David speaks with Neville Medhora, an expert copywriter, best-selling author of "This book will teach you how to write better", and founder of Copywriting Course and SwipeFile.com.
Copywriting has evolved dramatically since its beginnings, and in this episode, Neville and David explore this transformation. Neville breaks down the AIDA formula - a 4-step approach that can instantly improve your writing. We discuss how to set meaningful goals and where to focus your time and energy. With AI rapidly changing the landscape, we examine its impact on copywriting careers. Finally, we debate whether David Ogilvy's classic advice still applies in 2025 or if it's time for new thinking. This conversation offers practical insights for anyone looking to sharpen their copywriting skills in today's changing environment.
They talked about:
📝 How copywriting has changed over time
🎯 How to set goals and decide what to focus on
👀 Whether David Ogilvy's copywriting lessons are still useful in 2025 (spoiler: they are!)
🧠 The AIDA formula: a 4-step approach to better your copywriting right away
🤖 The impact of AI on copywriting jobs
This is just one part of a longer conversation, and it's the second part. You can listen to the earlier episode here:
Part 1: https://theknowledge.io/nevillemedhora-1/
Listen to your favourite podcast player:
🎧 Listen on Spotify:
📹 Watch on Youtube:
📄 Show notes:
[00:00] Introduction
[02:04] How copywriting has changed over time
[07:46] The AIDA formula: a 4-step approach for better copywriting right away
[16:37] How to set goals and decide what to focus on
[19:17] Choosing where to focus your time and attention
[22:33] AI's influence on the copywriting industry
[31:06] Are David Ogilvy's copywriting lessons still relevant in 2025?
🗣 Mentioned in the show:
Nathan Barry https://nathanbarry.com/
Sam Parr https://x.com/thesamparr
Noah Kagan https://noahkagan.com/
Casey Neistat https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casey_Neistat
Mark Andreessen https://theknowledge.io/issue64/
Elon Musk https://theknowledge.io/elons-law-beating-hofstadters-law-with-ridiculous-deadlines/
David Ogilvy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Ogilvy_(businessman)
Shaquille O'Neal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shaquille_O'Neal
AppSumo https://appsumo.com/
The Hustle https://thehustle.co/
WeWork https://www.wework.com/
Google https://google.com/
Yahoo https://yahoo.com/
ChatGPT chat.com
Facebook facebook.com
Amazon AWS https://aws.amazon.com/
Apple https://www.apple.com/
Tesla https://www.tesla.com/
Bitcoin https://theknowledge.io/what-is-cryptocurrency/
Reddit https://www.reddit.com/
WordPress https://wordpress.com/
CopywritingCourse.com
SwipeFile.com
Nevblog.com
Twitter https://x.com/
Spotify https://ads.spotify.com/
Zoom https://www.zoom.com/
Pinterest https://au.pinterest.com/
AIDA Formula https://copywritingcourse.com/blogs/42-aida-formula/
Boron Letters https://www.thegaryhalbertletter.com/Boron/BoronLetterCh1.htm
👤 Connect with Neville:
Twitter / X: https://x.com/nevmed
Marketing SwipeFile: SwipeFile.com
Course: CopywritingCourse.com
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/neville_medhora
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/kopywriting
👨🏾💻 About David Elikwu:
David Elikwu FRSA is a serial entrepreneur, strategist, and writer. David is the founder of The Knowledge, a platform helping people think deeper and work smarter.
🐣 Twitter: @Delikwu / @itstheknowledge
🌐 Website: https://www.davidelikwu.com
📽️ Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/davidelikwu
📸 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/delikwu/
🕺 TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@delikwu
🎙️ Podcast: http://plnk.to/theknowledge
📖 Free Book: https://pro.theknowledge.io/frames
My Online Course
🖥️ Decision Hacker: http://www.decisionhacker.io/
Decision Hacker will help you hack your default patterns and become an intentional architect of your life. You’ll learn everything you need to transform your decisions, your habits, and your outcomes.
The Knowledge
📩 Newsletter: https://theknowledge.io
The Knowledge is a weekly newsletter for people who want to get more out of life. It's full of insights from psychology, philosophy, productivity, and business, all designed to make you more productive, creative, and decisive.
