[HN Gopher] What I learnt roasting 200 landing pages
___________________________________________________________________
What I learnt roasting 200 landing pages
Author : deadcoder0904
Score : 554 points
Date : 2021-05-13 10:07 UTC (12 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (blog.roastmylandingpage.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (blog.roastmylandingpage.com)
| orliesaurus wrote:
| Shameless Plug: I also roasted stuff, in fact over 200 pages, in
| public - on my YouTube channel: https://lf.gg/youtube/
|
| This started as a side project during the pandemic, I was really
| bored.
|
| I am not as good looking as Oliver and my English isn't as fluid
| but I tried...
|
| P.S. If you have ANY suggestion on how to improve my YouTube
| channel - could you share it?
| fluidcruft wrote:
| Am I the only one who really hates these opaque landing pages?
| They all just look the same and you never know what the hell is
| actually being sold. Like that popwork one he's glowing over in
| the video.
|
| It's like you're walking down the street and bums keep handing
| you shiny wrapped presents. At first they all look shiny and you
| want to open it but then you've opened enough of them to know
| they're probably full of shit.
|
| So I stop bothering opening them. No, I don't want to create an
| account and give you my email so that you can spam me for months
| merely to know what's inside the box. Frankly my next stop is
| finding a video on YouTube of someone actually showing how to
| use... whatever it is. Or people talking about using it in a
| forum or something.
| sosborn wrote:
| My theory: the person in charge of a landing page doesn't want
| people bouncing off the site from the page they control (don't
| want the metrics to look bad!), so they tend to make it opaque
| to encourage click throughs. It doesn't matter what the best
| user experience is because they don't get measured on that.
| They get measured on bounce rate.
| hinkley wrote:
| As a developer I've had to pound into people's heads that as
| the company grows, very few things we have worked on rank as
| 'special' for more than a little bit.
|
| You do the reader a favor if you get to the 'why do you care'
| part immediately, because in fact it may turn out that they
| don't.
|
| Documentation eventually turns into a data warehouse. There's
| so much of it and you can't keep it straight, so some memorable
| fraction of the time, going to a Wiki page or your bookmarks or
| - god forbid - browser history. It's basically a fishing
| expedition. You know that there's a thing that did X, but you
| don't remember which thing it was (and code names make that
| basically impossible), so you're just going to scan a bunch of
| them until you find the right one.
|
| If every page is like those cooking recipes that are held
| hostage by the life story of the creator, you're going to get
| pretty grumpy. Landing pages remind me a lot of this, because
| I've looked at twenty tools and I can't remember which one is
| for Postgres backups and which one is for Javascript
| minification. No, this one is for JSON. Next tab.
| atatatat wrote:
| > You do the reader a favor if you get to the 'why do you
| care' part immediately, because in fact it may turn out that
| they don't.
|
| Here's why the web is a mess:
|
| We've turned it over to Google, through search, and Google
| penalizes sites' rankings in search results for having Chrome
| users leave if they read the first line and realize the site
| or service isn't for them.
|
| After all -- your site is less engaging than the site that
| most users ended up on -- right?!
| hinkley wrote:
| Perverse incentives.
|
| Also I don't know about you, but when I'm researching
| something I open a new window, and I middle click all the
| reasonable looking links on the search page.
|
| My time with that tab open has nothing to do with that tab.
| It's mostly to do with the tabs chronologically before
| them, and whether I see something shiny that distracts me.
| ollymeakings wrote:
| You watched the video so you know at 1 minute in I say how
| important it is to simply tell people what you actually do.
|
| I also advocate for plain language and showing the product not
| just talking about it.
| fluidcruft wrote:
| Yeah, I saw that but still. It starts off with 1-on-1
| meetings with managers and employees but then I guess it's
| actually just some scheduled survey like a weekly qualtrics
| to /dev/null that admin pushes at us already or whatever.
| Finally. That's what I got from that.
|
| I guess what I would say is that the pop.work* landing page
| seems to want to sell itself as scratching an itch or solving
| a problem, but doesn't tell us what that itch or problem is
| or even show us how it solves it. It's just vague and no
| details (which is a major red flag about a landing page for
| me personally).
|
| *lots of alternate "popwork" out there and you don't even
| link it or anything so I had to google text from the landing
| page in the video to find what and where it even was or if
| they'd completely pivoted to a different product
| (popwork.com)
| onlyfortoday2 wrote:
| but still what? stop moaning LOL
| mercwear wrote:
| This post is giving me 2010-2015 CRO is everything vibes and the
| landing page for the roast site is actually bad imho.
| swsieber wrote:
| > 95% of roasts were booked by male founders.
|
| I'd be really curious what the demographics are for founders. I'm
| not in the SV area, and I'd love to know how representative (or
| not) of the general founder population that is.
| aosaigh wrote:
| (Rant) What a snobby, begrudging comments section. Well done to
| OP for writing a detailed summary of a succesful productised
| service that they got off the ground as well as a solid list of
| actionable tasks you can take to improve your own product.
|
| They've outlined how their clients have loved the service, it's
| been financially successful and everyone is happy, yet all people
| here do is complain about a) how this is the downfall of the
| internet b) there's some technical or editorial minutiae of the
| post itself they dislike c) how they could have done it better d)
| what they're doing is just plain wrong or unimportant.
|
| If HN had its way, every product and service on the planet would
| be devoid of marketing, sales or design and the only way you
| could buy it was via the command line. Infuriating.
| pkdpic_y9k wrote:
| I definitely hear you but at this point its kind of why I come
| to HN and why I tell my software students to do the same. I
| think you're right that if a lot of these folks had their way
| the only way to do anything on a computer would be through a
| terminal interface, but when its not taking the form of an
| inactionable rant that just feels like such a beautiful kind of
| idealism to me and a valid / real perspective shared by a lot
| of engineers. I too cant help myself from occasionally dreaming
| of some alternate reality where GUIs were never invented and
| all the problems of addictive online media were somehow
| magically sidestepped.
|
| In any case even though I could have done without the repeated
| revenue stats being thrown around I think its great this guy
| made the extra effort to consolidate his observations and
| conclusions as an open resource. What more can we all do as
| members of this community?
|
| That said after reading the article and a lot of the comments I
| did find myself wondering, if we stopped treating our users
| like 12 year olds would they stop interacting with our sites
| like 12 year olds? And is that even something we'd want?
| jt2190 wrote:
| > ... if we stopped treating our users like 12 year olds...
|
| This is _not_ what the OP is suggesting. He 's paraphrasing a
| well-established usability guideline [1] to use text that has
| a readability score of 5th grade or lower, _because people
| are in a hurry and they don 't read text on the web, they
| scan it._ Using more complex sentence structures in this
| context only leads to misreadings and misunderstandings.
|
| [1] https://www.nngroup.com/articles/how-users-read-on-the-
| web/
| chefchaouen wrote:
| A dev in my department is doing a POC to demonstrate the
| relationship between the quantifiable readability (albeit
| in Japanese) of a company's securities filings and that
| company's financial performance. That project, and the
| nngroup link you kindly shared make me think readability is
| a legitimately important consideration when designing a
| landing page as the OP is suggesting.
| lifeisstillgood wrote:
| What's the (proposed) causal relationship there?
