Episode 1309: The Next Evolution of the Video Sales Letter with Jon Benson

AI can write faster, but the real breakthrough occurs when it understands the strategy behind the words. In this episode of Sharkpreneur, Seth Greene interviews Jon Benson, Copywriter, Entrepreneur, and AI Pioneer, who shares how his direct-response copywriting evolved into building an AI platform for long-form sales copy. He explains why his team focuses on pre-prompting, promptless AI, frameworks, and LLM-agnostic systems rather than basic chatbot-style prompting. Jon also discusses how BNSN AI interviews users like a copywriter would, researches the market, strengthens messaging, and helps marketers create copy designed to convert. Key Takeaways: → BNSN AI was built to help marketers create direct-response copy faster and more efficiently without replacing copywriters. → Pre-prompting and promptless AI describe how this platform guides output before a traditional prompt is ever sent. → BNSN AI is designed to work with multiple LLMs. → The system runs copy through multiple models, settings, and revisions before the user sees the final result. → Many AI writing tools struggle because they function as simple skins on top of chatbots rather than as purpose-built copy systems. Jon Benson is a copywriter, entrepreneur, and AI pioneer whose work has quietly shaped how the world buys online. Best known as the inventor of the Video Sales Letter, a format that became the backbone of modern digital marketing, he has spent decades writing copy that moves people to act—not through manipulation, but through what he calls “persuasion that feels good on both sides.” In 2010, Jon turned his attention to copywriting software, becoming one of the earliest pioneers at the intersection of AI and sales copy. That work eventually evolved into BNSN, a platform trained exclusively on high-converting marketing campaigns and built for small-business owners who sell good things to good people. BNSN reflects Jon’s core belief that the human element of business—community, coaching, and genuine connection—distinguishes sustainable success from a flash in the pan. Connect With Jon: Website: https://bnsn.ai/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/itsjonbenson/ X: https://x.com/itsjonbenson Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/itsjonbenson LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonbenson/ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCPDvmgurd-rym4pyPjviIuw

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Welcome to the Sharkpreneur Podcast with Kevin Harrington and Seth Green. Kevin Harrington is the inventor of the infomercial, one of the original sharks from the hit TV show Shark Tank, and has generated over $5 billion in TV and digital direct response sales. Seth Green is the world's first trusted authority on cutting-edge direct response marketing, a bestselling author, and the only three-time marketer of the year nominee. On the podcast, Kevin and Seth interview sharkpreneurs who share straight talk on what it takes to explode your business.

• 0:38Speaker 01

  Forty-nine faces looked to him in triumph. Over the last 12 months, they had each taken turns and promoted his business for a week at a time, driving over $987,342 in revenue. What if you had a network of 50 centers of influence who promoted your business every week for a year? Grab your copy of the number one Amazon bestselling book, The Ultimate Guide to Growing Your Business with a Podcast at 33% off the Amazon price by going to ultimatenpodcastbook.com. Again, that website for 33% off the Amazon price is ultimatenpodcastbook.com. Welcome to the podcast. This is your co-host Seth Green. Today, I have the good fortune to be welcoming back a repeat guest and friend, John Benson, who you probably know as the inventor of the video sales letter.

• 1:23Speaker 01

  John was last on the show, I think it was over a decade ago, almost 12 years ago. He's been up to a lot since then. So, John, thank you so much for coming back.

• 1:33Speaker 02

  It's good to be back again, Seth. Like I said, every decade, man.

• 1:37Speaker 01

  Every decade. All right. So, tell us a little bit about how your world has changed and what you're up to now beyond being, you know, obviously the billion-dollar copywriter behind an entire movement.

• 1:51Speaker 02

  Well, a lot. I mean, we've been into what became AI since 2010. We started back in, well, back in the dinosaur era when it comes down to AI, back into very early, really nascent machine learning stuff, which is what led me into developing the software tools I did, and eventually led me into developing Benson, and that was the first real copywriting AI. And that was dedicated to direct response copywriting, long-form direct response copywriting. And so, we've been doing this quite a while, and so that's, that's been like a big focus of mine, not because I think that we want to replace copywriters, but because we just want to do things much faster, much more efficiently, give you the, give you the abilities of 10 people rather than one. So, that's kind of the focus.

