[shripadk]

Left a comment on the IndieHackers page. Keeping a copy here for those who aren't reading the comments section. I have noticed this a lot in various websites I have helped in ad campaigns. Their biggest problem is their landing page. Just like this article uses lots of jargons to explain simple concepts, their landing page reflects the same. For those of you wanting to know more about landing page optimization just watch Isaac Rudansky's excellent videos on Udemy. One of the most important rules is the 5 second test. Show your landing page to your colleagues/friends/family depending on your target audience. If they can't understand what your business proposition is in 5 seconds you have failed landing page optimization. As simple as that.

The comment I posted on the IndieHackers page:

------------------

The landing page is too complex. Like what does "Full stack adaptive delivery" even mean? I am sure 90% of your paid visitors are just bouncing because that landing page tagline is alien to them. Dumb it down. Make it simple.

Surprisingly, the description in the Indiehackers page makes so much more sense than the one you put up: "File-system-as-a-service that does uploads, storage, and media processing for Web and mobile apps, so you can ship products faster and scale them painlessly"

If you told me that the first time I would have understood your value proposition. Don't get too fancy with your taglines. People don't have time to understand what you are saying. People don't like fancy terminologies except for what is popular. There are too many jargons already. Don't complicate it further.

Instead of "Full stack adaptive delivery" just try: "File-system-as-service". Instead of "Serve ultimate UX with better images on any website. One script to rule them all." just have: "Ship products faster with better images on any website". That's it. You will get 50+% higher conversion rates with just this one change.

[TeMPOraL]

> Don't get too fancy with your taglines. People don't have time to understand what you are saying. People don't like fancy terminologies except for what is popular.

It's worse than that. And it's my pet peeve about many startup landing pages these days. It's not like people don't have time to understand - there's nothing there to understand! "Full stack adaptive delivery" is a near-meaningless phrase. It can be construed to mean just about anything. It would fit just as well on a logistics company page, or on a sticker on the side of an ICBM.

I wish people would just say what they actually do.

[EdwardDiego]

> "Full stack adaptive delivery" is a near-meaningless phrase. It can be construed to mean just about anything. It would fit just as well on a logistics company page, or on a sticker on the side of an ICBM.

I personally wonder if they used the Startup Generator in earnestness. [1]

But yeah, I'm a senior techie, and often involved in potential procurement discussions, and sweet Jesus, if you want us to give you money, give us some goddamned concrete facts. You synergise enterprise cloud offerings?Oh, you mean you have a templating language that tries to generify Terraform and CloudFormation and does both badly.

I sometimes feel like people in ticket clipping businesses like this (their CDN offering is, um, Akamai, but you can make pictures grayscale using their DSL because that's easier than using a photo editor?) are scared of saying what they actually do because then you'll realise that they don't do much for the money they're asking.

[1] http://tiffzhang.com/startup

[ryguytilidie]

I do recruiting consulting and it blows my mind how every time I ask a startup how they differentiate from other startups and what specific advantages they want me to discuss, they give me a bunch of meaningless phrases. Its like founders are being taught a different language that they think provides value but makes no fucking sense.

[TeMPOraL]

I'd love to know where they learn that.

In my university years, I used to invent such ridiculously overblown phrases for simple things I did, as a form of mockery of corporate culture and my general pastime. But at some point I did realize that these phrases are hashing functions - like the ones you use in a hash table to put objects into buckets. So for a particular thing I do, say "adding colors to terminal applications", I could invent a bunch of nonsense phrases - "enriching the user experience of advanced software", or "delivering visual artistry to professional digital media" or whatnot. It was fun going in this direction, and we'd have a good laugh - but a person seeing just the output could never arrive at my original input, "adding colors to CLI apps". It was one of infinitely many things I could hash under the same phrase, and they could never know which one I did.

So in my eyes, if you're trying to explain something to someone, then using these phrases is essentially equivalent to taking MD5 of what you wanted to say and pasting that hash.

[DenisM]

I think it's pretty much spot-on.