| Companies with clear business models can write clear
| notes to the Stock Exchnage, or companies that write
| clearly to the exchnage can communicate to the market
| (users investors) also clearly
|
| (I am assuming that no-one thinks that Japanese consumers
| read security filings before making their weekly shop?)
| solipsism wrote:
| _like such a beautiful kind of idealism to me_
|
| _dreaming of some alternate reality where GUIs were never
| invented_
|
| This is the ideal dream state you send your students to
| absorb? A bunch of terminal-users obsessed with building
| everything in the terminal? Why indoctrinate your students
| into that?
|
| Note: Reading over the above I realize it sounds
| antagonistic, probably because I formed everything as a
| question. I don't mean it to be antagonistic. It's just me
| not understanding where you're coming from.
|
| _if we stopped treating our users like 12 year olds would
| they stop interacting with our sites like 12 year olds_
|
| Yeah, maybe. But... I'm not sure if you want my dad to be
| part of your idealized future, but if you do, the terminal is
| not going to be the way to do it
|
| I'm all for finding ways to empower users, but how does that
| lead to you getting off the train at no GUIs, instead of
| _better_ GUIs?
| JohnWhigham wrote:
| Treating the masses like children is a habit that predates
| the Internet. But it's not always bad. Pruning a landing
| page's CTA to be as succinct as possible is necessary because
| time is the universal currency, and we only have so much of
| it to spend.
| tyrust wrote:
| > I too cant help myself from occasionally dreaming of some
| alternate reality where GUIs were never invented and all the
| problems of addictive online media were somehow magically
| sidestepped.
|
| MUDs were before my time, but I have a friend that claims to
| have spent hundreds of hours playing these text-based games.
|
| Addiction is a human issue and isn't limited to one form or
| another.
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| > If HN had its way, every product and service on the planet
| would be devoid of marketing, sales or design and the only way
| you could buy it was via the command line.
|
| ... Unironically, that would be amazing. Maybe an optional page
| for pictures/screenshots, but otherwise I don't see a problem
| with that if your audience is compatible. I mean, I don't
| expect everyone to go that way, but if I never had to leave my
| terminal I'd count it an improvement.
| hathawsh wrote:
| I agree; this looks like a great service. I don't understand
| the objections. Thanks @ollymeakings!
| msla wrote:
| Maybe if more people knew the bizarre way "roast" was
| apparently being used here, the comments would be better.
| onlyfortoday2 wrote:
| welcome to HN LOL
| kwertyoowiyop wrote:
| That's just because people on HN are FAR too smart to be
| affected by mere APPEARANCES.
|
| /s
| dang wrote:
| " _Please don 't sneer, including at the rest of the
| community._" https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| kleer001 wrote:
| > the only way you could buy it was via the command line
|
| Hahaha! Congrats, I actually chuckled.
|
| Technically though, I don't think there's anything that by
| default is purchasable via CLI. But, yes, that's why it's
| funny.
| kbelder wrote:
| Build a CLI interface to amazon. There's your million dollar
| idea.
|
| amzn buy --ship fedex --address home "micro usb 6' cable"
| kleer001 wrote:
| Sounds good...
|
| The hooks for Amazon Dash are likely closed as it was
| phased out a year after start.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Dash
|
| Though, it can be done through Alexa.
|
| There's this :
|
| https://github.com/MarQG/bamazon-cli
|
| But I have no idea what a bamazon database is.
|
| Personally I don't think I'd ever want to build a product
| on top of a huge company's product. That way lies madness.
| runiq wrote:
| I mean... I'd use that.
| pelagicAustral wrote:
| Yes, please.
| EricE wrote:
| It really is amazing. He's helping people improve _landing
| pages_.
|
| It's not how to generate spam, robocalls, improve your targeted
| facebook ads or some other form of active marketing - it's
| about making your passive marketing message more effective.
|
| I dunno why everyone assumes _all_ marketing is bad. Without
| marketing how the heck would you ever learn about or even find
| potentially useful products? As with all things moderation is
| key and this guy is focusing on the most neutral kind of
| marketing out there!
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| > I dunno why everyone assumes all marketing is bad.
|
| All marketing is inherently untrustworthy by virtue of
| conflict of interest. The people trying to sell products have
| every incentive to lie and mislead potential consumers. At
| best you get language that emphasizes upsides while
| downplaying downsides.
|
| There's a reason people search forums like reddit when they
| need real product reviews: marketing simply cannot be
| trusted.
|
| > Without marketing how the heck would you ever learn about
| or even find potentially useful products?
|
| Word of mouth.
| eropple wrote:
| _> The people trying to sell products have every incentive
| to lie and mislead potential consumers._
|
| Absolutely not, unless your business model relies on single
| sales.
|
| In functioning organizations with _actual products_ ,
| marketing and sales are advocacy functions for the customer
| as much as they are revenue functions for the business.
| They're how you know what to make and who to target.
| antris wrote:
| The point was that relying on marketing messages causes
| the user having to research themselves what the product
| is actually good at and what it isn't good at and wasting
| time because the company isn't upfront the products
| strengths and weaknesses. The product might be sufficient
| in the end, but marketing will very rarely tell you what
| the product is _actually_ sufficient at and what it is
| not.
|
| The statement wasn't about whether the product is
| actually good or not, though in extreme cases, yes, the
| product is worthless while the marketing is all rainbows
| and sunshine. But relying on marketing is bad for the
| user in nearly every case, even if the product is good.
|
| And even if you are "one of the good guys", your users
| won't know that. That's why you should verify from
| independent sources, or do your own research.
|
| If marketing was really a reliable source of information,
| reviews, samples, product trials etc. wouldn't be a
| thing.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| You say this but ISPs deliver only a fraction of the
| bandwidth they advertise, SSD marketing doesn't mention
| the fact you're not supposed write to it too much... Drug
| marketing never mentions any side effects, food marketing
| blatantly takes advantage of the public's ignorance...
|
| People should assume all marketing is incomplete or
| untrustworthy information _at best_.
| Xamayon wrote:
| Word of mouth works, but can be very slow and still faces
| the problem of getting those first users. Where did the
| first person in the chain hear about it if not for
| marketing or self promotion? At some point the word has to
| reach someone who can actually spread it before anything
| will happen. So many awesome products and services die
| because they aren't flashy or cool enough to drive viral
| word of mouth spread.
|
| I'm quite familiar with this, as my reverse image search
| service SauceNAO has never done any kind of paid marketing.
| It took years for users to spread the word to any
| significant degree. Even now, nearly 13 years later, there
| are many people who would benefit from it greatly who have
| never even heard of us...
