Your Aunt Judy's Ass Has More Perspective Than You or Me Right Now

Humble. Pie.

Those two words are, what I suspect, the most important two words in entrepreneurship, and I’ll tell you why:

Because most of us are blind.

So, so horribly blind!

When you’re building something new, you can’t see two feet in front of you. None of us can! It’s what makes entrepreneurs great at what they do: intense, horse-like focus. But all of that focus comes at a cost, and oftentimes that’s the cost of our own success. #shotinfoot

When you’re in the thick of a new business, your eyes are centimeters away from what you’re working on, at all times. You’re zoomed in. You’re in your own head. You’re not listening to Don the weather man on TV. (Unless, of course, there’s a tornado flying by your head in Philadelphia, in which case, you retreat to your bathroom tub with the closet thing you can find to a helmet: a spaghetti pot.) (That was so me the day before yesterday.)

Anyway: you’re concentrating! You’re thinking! You’re re-writing the same paragraph 150 thousand times! You’re analyzing and re-analyzing everything. You’re shaping and molding and doing and re-doing. You’re IN IT, BABY. And that’s great! That’s what you’re supposed to be doing.

EXCEPT—eventually, you can’t see the forest through the trees.

Eventually your eyes get so close to your work, everything starts to go fuzzy.

You can’t see your own work objectively anymore.

You have lost the ability to see.

So, what happens then?

Well, a few things (and they’re never good). You perfection the crap out of it and never actually launch. You launch and no one cares. You buy ads and no one clicks. You send out offers and no one buys. And you keep on promoting yourself half-heartedly, hoping that “the right people will align.” And you waste a whole lot of time and money because you couldn’t see what was right in front of your face the entire time:

The flaws.

Every idea has ‘em. And when you put a new idea out into the world, a large part of success is about wrestling with those flaws and trying to whip ‘em into smooooth, smooth cake batter. But here’s the thing: you can’t see the flaws when you’re that close. You’re too close. You’re staring at molecules. Your Aunt Judy’s ass has more perspective than you do right now.

So instead of fixing the flaws, you know what we tend to do?

A wholeeeee lot of random explanations / rationalizations / justifications / guessing.

I did my best, and that’s all I can do! I put it out into the world, and that was my only job! Whatever happens now is in the universe’s hands. ←baaahahahahaha.

And that’s how great ideas get murdered. They get murdered by their very creators, entirely by accident, because those same creators were not able to see past their own blind spots. They did not steward the idea forward; they stewarded their egos forward, instead. And soon, before you know it, that same business idea you were SO excited about; so motivated to work on; so excited for…is a dead slimy fish in the water.

And you know, this is normal! This happens to all of us, when we get too close to our work—especially when our ego is involved. We’re fragile! It’s our baby! And clearly, we always think our own ideas are (probably) better than they are—or at least better presented than they are. And that’s what I wanted to bring up today: the presentation of your ideas.

In other words: your messaging.

The way you talk about your idea is just as important as the actual idea itself: fact. I say this because if you can’t get someone to buy into what you do, then they never get to actually experience the magic that is YOU. So what you write on your website, your landing page, your sales page is actually para-freaking-mount: it’s the clothes you put on your offer. It’s the perception you create. It’s the understanding people will have. And that determines everything.

The problem is that most of us don’t really know what to say about our idea. It’s hard to communicate that kind of thing—especially when it’s still new and you’re still gnawing on it. But we give it our best college try, anyway, and just try to guess what’s going to resonate.

This is when we get into trouble. (Self included!) And we get into trouble because we can’t see straight. We aren’t our customers. We aren’t strangers. We aren’t able to see anything objectively. And so we write things that are, frankly, ridiculous. 🙂 And I am so guilty!!! I did that very thing just this week.

