Tell them why you started.

Ask a founder why they started and you usually get one of two answers. The polished one, from the About page: “We saw a gap in the market.” Or the real one, told over a coffee: the job they hated, the thing that broke, the customer who said something that stuck. The second answer is the one people remember. It’s also the one that almost never makes it online.

That matters more now than it used to. A competitor can rebuild your product, your pricing page and your ads in an afternoon. They can’t rebuild the night you decided to quit and do this instead. That part only happened to you.

Why the polished version fails

“We saw a gap in the market” is true of every business ever started, so it says nothing. It has no person in it, no moment and no stakes. It reads like it was written to be safe, and readers can tell.

The real version has all three. Picture a plumber who started her own company after watching a crew leave a pensioner’s kitchen flooded. Or a bakery that exists because the owner couldn’t find bread his diabetic father could eat. You don’t need to agree with either of them to remember them, and remembering is most of the job.

What to put in it

–The moment. Not the year, the scene: where you were and what you saw.

–The problem, in plain words. What was wrong, and who it was wrong for.

–The decision. What you gave up to fix it, even if it was only your evenings.

Leave out the milestones, the funding and the team size. Those belong in a pitch deck. The origin story is about why, not how far.

Tell it more than once

Most founders tell their story once, on a page nobody visits, and then feel strange repeating it. But new people find you every week, and none of them were there the first time. A reason told once is a fact. A reason told for years becomes what people know you for.

It also doesn’t have to be the same video every time. One week it’s the full scene. Another week it’s a customer who had the same problem you did. Another it’s a decision you made last month that only makes sense if you know why you started.

This week, write your why in five sentences, the way you’d say it over a coffee. Then read it out loud to your phone camera in one take, without notes. If it sounds like you, post it. If it sounds like an About page, start again from the moment.

Be the obvious choice, not another copy.