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| > Word of mouth works, but can be very slow
|
| Is slow growth not fine? I think organic growth is
| healthier for society. All this explosive never ending
| economic growth we see today seems pathological to me.
|
| > Where did the first person in the chain hear about it
| if not for marketing or self promotion?
|
| Those first users are presumed to be close to the person
| who made the product. People trust their friends. They'll
| tell other people about it if they liked it.
|
| > my reverse image search service SauceNAO
|
| Thank you for making SauceNAO. I first saw it on image
| boards, it's a well-integrated feature of those sites.
|
| I'm not sure if you have a business model so I can't tell
| if advertising would present conflicts of interest.
| kradeelav wrote:
| This is off topic to the main post, but wanted to thank
| you personally as somebody who's used saucenao pretty
| consistently for the last ten years, being adjacent to a
| lot of anime/game fandoms and even personally posting art
| on pixiv regularly. Such a fantastic and easy little
| tool. Can't even remember where I heard about it, which
| in some ways speaks to how good the site is.
| shanecleveland wrote:
| I'd say that honest, thorough and helpful articles like
| this as a function of marketing lead to word-of-mouth,
| organic growth.
| tshaddox wrote:
| Marketing is no more inherently trustworthy than any other
| form of communication. Of course it's important to have
| some personal ability to detect deceit, and it's also
| important to have systems in place to disincentivize
| deceit. But the fact is that, when such systems are not in
| place or are not sufficiently strong, of course there are
| many cases where people are incentivized to lie with any
| form of communication.
| notriddle wrote:
| Word of mouth is something you can optimize for. Multi-
| level marketing schemes and social networks both do this.
|
| I would prefer companies to focus on landing page quality
| than to start altering the product to turn customers into
| salesfolks.
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| > I dunno why everyone assumes all marketing is bad.
|
| Because 99% of marketing is bad.
| tshaddox wrote:
| Are you sure you're not just weighing that heavily based on
| how frustrated you are by a given piece of marketing and
| thus heavily over-counting the "bad" marketing and under-
| counting the huge amount of marketing that doesn't stand
| out and frustrate you?
| atatatat wrote:
| 99% of marketERS are bad.
|
| Only like...80% of marketing is bad.
| z3t4 wrote:
| > f HN had its way, every product and service on the planet
| would be devoid of marketing, sales or design and the only way
| you could buy it was via the command line
| grep "features" | sort price
|
| Meanwhile the rest of the world make their purchase decision
| based on emotions, social, and smell (we need a smell API in
| web browsers), and prefer passively.
| dang wrote:
| Ah, the contrarian dynamic strikes again:
|
| (1) an initial wave of objections to the article;
|
| (2) a second wave of objections to the objections;
|
| (3) those get upvoted, so that
|
| (4) the most popular comment becomes the one about how the site
| is so negative, all people do is complain, etc., producing
|
| (5) irony!
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24215601
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25434665
|
| https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
|
| If you study this phenomenon, it becomes clear that the
| difference between (1) and (2) is not negativity, just timing.
| And the upvotes of (3) are negative in the same way. Negativity
| about negativity is not positive. It's idempotent.
|
| (Edit: I hope it's clear that I don't mean to pick on you or
| anyone else personally! This is a systemic problem that we're
| all part of--that's kind of the whole point actually.)
|
| If we want a solution to the ambient negativity that can
| afflict HN threads--which we certainly do--we need to tackle it
| a little more deeply. We all need to become aware of how the
| same negativity that we perceive in others exists in ourselves,
| and without cheap avoidances like "well, the others do it
| worse". It always seems like others do it worse; everyone
| experiences that. It is the chief way we avoid looking at
| ourselves.
|
| If we admit that we're all just mirroring our own denied
| negativity to each other, we can start taking steps to a
| solution. Not that we'd never be negative any more--but maybe
| we can get less mechanical in our responses if we learn
| something about how the mechanism works _in ourselves_.
| Denouncing it in others doesn 't work--that's how the problem
| recreates itself: all this disowned negativity keeps
| circulating through the system, when what's needed is for
| people to work with it internally so that it can start to shift
| a little.
|
| That's why the site guidelines now include this line: " _Please
| don 't sneer, including at the rest of the community._" - as a
| baby step in that direction. The HN community has been around
| for long enough that I think we can take this as a task to work
| on together. It would be a big step towards optimizing this
| place for curiosity (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page
| =0&prefix=true&sor...), which is what we're all here for.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| throwaway_kufu wrote:
| The mmm.pages post yesterday was really refreshing positive,
| until a comment floating to the top ranted about geocities
| style/gifs being schizophrenic, nostalgia being toxic, and
| real creativity = having the same cookie cutter modern web
| design as everyone else (now that's irony).
|
| But based on your comment, you either: a) were inspired by
| the post itself and decided to have a little fun roasting
| this comment; or b) need to take a vacation.
| [deleted]
| kiddico wrote:
| or c) dang just has their finger on the pulse and has seen
| this every day for years.
| daanlo wrote:
| Small observation on this great comment :)
|
| I noticed on twitter that the culture (at least in my bubble)
| valued ,,smartness" over empathy. In attempt to say something
| ,,smart" it lead to many snarky responses.
|
| I also noticed this pattern in myself, which is why I stopped
| replying to tweets. (It was easier for me to stop replying
| than stopping to reply in a snarky way).
|
| For twitter I think this is not only a question of community,
| but also a question of design (ui/ux). And how the ui/ux
| shapes the community.
|
| If I ran HN, I would consider if there are any (small) UX
| changes in the comment flow that could improve the ,,well,
| actually"/contrarian metric.
| jgwil2 wrote:
| Do you have any ideas for how that could be done on HN?
| What about Twitter UX in particular do you think leads to
| that dynamic?
| echlebek wrote:
| Seems some debouncing is required :)
| hawski wrote:
| Sometimes I would like to see comments divided in two
| sections: 1. discussion strictly about the contents of the
| submission and 2. all the rest, which I would call meta. Meta
| would be hidden by default and often would be a catch-all for
| many types of negative comments in type of ("the page is
| unreadable", "I hate marketing", "I don't know what this
| is"). I know that many of my comments, like this one, would
| go to the meta section, but sometimes when I think about it
| like that I decide not to write a comment. Interesting thing
| would be to divide karma and weigh content comments by
| content karma and meta comments by meta karma. The problem
| would be that a reply to a content comment could be meta, so
| maybe every thread would have its own section?
| ericb wrote:
| That sounds amazing!
|
| That would get the content separated from the noise. I'd
| love it. The problem with these meta topics is that they
| are like the bike shed problem--emotionally driven, easy to
| get sucked into, everyone has an opinion, but ultimately, a
| distraction that takes away from the important stuff.
|
| Here's an implementation. We have _up_ and _down_ voting.
| Let me vote these _sideways_.
|
| This would be a left arrow, which hides them for me--
| conceptually like kicking them off the screen--and if a
| quorum develops past a threshold, by default for anyone
| with "meta" turned off.
| dang wrote:
| One question is how would you categorize them. It could be
| some combination of software, user input, and moderator
| action, and there are problems with all three.
|
| I would use the word 'generic' rather than 'meta'. Generic
| includes meta but also all other predictable themes, and a
| subthread that goes off-topic isn't necessarily bad--
| whimsical tangents can be interesting when unpredictable,
| as long as they're not done too often (at which point they
| would become generic).
|
| We downweight generic subthreads and the current certainly
| counts as that, but I haven't downweighted it in this case
| because it seemed more important to communicate to the
| community about this.
|
| https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&so
| r...
| jffry wrote:
| Is your downweighting process driven by manual reading
| through threads or are there signals that draw your
| attention to potentially-downweight-worthy subthreads?
|
| edit: that is to say, I wouldn't expect user-driven
| signals to automatically partition or downweight
| subthreads, I was more curious if they are useful in
| existing moderation actions and how they might
| extrapolate.
