Get Over the Fear: Sifu Edward & Sifu Julliana Armstrong Sit Down With Convertri's Andy Fletcher
Adapted from the recorded conversation; the guest's words are verbatim. The questions are reconstructed and voiced by Sifu Edward and Sifu Julliana Armstrong.
🎥 Video podcast coming soon. The complete interview will play here once published. The full conversation is transcribed below, and the audio edition will be available on sifuarmstrong.tv.
In a new Sifu Armstrong interview, the co-founder of Convertri explains why he built a page builder around the idea that if you can use Word, you can use it, and why fear, not skill, is most people’s real obstacle.
Andy Fletcher’s path to building landing-page software started with a bad joke at a marketing conference. He joined Sifu Edward and Sifu Julliana Armstrong for the latest Warrior Intelligence Series conversation to explain how that joke became Convertri.
Fletcher (co-founder of Convertri, the funnel and landing-page builder) was on a panel in 2015 when a friend asked why it took developers so long, and cost so much, to move a logo on a webpage. The laugh-line answer nagged at him afterward. Combined with research his business partner was reading on page-speed and lost traffic, the idea crystallized into one governing principle, printed out and stuck on the office wall for every developer to see: “If you can use Word, you can use Convertri to make a page.”
That obsession with simplicity shows up everywhere in how Fletcher talks about the platform, including what he sees as the single biggest mistake users make. “I would say probably the biggest mistake is trying to be too clever and too fancy,” he said, pointing to fancy animations that study after study shows hurt conversion rather than helping it. His broader philosophy on funnels follows the same logic: give a page one job, measure whether people did it or didn’t, and improve one visitor at a time. “On this page, five out of a hundred people bought the product, and tomorrow we’re going to try and make it six out of a hundred,” he said, describing the clarity a simple funnel gives that a typical website’s analytics never do.
Fletcher is candid, too, about the cost of his own drive. He calls himself a full-blown workaholic, prone to waking at 1 a.m. with ideas he has to write down immediately. But the advice he most wanted to leave with the Armstrongs' audience wasn’t about software at all. “Get over the fear and do it. Just embrace the fact you are going to suck horribly and just get started,” he said, describing years he lost simply avoiding the discomfort of being visibly bad at something new. “I wish I’d got to that a bit quicker.”
Fletcher also pushed back gently on industry trends chasing the newest checkout technology (digital wallets and one-tap payments) arguing that most everyday buyers just want a familiar box to type a card number into, and that optimizing for the cutting-edge few often costs more than it earns among the much larger middle.
The Armstrongs heard in that a truth they teach every beginner on the mat: nobody arrives good. The people who eventually get good are simply the ones willing to be bad in public long enough to stop being bad.
In This Conversation
- The joke at a 2015 conference that became Convertri
- “Just like Word,” the sign on the wall behind every feature decision
- Why fancy animations and cutting-edge checkout tech usually backfire
- Funnels explained simply: one page, one action, one measurable result
- Being a self-described workaholic, and the cost of never switching off
- “Embrace that you’re going to suck,” his real advice for starting out
The Full Conversation
Sifu Edward Armstrong: A movement lives or dies at the door. You can have the greatest art on earth, but if the path from "curious" to "enrolled" is confusing, slow, or ugly, the warrior turns away before they ever step on the mat. That's why the unglamorous machinery of sign-up pages matters so much to our Academy Commanders, and why I wanted to sit down with the man who built one of the best tools on the planet for exactly that.
Sifu Julliana Armstrong: And the thing he says that I'd tattoo on every beginner is this: get over the fear, accept that you're going to be terrible at first, and start anyway. Every competitor I admire was once visibly, painfully bad, and the only ones who became great were willing to be a fool in front of the mirror long enough to stop being one.
Our guest is Andy Fletcher, co-founder of Convertri, one of the major players in funnel and landing-page technology, built on the belief that the tools should be radically simpler than they are. Andy, welcome.
Andy Fletcher: Hey, thank you so much for having me today.
Sifu Edward Armstrong: I'm a believer that the best things are often the ones we fall into sideways. How did you end up in the online world, and what led to Convertri?
