Tell me what your company does
medium.com
medium.com
> I think the big companies do it to get you on the phone — so they can upsell.
I was thinking these things, and then BOOM, he says what I'm thinking haha.
These are sales oriented companies. By contrast, B2C is quantity oriented. They need more customers buying their mostly undifferentiated price tiers. Selling expensive pants vs regular pants isn't worth high touch sales. However, in B2B, selling "really really expensive enterprise plan" vs "regular enterprise plan" is definitely worth high touch sales. They want to do everything they can to get you "interested, but confused" and pick up the phone.
Firstly because inbound phone calls are incredibly rare. Maybe it's more common for people to pick up the phone in the states but in my three years selling B2B SaaS (enterprise and startup) I never received a hot inbound lead on the phone. It's a bit different if your market leader but most companies and products aren't so I don't think it's a valid strategy.
Secondly because if you are doing a proper inbound strategy you need to entice people with content, product demonstrations or trials (ie showing the product).
Finally, if you want to obfuscate your offering, you don't need to hide it behind a bunch of mumbo jumbo. People rarely understand exactly what your product does even if you give them full access to it for a month.
I think the reason is simpler. A mixture of incompetence - B2B companies don't have the marketing savvy of FMCGs - and the fact competitors don't do a much better job. It's harder to write a clear, concise and enticing description of what you do than just generating buzzwordy corporate bs. It looks marketingy, so the copy is going to be signed off by everyone. Besides, everyone else in the industry is throwing around the same buzzwords, so you get this bubble of nonsense speak and everyone just rolls with it.
They put a lot of money and effort into sales and marketing, and you underestimate them by thinking that it's a sign of incompetence.
We're talking about why a lot of B2B tech companies have a lot buzzwordy nonsense instead of descriptions of what they can do for their customers (this is not unique to tech companies, I would say this goes for most B2B) and the theory put forward was that it's to get people to pickup the phone so they can understand what the fuck the product does. This is what I debunked.
I literally worked as a salesrep at a fairly big B2B marketing startup and one of the largest enterprise software companies.
What you refer to is content marketing to generate inbound leads. Those leads would then be put on a mailing list and and an outbound process would start. Except the "book a demo" (inbound lead) which I never recall leading to a good deal.
If you are a small stage startup with a small sales team you can probably get by on inbound but you have to go outbound to saturate the market. Even then, having poor description is going to hurt your Google fu so I don't buy the strategy.
If your the market leader, like salesforce in crm, you're going to see a lot of inbound but that's because people know your product and you're gartner quadrant status. Even then you'd still do maybe 50/50 inbound outbound.
In either case, the "it's shit because it works" argument still doesn't really hold up.
They put a lot of money into sales, they put a lot of money into going to conferences. They do not, however, seem to put really any money into a decent copywriter.
I'm not saying the message should be an engineering manual of the ins and outs the product but it should be clear, concise and entice customers to give the product further attention.
Consider seo description field of HubSpot
>HubSpot is an inbound marketing and sales platform that helps companies attract visitors, convert leads, and close customers.
Vs. Optimizely
> Be brave, experiment everywhere, and transform your customer experience with Optimizely.
Seriously WTF
I feel your pain. I just brought the Google fu aspect up in another comment.
some B2Bs started out doing one thing and then end up doing all kinds other random crap that clients just decided they rather have one team managing a whole project rather than spread out over 200 vendors and contractors and managing it themselves. there's nothing wrong with that! some clients are fighting to keep their business afloat instead of spending all day individually managing their service vendors. and if the B2B gets paid for that kind of work, it's sometimes worth doing.
so if you're a B2B with experience herding 200 different vendors and contractors doing odd crap for a single project, why not advertise it? alas when you do it just sounds really generic like "enterprise solutions" or even "everything". i mean, these companies in the article probably started off doing data analytics then ended up being really good at hooking up internal systems with data collection and then also doing consulting and then marketing and every other thing because their clients must have asked for follow up on their products.
to the author of the medium article. if you see that these companies do everything, why not just give them a call and ask them if they can do that one specific thing? chances are, they've done it before, and even if they haven't, maybe they'll do it for you anyway?
