The one page a busy founder finishes
Unit 7 of 8 · Lesson 1 of 3Index
Thursday night. Everything from this week has to fit on one page, and Maya will read it in ninety seconds, between two calls.
Lead with the decision you want
Ninety seconds
Maya reads the top of the page, glances at the rest, and decides. Write for that reader.
The ask comes first
Not background. Not how you did it. What you want decided, and by when, in the first sentence.
Five parts, one page
The ask. The problem, with three pieces of evidence. The metric and its counter. The recommendation. What you are not doing.
Then cut a third
Read it out loud. Every sentence you stumble on is doing two jobs. Split it or delete it.
How Amazon handled it
- The situation
Amazon teams write the press release and a list of hard questions and answers for a product before anyone builds it.
- What they did
Colin Bryar and Bill Carr describe the practice in their book Working Backwards: if the press release is dull, or the hard questions have no good answers, the idea dies at the cost of a few pages instead of a few months.
- Why it matters to you
Writing is not how you report the work. It is how you find out whether the work is any good.
Doing it with AI, and where it breaks
Draft with a model, delete most of it, then ask which sentences could go without changing what a reader would do.
AI drafts hedge, restate the question before answering it, and end each section with a summary nobody needs. It reads as thorough and it is the opposite. Learn your model's habits.
Here is my one pager. List every sentence that could be deleted without changing what a reader would do. Do not rewrite anything. Just list the deletions.
Build it
The one pager: the ask, the problem and evidence, the metric and counter, the recommendation, and what you are not doing. About 250 words.
Google Docs
The worked solution
Stuck, or want to compare?
There is a worked solution. Try the build first. Reading it before you have attempted anything is the fastest way to learn nothing.
Checkpoint
If you did the build, these take two minutes. If you cannot answer one of them, that is the part to go back to.
Moving on marks this lesson complete. Finish the build first, it is the part that counts.