4 ms·

Is Your Landing Page Good Enough to Get into Y Combinator?

47 points by yread 8y ago

swingline-747 8y ago
Consider having a /humans.txt and a founders@ email address that isn't advertised.
epynonymous 8y ago
this is pretty awesome, plenty of great advice littered throughout. would be nice if your advice could be automated, i.e. i give you a url, you give it a score based on your advice, i don't see a need for rocket science. another method could be to make it more of a crowd review of a landing page (or any page). some mechanism would be needed to filter out the good and bad advice since this would be open to all (kind of like hacker news scoring of comments). or you could have professionals able to rate and critique websites. all this could be charged as a service or advertisements for revenue. one thing that would be a dis-service to the web would be that all webpages would start to look like one another. and in some senses, some of these wacko vc's might like "tasting the future". one nitpick on your page format, it's hard to peruse through and find the good examples and bad, i'm not much of a design aficionado, so some of these things i can't really tell the difference between unless i read all your comments.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
EGreg 8y ago
Can I get this landing page critiqued (POSITIVE AND NEGATIVE) according to the points this advice says? It seems to do well I think, esp on mobile! https://qbix.com https://qbix.com
- probably_wrong 8y ago
  As a random internet user, I would say: applying the points of the article to your website... Best applied positive points (others apply too, but there's no point in making a list with things you already know about): 2. Make the website about the customer, not you 11. Don't write meaningless B.S. and banalities 12. Make your call to action visible 26. Make your stuff legible 31. Leverage Social Proof: This comes with a caveat - the globe with '5 Million downloads' works fine, but I would find something less '90s. 36. List your features/Benefits using... lists: I would make them more concrete, but there's a good first version already (see discussion at the end regarding this) 48. Offer a quick demo (see discussion at the end) Points that could be improved: 3. Make Your Value Proposition Crystal Clear: "We build apps for all kinds of communities" raises more questions that answers (what apps? what's a community in this context?) 5. Don't use buzzwords: "Empowering", "Uniting" doesn't tell much 9. Make sure your copy passes the "so what" test 15. Anticipate and answer all objections 23. Don't just make statements, show value: Note that this is buried in your presentation. Being a PDF, there's 0 chance I would have read that on my phone. 25. Don't hide content people want to see: On mobile, reading the "meatier" part of the content requires me to click on vague terms such as "Engagement", one by one. I would suggest either making the titles clearer, or not auto-hide by default. 28. Explain why I should buy your product and 34. Explain how your product works: I did not watch the video, because I usually skip them. As a result, I had no idea what your product actually did until I read the presentation. Now, maybe the people who need to manage communities actually do, I couldn't tell since I don't have B.A.N.T. here. Just bringing it up Now, here comes a completely separated set of observations. First, you might consider unifying your visual design: the website, the presentation, and the "let's work together" section all have different visual designs. Your "Let's work together" page, however, raises lots of questions - not because it's bad, but actually because it's almost better - clear example of what the app does, link to request demo, e-mail contact... (the stock footage needs work, though). I find myself confused as to how to better unify all of these points into one. Finally, I've seen the video. I would suggest that you split the video in sections: "What the app does", "How we handle privacy", "Qbix in our office: a case study", and so on. I wouldn't put the private key exchange and how you use iframes in an introductory video. And as a final small detail, I like the narrator's voice, but he should consider a better microphone (or renting a recording booth for an hour).

47 points by yread 8y ago

Consider having a /humans.txt and a founders@ email address that isn't advertised.

this is pretty awesome, plenty of great advice littered throughout. would be nice if your advice could be automated, i.e. i give you a url, you give it a score based on your advice, i don't see a need for rocket science. another method could be to make it more of a crowd review of a landing page (or any page). some mechanism would be needed to filter out the good and bad advice since this would be open to all (kind of like hacker news scoring of comments). or you could have professionals able to rate and critique websites. all this could be charged as a service or advertisements for revenue. one thing that would be a dis-service to the web would be that all webpages would start to look like one another. and in some senses, some of these wacko vc's might like "tasting the future". one nitpick on your page format, it's hard to peruse through and find the good examples and bad, i'm not much of a design aficionado, so some of these things i can't really tell the difference between unless i read all your comments.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

EGreg 8y ago

Can I get this landing page critiqued (POSITIVE AND NEGATIVE) according to the points this advice says? It seems to do well I think, esp on mobile! https://qbix.com https://qbix.com

probably_wrong 8y ago
As a random internet user, I would say: applying the points of the article to your website... Best applied positive points (others apply too, but there's no point in making a list with things you already know about): 2. Make the website about the customer, not you 11. Don't write meaningless B.S. and banalities 12. Make your call to action visible 26. Make your stuff legible 31. Leverage Social Proof: This comes with a caveat - the globe with '5 Million downloads' works fine, but I would find something less '90s. 36. List your features/Benefits using... lists: I would make them more concrete, but there's a good first version already (see discussion at the end regarding this) 48. Offer a quick demo (see discussion at the end) Points that could be improved: 3. Make Your Value Proposition Crystal Clear: "We build apps for all kinds of communities" raises more questions that answers (what apps? what's a community in this context?) 5. Don't use buzzwords: "Empowering", "Uniting" doesn't tell much 9. Make sure your copy passes the "so what" test 15. Anticipate and answer all objections 23. Don't just make statements, show value: Note that this is buried in your presentation. Being a PDF, there's 0 chance I would have read that on my phone. 25. Don't hide content people want to see: On mobile, reading the "meatier" part of the content requires me to click on vague terms such as "Engagement", one by one. I would suggest either making the titles clearer, or not auto-hide by default. 28. Explain why I should buy your product and 34. Explain how your product works: I did not watch the video, because I usually skip them. As a result, I had no idea what your product actually did until I read the presentation. Now, maybe the people who need to manage communities actually do, I couldn't tell since I don't have B.A.N.T. here. Just bringing it up Now, here comes a completely separated set of observations. First, you might consider unifying your visual design: the website, the presentation, and the "let's work together" section all have different visual designs. Your "Let's work together" page, however, raises lots of questions - not because it's bad, but actually because it's almost better - clear example of what the app does, link to request demo, e-mail contact... (the stock footage needs work, though). I find myself confused as to how to better unify all of these points into one. Finally, I've seen the video. I would suggest that you split the video in sections: "What the app does", "How we handle privacy", "Qbix in our office: a case study", and so on. I wouldn't put the private key exchange and how you use iframes in an introductory video. And as a final small detail, I like the narrator's voice, but he should consider a better microphone (or renting a recording booth for an hour).