Neville Medhora (AKA Nev) is an established copywriter and the trusted sidekick of Noah Kagan, as a partner of the entrepreneurial marketplace AppSumo. Nev made his mark creating one of the first successful drop-shipping businesses on the Web, HouseOfRave.com, and has since sold that company to work on creating successful digital and packaged products as well as consult fellow entrepreneurs on how to launch successful start-ups. He is known for his quirky attitude and ability to connect with his audience through unique marketing copy, which he passes down to other marketers through his Kopywriting Kourse [sic].
1) Your copywriting style is reminiscent, in my opinion, of some of the techniques Dan Kennedy teaches. Who has helped and/or influenced your sales copy style and how have you refined your voice over time to make it uniquely your own?
I’ve been writing for a long time and I’ve always had a weird way of writing. I do not care for grammar all that much. I’ve just feel that if it gets to the point, what’s the difference. You know how some people complain, “kids nowadays use the letter U instead of ‘you’,” those kids are actually being more efficient with their words. The point of language is not to write it in a certain way, it’s to get information from the page to your brain, right? So if it does it, who cares? So I always wrote like that a bit, in my unique way, and then I started reading Gary Halbert. He was definitely a huge influence. His style would just get you to keep turning the page and turning the page, until you were done with the whole letter and you were captivated the whole time. And I was just like… why was I more captivated by his stuff than anyone else’s? And it’s because he laid it out in a unique way. I realized later he actually put effort into this… like okay, by the end of the page, they should want to turn the page, so I’m going to leave them a cliffhanger, and this format will help them along.
So Gary Halbert was definitely a huge influence. Joseph Sugarman, I liked his stuff because he was always a marketer, but he was never a scummy marketer. A lot of the copy guys in the past would use all these tramped up language – “the most exciting thing…” and then the product was actually crappy. That’s called a LIE. At least where I come from, that’s called a lie. When you say one thing, but you deliver another, that is a scam or a lie and I am not into that. And Joseph Sugarman would actually deliver what he said he would. I liked his stuff cause he was definitely not a scammer. I tell the truth and write like I speak. It makes sense to me. Why would I change my language just because I change the medium? So that’s how I developed my writing style… my own recipe influenced by Halbert and Sugarman.
2) Given you put a high value on copy, what’s your opinion on budding entrepreneurs extensively using multivariate testing? In other words, is it worth spending resources seeing if it’s the right product, just the wrong message? And, do you have any testing hacks you can share to make A/B testing easier?
It really depends on the use case but basically there are two different kinds of people. There’s the person that already has his product running and another type of person who doesn’t know their product yet. The latter is the kind of person that needs to go out and put out tests before any serious investment, right?
Let me give you an example… it’s called positioning, right? So I had this company called House of Rave back in the day. It was a drop-shipping business that did well enough that it paid my way through college. I spent a lot of time on it. Everyone kept asking me, “How did you make that drop-shipping business work?” They assumed I did very little and I would constantly have to answer questions about operations. So I made a six-part series on my blog where I just answered every single question people had. Yet, people kept asking me more and more and more questions so I decided to make a digital product about how House of Raves works to cater to this demand. And sure enough, a lot of people bought it off my blog and then created their own drop-shipping businesses.
The need for testing also depends on how you get your traffic. I had been putting content out there for a long time so I had warm prospects… no need to test if people are asking me directly to give them product. My value proposition was already familiar. Now if you have cold traffic coming from Google AdWords, and the visitors don’t know anything about you, and you have to convert them right away then you really should be testing.
3) What advice do you have for people trying to find their voice, as well as an audience, in the sea of Internet clutter? It seems like there are some many people trying to emulate the style of Gary V. or Frank Kern on the assumption you have to drop the F bomb to get attention. What advice do you have for good people that are not necessarily suited for “peacocking”?
I am an extrovert. I like going out and being in crowds. I get my strength from other people. If there’s someone else working in my apartment with me, I work harder. When I’m alone I tend to slack off because I generate a lot of my energy from other people. I know that about myself. And therefore whenever people meet me in real life, it’s pretty congruent to what they thought they were going to get. There are some people who try to emulate a loud style, but they are very quiet in real life. And it usually doesn’t translate very well… like they’ll curse to get attention, but cursing doesn’t get attention, it just offends people. If I keep saying Fuck! Fuck! Fuck! You’re just kind of like, “Why are you saying that, what’s the point?” Okay. But if I’m getting really, really into something and I need to make a strong point, and that curse word happens to be fuck, in the heat of that moment, that curse word does add some emphasis to my point. Whereas if I just say fuck for no reason, it’s just kind of inappropriate and for written copy you know spam-filters are going to catch it sometimes so your at risk of not reaching your audience as well. Do you need to add in stuff like that? If you are boring and technical, you can be boring and technical… be yourself… because you know what, there is other boring and technical people out there that will read your stuff.
