My most embarrassing failure — Sara Anna Powers

Since 2016, I’ve been building an audience of business owners who are interested in copywriting and messaging.

I have tried for many years to serve my audience with integrity — one of the core values of my business.

So when AI (which had been around since the 1950s but was mostly used by engineers, data scientists and researchers) became widely accessible in 2022, I faced a fork in the road.

And this will be relevant to you, which you’ll see shortly.

My million-dollar offer was a program, the Clickworthy Copywriting Certification®, that taught professionals how to become copywriters.

I started studying copywriting while I was a full-time attorney and built my copywriting business to six-figures on the side of a very demanding day job. So I knew first-hand the opportunity that the profession provided.

Then, in the fall of 2022, ChatGPT became widely accessible.

Interestingly, this was right after our first multiple-six-figure launch of the Clickworthy Copywriting Certification® (in August 2022) and right before our second multiple-six-figure launch of the program (in January 2023).

And while I was a little concerned about AI, the advent of widespread accessibility of ChatGPT did not dampen the company’s sales or my students’ success in 2022 or 2023.

Right before my 43rd birthday, I had my daughter Sara in March 2023.

I planned my next big launch of the Certification for February 2024.

We had excellent data from past launches, and based on that date, the launch was projected to bring in $750k.

More than 5000 people signed up for the launch, and I served my heart out for nearly three weeks teaching them everything I could about copywriting in 12+ hours of live teaching before we opened the program for enrollment.

When the doors closed, our launch revenue totalled just over $100k.

This was, at the time, devastating for me.

In retrospect spending $53,000 on ads and making more than $100,000 sounds pretty good, right?

But when you factor in the fact that I had 30 affiliates who all together made fewer than 5 sales, that I paid an affiliate manager 5-figures to support those affiliates, that the fees for our ads manager in the 6 months leading up to the launch and for the launch itself (her fees, NOT the ads cost) were more than $45,000, that the fees for the ads themselves were $53,000, and that ads only brought in a tiny portion of our sales and the vast majority of sales was brought in from organic traffic (people who were already on my list or following me before I promoted this launch), it starts to make sense how shockingly “bad” this launch was for my company.

I had a new baby, less than a year old, and a launch that lost money after ad fees, my ads manager’s fees, the affiliate manager’s payment, affiliate compensations and team salaries.

This meant that my company had to make up hundreds of thousands of dollars in projected revenue, all while I was still nursing an infant and adjusting to being a new mother at age 43.

And beyond that, it was an indicator to me that during the year following my daughter’s birth, the market had shifted radically.

I tried to reason with myself that maybe it was just a fluke.

Perhaps we just ran traffic to the wrong audience, or my energy was different as a mother and not as compelling to clients in some way.

Throughout 2024 I tested abridged variations of the certification offer, at lower prices, and saw a little traction here and there, but no large-scale momentum.

I continued to support my clients in building copywriting businesses, but the opportunities to sign up premium clients as new writers were thinning out.

I put my foot down about AI, obstinately believing that real writers who used it were selling out, and outright resenting it for disrupting the trajectory of my business and the ease with which my clients had previously been able to build lucrative copywriting careers.

In 2025, I watched the market shift even further toward scale and automation while I continued to teach my clients pure copywriting skills, with no AI-intervention.

Throughout 2025, I tested several different offers: in messaging, general online business-building, and even a full program on how to build out a certification.

Nothing was hitting.

It was like a critical ingredient was missing.

In the midst of all this struggle, I quit showing up on social media.

I still emailed my list, but I stopped growing my list.

In fact, while my list was around 20,000 subscribers strong in early 2024, at the time that I’m writing this newsletter I have 6552 subscribers.

(The silver lining there is that these subscribers are very active, and I now have a 60+% open rate for every single email).

For 18 months, it felt like all the skills I had built leading my business for 10+ years no longer mattered.

So I reached the nadir (for a business owner, that is).

I began looking for jobs.

I even made it through 4 interviews for a role as in-house legal counsel at a reputable organization.

Only to find out that the salary was less than my starting salary as an attorney 16 years ago straight out of law school, with no experience.

This was a low I debated about even sharing with you, because it is the furthest I’ve ever strayed from my purpose where business is concerned.

But I believe that sharing this will be helpful because I’m betting that you might have experienced your own low over the last few years. It probably wasn’t the same as mine, but we all hit lows . . . and it’s good to know you’re not alone.

There are a lot more thoughts I have to share around today’s working environment, but I’ll close this embarrassing chapter out by sharing that with the disappointment of the shockingly low salary offered for a senior-level legal counsel role, my eyes were opened to the reality that the entire landscape of business had shifted around me, and I had quite simply failed to adapt.

And for that, I owe you an apology.

You have trusted me to bring you the best wisdom and guidance around messaging in business for more than 10 years, and I let my fear hold me back from evolving.

