A human take on AI-created content
Courtney Fanning on finding your voice, living abroad, and working less
The Sustainable Solopreneur is a weekly newsletter about seasonal, cyclical, supportive business strategy for solopreneurs and creative souls who want more out of life than the status quo, hosted by business coach and strategist Jenni Gritters. Today, you’re reading the Sample Paths column, which takes you behind the scenes of someone else’s unique path to success.
Psst: Jenni’s first book comes out on October 21st! Join the Launch Squad for a week of activities, teachings and workshops here.
Today I’m excited to introduce you to a delight of a human: Courtney Fanning is a brand messaging strategist and copywriter who brings a completely fresh perspective to the world of words. With a background as a professional ballerina and a master’s degree in “selling stories” from NYU, she’s built a practice that’s equal parts empathy, strategy, and creative play.
After living overseas with her family for the past few years, she restructured her entire business around a 30-hour work week, proving that you can thrive without grinding yourself into the ground. (Very on brand for those of us who love sustainable solopreneurship.)
She also has one of the most practical, no-BS takes on AI I’ve heard, especially for those of us who feel conflicted about it. (Spoiler: Write 10,000 words first, then we can talk.)
Enjoy Courtney’s take on the path less traveled.
Courtney, I’m so glad you’re here! Can you tell us a bit about how you’d describe your work right now?
If I said, I’m your sounding board, intuitive business advisor, sometimes therapist, mind reader, and I do your homework for a living, would you guess that I’m a copywriter? I think I speak for all copywriters when I say our work is deeply strategic, and so very little of it has to do with words.
I got my start building brand campaigns in the book publishing industry, and through a series of events, I worked in higher education, the arts, and the tech industry. It never ceases to amaze me that no matter the client or the industry—a leadership coach for high-performance organizations, a mental health app for veterans, a pediatrician turned newborn care course creator—about 80% of our time is spent unpacking who you are, how you want to be perceived, how your audience relates to your offers, and how to convey all those things in concise sound bites you can read.
Because of my background as an artist (I’m a former professional ballerina) and an academic (I have a master’s degree in “selling stories” from NYU), my work as a brand messaging strategist and copywriter is highly empathetic and informed by data. And I freaking love it!
What are some “non-traditional” copy strategies you use with your clients, and why do they work?
Beyond being conversion-minded and strategy-first, I really push my clients to loosen the top button and get more conversational with their copy. Even though my clients choose me because my own website is written in a conversational tone with depth, and they know their audiences respond to brands that sound imperfectly human, they fall into old patterns of communicating out of fear. To coach them out of this, I write a ton of before-and-after copy swipes for them as part of their Brand Messaging Strategy blueprint deck. Once a client sees: instead of “Comprehensive stakeholder engagement protocols,” we might say “We make sure the right voices are heard at the right time,” they get it, and we have so much more room to play!
I also have an Audience Persona & Brand Messaging framework where we “flip the script” to create core brand messaging you can literally copy and paste all over your website and brand assets. I hate a PDF brand guide that you can’t update (mine are all Google Slides) and is full of non-actionable guidelines that mean nothing. I work so hard to show my clients: Here’s exactly how you can use this and here’s where it can go. I want you to use the copy we develop in a hundred different ways!
I know you lived overseas for a bit. Can you tell us what this taught you about running a business and your own capacity?
It made me realize which activities I was doing were actually important to my business. When you take away after-school childcare, add in working across 14 different time zones, longer school holidays, and throw in a dash of special education needs, you very quickly realize you can’t run a business as usual. I grossly underestimated how much I’d need to restructure the pacing of my client work and that I’d have to put my Copywriting Cohort on pause because I simply did not have the capacity to do it all.
Guess what? It was AMAZING. It made me admit what I knew on paper (and my P&L) to be true. The things that were taking all of my time were making me the least amount of money and causing me the most amount of anxiety. It also unexpectedly revealed that not only am I an introvert in real life, but I am also an introvert online. I’m just not interested in being performative during this season of life. (And I say this as a former performance artist who, for better or worse, craves external validation!)
