The Secret Copywriting Job Market | Masterclass with Alexandre Bocquet

80% of jobs are never posted online. 80% of jobs are never posted on platform, not on network, not on fiber, not on battery.io. 80% of jobs are filled through word of mouth. So if you're a freelancer and you're struggling to get clients, you shouldn't just rely on the platforms. You should really tap into your own network and create your own opportunities within your network, within the people that are around you because there's a lot of people relying on just the platforms. You're not the only one. And again, you just fall within the 20% of jobs that are all posting online. And that's very competitive. I don't even know if it's 20% for cooperatives, maybe for other freelancers, but for cooperating, it feels like 10% of the gigs are online and 90% is coming from this underground, sort of like referral-based marketplace. You know, I think that's the real game. That's where you win because you know, long-lived doing this, like, thousands of cold email, you know, a day strategies, right? I'm often saying to cooperatives, "Hey, there are so many gigs. There's so much money. There are so many five thousand to ten thousand even higher paid gigs." But many cooperatives will say, "Oh, I thought you know cooperating is dead. I'm not seeing any gigs." Yeah, because they're not on the platforms. And that job or that gig never makes it to social media. What are some of the things that freelancers cooperatives can do to start thinking about how they can kind of build this network for themselves and break into that industry? So there's this thing called network harvesting that are like to call because it's like a garden. Like picture your backyard, you're planning tomatoes and shit. You've got this backyard that's full of leads but you spend your time looking in the front window. You're not really looking at your own backyard where all the treasure is. And so that's what this whole network harvesting is. You've got the leads hiding in play side, but you're not really thinking about the way of getting them because usually there's no structure. You're thinking, "Ah, I don't have that big of a network." Everyone has a network. Even if you don't think you have a big network, you can still find a dozen prospects. I think that's the reason why I've never ran out of leads. As a matter of fact, I've had an overflow of leads which is kind of an anomaly in the freelancing space. I've had to make real more leads than I could handle. What you just said is like literally the playbook for exactly how I built my entire freelance business. Like everything. That is the most valuable 10 minutes on how to close clients I think we have on this channel. This point, it's not really much of an opinion. I think a lot of the stuff is just data. This is just how it works. Okay, I'm here with Alex Bukay today. Thanks so much for joining me, man. Really appreciate it. Thanks, Matthew. Appreciate the invite. Yeah, so you've done a lot of cool stuff over the last few years. I know we were chatting the other day and you mentioned that you have helped clients. You've spent over $100 million on meta ads for clients. You're the founder of Bedley. You're also the founder of the Modern Freelancer. And I thought that'd be really cool to have an interview because the kind of people that you've been working with and the freelancers you're working with is very similar to closing clients is very similar. And that sort of space is cooperating. In fact, many crossovers because I know you also help copyright us too. So yeah, we're really looking forward to chat. Yeah, I appreciate that. Thanks for having me. I'm excited to chat through everything. Freedance marketing related. Obviously we're coming into the end of the year here. There's a lot of interesting things going on in the space with AI. Is AI taking my job? Is AI not taking my job? Is AI helping me make more money or crush my income? I think there's a lot of questions. A lot of freelancers are asking and I've got my own perspective on it on a lot of it. Not just AI, but just the state of freelancing. So I'm looking forward to chat through it to. Yeah, I mean, the first thing I'd love to know is how did you get 15,000 freelancers on a wait list? Yeah, that's a good question. So for those of you who don't know me, I started a freelance marketplace called Betterly. It's important for me to give you the background of how I ended up getting 15,000 freelancers on the wait list. So basically I was working at an agency. I was a director of paid social at mute 6 in LA. It was quite a well known agency in our space for Facebook advertising. We grew a lot of e-commerce brands. And essentially we got acquired in 2021. So when that happened, I went on to freelance myself. I decided, hey, I'm back on the market. Let me go ahead and just become a freelancer again and join my freedom. Not being an agency slave anymore because agency work is so much work. And so I did that for a couple of months, but I got a bunch of referrals. Thankfully, because I built a big network. When people found out I was on the market, I started to get a bunch of referrals from e-commerce brands saying, hey, we can get Alex out probably a fraction of the price of what mute 6 cost when he was working there. So let's go ahead and hit him up. So out of nowhere, I just ended up with tons of leads falling to my laps. Maybe not dozens every week, but it was pretty wild at one point in 2022. And so what happened is I started to hand some of those leads to buddies of mine that were really good at what they did in their in their space, whether it was Facebook ads or Google ads. And then one day I woke up and I said, you know what? I'm here handing out leads like it's Christmas. Maybe I should ask my friends to give me a little cut of their income. And so that's how better it was born. So better is basically a matchmaking platform that puts together a freelance marketer with brands. I've been given many names. I'm the Tinder of freelance marketing, the agents of super super marketers. But that's basically what we do. We match amazing talent with brands. And so long story short, we started to do that. Got really good success helped probably 150 to 100 freelancers quit their day jobs. They're nine to five agency jobs or they're in house jobs to go full-time freelance. That was a lot of fun and the word spread. So all of a sudden there's a rumor in town that there's this new platform called Betterly that's not just like an upwork or a five or four low quality talent, but it's actually us based and helps freelancers to start really big retainers anywhere from 4000 to 10,000. And so as you can imagine that blew up a waitlist. There's two buttons on my website. There's a higher marketer and the ploy as a marketer. The apply as a marketer bond got pressed a lot more time than the higher freelancers. So we we just blew up or the demand for for I should say the supply in in technical terms. We blew up the supply of freelancers through the platform. And I woke up one morning to meet thousands of people applying and that's when I decided I first of all I can't help every single one of those freelancers even though that's what the platform was built for. There's only so much salesman power. I can I can push through. So let me go ahead and create a website. I'll start sharing my thoughts on the blog. So I built the modern freelancers.com. I bought that domain, cost me about three grand. Apparently it's a very premium domain and I just started to write a blog slash newsletter every Friday. At first I was writing for I think 15 people on my email list and it just started to grow organically. And essentially that was my way of telling all these freelancers look I can't help you right now. I don't have a client for all of you. But here's three things I've done in my career freelancing for eight years that made me a successful freelancer. A sustainable freelancer is a big theme of my newsletter is how to actually enjoy freelancing and now getting burnt out the same way you can get burnt out working in an agency. So yeah that's how we that's how we blew up the the wait list on betterly and essentially funneled a lot of those people into the modern freelancer which is now a much better resource for a lot of freelancers, copywriters, pay social media buyers to actually learn how to find freelance clients as opposed to sitting on the bench and waiting for us to provide them opportunities. I was actually about to say that because you know with 15,000 people looking for clients with that much supply, it's pretty clear that freelancers and general struggle to get high paying clients. Like that seems to be the biggest issue. It's clear but it's also clear that a lot of them need to be resourceful to find clients today. They can't just rely on platforms. Platforms are great but 80% of jobs are never posted online. 