Sam Parr's Advice on Copywriting: Copy Work, Headlines, and Writing Like You Talk

Sam Parr co-founded The Hustle, a business newsletter that grew to over 1.5 million subscribers before selling to HubSpot for a reported $27 million. He co-hosts My First Million, one of the most popular business podcasts. Before The Hustle, he ran a hot dog stand, sold a roommate-matching website, and learned copywriting by studying the greats. He credits all of it to writing.

His writing advice comes from David Perell's How I Write podcast (2024), The Hustle's writing guide, a Neville Medhora live copywriting session, Daniel Miessler's extracted wisdom breakdown, and Podcast Notes summaries.

Copywriting Is the Number One Money-Making Skill

"Being an okay copywriter is the number one skill if you want to make money." Parr does not qualify this. He does not say "one of the top skills." He says number one.

Why? Because copywriting underlies everything in business. Sales pages. Emails. Landing pages. Pitch decks. Fundraising memos. Product descriptions. Job postings. Tweets that build an audience. Every business function that involves persuading someone to do something involves copywriting.

Most people think of copywriting as advertising. Parr thinks of it as communication. The ability to write clearly and persuasively is the meta-skill that makes every other skill more effective. A great engineer who writes great emails gets promoted faster than a great engineer who writes confusing ones.

Copy Work: The Benjamin Franklin Method

Parr's core training method is copy work. Take a piece of writing you admire. Copy it by hand. Word for word. For an hour a day. He credits this practice as the single most important thing he did to become a better writer.

Benjamin Franklin did this. He would read an essay from The Spectator, set it aside, and try to recreate it from memory. Then he compared his version to the original. Where did he fall short? What did the original do that he missed? He repeated this process until his versions matched the originals in quality.

Copy work builds intuition for rhythm, structure, and word choice. You cannot copy a great sentence without absorbing something about what makes it great. Your hand learns what your brain cannot articulate. After hundreds of hours of copy work, you start producing sentences that have the rhythm of the writers you studied.

This is how musicians learn. They play other people's songs before writing their own. They internalize chord progressions, melody structures, and rhythmic patterns. Then those patterns show up in their original work. Writing is no different.

Headlines First, Headlines Always

David Ogilvy said: "On average, five times as many people read the headline as read the body copy." Parr takes this literally. "90% of people will read your headline without consuming your article." If the headline does not work, nothing else matters.

Parr writes headlines before anything else. He writes 25 or more variations. He tests them against each other. He asks: would I click on this? Would I share this? Would I stop scrolling for this? He sends the top candidates to friends for feedback.

The Hustle's internal process: write the headline in 3 to 10 words using plain English. Then write a 1 to 2 sentence description of the piece. This forces clarity before a single paragraph gets drafted. If you cannot describe what the piece is about in two sentences, you do not know what you are writing yet.

A headline has one job: get the reader to read the first sentence. The first sentence has one job: get the reader to read the second sentence. Parr calls this the "slippery slope" - each sentence compels the next. If you lose the reader at the headline, you have lost them entirely.

The Forgotten Text

The Hustle grew partly because Parr obsessed over text that other companies ignored. The thank-you page after email signup. The confirmation email. The onboarding sequence. He calls these "the forgotten text" - real estate that most businesses fill with generic copy but that Parr treated as prime.

His welcome email for The Hustle: "What just happened was magic. You see, as you entered your email, a little bell went off in our office. And when we heard that bell, we went crazy. I just saw my head of operations, Cara, she just ran outside and hugged a guy." It continues from there. Nobody expects personality in a confirmation email. That surprise is what made readers forward it.

His broader insight: study companies not at their current scale but at their beginnings. "Go to the internet archive and see what they did in the early days." If a company just announced a Series A, look at what their copy said three months before. "Because if they raised that funding round, things are working. Let's see what things were when they were nothing and they had to make it work."

Edit by Subtraction

"I'm a lousy copywriter, but I am a good editor." Parr quotes Ogilvy here to make a point: the real work happens in editing. His specific technique: remove the first 25% and last 25% of any draft. What remains is usually the good part.

This sounds brutal. It is. But most writers bury their best material in the middle. The first few paragraphs are warmup. The last few are repetition. Cutting from both ends exposes the core.

