Scan time: 2-3 minutes / Read time: 3-5 minutes
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Hey rebel ideapreneurs 🦸♂️🦸♀️
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🙋♀️ Paige’s About page that’s all about her
Paige is a marketing manager who’s building a course on the side, for small bakeries.
She’s writing the About page for her course, and it comes out as a paragraph about her.
It covers where she grew up, the job she started out in,
the year everything changed, and the lessons she learned along the way.
🧩 Her struggle:
She writes the page about her own journey,
so bakery owners leave before they see how she could help them.
At a yard sale, she flips through an old book about American ads,
and reads the true story of a famous bodybuilder
who also had a great story about himself to tell,
and whose ad ran in comic books for decades.
But the hero of that ad wasn’t him.
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🏖️ The advertisement about somebody called Mac
Charles Atlas was born Angelo Siciliano, a skinny immigrant kid in Brooklyn who got bullied and beaten up as a teenager.
Atlas often said that at Coney Island one day, a lifeguard kicked sand in his face in front of his date.
He was too poor to buy barbells, so he built his own training system, pushing one muscle against another.
He used it to remake himself into “the world’s most perfectly developed man.”
He turned that system into a mail-order course, no weights or gym required.
For years the business barely survived, until in 1928 an advertising man named Charles Roman joined him as a partner.
Roman gave the method its name, Dynamic Tension.
Roman took the sand-kicking story Atlas told and turned it into a comic strip ad.
In the strip, a skinny young man called Mac goes home, orders the course, comes back, and hits the bully.
That cartoon ran on the back pages of American comic books from the 1940s into the 1970s.
Roman made Mac up.
He was never a real person.
The strip never describes what Atlas looked like.
In the drawings, it’s Mac who gets sand kicked in his face, and Mac who says every line of dialogue.
Charles Atlas is barely in his own advertisement.
There is no story about where Atlas came from on that page.
There is no list of the titles he won.
The whole strip is about Mac.
The real Charles Atlas shows up only as a name.
He’s the company Mac writes away to, to order the course.
Turns out that strip is a campaign that ran for three decades.
The man selling the product stayed almost entirely off the page.
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🔥 The recipe
➡️ The Hero Seat
The Atlas ad ran for decades because it was about Mac, not about Atlas.
This approach is called The Hero Seat.
Charles Roman wasn’t being humble.
He’d worked out that your reader already sees themselves as the hero of their own life.
The only part left for you to play is the guide, the one who has been there and shows them the way.
Donald Miller built that same idea into a company, StoryBrand.
It now teaches more than ten thousand businesses a year to do the same thing.
His rule is principle number one in his book, Building a StoryBrand: “The customer is the hero, not your brand.”
So the next time you write a newsletter, or your About page, stop opening with your own journey.
Open with theirs instead.
They see their own situation in your first line, so they keep reading for the second.
Write about your reader, the way Roman wrote the ad about Mac.
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🛠️ Paige’s turn
Now, back to Paige, whose About page for her bakery course is all about her.
That night, she runs the prompt at the bottom of this email, and gives it her About page as it stands.
Her AI sidekick doesn’t waste words:
Your first line should be about a baker with empty tables on a weekday morning,
and your own career gets one line, near the bottom.
She deletes the paragraph about her journey that night.
Her new first line is about a bakery owner watching the chain café down the street fill up.
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🌅 A month later
Paige’s About page opens with the baker now, and her own story is one line near the bottom.
Three bakery owners have emailed her to say the page sounds like it was written about their shop.
One of them asked when the course starts.
Your About page is probably about you right now.
Put your reader at the center of your About page, the way Charles Roman put Mac at the center of the Atlas ad.
That’s it, my fellow outliers!
Yours ‘showing you that building a business is fun, not a drain’ Vijay Peduru 🦸♂️
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🏄♀️ The prompt
The prompt below rewrites your About page and your opening lines so the reader is the one in the story.
🧰 What you’ll need
Your About page or bio, as it stands now
- Paste it in exactly as it is.
- e.g. “I spent twelve years in marketing at big food brands before I started helping small businesses, and I’m passionate about helping local businesses grow...”Who you’re actually writing for, and what they want but don’t have yet
- Type it, or say it out loud with a voice tool.
- e.g. owners of small neighborhood bakeries, and they want more regulars coming through the door on weekdaysWhat’s in their way, and what you can really do about it
- e.g. the chain café shows up first when people nearby search online, and I have helped about thirty small businesses get found locally
🚀 How to run it
Open your AI sidekick, ChatGPT, Claude, or whichever one you use.
Swap the three examples, the text inside the curly brackets, for your own, then run it. If your AI sidekick can already see your notes, you can run it as is.
🧪 Want to test it first? Run it without changing anything, and it will use the examples.
CONTEXT:
- Use my own material first. If you can see my course pages, my emails, or my notes, pull the real details from there instead of the examples below.
- If you know how I write, use my voice. Otherwise, write in a clear, warm, no-jargon voice — first-person, plain words, no startup-speak.
- If you know who my readers are, write for them. Otherwise assume owners of small neighborhood bakeries who want more local customers.
- If I have replaced the examples, use only mine. If an example is still there, fill it in from what you already know about me, and mark it as your assumption. If you don't know anything about me yet, use the example exactly as written.
- My background may appear only as evidence that I can guide them. It never appears as the subject.
=============== INPUTS — edit these, or just run as is ===============
My current About page or bio, pasted as it stands:
{e.g. "I spent twelve years in marketing at big food brands before I started helping small businesses, and I'm passionate about helping local businesses grow..."}
Who I am actually writing for, and what they want that they have not got:
{e.g. owners of small neighborhood bakeries, and they want more regulars coming through the door on weekdays}
What is in their way, and what I can genuinely do about that:
{e.g. the chain café shows up first when people nearby search online, and I have helped about thirty small businesses get found locally}
======================== END OF INPUTS ========================
Outputs:
1. Who the hero is now — read my current text back and say plainly who it is about.
2. The rewrite — my About page with the reader as the hero and me as the guide, same length or shorter.
3. The first line — one opening sentence that names their situation so precisely they assume I mean them.
4. Where my background goes — the one or two lines of my own story that survive, and what job each is doing.
5. The three sentences to delete forever — the bits about my journey that were never for the reader.
Then tell me the one word in my current text that gives away who I thought the story was about.