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Comment by RyanZAG | Hacker News Reader

It's pretty common on a lot of recent startup landing pages. Great looking design, nice little touches like animation - but very little detail on how the product actually works. The assumption is that someone curious is going to sign up to find out. Lots of people won't do this and will just bounce. I think every landing page should try to answer these questions:

  What is your product?
  Why would I use your product?
  How does your product work?
  What does your product cost? 
    ("Still working on it" is fine, but say so)
  What countries are you available in?

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You've made a good list, but I think we need to begin with even more basic things.

(1) Make sure people know that the page deals with a product that is sold by a company. A web page can be anything. Maybe it's a comic strip. Or a page of essays ranting about various topics. Or an open-source project. Or a demonstration of some CSS technique.

(2) Tell what kind of thing the product is. Some companies, when asked about their product, will say something like, "It helps people discover and share ... [whatever]." But given that, I don't know whether it's an iOS app or a Windows binary or web site or an e-mail list or a metal detector or a buy-some-food-and-send-half-to-my-friend shopping service.

But all the marketing people will say "we don't sell products we sell solutions."

I think there's a legitimate version of that. People mostly buy solutions, not products. For example, my projector recently died, so I bought another one. That one didn't actually solve my problem, so I returned it for one that did.

So I think a good landing page should make it clear what the solution is. For example, Dropbox opens with "Your stuff, anywhere", with a picture of a phone and a tablet sitting on a laptop. Their product is disk space plus some free syncing software. But they have wisely focused on the solution, not the product.

If that gets in the way of writing copy that actually converts people, fire your marketing staff.

If you don't tell me what you are giving me a solution to, I don't know whether it fits my problem.

Also, I generally know my problem better than you do.

There should be a W3C validator service for this.

Oddly: seems like this might be a place for Google to put its natural language processing skills to work. If they can figure out WTF a product, excuse me, solution page is about, you're in reasonably good hands. Maybe.

Many times I see a link on HN and click on it, and they act like everyone knows exactly what is going on.

It gives me a nagging feeling that I am completely out of touch with HN, too.

The way moderators edit headlines doesn't help this at all.

This happens almost 100% of the time with product updates. You are taken to a page that says "We have released version 3.1.5 of Gizmo. Download it here." with not even a hint of what Gizmo is.

Well obviously Giz.mo giz's your mo's. Update 3.1.5 is going to completely upend the status quo, it is so disruptive & social.

Edit: The downvotes are making me giggle like a small child. Do I have a problem?

Updates and bugreports are two communications I specifically had in mind when writing my "Tell me what the fuck it is EVERY GODDAMNED TIME YOU COMMUNICATE ABOUT THE PRODUCT" above. Major peeve.

You're not alone. I find an awful lot (a majority?) of look-at-this HN posts to be nearly incomprehensible.

Yeah, especially if you think your blog post will get submitted to HN or reddit or TechCrunch... assume that nobody knows what your company does! Those that do will just skip over it, and those of us that don't will now know and everyone's happy.

Yeah, that's the problem here. The main product page doesn't answer any of this at all, and there doesn't appear to be an FAQ or any actual information about how the process works.

At best, I infer that this is a kickstarter clone for startups, but my major questions as a potential backer, like how does this work legally don't seem to be answered at all. The signup for the email list doesn't actually explain what "curated" means here, and the signup is a 1 field form for my email.

And if I were a potential project creator, there's even less information. They mention "support", but there isn't any info about what that support is.

Clicking on the "About" just brings up pictures of the team and investors, which is pretty much worthless information. I want to know about what the company does, not just who's in it. Their "product" page is a kickstarter-style pitch page, but it's not clear that they're actually talking about the product(which they apparently are)... and it appears that they're using it to sell things to raise money for the startup.

I find it interesting and useful to contrast Ramen's website with Peek's. http://www.usertesting.com/?utm_source=Peek%20Home&utm_mediu...

The first text you see says "Eliminate bad customer experiences. Get videos of real people speaking their thoughts as they use your website or mobile app."

