Ever since high school, I have always been interested in writing. I landed my very first writing job as a freelancer to write campaign reviews for Cannes Lion Prediction event for a digital branding magazine. After that, in this way or another, my work always involves writing, from writing contents for a company’s brochure, website, blog posts to a piece of headline in Facebook ads or magazine ads. Crafting the concepts and playing with words always bring me a rapturous joy.
In the last crowdfunding campaign on Indiegogo that I led, we achieved more than $600K within three funding months and 1.5 million USD in total. The email campaigns I wrote brought 17% of the fund raised. Obviously, there are different variables that influence the success of a crowdfunding campaign, but words and stories count, especially when it comes to a newly launched product of a small start-up.
Project 1: Website contents – How much content is enough?
Planning the contents for the whole website can be a very daunting task. One must take into consideration all aspects, from core values of the brand, the target audience, to the information hierarchy, SEO and on-site user experience (can the users find the information they need easily, is the website informative, etc).
From a very minimal site from the first day, with the support of my colleagues, I turned the site into multi-pages with different types of contents and stories, testimonials of bloggers, and company’s own journals of different activities such as exhibitions, awards, or introductions of new hires.
Minimalism is a trend but a small startup can’t afford such luxury. The era of internet revolution generates an “empowered” customer generation” who are tech-savvy and can always search for anything they want, or can even negotiate the meaning of brands. Start-ups, therefore, have to provide as much info as possible to their potential customers, be it a third party’s blog posts, articles on some digital news outlets, company’s own media, to name a few.
Project 2: Branding materials: brochure, leaflets, & magazine ads
“Passport to the quiet world” is the company’s official brochure. When I entered the company, there was an exhibition coming, so I proposed designing a more informative brochure in a smaller size. The name came up when I thought that it would be difficult to get attention from a huge exhibition with lots of giveaway leaflets. It needs to be something fun and unusual, which triggered Janne, the founder, to think of the idea of resembling the brochure as a real passport.
The brochure successfully catches visitors’ attention at the exhibitions, from IFA to CES. At some exhibitions, we had to print out more of that locally.
Furthermore, I designed and wrote the contents for most of the leaflets used at exhibitions and the inflight magazine adverts (Singapore Airlines, Qartar Airways, Lufthansa, Air France, etc).
Project 3: Job description with more than 170 applications within a month.
This project ended my journey with QuietOn before I embarked on my new route. Since we are a small startup, it is too pricey to have a wrong hire. We would love to make it specific about QuietOn, not any other startup.
The simple conversational style of Forrest Gump inspired me to write this job description (JD). We got a lot of interesting applications with the real PDF proposals as requested in the JD. Some even wrote us back and wanted to talk with us even they know it is hard for them to relocate to Kempele, merely just because they are interested in us. But most importantly, the company got a good hire that can bring it further in its development.
I had a great time working with Janne, the founder and my boss. He has the vision and the enthusiasm of an entrepreneur.
Besides the copy writing work at QuietOn, I did a side project on Remotely Controlled Vehicle (ROV), aka Aalto Explorer. Check out the blog here!