I'm a conversion copywriter. The work is messaging, positioning, and the copy that decides whether a page actually converts, mostly for SaaS, tech, and DTC businesses trying to grow their revenue and their reach.

My way in was the realisation that there's only so much you can do one-to-many. There's only so much content you can publish, only so many ways to help people at scale. High-level strategy and tactics sound great on paper, they look great in a blog post, but people really struggle to implement that by themselves. I'd much rather sit with one person and solve one specific problem with them. A half-hour conversation does more than hours of blog posts or DIY courses. The impact is huge, and that pulled me toward the one-to-one work.

A lot of it sounds like: this page isn't converting, my website isn't converting, this ad isn't converting, and I don't even know where to begin. We followed the best practices, we did what the industry gurus said, we tried all the techniques, and we still don't know what we're doing wrong.

The answer is almost never the thing they came in for. Founders work in a closed box, an echo chamber, and it's so hard to pull yourself out of that and look at your own thing objectively. So the most frequent advice I give is the same line over and over: think about what your customer would think. Put yourself in their shoes. It's the hardest thing in the world to do, because this is your baby, this is the thing you left a stable career for, and there's so much tension and anxiety wrapped up in it. But pause that for a second. You're not selling this to your co-founder or your family. When a stranger lands on your site, they decide in about five seconds whether to keep reading. If there's no spark above the fold, they're gone. It can be the most amazing product in the world, but if you wouldn't have the patience for it on someone else's site, nobody will have the patience for it on yours.

I prep as much as I can, read up on the mentee and their company so I understand the context going in. But a lot of getting to the solution is just figuring out what the real problem is in the first place, because what they write in the booking description often isn't it.

So part of it is rubber ducking, the thing devs do when they read their code back line by line to a rubber duck. I get the mentee to walk through it from the starting point to where they are today, and the solution usually falls out of that on its own. Someone will say I think it's the design on my landing page, and the design has nothing to do with it. You don't explain what the product even is in the copy. Don't touch the design, swap this sentence for that one, move this section, see how it goes. There's a metaphor I love for this: a bridge has a hole in it and people keep falling through, so they build a hospital at the bottom to treat everyone who falls. What they actually need is to fix the hole. Most of my job is working out whether you need the hospital or you just need to fix the hole.

Don't apply if cracking a stranger's problem doesn't genuinely excite you. You can feel when someone's phoning it in, and so can the mentee.

Apply if that detective feeling appeals to you: a case to crack, a time limit, one partner to solve it with, and a real thrill when you get there together. You need to be able to challenge someone's thinking when they've poured their life into something, without it landing as an attack, and you need to actually listen instead of waiting to dump what you know. If sitting with a stranger's hard problem for thirty minutes sounds like fun rather than a chore, you'll fit right in.