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Comment by ryanio | Hacker News Reader

This guy needs a few lessons on effective public speaking and presentation, this introduction video of him makes me cringe.. I couldn't watch more than just a few minutes of it. Oh, and a web designer couldn't hurt either, who's going to read those walls of text?

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who's going to read those walls of text?

The buyers, mostly.

If you don't run marketing at a B2B SaaS company it is a wall of text. If that's you, I'll save you time: don't read it or, if you do read it, read it only for academic interest on doing copywriting.

If, on the other hand, one is in charge of increasing the sales of a B2B SaaS company, this page is basically designed to be total brain crack.

It presents an idea which is either new or which one is vaguely aware of, presents concrete suggestions for implementation, has a case study which the target customer will find incredibly compelling, teaches one thing they can literally execute on by the end of today, and then drumroll says that if you found the page to be valuable then there are five hours of very dense, action-packed video and guides where that came from, for a very reasonable price by the standards of B2B SaaS companies.

I can attest to the brain-crackness. We're a bootstrapped startup that is starting to have a compelling product, and starting to think more about how to market it. We're definitely aware of the idea of lifecycle marketing and have been thinking about implementing it.

If purchasing this course lets us get a lifecycle marketing system going that is 10% more effective two weeks earlier than if we had to learn the lessons ourselves, it would pay for itself. Of course, if we had to smash our brains against it and try to pick out a cohesive strategy from across the internet it's very likely to take us a long time - months or years - to learn all the things in the course.

If you're in the target market for this product, and you know patio11 enough to trust him, the sales pitch boils down to "You give me several hundred dollars, and I'll give you thousands of dollars."

Haha, but even with that rational analysis done, the idea of spending that much on something pains my bootstrapping mind tremendously.

I think a decent way to think of it is in terms of customer LTV. "If I get N customers out of this, I break even." For a lot of B2B SaaS products, N is something like 1 or 2. For that reason alone, I think the price is a bit low.

Long form sales copy is all about bullet points, headings, subheadings - essentially presenting a ton of copy in an easily digestible format - specifically avoiding looking like a wall of text!

Walls of text convert like crazy. You aren't targeting the Big Business Corporate Dickhead Department. You're targeting someone sitting in their underwear at their computer. The wall of text serves to draw them in, confuse them, set them straight, give them an ah-ha moment, then say "there's more of this delicious feeling of mastery for only a few hundred dollars..."

Basically, zinga of marketing. Also see: 30 minute infomercials. "This towel will change your life!"

He did something right. I read it start to finish without pause.

I am in the target demographic, we've just started implementing lifecycle emails at my company.

I'm not agreeing with the op. Just looking cross eyed at the wall of text statement.

But, are you in charge of a lifecycle email campaign? For whatever reason, it didn't feel like a wall of text to me.

But if the topic wasn't of intense interest, maybe it would have.

I am most definitely not your target customer for this (not yet, anyway - one day, maybe, who knows?)

Still, it's quite clear how well you demonstrate value - that last paragraph is exactly one sentence long and yet has five concise, concrete pointers on what exactly makes long copy good. As such, I suspect buyers will be extremely happy with the content of the actual course :)

For now I'll continue to enjoy the rest of your excellent free content. Thanks and good luck!

Does the long sales copy letter (on the web) have a place when you're selling a SASS app? Say an appointment reminder system? I've been convinced it works for info products -- but haven't seen good examples for applications.

(or is the long for content done only in emails and not on the site itself)

> this introduction video of him makes me cringe

This is true. The video is poor quality - washed out. And despite wearing a bulky headset with an enormous microphone, there are weird feedback(?) "booms" every few seconds.

I personally couldn't get past the gimmick with the $100 bill. It was really tacky and is such a cliched TV informercial ploy for attention.

The red tracksuit doesn't help convey a sense of authority either. He didn't properly comb his hair (though this is an understandable issue for many people, get some hair gel). And there are distracting reflections on his glasses - an easy solution for this is contacts. The background of the room, all Japanese-y, is distracting as well.

Summary: if you're going to be a salesman on video, you need to look the part. Patrick most definitely does not look the part.

I agree. I know Patrick is known around HN for giving out good info but watching some of his videos was oddly distracting to me because something in the back of my mind reminds how awkward they are. Even just start by losing the nerdy headset I think it will help viewers focus more on the content rather than the awkwardness in the video.

>The background of the room, all Japanese-y, is distracting as well.

Well, he does live in Japan...

Yeah, well that's not at all relevant to the customers - they need clean, simple videos where the focus is Patrick and the content he's providing. Anything other than that is a distraction.

At first I thought you were being sarcastic... Patrick delivered one of the most amazing talks of all time at Business of Software (ie. the "Old Spice" presentation):

http://www.kalzumeus.com/2011/03/26/software-for-underserved...

You might not like this video, but I wouldn't generalize so prematurely.

I didn't think it was as bad as you're describing ... and it's very hard to perform on video presentations that don't include an audience (you feed off an audience's energy and get immediate feedback ... and in my case I get a real shot of adrenaline too).

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