Writing to customers (marketing copy)

`1:19:11`

certainly going to finish because it's not that long and hopefully I'm pulling them through and it's you're able to read a letter you're it's hard to read a website how should it be different? I like long-form like more of a long-form old-school like direct mail style letter kind of style. Uh which we've experimented with in the past and and I've tried to do that. Our current site's not quite like that, but there's longer paragraphs. People are used to reading things in a certain way. Human race has been reading in a certain It could be right to left, left to right, but it's top-down usually like in a way where there's a sentence and it makes a paragraph, there's a space, there's another We don't We know how to do that. We know how to consume that. Right? I think the more you write that way, the better off it's going to be. Imagine like reading a

`1:19:57`

New York Times article that was just like Sometimes they do really beautiful visual articles, but if it wasn't an article format, it was like a web design page format of an article, you'd be like weird. I can't read this. I don't I can't absorb this. I don't know what's important. I don't know what in what order I'm supposed to really go through this. It'd be weird. So, I think that we do this on our websites because marketing. And then we're just kind of making it harder on ourselves. Yeah, what I'm taking away from you the past few minutes is like marketing professional and it's really just you are communicating to another human being and that human being is somebody like the Uber driver who maybe just started an LLC and they're trying to figure out place where am I going to how is my team going to communicate as we're going to do this? And

`1:20:44`

this comes down to people talking to people and there's all this fluff about business, the ties in the corporate world, all the corporate speak, but fundamentally it's just you're communicating to another human being and do not forget that. That's it. That's it. And I think business like the idea of wrapping it in business is what makes it hard and makes people stumble with it and it's funny like if business what what makes it hard actually is that there's money involved. If there's no money involved in a and this is like a hypothetical. If businesses didn't have money involved, they'd be more fun. People wouldn't take it so seriously. They wouldn't feel like they're so at risk all the time. And I try to think of it that way. I mean there's money of course, you got to like pay your bills and everything, but if this is more just like a fun thing to do and to make

`1:21:29`

stuff, you wouldn't try so hard and over try to have this message that you want to get out and and and and lather it in bad formats and buzzwords and jargon. You would just say the damn thing. Like you're having a conversation with somebody. We could not have written this conversation out. I mean wouldn't It would have been worse. Right? You know, this It's just talking it out is what makes it good. It makes it clear and direct, I hope. Mhm. Yeah. You've written four books. Yep. Getting Real, Rework, Remote, It Doesn't Have to Be Crazy at Work. Walk me through those four books and why you chose to write those books at those specific moments in time. Okay, that's a big question. Um and I don't I don't know if I have a real answer, but I'll work it out, okay?

`1:22:15`

So, Getting Real was in the early days. I think we published that in 2006 maybe. I don't remember exactly when that was, but it was pretty early on. Um and it was it was like our back in the day this was basically our method for building software and it was written to an audience of software makers. Our future books are written to a more broad business audience. Initially, we didn't have broad business. We had a software maker audience. And so, we wanted to basically put our cookbook out there. This is how I think about it. Right. So, I think about um I'm inspired by chefs basically. Chefs, really good cooks. they have recipes which they follow and you would think if they were business, they would keep them close to their