Andy Fletcher: Yeah, sure. So, my background is all technology. I have a computer science degree for my sins and after university I worked in a couple of tech jobs, and at one of them I worked at this absolutely terrible startup where we did all manner of things that never worked. We burned through a lot of venture capital while I worked there. I'd like to add, that wasn't my fault. And one of the things we did was celebrity websites. So, my stupidest claim to fame is that I worked on the official website for Ant and Dec. While I was there, a mate of mine bought an SEO book, because he knew I would read anything put on my desk. He left it on my desk knowing that I would pick it up when the senior managers were coming around looking for somebody to be the. I was politely referred to as the SEO bitch. And sure enough, I was sat there reading this book on SEO and the guy was like, "Ah, Andy, you know all about this. Fantastic. You get this new job." So that's how I got started with online digital marketing. And when that startup went belly up and they decided that paying us was optional, I went into business with myself doing SEO for clients and then making SEO products.
Convertri is actually the punchline to a really bad joke from an internet marketing conference in summer 2015. I was on a panel of more tech-focused digital marketers, answering questions about how software gets built. And my mate Jay sticks his hand up and he's like, "Andy, you're a developer. It's 2015, why when I get my developer to move my logo to the other side of the page, why does it take him so long? Why is it so expensive?" And at the time, my answer was a laugh-line that made me sound like a jerk. But that thought really nagged at me. Why, at the time, was it so hard to get pages live? There were all kinds of page builders that promised the earth, but if you wanted to do anything slightly off-piste, or take advantage of breakthroughs in technology, you just couldn't. You had to custom code stuff, you had to hire developers.
So, that's when we started putting together the first version. At the same time, my business partner Neil was reading all of the page-speed reports coming out of Amazon and Google where they were talking about how you lose, at the time it was 40% of your traffic, if your pages didn't load in three seconds. It's now up north of 50%. And we realised we could combine these concepts of: you put a thing on a page, you hit publish, and where you put it is where it appears. That's it. You don't have to understand responsive technology and rows and columns and all of this complicated stuff. If you can use Word, you can use Convertri to make a page, and then that page will load really, really, really fast. And that makes such a big difference to ad spend, to any landing page.
Sifu Julliana Armstrong: "If you can use Word, you can use Convertri." That's exactly the bar we hold our own operator platform to. The technology can never be the wall that keeps a willing person out. How did you fight to keep it that simple, and how does that beat wrestling with something like WordPress?
Andy Fletcher: The goal was as simple as it can possibly be. We made all of the developers working on it print out the words "just like Word" and stick it up on the wall. So every time we developed a new feature, they would ask, "How should this bit work?" And I tap the sign, every time. I want a 60-year-old to pick this up, move some things around, start typing and be like, "Oh, it's just like Word."
WordPress still has its place. We still run our own blog on WordPress. It's definitely not an either-or thing, but there's big chunks of the experience that WordPress makes really hard. With a tech background, I've worked on a tonne of WordPress sites and it's always the same sticking points. The security's been compromised, some update they forgot to run. And then anytime you want to do something, it's like, "Oh, you need a plugin for that." And then this plugin isn't compatible with that plugin, and this plugin doesn't work with that theme. It becomes this mess of tech when a marketer just doesn't care. It's not what they're interested in, nor should it be. They want to focus on, "How do I write a compelling message? How do I build a simple page that will generate me leads and make me sales?" What we've set out to do with Convertri is just push all of that into the background. Let us worry about all of that technical stuff so marketers can focus on marketing.
And Convertri gives you a mobile-specific mode, which to our knowledge, hardly any other builder out there does. Most give you a responsive design, so you design the desktop page and then it produces the mobile mode, but whatever it produces, that's it. With Convertri, we'll still produce an automatic mobile mode for you, but then you have complete control. You can move things around, custom fit it, change the scaling. Even simple things like hiding certain things on mobile, shrinking the headline font, or swapping the ordering around makes a really big difference to that mobile conversion experience.
Sifu Julliana Armstrong: Pushing the tech into the background so the operator can focus on the message. That's how we want every Academy Commander to feel: free to teach, not buried in admin. I want to ask about checkout, because I notice you don't chase every shiny new payment fad.
