. One smooth; the other cracked. The words are huge.
• They succinctly show the benefits. In 8 words and 2 objects, they tell you what it is and why it’s better than competitors.

Cheetos daring below the fold

This one is surprising. Usually, in copy, you want to captivate your reader in the first three seconds. But here, the first 90% of the words have absolutely nothing to do with the product.

It takes a whole 33 words to get to the punch line. Which is literally below the fold—you have to open the folded newspaper just to see what this is all about.

It shouldn’t work. But it does. Here’s why.

• It’s daring. It does the opposite of what we expect: to be sold something right away. It zigs where others would zag.
• It’s sensory. When we finally do get to the punch line, it’s in a high-contrast bright orange—just like the person’s fingertips. And those fingers tap into three senses: sight, taste, and touch.
• It makes you think and chuckle. You have to put two and two together to get it. That gives you a nice hit of dopamine and a chuckle.
• It’s curiosity piquing. Your brain is a categorization machine. It demands to know what connects seemingly unlike things. 

To write memorable copy, make it different, make it vivid, and make it curious.

Porsche’s “before vs after”

Here’s a classic car copywriting tactic in action.

BAB: before-after-bridge.

• Before: The problem/pain point your audience is facing. Like driving behind a Porsche in a car that’s not a Porsche.
• After: What life is like when that problem/pain point is resolved. Hands grip a sport steering wheel.
• Bridge: The solution—your product—bridges you from before to after.

I like BAB because it spotlights experience. Try to zero in on and accentuate what it’s like to have or not have your product.

The Sandtex and Porches ads broadly fall under X vs. Y, a very common and powerful format in ads and organic content.

Wrapping up

These ads? Old but gold. In short:

• Lean into striking images, be succinct, and show the benefits.
• Be bold, different, and peek curiosity.
• Use the before-after-bridge copywriting framework to sell the dream.

Want to be inspired by old print ads? Find more here and here.

1. Ads get attention and pique interest.
2. Landing pages convert interest into intention.
3. Emails convert people over time when they're ready.

Remember: It’s rare to see something for the first time and buy it immediately.

Use these steps to write email sequences that sell for you and make your acquisition efforts more profitable.

We need folks to open, engage, read, and take action. Let’s dive in:

1. Get people to open

Only three things dictate whether someone opens an email in their inbox:

1. Your reputation (the “from”)
2. The subject line
3. The pre-header (shown in most email tools)

Here’s what those look like:

A reputation is earned slowly. The subject line and pre-header are more immediately controllable. They need to hook people to get them to open.

Three triggers that cause people to click:

1. Self-interest: Offer email subscribers something that's going to help them.
   1. Example from Spotify: “Playlists made just for you”—save them time and effort.
2. Emotional interest: Spark positive emotion.
   1. Example from Typeform: “You're invited to the premiere”—make them feel special.
3. Relational interest: Get them to like you, trust you, and want to hear what you have to say.
   1. Example from Allbirds: “Leave a lighter footprint”—build connections to the brand and mission.

Write subjects and pre-headers that spark one of these three interests, and they’re more likely to open.

There are many more ways to hook. Subscribe to our free email course on Unignorable Hooks.

2. Get people to read it

Email copy needs to check these boxes:

• Aggressively concise. Don’t waste time with fluff.
• Not clickbait. Fulfill the expectations you set in your subject line.
• Keeps hooking them. Your subject line gets them to open, your opener gets them to keep reading. Continue to build interest and keep them engaged.
• Make the email valuable itself, but promise even more value that’s only delivered when subscribers click your CTA.

Help your readers. And do it succinctly. ‍Frameworks like PAS and AIDA can help:

3. Design it for engagement

Words aren’t everything. Once people open your email, they reflexively decide if they’re going to read it, skim it, or bounce based on their first impression.

Here are a few tips for designing attractive, engaging emails:

1. Make it easy to read and skim. Use a standard, large-ish font (12px to 16px).
2. Design for mobile, then adapt that design to desktop. Most people will read your email on mobile.
3. Hi-fi or lo-fi. If you’re going hi-fi, make it look great and on brand. If lo-fi, make it look like a regular old email sent by a person. Either can work well.

A job well done from Starbucks:

It’s simple, attractive, and easy to read on mobile.

4‍. Get people to take action

Why are you sending this email? 

Optimize the email to achieve that goal. If your goal is:

• To increase webinar signups, a possible CTA would be “book your spot” (which we think is a bit more motivating than the standard “register now”).
• To get feedback, your CTA might be “take the 1-minute survey and get 20% off.” Adding a time frame clarifies the commitment level.
• To drive sales, your CTA might be “Get 20% off today only.”

These examples are specific and directly relevant to the page at the other end of the click. We call these calls to value. Instead of generic prompts, they provide clear value to the reader.

Here’s an example of steps 2, 3, and 4 done right:

Why Cameo’s email works: 

• It’s personal—timed just before the recipient’s birthday. 
• The paragraphs are short and conversational. They use vivid language that paints a picture: You can have socks, or you can celebrate with a celebrity. That’s an appealing either/or. 
• The CTA “Celebrate…” is a clear, specific next step to getting value that leaves you curiously wondering: “which celebs?”

5. Measure, then improve

Don’t just create once and call it done. Monitor performance, figure out what needs improvement, and keep experimenting.

Pay close attention to click-through rate (what percentage of folks are clicking your CTAs) and, if your goal is a sale, revenue per email/subscriber.

We cover the most important email KPIs and how to use them in an article here.

There you have it!

Email funnels are the perfect supplement to a strong ad and organic strategy. 

Use this process to write good emails and place them in your sequences to convert more of your traffic.

There are only so many fundamental ways to grow a company. And not all ways work for all businesses. 

Place your product on this chart to get a general idea of what will likely work:

Large bubbles = more money spent. But it generally also means that it works at scale for many companies. Smaller bubbles mean it either has a smaller impact, works less often, or people don’t give it enough credit.

Here's the data used for this chart.

If you haven’t seen the Racecar Growth Framework, it breaks down the “growth engines” and the “boosts/accelerants” that drive true growth,  and recommends the order of operations.

Let’s dive into the 4 quadrants (and edge cases):

• Top-left – Random people would want it + they’re looking for it:
  • Very broadly appealing stuff people actively search out when needed, like kitchen scissors, a plunger, a marketing agency, or a software tool. Usually, that’s done by searching on Amazon or Google.
  • You can’t control who searches for what on Google, so the broader the user, the better.
• Top-right – Specific people + looking for it
  • You can control which trade shows you go to. And people typically go to them to find things to use/buy.
  • You can also do your best to get onto review sites by contacting the creator or incentivizing past customers to post reviews.
• Bottom-left – Random people + not looking for it
  • Very broad things people don’t really need or are likely already using, like kids' toys, Tide, Dove, Colgate, etc.
  • And dumb new products people didn’t know existed in infomercials like the Slap-Chop, Shamwow, and dumb fitness doo-dad.
• Bottom-right – Specific people + not looking for it
  • If they’re not looking for it, you must go to them. You create lists of people that might be interested and contact them via email or mail.
  • Or you use LinkedIn’s great but expensive targeting.
  • To be honest, you can use social ads to do pretty specific targeting by uploading your lists of prospects to the ad channels.
  • One acquisition channel missing here is communities. Whether they’re on Facebook, Circle, Skool, Slack, Mighty, Meetup, or Twitter/X.

Things that fall in the middle generally mean that “it depends.” 

For example:

• Reddit: Sure, it has a very broad user base, but the people in subreddits often have niche interests so it could be a viable way to find your audience.
• Facebook: Posting organically is broad. Groups are similar to subreddits, you can find or create niche ones. And for ads, you can get pretty niche if you do clever things like uploading custom audiences of people you’ve prospected.
• Social Channels: All the social channels are broader if you post organically and can be a lot more niche if you run ads.
• Affiliate: This depends because affiliates can have very niche audiences.
• Magazines: Some are industry-specific, but newspapers, not so much.

Find where your product/audience fits on this chart, and focus your efforts on the proven channels. Check out:

• Our Growth Vault for tactics for each of these,
• Our guides on making/running ads and content marketing.
• And the Racecar Growth Framework for more granular recommendations:

Buyer journeys aren’t nearly as clean as we like to imagine. Most people won’t see your ad → visit your landing page → buy immediately.

