The brand story and the founder’s story

A brand story explains why a project exists and for whom; a founder’s story explains why this person can be trusted. Both rest on a reason and on facts.

Two questions

Somewhere on a site, a person pauses and thinks: “Who are these people?” That is what the “About” page, or “About me”, is for. There are two stories you can tell on it, and they answer different questions.

• The brand (project) story. Why all this exists, and for whom. Its hero is again the visitor, and the project is a guide that has a reason to exist.
• The founder’s story. Why this particular person can be trusted. Its hero is the founder, but for one scene only: it is there to show where the guide’s empathy and experience come from.

On a small site this is almost always one page. For a solo expert it is called “About me”: the brand story and the founder’s story are the same.

Check yourself: what question does the founder’s story answer?

“Why can this person be trusted?” It shows where the guide’s experience and empathy come from.

What a brand story is made of

A good brand story has three things.

1. A reason. Why this project appeared: what you saw, what you weren’t happy with. Not “we always dreamed”, but “I saw how…”.
2. Beliefs as choices. Instead of “we value honesty”, write the decision you made for its sake: “we quote the price before the work starts”. Values you can’t check aren’t values, they’re slogans.
3. Proof. Facts the reader can check: a length of time, a number, a document.

Two familiar moves are best avoided. The first is the heroic founding myth (“we started in a garage, and now…”), which reads the same at a thousand companies. The second is a string of judging words such as “professionalism, responsibility, a personalized approach”.

The swap test

A simple way to find an empty sentence: put it on a competitor’s site. If nothing changes, it is empty. “We are a team of dedicated professionals with a wealth of experience” fits anyone. “Since 2012 we have helped the owners of 140 lots confirm their boundaries” belongs to you alone.

A second test is “so what?” “We take a personalized approach.” So what? If that can’t be answered with a fact (“we name the time and price before the work”), the sentence should be replaced.

A third is “prove it”: for every claim there should be a document, a number or a case.

Try it on the diagram: it underlines stock phrases and counts the sentences with no number or date. Paste in your own text. The program is crude. It suggests where to look, and a person decides.

Text (an “About us” or “About me”; you can paste your own) We are a team of dedicated professionals with a wealth of experience. We offer a personalized approach to every client and guarantee a high-quality result. Since 2012 we have helped the owners of 140 lots in Riverbend confirm their boundaries. We care about you.

Sentences: 4, with a number or a date: 1. Stock phrases: 6.

We are a team of dedicated professionals with a wealth of experience. We offer a personalized approach to every client and guarantee a high-quality result. Since 2012 we have helped the owners of 140 lots in Riverbend confirm their boundaries. We care about you.

What is marked is a candidate for the swap test: could the same sentence go on a competitor’s site with nothing changed? Then it is empty. The program proves nothing: it only suggests where to look.

Check yourself: how does the swap test work?

Move the sentence to a competitor’s site. If nothing changes, it’s empty: replace it with a fact that only you have.

The founder’s story

A strong founder’s story is short and built on one event.

1. The turn. What happened, and when or where. “In autumn 2012, in Riverbend, I spent half a year unable to get a clear answer to a question of my own.”
2. What it taught. Not a moral, but a conclusion for the work: “people need someone who explains step by step”.
3. What you do now. How the conclusion became your practice for the people the site is for.

Beside it stand supporting facts: documents, lengths of time, memberships. For experts this matters especially: a person must be able to tell a story from a checkable fact.

Four rules:

• Modesty. You are no savior. One scene is enough, and the victories belong in case studies.
• Truth. Only what happened. An invented founder’s story falls apart at the first check.
• Consent. If other people are in the story, name them only with their permission, and more often not at all.
• Use to the reader. The story must lead to what you offer, not to your biography for its own sake.

Such a page also helps with search engines: Google’s quality rater guidelines talk about the author’s first-hand experience and expertise (E-E-A-T), and about readers being able to tell who stands behind a site.

Check yourself: what should a founder’s story teach?

What the event taught, and how that became your practice for the reader. Not a moral, but a conclusion for the work.

Three lengths

You need to be able to tell the same story at three sizes.

• A line (up to fifteen words): a caption under the name, a line in a profile.
• A paragraph (about sixty words): an announcement on the home page, an email, a post.
• A page (three paragraphs or more): the “About” page itself.

The trick is that the reason is one: in the line it sounds like “because I once couldn’t make sense of it myself”, in the paragraph it is unfolded, on the page it becomes a scene. If the reason differs, the reader hears three different people. That is why in the practice you mark it in all three.

Language and tone

If a site has two languages, each needs its own version of the line, and ideally of the page. This is not word-for-word translation but a retelling for a reader of the other language: the turns of phrase and tone differ, and the facts need checking. Machine translation of a text that has legal weight risks distortion, and we will come back to it in the part on law.

Take the tone from the brief. A calm project suits a restrained “I”, a bold one short sentences, but neither has empty words.

Practice

Write an “About” page in three lengths.

1. A line under the name: one for each language of the site. One sentence.
2. A page of three paragraphs: the turn (with a date or a place), the lesson, what you do now. The supporting facts from the brief stay as a list at the bottom.
3. An announcement in a working note: about twenty words or more.
4. One reason: mark it in each length with a span element of the class reason. You can remove the marking afterwards if you don’t need it.

Don’t write “professional”, “personalized approach”, “best” or “unique”: name facts instead of judging words.

What was wrong with 2010

In the era of WordPress and ready-made themes, the “About us” page was often left as the theme’s empty placeholder with Latin filler text, or a set of judging words. A good theme couldn’t give a site a voice: you had to write one yourself. Today it is the same with AI: it will happily compose “a team of dedicated professionals with a wealth of experience”. The swap test is still done by hand.