Building a $10 Million Brand: Olly Richard's Guide to Storytelling

In this episode of "The Digital Personality Podcast," host Jackson Lintz sits down with Olly Richards, the innovative founder of Story Learning, a $10 million education business that's transforming language learning through the art of storytelling. Olly shares his journey from a jazz musician to an education pioneer, detailing how he discovered the immense power of stories in teaching and marketing.

Dive deep into the conversation as Olly reveals the nuances of storytelling in content creation, the strategic integration of marketing and brand identity, and the pivotal moments that guided him to rebrand and refocus his business around a narrative. Learn why stories are not just tools for engagement but foundational elements that can shape learning, marketing, and personal branding.

Whether you're intrigued by the mechanics of language learning, interested in leveraging storytelling for branding or seeking insights on creating compelling content, this episode offers a wealth of knowledge and practical advice.

Join us as we unravel the secrets to building a memorable digital presence and discover how you can apply Olly's lessons to your own journey in personal branding and beyond.

Olly Richard's Instagram ➡︎ https://www.instagram.com/realollyrichards/
Olly Richard's Youtube  ➡︎ https://www.youtube.com/@realollyrichards/videos

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Transcript

Jackson (00:01.988)
All right, welcome to the Digital Personality Podcast, where we dive deep into the art and science of building a compelling personal brand in the digital world. I'm your host, Jackson Lintz, and today we're exploring the fascinating intersection of storytelling, content creation, and personal branding. Joining us is a very special guest, Ollie Richards, the founder of a $10 million education business called Story Learning.

Ollie has revolutionized language learning by intertwining it with captivating stories, proving that education can both be engaging and effective. His unique approach has not only helped thousands learn new languages, but has also massfully demonstrated the power of narrative in building a personal and educational brand. Today, Ollie will share his insights on the importance of storytelling and personal branding, his holistic view of marketing, and how he's used these strategies to craft a brand that resonates deeply with his audience.

Whether you're a business owner, a content creator, or anyone interested in making a mark online, all these experiences and strategies are about to provide you with a ton of valuable lessons. So let's dive in and uncover the secrets to creating a digital personality that truly stands out. Welcome, Molly.

Olly (01:12.022)
No pressure. Thank you very much. Good to be here.

Jackson (01:15.365)
Yeah, for sure. So why don't you give us like a one minute rundown of story learning, you know, what got you started in that company and ultimately what made you go into that niche, right? Because it's a very niche business around storytelling for foreign languages. So just dive a little bit into that.

Olly (01:32.042)
Yeah, sure. So I'm someone that's had a series of seven year careers is how I describe it. So my first seven years of my career was I was actually a jazz musician. So I did went to a degree in jazz piano performance. I was playing professionally, tons of fun. And then I eventually fell out of love with the lifestyle, the jazz music lifestyle. You've very much got to be all in with that. And I wasn't. And so I kind of drifted for a couple of years. And then I decided to.

Jackson (01:40.97)
Oh wow.

Jackson (01:54.698)
Yeah.

Olly (02:02.306)
travel the world and teach English. So I did a course to train as being an English teacher. And then I went to get a job in Japan. I lived in Japan for four years teaching English and then three more years in the Middle East. So that was another seven year career teaching English. And then towards the end of that, I got very, I was kind of bored. I was in a sort of sort of middle management position in one of the English schools and I got a bit bored with what I was doing. So I decided to.

I needed a creative outlet. So I started blogging about my experience with languages because I didn't just teach English. I also learned languages. I'd learned eight languages also myself, just for fun. It's always been my big passion really alongside music. So I just started blogging about my approach to languages and language learning. And after starting, I decided to actually go out and learn a bit more about blogging and how to actually grow a blog properly.

Jackson (02:37.374)
Mm.

Olly (02:59.946)
And I quickly realized that this can become a big thing. So I kind of then went down the marketing route and I learned about, uh, about audience building, online marketing, um, course creation, stuff like that. And then, you know, the business just kind of snowballed. What's it five, but from like a blog to five figure, six figure, seven things. Um, and it's now 10 and a half years old, you know, so it's, it's not been a quick journey, a lot of the best businesses are built over a long, over a long time.

