[pferde]

This describes also my "journey" within the homepage, to the letter.

I see this often on similar small product homepages. Many of them describe the product for someone already familiar with it, and could do with taking a step back and trying to describe it for someone who, figuratively speaking, accidentally stumbled onto it and has no idea what's going on.

[Radim]

Have you considered that in some cases (though probably not Calendso's), that may be on purpose?

The VC crowd would have you believe that every product must disrupt the whole world – for the casual visitor, their gradma and their dog.

But niche products have to ward off tyre-kickers and what-if time-wasters, as much as entice their target audience. Using industry-specific jargon kills both flies at once.

If you "don't get it", you may not be the target audience.

[jjeaff]

This is our strategy exactly. We get a lot of outsiders or investors critiquing that we have industry jargon on our landing page that only insiders understand. That is 100% by design.

Not only does it signal to insiders that we know what we are talking about and that our software was built with them in mind, but it also scares away people that it is not built for. Which helps us avoid answering countless inquiries as to whether this software can work for this or that.

[ivan_gammel]

Exactly. Home page belongs to the marketing team, not to engineering, and those wizards of target audiences quite often find counter-intuitive ways to reach their goals. If message „we are like X, but better“ gets visits and reaches the expected conversion rates, then who we are to challenge that work?

[pferde]

Thanks, I haven't considered this angle. Although I loathe the fact that it works like this - deliberately lowering information value of a page giving you an advantage. It feels scummy.

But hey, if it brings more money, it's justified, right? :/

[fragmede]

I'm am curious how it feels scummy, especially in the information age with the world's knowledge available at your fingertips. Seriously, it's 4 clicks, to select the word Calendly, right click, and search Google.

Not to make it personly, but eg, you spent zero space in your comment defining the meaning of the word "scummy". Adding a definition of the word scummy would, from an abstract angle, raise the information content of your comment. It doesn't seem scummy (at least to me) that you assumed all readers would know what that word means, even considering that readers here may not have English as their first language, and thus might NOT know what the word means. At some level, we just accept that people know things, sometimes unevenly, and it's not at all 'scummy' to withhold 'known' information.

The other thing here is that there's a difference between information amount, and information value - and there's an unappreciated value in NOT having something. The principle of "less is more" holds here. Calendly or this clone doesn't explain everything. It doesn't talk about what a Computer is, or what the Internet is or the history of APIs.

[divan]

Came here to write the same.