The biggest winner in DTC is usually the business that's willing to take on the most legal risk in their ads. It always plays out that way. Brand scales using relatively normal ads. Then a competitor pops up and starts running ads that are 10% more aggressive. The original brand sees CAC go up because there's a new competitor bidding with better ads. In order to cope with the increased CAC, the original brand has a few options. Option 1: one-up the competitor by running ads that are more aggressive, which creates a never ending spiral of out-lying and out-risking. Option 2: switch to MRR/focus on LTV. Option 3: do both. That's why the market is playing out the way it is right now. Creative strategists are in higher demand than ever. And eCom businesses are switching over to MRR en masse, desperate for retention experts who know how to build and optimise a retention program - because the edge is now in retention economics. And if you're a brand owner running subscriptions without understanding cohort analytics, zero day churn, split testing on your subscription cohorts and beating controls, not knowing what good/bad metrics look like; you are going to lose to the brands who do (ie the clients at Mailer Profit)
Zarak retweeted
8 MORE THINGS YOUR EMAIL AGENCY HOPES YOU NEVER NOTICE
1) Your customers use the same words over and over in reviews and support tickets. Read the tickets, then read the copy. Those exact words never show up in it.
2) Read the copy out loud. It looks fine on a screen and sounds terrible coming out of a mouth. Real voice survives being spoken. Templated voice doesn't.
3) They never use a PS. Most people scroll straight to it first. It's the most-read line in the email, and it's just not there.
4) Or every email has a PS, and it's the same push every time. No pattern interrupt, no reason to actually read it. Just a habit nobody questioned.
5) The PS at the bottom has the same energy as the headline at the top. A real person's PS is an afterthought. This one is just the pitch again in a smaller font.
6) Only the major holidays get emails. BFCM, Christmas, Valentine's, whatever's already on everyone else's calendar. No holiday that's actually theirs, no founding date, no "national [whatever they sell] day," no made-up occasion tied to the brand itself.
7) A holiday hits, and the brand gets a generic sale banner with a new date swapped in. A brand with an actual personality would have an opinion about that holiday, not just a discount code for it.
8) The only thing that ever gets tested is subject lines and discount depth. Never positioning. Never the actual story.
xitter.cf/Saturdaymatters/status…
8 THINGS YOUR EMAIL AGENCY HOPES YOU NEVER NOTICE
1) Every email in the flow could be swapped for a competitor's and nobody would notice. The grammar's right. The brand isn't in it.
2) Read ten subject lines back to back. They could belong to ten different brands. Nothing distinctly “yours” survives past the first line.
3) No callbacks. No inside jokes. No reference to last week's email. Every send starts from zero, like the brand has amnesia.
4) The founder has a voice. You've heard it on calls, in texts, in how they explain the product to a friend. None of that voice ever makes it into copy.
5) The copywriter never takes a position on anything. Every line is a product fact wearing an exclamation point.
6) Every offer leans on a discount code to do the work. Nobody built a reason to open the email that isn't 15% off.
7) Read a month of sends in one sitting instead of one at a time. Individually they're fine. Together, it reads like three different people took turns.
8) No running bit, no recurring character, no phrase that's ‘become a thing’ with the list. A list that's been mailed to for six months should have inside references by now. If it doesn't, nobody's actually talking to them.
Zarak retweeted
This guy has hired and fired 4 email agencies in the last 7 months.
... We're still here.
Thinking that you can wake up late and still be as effective is a psy-op that’s designed to keep you less successful than you could be. Most successful people are still waking up before the sun. There's something about waking up early that seems wiser, and more noble. Waking up and working late leaves the opposite impression - that you’re disorganized and lazy. Ben Franklin said 300 years ago: "early to bed and early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise." And if you don't believe me, just take one look at the most effective people you personally know of. One thing they probably all have in common is a good sleep schedule. I see this in my employees specifically. The best ones are up early. This is such a failure-proof indicator of someones effectiveness that I literally fired an employee of mine after we did a team retreat; he consistently woke up later than everyone else in the villa.