Jackson (03:25.95)
Yeah.

Olly (03:29.014)
But one of the things, it didn't, I didn't, we didn't start off talking about stories actually, it used, at the beginning it was just my own experience with languages. But then through a series of experiments and twists and turns, we kind of discovered that stories, what was the concept that was resonating most strongly with the audience. So I kind of pivoted the whole business towards that and made it all about learning languages with stories, rebranded as story learning.

And that's, that's what's been going on now for over 10 years. And then more recently, um, it was coincided with the 10 year mark. Really. I started wanting to teach, um, uh, education business owners, how to scale their education businesses, because that's kind of what I've been doing for the last 10 years. So I just continued this cycle of teaching and creating. So I started my personal brand at ollyrichards.co where I write a newsletter about business stuff, online business stuff.

Jackson (04:20.586)
Yeah.

Olly (04:27.97)
for educators and I'm essentially following the exact same playbook. So I'm telling stories about stuff that we have done at story learning. Um, and how we've grown the business there. So, you know, really it's just been a whole big, uh, endless, um, series of, of stories and teaching and creating and selling and growing and stuff like that.

Jackson (04:28.492)
Mm-hmm.

Jackson (04:49.512)
Yeah. No, that's amazing. And, you know, I've been reading books on storytelling, everything like that. And it's pretty much how everyone sees the world.

Right, so everyone can relate to stories and so when you share them, that's how they see the world, so they're gonna be able to relate to them more. I'm interested in your transition period of creating content and writing. What was the transition from not storytelling to being like, oh, this is where I'm gonna head with my content creation. I'm gonna tell more stories and I'm gonna be able to attract a better audience because of that.

Olly (05:22.526)
Yeah, so I mean, I've always used, so behind stories, to get into language learning theory for a second, behind stories is reading. So reading is a very powerful way to learn languages because when you've got a text, it gives you time to sit and be with the language. Whereas for example, if you're watching Netflix, everything's happening too quickly, so it's hard to, hard to really learn. It's not good study material. So I'd always use reading myself as a language learning device and

So it was authentic in that sense. But so what happened was I published a few books of short stories, um, for language learning and they were super popular. Um, and I noticed in fact, we're coming up on our 1 millionth copy sold of those books, which is an exciting milestone. Um, so that, that was the kind of first, the first thing that really took me by surprise. So then I started thinking, well, what if I started making, changing my courses to be based on

Jackson (06:05.804)
Wow. Nice.

Olly (06:19.43)
stories, given that it's obviously, you know, working and they did really well as well. And so it was through a series of kind of short experiments that we really proved that. Um, it was just a happy coincidence because I had learned languages through stories myself. I thought that I wanted to try teaching my way. It did, went really well. Um, and then, so it was just one of those very, very obvious things, you know, where, where all the stars align. And, um, so then eventually I just, I said, right. Well, what, what?

what does all in look like? And it looked like making our entire product range about stories. It meant getting our books, our short story books, traditionally published with Hachette, one of the biggest publishers in the world. Uh, it meant rebranding the whole business to the name story learning. It wasn't story learning originally. Um, and then redesigned the whole website and then starting to tell stories in our emails and all of that. So it was, it was a tipping point. Where, after, after which it made sense to do nothing but

Jackson (07:06.217)
Yeah.

Olly (07:18.422)
but stories. So, you know, the lesson I take from that is really that, it's very difficult to know these things in advance. So by putting lots of shots out into the world and watching what works, you kind of gradually get yourself closer and closer to something resembling a good answer.

Jackson (07:40.185)
Yeah. So what are the three benefits from learning from stories specifically?

