Startups, your landing page sucks | Hacker News Reader

Startups, your landing page sucks

blog.press42.com

29 pointsabarrera47 comments

The irony here is how bad the press42.com landing page is; your value proposition is pretty unclear with your one sentence. Try working on your own landing page before dishing out criticism, (not to say that what you said isn't true).

Plus:

- They don't link from the blog to the site from their logo. Marketing 101 here, folks.

- Here is their pitch:

We allow startups to get the right exposure to media while bloggers are able to filter the stories they get.

Huh?

- Thier tagline:

The matchmaking platform for startups and bloggers

Unless the business is aiming at selling to bloggers, this line is not quite clear.

- I have to click on an image of a button to find out you have not launched and are just asking for my email. Double huh?

It is obvious there has not been a test run in this landing page. Which reminds me of rule #1 of landing page: Continually Test Everything.

Good luck to the Press42 team.

Hey, fair point, so, I'm a huge believer of positive feedback, so what are your suggestions? What parts don't you understand? How would you rephrase it? Very open to suggestions :)

Pretty link bait-y. I could also write an article with:

Title: Internal combustion engines will never work

Content: I saw this guy who forgot to fill gas this morning

"There's not the least thing can be said or done, but people will talk and find fault." - Cervantes

There's only two sentences on the press42.com home page, but despite such brevity, I had zero trouble understanding their value proposition.

"We allow startups to get the right exposure to media while bloggers are able to filter the stories they get."

So what does this mean for a blogger? Filtering stories I can get? To read? Write?

Startups who are still figuring it out like to use ambiguous blanket statements in order to "capture as much of an audience as possible". They are afraid they are missing out on potential users if don't appeal to everyone.

I think you are the exception to the rule. I could guess what I think it means, but I shouldn't have to.

How would you rephrase it? Would love to hear suggestions :)

So how would you rephrase it? Open to suggestions :)

Really depends on what you actually do as a company

We allow startups to push their stories in the system. The platform does some semantic analysis, figures out what is your startup is doing and pushes it to the right blogger/journalist in the right market. On the other hand, bloggers get access to a stream of stories that are suited either to their preferences or to the topics they tend to write about. Essentially something like match.com but with startups and bloggers.

That's much more clear to me now

Haha, yeah. I find it hilarious when a startup founder is running around doing business meetings and asking for tech cofounders and all this stuff, and I go to his landing page, and it has no information whatsoever. Like a tag line and a picture.

In one case I met the guy and he actually had a decent demo, but there was no way for anyone to ever see it and get some interest in working with him unless you already knew him ahead of time and were willing to meet him to see it. People like this just don't get the power of the internet at all.

Later on I mentioned his idea to a VC who was very into that space, and the VC got interested and immediately tried to lookup the app on the app store while I was talking to him, then asked for a web page. So the guy even blew VC interest by hiding his demo in his pocket. A YouTube video would have taken him 5 minutes and at least gotten him to YC "ugly duckling" demo day status.

YES, THIS.

While I wish this article actually provided some examples (I did that here too - http://www.johnfdoherty.com/landing-pages-that-rank/), it's a decent rant.

I think startups confuse landing page with launch page. A launch page (i.e. ambiguous launchrock page) is to gain interest, quite possibly before you are certain what the MVP will do. A landing page (i.e. signup page) needs to communicate what value you bring to the person signing up. Too often the launch page turns into the landing page without much thought.

The Spanish web site I think he's referring to has an English version: http://greenmomit.es/en/ , but the link is buried at the bottom of the page instead of at the top. The sarcasm of the author is a put off for me, like startups in an international competition didn't know about having pages in English.

Criticizing is easy, for example: a media company should know better than using grey fonts over a black background.

He also criticizes startups for not defaulting to English. Not to mention the arrogance of making that statement when there are more native Spanish speakers than native English speakers.

I don't think native speakers is that meaningful of a metric in this case. Fluent speakers is the more interesting case and as far as I can tell, many more people are fluent in English than in Spanish. Additionally, the average income of fluent English speakers is likely higher than the average income of fluent Spanish speakers.

You mean on the side column of the blog?

Yes

Been wanting to change that for a long time, but yes, you are actually right. That's the reason why we changed the main site's look, but the blog is lagging behind. The fact is, that the side column isn't that important, as it's meta info, but you're right, thxs.

