Buying out Justin from Copy Accelerator + My Vision Moving Forward

Good morning,

As some of you have probably heard, as of this week I am officially the 100% owner of Copy Accelerator after acquiring my partner Justin’s 50% Share.?

The process with J was smooth and easy, and we’re truly parting as friends. It’s absolutely one of those best-case scenarios.

From my perspective and motivation for doing this acquisition, it just came down to us having different visions for the program. Additionally, I know Justin also felt like he needed to take a breather in his life as well.?

Now speaking of vision, there are indeed going to be several changes coming to CA in the days, weeks, and months to come. To explain what some of those are, I did a write up to all of our Copy Accelerator LITE and Full Members this morning, and I’m going to repost it here.

I think you’ll find this to be interesting regardless of if you’re a business owner, a freelancer, or something else. Additionally, this post shares some important thoughts on where I see the DR Space and Copywriting Industries heading too, and where my focus will be personally.?

Here is a portion of the post related to those changes and my vision, I hope you enjoy:

Update #1: CA Labs

First, I’m going to be adding a Performance Equity component to Copy Accelerator Full. This is tentatively being named CA Labs. The goal is to allow CA Full Members to get equity in various offers and companies, as well as to have chances at lucrative profit sharing, royalty deals, performance bonuses, etc. This will be run by Luke Mills, Mario Castelli, and myself to start.?

Let me give you some examples of how this works.

There’s an established offer owner in the space who has always struggled to find great copywriters. He wants to start a new supplement company, and he wants to use CA Labs as the solution. The deal we’ve discussed is the following:

1. He pays CA Labs $10k up front AND gives CA Labs 30% ownership in the new company.?
2. We then turnaround and hire two copy writers from CA Full at $5k Each. Luke, Mario, and I help those copywriters come up with big ideas, mechanisms, etc. We help copy chief the work as well. We’re also consulting on the launch, acquisition strategy, etc.?
3. If one of the CA Full Copywriters creates a sales letter that becomes a control and starts scaling, they get 5% from our pool of 30% equity. They also get another 5% reserved for them over the course of a year, which they can earn as long as they are being active and assisting as needed.?
4. Meanwhile, CA Labs is holding 20% total, which is basically split between Stefan, Luke, and Mario (and potentially longer-term we may bring other people in who also get a piece of equity from this pool).?
5. In addition to the copy chiefing, CA Labs is also helping with vetting projects, all the legal fees and contract negotiations, financial auditing and payment collections, deal flow, etc.?

Now that is one example, and it’s something I’m already negotiating.?

In other cases, with more established companies, equity may not be on the table. But in those cases, we can still negotiate very strong royalty deals, performance bonuses, profit or rev shares, etc.?

And also please note – this won’t only be for long-form. There will be cases where eComm type companies need help with FB Ads, or Conversion Optimization, etc. In those cases, we can still create similar types of ideas.?

I like this CA Labs model for several reasons.?

First of all, I know that a LOT of our members want to become Offer Owners. This satisfies that goal. But what’s even better is that it will start giving full members ownership and equity in projects, without all of the headaches and financial risk that comes from starting an offer from scratch. Trust me – starting your own offer and actually getting it to scale is hard AS FUCK. And once it is scaled, keeping it going is even harder. That’s why, I think a much better path is getting 5-20% equity in offers run by very experienced operators, where your role is to just focus on the creative and copy side.?

Second, another goal for many of our members is more passive income. This satisfies this goal with the royalty, profit share, and performance bonus side of things.

Third, it serves as a nice "ascension" element for the program. I think one of the big reasons people don’t renew in CA Lite is because they feel like they’ve "maxed out" and don’t have someplace to go. Now with Labs, you do.?

When you’re ready, moving into CA Full and getting involved in these Performance Deals is pretty exciting (at least I think it is). Over time you could have equity in multiple profitable offers + profit shares and royalties flowing in etc. This could get you to 6 figures + per month passively (in some cases) and also gives you the potential for large financial windfalls through liquidity events (when a business or offer sells).?

Fourth, I like to Zig when others Zag. And right now, I think there’s a bit of a "knock" against a lot of copywriters for trying to charge more money than they are worth. Business owners are getting sick of being quoted $15k or $25k from writers who maybe have one single winner, or no winners under their belt. CA Labs is an irresistible offer to a lot of those same biz owners, because we’re going to actually undercut the market (up front) in exchange for a lot of upside on the back. And instead of this coming from just "random" people – it’s coming from CA Full Copywriters + Me, Luke, and Mario.?

Update #2: Overhauling the Event.?

The next CA Event is August 30th – September 1st in Austin, Texas.?

I’m going to market it more to business owners than I am copywriters.?

You heard that right, the event will NOT be used as an acquisition channel to bring copywriters into CA Lite.?

In fact, I’m going to raise the ticket price of the next CA Live Event to $2,950 specifically to discourage newer copywriters from attending.

