Comment by oehpr | Hacker News Reader

Comment by oehpr | Hacker News Reader

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a "Virtual meetup platform" confused me. I signed up thinking this was a platform where my coworkers could meet up to discuss things, an alternative to meet or zoom.

But this is actually a premium access streaming platform. You sell tickets for events or seminars or whatever. take a cut of the tickets and host the event. Good for things like training seminars or whatever.

I think that kind of makes the introduction page a bit of a fail, It seems every person who makes the introduction page for their product always suffers HARD from the curse of knowledge. You MUST spend a huge amount effort clearly explaining what your product is and is not. There is simply no latitude for flowery bullshit language like "Explore a world of limitless experiences. Use our platform to discover what drives you. Bring your passions; we'll bring the community." Users don't have the patience to read this, and you don't have the time to be speaking it.

That said. Maybe this is something that only matters for posts like this one. Where the people coming to your site are likely in your target audience. Maybe the bulk of your customers will be coming from referrals which will never even see the introduction page. Maybe it's not worth worrying about?

Well. Best of luck anyway.

> But this is actually a premium access streaming platform. You sell tickets for events or seminars or whatever. take a cut of the tickets and host the event. Good for things like training seminars or whatever.

This is not an easy problem. It's always intriguing to me how hard it is to write a clear description of your own product that explains WTF it really is.

Yet someone external (as above) can often cut to the chase with a pithy and useful description.

I genuinely don't know what the reason is. In this example, I guess "premium access streaming platform" are not words the marketing team would like (maybe it sounds a bit porn-like ?).

Yet it is certainly way better than "virtual meetup platform", because it clearly conveys who pays what and for whom.

And this is as clear as a bell "You sell tickets for events or seminars or whatever. take a cut of the tickets and host the event. Good for things like training seminars or whatever.".

But again, that's kind of language that the marketing guys/gals might eschew as overly informal/familiar - even though it encapsulates beautifully why I might want to investigate this product.

Its definitely not solely a marketing speak problem. There are only two of us at my startup and we've had at least 10 revisions just to get the above the fold text in place. The below the fold we are still working on and will have a new revision soon.

Yet even now if you told me what we do is not clear I would not be very surprised. I mean sure it seems clear to me but how could it not since I already use the product myself?

I hit this myself all the time with my product. I think the core problem is that we're too close. We know all the little things it can do, so it's hard to pull back and see what the BIG things really look like.

Hey, I work on Venu. We're actually in the process of coming up with some new content/verbiage for the site because we actually agree with you. We came up with content for this very early on in development. This landing page served initially as a way for people to sign up for closed beta and eventually we don't plan to use it. But yea we will come up something better in the future for sure! Thanks!

Feature request: Can the events that are free have something other than a "purchase ticket" button? That's making me vaguely uncomfortable for some reason. Maybe just a H1 saying that it's free and more emphasis on adding it to a calendar? Should free events need accounts? You might get more traffic if they don't. And with more traffic you get more eyes on the content that does cost money.

For sure! In our cart view we don't ask for payment info, but definitely hear you on this. We'll begin discussing what changes are needed to facilitate this. We are trying to keep the barrier to entry low -- for both creating & viewing so this would certainly do that!

I think this has great potential, and immediately understood the value offering of it before visiting the page. That said, I'm glad you're re-crafting the landing page.

A couple suggestions/phrasings that come to mind and - at least in my opinion - would quickly convey the intent of the platform: "Make the world your next convention venue"

Okay, maybe I'm worse at this than I thought...

Interesting. I got it right away due to having used Meetup the company before, so a virtual version makes sense.

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