
Tell me what your company does - HappyKasper
https://medium.com/@kasperkubica/for-the-love-of-god-please-tell-me-what-your-company-does-c2f0b835ab92
======
nickstefan12
> 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 pants vs regular pants isn't worth high touch sales.
However, in B2B, selling "really really expensive enterprise plan" vs "regular
enterprise plan" is definitely worth high touch sales. They want to do
everything they can to get you "interested, but confused" and pick up the
phone.

~~~
cerved
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.

~~~
adambyrtek
B2B startups don't rely on inbound phone calls, they want you to leave your
email, phone number, and company size in order to "receive a case study",
"book a product demo", or "subscribe to a newsletter", and that's when the
real sales process starts.

They put a lot of money and effort into sales and marketing, and you
underestimate them by thinking that it's a sign of incompetence.

~~~
cerved
Bro, read my comment.

We're talking about why a lot of B2B tech companies have a lot buzzwordy
nonsense instead of descriptions of what they can do for their customers (this
is not unique to tech companies, I would say this goes for most B2B) and the
theory put forward was that it's to get people to pickup the phone so they can
understand what the fuck the product does. This is what I debunked.

I literally worked as a salesrep at a fairly big B2B marketing startup and one
of the largest enterprise software companies.

What you refer to is content marketing to generate inbound leads. Those leads
would then be put on a mailing list and and an outbound process would start.
Except the "book a demo" (inbound lead) which I never recall leading to a good
deal.

If you are a small stage startup with a small sales team you can probably get
by on inbound but you have to go outbound to saturate the market. Even then,
having poor description is going to hurt your Google fu so I don't buy the
strategy.

If your the market leader, like salesforce in crm, you're going to see a lot
of inbound but that's because people know your product and you're gartner
quadrant status. Even then you'd still do maybe 50/50 inbound outbound.

In either case, the "it's shit because it works" argument still doesn't really
hold up.

They put a lot of money into sales, they put a lot of money into going to
conferences. They do not, however, seem to put really any money into a decent
copywriter.

~~~
adambyrtek
All very good points. I was just saying that in my opinion they might be
intentionally abstract to make you feel like they can solve all your problems,
and vague enough to convince you to leave your contact details to find out
more, but the ultimate goal is to get you into the funnel. I think we agree on
most points, I just think it's not necessarily a sign of incompetence.

~~~
cerved
That might be the case but vagueness doesn't sell.

I'm not saying the message should be an engineering manual of the ins and outs
the product but it should be clear, concise and entice customers to give the
product further attention.

Consider seo description field of HubSpot

>HubSpot is an inbound marketing and sales platform that helps companies
attract visitors, convert leads, and close customers.

Vs. Optimizely

> Be brave, experiment everywhere, and transform your customer experience with
> Optimizely.

Seriously WTF

------
Retr0spectrum
I came across this recently:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l644fAxGzlw](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 nothing in particular, followed by their logo
being shown for a mere 10 seconds at the end.

I couldn't believe that this wasn't a parody (at least, I don't think it is),
it's exactly like something out of HBO's Silicon Valley show.

~~~
kaffeemitsahne
"The First A.I. Big Data Marketing Cloud for BlockChain"

This is pure comedy.

~~~
rdiddly
OK granted it has AI, big data, cloud and blockchain, but is it social? That's
what I wanna know. Never forget social, because that's what leads to viral.
Also engine. We need an engine. If it was a viral AI bigdata social marketing
cloud engine for blockchain, then you'd have something.

~~~
redler
Call one of our solutioneers or successsmiths to arrange a Webex demo.

------
rsp1984
So much this. Another perfect example:
[https://databricks.com](https://databricks.com)

They just raised a $140m round of financing so apparently they have some good
stuff going on. If you look at the website though:

 _The Unified Analytics Platform. Accelerate innovation by unifying data
science, engineering, and business._

Sorry, what? Click on "learn more about the platform":

 _DATABRICKS IS A TRULY UNIFIED APPROACH TO DATA ANALYTICS AT SCALE. Founded
by the team who created Apache Spark, Databricks provides a Unified Analytics
Platform that accelerates innovation by unifying data science, engineering,
and business._

I still have no clue what exactly TF the product is but I sure got my weekly
dose of BS buzzwords.

~~~
avip
This is hilarious! I'm a paying customer of databricks, a useful service that
can, and should, be described in a single medium length sentence.

~~~
Illniyar
How will you describe it?

~~~
Consultant32452
Databricks provides a Unified Analytics Platform that accelerates innovation
by unifying data science, engineering, and business.

