I Was Mumbling Through a Networking Event When I Realized My Website Already Wrote My Elevator Pitch

Last spring, I stood in a rooftop bar in the West Loop holding a lukewarm beer and completely butchering my own introduction.

"I do, like, websites? And some writing. And I've been working on this thing — it's kind of hard to explain."

The person I was talking to nodded politely, scanned the room for a better conversation, and drifted away. Fair. I would have done the same.

Here's the humiliating part: I'd spent the previous weekend rewriting my About page. I had agonized over every sentence. I knew exactly who I was — in writing. The moment someone asked me out loud, all of it evaporated.

The Answer Was Already Published

On the train home, I pulled up my own site on my phone and read my About page like a stranger. And there it was, in the second paragraph: a tight, two-sentence description of what I do, who I do it for, and why it matters.

I had written that. Carefully. Months earlier. And then I never once said it out loud.

This is the weird blind spot of building a personal website. You assume the writing and the speaking are the same skill. They're not. Writing gives you unlimited drafts. Conversation gives you one take, live, with a stranger holding a beer. But the raw material — the thinking, the editing, the ruthless cutting — that's transferable. If you've done the work on your site, you've already done 80% of the work of describing yourself anywhere else.

Your Website Is a Quarry

Once I noticed this, I started mining my own copy everywhere:

• The elevator pitch. My About page's opening paragraph, trimmed to two sentences, is now what I say at events. No more mumbling.
• The short bio. Every conference application asks for a 50-word bio. I lifted mine from my site's footer and tweaked it in five minutes instead of agonizing for an hour.
• The interview answer. "Tell me about yourself" is just the About page question with a different font. I now have a mental outline — origin, current focus, what I'm curious about next — that mirrors how my site is structured.
• The LinkedIn headline. stolen, essentially, from my homepage hero. Sorry, LinkedIn.

The pattern in all of this: the site forces clarity, and clarity is portable. You don't need to be a natural talker. You need to have already decided what you want to say.

Why Writing It Down First Works

There's a reason this works better than improvising. When you write your own story for a public page, you have to make a hundred small decisions an improviser never gets to make. What do you lead with? What do you cut? What sounds impressive but is actually vague? Which project actually represents you versus the one you're just proud of in a private way?

Every one of those decisions is a pre-made answer to a question you'll get asked later. The About page is basically a rehearsal for every introduction, interview, and awkward rooftop conversation you'll ever have.

And the reverse is true, too. After that night in the West Loop, I started paying attention to which parts of my pitch made people lean in and which made their eyes glaze. Then I updated the site to match. The spoken version and the written version started editing each other, and both got sharper.

A Small Practical Exercise

If your site exists but your spoken intro doesn't, try this:

1. Open your About page and read only the first two paragraphs.
2. Cut everything that would sound weird if you said it at a bar. Kill jargon, kill buzzwords, kill anything you'd never say out loud.
3. What's left should be roughly 15 seconds long. Say it into your phone's voice memo app until it doesn't sound like reading.
4. That's your pitch. It's already yours. You just never claimed it.

If the exercise produces nothing usable, that's useful too — it means your About page is written for an audience of search engines, not humans, and you've got some rewriting to do.

The Site Talks So You Don't Have To (But You Still Have To)

I used to think of my personal site as a thing that worked while I slept — a portfolio that networked for me in the background. That's true, but it undersells it. The real payoff isn't just that the site exists. It's that building it forced me to figure out what I actually wanted to say about myself, once, in writing, with time to get it right.

Everything else — the pitches, the bios, the interviews, the rooftop small talk — is just that same story, translated into different formats.

So the next time you're standing somewhere holding a lukewarm drink, fumbling through who you are, remember: you may have already written the answer. Go read your own website. It knows you better than you think.