• 2:35Speaker 01

  Awesome. So, talk a little bit about, you know, kind of what you've built.

• 2:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, so what our approach was from day one was, this is back, you gotta go, again, we're talking like in, it's like dog years, right? Every year in AI, it's like, it's like a dog year, it's seven years in, in, in real time, but if you go back to like, back in GPT-3 days, right? When you could get maybe 30 words out of, out of the AI, and it sounded all the same, and it was, it was really pretty horrible, but we saw the potential, we saw the handwriting on the wall. And so, we started a, a company reached out to me and said, could you put your video sales letter formula inside of our, could you let us train the model on it? I said, sure, knock yourself out, because I was like, this is no way this is gonna happen. And back then, I was right. It was, so they got 60 seconds worth out of it, and that's about it.

• 3:25Speaker 02

  But during that process, I saw a way to do it that they weren't doing, and I was, I told my team, I said, I think that this may work, let's try it this way, and ended up trademarking the process, and so we have a trademark on it. And we built Benson, the platform, the AI platform around this entire process. So, it's how we figured out how to do it four years ago, and, and the funny thing is, it's like, we're completely agentic, we've been, we were talking about agentic stuff two and a half years ago, before people even knew the term, but the, the agents are not smart enough to this very day to write copy the way that we were able to write copy with Benson. So, so we use agents to do certain things, but we still rely on the same exact principles

• 4:09Speaker 02

  that we were using, you know, four years ago. So, so I think that, that it's a little bit different in the sense that you're not just typing into, you're not typing into an empty field saying, I think I need a, a video sales letter, or an email sequence, and I have no idea what I'm, what it is, or here's the one I like, you know, that kind of thing. That thing you could do in chat, this is much more sophisticated and gives you a better copy. So, that's, copy that converts.

• 4:33Speaker 01

  That's even more important. So, talk a little bit about how you've rolled it out, how you've made it available, and kind of what it's been doing.

• 4:43Speaker 02

  Yes, we rolled that out originally, I opened it up to just an inner circle of about 100 people, went to Todd Brown's mastermind, I was a member of that for years, and, and said, hey, guys, I have this thing, and I'm tossing between two names, and one of the names sounded like a typical AI name, and the other one was Benson, everybody goes, you have to call it that, you have to call, so I, my wife was very emphatic about it, I think it's because it's her last name too, but, but nonetheless, it's my last name without the vowels, and it was rolled out originally, it was gonna be, okay, I'm just gonna write the, the world's first VSL AI, you know, so this is, why not, you know, my name is attached to it. And while we were rolling it out, I was like, why on earth limit it to just VSLs when they can, that's the hard part, we can, the easier part is the, the emails and the ads and things like that. So, so we rolled it out as a complete framework-based system, and we were using the term frameworks,

• 5:28Speaker 02

  and it was really funny, because I never in a million years saw that the framework would be like a new AI term that would come along. I would love to think that I took some kind of credit in that, but I don't think so, but, but nonetheless, it's like, next thing you know, everybody's talking about frameworks, and I went, man, we have literal, they're, they're literally called frameworks in the, in the, in the platform, and I just changed it to generators, because I didn't like the name framework, because it sounded like a template. And so, anyway, we've been doing framework-style stuff for ages, and we would just take the frameworks and do a more sophisticated version of it, which we, that's what we trademarked, something called pre-prompting. So, we do something before the prompt gets sent, and, and it's a, it's a pretty cool way of getting copy to sound, or anything to sound better, really, but especially copy.

• 6:12Speaker 01

  That is awesome. Have you had enough usage that people have implemented it, and kind of, you can report back in terms of the improvement in results and stuff that they're getting?