~~~
Terr_
... username checks out.

------
jack9
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 suspected that IBMs bread
and butter is to move the sunk cost of contact into an actual sunk cost of
technical debt, but I have firsthand experience now. The sign of a bad culture
and lazy marketing.

~~~
stuartaxelowen
Holy crap, this totally explains MongoDB's success.

------
continuations
My startup is focused on customer-oriented experiential personalized
relationship-building solutions by leveraging distributed smart reactive coin
offerings powered by unsupervised blockchain adversarial deep learning
supported by containerized self-driving car clouds.

Investors plz line up, take a number, and contact me thru PM.

~~~
christophilus
So, I'm confused. Is it the Uber of Facebooks, or the Facebook of Ubers?

~~~
continuations
It's the Uber of Initial Facebook Offering. I thought that was painfully
clear.

------
a_d
There are possibly a few things happening that explain this:

1\. Fear of not communicating "everything" that you do. The fear is of being
perceived as a very narrow solution when it does a lot more.

2\. Advice that says "communicate the benefits" not "what you do". This advice
could manifest itself in the wrong kind of (flowery) language. So instead of
saying "export payroll reports for QuickBooks automatically" websites say
"free up for time" [made up example]

3\. Internal decision-making by committee.

4\. Copying some website that you like - instead of thinking and reasoning
from ground-up about 'what is it that I _really_ want to say'.

5\. Pretending to be a big/legit company when you are small

6\. Big company with so many features that it would rather just show you the
entire sales deck - the website is just _there_ because it needs to be, but
plays a tiny role in conversions. [why focus on something that doesn't add
value - in this case, the website e.g. SAP.com]

This is a good article. Everyone who is running an online would benefit from
thinking hard about this.

~~~
scrollaway
I suspect at least part of it is sites being sold to companies by contractors
who use the same tricks as mediums: be generic, make vague statements that
apply to anyone.

Contractors are the least well positioned people to know how to describe what
a company does. So when the company calls them and asks them for a rockstar
ninja site, they get generic stuff and execs go "oh yeah, that's such a
perfect description of what we do" with no regard for those that might not
already know.

------
dyim
Just to play devil's advocate:

Whenever I'm seriously considering purchasing an enterprise B2B product, I
mostly know what they do before visiting their website. I've heard of them
already, either through word of mouth, or by explicitly asking friends for
recommendations. I suspect that I'm not too different from most purchasers.

If a company's targeting a landing page for someone like me, perhaps they
shouldn't optimize for clarity; they should optimize for signaling
reliability. So, the "Web 20.17 parallax-ed boots[t]rap-ed responsive home
page" serves a purpose - it reminds me of all the other Web 20.17... B2B
services I've happily used in the past.

I'm probably ascribing way too much significance to the semiotics of B2B
homepages [1]. But I find it tough to believe that (e.g.) Optimizely hasn't,
well, optimized their homepage for _something_.

[1] Also, take what I say with a huge grain of salt. My business' homepage
needs a lot of work...

~~~
nicodjimenez
Agreed. Probably for some B2B companies, getting people talking about your
product and then having a vague but fancy landing page makes sense. Landing
pages need to be optimized to create sequences of actions that lead to "buy"
decisions. So maybe: 1) Developer at company X hears good things about Y from
Hackernews 2) Cost of product for X is high enough that it needs to be
approved by senior people at the company 3) These senior decision makers may
not be engineers, and they may just look at the landing page as a marker of
how well capitalized the company is / if they give the impression that if
customization is required, company Y will be willing to step outside the
bounds of "shrink wrapped software" to accommodate company X's needs.

------
rdtsc
Maybe this is the equivalent of the scammers claiming they are from Nigeria
even if they are not. That's how scammers filter out automatically all those
who are smart enough to see through the bullshit and only get the suckers to
respond. These companies filter out those who see through the bullshit and
only get the suckers, too?

Startup marketing is not necessarily geared for customers (end-users). They
are just as much geared towards VCs who are courted and who are expected to
bankroll the company. Some non-negligible number of startup founders jumped on
the bandwagon with the goal not necessarily make a product, get customers, but
really just to be CEOs and play "startup". That can be done by fooling a few
angels. Depending on who these prospective VCs are the message and marketing
can be adjusted to appeal to them. Just because someone has a lot of money
doesn't mean they can't be fooled or taken advantage of. They probably hear
and see all this startup activity, unicorns left and right so they are eager
to play the game. And so they are matched up with just as eager "founders" who
also want to play the startup game.

The last paragraph was from experience. The person fooled some older wealthy
guys to invest in their silly idea. They burnt though millions in a few years
renting an office in SV, hiring lots of workers, going to conferences,
rewriting their thing with the latest frameworks. And yes eventually it all
failed, because they had 0 paying customers. But it also didn't fail, because
now they speak at conferences and put ex-SV CEO and founder on their title and
so on.

The idea is, if you just dig a bit deeper, it is easy to see things a bit more
clear.

------
orblivion
I can understand avoiding clickbait, but it seems that HN has a policy of
making sure titles are sufficiently boring. Originally this post's title
matched the blog post's title:

> For the love of God, please tell me what your company does

Adds some flair. Expresses the sentiment of the article. Now it simply says:

> Tell me what your company does

On the other hand, HN is an impressively effective, open minded atmosphere for
discussion. The bit of pruning that is done must be working. I wonder if this
policy somehow leads to success overall.

