You built something last week that solved a client’s problem.

A template.

A framework.

A voice note that finally made macros click for someone who’d been confused for months.

A checklist that got a client through meal prep Sunday without losing the will to live.

You sent it. It helped them - good.

But you moved on.

Coaches solve valuable problems every single day - in their DMs, on their check-in calls, in their own heads when they figure out how to explain something in a way that really clicks for a client.

But then they just... move on to the next problem.

The resource gets buried in a Google Drive folder. The voice note disappears. The template gets used once and forgotten.

Meanwhile, the same coach is sitting at their desk on a Tuesday thinking: I need to create more content. I need something to offer. I need a lead magnet.

You already have so much.

Think about everything you’ve built in the last 12 months of coaching:

Weekly meal plan templates.

Training splits.

Grocery lists.

A “back on track” protocol you’ve sent to a dozen clients who fell off after a holiday.

A checklist for eating out without derailing progress.

A Loom explaining progressive overload that you’ve basically recorded 40 times because you keep having the same conversation.

All of that is an asset.

Every single thing on that list could be packaged, named, and offered - either for free to warm up your audience, or for a small amount of money to someone who’s not yet a client but is definitely in your orbit.

Free to clients. Paid to followers.

Once you’ve helped someone solve even a small problem, the conversation about working together long-term is a completely different one.

You’re not a stranger anymore. The trust is already there.

What a micro offer actually is (and isn’t)

A micro offer is not a watered-down version of your coaching package.

It’s a focused solution to one specific problem that’s PART of what your coaching helps with… priced low enough that it’s an impulse buy.

The point isn’t primarily the revenue (though that’s nice). The point is that someone who pays you, even a small amount, has crossed a line. They’re a buyer now.

Selling to an existing buyer has a success rate of 60–70%, compared to 3–20% for a cold prospect.

By the time someone finishes your micro offer, they should be a better prospect for your main coaching package.

You’ve solved one of the small bottlenecks they get hung up on.

How to find yours

Open your phone. Your notes app. Your camera roll. Your saved posts. Your DMs.

You’re looking for:

• A method or framework you use regularly that gets results

• A question you get asked all the time

• A piece of content that performed better than you expected

• A voice note or check-in that explains something really clearly

• A client win (even a small one) that came from something repeatable you did

Write down 3 things. Those are your raw materials.

Then ask yourself: If someone paid me to solve just this one thing, what would that look like?

What’s the specific problem it solves? Who has that problem? What does it include? What result do they get, and how long does it take?

One outcome only. Give it a cool name that sounds like it solves the problem. Put a payment link on it. Done.

The idea isn’t that you give them your whole coaching offer as a “light” version, but that you give them one part of the problem 100% solved:

You probably have versions of all of these micro offers in your Google drive right now.

You just haven’t put them in front of the right people for a while.

Here’s how:

1. Hand raisers - these get people to identify if they have the problem you can help with. Looks like: "Drop a 👋 if you've ever done everything right for three weeks and then completely lost momentum." This isn’t about selling them - just identifying them.

2. The 2 Step Follow-up - specific, low barrier, sent straight to the people that responded: "I've been working on something that's going to help with exactly that - the week 3 wall. If you want me to send it over, comment [keyword] / hit the sticker / whatever."

It’s elegant because there’s NO big fanfare, no sales page, no funnel - just “hey, I made this to help people like you with problems like this. Want it?”

I love it.

Anyway, I actually use this myself all the time…

So I have a shitload of ideas you can grab if you’re looking for inspiration.

To grab this list DM me the word “LIST” on instagram.

I’ll send you over a big ass list.

“I will write your social media content to build your authority on Instagram.”

That was the whole offer.

It was called the dirty dozen - because it was only 12 posts.

It grew crazy fast because people could see it was working.

I was getting good results in one specific place.

NOT being all things to everyone.

These days, social media is probably the smallest part of what we do in terms of ROI for clients.

But it was the thing that got us known. The narrow lane built the wider road.

I was reminded of this recently when a copywriter I’d hired for some freelance work was asked to give a talk on Meta ads for travel agents.

He sent me a DM about it - questioning if he should say yes to the opportunity.

The brief he received was enormous.

Explain what Meta ads are, how they work, how to build campaigns, what pricing and reach mean, ads vs boosted posts, how to know if they’re right for your business, what investment will make a difference…

It was basically: explain everything.

Insane.

He knows his stuff.

But nobody walks away from a talk like that having actually learned something actionable.

It’s WAY too much, way too broad.

The audience leaves overwhelmed, with no idea what to do first. We were gonna do something different…

Control the frame on what you’re there to answer

Not “Meta ads for travel agents”.

That’s a whole universe of content.

Instead, we were going to define and constrain the frame:

“How to set up a lead form ad for travel agents in Q3 so you can build your first campaign, keep control of your spending, and get more qualified leads, even if you don’t have a media buyer in your team.

We’ll talk about the key metrics that matter… and what’s a distraction…

You’ll also learn the 3 types of creatives that go into every test - so get your phones ready, because I’ll show you a QR code you can scan to grab my 5 best performing scripts right to your inbox!”

Same expertise.

But a completely different level of confidence.

Suddenly there’s a person in the room. There’s a problem. There’s an outcome.

And he doesn’t have to be an authority on all of Meta ads - which is crazy overwhelming for them and him…

He just has to know this part really, really well.

Which he does.

Here’s the framework… it works for any speaking opportunity.

1. Define the one question you’re there to answer.

Not the topic. The question.

Make it specific enough that someone in your audience can put their hand up and say that’s me.

If your title could apply to everyone, it’ll land with no one.

2. Tell them what they’ll learn and what’s a distraction.

This is underrated.

Giving your audience permission to stop worrying about everything else is an act of massive authority because you’ve immediately taken control of the talk.

“We’re not covering X today” is almost as valuable as what you are covering, because it defines the hard boundaries of what you’ll talk about.

This is more important if you’re less confident about going off plan because it stops people from asking questions about stuff that’s not what you’re prepared to cover.

3. Always create a live offer moment.

This is where most people leave money (and list growth) on the table.

You’ve got a room full of people who are engaged, who trust you enough to be there, and then… the talk ends and everyone goes home.

You’re hoping someone looks you up on Instagram (after a full day of speakers) and reaches out.

Don’t let that happen.

• A QR code that goes to your five best scripts.

• A ManyChat keyword that triggers a download right there in the room.

• A simple landing page with the one resource that goes deeper on what you just taught.

Something they can grab right now, while you’re still in the room with them.

The photo on stage is useful as an authority signal… but it disappears from people’s feeds in 48 hours.

The email address stays & gives you countless opportunities.

I wrote about this a bit more in this article:

4. Say yes to the opportunities you’re given, not the ones you wish you’d been given.

This writer would have much preferred to give a talk about SEO for car dealerships… but this was the opportunity he got.

But inside the overwhelming brief he was given was a talk he could absolutely give.

One that was specific, valuable and actionable…

As long as he was willing to reframe it.

Most coaches I know do this too.

They get asked to speak in a community, on a podcast, at an event, and they either say no because they don’t feel like the expert, or they say yes and try to cover everything and dilute the whole thing.

You don’t need to be the definitive authority on a topic.

You need to own one specific answer to one specific question really well.

That’s how Kind Copy started. One thing. Done well. For the right people.

The rest followed.

The hardest part of this isn’t understanding the framework…

It’s applying it when you’re staring at a vague brief and trying to figure out what your specific question actually is.

That’s exactly the kind of thinking CathAI is built for.

Not to give you a generic talk outline, but to help you find the angle that’s true to what you actually know.

If you’ve got a talk booked, and you’d like to take it for a test drive…

You can start a free 7-day trial now.

There’s a clip of Guru from Gang Starr getting interviewed at the start of You Know My Steez…

“That makes me know that what ‘re doing… we had the right idea in the beginning. And we just need to maintain our focus, and elevate… what we do, we update our formulas…

We have certain formulas, but we update ‘em with the times and everything, y’know?

So the rhyme style is elevated, the style of beats is elevated, but it’s still Guru & Premier - and there’s always a message involved.”

If you don’t know the song - I’ll link it at the end of this post.

There are probably only 25 stories - your formulas - you’ll tell over and over again as a coach.

The narrative spine that taught you lessons so strong that you actually built your whole philosophy around them.

But for many coaches, they feel like they rely on 2 kinds of stories…

1. Those which are very new - often partially borrowed from people whose content you consume now…

The Hormozi / Gary Vee / Jocko style content, which resonates with you… but is too advanced for the people you’re coaching…

So it doesn’t attract them.

2. Or the very old, dating back to the start of the journey, which has probably stopped resonating with you - but always bangs whenever you put it out.

Creating this content probably bores you, because you’re past it… and it keeps you feeling stuck, serving clients you want to outgrow.

I had a conversation with a coach yesterday who I absolutely adore. I think she’s exceptional at what she does. And she told me…

“I’m sitting on a goldmine of stories I’ve stopped telling.”

That’s what I call The Good Chapter Problem.

In practice, coaches haven’t run out of stories, but they’re in a chapter of their lives now where things are actually pretty good.

They’ve solved a lot of those early problems.

But the struggle chapters from the early days have a sort of legitimacy. They’re raw, scrappy, and have an underdog energy.

And the “good times” kinda feel like showing off… or that you have nothing left to teach.

And that can feel like you’re telling the same 3 stories over and over again - that are YEARS old.

So your audience are missing the bridge.

They resonate with your early struggle… that’s good.

They might see or sense your current success… that’s good, too.

But they’re missing the bridge that gets them there.

Now those early problems you solved - the ones that felt like earth shattering problems at the time… They’re just a normal day for you now.

In fact, they wouldn’t even register as problems.

Your CAPACITY for problems is so much greater now, you’ve solved something twice as hard this morning without even considering it a problem.

Let me give you an example…

When Boris closed the gyms in March 2020, I moved my business online. And I stayed awake ALL NIGHT trying to figure out how to “build a website”.

What I actually wanted was a landing page with an exit popup. But I didn’t have ANY of those words so I couldn’t even google it.

It wasn’t even the right solution to the problem!

But that felt like a 10/10 problem in terms of:

• How hard it is

• How urgent it is to solve it

And my capacity to solve it (skill, money, time etc. was 0/10).

So I remember that.

Now? Every single day I come to work and probably 80% of the jobs on my list are things I have no idea how to do.

But my capacity has expanded so much that it’s normal.

For a coach, this might be getting stuck in telling the story of your own transformation…

Weight loss, rehabbing an injury, maybe burnout…

These are the things you built your audience around.

But you’re not talking about anything in “the inbetween”.

The reason old problems felt so significant is because it took 100% of your ability (and more) to solve them. You HAD TO expand. You HAD TO become someone new to solve them.

It took more of you then.

But you’re not showing your audience the level of competence you actually have now.

The good chapters are still valuable. But they’re harder to recognise.

Important caveat: You do not have to talk about ANYTHING you don’t want to talk about. The point isn’t that you’re 100% transparent - you still control the narrative. You choose what you disclose, always.

