Writing has to be playful and fun

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becomes playful for me. And then I know it's going to be good as well. Has to be playful. I think. I don't like to get too serious about this stuff. And so, I'm here I'm like, "Payers and players and church This is fun." And I'm ripping on landlords to a certain degree. Like this is getting fun. Then let me just stop you there real Okay. One thing that I love about play that I just realized is when you're playing, you can't not be who you really are. There's no such thing as play without personality. And so, I think that what play does is it brings out the personality that so many people are seeking. Yeah. Valuations shot to the moon on the backs of businesses subscribed at luxury prices for commodity services that they had little control over. Add up your SaaS subscriptions last year. You should own that by now.

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I like that sentence, right? Well, I well, I think that that kind of hits them. Boom, you should own that by now. And that's sort of the third big hit. And you did. That's the revelation for me. So, it's a revelation. It's like "You're right, I should own that by now." That's what I wanted to put in someone's head. Like, "Yeah, I've been paying for these subscriptions for years. It's kind of the same thing. Yeah, I'm getting new features, but it's essentially the same thing. These companies have been making tons and tons and tons and tons of money, valuations through the moon. I should own this by now. You're damn right I should." Like that's how I wanted I wanted to transfer this feeling into the person at that moment and go, "You're damn right I should. I hadn't thought about that, but yeah, I should." You know, that kind of feeling. So, that's what that was about. So, now what you do is you

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have one more line here about SaaS and then what you do is you begin to introduce Once, which is this line of products. So, tell me about that transition and then why you thought about the structure in this way of talk about the problem, do a transition and then talk about Once. I want to get someone to to nod their head first. So, if I'm going to get um someone to agree with me later in a I kind of want them to agree with me it's kind of like you read the first half of this and you're probably going to go, "Yeah. Yeah. Uh-huh. Yeah." You're nodding. I want to find this resonance. Like I'm nodding, you're nodding and now you're open to hearing what I have to say. I've described what

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I feel like is the reality and now here's what I want to bring to what I what I want to happen next, what I what I think is that could be the new reality. So, that's why that that generally that format works well for me. Um I mean, I've seen and you when you look at great product demos, it's the same way. They kind of show a product and they go, "This is what's wrong with the product or the the category and like here's our solution." It's just kind of a nice way to I think establish a reality, get someone to go, "Yeah." And then they're open. And then you have some fun with Once. Once. Once. Once. Once. But what stands out is the way that you begin that is you say, "Once. Once upon a time you owned what you paid for. You controlled what you depended on

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and your privacy and security were your own business." Can I stop you there? The name Once, which is this brand, that the name came from um writing that once upon a time thinking actually, I didn't write thinking once upon a time used to pay for software. Huh. I'm like Once is actually once upon a time. That's good. I like that word. It also since we're paying once, once and once upon a time, like there's this double meaning there, which I really liked. And um so, it actually the name of the thing actually came from writing and thinking about how to talk about the And then how do you think about Now, you have the basically five bullet points that you talk about with Once. So why

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five bullet points? Why do you focus on those? You say, "Pay one time, own forever." You say, "We write the code, you get to see it." You say "We give you the software, you get to host it." You say, "Simple and straightforward, not enterprisey and bloated." And then finally, for one fixed price. Once. So, those bullets sort of follow a similar structure where the first half of the sentence is like the previous existence or reality and the second half is like the new the new things. I like that pattern. I like the bounce. I like the rhythm. I like the bounce. To me like if something's bouncing it's it's moving. I like the movement in the words and the sentence and I think it pulls people through. They're short. They're punchy. Yep. But hey, let's go on to the

`0:49:54`

Hey letter. So this one you open a little differently. You say, "Hey everyone, I'm Jason, CEO here at what are you going for there? Yeah, that that's a good question. Um when we launched which is an email service. I launched it initially with a with just this letter. This letter is currently on the existing site if you go down to the bottom of it. But initially at hey.com it was just And um it it was just this for a few So we didn't want to say exactly what we were doing, but we kind of want to say something about what we were doing. And in this case, I felt like it was more of a personal letter. The what the the once one is more of a This one felt more like a letter. Like I'm writing it to you and to say hi, here's my name.

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It kind of opens it up in a more personal way. Um I don't know strategically why I went that route, but it just felt like the right thing to do if there's only going to be this. It's less aggressive. It's more like a love letter to email. And so I wanted to open up in a in a in a happier thing than like a sharp statement. One of the things though that does show up in both is that has the same structure of things used to be this way. We loved how they were. Then they became broken and now we're trying to redeem the way that things are for how they should be. Structurally the same. And I think that what's important maybe about this if you're going to drive anything is like again, there's a there is a formula But they don't need to be the exact same

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formulas. This they're similar formulas. Like this one's more of a personal letter. Um but you'll see at the bottom of this one my my avatar is in the bottom of this one. The other one is not on the left hand side. Um my email address is on the left hand side. It's not on the right hand side. Like there's some some differences, but strategically or not even that, it is the same approach to getting a message out there which is to establish how it was or what's wrong with the current and what we're going to do about the the present. It then says, "Email gets a bad rap, but it shouldn't. Email's a It feels great to get an email from someone you care about or a newsletter you enjoy or an update from a service you like. That's how email used to feel all the time." And this is a feeling

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that is I want to get across early because most people don't like email. But you're like, "Actually, it's not that I don't like email. Like if I get an email from my wife, like I like that. If I get an email from an old friend, I like that. My uncle who's 100, he sends me an email, like I'm look when I see my my mom's uncle, my great uncle. I'm "This is amazing. I want to read this." So email is not bad. What's become of email is bad, but at its core it's still a wonderful thing. It's a treasure. So yeah. I want to people to go back go, "Yeah, I don't hate all email. I hate the spam. I hate like the the too many things that you know, emails from people I don't know. That's the stuff I don't like, but email itself is actually wonderful. Just like getting a letter in the mail is wonderful, but you also get junk mail. Do you hate letters? No, you