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Comment by rsweeney21 | Hacker News Reader

Congrats on the launch!

Some feedback from a potential customer:

The first thing I read on your homepage is: "A faster and more engaging way to empower your team."

This means absolutely nothing to me - I have no idea what your product does. Something like "Faster issue tracking for remote teams." would be better.

Hope this helps!

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I've seen 2 different opinions from people when it comes to the copy. 1st is to tell what value you provide to your customers (Mario analogy https://twitter.com/GorvGoyl/status/1334116488349827072). or 2nd is to tell what exactly your product does (your audience will figure out value on their own).

It might differ based on the target audience. Enterprise messaging can be quite different than SMB, or even for VCs

"A faster and more engaging way to empower your team" does not tell you the equivalent of "shoot awesome fireballs", it contains a lot less info.

A bit of A/B testing could help figure this out?

>1st is to tell what value you provide to your customers (Mario analogy https://twitter.com/GorvGoyl/status/1334116488349827072)

Their example is a product that is so universally well known that everyone will know what it does. So they do in fact explain what the product does in a single word right at the top: "Colgate". They don't need more. You do.

this makes sense for household brands (slack, gmail etc) but what about the other businesses. So, I quickly checked landing pages (on phone) of some successful Saas products like asana, figma, basecamp, trello, notion and they all seem to provide value first (above the fold) and immediately after it they provide a screenshot of what their tool looks like. Good learning.

Interesting, thinking about it the audience is what matters. Someone landing on your webpage is already primed with what the product is. For example monday.com talks about value first. However the Google Search copy mentions what it does, the TV commercial mentions what it does, etc. So if you're on monday.com then you already know what the product does. Even if you heard it by word of mouth, you'd have been told context around what it is.

Thanks very much for the feedback. It's always a bit of a struggle with landing page copy and positioning. But super useful to hear when something doesn't resonate.

If your page resonates, there's probably something wrong with your monitor. If you want engineers to be interested in your product, stick with concise and accurate descriptions, stay away from vague and meaningless business buzzwords and buzzphrases.

That's fair enough. The language that's there originally came from the fact that we see many teams where engineers are left out of the loop when it comes to the early stages of planning initiatives/features. One of the benefits teams have told us they get from Kitemaker is getting the whole team involved earlier, rather than PMs doing too much of the planning themselves and then just splitting tasks out to engineers.

But we'll revisit it!

Thanks for the response! Take my opinion with a grain of salt, I'm quite curmudgeonly when it comes to marketing speak. I just know that, if I were looking for a product like yours, I would move on with my search as soon as I encountered more vacuous language than descriptive language; then would probably come back to it when I encountered the same problem with every other product page.

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