| 1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote:
| "If HN had its way, every product and service on the planet
| would be devoid of marketing, sales or design and the only way
| you could buy it was via the command line."
|
| s/planet/www/
|
| This is funny because I have always had a dream about ordering
| from the command line, instead of fiddling with HTML forms in
| web pages in graphical web browsers. Then we users could more
| easily automate purchases.
|
| In the dream, order details are in the HTTP headers. There is a
| standard that all sites would have to follow.
|
| HTTP headers can be unambiguous. Consider a proposal like the
| DNT header. Instead of being able to manipulate a user into
| giving "consent" via ever more "creative" web forms, popups,
| etc., the question is standardardised as a binary one: yes or
| no. The answer can be automated.
|
| Then I wake up. We remain stuck with HTML forms of infinite
| variablity.
| gnarbarian wrote:
| This is one of the most negative player hating envious websites
| ever. definitely not what you would expect from a community
| ostensibly set up around trailblazing, high risk
| entrepreneurship.
| dang wrote:
| The trouble is that comments like this manifest the exact
| same negativity that they complain about. We're all busy
| seeing it in _other_ people, which is what keeps the
| negativity going.
| chuckSu wrote:
| HN comment section been toxic
| serverholic wrote:
| I've had to take breaks from HN just because of how
| insufferable people are on here.
| dang wrote:
| The only way to address that is for us all to start seeing
| the same insufferability in ourselves. That's why the site
| guidelines now include " _Please don 't sneer, including at
| the rest of the community._" -- as a tentative first step in
| that direction.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
|
| Let's hope that HN is around for the rest of our lives
| because it will probably take at least that long.
|
| Edit: I pinched this comment for a long explanation upthread:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27145616
| [deleted]
| chrisseaton wrote:
| Doesn't roasting mean to unfairly and harshly criticise? Maybe
| that's what people are reacting to.
| Jasper_ wrote:
| ... all we're doing is roasting their landing page. I thought
| that would be on topic here.
| duxup wrote:
| I'll admit I felt a less than positive impulse from the title
| of the article.
|
| Probably the 'roasting' part reminded me of bikeshedding /
| every yokel with their own advice that occurs surrounding a
| font or button color or something .... that's kinda a horrible
| peeve for a lot of folks and came to mind for me.
|
| But the article and ideas seems sensible.
|
| Landing pages are hard, I think there's a lot of magic and
| weird theory out there on them. I did enjoy how focused and
| down to earth this article / his advice was.
|
| Anyone who felt similarly I suggest giving the article a read,
| it's pretty good IMO. Probably not going to turn a landing page
| into a customer magnet but nothing really does that and I think
| the advice is good / I find it useful.
| rorykoehler wrote:
| I saw this in the wild (Twitter I think) before I saw it here
| and ignored it because of the name.
| duxup wrote:
| I almost did here, for the reasons stated.
|
| I very much would have ignored it on Twitter ;)
|
| Glad I did not here.
| steve76 wrote:
| No one has any money. That's the big problem today. The people
| who have it went far away, and turned their backs on everyone.
| The best way to sell is to live there. Go there and live among
| people and it's easy. But today everyone is poor. Nothing wrong
| with being poor. Wealth today is about being opportune.
|
| You can commoditize people. Churn leads. The top of knowledge
| is known by a few people in the world though. The authorities
| who can speak truth to medical researchers or experimental
| scientists can't be churned. So you are just wasting your time.
|
| You're going to sell. Sell what? Do business what? Work what?
| $20 trillion economy. Much better for everyone to just jump
| onboard. The world would be a better place if you could work
| remotely running essential services without having to travel to
| Africa or Asia as a corporate hostage just so some jerk in a
| suit can buy a bigger yacht.
| punkspider wrote:
| Am I the only one that thinks a table of contents would be great
| for this article?
|
| It starts off salesy and when this happens I tend to avoid
| committing to it, so I think a table of contents would really
| help a user decide if this is a good read for them or not.
| axiosgunnar wrote:
| This is literally a 4min read and the author divided it up
| pretty nicely in parts and bullet points.
|
| Every bullet point is an interesting insight for itself, so you
| could leave after reading half way and still make a net
| intellectual profit.
|
| People are so overly critical these days, the guy is literally
| giving away useful hard numbers and advice for free (some
| exposure for himself).
|
| Oliver, please take HN comments with a grain if salt. :-)
| People are very demanding here (which might be a good thing of
| course)
| transitus wrote:
| @ollymeakings, the key point I would have loved to learn was how
| effective your service was. So by implementing (some / all) of
| your advice, how much did the conversion increase over next 3
| months or so? (with no additional marketing and other implausible
| but desirable assumptions). You do mention "as I built evidence
| of the roasts increasing conversion" but leave the evidence
| hanging. Or perhaps I read the otherwise quite comprehensive
| piece too hastily. Interesting stuff, thanks for sharing!
| ollymeakings wrote:
| Yes there is an issue with the client agreeing with me sharing
| the data. It's something that is being addressed with new
| clients.
|
| The main thing is to ensure you AB test. Lots of what's in the
| post is proven, not just by my own experiments, but by
| organisations like Unbounce who have global data across 1,000s
| of pages.
|
| However the true key to improving your own loading page is to
| grow and act on your own quantqual data.
| ribs wrote:
| As @transitus said, some quantitative statements about
| results would be really helpful here. I hope you can get
| some. Other than that, what you're saying is very convincing.
| jojo_kelly wrote:
| Love this, what a good idea.
|
| But, do you think you're undercharging at PS150 per roast?
| JohnJamesRambo wrote:
| Your site is cancer on my tiny iPhone SE screen. Banner thing,
| little chat bubble of your face, pop-ups everywhere. Is it a
| parody site?
| ollymeakings wrote:
| Is it a parody phone :)
| JohnJamesRambo wrote:
| No it's the best phone ever made.
| another_kel wrote:
| It's not since the iphone 12 mini was released
| Gracana wrote:
| You must reserve the good roasts for paying customers.
| lifeisstillgood wrote:
| This is a lot of real effort - one per workday for a year. I just
| am trying to imagine what I could do similarly:
|
| - a code review from an OSS project per day?
|
| - a bug fix per day?
|
| - document something every day
|
| - add a line of code to an OSS project per day?
|
| Any ideas?
| amelius wrote:
| Instead of using this service, you can also post your project to
| HN for the same result :)
| rajasimon wrote:
| Yeah! HN roast are indeed very good. I was launching my project
| in HN and six hours later I have shutdown the project. Because
| I got roasted. Left and right comments are shown it's not good
| for either party ( Me and HN users )
|
| Note: The project I have mentioned is targeted to HN users in
| mind.
| beejiu wrote:
| Judging by all the 'I know better' comments that are posted in
| this very post, you really couldn't.
| skc wrote:
| Except HN will probably bring your site down in the process.
| I'm always in two minds about it even beyond the famously tough
| crowd here.
| rchaud wrote:
| Hardly. HN will talk about how they could build the same thing
| in a week, why enterprise pricing is "Call to discuss" only, or
| complaining about the use of Google/Adobe Analytics.
| egberts1 wrote:
| Can I roast the roaster for not summarizing how he does the
| roasting (unless he is not wanting more business)? #headduck
| grenoire wrote:
| Drink some Diet Coke and it shall all be revealed onto you.
