We recently connected with Mark Williams and have shared our conversation below.

Mark , thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Risk taking is something we’re really interested in and we’d love to hear the story of a risk you’ve taken.

In 2017, aged 24, I took a risk that completely changed the course of my life: quitting a stable job in PR to go self-employed and travel the world.

At the time, it wasn’t really about owning a business. I’d heard about people called ‘digital nomads’ who were working wherever they wanted. Co-working spaces, coffee shops, beach bars – it sounded amazing.

I wasn’t exactly prepared; I had no savings, no freelance reputation and no clients. But I’m an optimist. I figured I could do it and booked a flight.

Six weeks later I was a newly minted, self-employed copywriter on the tropical island of Koh Phangan, Thailand. It’s famous for pristine white beaches, crystal-clear waters and all-night parties.

So I set to work building a client base. But it took way longer than expected. Like most new freelancers, I didn’t know my worth, or how to increase my rates. I tried to plug the gaps writing for the infamous ‘content mills’: online platforms churning out flat, generic copy from rookie writers earning a couple of dollars an hour.

Earnings were a problem. So much of a problem, in fact, that I once slept on the street in George Town, Malaysia, because a client hadn’t paid on time and I didn’t have even enough left for a backpacker hostel bed.

Fast-forward to 2025, and I’m still a self-employed copywriter. So things worked out in the end! In the last eight years I’ve built the business to a level I’m proud of and maintained the lifestyle I wanted – visiting 50 countries and counting along the way.

If I hadn’t taken that first risk, I wouldn’t have seen the world, worked with countless amazing clients, or met my incredible partner Emese.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

Sure! My business is Lightbox Copywriting – a conversion copywriting and product marketing studio for B2B tech companies. It’s just me full time, with a crack team of specialised freelancers with skills like like email marketing, journalism, brand and design to help out when a brief requires.

We help clients stand out in crowded categories with positioning strategy, brand & product messaging strategy, website copy, sales enablement assets (like decks and brochures), case studies and email copywriting, among other things.

Those clients fall into three groups: startups & scale-ups who are still finding their feet on their go-to-market, enterprise clients who run regular activations & campaigns through the year, and B2B agencies who don’t typically have a copywriter in-house for their own client work.

It’s a really competitive field. Tech lay-offs and economic trends mean there are lots of very talented people joining the flexible workforce every month, so copywriters need some clear differentiators to win new business.

Lightbox has three.

First – and probably most important – is world-beating client service. Our reviews consistently say we go above and beyond to make sure our clients achieve their end goal, which is usually sales or lead generation.

Across all feedback submitted by clients on Clutch and G2 so far, we’re rated a perfect 5.0. It seems this is less common than you’d think. I always assumed that making clients’ lives easy is just the table stakes, but clients often say things haven’t worked out with previous freelancers or agencies.

Second is a unique blend of skills in such a small team: combining marketing nous, behavioural science expertise (more on that later), and journalism experience. The result is work that’s more relatable, more persuasive and more memorable. All of which translates into more sales.

And the last one is our processes. I’ve spent a long time learning what works, what doesn’t, and how to make sure we’re always asking the right questions. From early discovery to final execution we’ve now got a very clear, linear approach to better understand our clients’ customers and tell the right story to differentiate.

Overall I think I’m proudest of the calibre of clients we’ve been able to work with, either directly or through agency partners.

There’s Slack, IBM and Deliveroo. There’s Givaudan – who combine AI with chemistry to create the flavours in thousands of different products we eat and drink every week. And there’s also the sovereign wealth fund for a country in the Middle East.

Are there any books, videos or other content that you feel have meaningfully impacted your thinking?

It has to be the book that sparked my interest in behavioural science, the study of why humans make the decisions we do. Robert Cialdini’s ‘Persuasion’ completely transformed how I see marketing, and how we all can be more effective in our jobs.

Think of behavioural science as a magnifying glass. It helps us better understand why people make certain choices every day – from their Starbucks order to the home they buy.

Let’s say you’re a software company. You want somebody to try out the features in your free trial – all the bells and whistles. The product definitely benefits the customer; they’re interested for sure. And they probably intended to try it. But then life got in the way, and they did something else instead.

That’s because what we *think* we’ll do in the future is often very different to what we *actually* do. Market research rarely tells the whole story; behavioural science gives us the missing piece of the puzzle.

With frameworks to understand the barriers that make it hard for us to perform a behaviour, psychological insight on how we make subconscious, emotional decisions, and scientifically proven techniques to make a certain choice feel more appealing, we can ‘nudge’ more people into finishing that free trial. Or exercising more, or buying healthier food. The potential is almost limitless.

Weirdly, though, the private sector has lagged far behind the public sector in adopting these strategies and tactics to influence our choices. If you’re in the business of changing a behaviour – and I can’t think of any business that isn’t – then you should be learning about behavioural science.

In *Persuasion*, Cialdini identifies 7 of the most effective nudges for sales and marketing teams, which he calls ‘principles of persuasion’, and the proven psychology behind them. If you’ve read the book, you might spot a few on the Lightbox website, and you’ll certainly notice them in the world around you. It’s a really, really good read.

Now, I use a more structured, evidence-based, behavioural approach in all client work – which ultimately improves results and grows their bottom line.

Do you have any stories of times when you almost missed payroll or any other near death experiences for your business?

To be honest, it felt like there were a few in 2024. Because we primarily work with startups and scale-ups, the bulk of the work – like writing copy for a new website – only needs to be done once. It isn’t recurring revenue.

So winning new business is never far from the mind, and last year was the biggest rollercoaster in that respect. Over the course of the year six different projects were cancelled or indefinitely postponed for various reasons – budgets were too squeezed, priorities changed, or in one case, the client just disappeared. It began to take a serious toll on my mental health.

As far as I know, it’s not a reflection of the work; several of these clients left glowing reviews. And it’s by no means unique to Lightbox. Scroll through LinkedIn and you’ll see that lots of people in this field had similar experiences last year.

That doesn’t, though, make it any less painful to lose out on £20,000 of revenue. It’s a lot of money for a one-person business.

But there’s an upside: just when things were feeling desperate, another project would always come through the door. And actually, by December, revenues were slightly up on the previous year.

I’m still hoping for a less stressful 2025! And if anyone’s reading this who had similar experiences – hang in there. You got this. I very nearly gave up at one point, and I’m glad I didn’t.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://lightboxcopywriting.com
• Instagram: @markdw_
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lightboxmark/