Good article, which is more for the case when you know your customers and when your sales process already kinda works (although not optimally).

For most startups though, the problem is that they don't know their customers, have an imaginary idea of what customers might need and create a product based on guesses.

Customer development (or other methods such as compiling/filtering data from forums/blogs) helps with figuring those and create powerful value propositions.

No argument from me there - that is definitely the number one problem. In the future, I'll be tackling some of those topics on how to know your customer, since it is so critically important to business success. It's harder to fix existing sites if they haven't done that legwork up front :)

I see this exact issue a lot as well when consulting with customers. It isn't so much a startup problem as a website problem, when a site is over-designed and not built to sell.

An example would show better what the author meant.

I agree. Interestingly, there is a link in the article to another article that shows several examples.

ETA link: http://copyhackers.com/2013/02/your-most-overlooked-home-pag...

I tried to give one solid example, but the copyhackers link is a must read.

Good article. I actually saw their post asking for advice on r/entrepreneur.

I would have liked to see what you could have done with their messaging tho, if only to show the thought process behind it.