People try to summarize their thoughts, but if they are not good at it the summary ends up being "We're pretty cool, not like those other non-cool people, and we stand for good things". And then, having arrived at that thought, they express it using the words they have heard before in similar circumstances.

And boom - pretentious mediocracy seasoned with hollow platitudes!

[dchichkov]

They might have arrived to this state of the page with meticulous A/B testing, optimizing for some function.

[pillefitz]

Maybe the initial guess was far off, so A/B testing led them to a pretty bad local optimum?

[bob33212]

"We find null and empty values in your tables and Excel files and prompt your users to fix them" sounds like a 10 dollar idea. How are you going to get employees and investors to really jump on board with that.

"We revolutionize Enterprise Data Quality with next generation AI in the cloud" sounds better to employees, investors, and in some cases buyers

[WWLink]

So you're saying that there's a lot of con artists out there? No surprise really lol.

[TeMPOraL]

This is how extreme waste is created in this industry.

[travisjungroth]

And if there’s a collision, just move to the next one!

[shripadk]

I never thought of it this way. Really nice analogy.

[somecallitblues]

Cryptic you were.

[colechristensen]

The emperor has no clothes... there is a skill in speaking in an optimistic way using a series of intentionally vague words which smart people feel bad about not understanding so they just pretend they do and think positively about a product because for the life of them they could not articulate why the pitch/business/product didn't have any value. There's nothing to argue against because "I don't know what you're talking about" is an apparent argument against yourself.

I'm going to start a business selling a quantum leap in synergy paradigms. Begin with the tagline, move on to a landing page, and after that's nicely done, get a group of people together to brainstorm what the company actually does.

[cosmodisk]

A few weeks ago had a call from a saleswoman,after multiple failed attempts ( she called a few people in the company until finally someone transferred across) she managed to talk to me. I get a fair share of emails,calls and LinkedIn messages because of my title- everybody is trying to sell. So I thought 'screw this, let's see what she's got to say'. After her intro, and me asking a number of questions,I was still not sure what she was selling ( something in the cloud). Started with some storage solutions and ended with some security analytics. So it's not the CEOs of these companies, it's the sales reps as well. How can ever buy anything if I have no clue what it is.

[antaviana]

That reminds me a Dilbert strip:

Salesman: "We provide win-win situations and customer-focused solutions."

Dilbert: "But, what is the product or service that you actually sell?"

Salesman: "We don't sell, we partner."

[A_Parr]

The salesman exploits quantum physics by keeping what their company does in superposition until you collapse the waveform by revealing what you're willing to pay for. Instantly a developer at that company gets a bad feeling about something, but doesn't know what, until their manager walks over with a note from sales. They then retroactively do a bunch of work to have a deliverable by the next quarter.

[bob33212]

All they care about is getting you in a demo or free trial.

After that all they care about is getting you to agree that the demo looks good.

After that all they care about is getting you to agree that this product could be somehow useful in your company

Then they pounce. They ask when you are going to sign the contract because if you don't do it ASAP you will lose the discount. If you try to say that you don't want it, they start with the guilt trip. "I thought we had a deal. I have already booked my trip to come see you next week."

[antisthenes]

> The emperor has no clothes... there is a skill in speaking in an optimistic way using a series of intentionally vague words which smart people feel bad about not understanding so they just pretend they do and think positively about a product because for the life of them they could not articulate why the pitch/business/product didn't have any value. There's nothing to argue against because "I don't know what you're talking about" is an apparent argument against yourself.

Sounds like WeWork. If you've ever seen that Neumann/Kutcher interview, that's exactly how it went.

[throwaheyy]

I have a term for this phenomenon — the ‘Endo factor’. Credit to the geniuses at Theranos.

[cosmodisk]

LinkedIn is full of this shit. Depending on what people one follows or has in contacts, it's just too esy to forget there's anything else but 'thought leaders', 'thinkers in cheaf', 'harmony executors', 'power multiplier' and so on. Our office is next to a managed kitchen,one of those that cook food for restaurants on Deliveroo or Uber Eats. It's a kitchen. If you'd look at the owner's LinkedIn profile, you could probably say he's the next Elon Musk. You have a few managed kitchens, that's it.You are not a visionary,come on,man. Eventually others start copying.