I talk about sharing scars, not wounds.

Stuff you’ve solved, not stuff you’re solving.

Use the audit below to work through which chapters you’ve been skipping…

Subscribe now

The Good Chapter Audit

Step 1: When you tell your story, where does it start and end? Write it out, in bullet point form - just to get the rough shape of it in order.

Step 2: When you tell your most common stories and share your lessons, there’ll be some parts you tell more than others… The parts you don’t tell: the little decisions that you used to lie awake worrying about, the hard conversations you avoided, the standard you no longer accept… Find 10 things that used to feel like a problem, but don’t any more.

Step 3: Find the fear for each of those things. It’s usually one of three things:

• Not feeling like an expert - it’s just “something you did”

• This already exists from someone way better to speak on it than me

• I don’t want to make an error and get called out for it

It might be that you’re worried about who you’d attract by talking about it - don’t think about this yet, just name it.

Step 4: What patterns do you see? You’ll find repeating patterns about the kind of coach you are now - not just back when you were getting started. The answers are your good chapters.

…they’re also the bridge to help you shift your niche from the people you served at the start, to people you’d like to serve now.

Want a hand pulling out the golden nuggets from your story?

→ Start a 7 day free trial of CathAI now.

…Listen to You Know My Steez here.

I want air conditioning in my house and the sales experience I had yesterday to arrange it was awful.

My house is traps heat, and now that I’m almost 42, I’m boiling all of the time.

So I want air con in my bedroom for sure, and maybe in the living room too.

Potentially a big sale.

I ring the company that already fitted my office and my gym - I’m an existing customer, already sold - and they send someone out.

He turns up on time. Good start.

But I’ve never met this guy before. He wasn’t the guy who installed the other ones.

Then he leans in my office doorway and goes, “who built this?”

He hasn’t even told me his name.

I’m hostile immediately.

We go upstairs to my bedroom. He sits down at my desk. In my chair. Settles in.

I hate strangers in my house. Do not sit down. Do not settle in. Measure your stuff and leave.

He starts explaining the ins and outs - listing units from worst to best. I stop him.

“Don’t tell me about the shit ones, pal. Just make one recommendation. You’re the expert.”

I need two pieces of information:

1. How much?

2. When can you start?

He has neither. He has to ring the office for a price. He doesn’t have his calendar.

After half an hour of this I felt like screaming - why are you here and SO badly prepared?

He totally fumbled it.

The lesson is crystal clear:

Inbound leads are convinced.

By the time you speak to them, they’re ready to go.

They’ve decided. Your marketing worked.

The only thing left to do is make the next step so obvious and frictionless that there’s no reason to pause.

What kills the deal is often unnecessary friction.

Options they didn’t ask for.

Information they don’t need.

Steps that should have been sorted before they arrived.

Go through your entire process - every step from first touchpoint to payment - and ask yourself: is this really important?

If not - chop it.

The goal is for someone to arrive ready to say yes, and any friction they feel is added 100% intentionally when you’re trying to pre-qualify them.

CathAI is open at founder pricing until May 4th - after that the price goes up when the proper launch page goes live. If you've been thinking about it, this is final date to grab the lowest annual price.

I did something I don’t usually do on a consultation call this week.

The client asked me about my process for capturing ideas. He kept losing his - good ones.

He’d have a conversation with a client of his, maybe write something brilliant after the session.

Possibly make a little reel.

But by the next week… it was gone.

He asked about my process.

So I thought: I’ll just show him what I do.

I shared my screen.

What followed was about 15 minutes of me pulling up a workflow I’ve never properly documented, because it genuinely never occurred to me that it was worth explaining.

I’m not a “systems” person.

I’ve always struggled with processes.

So I assumed this was something that everyone else was far more systemised with than I am.

…His reaction suggested I might be wrong about that.

Since he found it useful, I figured you might too.

I’ll show you the system, the exact prompts, my decision filter - the whole shebang.

I’ve made it into a proper Notion SOP you can snag at the end of this article.

How does this help you turn followers to clients?

By taking your content ideas from conversations with people who either are already your clients…

Or who are great fits to become clients…

You know for sure these are the kinds of things they want you to cover - because they asked.

No guesswork needed. This is live market research from the people who are actually paying to be near you.

And talking about these things in your marketing brings MORE of those people to you.

Let me walk you through it…

Step 1: EVERYTHING gets transcribed

I’m genuinely obsessive about transcripts.

I run my whole life through otter, and I have the juiciest top end version of it because I have the working memory of a goldfish with a head injury.

• Calls

• Webinars

• Voicenotes

• Podcast appearances

• Community workshops and trainings

Everything gets a transcript.

I’ve done this for years because searching back through video, or voicenotes because “I know I heard it somewhere, I just can’t place it” - is a HUGE operational drag.

The principle is: if you did the thinking, capture it and make it visible. If you can’t search it later, it might as well not exist.

Pro tip: Make sure you’re named in the transcript.

You don’t have to name the other people (especially if you’re talking about sensitive stuff where they might prefer to be anonymous).

Then export the .txt file & drop it into your AI.

Step 2: Ask AI to “find all the clever things I said”

That’s the actual prompt I use. Word for word.

I take a call transcript, sometimes a whole week’s worth bundled together, and give it to Claude or ChatGPT.

I don’t ask for a summary.

I don’t ask for a list of topics.

I’m looking for insight density.

Where something lands particularly hard for someone, and has outsized returns for them.

I ask it to take a direct quote, and (if there’s more than one file uploaded) to give attribution.

This step exists entirely because I can’t remember what I said.

I have a lot of conversations. The volume would bury me without it. But even if I only have 1 conversation… my memory sucks.

Step 3: everything goes into 1 Notion database, tagged “idea”

I paste the output into a running document connected to that client.

I don’t organise it particularly. I don’t colour code it or build a content calendar around it. I auto-tag it and move on.

My team would like me to do more with the filing than I do. This is me being honest about the version I actually run, not the aspirational version.

I filter for anything that I haven’t already archived (because that’s over 150 individual entries since January 1st and it gets overwheming fast).

Inside each of these entries, there are anything from 5-20 ideas.

It’s probably not the best way of organising them, but it’s organised enough.

Plus, you can always just open a fresh page and create new ideas fresh, if you need to.

Step 4: at the end of the month, I find my modal topics

I take everything from that month’s idea document and ask one question:

What did I talk about most often this month?

I don’t sit down and reverse engineer my content pillars from a brand strategy document.

I identify them from what I actually said, and repeated, from real conversations.

That’s a much more reliable signal than anything I’d come up with in a forced planning session.

It also means my content reflects what I’m actually thinking about right now, not what I decided I should be thinking about 6 weeks ago.

It feels alive, and fresh.

Step 5: my decision filter

This is the part that determines what happens to each idea next.

There’s only 1 question:

Does this idea lend itself to a tangible, repeatable asset?

A framework. A template. A prompt. A checklist. A swipe.

Just a resource of some kind.

Doesn’t matter so much exactly what, as long as it’s something the reader could actually use.

• Yes → it’s a long form article for Substack.

• No → it’s short-form for now. Write it, schedule it, move on.

If I can’t identify what the next step would be for the reader, it’s not ready to be an article yet.

It might get there in time. Maybe not. Doesn’t matter - because there’s no shortage of ideas.

The lead magnet insertion

If something clears the filter and becomes a lead magnet, I add one line at the bottom of the document that points somewhere.

Right now, it points to CathAI.

Before that, it pointed to my paid consultation call.

Before that, a workshop replay.

The content is the constant. But the offer might change.

This is how I avoid pushing content that doesn’t go anywhere.

I have a policy of “no orphan tasks” in marketing. Recommend you do the same.

What I showed him & he couldn’t believe…

The lead magnet library.

Every asset I’ve ever built off the back of a piece of content.

Every one of them started exactly like this - as an idea that cleared the decision filter, got written into something useful, and got a line at the end pointing somewhere.

None of them took very long because the thinking was already done.

You can link to the entire library any time someone joins your email list.

Give it all away. It only gets more valuable with time.

→ https://newsletter.kindcopy.co.uk/

See for yourself here.

This is the system I use to make sure I’m never starting from a blank document… and never struggle for content ideas.

Grab the Notion SOP below so you can run the same process

It has the exact prompts, the decision filter as a template, and the lead magnet insertion logic ready to fill in.

Click the image to grab it.

And if you want to running this with an AI that already knows your voice, your client base, and what you sound like when you're actually being clever - have a look at CathAI before May 4th.

Hey coach,

Right now, as you read this, there’s someone in your audience who’s liked your last 9 posts, watched every story you’ve posted this week, and read every word of your captions - at least once.

But because they’ve never raised their hand, or asked for help…

You’ve written them off as a tyre kicker.

Or more likely: you’re not even aware of them at all.

But they’re buying the way literally everyone buys: by gathering evidence.

And every time you show up, you’re tipping the scales in your favour.

But you don’t have to just wait while a bunch of other coaches all try to win them over first.

You just have to recognise and follow up with the warmth they’re already showing you.

3 temperatures

Annoyingly for coaches who build their businesses on Instagram (most of them), you can’t tell WHO saved your post, or clicked your link on that platform. Only the number of people who have.

That’s why people buy from you and tell you they’ve loved your content for the last 6 months… that something you posted and forgot about ages ago has been living rent-free in their head.

That you’re the inspiration that’s helped them be consistent with their training for the first time in their lives.

…that it can take you by surprise.

You think “I didn’t even know you were watching”.

The data you are able to access is aggregated and frustrating.

But you can see 3 things at an account level:

1. Likes: lowest intent, but it gives you a name. You can see that person exists, they see your content, they chose a public signal of support.

2. Comments: they stopped, had a thought, and took the time to type it out - hoping you’d see it. That’s a pretty warm signal and you can assume they’d be content if you replied, had a genuine conversation with you. (As long as their comment wasn’t negative or aggressive).

3. DMs: this is the one coaches get most wrong, imo. They’re waiting for the keyword DM to drop. For the person to say “tell me how I can work with you” - which almost never happens. They say something innocuous, mundane… but they put themselves out there… and most coaches have written them off.

Please don’t wait for a more explicit hand-raiser. Your audience are trying to communicate and get your attention. You probably missed it.

I made this mistake myself

I’ve been building CathAI - a custom AI trained on all our best copy, frameworks, voice, philosophy etc.

I’m insanely proud of this product.

And I thought I was being insufferable about it - posting about it, emailing about it. I thought people were going to get sick of me for sure.

1-2 people unsubscribed that I actually really liked as humans and I was gutted that they’d chosen to leave.

Then…

Last night, someone messaged me about a sales page.

Long story short, they couldn’t afford my prices and were totally open about it.

This person was a warm enough lead that they reached out and specifically asked about a service I provide.

…And they still had no idea I was in the middle of a launch.

I am once again reminded:

You have to practically beat down people’s doors before they even register you’re even THERE.

They do not know about your subtle launch.

