It's worse than that. And it's my pet peeve about many startup landing pages these days. It's not like people don't have time to understand - there's nothing there to understand! "Full stack adaptive delivery" is a near-meaningless phrase. It can be construed to mean just about anything. It would fit just as well on a logistics company page, or on a sticker on the side of an ICBM.
I wish people would just say what they actually do.
I personally wonder if they used the Startup Generator in earnestness. [1]
But yeah, I'm a senior techie, and often involved in potential procurement discussions, and sweet Jesus, if you want us to give you money, give us some goddamned concrete facts. You synergise enterprise cloud offerings?Oh, you mean you have a templating language that tries to generify Terraform and CloudFormation and does both badly.
I sometimes feel like people in ticket clipping businesses like this (their CDN offering is, um, Akamai, but you can make pictures grayscale using their DSL because that's easier than using a photo editor?) are scared of saying what they actually do because then you'll realise that they don't do much for the money they're asking.
In my university years, I used to invent such ridiculously overblown phrases for simple things I did, as a form of mockery of corporate culture and my general pastime. But at some point I did realize that these phrases are hashing functions - like the ones you use in a hash table to put objects into buckets. So for a particular thing I do, say "adding colors to terminal applications", I could invent a bunch of nonsense phrases - "enriching the user experience of advanced software", or "delivering visual artistry to professional digital media" or whatnot. It was fun going in this direction, and we'd have a good laugh - but a person seeing just the output could never arrive at my original input, "adding colors to CLI apps". It was one of infinitely many things I could hash under the same phrase, and they could never know which one I did.
So in my eyes, if you're trying to explain something to someone, then using these phrases is essentially equivalent to taking MD5 of what you wanted to say and pasting that hash.
People try to summarize their thoughts, but if they are not good at it the summary ends up being "We're pretty cool, not like those other non-cool people, and we stand for good things". And then, having arrived at that thought, they express it using the words they have heard before in similar circumstances.
And boom - pretentious mediocracy seasoned with hollow platitudes!
"We revolutionize Enterprise Data Quality with next generation AI in the cloud" sounds better to employees, investors, and in some cases buyers
I'm going to start a business selling a quantum leap in synergy paradigms. Begin with the tagline, move on to a landing page, and after that's nicely done, get a group of people together to brainstorm what the company actually does.
Salesman: "We provide win-win situations and customer-focused solutions."
Dilbert: "But, what is the product or service that you actually sell?"
Salesman: "We don't sell, we partner."
After that all they care about is getting you to agree that the demo looks good.
After that all they care about is getting you to agree that this product could be somehow useful in your company
Then they pounce. They ask when you are going to sign the contract because if you don't do it ASAP you will lose the discount. If you try to say that you don't want it, they start with the guilt trip. "I thought we had a deal. I have already booked my trip to come see you next week."
Sounds like WeWork. If you've ever seen that Neumann/Kutcher interview, that's exactly how it went.
But I also have a lesson from my former decades on earth: if lots of people are doing something that seems crazy to you, there is probably something you don't know. So could it be that there is some reason all these startups are so maddeningly obtuse? Other than just being bad at communication, I mean? Is there some incentive to not actually say what you do?
Think of it more like the well-appointed lobby of an office headquarters. I don't think anyone would expect the lobby of an office building to explain what the company does. It's just supposed to look nice and welcoming.
This makes sense to me. You generally don't see uninformative homepages from consumer software-as-a-service or direct-to-consumer companies, for instance. Airbnb and Airtable both seem to immediately explain in fairly clear terms what they do, for example.
Even massive software companies with a huge range of products that self-serve to business customers have pretty explanatory homepages. Salesforce is a decent example.
I think the home pages that get these sorts of complaints are either companies that don't have product-market fit (and thus don't even know what they are yet), or companies that have long involved sales processes with large enterprise clients where they probably tend to negotiate highly-customized services. An example of the latter that comes to mind is Splunk, whose website uses a lot of buzz words and seems to basically be saying "trust us, if you're a big company with a lot of data, we can do anything you need regarding your data."