~~~
jv22222
I've been wondering the same thing. It does, sometimes, seem to come across a
bit like the thought police...

~~~
orblivion
I've seen people earnestly discuss climate skepticism here, which is a pretty
taboo opinion to have these days, at least (let's say) in tech circles. So I
don't think it's thought police. More like fun police.

------
mhewett
I've been trying for several years to determine the company size at which we
will be forced to turn our understandable site into marketing buzzwords and
incomprehensible sentences. 50 people? $5 million/year in revenue? What is the
turning point and who drops by to force us into incomprehensibility?

~~~
pmiller2
I don't know, but there are phrases on my company's website that literally
don't mean anything to me, and I work on the product it's supposed to be
referencing. We have about 100 employees.

------
cperciva
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.

~~~
peacelilly
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 effort.

~~~
megous
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.

~~~
cperciva
Not just on small width devices! The navigation menu is at the bottom if you
look at the website in lynx, too (with a link to it at the top).

------
csense
Anytime I go onto a company's website and I either can't figure out what they
do, or pricing information isn't available, I think "Right, their business
model is to overcharge folks who have more money than sense" and I promptly
leave.

~~~
cagenut
I felt that way in my 20's too. I have since grown up and made a lot of money
realizing I was wrong, but I still _feel_ that way.

~~~
Xcelerate
So... why is he wrong?

~~~
mrhappyunhappy
There are a number of reasons some websites do not list prices:

1\. Pricing sets the wrong expectation for the true price you may actually pay
once you get all the features you need and may not be aware of thus making the
sale more difficult.

2\. Pricing sets a transactional tone vs a mutually beneficial relationship

3\. Pricing anchors your mind set to how much something costs vs how much
value / ROI you get out of that product or service.

All of these do disservice to seeker and provider.

~~~
Aloha
Yes - perhaps - but If I'm a small business looking for a thing that does X -
I want to know if this is in the ballpark for me - or perhaps this is targeted
at someone bigger. Price is a helpful way to determine that - because god
knows, you can't figure that out from the marketing gobbledygook on the
website anymore. The ROI doesn't matter if you can't afford the investment in
the first place.

~~~
mrhappyunhappy
Then those websites are not targeting you and could care less what your needs
are.

------
sgustard
My company squeezes juice out of bags. That was easy to explain, but didn't
seem to help. Pretty sure we should have gone with "scalable antioxidant
delivery systems."

~~~
samstave
Socially connected Intelligent nutrient extraction at you fingertips

------
glandium
Kind of related: Many sites have a footer with links like "About us", etc.
which would seem like what people may want to check out right? Well, some of
them also have infinite scroll, and the footer is not visible without
scrolling, so you scroll down, see the footer for a brief moment, until more
content is loaded and pushes the footer out of the view . Rince. Repeat. It's
as if they don't want you to ever use that footer.

------
nathan_f77
This inspired me to redo the landing page for my side project:
[https://formapi.io/](https://formapi.io/)

Would appreciate some feedback. Is the purpose clear enough? I know it won't
make sense unless you're a developer, but it's a tool for developers.

It's just a rough draft, so it probably won't be that sparse when I launch. I
need to add a proper pricing page, and a tab bar at the top. I'm also planning
to add a demo API request that you can run, similar to mailgun.com.

~~~
pdimitar
I would use a bigger font, and probably another font face as well -- maybe
Avenir (although it's paid). I'd also make the 3 bullet points bigger since
they are the only textual representation of how to use your product.

