Comment by DoreenMichele | Hacker News Reader

Comment by DoreenMichele | Hacker News Reader

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Try reading this: https://johnnycupcakes.com/pages/about

Then sit down and "tell your story" in writing as if you were telling it over beers at a pub to a few new-ish friends who don't all equally well know your backstory. Get someone to read through it before publishing it. Good feedback is very helpful. Also, grammar check, spell check, etc.

You want to be somewhat entertaining, but more importantly you want to capture as succinctly and compellingly as possible why you are uniquely/especially qualified to offer a new and better solution to an old and tired problem space, basically.

There's also a movie clip I like and I've written about why elsewhere, so let me link you to that write up:

https://www.reddit.com/r/CitizenPlanners/comments/ecr2vv/get...

I actually suck at the doing business thing or I would no doubt have some brilliant tie-in here to "And if you have trouble with that, you can hire me..blah blah blah." This is why I still work for a writing service. And I blog.

Thanks for pointing me there! This whole about us thing took me longer to write than the content for the rest of the page, I hate selling myself. Seems I have my work cut out for me over the next couple of days!

Feel free to email me with your first draft or whatever.

I don't know how to do this networking thing or whatever, but I do know something about writing and about doing stuff on a budget.

Sounds good! Expect mail next week. And I ain't good at this whole networking thing neither.

Awesome!

This was an excellent exchange that I learned a lot from. Thank you both.

I agree with the "tell the story as if you were telling it over beers at a pub" part but please don't make your page 9Mb like in the first example ;)

Someone at a meeting recently quoted some historical figure about "If you want me to write a speech of 5000 words, that will be a thousand dollars. If you want me to write a speech of 500 words, that will be ten thousand dollars."

Writing concisely is a virtue, but getting in all the details often matters more. It's fine if the first draft is wordy. If you can reach a point where it tells the story well and is also concise, you probably have something "worth its weight in gold."

It can take a lot of time to get there. Good writing can take a lot of time. This is often not at all obvious.

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