A founder sits down to write the home page and starts with the headline. Three hours later there are twelve versions, each a little cleverer than the last, and none of them sounds like anything a customer has said. The page goes live with the cleverest one. Visitors read it, nod politely and leave, because it describes the company the founder wants to be rather than the problem the buyer has.
The line is not a slogan.
A slogan is written to be remembered. The line is written to be repeated. It is the sentence a customer would use to describe you to a colleague who has the same problem: what you do, for whom, and why it is better than what they do today.
That difference matters because a visitor does not read a startup's site to be impressed. They read it to decide whether this is worth a call. A headline that makes them work out what the company does has spent the only seconds it had. A plain sentence they recognise buys the next paragraph.
Good lines are usually less interesting than founders expect. "Payroll for restaurants with more than one location." "Contract review for in-house legal teams of one." They read like a description because they are one. The cleverness belongs in the product, not in the first sentence about it.
Customers write the line. Founders find it.
The words are already out there. They are in sales calls, in support tickets, in the email a happy customer sent their boss to justify the purchase. The job is to listen for them and write them down verbatim, including the clumsy ones.
Three questions on any customer call will surface most of it. What were you using before? What made you look for something else? How would you explain us to someone on your team? The answers to the last one are drafts of the line. When three different customers describe you in roughly the same words, those are the words.
A founder who has not had those conversations is writing fiction. That is not a criticism of the writing. It is a reason to postpone it. A site with a provisional line and a plan to replace it after twenty calls beats a site with a polished line nobody has tested. For how the sentence gets earned in the first place, see Positioning is the sentence your startup must earn.
Every other block on the page answers the line.
Once the line exists, the rest of the copy has a job. Each section answers the question the line raises in a reader's head. If the line says payroll for multi-location restaurants, the reader wants to know how it handles staff who work at two locations, what it costs to switch, and who else like them uses it. Those are the sections.
This is why copy written section by section reads like a brochure and copy written from the line reads like an argument. The home page has to make one case, and the line is the claim that case defends. What a startup's home page has to do. covers the structure; the line is what holds it together.
It also makes editing easier. Any sentence that does not support the line, answer a question it raises, or move the reader toward a call can go. Most first drafts lose a good share of their words to that test and read better for it.
Plain words beat brand voice at this stage.
Founders often reach for a voice before they have a message. The copy gets adjectives, metaphors and a tone that sounds like a much larger company. Then a technical buyer arrives, cannot find what the product does, and leaves.
Voice matters later, once the message is settled and the company knows who reads its pages. Early on, the best copy sounds like a capable person explaining something clearly to a peer. Short sentences. The buyer's own terms for the problem. No words a customer would never use about themselves.
A useful check: read the home page aloud to someone who fits the buyer profile and ask them to tell it back to you. If what comes back is close to the line, the copy works. If it comes back vague, the copy is decorating instead of saying something.
Rewrite the line when the calls change.
The line is not permanent. As the company moves upmarket, adds a second buyer or learns that customers value something unexpected, the way people describe it changes. The site should follow.
Set a habit rather than a rewrite project. Every month or so, compare the line with the last handful of sales calls. If customers have started describing you differently, test the new words in outbound emails or ads before moving them to the home page. A line that wins in a subject line is usually ready for the headline. For what else the first site needs, see What a startup's first website actually needs.
Write down how your last five customers described you, verbatim, and build the home page from the sentence that repeats. If you want help with the rest of the page, the Website work starts there.
Tell us what you're building.