My Favourite Tools
🎞️ Descript: https://bit.ly/descript-de
📨 Convertkit: https://bit.ly/convertkit-de
🔰 NordVPN: https://bit.ly/nordvpn-de
💹 Nutmeg: http://bit.ly/nutmegde
🎧 Audible: https://bit.ly/audiblede
📜 Full transcript:
How copywriting has changed over time
David Elikwu: I want to ask you a bit about how copywriting has evolved or like the evolution of the space in general, but just going back, it's funny how, like you say, back then, there was so much you had to learn from scratch. And even for me, surprised that, I mean, I guess it makes sense because I was young. So I was trying to figure out why I didn't learn any of this stuff back in those, in those days. But I think, yeah, I was quite young in the sense that I didn't have a lot of computer time. So even that first site that I have, it was kind of like half online, half offline, because offline, I would just sell, like, whiteboard clickers to, we sold to teachers at my school, and my mum was a teacher, to teachers at her school, and then we used that to then buy phones, so this is around when the first iPhone was coming out, so there was also then like, Chinese capacitive phones, but they weren't even trying to make iPhone clones, they were just making completely different stuff, but also with touchscreens, so we would sell some of those.
And so that was then what I started selling online as well. But it was a really strange space that yeah, I don't think I ever figured out the online part of it. Cause like you [00:03:00] say, I think it was still early enough that people could just find it online. If you just have decent enough descriptions and you do decent enough SEO, I didn't have to figure out the copywriting part too much, but then I did a lot of the marketing offline. I was just trying to think I was remembering.
So first of all, I don't know why my mom let me, but I put this big sticker on her car. So she would be driving around, like, you know, doing errands,
Neville Medhora: It's like cell phones and then your phone number?
David Elikwu: Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Literally like a massive cell phone, my phone number, all this stuff. And I was in the Yellow Pages. I think you guys had Yellow Pages as well, right? Or if it's called something different. Yeah. So I was in the Yellow Pages. So people would call me, well, people would call the house. Actually, I didn't have a phone.
Neville Medhora: It worked. The, the car thing worked?
David Elikwu: A little bit at least locally it worked. And then also okay, I'll tell you what did work. So I used to and it sounds stupid, actually, I don't know why it worked. I think they still have it now, but back in the day if you go to like video game stores they didn't have the discs in the video game. So they would just put the case of the game [00:04:00] on the shelf. So I had a ton of business cards. I would go into these video game stores and I would put my business cards inside the game box. So I would either put it inside, but then people would start seeing it like when they took it to the till, and so I would get in trouble. So then what I started doing is if you open it, you can put it underneath the paper so that it's actually not visible when it's closed. So what would happen is someone would buy the game. Obviously they'll open it at the counter, put the CD in, they'll take it home. And when they're at home, they'll open it up and my business card will fall out. So now it's in their house. And then they're seeing my business card and then they're looking at it. And obviously it's a bit of a magic trick. Cause now you're like, what is this thing? And then maybe you go on my website and you say, hell, you know, some interesting phones, it's whatever, but some offline marketing stuff.
Neville Medhora: The new version of what you're talking about is like posting short videos and podcasts and stuff, like hoping people see it and then follow along.
David Elikwu: Yes. Yeah. Yeah, exactly.
Neville Medhora: It's the evolution of it. It used to be posting a page on Yahoo or Google, and then just like stuffing it with [00:05:00] keywords saying like rave lights, rave lights, rave lights, that was the first evolution. Then search engines get smarter and smarter and smarter. And now like less and less people are using search engines to necessarily find something rather than browsing their social media feeds. So you have to be there.
So it's kind of like, how do you get organic traffic based on the time of the technology, right? So back in the day, it might've been radio or TV appearances or something like that, and now it's, it's podcast, social media. I mean, just, it just keeps changing. It'll probably evolve even more. And then I'm sure when like VR happens, it'll be like a whole different game, like that's going to be a whole different world.
David Elikwu: Yeah, that would be scary. Especially when you're wearing your airpods pro you can't even take it off and ads are just flying into your face from from somewhere. But I'm interested to know like how you found this part because also when even with copywriting I do remember a particular point in time on the internet where people figured out sales pages. And it became like a standard template. You could go to buy anything and you don't want this, I can see it in my mind. I know what the buttons look like is these gold buttons. And then the sales page is really long. And then they've got this [00:06:00] picture and then, or there's a video and there's a link to some webinar or there's something, and this could be for any product. It could be for protein shakes. It could be for anything.
So how do you find that, I guess it's a recurring thing, but there's a sense in which at various points, people then figure out, Oh, this works. And then everyone's trying to optimize for the same thing, and then it starts to work maybe a bit less. Or do you find that the principles that you have figured out have consistently worked. And actually, it doesn't matter what everyone else is doing, it will just work or do you have to adapt in someway.
Neville Medhora: Well, the psychological principles are the same. Human brain hasn't changed in 10, 000 years, right? We all have the same brain is people did a hundred years ago. There's no difference. However, like little tactics have changed, right?
