Ask HN: How would you change our landing page? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How would you change our landing page?

5 pointssorenbs21 comments

We create personalised meal plans in a fashion similar to how Spotify creates personalised playlists.

We have tried many different landing pages including infomercial style pages with explanations, testimonials etc. and a few variations of FB/Linkedin/Pinterest style very terse pages simply asking people to sign up.

The variant that performs best for us is a preview of the actual application where prospective users can provide some information and see how that affects their meal plan in real time. When they want to open a recipe we ask them to sign up. This converts ~10% of our visitors.

I have never seen a landing page like this before so would love your thoughts on it or references that discuss this.

Landing page: https://eatbetter.io

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Nice idea for a startup!

OK, let's see:

1) There's no clear explanation of what the site is. Your H1 or equivalent is "Any food you don't eat?" - my response would be "no", some confusion, and then closing the tab. You might want to use that space to explain, in brief, what you're doing - "We create personalised meal plans in a fashion similar to how Spotify creates personalised playlists." is a pretty good explanation.

2) I'm not sure what I'm meant to do with the meals that are being presented. Am I meant to cook them? Will they be delivered? Are they just examples of things I like?

3) Clicking on one brings me immediately to a signup modal. I still don't know what this site is or what it does, and I haven't had any chance to play with it, and now you want my email address? At that point I'll definitely click away.

4) "Start cooking today" - hate to harp on about this, but I still don't know what I'm getting. Are you going to teach me to cook? Send me ingredients? Introduce me to new dishes?

Overall, it's an intriguing concept, but you're in need of a lot - a LOT - clearer explanation. That doesn't necessarily need to translate into a lot of copy text - even a clear header and a couple of sentences would do.

I'd also recommend showing users what they'll get from you, at least in very previewed form, before you ask them to sign up.

Your Call To Action button at the bottom is good, btw. If I've selected something and know what I'm getting "Get Your Meal Plan" is a solid CTA that will probably propel me through the email signup - if I'm interested in what you're selling.

Your loading times are a bit erratic - you might want to look at optimising those. I saw one 1.5sec load - acceptable - but another that was over 3 sec, which is into "people are going to give up" territory.

Hope that was helpful, and good luck with the site!

The value proposition doesn't seem particularly clear to me. First off, I'm not sure what the website is supposed to be. It looks like just another recipe website. (Disclaimer: I visited the page before reading any commentary)

It seems like you're trying to do something new - new as in why do I need a personalized meal plan so you will need to educate the user on the benefits of having one. I'd be curious to have a look at your previous landing pages.

The headline "Any food you don't eat" doesn't fully explain what the site is about, what's the purpose of my clicking on the food images and what would I get after all this?

This is an interesting concept and it might be very useful especially for people with strict diets (ones who actually need a personalized meal plan) - I would focus my marketing efforts on those guys. Or athletes. It's too early for the general public I think. Good luck!

Thanks!

We are focusing on people with autoimmune disease for exactly that reason. They are more in need of this kind of service, so probably more forgiving. Our long term goal is to solve my own problem, which is that I hate all the planning and decisions involved in cooking normal healthy food.

Here's a very terse page https://eatbetter.io/signup And this one is more informational https://about.eatbetter.io

We will definitely try a few ways to put more educational information on the interactive landing page.

It's great that you already have your target customer. In which case, I would reach out to them and focus the marketing content on them.

Your vision of extending it to the general public is possible but again, you'll need to educate us and help us understand why we cannot live without a personalized meal plan. I think you have it on your blog page where you highlight how eating better changed your health. That to me is huge! That's the key benefit you need to sell.

Thanks for sharing the links!

Thank you for the feedback tixocloud. It's super valuable!

On mobile (disclaimer)

not extremely clear what your value proposition is.

I would keep going down the path of interactivity, add another widget that can appeal to a different segment. I would also consider adding a read more area at the bottom for people who like to dig deeper before acting.

Thanks Skaplun. Would you add the read more content directly on the page so users can scroll to it? I'm concerned that might distract people...

I don't get it, neither what I get from you or what you are trying to sell to me.

I don't understand why I have to sign up to get a recipe, I can get those for free all over the internet, so why should I sign up for yours - are they so much better?

Also the images and button styles make me think it's an old website, and since there are no clear dividers I had to re-read the "Any food you don't eat" to understand what pressing the buttons do (the opposite of what most food type buttons do on recipe websites)

Hi there. This is not related to your question, but I thought I'd mention this anyway.

I'm vegan and I pressed the 'pork', 'fish/seafood', 'beef', 'poultry' and 'dairy' buttons but there's still lots of seafood and chicken in the suggestions. I would also suggest you have 'vegetarian' (maybe also 'prescetarian') and 'vegan' options that press the appropriate buttons (unless you explicitly want to exclude/disuade these diets?)

Yeah, we want to support vegetarians, but right now we don't have enough content to provide a good experience - as you noticed. It will come eventually.

Maybe above the foods you don't eat -- add a similar bar with:

Why do you want to eat better? [Lose weight] | [Gain muscle] | [Lower cholesterol]

And use that in the response.

That way you'd be letting them provide the benefit. Another thing you could do is talk about delivering the meal plan to their inbox, so that signing up is the obvious thing to ask.

I'd be somewhat concerned that the lack of text will harm SEO -- you have fewer terms to find. But perhaps you are driving traffic a different way.

I did not understand the information below the picture (the body with a number 3?)

Thanks! That's two really good ideas. I especially like including something about delivering meal plans via email in the messaging to make that step easier for the user.

We try to drive seo traffic through our blog at http://blog.eatbetter.io

The page feels sparse at full screen and crowded when it's at a quarter of the screen. I wish that the bar with the food types stretched to the full page width on desktop, and collapsed and stacked on a smaller screen. Also, clicking each of the buttons doesn't really do what they're supposed to, ie. clicking the fish button and there is a chicken recipe?

it seems like a really cool idea!

Thanks werber. Clearly we don't communicate the purpose of the buttons well enough, as they are actually supposed to remove food you don't eat vs showing recipes with that food item :-)

I would make sure you provide something before you have people sign up. By this I mean either actually provide the recipes or at least a sample or tell me a little bit more about the product.

Also - you have a typo on your signup page. "healtier" != "healthier" (https://eatbetter.io/signup)

FYI there's a typo in your site's <title /> ("psesonalised" instead of "personalised")

Thanks. This is a bit embarrassing :-)

I'd sure love to know what "Get your meal plan" does, without needing to signup to anything.

If the truth about "consumers attention span is only 7 seconds", then they will click on "Get your meal plan", see a signup and probably close the site.

Also, "Eat Better - Psesonalised Meal Plans" - probably need to fix that typo.

Do you think we should move the signup ask further downstream? perhaps we could let people use the meal plan without even asking for an email. The problem then becomes that we use daily emails to keep users engaged, and we see a fairly high number of users become active users only after we keep them engaged for a week or more.

> Do you think we should move the signup ask further downstream?

Not that much further, but just until the initial session ends.

It can be like:

- Load webpage

- Initial discovery ("ahh this is what it does")

- Get the first meal plan (start the email offer here, eg "would you like us to email you this meal-plan in a nicely formatted PDF")

- User about to leave ("hey, looks like you made your first meal plan, why not create an account and keep on discovering new food")

It's all about AB-testing though. Don't ever take my suggestion as your final solution. Always test to see what the percentage of on-boarding is.

If using the app and then getting signups increases from 10% to 30+%, you know this is how to do it (or try something different if it only increases by 1 or 2%)

Thanks! I really think we should play around with this balance of early value vs pressure to sign up.

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