Every word must serve a purpose. Parr avoids adverbs - words ending in "-ly." Stephen King's rule: "The road to hell is paved with adverbs." Use stronger verbs instead. "She walked quickly" becomes "She sprinted." The verb does the work. The adverb is dead weight.

Write Like You Talk

Parr's writing sounds like conversation. Short sentences. Colloquial language. The occasional sentence fragment. If you would not say it out loud to a friend, do not write it.

Parr's test: read it out loud. If it sounds like a person talking, it works. If it sounds like a textbook, rewrite it. The Hustle grew to 1.5 million subscribers because every email sounded like it came from a smart friend, not a marketing department. The writing guide on The Hustle's own site puts specific numbers on this: target a 7th to 8th grade reading level, sentences under 25 words. Warren Buffett averages just 13 words per sentence in his annual letters.

Boldness at the Keyboard

Parr has "Bold Fast Fun" tattooed on his arm. When asked to coach a writer whose work felt sterile, his diagnosis was immediate: "That was written under some kind of fear. That was not written from a place of love and the flames of passion."

His fix is copy work as warmup. Before writing, he spends ten minutes copying a passage from a writer who approaches the keyboard with boldness - Anthony Bourdain, Felix Dennis. "I'm feeling a little weak today. I need to get bold." Then he writes.

He describes the discovery process the same way: boldness comes from editing, not drafting. "Nine out of ten times, the good shit comes out in editing. The first five paragraphs, just delete them. That's where it starts." David Ogilvy said it: "I'm a lousy copywriter, but I am a world-class editor." The warmup is getting the fear out of the way. The real work is cutting to what is bold.

For Parr, writing without soul fails even when it follows all the rules. He learned this from reading The Elements of Eloquence: sometimes phrases work precisely because they add words, not subtract them. "One small step for man, a giant leap for mankind." You could compress that. It would die. Some sentences earn every syllable.

Speed and Stakes

In one of Parr's short-form videos, he distills his philosophy to a single principle: speed with stakes. Start immediately. Put something on the line so you cannot back out.

"If you're fat and you feel fat and disgusting, post a shirtless picture online and say in 60 days I'm going to look better." Do it right now. Put your back against the wall. The same applies to writing. Do not wait until you feel ready. Publish something. Put your name on it. The pressure of public commitment forces output that private deliberation never will.

This connects to his broader view that momentum matters more than perfection. "I believe in speed. I believe in momentum." A mediocre piece published today teaches you more than a perfect piece you never finish.

The Five Books That Shaped The Hustle's Voice

Parr has publicly listed the books that most influenced The Hustle's writing style. They reveal his priorities:

• Advertising Secrets of the Written Word by Joe Sugarman. Parr follows Sugarman's AIDA formula: Attention (grab the reader), Interest (share the facts), Desire (tell stories that make them want it), Action (tell them what to do next).
• Ogilvy on Advertising by David Ogilvy. Headlines, specificity, and the discipline of editing.
• The Boron Letters by Gary Halbert. Copywriting fundamentals written as letters from a father to his son.
• On Writing Well by William Zinsser. Clarity, simplicity, and the war on clutter.
• On Writing by Stephen King. Kill your darlings. Cut the adverbs. Tell the truth.

These five books, combined with daily copy work, form the complete Parr curriculum for becoming a better writer.

Key Takeaways

• Copywriting is the number one money-making skill. It underlies all business communication.
• Do copy work daily. Copy great writing by hand. Benjamin Franklin did this.
• Write 25+ headline variations. If the headline fails, nothing else matters.
• Treat forgotten text as prime real estate. Welcome emails, thank-you pages, confirmation messages.
• Edit by subtraction. Cut the first 25% and last 25%. Kill the adverbs.
• Write like you talk. Target 7th-8th grade reading level. 25 words per sentence max.
• Start fast. Put stakes on it. Momentum beats perfection.
• Study companies at their beginning, not their peak. The internet archive shows what worked when they had nothing.

Copy work builds taste. AI editing tests taste. When you can look at an AI suggestion and know instantly whether it improves or flattens your copy, that is the taste copy work built. The best writers do not accept every AI edit. They accept the ones that sharpen the message and reject the ones that dull it.

This post draws from Parr's appearance on How I Write, The Hustle's writing guide, Neville Medhora's live session, and Daniel Miessler's wisdom extraction. Athens is an AI writing editor that helps you write sharper copy - with every AI change visible so you can keep your voice.