Sofia Mendes on sales pages that convert without sounding desperate

Sofia Mendes is a conversion copy strategist who spent five years writing launch copy for online educators before going independent and working with female founders on their sales pages.

She kept noticing the same problem: brilliant founders with strong offers, and sales pages that read like everyone else's.

Lead with the customer's language, not the founder's. "Stop writing about your offer. Write about the moment someone realises they need it." The first 150 words of any sales page should sound like an uncomfortably accurate description of the reader's Tuesday morning.

Her process always begins with five customer interviews. Only then does she load the transcripts into a structured AI prompt that surfaces the exact phrases customers use to describe the problem — not the phrases the founder wishes they used. On her own flagship offer, the page got shorter, not longer, and the headline finally matched the words customers were already saying in their DMs.

Conversions on her flagship offer lifted from 4.2% to 5.9% in a single launch cycle.

Interview five customers before you write a word, and let their phrasing — not yours — set the headline.