Should the founder write the marketing copy, or hire a copywriter?
I've written every word on my site myself. The homepage, the pricing page, the emails, the ads, everything. And I'm starting to wonder if that's craft or just stubbornness.
Writing it myself means the voice is real, the claims are true, and the copy sounds like a person instead of a brochure.
Nobody knows the product like I do, and nobody can feel the frustration of the customer like I can, because I've been answering their emails for two years.
But it also means everything takes me ten times longer than it should, and I'm not actually good at it — I'm just good at it enough. A real copywriter could take my half-formed sentences and turn them into something that converts, in a fraction of the time, and I could spend those hours on the product.
The fear is that hiring someone means losing the voice. That they'll write something smooth and generic and technically fine, and it'll read like every other SaaS page, and I'll have traded my one real advantage for polish.
Have you hired a copywriter? Did it actually improve conversion, or did you spend weeks explaining your product and get back something that sounded like a stranger?
Replies
the voice is the one part you can't hand off, and it's also the part that converts, so i'd keep writing it. what a copywriter actually sells you is polish, and polished is exactly the thing that reads like a stranger. the half-formed sentence that came straight out of two years of customer emails is usually the line that works, clumsy and all.