Our take on copywriting

Here’s my take on writing copy.

Whether it’s ad copy, website copy, or even a script for a video, you’ll hear this advice all the time: your audience is stupid. Treat them like idiots. That’s how you sharpen your writing. Cut it down to the bare minimum. Make it painfully simple. Make it scannable. Get the point across as fast as possible, because people are stupid.

I disagree. Vehemently.

I think this is one of those cases where the result is often right, but the reason people give for it is wrong. And I wanted to make that distinction really clear.

Your audience is not stupid.

In general, I like to imagine that nobody is stupid. Because if anyone’s going to be stupid, it’s probably me. So I’m going to defend my people here.

Now, where people are right: yes, your copy should be simple. Easy to read. Easy to understand. Easy to grasp quickly. You don’t want three paragraphs in a hero section—no one is reading that shit.

But the reason isn’t that your audience is dumb.

The reason is that there is an insane amount of stimulus in the world. Noise everywhere. And when someone lands on your site or hits play on your video, they don’t know you. You haven’t earned anything from them yet. You haven’t earned enough respect for them to allocate brain cells to hearing you out.

You get a few words. A few seconds.

That’s it.

Your job in that moment isn’t to educate them or impress them. It’s to earn enough respect for them to keep paying attention. Once you do that, then you get options. Maybe you’ve earned the right to slow down a bit. Maybe you can add nuance. Maybe you can write longer. Or maybe you’re constantly fighting for their attention the whole time.

Both are real.

When you’re trying to hook someone, the hook almost has to feel elementary. Sometimes it feels stupid. But the reason isn’t that they are stupid—it’s that in that first second, you are arguing for your right to exist in their world at all. You’re arguing to even be noticed.

So no, they’re not dumb. You just haven’t earned their respect yet.

Now, how do you actually earn that respect?

Here’s where I’ll partially contradict myself and say: yeah, keep it stupid. Not because they’re stupid—but because no one gives a shit about you.

No one cares who you are.
No one cares what you built.
No one cares about your company, your product, your journey, your vision.

No one cares.

People only care about what you do for them. What problem you solve. What pain you remove. What annoyance you make go away.

This is why I love the StoryBrand framework by Donald Miller. It was introduced to me by Marc Feder at Boundary, who is the best copywriter I’ve ever met in my life.

The core idea is simple: the customer is the hero. Not you.

You’re not the main character. You’re the guide.

That perspective flips everything. You stop writing “we built this” and “our company believes” and “we’re excited to announce.” All of that is useless. If someone lands on your site and you immediately tell them, “You can save this much time on this thing that annoys you every single day,” now you’re speaking their language.

You’re showing you understand their problem. You’re showing you get them. And you’re positioning yourself as someone who can help—without making yourself the center of the story.

That’s the philosophy. But philosophy doesn’t write sentences for you.

The actual craft part—the part that hurts—comes down to this: cut. And then cut again. And then cut again.

Marc hammered this into me constantly. Even when you’re convinced there’s nothing left to trim, there’s a very good chance you can still trim more.

“Less is more” sounds like a cliché until you actually try to do it. It’s brutally hard. It is so much harder to say something with fewer words than it is to ramble for a paragraph. Which is annoying, honestly, because school trains you to do the opposite. Hit word counts. Stretch arguments. Drag a simple idea out to 5,000 words.

No one is reading that shit.

At least not in the world of selling things. Or marketing. Or advertising. If you have an argument, you have to make it succinct. Boil it down to the core. Say that first. Then, if needed, expand.

That’s why Smart Brevity resonated with me so much. You respect the reader’s time. You respect their attention. You lead with the big, juicy takeaway. Then you give a few key details. And then—optionally—you offer the deeper dive.

That way, even if they bounce, they still got the point. Straight from the get-go, they understand what you’re trying to say.

So yeah, that’s basically how I think about copy. How I try to write it. And how I evaluate it when I see other people’s work.

I’m not saying this is objectively correct. It’s just what excites me. It’s what feels right to me. It’s what makes writing feel honest instead of manipulative.

Anyways. That’s my two cents. Let me know what you think.