Running a small business on the side means you are the client and the copywriter at the same time, and it is genuinely one of the harder things to navigate. There is no brief. No one to push back on you. No outside perspective telling you that your headline is too insidebaseball or that your about page reads like a resume.
The part that trips me up is emotional distance. With client work you can look at a product somewhat objectively and find the angle that actually matters to a buyer. With your own thing you are too close to it. You know every flaw, every compromise you made, and that bleeds into the copy whether you want it to or not. It either gets defensive or overclaims to compensate.
What I have been testing is writing the copy as if I just took on a new client and know nothing personal about the business. It forces me to ask the basic questions I would ask anyone else. Sounds obvious but it actually helps break the loop.
Curious how other people here handle this. Do you bring in someone to review it cold, or just keep rewriting until it stops sounding like you wrote it for yourself? Also wondering if the copy for your own business has ever actually converted better than stuff you wrote for clients, because mine is kind of embarrassingly inconsistent.