Beside that you have buttons "how it works", "Features", and a few more. Click on "how it works" and you land on a page that explains how it works. It is trivial to understand what this service is, whether it might be something you want, and how to get the information you need.

In contrast, on Ramen we get photos of the team.

When you've spent hours upon hours deep in the engine room of your product it's SO easy to forget that no one else knows what you've built. Doubly-so if you've come from the corporate world working on a product that already has immediate brand recognition.

This is a good checklist.

Honestly, at my last company we decided against adding a lot of this information. After measuring, it turned out that a simple, bare-bones landing page converted to signup best. After some investigation, it turned out that, for our business, the overwhelming majority of users showed up already knowing what they were about, rather than by searching "how do I x" or landing there via hacker news. What converted best was a site with our logo to confirm they were in the right place and a big, obvious way to sign up/in.

May I ask what type of product your company is offering? It's great that you have enough brand recognition to make the assumption that people know exactly what you're offering, but I feel that this isn't true even for the biggest brands in certain domains.

I believe the site in question is https://www.expensify.com.

Do you at least have a link on the landing page that will take a visitor to a product explanation?

And they'll want your email address, and global permissions for your twitter and/or facebook account, just for the chance to maybe find out in the future what they should be telling you up front. "signing up" has, unfortunately, become something of a user-hostile act of late.

Indeed, this helps solve a bigger problem than usability: what the hell are they selling.

I'm often frustrated by the poor messaging written on landing pages or even the 'About [Product]' pages. Either the page is 100% marketing fluff or 100% technical info. With marketing fluff, I can read a thousand words and still not get any substance. With just technical info, they often leave out answering the key marketing answers: what are the competitive advantages?

It's not just startup pages. Often open source software homepage is a news page, which means recent release change lists are what the user sees first.

I guess someone good at writing and wrangling the change system could submit change requests, but it's a shame that's needed.

Also if it's a blog post provide a big, fat, highly visible link to your actual site.

It's incredible how many product blogs will just bring you to the blog's main page if you click the title instead of the actual product website.

It's incredible that this happens. A popular blog post is the best way to get traffic back into your website, especially if your blog post is a technical one instead of a product update. I think:

"Oh wow, these guys really care about their product. I should check it out and keep it in the back of my mind for the future"

Also, When answering the question "what is your product" DO NOT SAY "we are like yyy for xxx"

Half the sites I see that use this I have absolutely no idea what 'yyy' is or does, so you may as well have put nothing at all.

Yeah I hear you. We put ton of long form philosophical waxing onto our blog in the early days. We're working now on taking all that and boiling it down to homepage-speak. Homepages are hard ;)

You already know this, but...on the Ramen Project Page itself (buried below all the "Back this Project" links) is a "How It Works" sections that seems to contain exactly the information the Peeker was looking for (I watched the video, and he must have said "how does this work" or some variation of that 5 or 6 times)

Why not just put that (or a link directly to that section) somewhere prominent on the home page?

> Lots of people won't do this and will just bounce

That's a huge assumption. The only way to know for real is to A/B test. You may be surprised by what testing will tell you. We constantly A/B test landing page designs at Ordoro, and have often found results that are counter-intuitive.

Agreed. I'm hoping the dude used a bigger sample than one to determine whether the design needs to change. A/B test for sure.

Any specific examples you could share?

Or better yet

Here is a problem This is how our product solves that problem

followed by additional features that make your product stand out.

No, that's worse!

The page shouldn't say: "Today, developing apps is cheap, and founders want to take the risk themselves. There's no need for millions of dollars. Let's cut Wall Street out, and fund them ourselves. With Ramen.is, you can:

* ... * ...

It should say, "Crowd-funding for app developers. Let your app be funded by those who need it, $5 at a time.

If you build it, it's because they came."

A big one for me:

    What does your product look like?

And: How much does it cost?

Oh man, this is the one that cheeses me off so much. These web sites where you have to give them your email to get info about a product, or whatever. Forget it. Not going to touch it with a 10-foot pole. If you can't be honest and open up-front, I'm sure as heck not doing business with you.

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