TCC Podcast #325: From Solo Copywriter to Thriving Agency Owner with Chanti Zak

The people and stuff we mentioned on the show:

Join The Copywriter Accelerator
The Copywriter Think Tank
Kira’s website
Rob’s website
Chanti’s website
The Copywriter Club Facebook Group
The Copywriter Underground
Free month of Brain.FM
Episode 54
Episode 141

Full Transcript:

Rob Marsh:  If you listen to last week’s episode, you know that from time to time, we like to have previous guests come back and talk about the evolution of their businesses since the last time that we spoke. This week, we’re doing it again. Our guest for this episode of The Copywriter Club Podcast is former Copywriter Accelerator member and former Copywriter Think Tank member, Chanti Zak. Chanti shared the details about the three phases of her business that she’s gone through over the last couple of years since we last talked to her and when she first started out as a copywriter. And if you are just starting out or you’re thinking about what your business could become in the future, you’re going to find a lot of inspiration in what Chanti has to share today.

Kira Hug:  But first, this podcast episode is sponsored by The Copywriter Accelerator, which is our five-month mastermind/coaching program for copywriters who want to build a profitable copywriting business and make roughly $10,000 a month in their business consistently. So if that grabbed your attention, if that’s what you want to do in the New Year, then join the wait list for The Copywriter Accelerator, and you can do that by going to thecopywriteraccelerator.com.

Rob Marsh:  Okay, let’s get to our interview with Chanti.

Kira Hug:  Let’s just rewind a little bit. We don’t have to cover everything that’s happened since we last chatted, but can you share a highlight reel with one of your highlights from the last two years post-COVID?

Chanti Zak:  Oh my gosh. From the last two years, probably one of the biggest things has been building a team and just working with a lot more brilliant humans and learning how to ask for help and support in my business, but also in life.

Rob Marsh:  We’ll link to the first interview. In fact, we’ve talked to you a couple times on the podcast, if I’m not mistaken, Chanti. But we’re going to link back to those so that people can catch up and hear how you built your business and how you literally went from getting laid off to creating this business. But we should probably also not only have you just built the team, but let’s talk a little bit about where you are in your business, the kinds of things that you’re doing today, the kinds of courses and work that you do for the clients. When we talked that first time, you didn’t have this huge roster of famous, big name marketers and copywriters and the who’s who of the internet that you have today. So tell us about that business.

Chanti Zak:  Yeah. Oh my gosh, it’s been a wild ride. So yeah, I think the first time I was on the pod was totally solo, really just figuring things out and I feel like I had no clue where I was headed or what I was doing. And today, I sometimes feel the same way, but I have a little agency, so that’s a big change because demand for quizzes became so impossible for me to meet by myself that it was time to bring other people in. And so the agency; learning how to run that, that’s been a big change. And then I think the first one was on the pod, I didn’t have a course either, and I was very much behind the scenes and putting all my energy into everybody else’s business and not my own.

So shifting from that to, “Okay, I’m going to use and discover my own voice and build my own audience and use the skills I’m using for clients for myself.” And that’s been a journey too. So Grow with Quizzes is my main course, and I probably am 50/50 now in terms of revenue from clients and from the course and other smaller courses that I’ve created. And that was my goal for a long time, was to get to that 50/50 mark. And so, now I’m there and wondering kind of what’s next.

Kira Hug:  Congratulations. Because reaching that 50/50 mark is not easy, and I know it’s a goal for many copywriters we talked to. I want to go back in time and just go to the moment or the moments when you were thinking through your strategy and thinking through, “Do I want to build an agency, do I want to be a 50/50 agency in courses?” How did you work out the plan so that you could start to implement and find people and build it out?

Chanti Zak:  So I think as copywriters, we’re in a unique position because we see directly the impact and results that words and stories and knowing how to sell has for our clients and seeing that for them necessitates seeing it for ourselves. So that was the shift for me was like, “Oh, what I did this thing for a client that made them millions or grew their list by tens of thousands, what if I applied those same skills to my own business? And what would that look like in terms of just using my energy to do what I love and not burnout?” Because I think that’s another thing as copywriters, once you’re in the groove and you know how to get clients and you gain some solid skills, there’s almost always too much work and too many people who are like, “I want that. I want that.” And so yeah, learning to say no and say yes to experimenting with doing these things for myself and my own business, I think that happened probably like 2017, 2018, I started really shifting my mindset to that direction, but that was really hard.

