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Comment by generalk | Hacker News Reader

> Does the first sentence not cover that fairly well?

It does not.

The first sentence on the site ("Perkeep [...] is a set of open source formats...") describes literally what the thing is, but not at all what it _does_.

Not to slam on these cats, because marketing copy is _hard_. For project collaborators, or open-source dorks who live in this kind of world anyway, the sentence on the homepage is probably perfectly descriptive.

But I agree with my GP post. Reading the homepage I had no idea what Perkeep actually did.

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What it _does_ is:

> modeling, storing, searching, sharing and synchronizing [...] files or objects, tweets or 5TB videos, and you can access it via a phone, browser or FUSE filesystem

I mean maybe it could have been more explicit or they could have added more detail, but having this as the first sentence is WAY better than most of the 'professional' landing pages for startups that get posted here. 'Harmonizes synergy and increases your ability to wow your target space with your aspirations', now that's meaningless.

Them: “The project description isn’t clear to me.”

You: “Well I’m sorry it wasn’t clear to you but it was clear to me and better than these other things and here’s why it should have been clear to you.”

If someone tells you something is unclear to them, arguing about it doesn’t change the fact that it wasn’t clear to them.

As an engineer

> files or objects, tweets or 5TB videos

means rsync, curl, and Twitter API integration. It obviously does more than this, since I can throw something together that does that in a few hours. Where is the list of everything it supports?!?

That should be front and center.

I managed to parse it, but there's a great grabber sentence down below that might be right at the top:

"Your data should be alive in 80 years, especially if you are." To which you might add, "We're here to help you make sure that's what happens". Then follow that with the "Things Perkeep believes ..." section.

After that, the mission is clear, how it works is clear (though many people might have -no idea- what 'Open source' is good for). Only Then (IMO) can you get away with going all technical on them!

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