[sopooneo]

I am with you on this. When I look up new companies and can't get a basic idea of their product/service even after spending minutes on their home page, it drives me batty.

But I also have a lesson from my former decades on earth: if lots of people are doing something that seems crazy to you, there is probably something you don't know. So could it be that there is some reason all these startups are so maddeningly obtuse? Other than just being bad at communication, I mean? Is there some incentive to not actually say what you do?

[baddox]

For many companies, the home page is probably simply not used for selling their product or informing new people about the company, and instead serves more as a symbol of the company's aesthetic and a way to welcome and comfort visitors.

Think of it more like the well-appointed lobby of an office headquarters. I don't think anyone would expect the lobby of an office building to explain what the company does. It's just supposed to look nice and welcoming.

This makes sense to me. You generally don't see uninformative homepages from consumer software-as-a-service or direct-to-consumer companies, for instance. Airbnb and Airtable both seem to immediately explain in fairly clear terms what they do, for example.

Even massive software companies with a huge range of products that self-serve to business customers have pretty explanatory homepages. Salesforce is a decent example.

I think the home pages that get these sorts of complaints are either companies that don't have product-market fit (and thus don't even know what they are yet), or companies that have long involved sales processes with large enterprise clients where they probably tend to negotiate highly-customized services. An example of the latter that comes to mind is Splunk, whose website uses a lot of buzz words and seems to basically be saying "trust us, if you're a big company with a lot of data, we can do anything you need regarding your data."

[ChrisInEdmonton]

I disagree on Airtable. Their homepage currently says "Part spreadsheet, part database, and entirely flexible, teams use Airtable to organize their work, their way."

I'm a software developer. I have no idea what they are selling, based on that. Is this some sort of souped up Google Sheets competitor? If so, what does it do better? Is this a team workflow management tool? If so, why bring up spreadsheets and databases? I suppose some teams may try to organise their workflow using spreadsheets, but this far into the 21st century, most people use tools like Jira or Github Issues or Monday.com or one of fifty other tools. Is this a software development tool? If so, errr, what?

I literally haven't the slightest idea, after reading their homepage, what problem this is trying to solve, what solution it is offering, and what the target market is. Am I a potential customer? I haven't the slightest idea. Can this help solve any problem I have? Maybe, but the homepage goes out of its way to refuse to answer this question.

Airtable has even targeted ads at me. It's not like I've only spent two minutes looking at their site. I still haven't the faintest clue what they do, let alone why they are better than competing alternatives.

[dakna]

> I'm a software developer.

I think that is why it is too generic for you. You already understand the underlying concepts of a spreadsheet, a database etc. Their target audience doesn't, but they know they need something _like_ that.

I think Airtable is in the no-code/low-code camp. Business people that have some technical ability and used to write Excel macros, can build a tool for their custom business process. Just like they did with MS Excel (or even MS Access) before.

And those people react to the buzzwords. "Oh, it can do a little bit of everything in one tool? And I can get it done without talking to the IT department? Book it."

I think you are too far ahead in your abilities to see the value it provides for people that rely on developer time to get anything technical done.

[baddox]

> I have no idea what they are selling, based on that.

I'm not sure why you don't have an idea of what they are selling, unless you just don't believe what their website says. "Part spreadsheet, part database" really is an accurate explanation of their product. It's basically how I would start any explanation of the Airtable product.

The rest of it ("entirely flexible, teams use Airtable to organize their work, their way") is certainly market-speak, and doesn't give much more information, but it also doesn't obfuscate anything.

[pc86]

I'm curious how often you push back on that and say "no, 'full stack adaptive delivery' doesn't really mean anything. Tell. Me. What. You Do."

[EdwardDiego]

When I've done that, people get defensive - if you're doing cool shit, you'd say so. When you're doing something simple you say something that sounds grandiose and enterprisey - we're doing "Full stack adaptive delivery" because you're worried people will realise that "you upload media to us, and can use our system to convert it if you want, and then we serve it via Akamai" will make people think that about 2/3 of your offering is rather pointless, and you could probably get the last 1/3 direct from Akamai for cheaper.

