Max Sturtevant

Most sales emails give people 72 hours to claim a deal. The customer opens it, finds it interesting, and decides to come back later since they still have time. Then they forget and never buy… We replaced the time-based deadline with a quantity limit. Instead of 72 hours, we say “first 100 people only.” The customer opens that same email, and now there's no option to wait. They have to act now or lose the offer to someone else. Nothing about your offer changes. The only thing that changes is whether your customer buys now… or never.

The "leaked" founder message. Try it.

I join every team call with something like “what’s up fuckers” or “top of the morning big dawgs” Seems stupid and I feel corny writing this… But stuff like that really does contribute to company culture and overall vibes. Company culture starts with YOU as the founder. Humans mirror each other’s energy, especially people of authority. If you show up stressed, your team is going to pick up that and become stressed. If you show up high energy, your team will show up high energy. This is why I try to create a fun, lighthearted environment every single day with little things like that. This is mostly unintentional, as that is just who I am, but you really can see the effects. Agency founders say they want a company people love to work at, but that rarely ends up being the case. I've seen so many agencies where the team is stressed 24/7 and scared to miss a single slack message. We hold a high bar at Well Copy… Responsiveness matters and quality matters immensely. But I'd rather have a company where people genuinely love working there than a high stress environment. Employee retention and work quality is much higher. And when people enjoy where they work, they do better work.

A friend of mine made $40K from one email and one text message with a flow most people have never heard of… He had a window shopping problem. People were clicking his emails and visiting his site multiple times a month, but not buying. By the time the next email went out, the customer was already cold. So he set up what we call the “Espresso Shot Flow.” If someone has been active on your site multiple times (in the past 30 days), clicks an email link, and doesn't buy within 10 to 15 minutes, they get a quick offer. That person might still be on your website so instead of waiting until they go cold, you hit them with a quick offer to push them over the edge. It fires about 10 minutes after they click, like an espresso shot… but instead it’s a quick burst of cash. That flow generated $40,000 for this 8-figure brand. One email, one text message, and it sits in their top 5 best-performing flows. So if people are clicking your emails but aren’t buying, you just need a faster response. The window is 10 minutes, not 3 days.

Selena Gomez needs a new marketing team. Watch me fix what they are doing.

Gotta make sure you label your customers with desirable traits/outcomes. This email “You want your dog to live forever. Feed them like it” does just that. It labels them with a positive attribute (someone who cares about their dogs health) and then positions their product as ideal solution. Before you write your next email, ask yourself: what does my customer need to believe about themselves? Lead with that.

We hid the discount code inside a crossword puzzle and people actually sat there and solved it (we gave the discount in a follow up)

AI vs Marketer email design faceoff.

The 7 lowest ROI activities with email: 1. Obsessing over click rates. Irrelevant, just look at revenue. 2. Hyper-segmenting your sends to tiny sub-lists instead of just sending to your full engaged segment. 3. Spending time trying to re-engage unengaged profiles that stopped caring about you months ago. 4. Obsessing over every sentence of your email copy when most people are scanning, not reading. 5. Only sending designed emails and never mixing in text-based founder emails. 6. Building welcome flows or abandonment flows past 5 emails when the first 3-4 make all the money. 7. Writing and strategizing every email yourself because you refuse to build a system with AI.

Everything you need to know about 2026 email marketing

Brands incorrectly assume they need a new idea every time they send an email. This couldn't be further from the truth. A wise man once said, “People need to be reminded more than they need to be instructed." Your customers don't need a new lesson every week... They need to hear the same core message, the one that already resonates, said in different ways over and over again. Look at this example from Neutonic. They have one core message: Afternoon energy crashes are killing your productivity and Neutonic fixes that. Email 1 leads with a mirror - "9:02 am you vs. 4:17 pm you." Instead of relying on stats, they tap into a familiar feeling you immediately recognize in yourself. Email 2 leads with a stat - 56% of their customers said afternoon energy was a problem. They're using social proof to validate the pain before presenting the fix. It’s the same message with two completely different angles. There are a million ways to repackage the same angle without it ever getting boring. Keep reminding people of your core benefits.

Here’s a split test we recently ran: Showing the price vs. hiding the price. Showing the price generated $2,437 in sales. Hiding the price sold just $964. Why? Showing your prices upfront generates more purchase-intent clicks. While there’s no curiosity about the price, it’s great for lower-priced, impulse-driven products. Hiding the price can boost click-though rates because people have to click to find out how much it costs. This is especially useful for higher AOV products where you want to sell through emotion first. You can run this as a simple test to find out which works better for your brand. Split your next few campaigns 50/50, price shown vs. hidden, and measure CTR and sales.

New podcast out now with the goat himself @iamshackelford Stupid amount of sauce on scaling brands through smart retention marketing. Info below 👇

All that one needs to know about scaling subscription brands

This email breaks all the rules of good email design: - No button above the fold - Long block of text - No fancy colors or design But it still converted like crazy. Sometimes, what works best is counterintuitive. A longform thread packaged as a Reddit post builds credibility and serves as a pattern interrupt. Most brands try to pack as many surface level reviews into their email, and the customer has been fatigued from this. But for a high AOV brand like this, one long, uninterrupted review builds much more trust with their audience.

I stole Alex Hormozi’s playbook and made $200M with email marketing Save this 👇🏼

My top-performing emails all follow a similar structure. Your hero section focuses on one benefit / angle. When you try to say everything, you end up saying nothing. Your first CTA goes above in the hero before the scroll, it converts way more than you'd think. You shouldn’t make your hot buyers scroll in order to click. The second part is just as important. Instead of writing paragraphs explaining why your product is good, use infographics. Answer the questions your customer is already asking: what is this, how does it work, will it work for me, is it better than what I have now? Drop a second CTA in the middle. Not every reader makes it to the bottom. By the time they reach the bottom they've had the problem named and the solution explained. Show the product, add social proof, and give them a reason to buy today.

We have a 6-month-old brand on WellCopy that’s clearing $20M/month (with 30% of revenue coming from email)... You’ve never heard of this brand. Completely off the radar. They went all in on paid acquisition from day one and started spending millions per month on ads. When you spend that much on ads, every visitor who leaves without converting costs real money. So their goal was to squeeze every dollar out of that traffic before people left the site. We hyper-optimized their pop-up form and rebuilt their core email flows to squeeze every dollar out of that paid traffic… Now 30% of the brand's total revenue comes from email. On a $25M/month business, that’s ~ $7M/month from flows and campaigns alone. That email revenue made their entire ad spend significantly more profitable. When you spend millions on ads, the difference between 0% and 25% email attribution is the difference between bleeding cash and printing cash. 6 months live. $25M/month. $7M/month from email. They’re not slowing down…

We barely look at credentials when we hire… We look for 2 things: - Dawg Mentality - FigureItTheFuckOutAbility Dawg mentality means obsession. They relentlessly are learning and relentlessly are executing. These are people who want to do their job to the best of their ability because they hold themselves to a high standard. They know what needs to be done and don't need to be asked twice. They produce top-tier work because they are top-tier humans. FigureItTheFuckOutAbility is the second component, stolen from @danielfazio These are people with high agency and problem-solving skills. They run into a problem and don’t need to be hand held to through the solution. They just do shit. They figure it the fuck out. These two traits combined are more important than any previous work experience in the agency space. Anyone can learn how to design and write copy… Very few people have these winner traits.