The Trust Recession is Real

The fastest way to build trust without a long-form sales letter.

Jason here.

While my wife and I both tend to be penny-pinchers, we've got very different ways of buying things online.

I usually find something "close enough" to what I'm looking for with 4+ star reviews.

My wife does hours of research, pouring over online reviews and asking for recommendations.

I used to think this was just her being overly cautious.

But I've been watching our campaigns this past year, talking to other marketers, seeing the same frustrations pop up everywhere, and I'm starting to think she's not the outlier.

She's the new normal.

Something's broken in how marketing works right now, and I finally think I understand what it is.

The 2026 Trust Recession

Everyone's talking about AI - and yeah, it's changed how everything, but not in the way most marketers are focused on.

The problem isn't that AI can write copy faster. The problem is that people know it can.

The internet is now flooded with content that looks professional, sounds legitimate, and could be completely fabricated by a computer in thirty seconds.

Deepfakes are so good that a family member just said they don't trust much of what they see online anymore. And AI-written copy is everywhere... people can feel it even when they can't quite put their finger on why.

The result is that the skepticism level is way higher than it used to be.

Every sales page, every email, every ad gets filtered through this lens of "is this even real? Is there a human on the other end of this, or am I being sold by a machine?"

And as a copywriter, my instinct used to be the same response to most problems. Write better copy. More compelling headlines. Stronger proof. Tighter offers. That's the solution to everything, right?

But I'm starting to think that's completely missing the point this time.

The problem isn't the words. It's who's saying them.

When YOU say YOU'RE good - when you make claims about yourself, your product, your results - people discount it automatically now.

It doesn't matter how true it is or how well you write it.

Self-promotion has always been discounted to some degree, but the discount rate has gone through the roof in 2026. And meanwhile, the premium on third-party validation has never been higher.

Which brings me back to my wife.

When she's digging through the fifth page of Amazon reviews, I have to remind myself sometimes...

This is how trust has always worked for people. Friends giving movie recommendations or saying "you've gotta try this Italian restaurant."

We just forgot because the internet let us shortcut it for a while with fancy sales pages and stacked testimonials.

That shortcut is closing fast though.

So I've been asking myself:

What actually builds trust right now?

And the answer keeps coming back to the same thing. Other people saying you're good.

Not testimonials on a sales page - those feel manufactured now, whether they are or not. Not case studies that could be cherry-picked or fabricated. Real people, in real communities, having real conversations about real results.

When a friend recommends something, there's an instant trust transfer that happens. You skip the skepticism entirely. You go straight to "where do I sign up?"

And it turns out communities can create that at scale - when people are actually interacting, asking questions, sharing wins, helping each other through problems, that's trust being built in real time. And it's almost impossible to fake.

I'm not just theorizing here, by the way. I stumbled into this working firsthand last year.

Back around last February, we ran a campaign with NO traditional sales letter. No long-form VSL. Nothing you'd recognize from the old playbook. We just got access to a 650-person Skool community and did some consistent nurturing.

The result: $45,000 in 90 days.

The community did the selling for us.

People saw what was happening inside, got their questions answered by other members who'd been through the same doubts, watched others post results in real time.

More importantly, they saw other people raving about the product in the comments.

By the time they hit the checkout page, the internal dialogue had already shifted from "should I buy this?" to "how do I make sure I don't miss this?"

Now - I'll be honest - I'm not entirely sure I could recreate that on purpose. We stumbled into a lot of what worked.

I know community-based selling is the move, but I don't have the repeatable system dialed in the way I'd need to teach it to someone else.

Travis Sago does this better than anybody I know though.

He regularly runs six-figure campaigns using communities as the core engine.

And he's managed to figure out both sides of the equation - building engaged communities that actually stay alive AND monetizing them without burning the whole thing down.

That second part is where most people fail, by the way. They either can't get engagement in the first place, or they kill the community the moment they try to sell anything.

Travis has solved both problems in a way that actually makes sense.

How to build a respectable income with a tiny community

Travis put together something called Community Fire Mojo, and it goes against a lot of conventional wisdom - which is probably why it works.

You've probably heard of the FIRE movement. Financial Independence, Retire Early.

The whole philosophy of scrimping and saving and living below your means until you hit some magic number and can finally stop grinding.

Travis's approach is different. He shows you how to "retire early" (or at least add more FUN money) with small communities, running one "fun auction" per month.

It's the anti-savings approach - build an asset that generates income with minimal daily input, instead of stockpiling cash and waiting decades to enjoy your life.

===> Check out Community Fire Mojo here

I don't know if this is the type of thing that floats your boat or not.

Maybe you're already swimming in community-building expertise. Maybe you're not feeling what I'm feeling about the market right now.

Either way, I'm sharing it because it's genuinely what I see working - and when I find something that works in a market where the old playbook seems increasingly useless, it feels worth passing along.

At minimum, I hope this at least got you thinking about the trust problem differently.

But if you're interested in seeing how we're building trust today WITHOUT 50-page sales letters, I'd recommend you give it a look-see.

===> See how Travis is making a respectable and low-stress living with tiny communities

Talk soon,

Jason

P.S. I’ve got some big changes coming to The Copywriter’s Coach this year, including a new revamp of the website and some more good stuff for paid members (at a lower price). Stay tuned.