> the more expensive the service a B2B company provides, the more incomprehensible its website<p>> I think the big companies do it to get you on the phone — so they can upsell.<p>I was thinking these things, and then BOOM, he says what I'm thinking haha.<p>These are sales oriented companies. By contrast, B2C is quantity oriented. They need more customers buying their mostly undifferentiated price tiers. Selling expensive pants vs regular pants isn't worth high touch sales. However, in B2B, selling "really really expensive enterprise plan" vs "regular enterprise plan" is definitely worth high touch sales. They want to do everything they can to get you "interested, but confused" and pick up the phone.
I came across this recently:<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l644fAxGzlw" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l644fAxGzlw</a><p>Don't waste your time watching it. It's a promo video for yet another a very scammy looking ICO.<p>I watched through the entire 3 minute video, only because I found it increasingly amusing how long they were taking to "get to the point". As it turns out, this video is 3 minutes of stock videos of Dubai with a pseudo-inspirational voiceover about nothing in particular, followed by their logo being shown for a mere 10 seconds at the end.<p>I couldn't believe that this wasn't a parody (at least, I don't think it is), it's exactly like something out of HBO's Silicon Valley show.
So much this. Another perfect example: <a href="https://databricks.com" rel="nofollow">https://databricks.com</a><p>They just raised a $140m round of financing so apparently they have some good stuff going on. If you look at the website though:<p><i>The Unified Analytics Platform. Accelerate innovation by unifying data science, engineering, and business.</i><p>Sorry, what? Click on "learn more about the platform":<p><i>DATABRICKS IS A TRULY UNIFIED APPROACH TO DATA ANALYTICS AT SCALE. Founded by the team who created Apache Spark, Databricks provides a Unified Analytics Platform that accelerates innovation by unifying data science, engineering, and business.</i><p>I still have no clue what exactly TF the product is but I sure got my weekly dose of BS buzzwords.
The bait-sunk-cost approach = get em talking however you need to (including them asking what the hell you actually do) to tell you what they want and sell your solution as a possibility or the best approach.<p>I hate this transparent attempt to trick (me) the customer. IBM has done this to me when I'm drilling down into technical requirements like I'm some middle manager who doesn't know the actual needs. I always suspected that IBMs bread and butter is to move the sunk cost of contact into an actual sunk cost of technical debt, but I have firsthand experience now. The sign of a bad culture and lazy marketing.
My startup is focused on customer-oriented experiential personalized relationship-building solutions by leveraging distributed smart reactive coin offerings powered by unsupervised blockchain adversarial deep learning supported by containerized self-driving car clouds.<p>Investors plz line up, take a number, and contact me thru PM.
There are possibly a few things happening that explain this:<p>1. Fear of not communicating "everything" that you do. The fear is of being perceived as a very narrow solution when it does a lot more.<p>2. Advice that says "communicate the benefits" not "what you do". This advice could manifest itself in the wrong kind of (flowery) language. So instead of saying "export payroll reports for QuickBooks automatically" websites say "free up for time" [made up example]<p>3. Internal decision-making by committee.<p>4. Copying some website that you like - instead of thinking and reasoning from ground-up about 'what is it that I <i>really</i> want to say'.<p>5. Pretending to be a big/legit company when you are small<p>6. Big company with so many features that it would rather just show you the entire sales deck - the website is just <i>there</i> because it needs to be, but plays a tiny role in conversions. [why focus on something that doesn't add value - in this case, the website e.g. SAP.com]<p>This is a good article. Everyone who is running an online would benefit from thinking hard about this.
Just to play devil's advocate:<p>Whenever I'm seriously considering purchasing an enterprise B2B product, I mostly know what they do before visiting their website. I've heard of them already, either through word of mouth, or by explicitly asking friends for recommendations. I suspect that I'm not too different from most purchasers.<p>If a company's targeting a landing page for someone like me, perhaps they shouldn't optimize for clarity; they should optimize for signaling reliability. So, the "Web 20.17 parallax-ed boots[t]rap-ed responsive home page" serves a purpose - it reminds me of all the other Web 20.17... B2B services I've happily used in the past.<p>I'm probably ascribing way too much significance to the semiotics of B2B homepages [1]. But I find it tough to believe that (e.g.) Optimizely hasn't, well, optimized their homepage for <i>something</i>.<p>[1] Also, take what I say with a huge grain of salt. My business' homepage needs a lot of work...