They have not noticed you soft opening a thing.

Coaches are walking around worried about “being too salesy” - pulling back on their promo, softening their language, second guessing themselves…

Their audiences are scrolling past, totally unaware they’re even making an offer.

Literally no one has noticed you.

Please do not pull back mid-launch.

Please do not soften, quieten or slow down.

Please do not turn off your notifications and take a holiday in the MIDDLE of this.

How I use AI to help me with this:

I schedule a task once a week in Claude Cowork.

My instructions look like this…

NOTE: Discord is specific to my business (it’s where I handle my client communication). You can swap it for wherever you're already in conversation with clients, like your Skool communities etc.

The objective of my task is to look for high intent buying signals from people who I'm already speaking to - and who I might have missed.

CHANNEL 1: DISCORD

You're ONLY going to check in the kind copy server & my direct messages.

You're ONLY going to check active channels, that have unread messages.

The most popular channels are likely to be 1:1 channels, with a client's name, or the groups of channels for a specific service.

This channel is full of people who are already spending with us. Your goal here is to search for any statements where people are indicating they need something more, something extra, or something more bespoke.

CHANNEL 2: INSTAGRAM

You're going to look in my DMs, and in the public comments people have left on my profile.

You're going to scan for ALL messages - read and unread.

Your goal here is to look for all buying signals - so people who are clients, customers, and prospects. Search for any statements where people are indicating they need support with marketing. In this channel that often looks:

Explicit: I need help with...
Implicit: I'm confused about...

We offer a wide range of marketing services - so if you see something that looks like an opportunity - bring it to me, and I'll decide if it's worth checking out.

Indicate:

- who I should reach out to
- what they said to make you think they needed help
- when they said it
- suggest something we could give them

When you scan, you're going to search back the last 7 days. This should happen every week on a Friday.

You can do this manually, too of course.

Just go through your DMs and look for people who have messaged, interacted, liked stories or posts… even small indicators they’re engaged and into what you’re posting.

And develop a system of following up with them.

Invite them to something.

Talk to them.

For coaches, this is key because they have a problem you can help them solve.

If you did this for every single person that’s shown you they’re a lead - consistently - you’d have more business than you could possibly fulfil.

Check out what we’re building with CathAI.

My goal is to get the Kind Copy philosophy into as many coaches’ hands as possible and I’m not going to be subtle about it any more.

Today’s article is a personal one.

This is a real extract from my actual journal.

"I'm sick of telling people what they should and shouldn't like or do with AI. It feels constricting. And every time I put out a message that directly contradicts their current behaviour, it drives a wedge between us. They're using AI anyway. And so am I."

I’ve been wrestling with this for a while, because I broke one of my own fundamental rules. Not as a marketer, but just as a decent human.

Don’t tell me what to do. Ever.

My number 1 value is agency. So instead, I meet them where they are, take the direction they’re already moving in, and help them get there better.

And for a while, I’ve been on my high horse about using AI for copy… I lost sight of it.

Back in October last year, I had one of the most profound conversations I’ve ever had with AI.

It was around the business finances, and our Stripe data - and it challenged a lot of beliefs about what I thought worked in the business.

I wrote about it here.

It was so important to how I planned our year, that I even ran a webinar on it earlier this year to teach more coaches how they could apply it to their own businesses.

But if I’d shown that conversation to James, my accountant (a genuinely fantastic expert) - he’d probably look at the output and think…

• This lacks nuance

• This is a bit clumsy, or not quite right

• This shouldn’t be used instead of expert tax advice

…and he’d be quite right, I’m sure...

But as a non-expert, I actually felt like I had way more clarity on my numbers.

I felt a lot less frightened of my spreadsheets.

And I was starting to make connections that I had otherwise overlooked.

That’s when it hit me.

I’m negging AI for copy because I spent a ton of time, effort, energy and money learning how to write copy and make a living from it.

But if I felt about writing like I felt about my accounts (allergic as fuck), then it would be incredibly helpful.

Seems so obvious now I’m explaining it.

But for some reason, when it came to AI, I’d abandoned it - and that was a mistake.

I had decided AI was bullshit for copy.

That it read flat, that it’s manipulative, and uses clumsy tools like false urgency and pain agitation that we’re really against for coaches (who have got to work with the people they serve, rather than just doing stuff for them).

I decided it wasn’t right for the health and fitness niche, which is one of the fastest growing verticals in the world - because most of what AI is trained on is product (not service) and old market stuff that we’ve outgrown.

I still think that’s true for generic AI.

But instead of saying “here’s how to use it better”…

I started saying “here’s what you should do instead.”

Every time I positioned the way my audience was already behaving as wrong, it would drive a wedge between us.

I was doing the exact thing I told coaches NOT to do with their own audience.

And the stupidest thing was… if I’d said that to me, I’d have told me to fuck right off.

Plus, the whole time, I was using AI myself. Every day.

Not for copy - but for lots of other things.

I was using it to go through 900 YouTube videos for a client and categorise them in 30 minutes.

I was using it to surface the warm leads I’d gone blind to in my own inbox.

I was asking it to go through years of call transcripts and give me back the most useful things I’d said - my own IP, returned to me because I couldn’t hold it all in my head anymore.

I was getting it to make Canva graphics of all the lovely comments my clients were saying to me (scattered across Instagram, and Discord and WhatsApp) and I was losing track of them, and not using them anywhere.

…would that be enough for a YouTube specialist, a setter paid on commission, or a graphic designer?

Obviously not.

But I’m not any of those things.

My AI handled everything that was getting between me and the work I valued (writing).

That’s not AI replacing me.

That’s AI creating space for more of me.

What I should have said from the start.

You know what you want.

You know your business better than I do.

You know whether AI is saving you time or costing you something.

You know whether the content it produces sounds like you or not.

I can give you frameworks. I can give you patterns from years of watching what works and what’s missing when things flop.

But I can’t tell you what to want. No one should.

So use AI. Of course.

It’s fucking awesome at a lot of things.

The question isn’t whether you should, it’s how to best implement it for you.

I’ve learned the gap between AI that sounds like you… and AI that sounds like... well, AI… almost always comes down to one thing: context.

When you give it a real picture of who you are, it gets way better.

But it’s hard to do that off the cuff, I found.

So here’s a couple of documents I use with my AI to keep it up to date on the business, the service suite, the financial goals - all that stuff.

I’ll give you that today, in case it helps you too.

Your AI source document:

Before you open any AI tool and ask it to write anything for your business, you need a reference document that tells it who you actually are. Paste it at the top of any conversation. Update it as your business changes and treat it as a living document - I have a repeating reminder to revisit this every quarter.

Here’s what it needs to include:

Who I am and why I do this: Your background, your story, the specific experience that brought you to coaching. Voicenote this so that it doesn’t sound too polished. The thing you’d tell someone if they asked you properly.

Who I work with: Be surgical. Age, life stage, what they’ve already tried, what keeps them stuck, what they actually want versus what they say they want. The more precise, the more useful.

What I help them do: One clear sentence. If you can’t write it in one sentence, you don’t have clarity on it yet, and neither will the AI. I like to make mine fit on a Post-It (an old trick from my teacher days).

What I believe about the way coaching should work: Your philosophy. What you do differently and why. What you refuse to do. This is the most important section, and the one most people skip. This is the hill you die on (for us, it’s kindness).

Words I actually use: 3-5 phrases that sound like you. Things your clients would recognise. The more specific and idiosyncratic, the better. Best way to find these is to give your AI raw transcripts of you actually talking (voicenotes, client feedback, coaching calls etc - nothing too “presented”)

Words I never use: I learned this from Marc Rhodes back in the day when I wrote for him. The jargon. The bro-coaching phrases. The clichés that make you want to punch yourself in the face. These will be things you have a physical reaction to. For us, it’s always shame based language.

The offer: What you sell, what it costs, who it’s designed for, and who it’s not for.

Proof that it works: Specific client results. Names if possible. Numbers if you have them. Real stories if you don’t. It’s easy to anonymise people afterwards - but hard to remember people years after you coached them. If you do nothing else - do this step.

What I’m not: The coaches you’re intentionally different from. The approaches you’ve rejected. The way you will never do things, and why.

Paste this into any AI conversation before you ask for anything. It won’t guarantee perfect output but it will get you a lot closer than it could do by itself.

And even if you don’t ever use AI - these documents will really help you and any team members you hire.

Then I built CathAI.

Here’s the other thing I wrote in my journal that week.

“If it’s our own AI, I know it’ll be effective. And it serves the bigger mission of helping the market be kinder.”

CathAI is trained on a decade of Kind Copy IP. The frameworks, the philosophy, real client consultations, webinars, podcasts.

Not a summary of it - my actual thinking, in the words it developed in, tested across 500+ businesses in the health and fitness space.

But more than what it knows, I want to tell you how it works.

It doesn’t tell you what to want.

It takes what you’re already doing, what you already believe, the direction you’re already moving in and helps you do it better.

It asks the questions I would ask if we were working together.

It pushes back (gently) when something’s vague and helps you tease out more certainty.

It builds your source document with you through conversation, and adds to it every time you talk, so the longer you use it the more precisely it understands your specific business.

It won’t tell you your approach is wrong, but it can and will take your approach and make it sharper.

Releasing CathAI for public consumption wasn’t just a product decision.

I wanted the whole philosophy of Kind Copy available to as many people as possible.

You know your business.

You know your clients.

You know the direction you want to go.

CathAI’s job is to support that based on what I know works like gangbusters for this market.

Plus, selfishly - it gives me my mornings back.

Poetry porch with a flat white. Not rushing through my workout.

…It’s not completely altruistic.

I rolled out Founder Tier at a bite-my-hand-off price: £999 for 12 months, available until 4th May.

I’m so excited by the thought that we can actually help people. I have real people in mind who’d be perfect for this offer.

I can’t wait to show it to them.

At the start of this year, I said to my mentor…

“In an age of AI, the most important skill is to be able to unlearn and re-learn fast.”

I meant it for coaches.

Turns out I needed to hear it myself.

Here’s a belief that’s costing fitness coaches a fortune:

You have to warm people up before you can sell to them.

It sounds reasonable. It’s also why so many coaches have enormous audiences and threadbare Stripe accounts.

The warm-up content never ends. There’s always another reel to post, another carousel to design, another piece of top-of-funnel content to feed the algorithm. And the people it attracts are interested in fitness… just not necessarily interested in paying for coaching.

I stopped doing top-of-funnel content years ago.

I don’t write to people who are just discovering they have a problem.

I don’t do awareness posts, bullshit that’s designed for sharing, or content aimed at someone who’s never thought about solving their problem.

I start in the middle - with people who are already solution-aware - and I’ve never noticed a gap in either the quality of our audience or our ability to convert them.

For a copywriting business, that probably seems less radical than it does for a fitness coach.

But the mechanism is the same.

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Think about a business consultant who works with founders of growing companies.

She could publish content about why culture matters, why leadership is hard, why most businesses plateau around the same revenue mark. Good content. Broad appeal. The kind of stuff that gets shares from people who like thinking about business.