I feel bad shitting on a startup, but reading their docs I'm struggling to see what value they add beyond abstracting S3 and Akamai.

[hvs]

I'm not digging into their offering, but "making things easier" can be a great value proposition. They just need to be upfront about it.

[EdwardDiego]

It looks like you can allow admin or users to easily upload files to an S3 bucket that you don't have to manage, and then serve them via Akamai without configuring it.

I guess there's a value add there if you don't have a person on board who can configure S3 and Akamai.

[ryguytilidie]

As the person below said, a lot of these people have answers for pretty much everything. I'm the person you're responding to and it pretty much always goes like this:

"Arent there other companies working on fraud on the blockchain? How are you different?"

"Our team is amazing and is made up of myself and my founder who have 3-4 years of experience and need to fill it with 8+ year experienced engineers because before then no one is really useful here."

Me: "..."

OR

"Do we really need another machine learning solution to classify documents? What is different from you and your competitors?"

"Well, we think everyone else is doing it wrong and that we've found the perfect solution."

"What is that?"

"Myself and my cofounder are far smarter than any of our competitors".

OR

"How do you talk to candidates about salary?"

"Well, we don't give any actual numbers, but we share our compensation philosophy doc, which ive linked here".

"Right, but can you afford these people? why do you expect them to take a huge pay cut to make you a millionaire?"

"The right person will have faith"

There's always an answer that feels like it was fed to them by a VC who knows it won't really work, but is just hoping and praying.

[jccooper]

It may work in in impressing people while speaking, where you have more attention and can elaborate on what you actually do later, and maybe people get trained to do this during the fundraising process, but in the online sales cycle... "That's nice. Ctrl-W."

[megablast]

> they give me a bunch of meaningless phrases.

Because you are asking a meaningless question. Firstly, they are no experts on their competitors. Secondly, how can anyone even be, unless they have used all of them for a long time? Who can do that comparison??

[ryguytilidie]

You're mocking the idea that the founder of a company would understand their market...?

[shandor]

I have the feeling that "Full stack adaptive delivery" and its ilk are aimed at VCs or BigCorp sourcing managers instead of anyone that would actually use the product. The sad thing is that they seem to be so mutually exclusive nowadays.

[sgc]

We need an "engineer's hotkey" which would be a widely used hotkey combination which would change the css to show the no bs version of your landing page.

[ben509]

Not quite that, but if you had a shortcut to switch fonts, it could set the font to Sans Bullshit Sans[1].

[1]: http://www.sansbullshitsans.com/

[belinder]

That's definitely what it is. We are looking at it from the perspective of developers but I don't think that's the target

[mc32]

Exactly this.

So many times I have to spend ten minutes digging into what some of these companies actually do.

It’s highly frustrating. Give some examples of what you do. Explain it in simple language. Don’t rely on conceptual language because it doesn’t tell me what your offering does.

[roelschroeven]

I often resort to taking a look at the Wikipedia article about the company, if they have one, and usually that tells me in a few lines the no-nonsense version of what the company or product actually does.

[relic]

I think if companies actually said what they did, a portion of them would say things like "we use our massive collection of user data to help you _____".

[mguerville]

That's one of my favorite tool to try to get a brainstorming session back on track, to point to the fact that one of the sticky notes or items written on the white board is so vague it could be used for {insert ridiculously out of place business}

[montjoy]

I’m going to steal this whenever someone tells me they are a full stack developer from now on. Oh? So do you ship ICBMs?

[shripadk]

Exactly. I was being polite. I concur with everything you said.

[ggggtez]

I would not have guess that "full stack adaptive delivery" means cloud storage.

Maybe pay that $50k to a consultant to fix your copy.

[scottLobster]

My go-to example is Robert DeNiro's line from The Irishmen: "You like steak? I deliver steak. I could deliver you steak."

Granted there was some mob subtext to that line but the world would be a better place if people strove for that level of simplicity in their messaging.

