Artificial intelligence is transforming the way entrepreneurs build businesses—but what if AI could do more than automate tasks? What if it could capture the unique thinking, voice, and decision-making process of the world’s most successful founders? In this episode of Build It to Billions, Brett Swarts sits down with Jon Benson, the legendary copywriting pioneer credited with helping shape the modern Video Sales Letter (VSL) and now the founder of BNSN.AI. Drawing on decades of experience in direct-response marketing, Jon shares how AI is evolving from a productivity tool into a powerful system for preserving and multiplying entrepreneurial expertise.
Throughout the conversation, Jon explores how business owners can leverage AI to scale their impact without sacrificing authenticity. From building AI models that reflect an entrepreneur’s unique style to using intelligent systems to create compelling marketing, improve decision-making, and increase business value, this episode offers a forward-looking perspective on the future of entrepreneurship. Whether you’re growing a company, preparing for an exit, or simply looking to stay ahead in the AI revolution, Jon’s insights will challenge how you think about technology, leadership, and creating lasting leverage.
Episode Highlights Here:
Brett
Before we jump into this episode, I would invite you to join our community to help you become a better steward, scale to billions, and ultimately give more or all of it away. All I want you to do is to click the subscribe button right now. I love your support, it’s incredible to see your comments, and we’re just getting started. I can’t wait to go on this journey with you. Thank you so much for subscribing. It means the world to me. Welcome to the Build to Billings podcast, where we got successful entrepreneurs and investors on their journey from millions to billions. We believe the key to scaling and compounding your wealth and life starts every single day with the mindset and practice of stewardship over ownership and applying billionaire biblical principles. Our ultimate goals have to scale and compound your wealth and life, so you can give moral all the way to help MVPs. My name is Brett Swartz. Each and every episode, we feature some of the world’s top entrepreneurs, millionaires, or billionaires, and they share their secrets, insights, and wisdom with us, so we can all level up and make a bigger impact. I’m excited about our next guest. He’s a copywriter, entrepreneur, and AI pioneer, whose work has been quietly shaped how the world buys things online. He’s best known as the inventor of the video sales letter, the format that became the backbone of modern digital marketing. He spent decades writing words that move people to act, not through manipulation, but through what he calls persuasion that feels good on both sides. In 2010 he turned his attention to copy software, becoming one of the earliest pioneers at the intersection of AI in sales copy, and so much more. We’re going to be talking about today. Please welcome the show with me, Mr. Jon Benson. Jon, how you doing?
Jon
Hey Brett, how are you doing? Great, man.
Brett
I’m fantastic. Thank you for meeting today on Memorial Day, and, and for our listeners out there getting to know you for the first time, maybe could you give us a little bit more color on who you are and what you’re doing these days,
Jon
yeah. So, I got started in 2004 I was, I owned an ad agency at the time in Dallas. I was a graphic designer and a musician, and that’s basically what I did for 15 years, almost. And I
wrote a book, and I teamed up with a guy that was an internet marketer. I had no idea what the word copywriter even meant. I thought it was like something a government did, you know they put the little C at the end of something? I had no idea what it was, so I never set out to be a copywriter. And next thing you know, I have a book that’s selling it. I quit my day job, I’ll put it that way. And then wrote the second one and had to write my copy myself because I didn’t have the partner, and I found out really quickly that’s very hard to do. So, I got, I dove into it, and never, never was very good at it for the first year, and then I stumbled on a way to do it with how my brain kind of responded, which was a video sales letter. It was essentially like I thought to me, like people aren’t reading sales pages, they’re reading like maybe 8% if you’re lucky, they’ll read the headline, sub headline, they’ll skim, they’ll go down to the price, they’ll, they’re not sold by the time they get the price. So, I was trying to solve that problem, and at the same time I wasn’t a good writer at the time, so I figured, well, what if I just wrote one block at a time? If, well, what if there’s a way they could just look at one section of a sales letter at a time, and that became the impetus for the first video sales letter, and I did the first one, and then just get just took off after that. Everybody wanted one, and next thing I know, I’m a copywriter, and that was not what I plan to be, but ended up being a pretty good one.
Brett
So it was all worked out well, you know. I believe we all been given certain, you know, gifts and talents, and God’s given us these things to be a unique work in this life. You know, I’m curious, growing up in the musical background, the creativity, and then you see all these things kind of come together, and then you naturally work through this yourself, and I believe you’re also best positioned to serve the person you once were. Talk about your unique gift, creative music, and all this kind of come together where you’re at today.
Jon
Yeah, one thing we’ve noticed a lot in the copywriting spaces, musicians tend to be a lot of musicians are copywriters, and vice versa, and they anthropic released a survey or a poll or something, and looked at who would who spoke to the machines better than other people, and turns found out that my degree in philosophy was not just deep thoughts of
unemployment. It seems like it actually paid off in the end. So, people that studied philosophy, and people that studied logic, and people, the Hoover artists and creators, so like musicians and things of that nature. So, maybe that’s the natural intersection of how we ended up talking to AI more effectively, but I’m not really sure if that’s the case necessarily, or if it’s just dumbuck, but whatever it is, it worked. And yeah, I find music and copy go together incredibly well. I teach a course called copy theory, so as in music theory, it’s the same thing. There’s a theory of copy, like there’s a theory of music, and talk about rhythm, I talk about pace, I talk about tone, the all the things you would think about in music, we kind of broken down into how we think about words. Words are very rhythmical, words should be very rhythmical, which is why most AIs don’t do it very well. They, they don’t understand the human rhythm.
Brett
Let’s just talk about that. Talk about your, you know, your two. Number one tool that you’reusing to help and have helped many entrepreneurs, and so if you like this little short clip of theinterview I just did, click over here to watch the full interview, and please don’t forget tosubscribe. Thanks so much, everybody.
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About Jon Benson
Jon Benson is a pioneering entrepreneur, renowned direct-response copywriter, and founder of BNSN.AI, an artificial intelligence platform built to help businesses create high-converting marketing content at scale. Widely recognized as one of the pioneers of the modern Video Sales Letter (VSL), Jon has spent more than two decades helping entrepreneurs, marketers, and companies dramatically increase sales through persuasive storytelling, consumer psychology, and proven copywriting frameworks. His work has influenced countless online businesses and generated hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue across industries including health, finance, software, and e-commerce.
Today, Jon is at the forefront of the AI revolution, combining his deep expertise in marketing with cutting-edge artificial intelligence to help entrepreneurs capture, scale, and even “clone” their unique knowledge and communication style. Through BNSN.AI, he empowers business owners to leverage AI as a strategic growth partner rather than simply a content-generation tool. His mission is to help founders multiply their impact, preserve their expertise, and build businesses that are more scalable, valuable, and prepared for the future.
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