Olly (07:46.498)
I mean, so as you say, stories are the way that we see the world. And so, you know, I'm not sure if there are three benefits in particular. There are many benefits, but the most obvious one that I, that I, that I will talk about is the fact that stories just give context to information. Right. So if I tell you a story about how, um, you know, I, I was, uh, I was trying to get to the supermarket before it closed. Um, and I knew that the supermarket closed at five o'clock. Um,

and I was desperate to get there. I had to dash across town, I had to swim through a river, like jump through hoops, run through a burning building. And I got there at 4.59 and managed to get my loaf of bread before it closed at five. Like you're just gonna remember the fact that the supermarket closes at five because there's all this other stuff that's happening around it. And so it makes things more memorable because it gives facts, context to latch onto. And as humans, we process information through stories from early cave.

Jackson (08:33.854)
Yeah.

Olly (08:45.922)
cave drawings to, you know, books like the Bible or the Quran. Um, um, you know, the, some of the most famous novels, for example, are how we make sense of life. These are all stories. And, um, and so, you know, you'd pick your, pick your, your major, your major part of life. And it's got stories.

running through the whole thing. So fundamentally stories make things more memorable. They're also more entertaining, which means we're more likely to engage with the stuff in the first place. They also, in the context of marketing, make boring things very, very interesting. You know, I mean, take B2B. People think, for example, you can't do anything interesting with B2B marketing because it's all serious professionals. Well, I'll tell you what, if you're sitting at a desk and you get a hundred emails in your inbox every day, or telling you about the latest update to...

Jackson (09:38.517)
Yeah.

Olly (09:44.834)
Microsoft office or whatever, and then write requests for proposals and God knows what. If a story from me comes into your inbox telling you about something that happened to me on the tube, on the Metro yesterday evening that shocked me, you're going to open and read that. Just because the fact that you're at work or it's about a work context doesn't mean that suddenly you stop being human. So stories, they cut through from beginning to end. You see that right now in the presidential...

elections in the US. It's all about what story can you tell? What narrative is going to capture people's attention? Stories are how we see the world.

Jackson (10:22.482)
Yeah, no, it's very interesting because I feel like in today's day and age with social media and all these different ways of marketing.

people are so promotional and they move away from stories and actually connecting with the audience. And so it's very hard to build that connection when you're just trying to promote, you're just trying to sell, and you're not actually letting them into your world and how you see things, which is through the stories. And so I'm interested.

from like your experience, like obviously you've had a ton of experience creating stories. What are the components that go into creating a viral story? Something that's very shareable.

Olly (11:06.722)
So this can happen on many, many different levels, right? So I typically don't do, I'm not big on social media, for example, never have been. So the question of virality is often something that we associate with social media. There are people who are great at telling stories on social media, Nick Huber's a fantastic storyteller. He'll often tell an end-to-end story that gets people totally riled up in the space of one kind of one...

short shortish tweet. So, and that's often just a point that's made in a very anecdotal format, you know, instead of just a regular tweet. Um, but then you've got stories over email, and then you've got stories over the, over the, over a kind of longer form blog post, and you've got entire books of stories and, and there are elements to this, which, which

which you can go very, very deep on this. There are entire books written on the different arcs that stories can have. I mean, the hero's journey is one of the things that's most well known, which talks about the various different stages that the hero, the protagonist in the story has to go through in order to...

Jackson (12:11.564)
Mm-hmm.

Olly (12:26.422)
you know, fulfill the criteria of a meaningful stories that they have to have a, an enemy, they have to have a struggle, they have to have a setback, multiple setbacks, they have to be close to the end and then almost getting the prize when it snatched away at the last minute and then they have to find another way to get it, you know, there are all of these different story arcs. Um, and you know, I, I don't really claim to be a particularly good storyteller per se, because you know, you're up against Dostoevsky.

Jackson (12:43.928)
Mm-hmm.

Olly (12:55.646)
Um, and Shakespeare, if you take it to that, to that extreme. So I, you know, I'm, I'm nowhere compared to those guys. I think what, what I feel like I've done quite well is I've got quite good at using stories for persuasion and teaching and, um, communicating online. Um, because you can use stories to sell, you can use stories to, to teach. Um, you can use, you can use stories to.

Jackson (12:57.24)
Mm.