It’s more likely to go like this:

1. They see your ad while doom-scrolling Instagram. They click.
2. Something distracts them away from their phone.
3. They remember later in the evening (or 3 weeks later) thanks to a Trigger Event.
4. They google your company name.
5. They visit your homepage—not the conversion-focused landing page you intended them to hit.

(At least, that’s how I tend to buy things online.)

Is your homepage optimized for conversion? If not, you may be leaving growth on the table. 

Yes, your homepage has many jobs (too many). One is to orient people to your brand and everything you do. But don’t forget that high-intent visitors often visit your homepage late in the funnel.

Design it with conversion in mind.

Here are some quick ways to make sure your homepage converts:

1. Start by nailing the above-the-fold

Your above-the-fold (ATF) is the portion of your website that’s immediately visible to visitors—your hero header, subheaders, imagery, and calls to action.

Header and subheaders: Keep your copy short. Concisely convey what your product is and why they should care. Visitors shouldn’t have to scroll to understand what you offer and how they’ll get value from you.

Imagery: Static images, slides, video—whatever you choose, keep your products at the forefront. Photos with people are optional, but they have a proven track record of increasing conversion.

Call to action (CTA): Your ATF is the most important part of your most important page, and your CTA here might be the most important part of your entire site. This is what drives action. CTAs for ecommerce tend to be “shop now.” For services, “get started” and “try now” work well. Make sure your CTA is high-contrast and unignorable.

Here’s an example of an above-the-fold done well.

• Concise, punchy header and subheader explaining what Mosaic is and why you should care.
• Attractive visuals of the product
• Clear, high-contrast call to action (although they should depart from their monochrome design and make the CTA a contrasting color to make it pop).

We wrote an entire playbook on ATF alone. When you’re ready to create your ATF, you can follow our step-by-step process.

2. Handle objections in your below-the-fold.

Below the fold, you briefly address any objections visitors might have.

Some elements you might include here:

Social proof: Share reviews, press, user-generated content, testimonials, and endorsements, ratings, customer logos, and customer stats.

• Include social proof near your CTAs to handle their objections at the key moment where they’re deciding to click or not. Trust leads to action.
• There’s basically no such thing as too much social proof. 

Product features: Highlight unique product features that address common concerns.

• Worried about quality? Here’s why we’re the best you can get.
• Worried it’ll take too long? We’ll have you onboarded in 5 minutes or less.
• Worried about not liking the product? If you don’t like it we’ll give you a full refund.

FAQ: Take it a step further and add an FAQ section.

• Start with the most common or highest-friction questions.
• Assume they didn’t read the whole page and repeat all the key points.

Bestsellers: If you have several products, highlight your flagship and most popular items. Or highlight a “starter pack” or samples.

Footer: Include pages in the footer that you want to give visitors access to but aren’t critical to the conversion journey, like your exchanges and returns policy.

I like how MUD\WTR uses their FAQ section to address common questions (objections):

Include CTAs throughout your homepage so visitors don’t have to scroll back to the ATF to take the next step in their buyer journey: the product, pricing, or sign-up pages. CTAs in a sticky nav work well, too.

3. Run an A/B test. 

But wait, it’s easy to make changes and assume they’re better. Time to test that:

Filter for people who have already visited your ad landing pages—these are the warm visitors we’re experimenting with. Send half to your current homepage and the other half to your new, conversion-focused homepage. See which performs better.

Put a little love into your homepage, you might see a big bump in conversion.

Dive into our Above the Fold playbook and Landing Page guide.

The highest ROI campaigns will always be to warm audiences. Whether they’ve:

• Visited your homepage
• Visited key parts of your site (FAQ, return policy, pricing, checkout)
• Purchased previously
• Filled out a lead magnet
• Jumped on a sales call

Cold audiences need a ton of convincing.

Warm audiences sometimes just need to be reminded that you exist. Or you need to overcome whatever unresolved objection they may have.

Here are some lesser-known remarketing strategies to boost sales & reduce churn.

1. Retarget high-performing audiences on cheaper channels

Use top-tier channels and targeting to find quality people, then use cheaper/lower-quality channels to remarket to them. For example:

1. Ensure all your ad sets and ads have unique UTM tags.
2. Find your top Google Ads keywords or Facebook/LinkedIn audiences.
   1. LinkedIn is very expensive but has great targeting.
3. Create custom audiences on Twitter or Display Ads targeting people who visited with those unique UTM tags where people’s attention is cheaper.

Find them where it’s expensive, focus where it’s cheaper.

2. Cross-sell, up-sell, and re-engage inactive customers

After a sale most companies just rely on email to do all the engagement and closing. But, the average open rate on emails is 30~40%.

And a lot of people just open and archive without reading. Instead, use remarketing:

1. Identify cohorts of people who are:
   1. Not reading or engaging with your emails.
   2. Less likely to repurchase or more likely to churn (haven’t been actively using the product)
2. Run retargeting ads to these segments on social platforms (Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc) to re-engage them.

Here’s how Amazon does it:

3. Remarket for months to come

A lot of folks focus on remarketing within the first few days. Abandoned cart emails or ads after the first day or two. After a couple of week or so, they kinda give up.

Remember: Someone will rarely hit your site and be ready to buy at that moment.

Usually, it’s not “no”. It’s “not yet.” For example:

• For shoes, maybe they don’t need a new pair right now, but they might next spring/summer.
• For B2B services or tools, maybe it’ll take the company months to figure out if they actually need you or if the time is right.

It’s still a decent idea to use a higher budget the sooner the interaction because they are hotter. But try remarketing to people months later.

As a rule of thumb, you should get more salesy the longer it’s been. Don’t overwhelm someone while they’re deciding; it might turn them off. But if you wait 6 months and they’ve forgotten details, hit them with a more direct pitch.

4. Don’t just optimize for purchases

Ad platforms can tell when someone is close to purchasing and charge more for their eyeballs or clicks if your ad campaigns are optimized for sales. Instead:

1. Identify or create pieces of content that lead to leads/sales.
2. Make sure there’s a strong CTA embedded into the content.
3. Send people to that content and optimize your ads for “engagement”:
   1. 50% scroll depth
   2. 20+ seconds on the page (or longer)

This may lead to more conversions at a lower price. Example:

5. Get creative for sniffing for intent

Focus on more than just the obvious pricing pages, product pages, checkouts, and free trial events. Here are other ideas:

• Return policy page
• Clicked on 3+ FAQ items
• Clicked on numerous product photos
• Spent X time on the pricing page & scrolled through the different comparisons
• Used search or filtered
• Clicked to numerous pages on the site

Get creative with sniffing for intent and combine it with:

6. Be specific

Specific will always outperform general. Customize ads and emails to match users' confirmed interests and interactions. For example:

• If they visited a specific product page, hit them with an ad or email featuring that specific product.
• If they talked to a specific sales rep, include them in an ad for familiarity.
• If they spent a bunch of time on the pricing page, they might need help figuring out which plan is right for them.
• If they visited the return policy, maybe they're worried they won't like it

Example: Chaiirish used a product the user visited and added some urgency:

Remember:

• Warm > cold
• Specific > general
• Creative > same-old

If you want some ad inspiration, check out our Ad Vault. And if you want to dive deeper into ad tactics, check out the 461 tactics in our Growth Vault.

Calm makes $7.7M per month and has 150M+ downloads for their meditation app.

~50% of Calm’s social traffic comes on autopilot from handfuls of YouTube videos, getting thousands of views per hour on videos that are upwards of 7 years old.

You might suspect they’re all related to meditation, but they’re not. They’re almost all related to sleep:

Calm realized that their biggest usage time was between 9PM and 11PM.

Clearly, people used their app to help calm their minds and go to sleep. So targeting people who are pulling up videos to help them sleep is a high-intent audience that would be interested in their product.

It turns out related keywords have a ton of search volume on Google and YouTube:

So they created videos related to sleep: bedtime stories, rain noises, white noise, ocean sounds, and deep sleep meditations.

And then they subtly funnel viewers to their app:

There’s no other pitch besides the Calm logo as a watermark during the videos.

The beauty of this is that someone will likely pull up the same video every night and see Calm’s logo and CTA every time.