Finally, usually sales end up with either director of engineering/whatever or VP/SVP, so do a really good presentstion...
Clarity is difficult, and if it rarely makes a difference to businesses then it gets left out.
One reason clarity is difficult is that it requires narrowing what you say. Measurable accountable and integrated business software solutions. From the outside this sounds pointless and meaningless. From the inside it sounds nice and wide, encompassing everything they do. Better too broad than too narrow.
People's CVs sometimes have the same problem, resistance to limiting language.
The reason it doesn't matter is the way they get business. In face-to-face sales, clarity is surprisingly unimportant. It can even hurt by allowing prospects to raise objections without the presence of a salesman. Basically, the company's marketing doesn't matter, so it sucks.
If you're selling the exact same product ("exact" in the business-sense that includes stuff like support or long-term price commitments, not in the geek-sense where CentOS is the exact same as RedHat) for two vastly different price points, you should probably make sure those customers don't meet.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l644fAxGzlw
Don't waste your time watching it. It's a promo video for yet another a very scammy looking ICO.
I watched through the entire 3 minute video, only because I found it increasingly amusing how long they were taking to "get to the point". As it turns out, this video is 3 minutes of stock videos of Dubai with a pseudo-inspirational voiceover about nothing in particular, followed by their logo being shown for a mere 10 seconds at the end.
I couldn't believe that this wasn't a parody (at least, I don't think it is), it's exactly like something out of HBO's Silicon Valley show.
http://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/gurbaksh-chahals-ugly...
I had to pay a larger fine for forgetting to pay a $40 ticket.
This is pure comedy.
You'll notice over there that you can "BELIMITLESS", if you like.
At least today this is making my world a better place.
Edit: It's fascinating like a train wreck. Imagine using this as the script for a scene where someone is on the phone with their dad, who is in a room with a bomb that will detonate exactly 3 minutes and 6 seconds from now (but we compress it to 2 minutes because the actor will be saying the lines very fast) and the dad hurriedly and tearfully tries to deliver all the advice he can cram in. As he remembers things to say in pretty much random order, he blurts them out.
I think that's on purpose. They want you to invest time in it so that the sunk-cost-fallacy prevents you from admitting to yourself that it's a scam. It's the same reason that many courses start with a free video "but first, a little bit of history" or something.
Feels very scammy. Brought to you by Gurbaksh Chahal..
What I can't believe is who the hell would watch this video and think anything other than "run away".
It frustrates me so much especially when smaller companies are doing this.
They just raised a $140m round of financing so apparently they have some good stuff going on. If you look at the website though:
The Unified Analytics Platform. Accelerate innovation by unifying data science, engineering, and business.
Sorry, what? Click on "learn more about the platform":
DATABRICKS IS A TRULY UNIFIED APPROACH TO DATA ANALYTICS AT SCALE. Founded by the team who created Apache Spark, Databricks provides a Unified Analytics Platform that accelerates innovation by unifying data science, engineering, and business.
I still have no clue what exactly TF the product is but I sure got my weekly dose of BS buzzwords.
That sounds like a calendar + recipe aggregator idea.
Then there's a Learn More button right there, which explains all that in more details.
It's certainly complex and has a large ambition, but it's not like they're advertising that they're making the world a better place while selling todo lists.
Basically the product is Spark Notebooks (think Juypter) on AWS that allow you to quickly create clusters and even do fancy stuff with spark streaming.
A key thing that people miss also is the the creator of Spark is the CTO of Databricks and Databricks to some extent controls the direction of Spark. This probably impacts its valuation.
I hate this transparent attempt to trick (me) the customer. IBM has done this to me when I'm drilling down into technical requirements like I'm some middle manager who doesn't know the actual needs. I always suspected that IBMs bread and butter is to move the sunk cost of contact into an actual sunk cost of technical debt, but I have firsthand experience now. The sign of a bad culture and lazy marketing.