80% of jobs are never posted on platform, non-on-app work, non-fiber, non-on-betterly.io. So if someone's looking for, if I'm looking for a really good copywriter, first thing I'm going to do is text you right. Hey Matthew, you run a really good community with a bunch of copywriters. Who's your best copywriter that can write about beauty or supplements or who's the best at writing haven't toils for tech gadgets. And most, more likely than not, you'll send someone that's amazing and I'll end up hiring them. If you don't, I'm going to text the next four best people I know in the copywriting space. And most likely, I'll hire someone that they recommend. And if I don't, that's when I fall on the bottom 20% of jobs that are posting. That's when it goes to the job board. That's correct. And so you end up more often than not with bottom of the barrel jobs. And I see it with clients that come through better way to desperate. They have, it's usually very niche. I get a lot of people that come from to me, they're selling CBD or things that are very niche that aren't as common as selling shirts on Shopify. And so my point is if you're a freelancer and you're struggling to get clients, you shouldn't just rely on the platforms. You should really tap into your own network and provide yourself, create your own opportunities within your network within the people that are around you because there's a lot of people relying on just the platforms. And again, you just fall within the 20% of jobs that are posting online. And that's not necessarily that's very competitive. They're still good jobs nonetheless, but they're just too competitive. That's interesting. And I think that, you know, to your point, right, with my, in my private mastermind, there are copy writers that will post a job from their clients. They'll say, Hey, my client is looking for someone who can do this type of copy. I'm a bit busy. Does anybody want it? And I see it all the time. So I'm often saying to copyright is, Hey, there are so many gigs. There's so much money, there's so many five thousand to ten thousand even higher paid gigs. And you just, you know, like there are so many, but many operators will say, oh, I thought in a cooperating stead, I'm not seeing any gigs. Yeah, because they're not, they're not on the platforms. Because I think nowadays as well, right, especially now, like 2026 season, many businesses have been burnt by hiring operators from platforms, because a lot of operators have come into the industry recently from Bizop or from some sort of, you know, free course, they don't really have the skill. That's the only place that they're looking for gigs. So the ratio of like average talent that applies on a job board versus the sophisticated strong market is that usually get referrals. There's a higher ratio of like lower quality or like less experienced riders. So they're also burns more business owners. And that means like the next time a business owner is looking for a cooperative or freelancer, they're not necessarily going to be so excited about posting an upwork and having to filter through 300 average applications. It's like, can we just ask Alex or come with you know, just like ask somebody that we know, like, or ask the team, hey, marketing director, do you know cooperators? Like, can we just ask you like, do you know people in your network? Recently, I hired somebody to help me with my website. It's like, I didn't make a job post. Someone in my team was like, I know the right person, you know, so it's always like that. And it's been my experience that even though I don't even know if it's 20% for cooperators, maybe for other freelancers, but for cooperating, it feels like 10% of the gigs online and 90% is coming from this underground, so they're like referral based marketplace, you know? Yeah. And this underground is a multi-headed monster. It's like the dog and Harry Potter, the three headed dog, right? This is what that monster looks like. And you want that monster to be on your side. In other words, you want to be top of mind. So those people that get referred into new businesses, that's usually because there's one guy that comes in the business, a fractional CMO, a new VP of marketing, a hire that comes in into an organization. And right away, they bring on their own marketing team. And these are typically the same five freelancers they can count their head. In other words, you've got to know people in industry, you've got to make buddies with people that have an overlap with the industry you're working on. So if you know someone who's heavily invested in the VC side of things that have access to a lot of brands, you want to become their good two freelancers or you want to become their good two cop. There's this one guy, Max. I met very early in my career in 2018. I got introduced to him by one of my co-workers who was in sales at our agency. And that guy was looking to hire a marketing agency, but didn't have the budget. So my friend who worked at the agency introduced me and said, Hey, you stuck to Alex. Maybe he'll freelanc it for you. This guy, Max, we've been doing projects almost every year since 2018. We're about to launch two more in January. I've literally made hundreds of thousands of dollars off of that one guy because he's a fractional COO. He's a chief operating officer. So it comes to organizations that are struggling with their operations. He cleans up the house and he brings on resources to execute on his Facebook ad guy. And it's funny because every time he brings me on a job, I see the same team. It's Daniel is doing Google and Sam is doing email. It's always the three of us. He brings on an L bring. Yeah, it's literally. I'm laughing about this because it's the same thing with me. When I was working with a lot of business coaches, it's the same. It's like, I'll have my one marketing director. He brings me on. I'm like, Oh, Hey, Peter, nice to see you. Blake. Nice to see you too. Nice to see you too. Oh, we got the same automation specialist as well. And then the next time, then let's say Peter introduces me to a team. If I go in there, it's like, Oh, there's Blake again. And there's this. They just seem to always be in the same, same accounts. It's a good point to make. That's really where the industry. That's actually the real, I think that's the real game. If you want to make serious money, free lunch, that's where you win because you're no longer doing this thousands of cold email a day. Strategy is right. Look, I teach a lot of different ways to find clients in my content. But the reality is 80, 90% of my business comes from referrals and my own network. And again, the way of getting referrals is to become really good at what you do. That's the first thing for anyone listening to this. The best sell strategy is not to go cold emailing is to take more online courses, more TikTok videos, more YouTube videos. If you're a copywriter, you should be subscribing on X to the top five people who write about copywriting in your space and you should consume your content. You should be on TikTok looking at the experts. You should be reading newsletters listening to podcasts. I think that's the reason why I've never ran out of leads as a matter of fact, I've had an overflow of leads, which is kind of an anomaly in the freelancing space. I've had most of my career more leads than I could handle. And the same is true of many of my colleagues from Utrecht's is because we always made a big deal out of being a life from students going to conferences, going to shop talk every year, going to traffic and conversions in San Diego, investing into investing some of your earnings back into your success is such a big deal. Because when you stay on top of the game, that's when you get referrals and those people who bring you on the table to work on some projects, that make them look good. Whenever I bring a freelancer to a client, which I've literally done over a thousand times, there's no better feeling than when the client calls me and tells me, Hey, your freelancers crushing it right now. We've doubled our sales. We've hit new records, like Friday, this and that. It makes me look good. And by extension, I'm going to refer that person a hundred more times because they're going to make me look good every time. It's good will. And of course, it's revenue because of my business. But for most people who make referrals, it's not even about revenues, it's just about goodwill. They want to look good in front of the partner that they brought. And they're thinking of you because you got really good at your craft. So I'm as a copy of the listings, those right? I'm thinking, okay, do I need to join an agency and meet those core people there? And then the rest of my career sorted out. Like, how do I make that break in? How do I get into that sort of place? Because in my experience, right, for me, I was I was working in a like in house gig. I think of very sort of, yeah, maybe not that's it's not the same niche as you, but it was like a big company. And everybody in there was friends with. And then that same team sort of ended up being in all these other places, right? And it's like they're bringing me along. And you know, story sounds quite similar. You were in that group. You were in that company. And then you went off afterwards. Is that is that a prerequisite to make this work? Or is it other ways that you can do this? It's not a prerequisite, but it's definitely a hack. When I graduated