Can You Customize My Startup's Login Page?
1–10 of 55 posts
Re: Can You Customize My Startup's Login Page?
#2If the landing pages are not tidy, I'm not going to put my credit card anywhere on the site.
Re: Can You Customize My Startup's Login Page?
#3Absolutely this (with caveats).
You might argue that the idea of an MVP has shifted more towards "quality", but if you're not in a crowded market (I am, OnlineOrNot got significantly more users when I started caring about landing pages), and fixing expensive problems, you can get away with a lot.
In a previous gig I worked at a startup so early stage they had hardcoded their logins in the backend, and users could not change anything without emailing us. The problem we were solving was worth tens of thousands of dollars to the users, so they didn't care.
Re: Can You Customize My Startup's Login Page?
#4This is poor advice.
Lots of people make a quick judgement on your trustworthiness based on whether you at least have adequate design. If they turn away in 200 ms because of poor design, they will never be able to evaluate what your true value proposition is.
Many decisions in a B2B context are defensively made, so as to avoid the risk of looking stupid in the future if things don't work out. Like the old saying, nobody got fired for buying IBM. If your branding and design isn't at least adequate, again there will be no trust and a fear of being blamed in the future.
I've even had clients tell me that design really doesn't matter and they just want to see functionality right now, only to be shown something with full functionality but poor design and then walk away.
The trick is to not be a perfectionist but to spend the 20% effort that will get you to the 80% which is good enough.
Re: Can You Customize My Startup's Login Page?
#5If you spend your life filtering out for the "right kind of customer" based on some Platonic ideal you have of a correct customer you are going to throw 95% of them away
Re: Can You Customize My Startup's Login Page?
#6Yes, but also no.
I think the general sentiment (spend time on things that matter) is valid, but to some extremes it might bring more damage than value. In this specific case, either you have a disruptive product such as GPT that sells itself, or you will need to promote the s*t out of it before it has some traction (the common fallacy of "build it and they will come").
So I agree, spending a ton of time customizing a signup or landing page, a powerpoint presentation, etc might be at the same time a waste of time, and the most important thing to do - depending on the circumstances.
Re: Can You Customize My Startup's Login Page?
#7All of the examples given are about trust. Does the user trust that the product is worth their time to use, does the investor trust that the company will make them money.
There are many ways to gain trust, and you often need some of everything. A website that looks like it was built in the 90s likely won't gain sufficient user trust to even get to proving the value of the features. An investor deck that doesn't pass a minimum bar won't even get a reply, let alone a chance to defend the product.
This is not because people are "shallow" and want their login pages or decks to be pretty, it's because we pattern match to save time. I don't reply to every terrible recruiter email I get because I know from experience that it's unlikely to be of any benefit to me – I don't need to do some job interviews every time to make that reasonable conclusion.
Know your audience, know what their bar is, don't spend time going above and beyond on details that don't matter, but do spend time reaching the bars that are necessary, there are many of them.
Re: Can You Customize My Startup's Login Page?
#8Well, as usual it depends. It depends on who is your target customer and what they value. Here in Hacker News the login page is completely barebones and it's OK. In other cases that won't pass, but a login page using the stock tailwind components (or another library) will be enough.
In general, I'd say that picking a good library of components is necessary for most projects and it will take you to the proverbial 80% results with 20% effort.
Re: Can You Customize My Startup's Login Page?
#9This is poor advice. Lots of people make a quick judgement on your trustworthiness based on whether you at least have adequate design. If they turn away in 200 ms because of poor design, they will never be able to evaluate what your true value proposition is. Many decisions in a B2B context are defensively made, so as to avoid the risk of looking stupid in the future if things don't work out. Like the old saying, nob…
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 behind the polish, whereas if you give them something that doesn't look great, they'll know you're serious about giving them the latest, rawest, earliest experience of whatever it is you're innovating on.
(Of course, "early adopters" is a rather small market niche, so you might not grow very far doing just this.)
Re: Can You Customize My Startup's Login Page?
#10This is poor advice. Lots of people make a quick judgement on your trustworthiness based on whether you at least have adequate design. If they turn away in 200 ms because of poor design, they will never be able to evaluate what your true value proposition is. Many decisions in a B2B context are defensively made, so as to avoid the risk of looking stupid in the future if things don't work out. Like the old saying, nob…
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