I think what you say is true, but only if you somehow arrive on a website with absolutely no understanding of what you're looking at or how you arrived there.

I think what you say is true, but only if you somehow arrive on a website with absolutely no understanding of what you're looking at or how you arrived there. When most people land on a company's home page, they arrived there from searching specific keywords in a search engine (which demonstrates a context for what they're searching for), clicking-through a socially shared link (which probably includes descriptive text like "Checkout this awesome Fireworks replacement I've been using...), or directly clicking marketing messages in an email or display ad (in which case they'll have a very clear understanding of the category the company is in). In other words, they have a pretty good sense of "what this thing is," and they want to know _why_ it's better than the other ones they've seen. Now, if you click a link on HN that says something like "I'm 13! Checkout the product I coded over the weekend!" then yes, the main question will be "what is this thing?" But in the "real world," people don't often stumble randomly across websites in this way, and if they do, they're probably not in the target audience anyway. Most of the time (and I'm assuming we're all optimizing for most of the time instances), users already know generally what you do. So tell them why you do it in a way that is interesting and meaningful.