This is not only a great example of using data to find the next growth opportunity, but it’s also a great example of the law of conservation of attractive profits.

Law of conservation of attractive profits

“In the face of technological disruption, profit opportunities shift from the main product to specialized, hard-to-replicate components or services.”

This law was created by Harvard Business professor Clayton Christensen.

Chris Dixon (a16z) summarizes it with an analogy in his book Read Write Own:

“Commoditizing a layer in a tech stack is like squeezing a balloon. The volume of air stays constant but shifts to other areas. The same is true for profits in a tech stack (roughly). The overall profits are conserved but shift from layer to layer.”

For example, Google started as a Search engine and now makes over $50B per year. To maintain their profits from Search, they’ve tried to own more of the stack required to access it: browser (Chrome), device (Google Pixel), operating system (Android and Chromebook), and telecommunication network (Google Fi).

Even still, they pay Apple $12B per year to be the default search engine on Apple devices to maintain their dominance—that price would be much higher if Android didn’t emerge as a massive contender to Apple’s smartphone dominance.

Takeaway: You can steal away land from your competitor by offering what they sell for free. As Bezos said: "Your margin is my opportunity."

Similarly, IBM invests in open-source operating systems (Linux) not to “give back.”

They just don't want to share profits with corporations like Microsoft. Meta is investing in open-source large language models (LLMs), so it doesn’t need to pay to use OpenAIs.

Now, Google’s strategy is to create free and just as powerful versions of ChatGPT. So far, they are not winning that battle.

Calm has done something similar to a smaller degree.

Most people post videos on YouTube to generate ad revenue.

Calm has created a mobile app that generates $8M per month. They don’t need to monetize YouTube videos for sleep, meditation, and relaxation sounds.

Instead, they want it to have as much reach as possible and build as much affinity as possible so they can convert more people to their app.

So, Calm can have the best sleep sound video with zero ads. That matters to people. This is the most popular ad from Calm’s most popular video:

HubSpot can pump out insane amounts of free marketing content because they don’t need to make money from selling education. They make all of their money from their CRM.

Alex Hormozi doesn’t need to charge you for his book or courses because he’ll make way more money by being able to buy into your business for a low valuation because of the affinity he’s built. This gives him a big edge against other creators who have to charge or add sponsors.

Takeaway question: What are people paying competitors for that you can offer to them for free?

For deeper dives into Calm’s YouTube strategy, check out Strategy Breakdowns and Foundation.

Getting your first batch of customers can be one of the hardest or easiest parts.

It’s really hard if you do it incorrectly for your product type.

How you approach it depends on:

• Purchase intent of the customer (high vs low)
  • High: Something people already know they need. A known problem that people know there’s a solution for.
  • Low: Something people don’t know they need yet! An unknown problem or an unknown solution.
• The competitiveness and makeup of the market
• How broadly appealing the product is
• If they’re actively looking for a solution
• If the customer has switching costs (aka opportunity costs)
• Complex vs simple product
• Product category (B2B vs B2C)
• Geographic constraints
• Self-serve vs high-touch

Luckily, Ali created two flow charts depending on customer purchase intent.

GTM motions for high-intent customers

Here’s the flow chart, explanations of each channel below:

#1. Produce discoverable content:

High-intent, no competitors, looking for solution

Create content that people find while searching for a solution. This can be on Quora, Reddit, communities, YouTube, TikTok, or good ol' fashioned Google.

#2. Overservice 1 customer:

High-intent, no competitors, not looking for solution, complex product/solution

For complex, high-ticket products, go above and beyond for a single customer. Create a product/service that absolutely wows them.

Then, get referrals and create a case study.

#3. Hack a distribution channel:

High-intent, no competitors, not looking for solution, simple product/solution

Use clever hacks on existing marketplaces to get visibility:

• Airbnb: Automatic “post to craiglist” feature to increase visibility. [Source]
• “Tiktok: Appended “for Facebook & Instagram” at the end of the app name on the app store to get in front of people looking for FB or IG. [Source]”
• “Paypal: Created bots that reached out to eBay sellers pretending to be real customers and insisting on paying only via PayPal. [Source]”

Note: Quoted examples are from Ali’s article.

#4. Fish on forums/communities

High-intent, competitive space, no switching costs

Similar to #1, except you find existing posts/questions on Quora/Reddit/Forums, answer their question, and link to your product.

Don’t be spammy.

#5. Cold outreach (and reduce the friction)

High-intent, competitive space, high switching costs

If it’s harder for customers to switch from competitors, reach out to your customers directly, offer free value, and be willing to help them migrate. ConvertKit famously did this to get creators off of competitors like Mailchimp.

GTM motions for low-intent customers

#6. Launch somewhere (+ PR)

Low-intent, enterprise competitors, self-serve product

If your customers are massive, slow, clunky enterprises, get in front of the small guys. Launch on Product Hunt, Techcrunch, Hacker News, Indiehackers, or KickStarter, or do a PR push (see #12).

A great way to have a big launch is to be “building in public” (see #10) for months before launch.

#7. Warm outreach/intro

Low-intent, enterprise competitors, high-touch product
Low-intent, no competitors, B2B

Find people in your network who likely have the problem but haven’t found a solution (in person or via LinkedIn), overdeliver, and ask for a referral.

In general, warm outreach is infinitely better than cold outreach, so putting yourself out there is an excellent way to increase response and close rates.

#8. Embed yourself in a community

Low-intent, modern competitors, niche appeal

If the product is niche, be a key member in communities around this niche. These could be on Reddit, Facebook, Stack Overflow, campuses, community centers, or dedicated sites and forums.

Or create your own community around it on Reddit, Facebook, Meetup, or Circle.

#9. Grab attention [on the streets]

Low-intent, modern competitors, broad appeal, geographically constrained

Place objects and signs where your customers hang out. For example, “the dating app Honeypot (now Thursday) got its first users by placing whiteboards with quirky messages around the streets of London. [Source]”

#10. Build in public

Low-intent, modern competitors, broad appeal, worldwide

If your product is broadly appealing and the market is competitive, then use social platforms to build an audience that likes and believes in you and your product. Attract people to you by being authentic.

#11. Use influencers

Low-intent, no competitors, B2C

If it’s a new product category targeting consumers, strike deals with micro and nano influencers to share your product on TikTok, Instagram, YouTube videos, and blogs.

Or, at the very least, get them using it.

Note B2B influencers are also on the rise ;0

#12. Full blown PR

Low-intent, strong social mission

If you have a strong social mission, like Tom’s “buy 1 give 1” business model where they’d give shoes to those in need, then you’re a strong candidate for a full blown PR cycle. You can manage this by contacting editors/writers at publications or working with a PR agency.

Ali gives examples of companies for each in the full article.

Takeaway: Find yourself in the flow chart, and then focus on that channel.

Nothing sells better than a happy customer.

Here are 10 research-backed recommendations for getting and displaying reviews:

Encourage comparisons in reviews

A review that compares your product to another is far better than a regular review:

• Positive reviews that compare your product increase sales by up to 26%. They anchor your product as being better than competitors. For example, “The iPhone 15 has a better camera than my friend’s Google Pixel” is better than “The iPhone 15 camera is really good.”
• Negative reviews that compare are up to 47% less harmful. We attribute their dislike to their personal preferences. Example: “The iPhone’s battery life isn’t as good as the Pixel” is less harmful than “The iPhone battery life sucks.”

Encourage reviews to compare your product by asking: “How was it compared to a similar product you’ve tried?”

Expert recommendations vs customer reviews

Should you display simple customer reviews or expert recommendations?

It depends on how easy it is for people to judge the product's quality by using it:

• If it’s easy to judge the quality, then do customer reviews. Examples: T-shirts, food, hotels.
• If it’s hard to judge and requires expertise, do an expert recommendation. Examples: insurance, dentists, educational institutions, software, agencies.
  • Would you trust “Bob Smith” to recommend a heart surgeon? Or would you trust your family doctor more?

How incentives boost reviews

Most happy customers will never bother to leave a review. Even if you ask them.

But incentivizing them with free products, cash, gift cards, or contest entries makes it much more likely that they will leave a review, and it’s more likely to be positive.

