I teach copywriting and run https://nitter.cf/t.co/t7xspnl9ey

Joined June 2011
Had a buzz cut. Went on my favourite podcast :) “Learn Great Copywriting in 76 minutes”
Harry Dry is the best copywriter I know. He's built a 130,000-person newsletter teaching people how to do it, and by the end of this interview, you'll be at least a Green Belt in copywriting. Some of his rules for writing: 1) A great sentence is a good sentence made shorter. 2) Writing great copy begins with having something to say in the first place. 3) Copy is like food. How it looks matters. 4) Since the look of copy matters so much, don't write copy in Google Docs. Write it in Figma (so you can write and design at the same time). 5) Kaplan's Law of Words: Any word that isn't working for you is working against you. 6) You know a paragraph is ready to ship when there's nothing left to remove. It's like a Jenga tower. The entire thing should collapse if you remove something. 7) Make a promise in the title so the reader knows exactly what they're going to get if they click. Then, deliver on the promise. 8) The three laws of copywriting: (1) Make it concrete, (2) make it visual, and (3) make it falsifiable. 9) Make it concrete: Don't be abstract. For an example, say you're writing about habits. Don't talk about "productive routines." That's abstract. Write about "waking up at 6am to write" instead. It's concrete — and much more vibrant. 10) Make it visual: People see in pictures. This is why instead of memorizing card numbers directly, world memory champions memorize cards by turning them into pictures and then back to cards. 11) Make it falsifiable: When you write a sentence that's true or false, you put your head on the chopping block, which makes people sit up in their seat. 12) When has a falsifiable statement resonated? Galileo got sentenced to a decade of house arrest for saying that the earth spins around the sun. That's a falsifiable sentence. But nobody would've done anything if he'd said that the earth has a harmonious connection with a celestial object. 13) Write with the delete key. Using fewer words lets you be more impactful with the words you keep. 14) The job of a sales page is to make a bold claim at the top. Then spend the rest of the page backing up what you've said... with a ridiculous amount of proof. 15) If your competitor could've written the sentence, cut it. 16) Good copy is differentiated. Here's an example: Elon Musk shouldn't write "The Cybertruck is the world's best truck." Ford or Dodge can write that sentence. But only Elon can write: "The Cybertruck is tougher than an F-150 and faster than a Porsche." 17) Some days, the writing comes easily. Some days, it takes sweat. The reader doesn't care if you wrote for two minutes, two hours, or two days. The ink looks the same. 18) Great copy reads like your customer wrote it. Talk to them. That's just an introduction to the copywriting philosophy of @harrydry. I've shared the full interview below. I recommend you watch this one because we pull from so many visual references and do a lot of screen sharing. If you'd rather watch on YouTube, I've shared the link in the reply tweets.
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“It’s like hiring Tom Cruise, finding out he charges by the stunt, and you don’t know if you’re making Jerry Maguire or Mission: Impossible” is a hilarious analogy for companies blowing their AI tokens.
Today, Ramp raised $750M at a $44B valuation. Last time we grew this fast, we were 1/20th the size. For 2000 years, business was built on two pillars. Today, a third: intelligence. It’s your least governed cost. It’s also your single greatest opportunity.
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“Money talks. Now it thinks.” ^ Learn how to fit your idea on a post-it. If an agency gives you a 28 page doc full of “2x2 matrix” and “archetypes”... you're being politely mugged. Five words do 50% of the work.
Today, Ramp raised another $300M at a $32B valuation. In the past year our revenue has doubled to over $1B, growing 10x faster than the median public SaaS. We all know money talks — we're teaching it to think. Getting big no longer means getting slow.
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One of the reasons modern books are dreadful is publishers like to give deals to people with followers; and what these people are good at is marketing, not writing. So a poor cuttlefish dies in the name of screenshotting a bestseller list, and you never see the book again. Well done. What next? Sell a journal? A TED Talk? Books are no longer about writing. I met Sheehan on a first-floor corridor in Durham. Two weeks before his 18th birthday; two weeks after he buried his play underneath the school. Everyone else did their degree and got drunk; he wrote two books: Conversations with the God of Love and Here Lies Montgomery Burns. The former? Hit and miss. The latter? Good, but unpublishable. Soon, it was time for “everyone” to move to London and get a job with the highest salary they could find. Sheehan stayed in Durham, got a job as a night porter and wrote his third book, So Long, Freedom. It was never about “what’s next.” It was always about writing. I said, “You’re not a real writer until you can show me a rejection letter.” So he started emailing publishers, and forwarding me rejection letters. That was four years ago, he was he was working at McDonald’s. You don't fake writing. You live it.
