[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.