Everything in a startup is a trade-off.

When faced with "build product" vs "prettify website" what would most people here do?

Seems like a lot of folks here are making assumptions about what's most important to a given startup at a given time by looking from the outside. I'm sure in some cases they're right but not necessarily all.

Admittedly for 'launching' at a conference I'd assume an informative website would be a priority but what do I know?

"kudos to the other French start-ups for finally realizing that the world doesn’t speak French"

Pardon, but I don't believe there is a language the world speaks.

"three companies out of the sixteen had their webpage in their local language"

Does the author mean that thirteen of the websites were in English, and is complaining about the remaining three being in a different language? Would the author hold the same standard to English-first websites to translate them in to a variety of other local languages? If not, what an astonishingly self-centered perspective.

What's some good examples of well put together landing pages then?

http://blog.kissmetrics.com/landing-page-design-infographic/ is a great start. Just focusing on 1, 2, 4, 5, 6 and 8 will put you ahead of the game.

What I've settled on is sales letters:

http://www.instahero.com/

I second this, is there a good round-up somewhere with great examples with awesome interactions?

Simply Google "website landing pages inspiration" you'll get a ton of great lists to comb over.

Also tyler-b's comment should help you focus on the important features of a landing page

Our landing page is suffering from the same disease - anyone willing to help us out, we're missing a marketing person in our team :)

Startups also need to consider what traffic sources are arriving at their landing page. As a paid search guy, I'm sending traffic from Google PPC to landing pages, not home pages, and we're optimizing these pages all the time.

We leverage over a decade of experience and are happy to offer individual startups advice. (We also have a conversion optimization program available for a fee.) I'm also happy to summarize our best practices (for paid search anyway). We preach this stuff all day long.

- What is the search intent of the visitor for each keyword you're buying? Own this question by pulling search term reports as often as possible. - Be sure the ad copy matches search intent

- Be sure the landing page matches the ad, which matches search intent

- Have a very strong offer that stands out from the crowd. This one usually takes a team to develop. Test different offers.

- If the all of the above are in line, get the @#$% outta the way! Don't fill your landing page with all kinds of unnecessary links, videos, white papers, history, about the team, etc. Just provide a nice big button to push them along the funnel.

- Some folks benefit from placing a signup form directly on the landing page. Others actually want to qualify the visitor a bit more by forcing a click to the next page. It all depends on you.

- Are you equipped to handle phone calls? Then provide a big phone number! And use dashes like this: 415-123-4567, not periods 415.123.4567.

- Test, test, and test some more. We swear by Optimizely for LP testing.

Hope this helps.

It helps, thanks - but our problem is a different kind: We find it hard to write a good, selling copy; It's pretty much the only reason we don't have a proper landing page yet.

Why would dashes in phone numbers be better than dots?

I think if you had a marketing person they would be slapping you for letting your site remain down for an hour while you have people interested in checking it out :D

Any idea when it'll be back up? I'd like to check it out.

It's up now, although this is still temporary - will be changed in a week or so, for two reasons:

- we pivoted into WordPress market because talking with our prospective customers revealed a real need for a real-time WP support platform

- we changed our name to Codeable, because Carmivore didn't position all that well (the new domain will be codeable.io)

We already have 40 contractors (hand picked, invited) that are on standby (while we prepare the legalities to be able to process payments online).

Right now, it's suffering from a 502 Bad Gateway ;).

Yeah, that's me - currently working on some server internals. Will be back soon :)

When you are done, shoot me an email.

Done

Regarding "have your contact details on your website, not an ugly, stupid and useless form that no one uses."

Is there any advantage to having a visible e-mail address your site vs a contact form?

well, they could email you :) hard to put screenshots etc in a form but its pretty easy from mail client. I would think adding a little footer with an email and phone number wouldn't hurt. Be nice for people who don't like the "contact us" forms (ie me, especially when they don't work).

Potential startup in there based on his form to ask for feedback - i.e. people pay to get feedback early on in their startups. Someone connects businesses with feedback people.

http://www.feedbackarmy.com

One of the suggested questions you could ask (when I last looked) was "What does this site do?" The examples page gives you a pretty good idea of how it works.

Are the startups themselves any good?

https://www.thalmic.com/ comes to mind.

Quite ironic considering there isn't any interaction. Effortless indeed.

Cool stuff :)

Oh my gosh read this startups. Please.

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