Here’s the data:

• Home improvement store product reviews were 83.4% more positive when incentivized via sweepstakes entries.
• Even a modest $0.25 incentive paid immediately for rating and reviewing a video proved effective, leading to a 20.6% increase in positivity

Do not ask for a positive review. That might backfire and is against Amazon TOS.

Don’t ask for reviews too soon

Getting asked to review a product you just got is like a popup modal asking you to subscribe before you even know what the website is.

Recommendation: Wait at least 10 days before asking for a review to increase the chance they review by 40-60%.

Additional recommendations for software reviews:

• Don’t do it based on time after signing up; do it based on milestones of usage (for example, they just hit their "aha" moment with your product.
• Don’t ask them when they’re clearly in the middle of something.

Some negative reviews are good for you

You see a 4.9-star-rated espresso machine and start reading the reviews. They’re all resoundingly positive…, but you start to get a little suspicious that they’re all fake.

You check the 1-star reviews and see: “There is a considerable difference in taste when mineral or filtered water is used rather than tap water”

You laugh and say, “That has nothing to do with the machine, you bozo!! Well, if that’s all people have to complain about, then it must be good.”

Oddly enough, a low, fairly irrelevant review will improve your perception of a highly-rated product by ~15%.

Takeaway: Don’t hide negative irrelevant reviews, or maybe even showcase them!

Show “likes” on the product page

Leverage the engagement your product has received on social media:

Oddly enough, this only increased sales during non-work hours. However, each additional like received increased sales by €0.26, about 0.14% of the product price.

Takeaway: Show a product’s likes and a few profile photos of people who liked it.

The first review sets the tone

We’re the pinnacle of herd animals.

If the first review is negative, you’ll get fewer sales, fewer reviews, and more negative reviews. This effect can last for 3 years or more.

And the opposite happens if the first review is positive.

Here are some recommendations:

• Launch products to a select group of customers mostly likely to rate it highly.
• Launch on new marketplaces (like Amazon or Walmart) the same way.
• Reach out to early customers that you think are happy and incentivize them to write a review about it.
• If you get a negative review early, do everything you can to correct it.

Order matters

Sales are up to 84% higher if the first review is 5-star versus 1-star, and we rarely read more than 10 reviews before deciding.

Takeaway: Display at least one positive review first before displaying others. Never display a negative review first.

4.3 is better than 4.9 (if it’s your own website)

Oddly, sales peak between 4.0 and 4.5 stars and dip down at 4.5 to 5.0. At really high ratings, we become skeptical and assume the results are manipulated (the study focused on specific retail websites and not a marketplace like Amazon).

Takeaway: Don’t delete or hide all reviews lower than 5.

Reply to all reviews

Replying to reviews has various benefits:

• It can make an upset customer change their mind and increase their rating (and maybe even stay a customer).
• It signals to people that you care about customers.
• And a study showed it increased the number of reviews by 12% and increased the average rating by 0.12 stars.

So make sure to reply to all of them!

–––

Use these 10 research-backed ways to get the most out of customer reviews.

Check our Growth Vault for 84 other CRO tactics (and 373 growth tactics).

Fundamentally, there are only 4 high-level ways to drive growth.

This image from MKT1 summarizes it perfectly:

A startup can do a million things to grow (we’ve covered over 455 of them here), but given extremely limited resources, you should find the highest leverage place to apply pressure to grow now.

Understanding these 4 primary levers helps you prioritize. Let’s dive into each:

1. Get more $$$ from your current slice of pie

• Charge more money from existing customers (make sure to increase perceived value too).
• Sell more products to existing customers (upsell/cross-sell)
• For SaaS, increase revenue per customer by adding new features and tiers, increase the number of seats they use, or increase product usage.
• Reduce churn so revenue can grow over time. The SaaS Quick Ratio is a handy metric for determining whether your growth and churn are healthy.

2. Capture the same pie more efficiently

You’re always getting new customers, but you can do it better. You can generate more revenue with the same or less cost and effort.

There are really only two fundamental ways to do this:

• Increase conversion rates with better funnels (copy, landing pages, lead magnets, sales, etc).
• Lower acquisition costs with better creatives, targeting, lead quality, (and conversion rates ;0)

Note: Check our Growth Vault for 84+ tactics to increase conversions

3. Capture more of the same pie

You’re growing within the same market segment but can get MORE leads:

• Double down on what’s working, but always experiment with creative ideas.
• Watch out for diminishing returns (increasing acquisition costs), especially on ads, if you’ve been going after the same market for a while and keep increasing budgets. That’s especially true if it’s a niche market.
• If you’re steadily growing, don’t wait until you cap out before expanding the pie because it takes longer than you think.
• Set up a different growth engine (content or sales instead of ads)

Note: No matter how good you are, you will never get the whole pie, sorry!

4. Expand the pie (or test new pies entirely)

• Go after new markets/segments (industries, company sizes, geos, verticals).
  • If you’re very early stage, this is just trying to find product-market fit.
• Depending on the new segment, you can either use the same growth engine (ads) or you need to set up another one (i.e., outbound or content).
• Create new content, messaging, and funnels tailored to the new “pie”.
• Always run small tests before going all in. Make sure to prioritize your tests using the RICE/DRICE frameworks.
• Double down if you have similar or higher conversion rates with this new market or segment.

How to use it

Every few months, pick one of these to prioritize and go hard on it. What matters most will depend on your current circumstances (and likely stage). For example:

• A very early-stage company is either focusing hard on one market/segment or testing several to find product-market fit.
• A startup with PMF will likely want to improve conversion rates with well-optimized funnels, great onboarding, and strong retention.
• Then they'll want to focus on capturing more of the same pie by ramping up their current growth engine (ads) or setting up a second (outbound).
• Then they might want to get more from their current customers by charging more and upselling and cross-selling.
• Then, they might want to expand markets/segments as they reach saturation in their current ones.

To dive deeper into this concept, check out the rest of MKT1's great article.

How people/companies normally create an article or post:

They randomly pick a topic out of the air and start writing, not really knowing where it's gonna end up. The structure kinda just happens as they write.

They hit publish, and that topic is “done.”

Right?

Unfortunately, four things make that the wrong way to do it:

• People need to hear the same message numerous times in numerous ways for the message to sink in.
• You can’t guarantee that everyone will see a given post, article, or newsletter.
• Companies only have so many core ideas to communicate.
• Generating ideas and creating content is a slog if done haphazardly.

Finding ways to share the same idea in dozens of ways is critical.

How they should create content:

1. Use a system to generate ideas (like listing out all your customers' problems)
2. Turn each idea into numerous, clearly-defined posts

To achieve #1 and #2, you need to understand the 10 fundamental types of posts you can create. Using them you can turn a single topic into dozens of pieces of unique-feeling content.

The 10 types of posts

The easiest way to illustrate this is with a visual with examples baked in:

Here’s a high-res version to save for future use.

An example using a single topic

Let’s come up with a post for each type for "writing strong hooks:"

1. Actionable: "How to write a fear-based hook"
2. Observation: "The best creators' hooks don't feel like hooks"
3. X vs Y: "When you use a hook vs When you don't"
4. Motivation: "How a powerful hook got me featured in Forbes"
5. Analytical: "Hooks from LinkedIn's Top 30 Creators"
6. Listicle: "10 books for writing hooks"
7. Contrarian: "Most hooks are clickbait"
8. Testimonial/Client win: "How my client grew to 50k followers"
9. Personal story: "How obsessing over my hooks changed my business"
10. Meme: idk some meme about hooks

These are just off-the-cuff ideas. You could approach each one quite differently:

• There are endless memes.
• You can share multiple client stories over time.
• You can share various frameworks on writing hooks.
• You can analyze specific people’s hooks.

In short, you could easily generate over 100+ post ideas about writing hooks using these 10 post types as a guide.

And that’s just for the content idea of “writing hooks,” which could be a subtopic within broader topics like creating ads, copywriting, or audience building.

Plug these into your content creation system, and it will be much easier to generate a ton of great post ideas. Read the full article for examples and frameworks.

With ads and landing pages, you have seconds to:

• Communicate what you sell
• Why it matters to them
• Make them feel something

Energizing emotions such as excitement, amusement, and awe drive action—clicking, buying, sharing, or engaging. Ads that make you feel something are also a lot more memorable.

The Mullet (aka The Smile) is a simple and effective way to check those boxes in a single, powerful headline.