And at first, I created the course and I didn’t have a team and I was still doing one-on-one client projects, figuring out how to launch my own course, support my own students, and it was just way overwhelming. Every big change that I made in my business, even adding the course, building the agency, building a team was brought forth because of my children. Well, my husband and I decided we were going to have another baby when my son was four. And that was a wake-up call because I didn’t know what it was going to be. With my first, I didn’t sleep for two years and it was so intense. So I’m like, “Okay, preparing for that, what can I do to set myself up for this to not lead to massive burnout and overwhelm?” And so, the course was the solution in that instance.

And then fast forward, when my daughter was seven months old, I found out I was pregnant and I’m like, “Okay, having another baby.” And that was when I really looked at bringing in support and building that agency. So those were the key moments where I realized, “Okay, big change needs to happen.” And both of them changed everything.

Rob Marsh:  So, Chanti, listening to you talk about that, you went from being on your own to growing to 10 people, that’s a pretty big jump. Will you step us through each decision like what was the first position you added, what was the second, and why did you need that person in your business? Obviously you need to be generating the revenue to support a team like that, none of us have gold mines in our backyards. You might actually have one in your backyard just undiscovered, but my backyard is not quite that big. But yeah, talk us through building that team step by step.

Chanti Zak:  Yeah. Well, and I’ll just preface that with that’s been a real challenge and struggle is the revenue to support the team. There have been many months where on the surface I’m making a ton of money, but behind the scenes, I’m spending all of it on a mostly team. So that’s been a huge challenge that I’m honestly still trying to navigate and figure out. But the first team member that I brought on was a VA, and that was pretty early on. And I would highly, highly recommend anyone listening who’s still doing their own invoicing and putting their own proposals together, and if you can afford even just a few hours a week, that was a game changer, that was the first step.

And I think I started with 10 hours a month of support from my VA. So that was the first step was getting a VA who helped me with all the administrative stuff. And then from there, I started bringing on contractors to help with client projects. And that was a huge learning curve too, honestly, because I am a bit of a control freak and I would really not set my contractors up for success every time.

Rob Marsh:  This is sounding a little familiar to me.

Chanti Zak:  There’s been so much learning in that realm of what information and training and support and resources do we need to give a contractor or an employee so that they can succeed at the task. And I just had no clue. I was like, “Here’s this project, here’s some info on the client, go forth and crush it.” And so often, it would come back to me and I would read what was created, and my mind went straight to, “Oh God, I need to rewrite this whole thing.” And that was a really hard pattern to break. We just had Joel Klettke on our podcast and he was talking about the same thing. And he shared this great example of like even McDonald’s, we have this culture like, “Oh, you just work at McDonald’s? Come on.” And there’s like this degradation around it. But actually McDonald’s spends months training their employees on their systems and processes. And we as writers and agency owners and as business owners in general, hire contractors and we’re like, “Here, you know what to do, go figure it out,” or team members.

Rob Marsh:  Good luck. Have fun.

Kira Hug:  Well, it’s even worse than that. Sometimes we expect them to read our minds. It’s like, “Oh, you can’t read my mind and know exactly what to do?”

Chanti Zak:  Yeah. And, “Oh, you don’t understand my process? You can’t hang out in my brain. What do you mean?” So yeah, that was my first experience and that was really hard. So over probably the course of a year working with lots of different contractors, I started getting better at that. And I found a few really solid people that I loved working with that started to learn what I was looking for and that were really amazing. And one of them was my now best friend, Dawn. So we met through The Copywriter Underground and I had posted a job and she reached out. And so we started working together. I hired her as a contractor and she was almost working for me full-time just as a contractor. And so at that point, it was like, “Okay, do you just want to work for me full-time?”

And she was on board. So she was my first full-time hire. And she’s so good at communicating, she’s so patient, she’s so good at receiving a deliverable that maybe needs some TLC and some love. And instead of just taking it upon herself to do all of that, she would get on a call with the freighter and talk to them and really go back and forth and help them grow. And so, she served this role as an in between sort of a copy chief really for the contractors that I was still working with and myself. And by the time I would get the quiz or the email or the sales page to review it, she’d already gone over it multiple times. And it was in a place where my nervous system when I read it was not freaking out and thinking, “I need to stay up till midnight to redo this whole thing.”