I know some people that don’t like going out, they don’t like being in crowds, they prefer not to talk to other people, they like just being in their own head. They don’t need your validation for really anything, they’re very secure. In my experience these folks are not good at writing stuff that entertains but that is okay because copy doesn’t always need to be that entertaining. Sometimes it just needs to be informative and useful. If you’re a boring, calculated kind of person, write in a boring calculated way. Also it is important to note nowadays it is easy to take cheap classes and improve on almost anything even if you do not have inherent talent. For instance a lot of people that are good on camera are actually very shy. Marilyn Manson is actually a really shy guy, but does crazy things on stage. His inner persona and his on-stage persona are very different. Some of this can be taught and improved upon, so just because you’re not good at it now doesn’t mean you won’t be good at it later. Andrew Warner, when he started Mixergy, he wanted to be the best interviewer in the world, so he was like – I’m just going to interview someone every single day until I get good, and now he is.
4) What are three relatively unknown and/or obscure productivity tools that you use to make your entrepreneurial life easier, that are not contained within your Problem Solving Checklist product?
I think simple shortcuts are underrated and can save people a lot of time, so the first is the Alfred App and shortcut keys like Chrome’s keyboard shortcuts. The second is there’s a thing called SelfControl. For this app you type in a list of websites you don’t want to go to and press start, and in a certain amount of time, it will just nuke those websites. The third productivity tool that I use is my old-fashioned handwritten To Do List. Have your readers take a look at the following video.
What I don’t mention in the video is I write my tasks the day before. That’s the main thing, I make my to do list the day before, and I don’t add anything to my list the same day (generally). If you pile stuff on in the same day you do not get the satisfaction of ever being done. What’s the fun in that?
Another nugget not in the video is I try to stack the most important things first, but if I’m being lazy I’ll just pick the easiest thing to do. Not a good method but it is what I do. Good advice is doing the hardest thing first, so you just get it done. But sometimes if I wake up really early in the morning, my brain is just not working and so I’ll just do the easiest thing, just to knock a few out of the way and get momentum. If it is something timely like going to the DMV to get my registration fixed and the DMV doesn’t open until nine or something I might mess with the order too, but ideally you stack the most important items in order first so they get done first.
5) Given your experience with the AppSumo Wantrepreneur course, what’s a consistent folly you see with budding entrepreneurs that you know from your own experience they might not overcome by mere mentorship and instruction? In other words, a common weakness that is usually only overcome through the school of hard knocks?
First time entrepreneurs notoriously like to complicate things so they don’t have to take action. I see this especially with engineers. Here are extremely smart people. They can create a product over a weekend (think hackathons), faster than I ever could. Yet, they consistently get in their own way with questions like: What happens if it grows too big? What happens if we get 10,000 customers the first day? It’s like, don’t flatter yourself. If you start getting 10,000 customers a day, then worry about how you are going to spend your money. And the biggest thing I see is the fear of putting it out there right away. Here’s an example, someone came to me wanting to be a photographer. They said, “I’ve been wanting to be a photographer, but you know, I’m in school for most of the day, etc., etc.” So many excuses! I give these people advice like just try testing your service to people you know and I hear responses like, “I’ll think about it and I’ll do it next week.” No you won’t. Back to the photographer example, we go and we start typing out content for a website, take a couple of their best sample pictures and put them out there and it is so nerve-racking for this person because they’ve never really done that before. There has always been comfort in the excuse. I ask them to post their site on their Facebook page and they’re reluctant. I’m like, “Well, you want to be a photographer, right?” They say, “Yeah, I really want to try that.” And I say, “Well, have you told a single potential customer about it?” And they say, “Well, my portfolio isn’t fully…” Dude, you want to be a photographer, but you don’t want to tell anyone about it? If you want to be a photographer start being a photographer, and then keep doing it and you’ll start becoming a better photographer. This is just one example but it applies to most entrepreneurs. My advice: put something out there really quick and see if anyone wants it; if they do, congratulations you are an entrepreneur! Now start working on being a better one.