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Comment by ccantana | Hacker News Reader

For what it’s worth, we’ve had a lot of success with a strategy not mentioned here: hosting a site that’s intentionally mysterious, if not slightly provocative.

About 35% of all visitors to our site end up subscribing.

We’re not a SaaS company, so I realize this may be comparing apples to oranges, but we had experimented with a lot of different, elaborate, shiny landing pages that were similar to a few encouraged here.

And after falling flat on our face for months, we realized that an incredibly simple, borderline-mysterious landing page converted users far more effectively.

(For the curious, this is the landing page: https://techloaf.io)

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This is important - techloaf (big fan here!) is obviously an outlier, but generally the bigger and more complex the product, the vaguer the landing pages get.

I always thought this was a shifty strategy to get you on the phone and have salespeople con you, but after reading _Mastering the Complex Sale_ I've come to realise that it makes sense - you want to understand a potential customer's needs before you actually try to pitch anything concrete at them.

That's probably good for getting a lot of sign-ups with no intent to become a paying customer/active user of your product, but I'm curious how many of those users would convert down funnel.

Convert to what? Croutons?

You should come write for us :)

To sign ups or subscribers.

They’re one and the same for us; our core product is a weekly newsletter.

Your emails are hilarious. Love them!

For the lazy, here's a preview: https://mailchi.mp/872ceee548ec/its-loaf-time

Thank you! Nice to see a few early supporters on here :)

I'll admit, I subscribed without knowing what I was getting into. Sometimes a little mystery is good in life :-)

A picture is worth a thousand words, or in your case, an example.

Exactly, we have the luxury of being able to show a single, clear example of essentially the entire product. I realize that most SaaS companies probably don’t have that luxury, as each customer’s use case will be slightly different.

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