Monday Memo
A Byte of Knowledge
As your clients lean harder on AI, they can start unquestioningly trusting whatever it produces as expert work.
Even though they don't actually have the taste and expertise themselves to tell good from bad.
Could be copy, design, content.
There's an old parable that explains exactly what's happening to them.
David Foster Wallace told of two young fish who pass an older one asking, "How's the water?"
The pair swim on, baffled, until one asks, "What the hell is water?"
They're so soaked they can't perceive it.
That's more and more clients lately.
He's submerged in AI output, mistaking it for the ocean because he's never known anything else.
The clean grammar reads as quality to an eye that has never studied a converting line.
So you have to keep showing him the difference. You have to make your expertise known more than ever.
Left alone, he might decide a prompt does your whole job and let you go.
Reinforce the taste he can't see, or get replaced by the thing he can't judge.
🚀 WATCH: How These AI Copy Bots Are Producing World-Class Sales Copy 50X Faster Than Even The "BEST" Copywriters On The Market…
(Plus… They Don't Get Sick, Miss Deadlines, Or Ask For Raises Either!)
Watch the full AI Copywriting Tell-All Video Here
Something to Ponder
We Asked – AI Answered
Our Question:
“What are products and services where EFFORT is actually a selling point? As opposed to the normal goal of making the outcome for a prospect as frictionless, low effort as possible."
AI's Answer: Why People Will Pay to Suffer 🥵
Effort sells when the effort becomes the product... when the sweat, the assembly, or the climb is what the buyer is actually buying.
🔨 The IKEA Effect: Your Sweat Inflates the Price Tag
Plain version: when you build something yourself, your brain overvalues it. The name comes from the furniture. You spend an hour cursing at an Allen wrench, and suddenly that wobbly $40 bookshelf feels like a $400 heirloom. Your labor got baked into the price tag inside your own head.
Harvard's Michael Norton, with Daniel Mochon and Dan Ariely, proved it across four studies. People assembled IKEA boxes, folded origami, and built Lego sets, then put a dollar value on the result:
→ They priced their own amateur work as high as a professional's polished version
→ They paid MORE to keep what they'd built than to buy an identical finished one
→ They assumed everyone else saw the same genius in it (nobody did)
The engine underneath is ownership. Effort is how the brain stamps "this is mine" on an object, and we always overpay for what's ours.
⚠️ One hard boundary: they had to FINISH. When people built something and then failed or wrecked it, the magic vanished and the value dropped to zero. A half-built dresser is just frustration on the floor.
💡 For your copy: hand the buyer a real task he can complete, and that effort converts him into a co-owner who defends the purchase like family.
🍰 The Betty Crocker Fix
1950s. General Mills sells a cake mix so easy you only add water. It bombs. Housewives feel like cheats who got handed a shortcut.
Their fix sounds insane to a "remove all friction" marketer: they pulled an ingredient OUT and made women crack in a real egg.
📈 Sales jumped. That single drop of effort gave the cook permission to call the cake hers. The lesson cost General Mills real money: a sliver of struggle beats total convenience when the buyer wants to feel capable.
⚔️ Spartan Sells The Pain On Purpose
Spartan removes zero friction. Their actual pitch: "commit to something hard." They frame the difficulty as a badge, and grit-hungry Americans line up to be tested.
The market is voting with its wallet:
→ 500,000+ finishers in 2025 (year-end projection near 1.3 million)
→ 12 million lifetime finishers in the record books
→ Obstacle racing enters the 2028 Olympics
Same engine fires CrossFit, Whole30, GORUCK, and David Goggins' entire empire. These buyers want a mountain with their name carved at the top, and they want to earn every step.
🧠 The 1959 Receipt
Psychologists Elliot Aronson and Judson Mills tested initiation rituals. Verdict: the harsher the hazing, the more members loved the group afterward.
We guard what cost us. A thing earned cheaply gets tossed just as cheaply. Fraternities and Marine boot camp have run on exactly this for a century. Make the door heavy and the room behind it feels sacred.
💰 Put It In Your Copy
When your offer demands real work, stop apologizing for it. Reframe the effort as the velvet rope:
🧗 Sell the climb. Name the hard parts out loud and dare them to show up.
✍️ Make them a co-author. Hand over one real task so the win belongs to them.
🚪 Gate the door. "This isn't for everyone" pulls the right people closer.
The pill still outsells the diet for the lazy majority. But the man who wants to become someone... he'll pay a premium for the right to earn it. So charge him for the privilege.
Thanks for reading the Monday Memo.
Until next time!
The AI Marketers
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