| josefresco wrote:
| In the article he embeds a Tweet showing his first version vs his
| 20th version. Then I went to the site, and what's live looks more
| like the 1st version so I'm confused.
| ollymeakings wrote:
| Constantly testing!
| josefresco wrote:
| The cynical side of me thinks this is the problem with the
| "landing page optimization" market. Measure, tweak, measure,
| tweak (repeat 20x) and before you know it, you're back to
| where you began!
|
| A couple years back, I read another article about landing
| pages that warned against taking A/B testing logic to the
| extreme, as it may lead you down the wrong path.
|
| My advice: Use your instincts/experience/feedback along with
| raw data.
| treerunner wrote:
| This is how you architect a boring web.
| rchaud wrote:
| "Landing Page" tells you this is for SaaS products sales pages.
| Of course it's boring.
|
| Although it would be interesting to see a parody of such sites,
| such as the classic "Every Bootstrap website ever"[0]
|
| [0]: https://www.dagusa.com/
| JackPoach wrote:
| Sorry to be pain in the butt, but this is largely irrelevant.
| There are a lot of experts or 'experts' who analyze other people
| mistakes. However, the real data for landing pages comes from
| actual customers, not expert opinion, however good or bad it is.
| Second, the #1 mistake for landing pages happens before the
| landing page is even created. Namely figuring out what to offer,
| how to offer it, how to stand out and how to make your goods or
| services way better than competition. Make mistake at this stage
| and no landing page will save you and analyzing landing page for
| a bad product or a bad offer will only take you away from seeing
| the real problem /*rant off.
|
| I see zero relevance in the post. The author may have learned
| something, but I as a reader did not. Usual marketing bullshit.
| ollymeakings wrote:
| Hi, author here
|
| I shared what I learnt across the 200 pages I reviewed and my
| focus is on landing page conversion. I am working on the
| assumption there is some sort of product market fit.
|
| I also included techniques to generate insights - like exit
| intent, review analytics and heatmaps, introducing a cycle of
| testing - rather than just telling people what they should do.
|
| Finally, I don't look at naff tricks on the visitor. It's all
| focused on proven concepts for relaying what makes your
| business great.
|
| However if you can find anything in the list you feel is some
| sort of bizarre manipulation or trick I'm happy to look again.
| dhsysusbsjsi wrote:
| I stopped reading when it said make the landing page focus on
| one thing. No no no. I HATE pages where it's plastered with
| "Sign up" but you have to search for the login button.
| rchaud wrote:
| A "landing page" is not necessarily the home page. It can
| be a page that a Google/Bing ad points to, or one that
| ranks high on search, that's specifically designed to talk
| about the product and its features.
|
| If you are already a user of the product, chances are
| you'll bookmark the login page, or have it appear in your
| browser autocomplete. Worst case scenario, you'll go to the
| homepage and click the login button on the top right.
| EricE wrote:
| >A "landing page" is not necessarily the home page.
|
| Excellent point. And a very powerful one too. It just
| caused me to think about the content and structure of an
| educational site I'm involved with in a VERY different
| way. Thanks!
| rchaud wrote:
| You're welcome.
|
| The "landing page" is ultimately wherever you, the site
| owner, want the user to land on. The reason a distinction
| is drawn between a landing page and a home page is
| because there can only be one home page. But there is no
| limit to the number of landing pages you can create.
|
| - LP 1 for "Self-serve video course" users
|
| - LP 2 for "Live, Group based instruction" users
|
| And even there, LP1 could have Variant 1 and Variant 2,
| which are randomly served to users as part of a split
| test, to see which page converted better. You can use
| tools like Unbounce or Optimizely to serve the pages to a
| randomized audience.
| admissionsguy wrote:
| I often take the excessive focus on things like the landing
| page, design details to be a sign of inexperience/immaturity on
| the part of founders. Once you have a selling product, by all
| means, do optimize at the margins. But at an early stage, it's
| just a distraction.
| ollymeakings wrote:
| Really? I recently optimised a landing page for a client who
| had PS100,000 weekly ad spend on Facebook and increased their
| paid ROI by 40%.
|
| Trust me, it's a critical part of the conversion performance.
| admissionsguy wrote:
| Sounds like they had a selling product to begin with.
| Optimisation has its place of course, but when the client
| is a pre-revenue startup with uncertain business plan and a
| scrappy budget, and they keep refining pixels on the
| landing page, I feel bad for them. While another client
| goes from zero to $20k MRR in two months with a $20
| Themeforest template and a Lorem ipsum text still there.
| ollymeakings wrote:
| Oh yeah, totally agree - multiple landing page iterations
| for early stage pre-revenue is silly.
|
| I do cover user acquisition, methods of validation, when
| to test, types of test, the culture of lean, and more in
| the roast.
|
| One thing to note however with the buyer you describe -
| they often make REALLY rudimentary mistakes. I've seen
| people forget CTAs, links not working, totally confused
| language (no idea what they do), missing key elements,
| not written to buyer etc.
|
| Also missing great opportunities to showcase their
| business more powerfully. For them it's PS149 and they
| have another person look at it and give practical
| feedback.
| kackerd wrote:
| I know that there is a lot of art behind these type of patterns
| and getting people to sign up, etc. However whenever I see them
| discussing techniques, they seem to ignore the fact that people
| quickly learn to work around them.
|
| If I go to a new company's site, I'll quickly try and figure
| out whether I can get the info I need without signing up to
| anything I don't want. I'm used to weighing up giving my
| personal details, signing up for emails etc. If your site seems
| too spammy, intentionally opaque, or just yechy, I'll just
| forget about it and move on.
|
| Change the patterns or the KPIs, and I'm sure that many of your
| page visitors will change up too, especially the more savvy
| ones.
| JackPoach wrote:
| Yep, this is exactly why infobiz one-pagers with extra long
| text blocks that never ended started having the opposite
| effect. It's like writing THIS IS A SCAM in bold letters.
| 'Customer isn't a fool. She's your mother'(C)
| kackerd wrote:
| Yes. A lot of 'innovation' in marketing is just changing
| things to eliminate design decisions which are associated
| with scamminess and coming up with new ones which aren't
| yet overused by the worst bottom-feeders and so seem
| 'fresh'.
| Mauricebranagh wrote:
| Its actually interesting (bit on the spammy side) a lot of
| sites get built by a developer who doesn't relay pay any
| attention on to its intended function.
|
| And designing the right architecture for example do not stuff
| all your sku's / PDP on one single page with just images, no
| text and a page title of "Products"
|
| And a lot of businesses a page will have to serve multiple
| requirements: a laser focused ppc landing page targeting one
| term well that's a lot easier.
| wombatmobile wrote:
| This sounded interesting so I clicked on TFA.
|
| OMG it does that thing I can't stand in news publications of
| repeating the same thing over and over!
|
| This is literally the first 8 lines of TFA:
|
| - - -
|
| What I learnt roasting 200 landing pages in 12 months
|
| 200 roasts, PS70,000 in revenue and 642 cans of Diet Coke later.
|
| What I learnt roasting 200 landing pages in 12 months
|
| 200 roasts, PS70,000 in revenue and 642 cans of Diet Coke later
|
| 200 roasts, PS70,000 in revenue and 642 cans of Diet Coke later
|
| 12 months of roasting landing pages
|
| Over the last twelve months I've roasted the landing pages of 200
| startups.