It’s audience building.

Or she could publish content that speaks directly to a founder who already knows they need to have a hard conversation with a team member about underperformance, that showcases a case study of a client who’s crushing it, or the exact methods they use to get moving again after revenue has stalled.

It’s about her authority, and getting people to apply to work with her.

The fitness version of this is more nuanced, because your content has to work on multiple levels at once.

You’re not just speaking to one type of person - you’re speaking to someone who knows they need to change, knows they’ve tried on their own, and is wondering whether working with a coach might actually be the thing they haven’t tried yet.

That person doesn’t need you to explain why fitness matters. They know.

They don’t need motivational content. They’re not unmotivated - they’re stuck.

They need to feel understood.

To see themselves reflected in your content accurately enough that they think: this person gets it. Maybe their approach can help me too.

One of our clients halved her funnel time (the gap between someone first finding her and paying) by keeping her messaging focused on the specific emotional experience of being a menopausal woman in her 50s who has tried everything and still doesn’t feel like herself.

The content spoke to someone who was already standing at the door.

Is that a smaller audience?

Yes. But they’re ready to buy.

The only people who need low-insight content are people who haven’t yet tried to solve the problem themselves.

By the time someone is ready to invest in coaching, they’re past that. They need to see that you think about this differently from everyone else.

Middle-funnel content does that.

Top-of-funnel content, even when it’s awesome, almost never will.

The coaches who have this working aren’t necessarily producing more content. Although that’s often part of testing what’s working for them.

The copy we write for ourselves ALWAYS assumes the reader is already aware they have a problem, already looking for a solution, and already slightly sceptical that anyone else will do.

That’s a very different thing to write for.

And a much more commercially useful audience to attract.

Here's what that looks like in practice…

7 posts from this month's Copy Tapas.

If you’ve never heard me talk about this before, Copy Tapas is a monthly done-for-you community, with fresh social media drops written specifically for health and fitness coaches running online businesses.

Here’s a spread across top, middle and bottom of funnel so you can see the difference in how each stage sounds, what it’s trying to do, and who it’s speaking to.

Use them as swipe copy, as inspiration, or as a benchmark for auditing what you’re currently posting.

If you want content like this every month, come join us: kindcopy.uk/tapas-2026

This month, we’re also running a sprint in WhatsApp - so you can get a ton of hands on accountability and support with your chosen goal.

I’m personally building something HUGE.

I’m 50% nervous and 50% excited.

Can’t wait to share that at the end of the month.

Anyway… here’s the content so you can see what I mean…

Top of funnel: Post 1

Every year, around this time, something shifts for [niche].

The days get longer.

You feel a bit more like yourself.

And suddenly you want to change everything...

Your food, your routine, your body, your habits.

All of it.

Immediately.

It feels like motivation.

And in a way, it is.

But it’s also the exact same feeling that sent you into an unsustainable plan in January.

That surge of energy is real.

The problem is what most people do with it.

…Sprint like fuck.

And sprinting feels super productive… until it doesn’t.

Which, if you’ve been here before, you already know tends to be around week 3.

The [niche] who actually change something this spring are the ones who use that energy to build something small and repeatable…

Instead of something dramatic and temporary.

Motivation is a terrible foundation, because it comes and goes.

Structure stays.

If you’ve been here before, you already know this.

The question is what you do with it this time.

Top of funnel: Post 2

I was just in a coffee shop, and I could hear it starting.

Someone ahead of me was debating whether to have a slice of cake with their coffee…

And I could hear them chatting to their mate about “summer body”.

If you’re already thinking about a “before & after”...

I want you to be cautious:

If you’re not careful, you spend the whole month measuring yourself against a highlight reel of other people’s results they had over a winter of work.

While completely overlooking your own progress.

Please remember…

You’re never seeing the full picture.

You’re seeing the post.

Not the years of attempts before it.

Not the camera roll full of shots, trying to get the angle right, and feel comfortable.

Not how that person feels on a Tuesday when nobody’s watching.

Comparison this time of year is particularly brutal because the stakes feel high with summer coming.

This is the time of year people talk to me about feeling behind…

Or that everyone seems to be further ahead than they are with their goals.

I’m sure they think the same about you, by the way.

This is a PSA for all [niche]: The only progress worth measuring right now is your own, against where you were.

And if you have a clear idea of where you wanna be…

Drop me a follow. Let me help.

Notice how the reader doesn’t have to trust the coach - or even know them - for this to feel true? That’s what top of funnel content should do.

Middle of Funnel: Post 3

Something I’ve noticed after working with a lot of [niche]...

The ones who find it hardest to get started aren’t the ones who’ve never tried.

They’re the ones who’ve tried the most.

They’re FAR from beginners.

There’s a reason for that…

Every time you start some good habits, and they don’t stick…

It costs you something.

Something that doesn’t show up anywhere on the plan.

And often something you’re not expecting.

Not energy. Not time. Not even money, though that adds up too.

Trust.

Specifically, the trust you have in yourself when you say, “This time I’m going to do it.”

I had a client a while back who came to me after what she described as “about 15 attempts” at getting this sorted.

I asked her what happened on attempt 15.

She said: “Honestly? I think I already knew it wasn’t going to work when I started.”

That hit me.

She wasn’t being defeatist or negative.

The way she said it was just accurately reporting what she believed.

Her brain had just updated its expectations based on the evidence available.

15 starts. 15 stops.

Of course, part of her was sceptical.

The thing is... the approaches she’d been using almost guaranteed that outcome.

Restriction leads to rebellion.

All or nothing means every hard week becomes a reason to stop.

And every stop makes the next start feel a little more pointless.

So the resistance we feel to “starting again” is actually a predictable result of a broken structure.

The goal isn’t to “just try harder” next time.

Or to “start again Monday”.

If they were gonna work, it probably would have worked by now.

Instead, let’s stop setting ourselves up to fail.

That’s what we work on first inside [Programme Name].

Middle of Funnel: Post 4

I want to talk about something a bit uncomfortable.

Because I reckon most [niche] have done this.

It’s late. You’re tired.

Something’s happened that day that’s made you feel rubbish about yourself.

And you find yourself Googling.

“Fastest way to lose weight”.

“Best diet for quick results”.

“How to lose a stone in a month”.

And you already know the answer isn’t in there.

You’ve been here before. You know how this goes.

You’ve read the articles, tried the plans, downloaded the apps.

So why are you still searching?

Because it’s not really about the information.

It’s about the feeling.

The frustration of trying and nothing moving.

The exhaustion of thinking about this every single day.

The desperate hope that somewhere out there is something that finally makes this feel less hard.

I had a client describe it to me once as “looking for a trapdoor.”

Not a solution. A way out of the feeling.

And I thought... yeah. That’s exactly it.

No search result fixes that feeling.

And every plan that promises to be the fastest, easiest, most painless option is aimed directly at that feeling, not at what you actually need.

What you actually need is something that removes the conditions that keep sending you back to the search bar at 11pm.

That’s what [Programme Name] is built around.

Does that resonate? I’d love to hear about it in the comments.

Middle of Funnel: Post 5

The [niche] who come to [Programme Name] are not short on information.

They know what a good meal looks like.

They know movement matters.

They know sleep is important.

They’ve read the articles, watched the videos, downloaded the apps.

They don’t have a knowledge problem.

So why isn’t it working?

I had a client tell me in our first session:

“I know exactly what I should be doing. I just can’t seem to actually do it.”

And I said: tell me about your week.

She’s up at 6 with the kids.

Works full-time.

Sole parent.

Elderly parent who needs support.

Trying to see friends occasionally so she doesn’t lose her mind entirely.

By the time she has a moment to think about herself, it’s 9:30pm and she’s running on empty.

And she’s wondering why she can’t stick to a meal plan!

The gap between knowing and doing isn’t a discipline gap.

It’s a conditions gap.

She wasn’t failing because she lacked knowledge or willpower.

She was failing because she was trying to execute a plan that was designed for someone with a completely different life.

The question was never “what should I do?”

It was “what can I actually sustain inside the life I’m living right now?”

Those are very different questions.

And only one of them leads anywhere useful.

Bottom of Funnel: Post 6

What it takes to join [Programme Name] right now…

I want to make this as straightforward as possible.

Because I think one of the things that stops [niche] from reaching out is not knowing what reaching out actually involves.

So here’s exactly what happens.

You send me a message. That’s it. That’s step one.

I’ll come back to you, usually same day, and ask a few questions.

Nothing complicated. Just enough to understand where you are and what you’re trying to figure out.

From there, if it seems like [Programme Name] could be a good fit, we’ll have a conversation.

Not a sales call (that’s not my vibe)... Just a proper conversation where I give you honest answers to whatever you want to know.

If it’s right for you, I’ll tell you. If it isn’t, I’ll tell you that too.

There’s no pressure or ridiculous countdown timer. None of that “this offer expires tonight” bullshit.

Just a straightforward conversation between two people figuring out whether this makes sense.

Most [niche] who reach out tell me afterwards they wished they’d done it sooner. Not because they were immediately convinced. Because the conversation itself was useful.

If you’ve been sitting on this for a while… You already know what doing nothing feels like.

Send me a message.

Let’s just talk.

Bottom of Funnel: Post 7

The question I get asked most before someone joins…

There’s one question I get more than any other before someone joins [Programme Name].

They don’t always ask it directly. Sometimes it comes out sideways as a joke, or buried inside a longer message.

But it’s always there…

“What if I fail again?”

And I never dismiss it. Because it’s not an irrational fear. It’s based on real experience.

Real attempts that didn’t hold. Real hope that didn’t pan out and real money and time and energy spent on something that sent them back to the beginning.

So here’s the honest answer.

I can’t guarantee you won’t have hard weeks. You almost certainly will.

I can’t guarantee the process will always feel straightforward. It won’t.

What I can tell you is that [Programme Name] is built around the assumption that hard weeks happen.

That life gets complicated and that motivation comes and goes.

And that none of those things have to mean starting again.

The [niche] who’ve been where you are and come out the other side didn’t succeed because they finally found enough willpower.

They succeeded because they finally had a structure that didn’t collapse the first time something went wrong.

That’s what’s different here.

If that fear is what’s been stopping you from reaching out…

I’d rather you sent me a message and we talked it through.

Than stayed stuck because of a question I could have answered.

Your warmest leads are already in your audience. They just need content that treats them like they are.

A client came to us with a problem she couldn’t quite name.

Her ads were running.

Traffic was coming in.

Leads were booking calls.

But the calls were horrendous.

Totally the wrong people, wrong expectations, wrong energy.

Her sales team kept telling her the leads were getting worse… but the ad metrics looked fine.

I mean, they were booking calls.

So they assumed they were working fine.

That’s when we stepped in.

We pulled everything apart.

The ads, the landing page, the DMs, the email sequence, the call booking confirmation.

The copy was technically fine. The offer was clear. The funnel was set up correctly.