Olly (13:24.822)
to just build a relationship with your audience. So when it comes to what makes a good story, generally the way, if I were to give you one very simple way that I tend to approach this, it is that I will start, let's take email for example, this is where I do a lot of my stuff. If I wanna write an email, and it could be a single email or a series of emails, I will first of all start by understanding what is the point.

that I'm trying to make. What's the transformation that I want the reader to, the transformation that wants to happen in the reader's mind. What do I want them to go through? What do I want them to understand or have learned by the end of having read my email? Get very clear on that first and then I'll find a story to wrap around it. Right. So for example, if I'm trying to tell people that, um, we'll be a good example. So I often, I often, uh, talk about in the business context, how

Jackson (14:08.492)
Mm-hmm.

Olly (14:24.246)
delegation is something you've got to be quite careful about because there's a lot of dogma around delegation. Everyone says, Oh, you have to delegate, delegate the $100 an hour tasks. So you can focus on the hundred on the $10,000 an hour tasks or, or whatever. And that's generally speaking is true, but the problem is that people, people will delegate too quickly before they actually know what they're going to replace that time with. And.

Jackson (14:37.962)
Yeah.

Olly (14:50.606)
And then there are things that should really never be delegated. I mean, sales is a good example. I mean, I meet so many business owners who sort of tell me about where they're at in their business and they're struggling with sales. And they'll tell me like, yeah, the sales guy I've got, he just doesn't get it. You know, and we've got two salespeople and they're just not selling like I am. And I say, well, get on the phone and start selling then. Why are you delegating the one thing that brings in the revenue for your business?

Jackson (15:12.603)
Mm.

Olly (15:20.15)
And then they'll say, well, but I can't scale without that. And then I'll say, well, that's a hypothetical, as a theoretical objection for where you are right now, you need to be on the phone selling. So, you know, get on with it. So, um, so anyway, what I I'll often use, um, the example of a Hollywood actor. So there's one particular video where I told this story about Will Smith and, and it was, uh, I mean, it's more of an analogy than a story really, but it kind of proves the point. And Will Smith.

you know, one of the most successful, richest, famous people on the planet. He can't delegate. He can't have someone come up to him and say, Hey, will you want to do this new film? And then he replies, yeah, sure. I'll get, uh, I'll get Joe blogs over here to do it for me. So, you know, to play, to play that, that scene on the train, you can't do that. Like the most, you know, you, you generally find that successful people are also very busy. They like work. They can, they actually can't delegate the thing that they're most well known for. So, um,

So, but rather than make the point about, about delegation, I'll tell the story about Will Smith instead because it's memorable. And so now I kind of get people emailing me. So I remember, I remember that thing about Will Smith and, you know, my, my video team turned it into a short on YouTube and did really well. Uh, so, so yeah, that's a kind of very, very long way of saying I tried to start with a point that I want to make and then find a story that neatly describes.

the point that I'm trying to make. And that's a very good starting point for making, for using stories to communicate about anything.

Jackson (16:58.184)
Yeah, yeah, 100%. So what makes?

a transformational story different than a regular story? Because a lot of people tell stories and some of them don't have points. One really popular story structure, along with the hero arc, is the three-act story structure, where you're setting up the problem, you're taking the viewer or the audience through a set of hardships or challenges to overcome that problem, which is act two, and then in act three, you're solving that problem or coming up with a solution. So what would you say is the difference

story compared to just a regular story that doesn't impact or transform people.

Olly (17:35.446)
Well, I mean, a regular story is a transformational story as well. I mean, you can't, I mean, tell me a story that you've heard recently that didn't have a point.

Jackson (17:46.348)
So you're saying all stories have a point.

