Neville Medhora from Kopywriting Kourse on how to write like a champion

Neville, first of all, first and foremost, how do you spell Copywriting Kourse?

With K's. So Copywriting Kourse like normal, but with K's. It's misspelled on purpose.

What's the story behind that?

What I tell people is that copywriting with a C is mainly text and stuff like that, right? So it indicates that text is the only thing that we're wrangling, whereas copywriting indicates like you can transfer information from my brain to your brain through video, through a GIF, through emotion without text. That's what copywriting is. It's how do I get information from one brain to another brain or to a million brains? The real reason is Copywriting Course with C's was not available as a domain. I love it.

See, sometimes you have to come up with a better name. I mean, the name Single Grain was like Sujin coming up with, looking at the cereal box and saying Single Grain, right?

Ironically enough, people start using copy with a K for like everything now. Like, it's like a thing.

Yeah, it works. For those of you, those people that don't know who you are, who are you and what do you do?

I've been an entrepreneur my whole life. I've never had a job. That's kind of interesting. So since high school, I ran a rave company for 10 years. I sold it in 2011. called House of Rave. I believe it may still exist. It's not mine, so don't complain about it. And then I was part of AppSumo. I helped definitely grow from the beginning, and then I created the Voice of AppSumo, which was—

The Voice of AppSumo.

The Voice of AppSumo, the big fat, the 512-pound fat Asian sumo. Yeah, there's a lot more fat jokes, a lot more Asian jokes back in the day. We can't do those as much anymore.

Yeah.

And so I'm still, I help out the company whenever I need. I help out another big email list called The Hustle. And then I full-time run copywritingcourse.com, where I teach businesses, primarily software businesses, how to market their stuff, how to write better copy. Usually simpler, use more GIFs, use less copy.

That's always my advice. So for this short conversation, I think a lot of people, especially in tech, you know, everyone talks about paid ads. They don't talk about the importance of conversion that much. They don't talk about copywriting, which I think is kind of a dying art, but I think it's still super important. It's what I first started learning when I started learning marketing. Ironically, I actually read his blog on how he grew his business in the early days. You can listen to that podcast on Growth Everywhere. Just search Growth Everywhere, Neville Medhora. What is copywriting and why is it important to businesses today?

So without going too far back, like back in like the 1800s or 1950s, really the only way to sell a product, let's say you were trying to sell this globe, right? The way that you sell this globe is you don't go on Instagram and post a picture of it because guess what? That's not invented yet. So what do you do? You buy ads like in a magazine. Or you send out direct mail. Like you write a letter and keep this like when people were typing and stuff like that. So it's hard to reproduce a letter. You stuff it in an envelope, you get someone's address, you lick a stamp, you put it on it, and you pay for every step of these things, okay? And you pay for the people to pack this up, then you send it out. Now let me tell you, if you're about to spend like a million dollars to sell this globe, like you damn well better have something good in that envelope, right? So back then they used to Right now you can just blast out an email, who gives a shit, right? But before, if you're gonna spend a million bucks, you damn well better know what's gonna happen. So what they would do is they would test envelopes to a small batch of people, and they would get, let's say, people in Ohio ordered, but people in Kansas didn't. They'd be like, okay, we're not sending anyone to Kansas. And then they would test different packages of the envelope. One they would include a picture, one they would not include a picture, stuff like that, and see which ones. And that's where copywriting was born. It's kind of a science. And then as things got easier to distribute, so like you could blast out an email, you could make a webpage, and like hundreds of people can look at it for essentially free, people kind of said like, oh, you know, it's not worth testing. But the people who end up testing a lot like that and paying very close attention to how people interact with the copy or the video or anything, those are the ones that usually win.

Got it.

So yeah, it originated from that, and if you apply that to now how easy it is to blast out to an email list, but also take care in what you send people, it just compounds itself. Right? So, 100,000 email lists, some people will buy it, even if it's crappy, but if you make it really good, then a bunch of people will buy it. Makes sense.

