Show HN: SimplyBuilt – Makes building a website so easy, your mother could do it
simplybuilt.com
simplybuilt.com
With the recent efforts to improve access to programming for all genders this type of tag line may not resonate very well with some of your technical audience.
I would consider replacing 'mother' with 'grandparents'.
Although the Dilbert strip (with a "sexist imbecile" punchline) sums it up perfectly.
I'm trying hard to find a relevant context where "your mother" phrase would be appropriate, but so far I'm failing. It's poor marketing at best.
It's not that mother's are ignorant, it's that mother's care about your success more than your feelings and will tell you drupal & wordpress suck no matter how much work you put into it. I'm working on a new Apostrophe 2 site for her now. Mom if you read this it's coming, and it'll be good I promise :)
My mother falls into this stereotype that everyone is hating on. If anyone should be offended by this, I should be in that crowd. I'm not offended, because a) she's not dumb, she just hasn't been given the right tools until now b) this post isn't really about my mother or someone else's mother.
Good thing I didn't say "a caveman could do it" as I might be in a similar situation. Except with cavemen. Or people related to cavemen.
Nobody likes feeling stupid, I would assume, this is magnified by how one wants to appear to their children.
My father liked his website but I had to keep it updated for him, he would not participate in it.
What is troublesome, though, is that the example person is invariably a female ancestor or relative: it is always "mother", "grandmother" or "kid sister" ("encryption scheme that will keep out your kid sister but not the NSA").
Many programmers have a father or grandfather who are not programmers, or technologically savvy. Many have a prying kid brother rather than kid sister.
It's a shame, in a way, that the "your mother could do it" in the title is what's getting most of the attention here – really shows the importance of choosing your words carefully.
are you implying that my mother's stupid?
It's a humorous stereotype, not everything is sexist.
And if we're going off of anecdotal evidence, neither of my parents are technically inclined. We're not all privileged enough to have multiple generations of experience with technology in our family, let alone computers.
No. It's sexist because it assumes something about a group of people based solely on gender. Or it can be also an example of ageism if both gender and age are involved.
But let's forget it for now, there's another problem here and that is the title is just poor writing. If the author aimed for comical value, then he should have used someone who certainly wouldn't want to create a website. A cat would work. Caveman, too, really. That's because being comical in this case is based on a sharp contrast - it's hard to imagine either a cat or a caveman building a website, and images we tend to see when trying are rather funny.
By using someone who could want to build a website, and someone almost all people have deep connection with, you're just dividing your audience into two groups, those with "website making" someone and those without. What do you think is to gain from such a division? Maybe a flamewar, at best.
Either way, whether it's just poor writing, poor marketing or sexism, it's still counter productive. It attracts bad kind of attention and encourages off topic rants. Don't do this. If you're (the author) not skilled in writing enough, just find a copywriter who will write the piece for you. Or write it yourself and send it to all your friends asking for corrections. There are ways of avoiding outcome such as the one in this thread - I see no rational reason why you would rather write something unknowingly controversial and detrimental to whatever you want to present to people.
Got that off my chest, moving on:
The video and landing page are very attractive. The video is solid but too long. While watching it, I kept mentally inserting edit markers. You can get this down to 30 seconds and it will be crisper and more to the point. When the bulk of a video is audio (you're basically just overlaying some audio on top of AE or Motion, and it looks great, but this isn't a complex story), make sure you're being as concise as you can be. If I were you, I'd edit the audio track first, cut some pauses and redundant phrasing, get it to 30 seconds, then match the animation accordingly. The end result will likely be way more successful and impressive. Brevity is bliss.
Other thoughts:
* You need examples of other sites, of the site builder tool (and of the data entry form) and of the backend.