Investors plz line up, take a number, and contact me thru PM.
1. Fear of not communicating "everything" that you do. The fear is of being perceived as a very narrow solution when it does a lot more.
2. Advice that says "communicate the benefits" not "what you do". This advice could manifest itself in the wrong kind of (flowery) language. So instead of saying "export payroll reports for QuickBooks automatically" websites say "free up for time" [made up example]
3. Internal decision-making by committee.
4. Copying some website that you like - instead of thinking and reasoning from ground-up about 'what is it that I really want to say'.
5. Pretending to be a big/legit company when you are small
6. Big company with so many features that it would rather just show you the entire sales deck - the website is just there because it needs to be, but plays a tiny role in conversions. [why focus on something that doesn't add value - in this case, the website e.g. SAP.com]
This is a good article. Everyone who is running an online would benefit from thinking hard about this.
Contractors are the least well positioned people to know how to describe what a company does. So when the company calls them and asks them for a rockstar ninja site, they get generic stuff and execs go "oh yeah, that's such a perfect description of what we do" with no regard for those that might not already know.
Whenever I'm seriously considering purchasing an enterprise B2B product, I mostly know what they do before visiting their website. I've heard of them already, either through word of mouth, or by explicitly asking friends for recommendations. I suspect that I'm not too different from most purchasers.
If a company's targeting a landing page for someone like me, perhaps they shouldn't optimize for clarity; they should optimize for signaling reliability. So, the "Web 20.17 parallax-ed boots[t]rap-ed responsive home page" serves a purpose - it reminds me of all the other Web 20.17... B2B services I've happily used in the past.
I'm probably ascribing way too much significance to the semiotics of B2B homepages [1]. But I find it tough to believe that (e.g.) Optimizely hasn't, well, optimized their homepage for something.
[1] Also, take what I say with a huge grain of salt. My business' homepage needs a lot of work...
Startup marketing is not necessarily geared for customers (end-users). They are just as much geared towards VCs who are courted and who are expected to bankroll the company. Some non-negligible number of startup founders jumped on the bandwagon with the goal not necessarily make a product, get customers, but really just to be CEOs and play "startup". That can be done by fooling a few angels. Depending on who these prospective VCs are the message and marketing can be adjusted to appeal to them. Just because someone has a lot of money doesn't mean they can't be fooled or taken advantage of. They probably hear and see all this startup activity, unicorns left and right so they are eager to play the game. And so they are matched up with just as eager "founders" who also want to play the startup game.
The last paragraph was from experience. The person fooled some older wealthy guys to invest in their silly idea. They burnt though millions in a few years renting an office in SV, hiring lots of workers, going to conferences, rewriting their thing with the latest frameworks. And yes eventually it all failed, because they had 0 paying customers. But it also didn't fail, because now they speak at conferences and put ex-SV CEO and founder on their title and so on.
The idea is, if you just dig a bit deeper, it is easy to see things a bit more clear.
> For the love of God, please tell me what your company does
Adds some flair. Expresses the sentiment of the article. Now it simply says:
> Tell me what your company does
On the other hand, HN is an impressively effective, open minded atmosphere for discussion. The bit of pruning that is done must be working. I wonder if this policy somehow leads to success overall.
Oh, okay, that makes sense. Probably some super-secure online backup service...
>Encryption: Your data can only be accessed with your personal keys. We can't access your data even if we wanted to! >Source code: The client code is available. You don't need to trust us; you can check the encryption yourself! >Deduplication: Only the unique data between your current files and encrypted archives is uploaded.
Wow, that's... extremely clear. That's literally everything I wanted to know, save for maybe pricing...
>Storage: 250 picodollars / byte-month of encoded data >Bandwidth: 250 picodollars / byte of encoded data
...aha, it's something confusing!
>($0.25 / GB-month)
...never mind. This is extremely clear.