Maybe this is the equivalent of the scammers claiming they are from Nigeria even if they are not. That's how scammers filter out automatically all those who are smart enough to see through the bullshit and only get the suckers to respond. These companies filter out those who see through the bullshit and only get the suckers, too?<p>Startup marketing is not necessarily geared for customers (end-users). They are just as much geared towards VCs who are courted and who are expected to bankroll the company. Some non-negligible number of startup founders jumped on the bandwagon with the goal not necessarily make a product, get customers, but really just to be CEOs and play "startup". That can be done by fooling a few angels. Depending on who these prospective VCs are the message and marketing can be adjusted to appeal to them. Just because someone has a lot of money doesn't mean they can't be fooled or taken advantage of. They probably hear and see all this startup activity, unicorns left and right so they are eager to play the game. And so they are matched up with just as eager "founders" who also want to play the startup game.<p>The last paragraph was from experience. The person fooled some older wealthy guys to invest in their silly idea. They burnt though millions in a few years renting an office in SV, hiring lots of workers, going to conferences, rewriting their thing with the latest frameworks. And yes eventually it all failed, because they had 0 paying customers. But it also didn't fail, because now they speak at conferences and put ex-SV CEO and founder on their title and so on.<p>The idea is, if you just dig a bit deeper, it is easy to see things a bit more clear.
I can understand avoiding clickbait, but it seems that HN has a policy of making sure titles are sufficiently boring. Originally this post's title matched the blog post's title:<p>> For the love of God, please tell me what your company does<p>Adds some flair. Expresses the sentiment of the article. Now it simply says:<p>> Tell me what your company does<p>On the other hand, HN is an impressively effective, open minded atmosphere for discussion. The bit of pruning that is done must be working. I wonder if this policy somehow leads to success overall.
I've been trying for several years to determine the company size at which we will be forced to turn our understandable site into marketing buzzwords and incomprehensible sentences. 50 people? $5 million/year in revenue? What is the turning point and who drops by to force us into incomprehensibility?
I want to see this guy review the Tarsnap website. For all that some people don't like my web design, I'd like to think that it's <i>very</i> easy to figure out what Tarsnap is.
Anytime I go onto a company's website and I either can't figure out what they do, or pricing information isn't available, I think "Right, their business model is to overcharge folks who have more money than sense" and I promptly leave.
My company squeezes juice out of bags. That was easy to explain, but didn't seem to help. Pretty sure we should have gone with "scalable antioxidant delivery systems."
Kind of related: Many sites have a footer with links like "About us", etc. which would seem like what people may want to check out right? Well, some of them also have infinite scroll, and the footer is not visible without scrolling, so you scroll down, see the footer for a brief moment, until more content is loaded and pushes the footer out of the view . Rince. Repeat. It's as if they don't want you to ever use that footer.
This inspired me to redo the landing page for my side project: <a href="https://formapi.io/" rel="nofollow">https://formapi.io/</a><p>Would appreciate some feedback. Is the purpose clear enough? I know it won't make sense unless you're a developer, but it's a tool for developers.<p>It's just a rough draft, so it probably won't be that sparse when I launch. I need to add a proper pricing page, and a tab bar at the top. I'm also planning to add a demo API request that you can run, similar to mailgun.com.
I've thought it was because they needed to fill up a large blank area with copy (words), otherwise the page will look weird.<p>It might be because the adage, "don't sell a product, sell an emotion," but taken to an inconceivable level.<p>Or maybe it's like legalese, it's not necessary, but looks good if you are billing at $500 an hour.
