In this episode, I talk with Mat Patterson, a CX professional turned technical marketing writer who spent nearly a decade each at Campaign Monitor and Help Scout before going freelance and founding More Human Content. We talk about why content that keeps its personality connects better than content with all the edges sanded off, how he treats an email newsletter as an invitation into someone's inbox rather than a transaction, why small companies shouldn't voluntarily start sounding like big ones, and how years of putting his own name and face on his work shaped his move into freelancing.

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Mat and I discuss his winding path into writing for a living, which started with tech support out of university and a stint as a web designer beginning in the late 1990s, when one HTML course was enough to qualify you. He shares the moment he noticed someone had copied his company website, not the design but the copy, which he took as a sign he should probably be doing more writing and less web design. He joined Campaign Monitor as a support person, a role that called for web design skills and that he came to as an existing customer, and we talk about how being a user first gives you a real feel for how a company thinks and treats people. Over nearly ten years there he handled email support while also writing content for the knowledge base, the blog, and eventually giving conference talks, and that combination led him to a customer evangelist role at Help Scout for another decade before he went freelance and founded More Human Content.

The heart of our conversation is Mat's case for keeping personality in the content you write. He describes the frustration of finding a company whose voice you like, then opening their documentation and discovering every bit of life has been sucked out of it. We talk about the gravitational pull that draws growing companies toward a middle ground of corporate language that makes everyone sound the same, and why small companies and individuals shouldn't voluntarily give that up when they don't have to. Mat also reframes email newsletters as something closer to an invitation: when someone hands you their email address, they're letting you into their house, so the least you can do is be interesting. We discuss why a newsletter can feel like a conversation rather than a transaction, why the small risk of putting personality into your writing is worth the connection it builds with the people who do respond to it, and how putting his own name and face on a decade of content built a following that followed him when he left.

We spend the second half on the practical side of going freelance, including the fact that Mat left Help Scout full time and immediately signed a contract to keep making their content, how he decided what other work to offer, the difference between the ideal client he'd love to find and the writing that pays the bills in the meantime, and why marketing yourself while you're already busy matters more than waiting until you need the work. We both land on the value of a "one-page menu" instead of trying to be a cafeteria, and Mat shares how Greg McKeown's Essentialism gave him permission to get better at the things he's genuinely good at rather than trying to learn everything. He also makes a case for reading broadly, including libraries and secondhand bookshops, where he turned up a 1952 book called How to Write Technical Books that worries about many of the same problems we still have. Mat closes with the advice he keeps coming back to even though he doesn't always manage it: stop talking and start listening.

About Mat Patterson:

A former SaaS customer support team leader, Mat spent years teaching people how to deliver better online support before founding More Human Content, creating customer-centric content for people-centric businesses.

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