So, if you're talking about like a VSL, like video that didn't have a play. It just started playing. It wouldn't stop and you couldn't pause it. That used to work really well for a while, especially with like these aggressive marketers. And then like google was just like, hey, you can't do that. Like it's just, it's annoying. Like you can't have it just play as soon as someone goes to the page, they have to be able to pause it, right. And so then if you had that, they just didn't [00:07:00] index you. So then no one had it, right. Now you just don't see that anymore. It's not a thing.
Tactics change, however, the psychological stuff does not change, right? Making someone internally want to buy something is still very powerful. So if someone says like, oh, my, my stuff is a hundred dollars a month, and people are like, oh, I can't afford that. But then they go and buy a $1,200 iPhone, and you're like, well, they, they can afford it. They just didn't think it was valuable enough for $1,200, right? So it just depends what it is. So you have to demonstrate why your product is valuable. And a lot of people don't, they'll just like, here's what it does, but it's like, okay, that's cool. It's very technical, but like, what can you get out of that? right? How is this product going to make you money, save you time, make your business better, that type of thing. And that's where copywriting comes in. Just like convincing people why this is a good idea and displaying all the benefits and features and why it's actually going to help them.
The AIDA formula: a 4-step approach to better your copywriting right away
David Elikwu: Can you tell me a bit more about the basics of copywriting, some of the, you mentioned the, like, the underlying principles of how the human brain works and why you're able to tap into that through the way in which you sell [00:08:00] something. I'd be interested to hear more about that.
Neville Medhora: Yeah. I think, I think if you just say like buy this, right? It's a weird example, but yeah, my coffee mug, if you just say buy this, that's a okay, right? But if you use something like the AIDA formula, it's like attention, interest, desire, action. So it's just like, hey, do you want to get more attention on your, on your webinars? I found whenever I use this coffee mug, I get a 17 percent more clicks. I don't know. I'm just making stuff up at this point.
So then you interest them with interesting facts about the coffee mug, say that it's made of shatter resistant stuff. So it won't break. It's actually really cheap. It gets more engagement. And you say, if you use this, if you keep this coffee mug by your desk, it'll get people to ask about it. It'll create more engagement and potentially more clicks and more sales. And then you get them to take action on where they can buy it.
So the way that you approach something is like informing and educating people first, and then getting them to buy it. Whereas I think a lot of people go into like, you need to buy this. This is a great opportunity.
The other way you can approach copywriting is from the, in a new technology era, we have [00:09:00] so many different touch points with people, social media, email and stuff. And so people are like, how do I make this email really good? I'm just like, how do you make your entire email sequence good, right? So instead of trying to sell people really hard on the first one, you actually have many, many different points of time where you can hit people up over email unlimited, essentially. But people do unsubscribe or people don't look forward to your email. It goes into the promotions box and they get lost forever, right? And so how do we get people to open your emails? And so a lot of copywriting is about how do we just like, provide a lot of value to people?
So, for copywriting course, if someone signs up, they get like, six months of great content for free. And then occasionally we mentioned the copywriting course or every friday we send out an email newsletter. That's just like all just like good stuff. And at the bottom, maybe it mentions copywriting course. So copyright is approaching it like that. What's the order, what's the sequence of events we can tell people about our product that'll make them want to stay around and that helps them. So they want to stay around for a long time.
I think that was the thing with AppSumo that if you're going to try to sell someone every day, why would they stay on? [00:10:00] Like, why would they want to be pitched, right? So part of it was discoverability, right? So there's to discover new tools, but then also for us, what we had to do was, which made our job a lot harder than just being like, Hey, promotion on the software, it's like, we have to learn the software ourselves, use it, showcase how we're using it, showcase how other people are using it to make money, save time, et cetera, and then sell it.
So it is a little bit of extra work to do that, but it is worth it in the long run. [00:11:00]
David Elikwu: And you get a lot of companies that come to you now to help them in some way, shape or form to do this. What is the part where you usually see them fall down? Like what's the thing that, cause there's a sense in which some of this can seem like common sense. Oh, I'm trying to sell you this thing. I should just tell you why it's valuable and why you should care and make you care about it and blah, blah, blah. But it's something that people struggle with. So like, what is it that usually you find like, blocks people?
Neville Medhora: It's generally pretty simple. It's not like the design of their website or anything. A lot of times you come to their website and these are like B2B companies where the average customer value is a hundred thousand plus, right? And you read their stuff and they generally designed it by committee.