college, I really wanted to be an entrepreneur. I've watched way too many Gary Vee videos. And I thought I was a failure because I took a job. God forbid an ambitious entrepreneur takes a job before he starts his own thing, right? Well, it turns out that was the best thing I ever did, spending four years learning from the pros, learning on their dime, and actually getting paid to learn. That was quite amazing, but I'm seeing a shift these days. A lot more people don't even go to college or they'll do a license for two years. I see a lot of people in our space, skipping the whole formality of paying so much money to go to college or university. And so for those people, they're all getting started. Some of them might be as young as 18, 19 year old. If you don't have that exposure with not even to a company, but just to a university, you don't feel like you have this real life network yet. Then find your online world. Join the discord communities. Join the Slack communities. Slack has amazing communities. There's the growth tribe. We had our own community through betterly. There's tons of online communities where you can meet people and actually end up meeting them in real life or taking Zoom calls with them, virtual coffee. You can build a whole world online because of all these people starting communities. You have a community that's quite amazing. I've sure I've thought about that right from the get go. You join a copywriting community like yours immediately. You saw getting incubated in this ecosystem of hundreds of people who do the same thing you do. Isn't that amazing? What you really want to do from a sales standpoint, because I think your community has tons of value in terms of crafting your skill set. If you really want to find a community where people will make referrals and not compete with you as much, that's when you join communities that have complementing skill sets. In other words, if you're a copywriter, join a community of freelance marketers that has paid social buyers, paid surge buyers, SEO writers, people who again get on clients, retainers that also need what you're offering. Now you're borrowing their audience. You're making friends with people. It's not always one way. Meaning you'll also refer to these people. If you make really good friends with one person who's an amazing email marketer from a technical standpoint, not writing, then you guys can be buddies. Every time you get some boarded on an account, they need to help with their clavio because the engagement rate or the open rate is down and he makes a good impression. Now the client has trust with him. The next time they mention to him, they need a new copywriter. You'll be the one that will refer and vice versa. You get on board into a client, one of you freelance clients and you write a bad as email flow, but they're open rate suck or they deliverably suck. You're going to bring your buddy. You also want to find this little buddy system that works super well. You want to find a handful of complimentary service providers that are in your vertical. If you do e-commerce, just stay within e-commerce. Find someone that's in the same vertical, but in the different channel. If that makes sense. I have one email marketer tech guy that I basically bring into every single account. I don't know how much he's made at this point from all the different deals that I've brought him into, but he's always a game. I'm like, "Hey man, you're looking for another client." He's like, "Of course, Matt. I'm ready to go." I'm like, "Okay." He's the account. You know the game. Here's the-- problems I'm basically dealing with same time, same problems as last time. Can you come and fix them? Perfect. He's in the account. We set it up. We make everybody money. Yeah, it's, I mean, like my whole career as a freelancer was built with this. It's really cool that, you know, what you're talking about, just, you know, the way you're explaining it just sounds exactly like the way I was, you know, fortunate to, I think I stumbled on a little bit of this stuff. I think I had the right connections in the beginning. It wasn't as intentional, but I wasn't the right communities. I was with the right people. And, but I think the thing is, and I think many cooperators and marketers and freelancers in general, they don't understand this. There is always an aspect and element of luck always. But it's like, what do you do when you get that? So what happens when you get that referral from that one person? If you deliver properly and you crush it and you go all in and you actually treat that person correctly, you might get another $100,000 worth of business over the next three years. But most of the time, I think many freelancers, they don't know how to handle that or receive that referral the right way. I think a lot like a simple stuff, for example, thank you so much for making this introduction. Just making small, you know, just showing general appreciation, treating that prospect or treating that person correctly, responding to that person quickly. Imagine you make a referral, you create a group chat, and then the person you refer to as a freelancer doesn't reply for five days. Like you're never going to, it's done. It's done. You're not going to make referrals for them again. Absolutely not. I mean, it takes a long time to build a reputation, but it only takes one event to ruin it. I've seen it over and over again. I mean, I've seen the people who exactly what you laid out. It's incredible how some people won't even give you a simple thank you when you just introduced them to a huge account out of pure kindness, just because you think they're the right fit. I think you go a long way, right? Network shouldn't be taken for granted. And also, if someone makes a referral to you, you don't want to drop the ball. I mean, it's just not good business overall, and you certainly won't recover from it because if you drop, that's why I always tell people don't take on more than you can shoot. It's okay to say no. As a matter of fact, that's one of the things I like to talk about on social media is how to say no. I literally just said no two days ago. I could share my screen right now and show you. I've turned down an upsell from one of my clients that wanted me to take on a lot more through the holidays because one of the people quit. And I told him I can't. I literally I will consider it. I had a call with her and we looked over it. It's way too much. It's way too much meant powerful. One free dancer, especially through the holidays. And I said, I'm not going to do you a favor taking this on, even though that was an extra three grand a month in retainer, because I'm not going to be able to do the same job as the person who was doing it before. As a matter of fact, this isn't in house job. So I was trying to be helpful. So I'm actually going to take on probably 10, 15% just to help her alleviate the transition. Basically, they're only going to run the bare minimum. But then very quickly, they're going to shift that responsibility over to their new marketing hire that starts in January. So I was trying to be accommodating, but also straight forward. I I I love to make an extra three grand a month. Think about all the things you can do with an extra $36,000 a year. But if I don't think I can deliver 100% and above, I'd rather not take it because that three guys going to be nothing compared to how much my reputation is damaged. When they find out, I can't actually deliver on that scope of work. And the words don't spreading. Yeah. No, I mean, I agree. I think I think you're going to have a difficult situation. If you take on work and then you don't deliver on it. And it's like, it's even worse when it's a referral because then two people get like you run your reputation twice. And then they're going to speak about it too, right? I don't think people realize this. If you if you haven't built a deep online like you haven't built connections in the online world, you might not know how often this happens, but the amount of conversations I have behind the scenes where the negative drama spreads because it's almost funny sometimes is like this person really like dropped the ball. And like, can you believe that they did this? That any other everybody's talking about that person behind their back. I try not to engage with that conversation, but people do that freelancers are like freelancers are brutal with each other. They'll like have a conversation behind the they'll have a conversation behind the scenes about somebody that dropped the ball or complained about something online or did something. And it's like that person's reputation. Now they have all this invisible work that they have to do to try and recover it if they can. Yeah. And if you have an experience, those conversations, maybe you've experienced the ones from freelancers talking about clients because I've heard those as well. There are clients in the freelance paid social space that are on a on a unspoken black list. I mean, I'm not going to say names, but I can think of two or three top of mind that you ask anyone that's in the top 1% of Facebook ad buying in the US. They've come across that client at