Jason Fried · 2024-05-22 · source ↗ · whole document (10)
Writing has to be playful and fun
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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
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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