How to Write Your Own Landing Copy in an AfternoonHow to Write Your Own Landing Copy in an Afternoon

You have already said it well once, out loud, to someone who did not get it. The job is finding that sentence again, not inventing a new one.

Stop writing, start transcribing

Founders write badly about their own product for a predictable reason: writing invites you to sound like a company. Speaking does not. The version you say to a sceptical friend is almost always clearer than the version you type, because a friend interrupts when you get vague.

So record yourself explaining the product to someone outside your field for ten minutes. Transcribe it. The landing page is in there, in fragments, and finding it is editing rather than writing.

Three questions, in order

• What does it do? Say the mechanism, not the benefit — benefits without mechanisms read as advertising.
• Who is it for? Name them specifically enough that someone can rule themselves out.
• Why should anyone believe you? Point at a thing, not an adjective.

Answer those three in that order and you have the top of the page. Most drafts fail because they answer the second question first, and the reader has nothing to attach the audience to yet.

The edit that fixes most of it

Delete every sentence that would still be true if a competitor published it. Seamless, powerful, end-to-end and built for scale are all free to claim, which is why they carry no information. What survives the delete is the part only you could have written.

If the sentence is true of everyone in your category, it is doing no work on your page.

Then read the whole thing aloud. Where you stumble, the reader stumbles. That is not a style note — it is the only proofreading tool that reliably works.