one point who's tried to hire them and everyone will turn them down because they know he's a nightmare. Right? So your reputation is everything. Yeah, those clients is funny. There's a couple of clients that I know like within my community, we don't have a black list. You know, you can't actually black list. But it's an unspoken is like, no, no, no, you don't want that deal. It looks good. You don't want that deal. Don't don't go for it. And then that person's like, why can't we find copywriters? Why they're always posting on this is and that it goes back to that barrel, like the thing that we were talking about, bottom of the barrel is like a lot of those clients that are blacklisted from the top 1%. They're the ones that are constantly posting on the job board. And then copywriters will like maybe get burned again and again. So a lot of corporations might be thinking like, why am I always getting bad clients? It's like, well, the top 1%, sometimes doesn't want to work with those people because of the bad experiences. And now you just get burnt and then your data set is like warped because you think that that's like how most businesses are. It's like, no, it's just that they can't hire a copywriters from referral because they've burnt the reputation. And then the opposite's true too with freelancers. Why is it? I can't close any clients because you did this that the other a few years ago. And the top 1% doesn't want to hire you. Now you have to like fix that or change niche or like, it's a mess. Yeah, if that happens to you, it's best to rebel from scratch and rebel that trust slowly. But in the end, it's worth it. Yeah. Okay, that's great. So if we were to go into let's say like a tactical thing. Because I know actually you just did a workshop for us. Literally like today, like you just did a workshop for us. And I really appreciated the dojo loved it. It was very, very, it was very, very thorough step by step. I know there's a few secrets in there that we'll keep in that training. But if you could touch upon what are some of the things that freelancers corporate is can do to start thinking about how they can kind of build this network for themselves and break into that industry. Yeah. Like I said earlier, there's so many different ways to get clients. You can do call emailing. You can apply on the platforms. You can do your own paid ads. Basically, limitless ways of finding clients. You go to a networking event, chamber of commerce, type of stuff. I mean, the list goes on and on. But at the end of the day, the top freelancers I've worked with, 80, 90% of the net of their business came from their own network. They own network and referrals. We saw like going on loop here with the referrals. But that's really what the top freelancers thrive on. It's referrals and their own network. So there's this thing called network harvesting that I like to call, which is not really a fancy term that people always wonder what the hell do you mean with network harvesting because it's like a garden. You've got this backyard that's full of leads. But you too often, you spend your time looking in the front window. You've got the leads hiding in play side. But you're not really thinking about the way the way of getting them because usually there's no structure. You're thinking, I don't have that big of a network. Everyone has a network. So I've got this little tracker. I like to use that that's broken down into three categories of potential clients. The first one is prospects. They're just my big list of people that I'm talking to on an ongoing basis. Every time I have a conversation, see I just make you on the street and we chat and I found out we're sort of in the same space. Facebook ads, you copywriting, boom Matthew is in my prospect list. Maybe he's not a client, but maybe he can refer me to someone. I want him to remember me. I want to be I want to be top of mind. So this is my prospect. Well, maybe I met a potential client at a networking event. Boom, he's in my prospect list. I'm going to nurture those people until I move them up to the next bucket, which is my lead bucket. So if this person that I met at the Chamber of Commerce event turns out to be a good potential client, I move them up to leads and that's when you start to have a conversation with them. You start to do an audit. You provide value. Maybe they've never ran ads before or they send out emails, but no one reads them because they're copywriting sucks. So maybe you write them an email, just show them what good copywriting could look like. Maybe you even let them try that email for free or for flat fee that's lower than what you would typically charge. Just to show them proof is in the pudding. And all of a sudden that prospect that went from a prospect to a lead turns from the lead to a client. And so this beautiful sheet, this beautiful dashboard and if your audience is interested in in grabbing that spreadsheet, I'm happy to give it away for free. Just make a copy. Maybe we'll put that in the description or in the comments or whatever description. Let's do that. Cool. I'm happy to give that as a gift to your audience. That's a really good way of of mechanically tracking your your network because otherwise it's all over the place. As a matter of fact, in my spreadsheet, I go as far as writing down whether they came from whether I DM them on LinkedIn, on Instagram, or I texted them out of a drop down because I forget, you know, if people I text, people I WhatsApp, people I send emails on LinkedIn, people I send emails on Instagram, people I actually run into the coffee shop. So I actually keep track of everything. And that's really helping me make sense of my pipeline. And typically when I go from putting them in the prospecting bucket to the lead bucket, I start to assign a monthly dollar value to them. And that monthly dollar value is very motivating because you'll always have a bunch of leads that are, you know, like you, not all of them will become clients. But because it aggregates, you see a huge number. So like right now my monthly potential retainer for my list is like $80,000 because I have like a dozen good leads. Yeah, recurring per month. I'm not going to close 80 grand worth of business tomorrow. But I know that technically if I closed all of them, I could. Now what happens if I only close a quarter of them, that's still 20 grand a month, right? So in my, in my spreadsheet, I like to have a dollar value associated to them whenever I bring them up closer to becoming a client, that's that's very motivating. And of course, after I close them, I move them up in my top bucket, which is my, my clients. And same daily, there's a formula that aggregates my, my total MR. It's always very motivating to see how much money you're making every month on paper. So this is how I'm tracking people. That's the first step of, of, uh, technically finding new clients. Now the game is to always keep your prospecting bucket at the bond field. It's basically having logs and, uh, and, and a fire, right? If you're running out of logs, your fire is going to die. I just came up with that. But that's actually good analogy. If you run out of logs, your fire will die. So your logs are your prospects and the fire are your clients. I like that. I like that. No clients. Okay. Um, and so the beauty is just tons of prospects out there, just tons of logs. I break these guys into four different categories. I think I went over here earlier with, uh, with your team is you got your, your, your hot prospects, your warm prospects, your cold one and your frozen ones. And they're very different. So your hot prospects, they're basically ex clients. So we all have a running list of ex clients that are actually primed to start working with us again. So unless you actually wronged your client or really fucked it up for them, there's a chance you might be able to get them back, even if it's only been a couple of months, since they've gone or a couple of years. Clients aren't sitting around all day after they leave, thinking about giving you jobs. They're not thinking around thinking, sitting around thinking, what are my fuchs doing? Maybe I should try and find him work again, right? Copper. No, they're not thinking about you. I don't take it personally. They're just not. It's your job to be top of my end again. And so this one bucket's usually the first one I go after. It's just former clients coming up with a reason to hit them up. That's not just, hey, you want to work together again. You want to come up with some sort of value to bring to the table. Hey, I thought of you. I just read this article about the e-commerce product you sell, that industry is booming. And, and I saw this new product coming out. Anyway, I thought of you guys. Maybe that gives you inspiration for your next line of product. Or, hey, I was scrolling Instagram and I saw this incredible ad that was actually an avatoyal for one of your competitors. I don't know if you saw it, but it's pretty bad-ass. And it looks like that converse is pretty good for them. Just get the conversation going. Don't talk about yourself. Talk about something interesting to them. Kinds come back. There's nothing is