I could keep going, but as far as copy, this website is excellent. And even the design could be considered a plus given your target audience.
Though if Tarsnap ever gets a GUI, I would suggest giving the website one as well :)
Since we're doing website critique, here's some CSS tweaking (no serious adjustments) that fixes most of my design complaints:
Before: http://i.imgur.com/yopLaY7.png
After: http://i.imgur.com/iANMrgp.png
CSS: https://gist.github.com/madebyollin/41e7aaf1d7604c2ccd54b8f3...
Here are some easy to implement design suggestions: You should change the title of the first heading so it's not the same as the banner. I think "What is Tarsnap?" is a good choice. Speaking of the banner, vectorize it. Finally, please remove the bars from the asides.
Your product is good, so transferring a little attention to its web presence is worth the effort.
I hope he doesn't listen to the folks saying he should follow the herd. Websites where you have to page down below the fold to get basic information on the product? We should be pointing them at Tarsnap. But flat design is king on mobile, so we won't be getting many of these website layouts anymore.
On small width device the menu will be on the bottom, so there's no duplication. (website seems to be responsive)
I like that the menu is on the bottom and not hidden behind a hamburger button.
I don't think this website should be made to "look better" i.e turned into some corporate garbage, but it could definitely look better... looks kinda like an open source programmers best shot at making something look good.
There's a middle ground between looking corporate (irrelevant) and looking unprofessional.
In your shoes I would be going for a style of "very plain, but very neat" looking. Aiming for perfectly spaced between elements, attractive font, minimal but matching colors. Function graphics only.
This kinda looks OK:
1. Pricing sets the wrong expectation for the true price you may actually pay once you get all the features you need and may not be aware of thus making the sale more difficult.
2. Pricing sets a transactional tone vs a mutually beneficial relationship
3. Pricing anchors your mind set to how much something costs vs how much value / ROI you get out of that product or service.
All of these do disservice to seeker and provider.
It's called price discrimination. As Joel Spolsky says in his essay on the topic [1], "it pisses the heck off of people."
[1] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2004/12/15/camels-and-rubber-...
Would appreciate some feedback. Is the purpose clear enough? I know it won't make sense unless you're a developer, but it's a tool for developers.
It's just a rough draft, so it probably won't be that sparse when I launch. I need to add a proper pricing page, and a tab bar at the top. I'm also planning to add a demo API request that you can run, similar to mailgun.com.
Outside of that the website is pretty good and serves its purpose!
It might be because the adage, "don't sell a product, sell an emotion," but taken to an inconceivable level.
Or maybe it's like legalese, it's not necessary, but looks good if you are billing at $500 an hour.
> Welcome to Outside Insight
> Billions of online conversations, freshly filtered.
The title of their landing page is even more to the point:
> Media Intelligence, Media Monitoring, and Social Monitoring
I thought Optimizely was an A/B testing tool, which makes their punchline OK:
> Optimizely lets you experiment on everything—from design choices to algorithms. That way the best ideas always win, and the best customer experiences get even better.
I suppose this only adds to his argument though, it's hard to tell what companies do.
My main point is that it shouldn't ever be difficult for a potential customer to quickly get to that understanding, and I do believe these sites could do a far better job at quickly and clearly explaining their companies' function... just like you did.
"Meltwater's flagship product is media monitoring". "Optimizely is a website A/B testing tool". Boom.
For instance, Optimizely has a website A/B testing tool. They also support smartphone app A/B testing, and I think some backend/server-side testing. If smart watches or VR take off, they'll probably try to support those as well.
They also recently added automated content generation: I know they can generate product and page recommendations, and there may be other options as well.
They're a relatively young company and probably aren't ready to be typecast as "website A/B testing," in case another offering really takes off.
Don't get me wrong, I'm fully on board with the idea of marketing your benefits, not features, but so very much of the marketing writing you see out there now takes the concept to this unhelpful extreme.
I ride my bike past a shop every few days that's called something like "Shelter Solutions," but in smaller print they say "We rent equipment for commercial and residential roofing need". Boom, done, that's what I care about.