So she was my first full-time hire. And then from there, again, we were working with contractors so regularly that it was like, “Well, do you just want to come on full-time?” Instead of having seven different contractors that are helping, we could have two full-time employees and this real team feeling like we’re all on the same page, we’re all connecting, at some points, it was daily just quick meetings. So that became three full-time writers and eventually a full-time assistant too and project manager, and then still a few contractors. And Dawn was really helping manage all of that. And so she was with me full-time for, I think, two years, and then just recently went off on her own to start her own copywriting business, and she’s doing amazing and crushing it. And so yeah, now we’re at one full-time writer and then there are still lots of different contractors that, by this point, most of them I’ve been working with for a few years.

Kira Hug:  Okay. So I love how you’ve figured it out over time and you’re admitting that it wasn’t easy. And there’s so many copywriters that listen to the show and we talked to who are really ready to hire or just to bring on contractors, but they’re struggling with similar struggles. So what advice would you give them so they don’t have to spend a year or two figuring it out? What could they do to move that forward faster?

Chanti Zak:  So what we built internally that really helped was basically a breakdown of every single asset that I would be bringing on a contractor to create, and we created internal templates for each of those things. And this is maybe easier for me than for someone who’s doing all the things, and it’s going to take a lot longer to create templates for every single copy asset you could imagine. But for me, it’s mostly quizzes, the emails that come after launch, sequences, sales pages, but mostly quizzes. So we created the templates for those, and then we created some videos that go into why are we structuring things this way, what’s the thought process behind it. Any contractor or team member that we bring on goes through my program and has access to support and mentorship either from me or from another team member that’s been doing this for a while and that knows the ropes.

And even my assistant/project manager, Dustin, he’s getting on calls with writers all the time to help them navigate all the things that are happening within the project and just really creating a supportive environment. And I never had that when I was a contractor for other agencies, which I did for a while. It was always just, “Here’s the project, here’s the scope, go figure it out.” And I just thought, “Okay, that’s how it is. Cool.” But yeah, it certainly would’ve been nice to have a feeling that I could reach out to someone, get on a call, ask questions, get an extra set of eyeballs on my work. And the final thing is instead of me jumping to like, “I just need to fix this, I don’t have time,” and getting into that panic mode and control mindset, we bake in a lot of time for review.

And for me to be able to go through the copy and make a video and say, “Okay, this section, I love what you did here, but here’s how we could change this,” and really just offer more guidance and then give it back to them and say like, “Okay, now go make those changes and come back to me.” And that I think creates a culture of growth and that’s who I would want to work for if I was still contracting. So those are the biggest changes that are just setting them up for success. We also added in a pretty thorough research process that’s standardized, whereas when I would take clients on my own, I didn’t have that, I would just stalk them, dive into their universe, make a Google Doc with a whole bunch of messy notes and go from there. And that’s not a process where I can hire someone and say, “Just do that.” I mean, maybe some people, but for the most part, having a bit more structure around the research process has also been really helpful.

Rob Marsh:  So while we’re talking about processes, you’ve obviously gotten pretty good at finding processes for getting good people on your team for doing the work, but it’s not just you have good people and good projects, you have really good clients. How do you make sure that you only end up with great clients that you want to work with?

Chanti Zak:  Yeah. Well, this is another thing that I would say has been a team effort. And you guys, it’s almost embarrassing to say like all these really wonderful positive changes that have happened in my business are because of other people or my babies coming into the world. And so, the changes around what clients we say yes to, the impetus for that was seeing if I’m just accepting clients who are not respecting our timelines, who expect the moon and the stars, who aren’t really aligned with what we’re creating, which like full disclosure I’ve totally done many times. And when it’s just me suffering the consequences, I would just suck it up and tell myself, “Ah, never again,” but still continue to make the same mistakes and too often let clients walk all over me because I’m a yes girl, I’m a total natural people pleaser. And breaking that pattern is because I saw the suffering it caused my team and that they weren’t feeling successful on a project, not because their work wasn’t good, but because the client was off the rails and swapping the word strong for the word mighty.