Now this might seem weird, so let me explain the reasons why:

1. In order for the Copy Accelerator Ecosystem to thrive we need a strong relationship with the business owners, offer owners, and entrepreneurs in the space. But because our events have been used as acquisition channels, we’ve turned off many of those said business owners. They don’t want to get a ticket to our big events because it feels like a "freelancer pitch fest" where they are just meat in the eyes of many brand-new copywriters. Long-term, this will lead to more-and-more business owners opting out of our events. Not only would that end up hurting us if we were using the event as an acquisition channel (which we’re not), but it would also hurt our CA Members Specifically by limiting your opportunities.
2. So because of that, I’m going to focus much more on getting a ton of high-level business owners into the room. If freelance copywriters want to get a ticket for $2,950 then AWESOME, because those people are probably a good fit for CA too. But mostly it’ll be high level business owners and high-level content geared towards them.?
3. As CA LITE and FULL Members, this obviously benefits you a lot. You’ll have less competition at the events. It also increases the inherent value of your memberships of course, because now if you were to not be part of the ecosystem and just purchase tickets for the event, you’d be paying $6k per year on tickets alone.?
4. And of course from a CA Labs perspective, this is good too. Because with more business owners it means more deal flow potential for that.?
5. And related to all of this, the event will be a bit different. It’ll likely be a bit smaller and more intimate than the last few events. I also will NOT be pitching CA Membership from stage. And I won’t be doing a bunch of panels or even matchmaking sessions. Instead, you’ll do your own matchmaking through building relationships with the many business owners who are here.?
6. Just an FYI on the event btw, some of the confirmed speakers right now include: Nick Daniel (CEO VShred), Chance and Abdul (Modern Millionaires), Jason Fladlien (Architected the $57MM launch of The Plan), Noah Kagan (App Sumo), Alyssa Dillon (a homegrown CA Member who is now doing 7 figures a year in the Accounting Space!) and more. I’m working on getting several Female Entrepreneurs and Founders as well, including two who both created D2C Companies with 9 Figure Exits (more on that below).?

Update #3. Overall Focus

In addition to everything mentioned above, I’m going to work on helping both LITE and FULL Members to grow and move into new and exciting verticals. This is necessary for your long-term success and for our long-term survival.

Here’s the deal:

The pool of people/companies successfully running DR Clickbank-Style Offers is shrinking (thanks to IOS 14, Inflation, Etc).?

Meanwhile the number of new copywriters entering the space and wanting to work for those clients is getting bigger (due to many people presenting copywriting as a Biz Opp).?

Well again, as mentioned, I like to zig when others zag.?

So I want to be connecting our members to leaders, innovators, and entrepreneurs in a wider array of verticals and industries.?

More stuff in Web 3.0, Politics, eComm, etc.?

I want to be bringing you opportunities to work with Venture-Backed or Private-Equity Backed Companies. Opportunities to take the skills you’ve developed in CA and apply them in industries that are desperate for them, have hundreds of billions of dollars in untapped potential, and where you have very little serious competition.?

To that end, you’ll see this influence some of our weekly training calls moving forward.?

You’ll also see it influence some of the speakers at our future events.?

For example, at the Austin one coming up – I plan on having a panel with VCs and Private Equity people. I just had a call today to try and sign-on two different female founders of D2C Companies that both sold for several hundred million dollars. One of those founders is now Head of Innovation for one of the 20 largest companies in the world. I think we should all get to know her better.

When it comes to our events, this content will be great for the business owners in attendance, but these are also folks that our copywriters should be wanting to build relationships with in general.?

Now to be clear: this doesn’t mean we’re not going to be talking about VSLs, FB Ads, Email Creatives, etc. We’ll still talk about that stuff too. But we are going to blend that with new verticals, new types of copy, etc to expand and grow our collective horizons.?

Update #4. The CA Ascension Model.

You might be wondering, since we won’t be focusing on acquiring new CA LITE or Full Members at events, what’s the overall model here??

Short-term, I’m going to hire one of our CA Members as a consultant to help me develop a strong $4k-$5k program that we market through viral and organic content + influencers. This is the same strategy he’s architected and used to help a client in the Amazon FBA space go to $2MM per month on a single funnel that doesn’t have any upsells.?

I’ll probably take the 8 Week Mentorship Program we’ve been doing, add in 4 weeks specifically on getting clients, add some more bonuses to it all – and voila! Then a percentage of those people will naturally ascend into CAL and CAF. But frankly, even if they don’t, we can build a very strong 8 figure company on this model alone, and it won’t matter if CAL grows a ton or not.?

Then in the medium-term, I will of course still build out lower ticket offers at $47, $97, and so on. There will be some obvious ascension there, but I’m actually looking at these more from the following perspective:

1) Impact at Scale is one of my biggest values. So having affordable but extremely high-quality courses and programs help me to achieve this.

2) It’s also a great marketing tool for me and for Copy Accelerator. If I can run some low ticket offers on cold traffic, at scale, it means billions of impressions over time. That’s great for branding, and ultimately benefits the whole ecosystem.?

Okay, there are even more updates coming up, but I wanted to post this and share some of my vision for you. Please feel free to leave a comment with any questions, thoughts, or ideas you’ve got – and I’ll answer and interact as I’m able!

- SPG?

P.S.?This post originally came from an email I sent to my private list. If you want to see more stuff like this from me, you can apply to join my list?using this link.