Forgot to add but this is especially important if you're a copywriter/creative strategist. When you write copy, you're doing the most cognitively demanding work in all of marketing - writing messaging that needs to stop complete strangers dead in their tracks, build instant trust, and convince them to take action. Your brain needs to be firing at peak capacity. And your peak mental performance happens within the first few hours after waking up - not after you've been awake and brain rotting on titkok. The reason is simple: Your prefrontal cortex - the part of your brain responsible for complex thinking, creativity, and decision-making - has limited daily capacity. It's like a muscle that fatigues with use. The early morning has another massive advantage: Zero distraction
I know super high IQ individuals who studied at the most prestigious institutions in the world who, when prompted, will tell you to your face that "IQ isn't real" and it doesn't have a correlation with your long term success. That's because they lack realism. They let their emotions and sense of ethics cloud their entire reality; ie a super high IQ that sees a VSL for the first time and thinks 'this would never work' simply because it wouldn't work on THEM. This doesn't mean they are dumb. It just means they use their high IQs to justify their view of the world, rather than seek out truth. These types might go on to make great employees/doctors/lawyers. But the best entrepreneurs are people with high IQs AND high realism..
U will only win long term by having an edge. And your edge doesn’t need to be complicated. It just has to be the most expensive, time consuming and difficult task you can think of to beat your competition. When you build an edge, you develop a sense of conviction that can’t be faked. Because you know that 99% of people are not willing or capable of going through the fire you went through to get here. I’ve been working on the same core thing for the last 5 years… direct response. The only thing that might change is the medium through which I choose to generate income. Whether it’s my marketing agency, or my daily newsletter, or scaling an offer on cold traffic - the core thing is always direct response. That’s why I can’t really give out beginner advice. I can’t tell you how to get to the position I’m in because there is no shortcut, I just kept doing the same thing and let the rest fall into place. I kept tweeting. I kept writing. I kept paying for consulting. I kept reading. That’s all it is. The first time I got paid as a freelance copywriter was when I was 17. I'm 24 now. The first direct response advertising book I read was when I was 16. The principles haven’t changed since then, and never will change regardless of market conditions or AI. This is what gives me my edge. This is why my business has a ‘soul’. Because it is built off of true value that you can’t buy or SOP. You can’t simply emulate us with systems and templates. Focus on principles and put yourself in a vehicle where you can build until you die. If you don’t do this now, you’l find yourself stuck on a merry go round of re-acting rather than pro-acting until you eventually throw in the towel and go back to being average again
Sarah and I have grown our team from 12 -> 37 people over the course of a year. A genuine world class operator and expert when it comes to retention. My team is cracked lol
Hey retard this is not your brand lol. The owner is a close friend of mine & and works with my retention team. Michael '$1k eCom mentorship' has absolutely ZERO affiliation with this business. Wild how many people believed this LARP
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Sarah is by far the smartest retention strategist I've ever had the pleasure of working with. One of the few people who 'gets it' in a world of AI slop and automated blanket-solution service delivery. Definitely follow her
8 THINGS YOUR EMAIL AGENCY HOPES YOU NEVER NOTICE
1) Every email in the flow could be swapped for a competitor's and nobody would notice. The grammar's right. The brand isn't in it.
2) Read ten subject lines back to back. They could belong to ten different brands. Nothing distinctly “yours” survives past the first line.
3) No callbacks. No inside jokes. No reference to last week's email. Every send starts from zero, like the brand has amnesia.
4) The founder has a voice. You've heard it on calls, in texts, in how they explain the product to a friend. None of that voice ever makes it into copy.
5) The copywriter never takes a position on anything. Every line is a product fact wearing an exclamation point.
6) Every offer leans on a discount code to do the work. Nobody built a reason to open the email that isn't 15% off.
7) Read a month of sends in one sitting instead of one at a time. Individually they're fine. Together, it reads like three different people took turns.
8) No running bit, no recurring character, no phrase that's ‘become a thing’ with the list. A list that's been mailed to for six months should have inside references by now. If it doesn't, nobody's actually talking to them.
Most people believe that when you scale a service business/agency past a certain point, your service quality will inevitably drop off. I simply chose not to believe this, and our service quality has improved with scale. Your beliefs will always shape your reality
No one even talks anymore. It's just one person using a large language model to produce a response to your question (which you probably also used an LLM to formulate). After which, you use an LLM to break their response down, and then prompt it to come up with another response. This was one of the satanic elites greatest plays. Rot their brains away till they can't function without us... then switch to token based billing and become profitable. And harvest all their data ofc. I'm not just saying this either. I saw someone complaining in a group chat the other day about how his employees chat GPT literally everything - corporate slop which seems to be perfectly formulated with chat GPT. His employees use it to BS their way out of taking responsibility for poor performance and even reply to the most basic of questions from other team members. The business owner asked for advice on what to do. IMO? Fire the entire team and start from scratch. The brain rot has already taken over and there's not much u can do at this point. Skill issue + cultural issue. I have personally never faced such problems. In my company's we have no room for brain rot merchants, nor do we have room for poor performance and people who lack attention to detail. I have pre-AI copywriters who I started training in 2021 still working for me to this day. That said, I don't care how u get the work done as long as u do it with attention and care, and the final product is good enough to get my stamp of approval.
