For about a year my homepage said this:
Technical founders and CEOs at growth-stage and lower middle-market PE-backed companies.
It is accurate. It is also a filter, not a sentence. It is the kind of line you would hand to a data provider to build a list. No founder has ever read it and thought that’s me.
That is the difference between a description and positioning, and it is the single most common thing I find when I read someone else’s homepage. So it seemed fair to start with mine.
The test I use
Read your homepage as your buyer, not as its author. Your buyer arrives with a problem, not with curiosity about you. They give you a few seconds. In those seconds they are answering one question: is this person talking about me?
Three things decide it.
Does the first line name a person or a category? Categories are safe and forgettable. My old headline was “GTM Strategy in the new AI Era.” That could sit on four hundred consultants’ websites. It said nothing about who was reading it.
Does the qualification happen in words or in money? My site said “For qualified founders” because the first call was free, and free things need a gate. The words were straining to do a job that a price does silently.
Does the structured data agree with the copy? This one gets missed almost every time. Search engines and answer engines read your JSON-LD more literally than your prose. Mine described “fractional marketing leadership for technical founders” long after I had stopped describing myself that way out loud.
What I actually found
The gap was not between my copy and good copy. It was between my copy and my own book of business.
Look at who I have actually worked with this year: a femtech founder building a device for women’s cognitive health. A nonprofit running workforce development in Dallas. Companies in regulated categories where the rules are real, where getting it wrong has consequences beyond a bad quarter.
None of those people chose their category because it was hot. They chose it because the problem was real.
That is the through-line. It was already true. It just was not written down anywhere.
What changed
The headline now reads:
You built it because it mattered. Now it has to grow.
And the who-I-work-with section opens on identity rather than firmographics:
Purpose-driven founders. You built the company because the problem was real, not because the category was hot — and people are already paying you for it.
That second clause is doing real work. “Purpose-driven” on its own says who you are, not whether you can hire me — and every pre-revenue, mission-first founder would read it as an invitation. The traction beat is what keeps the line honest.
The part that stung
The free intro call was the hardest thing to give up, because it felt generous.
It was not generous. It was unqualified. It filled my calendar with conversations that were pleasant and went nowhere, and it forced the rest of the page to spend words defending the gate. Replacing it with a fixed-fee engagement did more for qualification than any sentence could.
Try it on yours
You do not need me for this. Open your homepage. Read the first line out loud and ask whether it names a person or a category. Then open your page source, find your JSON-LD, and see whether it still describes the company you were two years ago.
Most people find at least one of the three. If you would rather someone else did the reading, that is what a Positioning Teardown is: one week, $2,500, your positioning read the way your buyer reads it.
Either way, do the exercise. The uncomfortable part is usually the useful part.