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Do not index
Do not index
Your LinkedIn About section reads like a cover letter because you wrote it the way you thought you were supposed to—credentials stacked, value propositions polished, mission statement positioned front and center. The problem is that every founder's About section follows the same template, which means yours doesn't actually position you as different. It positions you as interchangeable.
The About section that generates referrals and inbound interest tells the story of why you're doing this work and who it's for, using the same voice you'd use explaining your business over dinner. Not the elevator pitch version. The real explanation—the one where someone asks follow-up questions and you lean in because you're actually interested in the problem you're solving.
Most founders optimize their LinkedIn profiles for search algorithms when they should be optimizing for the moment a potential client or partner decides whether to keep reading. That decision happens in the first three sentences, and it's based entirely on whether you sound like a human being who understands a specific problem or like an AI-generated composite of every founder profile they've already scrolled past. The distinction matters more than most positioning work because this is where trust either forms or evaporates.
Who This Approach Is For (And Who It Isn't)
This is for founders running agencies or service businesses between $500k and $2M in revenue who generate most of their deal flow through referrals and direct outreach. You're not optimizing for recruiter searches or job opportunities. You're positioning for a specific type of client or partner who needs to understand not just what you do but why you're the right person to do it. Your About section should exclude more people than it includes—that's the signal that you understand your market.
This isn't for founders still figuring out their positioning or those building horizontal platforms that need to appeal to everyone. If you're pre-revenue or your ideal client profile changes quarterly, write a straightforward summary of your background and current focus. The narrative approach only works when you have clarity about who you serve and what problem you solve better than alternatives. It also doesn't work if you're uncomfortable telling the story of how you got here—the career pivots, the failures, the specific moment you realized the market needed something different. Generic origin stories perform worse than no story at all.
The Founder Origin Framework
The About section that differentiates follows a three-part structure: the origin of the insight, the translation into methodology, and the exclusion criteria. This isn't a framework you follow mechanically—it's the underlying architecture that allows your actual voice to come through without wandering into irrelevance.
The origin of the insight is the story of how you discovered the problem you're solving. This isn't your resume. It's the specific experience or pattern you noticed that other people in your industry weren't talking about. For me, it was watching agencies produce objectively good content that still resulted in client churn every six months. The writing wasn't the problem—the delivery systems were optimized for agency convenience instead of client voice preservation. That observation didn't come from a framework or a course. It came from being inside the work and seeing the same pattern repeat across different clients and team structures. Your origin story needs that same specificity. The reader should be able to picture the moment or the pattern, not just understand it conceptually.
The translation into methodology is where you explain what you do differently as a result of that insight. This is where most founders default to value propositions and service descriptions, which immediately kills the momentum. Instead, describe the approach or system you built to solve the problem you identified. Not the benefits—the actual mechanism. When I write about voice extraction from discovery calls, I'm not listing features of a service. I'm describing the specific process that prevents the three-month trial-and-error period most ghostwriters accept as inevitable. The methodology section should make a knowledgeable reader think "that makes sense, but I've never seen anyone structure it that way." If they think "yes, everyone does that," you haven't differentiated.
The exclusion criteria is where you explicitly state who this isn't for. Most founders skip this because it feels counterintuitive to turn away potential clients. But exclusion is the strongest positioning signal available to you. When you say "this doesn't work if you're still figuring out your ideal client profile" or "skip this if you need someone who follows LinkedIn best practices instead of breaking them strategically," you're telling the right people that you understand the nuances of the work. You're also filtering out the prospects who would churn anyway because they're not ready for your approach. The founders who generate consistent referral business all have clear exclusion criteria in their About sections. The ones still chasing every lead don't.
Why Voice Matters More Than Optimization
The reason most About sections sound like AI wrote them is because founders optimize for keywords and search visibility instead of voice authenticity. They've read the advice about LinkedIn SEO and profile optimization, so they stuff their sections with industry terms and role-based keywords. The result is a profile that ranks well in searches but converts poorly when someone actually reads it.
LinkedIn SEO tactics make founders sound like job seekers, not industry authorities. When your About section reads like you're trying to get past an applicant tracking system, you've already lost the positioning battle. The founders who generate inbound interest write their sections the way they'd explain their business to someone who asked genuine questions—complete sentences, natural transitions, the occasional aside that reveals personality. They use industry language because that's how they actually talk, not because they're optimizing for search.
The test for whether your About section works is simple: read it out loud as if you're explaining your business to someone at a conference. If you stumble over phrases or feel like you're performing instead of explaining, rewrite those sections. The voice that converts is the same voice you use when you're genuinely interested in helping someone understand whether you're the right fit for their situation. Not the sales voice. Not the thought leadership voice. The advisory voice—the one that assumes the reader is sophisticated enough to evaluate nuance.
What This Means for Your Business Trajectory
The founders who treat their About section as a positioning document instead of a profile summary generate different types of opportunities. They get referrals from people who read the section and immediately thought of someone who fits the exact criteria described. They get inbound messages from prospects who've already self-qualified based on the exclusion criteria. They avoid the tire-kicker calls with people who want their methodology but at a different price point or service level.
Your About section is working when people reference specific phrases from it in their outreach. When someone says "I read your section about optimizing for client voice instead of production efficiency and that's exactly our problem," you know the positioning landed. When they send generic connection requests or ask questions your About section already answered, you know it didn't. The difference between those two outcomes is whether you wrote for search algorithms or for the specific person who needs to understand why you're different. Most founders choose the algorithm. The ones building sustainable, referral-based businesses choose the person.