[ksahin]

You made my day with this quote thanks!

[inkeddeveloper]

But the mob gets things done so...

[stef25]

I was wondering if perhaps they could make it easy for me to handle responsive images & formats.

"Easily implement our Bi-Directional CDN© to personalize on-demand adaptive delivery of UX-relevant content. Engage your target audiences"

Slowly backs away

[MR4D]

I don't argue with your statement, but I found the summary at the end to be quite good:

$50K of lessons learned, summarized for you Let’s recap our lessons learned:

Narrow down your extended keyword set and focus on the keyword groups you have polished content and landing pages for, especially when you have a complex product.

Use an awareness ladder to inform keyword segmentation by purchase stage but revisit it often to validate and adjust.

Do not use the same landing pages for different steps of your awareness ladder.

Do not wait for leads to become paid users to decide on the quality of paid ads campaigns: focus on quick metrics and tailor experiments to one step of your funnel at a time.

Take a test-and-learn approach with small budgets to quickly fine-tune campaigns, focusing on page quality and clickthrough rates.

Run tests to optimize page content, which will reduce your cost per click.

Once you find your winner, you’re ready to go all-in. Now’s the time to pass it off to an agency to scale things up, if you are contracting out campaign management.

[degenerate]

Linking to the UDemy course, since you mentioned it: https://www.udemy.com/course/landing-page-design-best-practi...

[pgrote]

Weird. If you go to udemy it says $9.99. If you logon to purchase, it says $199.99. lol

[lsalvatore]

It's a new student discount. Now that I've provided valuable information to this thread, I'll just go and link my Udemy course: https://www.udemy.com/course/react-data-visualization-build-...

[ses1984]

On the other hand, if I saw "file system as a service" I would also bounce immediately becuase who needs that?

I have a file system, it comes included in every/any os that matters. How does filesystem as a service help me?

[shripadk]

Yes I am not saying it is the best. But it is better than "Full stack adaptive delivery". Can it be improved? Surely. But does it need to be complicated further? Definitely not.

[xmprt]

You don't need a "filesystem as a service" but if you were one of the few people who did and you saw "full stack adaptive delivery" there's a big chance you're not going to read any further.

Let's say 50% of people actually read past the tagline. People like you might read a bit further and realize they don't need it anyway. People who do need it might not read further though and you'd lose that sale.

[TeMPOraL]

You're probably not a target audience. A "file system as a service" is a thought that would probably pop in your head if you faced the problem they're trying to solve.

[ses1984]

I think the target audience has business problems not file system problems.

File system as a service doesn't tell me what business problems can be solved with this.

[TeMPOraL]

I think the immediate target audience are still technical people. Business people dealing with business problems indeed don't think about stuff like this. But the tech people that solve business problems for business people - they absolutely do. And they're the ones that select tools and design architectures for the solution.

[ryandrake]

You know how E-mail scams are always riddled with typos and grammar mistakes? A theory is that this is a deliberate way to filter out the people too smart/cyncial to fall for the scam. "By sending an initial email that's obvious in its shortcomings, the scammers are isolating the most gullible targets. If you trash their email, that's fine. They don't want you, someone from whom there's virtually no chance of receiving any money. They want people who, faced with a ridiculous email, still don't recognize its illegitimacy." [1]

When you say your service offers a cloud-based solution for delivering orchestrated micro-services powered by AI and ML, you're not targeting technical people who know this is bullshit. You're not even after business people with a real problem to solve. You're trying to isolate out-of-their-element execs with more budget than brains, who are impressed by jargon they don't understand, and who have a KPI to "undertake synergistic partnerships with hip technical solutions providers."

1: https://www.businessinsider.com/why-nigerian-scam-emails-are...

[amayne]

I think the more likely scenario is that they’re filled with typos to avoid spam detection filters for keywords and phrases. The gullibility theory doesn’t explain the advantage of using similarly appearing letters (the number one for the lowercase L), etc., which spam uses all the time.

[ses1984]

"Filesystem as a service" can mean too many different things to technical people, that it's basically meaningless.