Andy Fletcher: We are definitely still in the infancy of that. Our industry has a bit of a fetish with the latest, greatest technology. And while Apple Pay's big, all of these wallets are big business now, but compared to the number of people that don't have it, don't understand it, don't want to understand it. They have a credit card, they know how to type digits into a box. A lot of people are very focused on, "How can I make it easier for the user?" with no-typing Apple Pay style stuff. But what they're doing there is optimising for the subset of people who are right at the cutting edge, and they're going to make it work whatever your UI looks like. Whereas your average user doesn't understand that stuff, doesn't want to understand it. They understand they've got a card, they type the numbers into a box and then they've bought your thing. And we find optimising for that side of it generally produces a better result than going, "Have you got an Apple Wallet? How about one of these Google things?" and your average user is like, "No, I don't. Give me the box."
They're coming, the wallets, they're here in a fairly big way and they're only going to get bigger. We've just noticed this theme of people obsessing over the cutting edge part and ignoring the big bulk of users in the middle who don't really get it.
Sifu Julliana Armstrong: Serving the many in the middle instead of the flashy few at the edge. That's a deeply unsexy discipline, and it's exactly right. Which leads me to ask: from your seat watching thousands of people use the platform, what's the biggest mistake you see them make?
Andy Fletcher: Oh, that's a really good question. So, I would say probably the biggest mistake is trying to be too clever and too fancy. A really good example is everyone comes to our platform wanting things like fancy animations, when study after study after study has shown they ruin your conversion rate. Animations appeal to the person that has to look at the site seven times a day for a year, whereas somebody just trying to get the information gets distracted by things moving around, fading in, and dancing around the page. Your average user is very happy to start at the top, maybe they'll skim read, maybe they'll read the whole thing, but they're very happy to just know that all they've got to do is pull that scroll bar down and get to the end.
You'll notice a really big theme in a lot of what I've been talking about, and that's a focus on simplicity first. Everyone online is obsessed with the latest widget, the latest craze, and a great many people would sell a great many more products if they would just focus on the basics. There's so many parts to this that you just don't need, and some fangled guru has said, "Oh, you must have this magic thing or you can't sell online," and it just doesn't make a difference a lot of the time.
Sifu Edward Armstrong: "Focus on the basics." That's the whole philosophy of the 9 Forms. A flashy spinning technique loses the fight; a clean, fast, fundamental strike wins it. The flourish is for the person who's bored of the work, never for the person trying to actually get somewhere. Explain, for the warriors who hear "funnel" and freeze. What is one, and why does it make everything clearer?
Andy Fletcher: Yeah, of course. We think about funnels in a couple of different ways. The first most important one is the idea of the positive and the negative action, which makes everything so much easier to test. With a typical website, you log into Google Analytics like, "How is my website doing?" And Google Analytics is like, "Here is a load of random data." It'll tell you that a bunch of people clicked on this page, a bunch of people clicked on that page. But it's very hard to determine what people actually did and didn't do. Where did they drop off? What made them buy?
With a funnel approach, each page has a specific action. Talking about a sales page, we have a product for sale and ideally we have no other links on the page other than the ability to buy the product. So everyone that comes to our page either buys the product or they don't. So when you look at your analytics, you don't have to go, "Oh, 3% of people bought it and 7% went to this other page..." It's like, "On this page, five out of a hundred people bought the product, and tomorrow we're going to try and make it six out of a hundred," which makes everything about it just so much easier to think about than the complexity you get from a typical website.
I'm a completely nerdy, techie guy, and I fell in love with direct response marketing online, this idea that we can tell how our marketing is doing. We run an ad, people come to our landing page, and we know how much we spent for those clicks, and of those clicks how many made it to the page, and of those how many opted in or bought. Everything is just so much more measurable compared to, "Well, I stuck 5,000 flyers out there and I don't really know what happened." I love that aspect of direct response online.
Sifu Edward Armstrong: "Five out of a hundred today, six tomorrow." That's the warrior's whole game: one honest increment at a time, measured, repeated, compounded. Now I have to push on something, because you said work-life balance isn't important to you. You're a self-described workaholic. As someone who's built a federation, I both admire the fire and worry about it.
