Write to one person

Copy that tries to talk to everyone talks to no one. Every book in the stack says the same thing in different words: picture one real, specific person and write to them as if it were a letter.

The mistake is to imagine "an audience", a crowd, a market segment. A crowd has no fears, no kitchen table, no Tuesday afternoon. A person does. When you write to a person, your sentences get warmer and sharper automatically, because you stop hedging for the imaginary exceptions in the crowd and start talking to one human who has one problem.

One framework I find genuinely useful is to map four things about that person before you write. Their fears, what keeps them up at night about this problem. Their wants, the result they are chasing. Their expectations, what they have been promised before and how they have been burned. And their deepest desires, the feeling underneath the result. Get those four down for one named person and the copy almost writes itself, because you are no longer guessing what to say. You are answering a real human you can picture.

The second half of this is to enter the conversation already running in their head. Your reader is not a blank page waiting for your pitch. They arrive mid-thought, already worried about something, already half-sold or half-cynical about your category. Good copy meets that thought where it is. It does not start from your message. It starts from theirs.

For me this matters constantly. My reader is often another founder who has watched the AI hype, half-believes it, and is quietly wondering whether any of it is real or whether it is all demos and threads. So I do not open by announcing what I have built. I open closer to what they are already thinking: that a year ago the idea of one person running real companies this way would have sounded ridiculous, and part of them still suspects it is. That is their thought, not mine, and meeting it is how I earn the next line.

There is a vocabulary point here too. Use the reader's own words, not yours. Read how they actually describe the problem, the exact phrases they use, and write those back to them. Copy that uses the reader's language feels like it was written by someone who gets it, because it was.

INTERVIEW EWOUD: Describe the one specific person you picture when you write for Solid Ventures. Not a segment, a person. What do they do, what are they afraid of, what did they try before that let them down?

INTERVIEW EWOUD: What is the thought already running in your reader's head before they hit your site? What are they half-believing or half-doubting about you and your whole approach, and how do you meet that thought instead of ignoring it?