• Business in front: Put the factual business message upfront.
  • “Follow me on LinkedIn.”
  • “People swear by it.”
  • “Please enjoy responsibly.”
• Party in the back: Make them smile with a joke on the business message.
  • “Or I’ll keep following you in person.”
  • “And at it.”
  • “The Internet never forgets”

Got it?

Nah, of course not. Let’s dive into some examples (all from Dan Nelken’s post):

The Mullet is a powerful way to quickly get the important message across and leave them with a smile on their face. People who see your mullet will:

• “Get” what you sell
• Feel positively towards you (which is rare for an ad)
• Remember you (so they think of you after a Trigger Event)
• And most importantly, more likely to take action

Dan even uses this technique for his copywriting newsletter 🤣:

Experiment using The Mullet in your next ad or landing page header.

And if you need help figuring out your value props and writing a header and subheader for your site, check out our popular Above the Fold Playbook.

How many of you would, at least on occasion, like to be out of the relationship you’re in?

That’s the powerful opening line for an ad (here’s the video) from MasterClass for their course with renowned relationship therapist Esther Perel:

It’s a powerful ad that doesn’t feel intrusive or overly promotional. It’s emotional and thought provoking. It’s filled with credibility building and social proof.

Here’s the line-by-line analysis (click here or the image for a high-res version):

Key learnings:

• For longer videos like this, use various cuts to keep people engaged
• Use a strong hook to get people interested, then use another hook halfway to keep their attention (ex: ”Would you say, coming out of your childhood…”)
• Layer credibility and social proof throughout the video to add weight to what you’re saying
• Use social proof/testimonials to pitch the product instead of doing it directly
• Sell the benefits, not the features
• Leave the CTA subtle in the video and use the ad itself to do the pitch.

Want ad inspiration from top startups? Check out our Ad Vault.

As Alex starts his post: “What should a strategy actually LOOK LIKE? What is the "thing"? What is the format?”

It's not a 50-page business plan or an Excel file with 10 years of projected cashflows.

Instead, here’s how to write a simple & effective strategy: as a Google or Word doc.

It’s divided into 4 sections:

1. The strategy argument: Outline your interpretation of the market, your plan, and why you think your plan will work.
2. The strategy statement: A short practical statement of the strategy. Boil it down so your friend can understand it when you tell them over drinks.
3. The implications: A list of the key things you must do to execute the strategy.
4. The execution flow: A suggested order and prioritization of these actions.

Strategy argument

Structure your argument in a narrative flow:

1. The status quo: This is what the market is like right now
2. Why this sucks: Why the status quo needs to change
3. Our belief: How we think differently to everyone else (our breakthrough insight)
4. Our solution: Based on our breakthrough insight, this is how we will fix the status quo and deliver massive value

The narrative flow helps you refine the weak parts of your thinking.## 

The strategy statement

Our brains are lazy. Even exceptionally intelligent people like simplicity.

The best strategies can be summarized in a simple sentence.

Everyone on the team should be able to hear this statement, understand it, remember it, and help it shape their thinking.

As Alex recommends:

• Don’t make it pretty (or cute)
• Don’t make it too short (or you’ll confuse people)
• Don’t make it sound like a tagline (this isn’t marketing copy)

Just make it clear. Unambiguous. Practical. Usable.

For example, when Tesla started, EVs were small and boring. Tesla could have said:

"Use EV technology to create luxury, high-performance vehicles to attract people to the segment and grow the size of the market (before going down market).”

(The bolded text is my addition to Alex’s example.)

In other words: “Make electric cars cool and desirable, then make them accessible.”

The implications

Outline the changes that need to take place to bring the business to a position where it is obviously delivering the strategy.

Obviously means that an external observer could explain your strategy to you simply by looking at what you’re up to.

For example, we never explicitly told the world that our strategy was to create a media/education business to provide free value to early-stage founders so that they trust us and want to work with our agency. But that became obvious to many people.

Break this down into sections across different parts of the business. Product, Brand, Marketing, Sales.

What does it mean for each of them? How do they each need to change?

Execution flow

If you nailed the strategy, it should be easy. If it’s not, your strategy isn’t clear enough.

Sketch out the order of the high-level actions to implement this strategy:

1. First we need to do this
2. Then this
3. Then this

This isn’t every single task. That’s what Asana, Basecamp, and ClickUp are for. Instead, these are the high-level things your company must do to fulfill its strategy.

For example, to create a media/education business to provide free value to early-stage startups so they trust us and want to work with our agency, that could have been:

1. Start a free growth community
2. Start a free newsletter to nurture the community
3. Create free resources and distribute them on our website and social media and include mentions of the agency
4. Grow the audience and traffic to these resources

What’s next

Run the strategy by the team and friends. Then, start implementing it.

And stick to it. Don’t get distracted or compromise until the strategy is proven wrong.

If you want to dive deeper into some of Alex’s strategic ideas, I’ve written about 3 of them in previous newsletters:

• Play the Opposite’s Game with your strategy
• “Normalize the Weird” or “Weird the Normal”
• Contrarian Value

I also recommend his book No Bullsh*t Strategy.

Or you can read through the 48 strategy tactics we've had in the newsletter.

I’ve spent far too many hours scrolling through the top posts on Reddit, YouTube, X, and Instagram to reverse-engineer what made them go viral.

Three distinct types of posts go viral:

1. Remarkable world news: pandemics, wars, explosions, new presidents, etc. This goes viral because of its real-world impact.
2. They’re cute, hilarious, funny, amazing, inspiring, infuriating, or heartwarming.
   1. A woman’s car melted by a fire, but her Stanley mug remains pristine.
   2. The Dallas Zoo simply tweeted: “The Zoo is closed today due to a serious situation.” Comedy gold.
   3. Greta Thunberg dunks on Andrew Tate.
3. Someone went extremely over the top and did something 99.9999999% would not. More on this below.

#1 and #2 are quite hard to manufacture.

But with #3, you have a serious chance if you’re creative and put in the work.

Some examples of going over the top:

1. Mr Doodle spent 2 years doodling all over the walls, floors, ceilings, and furniture of a completely white house and filmed it as a stop motion video – 6.4M views on YouTube and 158k upvotes on Reddit
2. MrBeast spent 17+ hours saying "Logan Paul" 100,000 times – 23M views
   1. This is MrBeast’s thing. Doing insane stuff that no one else will: recreating Squid Game, burying himself for 50 hours, rebuilding Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory, or going through the same Drive-Thru 1,000 times.
3. A man turned his missing eye into a working flashlight –192k upvotes on Reddit
4. KamuiCosplay spent 1.5 years creating an insanely detailed cosplay costume with over 1,000 LEDs – 152k upvotes on Reddit
5. Richard Linklater filmed the movie Boyhood over 11 years with the same cast to accurately portray growing up – $57.3M box office on a $4M budget.

The above are flashy consumer examples, but it can be applied to B2B as well

The bar (and the viral ceiling) is often much lower. Some simple and effective examples:

• The massive CopyHackers guide Every Copywriting Formula Ever. It's an obvious bookmark as a copywriter.
• Lenny’s Newsletter’s goes incredibly deep in his articles, often featuring quotes from dozens of people he interviewed at hot startups.
• Naim Ahmed’s post, where he analyzed 100 hooks in detail.
• Richard van der Blom’s annual 100 page PDF reports on the LinkedIn Algorithm.
• GrowthInReverse’s deep analyses of how creators grew to 50,000 subscribers.

You want someone to say: “Wow, this is insane! I can’t believe someone did this.”

Because if they do, they’ll forward it to someone else.

An important caveat

So yes, this may be the most likely way to go viral.

But it requires a really good idea and a TON of work (that's the whole point).

To be more than a simple flash in the pan, you need to find something related to what you sell. Otherwise, it's just a cool thing that people share, and you don't get anything lasting out of it. Your product/service needs to be an inherent part of the story.

Takeaway: Make your message so integral to the narrative that people can’t tell or experience the story without it.

Mr Doodle's is a great example of that. He took his regular art to an unparalleled level. If you liked the video, you'll love his art. You can't tell the story of the video without talking about his art.KamuiCosplay, too, created a great piece of marketing by highlighting her skill.

