The first three words do ninety per cent of the work

The first three words do ninety per cent of the work

On every platform that matters, the buyer decides in a fraction of a second whether to keep reading. That decision is made on the opening: the first line of a LinkedIn post, the headline of a search ad, the first frame of a video. If the opening does not stop the right person and repel the wrong one, nothing after it gets read. You are writing for the scroll, not for the page.

A strong opening usually does one of three things. It names the reader so precisely they feel seen ("If you run paid for a B2B SaaS under 10M ARR"). It states a tension they feel but have not articulated ("Your best-performing ad is quietly killing your pipeline"). Or it makes a claim sharp enough to feel like a bet ("Most demo-request ads are training your audience to ignore you"). What it never does is warm up. There is no runway in paid; you start at the point.

Specificity is the cheapest way to win the opening. "Increase conversions" is invisible. "Cut your cost-per-demo by 40 per cent without touching your landing page" is a stop. Numbers, named roles, and concrete outcomes beat adjectives every time, because they signal that a real practitioner wrote this, not a brand committee.

Repelling the wrong reader is just as important as attracting the right one. If your opening is broad enough that everyone keeps reading, your costs rise and your lead quality falls, because you are paying for clicks from people who will never buy. A good opening is a filter: it should make a chunk of the audience scroll past, gladly.

INTERVIEW EWOUD: Give me two or three opening lines you have written that clearly out-performed, and the boring version they replaced.

INTERVIEW EWOUD: Do you have a rule of thumb for how specific the opening number has to be before it earns the click?