usually personal unless you really did something that messed up with their business. But a lot of the time clients just leave because they have a natural cycle. They leave because there's the next best guy who pitched the next shinyest idea, right? But a lot of the time, they always, they also boom right back because the grass is always greener on the other side. So I get clients all the time that leave and then we get them back a couple of months later or a year later, they saw I do an agency tour. It's just a natural cycle of clients. And my definition, if you stay with someone for a very long time, they don't get as excited as the person that just gone boarded. It's just natural and you shouldn't take it personally if clients leave after a while. But you should always consider taking them back. Another good reason to bring them back is if you were just doing email-cup writing when you when you last worked with them maybe six months ago and they ended up doing email-cup writing in-house, well, maybe now you do other totals. So now you can send them an email and say, "Hey, I was just thinking about you guys. I do avatoyles now. I wrote this incredible avatoyle for this client. Here are a couple metrics that made me think of you. Here's three angles. I just wrote down my notes. Anyway, I thought you should know and would love to catch up sometime. And now you got a foot in the door maybe within you offer you have, right? So again, these are your warm prospects. There's one more there I really like. Is all your mentors, your former bosses, anyone that really wants to succeed that knows you, that's worked with you, is a really good fit to hit up. So think about all the people in your warm bucket, write them down in your prospecting box and reach out. So that's one way of finding clients. Second one is your warm prospects. Warm prospects, these are people that you actually sent leads. I mean, sent proposals to. So you've had them in your pipeline. You met them somewhere, conversation went well, you sent them a proposal and then crickets or they kindly let you know, hey, we went with somebody else. Sorry. Or you're too expensive or whatever, but you send them a proposal. You went pretty far in the process, very closely closing them, but you fell short. These are really good people to reactivate. The same way I just described everything with your hot prospect is giving them value, coming up with interesting topics that are valuable to them. Not just hitting them up saying, hey, want to work together again. That's how you end up on the, do not answer email list. Just bring them value. So yeah, these are good people. Also just your leads. Like some people you never got to give them a proposal. You just hit them up. Maybe you talk, maybe you had a call. You didn't get that far with them. Reactivate them. People get busy. Some people wanted to work with you, but then they kind of forgot about it because life goes on. And maybe you could have closed them if you followed up a little bit. Third bucket is going to be a cold leads. That's a massive one. Cold leads is basically anyone you've ever met that hasn't worked with you. Has an engaged with you. It could be former co-workers. You hit them up. Have you been? It's basically people you do a touch base with. Very casual. Maybe you want to get some coffee. You want to grab 20 minutes to catch up on zoom. And you want to ask them about them. What have you been up to? Has your new gig trading you? I just hit up one of my good friends. We used to work together by having talked to her in years. And I saw she just joined Shopify in partnerships. So that's that's cool. Like generally, that's cool. But also let me hit her up. Catch up. See how life is going. Remind her that I'm really qualified, paid social freelancer. And who knows? Maybe within her ecosystem of being a partnership manager at Shopify. She'll have clients looking for my for my type of role. It's a game of being top of mind because there's so many freelancers. Whenever she'll get asked for a recommendation for the channel you offer, copywriting or paid social, whichever it is, you want to be the first person she thinks about. It's a game of reps. So that's her third bucket, the prospecting bucket. And then the fourth and final bucket that I recommend freelancers to always go after is the frozen bucket. What's the frozen bucket? Matthew, you ask these are your dream clients that literally don't know you exist. They're walking around earth at this very moment right now. You're dreaming of working with this brand or this company, but they don't know who you are. They've never heard your name. They've never seen your face. These are people you have to be really bold and come up with a really good excuse to DM them on Instagram, LinkedIn, find their email and come up with something that's really outside the box that will make them think, wow, this person's interesting. I'll give them the time of the day. One of the ways I'm doing this, I have my blog, the Mono Freedenter. So when I want to work with a company that's, that's again, never heard of me, I will write a blog article about them. A really nice piece that obviously make them look good. And, and I'll just DM the founder and say, hey, I just want to let you know I'm a big fan of your product or your service. It's usually things that I actually use. And also I just wrote a nice, a nice article I wanted to share with you. Just leave it at that. You would be shocked how many people actually see this and say, wow, this is cool. Or if you have a blog, make a piece of content. I've made a couple of reels for clients that end up closing. Same deal with products. You know, there's a handful of products you use every day. You want to work with those brands. Become a customer, spend 20 bucks to buy their product and then just give them some nice feedback about it, right? Or if you don't want to do any of the above, just provide value, write an amazing email for them, write an amazing landing page, do it for free. Whatever it can give them a taste for what your skill set is, then then go ahead and provide that for free. You know, it probably will take you a couple of hours, but the upside is still infinite for this bucket that it's totally worth it. So that's your frozen bucket. That's basically where dreams live. It's really, it could be anyone could be Nike. It could be about anyone of the sun. They're all have LinkedIn, all have Instagram and there's endless ways of getting their attention. So to make a long story short, if you can go ahead and really itemize in your head, those four kinds of prospects that exist, then you can start hitting them up one by one, plug them into a tracker and mechanically go through them, set up polls, set up coffee meetings. And then as you go, it just becomes, it just becomes sort of a snobbling effect because you might just reach out to 50 people in a month and then just 30 the next month and then 10 a month after, but they compound. And one day you wake up and you've got a text from someone saying, Hey, are you are you still doing a copywriting for a for a beauty beauty brands that use a Clavio? Because I have someone that just met at this event, seeing next to me at the round table, randomly and I just thought of you because because we caught up two months ago. And boom, that's how you get referrals. - So over the last year, I've seen something I've never seen before. Copper it is marketers, they're making more money than ever before, especially the top 1%. And if you want to be one of them and you want to join us and you want to get insights into exactly what's happening in our industry and also get my raw and unfiltered thoughts, the stuff that we're not sharing here on YouTube, then apply to join my email list at list.copywriting.org. And yeah, I'll see you in my next email. Now let's get back to the video. What you just said is like literally the playbook for exactly how I built my entire freelance business, like everything. Like it is so well said, I appreciate that man. Like I just want people to listen to it and it makes me feel a little bit frustrated sometimes with freelancers because I know that a lot of the stuff they may subconsciously know a little bit of this already, but it's like just take the Google sheet or take the prospecting sheet and actually start doing this, making the effort to do it. Yeah, the client doesn't arrive tomorrow. The client might take two, three months depending on the sales cycle, but this is the long play. This is the play where you don't sit there all day prospecting and you actually start kind of farming. You know, they're harvesting. It's like you said network harvesting, right? It's like, and I think about my very first big client that I closed that changed my career. It was a frozen bucket because I bought their product. - Really? - Yeah, I bought their product. I learned a lot from them. It was a language learning product. It helped me learn French and Spanish. So I was studying French and Spanish with their product and it gave me an incredible experience in Montreal, Canada because I went to Montreal and I was speaking French and that product helped me speak