• 6:23Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah, four years worth, and it's, yeah, all the video testimonials are all over our pages, so, yeah. Yeah, it's, it's, it's definitely the Ferrari of copywriting applications, for sure. I mean, it's, it's, that's, that's, we want to be known for one thing, and one thing only, great copy. It's like, it's, it's really neat that I've got friends of mine that say, oh, look, all right, I will build the copy and also bake you a cake at the same time, and that's great, but I just want, the, the copy is paramount, and it, trust me, I see so many of these, and they are, yeah, they're just skills, they're, they're just running skills, trying to hope and pray that the AI spits out the right copy, and, and we, we don't do that. We, we, well, we run skills, but we don't, we run it through multiple models, multiple

• 7:05Speaker 02

  LLMs, multiple different temperature settings, and, and we'll run one piece of copy four or five times before you ever see it. So, we're saying, okay, now run this, and then take this out, and make this structure, and do this, and pull this, you know? So, it's a lot of stuff back and forth that no one in their right mind would probably want to do on their own, and so we just make it easier for them. And plus, you know, it's, I was just asked this morning, well, what's the difference in this and say, go into Claude, which is a pretty good writer? So, well, because Claude is limited to one LLM.

• 7:35Speaker 02

  I mean, unless you, you know, it's, it's just, if you're using OpenClaw, maybe you can, you can get by with, but Claude itself, it's not gonna call OpenAI and Grok, and it's not gonna do that, but we know that there are certain LLMs that are better at certain parts of certain things than other LLMs and others, other models, and so that's basically what we do. We built the system from day one to be LLM agnostic, so that's, that's kind of an important part of it.

• 8:02Speaker 01

  Absolutely. So, is it doing all of the things that you just referenced, or am I now, okay, so I don't have to take it to seven different LLMs and figure out what to tell each one to do?

• 8:12Speaker 02

  Gosh, no. Man, we wanted to make it, so, I mean, so I, the, the two things we coined was pre-prompting and promptless AI, so we trademarked those two terms, because when we came out, there was no other AI that I was aware of that you didn't need a prompt. So, we didn't work on any prompts at all, you literally just, you just click buttons. And so, I thought at that time, and looking back, I was, I was wrong about this, and that's okay, I don't mind being, because I'm wrong about a lot of things, but I was definitely wrong about this, I said, who wants to be a prompt engineer? It seems like people fell in love with being prompt engineers for a little while, now they're back to, oh, I don't know about, they're getting into skills and frameworks, and, and we were kind of like at that point from day one, saying, look, just, you don't have to worry about what to ask it, you know?

• 8:55Speaker 02

  Now we have a way, you can ask it, or you can not ask it, you can click a button or not click a button. But my point is, before, you couldn't even ask anything, you just click a button, and it comes, out comes the copy, and we wouldn't want you to figure out like, oh, you, I should have this temperature setting at this model for this part of the lead, and it's just like, you know, no one's gonna do that but a human. And that's where I think a lot of the AI apps fall apart, is they're, they're just skins and clones of ChatGPT or whatever, and, and we're definitely not that, I think, you know? Could have made a lot more money, I think, less development costs, but there's no way I'm gonna put out something crappy with my name on it.

• 9:29Speaker 01

  What do you think surprised you the most about, about what you built?

• 9:35Speaker 02

  Um, well, there's a good and a bad in that. I said, the, the, when I said the bad, the challenging part was, I, I really thought that Pete, that this would like be the most obvious thing in the world for people that, oh my gosh, I don't have to put a prompt in here at all. This is the easiest thing in the world. And I thought that this is going to take off on a massive scale, right? So it, that did not happen. That took, it took off on a scale for a very like, it was like, almost like a cult classic film, you know, it's like, it just kinda had this slow burn of a grind of like, just people catching on going, oh my gosh, this is a little, this app over here that does all this stuff, you know, but it was, it was not the explosion that I was, I was hoping for, despite being on top of everything and all that. And what was, what was the explosion was, oh, I can ask, I can chat in a question. And I, I had

