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Comment by themoonbus | Hacker News Reader

People on the internet are easily distracted and have short attention spans. You want them to get interested enough to actually run your demo. I'm not going to take 10 minutes to delve deeper unless you hook me to begin with.

Also, you don't need to have text that appeals to everyone (there is no "average" user), but you should be able to write text that appeals to at least one of your groups (individuals, developers, enterprise). The two sentences you have currently are so generic that they don't say anything at all. An open source platform? An open source platform that does what?

Target the group with your messaging that you are targeting with your platform. Sure, sandstorm could be used by any of them, but which group is MOST important to your platform?

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10 minutes? The demo allows you to set up a Wordpress blog in literally 10 seconds (it's four clicks and no typing or scrolling -- not even to log in). I'm not sure why that's so onerous, even for folks with short attention spans.

Admittedly people don't find that out until they've already decided to click, which they might not if they expect it will take 10 minutes. :)

Maybe we should change the button text to "60-second demo" or something...

That's such a great line that you just wrote: "You can setup a WordPress blog in 10 seconds". Why don't you say that under the demo link? Or say, "Try our demo. It takes 10 seconds to install WordPress" or whatever app.

It's not onerous at all, but you have to get people to the point where they're actually at the demo. My "10 minutes" was based on the thought process that goes through my head when I see a "try our demo" link. If the demo takes only 10 seconds, that's highlighting a major selling point of your platform, so make that explicit.

(Note that rpdillon is just a commenter, not a Sandstorm dev. But, yes, this is a good idea.)

This exchange made me smile. It got to the benefits in the end though.

How about 'Run X in Y minutes' (somewhat after the Learn X in Y series).

I've added a brief subtext based in part on your suggestions. Let me know what you think.

Looks good! I would think about replacing your main tagline with that sentence, or something like it. Not to be overly harsh, but your main tagline doesn't say anything.

Edit: Actually, I think if you said something like "Sandstorm is an open source app platform for personal servers" that would be a major improvement. The whole "app" part is missing from the main tagline. Then, your sub-tagline goes into more detail about what apps.

Edit 2: Actually, I would remove the open source part altogether. It's redundant if you have a github link somewhere on your page, which you do, and I think the developer community you are targeting would assume that it's open source. Or, just keep "open".

Actually, the words "open source" are a recent addition to our header, whereas we've always had the github link. We discovered from feedback that many people who visited our page had no idea that it was open source, since most people don't look at nav bars, and this of course completely changed their perception of the project (for the worse, obviously). When we put "open source" into the header, we saw a marked increase in interest.

Thanks for the feedback, though! We'll think about inserting "app" in there.

Ah, gotcha. Makes sense!

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