Outside of that the website is pretty good and serves its purpose!

~~~
nathan_f77
Thanks for the feedback! I love Avenir, and was using it until I realized it
wasn't free. I might switch to Lato from Google Fonts, which is pretty
similar, and I'll make the text bigger.

------
Clubber
I've thought it was because they needed to fill up a large blank area with
copy (words), otherwise the page will look weird.

It might be because the adage, "don't sell a product, sell an emotion," but
taken to an inconceivable level.

Or maybe it's like legalese, it's not necessary, but looks good if you are
billing at $500 an hour.

------
Kiro
I thought Meltwater's flagship product was media monitoring, which their
slogan kind of captures:

> Welcome to Outside Insight

> Billions of online conversations, freshly filtered.

The title of their landing page is even more to the point:

> Media Intelligence, Media Monitoring, and Social Monitoring

I thought Optimizely was an A/B testing tool, which makes their punchline OK:

> Optimizely lets you experiment on everything—from design choices to
> algorithms. That way the best ideas always win, and the best customer
> experiences get even better.

I suppose this only adds to his argument though, it's hard to tell what
companies do.

~~~
HappyKasper
You're right, Meltwater and Optimizely aren't as bad as it gets (84.51
definitely is). And after spending some time on those websites, you're able to
get a pretty good sense for what they do.

My main point is that it shouldn't ever be difficult for a potential customer
to quickly get to that understanding, and I do believe these sites could do a
far better job at quickly and clearly explaining their companies' function...
just like you did.

"Meltwater's flagship product is media monitoring". "Optimizely is a website
A/B testing tool". Boom.

~~~
smelendez
I think they want to be able to pivot and add new services without having to
retract how they previously labeled themselves.

For instance, Optimizely has a website A/B testing tool. They also support
smartphone app A/B testing, and I think some backend/server-side testing. If
smart watches or VR take off, they'll probably try to support those as well.

They also recently added automated content generation: I know they can
generate product and page recommendations, and there may be other options as
well.

They're a relatively young company and probably aren't ready to be typecast as
"website A/B testing," in case another offering really takes off.

------
trgv
I always assumed this is just the result of the people who design the site not
knowing what the company does.

~~~
mrhappyunhappy
Designers have nothing to do with it. Most designers unless specifically hired
to also write copy, use placeholder text. It's usually the inhouse marketing
person who has marketing language fatigued drilled down from their bosses that
can't think straight to get the right words out. I don't blame those people, I
feel sorry for them.

------
paultopia
Also, PUT THE PRICES ON THERE. Even more infuriating than a company that won't
tell you what they do is a company that tells you what they do and then
demands you contact them to be salespersoned at before they'll tell you the
price. Fuck you, no.

~~~
mrhappyunhappy
You don't understand anything about business do you?

~~~
flukus
I understand they aren't getting my business without prices listed. I don't
get to make any multi-million dollar decisions (except maybe in the extreme
long term) but several times I've been tasked with research problems where
commercial software or external services may be part of the solution. The ones
with no prices get taken out of the evaluation process because I can't
evaluate if they're feasible or not.

~~~
mrhappyunhappy
I feel sorry for your employer then.

------
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.

~~~
inthewoods
Most of the B2B companies I've worked for don't have enough traffic to perform
an A/B test in anything short of 6 months.

------
Micoloth
[[pro tip- a lot of startup companies actually do not do anything]]

------
lou1306
This is some Silicon-Valley-the-HBO-show-grade stuff. I wonder whether the
people designing these website still think they're being hip or they just have
to cater to some blissfully unaware managers.

------
Frondo
Yep, this is the end-game of "customers buy benefits, not features" marketing
writing.

Don't get me wrong, I'm fully on board with the idea of marketing your
benefits, not features, but so very much of the marketing writing you see out
there now takes the concept to this unhelpful extreme.

I ride my bike past a shop every few days that's called something like
"Shelter Solutions," but in smaller print they say "We rent equipment for
commercial and residential roofing need". Boom, done, that's what I care
about.

Or some lady who gave me a fistful of business cards at a networking event
(she apparently has five thriving gigs, eyeroll), one of which was
"telecommunications solutions consultant"\--talking to her, she has some cell
phone MLM program she's a part of.