Or some lady who gave me a fistful of business cards at a networking event (she apparently has five thriving gigs, eyeroll), one of which was "telecommunications solutions consultant"--talking to her, she has some cell phone MLM program she's a part of.
Customers buy benefits, but if you're not telling them what the features are, you've failed at writing clear copy. Most people do.
What I mean is this - I'm not going to buy a product that I don't understand, period. Be it a piece of software (from kitten photo apps to CAD software) or an appliance, I only buy (and ever imagine buying) things for which I at least clearly understand what inputs and outputs are. I can use this software to upload JPGs to friends. I put dirty dishes in this appliance, add some consumables, and clean dishes pop out. Those are "features", not "benefits".
On the other hand, when I see people selling on "benefits", I immediately assume they're dishonest and steer away. The listed benefits usually are, at best, a serious abuse of some cherry-picked words, and at worst outright lies. It's one of the strongest negative signals for me when evaluating companies (especially when I don't have third-party information on their actual products).
Do most people really live their lives looking for something to buy that will make their lives "connected", or their company "full of streamlined cloud synergy" or something?
What I discovered resonates with this blog post...
1. I compared powerpoint decks from 2010 to 2017. The pictures got better but the fluff and high level descriptions got further and further away from what our product actually does! I think this is due to multiple marketing leaders taking over and putting their veneer on the marketing message rather than sticking with the current message in order to justify their role.
2. Current sales reps are taught the high level benefits and problem the solution solves but they had no idea of the basics. So again when they speak to potential customers they sound like a Deloitte consultant using words that are so far away from the basic issue a customer is trying to solve.
3. R&D also became focused on the high level benefits and forgot that we sell technology and features DO actually matter they just shouldn't be the only focus of a sales/marketing team.
Its interesting to see that most sales strategies today imbue this idea but I think what happened is most of us have gone so far off the map that we end up with Meltwater problems.
1. Explain the value of what you do 2. Explain how it's implemented
The Optimizely example in this article is the former, though the headline is not great. The subhead is pretty decent.
Optimizely could easily say "we're an application for testing different versions of your app", which is true and explains what they literally do.
In my experience, if you care about conversions, "explain the value" wins. People who believe they need experimentation don't mind digging for implementation. But they want to know you'll make them more money, or do something else to improve their lives.
This is weird for people like me, I'd usually rather read the README version of a product. But I'm not the one making buying decisions for Optimizely or an agency.
These landing pages are optimised for conversion, which means they're targeted at the niche who are most likely to convert already - and for bigger, specialist firms, that niche quite likely already knows the essence of what the company does.
Because these users are also likely evaluating competitors at the same time, the pressure is on the company to differentiate - and one way to do that is to tout your high level values.
"We're not just an X, we are an X which gets your need for Y unlike $competitor"
All of this isn't to say that incomprehensible websites are good, of course. There are ways to express how you're way up maslow's heirarchy without being completely confusing.
(Continental is one of the world's largest auto parts makers, over a century old, based in Germany, and with over 200,000 employees. They make everything from tires to self-driving car sensor integration units. Not a fly-by-night startup.)
Look at General Electric.[2] Their home page has "The Digital Industry Company - Imagination at Work", clip art of some enormous piece of machinery, and a search box. Of course, GE probably made that enormous piece of machinery. But there's no indication of what they do. For that, you have to use the "GE Businesses" drop-down menu. It may take a while to find out that GE is prepared to sell you a jet engine or a locomotive.
What seems to be happening is that startups are emulating big-company sites. Badly.
[1] https://www.continental-corporation.com/en [2] https://www.ge.com/
I mean, GE was formed by Thomas Edison himself, they have everything from jet engines to self-driving cars. I suppose if you are the person responsible for shopping around for jet engines for your company you are not going to ge.com for specs.
Considering their size, I'd expect them to try to lure individuals(career and jobs) through their website instead of potential customers.