* You are going up against Squarespace, Wix, Weebly, Yola and others. Wix, Weebly and Yola also have "free" options. I'm not advocating that you take that approach (on the contrary, I think when you do that it is often a deterrent to viable, paying customers because your main appeal is to the bottom of the barrel), but you need to be able to answer the question, "why not X." This is a saturated market, you need to be able to explain why your solution is better/easier/more-secure/whatever
* I want to know more about the company. I know this is just a Show HN, but before I would plunk down a credit card, I want some sort of idea (even if it is bullshit) of the people behind the site. As someone mentioned upthread, lay people fear losing their stuff if a host goes kaput.
Speaking of which, what is your data portability process?
- Good early launch page. Solid design. Now make sure you can actually answer real questions about your product!
Hah. So it's ok to be ageist but not sexist? Think about why you don't see 'parents' as ageist...
This is the problem with today's politically correct climate - it's not about what the person is intending to say anymore, it's about how people perceive what is said. And if a group perceives it as offensive then look out, because it doesn't matter what your intentions were anymore because your intentions are now being decided by others for you. Any hypocrisy in those people's stances is obviously to be ignored.
It's an interesting dynamic to watch. It's a shame you have to tip toe so much, it almost seems to take away from the actual issues these days.
As for ageist, that actually strikes at the heart of the topic. Web facility is absolutely correlated with age. Its defensible to talk about generations and technology frankly.
My point is that the person that has a problem with what they consider obvious stereotyping that's a problem with discrimination has easily overlooked something others would consider an obvious stereotype that leads to discrimination...
If we're going to lambast the OP for being sexist, then this commenter should be lambasted for being ageist. Yet I bet if you ask the commenter they'll say they don't behave like an ageist and would rather not be called such...
yet said commenter doesn't bother affording the OP the same level of discourse or benefit of the doubt.
today's political correctness is full of this sort of hypocrisy.
in my opinion the better option is for people to stop being so sensitive and to look for actual discrimination instead of perceiving it from people they know nothing about based on one line on the internet...
I'm not even saying its a good tagline, I'm simply saying the gendered aspect is unnecessary because if we're dealing with stereotypes, old[1] people get confused by the Internet is far more valid than the inference that it's just older women who are uncomfortable. That's the distinction.
[1] to be clear, I'm not saying anyone not born in Gen X or Gen Y is "old" or less comfortable online.
Yeah, right. It's like this since 5th century BC at least. Haven't you ever heard about rhetoric? About Sophists?
Go read transcripts of some ancient (and I mean ancient, like 2k years ancient) public speeches, from politicians and philosophers. Tip toeing? Yeah, sometimes; sometimes exactly the opposite, but always well chosen words for conveying a particular thing to a specific target audience. It was considered an art and was widely taught until 19th century. The difference today is that there are many more poor, unprepared speakers (and writers), not that it's harder to convince people or harder not to piss them off.
I used mother because my mother wouldn't have been able to build a website with existing tools, but could with SimplyBuilt. I found it not at all sexist, nor ageist, just that she didn't have the right tools until now. But that isn't what this product is about.
www.simplybuilt.com is built using SimplyBuilt.com. We'll add more examples soon. www.pushagency.io is another example. Anyone could sign up for SimplyBuilt.com and create our launch page. Eat your own dog food!
We're easier to use than the competitors. Simply try it out, and you'll find out. We'll illustrate this fact in the future.
Good point about the company and adding content about the people behind it. The best we've got right now is https://my.simplybuilt.com/humans.txt. We can and should improve this as well, thanks especially for this comment.
We're focusing on gaining customers right now, not how they'll leave us. Hopefully they don't want to do that any time soon.
The reason this is important is that long term sustainability is probably the most important feature for websites for non-nerds. People just don't want to deal with moving content to a new service, learning a new interface, etc. For this reason I would only recommend something that looks like it will be around for 5+ years. I'm confident that SquareSpace is stable and has a business model that works, whatever other flaws they have.
We are using the same concept for our Local targeting basic crm + website tool. We may get a few lessons from your tool ;)
Also: cool that you designed the landing page using SimplyBuilt! I would advertise that.