👋 Hey, I’m Jaryd. I share one stealable idea with you a week on product, growth, AI, marketing, or strategy. My goal is to help with the hard part—growing the thing you’re trying to build. For more: Explore the top ideas | Watch me yap

People don’t want to buy from companies, they want to buy from other people.

And that’s you. When you’re early-days building something new, and when most websites and app landing pages are now looking the same (largely thanks to Claude and it’s fingerprints everywhere), you have to do something a bit different to make the human side of your product stand out.

The more human your messaging, the more people see you and can connect with your idea beyond clever (or generally, generic as hell) copywriting or feature grids.

Luckily it really couldn’t be easier to do this, yet most people and companies don’t do this.

Which makes this a simple, fast, free, and high ROI idea you can steal right now.

It’s the founder note. AKA the founder’s letter on a website. And in some examples, even founder’s note screen inside an app onboarding flow.

The first time I saw one of these was years ago, on Basecamp’s site with the letter from their CEO, Jason Fried. Just a few hundred words written as a personal message, talking directly to the audience. Signed by him. The biggest thing it does IMO is it personifies the problem, and thus the product.

It’s not a company telling me about the problem they solve and how they are better than some other company, it’s Jason…the guy who had a problem and built this product to fix it for people like him who had the same problem.

His words feels real to me and not salesy. It’s worth reading his founder note.

Companies spend so much time deliberating the perfect copy for their websites. My wife works in content and I see these documents and revisions and hear the calls in the background as people go back and forth around copy just to land on “The platform for AI success”, which tells me nothing about the problem and doesn’t compel me to nod my head and buy from you.

So much of a homepage is built to turn heads and convince people of a problem and that they need to buy said solution. Big claims, large numbers, standout images, louder headlines. Of course it’s possible to turn heads and get people to buy, but it's a hard road.

The founder letter plays the opposite game. It’s plain, a bit long and text heavy, written by one person, and it’s trying to get you to “nod your head, not turn your head”. As Jason says “Whenever I write something with the intention to explain, sell, or promote, I'm aiming for head nods. I'm looking to find a certain resonance with those who are already traveling in this direction, who already see things similarly.”

The founder note helps you sell to the right people who are actually interested in buying what you’re selling.

My friend Tom launched quicker.chat the other day and wrote up his advice for launching a homepage for a new product. Point 5 and 6 point to this same idea

Again, the founder note does a lot of work to ease people into your why without marketing to them. I’ll show you mine now, but first, a quick sponsored callout to app builders/dev about an incredible event next week 👇

Adding paragraphs of text goes against intuition when we’re told peoples attention span is short and people want to skim. And that’s the first reason this works.

1. Skimmers skim. Buyers read. People read about 20 to 28% of the words on a page. Your hero h1 headline is for them and so is your subtext below it. The letter is for the few who slow down because they’re actually thinking about paying you, and by the bottom of it they’ve nodded a few times and are ready to buy.

2. Agreement is cheaper than persuasion. Changing a mind and convincing someone of a problem is expensive and mostly fails. Finding people already heading your way and saying “me too” costs almost nothing. But that type of agreement building is hard with punchy copy written by marketing teams. Letters cut through noise and just plainly say what people need to hear.

3. Your name and face can’t be cloned. Every AI tool’s homepage is looking more the same and marketing copy often lacks human fingerprints. No emotional connection there. But your founder note puts your face and name on your product with your words and your story, which firstly is hard to copy, but more so, builds trust and identifies the people behind your product.

4. People want to buy from people. Back to the opening line, there’s a reason so many founders are investing in building personal brands on LinkedIn now and big b2b companies are growing creator programs. The truth is that people sell IDEAS and STORIES way better than companies ever can, and the more human and authentic any message around what your product does for people and why, the more likely people with nod heads and try you out.

My newsletter is a personal project, written by me only for both for you and myself. It’s uncommon to see a founder note on a newsletter, which is exactly why I added one. You can see it live here. My goal is to introduce me and the why behind what I write.

I also added it on my app site for Little Moments

But both of these examples are subsections of the website.

Here’s another iconic example from Jason Fried: this one, from Hey.com. Where for a long time, the ENTIRE WEBSITE was just this founder note. Nothing else.

As Jason said, “There's no convincing in here. No telling anyone their position is wrong. No attempt to change minds. Just a gentle story that aligns a sympathetic reader's point of view with mine. One that gets them to nod their head.”

Having looked at several founder notes, there’s a clear anatomy that seems to work. Here’s what to think about as you write yours 👇

Ideally, every sentence or paragraph should earn a nod.

It goes without saying, but obviously a founder letter won’t save a product nobody wants. But, if you’re onto something people care about, it’s a small change that can have a big impact

—Jaryd (+ a mini founder note below)