|
| - - -
|
| I get so annoyed when news articles do that, because they skimp
| on writing abstract leaders by simply duplicating text from the
| opening para.
|
| I don't know what else this article says because I stopped
| reading and closed the tab.
| ollymeakings wrote:
| That is a quirk of Ghost, it took the summary text from the
| blog homepage and inserted it into the post. I fixed it.
|
| I didn't purposefully use that phrase repeatedly. Thanks for
| spotting.
| travisjungroth wrote:
| Your post got roasted!
| ollymeakings wrote:
| The roaster became the roastee
| Infernal wrote:
| My, how the spitroast has turned
| [deleted]
| Brendinooo wrote:
| Interesting that you call this out. You're right! But I didn't
| notice it at all.
|
| Maybe I just got used to this sort of pattern, or maybe this is
| where being a skimmer actually benefits me...
| augustk wrote:
| TFA?
|
| https://blog.mitchjlee.com/2020/your-writing-style-is-costly
| royletron wrote:
| But I do want a Diet Coke.
| willcipriano wrote:
| The content is algorithm first, not human first. I too refrain
| from consuming articles written for computers.
| spicybright wrote:
| It's pretty sad webpages now are written for search engines
| to parse and only incidentally, for humans to read.
| ollymeakings wrote:
| It wasn't written for search.
|
| Nobody googles titles like 'what I learnt'
|
| The blog post shares every single insight I learnt
| reviewing landing pages and running my business without any
| SEO implemented at all.
| virgil_disgr4ce wrote:
| Ignore the haters. They don't have anything better to do.
| It's a great article and I found it really useful!
| xbar wrote:
| Bookmarked, on the assumption that you were right.
|
| Did I miss the data that backs up your assertions that
| the improvements were effective?
| weird-eye-issue wrote:
| This used to be the case but Google is getting much better
| at understanding topics and how they relate to each other.
| These days, writing good quality content that is
| comprehensive is best for humans and Google. Sure there is
| some gaming of the system but it's not like it used to be
| WesolyKubeczek wrote:
| It's way worse now.
| devtul wrote:
| Is this why recipes online are such a pain?
|
| "Want to check my roasted platypus recipe? Check out this
| 1000 words tell on why I love roasting platypuses"
|
| Of course paired with an auto play video of unrelated
| content.
| virgil_disgr4ce wrote:
| "I'll get to the recipe in a minute, but first let me tell
| you about the time I dropped a penny into the Trevi
| Fountain in Rome. You see, I had just broken up with my
| first boyfriend and..."
|
| F%(*ing insufferable madness
| joelkevinjones wrote:
| Copyright. The recipe itself can't be copyrighted, but the
| descriptive text around it can. This created a style in
| print media that carried over into the online world.
| xwdv wrote:
| Online recipes are a pain because I find the vast majority
| of them are written by women, who tend to meander with
| their posts while men get straight to the point.
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| Not sure I've ever seen such blatant, overt misogyny on
| HN before.
| frosted-flakes wrote:
| That's not why. It's because you only see the ones that
| do search engine optimization.
| compiler-guy wrote:
| Online recipes may or may not be written mostly by women,
| but the style is a consequence of copyright law, not
| biology or gender or even cultural norms around gender
| roles.
| xwdv wrote:
| Regardless, I do not think it was worth a barrage of down
| votes, as the majority of recipes are in fact written by
| women.
| servercobra wrote:
| The first half of your original sentence is a fact, but
| the second half is your opinion and likely what the
| downvotes are about.
| toomanyrichies wrote:
| Citation?
| burnished wrote:
| statements of the form "X is bad because women whereas
| men do good" are widely recognized as garbage. please
| don't pretend the problem is you claiming that women are
| the majority recipe-writer, that is clearly not the part
| people feel the need to express their disagreement with.
| xwdv wrote:
| So you're telling me if I cut off the rest of my comment
| at the comma it would suddenly be more acceptable? I
| doubt it.
| crysin wrote:
| You made a sexist comment with no evidence. Reap what you
| sow.
| davidmurdoch wrote:
| What is TFA?
| jcims wrote:
| The Fabulous Article
| Minor49er wrote:
| Similar to how RTFM stands for "Read The Fabulous Manual"
| NikolaeVarius wrote:
| Its Fucking
| [deleted]
| moshmosh wrote:
| I've always understood the F in any of these to translate
| to "fine" when in _ahem_ polite company. Same number of
| characters.
|
| [EDIT] LOL wow that justification is wrong, forgot about
| the 'ing'. Still, that's the word I've usually seen
| subbed.
| [deleted]
| dmitshur wrote:
| I didn't know what TFA was and my best guess was "the
| full article". This makes me realize RTFM could also be
| interpreted as read the full manual, which feels amusing.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| What, you never read all of the man pages on your Linux
| distro?
| macksd wrote:
| I will now be reading "AF" as "as fabulous".
| enumjorge wrote:
| It stands for "The Fucking Article".
| [deleted]
| conradludgate wrote:
| For a more sensible answer, I use "The Featured Article"
| dalmo3 wrote:
| TFA (thanks for answering).
| echlebek wrote:
| The fine article
| blaser-waffle wrote:
| The "Friendly" Article
| virgil_disgr4ce wrote:
| "Big... FRIENDLY Gun 9000"
| ElectricMind wrote:
| //I generated about PS20,000 in roast revenue, and another
| PS50,000 of freelance marketing work from clients //
|
| This guy made this much money with a simple idea. And he hasn't
| killed anyone. So even though I would never buy such service or
| think it is worth something to buy , I don't want roast this guy
| for earning money. All the best.
| ollymeakings wrote:
| Thank you! And every single client apart from one rated the
| roast 5/5 so they liked it too.
| swyx wrote:
| my swipe file of landing page advice articles here:
| https://github.com/sw-yx/launch-cheatsheet/blob/master/READM...
| kaltuer wrote:
| There are some technical terms that you need to explain, as not
| all of the readers are well-versed on your industry. I'd also
| like to roast your page, as it has no navigation page.
| dnndev wrote:
| Anyone know of a TLDR version? Top 10 on one page? Would love to
| watch all 20 minute videos but just not at this time.
| ollymeakings wrote:
| My twitter thread covers 16 points and with visuals
|
| https://twitter.com/helloitsolly/status/1390310904563224581
| dnndev wrote:
| Thank you! exactly what I was looking for
| dnndev wrote:
| Why the down votes? its a valid question... geesh...
| earksiinni wrote:
| Fantastic info, thank you, @ollymeakings!
|
| As you mentioned in the comments here, your article assumes that
| the business already has product-market fit. Do you have advice
| for people who are at the idea stage and are building landing
| pages as a way of finding product-market fit?
|
| I've been building a landing page to test out a consumer-oriented
| travel app idea before I build it. Ideally, I want to build a
| community of users before creating the app and learn from them
| what to build. Conversion at this point means signing up for an
| email list, then I reach out with a personal email. Not fancy,
| but it's a start.
|
| I see the landing page in my use case as a conversation starter:
| "Sign up for this app! Actually, the app doesn't exist yet, but
| I'd really like to build something like this for you. Does it
| strike your interest?" Not in a bait-and-switch way.