Olly (17:48.446)
Right, exactly. I mean, if you've got Trump standing up saying that the country is getting overrun by, I don't know what language he uses, but it's not nice. What he's trying to do is he's trying to tell the story of like, you know, hordes of invaders coming in to the country. And what's the purpose of the story? The purpose of the story is to make a political point that he wants to, he thinks that

We should control the borders or else he's just trying to score points against, uh, against the other side or whatever. Uh, if Shakespeare's writing Romeo and Juliet, he's making a point about love. Um, and, and about, you know, the complexity of relationships. If you have, if you have, um, you know, the, you know, great novels, like, um, like, um,

like, I mean, you know, take any of your great novels from the classics, particularly from the 19th and early 20th century, you know, you're Russian authors, you're British authors, I mean, they're all making points about life, about society. So, you know, even a film, even if, when it gets into entertainment, I feel like I'm straying out of my territory a little bit because, you know, if you take it like your average kind of romantic comedy,

Um, you know, is there a, is there a point behind the story? I don't know. I'm not the right guy for that, but, but generally speaking, I mean, stories. Should stories are making a point of some, of some kind. I think the, the skill comes in understanding the medium and the audience. So for example, if I'm writing an email or an email sequence, I may or may not have the space to have three acts.

in the story. It might be a bit of overkill. If you're writing online, people, A, don't often have the attention span to keep following and B, don't read emails sequentially. So you're kind of, you're screwed really if you try to do that. You know, there was a great course by Andre Chaperone called Auto Responder Madness that came out about 10 years ago and it became one of the kind of Bibles of...

Jackson (19:42.968)
Mm-hmm.

Olly (20:07.658)
of, um, online marketing, because it taught you how to write email sequences through stories. It was one of the, one of the earlier courses that I took and it was fantastic. And he talked about writing soap opera style stuff and, and having open loops and, and things. Now, 10 years ago, people would read email sequences sequentially day one, day two, day three, day four, they don't anymore, there's too much going on. They're too distracted. They, they, unless you're doing an exceptional job, um, which I guess is a challenge.

Jackson (20:27.38)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Olly (20:37.102)
is a challenge worth accepting. But unless you're doing an exceptional job, then you're really gonna struggle to hold your audience's attention every single day through a multi-part email sequence. And so you're gonna have to understand how to structure your story within the constraints of the medium that you're actually using. And so obviously, Twitter, you can do it, but it's gotta be short. It's gotta be very, very unambiguous.

In email, there's more room for nuance. And you can get people to read a long email, but you probably can't get them to read five days in a row of email. You see, so I think the skill really online comes down to knowing how to craft a story that works for the particular use case that you've got.

Jackson (21:14.068)
Yeah.

Jackson (21:24.936)
Yeah. 100%. So, so what, what frameworks do you, do you look at when you're writing story copy for different platforms like email, you know, like other marketing efforts, Twitter or X.

Olly (21:41.214)
Yeah, so again, I focus almost exclusively on the exact formula that I gave you before, which is what's the transformation I'm trying to get in people? And then what's the story that's going to explain it? I tend not to go much deeper than that for online writing for that exact reason, because you risk losing people. See, already in this...

this day and age, you've already, you're already fighting the temptation to use really kind of short, obvious copy for everything. And you're fighting it's Twitter, you're fighting YouTube short, Tik Tok, the temptation is already there. So in a way, even by, um, by diverting from that and telling a story, which by its nature is slower, that is already, it already feels like a risk if you, if you're not used to doing this. And so you,

to you really do need to make sure that the story that you're telling is, it has to be gripping, it has to be engaging. And you really don't have the space to do a lot, a lot more than, than actually tell the story, make sure it's coherent, make sure it actually, you know, leads from one step to the next. And again, this doesn't really speak to length so much, a lot of stuff I write is fairly long, although I wouldn't generally go much over, you know, 2000, maybe, maybe 3000 words at most.

Where I spend most of my time is actually in the editing. So I'll pick a pretty simple story because I want the point to be understood, but then I'll go back and I'll edit many, many times. What I do when I write my newsletters is I actually print it out on paper and I take a red pen and I go through and I mark it up and I delete entire sections, rewrite the headline. I spend a lot of work editing on paper actually. And the point there is that I want, I'm imagining someone scrolling through on their iPhone, reading the email, maybe skipping bits.

