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This is terrible advice. The author is essentially discounting the value of aesthetic, which is nonsense, and then suggesting that if you do value aesthetic you automatically have a bad product or a bad investor, again utter rubbish. I argue it’s the other way, discounting aesthetic in this way to me says you are either lazy (and therefore I should be concerned about credibility and other gaps) or you are a contraria…
i can't tell you the last time i went to a corporate site that had a shitty landing page and a wonderful to use product. this advice was sound 10 years ago, not now IMO.
I was involved with a startup that ultimately failed because of the dot com bubble, but one major observation was that everyone who used our product was fantastically enthusiastic about it, but persuading them that they needed it in the first place was really difficult. Making the login page look pretty helps with that.
If time is an issue then you find a way to polish without spending much time. What does the login page need except for a logo, a form and a few links? Remove the bloat and keeping things polished becomes easier than fixing it after the fact. Less is more.
Not sure that I can find common ground with this statement.
Branding is something that tends to be poorly understood (or supported) by "doers," (usually the tech people that are implementing the product).
The thing is, no one really appreciates a brand, unless it is successful.
I worked for a company that was (possibly still is) one of the premier brands in the world.
They had no cohesive branding strategy for about 75 of their 100 years, and ended up "retrofitting" a cohesive branding strategy, in the 1990s (my boss, who eventually became the Chairman, was behind that).
It was quite painful. It ended up working out, but there was a lot of agita.
I think we shouldn't "bikeshed" branding, but we'd be well advised to keep it in mind, from Day One.
> you don't have a product worth investing in
> your message isn't worth being executed on
Obviously, none of these are hurdles to playing the startup game. Appearances matter, regardless of whether you believe they should matter.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Your conclusion is hard to argue against, but I'd like to pitch in that some customers explicitly want something that's not well designed. In particular, those customers that think adopting an early-stage prototype will give them a competitive advantage, they expect something that's not well designed. If they get something shiny when they've asked for a prototype, they'll be worried you're trying to hide a turd behin…
Super interesting, I think this level of 3D client interaction is above my pay grade
And then sometimes bad design is just great on its own merits. By way of example: https://x.com/NCTreasurer/status/1577673238536245248?s=20
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27581391
Do you have that bookmarked, or just really good at searching?
If it were something like a web page which I found worthwhile it'd be saved as a MHTML, categorized and with notes in the filename for quick searching via Everything. I don't use bookmarks for anything except regularly accessed pages.
20 years ago there was an article[1] that argued anything worth sharing was worth saving, on the benefit of keeping a copy of content locally vs linking/bookmarking (which is prone to link rot). Ironically that site itself no longer exists.
> If you want your links to be worth anything in two, three, or five years, download all the pages you're linking to to your hard disk.
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20030207224216/http://www.j-brad...