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Let the Customer Be the Copywriter

The Story

Nathan’s ad research process pulls hooks from four sources, not the copywriter’s head (Source 1).

“There’s maybe three to five things that we’ll typically look at when we’re thinking about trying to come up with a bunch of different ads. So one is Reddit. That can mean going to individual Reddit threads. Like there’s a subreddit called Singularity that’s very focused on AI” (Source 1).

His copywriting principle: “I’m a big fan of the let the customer be the copywriter. Like if you just take what your customer or in this case readers believe, what their dream outcomes are, what their pain points are and just play that back to them, that will work really well as effective copy” (Source 1).

A specific Reddit-mined winner: “We found winning hooks around being afraid that AI is, they’re gonna get outperformed. Somebody’s gonna get outperformed or outpromoted because someone else in their team is using AI really, really well. That kind of style of hook came from us looking at Reddit comments and we’ve used that in all kinds of AI ads that have done quite well” (Source 1).

The four research sources he uses:

  1. Reddit — directly, plus a tool called GigaBrain (“perplexity meets Reddit and it does an awesome job of like doing all that manual teasing out”) (Source 1).
  2. Organic social — looking at Instagram and TikTok feeds for hook ideas (Source 1).
  3. Competitor ads (Source 1).
  4. Internal first-party data — “looking at what subject lines were your highest opened and what content was in those emails. Which links were clicked the most? Throw that all into ChatGPT. Have it tease out themes and then write your ads around those themes” (Source 1).

The structural approach to writing the hook itself: “What’s the dream outcome? Like what’s the thing they really really want to get out of the newsletter? So that would be like getting a raise at work or sounding really smart, or whatever some version of like what would make them feel good. Problems getting in the way of that dream outcome and then you write your ads around that” (Source 1).

The example for Superhuman: two ICPs (entrepreneurs and individual contributors) get two different hooks. For entrepreneurs: “you know how companies are going from zero to ten million dollars with five employees using AI.” For ICs: “the best employees act like CEOs. They delegate manual tasks like PowerPoint and Excel to AI so they can focus on strategic initiatives” (Source 1).

Lesson for Creators

The fastest way to write copy that converts is to stop writing it. The best ads are paraphrases of things the customer has already said in public — usually in Reddit threads where there’s no incentive to perform. The job of the copywriter is research and selection, not invention. Nathan’s process is reproducible because it doesn’t depend on talent: scrape the forums, scrape your own newsletter analytics, drop everything into ChatGPT for theme extraction, then write the hook around one specific dream outcome and one specific pain. Generic ads come from generic research; specific ads come from named pains the customer has already articulated.

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