But first I wanted to say: in order to be successful at this game, you can’t only seek the positive praise. You can’t just look for the happy emails and the nice testimonials and the extra-lengthy clap emojis on Instagram. You have to have the courage to look for the flaws. Stare ‘em dead in the eye. You have to be willing to ask really uncomfortable questions like, “Why didn’t they sign up? What turned them off? What doubts do they have? What do they see that I can’t?"

Only then can you start to tweak your messaging—and your product—in the right direction.

Because there is no such thing as just “not being aligned.” When you’re doing it right, your JOB is to align…on purpose. However, that requires you to really know who you’re targeting as a customer and whose problem you are solving, and that, perhaps, is one of the hardest parts of this biz: choosing. Deliberately creating for one group, and eschewing another. We really, really suck at this. But until you do that, you can’t write anything great. Everything you say will be confusing. And nothing will resonate.

Take it from me!

I just had a little rendezvous with this trap with the Meat & Hair daily creative writing newsletter.

I have been collecting feedback from my most excited subscribers and have been really listening to WHY they've been loving Meat & Hair—and three of the things that kept coming up were: “Thanks for giving me permission to be me,” “this is helping me find my voice,” “I’m starting not to write like a sleazy marketer anymore.” In short, reading the daily newsletter showing other writers unabashedly being themselves? Is rubbing off. It’s giving that vital permission I was hoping for; normalizing creativity in business and communications and helping to inspire and make it THE STANDARD. Making it fun to write again; to remember that you don’t have to take it all so seriously. And that oftentimes, you will be far more successful if you don’t.

So I wanted to play with the copy a bit and try to reflect my #1 user’s language inside of it. This is what you want to do with your customer’s voice: use it in your own copy. There’s only one problem:

“Give me permission to be myself, “helping me find my voice,” and “not sounding marketey” are really, really vague, intangible promises. At least, they are out of context, when you’re a total stranger looking at a landing page, trying to analyze whether or not a product is going to help you. Like, what IS this thing? The less tangible something is, the worse it converts. That's why I led with "Write more creatively in 1 minute a day.")

BUT, I decided to try it out anyway, combining that messaging with some of the user voice I was getting. Ultimately you never know until you test. That is the only way you can ever know what really resonates: you can’t guess. You can’t just write whatever’s in your own head. You can to get started and not stall in a permanent land of paralysis, but you can’t leave it that way. You must be committed to tweaking, editing, bettering, making changes as you get new information.

So! I popped the test copy into Wynter.

Wynter is the company of my long-time internet colleague—and brilliant marketing mind—Peep, and it’s a way that you can submit your website, your landing page, your sales page, your whatever to strangers who are in your target audience (you get to pick who), and they give you that objective, “fresh eyes” perspective that we are all so desperately lacking. It’s not about your design & website usability—this is ALLLL 100% focused on your messaging.

They will automatically ask your target market the following questions:

• What’s your first reaction after reading this section?
• What about this is unclear or offputting?
• How clear is the offer?
• How much do you care about what is offered?
• After reading, what’s still unclear?
• What’s your biggest doubt about the offer?
• What did you like most about the offer?
• How compelling is this offer?

You can also submit your own questions if you’re wondering something specific, but for my purposes, this was all I needed: all I’m trying to do right now is optimize the messaging before I pay for ads.

And boy…was I glad I ran THAT test.

As I should have known, it failed horrrrrribly. Horrrrrrribly.

And, while knowing it was wayyyy too wordy, here’s a list of the eye-opening feedback I received (remember I started this discussion with “humble pie!!”):

