He Hated My Voice. Now I Sell It for a Living

At uni, there was this guy who’d flinch every time I said “like” in a sentence.

You’d think I’d committed a hate crime against the English language.

He’d smugly correct me mid-conversation, like he was doing me a favour, while writing essays that sounded like they’d been Google Translated from a thesaurus.

The smugness. The unsolicited corrections. The deeply average grades.

Anyway.

More than a decade later, I still hear his voice sometimes. Usually right before I hit publish on something that sounds exactly like me.

Too casual. Too cheeky. Too “unprofessional.” Too bad.

Yet here I am. Building a business where tone of voice is the whole damn point.

Helping founders sound more like themselves, not less.

Writing copy that makes people say, “That feels like me”, not “That sounds like I opened ChatGPT and panicked.”

Your tone doesn’t need to be polished to the point of personality death. It needs to be clear, consistent and unmistakably yours and if someone like him doesn’t like it, congratulations! You’ve successfully filtered out someone who was never going to book anyway.

People don’t buy from perfect. They buy from real. 

So like... be it?!

Poetic, really.