So that was the reason why we really looked at, “Okay, who do we want to work with? What are the parameters here? What are the red flags? How can we communicate that we are not just going to serve you at your leisure?” It’s so common if a client just doesn’t respond to a request for feedback, and I get it, they’re busy, but they drop off the face of the earth and they pop back up into your inbox two months later and are like, “Hey, I’m ready. Can you make all these changes and have it done by Friday?” Those things were happening. So what we did to try and stop that essentially was, okay, so having a project manager and Dustin is not a people pleaser, he is a very logical, straightforward person who has no problem following up after a deadline and saying, “Hey, we would love to get this done for you. If you don’t get back to us within two days with your feedback, we’re going to have to activate our pause clause”, which we added a pause clause, I never had that, and that’s end of story.

And having that sort of boundaries being actually implemented sets a different tone and I think communicates a level of professionalism that most clients respect and align with and are like, “Yeah, cool. Right. Thank you for putting me in my place. I’m on it,” and we can keep things rolling. Whereas before that, I would get so busy and overwhelmed that if a client just didn’t respond, I was happy. I was like, “Okay, great, cool. I got more time to work on this new client’s stuff.” But then of course at some point, they come back and they’re like, “Okay, let’s pick back up,” and then everything is topsy-turvy. So having support in that department, not being the bad guy and having to email a client and be like, “Hey, no seriously, we need your feedback.” Or, “Hey, you actually need to pay your invoice if you want us to continue working.” Things like that, I was never good with. So having help has changed the game.

Kira Hug:  Yeah, I can relate to that as a fellow people pleaser, that is not my strong suit, but I think it helps for people like us to have other people who are protectors, bouncers can keep the boundaries for us. So thank you, Dustin. I am interested in how you’re spending your time now that you have this team and you’re splitting your offers 50/50 with courses and then services. Where are you focusing most of your time day-to-day at this point in your business?

Chanti Zak:  Not a lot of it is spent on actually copywriting for clients anymore, which is a strange thing. I’m definitely in this sort of strategy seat where I’m helping to really set the project up and then handing it off and being in a position of oversight as it’s worked on, but that doesn’t actually take that much time, which is wonderful. So a lot of time goes toward my own program, launching that, supporting students in there, getting on podcasts and creating content and writing emails for my own business. That’s where my copywriting energy is still going. I’m still writing pretty much all my own emails and social content, but also a lot of time goes into just management and meetings and supporting everyone and keeping all the balls in the air and doing sales calls and still working to bring in the right clients. Yeah, that’s really where my time is going these days.

Rob Marsh:  Can we talk a little bit more about that? Because I think there are a lot of copywriters who would see that kind of a shift in their business as not feeling okay, because we identify as writers, like the people who are doing the work, and you’ve basically created a different kind of a role for yourself within this copywriting agency that you have. So what kind of mindset kinds of things did you go through or maybe it was easy for you, Chanti? Maybe you’re like, “No, I’m the boss, I’m in charge and I’m okay with this.” But for me, that feels like a pretty significant shift.

Chanti Zak:  Yeah. No, it wasn’t easy. Like I said, I just have that inclination to jump in, fix things, do the work, and not necessarily communicate what I’m doing or what I’m changing. So that was my pattern for a long time and I still sometimes get sucked back into that, but at the same time, I have a lot more fun and I feel challenged by growing my own. I don’t even know how to create the distinction because my business is like it’s the agency and it’s clients, but it’s also courses, and I’m starting to get into coaching a little bit and writing emails to my list and building my list. And I have a lot more fun on that side these days. So in that sense, it’s easy because, I mean, if I get to write for myself, I am maybe my own worst critic, but I’m also my own easiest client, like I can say whatever and do things my way and not have to worry about the brand voice guidelines for client A and client B, and client C.

And so, there’s a lot of freedom in that and that’s been really fun. And that comes with its own challenges because I think it’s a lot easier to write for other people in some ways because you get to hide behind their message and their voice and their framework and their philosophy and their social proof. And doing that for yourself, you have to build all that up and you have to get to know things like, “Well, what do I stand for? What do I want to be known for? What is my IP?” And that’s a huge process. So that’s really the fun part I would say at this point, but also it’s really challenging at times.