Customers buy benefits, but if you're not telling them what the features are,
you've failed at writing clear copy. Most people do.

~~~
TeMPOraL
I sometimes feel like I'm an alien on this planet. I can't imagine how
"customers buy benefits, not features" could possibly work.

What I mean is this - I'm not going to buy a product that I don't understand,
period. Be it a piece of software (from kitten photo apps to CAD software) or
an appliance, I only buy (and ever imagine buying) things for which I at least
clearly understand what inputs and outputs are. I can use this software to
upload JPGs to friends. I put dirty dishes in this appliance, add some
consumables, and clean dishes pop out. Those are "features", not "benefits".

On the other hand, when I see people selling on "benefits", I immediately
assume they're dishonest and steer away. The listed benefits usually are, at
best, a serious abuse of some cherry-picked words, and at worst outright lies.
It's one of the strongest negative signals for me when evaluating companies
(especially when I don't have third-party information on their actual
products).

Do most people really live their lives looking for something to buy that will
make their lives "connected", or their company "full of streamlined cloud
synergy" or something?

~~~
Retra
Given how the sales and marketing people at my place of employment respond to
corporate announcements... they'll probably do anything to arrange words and
phrases into something that triggers a "sounds like a corporate executive"
response from their superiors.

------
mrkurt
There are two ways to tell people what a company does:

1\. Explain the value of what you do 2\. Explain how it's implemented

The Optimizely example in this article is the former, though the headline is
not great. The subhead is pretty decent.

Optimizely could easily say "we're an application for testing different
versions of your app", which is true and explains what they literally do.

In my experience, if you care about conversions, "explain the value" wins.
People who believe they need experimentation don't mind digging for
implementation. But they want to know you'll make them more money, or do
something else to improve their lives.

This is weird for people like me, I'd usually rather read the README version
of a product. But I'm not the one making buying decisions for Optimizely or an
agency.

------
draaglom
There's a good reason for this, and it's not (directly) to get you on the
phone & up-sell you.

These landing pages are optimised for conversion, which means they're targeted
at the niche who are most likely to convert already - and for bigger,
specialist firms, that niche quite likely already knows the essence of what
the company does.

Because these users are also likely evaluating competitors at the same time,
the pressure is on the company to differentiate - and one way to do that is to
tout your high level values.

"We're not just an X, we are an X which _gets_ your need for Y unlike
$competitor"

All of this isn't to say that incomprehensible websites are good, of course.
There are ways to express how you're way up maslow's heirarchy without being
completely confusing.

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

~~~
mrisoli
When companies get this big they usually can't just say what they do on their
website with two sentences, so IMO, this is the case where these artsy vague
landing pages are passable.

I mean, GE was formed by Thomas Edison himself, they have everything from jet
engines to self-driving cars. I suppose if you are the person responsible for
shopping around for jet engines for your company you are not going to ge.com
for specs.

Considering their size, I'd expect them to try to lure individuals(career and
jobs) through their website instead of potential customers.

------
yodon
Marketing is hard. Writing compelling advertising copy is hard. Figuring out
what people want and need to know about your product is hard.

Getting some designer with a great visual portfolio to make your website isn't
the same thing as having a marketing plan or a marketing strategy, but it's a
whole lot faster and cheaper and unfortunately most people don't know the
difference.

Oh, and as awesome as Simon Sinek's Ted talk[0] is, you're not Apple and
potential customers actually do care whether your product is useful for people
like them.

[0]
[https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=u4ZoJKF_VuA](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=u4ZoJKF_VuA)

------
hough
I think a pretty good example of how to describe what you do on your site is
[http://verily.com](http://verily.com) (owned by Alphabet/Google).

'We create tools that put health data into action' hits you right in the face
when you visit the page. Then you scroll down and see good descriptions of
their products.

As someone who visited their site after looking through similar sites filled
with marketing crap, I found it a relief to see something so simple. Use this
as a startup website template instead!

------
mrspeaker
It reminds me of Gavin Volure (Steve Martin) on 30 Rock. After getting busted
as a fraud he says "It's not a real company. You watch our commercials, we
never actually say what we did." and then it cuts to this beautiful corporate-
speak ad
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KlymNLAAzUM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KlymNLAAzUM)

I feel like I've hit that company 50-odd times in my life while searching for
vendors.

------
dvdhsu
I think the non-obvious difference here is bottoms-up vs top-down adoption.

If you're going bottoms-up, your deal size is smaller, and you want people to
start using you by themselves. Think consumer startups like Uber, Airbnb, and
enterprise startups like Github. The decision-makers here are ordinary people,
and they want to know exactly what they're buying so they can make an informed
decision.

If you're going top-down, your deal size is larger, and your goal is to get a
few high-paying customers. You want to maximize the # of people who you can
talk to (and convince) over the phone, as well as extract the highest $ value
out of. So you filter for the people who are a) serious about the problem, and
b) can make the decision. As a developer or engineer, your discretionary
budget probably isn't high enough for these companies to care about you. In
fact, they probably don't even want to talk to you!

So companies that mostly rely on top-down sales have very vague landing pages.
Their goal is to find specifically the people who have so much pain that
they're willing to take a 25-minute sales call. And if you're willing to spend
25 minutes, it probably means that you have the budget that they care about.

[edit: removed stuff about my own startup]