• 10:20Speaker 02

  to educate people like, if you, if you put your own question in there, that contaminates the thread. So we know like now we have a phrase called context rot. So if you've gone through any sort of like long form, lots of back and forth with say Claude code or whatever, you get what's called context rot. You get, you get too much, too many words in there. It's going to start spazzing out and doing weird things and all. Well, that just, that was way worse four years ago, way, way worse. So we're like, look, don't put stuff in there. Let us do this for you. And that was a harder sell than what I thought it was going to be. I thought it was going to be like an apple kind of thing. Oh, it's like apple. And the people that got it, got it. And so the rest of it's been education. And the, the thing that surprised me the most on the positive side is people sending me stuff like, man,

• 11:03Speaker 02

  I literally just output this VSL and it's making 500 grand on cold traffic. So yeah, that, those kinds of things are, yeah, that we were the very first AI that I know of for sure, that was doing high volume, you know, conversions on, on VSLs and, and ads and email campaigns and things like that. Cause we, we're doing it as right as we can.

• 11:21Speaker 01

  That is absolutely incredible. So we use tons of different AIs obviously in our business. So now I've got to ask, if you're telling me, how is it giving me a VSL script? If I am not prompting it, like ultimately I understand I can click some buttons, but theoretically you don't have to answer some questions at some point. And two, um, does your AI or do you have one that you recommend that now after you've got a script will actually produce the video?

• 11:47Speaker 02

  Uh, great question. Let me take the, let me take this, the second one first. Okay. So, um, I have an AI, a separate AI app that does exactly that. Takes a script and turns it into, turns it into the video that you output. Those are completely different things and they always will be because I, again, we're in the business of one thing only, we're words. If we start saying, oh, we can also do this. Now we can interlink with that. You can API into that and that's fine. But I really want those to be two completely separate entities entirely. That, that really needs to be that way. And I, I, I hope that people appreciate that, that we're not trying to be, this is going to be a cafeteria style kind of thing. Cause when you have a cafeteria, I don't care what the cafeteria is, all the

• 12:31Speaker 02

  items there suck. They just suck less than other things, right? There, you're not going to get a Michelin star restaurant quality meal at a cafeteria. You're just not going to do it, right? And so we want to be that, that, that high quality Michelin star meal experience. And so we want to focus just on that one thing. So that, that, so the code, everything is built around one thing, words and only. So, uh, but the, the, the first question is very interesting. And I, I think it's, it's something that I know that Kevin would really appreciate because we've had long conversations about this, he and I. Um, is what I do as a copywriter is exactly how I build Benson is we interview you. So we just ask you questions. And so we know that the customer, 95% of the time, they're not

• 13:14Speaker 02

  going to know the, they're, they're not going to know what questions to ask. They're going to come to a platform and go, if you're looking at chat GPT and you've got the prompt, the, the chatbot staring at you and you're going, okay, I need a, let's say a video sales editor since we're talking about it. I need a VSL. So you type in what I need a VSL, right? Well, chat's been trained on the entire internet. Um, the internet is flooded with really bad VSLs. So that's not the best way to go about it. So what we do is a little bit different is we'll say like, okay, we're going to start for the foundation. What do you want to make money with? Tell me what you want to sell. Well, I've got a dog book. I got a dog training book. Okay, great. Let's do some research on that real quick. Give me one second. Oh,

• 13:56Speaker 02

  I just found about 10 things that you may want to be focused on. The comments that people are saying about this, this is what's going on on Reddit right now. We're going to pull some of this into the VSL. So before you even know what you're talking, so, oh, oh, I didn't think about that. So let's get a big idea. What's the big idea behind it? Well, what's a big idea? Well, the big idea is this golden thread that's going to run through your marketing. It's going to be the thing that makes your book stand out from everybody else's. And so we just walk someone through this entire process as I would as a copywriter. So the exact same process is what we do. We interviewed, that's what I did for years. It's been, that would be the large part of our budget with, when somebody hired me for a hundred grand to write a letter, 25 of it would be for interviewing, for just getting to the research. I mean, the research is just grinding. Benson does the research automatically.

• 14:40Speaker 01

  That is absolutely fantastic. You have literally, you and people following your firm have generated billions and billions of dollars in sales. What's your biggest challenge now?