There's a couple of people on a zoom call and they say, Hey, what should we put on here? And then you read it and you're like, what are you, what are you selling? Like, I don't get it. Like from the outside point perspective, it's just like, encourage your dreams to grow big. They'll say these [00:12:00] weird, like aspirational headlines. You're like, what does that mean? Like, I don't, I don't get it. And so that is the biggest problem. So I go in there and I'm just like, hey, we sell services where we chop up your designs and make them into real web apps. Just like a plain English version of it. So actually a lot of the consulting I do, if you were to watch some of the calls, you'd just be like, that's very like obvious stuff almost.
But the problem is, and this happens all the times you get familiarity blinders. So whenever you look at your own sales page or your own emails, you're just like, I've seen them so many times that it's like, it's hard to like suggest new stuff for it. It's, it's hard to see what people don't see, but then you show it to someone else. And they're like, I don't get that part. What does that mean? And you're like, Oh, that's confusing image. They don't know what that means. So you go, let's change that. So I basically go in there and kind of solve the, the stuff that like, they don't, that they just get familiarity blindness on. I don't usually disclose any like specific details of like private consulting.
I actually like just came off a consulting call and I was like, that's be a good example, but I can't say the company. So.
David Elikwu: You can give like vague [00:13:00] generalities maybe.
Neville Medhora: Yeah. I mean, one of the things is like, some of the, especially like larger companies. They won't give specifics. So they're like, we can do this for you, this for you, this for you. And you're just like, what is the main, the main differentiator that you can do over other companies? And let's say, they're just like, we could do everything just faster, right? Some companies take a year to do these projects. We can do it in two to four weeks. And I'm like, where does it say that on their website?
And when you just say like, we could do it in two to four weeks, I think people don't believe you. Can you show them how you do that? And they're just like, well, actually we have like our own processes and templates and people that have been in the industry for a long time. So like we don't have to train them and like our, we have a high retention rate. So therefore when people come in, like they know what to do already, these aren't like brand new interns that are taking forever and like, yeah, yeah. Let's tell people that, right? So a lot of times they forget to mention these main reasons that people are signing up. so it's easy for an outsider to be like, let's give them these details. Whereas from inside that they just sometimes don't think about it. And [00:14:00] especially when people write by committee everyone ends up having an opinion and the, the, the message gets all jumbled, like almost every time. Like if there's 50 people on a call, I'm like, this is going to suck. This is, this is always going to be bad.
Let's do two, three, max four people on a call. Like there's no reason to have more.
David Elikwu: I know you've got swipe files. Is there any particular way that you recommend people get better at either the specific writing element or anything else that surrounds copywriting?
Neville Medhora: Be exposed to a lot of good copywriting. What are things that you like reading? So you mentioned like, The Hustle is an easy one. You liked reading that and you're just like, okay, what about that do I like, it's like, oh, because they use fun GIFs, they use images, they make their own graphs. They're talking about things in an interesting way. They've talked about a thing in the way I care about it, right?
So it's like google released a new AI. Okay like, whatever. But it's like, here's how you can use google's new AI to make money or whatever, that's interesting to you. So if you notice those types of things, so I actually I'm on the web a lot just for fun and I collect everything at SwipeFile.Com. So if you go there, it used to [00:15:00] just be like a side project I did for my own clients, because when they'd be like, hey, what's an example of a good landing page, I'd be like, Oh, crap. I just couldn't remember off the top of my head, right? I wouldn't remember all this stuff. So I started putting it there. It's like my own little pinterest, basically. It should, it should be called cool stuff Neville sees on the internet, is what swipefile.com should be. But we post a ton on there and the reason that people use it and that it's gaining traction is that people go, they're just like, I have an idea for my newsletter. I just need some inspiration and it's hard to type in. Like you're inspired from random places. That's what I've noticed. Like if you're trying to make a sales page, just looking at like sales page templates, sometimes it's like, okay. But then if you look at swipe file and you see like an old Ogilvy print ad and you're like, oh, wouldn't it be cool if we had an image like that and a headline like that?
So that's what swipe file is, like if you're working on an email, you're working on your newsletter, you're working on sitting at your podcast with show notes, you go to swipe file and see like an idea [00:16:00] that sparks another idea in your head. That's the whole point of it. And so we've, I've actually hired a developer onto it.
Now we're working on it and adding all these new features. It used to just kind of be like a WordPress blog where I posted stuff. And but now we've actually there's some, there's some pretty cool features that you actually like store your own swipes and then we're actually putting templates out.
So if you want to make your own sales pages, like it has all these like free google doc templates and stuff like that. So swipe file is growing. We started paying attention to it about three months ago. And each year it's like 66% more traffic each month, which is pretty cool. So, hoping to get it to about a hundred thousand per month.
Very shortly, probably in three, four months, I assume.
