Under this provocative title, there is a quite insightful post. Reinforces importance of focusing on actually selling your service/product rather than flattening yourself with cute homepage. I am gonna talk with teammates about taking this insight at tomorrow morning coffee.
Very interesting post. Whenever Facebook tries out a new design, people scream, but if it keeps users on the site longer, Facebook keeps it and the users eventually quite down - until the next time. ;)
If you dont keep trying, you're never going to find the one thing that moves you from ordinary to extraordinary.
> "I can compete by coming up with creative, effective solutions that can’t be implemented by my established competitors."
It looks like it all boils down to this but I can't for the life of me figure out what it means.
Solutions like what? What makes you think that your competitors can't implement them? If you yourself aren't exceptionally good at design or engineering like you humbly mention, what edge could you possibly have? If you're referring to deleting your homepage, that's very easy to duplicate!
> "signups increased 3x, and the bounce rate was down 10%"
The other alternative is that your blog is working as a marketing tool. People read your previous blog post, thought it was interesting, and decided to give it a spin. I'd wait for the effects of that to die down a little before I jump to any conclusions.
I think this guy just got on something.
He's doing just right, and for a guy who had no clue of programming 12 months ago, it is quite impressing.
The fact we are talking about it in here (and perhaps in other places as well), means, the marketing strategy just worked.
See the comments I quote from his blog
__Shripriya__
Saw this post on HN. I went to your homepage. I have no clue what the
service is, why would I sign up?
Making the user give up information and do work before showing them
value almost never works. At least for me...
__Emile Petrone__
Thank Shripriya for the comment! Fair enough. I'll know I've done my
job right when you sign up :)
__danoprey__
I've heard it's the "AirBNB" for food, but otherwise I'd have no idea
either. I agree, I come across lots of landing pages, some sell me, some
don't. Unless a friend recommended this to me, I wouldn't sign up. Word
of mouth is great, but this seems to exclude other methods for the sake
of it.
Less emphasis on the landing page = good.
NO emphasis on the landing page = bad.
I had no idea what his site was about until I read the blog post. And even now I'm still not very clear on what service he actually provides that can't be accomplished in a facebook or twitter post: "BBQ. My place. Sunday at 6."
In the attention economy, being wrong in a spectacular manner is way better than being right. My suspicion is that the controversy was a bigger factor in the sign-ups increase than the homepage deletion itself.
An earlier post that started the discussion, with more reasoning: http://housefed.tumblr.com/post/6690059612/delete-your-homep...