Microconf 2014: Website teardowns

NOTE: These recaps are a bit more for me than you. I’ll skip over stuff, include asides that are more personal notes to me, etc. Your mileage may vary. More detailed/sanctioned recaps will be available at http://microconfrecap.com at some point.

Teardowner: Patrick McKenzie

HookFeed.com

• Explicitly mention money or revenue. Visceral reaction to those, people don’t make the leap on their own.
• Maybe make the testimonial bigger and more prominent.
• Don’t love the positioning (“it’s time you knew what’s happening in your stripe account”). This is the batteries-not-included portion of Stripe, you could fix it, but we’ll do it for you instead.
• Give names to pricing tiers. Make them customer segments - Solo, Small Business, Enterprise, for instance.

SharpPLM

• Make it explicit who the intended customer is.
• Testimonial is awesome, but edit quote so they understand it’s for manufacturers.
• Mention who gave testimonial. This one, though, is made up.
• Get testimonial: When customer happy, “would you say X, X, X?” If “yes” response, “Can I quote you on that?”
• Drop testimonials where they tie into relevant part of buying process (ROI on buy page, for instance). Name value of testimonial = go home page. otherwise, get specific with placement.
• Kinda long-form copy, but isn’t actually long form copy. Either go whole hog with it, or go with the standard SaaS thing. Mixing the two doesn’t always work well.
• Pricing: Initial plan is per user than later’s aren’t. Make higher plan higher.
• As expected from Patrick, “Charge more.”
• CTA: “Get started now”, “Start winning more quotes now”
• First time at your website, not convinced you’re trustworthy. Get email address instead of credit card on initial visit.

Backup Outlook

• Great SEO domain name
• .org domain names = hidden secret of SEO domain names
• Figure out a way to package product so you can segment and price differentiate
• There are companies that will require a separate support contract[1].
• Think about adding an upper tier of cloud sync or backup.
• People coming here after googling “backup outlook” are already sold on the idea.

Just Add Content

• Tagline: Doesn’t love it. There are lots of “website builder for businesses”. Assume the user knows this exists, figure out why they’re not using one already.
• “Your website could look as professional as this one right now”
• Selling to a non-technical audience: feel free to bash technology, and “we protect from that”
• “Technically true is the best kind of true.”
• Marketing boss: If this is good enough for these guys, it must be good for me.
• Underlying platform is Wordpress. So you can leverage the platform to build your business.
• Feel free to ride on coattails.
• Would be even better if “What you do” portion of the graph has nothing rather than “Add content.” Maybe a higher level of the plan where you provide the content or convert the content into the website. This is brilliant, Ed.