The hardest sentence most small-business owners ever have to write is the first one on their About page.
Not the pricing. Not the returns policy. The one that starts with “I’m [name] and I…” and then goes nowhere.
It happens to almost everyone. You know your business inside out, but writing about yourself in public feels either boastful or flat — and you can never quite tell which. So the About page stays blank, or it sits as a two-line placeholder you meant to fix two years ago.
AI can help break this block. Not by writing the finished page for you, but by taking your rough, spoken answers and shaping them into sentences you can actually use.
Why self-written About pages go wrong
There are two problems. The first is that writing about yourself feels uncomfortable. Most business owners have a nagging sense they’re either showing off or underselling — so they hedge, and the result sounds like neither.
The second problem is trickier: what you write for yourself rarely sounds like you. In a real conversation, most business owners are warm and specific (“I started this because I couldn’t find a decent bakery in walking distance, so I opened one”). On the page, the same person tends to produce something flat and generic (“I am passionate about delivering quality products to valued customers”).
AI can’t fix the first problem — only you can decide you’re worth writing about. But it handles the second one well. Hand it the conversational version and ask it to write the polished one.
The five questions that do the real work
Before you open an AI tool, answer these five questions in rough notes. No need for full sentences — bullet points or a voice memo transcript work fine.
- What does your business actually do? The plain version, not the marketing version. (“I cut hair” beats “I provide bespoke style solutions.”)
- When did you start it, and why? Even a mundane reason is fine: “My old job disappeared and I decided to try something I’d always wanted to do.”
- Who do you mostly work with? A type of person, not a demographic. (“Busy parents who want dinner sorted fast” beats “25–45s.”)
- What do you do differently — or what do you refuse to do? This one can be very short. (“I only take three clients at a time” or “I don’t do rush jobs.”)
- One thing about the work that still makes you look forward to it. Anything real.
These five points are all an About page actually needs. Credentials, mission statements, and long histories are optional. The five above are the bones.
The prompt that does the work
Once you have rough answers, paste this into ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini — with your notes underneath:
You are helping me write the About page for my small business website. Below are my rough notes — informal answers to five questions. Please write a short About page: around 150 to 200 words, warm and direct, in first person, with no corporate language or buzzwords. Match the energy of someone talking to a customer across a counter, not a company addressing its shareholders. Use my words where you can; clean up the sentence structure; do not invent anything I haven’t given you.
[your five answers here]
The result won’t be publication-ready on the first try. But it will be much better than blank — and, crucially, it will be wrong in specific ways you can point to. That is exactly the right starting place. “Almost, but not quite” is easy to fix. Blank is not.
How to get from first draft to finished
Read the output aloud. Any sentence that makes you wince is one to rewrite yourself. AI tends to be slightly stiff; small edits bring it back.
Common fixes worth making:
- Replace “I am passionate about” with something you would actually say out loud
- Cut anything that could apply to any business (“committed to excellence,” “quality-driven,” “experienced professional”)
- Add a specific detail if the AI generalised one of your answers (say “a bicycle repair shop in Bristol,” not just “a bicycle shop”)
Once you have made those edits, paste the updated version back and ask: “Does any line still sound corporate or generic? If so, suggest a plainer alternative.”
Two or three rounds of this and most people end up with an About page they genuinely like — often for the first time.
A note on length and photos
Short About pages work better than long ones for most small businesses. If it takes more than 30 seconds to read, it is probably already too long. One or two short paragraphs is usually enough.
If you also need a one-line bio for under a photo, ask at the same time:
Also write a one-sentence bio, under 20 words, for a photo caption on the same page.
Getting both done in one sitting is efficient — the AI already has your context.
Try this today
Answer the five questions above as a voice note while doing something else — walking, washing up, waiting for the kettle. Rough and rambling is fine. Transcribe it (the Voice Memos app on iPhone does this automatically; Google Recorder on Android is free), then paste the transcript into a free AI chat with the prompt above. The whole thing takes about ten minutes, and you will have a first draft that is already better than a blank page — and probably better than the placeholder you have been meaning to replace.