

Ask HN: How would you change our landing page? - sorenbs

We create personalised meal plans in a fashion similar to how Spotify creates personalised playlists.<p>We have tried many different landing pages including infomercial style pages with explanations, testimonials etc. and a few variations of FB&#x2F;Linkedin&#x2F;Pinterest style very terse pages simply asking people to sign up.<p>The variant that performs best for us is a preview of the actual application where prospective users can provide some information and see how that affects their meal plan in real time. When they want to open a recipe we ask them to sign up. This converts ~10% of our visitors.<p>I have never seen a landing page like this before so would love your thoughts on it or references that discuss this.<p>Landing page: https:&#x2F;&#x2F;eatbetter.io
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thenomad
Nice idea for a startup!

OK, let's see:

1) There's no clear explanation of what the site is. Your H1 or equivalent is
"Any food you don't eat?" \- my response would be "no", some confusion, and
then closing the tab. You might want to use that space to explain, in brief,
what you're doing - "We create personalised meal plans in a fashion similar to
how Spotify creates personalised playlists." is a pretty good explanation.

2) I'm not sure what I'm meant to do with the meals that are being presented.
Am I meant to cook them? Will they be delivered? Are they just examples of
things I like?

3) Clicking on one brings me immediately to a signup modal. I still don't know
what this site is or what it does, and I haven't had any chance to play with
it, and now you want my email address? At that point I'll _definitely_ click
away.

4) "Start cooking today" \- hate to harp on about this, but I _still_ don't
know what I'm getting. Are you going to teach me to cook? Send me ingredients?
Introduce me to new dishes?

Overall, it's an intriguing concept, but you're in need of a lot - a LOT -
clearer explanation. That doesn't necessarily need to translate into a lot of
copy text - even a clear header and a couple of sentences would do.

I'd also recommend showing users what they'll get from you, at least in very
previewed form, before you ask them to sign up.

Your Call To Action button at the bottom is good, btw. If I've selected
something and know what I'm getting "Get Your Meal Plan" is a solid CTA that
will probably propel me through the email signup - if I'm interested in what
you're selling.

Your loading times are a bit erratic - you might want to look at optimising
those. I saw one 1.5sec load - acceptable - but another that was over 3 sec,
which is into "people are going to give up" territory.

Hope that was helpful, and good luck with the site!

------
tixocloud
The value proposition doesn't seem particularly clear to me. First off, I'm
not sure what the website is supposed to be. It looks like just another recipe
website. (Disclaimer: I visited the page before reading any commentary)

It seems like you're trying to do something new - new as in why do I need a
personalized meal plan so you will need to educate the user on the benefits of
having one. I'd be curious to have a look at your previous landing pages.

The headline "Any food you don't eat" doesn't fully explain what the site is
about, what's the purpose of my clicking on the food images and what would I
get after all this?

This is an interesting concept and it might be very useful especially for
people with strict diets (ones who actually need a personalized meal plan) - I
would focus my marketing efforts on those guys. Or athletes. It's too early
for the general public I think. Good luck!

~~~
sorenbs
Thanks!

We are focusing on people with autoimmune disease for exactly that reason.
They are more in need of this kind of service, so probably more forgiving. Our
long term goal is to solve my own problem, which is that I hate all the
planning and decisions involved in cooking normal healthy food.

Here's a very terse page
[https://eatbetter.io/signup](https://eatbetter.io/signup) And this one is
more informational [https://about.eatbetter.io](https://about.eatbetter.io)

We will definitely try a few ways to put more educational information on the
interactive landing page.

~~~
tixocloud
It's great that you already have your target customer. In which case, I would
reach out to them and focus the marketing content on them.

Your vision of extending it to the general public is possible but again,
you'll need to educate us and help us understand why we cannot live without a
personalized meal plan. I think you have it on your blog page where you
highlight how eating better changed your health. That to me is huge! That's
the key benefit you need to sell.

Thanks for sharing the links!

~~~
sorenbs
Thank you for the feedback tixocloud. It's super valuable!

------
skaplun
On mobile (disclaimer)

not extremely clear what your value proposition is.

I would keep going down the path of interactivity, add another widget that can
appeal to a different segment. I would also consider adding a read more area
at the bottom for people who like to dig deeper before acting.