What's old is new again, right? It's kind of the same concept.

Dude, like, I mean, we don't— I won't even go into it because it's like really secret, but a lot of the B2B stuff we do now is direct mail.

Wow.

And I'll end it at that, because it works, and I'm not gonna tell you about it. Great.

Well, yeah, the best marketers don't share their best stuff, so.

Nope, until it doesn't work, and then you make a course about it.

Make a course, and you sell it for a lot of money. Yeah. So, okay. What, for copywriting, I mean, you wrote the early-day AppSumo emails, right? So what kind of results were you able to get for AppSumo?

So originally it was Noah, and he was like building AppSumo off my couch. We'd like work together and stuff all the time. It was kind of a side project for him, but Noah was like really good at list building, so he had 50,000 people. So, you know, that's just Noah. And he really hated sending out the deals, so there's one called Grasshopper, you know, the phone tree company? And I'd actually used it for House of Rave, my previous company. He just sent out a deal that says like, get $100 off Grasshopper. And like, that was the deal, and it sold. And I told him, like, dude, I've been studying this copywriting stuff and using it on House of Rave. I did turn House of Rave from just an SEO, kind of hoping and praying I get orders, to email marketing company. I was like, let me try this on this AppSumo thing you're doing. And I wrote this really long email. It was like 3 pages. It was for a deal called Kernist, which is a font matching service, which is like the most boring crap in the world. It was only designers would want font matching service. Like, even I was like, what the fuck? Like, so, but I was like, there is a market for this. And it started out, it was pretty rough. We cleaned it up a little bit. The initial draft was like, if you're a font whore, because that's what they were.

Font whore?

Font whore. Yeah, there's people that really love fonts. Like, they know what Verdana is versus blah, blah, blah.

Font whore. Yeah.

So we called them font fanboys in the end because just for the spam reasons. And we made this really interesting way— we talked about how Steve Jobs was super, super duper into fonts, and we used these Steve Jobs quotes, and we explained how if you're a designer and you don't want to like figure out which are the best matching fonts, that this guy Kernist, who's a professional designer, does it for you. And this is like lifetime access to his list that he makes every month. And it was AppSumo's first $10,000 profit day.

Wow.

And we were both like, ooh, okay, that kind of worked. Like, we were almost taken aback by how well it worked. So we're like, let's try it again. So I wrote another, and another, and another, and for 2, 3 years, I was writing all the emails until it got overloaded and we had to hire other copywriters.

Got it, okay. And in that first 2 to 3 years, I think we did talk about some of the results. I mean, what was the company able to get to in terms of like size?

I think it was like, there was like 20 employees, although I don't gauge that as like a thing, but it was like millions of dollars of revenue.

Got it.

I think $5 million or something like that.

That's what copywriting can bring you, right? How do people get better at copywriting?

I'm teeing you up right now. Well, also, here's what I think it brings you. So keep in mind, AppSumo grew to, I mean, it's almost like a million people now. People would, open our emails every day, even if they weren't interested in what we were selling. So they'd just be like, dude, I just want to read your emails.

Guilty.

Yeah, I just want to read your emails. And so that was the biggest compliment, because you can't— like, people, even if we go to the promotions tab, whatever, people would hunt out the email to look for it and read it and figure out like what this new software is. And yeah, even is it entertaining or informative? Usually I like the 70% informative, 30% entertaining. That's my secret formula I like.

Got it, okay. And so how do people improve at copywriting? I mean, I'm sure you sucked when you first started, right?

Yeah, well, the first step is that most people don't even realize it's like a thing. Like, I almost didn't realize it, and so when I would send my House of Rave newsletter, 7,500 previous customers, so that's people who'd already paid me and had already liked the company. That's good, but I never made any sales. I made these very pretty newsletters. You can see them online somewhere, they're somewhere, and you can see my newsletter.