I thought Meltwater's flagship product was media monitoring, which their slogan kind of captures:<p>> Welcome to Outside Insight<p>> Billions of online conversations, freshly filtered.<p>The title of their landing page is even more to the point:<p>> Media Intelligence, Media Monitoring, and Social Monitoring<p>I thought Optimizely was an A/B testing tool, which makes their punchline OK:<p>> Optimizely lets you experiment on everything—from design choices to algorithms. That way the best ideas always win, and the best customer experiences get even better.<p>I suppose this only adds to his argument though, it's hard to tell what companies do.
Also, PUT THE PRICES ON THERE. Even more infuriating than a company that won't tell you what they do is a company that tells you what they do and then demands you contact them to be salespersoned at before they'll tell you the price. Fuck you, no.
I blame A/B testing actually. Too many folks run experiments without choosing which metric to optimize carefully. Here, marketers probably monitor click-through rates of their main homepage buttons. And unfortunately, if you change the landing page text from a few actually descriptive sentences to the BS described in this article, you probably end up with higher click through rates on your buttons.
This is some Silicon-Valley-the-HBO-show-grade stuff. I wonder whether the people designing these website still think they're being hip or they just have to cater to some blissfully unaware managers.
Yep, this is the end-game of "customers buy benefits, not features" marketing writing.<p>Don't get me wrong, I'm fully on board with the idea of marketing your benefits, not features, but so very much of the marketing writing you see out there now takes the concept to this unhelpful extreme.<p>I ride my bike past a shop every few days that's called something like "Shelter Solutions," but in smaller print they say "We rent equipment for commercial and residential roofing need". Boom, done, that's what I care about.<p>Or some lady who gave me a fistful of business cards at a networking event (she apparently has five thriving gigs, eyeroll), one of which was "telecommunications solutions consultant"--talking to her, she has some cell phone MLM program she's a part of.<p>Customers buy benefits, but if you're not telling them what the features are, you've failed at writing clear copy. Most people do.
There are two ways to tell people what a company does:<p>1. Explain the value of what you do
2. Explain how it's implemented<p>The Optimizely example in this article is the former, though the headline is not great. The subhead is pretty decent.<p>Optimizely could easily say "we're an application for testing different versions of your app", which is true and explains what they literally do.<p>In my experience, if you care about conversions, "explain the value" wins. People who believe they need experimentation don't mind digging for implementation. But they want to know you'll make them more money, or do something else to improve their lives.<p>This is weird for people like me, I'd usually rather read the README version of a product. But I'm not the one making buying decisions for Optimizely or an agency.
There's a good reason for this, and it's not (directly) to get you on the phone & up-sell you.<p>These landing pages are optimised for conversion, which means they're targeted at the niche who are most likely to convert already - and for bigger, specialist firms, that niche quite likely already knows the essence of what the company does.<p>Because these users are also likely evaluating competitors at the same time, the pressure is on the company to differentiate - and one way to do that is to tout your high level values.<p>"We're not just an X, we are an X which <i>gets</i> your need for Y unlike $competitor"<p>All of this isn't to say that incomprehensible websites are good, of course. There are ways to express how you're way up maslow's heirarchy without being completely confusing.