French. So I sent them a message and I said, "Hey, you don't realize what you've done for me because obviously I'm just a user." But like I want you to know, I used your product. It completely changed my life and enhanced my French speaking skills. And I'm so grateful. I see you guys are putting a lot of effort into your marketing, especially with email and I see you building an email list. There's not much I can really do to show you how much this has changed my life, but the least I could do is write you some emails because I'm an email copywriter. I want to write you 10 emails. For free, no charge, just as a thank you. And then they're like, "Yeah, let's do it." And then they got on the phone. I got the co-founder on the phone and marketing director worked with me. We wrote the emails and then after those 10 emails, those three emails, they were like, "Oh, we know we want to actually kind of bolt this into it." We had the last three emails as like selling something. I was like, "We need a landing page for these, you know, for these last three emails." And he's like, "Okay, would you be open to writing the landing page?" Sales page. I was like, "Yeah, sure, 1500 bucks." First 1500 bucks. There we go. First 1500 bucks, like, you know, it was my first big project. I looked at the check in the mail. I could see it was like shining. The light was shining. They sent me a physical check in Canada. I went to check that and I was like, "Okay, I'm a freelancer. I made it." But it's literally just because of that, you know. It's like exactly what you said. And then some of my next clients kind of similar. And then I started to work in teams. And then I applied literally the first three, the hot leads, the warm leads, cold leads. I just did that and five years later, million dollars, you know. Done. So like, you know, you can do it too. You can do it too. Yeah. I mean, when the right mind is going to say no to someone who's so dedicated to making your enterprise better, I mean, what's better than a really good copywriter? A copywriter who's a super user of your product. So if there's literally any product around you that's accessible, then I encourage you to really go after it. This is actually I met the founder of Movement Watch's Jake. When I was in college, I had an entrepreneurship professor who pushed us to actually go after that frozen bucket. And at the time, I wasn't even selling anything, but he basically wanted us to come up with a product, a CPG brand we really liked, or a company we admire, the branding and everything we stood for and reach out to the founder and get them to do an in person interview for 30 minutes. That was very important. It wasn't a fun interview. It was an in person interview. And as part of the assignment, you had to record it and take a selfie with the guy. So I looked around me. I remember thinking, okay, I admire Apple, but there's no way I'm going to get Steve Jobs on the phone. And I looked at my wrist and I was wearing a movement watch. And I had actually backed them up on Kickstarter. I think I was probably back in 2016. So I was most likely one of the first thousand customers. And I found on Instagram this guy Jake, he had like 10,000 followers, cool dude, entrepreneur. I was crazy looking up to him and I DM him and I say, hey man, I'm a college student, junior USC. I know these sounds out of the blue, but I'm actually one of the first few hundred customers, I think from movement, I backed you literally when the brand didn't exist. Anyway, I have this assignment and I'm really looking up to you and I'd love to see if you could take 30 minutes out of your busy day. I acknowledge he was busy and sure enough, he was busy. He was in the middle of selling it for $200 million. And this guy gave me 30 minutes. He gave me 30 minutes. It wasn't easy because the first time we set up the time, I showed up. The guy didn't show up no show. And so he went, he disappeared for two weeks and two weeks later, I followed up and he was like, man, I'm so sorry. I was a no show. A stuff was crazy. I owe you big time. So now I got this guy. I'm looking up to big time. He's coming to my meeting, me and nobody, a college student who feels like he owes me something because I followed up with him and he bought me coffee. We had coffee at Starbucks in Marinadelle, Ray, California. I'll never forget. I put my phone down, I recorded the interview, it took myself free. And to this day, these guys sell my mentor. All of this because I, you know, I wanted my way to hit him up and and show them I cared about his company and no one's out of reach. These guys, the one who made my whole career, he told me, do not go work at a brand, go work at an agency first. That's how you'll become a better marketer. And then once you become a really good marketer, go ahead and and either start your own thing or start a brand or something or go work at a brand that he was always full of good advice. All of them off of 1 DM, 1 DM on Instagram. Yeah, it's crazy. You're going to go ahead and close my, let me go ahead and close my car because I had this son in my face. So you're in Dubai. Sorry. Yeah, I have to buy in this. Son is moving. So hang on. That's much better. Because I was trying to have the facing south. So I'm facing west. So I'm trying to have the son in my face, but we're back. So I'm wondering if it's going to cook you because you know, Dubai is pretty hard, right? So yeah, yeah, it really is. When did you, when did you move to Dubai? You were in the States, right? And then you moved to Dubai? Yeah, I was in Los Angeles for 11 years from 2013 to 2024 basically. And then I moved to Texas for my last year in America. And then I moved to Dubai. So I spent basically all my 20s in the US. I moved there when I was 17. I was, I was there just to learn English. I was supposed to be here for a year, just as a gap year after high school. But one thing that's another, I ended up spending 12 years in this beautiful country. That's so cool. That's really, really cool. I have one thing I think a lot of corporate is definitely one and a half. What is the future for freelancing? I know it's a pretty big question because nobody can know exactly. But I mean, my perspective is it's going to be more and more about this, this network. Like I've been telling my private clients like the more time goes on and the more people can enter the space from anywhere in the world, the more it's going to be about who you know. But do you have any particular thoughts about like what 2026 is going to look like and how corporate is going to prepare themselves? Big time. I mean, it's always been about your network. But I think what's happening right now is freelancing is just going to continue to boom. A lot of people feel like freelancing is too crowded. A lot of people discourage because they don't think there's enough clients for everyone. But it's not true. Companies right now are building their team up with freelancers. So the way I built better early in 2022, I had 12 full-time hires in the office. Full-time hires are headache because you have to give them health insurance. You have to give them time off all that stuff. They're at the office, lunch, I love having employees. But when you have 12 in an office, it's so much less convenient than having freelancers. So now building these new companies, the modern freelancer, I don't have one full-time hire. I have about seven freelancers doing seven different things as opposed to a bunch of full-time hires. So my point is, for as many new freelancers are entering the market, there's just as many companies building off of, building the teams off of freelancers. So the demand is also rising just as much as the supply is rising. Now the crossover here is there's AI. A lot of people think their job is also getting replaced by AI. So I'm hearing either it's too crowded or AI can do my job. So we address getting too crowded. I don't think that's true. You just have to be in the 80% of jobs that don't get posted online, you have to do refer it. Now when it comes to AI, you have to treat AI as your silent business partner that doesn't cost you anything. So the reason why AI hasn't replaced your job is because say you're a founder, you have a business and you have eight different things you need to do on daily basis. You have product, marketing, sales and everything one of these disciplines has an AI that can basically help you do the job. The client doesn't have time to manage all eight AI tools. He doesn't have also the capability of knowing how you use those on top of his fingers. For copywriting, let's just use copywriting as an example. Claude is amazing. But the client doesn't have time to come up with all the best prompts. The client doesn't have time to take whatever Claude gave him and edit it and make it look good, right? Because that's not his job. expertise, use a freelancer should embrace it. You should tell your clients, I use AI, you should hire me because I spent all my time learning how to actually make the most out of cloud. You shouldn't hide behind the fact that you're using it. As a matter of fact, you'll probably feel like you're stupid. If you're a copyrighter, you