But, the man who turned his missing eye into a flashlight got nothing but a few days of dopamine from all the fleeting attention. No one knows or cares who he is specifically.

So find something that no one in your industry has ever done or is likely willing to do, and do it in a way that makes your product an integral part of the story.

I recommend the book Contagious: Why Things Catch On by Jonah Berger.

The typical company hires an SEO agency that pumps out low-quality content at high rates. Or they hire meh contract writers to write fairly meh content that are thinly veiled sales letters. Or they write surface-level and basic stuff.

And the typical person spends less than 30 minutes writing a LinkedIn post and wonders why it flops.

Which brings us to the first commandment of content marketing:

Thou shalt write for extremely high quality. 

Until you've earned a reputation for quality in the reader's mind, they don't read closely. Instead:

• They skim.
• They don't fully appreciate your arguments.
• They assume you're just trying to sell to them (instead of educate).

The ultimate “hook” is the author's reputation. In other words, the “from line” is more important than the subject line. The author more than the title. The podcast more than the episode title. The YouTuber more than the thumbnail.

You want to train people to see your name (or brand) and associate it with being worth the time investment to stop and read it.

Because most content is not.

You can do that by not shying away from great, in-depth content.

People don't have short attention spans for content: They finish three-hour Joe Rogan episodes and binge fourteen hours of Netflix.

They have short consideration spans: they must be hooked quickly. To do so, ensure your first minute is incredible.

Extreme quality stems from four factors:

• Engagement — Are you hooking readers with your intros? Are you exciting them about what they're about to learn? Are you effectively conveying how valuable the material is? Does it spread out hits of dopamine? Does it break up lots of text with images?
• Concision — Are you conveying your points without fluff?
• Depth — Are you offering a thorough analysis that exceeds the self-evident parts of the material? Are you giving them access to knowledge or data they wouldn’t normally have access to?
• Novelty — Are you sharing counter-intuitive thoughts that readers wouldn't have pieced together on their own? That's how you trigger dopamine hits.

Yes! All of this matters for SEO as well. A huge factor in SEO is whether someone clicked a link in Google and terminated their search on your post. It has to be good if the person stopped trying to find other resources to answer the question.

The criteria for different content types

Search-driven (SEO) content should fulfill these criteria:

• You have something comprehensive and actionable to say about the topic that can resolve someone’s query.
• Potential customers search Google or YouTube for this topic.
• The topic can naturally segue into a pitch for your product.

Sharing-driven (social) content should fulfill these criteria:

• You have something novel and surprising to say about the topic.
• The novelty resonates emotionally or intellectually, which prompts sharing.
• The topic can naturally segue into a pitch for your product or cement you in their mind as an expert in that topic.

And both types of content benefit if you go over the top. It makes it noteworthy, shareworthy, “bookmarkable,” and “linkable” (in other blogs and newsletters). The best backlink strategy is making content that people organically link to—also known as the Skyscraper Technique.

In short: quality is king

The world doesn’t need more content. But it desperately needs better content.

Across almost every industry or niche, there is opportunity to become a respected name by writing in-depth, quality content.

Train people to associate your name with quality, and you’ll have their attention.

What’s next?

This is an edited opening of our Content Marketing guide. Continue reading here.

Here are some additional resources:

• I enjoyed this podcast episode on Lenny Rachitsky’s writing process (writer of a 7-figure, 650,000-subscriber newsletter).
• My guide to writing hooks.
• My cofounder's guide to Writing Better (read by hundreds of thousands)
• Go through the 64 content marketing insights shared in this newsletter.

You don’t need “link building” trickery to rank in Google.

Here’s a startup whose only SEO strategy was to consistently publish perfectly optimized blog posts a few times per week:

They started with zero authority, zero backlinks, and a new domain.

So what makes a blog post “perfectly optimized?”

It's a blend of art, science, and choosing the right keywords. 

Let’s dive in.

The anatomy of a perfect blog post:

Before we do, an important message:

A perfect blog post is optimized as much for humans as it is machines. You need to make it engaging, thought provoking, and thorough. It needs to solve the person’s problem and sustain their interest throughout the process as time on site and “terminated user’s search” are strong SEO signals.

#1. SEO Metadata 

No, this is not for SEO ranking. It’s to improve clickthrough rates when your post shows up on Google. Treat it like ad copy—it must be compelling.

• Title: Craft a compelling title with your target keywords. Though not a direct ranking factor, it's bolded in search results and should include a CTA.
• Description: Treat it like ad copy, hook their interest so they click.
• URL: Ensure it matches your target keywords. Avoid duplicate page structures and refrain from including years in URLs.

For example, if you’re targeting “blog post checklist” do “/blog-post-checklist”

Resources to help: 

• Above the Fold Playbook (teaches header + subheader writing)
• 10 Ways to Hook People
• All our copywriting tactics

#2. Schema markup

• Implement schema types like Article, BlogPosting, and Breadcrumbs so your content displays on the Search Engine Results Page (SERP). If yours doesn’t, someone else’s will.

#3. Original images

• Every image should have a descriptive Alt attribute for SEO visibility and accessibility. Don’t just lazily say “image of UI.” Describe the key elements as if someone can’t see them.
• Break up or replace large amounts of text with visuals.
• Stock photos, no thank you.

#4. Content length:

• Aim for a minimum of 700 words, adjusting based on:
  • Competition: If competitors are at 1,000 words, make a more thorough article that’s 1,500+ words.
  • Query specificity: A shorter article is probably sufficient if the keyword is super specific. If it’s broad, like “brand marketing,” then a very broad and thorough article is likely required.

Don’t just add random nonsense like AI blog post writers seem to do. Instead, add contextually relevant sections and examples to round it out.

#5. Table of contents with anchor links:

• For longer articles (1,000+ words), add a table of contents to make it easy to jump to what they care about.
• Use anchor links throughout the content for easy navigation. Google indexes these, enhancing user experience (UX) and providing valuable data.

#6. Heading structure:

• Use only one H1—the title of the article, ideally with the target keyword.
• Add supporting text under each heading to add context.
• Use H2s, H3s, and H4s appropriately.
• Make headings compelling. You have to keep them interested.

#7. Internal links:

Internal links are extremely important. Many SEO experts say they’re more important than backlinks.

• Ensure every page has internal links leading to and from it. This aids in crawl efficiency and contextual relevance.
• If you have a long article targeting a high-level keyword ( ), each section in that article could link to another dedicated blog article (ex: top brand marketing examples, what is brand marketing).
• Aim for posts to have upwards of 7+ internal links by cross-linking related articles.

#8. HTML elements:

• Use lists, tables, and accordions to capture featured snippets. It also makes the article more legible and delightful of readers, increasing time on site and chance they terminate their search with your article (and maybe subscribe).

 #9. YouTube embed:

• Ideally, pair each blog post with a complementary YouTube video. Embedding videos act as backlinks and enhance visibility on both Google and YouTube.
  • Shopify grew their YouTube to 230k subscribers in 18 months with this strategy.

#10. Clear, compelling CTA 

• Add clear CTAs throughout the article to turn readers into leads. This can lead to better interaction metrics and conversions.
• Add contextually relevant lead magnets (email courses/PDFs) to each article.
• Add popup modals that trigger based on time on the page (a few minutes) or scroll depth (>50%).

To practice what we preach, here’s a helpful visual to go with it.

Use this checklist when creating blog posts and it’ll resonate with readers and search engines alike.

Thanks to our friends at Contact Studios for help with this one.

If it’s helpful, we collaborated with them to create 4 free blog post templates. They’ve used them to generate millions in organic traffic in the past 8 months.

Zero pressure, of course. You can easily write articles without them, but they’re a nice starting point.

Ad creative (imagery) is the number one way to make your ads profitable—or not.

Your job as a marketer is to:

1. Think out of the box
2. Draw inspiration from others
3. Make it clear what you sell
4. Make it hooky and to the point

Here are two great ad campaigns to learn from:

Chirps: Sharon, not Karen

2.4M views on YouTube and 5.6M views on Facebook.

And a lot of love in comments:

And it’s just an ad. An ad one of our team members saw on TV of all places.

