Ember

Most About pages open with a mission statement. “We're passionate about quality.” “We believe everyone deserves X.” Nobody reads past line one, because that line could belong to anyone. It's a category, not a company.

Basecamp does the same job differently. Their first line: “Born out of desperate necessity to stop embarrassing ourselves in front of our clients, the story of how Basecamp was born is likely your story, too.”

Twenty-six words. Look at what is inside them: a wound you can feel (embarrassing ourselves in front of clients), a cause (we kept getting it wrong), and a hand held out to the reader (likely your story, too). That is an origin, not a claim. It earns the second line.

The test for your own first line: swap your name for a competitor's. If it still reads fine, you don't have a first line yet. You have a category.

So find the wound. The expensive, obvious-in-hindsight, slightly embarrassing thing that made you start. Say that one. The rest of the page is just proof.