Even if I was squarely in the target audience, if I saw that, I wouldn't necessarily know it applied to me.

Maybe I'm wrong about that.

[TeMPOraL]

Yeah, it's still too generic to tell you exactly what happens - but it's a starting point. It either piques your interest or lets you filter out early. It's a major improvement over "full-stack adaptive delivery".

[kartickv]

This is an insightful yet very short comment, a combination I rarely see.

[ben509]

Generally it's for when you're running workstations in the clerd. E.g. AWS has EFS [1] to support Workspaces [2].

[1]: https://aws.amazon.com/efs/

[2]: https://aws.amazon.com/workspaces/

[igordebatur]

Hi there, just to clarify, the article is from 2018 and what we're looking at right now is a post re-publish with the "2019" addition. Back then, the main page looked something like that http://web.archive.org/web/20180802025742/https://uploadcare...

The "Adaptive Delivery" is the new technology we're currently testing copy for. Actually, we can also discuss the best explainers for "we analyze user context and tailor media content accordingly with our Image Transformations CDN API, serve it from Akamai." The full-stack thing is there to "show" we're leveraging the complete Uploadcare pipeline for just one line of code implementing the "adaptive behavior".

You provide your image URL It gets fetched to Uploadcare via reverse proxy Once it's there, it gets to our storage and is cached on CDN layers Then we analyze the page layout and tell the API which image version we want exactly API produces the version It gets served personalized to your every end-client session

[anonu]

Still feels like you're not taking shripadk's advice. Even complex things should be dumbed down. If a potential customer is interested they will click further.

I'm guilty of this as an engineer in a startup. Engineers thrive on the details. But users don't care too much. They just want the service.

[StavrosK]

You have inspired me to add a simpler landing page to one of my services:

https://imgz.org/?v=s

Also, should landing pages differentiate based on the query string ("?v=s" here), or be hosted on a new path?

[njsubedi]

This pricing:

    BUY THE SITE
    $999,999.98 Per Year
    1 GB
    What do you care? You own the site.
    Still no support
    BUY NOW

[mkl]

That's great! Your default landing page is pretty clear and to the point, too. I think a new path. "/simple"? "/nobullshit"? "/what"? I don't know.

[StavrosK]

Thank you! In the interest of fairness, I have added a complicated landing page as well:

https://imgz.org/?v=c

I will break them out into new paths, thanks.

[RHSeeger]

Those two pages are a brilliant summary of this entire thread. Well done.

[StavrosK]

Thanks!

[shripadk]

Perfect. Clear, concise and to the point.

Landing pages should preferably be hosted on its own path. Search engines index paths not the query string.

Also, think this way: if you have multiple features, you can have a landing page per feature explaining that one feature in depth. Then you can have your Ads target that one feature page that everyone wants. This helps when you introduce new features tomorrow. Instead of cramming everything into a single landing page (your homepage).

[StavrosK]

That makes sense, thank you. I'm also guessing they need to go into the sitemap so search engines discover them, right?

I'm not sure I've ever searched for something and got a different landing page as a result (though maybe I just didn't notice), so I didn't realize this was something people do.

[shripadk]

Yes sitemaps are great for search engines. Makes it easy for indexing.

> I'm not sure I've ever searched for something and got a different landing page as a result

That is probably because Google was shortening the destination URL. If you are running Google Ads you can set your own URL destination even though the actual landing page might be something totally different. You can check it out if you like by searching for something and focusing on the Ad. You'll typically have the landing page different from the Ad URL.

[ljf]

Great advise, but it reads as What, How and then Why.

I think flipping it around would be even more impactful. Start with Why ;)

[TeMPOraL]

I'm a techie so this may bias me, but I definitely prefer to see What and How before Why. The reason is, you as the solution provider are not in the position to tell me what problems you'll actually solve for me. You can make high-level promises, but whether your solution can realize them in context of my business and my tooling, depends on how they relate to your What and How. So either you tell me your What and How, or I have to tell you everything about my business and my problems - and since I'm on your landing page and we aren't really talking, I care and expect to see primarily your What and How.