|
| Thanks again!
|
| P.S.: I'm an engineer transitioning into entrepreneurship.
| Learning that marketing is my chief responsibility--and what
| marketing really means (way more than advertising)--has been an
| eye-opener for me. Here are some other landing page resources
| that I've found helpful:
|
| Rob Hope's Landing Page Hot Tips ebook:
| https://gumroad.com/l/hottips/root
|
| Harry from Marketing's guide to landing pages:
| https://marketingexamples.com/conversion/landing-page-guide
| robinj6 wrote:
| SEO has made the Internet so toxic. I can't stand wading through
| data these days, it's written for bots.
| Exuma wrote:
| Very nice. One minor correction -- The emoji you used next to
| "Processes I implemented" is unavailable on the latest OSX update
| for some reason. I'm not even sure what emoji it is, but it looks
| like stacked bars.
| schleiss wrote:
| > Focus your landing page on one conversion goal.
|
| How does this help with SEO? Won't your pages be too thin and
| suffer in Google's eyes? I thought rich content is the way to go.
| ravedave5 wrote:
| "Nearly every founder was able to capture their product or
| business USPs gracefully in the form, but only about 1 in 5 had
| this language on their landing page."
|
| I cannot belive how many landing pages I go to for prodcuts and I
| can't figure out what they actually do, or why to use them over
| X. It's shocking.
| duckmysick wrote:
| This also applies to open source projects on GitHub.
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| > I cannot belive how many landing pages I go to for prodcuts
| and I can't figure out what they actually do
|
| You can do _anything_ at Zombocom. [0]
|
| I can't believe how many years this site has been around, and
| it's still essentially the same site. The only change is that
| it now uses JavaScript to animate the spinning circles rather
| than Flash.
|
| [0] https://zombo.com/
| nocman wrote:
| "The only limit -- is yourself!" -- after all these years, I
| still _love_ that site. Still good for a laugh.
| EricE wrote:
| Indeed! The Curse of Knowledge strikes all the time if you
| aren't on constant guard for it.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curse_of_knowledge
| nitwit005 wrote:
| I tend to assume the issue is not that they can't explain
| things, but they don't want to. Plenty of companies spend a
| lot of money creating manuals to explain exactly how
| everything works, and then hide them away so that potential
| customers can't look at them.
|
| The most common reason seems to be a desire to force you to
| talk to sales.
| kleiba wrote:
| This could, however, be a way to implement one of the
| recommendations of this site: address the most niche audience
| you can until you reach a critical mass of customers. If you
| don't understand what the service/product is about, you're
| probably not part of the target niche.
|
| That said, there's also just really bad web sites out there, no
| doubt.
| ollymeakings wrote:
| Olly here, founder of roastmylandingpage.com
|
| Happy to answer any questions about the service or business not
| covered in the blog.
|
| You can also see the post as tweets, with visual examples from
| landing pages here:
| https://twitter.com/helloitsolly/status/1390310904563224581
| rfwhyte wrote:
| You talk exclusively in qualitative statements, but do you have
| any quantitative data to back up any of things you are saying?
| Its all well and good to say what you _think_ someone _should_
| do, but without actual data to back up these statements why
| should I believe you? You 're just some random dude from the
| internet, and just because you said something, does not make it
| true.
|
| You say for example "Contrast your product with competitors and
| the current way of doing things." but what data do you have to
| substantiate that this is anything other than your / intuition
| / opinion? What kind of conversion rate lift did you clients
| see by implementing this particular tactic while controlling
| other variables to ensure the integrity of the test?
|
| As someone who's spent a fair amount of time on CRO in the
| past, I appreciate that most of what you're saying is
| _probably_ right as it 's all broadly speaking conventional
| wisdom in the CRO space, but it rings somewhat hollow without
| actual data to back it up. I understand data sharing agreements
| with clients can be difficult to arrange, but had you even
| included data on how the tactics you're recommending had
| impacted the conversion rate of your _own_ landing page you
| could have at least had some proof in your pudding.
| illnewsthat wrote:
| I think including the example images in the original blog post
| would have helped to convey your points better.
| ollymeakings wrote:
| Yep, this post wasn't 100% complete. Someone else posted it.
|
| No complaints here but going to add images in asap.
| egypturnash wrote:
| _reads this_
|
| _ponders the front page of her art /comics site_
|
| Social proof... social proof... oh hey I have a couple of glowing
| quotes from Hugo winners for the cover of one of my comics, maybe
| I should put those on the link to it on the front of my site,
| too. Thanks, Landing Page Roast Guy.
|
| Maybe next I'll even edit the css so they're not in tiny low-
| contrast type. Nah. Gotta stay humble.
| GayforMoleman wrote:
| The article has acronyms (USP, CTA,...) that the author never
| cares to actually explain what they mean. I find that it's a
| really opaque and hostile way to approach a subject and it mostly
| makes me feel like the author wants to sound like he really knows
| what he's talking about. He stretches simple points (Have a clear
| mission statement/product description.) into longwinded
| statements with unnecessarily complicated jargon. Really just
| feels like I'm being pitched a service the whole time I'm
| reading.
| ollymeakings wrote:
| Unique selling point and call to action.
|
| I will actually correct that as one of my insights is to remove
| confusing acronyms to improve legibility.
|
| Sorry the rest didn't work for you.
| peterthehacker wrote:
| I've never heard of USPs before this article. Stopped reading
| to google "USPs landing page" which returned links to
| usps.com, the US mail carrier.
|
| CTA is pretty well known though. Regardless, explaining those
| acronyms would improve clarity.
| StavrosK wrote:
| I wrote something that might help:
| https://github.com/skorokithakis/expounder/
| TheCowboy wrote:
| I don't know why you got downvoted because this is a good
| idea.
|
| The only criticism I have is that usually the dotted
| underline is associated with adwords on some sites. I don't
| know if there's a better way to do it. Superscript question
| marks at the end of the phrase?
| moshmosh wrote:
| There's a built-in HTML tag for this that traditionally
| uses the dotted underline. Looks like it doesn't do that
| on all browsers, though, these days, but it's a CSS tweak
| to add it. Behavior also seems worse than it used to on
| some browsers--safari makes you hover for a little to see
| the expanded definition, while I recall clicking to see
| it before, which is better.
|
| https://developer.mozilla.org/en-
| US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/ab...
| StavrosK wrote:
| Hmm, I have an adblocker so I can't say I've seen that
| pattern much, but you can easily change the display for
| it with a few lines of CSS.
| frabjoused wrote:
| I feel like this useronboarding site
| (https://www.useronboard.com/) is the right way to go about this.
| It's informative, helpful but doesn't make the website its
| tearing down feel wrong.
| hungryforcodes wrote:
| "Real pain PAS (pain - agitate - solve) is a common copywriting
| technique used to increase conversion. Most landing pages touched
| on the pain they were addressing, but only 1 in 15 agitated or
| amplified the pain with emotional language and vivid imagery. The
| ones that did this well created much more powerful landing pages
| that moved me to explore the solution.
|
| Fix it: Agitate your visitor by painting a vivid picture of the
| pain using emotional language, stories and visuals."
|
| How is this not a dark pattern?