But the ads had been written by a different agency from us (we handled the organic).

It was so obvious the moment you put them next to everything else…

The organic content, the emails, the way she actually spoke in DMs…

You could feel the disconnection immediately.

The ads were “finger-waggy”, with “you know what you should do” energy. Pain-point heavy.

There was a way of speaking to the reader that would attract people who’re dabblers and blamers.

But everything after the ad was way warmer.

More considered. Softer in the way her actual clients needed the coach to be.

Two different voices in one funnel was bringing her terrible leads.

We call this The Voice Gap.

It’s like an invisible disconnect between what someone hears before they click and what they read after.

And it’s expensive.

Because people click away, feeling like something’s just off about you.

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It also happens more than coaches realise, because the fix isn’t always obvious. Actually - truth be told - the problem isn’t even obvious a lot of the time.

Most coaches don’t use a different agency for their ads.

But they might use a VA for their captions. Or AI for their emails. Or a social media intern who’s doing their best (with a two-line brief and a lot of goodwill).

Imagine a nutritionist who’s built a warm, unhurried presence on Instagram. She talks about food without guilt. Her whole brand is permission - to slow down, eat properly, stop punishing yourself.

Then she runs ads because someone told her she needed scale.

The ads are written by someone who’s never met her. They lead with urgency. Time-sensitive. Transformation-focused. Before and after language.

Absolutely right from a direct response perspective... They “work”.

But the people who click are in a different headspace entirely. They’re not looking for someone calm. They want a transformation, fast.

They get on a call with her and it’s a mismatch from the first minute. She can’t close them, and if she does - she doesn’t enjoy having them in her world.

Another victim of The Voice Gap.

The fitness coaching version of this is a little different, but the mechanism is the same.

One of our longest-standing clients came back to us after a stint working with a different agency on his copy.

He knew something was off, but he put it well:

“If my emails are [one guy’s], and my ads are [a different guy’s] and my Instagram is yours… it’s slipping away.”

He was right.

Not because the other writers were bad at their job.

But because his voice had been built over years of consistent content, and his audience trusted it.

The moment the subtle differences started becoming more obvious, people felt it… even if they couldn’t explicitly name it.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately.

The coaches who convert their warm audiences consistently don’t have to be the most talented copywriters.

They just use the same consistent tone everywhere.

• Same tone in the DMs as in the posts.

• Same energy in the emails as in the stories.

• Same language in the ads as in the first call.

The prospect never notices they’re moving through a “sequence”. They never reach the call wondering if they’ve been misled, misold or who the fuck they’re talking to because it sure wasn’t this person in the DMs.

They arrive already trusting, because everything they’ve heard has felt like the same vibe.

The Voice Gap matters most when you’re delegating content.

To a VA, AI, a team member or to a professional writing team like us.

It also matters when you’re shifting your message, or testing new ad creative, or letting something expire and go stale.

It doesn’t mean everything has to be written by you. It just has to sound like it was.

The clearer your voice, the smaller the gap.

Which brings me to the practical bit…

This week’s gift: The 9 Minute Voice Audit

The Voice Audit Prompt

Copy and paste this into Claude or ChatGPT. Answer each question honestly a few sentences is enough. At the end, ask: “Based on my answers, where is my voice most likely breaking down, and what should I look at first?”

I’m going to ask you seven questions about how my brand voice works across my marketing. I’ll answer them one by one. Once I’ve answered all seven, tell me where my voice is most likely breaking down and what I should look at first.

Question 1: How would you describe the tone of your organic social media content? (e.g. warm and personal, direct and no-nonsense, educational, playful, etc.)

Question 2: Who writes your email content? (You, a VA, AI, an agency, a mix?) Does it go through any kind of review before it goes out?

Question 3: If you’re running ads, who wrote them, and when did you last check whether they still sound like you?

Question 4: Read your last DM conversation with a warm lead out loud. Now read your last email. Do they sound like the same person wrote them?

Question 5: Has anyone ever got on a call with you and seemed surprised (either pleasantly or uncomfortably) by who you turned out to be?

Question 6: If a new follower spent 10 minutes going through your content, then clicked your link in bio, would the landing page feel like a continuation of what they’d just been reading? Or a different channel entirely?

Question 7: Do you have any kind of written record of your brand voice, like phrases you use, phrases you’d never use, the feeling you’re trying to create? (Even a rough one.)

Once you’ve answered all seven, ask: “Based on my answers, where is my voice most likely breaking down, and what should I look at first?”

Your warmest leads already trust your voice.

The job is not to lose that trust before they get to the call.

Welcome to Follower to Client: How online health and fitness coaches turn an audience of under 100k into consistent client enquiries - with content engineered for depth.

Real frameworks, swipes and templates every Wednesday, drawn from copy we write for real coaching businesses.

Most marketing advice for fitness coaches wrongly assumes the problem is your audience size.

It isn’t.

The coaches who are having no problem filling their programmes right now (without running ads, without cold DMing strangers, without dancing on Reels) aren’t doing it because they have more followers than you.

They’re doing it because they’ve built something more valuable than reach: a warm room full of people who already trust them.

This newsletter exists to show you exactly how they do it.

Every Wednesday, I share real frameworks, swipes and templates - drawn directly from the copy my team & I write for real coaching businesses - so you can convert the audience you’ve already built, without starting from scratch or relying on going viral.

Who Is Follower to Client For?

Follower to Client is written specifically for:

🏋️ Online personal trainers and fitness coaches who have built a genuine following on Instagram and feel like it should be converting better than it is. You’re not a beginner. You’ve got content going out, you’ve got people watching, and you know your stuff. What you don’t have is a clear, repeatable system for turning that warm attention into client enquiries. That’s exactly what we fix here.

🥗 Specialist health and wellness coaches. Nutritionists, sleep consultants, menopause coaches, sports psychologists, and others with deep expertise in a specific niche. Your audience is smaller and more targeted, which is actually your advantage. We’ll show you how to use the depth of that relationship as a commercial asset.

🎯 Fitness business owners growing their coaching model online who are tired of being told to post more, send cold DMs, try to go viral, or “just be consistent.” I’m WAY too ADHD to follow a content calendar & most of my clients are too. You need content engineered to do a job, and the strategic thinking behind why it works.

If any of that sounds like you, keep reading.

The Real Problems Fitness Coaches Face When It Comes to Converting Their Audience

Chances are you found this newsletter because something in the marketing isn’t working the way it should.

Here are the ten problems I see most often and the ones this newsletter is built to solve:

• Problem #1: The engagement trap. Likes and comments feel like progress, but they’re not converting into enquiries. Your content is entertaining. It isn’t selling.

• Problem #2: Talking to everyone. Trying to attract new followers and warm up existing ones in the same post means you end up resonating with neither.

• Problem #3: No depth in the content. Surface-level tips keep people scrolling. Content engineered for depth makes people stop, think, and trust.

• Problem #4: Inconsistent voice across your ecosystem. Your Instagram sounds like one person, your DMs sound like another, and your sales calls sound like a third. The people who show up aren’t quite the people you want because they responded to a version of you that doesn’t match what they find.

• Problem #5: The wrong funnel fix. Believing the answer is a new lead magnet, a new offer, or more top-of-funnel content. But the actual problem is a warm audience that hasn’t been given a compelling reason to move.

• Problem #6: No email strategy. Instagram is a rented room. The relationship lives there but it can’t compound there. Without an email list doing real work, every algorithm change costs you.

• Problem #7: Copy that describes instead of converts. Most fitness coach content explains facts the reader could Google or ask ChatGPT. The content that converts makes the reader feel understood before it ever mentions the offer.

• Problem #8: Proof that doesn’t connect to the problem or the promise. Testimonials posted as screenshots do less work than most coaches think. Social proof has to be positioned, not just published.

• Problem #9: The audience feels warm but acts cold. You’ve got 8,000 followers and a half-empty programme. There’s a very large, very expensive gap between attention and action… and it’s fixable.

• Problem #10: Over-reliance on outreach & exhausting public launches. Cold DMs and referral-dependent pipelines aren’t scalable and they leave you knackered. Content should do the qualifying work for you.

Sound like what you’re seeing? Good. That’s what we’re here for.

What You Get Every Wednesday

Follower to Client is not a newsletter full of opinions about marketing.

It’s a weekly delivery of things you can actually use, drawn from the copy my team writes for real coaching businesses every single week.

Here’s what that looks like in practice:

Proven Swipes and Templates

The frameworks and copy structures that are working inside real fitness coaching businesses right now. Not theory. Not what worked 3 years ago that your mentor swiped from their mentor. What’s converting this month - in emails, in Instagram captions, in DM openers, in sales page structures… and why it works.

Conversion Breakdowns

I’ll regularly take a piece of content - a caption, an email, a bio - and walk you through exactly what’s happening strategically. What’s doing the psychological work. Where the trust is being built. Why someone reading it is more likely to enquire. This is the part most marketing content skips. We don’t skip it.

Warm Audience Strategy

The bigger picture thinking behind the tactics. How your Instagram, your email list, your stories, and your DMs form an ecosystem - and how to make that ecosystem do more of the selling for you, without you having to be on call 24 hours a day.

The goal is simple: every Wednesday, you get something that makes your marketing better than it was the week before.

Subscribe now

Who Am I?

My name is Cath Reohorn. I run Kind Copy. A marketing and copywriting consultancy for health and fitness coaches.

I started where most of you started.

In 2017, I was a fully booked gym floor PT. In 2018, I co-owned a gym. I know what it’s like to build a client base from scratch, to depend on your reputation and your relationships, and to figure out the hard way that being excellent at your job isn’t the same as being good at marketing it.

Since 2020, I’ve been getting paid to write for some of the biggest names in the fitness industry and the mentors behind them. That work gave me a vantage point most marketers don’t have: I’m not studying fitness coaching marketing from the outside. I’m inside it, every single week, writing the copy that’s actively converting real audiences into real clients.

What I’ve learned from that is the basis of everything in this newsletter.

Kind Copy is a family business. My husband Aled works alongside me. My sister Claire keeps the day-to-day running. Jonny handles the ads and tech. We are a small, deliberately focused team and everything we build is built to last.

I’m also currently writing a book - The Thinking Creator - about how coaches build genuine authority in a world drowning in generated content. The thesis is simple: outsourcing the writing means outsourcing the thinking, and the thinking is the work. More on that another time.

Want More? Come Find Me on Email.

Every Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday I send something different.

The Substack you’re reading now is tactical - frameworks, swipes, conversion strategy, what’s working inside real businesses.

The email list is where I think out loud.

Philosophy. Psychology. Mindset.

How I’m trying to build a business that doesn’t cost everything you’ve got to give.

Behind-the-scenes of what we’re building at Kind Copy and what I’m learning as I build it. The stuff that doesn’t fit neatly into a framework but shapes everything underneath one.

I call it What’s Working Uncommonly Well — and it’s the closest thing I do to a real conversation.

If that sounds like your kind of thing:

Join the email list here →

See you Wednesdays.

