Why You Can’t Write Your Own Founder Story (And Why That’s Actually Good News)
You’ve rewritten your About page seventeen times.
It still reads like a corporate memo mated with a CV.
You know your story matters. You’ve read the articles. You’ve seen how the great founders do it - Airbnb’s “we couldn’t afford rent,” Spanx’s “I cut the feet off my pantyhose.” Simple. Human. Magnetic.
So why can’t you write yours?
Here’s the uncomfortable truth: Your brain is biologically incapable of seeing your own story clearly. And once you understand why, you’ll stop wrestling with blank pages and start extracting the narrative that’s been there all along.
The Curse of Knowledge (Or: Why You Bury Your Own Lead)
There’s a cognitive bias researchers call “the curse of knowledge.”
Once you know something deeply, you can’t remember what it’s like not to know it.
For founders, this is lethal.
You’ve lived inside your problem for years. The pain point that drove you to build your startup? It’s so obvious to you now that you forget it needs explaining.
So you write: “We’re building innovative solutions for SMB workflow optimization.”
What you’re not writing: “I watched my mum’s bakery nearly collapse because she was spending 20 hours a week on admin instead of baking. I built this so that never happens to another small business owner.”
One is forgettable. The other is a story.
The psychological block: You’ve compressed your entire journey into abstraction. Your brain has filed away the emotional, specific, human moments because they feel “unprofessional” or “too personal.”
But those moments? They’re the only parts anyone remembers.
The Proximity Problem
Here’s the second issue: You’re too close.
When you’re inside the story, you can’t see the narrative arc. You remember everything - every pivot, every co-founder disagreement, every almost-shutdown moment.
So you try to include it all. Or worse, you include none of it and stick to “safe” corporate language.
What actually happens in your brain: You’re experiencing what psychologists call “choice paralysis.” You have too much material, so you freeze. You default to the blandest possible version because it feels like the safest bet.
A good journalist interviews you for two hours and pulls out the three moments that matter. They ask: “Wait, go back… what did you feel when that happened?” They find the throughline you can’t see.
You don’t have that outside perspective. So your About page stays stuck in draft mode.
The Humility Trap
Most founders are builders, not self-promoters.
You downplay the risks you took. You skip the part where you maxed out credit cards or worked three years without salary. You don’t mention the moment your co-founder quit and you nearly gave up.
Why? Because sharing that feels like bragging. Or vulnerability. Or both.
But here’s what psychology research shows: Vulnerability builds trust faster than credibility.
When you share what you risked, what scared you, what almost broke you - that’s when people lean in. That’s when investors write cheques. That’s when customers choose you over the competitor with better features.
Your humility is costing you conversions.
What Your Brain Can’t Do (That AI Can)
Here’s where this gets interesting.
The reason you can’t write your own story isn’t a failure of skill. It’s a failure of perspective.
You need someone (or something) to:
- Ask you the questions you’d never think to ask yourself
- Identify the moments you think are boring but are actually gold
- Find the throughline you’re too close to see
- Pull out the emotion you’ve trained yourself to suppress
A great ghostwriter does this. So does a skilled journalist.
But most founders can’t afford to hire either.
That’s the unlock with guided AI interviews. The AI doesn’t have your curse of knowledge. It doesn’t care about looking professional. It asks the hard questions:
“What were you doing the moment you realized you had to build this?”
“What did your partner say when you quit your job?”
“What almost made you give up?”
And from your answers, it extracts the narrative structure you’ve been sitting on but couldn’t articulate.
The Three Questions That Change Everything
Most founders don’t have a story problem. They have an extraction problem.
Your story exists. It’s in there. You just can’t get it out onto the page.
So here’s where to start. Answer these three questions (actually answer them - write them down):
- What problem are you obsessed with solving? Not the market gap. The human problem. The thing that keeps you up at night and drives your passion.
- What makes your approach unique? How is your solution different from what already exists? What’s your unique angle or method?
- What was the moment you decided to do something about this? Describe the specific moment or experience that made you think, “I have to do something about this.”
If you can answer those clearly, you’ve got the bones of your story.
If you’re staring at the screen right now thinking “I don’t know how to answer these,” that’s exactly the problem we’re solving.
Your Story Is Your Moat
Features get copied within six months.
Pricing gets undercut by hungrier competitors.
But your story? That’s yours forever.
It’s the reason customers choose you when your competitor has a better feature set.
It’s the reason investors take meetings.
It’s the reason early employees join for equity instead of salary.
Stop treating your About page like an obligation. It’s not a page. It’s your trust engine. Your differentiation. Your first impression on everyone who Googles you after hearing your pitch.
The founders who win aren’t always the ones with the best product. They’re the ones who tell the story that makes people want them to win.
The Good News
You don’t need to become a writer.
You don’t need to hire a $10k ghostwriter.
You just need the right questions, in the right order, with something smart enough to find the throughline.
That’s it. That’s the entire game.
Your story is already there. You’ve been living it. You just need help getting it out of your head and onto the page in a way that actually lands.
Ready to extract yours? Answer three questions. Get three unique story angles. Free. No blank pages. No seventeen rewrites. Just your story, clearly told.
The world has enough generic About pages. It needs yours.