[ljf]

I was riffing on the famous book/Ted talk - https://youtu.be/IPYeCltXpxw

I agree the what often works for me, but if you want mass appeal it appears to be the Why that hooks people.

[mlonkibjuyhv]

Please, this whole "Ship products faster with better ..." has got to stop. Just the other day I went looking for some Shopify apps. Every single one described themselves as "Increase conversion, more money, better faster etc" on the bloody search page. Not a single word about what problem they where actually solving until far under the fold on the product page. I've been at this for days, and I still don't know if my needs have a turn-key solution.

[shripadk]

I am not his ad campaign manager or landing page optimizer. I just gave a quick tip. If I were to do it I would have done it differently. The idea is not to say that this is the best way to go about it. The idea is to steer him in the direction of keeping it simple. If you have a better tagline you can suggest it.

And yes, the tagline I mentioned may not be the best but it will definitely get him more conversions compared to the one he currently has. At the end of the day conversions matter the most. No sales, no business. Doesn't matter how much analysis you do.

[rhizome]

Cheap, fast, good...pick three!

[franciscop]

As someone who is trying to learn and some day launch something like this, thank you so much for this advice!

I've been known to complicate descriptions on my OSS packages but still achieved moderate success, so I'm thinking on how to convert this knowledge into revenue and these comments are super helpful.

Question: how do you manage to both keep it simple but relevant for SEO? Isn't SEO a lot about keyword stuffing?

[shripadk]

> Question: how do you manage to both keep it simple but relevant for SEO? Isn't SEO a lot about keyword stuffing?

SEO should be as natural as possible. Keyword stuffing actually has a negative impact on your Quality Score (if you are running Google Ads) in the long run. Do not forget that Google is always optimizing its algorithms. What was possible before isn't possible now. And what is possible to do today isn't possible to do in the future. Don't start by gaming the system. Start by doing it as natural as you can. Optimizations can always be made later on (if required). From my experience I have seen that SEO works best only if it has relevant content tagged along with it.

Sometimes, you might be in a niche where you don't even need to do any optimizations. And most products/services fall under this category. Just like you do not prematurely optimize your software, there is no need to do the same anywhere else. Even marketing.

[ryanlol]

> SEO should be as natural as possible

Natural looking to googles algos, not actually as natural as possible.

There are highly effective “unnatural” SEO strategies, for example you could just generate fake bounces on your competitors pages using proxies.

> Don't start by gaming the system. Start by doing it as natural as you can.

This is good advice. You can always game the system, but you probably shouldn’t start out by doing so.

Gaming the system can be incredibly lucrative, but also very difficult. Unless it’s the primary focus of your business, you probably shouldn’t even try.

[underdown]

> There are highly effective “unnatural” SEO strategies, for example you could just generate fake bounces on your competitors pages using proxies.

That's not unnatural seo it's negative seo.

[ryanlol]

Why can’t negative SEO be unnatural?

[stef25]

Keywords rarely involve complex jargon. The search volume for "Full stack adaptive delivery" is probably 0

[EdwardDiego]

Speak for yourself! I am routinely trying to find adaptive delivery for my full stack!

[IggleSniggle]

I'm trying to find a full delivery of stack adaptives, but my search results are always so filled with this other crap that I can never find what I'm looking for.

[shripadk]

> As someone who is trying to learn and some day launch something like this, thank you so much for this advice!

Thank you. Just sharing what I learned from the masters in the field. The best of which is Isaac Rudansky. Marketing is made unnecessarily complex these days. It is not rocket science. Anyone can do it.

[TeMPOraL]

> Marketing is made unnecessarily complex these days.

I have a cynical theory for that too!

The reason marketing is made complex is because it's not just marketers pushing products to the rest of the world, but also marketers pushing marketing tools to each other. Just like a marketer may exploit my fear for health of my kids, or desire for social status, they can exploit other marketer's fear of low campaign success or a desire for being a premium brand. Etc. So the industry gets increasingly opaque and full of voodoo, because the more complexity can be built in, the more people can make money without delivering any value that could be reliably attributed to them. Everyone buys each other's bullshit, money changes hands, everyone is happy, little actual value is created.