And I'm thinking, how can I make this as easy as possible to read? Very short sentences. People, I've got emails from people saying, Oli, why is every, why is every, every sentence a paragraph? You know, why, why does your, why does this paragraph have three words and, and some ellipses? And I don't generally reply to them, but if I did, what I would say is, well, look, it's because when people are read it, flicking through your email, you've got to make it so easy for them that, that they can just

Jackson (23:59.967)
Yeah.

Olly (24:03.094)
effortlessly follow through. And if you have big block paragraphs and things, like it's just, it's a tragedy, I guess, but it's just that again, it's the medium. People, you're gonna lose people. They're not going to follow it. They're not gonna read every word. They don't have that attention span. And so I spend a lot of time editing for consumption. And style, I'd say, because I like to take my voice and tone quite seriously. So I'm trying to maintain the flow, the voice and the tone,

If there's any sentences that are redundant, that are not contributing to the story, I'll take them out. I have no compunctions at all about deleting huge stuff that I spent ages writing. So I'll do all of that stuff, but I don't tend to make it too complicated for that exact reason.

Jackson (24:48.472)
Yeah.

Yeah, no, what you're saying with like mediums, it's so true. I mean, just like where we're heading with social media and everything, like attention spans are lower, especially in like the younger audiences. And when you said like, you know, you're looking through the emails and like you're skipping past points like that often happens with copy. You go to the actionable tips, you might like skip a few points. And if they can't jump to a specific point in your copy and be able to continue digesting it, then you're going to lose that viewer. Right. So being able to look at it from that standpoint.

I'm interested though, what are your key tips to create consumable stories and copy?

Olly (25:28.494)
I think it's exactly what I just said, honestly. I think, I know that there's a temptation to always be looking for the more, the kind of fancier level of things. And like I said, you know, we can take it to its full extreme and start studying Shakespeare and all that, which point you can do an entire university degree and all the techniques he has. But really what I'm looking for is a simple story that's unambiguous, where the point is easy to see. I'm looking for short sentences for readability.

I'm looking for voice and tone. So that what we also want is for people to engage with you as a person, to respond to your personality. So your voice and your tone is important. And then I'm looking for consumability. How easy is it to read all this stuff? There are other things you can do. Like if you've, for example, if you, if there's a point in the story where, and this is the sort of thing that makes your English teacher wanna just pull a gun on you, you know.

But when you get to one of the key points of the story, you know, you can bold that entire paragraph because for the person who's kind of semi skimming, it signals to them, okay, I'll just read that bit there. You know, and then you also want to make sure that once you've told the story, don't assume that the point has been understood. State the point very, very clearly afterwards. So, you know, you tell the story about Will Smith not being able to delegate. And then you say,

Jackson (26:33.866)
Mmm. Yep.

Olly (26:55.89)
you say very clearly. So as this story shows some things you shouldn't delegate. And if you are delegating the thing that brings in the cash, don't stop it. Start doing it. It's like, you got to be explicit with these things. So stories, um,

Olly (27:14.046)
Stories serve a very important purpose, but you've also got, but it's not enough by itself. You have to also study copywriting, which I think you're kind of, you're angling out there in some of your questions, because where I think where stories finish, copywriting picks up in order to actually make it an effective piece of marketing. And obviously I'm focusing very, very heavily here on the marketing side of things, but you know, what...

If you're using stories because you want to persuade and influence, then you have to also be explicit in what you write.

Jackson (27:50.676)
Yeah, yeah, 100%. And how I think about it is with every story and piece of copy, it gets translated through every industry, movies, TV, shows. People don't think about it, but it's all 100% scripted. So this has been written. This has been in copy. This has been edited multiple times.

Olly (28:06.143)
Yeah.

Olly (28:12.444)
Yeah, very much.

Jackson (28:14.722)
Yeah, so what is your content creation process look like with creating copy and then editing until you get that perfect newsletter, perfect piece of copy that you feel good enough to publish?

Olly (28:27.33)
So it very much depends on the medium, right? So if I'm writing a tweet versus a long form sales page, then it's gonna be a very different process. But I'll talk about maybe the more difficult stuff, which is the long form sales pages, newsletters. Typically, what I do first is I tend to do quite a lot of planning. So if I'm writing a newsletter or a sales page, I won't start writing anything until I've got all of my ideas down on paper, structured and organized.