I'm a software developer. I have no idea what they are selling, based on that. Is this some sort of souped up Google Sheets competitor? If so, what does it do better? Is this a team workflow management tool? If so, why bring up spreadsheets and databases? I suppose some teams may try to organise their workflow using spreadsheets, but this far into the 21st century, most people use tools like Jira or Github Issues or Monday.com or one of fifty other tools. Is this a software development tool? If so, errr, what?
I literally haven't the slightest idea, after reading their homepage, what problem this is trying to solve, what solution it is offering, and what the target market is. Am I a potential customer? I haven't the slightest idea. Can this help solve any problem I have? Maybe, but the homepage goes out of its way to refuse to answer this question.
Airtable has even targeted ads at me. It's not like I've only spent two minutes looking at their site. I still haven't the faintest clue what they do, let alone why they are better than competing alternatives.
I think that is why it is too generic for you. You already understand the underlying concepts of a spreadsheet, a database etc. Their target audience doesn't, but they know they need something _like_ that.
I think Airtable is in the no-code/low-code camp. Business people that have some technical ability and used to write Excel macros, can build a tool for their custom business process. Just like they did with MS Excel (or even MS Access) before.
And those people react to the buzzwords. "Oh, it can do a little bit of everything in one tool? And I can get it done without talking to the IT department? Book it."
I think you are too far ahead in your abilities to see the value it provides for people that rely on developer time to get anything technical done.
I'm not sure why you don't have an idea of what they are selling, unless you just don't believe what their website says. "Part spreadsheet, part database" really is an accurate explanation of their product. It's basically how I would start any explanation of the Airtable product.
The rest of it ("entirely flexible, teams use Airtable to organize their work, their way") is certainly market-speak, and doesn't give much more information, but it also doesn't obfuscate anything.
I feel bad shitting on a startup, but reading their docs I'm struggling to see what value they add beyond abstracting S3 and Akamai.
I guess there's a value add there if you don't have a person on board who can configure S3 and Akamai.
"Arent there other companies working on fraud on the blockchain? How are you different?"
"Our team is amazing and is made up of myself and my founder who have 3-4 years of experience and need to fill it with 8+ year experienced engineers because before then no one is really useful here."
Me: "..."
OR
"Do we really need another machine learning solution to classify documents? What is different from you and your competitors?"
"Well, we think everyone else is doing it wrong and that we've found the perfect solution."
"What is that?"
"Myself and my cofounder are far smarter than any of our competitors".
OR
"How do you talk to candidates about salary?"
"Well, we don't give any actual numbers, but we share our compensation philosophy doc, which ive linked here".
"Right, but can you afford these people? why do you expect them to take a huge pay cut to make you a millionaire?"
"The right person will have faith"
There's always an answer that feels like it was fed to them by a VC who knows it won't really work, but is just hoping and praying.
Because you are asking a meaningless question. Firstly, they are no experts on their competitors. Secondly, how can anyone even be, unless they have used all of them for a long time? Who can do that comparison??
So many times I have to spend ten minutes digging into what some of these companies actually do.
It’s highly frustrating. Give some examples of what you do. Explain it in simple language. Don’t rely on conceptual language because it doesn’t tell me what your offering does.
Maybe pay that $50k to a consultant to fix your copy.
Granted there was some mob subtext to that line but the world would be a better place if people strove for that level of simplicity in their messaging.
"Easily implement our Bi-Directional CDN© to personalize on-demand adaptive delivery of UX-relevant content. Engage your target audiences"
Slowly backs away
$50K of lessons learned, summarized for you Let’s recap our lessons learned:
Narrow down your extended keyword set and focus on the keyword groups you have polished content and landing pages for, especially when you have a complex product.
Use an awareness ladder to inform keyword segmentation by purchase stage but revisit it often to validate and adjust.
Do not use the same landing pages for different steps of your awareness ladder.
