Back in 2011, AppSumo sold its deals with one-line emails. A $100 phone-system credit got a single sentence announcing the discount.
Then Noah Kagan's friend Neville Medhora, who had spent most of a year buried in copywriting books, asked to write a few.
His first assignment was the hardest sell on the calendar: a font membership, around $125, that only hardcore designers would ever want.
So his email told everyone else to leave. If Lucida Sans Unicode meant nothing to you, close this message. Then he wrote, "If your knees go weak when I whisper, 'GARAMOND.'"
I write for a living, and my knees hold perfectly steady at Garamond. The right readers were built differently. The deal took off.
Some subscribers hated the email. It sold anyway. By Neville's own account, every email he wrote after it beat AppSumo's old ones, and one converted over 10 percent against what he calls a normal 1 percent. That's his own blog and he never published revenue, so hold the number loosely.
The words picked their reader, and that reader bought.
Read the first line of your sales page. Who does it tell to leave?
Tell me in the comments who you'd turn away.