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Comment by calmbonsai | Hacker News Reader

How to fail at a product website lesson #1: Don't describe the purpose and show the experience of your product on the home page.

I have no idea what "Hyperland" is.

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It is weird, this is their main website: https://hypr.land/

Which has a demo. This website seems to only be for the account / payments.

This landing page also fails to properly describe anything I understand.

It's sway with eye-candy. (Or, if you don't know about sway, the Wayland version of i3 — also with eye-candy).

If you're still not sure, you're simply not the target audience, these things almost always require further learning and customization, so some level of gate-keeping from the start is helpful.

Yep this - you’re not the target audience. It’s a UI desktop layer for Linux, made for the enthusiast.

But also, OP posted a link that is not mobile friendly (at least on safari) and doesn’t say much about what this is. The main page does a fine job though (for those would care I guess).

Then that's honestly not on them.

There’s got to be a term for this given how I see it daily: when experts are so hyper focused that they’re not even aware they might have to at least indicate what a compositor even is.

I think a common response is that if you don’t know, you’re not the audience anyways. But that lops off your customer funnel and limits the general awareness of your product. You want to bring everyone one step closer to your product from wherever they are.

average familiarity [1] comes to mind.

1 https://xkcd.com/2501/

That’s perfect.

In the case of niche, power user focused products like this I think it’s actually reasonable to assume the target audience should know what a compositor is.

For projects like this that come with some assembly required, having a light filter on your funnel can actually be beneficial. Cast too wide of a net and you collect a lot of people who aren’t qualified to use the product but expect a lot of support anyway.

It looks really horrible

Only if you already know what "compositor" means in this context.

> Modern compositor with the looks

> Hyprland provides the latest Wayland features, dynamic tiling, all the eyecandy, powerful plugins and much more, while still being lightweight and responsive

If you're in the market for a Wayland compositor you should know what compositor means. If you're not in the market for a Wayland compositor then I can't imagine you'd ever need to know anything about hyprland.

Imagine if you will a site where links are shared amongst a very tech-heavy audience. I for one think it's reasonable for the average HN reader to understand the sites linked to.

"If you don't understand it, you don't belong" is a crap attitude. They wanted to learn, if they didn't they wouldn't be asking what it means. What happened to good writing?

It's not about being tech-heavy, it's about specifically running a Linux desktop on a distribution where you're running a very modern software stack, and you're not using a bundled desktop, so you're in the market for a compositor built for Wayland.

That's just a very specific usecase. You can be extremely tech-heavy but if you run Windows then this wouldn't matter to you.

I'm a very tech-heavy guy, and no, I don't understand everything linked on HN because it's just outside of my scope. Anything with Mac OS? Couldn't tell you.

That's my point. If given a link to a random article about macOS details, I expect to be able to identify it as such, and not just be completely baffled. As a macOS user looking at the Hyprland page, you won't even know if it's meant for macOS, Windows, Linux, Android -- even the idea that it's software is only by implication.

I clicked 3 different links failing at answering that question for myself and then I stopped caring, though not enough to pass up one-upping your comment.

Neither the developers of Hypr nor the users care about having a good "product website" calling a window manager a product in the first place is already weird and just kinda shows you aren't the target audience.

Not everything is trying to be the next iPhone.

It's a tiling window manager for a few Linux distros.

Arch, not Ubuntu.

https://packages.ubuntu.com/search?suite=all&searchon=names&...

Sure, but their own install page recommends against it:

> distros like Pop!_OS, Ubuntu, etc. will have major issues running Hyprland.

> How to fail at a product website

..but they've been really successful in their niche..

maybe your intuition is off?

If ypu have no idea you probably dont want it tough

That assumes that everyone who wants your product already knows about it, which is true of zero products.

When the core of the "product" is support, it feels quite safe to say that if you don't know what hyprland is you'd probably won't be interested in hyprland support.

Agreed, but for this particular product, the number is probably a lot closer to zero than average.

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