The Seven Questions Your Page Should Already Be Able to Answer

Every visitor lands on a profile with the same handful of silent questions. They don't type these questions. They don't even fully articulate them to themselves. But every click, every scroll, every back-button is downstream of whether the page is answering them. The pages that fail are the pages that force the visitor to do the answering manually — by clicking around, by guessing, by reading between the lines of a list of buttons that wasn't designed to communicate.

The pages that win are the pages that pre-empt the questions and resolve them before the visitor even has to surface them.

This piece is a checklist. Seven questions. If your profile can already answer all seven, you've built something that works. If it can't, you have a punch list.

You can use this as a Parlei prompt — paste the seven questions into your AI of choice as a starting point for the kind of structured self-description that a good profile is built on. Or use it as a diagnostic on whatever profile you currently have, link-in-bio or otherwise.

1. Who is this person, in one sentence?

This is the first question and the one most pages flunk hardest.

Visitors don't want a job title. Job titles are noise — they tell you nothing about what someone is actually doing or whether you should care. The visitor wants a one-sentence description that combines what you do, who you do it for, and what makes the doing of it specific to you.

Software engineer at a startup fails this. So does creator and entrepreneur. So does helping founders build their best lives.

What works: I build payment infrastructure for marketplaces, currently at a Series B doing it for the wedding industry. Or: I'm a science journalist who covers the parts of biotech that don't get covered. Or: I run a small art studio that makes ambient video loops for galleries and TVs.

The sentence has to carry enough specificity that a reasonable stranger can predict, within five seconds, whether they want to keep reading.

2. What are they actually working on right now?

Not the highlight reel. The actual current project.

A profile that lists everything you've ever done with equal weight is a profile that flattens its own signal. The visitor doesn't know whether you wrote that 2019 essay last week or seven years ago. They don't know whether your "previously at Google" was the relevant part of your career or a footnote. They don't know whether the podcast you launched in 2022 is still going.

Profiles that work surface, prominently, what is current. The project you actually opened this morning. The thing you'd want to be remembered for if a stranger only saw one artifact.

This is hard because what's current changes. The Linktree-style flat list never changes. A page that's actually doing the work has to be updated regularly — or, in the Parlei case, has to know enough about your current context that it can answer the question on demand without you maintaining a separate "what I'm doing now" page.

3. Who is this person trying to reach?

Every profile is trying to reach somebody, but most profiles refuse to say so. They want to be everything to everybody. They want to leave the door open for any possible opportunity.

This is a mistake. A profile that doesn't filter is a profile that gets clogged with mismatched inbounds. The author then spends their week triaging meetings that the profile should have deflected.

What works: explicit, named targets. I want to talk to founders mid-raise. I'm looking for collaborators on small-publisher distribution. Press inquiries about [topic] welcome; everything else, please email my agent.

The specificity makes the matched inbounds higher quality, because the matched inbounds are now self-selected. And it gives the unmatched visitors a clean way to leave without wasting either side's time.

4. Who is this person trying to avoid?

Most profiles forget that there's a second half to question 3.

You don't just have audiences you want. You have audiences you want to deflect — the cold sales pitches, the wrong-stage investors, the recruiters for roles you'd never take, the speaking inquiries from conferences you've never heard of, the friend-of-a-friend asks for free advice that aren't going anywhere.

A profile that doesn't deflect spends the author's life triaging messages that shouldn't have made it through. A profile that deflects gracefully — by naming, in the conversation, who it's not for — saves both sides the round trip.

This is where Parlei is structurally different from a static page. A wall of buttons can't deflect; it can only enumerate. A conversation can say we appreciate the look, but this isn't a fit in the moment, without making the visitor feel like they bounced off a bouncer.

5. What does this person's work look like at its best?

Pages that work surface their best artifact prominently and don't bury it in a list.

If you write, the one essay you'd want a stranger to read should be one click away — not the seventh link down on a Substack archive. If you make videos, the one video you'd want them to watch should be embedded, not buried in a YouTube channel. If you build software, the one demo that captures what you do best should be the surface, not the GitHub profile page.

The mistake here is humility-flavored — who am I to say which of my essays is best? — but the visitor doesn't have time to figure that out for themselves. If you don't pick, the page picks for you, and the page picks badly. (It picks whichever link gets the most clicks, which is almost never the same as which one represents you best.)

Pick. Surface. Default the visitor to your best work, and let them dig past it if they want more.

6. Can I trust this person?

This is the question nobody types but everybody runs.

It gets answered, indirectly, by every signal on the page. The tone. The specificity. Whether the claims feel earned. Whether the social proof is real or theater. Whether the public footprint matches the private one. Whether someone has been doing the thing long enough that you don't have to worry about whether they'll still be doing it next quarter.

A good profile makes the trust question easy to resolve. A bad profile makes it impossible — usually by being so vague, so promotional, or so empty that the visitor has no signal to work with.

The Parlei version of answering this question is that the page sounds like you. Not a marketing department's version of you. Not the LinkedIn-formal version. The voice you'd use if you were explaining your work to someone you respected over coffee. That voice is what trust is built out of.

7. What's the right next step?

The last question and, structurally, the most important one.

The visitor has read the page. They've answered the first six questions to their own satisfaction. They've decided they want to engage. Now: what do they do?

A flat list of links makes this hard. There are eight calendars and twelve channels and the visitor has to guess. They usually guess wrong.

A page that talks back makes this easy. It asks what they're trying to do and routes them. Booking a call? Here's the calendar with a pre-flagged note. Asking a press question? Here's the email and the deadline window. Trying to share a project they think you'd care about? Here's the inbox that gets actually read. Sending a job opportunity? Here's the form with the three filters that make it worth your time.

The right next step is never the same for every visitor. The page that knows the difference is the page that doesn't waste anybody's day.

How to use this

Take the seven questions. Drop them into your AI of choice as a prompt. Ask the AI to walk you through, one at a time, what your answers actually are right now — not what you'd put on a polished page, what you'd say to a stranger over coffee.

The output of that conversation, structured, is the spine of a profile that works. You can paste it into Parlei when we open early access. You can paste it into whatever profile tool you currently use. You can paste it into your LinkedIn rewrite. The artifact has its own life.

The point is that the questions are the same regardless of where the answers land. Every page is being asked them. Your page is either answering them or it isn't.

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Parlei is in pre-launch. The seven questions are how we start every onboarding conversation, so if you want to test-drive what a structured answer feels like, the early-access cohort is the place.