What this ad does well:

• It starts in “TikTok format,” showing a woman yelling at people. This is a big “pattern interrupt” when you’re watching on a TV where everything has a high production value and is in a landscape format.
• It plays off of the popularity of the “Karen” meme, and who doesn’t love the spicy outrage from watching a Karen yell at someone?
• If you notice the comments on Facebook, many people are tagging their friends named Sharon. It's a perfect excuse to engage and spread it.
• It then switches to reality TV/documentary style with a dynamic back and forth between her, her Karen-like actions, and her husband’s take.
• It transitions to the product nicely and pitches it in a funny way that keeps you watching. It’s not a robotic ad read.

Gett’s black cab ads

Gett is an Uber competitor. They’re much smaller and can’t compete on speed, cost, brand recognition, or ad spend.

Here are the ads they made to display in London to advertise their taxi booking service.

For context: The ubiquitous taxi in the UK is the “black cab.” A big car that looks straight out of the 1950’s:

What these ads do well:

• They’re fighting a different fight. Uber and Lyft battle over cost, wait times, and ride options. They’re basically the same app. Instead, Gett focuses on the benefits of the quirky black cab: they’re big, they use bus lanes, they’re iconic, and they’re a great way to show up to a fancy event in heels.
• They’re funny, memorable, clever, and tongue-in-cheek. It leaves you with a positive association with the brand—which a lot of ads do not.

One of the most important metrics for an ad is memorability. It’s rare that someone sees an ad and immediately buys, particularly for in-person ads, but even digital ads.

Typically, people hear about a brand or product dozens of times when they don’t need it. Then a Trigger Event causes them to finally take action. They’ll typically buy the ones that first come to mind that they have positive associations with.

Creative, rhyming, and tongue-in-cheek copy help make you the one they think of.

Additional resources for ads

1. 52 growth tactics about Ads. And 55 on Copywriting.
2. Our popular Growth Guide’s Making Ads and Running Ads sections.
3. Browse our Ad Vault (a library of 164 curated ads) or the Meta Ad Library.
4. We can run your ads for you. Everyone on our ads team has 10+ years of experience.
5. I also recommend saving great ads to find as inspiration. Save them to Facebook, Instagram, Notion, mymind, or whatever tool you prefer.

What you don’t do is as important as what you do.

1 person businesses up to $1 trillion businesses have to decide what to focus on.

The smaller you are, the more important it is to spend precious resources on what matters. The larger you are, the more important it is to prevent a horde of people from doing a lot of the wrong things.

Many startups use the RICE prioritization framework, in which you rank each initiative on four factors (Reach, Impact, Confidence, and Effort) and combine them into a score. Then, you prioritize the ones with the highest score.

Let's dive into the parts of RICE:

#1. Reach 

How many customers would see the change (product), or how many new potential customers would it reach (marketing)?

How to rank it:

• The exact # of people you expect (50, 1k, 50k). You’d need to assume “per year” or “per month” for all your answers.
• Or something like this:
  • Most/All = 10
  • About half = 5
  • A fraction = 2

#2. Impact

How much would it affect the business if it worked? For example, how much more revenue this year?

How to rank it:

• A 1-3 or a 1-5 scale
• Or something like this:
  • S (<5%) = 3
  • M (5-10%) = 5
  • L (10-20%) = 10
  • XL (>20%) = 20

#3. Confidence

How likely is it to work?

How to rank it:

• A percentage confidence like 10%, 25%, 50%, and 80%

#4. Effort

How much time, money, or energy it takes. This is the only “negative” factor. You want this to be as low as possible.

How to rank it:

• A 1-5 scale
• The number of hours, days, or number of person-weeks or person-months
• Or something like this:
  • Trivial (XS) = 1
  • Few Days (S) = 2
  • 1-2 weeks (M) = 5
  • 1 month+ (L) = 20
  • Quarter+ (XL) = 60

Note: Everyone does the scoring and calculation differently depending on how they want to weigh the different things. Some do Low, Medium, and High on each. Some do more complicated ones. The “Or something like this” values above are from this template made by Alexey Komissarouk, which I recommend.

An example

For example, if you want to decide between re-doing your drip email campaign for new subscribers to promote your product and adding a blurb to your weekly newsletter, everyone would have various opinions about which is better.

But let’s RICE it:

Based on this scoring, even though the drip email rewrite would have a greater impact at a higher confidence level, it’s still worth doing the newsletter blurb first because it requires minimal effort and reaches more people.

Now, the team can objectively agree to prioritize that.

This becomes even more important when there are 100+ different ideas rather than just two. It makes it far easier and more objective to choose.

As important, however,  is that everyone on the team can throw ideas to the list, and you can go through and RICE each one and choose the winners. Everyone can feel their ideas are heard, and they can understand why they aren’t chosen.

It becomes objective rather than subjective or personal.

And if people feel comfortable submitting ideas, they’re more likely to do so, especially when the ideas are a bit crazy. You’ll not only be better at prioritizing ideas, but you’ll also have a team that’s better at generating interesting ideas.

And interesting ideas are the ones that often move the needle in a big way.

Get the whole team involved. There is no bad idea. Just put it in the table and RICE it.

Again, I recommend this template.

If you want to go even deeper

RICE is great, but the 30 seconds of evaluation are often guesswork.

So, for larger, more sophisticated companies that have already picked all the low-hanging fruit, you should do an even deeper analysis. This is what Darius and Alexey call the DRICE framework—a Detailed RICE.

Here are the components:

• Hypothesis: Briefly explain the idea with justifications for its effectiveness.
• Impact estimate: A bottom-up financial model estimating the idea's impact. For example, Darius and Alexey’s article provides a more detailed impact estimate.
• Cost estimate: Roughly break down the idea into smaller tasks and estimate the number of hours/days/weeks expected from the team for each (with a buffer) plus additional costs like production or legal costs.

The same components as RICE, just more detailed. You might discover that the impact or cost is significantly different than you first anticipated.

Check out Darius and Alexey’s article for more detail :)

SEO articles are not “one and done.”

It’s an iterative process that depends on how well the article is ranking and its trajectory. 

First, here’s evidence of WHY you should consider this. SEO expert Tim Hanson updated some stale articles when he discovered they were trending downwards. You can see the difference they made:

Here’s Tim’s process:

1. Pop up Search Console every quarter.
2. Go through all your articles that are at least a few months old. Find articles that are trending downwards and add them to a list.
3. For each page on that list, apply the below changes depending on how they currently rank.

Ranking 1-7 and getting traffic

These are the articles doing well. They rank for their target keywords and get a decent number of eyes and clicks. Once an article gets 100+ visitors a week change your goal from SEO increases (views) to conversion increases (sign ups, purchases).

Consider things like:

• Adding CTA’s/signups/relevant next blogs
• Adding videos to go deeper
• Creating lead magnets and content upgrades
• Potentially adding more context to the article

Do not fundamentally change the concept of the content.

Google has placed it high for a reason, and that reason is usually the “feel of the whole blog”. Don’t change that. Changing that more often than not results in losing rank.

Position 8-25

Content ranking here is on the right track, but needs a little something extra.

Often the article is not addressing the actual search intent. Why are people searching what they’re searching for? Are you actually answering that question or just addressing it? Are you answer their next question?

You’ll want to add things like

• Core keyword in the H1/H2’s. You’re likely missing it
• Shorter paragraphs and bullet lists to making skimming easier (improve readability)
• More internal links
• More focus on the key search intent
• Expanding further to answer their “next question”

Pos 25+

Assuming the blog is at least a few months old, it’s likely stuck.

The most common reason why it’s stuck is it doesn’t match search at all. It’s not even close. Go and take a deeper look at the pages ranking for the keyword you’re going for. See what patterns they all follow.

How are they talking about the keyword/keyphrase you’re trying to rank for? More than likely you’re missing something obvious that 5+ pages on the SERPs are doing well.

The second most common reason why you’re not ranking? Likely word count. Check the average word count and make sure you’re matching that average. Shorter is unfortunately not considered better in SEO most of the time.

Pos 50+

Rewrite entirely. If you’ve been holding this position for your core keyword for 6-12 months. You likely need to rewrite the whole thing. No one is ever going to see this page.

Quick note

The problem with content marketing is that every time you publish something, you're giving yourself future homework to edit and update it in the future—especially if it's about topics that shift and update frequently. This can become quite unwieldy quickly.

It's one of many reasons we recommend less, but better content.

