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You're not trying to sell 7zip. Imagine 7zip is a $1000 software. Would that page make you buy it? Now, starting every sentence with "you" is a bit odd, but th

You're not trying to sell 7zip. Imagine 7zip is a $1000 software. Would that page make you buy it? Now, starting every sentence with "you" is a bit odd, but the general idea is to focus on the user's problem rather than characteristics of the product. Fetures are boring, bland and frightening. I'm an user, I have problems, do you solve any of my problems? "7-Zip is a file archiver with a high compression ratio. 7-Zip is free software with open source. The most of the code is under the GNU LGPL license. Some parts of the code are under the BSD 3-clause License. Also there is unRAR license restriction for some parts of the code." vs "Are you fed up with buying hard drives after hard drives or choosing which files to delete and which files to keep, only to regret your decision afterward? Well, that time is over. With 7-zip, you can compress files more efficiently than ever and save space on your hard drive". Or, if you're promoting free software: "You don't want to buy one more software to archive your important files. At 7-zip, we heard you. 7-zip is free and open source, meaning not only you don't have to pay for it, but you can modify the source code if you really want to. You can even include it in your own, commercial software". Technical landing pages are good when you address technical people that are already sold to your product.

TeMPOraL 8y ago
I guess this is a reminder of how being too nerdy warps my thinking. I mean, of the examples you've given, I'd pattern-match the middle one to "company selling bullshit", and I'd consider the last one needlessly annoying. Do regular people really don't care about accurate information, and buy based on who can make nicest sounding blurb?
- sacado2 8y ago
  Well, first, I'm not necessarily the best copywriter in the world ;) Now, you can be much more "under the radar", and focus a little more on technical features, but still from the user's perspective. Look at rust's landing page : https://www.rust-lang.org/ https://www.rust-lang.org/ , or clion's : https://www.jetbrains.com/clion/ https://www.jetbrains.com/clion/ They use "you" a lot, and rather than telling "our product has such and such and such feature", say "you can solve this problem thanks to this feature, and this other problem with this other feature". "With CLion, you can create code that's beautiful and correct at the same time. Potential code issues are identified instantly and fixed as you type! Be sure all the proper changes are handled automatically by CLion. CLion also performs Data Flow analysis to find out all the cases of the unreachable code, infinite recursion and more." is more appealing to me than "CLion features a dataflow analyzer that is 47% more efficient than eclipse and can detect 153% more potential bugs (unreachable code, infinite recursion, etc.)".
  - TeMPOraL 8y ago
    Thanks for those examples. I agree, they both seem to follow the pattern of "$product lets you solve $yourproblem", or "Thanks to $features, $product lets you solve $yourproblem". Thanks to your comments, I'll be paying much more attention to use of the word "you" on product pages from now on :). As for my objection - my favourite product descriptions follow the pattern of listing concrete features, and concrete problems they're meant to solve. I feel it's because I know the problems I have, I know what the features mean, and I don't trust vendors to be honest about general description. I think (I hope) this could be said about most technical people in technical fields. The product pages for Rust and CLion essentially enumerate concrete features in prose, and that's why I like them. In CLion's case, this line didn't resonate with me: > With CLion, you can create code that's beautiful and correct at the same time. Potential code issues are identified instantly and fixed as you type! ... but it got rescued by an attached screenshot, that effectively communicated what kind of issues they're talking about. > [...] is more appealing to me than "CLion features a dataflow analyzer that is 47% more efficient than eclipse and can detect 153% more potential bugs [...] Yeah, I don't like that imaginary line too, but that's because "47% better than competition", "153% better than competition" pattern-matches to me to car salesmen bullshit.
