Distil to one message
Every strong piece of copy carries exactly one message. Not three, not a tidy list, one. The most common failure is trying to say everything, which guarantees the reader remembers nothing.
The discipline is to distil before you draft. Before writing the piece, you force yourself to answer, in a single sentence, what is the one thing this needs to say. If you cannot get it to one sentence, you have not finished thinking, go back to Part One.
A clean way to do this runs in three steps. First, the context: what is the situation, who is reading, what do they already believe. Second, what you are saying: the single proposition, the one idea you want lodged in their head. Third, the endline: the shortest, most memorable form of that idea, the line that could survive on its own.
For one venture the chain might run like this. Context: a founder who has seen the "one-person billion-dollar company" talk and does not know if it is real. What I am saying: I am attempting exactly that, in the open, and sharing the climb. The endline distils down to the question itself, can a solopreneur really build a billion-dollar company. One context, one proposition, one line. Everything else on the page serves that.
A related tool is the one-sentence offer you write before any copy: the result you deliver, how fast, and what the reader gets to stop doing. "Build a real company without raising a round, hiring a team, or ever selling it." That is not copy yet, it is the spine the copy hangs on. Get the offer to one sentence and the page has a backbone.
The rule that falls out of all this is to say one thing only. When you are tempted to add a second message because it is also true and also good, resist. A second message does not add to the first, it competes with it, and the reader, forced to split attention, holds onto neither. Cut it, or save it for its own piece.
INTERVIEW EWOUD: Give me the one-sentence message for each of your live ventures. If you can't get one to a single sentence, that's interesting too, what's tangled?
INTERVIEW EWOUD: Tell me about a time you tried to cram two good messages into one piece and it went flat. What did you cut, and did saying less actually land harder?