Hacker News Reader

I think you and others on this thread are being much too harsh on their messaging.

Most people who have the need this product is meeting will have already encountered Calendly as it is ubiquitous in the space. It's basically a generic term like "Zoom" at this point. "I'll send you my Calendly link" is something people will understand to mean send you a meeting scheduling link.

So "An open source Calendly alternative" is quite clear for most people who want to make use of this.

Their messaging is focused on reaching people who might use it, not the people who won't. As you note, after going through the site, the product is not something relevant to you.

yeah, it's pretty much how "Twitter clone" tells you as much about the expected feature set as half a page on microblogging, follow and share protocols, tagging and push notifications.

I think they could improve the below-the-fold description quite a bit, but the two words "Calendly alternative" convey the important bit about it being a customer-facing time-slot picker that connects to all your calendars, CRMs and webconferencing tools more precisely than "appointment scheduler" which might miss these features and lock you into various others, and probably gets more relevant search traffic too.

A strange take to say that was too harsh, when, the whole point was that it could be clearer? That's rather mild and constructive.

The counter argument that clear communication isn't all that necessary, because the people looking to receive this knowledge already should know this?

the message is clear, if you're in the target group.

that's good communication.

filters out non-prospects early.

Maybe I missed a sarcasm tag, but I found your statement to be puzzling, for a lack of less kind words.

What I'm saying, and others are saying, is that even for someone looking for exactly this, it would be easier for that person to know they found exactly this, with a more clear message about what this is.

And what you seem to be saying, unless I misunderstood, is that this is a good thing? Surely the non-prospects as you put it, would also more easily find themselves being non-prospects if they knew what this was?

Just in case this is perceived as stemming from annoyance, I can assure you that I'm not at all invested. However, I do find your take, puzzling. I hope this isn't a trend in IT-solution marketing I'm not aware of.

The 'trend' is that as an open source clone, Calendso doesn't have a marketing team behind it, so it's entirely true to point out that their landing page doesn't have the polish we've come to expect of a VC-backed unicorn company with a time-proven, expensive marketing firm taking pictures and writing website copy, and that it could do better.

What I think some are reacting to is that it's also unfair to expect that. The person looking for an "open-source Calendly alternative" knows they've found that because that's going to be what, by brand name, what they're looking for and will know they've found something that addresses that need, with those three words.

I'm honestly just confused by the comments here. No one is having unmet high expectations. There is also nothing unfair here.

You don't need a marketing team to write a single line giving a high-overview description of a solution. Pointing out that such a thing would be helpful is also absolutely ridiculous to reject to the extent as I've seen here.

If an open source project want to identify themselves exclusively through a competitor, then, I'm sure that's fine. However, to avoid sounding like a parrot, I'll leave it at that. Have a nice day

its not a trend. but when a project is early you don't want mass appeal. you want narrow appeal, only the folks that "lean in". so then you get a solid base to build from.

they are at level-1 and you are clearly a prospect once they are level-3+

and this is a good thing. for an early stage prospects like you are noise. filtering you out early improves their value chain (for now).

their message should (must) change as they grow to eventually attract the L2 and L3 type prospects

This describes also my "journey" within the homepage, to the letter.

I see this often on similar small product homepages. Many of them describe the product for someone already familiar with it, and could do with taking a step back and trying to describe it for someone who, figuratively speaking, accidentally stumbled onto it and has no idea what's going on.

Came here to write the same.

Have you considered that in some cases (though probably not Calendso's), that may be on purpose?

The VC crowd would have you believe that every product must disrupt the whole world – for the casual visitor, their gradma and their dog.

But niche products have to ward off tyre-kickers and what-if time-wasters, as much as entice their target audience. Using industry-specific jargon kills both flies at once.

If you "don't get it", you may not be the target audience.

Exactly. Home page belongs to the marketing team, not to engineering, and those wizards of target audiences quite often find counter-intuitive ways to reach their goals. If message „we are like X, but better“ gets visits and reaches the expected conversion rates, then who we are to challenge that work?

This is our strategy exactly. We get a lot of outsiders or investors critiquing that we have industry jargon on our landing page that only insiders understand. That is 100% by design.

Not only does it signal to insiders that we know what we are talking about and that our software was built with them in mind, but it also scares away people that it is not built for. Which helps us avoid answering countless inquiries as to whether this software can work for this or that.

Thanks, I haven't considered this angle. Although I loathe the fact that it works like this - deliberately lowering information value of a page giving you an advantage. It feels scummy.

But hey, if it brings more money, it's justified, right? :/

I'm am curious how it feels scummy, especially in the information age with the world's knowledge available at your fingertips. Seriously, it's 4 clicks, to select the word Calendly, right click, and search Google.

Not to make it personly, but eg, you spent zero space in your comment defining the meaning of the word "scummy". Adding a definition of the word scummy would, from an abstract angle, raise the information content of your comment. It doesn't seem scummy (at least to me) that you assumed all readers would know what that word means, even considering that readers here may not have English as their first language, and thus might NOT know what the word means. At some level, we just accept that people know things, sometimes unevenly, and it's not at all 'scummy' to withhold 'known' information.

The other thing here is that there's a difference between information amount, and information value - and there's an unappreciated value in NOT having something. The principle of "less is more" holds here. Calendly or this clone doesn't explain everything. It doesn't talk about what a Computer is, or what the Internet is or the history of APIs.

I think their home page is just fine given Calendly's market position and level of stagnation. Will be trying Calendoso today as it will not only save my company money, but will enable some very powerful new workflows.

This happens to me with so many new services. I guess a lot of people will just leave because they don't understand what it's about even if it's something they might actually want to use.

As a counterpoint, I instantly knew 90% what this was by using the term.

Also, what's up with this stock photo suddenly appearing halfway down the page?

https://images.unsplash.com/photo-1556761175-5973dc0f32e7

It's some picture of employees of "proof" (juding by the "proof.quip.com" URL in the guy's browser) watching a presentation by a guy in shorts holding a small statue of a whale with legs? What does that have to do with a calendar?

This is a tangent, but is there somewhere you can get this sort of feedback for your own apps/landing pages?

Clearly you can get it here. :) Post a "Show HN"?

Indiehackers community is sometimes helpful IMO

Find friends, the less familiar with the space the better. Ask them to write down facts about the product, in the order that they learn them. After each navigation, ask them to summarize what the product is and what problems it solves.

That’s basically the approach I took when writing that up.

I think the unfamiliarity is the most important part. It’s incredibly easy to be blind to what you know and others don’t. It also simulates a non interactive cold sell for the product, as opposed to trying to convince your competitor’s customers to jump ship.

You can post and seek feedback at IndieHackers site.

Have a look at https://www.roastmylandingpage.com/ and https://www.usertesting.com/

I agree with everything you have written and I would also suggest that they improve the video. It has the same shortcomings as the rest of the website and the charts presented are totally meaningless without proper axes and axes titles.

Wow. Maybe take a break, walk or smoke. The only thing I can really take from this long post is that you didn't know the category of product before. So, you don't work as coach, consultant, recruiter or similar. That's fine.

If you are not a customer and the page makes you not want to engage further, then it is a good page, isn't it?