Rob Marsh:  Okay, Kira, before we hear the second part of this interview, let’s just jump in and talk about a couple of points, a few things that maybe stood out to you, to me. What do you want to touch on, and maybe just add some thoughts too?

Kira Hug:  So many things. When listening to Chanti talk, I just hear the word that comes to mind is empowerment and the way she talked about using her own skills to build her own business and basically taking the skills and everything she did for her clients and putting them into practice to build her own business. And she started doing that really around 2017, ’18, and empowered herself to do that. And that excites me, I think that’s a lot of what we talk about on The Copywriter Club Podcast and in our community and our programs. It’s like, yes, we have these skills and these superpowers and we help our clients accomplish these amazing things in their businesses, which is great, that is wonderful. But we can also do that and use those skills to build our own businesses. And sometimes that becomes a copywriting agency or sometimes it becomes something entirely different, but we have those skills and so let’s use them. So I love that we kicked off the conversation with that empowerment piece.

Rob Marsh:  Listening to Chanti talk, it strikes me, this is one possible career track. Of course there are some copywriters who only want to write copy, they’ll be happy forever writing work for clients, individual clients that just come, and you can build a great career out of that, but sometimes it develops into something else. And it’s almost like Chanti’s had three different phases in her business and where she first started out as a solopreneur or individual copywriter doing the work, then she started to shift into her niche and she built some courses around it, started building this business teaching other people how to do it. And now this third phase where she’s basically got this agency, she’s the owner, CEO, doing less of the actual work in her business, but still making good money, the business is serving her in a different way, and it’s just been really fun to hear her talk.

Kira Hug:  Yeah. Not everyone wants to be the CEO of their business. Not every writer pursues that same dream, which is why it’s so fun to talk with so many different writers because we all are moving towards different goals. But for Chanti, that’s the direction she’s moved. And I like that she commented on the fact that her business has evolved due to her children. And when they came into this world, every time she brought a child, she had three kids into this world, she made significant changes in her business, and I could relate to that. I also have three kids. And so, when I think of it like when I brought each of them into the world, I made significant jumps and changes too. And so, throughout the conversation, I definitely could relate to a lot of what she’s saying just because our kids are about the same age and we’re both dealing with toddlers right now.

Rob Marsh: Yeah. My kids are obviously not the same age, but it still resonates because it doesn’t matter if you’ve got young kids or you’re at a different phase in life, that you want your business to support you where you are. And as I’ve been listening to Chanti talk, a question kind of occurs to me. She’s been super successful in creating courses, creating this business, and there are a lot of copywriters who’ve tried to do something similar and haven’t been as successful. And I was thinking, why has Chanti been so much more successful than so many others? And I think the answer is because rather than just saying, “Okay, I’ve been a copywriter and I’m going to teach copywriting,” obviously she had her niche, but she taught a tactic. She started talking about quizzes and teaching specifically how to do this one thing in the business.

And because of that, she became known for that thing very early on, people started coming to her for that thing as opposed to, “Well, I’ve successfully built a copywriting business. I’m going to teach other people how to do copywriting. I’ll teach people all of the things.” And because of that, she’s been super, super successful.

Kira Hug:  Yeah. I mean, she’s a great example of what a niche can do for your business. I mean, she is a great example of that. I also appreciated that we talked about the ups and downs of training copywriters to join your team. And Chanti was very transparent about how it has worked for her and that it’s definitely not easy, and some of the mistakes she made along the way. And some of the mistakes she shared are really, they feel quite universal because so many of us make the same mistakes over and over again. And so, some of the takeaways that someone could jump in and start working and hiring writers to join their team and hopefully avoid some of these mistakes that I made and Chanti made by just creating a supportive environment for their team from day one, and really building a training program for their writers as they bring them on in the same way that McDonald’s makes their training program for their team members.

And that’s not easy to accomplish, and most of us don’t do it. I didn’t do it when I brought on writers, but it can go a really long way and you’ll probably create that training program at some point when things continue to go wrong repeatedly and if you want to build a team and build an agency. And so, I really like the way she thought about just creating a supportive environment for her team members and her writers based off her experience and what she did not receive in some of her previous jobs. And I think we can all think about our previous jobs and our previous career, and we probably all have at least one job that was not a positive environment and how we could actually avoid that and create the opposite for our team. Even if our team means one person and it’s a contractor and it’s not a full-time employee, you can still set the stage as you build and change the workplace environment for just one person, which can make a huge difference.