Andy Fletcher: Oh, not important at all. I'm a complete workaholic. I love it. This is my hobby, this is my passion, this is my job. This is what gets me up in the morning. This morning I woke up at 1:00 AM with my brain buzzing with ideas, and I got up and started writing them down because I was awake. I love doing this. There's a team of 20 of us now. Contrary to some people's belief, I don't write all the code and answer all the support. We've got an incredibly talented team that handle a lot of the day-to-day. We've never really struggled with a motivated team; we seem to be really good at recruiting just really driven people. My job is to feed the pipeline, to talk about what's next.
Sifu Julliana Armstrong: I'll gently offer the other side, Andy, because we just sat with Donna Kennedy and Clate Mask, who both learned the hard way that the thing you love can quietly start owning you. The fire is a gift; just guard the foundation underneath it so it burns for decades, not months. Now, your best advice has nothing to do with software, does it? Tell our warriors how to actually begin.
Andy Fletcher: Get over the fear and do it. Just embrace the fact you are going to suck horribly and just get started. It took me so long to do the first few things, and I sucked, and I didn't want to suck. That was awful. I hated it, so I put off so many things. And when I finally got over my own ego and accepted that it was just better to do a bunch of imperfect stuff and learn some lessons, that's when things really started working for me.
But the mad gap between wanting to do the thing and doing the thing, because everyone's afraid, you don't want to have that feeling of just how badly you suck at it. But that's going to be true for the rest of forever. So, you may as well embrace whatever the next thing is. I still suck at so many things in my job to this day, but my brain wiring is different now and it's just like, "Cool, let's get up. Let's learn how to do it. Let's figure it out. Let's try a thing." And I wish I'd got to that a bit quicker.
Sifu Edward Armstrong: "Embrace the fact you're going to suck horribly and start anyway."
Sifu Julliana Armstrong: That's the white belt's sacred contract. The black belt is just a white belt who refused to quit being bad. Every champion I know was once humiliated on the mat and chose to come back the next day anyway.
Sifu Edward Armstrong: It's the same truth Jason Fladlien gave us (don't try to fight the black belt on day one), and Stefan Ciancio's "build the muscle." Andy, where should people find Convertri, and what's next for you?
Andy Fletcher: Obviously, I think people should come and check out Convertri. We've got a 14-day free trial, www.convertri.com, just click the sign-up button, and you get to try it for 14 days before we bill your card. I feel like I should mention some other things though. I'm currently obsessed with Alex Hormozi's $100M Offers book, like most of the internet is, and his new book $100M Leads. For anyone listening that has somehow not heard of Alex Hormozi, you should definitely check out his YouTube and his podcast. I have learned unbelievably much from that guy.
And what's next is probably our Editor 2.0 project. While Convertri's editor has been cutting edge the whole time, we see really big opportunities to take it to the next level still. We're hopeful to have something out later this year.
Sifu Edward Armstrong: All the best with that, Andy. Thank you so much for your time today. It's been an education.
Andy Fletcher: No, thank you very much for having me. It's been amazing to be here.
Sifu Julliana's closing word: The line I'm carrying out of this is the simplest and the hardest: get over the fear and accept that you're going to suck. Every master was first willing to be a fool in front of the mirror: to throw the ugly strike, to lose the early matches, to be visibly bad long enough to get good. The people who never start are just the ones who couldn't stomach that season. Don't skip it. Live in it until it passes.
Sifu Edward's closing word: Andy builds for the door (the moment a curious person decides whether to walk through), and his gospel is simplicity: just like Word, fast, no flash, serve the many in the middle, improve one out of a hundred at a time. That's the 9 Forms philosophy in software. Make the path so clean that no willing warrior gets lost on the way in, then get out of their way. And before any of it: get over the fear, and begin badly. We don't entertain warriors. We create them.
Andy Fletcher, co-founder of Convertri, the fast, "just like Word" funnel and landing-page builder. 14-day free trial at convertri.com.
ILLUSTRATIVE RESULTS. Any revenue, enrollment, margin or retention figure in this conversation is either a documented result from one of our own operations, a figure the guest reports about their own business, or an illustrative example, never a projection of your results.
Nothing here is financial, legal or tax advice.
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This conversation is part of the Sifu Armstrong Warrior Intelligence Series: interviews with world-class performers, builders, and thinkers, filtered through the lens of the warrior's path.
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