    - davidivadavid 8y ago
      That must be because you're only considering products for which you've done extensive research / have intimate knowledge of. Customers at early stages of the purchase cycle are often not aware of the problems a given product solves. They need to be educated about the value of the product by starting from a higher level. It's only when people are sold on the value of the product that they're interested in learning how the product delivers that benefit and what its features are. The message has to match the sophistication of the reader.
      - TeMPOraL 8y ago
        Sure, but you're not selling me on the value of the product with platitudes and meaningless sentences. Sentences like "X lets you solve your Y problems faster and better" have near-zero information value, because they don't define reference point and scale for "faster" and "better", nor do they say what "Y problems" it's helping to solve. I feel such copywriting only preys on people who can't read with understanding.
- coldtea 8y ago
  >Do regular people really don't care about accurate information, and buy based on who can make nicest sounding blurb? Not only "regular people", but you too are disproportionally affected by "nicest sounding blurb", and just don't realize it.
  - TeMPOraL 8y ago
    Maybe? I don't know. Whenever I notice someone using nice blurbs instead of a honest list of features and problems they solve, I immediately weigh the product down in my list.
    - coldtea 8y ago
      For stuff in your expertise yes, but for consumer products and services?
      - TeMPOraL 8y ago
        I'd say yes to most of them. It doesn't take more than high-school level of education and a nonzero interest in how things work to be able to evaluate such blurbs for consumer products and services. I may find myself lost when dealing with specialized products and services for areas I have zero experience with, but in those cases I try to completely ignore any information from product vendors, and read up on recommendations from communities in the area (a good starting point is usually /r/$area).
        sacado2 8y ago
        It can be very hard in highly niched domains. Very niched products typically have a high price / low number of customers profile, meaning you want to really be sure the product is right for you, but won't find any (or very little) recommendation online. Imagine a consultant who offers consulting on using cryptocurrencies as a payment method for your online business. The fees are $250 per hour. You're a paypal user and briefly considered using bitcoins for your online business, but are not sure about it. Or imagine a physiotherapist who offers a treatment for a very rare (but not life-threatening) condition no traditional medicine could cure. It is rather expensive, but the guy says he can help you, yet you won't find any testimonial on the web because of the rarity of the condition.
- the_af 8y ago
  > I'd pattern-match the middle one to "company selling bullshit" Me too. I'd guess most technically minded people will pattern match those two last examples as "company selling bullshit". In contrast, "7-Zip is a file archiver with a high compression ratio" conveys exactly the information I'm looking for. Gentoo Linux used to have one of these cringe-worthy blurbs. Something about their mascot Larry the Cow and how he found all other distros "the same" but Gentoo was "different" [1]. It was confusing and embarrassing. Now Gentoo's landing page reads "Welcome to Gentoo, a highly flexible, source-based Linux distribution". I know which one is cleaner and easier to understand! [1] now they seem to have moved it to a hard to find "about" page, right where it belongs: unseen! https://gentoo.org/get-started/about/ https://gentoo.org/get-started/about/
social_quotient 8y ago
What if the last one was something more like “You running more than one app for compressing files? We were too. Someone sent your a file with a new compression format that you don’t recognize? It’s really frustrating. We realized that most people need a tool they can reliably encode and decide in the right formats. We created 7-zip to be your trusted go to tool for managing all of your file compression needs. It’s free, open source, and developer friendly. Let us show you how we can help you and your customers.”
- sacado2 8y ago
  You're better at this than me ;)

