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Launch HN: Just words (YC W24) – Optimize your product's copy for user growth

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Re: Launch HN: Just words (YC W24) – Optimize your product's copy for user growth

#21

Post by mbesto »

nehagetschoice wrote: post #15
smt88 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Neither Stripe nor Intuit are converting users from their hero copy at this point. "Financial Infrastructure for the Internet" sounds like a diversification pitch to investors than anything else to me. A good example would be a company that isn't an unavoidable juggernaut in its space and also isn't great at marketing. There are many open-source projects that would work because they don't have a big marketing team, b…

You'd be surprised how few companies actually do any systematic copy optimization - it remains ad hoc even at the big players, which is one of the reasons we started this startup. In speaking to SMBs and large companies, our insight was that the problem of copy optimization resonates more with larger companies, as smaller companies are more focused on survival/basic marketing techniques like opening up new channels.…

> Larger companies have already exhausted those levers, and are ready for more sophisticated optimizations.

Sort of. Companies copy changes at larger companies because they're addressing a different audience and different set of needs for that audience.

TL;DR - concrete language / early stage ==>> abstract language / larger enterprise

Re: Launch HN: Just words (YC W24) – Optimize your product's copy for user growth

#22

Post by altdataseller »

doctorpangloss wrote: post #20

Meta, TikTok and Google have all the data. Not even a sampling. They can exactly answer what is the most effective copy for possibly anything that anyone wants to do. No A/B test required. So why don't they offer that? I know it's not because the data is proprietary or private, because basically all the information you need is visible on Facebook Ad Library, more than enough to answer most questions about authoring c…

I think even if you have all the data, it’s not always a science too because what works for one audience will not work in another.

HN is a good example of this. Headlines that are too outrageous or catchy do not get upvoted that much here but something simple like “I created a rust debugging toolkit” will likely get upvoted like crazy, while something like “I got laid off a day after I got pregnant. Here’s what happened” probably will get buzz on TikTok.

Re: Launch HN: Just words (YC W24) – Optimize your product's copy for user growth

#23

Post by nehagetschoice »

trevoragilbert wrote: post #9

I’ve spent lots of time dealing with the pain of this in past growth roles so I’m excited to see this! How are you handling messaging consistency for specific users? Ie. A user is shown an experimental string of copy with one value prop and you want it to show up multi-channel for them. Do you have a way to associate the experiments on a per-user level?

I'm curious to learn what kind of challenges you had in your past growth roles. It would be great to understand specific examples/workflows, and how you dealt with them.

Re: Launch HN: Just words (YC W24) – Optimize your product's copy for user growth

#25

Post by apsurd »

altdataseller wrote: post #22
doctorpangloss wrote: post #20

Meta, TikTok and Google have all the data. Not even a sampling. They can exactly answer what is the most effective copy for possibly anything that anyone wants to do. No A/B test required. So why don't they offer that? I know it's not because the data is proprietary or private, because basically all the information you need is visible on Facebook Ad Library, more than enough to answer most questions about authoring c…

I think even if you have all the data, it’s not always a science too because what works for one audience will not work in another. HN is a good example of this. Headlines that are too outrageous or catchy do not get upvoted that much here but something simple like “I created a rust debugging toolkit” will likely get upvoted like crazy, while something like “I got laid off a day after I got pregnant. Here’s what happe…

The danger is it's all local optima. A/b test shows lift on "i created a rust copilot" vs "rust debugging toolkit". Ultimately.. it's one big "so what" outcome. These are distractions. A product either has market fit or it doesn't.

The big companies are especially susceptible to these distractions because they have the budget to blow chasing micro funnel optimizations. It sounds reasonable, but in my experience i agree it's a waste of resources.

It's too hard to prove causality. Entire orgs are set up to run rigid experimentation analysis, and prove incrementality so we can trust the data. But that should be warning of just how complicated it is. and we can't 100% trust it. There's external factors. hence a button color and a line of text shouldn't make the cut list of priorities. it's not that significant.