don't use cloud, you still do things manually. How much is it going to cost me? Right? So you use cloud and you use all these tools to show your customer that you're actually the freelancer who was already good before that stuff existed. So most likely, you'll be even better than that. You have AI. You'll be faster, you'll deliver more, but also you'll be the person who's always on top of the latest tool that they haven't heard about because that's all you do all day every day. That's your discipline. The clients don't have time to be on top of all the latest AI tools. I mean, there's so many AI tools every day. I see them every day. My feed this AI tool can do this common AI and I'll send you the work. There's just so many of them. I keep track of the one that are creative because that's what I do. I do. I do performance creative for e-commerce brands. I know the tools that are coming out that are actually helpful for e-commerce brands to use to build that creative. I don't know shit about copywriting tools, SEO, AI tools. I don't have time for this. Now imagine the client is even less time. So I don't think AI is replacing anyone. Even some of the more basic tasks, you still need someone to manage the AI. I think if you continue to use those tools to get better at what you do, to deliver better quality work, more consistent quality, faster, you should still be able to charge as much as you did before, maybe even more. If you're able to increase the scope of work. This will feed back into your referral loop because you'll do a better job for your clients and you'll get more referrals back at the top of your funnel. Interesting. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I think that's, yeah. A lot of the things you said today, I just agree with completely because it's been my direct experience as well. It must come from all that experience working with thousands of freelancers. I mean, at this point, it's not really much of an opinion. Yeah, it is. Yeah. I know industry. They're like, you know, here's what I think you should do. Here's what I think you should do. And you should try this strategy and you should try this strategy. But once you have enough data, I mean, you know, I've got what like 500 people I'm working with. So I've got like 500 people's data. You know, you've got those 15,000 people on your waiting list. It's just data. You know, it's not an opinion anymore, right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So I agree. What else do I have? I actually had another thing I was really thinking about. And I was like going to ask you about it. I wanted to know. Yeah. How do you see how freelancers deliver for clients? Because I think that's also the other 50 that's the other side of the coin for referrals is like being able to deliver once you get the client. Like what are some of the things that you want to think about besides obviously the skill? So like, let's say I'm, you know, corporate. There's other aspects of that engagement, that relationship that you got to keep doing to keep them as a retain them. And then eventually get them to the point where they're referring to people to like what are some tips you have there? Yeah. I mean, obviously, you know, under promise and over deliver should always be the attitude. Right. So if you think you do something in three days, I'll then it'll take five because it's standard and give it to them in three days. That's under promising and over delivering that's the basis of any, uh, been a successful, um, uh, relationship. I think that's one of them. Um, I just had one that's my mind. Oh, yes, standardized. Standardize is the other big one. So if you're a copywriter, try as every kind of unique, try it to the best of your ability to standardize your product off rank. In other words, come up with packages. Don't just sign a retainer for client to do copywriting. Your scope of work should be as precise as can be. And I know it's never perfect, but your scope of work should be very detailed. It shouldn't say write emails and, uh, advertisers for clients. It should say, all right, 10 emails, uh, every month or every other week and then three other toils with 40 from the hoax. Be very precise with your scope of work. Figure out what makes you worth your time. In other words, create packages that make enough money that you're really motivated, motivated. I don't take so much time. Right. This is going to be a good ratio of, of, uh, time input and, and cash output. And once you've come up with your sweet spot of a package that's priced great, uh, tie enough for you to make money below enough that clients close on it. Then just go ahead and offer the same package over and over again. Find that sweet spot. If it's a $4,000 retainer and it includes 10 emails a month and three other toils, that's all you should be offering, right? Systematize it. And then within the, uh, service offering, figure out what works across your client. That's, uh, that's especially helpful if you're in the same industry. For example, e-commerce. If I do, uh, a retainer that involves 10 static ad creatives every month. That's all I do for five different clients. When I find one format of one creative that works for one client, I can copy and paste and offer it to my other clients. In other words, it took me a long time to come up with a winning angle for one brand. Now that I found it, I can apply that angle, uh, in their own language to the other four clients. So if you systemize things, you're very quickly able to replicate some of the wins from, uh, client number one across client two, three, four and five. So standardize your packages, come up with scope of works that are as accurate as possible, standardize your pricing if you can. Of course, be a little flexible, but try and have a north star. And then in the work you do that you deliver, come up with wins that you can replicate across the board, whether it's an angle, whether it's, uh, an ad format, whether it's an email format, whatever it is, try and not have to start from scratch every time. If I'm doing, uh, Facebook ads, I try and just do e-commerce. If I start to do lead generation or app installs, every time I've stray away from my little ecosystem of Shopify that connects to Facebook, it's just a headache because I don't know how to down like how to connect the tracking data from the app store back into the Facebook ad campaign. But I know how to do that for Shopify and meta because that's all I do all day. So try and systematize your scope of work, your deliverables. If you can stick to a niche, I think that was my last point. It's more so sticking to a niche, uh, that's replicable. Then you'll save a lot of time. You'll be able to deliver better work and less time and charge this as much or more. Interesting. There's one thing I'm going to not push back on, but like I want to get your thoughts on this because I've experienced a little differently with copywriting specifically. Like when you have, um, let's say standardized packages, how do you balance the act of like prescribing exactly what that business needs versus the package that you've set up? Because sometimes I've seen that work where like a copywriter does have a standardized package and they built up a good reputation like daily emails, for example, that's a pretty, pretty standardized package. But let's say like these days, a lot of businesses are looking for creative strategy and each business kind of has a slightly different perspective of what they think creative strategy should look like for their business. How do you find that middle ground? Do you just establish it on the sales call and you set it up then or like how would you go about that? I think you should never get stuck to a certain number of deliverables. I think it just depends on the client, right? If the client's, if you're, if you're standard package, you agree with yourself is a good average package is one email a day, but the kind that's two, I'm not saying you should limit yourself. Then you should offer two. What I'm saying you should be careful is offering a completely different deliverable. For example, writing an email is pretty standard. Writing one email or two emails is the same process, right? Or writing 100 emails is the same process. But if they start asking you to write lending pages, you better know how to do lending pages, right? Again, writing one lending page or 10 lending pages, same process. Be careful what you start offering within your product offering because when you have to start from scratch, learning how to do something new for every client, that's when it becomes very difficult. That's when you risk your reputation fast, right? That's right. That's right. And that's happened. The reason I bring this up, that's happened to me. I too kind of client, that's an app installed client. I'd never done app installed, but I say, that's okay. I know, I know Facebook ads, I know creative, how hard can it be? Turns out it's freaking difficult. I spent so much time figuring out how to attract the data. It's completely different. Setting traffic for Facebook to Shopify, which is what I've done my all career, to setting traffic for Facebook