The amusing thing is when a web site for a company that does real stuff ends up looking like one of those. I mentioned Continental in a self-driving car discussion. Here's their web site.[1] Someone commented that it looked like a fake company. The rearing-horse logo, "The future in motion" as a slogan, and the vague name looked suspicious. The pictures look like clip art. The top of the home page rotates through four large banners - "Making Mobility a Great Place to Live", "Let your Ideas Shape the Future", "Continental Pledges Support in Response to Hurricane Harvey", and "First 48V drive for electric bikes". The last at least mentions a product. The entire initial screen does look vague.<p>(Continental is one of the world's largest auto parts makers, over a century old, based in Germany, and with over 200,000 employees. They make everything from tires to self-driving car sensor integration units. Not a fly-by-night startup.)<p>Look at General Electric.[2] Their home page has "The Digital Industry Company - Imagination at Work", clip art of some enormous piece of machinery, and a search box. Of course, GE probably made that enormous piece of machinery. But there's no indication of what they do. For that, you have to use the "GE Businesses" drop-down menu. It may take a while to find out that GE is prepared to sell you a jet engine or a locomotive.<p>What seems to be happening is that startups are emulating big-company sites. Badly.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.continental-corporation.com/en" rel="nofollow">https://www.continental-corporation.com/en</a>
[2] <a href="https://www.ge.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.ge.com/</a>
Marketing is hard. Writing compelling advertising copy is hard. Figuring out what people want and need to know about your product is hard.<p>Getting some designer with a great visual portfolio to make your website isn't the same thing as having a marketing plan or a marketing strategy, but it's a whole lot faster and cheaper and unfortunately most people don't know the difference.<p>Oh, and as awesome as Simon Sinek's Ted talk[0] is, you're not Apple and potential customers actually do care whether your product is useful for people like them.<p>[0] <a href="https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=u4ZoJKF_VuA" rel="nofollow">https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=u4ZoJKF_VuA</a>
I think a pretty good example of how to describe what you do on your site is <a href="http://verily.com" rel="nofollow">http://verily.com</a> (owned by Alphabet/Google).<p>'We create tools that put health data into action' hits you right in the face when you visit the page. Then you scroll down and see good descriptions of their products.<p>As someone who visited their site after looking through similar sites filled with marketing crap, I found it a relief to see something so simple. Use this as a startup website template instead!
It reminds me of Gavin Volure (Steve Martin) on 30 Rock. After getting busted as a fraud he says "It's not a real company. You watch our commercials, we never actually say what we did." and then it cuts to this beautiful corporate-speak ad <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KlymNLAAzUM" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KlymNLAAzUM</a><p>I feel like I've hit that company 50-odd times in my life while searching for vendors.
I think the non-obvious difference here is bottoms-up vs top-down adoption.<p>If you're going bottoms-up, your deal size is smaller, and you want people to start using you by themselves. Think consumer startups like Uber, Airbnb, and enterprise startups like Github. The decision-makers here are ordinary people, and they want to know exactly what they're buying so they can make an informed decision.<p>If you're going top-down, your deal size is larger, and your goal is to get a few high-paying customers. You want to maximize the # of people who you can talk to (and convince) over the phone, as well as extract the highest $ value out of. So you filter for the people who are a) serious about the problem, and b) can make the decision. As a developer or engineer, your discretionary budget probably isn't high enough for these companies to care about you. In fact, they probably don't even want to talk to you!<p>So companies that mostly rely on top-down sales have very vague landing pages. Their goal is to find specifically the people who have so much pain that they're willing to take a 25-minute sales call. And if you're willing to spend 25 minutes, it probably means that you have the budget that they care about.<p>[edit: removed stuff about my own startup]
Some other reasons why B2B sites are incomprehensible, along with “get them on the phone at all costs”:<p>- What you do is totally opaque and requires a massive amount of context to explain. Yes, it’s 5 sentences, but only after both you and the user are in the same context trying to solve the same problem. Try to explain a randomly-selected B2B company’s model to your grandma. Impossible. Instead let’s focus on company branding and positive sounding platitudes.<p>- Once you’re selling to businesses, you’re selling to VPs and C-level executives. They don’t care about the problem you solve. You're solving some lower-level employee’s problem, or a systemic problem nobody experiences directly. Since the buyer (the VP) isn’t feeling any of the pain, the only way to justify the purchase is to focus exclusively on the high-level benefits of your service. They’re in charge of marketing. promise them perfect marketing. They’re in sales. Promise them better sales. Focus on the outcomes, not the “how”, at all costs.<p>- A lesser factor might be that companies love to align workers with an affirmation that the work these employees do 40+ hours a week is making the world better. B2B organizations have an especially hard time proving this because there’s no clear evidence their business does make the world better. No consumers who sing your praises or products that solve a problem the worker can empathize with. I suspect the large amount of mental gymnastics needed to justify “our company is a net good in the world” sometimes leaks into to marketing material which leads to weird-sounding empty affirmations that are more suited to internal employee “values” documents than actual marketing content. (“We make people’s lives easier”, for instance.)