• 14:50Speaker 02

  Uh, definitely growth. Uh, biggest challenge right now is, is expansion with, with being in Facebook jail. That, that's

• 14:58Speaker 01

  We can have a separate conversation about that. I have a few scars there from that.

• 15:01Speaker 02

  Oh my gosh. I, I don't know anyone that doesn't. And I, it's so funny because ours has nothing to do with, with, uh, being, doing something wrong in the ad department.

• 15:10Speaker 01

  I was gonna say you're an innocuous category. It's like you're not health, you're not wellness, you're not money, you're not vice, like.

• 15:16Speaker 02

  Nope, no, it's, it's, I've been, I've been in jail for, I was kicked off of Facebook for three years and then they let me back on, but I've got 60,000 followers on Instagram. I can't market to any of them. So we have to come up with other ways, which is, you know, I do a lot, I've got a YouTube channel. I do a lot of stuff where I just speak about all sorts of different things. So that's, it's more fun that way in a way, rather than trying to, okay, now we have to focus on traffic sources. YouTube's fine, but, but, uh, but Meta has been, uh, beyond challenge. And I'm not the only one that's gone through this, but I might, I think I'm the only one that's gone through it for free speech reasons. So I think that's, uh, that's, Kevin and I would, could talk for hours about that too. So.

• 15:53Speaker 01

  Absolutely. Your, your passion is obvious. What do you like best about what you're up to now?

• 15:57Speaker 02

  Oh dude, man, I, I absolutely love what I do. It's like, I, I, you know, I, I started this company when a lot of people quit doing stuff. And I'm like, I never will. I just, I love it. And I've been fascinated with tech and science fiction since I was a kid. So seeing AI come to life, I'm, I'm just seeing Lieutenant Commander data is standing over my shoulder. You know, I've just, I'm just seeing is the, the, this getting closer and closer to a, a world where we get rid of so many things. And I know that there's a lot of growing pains and horrible things that happen because of technology always does all, throughout all of human history. But hopefully the end result is not going to be a P doom of a hundred percent. It's going to be like maybe five percent. And then we'll all end up okay and a lot better off. So yeah, it's, it's exciting. It's a lot of fun.

• 16:41Speaker 01

  Awesome. For our folks who are watching, listening and want to learn more, where do they go to learn more about you and get Benson?

• 16:48Speaker 02

  Okay. Just go to bnsn.ai and we also have something called freebuyerprofile.com. That tells you is free. It gives you a 15 page report on the words and phrases that you should be using in your marketing and you should avoid in your marketing, depending on what, and we do this based on exactly what you're selling. So it gets you great, great little insight.

• 17:06Speaker 01

  Okay. So freebuyerprofile.ai and Benson, free profile, freebuyerprofile.com and Benson, B E N S N.com.

• 17:16Speaker 02

  It's bnsn.ai.

• 17:18Speaker 01

  Ah, without the vowels. That's what you meant.

• 17:20Speaker 02

  Yeah. B N S N.ai. Yeah.

• 17:21Speaker 01

  B N S N.ai. Awesome. Thank you for clarifying. Glad we're going to send them to the right place.

• 17:26Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 17:27Speaker 01

  All right. Well, we greatly appreciate your time. We know it's incredibly valuable. This has been Seth Green with John Benson from freebuyerprofile.com and bnsn.ai. John, thank you again for coming back to the show.

• 17:38Speaker 02

  Thank you, Seth. My pleasure.

• 17:40Speaker 01

  Thank you, everybody for watching or listening. We'll talk to you or see you next time.

• 17:44Speaker 03

  Why do so many businesses struggle while others seem to explode overnight? Do you wish you had the secret to this type of exponential growth? Now I've scaled more than 20 businesses to over $100 million and it's not just luck. In my new book with Mark Tim, Mentor to Millions, you'll learn the repeatable framework I use in all my business ventures for massive success. Order at kevimentor.com and get over $1,000 in bonuses. Head to kevimentor.com.