~~~
sorenbs
Thanks Skaplun. Would you add the read more content directly on the page so
users can scroll to it? I'm concerned that might distract people...

------
andersthue
I don't get it, neither what I get from you or what you are trying to sell to
me.

I don't understand why I have to sign up to get a recipe, I can get those for
free all over the internet, so why should I sign up for yours - are they so
much better?

Also the images and button styles make me think it's an old website, and since
there are no clear dividers I had to re-read the "Any food you don't eat" to
understand what pressing the buttons do (the opposite of what most food type
buttons do on recipe websites)

------
oniony
Hi there. This is not related to your question, but I thought I'd mention this
anyway.

I'm vegan and I pressed the 'pork', 'fish/seafood', 'beef', 'poultry' and
'dairy' buttons but there's still lots of seafood and chicken in the
suggestions. I would also suggest you have 'vegetarian' (maybe also
'prescetarian') and 'vegan' options that press the appropriate buttons (unless
you explicitly want to exclude/disuade these diets?)

~~~
sorenbs
Yeah, we want to support vegetarians, but right now we don't have enough
content to provide a good experience - as you noticed. It will come
eventually.

------
loumf
Maybe above the foods you don't eat -- add a similar bar with:

Why do you want to eat better? [Lose weight] | [Gain muscle] | [Lower
cholesterol]

And use that in the response.

That way you'd be letting them provide the benefit. Another thing you could do
is talk about delivering the meal plan to their inbox, so that signing up is
the obvious thing to ask.

I'd be somewhat concerned that the lack of text will harm SEO -- you have
fewer terms to find. But perhaps you are driving traffic a different way.

I did not understand the information below the picture (the body with a number
3?)

~~~
sorenbs
Thanks! That's two really good ideas. I especially like including something
about delivering meal plans via email in the messaging to make that step
easier for the user.

We try to drive seo traffic through our blog at
[http://blog.eatbetter.io](http://blog.eatbetter.io)

------
werber
The page feels sparse at full screen and crowded when it's at a quarter of the
screen. I wish that the bar with the food types stretched to the full page
width on desktop, and collapsed and stacked on a smaller screen. Also,
clicking each of the buttons doesn't really do what they're supposed to, ie.
clicking the fish button and there is a chicken recipe?

it seems like a really cool idea!

~~~
sorenbs
Thanks werber. Clearly we don't communicate the purpose of the buttons well
enough, as they are actually supposed to remove food you don't eat vs showing
recipes with that food item :-)

------
byanthonyrea
I would make sure you provide something before you have people sign up. By
this I mean either actually provide the recipes or at least a sample or tell
me a little bit more about the product.

Also - you have a typo on your signup page. "healtier" != "healthier"
([https://eatbetter.io/signup](https://eatbetter.io/signup))

------
ShaneCurran
FYI there's a typo in your site's <title /> ("psesonalised" instead of
"personalised")

~~~
sorenbs
Thanks. This is a bit embarrassing :-)

------
phantom_oracle
I'd sure love to know what "Get your meal plan" does, without needing to
signup to anything.

If the truth about "consumers attention span is only 7 seconds", then they
will click on "Get your meal plan", see a signup and probably close the site.

Also, "Eat Better - Psesonalised Meal Plans" \- probably need to fix that
typo.

~~~
sorenbs
Do you think we should move the signup ask further downstream? perhaps we
could let people use the meal plan without even asking for an email. The
problem then becomes that we use daily emails to keep users engaged, and we
see a fairly high number of users become active users only after we keep them
engaged for a week or more.

~~~
phantom_oracle
> Do you think we should move the signup ask further downstream?

Not that much further, but just until the initial session ends.

It can be like:

\- Load webpage

\- Initial discovery ("ahh this is what it does")

\- Get the first meal plan (start the email offer here, eg "would you like us
to email you this meal-plan in a nicely formatted PDF")

\- User about to leave ("hey, looks like you made your first meal plan, why
not create an account and keep on discovering new food")

It's all about AB-testing though. Don't ever take my suggestion as your final
solution. Always test to see what the percentage of on-boarding is.

If using the app and then getting signups increases from 10% to 30+%, you know
this is how to do it (or try something different if it only increases by 1 or
2%)

~~~
sorenbs
Thanks! I really think we should play around with this balance of early value
vs pressure to sign up.