Getting some designer with a great visual portfolio to make your website isn't the same thing as having a marketing plan or a marketing strategy, but it's a whole lot faster and cheaper and unfortunately most people don't know the difference.
Oh, and as awesome as Simon Sinek's Ted talk[0] is, you're not Apple and potential customers actually do care whether your product is useful for people like them.
'We create tools that put health data into action' hits you right in the face when you visit the page. Then you scroll down and see good descriptions of their products.
As someone who visited their site after looking through similar sites filled with marketing crap, I found it a relief to see something so simple. Use this as a startup website template instead!
I feel like I've hit that company 50-odd times in my life while searching for vendors.
If you're going bottoms-up, your deal size is smaller, and you want people to start using you by themselves. Think consumer startups like Uber, Airbnb, and enterprise startups like Github. The decision-makers here are ordinary people, and they want to know exactly what they're buying so they can make an informed decision.
If you're going top-down, your deal size is larger, and your goal is to get a few high-paying customers. You want to maximize the # of people who you can talk to (and convince) over the phone, as well as extract the highest $ value out of. So you filter for the people who are a) serious about the problem, and b) can make the decision. As a developer or engineer, your discretionary budget probably isn't high enough for these companies to care about you. In fact, they probably don't even want to talk to you!
So companies that mostly rely on top-down sales have very vague landing pages. Their goal is to find specifically the people who have so much pain that they're willing to take a 25-minute sales call. And if you're willing to spend 25 minutes, it probably means that you have the budget that they care about.
[edit: removed stuff about my own startup]
For now, that's who we're looking for. And a "request a demo" is a pretty good way of finding exactly those people.
But I would at least expect a landing page that showed the benefits to an executive, even if it came off as too vague to an engineer type.
The examples here simply don't communicate anything at all.
So it's a good filter for us, for now. Once we bring the price point down, you're absolutely right -- we want to have a descriptive landing page that makes people think "wow, that's exactly my problem!".
If even one of the competitors has a sticker price and publicly available documentation then I'd be evaluating them closely before even considering you.
- What you do is totally opaque and requires a massive amount of context to explain. Yes, it’s 5 sentences, but only after both you and the user are in the same context trying to solve the same problem. Try to explain a randomly-selected B2B company’s model to your grandma. Impossible. Instead let’s focus on company branding and positive sounding platitudes.
- Once you’re selling to businesses, you’re selling to VPs and C-level executives. They don’t care about the problem you solve. You're solving some lower-level employee’s problem, or a systemic problem nobody experiences directly. Since the buyer (the VP) isn’t feeling any of the pain, the only way to justify the purchase is to focus exclusively on the high-level benefits of your service. They’re in charge of marketing. promise them perfect marketing. They’re in sales. Promise them better sales. Focus on the outcomes, not the “how”, at all costs.
- A lesser factor might be that companies love to align workers with an affirmation that the work these employees do 40+ hours a week is making the world better. B2B organizations have an especially hard time proving this because there’s no clear evidence their business does make the world better. No consumers who sing your praises or products that solve a problem the worker can empathize with. I suspect the large amount of mental gymnastics needed to justify “our company is a net good in the world” sometimes leaks into to marketing material which leads to weird-sounding empty affirmations that are more suited to internal employee “values” documents than actual marketing content. (“We make people’s lives easier”, for instance.)
Front page of the Camel website:
Camel empowers you to define routing and mediation rules in a variety of domain-specific languages, including a Java-based Fluent API, Spring or Blueprint XML Configuration files, and a Scala DSL.
This means you get smart completion of routing rules in your IDE, whether in a Java, Scala or XML editor.
Apache Camel uses URIs to work directly with any kind of Transport or messaging model such as HTTP, ActiveMQ, JMS, JBI, SCA, MINA or CXF, as well as pluggable Components and Data Format options. Apache Camel is a small library with minimal dependencies for easy embedding in any Java application. Apache Camel lets you work with the same API regardless which kind of Transport is used - so learn the API once and you can interact with all the Components provided out-of-box.