TeMPOraL 8y ago

I guess this is a reminder of how being too nerdy warps my thinking. I mean, of the examples you've given, I'd pattern-match the middle one to "company selling bullshit", and I'd consider the last one needlessly annoying. Do regular people really don't care about accurate information, and buy based on who can make nicest sounding blurb?

sacado2 8y ago
Well, first, I'm not necessarily the best copywriter in the world ;) Now, you can be much more "under the radar", and focus a little more on technical features, but still from the user's perspective. Look at rust's landing page : https://www.rust-lang.org/ https://www.rust-lang.org/ , or clion's : https://www.jetbrains.com/clion/ https://www.jetbrains.com/clion/ They use "you" a lot, and rather than telling "our product has such and such and such feature", say "you can solve this problem thanks to this feature, and this other problem with this other feature". "With CLion, you can create code that's beautiful and correct at the same time. Potential code issues are identified instantly and fixed as you type! Be sure all the proper changes are handled automatically by CLion. CLion also performs Data Flow analysis to find out all the cases of the unreachable code, infinite recursion and more." is more appealing to me than "CLion features a dataflow analyzer that is 47% more efficient than eclipse and can detect 153% more potential bugs (unreachable code, infinite recursion, etc.)".
- TeMPOraL 8y ago
  Thanks for those examples. I agree, they both seem to follow the pattern of "$product lets you solve $yourproblem", or "Thanks to $features, $product lets you solve $yourproblem". Thanks to your comments, I'll be paying much more attention to use of the word "you" on product pages from now on :). As for my objection - my favourite product descriptions follow the pattern of listing concrete features, and concrete problems they're meant to solve. I feel it's because I know the problems I have, I know what the features mean, and I don't trust vendors to be honest about general description. I think (I hope) this could be said about most technical people in technical fields. The product pages for Rust and CLion essentially enumerate concrete features in prose, and that's why I like them. In CLion's case, this line didn't resonate with me: > With CLion, you can create code that's beautiful and correct at the same time. Potential code issues are identified instantly and fixed as you type! ... but it got rescued by an attached screenshot, that effectively communicated what kind of issues they're talking about. > [...] is more appealing to me than "CLion features a dataflow analyzer that is 47% more efficient than eclipse and can detect 153% more potential bugs [...] Yeah, I don't like that imaginary line too, but that's because "47% better than competition", "153% better than competition" pattern-matches to me to car salesmen bullshit.
  - davidivadavid 8y ago
    That must be because you're only considering products for which you've done extensive research / have intimate knowledge of. Customers at early stages of the purchase cycle are often not aware of the problems a given product solves. They need to be educated about the value of the product by starting from a higher level. It's only when people are sold on the value of the product that they're interested in learning how the product delivers that benefit and what its features are. The message has to match the sophistication of the reader.
    - TeMPOraL 8y ago
      Sure, but you're not selling me on the value of the product with platitudes and meaningless sentences. Sentences like "X lets you solve your Y problems faster and better" have near-zero information value, because they don't define reference point and scale for "faster" and "better", nor do they say what "Y problems" it's helping to solve. I feel such copywriting only preys on people who can't read with understanding.
coldtea 8y ago
>Do regular people really don't care about accurate information, and buy based on who can make nicest sounding blurb? Not only "regular people", but you too are disproportionally affected by "nicest sounding blurb", and just don't realize it.
- TeMPOraL 8y ago
  Maybe? I don't know. Whenever I notice someone using nice blurbs instead of a honest list of features and problems they solve, I immediately weigh the product down in my list.
  - coldtea 8y ago
    For stuff in your expertise yes, but for consumer products and services?
    - TeMPOraL 8y ago
      I'd say yes to most of them. It doesn't take more than high-school level of education and a nonzero interest in how things work to be able to evaluate such blurbs for consumer products and services. I may find myself lost when dealing with specialized products and services for areas I have zero experience with, but in those cases I try to completely ignore any information from product vendors, and read up on recommendations from communities in the area (a good starting point is usually /r/$area).
      - sacado2 8y ago
        It can be very hard in highly niched domains. Very niched products typically have a high price / low number of customers profile, meaning you want to really be sure the product is right for you, but won't find any (or very little) recommendation online. Imagine a consultant who offers consulting on using cryptocurrencies as a payment method for your online business. The fees are $250 per hour. You're a paypal user and briefly considered using bitcoins for your online business, but are not sure about it. Or imagine a physiotherapist who offers a treatment for a very rare (but not life-threatening) condition no traditional medicine could cure. It is rather expensive, but the guy says he can help you, yet you won't find any testimonial on the web because of the rarity of the condition.
the_af 8y ago
> I'd pattern-match the middle one to "company selling bullshit" Me too. I'd guess most technically minded people will pattern match those two last examples as "company selling bullshit". In contrast, "7-Zip is a file archiver with a high compression ratio" conveys exactly the information I'm looking for. Gentoo Linux used to have one of these cringe-worthy blurbs. Something about their mascot Larry the Cow and how he found all other distros "the same" but Gentoo was "different" [1]. It was confusing and embarrassing. Now Gentoo's landing page reads "Welcome to Gentoo, a highly flexible, source-based Linux distribution". I know which one is cleaner and easier to understand! [1] now they seem to have moved it to a hard to find "about" page, right where it belongs: unseen! https://gentoo.org/get-started/about/ https://gentoo.org/get-started/about/

social_quotient 8y ago

What if the last one was something more like “You running more than one app for compressing files? We were too. Someone sent your a file with a new compression format that you don’t recognize? It’s really frustrating. We realized that most people need a tool they can reliably encode and decide in the right formats. We created 7-zip to be your trusted go to tool for managing all of your file compression needs. It’s free, open source, and developer friendly. Let us show you how we can help you and your customers.”

sacado2 8y ago
You're better at this than me ;)