Do you still have your old blog?

Yeah, Nevblog, my personal blog.

Check it out.

Yeah, Nevblog. I think if you type in Nevblog House of Rave Experiment Quick Sell, some modification of those words, you'll find it. But, um, you can see the old emails. And while I got high open rates and people are like, oh, this is a very nice looking email, no sales. And the whole point was to get sales. So then the first thing I did, and you could learn from this, is I learned about copywriting. I read, um, The Boron Letters by Gary Halbert. You can get these for free online, just I will say this, print them. Print them. They were written in the '80s while he was in jail. I'll leave it at that. But if you read that, he taught— he's one of the old-school OG, like, rich dudes of the internet marketing world, the direct mail world back in the day, like pre-computer. So I read that and I was like, I'm doing this all wrong. So I used to go from negative $40 per email because I was losing money on the House of Rave email list, to I was making at least $2,000 to $4,000 per email blast I'd send out. Wow.

Wow.

After that. So that was like literally overnight became like an email marketing company, and it was a super fast turnaround. I was like, oh wait, I could describe a product without all the images and everything and talk about its benefits. You wanna know a quick example?

Yeah, yeah.

The first example I learned about? The first example I did was, there's these finger lights, right? And they're little lights that go on your fingers.

Yep, yep.

And they go, brrr. And I just thought like 16-year-olds on drugs at a rave were going like this to each other, like wigging out, right? But what I also realized from like, You know, picking up the phone every once in a while and talking to people on email was like, I would get a lot of orders from wedding planners. I would get a lot of orders from 35-year-old moms throwing birthdays. There was parents of autistic kids, no joke, I couldn't even make this up if I wanted to. Parents of autistic kids that would give them to their kids and for some reason this calmed them down. Kids would use them to look for monsters under the bed and wear them while they're sleeping. Battlestar Galactica, the show, bought a bunch to put as their laser ray guns.

That's nuts.

Yeah, and there's all these different reasons. Oh, plumbers would buy them because they have a headlamp, but they go under a sink, they can't see anything with the headlamp but on their fingers they could.

Hmm.

And so there's all these different uses of these stupid little finger lights and for the first time I was like, wait a second, maybe some people would like to hear that because not everyone knows that, right? And so I said like, you can use them for this, this, this, this, 10 different things, Halloween costumes, etc. Sure enough, like that deal sold out like that day and that's when I was just like, oh, okay, maybe if you take some time to adjust Just your messaging, you can completely change the outcome with just like a little bit of extra work. You're not changing design, nothing like that, just changing the text on the page. It's that simple sometimes.

Got it. So you got the BORN letters, and then there's the copywriting course too. So that's the last thing I want to talk about. What's the copywriting course?

Copywriting course was like, it was made out of demand. Like, I never made it meant to be a real company. January 2015 was it born as an actual company. But from AppSumo, we offered— people were like, how did you How do you write this stuff? Why do I keep reading your stuff? I don't even want to buy your stuff, but then I end up buying it. Why do I do this? So I made the copywriting course just to teach people like what I learned, and then it became this thing. And I was— and here was the big insight: companies would give all their people the copywriting course to watch before they were allowed to send out anything.

Hmm.

So like a secretary would start, and she's the one emailing everyone, and she'd write, dear sirs, to whom it may concern, blah blah blah, and people would be like, what the hell is this? So then she'd look at the copywriting course, maybe like an hour or 2 hours of videos, the original core course, and be like, oh, that's not how you write. That's not how you get a real response. That's like English, 9th grade AP English crap, right? So it kind of just retrains people really, really quick to write in a much different way.

There you go. Check out copywriting course, get the Boron Letters. I actually got it because of his recommendation, and it's actually really good. So if you want, if you care about conversions, if you care about just pleasing people, if you wanna make people happy, you wanna make your mom happy, check out Copywriting Course.

Wow.

Get better at copywriting, and we'll see you in the next video.