So I can't remember who said it. I don't know if it was Gary Bentsovanger or someone like that, but sales pages are not written. They are composed. So there's a kind of, and it is a bit of a myth that you can sit down and write a sales page. It's not what you do at all. When you prepare a sales page, you're conscious of all the different sections of the sales page. You know what needs to go into.

all of those different sections and you can write them completely separately and then later you'll assemble the sales page using all those different parts that you've done. So I have a process now if I'm doing something very important. So for example in my business personal brand I run these little workshops every month on different topics and the very first thing that I do is before I sit down and write any sales page or email or anything

I will write what I call a positioning doc. And in that positioning doc, I have a whole bunch of things. I write down who it's for, one single person, a precise avatar, I write down the transformation that I want them to get from it, all of the key benefits, and then all the different angles that could possibly be taken from, in the presentation of the marketing material.

And I'll spend quite some time getting all of that stuff down on paper. And then after that, then I might move to the sales page and then I am, um, essentially drawing from all of those things. So I already know who it's for. I'll know what the transformation is. I'll know what the key benefits are. Um, I will know, um, what the, um, what the, I mean,

Olly (30:44.286)
straightforward things that are easy to miss like the actual time and date of the workshop, you know, stuff like that. I will have some, you know, some things like who it's not for. I will know who some of the, if I'm presenting a certain vision, what's the competing vision and how might I position the thing that I'm doing against the competing vision. I'll know all of those things. So then typically when it comes to write the sales page, I'll just sit down and I'll write it as quickly as possible in one go.

Jackson (31:05.143)
Mm-hmm.

Olly (31:14.858)
And I learned this from Ben Settle, who said that he writes sales pages in a similar way. So I'll try and sit down and in one hour, I'll write the whole thing, beginning to end. Now it'll be very rough, but I'd rather spend the time editing the thing that I've already written than to... What I've really tried to avoid is getting a perfect first draft, because then typically you don't see the wood for the trees. You focus on the details, but not the flow. So the reason for me to write it very, very quickly is because I want to get all the flow out there.

Jackson (31:25.216)
Mm-hmm.

Jackson (31:39.991)
Yeah.

Olly (31:44.178)
I'll have an idea of the structure of my head, I know the different pieces, so I want to write it very quickly to get the flow out, and then I'll go back and I'll revisit it and I'll re-edit it, you know, five, 10, 15 times until it's perfect. Then I'll send it to a friend and I'll say, hey man, can you just read this and give me your gut take on it? Typically they'll come back to me and they'll say, you know what, these two bits just didn't sound right, or you're not using enough proof here, or whatever.

Jackson (31:55.828)
Yeah.

Olly (32:12.142)
And I'll read it back and I'll say, damn, you're right, I'm not. So then I'll go back and I'll edit it a little bit more. And then by that point, it's usually pretty good. So then I'll just pause on that and then after that I'll start to write the emails. Once I've written the sales page, I'll go and I'll write the emails because I now know exactly what the positioning of the product is on the sales page. And the emails, the job of the emails is to point back to the sales page. So that's made a lot easier there.

Well, often some of the copy can be lifted straight off the sales page into the emails. In the emails, I'm typically telling a story, but I might, but for each of the stories in one of the emails, I'll choose to take one of the angles that I've prepared from the positioning doc, and I'll just work my way through the different angles, find a story that matches each one. And, you know, so it's a very deliberate process of constructing the copy.

Jackson (33:06.87)
Yeah.

Yeah, 100%. Yeah. And it looks like, I mean, you've done really well in terms of aligning everything in your brand and in your business, like the messaging, the stories and everything, like it's that kind of like one point method. So like when you the sales page goes down to the newsletters will probably goes down to the Twitter and X posts, right. So I find that very interesting. In terms of like branding as a

Olly (33:30.411)
Yeah.

Jackson (33:37.698)
plays a role in that. What are like three overall tips that you would have for branding that someone could take and implement with their brand?