How to set goals and decide what to focus on
David Elikwu: Awesome. Okay. I mean, okay. Two very quick questions on that one. You do your monthly goals, yearly goals. How do you figure out what goals to set and what the path looks like to hit them? And then I want to ask you a bit more about how you structure the business and how you figure out what to focus on.
Neville Medhora: Yeah. I tried to do three monthly goals. If I have more than three goals, I generally don't finish them. And I actually post them right up. You can see them over here, but it's right above my wall. And [00:17:00] so whenever I'm just kind of like lost on what I should do one day, I'm just like, I look up there and I'm like, Oh yeah, that's the three things I got to do.
And so I kind of know how much work I can do each month or how long something's going to take at this point. So I make three monthly goals and then my whole month is just revolved around making sure I finished those first and then after that free time.
But yeah, three monthly goals each month, you go to nevblog.com and click on 'Goals' and you'll see like my goals for the last, I don't know, God knows how many years.
David Elikwu: How do you figure out which goals are worth setting? Cause I think there's also a part where you can set super ambitious goals, you could set all kinds of goals, like, how do you set goals that you actually make sure that you hit and that you, I mean, first of all, even the fact that you've been posting them for such a long time, it's good accountability, I guess. But you know, setting meaningful goals, I think is something a lot of people also struggle with really.
Neville Medhora: Yeah, trial and error. I used to post go like, it just depends. Like you think I used to think like revenue goals would really motivate me. It just doesn't like, there's some like disconnect with it. You're just like make this much money in a month, but I think my brain is answering the question of like, [00:18:00] why, what am I going to do with it?
So I think if there's some, like, if I hit this goal, then I get to buy a new car or like invest in this company or something like that, I think that's more useful for me. Or goals that just personally get you a little bit excited or goals that you have to, like, let's say a client hires you to do something. You have to finish it by a certain date. That's a good reason to have a goal, right? You have a deadline, hard deadlines are very good. So that's how I just say it's just been over the years. I've noticed that when I have too many goals, I'm too distracted on stuff that I don't get anything done, right? It's just overwhelming. There's like seven goals on the page. And you're like, what do I start with? So that's why I've landed on three goals. And the process itself of only picking three goals makes you figure out what to work on, right? So I have a bunch of stuff I want to work on. Then you go, okay, which of these goals, if I finish, will cascade and do all the other goals, right?
So let's say my goal is to like, get more followers or whatever, right? It's like, okay, what goal can I put that will create that result? So it's like, would maybe replying to three posts a day and posting one video a week will [00:19:00] get me to that number. So then that would be the goal. But just saying like, get 5,000 more followers. To me, that's not a really good goal. It has to be a process goal. Yeah. So what would lead to that? And that's the goal, not the actual like end result.
Choosing where to focus your time and attention
David Elikwu: And then in terms of like, the business as a whole, how do you figure out, I guess this kind of suckles a little bit back to some of what we discussed before about the idea that, I was writing about this for a book that I've been working on actually, like this idea that even if you look at someone like Shaquille O'Neal or a lot of people are good examples of this, you get really good at something. But then because you're actually good, maybe not just at that thing, but at other things, it can then distract and divide your attention. And actually suddenly you're trying to do a bunch of different things that might that reduce your capacity to do the one thing well, right? So you've got a few different projects that you're working on you've made some investments in the past. You've you do some consulting. How do you figure out like, what your business and how things should be structured and where you should pay the most attention. Cause you've got some YouTube stuff, you've got swipe files, you've got the copywriting [00:20:00] course, you've got consulting, you know, in any kind of world, you could say, maybe I just do a consulting and that's all we do. And that's a consulting business. And that should be a hundred percent of the energy. How do you figure out like how to find that balance between the different things?
Neville Medhora: Well, I think you have to make sure they all go into each other, right? I think the concept is called like a flywheel. Nathan Barry talks about that a lot, like a creator flywheel or something. So everything you do feeds into something else. And so I've always structured it around that.
So for example, swipe file is like the base level. It's like, I see a bunch of stuff. I take screenshots on my phone. It takes screenshots on my computer. Then I upload like, hey, I saw a cool Ad. I saw a cool billboard. I saw this car that had a, an Ad on it. I thought that was neat. So I just post a bunch of that crap. Now, most of it's kind of like, whatever, 80% of that probably goes nowhere. But then every week at the end of the week, I need to write my newsletter and I go to swipefile.Com and I rate it. And I just like steal all the stuff from there. It's my own stuff, so I'm not stealing it, but I just take all the ideas from there and then that goes out and hopefully gets more people.