to the app store, to download an app, add to relearn all these things, right? And then I did it again for Lee Jan and there's this learning curve. When you start to venture into different deliverables or different industries, different verticals, that's when more often than not, you can face a really steep learning curve. And that's, that's what you get into a dangerous zone. Unless you really want to stick to this niche, you'll love it. And you know, you'll have more clients like that than it's worth doing the learnings, but to the best of your ability, stick to one niche, you can't really get at it. Come up with something that's replicable fast, then you can do well, that you're known for. If it's writing copy for health and wellness supplements, that's a great niche. There's tons of work there. You should never try and work with a company that sells a payroll for women. Because now you have to learn a whole new world, right? I think that maybe that's a better example. Sometimes it's not just about the output, like the actual email, it's also about the learning curve of learning the audience. Because copy writing is all about the audience and triggering emotions. So if you know nothing about an audience, you have to relearn something from scratch every time. If you write it, if you write for old people all the time, you know what triggers old people, then you can replicate across different products. If all of a sudden you have to write for a Gen Z, you don't know how to write to Gen Z, you have to learn what what ticks them, what triggers them, right? I think that I think that was my point. He's trying to standardize your offering as much as possible to do a point that you're like efficient in water when you're in water. You already know what you're going to do before you even sign them. Because if you know how to do creative strategy, like for example, then the package might be 3K here, 4K here, 2K here, but the process is the same, right? Yeah. Versus if you go in and you let, I mean, I had that problem. I mean, I've had the same thing I took on the client. I was eager. I think a lot of corporate is especially once you crack prospecting or legion, you know, your network does have a couple of different types of fish that you're bringing in. That's right. That's kind of like sift between them, right? So if you're getting success for the first time with like serious momentum, you've got three clients on the table, ones are B2B software company, ones a language learning business, one is one wants you to write like ads. It's like that's cool and you could say yes to all those, but you're going to burn out very, very quickly and you're probably going to drop the ball. So as I had that, so I had a client that I had to work with. They were an agency in Australia and I thought, you know, what this agency, I came in with good authority. I came up, this was like three years ago. I had good authority. I came in as a sort of like a referral. They're like a multi-seven-fig agency and I was like, okay, how can it be? They had their own process for the way that they worked with all their clients because they're an agency and then optimized this, they have like a specific type of landing page that they like to write. It was like, there's a certain style because they were applying literally what we just been talking about. Like they've sanitized their process, right? I don't write landing pages like that and I could probably learn, but within 48 hours of that project, I still remember I was sitting in Victoria in Canada at a friend's desk eating cereal or something. I was like, I can't do this, I can't do this project. I don't know what they want. I wrote the sales letter landing page. They came back to me and they're like, Matt, this is not where we want. I was like, okay, well, don't pay me. Let me find you something. Somebody really quickly, I don't think this is going to be a fit for either of us. I think the learning curve here is a bit too far from me. Palasah have other clients. It would be a disservice to actually continue the project to figure it out. I mean, get you somebody that can integrate and for the trouble, don't worry about any payment. Because I just don't want to lose the reputation on it, but it was clearly not paid. So I think that's the thing as well as can you cut the deal when you know it's not working? I think many cooperatives, they've been a sit with that deal. I think had I been a little bit less experienced and was three years ago and I've been like earlier in my career like six years ago, I probably would have sat with that project, probably would have drank crap down the coffee and Red Bull, pulled my hair out and I probably would have lowered the quality of my delivery for all my other clients trying to fix this bad deal. All my other clients were suffered because of this client. So it's like better to just cut the deal, it didn't work, it's not a fit. And I think sometimes cooperatives as well, many freelancers will kind of take it personally, like the work didn't work. I mean, I think it's a great, that you bring up the app because you've spent all this money for clients. So you're clearly very, very good at what you do. And yet in this deal, you could maybe struggle with like maybe I don't know what I'm doing, right? But like cooperatives can get exposed to this, like maybe I don't know what I'm doing, it's just because you haven't done that process, right? You just haven't done that specific type of work. Yeah. And look, if you're early in your career, it's one thing to grind and sort of like catch up on learning these things. So if we take your example Matthew and you have three clients and three very different verticals and you pull your hair and pull all the nighters to figure it out, that might be okay at the beginning, because frankly, if you don't have any other options, sometimes you just have to do it, right? But the second you get three, four or five clients and get a little bit of momentum, you should focus your energy on narrowing down to your niche on something. I mean, there's countless examples of people who close more deals because they brand themselves as experts in a specific niche Michael who's in your communities. He's known as like the health and wellness copywriter every single time I come across a health and wellness brand that looks for copywriting. He's exactly for he's engraved in my brain as the go to health and wellness copywriter guy. He's the only, there's probably others, but he's the guy who brands like this. I know he's done it for so many companies and he's crushed it that I already know for a fact. He knows all the tricks. He just needs to tweak them and apply them to different brand, right? So that's the, there's certainly value being known as an expert in your own vertical on top of just obviously sitting time for yourself doing the work. It worked on me too, by the way, I also made Michael referral like when I first started working with him, he's like, I'm health. This is what I do. This is all I do every day health. And then somebody the week off to say, oh, you know, we've got a $50 million health business, you know, that does, it's some sort of like health supplements. And I was like, okay, well, the tough can I make that introduction, right? And it turned out to be great. And he, he still says it's been like a couple of years. He still sends me a nice message once in a while and says, thank you. Wow. That really changed my life. I really appreciate it because he's such a great dude, you know? And I think that's that's that's to the point. That's why I like if I get a health gig. I mean, now he's actually doing coaching in the community too. Now he's doing some copy critique and he's reviewing other people's health. Wow. Because it's like, well, he's the guy for it. And he does the guy. He's helped so many people. He's the guy. So you're going to become the guy or the girl, right? That does the does the thing that you do, right? Yeah. Now I really love this. And I really appreciate it. You know, you're coming on and sharing all these things with with me and also copyright isn't and some of the freelancers that listen to us. Where can somebody find you if they want to learn all your secrets? Modern freelancer? Yeah, the modernfreedancer.com. I write a newsletter myself every Friday. I promise it's not AI. Of course, I use AI to help me write my thoughts. But if you take one look at my newsletter, you'll see I share a lot of personal stories. I try to make my content very original, but also actionable. Basically, every now and right on Fridays, there's little nuggets like this. You can go straight into your free and business and apply. I write long form blog content on my website as well. A lot of guides and how to's. So I think this value there. And then you can follow me on Instagram, the modern freelancer with underscore the modern freelancer. Yeah, I think it's a good place. Perfect. And then you guys have also got the resource in the description. We're going to be adding that as well. So yeah, yeah. Thanks Alex. Appreciate this man. This is a great shot. Thanks so much Matthew. Chad soon. Yeah, take care. See you.