• “Worship” evokes religion—ewwww. (I didn’t even think of that.)
• Charisma rubs off like butter “is not as agreeable as the writer thinks it is,” reminds people of “sticky,” and “is a little cringy, like it’s trying too hard.” (Check!)
• Evokes an image of copying others and losing authenticity, not gaining it. (Great objection to overcome in future copy; points to need to be much more clear about what this is.)
• Way too long and wordy. (I know, I know, I know!)
• The claim “write more creatively in 1 minute a day” is "disingenuous at best” and is perceived as click bait.
• Mismatch between “write more creatively” and “find your voice” in subhead. (Totally. See it now.)
• Want an example. Let me see what I’m opting into.
• Not sure of the content quality. (See? People are really selective with giving away their email address—always keep that in mind.)
• Testimonial is “ridiculous.” “Get one from an author.” (Hahahahaha. And then I realized: I’m an author! I need to leverage my own credibility on the landing page, not just in the daily email.)
• Not exactly clear what they’re getting. What is being offered, really? How am I supposed to become a better writer by reading other people’s writing? (Which is why it got lengthy to begin with.)
• Brand name confusing, as it doesn’t evoke writing services. (In original version I connected Meat & Hair to substance & style.)
• How are these newsletters structured?
• What type of content is it? Non-fiction? Fiction? Do I have the option to choose what kind interests me?
• Is there interactivity? Am I getting prompts?
• What kind of services do they offer, and how do they make their money? Are they going to sell my email address?
• Am I really going to want this every day in my inbox?
• And, of course, a rough one to swallow: “If they use similes like ‘slips off like butter’ I would doubt they can really improve my writing. It takes just one poor image to make you doubt their ability to teach.”

Ouch!!!! That last one is true, though: I remember thinking that when I launched, but decided to favor execution over perfection. (And that's why we tweak now!!!)

So, you can see I have plenty of work to do—but you can see how helpful was THIS, right? Things like using the word “worship” didn’t even cross my mind. And that’s exactly my point: it won’t. You’re too close to the project. You’re staring at it day and night. You need objective feedback from strangers who are in your target market. You NEED other people’s perceptions of what you’re creating, so you can then go back to your desk and tweak your messaging accordingly.

Which you will be doing for at least the first year, if not eternity. Don’t be afraid to change your copy! To test different headlines and subheads and angles! To show it to strangers and use their feedback to GET BETTER. This is not about what you wrote or did or said yesterday, but what you need to write or do or say tomorrow.

Another tool I love is Google Optimize—it’s 100% free (!!!) and lets you test different versions of a webpage against each other to see which one gets more sign ups, etc. (So, for example, short version versus long version.) But that’s just ONE tool in your arsenal: I don't rely on that exclusively because it takes A LOT of traffic over time to get a statistically significant result, it’s black and white data (without knowing what’s wrong), and doesn’t offer any contextual feedback specific to your messaging. For that, I think Wynter is phenomenal.

So now I’ve got my marching orders! I will go back to the drawing board and write a fresh round of copy, using the feedback from my testers. And then it's likely I'll test it again. While this can get a little costly, it’s still less expensive than running a bunch of ads to a landing page that won’t convert, or asking my friends for their opinion and then getting a bunch of false positive validation. (It’s great, Ash! Do it! Launch it!!!!)

In the meantime, I hope you can see that no one is a genius out of the gate and trial and error is a huge part of success. IT NEVER JUST COMES, it is always engineered. So don’t get down on yourself if you’re not getting the results you want just yet! You WILL. It will get better, as long as you keep committing to helping it get better. Taking your ego out of the equation. And eating biggggg, giant slices of that humble pie. 😀

You can’t know everything. You can’t do everything. You can’t be everything.

You are not your customer.

You are simply someone who’s putting their best effort out there, trying to help, the best way you can. ❤️

Keep on going. Keep on testing. Keep on tweaking. Record your experiments. Keep a log! See what nudges things in the right direction and what doesn’t. Then iterate a little bit more. Tweak, tweak, tweak. Record the change. Eventually it’ll be like having a diary of all of your sweat, tears, successes and failures—and someday, when you’re hangin’ in your farmhouse in France, it’ll be really nice to look back on and see just what it took to get where you are—

—and remind yourself of what it’ll take the next time you begin again.

Have a great weekend!

Ash