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I call Océane my accidental copy cub, and the name fits perfectly. She never planned to become a copywriter. She stumbled into it after finishing a five-year law degree in France, where she specialized in medical law and family law. After her final internship, she realized she hated the work and could not picture herself spending the next thirty years buried in legal cases and medical jargon.
So she did what a lot of people do when they feel stuck and uncertain about their future. She went on Twitter. She kept seeing people talk about copywriting and masterminds, and her teachers had always told her she was a talented writer. She figured she had nothing to lose. She had about three or four months left before she officially graduated, so she told herself: if it works, it works. If it does not, she would go back to being a lawyer.
She Learned the Bare Minimum and Started Sending Cold Messages
Océane did not study copywriting the way most people tell you to. She took two short courses inside a mastermind, and the whole thing took her about half an hour. She skipped the part where you handwrite old ads to train your eye. She just wanted to make money as quickly as possible.
She started cold messaging people on Twitter and Instagram, offering to write product descriptions for ten dollars. She sent around a hundred to a hundred and fifty messages before someone finally said yes. Once she had that first testimonial, she raised her price to twenty dollars and kept flipping it upward from there.
That approach is smarter than it sounds. The number one complaint I hear in Facebook groups is “how do I get clients?” But Océane never overthought it. She priced so low that people would humor her just to see what she could do, and she was not trying to get rich on the first job. She was focused entirely on getting proof that she could deliver results.
She Had Clients, But Her Copy Was a Mess
By the time we started working together, Océane had been doing paid copywriting work for about a year and a half to two years. She had two retainers and was making around two thousand dollars a month, but her income had been all over the place before that: zero one month, four hundred the next, eight hundred after that. She was also working as a nanny in the afternoons to cover her bills, and she had a job offer sitting on the table for an administrative role managing apartment buildings in France. It paid about eight to nine hundred euros a month, full time. She was seriously considering taking it.
Then I reached out to her on Twitter.
I had seen her profile and noticed she had a testimonial from Jason Wong, the CEO of Doe Lashes, who is a well-known name in DTC e-commerce. That testimonial made me think she might be the real deal. So I sent her a DM. She did not have to pitch me, send samples, or write a proposal. I just asked for a quote, and when I got the retainer approved, I made sure it was for more than she had asked for.
When I actually read her copy, I was stunned. Some of her sentences did not sound like English at all. She had spent years writing 10,000 to 15,000 word law essays where the goal was to fill space, and she had trained herself to ramble. Every sentence was padded with words that added nothing. Every paragraph was stuffed with filler.
Her previous clients had never told her any of this. They loved her work, but they were not copywriters. They were happy as long as she followed their briefs and said something they liked to hear. Nobody had ever looked closely at her writing and told her what was wrong or how to fix it.
The Feedback Was Hard. She Almost Walked Away.
When I started copy chiefing her, I was direct. Direct response copywriting has real stakes because the copy either brings in leads and books calls or it does not. I held her to a high standard from day one, and the early feedback was not gentle.
“I probably angry-stared at my screen for like an hour,” she told me about the first time I told her a piece was terrible. “This man is so rude. I’m out of here. Like, forget me. I’m not writing for you anymore.”
She did not quit. She admitted that deep down she knew I was right, and she just had to push through the sting of hearing it. The early feedback hurt her pride in a real way. She had believed she was a good copywriter, and getting torn apart by someone who actually understood the craft shook her confidence badly. She told me she thought about going back to being a lawyer. She felt like she could not do it.
But she kept showing up. Over time, the feedback started to shift. The first time I gave her genuinely positive feedback, she said it felt like her dream day.
“Finally, like, he doesn’t hate me,” she laughed.
I want to be clear about why I was harsh with her. The feedback was always about the work, full stop. It was a criticism of the copy, not of her as a person. Sometimes you have to be direct or the message simply does not land. I have seen too many copywriters receive soft feedback from clients and never improve because nobody told them the truth about what they were producing.
Why I Kept Coaching Her When I Wanted to Give Up
There were moments when I thought about letting her go. I generally believe in hiring slow and firing fast, but I stuck with Océane longer than I might have with someone else, and there were two clear reasons for that.
The first was opportunity cost. Hiring a copywriter takes real time. You search, you interview, you trial them, and if it does not work out, you start the whole cycle over again. I was working with a client who runs a sales recruitment company, and he had taught me a great deal about how expensive that cycle really is. The entire point of hiring Océane was to free up my time so I could focus on more strategic work. If I kept firing and replacing writers, I would still be writing all the copy myself while also trying to find someone better.
The second reason was that I felt responsible for her progress. When a junior copywriter is struggling, that is partly on the manager and the copy chief. I was managing someone in this way for the first time, and I knew I was probably not coaching her as effectively as I could have been. So I gave her more leeway while I figured out how to teach better.
One thing I noticed was that her worst work always came when she was rushing. She would put something together at the last minute and I could tell immediately. I would point it out and she would get embarrassed because she knew I had caught her.
“I know it’s on me,” she told me. “Oftentimes when you say something like that, it’s because I didn’t listen properly or I was in a rush.”
She Grew as a Copywriter and as a Business Owner
The coaching relationship became more than just copy feedback over time. Océane started asking me questions about her other clients, and she was nervous about it at first because she did not want it to seem like she was taking advantage of the relationship. But I put her at ease and told her to ask whatever she needed.
She asked me how to handle sales calls, how to approach getting more work from a client without being pushy, and how to raise her rates without losing the relationship. A lot of the business advice I gave her, she took back out into the world and applied directly.
She also started setting higher standards for how clients treated her. Before we worked together, she was charging cheap rates and clients took advantage of that. They would ask for more than they paid for, show up late to meetings, or drop her without any notice. She accepted it because she felt like she had no other choice.
Working with me changed that. I was upfront with her from the start. I told her the retainer would require a lot from her, so I made sure the pay reflected that extra effort. She had never been treated that way by a client before, and it changed how she saw herself in the market.
“No one had ever treated me that way,” she said. “It changed a lot of my confidence in asking for stuff.”
Where She Is Now
Océane moved to Dubai. She has a large apartment and spends her summers traveling to crypto conferences and blockchain events around the world. Her income is generally around eight times what it was when we started working together, with peaks reaching ten to fifteen times that early level. She has one solid in-house contract that keeps her stable and takes on smaller projects when she has the bandwidth and the interest.
She now writes exclusively for crypto and blockchain companies, with some SaaS work on the side. She got into crypto personally around 2019, so the niche fits her naturally and she genuinely enjoys the work. She no longer has to hunt aggressively for clients. People approach her at events, referrals come in through her network, and clients seek her out.
“It would not be if it wasn’t for you,” she told me when I asked why her business had grown so much. “A lot of it has become like your wisdom that I like sent back out again.”
She is humble about her skills now in a way she was not before. She knows she is still learning and would not call herself a great copywriter. She would say she is slightly above average and still growing. That kind of honest self-assessment is actually a sign of real progress. The copywriters who think they have nothing left to learn are usually the ones who stop improving.
Océane did not become a copywriter on purpose. She fell into it, learned just enough to get started, and then found someone who would tell her the truth about her work. That combination turned out to be enough to change her life.
