#54 - Friday Shorts: Orienting Users to Your Product
A reminder about the importance of making your products and services easily accessible to customers
They say first impressions are made in seconds, and then increasingly difficult to change. I’m sure it differs by person, but I have the unfair habit of judging new products within the first 10-15 seconds.
The very moment I get to a landing page, I’m scrutinizing things like:
Design: color system, relative font sizing for big statements versus details, the feeling of dynamism)
Marks of trust: (testimonials, badges of approval for security and compliance)
Clarity of message: is it extremely obvious what problem this product is solving or is it vague? Here’s a super annoying example: “Enabling your business to operate with greater efficiency”
Jesus tapdancing christ, this could not be more vague and empty!
Here’s a baller example (full disclosure: Punchlist is an Overline company)
What’s working about Punchlist’s landing page? Clearly calling out what the product does, including a short description of how exactly you could use the product. Very easy access to “features” “integrations” “pricing” and “case studies”, and a very clear CTA / sampling opportunity via the Launch field. (Good job, Pete and Bernardo!)
I was thinking about this recently in a very different context than high-tech companies: neighborhood pizzerias.
There is a pizza shop that opened near me recently, and they are a case study in how to not launch a business and orient customers to the product. Let me tell you what they did, and the opportunities they missed:
No web presence (what!) [they should have a website, even a very simple one-pager]
Minimal marketing effort whatsoever beyond very low-height signs that could barely be read by passersby [they should’ve landed with a lightning strike in our local market, getting into local magazines, leveraging social, huge signs, etc.]
Mediocre product launched in a place with incredible pizza that is priced at the same level as their own [they are literally across the street from a local pizza empire with an amazing product, and about three miles away from one of the very best pizza spots in the entire Atlanta area]
Almost no attention paid to design: the interior is drab, the furniture is cheap. It’s obvious one person did this without any sense of humility in asking for help [no suggestion here]
Zero effort paid to welcome new customers — instead of being accommodating…offering samples… playing music… smiling / being generally friendly, the experience was the complete opposite:
Silent
Unfriendly service
Inflexible in accommodating customers
Slow
The saddest part of all this is that someone took a massive capital risk to launch this store. I don’t know the backstory of the business owners, but I have pretty unique insight into what it’s like to launch small, local businesses and I know that it usually comes from people taking immense personal risk (read: using their 401ks / savings) to get started. Assuming that is the case, this person launched a business that — by all accounts — will be lucky to survive for another six months (we’ve never seen more than 2 people in there, their reviews are wholly mediocre).
If only they had spent time thinking thoughtfully about how they would orient users to their product, they may have uncovered some of the above points without having to first burn tens of thousands of dollars and, most importantly, time before hitting an inflection point with customers. …An inflection point that may never come based on the above.
Yes, there’s something to be said for testing + learning and MVPs, but at the very very least your product needs to be: (1) easy to understand (checkmark on the above; pizza is easy to understand — LOVE pizza), (2) joyful, (3) supported by friendly…warm service, and (4) marketed to customers in a way that generates curiosity —> interest —> intent to try a product —> hopefully positive feedback that —> gets customers coming back over and over. Business 101 stuff.
Have a great weekend folks!