Some SEO resources

• Our past and future tactics about SEO and Content Marketing.
• Newsletters/blogs from SEO creators like Kevin Indig, Eli Schwartz, Backlinko, and Marie Haynes
• Some of our fave SEO tools: ahrefs, Semrush, Exploding Topics, and Surfer.

Tiny word changes can massively impact how people feel and react.

Our partner, Katelyn Bourgoin, and Phill Agnew (host of Nudge) coined the term “Wallet Opening Words.” Powerful words that cause people to reach into their wallets.

Here are some of my favorite lesser-known ones that are simple to implement:

Because bias

Simply telling people WHY you’re making a request is powerful. Even if it’s meaningless.

An experiment showed that 60% of people allowed the researcher to cut in line at the photocopier by saying “I have 5 pages. May I use the xerox machine?”

By simply adding "because I'm in a rush" raised compliance to 94%. Surprisingly, adding the obvious "because I have to make copies" also reached 93% when there was 5 pages, but had no change when they said it was 20 pages.

Specific prices

Specific numbers are both more believable and more memorable than round numbers. We’ve taken advantage of this by running sales for UNIGNORABLE for 37.5 hours vs 24 hours.

A study found that beggars received +60% more donations by asking for oddly specific amounts rather than the typical quarter, dollar, dime, etc.

Framing

There’s a classic psychological bias called “what you see is all there is.” We often take what is presented and evaluate it without bringing in all our knowledge about the world.

A powerful way this manifests is that you can control how someone perceives and experiences something by framing it a certain way. For example:

If you know the job your product does for customers (an indulgent snack), you can better frame it as being really good at doing that job (an unhealthy lassi). Whereas if you tried to frame your lassi as a healthier alternative to a milkshake, all the people seeking indulgent snack would go buy a milkshake.

Authority

Would you rather talk to a customer support person or the founder? Which would you more likely believe and reply to?

Turns out, letters from a dentist’s office saw a 54% reply rate when signed by the dentist, but only 18% when signed by the dentist’s secretary.

Emails that come from the founder will always perform better than emails that come from Bob the SDR. This donation request coming from Obama was the most successful email of his 2012 presidential campaign:

Present tense

People commonly write in past or future tense on websites and in emails.

But, present tense is far more powerful. A study found customer reviews using present tense receive 26.4% more upvotes and increase product purchase intent by 12.3%.

Studies also found that languages that use present tense to describe future actions (i.e. “I buy that tomorrow” rather than “I will buy that tomorrow”) are better at saving for the future because it feels more tangible.

Words are powerful

Just because you run a few ads or send a few emails that flop, doesn’t mean that no one wants your product or service. The words you choose are critical.

Here are some helpful copywriting resources:

1. Above the Fold Playbook: This will walk you through rewriting the most important part of your website: the beginning.
2. The Growth Guide: We walk through how to write copy for your landing pages and ads in this free guide to growth marketing. 
3. My copywriting articles: I have written a few free articles on copywriting ranging from copywriting frameworks and 10 ways to hook people.
4. Wallet Opening Words: This newsletter is a snippet of 5 of the 26.5 techniques that Katelyn and Phill cover in WOW.
5. Julian’s Guide to Writing Better: My cofounder Julian spent months developing his free writing guide after getting millions of views of his content.

52% of the Fortune 500 companies in 2000 went out of business by 2020. These are the world's largest companies with the biggest budgets.

And most of them died in just two decades.

Companies have two options to stay or become relevant:

• Sustaining Innovation. You make iteratively better products that you can charge more money from your current customers/market.
• Disruptive Innovation. You make products cheaper and more accessible for people outside your current market, which undercuts current products. Or you completely change the technology or form factor to make it way better.

Examples of this playing out

• Toyota emerged and made gas cars cheaper (which actually helped reliability). Ford had to decide if they tried to compete (#2) or make bigger and bigger trucks and SUVs (#1). Meanwhile, Tesla invested in electric, futuristic cars and became worth more than every other gas car company combined.
• Kodak made film cameras and focused on improving them each year. Nikon, Canon, Fuji, and Sony invested heavily in creating digital cameras and killed Kodak.
• Google focused on making more money from Search. Despite having more data to train AI than anybody else, a startup, OpenAI, creates ChatGPT and replaces the need for many Google searches because you can get nuanced responses.
• Lockheed Martin and Boeing made insanely expensive rockets and satellites. SpaceX emerged and made them way cheaper and reusable. It has already launched more satellites than all other companies combined (which is also acting to disrupt traditional Internet Service Providers with Starlinq).

If a company doesn't do #2, someone else will and kill them over time.

Most companies focus on #1 for a simple reason:

They’re made up of individuals trying to accumulate short-term evidence of achievement to demonstrate an upward life trajectory. This means more money, promotions, and awards.

And avoid evidence of incompetency, such as demotions, firings, or failure.

A company is a collection of individuals.

Individuals within the company all focus on accumulating short-term evidence of achievement. And profit this quarter or this year is king.

Employees and executive staff are often compensated with annual bonuses. Companies don't retroactively take that money back if the company fails 10 years later.

To maximize profit (and bonuses), they focus on improving current products for current customers and charge more money. An example of this is the iPhone. The iPhone 4 cost $199 to $299. The iPhone 15 costs $899 to $1599. Consumers are happy paying that because the iPhone 15 is so much better.

However, many companies neglect to invest in long-term, risky bets that could make their products cheaper and more accessible (but often worse) or completely different (and often better).

Startups are initially less profit-focused.

For them, short-term achievement is gaining any market share at all. And hungry, young founders are often driven by longer-term big payouts rather than short-term marginal gains.

Startups also typically can’t compete with incumbents on the best. But they can compete on different.

Startups are run by ambitious founders. Massive corporations are run by committees.

If it ever happens, it’s unlikely Apple will ever choose to disrupt the iPhone. iPhone sales are 52% of Apple’s revenue. Disruption could kill the cash cow.  

It will most likely be a startup that does unless Apple can maintain a culture of pushing disruptive innovation, even if it hurts in the short term. But I think that's unlikely now that a committee runs Apple.

Quick takeaway, you need both:

1. Sustaining Innovation to sustain or increase profit and keep customers happy.
2. Disruptive Innovation to stay or get ahead, and wow new or existing customers.

I recommend three videos and one article to dive deeper into these concepts:

1. Clay Christensen's TEDx talk and Harvard Business Review interview, which inspired this newsletter.
2. George Hotz's take on Lex Fridman's podcast, where he discusses the difference between companies that are "alive" and can pivot (ex: Facebook pivoting to Meta) and innovate and companies that are "dead" and cannot (ex: Google being so focused on Search that it missed generative AI). Here's the timestamp.
3. Clay Christensen's theory narrowly focuses on innovative disruption in making things more accessible and undercutting the market. Ben Thompson's 2013 critique of the theory says that's more true in B2B than B2C. Above, I discuss undercutting (Toyota and SpaceX) and drastic technological shifts (Tesla, digital cameras, OpenAI) as the two major forms of innovative disruption.

Classic maxim: If you want to increase a behavior, make it easier and more fun.

But this tactic flies in the face of that. It’s about intentionally adding friction in the form of:

1. Additional steps (more pages or more things to click or fill out)
2. More information or reading (more text, less images)
3. More decisions to be made (annual vs monthly, Pro vs Premium)

Here are examples curated by Ali Abouelatta of how adding friction increased conversions:

Additional steps + reading – Headspace

Headspace increased conversions by adding an intermediary page before the paywall to prime people with “why” they should subscribe.

Additional steps + decisions – Duolingo

Duolingo found that removing the 14-day pre-selected option increased retention. The pre-selected option is a quick “yeah, whatever, next!”

Having to stop and make a conscious decision causes you to take the goal seriously.

More reading + more decisions

Peloton used to have a super smooth one-click button to start their trial. Then they replaced it with a dense page with a lot to read. And you had to decide between two tiers. I suspect this did better because it highlights all the cool things you’re gonna to get, and you feel more in control.

People enjoy control.

So don’t just try to remove steps. Strategically make the process a little harder to get people to feel more in control and bought in.

The only way you find the best version is by experimenting.

Ali has a few more examples of Positive Friction here. I also recommend going through Growth.Design’s visual case studies.