Hi, I'm Scotty, bootstrapping a productized copywriting service

Hi everyone,

My name is Scotty Truong. I’m a copywriter and co-founder of an education agent company in my home country Vietnam. I’m also involved in a few software projects.

I’ve been bootstrapping a productized copywriting service. Think Wpcurve for small copywriting jobs.

Looking forward to contributing wherever I can be useful, and learning from everyone.

Welcome!

What is an Education Agency?

Copywriting is (in my experience), a very high skill area. Would a client in your productize copywriting service have access to the same copywriter each time?

(I find that the rapport b/t client and copywriter is critical, as is the copywriter’s knowledge of the industry and audience.

Hi Clay,

Basically our company works with a high-school student who wants to study abroad to find which college is a good fit for him. We earn a commission from the schools when we refer a student.

Very good points Clay. Right now, there’s only me. So the clients will get the same copywriter each time they send us a job. I limit the number of clients we take on, so I think I can handle it.

I’ve actually been thinking about it a lot. Right now we only focus on small jobs like writing a drip email, optimize a headline, etc… as from my conversations with small businesses, and from what I experience in my business as well, these small jobs are what they need the most.

For example, sometimes I want to implement a drip email campaign or a cart abandonment sequence, but I just can’t find the time. And good copywriters are near impossible to find on Elance or Odesk.

I think Headlines (esp. email subjects) are the “low hanging fruit” here.
I bet you could go in and in 10 minutes improve an email subject.
And measure the improvement w/ A/B testing.

Good copywriters are really hard to find.

Do you have any before/after examples of your work?

Have you gotten an idea of what your biggest “obstacle” is to “sales”?

(I’m working on a course on “validating your MVP” - it’s currently on hold b/c the person I’m doing it with is busy with other stuff, but I’m still collecting information).

I suspect one big issue (from my experience hiring copywriters) is that you don’t know what you’re getting (both in terms of cost and value). If I could just show you a subject line and then see what you came up with, with a price tag, then I can just decide whether to pay that.
Or if I KNEW the new subject would increase my open rate from 30% to 60% that’s worth $X

But it doesn’t work that way.

So you have to slowly establish trust.

Have you considered having some sort of introductory offer, like “I’ll improve an email subject for $X”

-Clay

Yes, I agree. It’s very difficult to hire good copywriters. I tried to outsource copywriting for my business a few times. I always got disappointed, and ended up doing it myself.

The problem is we never knew for sure if a new subject line would increase the open rate or not. All we can do is come up with hypotheses, create variations, and listen to what the market is telling us.

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Hi,

sounds interresting as i’m in need of a copywriter again and again. Care to share you url or ping me directly.

Hi Daniel,

I don’t want to plug it here. I’ll send you a PM with the link to the MVP landing page I’ve just put up.

wow! scotty am thinking of doing something similar here in the Philippines. Been listening to Dan Norris interviews now :smile:
I’m thinking of focusing on doing product descriptions but looking at wpcurve it seems more broad
the discussion about the difficulty of hiring good copywriter is insightful
would love to keep updated on your journey with this
i also think the book built to sell is relevant for this as the story basically focused on a small niche, systemized it :slight_smile:

Good stuff. I’ve been kicking around the idea of helping some of my customers with content (I run an email app).

What does your pricing look like?