~~~
jasonrhaas
If I have to get on a "sales call" just to see what the product is or demo it,
I am not interested. Let me try it for free, and tell me what it does... I
really don't have time or patience for sales calls.

~~~
dvdhsu
Then you're probably not the right customer for us! Do you have problems with
internal tooling that you'd pay thousands of $ / month to have solved?

For now, that's who we're looking for. And a "request a demo" is a pretty good
way of finding exactly those people.

------
pillowkusis
Some other reasons why B2B sites are incomprehensible, along with “get them on
the phone at all costs”:

\- What you do is totally opaque and requires a massive amount of context to
explain. Yes, it’s 5 sentences, but only after both you and the user are in
the same context trying to solve the same problem. Try to explain a randomly-
selected B2B company’s model to your grandma. Impossible. Instead let’s focus
on company branding and positive sounding platitudes.

\- Once you’re selling to businesses, you’re selling to VPs and C-level
executives. They don’t care about the problem you solve. You're solving some
lower-level employee’s problem, or a systemic problem nobody experiences
directly. Since the buyer (the VP) isn’t feeling any of the pain, the only way
to justify the purchase is to focus exclusively on the high-level benefits of
your service. They’re in charge of marketing. promise them perfect marketing.
They’re in sales. Promise them better sales. Focus on the outcomes, not the
“how”, at all costs.

\- A lesser factor might be that companies love to align workers with an
affirmation that the work these employees do 40+ hours a week is making the
world better. B2B organizations have an especially hard time proving this
because there’s no clear evidence their business does make the world better.
No consumers who sing your praises or products that solve a problem the worker
can empathize with. I suspect the large amount of mental gymnastics needed to
justify “our company is a net good in the world” sometimes leaks into to
marketing material which leads to weird-sounding empty affirmations that are
more suited to internal employee “values” documents than actual marketing
content. (“We make people’s lives easier”, for instance.)

------
hoodoof
[http://camel.apache.org/](http://camel.apache.org/)

Front page of the Camel website:

Camel empowers you to define routing and mediation rules in a variety of
domain-specific languages, including a Java-based Fluent API, Spring or
Blueprint XML Configuration files, and a Scala DSL.

This means you get smart completion of routing rules in your IDE, whether in a
Java, Scala or XML editor.

Apache Camel uses URIs to work directly with any kind of Transport or
messaging model such as HTTP, ActiveMQ, JMS, JBI, SCA, MINA or CXF, as well as
pluggable Components and Data Format options. Apache Camel is a small library
with minimal dependencies for easy embedding in any Java application. Apache
Camel lets you work with the same API regardless which kind of Transport is
used - so learn the API once and you can interact with all the Components
provided out-of-box.

Apache Camel provides support for Bean Binding and seamless integration with
popular frameworks such as CDI, Spring, Blueprint and Guice. Camel also has
extensive support for unit testing your routes.

------
teabee89
Reminds me of "I am Pied Piper": [http://siliconcali.com/wp-
content/uploads/2015/04/I_AM_PIED_...](http://siliconcali.com/wp-
content/uploads/2015/04/I_AM_PIED_PIPER_Billboard_SiliconCali.jpg)

------
smb06
I have looked at this website for a long time, my colleagues have looked at
it, friends have looked at it, and we still can't figure out what they do.

[http://www.thit.com/](http://www.thit.com/)

~~~
Retr0spectrum
From the sound of it, they don't know either:

[https://www.reddit.com/r/socialmedia/comments/11d8tt/can_som...](https://www.reddit.com/r/socialmedia/comments/11d8tt/can_someone_explain_to_me_what_thit_is_or_if_it/c6lsgam/)

 _" it is up to you to browse the site and create your own interpretation of
it"_

------
dredmorbius
This also applies to far too many non-companies as well. Free software
projects are notorious for this.

For both I generally prefer Wikipedia to their own webssites.

My own similar rant, as an HN comment, remains among my more popular
contributions here. "Please forward to marketing".

[https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/27d5xr/please_...](https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/27d5xr/please_forward_to_marketing_how_to_present_your/)

------
chiefalchemist
If I visit a site and they can't manage to tell me - clearly - what they do, I
presume they don't know either. I quicky move on.