I tried to convince myself in the beginning that it was wisdom not to learn AI, because it would surely be heavily regulated (3.5 years later, it still hasn’t been).

But the real reason I didn’t embrace it was that I was afraid of it.

And that is my most embarrassing failure:

Ignoring something so imperative for growth business just because I was scared.

I resisted AI because I felt like it was destroying everything I had built.

I let myself put bitterness and resentment ahead of possibility, adaptation, and growth.

Maybe you’ve been in a similar situation, where your world has been upended by AI.

Maybe you still fear that it’s going to steal your livelihood and destroy your business.

If you’ve felt like that, I promise you are not alone. Because I was right there with you for several years, feeling like a fraud because things were changing so quickly and I wanted them to stay the same so badly.

I was talking with a colleague who compared AI disrupting the marketplace to an asteroid hitting earth.

And after surviving the first hit, I didn’t want to go anywhere near that asteroid.

I wanted to pretend it didn’t exist.

I ignored it until it was unignorable.

My big turning point came after 18 months of metaphorically banging my head against a wall to test out different offers that might support my clients.

That’s when I realized that even if I fully left the copywriting niche, I would still need to understand and implement AI to truly serve my clients at the highest level.

And I had to ask myself a very important question:

What was I really tied to?

Was my true mission in business to teach copywriting?

Or was it to help small business owners navigate the uncertainty of the world, identify the opportunities in front of them, and build meaningful livelihoods by tapping into those opportunities?

For me, my true mission is absolutely the latter.

Copywriting was a vehicle that allowed me to serve my clients for many years, but in the end, what I’m deeply passionate about is helping people who KNOW they have potential to succeed in business hit revenue, profit, and lifestyle goals that the average employee would see as completely unattainable.

I’m firmly committed to helping people like you take your talent, multiply it, and monetize it online.

Once I got clear on my mission, I finally surrendered my stubbornness and decided that I would put my full effort into mastering the thing I had been so afraid of.

And as so often happens when we face our fears, as I dug into prompting, building projects, and setting up automations, I realized my fear had robbed me — and you — of nearly two years of forward momentum.

That ends today.

What you need to know is that I am fully committed to mastering the ethical use of AI in business, and bringing you the most current and impactful ways to incorporate AI into your business without losing your distinctive voice and authenticity.

Because just like copywriting was the most accessible way you could easily build to $5k or even $10k months back when I got started, mastering AI is the quickest way you can grow a profitable business today.

AI is today’s version of the opportunity that copywriting was years ago.

It’s a skill that all successful business owners must master (just like copywriting), and it’s something that is easy to master when you have access to the right skills, tools and principles in place.

It’s also something that, if you decide not to master it, or if you try to learn it in a piecemeal way (grabbing random prompts from Youtube, listening to various creators on social media, and trying to figure it out without a clear roadmap) can keep you stuck for many years to come.

AI is the present, and it’s going to be present in all of our futures.

It is the generational opportunity that is in front of all of us.

In the weeks to come, I’m going to be talking a lot about AI as an Amplifier.

Like a physical amp that a musician uses, the input matters more than the output.

That’s where I can bring you the deepest level of support.

Because in order to get excellent quality output from these new tools, you still have to understand the structure of high-converting copywriting — and beyond that, you have to actually own your point of view, your perspective, and your beliefs so that you are infusing anything you put into AI with your distinctive human voice.

My approach is, and will remain, human-first, AI-amplified.

My promise to you:

When you harness the power of AI correctly, you’ll be Anti-Generic.

While everyone else is starting to sound exactly the same, your voice will cut through the noise.

And this weekly newsletter is, and will always be, 100% written by me, not touched by AI.

So you always get thoughts and perspectives that are filtered through the lens of humanity and the belief that business is ultimately about relationships and deciding what you have to offer someone that will make a positive difference in their life.

The reality is that AI is THE opportunity in front of us all today, and each of us is standing at a fork in the road right now.

You can look left, where things have been, and wish for the way they were.

Or you can look right and go that way, to navigate a future that is uncertain, but that certainly involves, in some way, shape, or form, AI.

So if you’re ready to go left, I wish you all the best, and this is where we part ways.

But if you’re ready to go right with me, let me know here by sending me an email, because I’m seeing some things that I think could benefit you in a big way.

That’s what I’ll be writing about: where the opportunities lie right now, as well as the pitfalls to avoid so that you don’t make the same mistakes I’ve made.

And if you’re ready to come with me on this journey, your sending me an email is your commitment that we’re going to face this uncertain future with hope and possibility and, together, we’re going to figure this out.

I’ve got several interesting new ideas to share with you next week.

So until then, I’m wishing you great success,

Anna

P.S. Thank you for taking the time to read these transparent thoughts. I appreciate and value you.