Rob Marsh:  Yeah. As we were hearing Chanti talk about this stuff in her business, building the training process, building the systems, building relationships with her team members, it reminded me of our conversation with Brittany McBean, who was another Copywriter Accelerator and Copywriter Think Tank graduate, and the similar changes that she made in her business, and being really conscious about making sure that every single person who comes in knows the process, knows how they reach out to clients, the kinds of things that we write and go through all of that. And then when the team produces the work, it makes it so much easier because the expectations are set up front, we know exactly what the outputs are supposed to be, makes us so much easier to review and present to the client and basically takes us from this thing we do to a business that does the thing that we do.

Kira Hug:  Yeah, I was thinking of Brittany McBean too. I was going to mention that very similar agency model, similar hires, similar team model, at least as of the last time we talked to Brittany. And I think it’s a really smart model and even just choosing people to join your team based on personality and their style. Similar to me, Chanti is also a people pleaser, which she admitted too in our conversation. And so, she brought on Dustin, who sounds like might be a little bit more direct. And so I think for anyone who is a people pleaser, finding those people who compliment us, Rob, maybe you are that to me, since I’m more of a people pleaser, you can be more of the direct person on the team, maybe I’m good cop and you’re bad cop. But it’s really important to find those people to avoid caving in every time and not setting those boundaries.

Rob Marsh:  Yeah. When you’re building a team, you’ve got to find people who will do the stuff that you don’t like to do. Having other people who want to do the same stuff that you love to do, that’s just duplicating you. And obviously the reason to have a team is to get all of the pieces in place. And so, as you think about who to add on the team, I think Chanti was very conscious and really good as she built her team to cover all of those bases, and she’s done exceptionally well. And I think the same thing applies to clients. When we talk about getting great clients and working with those, you want to make sure that you’re working with clients who are doing the things that you like and you’re helping them solve those problems, and being aware of the red flags, the yellow flags, the stuff that bugs you and saying things upfront in your marketing on your website, whatever the pushes those clients away.

Creating the boundaries that Chanti talked about and making sure that you’ve got somebody on your team to help you implement them so that things will go as intended, as opposed to how the clients and maybe feel like something needs to happen in an emergency or if something becomes urgent, having all of that in place helps you have an effective business.

Kira Hug:  And we wrapped up this part of the conversation talking about why writing for yourself and writing for your own business can be quite amazing and quite positive and something that many of us want to do. But it’s also the downside of it too, like Chanti said, “It’s great because you could be your own easiest client, but you can also be your own worst critic.” And so, it just changes the game when you start to focus your time and you’re building out products and programs and now you are maybe the lead copy chief for your own brand and writing your own copy. And it’s rewarding, but it also can be very tricky because you can get in your way. And so, I’m glad that she touched on that because I know a lot of copywriters we talk to aspire to maybe not drop clients completely, but focus more time writing copy for their own products and creating new revenue streams and creating copy for that.

Rob Marsh:  Yeah. I think it’s critical to have that in your business where you can write for yourself, for your business, be focused on that in addition to being able to serve your clients. I thought what she shared there was amazing.

Kira Hug:  All right, let’s jump back into the interview with Chanti and listen to how she’s navigated her identity shifts over the years. How do you manage your identity as your identity shifts? Because, I mean, we’ve joked around about you’re the quiz queen and that has really served you well and helped you build this amazing business, but you continue to evolve as we do. And so, does that still feel like it’s the right fit or have you found that other titles and identities are a better fit? And then how do you kind of shift back and forth so it serves the business but also serves you?

Chanti Zak:  Yeah. That is a huge thing that I’m grappling with right now because I love quizzes and they’re super fun and that is sort of the backbone of what’s made my business work over the last years, but at the same time, there’s so much more. And working with clients and students, I see that the quiz isn’t everything, there’s a lot more going on that leads to holistic success. And I would feel remiss to not address those things and talk about all the other aspects of what can make your online business successful. So those are the areas where I’ve started in my email content and mostly email. Just talking about other stuff like mindset and lifestyle stuff and having support and building a team and all these other things, having really solid offers. I put out just a little workshop on offer development recently and people reply and they’re like, “How dare you talk about offers? You are supposed to only be talking about quizzes.”