Olly (33:51.95)
I think branding is often kind of misunderstood and conflated with things like positioning and sales and design. These things are all a little bit different. The thing that I think about mostly when it comes to branding is that

Jackson (33:57.153)
Mm-hmm.

Olly (34:12.666)
your voice and your tone that you take.

is very important because I think with branding people often think about the visual side of things. They often think about how it, how something looks and that is important, but I don't think it's that important compared to the other things. So I tend to think about, so you know, and earlier I, I mentioned that, but the positioning doc that I write. So.

Jackson (34:41.28)
Mm-hmm.

Olly (34:42.55)
The purpose of that is really to kind of incorporate all these different elements into it. So I know who the avatar is. I know, I know what I'm, what I'm selling. I know the different parts to it. And so with, so branding, I find creeps into wall into all of these creeps into every different element of that. So for example, to take, um, you know, previously I was talking about my, my business brand, but, but to take story learning as an example, um,

What we are trying to do with story learning is to very, very clearly differentiate it from everything else. And so we do that on multiple levels. So the purpose of story learning is to help people learn foreign languages and to change their lives with languages. The, the, the positioning of story learning is that story learning is what you do when you've tried everything else and you're finally ready to learn a language. Because we know that for our people, they've tried a bunch of the free apps before. It hasn't, hasn't worked.

Jackson (35:15.116)
Mm-hmm.

Olly (35:39.094)
And, but our stuff is a lot, our courses are a lot more in depth, a lot more serious. And so people often will do like three years of Duolingo and then they'll come to us and they'll be like, damn, I should have done this a little bit earlier. And then we know exactly what the tone is that we were using. We know who we're talking to. We know the avatar. And so we're very clearly speaking that tone and it's to a certain extent it's modeled around me because, because the business has kind of grown up around, around me a little bit. But.

Jackson (35:51.776)
Mm.

Olly (36:06.794)
because I don't really write copy in that business anymore. It's mostly done by, by the team. Um, it's kind of all understood. So I consider that to be brand, you know, the fact that we're expensive. And we lean into that as well. We're different. We're expensive. Um, we are, we are like a method of last resort, all of that stuff. It's it, it mixes in positioning, it mixes in design and mixes in branding. So where one begins and one ends. You know, it's.

can be can be tricky to say, but, but almost in almost every case. So I do a lot of work with entrepreneurs as, as part of my, um, my business personal brand, and I find that in almost every case, people just don't have this properly thought through. So they can do, they might go through a branding exercise and they might read a book on branding and answer a bunch of questions, but actually, if you don't have this complete picture, very, very clear in your head, then all that stuff is for nothing.

Jackson (36:53.697)
Yeah.

Olly (37:07.158)
Um, so I'm not sure how satisfactory of an answer that is, but that's how I think about it.

Jackson (37:12.808)
Yeah, no, that's awesome. Well, that pretty much wraps up everything on my end, Ali. I really appreciate you being on the Digital Personality podcast, being the first guest. So I guess direct everyone to where you would want them to go to learn more about what you do, your newsletter, social media.

Olly (37:25.006)
Well, no.

Olly (37:36.45)
Sure, well, so if you want to find out about my language business, you can go to storylearning.com. We also have a big YouTube channel that you can look for, just type in story learning into YouTube. And then if you want to find out more about my business stuff, then you should join my newsletter at ollyrichards.co. And if you do that, you'll get a completely free 118 page case study that describes exactly how story learning works.

in exhaustive detail and people really like that, that case study. It's just a Google Doc actually, it's nothing fancy, but I kind of just did a massive brain dump of 10 years of knowledge of building that company into a Google Doc. It's currently completely free, so you can sign up to the newsletter at ollyrichards.co and get yourself a copy of that.

Jackson (38:22.996)
Yeah, that's actually how I found Oli originally is through the case study and the outreach to him on Instagram to do this podcast. But yeah, the case studies really good, really in depth and you'll learn a lot just about online education, business world and story learning as a whole and how Oli did it all. So go check it out for sure.