Tell me what your company does • Hacker News Board

Re: Tell me what your company does

#91

Post by trengrj » Mon, Sep 04, 2017, 10:41 PM UTC

closeparen wrote: post #37

rsp1984 wrote: post #36

So much this. Another perfect example: https://databricks.com They just raised a $140m round of financing so apparently they have some good stuff going on. If you look at the website though: The Unified Analytics Platform. Accelerate innovation by unifying data science, engineering, and business. Sorry, what? Click on "learn more about the platform": DATABRICKS IS A TRULY UNIFIED APPROACH TO DATA ANALYTICS AT SCALE.…

(It's a Hadoop distribution).

Not a Hadoop distribution as Databricks uses S3 and DBIO for storage not HDFS. It doesn't even use Yarn so it can't really be called Hadoop at all.

Basically the product is Spark Notebooks (think Juypter) on AWS that allow you to quickly create clusters and even do fancy stuff with spark streaming.

A key thing that people miss also is the the creator of Spark is the CTO of Databricks and Databricks to some extent controls the direction of Spark. This probably impacts its valuation.

Re: Tell me what your company does

#92

Post by mbesto » Mon, Sep 04, 2017, 10:51 PM UTC

Ugh, here we go again...

If you're complaining that the copy on a successful tech company is not speaking to you, then it's likely that you aren't the intended audience.

Re: Tell me what your company does

#93

Post by scrollaway » Mon, Sep 04, 2017, 10:53 PM UTC

a_d wrote: post #90

There are possibly a few things happening that explain this: 1. Fear of not communicating "everything" that you do. The fear is of being perceived as a very narrow solution when it does a lot more. 2. Advice that says "communicate the benefits" not "what you do". This advice could manifest itself in the wrong kind of (flowery) language. So instead of saying "export payroll reports for QuickBooks automatically" websit…

I suspect at least part of it is sites being sold to companies by contractors who use the same tricks as mediums: be generic, make vague statements that apply to anyone.

Contractors are the least well positioned people to know how to describe what a company does. So when the company calls them and asks them for a rockstar ninja site, they get generic stuff and execs go "oh yeah, that's such a perfect description of what we do" with no regard for those that might not already know.

Re: Tell me what your company does

#94

Post by glandium » Mon, Sep 04, 2017, 10:56 PM UTC

Kind of related: Many sites have a footer with links like "About us", etc. which would seem like what people may want to check out right? Well, some of them also have infinite scroll, and the footer is not visible without scrolling, so you scroll down, see the footer for a brief moment, until more content is loaded and pushes the footer out of the view . Rince. Repeat. It's as if they don't want you to ever use that footer.

Re: Tell me what your company does

#95

Post by StavrosK » Mon, Sep 04, 2017, 11:08 PM UTC

Retr0spectrum wrote: post #38

I came across this recently: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l644fAxGzlw Don't waste your time watching it. It's a promo video for yet another a very scammy looking ICO. I watched through the entire 3 minute video, only because I found it increasingly amusing how long they were taking to "get to the point". As it turns out, this video is 3 minutes of stock videos of Dubai with a pseudo-inspirational voiceover about n…

"Live in such a way, that if someone spoke badly of you, no one would even believe it".

What I can't believe is who the hell would watch this video and think anything other than "run away".

Re: Tell me what your company does

#96

Post by yalogin » Mon, Sep 04, 2017, 11:08 PM UTC

My take is these companies are elusive in their descriptions because they sell data and/or harvest data. So they are worried about privacy people getting on their backs. So they try to not be direct and to get their through word of mouth or through their sales channels.

Re: Tell me what your company does

#97

Post by tlb » Mon, Sep 04, 2017, 11:11 PM UTC

nickstefan12 wrote: post #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 p…

Also, the more expensive your product, the higher up the ladder you have to sell because corporate budgets work that way. While people who will be using the product want to know what the product does, senior managers with budget approval want to know something more abstract, like will it improve their ROI by accelerating synergies or leverage their human capital to drive innovation. It can be more important to optimize the website for the people approving the budget.

Re: Tell me what your company does

#98

Post by bluetwo » Mon, Sep 04, 2017, 11:27 PM UTC

If you want to learn how to do it better, I can't recommend this book enough, "So What?" by Mark Magnacca.

https://www.amazon.com/So-What-Communicate-Matters-Audience/...

Spend the $10 and become a better communicator.

Re: Tell me what your company does

#99

Post by mrisoli » Mon, Sep 04, 2017, 11:29 PM UTC

Animats wrote: post #69

The amusing thing is when a web site for a company that does real stuff ends up looking like one of those. I mentioned Continental in a self-driving car discussion. Here's their web site.[1] Someone commented that it looked like a fake company. The rearing-horse logo, "The future in motion" as a slogan, and the vague name looked suspicious. The pictures look like clip art. The top of the home page rotates through fou…

When companies get this big they usually can't just say what they do on their website with two sentences, so IMO, this is the case where these artsy vague landing pages are passable.

I mean, GE was formed by Thomas Edison himself, they have everything from jet engines to self-driving cars. I suppose if you are the person responsible for shopping around for jet engines for your company you are not going to ge.com for specs.

Considering their size, I'd expect them to try to lure individuals(career and jobs) through their website instead of potential customers.

Re: Tell me what your company does

#100

Post by yeukhon » Mon, Sep 04, 2017, 11:33 PM UTC

tlb wrote: post #97

nickstefan12 wrote: post #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 p…

Also, the more expensive your product, the higher up the ladder you have to sell because corporate budgets work that way. While people who will be using the product want to know what the product does, senior managers with budget approval want to know something more abstract, like will it improve their ROI by accelerating synergies or leverage their human capital to drive innovation. It can be more important to optimi…

I will second the website optimization for all audiences in general. When I come across a vendor website and I find I am spammed by "read our whitepapers" popups or stop-right-there page, I usually judt quit, unless I find the product interesting. I also prefer if vendor doesn't ask for an email address before letting me download. I get it is needed for marketing, but if I really do like your product, I will follow up.

Finally, usually sales end up with either director of engineering/whatever or VP/SVP, so do a really good presentstion...