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Tell me what your company does

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Re: Tell me what your company does

#61

Post by megous »

peacelilly wrote: post #43
cperciva wrote: post #14

I 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 web design is indeed ugly, but at least it is functional. Here are some easy to implement design suggestions: You should change the title of the first heading so it's not the same as the banner. I think "What is Tarsnap?" is a good choice. Speaking of the banner, vectorize it. Finally, please remove the bars from the asides. Your product is good, so transferring a little attention to its web presence is worth the…

Ugly is subjective. I like it. It's actually readable and easy to navigate.

On small width device the menu will be on the bottom, so there's no duplication. (website seems to be responsive)

I like that the menu is on the bottom and not hidden behind a hamburger button.

Re: Tell me what your company does

#62

Post by cerved »

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…

It's an answer that provides a possibly logical reason for the behavior but I don't buy it.

Firstly because inbound phone calls are incredibly rare. Maybe it's more common for people to pick up the phone in the states but in my three years selling B2B SaaS (enterprise and startup) I never received a hot inbound lead on the phone. It's a bit different if your market leader but most companies and products aren't so I don't think it's a valid strategy.

Secondly because if you are doing a proper inbound strategy you need to entice people with content, product demonstrations or trials (ie showing the product).

Finally, if you want to obfuscate your offering, you don't need to hide it behind a bunch of mumbo jumbo. People rarely understand exactly what your product does even if you give them full access to it for a month.

I think the reason is simpler. A mixture of incompetence - B2B companies don't have the marketing savvy of FMCGs - and the fact competitors don't do a much better job. It's harder to write a clear, concise and enticing description of what you do than just generating buzzwordy corporate bs. It looks marketingy, so the copy is going to be signed off by everyone. Besides, everyone else in the industry is throwing around the same buzzwords, so you get this bubble of nonsense speak and everyone just rolls with it.

Re: Tell me what your company does

#64

Post by nicolasehrhardt »

I blame A/B testing actually. Too many folks run experiments without choosing which metric to optimize carefully. Here, marketers probably monitor click-through rates of their main homepage buttons. And unfortunately, if you change the landing page text from a few actually descriptive sentences to the BS described in this article, you probably end up with higher click through rates on your buttons.

Re: Tell me what your company does

#65

Post by jimjimjim »

nsriv wrote: post #60
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…

"Life goes on" is rich coming from Gurbaksh Chahal, a guy that kicked his girlfriend 117 times. http://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/gurbaksh-chahals-ugly...

what a terrible human being.

Re: Tell me what your company does

#66

Post by stuartaxelowen »

jack9 wrote: post #7

The bait-sunk-cost approach = get em talking however you need to (including them asking what the hell you actually do) to tell you what they want and sell your solution as a possibility or the best approach. I hate this transparent attempt to trick (me) the customer. IBM has done this to me when I'm drilling down into technical requirements like I'm some middle manager who doesn't know the actual needs. I always susp…

Holy crap, this totally explains MongoDB's success.

Re: Tell me what your company does

#69

Post by Animats »

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 four large banners - "Making Mobility a Great Place to Live", "Let your Ideas Shape the Future", "Continental Pledges Support in Response to Hurricane Harvey", and "First 48V drive for electric bikes". The last at least mentions a product. The entire initial screen does look vague.

(Continental is one of the world's largest auto parts makers, over a century old, based in Germany, and with over 200,000 employees. They make everything from tires to self-driving car sensor integration units. Not a fly-by-night startup.)

Look at General Electric.[2] Their home page has "The Digital Industry Company - Imagination at Work", clip art of some enormous piece of machinery, and a search box. Of course, GE probably made that enormous piece of machinery. But there's no indication of what they do. For that, you have to use the "GE Businesses" drop-down menu. It may take a while to find out that GE is prepared to sell you a jet engine or a locomotive.

What seems to be happening is that startups are emulating big-company sites. Badly.

[1] https://www.continental-corporation.com/en [2] https://www.ge.com/

Re: Tell me what your company does

#70

Post by wavefunction »

nsriv wrote: post #60
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…

"Life goes on" is rich coming from Gurbaksh Chahal, a guy that kicked his girlfriend 117 times. http://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/gurbaksh-chahals-ugly...

A $500 fine for brutal assault?

I had to pay a larger fine for forgetting to pay a $40 ticket.

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