Three years later. Never stop dreaming.
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Walking around the park, drinking coffee, alone. It’s the best part of my day. Soon I’m back on floor 6. Beautiful morning now black out blinds. And I stare down the lens like the barrel of a gun. Hello old friend. Write, record, pace, record, swap batteries, record. I read the old man and the sea and I feel like the old man. ‘I may not be as strong as I think, but I know many tricks and I have resolution.’ Give me one more month. See you early September 🫡
7th August, 2025. One hundred days. I'm burning the boats.
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I wrote this ad, and I quite like it
I first met Calvin in 2016. Karim and I had just launched Paribus. We weren’t a big company. Our office was my kitchen table. So when an email from a 17-year-old high school dropout landed in my inbox asking for an internship, I skimmed by it. Thankfully, Karim didn’t! - Admitted into MIT at age 16 - Code running on the International Space Station - Top 20 in the country in the Putnam Math Competition Calvin arrived on his first day in a T-shirt he wore representing the United States in a programming competition. Three weeks later he’d built an AI model to automate refund decisions. This was years before people knew what AI even was. Fast forward four years. Karim and I start Ramp. Our first phone call? Persuading Calvin to join as a founding engineer. The challenge: make filing an expense as easy as taking a photo of a receipt! Fortunately, Calvin looks at hard problems the way a dog looks at a bone. I watched him come back to the office every night, just as I was leaving, Wendy’s in hand, no small talk, working because he wanted to, only pausing to watch The Yankees’ playoff run. Eighty thousand expenses a day are now submitted using the code he wrote. Each one takes just 15 seconds, not 15 minutes. That’s 20,000 hours of work saved every day! Why am I telling this story? I think founders get too much credit. The single most important thing we do is hire people smarter than us. Phil Knight had Jeff Johnson, who drove to track meets across the Pacific Northwest and sold the first 3,250 pairs of Nike’s from the boot of his car. That’s why you’re wearing Nikes. Steve Jobs had Ken Kocienda, who mapped thousands of thumb taps to solve the seemingly impossible problem of touch-typing on glass. That’s why you have an iPhone in your pocket. Calvin is one of those people. Who wouldn’t want him to file your expenses?
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My favourite piece of writing advice. 2 minutes 54 seconds into the film “The French Dispatch” magazine editor, Arthur Howitzer Jr says to a staff writer: “Just try to make it sound like you wrote it that way on purpose.” Most sentences are not written ‘on purpose’. They happen. They are what one ‘should’ write — which is, of course, what one should never ever write. “We're excited to announce the future of photography” It sounds like writing, so let's rewrite it. “The industry formerly known as ‘photography’ has ceased to exist.” If you ask Google how to write with purpose, you will be told platitudes like ‘define your goal’. My advice is a little less comforting. Be provocative. School taught me to not be provocative. Bill Bernbach taught me that in advertising, it is necessary. I start by writing down what everyone in said industry is doing or saying. Then I ask what piece can I break so it doesn't sound like anything else. My reward is lots of bad ideas. But I'd rather bad ideas than boring ones. - ‘Refresh your thirst’ → ‘Murder your thirst’ (Liquid Death) - ‘Buy this jacket’ → ‘Don't buy this jacket’ (Patagonia) - ‘Party game for friends’ → ‘... for horrible people’ (Cards Against Humanity) Any idiot can be provocative. We are looking for provocativeness that stems from the product. Like Bernbach said “You are NOT right if you stand a man on his head JUST to get attention. You ARE right if you have him on his head to show how your product keeps things from falling out of his pockets.” When he shrunk the Beetle to a thumbprint it's because he wanted you to ‘think small’. When he wrote ‘ugly is only skin-deep’ it's because he wanted to talk about the air-cooled engine. When he showed you only ¼ of the Beetle it's because a ¼ of the money upfront is all you need. It ‘sounds like he wrote it that way on purpose.’ Because he did.
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7th August, 2025. One hundred days. I'm burning the boats.
When is @harrydry going to launch that course he said he would?
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New essay: Conviction
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Whole thing is wonderful! Read it slowly.
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I wrote this ad, and I quite like it
This quoted post is unavailable.
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Write copy that can't be copied
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Watch me rewrite an ad twenty times :) There’s no flash of inspiration. It’s more like building a cabinet. Lots of axe work, piece by piece, 'til it's there.
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