(Go on, the posts are clickable.)
Well, this is overdue.
Back in 2022, I co-founded Word Tonic, a gen-z-exclusive copywriting community with a few other gen z copywriters. We wanted a space for other people our age writing for a living to find each other, learn from each other, and explore the craft together.
To do that, we knew Word Tonic would have to be aggressively gen z from the start. That meant a casual and honest TOV, with the odd bit of swearing. We aren’t selling solutions to businesses, but rather a space to meet, chat and learn to gen z writers at all stages of their career—so we had to speak their (our) language. And it worked.
From its humble beginnings in a WhatsApp group (a mistake), I suggested that we expand it into a Discord server to make it much easier for people to interact. This also gave us space to invite other copywriters in for workshops and Q&As—and before we knew it, we’d had live masterclasses with writers from Disney, Marvel, Riot Games, Nintendo, and so many more. We’ve also somehow ended up with over 1000 members, at the time of writing, as well as a partnership with McCann and a periodical anthology of creative writing.
You can also also see us in Ad Age, among other places.
On the experience side, I’ve had a heavy hand in shaping the community Discord, created the creative writing anthology concept, contributed to our copywriting course, given AI and Games Writing workshops, handeled tech tickets and written bespoke python code for the server, and collaborated on copy for some of our Instagram posts. You’ve seen them above, and can see them alongside my other commercial copy here.