Apache Camel provides support for Bean Binding and seamless integration with popular frameworks such as CDI, Spring, Blueprint and Guice. Camel also has extensive support for unit testing your routes.
https://www.reddit.com/r/socialmedia/comments/11d8tt/can_som...
"it is up to you to browse the site and create your own interpretation of it"
For both I generally prefer Wikipedia to their own webssites.
My own similar rant, as an HN comment, remains among my more popular contributions here. "Please forward to marketing".
https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/27d5xr/please_...
The whole "it's free to try" routine is tiring at best. It's your product...communicate to me why I should care. If you don't know why that might be, it's not my job to figure it out for you (or for me).
The problem is, such tactics (artificially) inflate the new users KPI. Retention? Actually using the product? Ha! Who cares!! No one ever asks about that.
If you're complaining that the copy on a successful tech company is not speaking to you, then it's likely that you aren't the intended audience.
Upgrade to the Enterprise class platform.
Karaf provides dual polymorphic container and application bootstrapping paradigms to the Enterprise. Focus on your business code and application, Karaf deals with the rest
Best I can find: http://articles.latimes.com/1989-08-26/business/fi-897_1_ad-...
https://www.amazon.com/So-What-Communicate-Matters-Audience/...
Spend the $10 and become a better communicator.
A lot of the text seems to be placeholder/written by a designer who asked about what the company wanted for the content and never got a response.
It's quite hard to describe their business model without using the words "verified emails"; which is closely related to spam marketing I guess. A few thousand dollars a year also sounds very expensive for those email addresses/phone numbers
To take the previous examples, continentals and general electrics websites have nothing to sell to you whatsoever. The website is used to publish general company information online like: financial reports, global news, official contacts and addresses, job offers.
We're pretty close, but there's nothing there saying "this is a mailing list product" as such. I'll go see what can be done about that without ruining the pretty story.
"Pegasystems Inc. is the leader in software for customer engagement and operational excellence. Pega’s adaptive, cloud-architected software – built on its unified Pega® Platform – empowers people to rapidly deploy, and easily extend and change applications to meet strategic business needs. Over its 30-year history, Pega has delivered award-winning capabilities in CRM and BPM, powered by advanced artificial intelligence and robotic automation, to help the world’s leading brands achieve breakthrough business results."
I once did an in house mobile timekeeping app that interfaced with a big company accounting system that we could only talk to with xml directly. (Javascript on blackberry oddly...) It should have been so simple, but we had to do a lot of weird things because the accounting system was very obtuse. Reminds me of that.
It tells you exactly what it does in one sentence, and that sentence is the only one on the page. Despite that, it's probably not as popular as the vague sites being complained about here.
I hope they don't go down a route of blocking non-subscribers from reading their content like Quora.
One problem is people trying to pack ALL the features and ideas into that summary. So in the pursuit of wanting everyone to get the entire vision, the "what you offer right now" is lost.
As a company's product offerings expand into many, this gets even harder.
Enterprise sales has developed its own absurd language and culture that is now indistinguishable from parody.
All of the real sales and marketing is done offline
Or maybe have an explainer page offered to the user as a dialogue when they first go to the website.
It's often more obvious from the outside.
> The Flex group uses technology to improve the range and fluidity of human expression. We invent new concepts and representations that amplify people’s ability to create, connect, and understand. We create tools that blur the line between using and creating, in order to provide a conversational medium for thinking and doing.
What they really do is make graphical programming tools. That's it.
(I love that you wrote "our very own YCombinator" though!)
I smiled at that because "we push the visionary envelope" is destined to be someone's vapid b2b marketing tagline but then realised its been done:
Americus F. Callahan of Chicago, Illinois, in the United States, received the first patent for a windowed envelope on 10 June 1902. Originally called the "outlook envelop", the patent initially anticipated using thin rice paper as the transparent material forming the window, though this material has since been replaced by clear plastics. The design has otherwise remained nearly unchanged.