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Comment by db1 | Hacker News Reader

I went to your website, and I can't figure out what your product is or does. I had to click in to individuals before I figured out what it does.

Why not put "BeeLine Reader makes reading on-screen easier, faster, and more enjoyable. We use a simple cognitive trick — an eye-guiding color gradient — to pull your eyes from one line to the next." on your front page?

Maybe you guys have already done some kind of testing and found out that the current layout is optimal?

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Appreciate the feedback. We recently redesigned the website to offer silos, and one of the goals was to make the landing page not offer too many specifics that would make some audiences bounce. But perhaps your suggestion is just what we need to do. Thanks for taking the time to share!

One lesson learned: I should have linked to the /individual page instead of the generic landing page in my comment. Updating link now...

It's good to keep market-specific language to market-specific silos, but you need to put some little (milquetoast, plain-info) bit up front. Otherwise you turn off every market.

Totally agree. Would you say that GP's suggested language is sufficiently plain? I would worry that it would turn off publishing partners, who want to hear things like "increase audience engagement" not "read easier".

Maybe something generic like "improve focus while reading", which could appeal to individuals and publishing partners? Appreciate your taking the time to share feedback — this sort of stuff is not something we're skilled/experienced at.

I don't really have a good feel for any of those customers, so... ^_^

The lesson you should have learned is to make the generic landing page actually describe the what the product attempts to acheive! You have just had a load of inquisitive wanting-to-be-impressed HNers descend on your page and nobody knew what the thing was about! :)

Publishers, educators etc also need to understand what the value proposition is for their users.

I also think the page ought to be written in longer sentences. The current silo buttons aren't even making it clear that they explain more.

So, suggestions:

You just have to take the few sentences from your Individuals page "Reading on-screen can be tough on your eyes, especially if you have to do it all day long. We’re here to help. BeeLine Reader makes reading on-screen easier, faster, and more enjoyable." and put that on your landing page instead of "A New Way to Read."

Now change the "(choose)" subheading to "perspectives:", put it lower nearer the buttons instead of near the description, and perhaps left-align it.

Change the buttons from meaningless colours with labels to something descriptive like "for you the user :smile:", "for the publisher $" and "for the educator :graduation-hat-icon:".

Voila! good luck!

Super helpful, thanks!

I bounced as soon as I couldn’t find pricing information.

I have nothing to do with the website/product in question, but could you explain a bit more why you would "bounce" (assuming bounce means you would lose interest) if you didn't immediately see pricing information?

For me, I almost always bounce if I don't immediately see pricing information as it is an important signal with respect to whether or not this is something that's targeted towards me and/or whether or not they think I'll get sticker shock if they show it to me right away. In either case, the lack of readily available pricing makes me negatively inclined to spend more time looking into a product where I don't know if I'd ever consider paying whatever price they don't want to tell me.

It doesn't need to be a lot of detail, or precise. Even just a "from $..." or "plans starting at ..." would be enough.

I agree. There have been a lot of times I’ve been interested in something that seems to be exactly what I’m looking for but when I manage to find pricing information it’s starting at $990/mo. And now I’ve wasted all that time on a product very obviously not designed to help me remember to pick up bread at the store.

I appreciate that Citus Data is right out in the open that entry level is $800/mo. I know straight up I can’t afford it. But they also tell me the size of their minimum instances, which also tells me my product hasn’t yet scaled to the level to need their service. And by the time it does, $800/mo will be acceptable.

Ah, so were you talking about the partner pricing, for integrating into a site/app? I can see how it would be helpful to at least have some prices shown for that, to show the ballpark. For a casual website owner who just wants to make the copy easier to read, the pricing is de minimis (just enough to make sure that folks are serious about integrating and not wasting our time with a bunch of back-and-forth). Shoot me an email if you want to talk further!

I’m planning on it. Thanks for all your awesome interaction on this thread.

* So I just randomly came to your website because I slacked off and should actually do work.

* I know that I will forget I even clicked on that link. The page has 3.5 seconds to convince me to stay longer.

* I'm mildly intrigued and form, in my head, a price I'd be willing to pay for the product.

* I scan the navbar for a pricing link to see if my expectation matches reality. I find nothing.

* The site obviously doesn't value my time, so why should I stay?

It's disrespectful.

Two reasons. First, the tech spoke for itself and I was sold, if I could afford it. Don’t insert the friction of having to exchange an email and suck my information out of me to find out the cost. That goes against every theory and study about conversion, dating back to before the web. They have a saying, when you’ve made the sale, shut your fucking mouth. And as my example demonstrates, sales leak out of that funnel simply because people can’t be bothered.

Second, the other saying is if you have to ask how much it costs, you can’t afford it. So by concealing the price, the company is telling me the cost is too high and they know it. They are telegraphing that part of their sales process requires a salesperson to coerce the money out of me.

Interesting point about involving a salesperson — it came across that you would have to negotiate with a literal person before purchasing? I sort of always figure that it's just a matter of an upgrade notice that displays a price and that's that.

Also, note that we don't actually require (or even ask for) email addresses or anything personal when you install the browser plugin. You just click install, try it for 2 weeks, and then buy if you want. The standard pricing is $2/mo, with a discount for annual purchase.

I totally appreciate the feedback and will see how we can better communicate our pricing to alleviate concerns like this.

Good point — this is something we need to address. Our most popular products (browser plugin and iOS app) both have free trials so that people can see how much they like to read with BeeLine. The iOS app actually has very significant free functionality, so if you just want to use it as a reading list (like Pocket/Instapaper) you can do so for free via the Share Extension, which populates an offline reading list.

Things get more complicated, as the browser plugins are subscription ($2/mo or $22/yr) and the iOS app is one-time IAPs (mostly a few bucks, but more for the Kindle feature). I'm not sure how to succinctly communicate this, but you and other commenters make clear that we need to have some info here.

Thanks for taking the time to share your thoughts!

Thanks for the follow up. What if I have a website and I want all my pages rendered in Beeline? I immediately noticed being able to read faster and more comfortably. I view Beeline as a conversion optimization tool.

PS While your wife is pretty awesome thinking on her feet, I don’t see the case for ML providing meaningful optimization for Beeline. Maybe you dodged a bullet getting a pass from a VC with unrealistic expectations.

We have a JS widget that can be dropped into websites. I'd be interested to see if we can increase your conversion rate or other key metrics.

CNET did a study [1] that showed BeeLine readers were much more likely to finish an article, but it would be great to take things to the next level and see how that translates into purchases or other conversions.

Shoot me an email! contact@[domain]

1: the CNET study is discussed at the bottom of this article http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/05/a-bett...

I agree with the comment above. I wanted to ask you what your product does, then I thought "why should I ask you when I can check the website out". Then I checked the website and I didn't find a description.

I think it will be very helpful to have a simple description in your site. First impression matters.

p.s. I like the idea of your product.

You'd already updated the link above when I first looked at the site, but having a look at the home page, I didn't immediately notice that the Individual / Educational / Partners text were links, so I'd have probably been confused too!

I liked your reading challenge idea! Very interesting, even though apparently the results indicated that I didn't read any faster.

Yeah, as some here have pointed out, the topics are aimed a bit toward younger/less technical audiences, so it's perhaps not like your typical reading material.

I should also note that reading ease is an important (but difficult to measure) piece of this as well. So if it felt better for you, then it might be worth trying out the browser plugin and then trying the reading challenge again. There could be a little bit of a learning curve, as your eyes adjust to how quickly you can jump from line to line.

I disagree with everyone else!

The silos are good, you just need to make it much more obvious that the user needs to select one of the silos in order to get at more information. It's not particularly obvious that your buttons are buttons. I would also recommend that the content be full height / width so that on desktop at least the user doesn't scroll at all. The stock photo is probably unnecessary for the main page. Also you don't really need left/right margins since there isn't really text on the page, and that's what large margins are good for (but I'm assuming you know that since you made this app!)

Agree with db1's feedback. I almost immediately closed the page after not finding the pitch.

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