[[pro tip- a lot of startup companies actually do not do anything]]
Tell me what your company does
11–20 of 195 posts
Re: Tell me what your company does
#12> the more expensive the service a B2B company provides, the more incomprehensible its website
> I think the big companies do it to get you on the phone — so they can upsell.
I was thinking these things, and then BOOM, he says what I'm thinking haha.
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.
Re: Tell me what your company does
#13Marketing is hard. Writing compelling advertising copy is hard. Figuring out what people want and need to know about your product is hard.
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.
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.
Re: Tell me what your company does
#14I 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 very easy to figure out what Tarsnap is.
Re: Tell me what your company does
#15I'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?
Probably when actual "departments" become a thing (e.g. sales, marketing and engineering as separate tribes with separate incentives)
Re: Tell me what your company does
#16I'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 don't know, but there are phrases on my company's website that literally don't mean anything to me, and I work on the product it's supposed to be referencing. We have about 100 employees.
Re: Tell me what your company does
#17I 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 very easy to figure out what Tarsnap is.
The Tarsnap logo alone tells you more about what the product is than many entire websites I've seen.
Re: Tell me what your company does
#18marketing is a god damned religion
Re: Tell me what your company does
#19I'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?
It's probably the point where what you're selling is so amorphous, customizable, and expensive that it's different for each customer and you want to be able to say "Yes, we solve that problem" to everything. Maybe 7 figures per sale?
Re: Tell me what your company does
#20I thought Meltwater's flagship product was media monitoring, which their slogan kind of captures:
> Welcome to Outside Insight
> Billions of online conversations, freshly filtered.
The title of their landing page is even more to the point:
> Media Intelligence, Media Monitoring, and Social Monitoring
I thought Optimizely was an A/B testing tool, which makes their punchline OK:
> 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.
I suppose this only adds to his argument though, it's hard to tell what companies do.