The whole "it's free to try" routine is tiring at best. It's your
product...communicate to me why I should care. If you don't know why that
might be, it's not my job to figure it out for you (or for me).

The problem is, such tactics (artificially) inflate the new users KPI.
Retention? Actually using the product? Ha! Who cares!! No one ever asks about
that.

------
mbesto
Ugh, here we go again...

If you're complaining that the copy on a successful tech company is not
speaking to you, then it's likely that you aren't the intended audience.

------
gwbas1c
I suspect this happens when companies forget what they do!

------
eneveu
This also applies to some open source projects, like Apache Karaf (
[http://karaf.apache.org/](http://karaf.apache.org/) ):

 _Upgrade to the Enterprise class platform.

Karaf provides dual polymorphic container and application bootstrapping
paradigms to the Enterprise. Focus on your business code and application,
Karaf deals with the rest_

------
rconti
Anybody remember when the Infiniti car brand launched in the US, and all of
their ads were nonsensical and had no apparent relation to cars?

Best I can find:
[http://articles.latimes.com/1989-08-26/business/fi-897_1_ad-...](http://articles.latimes.com/1989-08-26/business/fi-897_1_ad-
campaign)

------
bluetwo
If you want to learn how to do it better, I can't recommend this book enough,
"So What?" by Mark Magnacca.

[https://www.amazon.com/So-What-Communicate-Matters-
Audience/...](https://www.amazon.com/So-What-Communicate-Matters-
Audience/dp/0137158262/)

Spend the $10 and become a better communicator.

------
dqv
Websites like that are "websites for the record". There are certain markets
who think it's weird that a company doesn't have a website, but don't really
care about the content or how it looks.

A lot of the text seems to be placeholder/written by a designer who asked
about what the company wanted for the content and never got a response.

------
bjarneh
> Yet for a few thousand dollars a year, Meltwater will give you reporters’
> emails and phone numbers

It's quite hard to describe their business model without using the words
"verified emails"; which is closely related to spam marketing I guess. A few
thousand dollars a year also sounds very expensive for those email
addresses/phone numbers

------
user5994461
Most websites don't sell anything directly. They don't need to be
understandable.

To take the previous examples, continentals and general electrics websites
have nothing to sell to you whatsoever. The website is used to publish general
company information online like: financial reports, global news, official
contacts and addresses, job offers.

------
brongondwana
Hrm... and checking out our brand new site:

[https://www.topicbox.com/](https://www.topicbox.com/)

We're pretty close, but there's nothing there saying "this is a mailing list
product" as such. I'll go see what can be done about that without ruining the
pretty story.

------
acomjean
a coworker left my company to go work at pega-systems. They've been around for
a while as a company but I visited their website to figure out what they do.
Its a little better now, but...

"Pegasystems Inc. is the leader in software for customer engagement and
operational excellence. Pega’s adaptive, cloud-architected software – built on
its unified Pega® Platform – empowers people to rapidly deploy, and easily
extend and change applications to meet strategic business needs. Over its
30-year history, Pega has delivered award-winning capabilities in CRM and BPM,
powered by advanced artificial intelligence and robotic automation, to help
the world’s leading brands achieve breakthrough business results."

[https://www.pega.com/about](https://www.pega.com/about)

~~~
jpatokal
So, um, what do they actually do? The only words in that that make any sense
are CRM (customer relationship management) and CPM (business process
management), and those are also hopelessly waffly business bingo buzzwords.

~~~
acomjean
I'm still not entirely sure. I think they just make business software for
businesses. Seems like something abstracted way too much..

I once did an in house mobile timekeeping app that interfaced with a big
company accounting system that we could only talk to with xml directly.
(Javascript on blackberry oddly...) It should have been so simple, but we had
to do a lot of weird things because the accounting system was very obtuse.
Reminds me of that.

------
shurcooL
Contrast that with a site like this:

[https://gotools.org](https://gotools.org)

It tells you exactly what it does in one sentence, and that sentence is the
only one on the page. Despite that, it's probably not as popular as the vague
sites being complained about here.

------
yalogin
My take is these companies are elusive in their descriptions because they sell
data and/or harvest data. So they are worried about privacy people getting on
their backs. So they try to not be direct and to get their through word of
mouth or through their sales channels.

------
crispinb
SV/tech sector narcissism and associated managerial credulity is going to
provide fodder for much epic and wonderful satire. Which is admittedly minor
compensation for this vast waste of human and other resources at a time when
we are facing so many genuine challenges.