Do not wait for leads to become paid users to decide on the quality of paid ads campaigns: focus on quick metrics and tailor experiments to one step of your funnel at a time.
Take a test-and-learn approach with small budgets to quickly fine-tune campaigns, focusing on page quality and clickthrough rates.
Run tests to optimize page content, which will reduce your cost per click.
Once you find your winner, you’re ready to go all-in. Now’s the time to pass it off to an agency to scale things up, if you are contracting out campaign management.
I have a file system, it comes included in every/any os that matters. How does filesystem as a service help me?
Let's say 50% of people actually read past the tagline. People like you might read a bit further and realize they don't need it anyway. People who do need it might not read further though and you'd lose that sale.
File system as a service doesn't tell me what business problems can be solved with this.
When you say your service offers a cloud-based solution for delivering orchestrated micro-services powered by AI and ML, you're not targeting technical people who know this is bullshit. You're not even after business people with a real problem to solve. You're trying to isolate out-of-their-element execs with more budget than brains, who are impressed by jargon they don't understand, and who have a KPI to "undertake synergistic partnerships with hip technical solutions providers."
1: https://www.businessinsider.com/why-nigerian-scam-emails-are...
Even if I was squarely in the target audience, if I saw that, I wouldn't necessarily know it applied to me.
Maybe I'm wrong about that.
The "Adaptive Delivery" is the new technology we're currently testing copy for. Actually, we can also discuss the best explainers for "we analyze user context and tailor media content accordingly with our Image Transformations CDN API, serve it from Akamai." The full-stack thing is there to "show" we're leveraging the complete Uploadcare pipeline for just one line of code implementing the "adaptive behavior".
You provide your image URL It gets fetched to Uploadcare via reverse proxy Once it's there, it gets to our storage and is cached on CDN layers Then we analyze the page layout and tell the API which image version we want exactly API produces the version It gets served personalized to your every end-client session
I'm guilty of this as an engineer in a startup. Engineers thrive on the details. But users don't care too much. They just want the service.
Also, should landing pages differentiate based on the query string ("?v=s" here), or be hosted on a new path?
BUY THE SITE
$999,999.98 Per Year
1 GB
What do you care? You own the site.
Still no support
BUY NOWI will break them out into new paths, thanks.
Landing pages should preferably be hosted on its own path. Search engines index paths not the query string.
Also, think this way: if you have multiple features, you can have a landing page per feature explaining that one feature in depth. Then you can have your Ads target that one feature page that everyone wants. This helps when you introduce new features tomorrow. Instead of cramming everything into a single landing page (your homepage).
I'm not sure I've ever searched for something and got a different landing page as a result (though maybe I just didn't notice), so I didn't realize this was something people do.
> I'm not sure I've ever searched for something and got a different landing page as a result
That is probably because Google was shortening the destination URL. If you are running Google Ads you can set your own URL destination even though the actual landing page might be something totally different. You can check it out if you like by searching for something and focusing on the Ad. You'll typically have the landing page different from the Ad URL.
I think flipping it around would be even more impactful. Start with Why ;)
I agree the what often works for me, but if you want mass appeal it appears to be the Why that hooks people.
And yes, the tagline I mentioned may not be the best but it will definitely get him more conversions compared to the one he currently has. At the end of the day conversions matter the most. No sales, no business. Doesn't matter how much analysis you do.
I've been known to complicate descriptions on my OSS packages but still achieved moderate success, so I'm thinking on how to convert this knowledge into revenue and these comments are super helpful.
Question: how do you manage to both keep it simple but relevant for SEO? Isn't SEO a lot about keyword stuffing?
SEO should be as natural as possible. Keyword stuffing actually has a negative impact on your Quality Score (if you are running Google Ads) in the long run. Do not forget that Google is always optimizing its algorithms. What was possible before isn't possible now. And what is possible to do today isn't possible to do in the future. Don't start by gaming the system. Start by doing it as natural as you can. Optimizations can always be made later on (if required). From my experience I have seen that SEO works best only if it has relevant content tagged along with it.