Kira Hug:  Wait, what? Did someone really reply and say that?

Rob Marsh:  That might’ve been me. No, I’m kidding.

Kira Hug:  I hope people did not do that and did not send that response to you.

Chanti Zak:  Yes, totally. I’ve had multiple replies, and this is negativity bias in full force. I get way more positive than negative, but our brains gravitate toward the negative. So the negative commentary is like, “Why are you talking about this? I signed up for your emails to learn about quizzes. I don’t want to hear about anything else.” And bridging that gap has been interesting because I’m like, “Well, I don’t want to sit down every week and write three emails only about quizzes. There’s other things to talk about. I have other skills that I would like to share with you.” And some people are game and they love it, and some people are like, “No, stay in your lane.” So yeah, navigating that has been really interesting. And how am I doing it? I don’t know. I’ve created a segment of my list where once in a while I’m like, “Hey, if you are here and the only thing you want to hear about is quizzes and quiz funnels and email marketing, click this link, I won’t email you about anything else.” And hundreds of people have clicked that link and are in that segment.

Kira Hug:  That is so-

Rob Marsh:  I’m starting to wonder what I’m allowed to talk about now in our email.

Kira Hug:  I know. Rob just talked about copywriting tips.

Rob Marsh:  My email that I’ll send out tomorrow, it’s going to be about driving across the country or whatever.

Kira Hug:  Don’t send it, just don’t do it now.

Chanti Zak:  Not allowed. You’re only allowed to talk about PAS or something.

Rob Marsh:  Wow. I mean, let’s talk a little bit more about that because niching has obviously helped you in a really big way. I mean, when people think about quizzes, your name is literally the first one that comes up. And I’m not just talking about people in our group, there are a-list copywriters who talk about Chanti as the quiz person. So there’s obviously a very positive side to that, but then yeah, there’s that, like how do you focus on one thing exclusively for so long and not have it drive you crazy?

Chanti Zak:  Yeah, exactly. Exactly. If you just get bored and sure there’s like, there’s new layers and I’m creating a quiz right now, a new quiz for my own business that’s like, it’s crazy. There’s like all this segmentation and 16 different results and I’m excited to talk about that and test it out and see how it goes and share that with my audience. But it does get old sharing the same tips and strategies over and over again. And that’s where it’s like, “Okay. Yes, this has served me so well. I’m certainly not going to throw the baby out with the bathwater and not focus on this anymore.” But at the same time, there’s other things I would love to explore and play around with. So I don’t know, I don’t have any answers yet. I’m really in this place of figuring out what that looks like.

Some ideas I have are, I’ve got the courses and the content and the emails to support a lot of automation on that side of things where if someone opts into my super meta quiz on what type of quiz to create or my free course on how to create a quiz or any other lead magnet that I have that’s quiz-centric, that could lead them to an automated sequence, an evergreen funnel, specific to quizzes, I can then ask them in that sequence, “Is this all you’re interested in, or do you want to hear about the empathy marketing ecosystem and everything that goes into that, and growth mindset strategies for entrepreneurs, and the daily life of trying to grow all my own food, and be a mom,” and all that stuff. “If you do, cool. Then that’s just going to naturally happen. If you don’t, you can click here and I won’t talk to you about that stuff.”

Rob Marsh:  Interesting hearing you talk about that too, Chanti, because even in my agency days, I remember companies, they get tired of their brand long before our customers do, and we do this as copywriters after two or three years like, “Well, I need to change up my website because it’s boring.” But it’s really only boring to me because I’ve seen it every day for three years, maybe multiple times a day, and I’ve rewritten it sometimes multiple times a day. But the customer coming or the client coming to my website today or tomorrow has never seen it before and it’s totally new and it’s still fresh for them. And so, there’s this balance obviously like it would be a massive mistake for you to throw away quizzes. I mean, you’ve earned $1 million selling quizzes and supporting people with quizzes, but at the same time, being trapped in something that fills that confining would be tough.

Kira Hug: