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Comment by matty22 | Hacker News Reader

I've been looking for an alternative to Google Docs/Sheets/Slides/etc for a while and I've seen these couple of suggestions come up a few times. Each time I look at them, I find their websites to be incomprehensible to what their product actually _is_. The worst of them is Coda. Looking at their landing page, I have NO idea what Coda is or does. None of the other alternatives seem to do what I want easily. I want to type in a URL, edit a spreadsheet, and close my browser. I'm sure one of these alternatives does exactly that, but it isn't obvious from their home pages that that is the case.

Classic startup landing page design where they forget to explain what their product is to potential users/clients.

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I never heard of Coda before so went to their landing page (https://coda.io) to see if it could really be as bad as you say it is.

The copy on the website is generally marketing heavy with things like "Coda is a new doc that grows with your ideas" but things like "Coda is a new canvas that blends tables and text together" makes sense to me, imagining that it's like a document that also have tables, that you can do computations on (so like Excel). The example videos/GIFs seems to show the functionality and when I reached the end, I feel like at least have a slight idea what it's about.

Wouldn't be enough to compare it with other services, but I definitely have "some idea" of what Coda is.

Am I alone in understanding this from looking at the website, without any prior experience?

I do know some other examples that could fit into the "Classic startup landing page design where they forget to explain what their product is to potential users/clients" ending of your comment, but I don't think Coda missed the mark on explaining what they do.

> I feel like at least have a slight idea what it's about.

But is a slight idea enough to make a purchase decision? I deduced that it's some sort of application that combines a table and text. But that could look and function 100 different ways. There's 4 or 5 animated gifs all doing something completely different, and none of those is typing text into something that looks like a spreadsheet. So I'm left wondering, does it have a spreadsheet capability? Without digging further or watching product tour videos, I have no idea.

As I said: "Wouldn't be enough to compare it with other services"

I was mainly replying to the "I have NO idea what Coda is or does".

> does it have a spreadsheet capability?

The first GIF (https://cdn.coda.io/assets/21b38f7b35ac/img/welcome/doc/tabl...) shows a spreadsheet, as far as I understand that tiny demo.

I agree with you that it could be better, but so many other startups do a lot worse that looking down on someone that is not perfect, hurts the cause of "fixing shitty landing pages" rather than helps.

That first gif is a todo list, which is NOT a spreadsheet.

> I agree with you that it could be better, but so many other startups do a lot worse that looking down on someone that is not perfect, hurts the cause of "fixing shitty landing pages" rather than helps.

So you agree that it sucks, but it isn't the worst landing page, so it gets a pass? I'm not on some crusade to fix shitty landing pages. I'm actively looking for a replacement for an application I use in my day-to-day life. The onus is on Coda to explain to me clearly and in 3s if their application meets those needs. I'm simply pointing out that their landing page has failed to do that FOR ME.

I thought it looked neat and wanted to try it. Click the sign up button and it asks me to log in with Google. No other options. The easiest way to get me to ditch a product is to use Google or Facebook for authentication. Right off the bat, I’m thinking monetizing user data is the primary component of the business model. It’s guilt by association at this point. Besides, I don’t use Google or Facebook and I’m not about to start now.

Wow, so there you go. Strike #2!

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