<a href="http://camel.apache.org/" rel="nofollow">http://camel.apache.org/</a><p>Front page of the Camel website:<p>Camel empowers you to define routing and mediation rules in a variety of domain-specific languages, including a Java-based Fluent API, Spring or Blueprint XML Configuration files, and a Scala DSL.<p>This means you get smart completion of routing rules in your IDE, whether in a Java, Scala or XML editor.<p>Apache Camel uses URIs to work directly with any kind of Transport or messaging model such as HTTP, ActiveMQ, JMS, JBI, SCA, MINA or CXF, as well as pluggable Components and Data Format options. Apache Camel is a small library with minimal dependencies for easy embedding in any Java application. Apache Camel lets you work with the same API regardless which kind of Transport is used - so learn the API once and you can interact with all the Components provided out-of-box.<p>Apache Camel provides support for Bean Binding and seamless integration with popular frameworks such as CDI, Spring, Blueprint and Guice. Camel also has extensive support for unit testing your routes.
Reminds me of "I am Pied Piper": <a href="http://siliconcali.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/I_AM_PIED_PIPER_Billboard_SiliconCali.jpg" rel="nofollow">http://siliconcali.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/I_AM_PIED_...</a>
I have looked at this website for a long time, my colleagues have looked at it, friends have looked at it, and we still can't figure out what they do.<p><a href="http://www.thit.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.thit.com/</a>
This also applies to far too many non-companies as well. Free software projects are notorious for this.<p>For both I generally prefer Wikipedia to their own webssites.<p>My own similar rant, as an HN comment, remains among my more popular contributions here. "Please forward to marketing".<p><a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/27d5xr/please_forward_to_marketing_how_to_present_your/" rel="nofollow">https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/27d5xr/please_...</a>
If I visit a site and they can't manage to tell me - clearly - what they do, I presume they don't know either. I quicky move on.<p>The whole "it's free to try" routine is tiring at best. It's your product...communicate to me why I should care. If you don't know why that might be, it's not my job to figure it out for you (or for me).<p>The problem is, such tactics (artificially) inflate the new users KPI. Retention? Actually using the product? Ha! Who cares!! No one ever asks about that.
Ugh, here we go again...<p>If you're complaining that the copy on a successful tech company is not speaking to you, then it's likely that you aren't the intended audience.
This also applies to some open source projects, like Apache Karaf ( <a href="http://karaf.apache.org/" rel="nofollow">http://karaf.apache.org/</a> ):<p><i>Upgrade to the Enterprise class platform.<p>Karaf provides dual polymorphic container and application bootstrapping paradigms to the Enterprise. Focus on your business code and application, Karaf deals with the rest</i>
Anybody remember when the Infiniti car brand launched in the US, and all of their ads were nonsensical and had no apparent relation to cars?<p>Best I can find:
<a href="http://articles.latimes.com/1989-08-26/business/fi-897_1_ad-campaign" rel="nofollow">http://articles.latimes.com/1989-08-26/business/fi-897_1_ad-...</a>
If you want to learn how to do it better, I can't recommend this book enough, "So What?" by Mark Magnacca.<p><a href="https://www.amazon.com/So-What-Communicate-Matters-Audience/dp/0137158262/" rel="nofollow">https://www.amazon.com/So-What-Communicate-Matters-Audience/...</a><p>Spend the $10 and become a better communicator.
Websites like that are "websites for the record". There are certain markets who think it's weird that a company doesn't have a website, but don't really care about the content or how it looks.<p>A lot of the text seems to be placeholder/written by a designer who asked about what the company wanted for the content and never got a response.
> Yet for a few thousand dollars a year, Meltwater will give you reporters’ emails and phone numbers<p>It's quite hard to describe their business model without using the words "verified emails"; which is closely related to spam marketing I guess. A few thousand dollars a year also sounds very expensive for those email addresses/phone numbers
Most websites don't sell anything directly. They don't need to be understandable.<p>To take the previous examples, continentals and general electrics websites have nothing to sell to you whatsoever. The website is used to publish general company information online like: financial reports, global news, official contacts and addresses, job offers.