✏️ Cath

Here’s how we do it:

For years, my clients were obsessed with getting the right content type.

It was easy to get caught up in that, to keep them happy.

First it was stills, then carousels, then reels, then talking heads.

As if any one format would be “the one”.

The algorithm kept shifting.

What worked in January flopped in March.

I’d optimise for something and by the time I launched it, the game had moved.

So we changed our entire approach.

Instead of predicting, we just put everything out there and see what sticks in a strategy one of my clients calls:

“Fuck it all out there”.

Phase 1: Production Over Perfection

We record 20+ pieces of content in a single session. Talking heads, B-roll, carousels, reels. Everything.

We don’t wait for them to be “perfect.” We don’t overthink the copy. We just create volume.

And then we fuck it all out there.

Meaning: we publish everything - rapidly - and see what lands with buyers.

Phase 2: Track Everything

Every piece of content gets tagged.

We track:

• Which posts start conversations

• Which posts get mentioned on sales calls

• Which posts buyers like best

Most coaches come to us already tracking likes.

We track conversations, time spent, and who actually buys.

The mistake most coaches make here is thinking “engagement” matters. That’s how they end up with a huge following making high protein recipes and no clients.

We don’t give a shit about followers, vanity metrics, virality - none of that.

We care about relationships, and buyers.

If you have a team member doing this, tell them to use Claude Cowork to help. Makes a huge difference.

Phase 3: Iterate

Whatever’s working, we do more of it immediately.

Whatever’s not working, we stop.

We don’t get attached to formats, because they matter much less than people think.

We’re ready to shift the delivery whenever it’s needed.

The Results

When we switched to this approach, we went from guessing to knowing.

Reach: 800K → 2M views in one month.

Funnel time: halved.

The algorithm will change again.

But human behaviour changes MUCH slower.

Why This Works

Everyone else is trying to outsmart the algorithm.

We just decided to test faster, because although trends are unpredictable, we can always track data.

You can’t perfect every piece of content.

But you can produce enough volume that some of it hits.

And once you have something that lands, and you’re paying attention - you can iterate quickly.

If you’re spending more time perfecting content than creating it, you’re doing it backwards.

1. Pick a single day.

2. Record 10 pieces.

3. Different formats.

4. Don’t overthink it.

5. Tag them.

6. Track what happens.

7. Do more of what wins.

I’m NOT saying produce and ship shit quality.

I’m saying don’t let perfection (which doesn’t exist) stop you from testing what works for YOUR preferences.

I’ve been writing this book and I’m in a particularly hellish place where nothing feels right.

The idea - which felt clear, and valid, and worth exploring just a few weeks ago…

Feels trite. I’m telling myself no one needs this.

Something I genuinely thought I was the only one talking about, I’ve seen at least one other person writing a book on right now.

I blamed all kinds of stupid stuff, that’s definitely not the problem.

My ADHD makes me task hop.

My software makes it hard to see the whole outline, and I think I’m repeating myself.

Maybe I should…

I knew I shouldn’t…

I’m also self aware enough to know this is all totally absurd, and part of the process. In fact, it’s a huge theme of the book: creativity is hard and feels like work.

I had chunks of the book written - it came out raw, half finished.

I was trying to shoe-horn them into chapters.

Organising & reorganising.

Shifting stuff around digitally.

Believing the structure would somehow “emerge”.

It didn’t. Not for me.

Then I did what I was putting off.

Grab a big roll of brown paper, stick the fucker to my desk and just wrote the notes the way they came out in my brain.

Little hierarchy.

No real structure… until there was.

Within about 20 minutes, a framework was emerging:

Where, why, who, what, how.

It was the same exact idea… but I could start to see the structure when it wasn’t in tabs, and chapters.

I immediately felt better. It started to feel possible again.

In real time, this is the realisation:

I wasn’t struggling with the book. I was struggling with the method.

"How do ‘real’ writers do this? I’ll try that…”

Instead of letting myself work the way I intuitively wanted to work.

I’m telling you this because I see a lot of founders try to use approaches that are given to them by others.

But because it kinda-sorta works…

They’re reluctant to make the switch.

Even when the method isn’t really suitable with them, or they’ve outgrown it.

I’m still figuring this out as I go.

But I’m not going to succumb to a sunk cost fallacy.

The price for that might be the book itself.

It came about - like most good offers - because the coaches who wanted me to write for them couldn’t get started with us because they had a real problem they needed to solve first.

They were struggling with their niche.

They were coaching people they couldn’t be arsed with and felt they’d outgrown.

Or worse…

They were coaching people they liked, and even admired - but the coaching process was tough because they were reluctant to challenge them, or hesitant to relate to them.

The idea was simple: Tell me your story, and I’ll give you your niche.

It was the fastest and simplest way to pick out a good fit niche, because it wasn’t based on some stiff market research document… or what their nearest competitors were doing.

It was based on the parts of their own lived experiences they’d totally overlooked. They were so close to their own expertise, they genuinely couldn’t see how valuable it would be.

It was a really popular offer, and it took a huge amount of pressure off coaches who were wasting time and opportunities on trying to figure out what should be obvious.

We’re shit at recognising what makes us interesting

Coaches and consultants in particular are poor at this because of the sheer scale of influential experiences you have. That’s what makes you so good at your work - you have a bigger body of lived experience than most.

But because that’s “just normal” to you…

Your expertise creates a distortion.

Things which are unremarkable to you - and you overlook - would actually be mega useful to someone else.

We downplay the value of our own experience.

And so, we default to what every social creature does: we look around, and see what everyone else is doing.

“Training. Nutrition. Lifestyle. Cool, I’ll do those too”. Safe topics for a coach… but not something only you could uniquely talk about.

I had a consultation call yesterday.

A great coach & his developer who were building a mentorship offer aimed at personal trainers. We were talking about what would need to go into the curriculum to help them build the foundation of their message.

I said something I’ve probably said hundreds of times.

The first two pillars will be roughly the same as everyone else’s.

Training. Nutrition.

But the thing that gets you to stand out is the third one. And you’d think that would be obvious to the person. I cannot stress enough how much it is not obvious to them.

That third pillar is the one that actually differentiates, and it almost always comes from lived experience.

• A career before coaching (for me, I was a psychologist)

• A personal struggle (for me, ADHD)

• A perspective that was shaped by something totally unrelated to fitness (for me, high agency, high creativity)

It’s the part of their biography that they’d never think to mention in a professional context, and it’s doing all the heavy lifting.

I spent 5 hours consulting with a coach before I wrote a single word for her

Admittedly, this isn’t typical.

But part of me thinks some time spent in consulting should be a prerequisite to working closely with someone.

We spent this time talking - deeply.

I asked questions. Listened. She talked about what she believed. The clear, shining truths - and the messy, half developed stuff. I came to understand her.

Not just her process. But why she’d built this way.

So when I started writing, all I had to do was reflect what I’d heard. I didn’t invent a single thing. There was nothing magic.

I’d listened to her talk about her work, and I wrote it in a way that was clear and structured.

But she’d done that work. Not me.

When the launch content went live, people who had followed her for years started to engage with the content. The ideas weren’t new - they had always been hers. But she hadn’t been able to see them clearly to lead with them.

She was too close to her gifts to recognise them.

You can’t read the label from inside the bottle

When I launched Month To Market, I made this the first module. I knew nothing else would work until this was solved.

You can’t write good content until you know what your angle is. You can’t build an offer with any kind of real clarity until you know the specific transformation that you can uniquely provide. You can’t market with conviction, and say what you gotta say with your whole chest when you’re using someone else’s ideas and frameworks.

Module 1 is basically biography mining.

It’s the process of going through your own story (and I don’t mean your CV) and finding the experiences, perspectives, and pivotal moments that shape how you think.

Sometimes they’re big, lifechanging moments… sometimes they’re actually really small things you overlooked…

But they’re always genuinely unique to you.

These are the stories your audience feels in their chest when they read them - because they resonate with your truth.

Most people skip this step.

They think it’s a waste of time - and they should be doing competitor research, or some more “hardcore” marketing thing. You can’t have an AI tell you the answers here.

That’s what makes it such an irreplaceable strategy.

But this is the foundation on which everything else is built.

It’s hard to do this alone

There’s a reason this feels difficult.

It’s not really a thinking problem.

It’s more of a proximity problem.

You’re so embedded in your own experiences and expertise that the things that are most interesting about you are invisible to you.

You’ve normalised the exact thing that sets you apart.

It’s not that you are like everyone else… but you sound like everyone else, until you can reconnect to the part of you that’s different.

That’s your unfair advantage.

The fix is embarrassingly simple…

You need someone outside of your experience to listen, ask the right questions, and reflect it back to you with more clarity than you arrived with.

That’s it. That’s the whole process.

If this has landed for you, and if you’re sitting there thinking, I genuinely don’t know what my angle is, my self paced course, Month to Market was built for exactly this.

It’s the process I’ve used with dozens of coaches and consultants to mine their biography for the elements of their story that are unique to them, likely to become a core content pillar, and almost certainly invisible to them right now.

You don’t need to make something up. You don’t need to be controversial for the sake of it. You don’t need to be divisive.

You need to be more honest.

And that starts with shining a light on your story.

I went through the course, and studied…

It wasn’t that I wanted to be a copywriter, so much as I wanted to understand copy so that I could communicate my own message better.

Anyway, Mike’s course was the start of a totally new life.

And his mentorship, and friendship, has been steady from day 1.

We even met for the first time last year, and recorded a podcast together… In a Content Space - a beautiful studio setup owned by our mutual friend Stephen Inala-Reedy.

Which you can watch here, if you like:

So when Mike announced he was buggering off to Bali…

And while there, he was planning to write a book…

I was excited to read it.

Mike’s been a big influence in my writing career, and I have a ton of gratitude for how his course changed my life.

…Then I heard he was running an intensive.

6 weeks of accountability so we could get our books done too.

I was in. Immediately.

I was psyched to spend time in a writers’ room.

Even though I write all day every day…

Lots of what we do as a team collaboratively is for our clients.

And the work I do that’s just for me (and for us), is done alone.

What was interesting though, was how much mental chatter kicked in straight away.

My brain - as soon as I was considering doing something that was outside the realm of my “normal writing” started finding reasons I should stick to my routine.

It sounded like:

“But I don’t have a title”

Even though I know damn well you don’t need a title to get started. I bet a title is like the headline, or subject line of an email… the very last thing you write.

“I don’t know how to publish a book”

How ridiculous. I haven’t even written it yet, and I’ve already found a problem with the next stage.

“I should buy this fancy software to write in”

This is the first thought of amateurs. Pre-occupation with tools.

I don’t think there’s anything wrong with investing in the right tool for the job… but recognise that it’s a nice to have - a way you can recognise the “author” in you (feeling resistance to that idea too, as I write it).

“I don’t know exactly what each chapter should say”

Relatedly: layout and planning issues, how to organise thoughts (virtual vs record cards), how to lay this out so that it’s coherent and useful, and deciding on the stylistic format of the book.