And then if a lot of people read that newsletter, then a [00:21:00] certain percentage of those join copywriting course, which is where I make money. A certain percentage of those will hire me or follow me and later buy something. And then like, as I get more attention on the different platforms, you get more access to things, perhaps you can sell something better.
And so everything's kind of like a flywheel. Like it should all go into each other, right? So, if I make a post on copywriting course, I'm like, okay, that can go in my newsletter that could also go on swipe file. So I'm gonna make 10 custom images for a post. I can put all of those on swipe file as well.
So I think all of my projects like roll into each other and I'm trying to make it more and more like everything I do goes into the next thing. So if I make a youtube video or a podcast interview, I put that out on copywriting course, and people see that. And then let's say a new person watches that interview is like, hey, this is pretty cool. Who's this guy? They subscribed to me. Two years later, they buy something from me. So it all kind of relates to each other. So the goal is to have everything in a nice little flywheel feeding each other.
David Elikwu: And how do you figure out what to do financially? I mean, you've been quite successful even [00:22:00] from high school slash university time.
Neville Medhora: Yeah, I've never been poor. Yeah.
David Elikwu: Yeah. But you get to make like investments. You invested in The Hustle. I think you invested in
Neville Medhora: Hustle, AppSumo, PinkjobMeat. Yeah. Like a bunch of different companies. Yeah.
David Elikwu: How do you think about like the investments that you make and, and what that looks like?
Neville Medhora: Most of them were like, like the hustle. Like I knew Sam when he was like for lack of a better word, like a nobody kind of like, he wasn't like a popular guy that he is now and he was starting to hustle and I had known him before. And I was like, this guy's impressive. So when he started a company, I wanted to invest. He actually had to convince me to invest. Cause I had no idea what he was talking about. So I invested in that and then like, they raised another round of funding. I paid more money, et cetera, like that kind of thing.
Noah, I was, I was, he was building AppSumo off my couch, right? So, we were like interlinked. I have equity in the company. I was actually working at the company, doing all the copywriting, hiring all the copywriters, all that kind of stuff. So, I worked in that. I have advisory shares. In a bunch of different companies. And the thing is, it's like, most of these things don't [00:23:00] pan out just because you invest in a company, doesn't mean you made money from the company and you might never make money from the company. What the way I've tried to view it with very few exceptions is like, if I don't make any money from this company or just lose my investment. Or time investment or money investment. Will I learn stuff from them? So for example, with the hustle, I was like, I'm not going to make money from this, or I didn't know if I was, I ended up making money, but also like they were throwing hustle cons. So I got to go backstage and hang out with the founder of WeWork and Casey Neistat or whatever, like just all these cool people and be involved in that. And then see like, what kind of facebook ads were working, what wasn't working, what was working with their newsletter, what wasn't working. And then I can apply that to my own business.
So for me, it was almost like, paying to be part of that behind the scenes knowledge. And for me, that's the way I viewed all these investments.
And then apart from that, I think investing in like, I've put my portfolio out there. It's basically all the bare metal companies and Tesla. So the, the bare metal of the internet, like who runs the internet? It's Amazon AWS, Google, Apple, facebook, and a couple others that run, you know, majority of the bare [00:24:00] metal on the internet, meaning the servers. Like if they disappeared, the internet would be gone. So, there's a few different investments that have just like, okay, if I just hold it and do nothing over the long run, will this go way up?
I think there's some others like Bitcoin, Ethereum, and then like, something like Tesla. Where you just like see their, their pace in like self driving and how far ahead they are everyone, and you're just like, this is going to be the biggest automaker in the world, bar none. I mean, it's not even going to be close.
So, so different things like that. That's how I view investments. And then angel investing is like, I want to be along for the ride of that.
AI's influence on the copywriting industry
David Elikwu: So you've mentioned AI before, how do you see that changing the way that, I mean, the way you do copywriting, do you think that, there's a sense these days where I think, as people apply AI to a bunch of things, people are just like, Oh, I could just do this. you know, even, even you said, I could be your lawyer. Maybe it could be your copywriter. Maybe it could do some of the basics of the things that you do, but for the people that actually do those jobs, sometimes there's also a feeling that. Hold on. The mouth feel that I have [00:25:00] as a person that does this job is different from this generic thing that the AI is doing. And actually it might be a great starting point, but actually I might do it differently as a lawyer or as a copywriter.
How do you feel about the way that you use AI yourself and the way that companies might use it to do some of the copywriting they need to do?
Neville Medhora: Yeah, I mean, a countdown till your job is fucked. I mean, like you have to, you have to update it. There's, there's, there's no way around it.