Hrm... and checking out our brand new site:<p><a href="https://www.topicbox.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.topicbox.com/</a><p>We're pretty close, but there's nothing there saying "this is a mailing list product" as such. I'll go see what can be done about that without ruining the pretty story.
a coworker left my company to go work at pega-systems. They've been around for a while as a company but I visited their website to figure out what they do. Its a little better now, but...<p>"Pegasystems Inc. is the leader in software for customer engagement and operational excellence. Pega’s adaptive, cloud-architected software – built on its unified Pega® Platform – empowers people to rapidly deploy, and easily extend and change applications to meet strategic business needs. Over its 30-year history, Pega has delivered award-winning capabilities in CRM and BPM, powered by advanced artificial intelligence and robotic automation, to help the world’s leading brands achieve breakthrough business results."<p><a href="https://www.pega.com/about" rel="nofollow">https://www.pega.com/about</a>
Contrast that with a site like this:<p><a href="https://gotools.org" rel="nofollow">https://gotools.org</a><p>It tells you exactly what it does in one sentence, and that sentence is the only one on the page. Despite that, it's probably not as popular as the vague sites being complained about here.
My take is these companies are elusive in their descriptions because they sell data and/or harvest data. So they are worried about privacy people getting on their backs. So they try to not be direct and to get their through word of mouth or through their sales channels.
SV/tech sector narcissism and associated managerial credulity is going to provide fodder for much epic and wonderful satire. Which is admittedly minor compensation for this vast waste of human and other resources at a time when we are facing so many genuine challenges.
Another frustrating trend is landing pages without sign in links. Optimizing for the acquisition/activation funnel is fine, but at least put in this one element for existing paying customers. Tooo often I find myself googling for "<name> login"
Off-topic: since when did Medium ask readers to "sign in to get the full experience" with a giant modal? Is anyone else getting this, or are they A/B testing?<p>I hope they don't go down a route of blocking non-subscribers from reading their content like Quora.
One-liners are hard.<p>One problem is people trying to pack ALL the features and ideas into that summary. So in the pursuit of wanting everyone to get the entire vision, the "what you offer right now" is lost.<p>As a company's product offerings expand into many, this gets even harder.
This is typical of the "Enterprise" B2B sales approach, as apposed to selling to small and medium sized businesses and startups.<p>Enterprise sales has developed its own absurd language and culture that is now indistinguishable from parody.
I think that in the world of B2B, the website isn't meant to sell product; it's meant to start a conversation/look legitimate. Sounding like your competitors == legitimacy.<p>All of the real sales and marketing is done offline
My theory is that if you can possibly do it, have no "explainer page", instead just BOOM you are now using the software.<p>Or maybe have an explainer page offered to the user as a dialogue when they first go to the website.
Here is my take on what SendGrid does: Sending an email is pretty easy. Sending a metric butt ton is hard and so is hooking it into your app. So, we help you with that because screwing that up could be very bad.
Bezos was infamous for jealously controlling every pixel on the Amazon landing page. You could easily imagine a better design but at least you knew what to do.
Here's a fun one, from our very own YCombinator:<p>> The Flex group uses technology to improve the range and fluidity of human expression. We invent new concepts and representations that amplify people’s ability to create, connect, and understand. We create tools that blur the line between using and creating, in order to provide a conversational medium for thinking and doing.<p>What they really do is make graphical programming tools. That's it.<p><a href="https://harc.ycr.org/flex/" rel="nofollow">https://harc.ycr.org/flex/</a>
I think the main problem is that people assume that in order to sell expensive products/services, the website needs to have 50 pages and feel like a complex entity. We sell a B2B UI Design service to web and mobile development companies, all we have is a simple one pager that doesn't do anything except explain in plain-english what the service is about. We have people buying/subscribing to our service sometimes as fast as a B2C product. I personally wouldn't want to be a slimly salesman on the phone, hide our prices and have complex copy on the website. The customers that do want that are not a fit for us. So the question is, what type of a customer are you trying to attract?