“What if I struggle to fit in client work in the ONE hour I’m on the call”

This is an old belief but one that comes up for me a lot.

This is the voice that has me rushing to my desk, cutting workouts short, and hurrying through my morning. An imagined belief that my clients expect me at my desk from 9-5… and they’d object if I stepped away for so much as a coffee and a bathroom break.

I’m working hard to consciously overcome this one. I thought I had, actually, so interesting to see it making an appearance.

“I should book myself 6 weeks in a writing cabin in the woods to have a taste of THAT life”

I know you don’t need to totally self-isolate to write.

I write for a living, I write for fun, I write almost constantly… It’s absolutely NOT necessary to have perfect conditions.

Paraphrasing Steven Pressfield: The muse likes to find us at our keyboards.

But it’s a dream of mine to have a cabin in the woods. A writers’ retreat… except I’m a total hermit, so I don’t necessarily want to share the space!

I think this is about quieting the outside noise so I can hear my own inner voice. This is something I’ve been exploring a lot this year - virtually.

Unsubscribing, unfollowing, and strictly limiting the content I consume.

Not because those accounts aren’t good, or interesting… but because they can overpower my own expression, and influence me in ways I don’t want at this stage of my life.

I’m trying hard to connect to my own beliefs…

And develop insight, and taste that’s genuinely my own.

This is the “virtual cabin” I’ve created for myself.

We all get mental chatter

When we’re doing familiar work, the “what ifs” tend to be quieter. We have a predictable process, and we’re comfortable with any small uncertainties…

But when you’re committing to something new, the mental chatter becomes more evident. Listen to it, and notice it…

But it’s important you don’t let it stop you.

I’ve heard Frank Kern talk about a perfect day.

I’ve heard explain that a happy life happens by stacking those perfect days on top of each other.

…But…

I just can’t fucking connect to it one bit, lads.

Literally zero emotional connection whatsoever.

It all feels like a bunch of daydreaming wank.

After all…

How am I meant to know what an ideal feels like - if I’ve never had that?

How could I possibly picture that vision if it has elements that I’ve never experienced?

I don’t lack imagination by any means…

So every time I heard this advice, I just rolled my eyes.

It felt like another “Emperor’s New Clothes” approach to personal development, where we all pretended it was useful…

While - in truth - none of us made any actual progress with it.

Until recently.

Looking Backwards, Not Forwards

Here’s the moment everything clicked for me.

Instead of projecting forward, into an imagined future…

I thought about times when I felt like I’d nailed my performance in the past.

Not that every part of my life was perfect…

But that - in that moment - I demonstrated one single quality that I actually valued in my real life.

Real, felt experience.

Those experiences connected to what I actually valued.

They FLOWED.

I started to write…

I wanted to understand what happened before, during and after so that I can anchor to the beliefs that drive these “peak states”.

And also… spend more time in them in the future.

Times when I felt my fittest & strongest.

Times when I was brave, and courageous.

Times when I held a boundary, and advocated for myself.

It was much easier than I expected. One memory helped me connect to another.

I quickly had 7 stories, with granular detail about what I felt in that moment… the primary and secondary emotions that I wanted to embody…

Then, I gave the stories to ChatGPT. Asked it to find patterns.

To be honest, I didn’t need AI to help me - once I had the stories, the patterns were obvious.

The Inverse Hack

Then, I had an idea.

I took the times when I felt at my worst.

Where I felt powerless, or hopeless, or bullied…

And wrote down those stories, where I felt like I’d “let myself down” in some way.

I had 2 or 3 examples.

The patterns here were obvious too.

I didn’t do this to beat myself up, or anything like that…

But rather to understand the “red flag states” that result in me feeling like I didn’t make the most of an opportunity, or didn’t advocate well for myself.

Now: I had the shadow version of flow state.

The anti-state.

How I’m Using This

Having this perspective is useful.

But I can already see the impact this is going to have on my life.

Knowing what makes me feel in peak state… I can draw very clear, rich conclusions about my values (deeper than “I value autonomy” which I knew before)

…and about the conditions & relationships when these states emerge.

I’ve written heaps of webinars for other people - but never one for myself.

Partially because I was a bit scared…

Live public speaking? Yeesh.

But also because I wasn’t sure what I wanted to get out of it.

It wasn’t meant to be a conversion event…

So we treated it liked an experiment.

(My team knows that if they frame stuff as an experimental project, my curiosity peaks and I can’t resist it!)

We wanted to learn 5 things:

1. Can a webinar grow the list with quality people?

2. Can we upsell people into a service to liquidate ad costs?

3. Can we learn to run ads to our own webinar?

4. Can I develop the skill of public speaking in this domain?

5. Can I shift a belief at scale?

We also debated whether to make it free or paid, and we went with paid - not for the revenue, but to bring quality buyers into the list.

Everyone who bought a ticket for the webinar for £99 got a month free in Copy Tapas (worth £99) so it wasn’t really about buying the webinar…

It was more about “let me bring you into my world so you can see what we’re doing for our clients”.

Our Lessons:

The list did grow.

By a lot.

In 30 days, we grew 733%.

Now, we did have other stuff going on at this time… like podcasts and lead magnets…

So I’m not 100% sure how much of this was just from the webinar. But we definitely grew.

Not bad for a paid webinar.

We were profitable on ads.

We didn’t set a huge budget…

But we made more than twice what we spent in a way that felt sustainable.

The real win was that one of my team members ran the entire thing - total control over the entire media buying arm of the project.

I just wrote the copy.

That felt awesome. I empowered a team member to do something they were interested in, and I got leverage.

Would 100% do that again.

Paid tickets filtered for quality.

It was a small event. Intimate, and mostly made up of people who were already Tapas members (they had free tickets).

Everyone who paid for a webinar spot engaged with the process.

No random freebie seekers.

Everyone was locked in ready to pay attention.

Would do that again.

I didn’t try to shift beliefs. Instead, I showed a process I had actually followed.

I liked this feeling.

It was less about convincing someone to do something, and more about here’s a process I followed that really helped me.

I think, for a first webinar, I liked that I wasn’t taking the role of “expert” - and instead, I was just showing steps I took.

That was valuable, and I often use that collaborative tone in my marketing.

Would do that again too.

The hardest part was starting.

This was the bit that I felt most uncomfortable with.

Managing the room. Getting people in. Worrying no one would come.

Hitting record, and not forgetting haha

I felt super comfortable teaching.

I felt the most anxiety around the logistics because it was unfamiliar.

I think I’d like to get more reps in around that…

Next Steps

I want to tackle that hard bit - starting.

So I was thinking I should run more webinars, more often.

Maybe make them shorter.

Make some of them free.

Just to get reps in on that challenging part at the beginning.

I think this is SUCH a hack. Looking at the parts of your business where you lack experience as a skill issue…

And designing opportunities to address them in a way that feels fun.

Instagram + DMs = money

It was Covid.

There was a surplus of money.

And endless time to scroll, compare and spend.

Coaches made a mint.

Post a transformation pic. Get flooded with DMs. Close clients & collect cash.

Repeat daily.

Most coaches just had an instagram account.

No email. No landing pages. No websites.

They didn’t NEED it, to be fair.

But when you only have an instagram account, it has to do ALL the heavy lifting.

1. It has to attract the right people

2. Position you as THE authority on your topic

3. And convert people to buy from you

And these days…

That approach is bleeding money.

When one page has to do everything, you can’t optimise for anything.

If your feed needs to attract cold traffic, educate them, AND get them to buy...

What do you even measure?

Engagement? Followers? DM requests?

It’s a mess.

Conversions suffer because people don’t know what action to take.

One Page. One Job.

Every piece of content…

Every page, every email…

Should have ONE clear purpose.

Not zero - not posting just to tick a box. That’s an orphan task.

And not 3.

The hardest part of this is just committing to making a decision.

That might look like:

• Instagram’s job? Drive traffic. That’s IT.

• Landing page? Capture the lead. Nothing else.

• Email sequence? Build trust and close the sale.

So if you’re looking at your social media engagement and wondering why people aren’t buying…

It’s because you’re asking the platform to do too many things at once.

You don’t need to attract, position AND convert all in 1 place anymore.

Trying to force that for the sake of simplicity is leaving serious money on the table.

What Does This Look Like In Real Life?

We had a client with absolutely mad numbers on instagram.

Huge levels of traffic - in the millions - wasting opportunity, running a 2020 funnel:

Posting → DM → Application → Call

Major bottlenecks faced:

• Hundreds of people start the application process, about 20% completed

• 50% of people ghosting in DMs, even after they filled out the form!

• Showing up to the call and needing 45+ minutes of hand-holding just to understand the process

…Which meant fewer calls, fewer closes and a lot of wasted opportunity.

We added a landing page.

This separated people who were casually interested in the workout content from the people who actually were considering buying.

We added a VSL on the landing page.

This educated them on the process they’d go through. So WAY more people who started the form actually completed the form - from 20% to 71%.

When they went through the form, they were expecting a DM.

They were excited about the prospect of the call and were pre-sold. Close rates went up, call times went down - so there was more capacity for calls.

When you know the ONE bottleneck, you can actually track the lead all the way through your ecosystem.

Want To Fix It?

You can keep rocking your current setup…

Maybe that’s working for you.

Or we can figure out what YOUR bottleneck is (because it’s gonna be unique).

Tonight, I’m doing a training.

We take a look at the patterns that already exist in your business, and build your 2026 marketing campaigns around them.

That way, you’re not doing outdated or generic stuff that doesn’t really work for you anymore.

Details here. Come join us.

It will shift how you think about your marketing in the next 12 months.

P.S.

Next time I run a webinar, I’m gonna share the one thing I recommended to improve that 50% ghost rate.

Highly tactical. Takes about 10 seconds to implement.

For YEARS I was doing a poor job of collecting testimonials.

Well, that’s not exactly it. I was collecting them.

Being pretty diligent about that.

But I didn’t have a way of organising or using them well.

Testimonials felt like a nice-to-have. Sort of like a trophy for a job well done.

The coaches I was writing for were generous with their praise. They were delighted with their results.

So I’d bang a screenshot up on Instagram stories - once…

And then never, ever use it again.

Or have any way of even finding it.

This wasn’t working.

I was wasting 99% of the incredible comments I was getting.

Worse, when it came time to launch something new, I had to dig through texts and the chaos of instagram archives trying to piece it together.

It was messy.

Until I started to reverse engineer how I would actually use these kind words… And it started to click.

The 3 Folder Approach

This is so simple, I wish I’d done it half a decade ago.

You need 3 folders.

1. The problems they tell you about

2. The stuff you actually did

3. The things they thank you for

Problems:

The problems they tell you about is where they give you their struggle in their words.

You’ll find these in your DMs, in your check-ins, on your sales calls… They’ll look something like:

“See, my problem is if I’m not training 7 days a week, it feels fucking pointless”

These become:

• Hooks

• Ad headlines

• Subject lines

Stuff you did:

The stuff you actually did are the tiny, forgetable, specific things that actually made a difference.