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| Not heard of PAS before but it's a stalwart of UK politics for
| those in power presently. Bonus points if you actually cause
| the pain, I guess.
| spicybright wrote:
| Reminds me of the "World's Best Cup of Coffee" scene from elf
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CUPDRnUWeBA
| abraae wrote:
| That's just marketing 101, as used for centuries.
|
| A dark pattern would be luring them in further with something
| like "the one thing you need to do to fix your conversion
| rates", but with a link leading to a list of 10 things, with
| that one thing at the end or even not there at all.
| kwertyoowiyop wrote:
| And number 6 was going to surprise me! (AVOID!)
| ollymeakings wrote:
| The user is feeling the pain, you are amplifying it.
|
| Yes it sound stupid but it's only about evoking a feeling the
| visitor already has.
|
| Here's some examples - they are everywhere
|
| https://twitter.com/helloitsolly/status/1391668206755106816
| HumblyTossed wrote:
| It should be. But I guess when the revenue of the entire
| freaking planet depends on manipulation, people start to accept
| it.
| sneak wrote:
| Dark patterns are:
|
| a) UI
|
| b) explicitly designed to mislead or confuse you into
| conflating things
|
| This is simple persuasion, not deception. It's also not UI.
| NikolaeVarius wrote:
| Dark patterns are not "anything you don't like"
| philtar wrote:
| If this was a dark pattern then almost all of sales is a dark
| pattern.
| risyachka wrote:
| Why would it be?
|
| There is nothing sinister in it. Probably 100% of people do the
| same in every day conversations in one or another way without
| even noticing.
| michaelt wrote:
| Well, a lot of beauty products sell themselves by making
| people feel ugly, security products by making people feel
| fearful, and so on.
|
| Some people find that perilously close to breaking someone's
| window then charging them to fix it.
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| > security products by making people feel fearful
|
| People _should_ be fearful. The lack of fear is allowing
| people and corporations to get hacked everywhere.
|
| Though I work in cybersecurity (though not for a
| cybersecurity company), so I may be a bit biased.
| yodon wrote:
| > How is this not a dark pattern?
|
| It's common for potential customers to have a need and a
| problem but not understand their own need or problem. The
| customer's lack of understanding of their problem doesn't mean
| they don't need the product ("wow, I didn't realize I had
| cancer/bad breath/incorrectly spelled words on my website -
| thanks for helping me understand I need chemo/a toothbrush/a
| spell-checker" or "I knew I couldn't spell but I didn't realize
| it was making people leave my website without reading the
| content, thank you for helping me understand I need a spell-
| checker") so sales activities often involve helping the
| customer recognize a problem as a problem and as a problem they
| face. This is particularly common in enterprise sales where the
| sales reps tend to function as expert consultants who have much
| deeper understanding of the problem at hand than the
| organization experiencing the problem, because of the scale and
| complexity of the problems and the reality that each
| organization ideally solves the problem in question at most
| once but the sales reps are involved in helping dozens or
| hundreds of companies identify and solve the problem. If you
| want to call all sales activities "Dark Patterns" that's your
| choice, but the word "sales" has served us well for hundreds of
| years, as have "advertising," "marketing," and "branding."
| eplanit wrote:
| Is this what marketers tell themselves, that they're doing
| good for the public?
| subutai_khan wrote:
| So what you are saying is every salesperson ever is a dark
| pattern proponent?
| AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote:
| Yes? That's pretty much my experience.
| onlyfortoday2 wrote:
| LOL okay bruh
| sethammons wrote:
| Not all sales is the used car guy trying to pull a fast one
| on you. Any decent sales experience is party A
| understanding the needs of party B and providing a solution
| that both parties accept. Good sales leads to both parties
| being happy. I say thank you to the grocery clerk because I
| want to give them money for food and they say thank you
| because they want my money. I'm happy to be eating.
| AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote:
| The grocery clerk isn't trying to market anything to you,
| they are merely handling a transaction.
| Silhouette wrote:
| And yet there is a good chance that almost everything
| about your visit to that grocery store was steering you
| to increase the amount you spend while there. On the
| other hand, if the store didn't put things you might want
| to buy out on display, no-one would be able to browse,
| which a lot of people enjoy and/or find useful. So where
| is the line between unfairly manipulative and simply
| showing what you're offering and inviting someone to buy
| it?
| Dudeman112 wrote:
| If they could, approximately all sales-y and marketing
| people would be happy to make 7 billion people pay them
| 20 quids for a pound of horseshit.
|
| So would I, the difference is they are regularly paid to
| try and do it.
| hungryforcodes wrote:
| I've done sales engineering, and usually the way I closed deals
| was by honestly finding solutions to client problems, not by
| dramatizing them.
|
| Perhaps it's the use of the word "agitate" -- but it does seem
| manipulative.
| apuchitnis wrote:
| Enjoyed reading this - some very actionable advice and honest
| learnings too.
| ollymeakings wrote:
| Thanks! Glad you like it :)
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| > Tools like Loom are amazing for recording video-in-video. But
| when they fail mid-roast recording it's horrible. When it happens
| 3 times in a row, you consider leaving your job, hiring a small
| dependable car, packing up your possessions and moving to a
| remote farm far away from everything and everyone you know.
|
| Any particular reason for choosing Loom over, say, OBS? I know
| OBS is primarily for game streamers, but it would get the job
| done just as well and might be more stable since it's incredibly
| popular.
|
| Or why not record your screen and webcam separately, and then
| edit the two together in post?
|
| Or am I misunderstanding the issue?
| sigg3 wrote:
| I, for one, really enjoyed reading your advice and mostly agree
| with them. It's like that book "Don't make me think".
|
| I've had some of the most confusing times when a HN link points
| to a landing page. I personally prefer getting a readme on
| github. But some of them completely forget to describe what the
| thing is/does/improves, too.
|
| I really dislike landing pages. But I also realize I'm probably
| sitting on the porch shouting and waving my cane :)
| tofukid wrote:
| I wonder what the range in conversation change was for landing
| page tweaks. I'm curious how much landing page tweaks in general
| really matter. Do you see 50% changes in conversion by making
| copy changes, or 5%?
| haydenkshaw wrote:
| Something really irks me about how this site is using the word
| 'roast'. Feels like any of the following words, with relevant
| dictionary definitions, would've been more intuitive: analyse,
| improve, critique, assess, evaluate.
|
| Instead, let's take a slang word, re-define it's accepted meaning
| by removing the interesting nuance of it's usage, and try and
| piggyback of it's coolness. Not to my tastes.
| ollymeakings wrote:
| It generates word of mouth and share-ability but agree it's not
| for everyone.
| abanayev wrote:
| Oliver, props on your business and thanks for the interesting
| insights. I'm really disappointed in HN today though.
| optymizer wrote:
| Thanks for the write-up! I don't get all the negativity in this
| thread.
|
| It's a well-written and detailed post, filled with actual
| content. I liked that the author included the financial
| information too. I wish you all the best!
| bigtasty wrote:
| Slightly off-topic, but I'm curious what your logo [1] is? Based
| on the first iteration of your website, it used to be the chicken
| drumstick emoji () or similar, but now it's a drumstick with
| purple and pink?
|
| [1] https://uploads-
| ssl.webflow.com/6059199ee613ee15184e8810/606...
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