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Comment by jmduke | Hacker News Reader

I am impressed by how much time I've spent on the site (and still don't understand exactly what it does or why it's worth $40/user/mo.) I am also impressed by how the future of web development is a node.js package.

To the creators: you are clearly capable of creating slick marketing (the site looks great!), I'd advise spending some time working on your value proposition. The "Just code / Just branch / Just works" trifecta is pithy, but it doesn't exactly explain what Bowery offers. (Also, having your learn more CTA redirect to the docs -- which start out with how to install Bowery -- is not ideal.)

(Also, as an FYI: the link to 'Philosophy' in the docs is broken.)

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I came here to say something similar. If the best pitch of your value proposition is "The Next Generation of Web Development", you're not going to get far with developers. Developers want to know specifically how you're going to help them. I'd argue that the byline is a better core pitch: "Build products, not infrastructure". From that, I can at least get an idea of where I'm headed. Leading with "next generation" really puts me off.

I have a short attention span for sites and after clicking around for approximately 30 seconds I have no clue what is going on. It seems to be an expanded team environment PaaS?

If I didn't click on this from hacker news, I would have bounced immediately.

The other thing is if I can't understand their marketing website, I have little faith that I would understand the product if using it.

I wish everyone creating products for developers would listen to this advice. There are so many developer products these days (including some successful ones) that leave me absolutely baffled even after a few minutes on their website. I am left with a vague sense of impressive-sounding features that probably apply to someone, but have no concrete idea what they are for or if they apply to me.

I think the cool part is that that you could do all of this stuff and not have to worry about any of the infrastructure.

The node package only works inside of the hosting environment. You're paying that much money for everything to be hosted. It says in the docs that there's no local development environment.

You will always have to worry about the infrastructure. This might be a view of hosted development's future, but every abstraction will leak. When the day the your app gets more sign ups in an hour than you have in your userbase, you'd better understand your env as deeply as possible.

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