[enumjorge]

Thanks for sharing. I get that as a business #2 and #3 provide marketing opportunities, but as a consumer this is part of the reason why the usefulness of search is slowly eroding. If I’m looking for something like “why[brand]” most of the time I want an independent review/opinion and not some sales copy by [brand] that has been SEO’d all the way to the top of the results.

[jonathanlydall]

Your concerns about "gaming" search results are very fair and valid. However, I feel that provided that sleazy SEO aren't being used, I don't think it's intrinsically bad.

I work for a small SaaS startup (still very early days) and this suggestion could solve one of the problems we have when it comes to marketing our product which very few people have heard of.

For us it's a little harder to get people to understand our product because there are no other well known products that are directly comparable to ours. However, there are well known products that are in the same problem space as ours.

The well known competing products tend to primarily focus on appealling to company "execs", but not so much the actual end users of them. The actual end users need to commit themselves and their skillsets into that particular proprietary technology, which smart ones may realize is not great for their long term career if they're planning on being able to move around the industry.

So our product is similar to these well known products in that it solves some of the same problems, but we differ greatly in that ours is geared towards end users who don't want any kind of platform lock-in.

After reading this website, I'm planning on making a page to compare ourselves to these particular "competing" products, but giving us the opportunity to show why even if you dislike those other products, you'll like ours because of its differences. This will also help people better understand the problem we're solving.

[franciscassel]

Fantastic, I'm glad to hear the insights in the piece were helpful to you, Jonathan.

[franciscassel]

Fair point! But as a business, it'd be negligent not to make your 'why' case, given that your consumers are looking for it.

Hopefully the business does it in a way that's transparent and forthright. I'm a big fan of making it really clear that a solution isn't going to be a perfect fit for everyone. No point in wasting anyone's time.

[dhimes]

It was a really excellent post. Thank you!

[Fission]

This is why we started Satchel (https://satchel.com/). It's like The Wirecutter or Consumer Reports for SaaS.

The goal is to provide an independent opinion and overview of different SaaS categories, as well as recommendations of the tools we think are best. The main downside is that writing high-quality opinions are difficult and time-consuming, but we've got some ideas on how to sidestep a lot of those challenges.

[NumberWangMan]

Nice, this looks really useful! By the way, the table of contents for your articles is cut off on the left, for me.

[graeme]

I’ve actually found this useful more often than not. To do it well you have to point to genuine differences and not just say “Product X sucks and we’re awesome!”

The ones that seem least useful are the aggregator sites making comparisons written by robots. But I’ve gotten genuine insight from competitor profiles.

[wastedhours]

I agree somewhat, but I also do appreciate reading why the company themselves think I should care. Often times it's the best way to get to the meat and potatoes of what their actual unique selling point is - you can get that from third parties, but it's also useful to get it from the company themselves.