It's coming for your job. And, and the thing is, it's, it's just depends on the perspective. Like, this is nothing new in history, right? Like stuff keeps advancing every generation. Our parents had this, like our parents thought like being a lawyer, being doctor was the great job now, like being lawyer, doctor is like, not necessarily a great job sometime, some places, but I know a lot of doctors that do not like their job.
So you're just like, your whole worldview gets upended every few decades, right? And we are no different. You're just older. That's why this seems scary because you're used to a certain thing and now it's changing and that's scary to a lot of people. A lot of young people are like, oh, thank God AI is here to do all this crap. I don't want to write stuff. [00:26:00] You know, I want to put out content, but I don't want to like, edit it and write html that's stupid. Like just let the computer do that, right?
So you have to keep updating your way of doing things. So for example, I'll categorize copy into like low level, medium, and high level copy, low level copy is like an email that goes out saying, your password was updated, right? Chat GPT can make that email very easily and make a billion different versions of it and even make it personalized to every single person, right? It's really good at that. Medium level copy is like a case study or something like that. And It can tell a pretty good case study and it's getting better. Humans are still better at it, but damn, it's catching up really, really quick. So let's say you knock that off. And then high level copies like Mark Andreessen, the venture capitalist, like pontificating stuff on twitter, right? That's a high level thing. It's not about the words that he's writing on the page, but rather like his whole life experience distilled down to like, a couple characters that's high level. I have not seen AI be really good at that, but I've seen it assist in it. And so actually the way that these things are being used in the real world is different than you [00:27:00] expect.
We all thought when GPT 2 was coming around and like GPT 3 was being released that like, everyone should be writing blog posts with AI, right? Be able to write really fast blog posts. Turns out no one gives a shit about blog posts anymore. Like it just, it's just like, not like the way to get attention anymore. So it's like, yeah, you can make a bunch a thousand blog posts a minute, but it's like, they don't help you. So, okay. That didn't turn out like we thought. What it does happen is like, let's say you're writing something about an experience you had, or like a project you're doing, you use AI to research stuff. You'd be like, who are other people that have done similar businesses like this? Give me their names, how much they made, find all everything you can about it. And it just goes and finds it, right. Or I'm like, how many times a day does Elon Musk tweet? Before I'd have to go research that or have someone else go research that, now it's like, it just does it, right.
We wanted to make record a bunch of short videos about like different rebrands throughout history. And I used to go just like browse the web, type in rebrand history, click. And I'm just like, find all the rebrands that were between a hundred [00:28:00] million dollars and a billion dollars that have actual images I can use for before and afters, and it'll go find them all. And they can make a post out of that and it'll give me 30 different examples, let's say that one. That's one, this one, there's eight of them that are good. The rest suck. So that's how we've been using AI is kind of like this, like sparring partner.
And then the other use case is for writing basic web apps and creating things and mocking things up very quickly. So if I want to make a tool, a lot of times I get really excited and I'll have my developer make it. And then later I'm like, this isn't that useful. Now I can just make it locally and use it for a while. And then I'm like, after like a day, I'm like, okay. And it says it actually isn't that useful. So you can, you can rapidly create things from no nowhere and turn it into reality very quickly using AI. You could do research much better.
So posts that I would have, I couldn't have made before I can now make with AI. But the, the use case we thought of like, everyone's going to write a bunch of blog posts like that didn't really happened like that, but this whole new wave of things did. So [00:29:00] it's just like people who used to be copywriters that would just write blog posts for big companies. I mean, they still exist. I think their jobs are going to change a lot and it's going to be the people that are really good with AI and tech are going to 10x and the people that don't, we'll just, just be left in the dust.
David Elikwu: Does it change how you, because you do your goals and plans for the year and I'm assuming you think like a few years in advance. And also I mean even when you think about let's say two years ago where AI was, it would be hard to even have imagined like what you could do right now. Do you think about how it changes the way you think about the future of what you're doing and how you like plan for that?
Neville Medhora: Yeah. If you can read like the red slash R slash red on the Reddit copywriting thread, people like, is AI going to kill this? it's like, if you're asking it is yeah. Yeah. It will, it will kill it in some way, but what happens is technology kills things and then rebirths them in different ways.
My most recent video was about like travel agents were completely destroyed by the [00:30:00] internet, but now there's a whole resurgence of these like travel hacking people that like take all your points and then book a trip for you. Or like these hyper localized companies that will say like, you're going to South America. Well, we'll plan like the best South America trip. can ask Chachaputi the best stuff, but we're going to tell you like, from a local perspective. So it was like traveling, like the industry is like bigger. Now, but in a different way, it's travel bloggers, travel, Instagram people. And so it's like, it's just rebirthed in a different way.