Re: Launch HN: Just words (YC W24) – Optimize your product's copy for user growth

#26

Post by lowercased »

altdataseller wrote: post #22
doctorpangloss wrote: post #20

Meta, TikTok and Google have all the data. Not even a sampling. They can exactly answer what is the most effective copy for possibly anything that anyone wants to do. No A/B test required. So why don't they offer that? I know it's not because the data is proprietary or private, because basically all the information you need is visible on Facebook Ad Library, more than enough to answer most questions about authoring c…

I think even if you have all the data, it’s not always a science too because what works for one audience will not work in another. HN is a good example of this. Headlines that are too outrageous or catchy do not get upvoted that much here but something simple like “I created a rust debugging toolkit” will likely get upvoted like crazy, while something like “I got laid off a day after I got pregnant. Here’s what happe…

> I think even if you have all the data, it’s not always a science too because what works for one audience will not work in another.

Wouldn't 'all the data' by definition have the data for various audiences at least calculable?

Re: Launch HN: Just words (YC W24) – Optimize your product's copy for user growth

#28

Post by nehagetschoice »

doctorpangloss wrote: post #20

Meta, TikTok and Google have all the data. Not even a sampling. They can exactly answer what is the most effective copy for possibly anything that anyone wants to do. No A/B test required. So why don't they offer that? I know it's not because the data is proprietary or private, because basically all the information you need is visible on Facebook Ad Library, more than enough to answer most questions about authoring c…

Appreciate the candid comments and opinions here. I'll break it down and go over them - 1. Having access to data is not the problem we're after (most companies have the first-party data in-house). The key challenges are around having a platform that fundamentally separates strings (copies) from code, and lets you update them effortlessly, based on inferences from that data. So, I am not sure I understand why this is a Google/Meta product? 2. UX is not the value add from this product - agree with you on it (even if it appeared to be the emphasis). The ability to make scientific edits without re-deployments and accelerating continuous iterations based on user feedback, is what we are going after. 3. Curious why you think A/B test results are fictional? Getting stat sig results is probably the surest way to conclude results. Perhaps there's a different angle you are talking about here? 4. RE: don't A/B test at all. Given the number of users that get exposed to every change a consumer company as large as Twitter makes, not testing can be disastrous, which brings up another great point - Large companies are struggling to use all the (generic) gen AI content today, because it needs to be performance tested before it can be placed in front of millions of users, and that's not scalable today. 5. You may be alluding to another good point - copy is as much as art, as it is science, and writing it well takes context, quality, and expertise. That's something we hold a strong opinion on, and we don't see this or any other tool eliminating that expertise. The goal is very much to streamline and augment those workflows.

Re: Launch HN: Just words (YC W24) – Optimize your product's copy for user growth

#29

Post by altdataseller »

apsurd wrote: post #25
altdataseller wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think even if you have all the data, it’s not always a science too because what works for one audience will not work in another. HN is a good example of this. Headlines that are too outrageous or catchy do not get upvoted that much here but something simple like “I created a rust debugging toolkit” will likely get upvoted like crazy, while something like “I got laid off a day after I got pregnant. Here’s what happe…

The danger is it's all local optima. A/b test shows lift on "i created a rust copilot" vs "rust debugging toolkit". Ultimately.. it's one big "so what" outcome. These are distractions. A product either has market fit or it doesn't. The big companies are especially susceptible to these distractions because they have the budget to blow chasing micro funnel optimizations. It sounds reasonable, but in my experience i agr…

Yes but just because you have product market fit doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try to optimize copy so that it reaches as big an audience as possible

Re: Launch HN: Just words (YC W24) – Optimize your product's copy for user growth

#30

Post by apsurd »

altdataseller wrote: post #29
apsurd wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The danger is it's all local optima. A/b test shows lift on "i created a rust copilot" vs "rust debugging toolkit". Ultimately.. it's one big "so what" outcome. These are distractions. A product either has market fit or it doesn't. The big companies are especially susceptible to these distractions because they have the budget to blow chasing micro funnel optimizations. It sounds reasonable, but in my experience i agr…

Yes but just because you have product market fit doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try to optimize copy so that it reaches as big an audience as possible

More companies think they have PMF than really do. So the risk is they get funding, without fit, and can afford to set up data science orgs to prove out experiments and use non trivial resources running copy tests.

if justwords can make this trivial then at least it's minimizing the distraction. that's a win, and fwiw i think b2b wants this product, so the company can do well. i just don't think micro content optimization, after doing it for unicorn for 8 years, really moves the needle like people believe the data shows. People use PMF products in spite of their UX! (for example)

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