What are your thoughts about AI? I loved hearing you talk about inputs and outputs the other day. It honestly felt like a relief to me.
Pardon my French, but “crap in, crap out” is a phrase I first heard in a photography class, meaning it doesn’t matter how many filters or edits you make to an image; if the original composition and settings are crap, you’ll always end up with a crappy final product. This couldn’t be truer for anything produced with AI.
We could talk about whether AI should be used for any creative endeavor—or at all—but the truth is, there are practical applications where AI can help solopreneurs who don’t have the benefit of a team doing all the invisible labor of running a business behind the scenes.
When it comes to copy and content creation, I firmly believe you need to have written 10,000 words about your business before you’re allowed to touch AI. You need to have a solid P.O.V., and have expressed in your voice across all your tonal ranges (because you express yourself differently on an About page than you do on a Sales page, for example). Then, you need to decide which parts of your work need original content that comes straight from your head, your heart, and your soul.
Your client onboarding emails for a new offer might not need to be wholly original—but that first onboarding sequence should have been. You must not use AI to write something from scratch, ever. That first sequence, written by you, gives you a baseline, but you still need to review and edit every single line of copy to make sure it’s in alignment. If the output sounds like it could have come from anybody, then you’re not ready to use AI. You need to practice writing for yourself and finding yourself between the lines, because AI’s not going to do it for you. And honestly, neither will a copywriter… but that’s a discussion for another day!
What are you most excited about right now, related to your work?
Bringing “freedom to live” back into my business. Related to my return from living abroad, instead of going back to a 40-hour work week, I’m sticking with 30 and pouring more energy into being a mom. I’m also turning 40 soon, and my “good for her, not for me” meter is off the charts. May it last!
What advice would you give to someone else who’s thinking about taking a non-traditional approach to their work, but feels really scared to disrupt the status quo?
The people who stand out are the ones doing things differently. The biggest disservice the online business culture gave us is the same blueprint. Everyone thinks they need to build a business the same way because one person did it and called it “proven”. Never mind that they are probably running a content-based business, and you’re running a service-based business.
Groupthink kills a new small business every day, so do your own thing because it’s the only way to thrive, rather than spending every day fighting to survive.
Courtney Fanning is the founder of Big Picture Copywriting and an expert in brand messaging and conversion copywriting for startups, founders, and large businesses. She has 15+ years of experience writing for businesses and brands across 26 industries, and her clients have appeared in Forbes, The New York Times, SXSW, Apartment Therapy, Rising Tide Society & more. In addition to client-side services and a DIY copywriting template shop, Courtney is a speaker, mentor, and workshop facilitator teaching the strategic art of aligning your brand and messaging to resonate with your ideal audience. She also holds a master’s degree in Print & Digital Media from New York University, which she lovingly refers to as her master’s in “selling stories”.
Join 3000+ readers who subscribe to her bi-weekly newsletter, Letters From Your Editor, for actionable writing advice and industry hot-takes that’ll breathe inspiration back into your day.
Curious about my (Jenni’s) background? I’m a writer and business coach living in Central Oregon. My goal is to teach everyone who will listen that it’s possible to build a simple, stable, successful business that supports your human needs first. Join my group coaching program, SUSTAIN, for more conversations like this (and a community of people who are all about the path less taken), and follow me on LinkedIn & Instagram.
Are you hiring a human today to do what you used AI for yesterday?
I LOVE this AI framework and totally agree! If we're going to train an AI model to help outsource brand tasks, that model is naturally going to need a LOT of source material in order to produce good and useful outputs. (Obviously, this is putting aside ethics which is going to feel diff for everyone.) I use this approach in my own business: I always write my newsletter and website content, BUT I will use AI to help me draft first versions of LinkedIn posts, which I typically repurpose from my newsletter anyway.