Text physiognomy is a real thing. If someone you’re close with texts you from a random number, you will be able to pinpoint exactly who that person is based on their text physiognomy. That’s why AI slop text gets glossed over. It has no soul in it. No one cares. I mean, how many times have you actually sat down to read, word for word, a very long output from an LLM? Not often I bet. U just gloss over it. Even if the information is inherently valuable. It just has no soul and u don’t feel anything from it. Now apply this to business. David Ogilvy said “The customer is not a moron. She's your wife”. Talk to your customer with the same level of respect that u would ur wife. The slop doesn’t work. But therein lies the problem - u don’t respect ur customer. That’s why your ads don’t work. And why your copy gets no spend. Because u didn’t give the customer the level of respect they require to convert. If u did, u would have put more soul into it. More research. Connect with them as a human would
It's easy to believe that extreme success is a privilege reserved for scammers, rich kids, or people who got lucky. The hard part is believing that it could be you. That's why belief always comes first, reality second. And that's why I don't really give advice anymore. I can tell you anything, but if your inherent belief stays the same, then nothing will change
We’re four years in and people are still talking about AI’s “potential” and what it “will” do and that we’re in the early stages of a technology that, for the most part, is still doing exactly what it was doing when it first launched. I can't wait to see what happens to the low IQs who left behind good, valuable careers/businesses to become patrons of AI slop. These hedge funds and AI slop corps constantly discuss what AI will or might or theoretically could do rather than what it actually does, because if they had to do that they’d have to say it constantly loses money and doesn’t have a measurable return on investment. Here's what someone in my private community said the other day and I fully agree:
"I’m convinced AI makes you a worse copywriter. It’s good for research. It’s good for short form straight forward, solution/product aware copy. But for unaware / problem aware copy and longer formats it really doesn’t work well. I started using heavy in 2023-2024z Helped me crank out 25+ hour long VSLs. Thought it was amazing. Then my hit rate slumped bad. For one client in particular. So I wrote a VSL for them and did it myself. That one did 10 million in rev. So yeah. AI fucks with your brain and makes you think it’s good / fast, when really it’s just fast and the copy lacks a lot. It’s only going to get worse btw. Tech companies will be optimizing for transparency and compliance and training to weed out manipulative content. People already seeing this with Claude."
But please, keep posting about your new agents and how they helped u streamline your business (highly doubt it - plus the people posting about this are too stupid to think of actually measuring the ROI/effectiveness of their AI implementations so you'd never actually know)
Yes. I was set up and betrayed by IRL friends of someone I considered a best friend. Kidnapped in foreign country at gunpoint and tortured for around 8 hours with a black bag on my head. Hands cuffed. Repeatedly told I would be killed. Total loss accrued > 300k usd. The kidnappers were kurds (avg 80 iq) so they did not find the hot wallet on my phone with real money on it lol. I was 23 when this happened. Business was good, but it had been plateau'ing for the last year and I didn't know what was stopping growth. I know now that it was me and my limiting beliefs. I now make significantly more than what I lost in a single month. But it was not easy to overcome the events and come to terms with it. I probably spent the next 2 months in fight or flight after it was said and done. I was told by my 'friend' that I would have the funds returned and it was all a big misunderstanding, but months later nothing changed. I will tell the full story one day, but for now it’s an ongoing investigation. But to answer the question, this was the canon event that led me to a mental rock bottom where I really didn't know if I was that guy anymore. But the truth is I was still him, and always have been him. I had no choice but to go back to the basics and reprogram myself subconsciously to grow again
I'm in bed every night with an excitement to wake up the next day. Butterflies in my stomach. Random ideas come to me at 2am when I'm drifting off - and I'll wake up and action them instantly. I'm dreaming about success with such vividness that I wake up questioning if that actually just happened or if it was just a dream. My mind keeps rendering solutions to every problem I face and it doesn't switch off. I have no desire for socialising and the opinions of others have become meaningless to me. I hope u get to experience the same one day