Four paragraphs and no more. I’ve written this page for other people a hundred times and avoided writing my own for years, so here it is with the parts that are actually about you left as brackets.
This is one sentence and no more, so if you have been sitting with the cursor blinking for a while, use exactly this shape and move on, because the shape is already doing the work and you don’t have to invent a better one.
Two proof points is the maximum here, because one number and one real name will carry more weight than six adjectives, and adjectives tend to be what we reach for when we would rather not commit to the number.
The exclusion sentence does more work than everything above it, because saying who you’re not for is the thing that makes the rest of it believable, and it costs you nothing, so keep it in even though it feels like the risky line.
This paragraph builds more trust than the credentials one does, so don’t skip it and don’t invent it either, because one true small detail is what makes a stranger feel like they have already met you.
Here is what the four paragraphs look like when somebody has actually filled them in, and the bookkeeper below is invented, so read it for the shape rather than for the sentences, because the sentences are the part that has to be true about you.
I’m Maren Kessler, and I do the bookkeeping for small food businesses in Portland, so you can stop doing it yourself at eleven at night on a Sunday.
I’ve been keeping books for eleven years, six of them for kitchens, and right now I look after nineteen food businesses including Sweetbriar Bakery and both Halcyon coffee bars. Which means when you hire me, your quarterly taxes stop being a surprise, and you get a real food cost number every month instead of once a year when your accountant finally asks for one.
Working with me is quiet. I send one email a month with your numbers and a short note on what changed, and I answer questions inside a day, and I tell you when something is going wrong while it is still cheap to fix. If you want somebody who sits in on your strategy meetings and talks about growth, I’m genuinely not your person, and that’s fine, because I would rather be very good at the part I’m good at.
Off the clock: I keep a sourdough starter that is older than this business, I swim at the public pool at six in the morning most weekdays, and I am teaching myself to laminate pastry, which is going slowly.
See what a month costsEvery bracket from the four templates is filled in up there, so notice that the numbers are doing the work in the second paragraph and the sentence about who she is not for is doing it in the third, and notice how ordinary the last paragraph is, because ordinary and true is what makes a stranger feel like they have already met you. Yours will sound nothing like Maren’s, and it shouldn’t, since what you are borrowing is the order of the four paragraphs and not the words inside them.
Four paragraphs, one photo where you look like yourself, and one button to the thing you sell, and that’s the whole page. About pages usually fail by turning into memoirs, so the shortness here is the point rather than a compromise, and yours can go up tonight or next week, whenever you have a quiet hour for it.
[ the whole page in one paste, brackets and all ]
do this nowCopy paragraph 1 and fill in its three brackets, because the one-liner takes five minutes once the shape is decided, and the shape is already decided.
Yours to keep. Get It Live writes the whole site from your answers, this page included, free.