Sometimes, you might be in a niche where you don't even need to do any optimizations. And most products/services fall under this category. Just like you do not prematurely optimize your software, there is no need to do the same anywhere else. Even marketing.
Natural looking to googles algos, not actually as natural as possible.
There are highly effective “unnatural” SEO strategies, for example you could just generate fake bounces on your competitors pages using proxies.
> Don't start by gaming the system. Start by doing it as natural as you can.
This is good advice. You can always game the system, but you probably shouldn’t start out by doing so.
Gaming the system can be incredibly lucrative, but also very difficult. Unless it’s the primary focus of your business, you probably shouldn’t even try.
That's not unnatural seo it's negative seo.
Thank you. Just sharing what I learned from the masters in the field. The best of which is Isaac Rudansky. Marketing is made unnecessarily complex these days. It is not rocket science. Anyone can do it.
I have a cynical theory for that too!
The reason marketing is made complex is because it's not just marketers pushing products to the rest of the world, but also marketers pushing marketing tools to each other. Just like a marketer may exploit my fear for health of my kids, or desire for social status, they can exploit other marketer's fear of low campaign success or a desire for being a premium brand. Etc. So the industry gets increasingly opaque and full of voodoo, because the more complexity can be built in, the more people can make money without delivering any value that could be reliably attributed to them. Everyone buys each other's bullshit, money changes hands, everyone is happy, little actual value is created.
My first thought was that someone is going to upload a 43 meg animated GIF and then complain that it's loading slow. Not a comment on your product, just past experience tells me it will happen.
As someone else said in this thread, do you optimize for venture capitalists instead of customers?
Are these people searching through Google for a company like yours though?
If those people are not your target market, don't give a shit about what they say related to the landing page content. You're not selling to them. If they don't understand the terminology used and they are not potential clients, you don't have to make a "less complex" landing page or change the wording just to make them happy.
The idea behind a tagline is to capture the user's attention. You can build up on the complexity as the user goes further down the page. But to start with a complicated tagline will cause your users to quit.
If someone is selling mangoes in a market and he shouts "Mangifera Indica for 5$" will people purchase from him? He is still selling Mangoes and dare I say he is more accurate (because the scientific name for Mango is Mangifera Indica). His potential customers will be those who are botanists because only they understand the scientific nomenclature. But those won't be his real customers too. What if the botanist hears the scientific name but his/her brain ignores it as the brain triggers only in certain environments (like in a lab)? What if the botanist is not interested in Mangoes even after understanding it? As you can see, your potential customers are narrowing down with every filter applied. This is exactly antithesis to "selling to as many as possible".
But if he shouts "Mangos for 5$" he attracts everyone interested in a Mango, including the botanist.
And I don't want to sound nasty but no technology is so advanced that it cannot be simplified. Also don't forget that people can smell bullshit from a mile away. That is what I have learnt from experience. We Engineers like to overcomplicate and overpromise stuff that will only come back to bite us later. Just follow the KISS principle: Keep It Simple, Stupid.
The comment I posted on the IndieHackers page:
------------------
The landing page is too complex. Like what does "Full stack adaptive delivery" even mean? I am sure 90% of your paid visitors are just bouncing because that landing page tagline is alien to them. Dumb it down. Make it simple.
Surprisingly, the description in the Indiehackers page makes so much more sense than the one you put up: "File-system-as-a-service that does uploads, storage, and media processing for Web and mobile apps, so you can ship products faster and scale them painlessly"
If you told me that the first time I would have understood your value proposition. Don't get too fancy with your taglines. People don't have time to understand what you are saying. People don't like fancy terminologies except for what is popular. There are too many jargons already. Don't complicate it further.
Instead of "Full stack adaptive delivery" just try: "File-system-as-service". Instead of "Serve ultimate UX with better images on any website. One script to rule them all." just have: "Ship products faster with better images on any website". That's it. You will get 50+% higher conversion rates with just this one change.