Nobody cares what you do. They care what problem you solve, who else has it, and why you're the right answer right now. Tell them the "so what" first, and if it's compelling, they'll ask about the product on their own. It's the oldest advice in my trade, and most small business websites still get it exactly backwards.
At the end of April 2024, a Dallas- and Denver-based company called Backflip announced a $15 million funding round led by FirstMark Capital. Backflip helps small-scale house flippers find, analyze and finance properties the kind of people who do one or two homes a year and can't get the tools or the credit the big investors get.
I spent four years running communications, editorial and economics at Realtor.com, so I watched the housing market seize up from very close range, and I read a lot of real estate funding announcements. This one stood out, and not because of the money.
Backflip gave the story to one outlet, TechCrunch, as an exclusive, and the piece didn't open with "fintech platform raises capital." It opened with the problem a broken housing market, and a class of small investors locked out of the financing that would let them fix up the homes nobody else wanted.
Then they did something startups almost never do: they opened the books. More than 900 homes funded since mid-2022. Revenue up roughly fivefold in 2023, to a run rate of about $10 million. Real numbers, from a private company, when they didn't have to share any.
The product showed up late in the story, and by then the reader wanted to know what it was.
Backflip did it right, so the cost here is the one most owner-operators pay by doing it the other way.
Pull up the homepage of almost any dental practice. Somewhere near the top is a list: General Dentistry. Cosmetic Dentistry. Implants. Invisalign. Every practice in town has that exact list, in roughly that order, often in the same template. It tells a patient nothing about why they should pick you, because it describes what you do rather than what's wrong with them.
A patient searching at 11 p.m. with a cracked molar is not searching for "general dentistry." They're asking whether anyone near them can see them Saturday, whether it's going to hurt, whether it's going to cost a fortune, and whether their insurance will cover it. A club prospect isn't looking for "Amenities: golf, tennis, pool, dining." They're wondering whether their kids will have friends there, and whether they'll feel like outsiders at the bar.
The services list answers none of that. So the patient keeps scrolling, and the practice that answered their actual question gets the call.
Four changes, none of which require a redesign:
I first wrote this as advice for startups, about press coverage. It turns out it was also the instruction manual for being found. People now ask AI assistants questions shaped exactly like problems "who can fix a cracked tooth this weekend near me" and the pages that get pulled into the answer are the ones that address the problem directly, in plain language, near the top. A list of services is as unreadable to a machine as it is to a patient skimming on a phone. It describes you. It doesn't answer anybody.
Your services aren't the story. The problem is the story. Lead with it.
Adapted from a piece first published May 3, 2024.