Like yesterday, I had a consultation call with a coach who needed a HYPER tactical hour where we actually wrote the texts asking for referrals and sent them.

He got 40 done.

That was a huge step towards building the business he actually wants.

In your world, that might be “I helped him eat 30g of fat and now his diet feels easy, because he’s not hungry”.

These become:

• Body copy

• Lead magnets

• Processes & SOPs

Things they thank you for:

The things they thank you for are the emotional benefits of working with you. They’re based on the outcomes, but they go further than “I lost 10lbs”.

These become:

• Testimonials

• Featured quotes

• Social proof

How To Use The Folders

This is the tactical part - you actually build your copy like Lego. It works even if you’re not creative.

Writing a social post?

• Hook = folder 1

• Story = folder 2

• CTA = folder 3

Writing an email?

• Subject line = folder 1

• Body = folder 2

• Next step = folder 3

Works for everything from ads to sales pages.

Why This Is So Effective

The psychology of this system is really simple.

Talking about their problems their way makes people feel seen.

What you did builds trust - not with them - but with yourself.

It reassures you that you actually do have IP, that you follow a process (even if it’s emerging) and that you’re actually materially different from other coaches. This is your point of difference.

And what they say thank you for helps you to see the emotional driver beneath the transformation.

When people read that, it gives them permission to think “I want that, maybe this will work for me too”

The 3 folders together create a complete narrative.

Start Building Your Folders

These days, I do this monthly but if you have a huge client base you might need to do it weekly.

Step 1: Go through your client conversations

• DMs, voicenotes, Zoom transcripts, check-ins, WhatsApp chats

• Extract the exact language they use

Step 2: Use AI to help you organise

• “I’m going to give you a bunch of client testimonials. Can you sort them into 3 categories: problems, the specific actions I took, and their praise & positive statements?”

• Save to a central place (like a Google doc). Done in 5 minutes.

Step 3: Add to the folders as you go

• I recommend setting this up as a recurring task in your calendar

• Every time a client says “I’m struggling with…” - folder 1. If they say “it helped when you…” - folder 2. If they say “thank you…” - folder 3.

Important: This can feel overwhelming if you try to do it for past comments. You can start this from today and this is still a super valuable resource.

You can get clever about building this into Notion and repurposing EACH comment in video, in a graphic, as a screenshot…

You can get as organised as you want.

Me? I just want something I can search.

If you have a system for this, let me know. I’m always looking to build better processes in my business.

All organic, zero ads.

Hundreds of people were starting his application form.

But most of them weren’t finishing it.

The funnel he was running was mega simple. Basically:

1. See his post

2. Click the applications link in his bio or get sent it via DM

3. Fill out the application process to book a call

It was simple and straightforward.

But it was so short, they’d get mid-way through the form, and abandon it.

The ones that DID finish it…

(About 20%)

They weren’t always great quality leads.

They’d ghost him in DMs.

They’d not show up to calls.

If they did show up, they were unprepared for the level of investment & commitment that was expected of them.

It was like they were missing vital context because they’d booked so impulsively.

In real terms, this meant the team were spending hours chasing people to confirm appointments.

Massive pain in the arse.

The Problem Wasn’t The Form

At first glance, it seemed like a form problem. We looked into things like…

• How far would they get before they’d abandon the form?

• What questions were tripping people up?

• Could we shorten the form, and make it easier to finish?

…But there was a stage we needed to do first.

People were getting to the form without context.

They hadn’t seen (contextualised) social proof.

They didn’t understand the process - or what would be required of them.

So they’d start filling it out… get partway through and think…

“Wait… What am I doing? What am I signing up for again?”

And just bail.

We’ll come back to the form itself another time…

But for now, there was something that needed to happen before we adjusted anything on the form.

We Did The Opposite Of What You’d Expect

We added a landing page before the application form.

One that showed the philosophy of the business…

Details of the coaching team…

Social proof & testimonials…

All the information people needed before they could apply. We didn’t want them to skip that important context.

It might seem counterintuitive to make it harder to apply, but the people who weren’t serious about the process…

They self-selected out.

They realised they weren’t ready.

They hit a bit of friction and realised they couldn’t be arsed.

Good.

These are the people who would have ghosted and needed chasing. People that need chasing usually just aren’t ready to buy yet.

It’s not just about being a good quality prospect.

It’s a lead indicator of being a good client.

And optimising for that starts WAY before they actually pay you anything.

Results

This one change took the completion rate on the form from 20% to 71%

Better quality leads.

Shorter sales calls.

Consistent close rates.

All because we made the process longer.

In terms of raw data, that meant instead of 100+ people starting and not completing…

We had something like 56 start and 40 complete.

OK - that’s fewer actual people.

But that’s just a traffic issue.

We can fix that down the road.

What matters now that we’ve fixed the leaks is that we can push more traffic through and nothing will break.

We stopped wasting leads.

Based on this one change, their worst month in 2025 would now be a 6-figure month.

And that’s if we changed NOTHING else.

Results like this compound.

This Isn’t “Done”

It would be great if you could “fix” your funnel once and be done with it.

In this instance, adding friction worked.

• It improved the completion rate

• Brought in better quality leads

• Made sales calls easier

But this is a living, breathing system - and what’s worked this month, might not work next…

We are ALWAYS trying to balance quality & quantity depending on what you need at any given moment.

Back when I was writing for Phil Graham, a huge part of my job wasn’t just to write the copy.

It was talking to the sales team every week and finding out:

• How’s the quality of the leads?

• Do we have enough calls booked?

• Are people showing up prepared or do they have questions?

Based on those answers, I’d adjust the page.

When we were flooded with leads, I’d add friction.

Longer landing page, with more questions on the form. Make them jump through a few hoops & show they were serious before they could book a call.

If the sales team had a quiet week, I’d remove friction.

Shorten the page, ask fewer questions and get people on the phone faster if we needed volume more than perfection.

Your marketing is a machine.

And machines need monitoring and fine-tuning on what’s working right now.

It’s not about just adding friction once, and forgetting about it…

Adjust based on what you need.

Need better quality? Add friction.

More volume? Remove friction.

Sales team overwhelmed? Add friction.

Sales team twiddling their thumbs? Remove friction.

It’s a dial, not a switch.

And the best marketers are monitoring and adjusting that dial in real time - based on their sales conversations.

Your Business Has A Unique Rhythm

Most coaches don’t realise…

Adding friction and removing friction isn’t done randomly.

It’s a response to the business’ rhythm.

You’ve got hot spots and choke points…

When your market wants to buy…

And times when it doesn’t matter how good your offer is… they’re just not biting.

The coaches that have the most PEACE in their businesses know when those windows are…

And build their entire content & campaign strategy around them.

That’s exactly what I’m teaching in my live workshop on February 4th.

If you want a strategy that’s aligned with YOUR rhythm, you’ll want to come along.

You can read all about it here...

Don’t plan any campaigns until you know when your most lucrative hot spots are.

Here’s how I used to do it:

1. Show up & talk

2. Share some solid insights

3. Write the promotional content for the episode as a thank you for having me on

4. Ask people to find me on instagram & let me know if the episode was helpful

That worked ok, honestly.

Helping to promote the episode put me ahead of other guests, so people liked having me on their podcasts because the episodes did well.

But at the start of 2026, it occurred to me that I could be doing WAY more.

And now, I’ll never go back to the old way…

Subscribe now

It all started because I was sick of getting the podcast clips back from the editors and thinking…

“How the fuck did you watch 30-60 minutes of non-stop value and this shite is the best clip you could find to promote the episode?!”

It felt like it was getting phoned in by some AI.

So this year, I decided I would ask for the questions in advance.

This way, I could think about what I wanted to say ahead of time, and make life easier for the editors.

I wanted to have my IP front and centre.

• Frameworks

• Mental models

• My methods, presented cleanly

That’s how it started.

The last podcast I did was with a sleep consultant called Jayne Havens.

She sent over the questions ahead of time, and I went to work making notes… But as I was writing, I realised:

I could help these guys WAY more.

This was only possible because I knew I’d be speaking to an audience of consultants about email marketing.

I met Jayne because I actually helped me re-write her welcome sequence.

(The most important email sequence in your business)

And in less than a month of that sequence being live, she’d made her money back & was ROI positive.

• So I had a relevant example…

• That I knew performed well…

• For that specific niche…

I quickly wrote a landing page that was designed specifically to talk to consultants about email marketing.

I realise now, I could have been even more specific.

You can see it here: https://www.kindcopy.uk/consultant-email

I wanted to write it in such a way that I could take the bones of it, and adapt it for other kinds of podcasts.

• I have a big audience of coaches.

• I have a smaller audience of creatives.

• My audience is broadly classified as “service businesses”.

And if they wanted to grab a free gift as a thank you for listening to my episode, I made them a guide to writing a welcome sequence.

I called it, “The Anatomy of a Welcome Sequence”.

And included stuff like:

• The purpose of each email

• What to include

• Example subject lines

• The structure of the sequence (how many, what order etc)

• The key psychological triggers that make people want to buy from you

• Real world examples as swipe copy

• What NOT to do

It was genuinely valuable.

It was dead easy to make, I just hosted it in Notion:

Inside, at the bottom, there’s a soft CTA to book a consultation call with me…

But if they don’t…

They go through a short email sequence…

They get asked to complete a personalisation survey, so I can send them more useful info…

They get some social proof from other clients I’d written welcome sequences for…

(for example, one guy who improve his sales team’s close rate from 20% to 80% and another long term coaching client who can directly attribute £2M in revenue to her welcome sequence in the last couple of years)

They get invited to check out the rest of the free content here on Substack…

And I chose a single, related podcast for them to listen to (a 34 minute banger I did with David Garfinkel about our ethos of kind marketing).

Which is a great intro to our values as a company…

And (I suspect) will get more clicks than linking them to all my recent podcasts.

Plus, I still made the promo material for Jayne.

Promoting the episode was easy for her.

Why This Matters

Podcast hosts are stuck doing all the heavy lifting.

They pay for the software…

They book the studio, if it’s face to face…

They wrangle the editors, and get it live…

They book the guests…

And then hope the audience gets something out of it.

So I wanted to be the guest that showed up WITH resources.

Like a partnership.

So your listeners walk away with something tangible.

And promotional assets that keep working after the episode drops.

Things that make the host look good for booking me.

Because each booking should create more opportunities to guest.

I want to guest on episodes where it feels like a partnership, and the listeners walk away with something tangible.

It’s not completely selfless.

I’m obviously hoping they opt in to my email list and eventually buy something from me.

But I genuinely want people to listen to the episode and think they’ve been served properly.

Have a poke around the links, it’s all built in public and available for you to see.

And if you have a podcast, and you want a guest who’s memorable and helps your audience beyond a “good conversation”…

Let’s talk.

I’d love to be the most generous guest you have this year.

P.S.

If you’re thinking “I should probably do this for MY podcast appearances...”

You’re right.

And if you want help building it... you know where to find me.