A Better Mousetrap – Converting WebPages to Web APIs | Hacker News Reader

A Better Mousetrap – Converting WebPages to Web APIs

turnerj.com

63 pointsshanselman21 comments

A suggestion - Stop burying the lede. Neither this post not the front page of your brand vantage website say what your service actually does, or what problem it solves. Instead it piles jargon on top of jargon and seems obsessed with talking about brands, despite the product you are offering not having anything to do with brands or branding. On mobile at least all that is above the fold on Brandvantage is a meaningless statement: "Data driven brands stand out" That seems to have no connection to the service you are actually offering - a way of extracting structured data from websites. It wasn't until I got to your use case page on brand vantage via the bottom footer that I managed to work out what your product does, which actually looks cool! You might have started by trying to build a "digital brand expert" Whatever that is, but that isn't what you've ended up with so I'd suggest to stop viewing and promoting it via this lens.

That's fair feedback. When I went about this whole process, I thought I was doing it the right way by setting up business entities with the name, getting a trademark and the various legal sides of things all on BrandVantage because I really thought the "digital brand expert" is what I was going to launch with. My pivot for structured data from websites definitely makes the name not lineup well with what I'm offering now.

The idea was that the data one could gather from sites (and eventually news articles, products and companies) would be able to help businesses with their brands (competitor analysis et al). The whole "data driven brands stand out", that was trying to signal to a certain type of business (ones that use analytics or other data sources to guide their business decisions) that this could be a useful tool for them.

I'm probably too emotionally and financially invested in the name to change it but yeah, I'll likely refactor the content to push the structured data angle harder (maybe bring a copy of the use cases information to the homepage) and just deal with the name not lining up to the product.

Let go of the name - find a better one that matches your pivot

Maybe you could keep BrandVantage as the brand/company name and have different product offerings with different names? Or does it not fit at all anymore?

https://mourner.github.io/bullshit.js/ is a very good ally when reading these kind of articles, by removing the buzzwords.

I've read the entire homepage and have zero idea:

1. what this is

2. why I would use it

sorry!

Inspiration is the thing that gets you to the thing.

You’re blog post was 1000% better than the landing page, because it was real. Stick to that voice. Replace the stock images and marketing-speak with halt-and-catch-fire design/quotes, code snippets and sample output.

Don’t try to get customers. Get early adopters who share the vision and want to come along for the ride as you experiment and push the envelope. If you’re vision is clear and speaks to a real pain (getting structured data from the web is a pita) there will be early adopters willing to pay. Those same people are your best market and will make great future employees.

This is all so confusing, and I am a professional web developer. You may have a great product, but it is literally buried under a mountain of marketing jargon.

it's all part of the author's "lot of big plans".

Others have already commented on the jargon so here's some comments on the product's landing page :

- using those free purple illustrations that are everywhere on the web gives off an air of laziness and cheapness

- ditto for the Unsplash photo that has nothing to do with your value proposition

- price your product in USD or auto-convert. Linking to a conversion page is friction. Are you saving me time or wasting it?

- don't say 'mistakes may happen' or you don't have good support. Act like a pro, you're trying to sell here

- show don't tell. Too much text. Show me a table of structured data without me having to click a button

As this is your first product this can be forgiven but if you want sales consider some of the above and maybe hang out on the homepages of some of the most successful SaaS businesses to see how they do it.

I really like the "What you should know..." section of the BrandVantage website: https://brandvantage.co I like how honest and transparent it is, and how it sets proper expectations.

>In time though, I got to a stage where it felt like I could launch and was hyping myself up until reality struck: I didn't actually build what I set out to build.

Nice writeup! I'm sure this has happened to many of us haha. Glad you kept going and launched your app!

Thanks! It has been a long time coming but I'm glad I've launched - now I can focus on iteratively improving what I've built in the open.

Based on a quick read I didn't understand:

a) What is the goal? b) What is the problem relative to the goal? c) What is the solution that will help to reach the goal? d) Who would use it (whatever it is), how and why?

I'm confused... What is a digital brand expert? I read into the article a little bit, and had to leave -- so much jargon I didn't even understand (and I'm fairly technical).

Basically I was trying to build some software which would be able to do what marketing and SEO people (what I call "brand experts") do for larger businesses, but provide those services for smaller businesses.

Happy to try and explain any of the jargon if you'd like.

My total off the cuff not marketing person take on your last sentence is that if you have to explain your product one on one to people who can't easily understand your site, maybe you should consider rewriting the site. Again though I'm not a marketing person so maybe this is some marketing strategy.

Is it basically a simple web crawler that parses the structured Schema.org data?

I tried Amazon.de but it seems to block (503 HTTP) the requests already.

I came to the comments after reading the first two paragraphs for an explanation and then back to the sure once I learned there were links at the bottom.

I think a good side project for OP would be writing books (not a slight).

At "Try Our WebPage API" I suggest putting a spinning loading animation while waiting for the results.

Why you write so much stuff? Isn’t there a one highlighted paragraph that describes what you do in there?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com