Joe Rooks 👻✏️

Ghostwriter of brand-building content for leaders & investors in tech, energy & engineering.

[Joe Rooks 👻✏️ @Lexicontent]

🧵 Eleven years ago today—July 3, 2014—I was sitting in the food court of the Atlantic Station Target in Atlanta, looking out at the skyline and laying the groundwork for what would become Lexicontent.

[Joseph Rooks @JosephRooks]

After 8 days, 1 no-show supervisor phone call, 1 useless rank-and-file tech support person phone call, and more than 40 emails, @Meta Pro "Support" is asking for my phone number a third time after fabricating three completely different justifications for disabling my account.

[Joe Rooks 👻✏️ @Lexicontent]

#CopywritingStillMatters

[Joe Rooks 👻✏️ @Lexicontent]

Damn, that's a short theater run.

[Joe Rooks 👻✏️ @Lexicontent]

@Pauline_Cx Reading this made me want to throw my keyboard

[Joe Rooks 👻✏️ @Lexicontent]

@andresmendezdev @tdinh_me A lot of these companies continuing to exist will become unaffordable before too long. There will be a correction. There always is as the market gets saturated with competition and costs plummet.

[Joe Rooks 👻✏️ @Lexicontent]

Something something gold rush something something shovels

[Tony Dinh @tdinh_me]

How come AI models that cost $200/month are now normal??

[Joe Rooks 👻✏️ @Lexicontent]

AMEN 🙏 Your extrapolation is bullshit

[Dmytro Krasun @DmytroKrasun]

If you share ARR publicly on the third day after the launch, or even 7 months after it, you are manipulating me.

ARR better be calculated after 13 months (when the churn starts to kick in).

Because even with "modest" churn of 5%, it will be 50% of the reported ARR at the end of the year.

[Joe Rooks 👻✏️ @Lexicontent]

@asmartbear Thankfully not a problem I had after about 6 months in when I simply opened my website and deleted 95% of my "services" and focused on just selling the ones I could do without dealing with Atlanta rush hour 🤠

[Joe Rooks 👻✏️ @Lexicontent]

1b: Picked a business that's successful by the wrong metrics, so it doesn't feel good at all even though it "should"

[Jason Cohen @asmartbear]

The people who say you shouldn’t work on your business on the weekends either:

1. Have never built a successful business or
2. Spent years working overtime to build a sustainable business/lifestyle (great!) and forgot what it took to get there (not great!)

[Joe Rooks 👻✏️ @Lexicontent]

@arvidkahl Scrappy, love it.

[Jon Yongfook @yongfook]

Every 6 months there is a new “make money by doing <grift>” grift

Shitcoins
NFTs
Boilerplates
Vibe coding a SaaS

Learn to spot them and avoid.

[Joe Rooks 👻✏️ @Lexicontent]

Here’s to 11 more years of making it up as I go, writing it down, and telling others how it works.

Happy 11 years, @Lexicontent.

<3, @josephrooks

[Joe Rooks 👻✏️ @Lexicontent]

Our second potential client - an agency creative director - wanted to meet about working on a project for one of their clients.

But someone we didn't know tagged along and spent the whole meeting asking questions about our work and our process.

[Joe Rooks 👻✏️ @Lexicontent]

There’s a lot more grey in my hair now.

Might all be grey, honestly. I stopped keeping track.

But I’ve never stopped:

* Inventing the process
* Writing it down
* Trusting it to take me where I need to go

[Joe Rooks 👻✏️ @Lexicontent]

Our first client booked a $5,000 project.

We were thrilled. But they wanted everything done their way... they were messy and disorganized.

We mutually ended the project halfway through. Losing $2,500 hurt a lot back then.

[Joe Rooks 👻✏️ @Lexicontent]

🧵 Eleven years ago today—July 3, 2014—I was sitting in the food court of the Atlantic Station Target in Atlanta, looking out at the skyline and laying the groundwork for what would become Lexicontent.

[Joe Rooks 👻✏️ @Lexicontent]

...and the other half writing down “our way” of doing things.

Even if it was just for us at the start, it gave us something to point to.

A structure. Promises. Principles.

[Joe Rooks 👻✏️ @Lexicontent]

I figured if we could show we had a thoughtful way of working, we’d be taken seriously.

So as we got things rolling, I spent half my day reaching out to people we wanted to work with...

[Joe Rooks 👻✏️ @Lexicontent]

Before we even had a client, I was obsessed with process.

I wanted to be able to say we had one—when so many others were just taking orders like it was a drive-thru window.

[Joe Rooks 👻✏️ @Lexicontent]

But we were confident we could come up with an approach that treated people better than most of what I’d seen in the market.

Even if we didn’t yet know what “better” meant.