Ask HN: Why are some websites so bad at describing their product?

The best resource I have seen that discusses this issue and offers a solution is https://www.mystorybrand.com/

Potential customers should be able to answer these questions within 5 SECONDS of reading the site, or marketing material: 1. What do you offer? 2. How will it make my life better? 3. What do I need to do to buy it?

You can do this with fewer than 300 words on your sales page.

Honest answer to an honest question? Because the nerds are in charge.

I’ve lost count of the number of times dev types have been put in marketing or management roles because someone thought that stuff is easy. Imagine putting a marketing type in charge of your server.

Writing, marketing, product management: these are all real, solid skills, and quite often (not always), devs or startup CEO’s don’t have them.

To add, nerds are not always the programmers. There are plenty of people from finance who do the same. Sometimes the CEO, who has a sales background, gets a little too obsessed with the technology behind the product and doesn't explain what problem it solves.

There's a cliche that the ideal founding team is a hacker (dev), a hustler (business), and a hipster (UX). When a team misses out on the hipster founder, these things happen.

> Why is it like this?

1. It is hard to guess what someone else will understand.

2. There is a trade-off between using words everyone knows, being concise, and getting enough richness of meaning across.

One of the world's top professionals in technical communication has a book where he uses diagrams and only the ten hundred most common English words to explain subjects[1]. However, this sort of thing can people feeling condescended-to[2].

3. Different forms of communication have different goals.

The goal of that page is not to help every software engineer understand what New Relic is without them using it.

The goal of that page is to sell software. There are multiple audiences for that, which means making communication tradeoffs

4. Sometimes people fail at doing things well. That includes copy-editing.

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> What do I have to do to become the type of developer that doesn't cry when I have to investigate a new product solution?

I empathize with the feeling of overwhelm.

> What do I have to do

To answer the question:

0. Before starting, accept that some stranger on the internet can only give you a direction or mental framework -- I cannot answer this question. Answering it requires building a relationship with someone you trust to be a sounding board. Talk out the situations and your emotions and your thoughts with them and your brain will likely find a way to make sense of it.

1. First, accept that there will always be things that you do not know. It is thermodynamically impossible to learn enough that you'll be able to understand the every product at-a-glance. There are many product-builders and only one you. The world is deep and fractal in its complexity. Terry Pratchett phrases this well[1].

2. Second, accept that there will always be decisions to be made under conditions of imperfect information. Do not try to make an optimal decision in a complex situation. Neural networks which try too hard to optimize things create disasters[2]. Instead: choose what you care about, strive to think in a way you can be proud of, and then chill. The dice will fall where they fall. . Kenny Rogers phrases this well[3].

3. Third, be mindful that things rarely end with a mission accomplished. Instead, they usually start or change feedback loops that need to be attended-to. So be ready to notice and respond. It may be that Agile is Dead[4], but to notice and respond is the living heart of building products with a spirit of agility.

4.Fourth, build relationships with other engineers and talk with them about the problems they face in their jobs. This will enable you to practice understanding the way people phrase and mis-phrase things. It will also improve the quality of your code as you'll have a mind more well-trained to foresee the frustrations of your fellow engineers.

[1]

> “I told her we were going to get married, and all she could talk about was frogs. She said there's these hills where it's hot and rains all the time, and in the rainforests there are these very tall trees and right in the top branches of the trees there are these like great big flowers called . . . bromeliads, I think, and water gets into the flowers and makes little pools and there's a type of frog that lays eggs in the pools and tadpoles hatch and grow into new frogs and these little frogs live their whole lives in the flowers right at the top of the trees and don't even know about the ground, and once you know the world is full of things like that, your life is never the same.” -- Wings, Terry Pratchett

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ao4jwLwT36M

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7hx4gdlfamo

[4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a-BOSpxYJ9M

Because the makers of websites are web devs and not copywriters.

I’m a copywriter that specializes in SaaS tools, and it’s literally always the case.

The founders are brilliant nerds but haven’t a cooking clue about the first thing when it comes to marketing, product positioning or delivery of their value proposition.

Big startups such as New Relic have editors that review everything that goes online. For small startups that are just starting sure.

This is the main reason, and the site's aren't pulling enough money to get copy writers

Are you sure you're a potential customer? Apart from the somewhat broken English I can't see what's wrong with that 50-word summary.

I'd guess they would have a few pages explaining its features but it seems the website is down atm.

Yep!

Indeed. I don't know anything about New Relic apart from that summary, and it seemed to contain enough information to get started making a similar product.

I think their potential customers likely understand the jargon used, which is really just "serverless" and perhaps "monolithic", maybe "platform".

I don't understand OP's problem with "observability", though. I don't think that counts as jargon, and it doesn't seem like a hard English word to understand. A dictionary would have helped more than Wikipedia, in any case.

Sometimes people focus too much on the 'how' instead of the 'what problem this solves' when describing their value proposition.

The example description in the OP doesn't say anything about "how", though. It seems completely focused on "what problem this solves". I'd quote you where, but it's the whole thing.

I've noticed this too. In many cases it's purely down to poor marketing/copywriting, but I think in some cases it's because they've specifically tailored the language to their target customer.

If the language is compelling to the people who actually buy the product (who may be quite nerdy/technical themselves), then it doesn't matter if it's confusing to the average person.

I find that product descriptions can be hard to parse when they fail to describe the problem they solve, and instead focus only on describing aspects of their solution.

Not a very good example considering New Relic dominates that space. Also, companies adapt their description to include latest trending words such as observability.