So it kills the old stuff and rebirths a new. And so, I think people have to be ready for that and just play with it. I mean, the easy answer is like, here's the thing. I used to play with all this stuff for free. Like you don't, it's not some like really hard thing. I would actually pause it. Like back in the day, it was harder because you had to be technical. You have to be pretty technical.
Now with some of the new AI stuff, you can be like just adult and just talk to it. Like you don't, you don't have to know programming and stuff. When you were doing front pager and dream weaver, that was technical work that most people didn't understand at the time that's why you were able to profit off of it. But now you [00:31:00] don't need to be that technical. It sure as hell helps though. If you are technical, you probably will earn more. Yeah.
Are David Ogilvy's copywriting lessons still relevant in 2025?
David Elikwu: Maybe this is the last question that I would ask you but I think, going right off the back of that, where do you think the best starting place would be to learn now, considering that you have AI, you have all these tools, things are quite different before, and it could be the same now, but you might have said, Oh, just go get the boron letters, go and start reading Ogilvy, blah, blah, blah, because you were starting from a blank page.
You were always going to start from a blank page. You probably need to familiarize yourself a lot with, you know, what people have said before, what things are like before, but I could probably just type into chat GPT, just tell me, you know, summarize what Ogilvy says about copywriting or whatever, it might not be great.
And, and I don't advocate for that in all circumstances, but know, there's, there's that tension there as well. Yeah.
Neville Medhora: Well, not only, I mean, summarization is like step one. Now you can just say, do it like them and don't do it, right. Like that's the cool part about AI. It's not just like summarizing it and give me [00:32:00] like bullet points of what else could be said. It's just like, write this copy like Ogilvy.
But here's the thing, I think you can't be attached to like your idea of like what good writing is and stuff. And so people are just like, in the future, people may not even write and people now can't understand that, but you're just like, okay, if there's wasn't a tool that was able to do this. And now you can say, write like Ogilvy and add about selling dinosaur mugs and it will do it. And it'll do it a million different ways and you can customize it. And I can say, make it in Spanish, make it in French, make it shorter, make it longer, add an image, create a custom image for it. And it'll do it. That is a very, very big shift in the world, right. And so I think people need to be using it all the time.
Now I think what makes people less afraid of AI is when they start using it all the time. You realize that's not perfect. And there still is like some time to go. And you realize what else it can do. So for example, like the AI images, I was like, I'm going to go all AI images. Cause I make a lot of stick figures and stuff. And it takes a lot of time to like make them. And so I started using AI and it's just like, I was spending more time to like, just tune it and get it to the [00:33:00] right place. And it was never exactly what I wanted. And I was like, I can just draw it. Like I know what I want in my head and I can just draw it out and get exactly what I want. It ended up taking me less time to make the custom images than the AI, right. Currently currently. So, you know, in two years, Might have a different conversation.
So it's just kind of like the same thing. So even whenever I'd write tweets, I'd be like, write a tweet about this. And it's like that, that it never came out the same way, but what I realized was it came up with a lot of like interesting angles I never thought of for tweets that I could write. So I think just using it gets you pointed in the right direction.
David Elikwu: Yeah, I completely agree with that. I think there's definitely been times I've tried to at least see like what it looks like if I does some writing and stuff and it's just not It's, it's not good. I think at least, at least for me and for a lot of people, if you have an individual style, there's a way that you like to write, a way you like to communicate.
But what it is good for, for example, maybe two use cases is one, I make a lot of notes. Like I, I handwrite a lot of notes. I can just dump all my notes in and just say, okay, organize this because I was, thinking very randomly when I was writing this stuff down, can [00:34:00] you just structure this in a way that I normally would have done that, but I would have had to sit down for like 45 minutes and filter through my own thoughts.
How about you just look at it for five seconds and just structure all this stuff that I've said. So that's one use case. And then another, like you said, is finding angles is, you know, just giving me ideas because I have written for enough time that I will have a sense of what sucks. So, instead of me spending all the time and thinking of, okay, should I do it this way? Should I do it that way? How about you just do it very quickly? Give me five different ways that would have taken me, you know, the next 20 minutes to an hour. And I would just know what sucks and I will figure out very quickly the direction I should be going in. And it just helps you to shortcut things in that way as well.
Neville Medhora: It's quite a useful tool. I don't view it as like us versus them kind of thing. It's like, there's this new tool and like, I don't know, get used to it. Just use it. And it's like the easiest thing to use. It's very, and it's free. So
David Elikwu: Thank you so much for tuning in. Please do stay tuned for more. Don't forget to rate, review and subscribe. It really helps the podcast and follow [00:35:00] me on Twitter feel free to shoot me any thoughts. See you next time.
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