------
karmakaze
Another frustrating trend is landing pages without sign in links. Optimizing
for the acquisition/activation funnel is fine, but at least put in this one
element for existing paying customers. Tooo often I find myself googling for
"<name> login"

------
echelon
Off-topic: since when did Medium ask readers to "sign in to get the full
experience" with a giant modal? Is anyone else getting this, or are they A/B
testing?

I hope they don't go down a route of blocking non-subscribers from reading
their content like Quora.

~~~
fauigerzigerk
I'm not getting it.

------
adora
One-liners are hard.

One problem is people trying to pack ALL the features and ideas into that
summary. So in the pursuit of wanting everyone to get the entire vision, the
"what you offer right now" is lost.

As a company's product offerings expand into many, this gets even harder.

------
macawfish
marketing is a god damned religion

------
yaseer
This is typical of the "Enterprise" B2B sales approach, as apposed to selling
to small and medium sized businesses and startups.

Enterprise sales has developed its own absurd language and culture that is now
indistinguishable from parody.

------
nunez
I think that in the world of B2B, the website isn't meant to sell product;
it's meant to start a conversation/look legitimate. Sounding like your
competitors == legitimacy.

All of the real sales and marketing is done offline

------
hoodoof
My theory is that if you can possibly do it, have no "explainer page", instead
just BOOM you are now using the software.

Or maybe have an explainer page offered to the user as a dialogue when they
first go to the website.

------
stevekinney
Here is my take on what SendGrid does: Sending an email is pretty easy.
Sending a metric butt ton is hard and so is hooking it into your app. So, we
help you with that because screwing that up could be very bad.

------
CalChris
Bezos was infamous for jealously controlling every pixel on the Amazon landing
page. You could easily imagine a better design but at least you knew what to
do.

------
Terr_
Confusopoly:
[http://dilbert.com/strip/2010-11-21](http://dilbert.com/strip/2010-11-21)

------
hoodoof
Strange how it can be so hard to briefly describe what a company does.

It's often more obvious from the outside.

------
Korean
Most nerds aren't good at communicating.

------
nether
Here's a fun one, from our very own YCombinator:

> The Flex group uses technology to improve the range and fluidity of human
> expression. We invent new concepts and representations that amplify people’s
> ability to create, connect, and understand. We create tools that blur the
> line between using and creating, in order to provide a conversational medium
> for thinking and doing.

What they really do is make graphical programming tools. That's it.

[https://harc.ycr.org/flex/](https://harc.ycr.org/flex/)

~~~
dang
That's not a company, that's a research group. Is that different? I think so.
They're supposed to push the visionary envelope while a company is supposed to
make money. Instant-noodle accessibility is critical to the latter.

(I love that you wrote "our very own YCombinator" though!)

~~~
duncanawoods
> push the visionary envelope

I smiled at that because "we push the visionary envelope" is destined to be
someone's vapid b2b marketing tagline but then realised its been done:

 _Americus F. Callahan of Chicago, Illinois, in the United States, received
the first patent for a windowed envelope on 10 June 1902. Originally called
the "outlook envelop", the patent initially anticipated using thin rice paper
as the transparent material forming the window, though this material has since
been replaced by clear plastics. The design has otherwise remained nearly
unchanged._

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windowed_envelope](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windowed_envelope)

------
fairpx
I think the main problem is that people assume that in order to sell expensive
products/services, the website needs to have 50 pages and feel like a complex
entity. We sell a B2B UI Design service to web and mobile development
companies, all we have is a simple one pager that doesn't do anything except
explain in plain-english what the service is about. We have people
buying/subscribing to our service sometimes as fast as a B2C product. I
personally wouldn't want to be a slimly salesman on the phone, hide our prices
and have complex copy on the website. The customers that do want that are not
a fit for us. So the question is, what type of a customer are you trying to
attract?

~~~
mrhappyunhappy
It all depends on what kind of business you are running. Your 2k design
package might be great for someone on a budget but a large number of
businesses want value and don't focus on price. Ironically you are attracting
a certain kind of client yourself. You post about attracting 300 clients but
do you talk about the quality of life of your employees? Do hey work minimum
wage? Outsourced to India? I have no idea what kind of quality of life you
create for your employees at your rates. Not to mention you are selling a
commodity not a specialized service so to say that people are blissfully
unaware of affordable companies like yours might be better achieved on junk
showcase sites like dribbble - spew out a bunch of garbage and see what
sticks.

------
gt_
Is this one of those? [http://cameraiq.co/](http://cameraiq.co/)

