Scan time: 2-3 minutes / Read time: 3-5 minutes
Howdy rebel ideapreneurs 🦸♂️🦸♀️
🎬 The body on the poster
Saul Bass, a graphic designer, put a black image of a human body on a movie poster.
The head, arms and legs sat apart, like pieces of a puzzle.
The poster was for Anatomy of a Murder, a 1959 movie by director Otto Preminger.
The movie follows a murder trial.
There was plenty Saul could have tried to explain on that poster.
A trial involves people telling their stories and a jury deciding what to believe.
Trying to explain the whole case would take far more than a picture.
Saul chose one image to introduce the movie: that body in pieces.
Beside the title, it suggested a murder story with something to work out.
It could make someone curious before they knew a single character's name.
He also used the same design in the opening of the movie.
That's where the names of the people who made it appear on screen.
First, the whole body appears.
Then its separate parts appear beside the names.
Saul made those images with paper cutouts on a plain background.
Someone who'd seen the poster could recognize the body when the movie started.
The design gave them a simple way to recognize the movie, without explaining the entire trial.
The details of the story could come after people started watching.
The poster had a different job: give them a reason to be interested.
⛳️ The problem
Saul sold a whole movie with one picture, and never tried to explain the trial on the poster.
Back at our desk, we are writing the bio for our social media profile, the one people read before they decide to follow us.
We list the two degrees, the four job titles, and the award from 2019, because we are afraid readers will not trust us without them.
A stranger gets to the end of it knowing where we worked, and still has no idea what following us will do for them.
So they read our life story, shrug, and scroll on to the next profile.
Saul would have cut all of it and kept one thing: the reason to keep reading.
There is a bio that fits in one line, keeps your career in it, and tells a stranger what they will get from following you.
A former trader did it, and his program has since helped more than ten thousand writers, so here is what he wrote.
✍️ The old job that stayed in the bio
Dickie Bush and his business partner, Nicolas Cole, showed their newsletter readers a bio full of impressive job titles.
A bio is the short description of yourself on your profile.
Their example listed the person's roles as a company boss, board member and investor.
That was a looong list of achievements for a bio that never said what the person wrote about.
Dickie and Nicolas pointed out the gap: they couldn't tell what a reader would get from following that person.
Then, in the same article, they showed examples of bios that gave readers a reason to follow.
One belonged to Dickie.
This was June 2023, in their newsletter, Write With AI.
The two taught online writing through their program, Ship 30 for 30.
Dickie's bio included his old job at BlackRock, a major investment firm:
"Former @blackrock trader turned digital builder"
He'd kept his career change in his bio: from working for a financial firm to working for himself.
His online writing program was an example of what he now built.
For someone hoping to make that change, his experience could feel encouraging.
And he included what he'd done for other writers.
Get this — his bio said he'd helped over 10,000 people start writing through Ship 30 for 30.
The first example had left readers guessing what they could learn.
Dickie's gave a new writer a reason to pay attention: he'd already helped thousands of people start.
Turns out he could keep his old job and still make the bio useful to a reader.
His background explained who he was.
The writing result explained why someone might want to follow him.
🔥 The recipe
➡️ Cut to One Line
Saul used one picture to introduce a murder movie.
Dickie included a writing result that gave new writers a reason to follow him.
Both chose details that helped people decide whether they were interested.
This tactic is called Cut to One Line: give your intended reader one reason to follow, in one sentence.
The finished bio can be longer, as Dickie's was.
So the next time you edit your social media bio, start with what makes it useful to the person reading.
You can be proud of your experience without listing every job.
Save the full work history for your About page.
That's it, my fellow outliers!
Yours 'showing you that building a business is fun, not a drain' Vijay Peduru 🦸♂️
🏄♀️ The prompt
The prompt below uses Dickie and Nicolas's five bio types to draft newsletter bios you can test with real readers.
Save this prompt as a Skill or add to Project in your favorite AI tool — build once, use often.
Run it as is. Your AI sidekick will use your own files if it can see them, and the example values if it cannot.
CONTEXT:
- Use my own material first. If you can see my files, my notes, and my drafts, pull the real details from there instead of the examples below.
- If my Voice Profile exists, write in that voice. Otherwise, write in a clear, warm, no-jargon voice — first-person, plain words, no startup-speak.
- If my ICP / Audience doc exists, target that reader. Otherwise assume independent podcasters, one to three years in.
- Anything I leave as an example, treat as real. Anything I delete, fill in from what you already know about me, and mark it as your assumption.
- Write five genuinely DIFFERENT bios, not five edits of one. Keep the intended audience consistent so I can compare five ways of writing a bio for the same work. Leave out unrelated experience. Use these five types: Outcome = what readers can achieve; Aspirational Brand = who readers hope to become; Credible Category = your field and point of view; Credible Talker = topic, real results and relevant experience; Specialist = a specific skill for a specific reader. Never invent a result, qualification or promise. Under 20 words each.
=============== INPUTS — edit these, or just run as is ===============
My current bio, exactly as it stands:
{e.g. "Ex-BBC. Writer, producer, consultant. Passionate about audio storytelling. Cambridge. Views my own."}
Everything I have actually done, and the skill people come to me for in real life:
{e.g. twelve years in radio and a series of documentaries, and people ask me to listen to their opening and find what makes listeners stop}
The people I most want to reach, and what those people are worried about:
{e.g. independent podcasters whose downloads stall after episode five, worried that nobody finishes their episodes and they cannot tell why}
======================== END OF INPUTS ========================
Outputs:
1. What my current bio is doing — read it cold and say which intended reader, if any, would want to follow.
2. Five bios — five different ones, each under 20 words, each naming the intended reader and using one of the five bio types.
3. What each leaves out — for every version, the credentials it drops and why that is the right trade.
4. My pick and why — which one you would run, with the reasoning.
5. How to test it — where to try each bio and which reader actions to compare, such as profile follows or newsletter signups.
Then tell me which fact, if any, has no clear connection to what my intended reader needs.