8-year-old sales geniuses

I was walking down the street in Istanbul the other day. 

It was blazing hot out. I was thirsty.

"I should buy a bottle of water," I think.

A block later, I saw an 8 year old kid selling bottles of ice cold water.

What did I do? I shuddered. "Oh God, he's selling me something!" 

My fight-or-flight response kicked in and I brushed past him, walking as fast as I could and trying desperately not to make eye contact.

As I walk away, I start kicking myself. It's 90 degrees outside. I'm thirsty. I'm an idiot if I don't buy a bottle of water from this kid.

"Should I go back?"

I think for a second.

"Nahhhhhh...", I say. "That would make me look stupid."

A block later, I see another kid selling bottles of ice cold water. A chance to correct my mistake!

But first: I look over my shoulder, to make sure the first kid couldn't see us.

God forbid he sees me buying from this other kid after I passed him up!

But the first kid couldn't see me. I was in the clear. 

(If the first kid had been watching, I might have died of thirst out there.)

Then I asked the second kid, "how much for a bottle of water?"

"Ten lira," he says. (That's about 25 cents.)

I bought a bottle of water.

~

There are 3 important sales and marketing lessons hidden in this story. Do you see them?

Lesson #1: People feel uncomfortable around salespeople and say "no" to them automatically

For some reason, we're conditioned to say "no" to salespeople.

Maybe they're afraid of having uncomfortable conversations where they have to say "no". Or maybe they're afraid of getting "got".

Either way, when someone's selling you something, it's psychologically easier to just dehumanize them than to engage with them. 

(That goes even if that someone selling you something is an 8 year old kid!)

This is something that anyone selling anything has to overcome.

How do you do this? One way is to seem like you're "not normal".

When I was a door-to-door salesman, the people training me all told me, "you cannot seem like a normal door-to-door salesman. If they think you're a regular door-to-door salesman, they'll say no to you on instinct. You have to make people feel like you're different."

Lesson #2: People don't want to look stupid.

After I turned the first kid down, I thought about turning around for a minute.

I decided not to... because I didn't want to look stupid.

I literally turned down a bottle of ice cold water on a blazing hot day, because I didn't want to look stupid.

Then when I saw the second kid, what was the first thing I did? I looked over my shoulder to make sure the other kid couldn't see me.

People don't want to look stupid. If they said no to your face once, they'll usually want to keep saying no, because changing their minds makes them look inconsistent (and therefore stupid, in their head).

At that point, saying "no" to you becomes a matter of pride.

How do you deal with this? You need to make sure they know they have permission to change their minds.

3. Every time you make an offer, you get people closer to buying.

I didn't buy from the first kid... but seeing him selling water put the idea in my mind to buy water.

Then I bought from the second kid.

The lesson here is, even if you're rejected at first, just keep making your pitch.

Even if people don't buy right away, you make them THINK about buying.

They start weighing the pros and cons in their heads.

Then when a good time to buy rolls around, they're more likely to buy.

-Theo

P.S. Here's the funny part of the story: these kids looked similar and they were set up a block apart. I think they were brothers and this was their scheme. 

They knew that a bunch of passing idiots like me would politely decline the first kid, then think, "actually, I could use a bottle of water", then buy a water bottle from the second kid.

Well done!

Why I didn't write this email with AI

Last week I told you about why I started writing most of my copy for clients with AI.

This week I'm gonna tell you about why I still do a lot of my personal writing by hand.

AI is useful for some things and not for others. When I write emails like the one you're reading now, I want to share my actual thoughts — so I don't mess with AI. 

Same thing when I write articles for my Substack (where I talk about social sciences). I'm sharing my own original thoughts — and AI can't go into my brain and pick those out. I still have to do that the old fashioned way. 

A lot of coaches are going to build an AI to do their content for them and save themselves a lot of time.

But some coaches are going to ruin their own personal brand by trying to get a robot to sound like them.

Whether you should use AI depends on WHY your audience follows you.

If your brand is about being a thought leader and saying new, original stuff, you can't do that with AI. You have to write by hand. (Although you can have AI help you with research, editing, etc.)

If you just make fun, entertaining, inspirational story-based content, you can get an AI to do that for you in minutes.

Similarly, if you make content for beginners, you can get an AI to do that for you.

The general rule of thumb is, if you can hire someone to make your content for you, you can probably get an AI to do it. But if you have to do your own writing, AI won't help you.

If you're trying to decide whether AI can work in your business, ask yourself how smart your audience is and why they follow you. 

If you teach intermediate to advanced level people — keep doing it by hand.

If you teach beginners — save yourself some time and get a GPT to do the work for you.

Why I changed my mind about AI copy

If you hired me to write copy for you in December, I would have written every word by hand.

Now I will use AI to do most of the work.

3 things have changed since then:

1. AI copy got better

When ChatGPT came out in late 2022, it sucked at writing copy.

But AI writing has gotten way better since then.

It's only going to keep getting better.

2. People got better at training AI to write

I was convinced that AI writing stank until I saw what Stefan Georgi was doing with it.

He had a prompt that wrote an awesome VSL from scratch.

One of his students, Luke Mills, sends me emails that look and sound perfect. I would have no idea that AI was writing them if he hadn't said so.

So I bought one of Stefan Georgi's courses and played around with the prompts.

They work like a charm.

(I've even found some prompts I can use to write copy that doesn't sound like an AI wrote it.)

3. I stopped being stubborn and adapted to the future

This one was more of a mindset shift for me. 

"Copywriter" was a big part of my identity. It was tough to let go of that.

But, it's no fun being a dinosaur. You don't make any money when you're a dinosaur.

Nobody's really hiring "copywriters" anymore... UpWork is slim pickings these days.

Luckily, I've built plenty of other skills that are a lot more valuable than just "copywriting"...

And I realized I could help more businesses and make more money by selling those skills instead.

Plus, the fun part of marketing is the strategy. 

(Sometimes I enjoy the writing part... but recently I've started looking at it more as busywork. It's a grind. I would rather think about things from a 300-foot bird's eye perspective than spend hours analyzing every single word in an email.)

So these days I'm positioning myself more as an email promo guy, where copy is just part of what I do.

Now, a word of warning if you're thinking of using AI to do your own copy. 

There's an important caveat: you still have to know what good copy looks like.

You can't just roll with the first thing ChatGPT gives you — you have to recognize all the issues with it, and then either edit the copy manually or tell ChatGPT how to fix it.

(Ironically, the best way to build this skill is to write your own copy by hand.)

You also need to know the right way to train and prompt your AI — you can't just type "write me a sales page".

It's like cutting hair — just because you have a pair of scissors handy doesn't mean you should start snipping at your bangs. You have to know what you're doing.