[shripadk]

I agree with you again. I have come to the same conclusion as you have. Many of the tools that are used by marketers are absolutely pointless. I suspect it is used to beef up their presentations to prospective clients. How else would they differentiate themselves from the 100 other ad agencies that are doing the same thing? Show metrics from an obscure tool hyped up by an "industry expert" and show where the client lacks compared to competitors. The most prolific of these tools is keyword analysis tools. You just have to trust the data that is generated by these tools and then reports are created based on these approximations. No one knows for sure if the numbers are accurate or not.

[tatersolid]

So it’s sorta like npm for marketing people? They share meaningless phraseology packages arranged in a way-too-deep dependency graph?

[robot]

How does this landing page read, we provide a similar service: https://imagefix.io

[RHSeeger]

> It reduces size of PNG/JPEG images as they get uploaded.

My first thought was that someone is going to upload a 43 meg animated GIF and then complain that it's loading slow. Not a comment on your product, just past experience tells me it will happen.

[shripadk]

Perfect!

[fnord77]

Edward Tufte suggests just the opposite. He claims most people underestimate the intelligence of their audience

[shripadk]

But you aren't putting up a website to test the intelligence of your audience. You are putting up a website to sell your product/service. When you walk through a market you find vendors shouting out what they have on offer. They keep it precise: the item they are selling and the price. That is it. This is a tried and tested method of selling. One that humans have adapted to over generations. Tufte might have said that in the context of visualizations. Doesn't mean it applies to marketing as well.

[nottorp]

What's with the mobile oriented design that every startup that's trying to be cool has? Little text that doesn't say anything, check. Loads of whitespace, check. Pretty photos that don't mean anything, check. Even if your description was less technobabbleish, i'd just close the page and move on.

As someone else said in this thread, do you optimize for venture capitalists instead of customers?

[aguyfromnb]

>If they can't understand what your business proposition is in 5 seconds you have failed landing page optimization.

Are these people searching through Google for a company like yours though?

[going_to_800]

I'm really sick of all that "your keywords are too complex" or "people don't understand what you're saying", most of the times coming from people that know nothing about that niche or industry.

If those people are not your target market, don't give a shit about what they say related to the landing page content. You're not selling to them. If they don't understand the terminology used and they are not potential clients, you don't have to make a "less complex" landing page or change the wording just to make them happy.

[shripadk]

You can have your opinions but this is not how marketing or sales work. It isn't some new tech. This is age old stuff that has been going on since humans started trading. You always, always dumb it down even for your potential clients. The reason is more to do with cognition than to do with the client's knowledge. Your brain is not always focused on everything around you. It is more psychological. You are thinking in binary (or in other words: logically). The brain is more complex than that. It can sometimes fail to do the simplest of tasks but at the same time be capable of solving the most complex of problems.

The idea behind a tagline is to capture the user's attention. You can build up on the complexity as the user goes further down the page. But to start with a complicated tagline will cause your users to quit.

If someone is selling mangoes in a market and he shouts "Mangifera Indica for 5$" will people purchase from him? He is still selling Mangoes and dare I say he is more accurate (because the scientific name for Mango is Mangifera Indica). His potential customers will be those who are botanists because only they understand the scientific nomenclature. But those won't be his real customers too. What if the botanist hears the scientific name but his/her brain ignores it as the brain triggers only in certain environments (like in a lab)? What if the botanist is not interested in Mangoes even after understanding it? As you can see, your potential customers are narrowing down with every filter applied. This is exactly antithesis to "selling to as many as possible".

But if he shouts "Mangos for 5$" he attracts everyone interested in a Mango, including the botanist.

And I don't want to sound nasty but no technology is so advanced that it cannot be simplified. Also don't forget that people can smell bullshit from a mile away. That is what I have learnt from experience. We Engineers like to overcomplicate and overpromise stuff that will only come back to bite us later. Just follow the KISS principle: Keep It Simple, Stupid.