Could you please brutally review my product website?

During YC, we relentlessly practice our “two-sentence description.” It’s roughly of the form “ACME makes soup taste better. We do it with a seasoning that chefs add to their broth.” That is, what you do, and how you do it (or an example.)

Yours might be “Perfai makes APIs faster. We do this by ?” The “how” is unclear.

Are the case studies from actual users? Why all of the disclaimers?

Your site mostly makes the claim that “slow APIs lead to churn.” If that is true, it is not obvious to me. I almost wonder if the copy was written by AI, as it uses plausible-sounding verbiage but is unconvincing.

I believe the real problem is that you haven’t talked to enough potential users about their API problems. If you were able to quote their pain points in their own words, I think the copy would more convincingly demonstrate there is a problem and how your solution fixes it.

OP you're getting a lot of criticism in this thread, and 100% going through it will be the best thing you have ever done. People are doing God's work here and you are to be applauded as well for wanting this honesty in the first place. Good luck.

- A very slow website is trying to sell me a product about optimizing my product. That immediately kills my first impression

- More specifically, the blocks takes ages to display after scrolling on mobile

- There is a horizontal scrollbar on mobile, which is annoying (Kiwi Browser)

- You should drop the fancy JS and make plain HTML pages, or it's going to hurt the performance and SEO.

- After quickly reading the webpage, I do not understand what this it about. How can a third party product make my hand crafted 10-endpoints REST API faster? Is it some kind of CDN? Or analysis tool to help navigate big APIs? (in the second case, you should clearly sell it as such, because it does not actually make anything faster by itself)

Kill the "appear on scroll" imo.

What it results in is scrolling, seeing a completely blank screen for a second or so while scrolling happens and updates are deferred, and then showing something. It could have been there all along.

On mobile the page is too wide so you can accidentally scroll right to an area with no content pretty easily.

Also on mobile the button below "Get a free assessment done by our expert performance engineering team." only shows the letter "S"

This is on iPhone 14 pro

Too many animations. Probably loading in a lot of custom js. Honestly keeping it simple is probably the best bet it already looks pretty generic for these kinds of sites the animations don't really help. Often the goal for those is subtle which is why people spend a lot of money on ux designers to do just that. Overall it's fine but some stuff should probably just be removed. Your site isn't really accessible but that shouldn't matter for your userbase.

The website is slow to do an initial load and when scrolling it takes longer than a second to load the next section. The website seems mostly static, (except for the PerfAI terminal) it shouldn't be this slow.

It looks like you're using Webflow, not sure if it's possible to make it faster.

Lighthouse on my MacBook Pro 13-inch 2020 i7:

https://imgur.com/a/dSPmea2

It is similar to a presentation deck, with plenty of empty whitespace, tiny low-contrast text, some Pioneer plaque-like graphics, and in the end the punchline is "Request a demo".

Just set a price, don't ask people to request a demo because they won't.

Some what I would suggest is:

- More contrast between the text and the background

- Less text

- Put the most meaningful text earlier

- Create "plans": basic, pro, enterprise. Keep the "Contact sales" button only for enterprise.

The first thing is a prompt to enter a Swagger definition url. Without context, how do I know if I am singing up for DDoS as a service or something legit? It doesn't tell what it does but prompts me...

The page assumes that the reader knows what it's about. That I care about putting a swagger url, and get... something as the output. Tell me what's the goal, what's the value of the output.

My advice is to take HN suggestions with a serious grain of salt.

Why do I care that it is powered by AI? The copy seems smarmy and scammy.

If you built something that will make APIs with an OpenAPI spec faster, can you say that in a way that doesn't seem like you are selling snake oil?

I'd say you need to start again. Make sure your content is solid first, then your layout, then your color scheme.

Only play around with JS and animating once you're sure it's absolutely needed. Most animated reveals are wishful attempts to look high tech that just irritate the visitor. If you're in doubt, just follow how a major company like stripe.com does it.

The copy needs an edit pass. Remove useless words and condense sentences.

What is the AI doing here?

Can I use it if I don’t have “swagger”? I don’t have swagger - I only have Typescript.

Who is providing the “AI”? Is this an LLM thing or like, your own deep learning model? Hard to say I want to give API access to random vendor.

Step 1 is “call us” - I would never bite.

* As others were saying “no-code” implies non-tech. I’d focus on “continuous” or “api performance testing on autopilot”.

* Marketing websites need to be mobile first. Your first impression will be on a phone even if the product isn’t usable there. The demo should be a one click on an example domain and you might even fake the formatting.

* Put the case study logos on the home page for social proof

* A much simpler and more useful solution to API testing is to scrape or record latency data from prod. With that data I don’t have to worry about authentication or making sure the automated tests are hitting a realistic account setup. Those are the hardest parts of doing synthetic performance testing and you expect the customer to do those for you.

> Neglecting API performance results in poor UX and high customer churn. Deliver high-performance APIs to stop churn and boost 3x retention.

Remove the first sentence.

Also the viewport width is broken on mobile (chrome on android). I shouldn't be able to zoom in and out on mobile either.

Docs on the viewport meta tag: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Viewport_m...

These are the most obvious things I noticed within 5 seconds and I stopped after this.

Sure. I have Javascript blocked by default and all I see is a blank screen and the title in the browser bar "PerfAi".

So you are communicating exactly nothing to me about who you are and what you do.

You don't care enough to even throw an alt-text

I've been known to unblock things I find interesting, but you're not even giving me a hint of motivation to do so.

Hey!

I like that it's relatively clean. No huge images or animations. It has a bit of Google feel to it with focus on central text field and limited distraction.

Being that simple, it should be blazingly fast. It appears it uses code to... make things slower? That's going to divide audience, to those who like cute effects and those who just want to get to it. Who's more likely to be your buyers?

It was not at ALL obvious to me that I should scroll down. Again, it evokes google, there's a search box, and four sections / buttons / numbers at bottom that seemed to indicate end of content/page.

Your pricing/faq structure is confusing to me. Pricing goes to FAQ, FAQ goes to pricing#FAQ. There's no pricing either way :D

I don't know if there's enough description right up front, or an easy enough link, to understand what it does / what's your sales pitch / why this is worth the time. But I like that you can try it right away with minimal hassle. Goes back to my first point though - if your audience are no-nonsense techies, reconsider the value of intentionally slowing / fading things in :)

FAQ letters are either somewhat low contrast/hard to read if cursor is not on them, or very hard / extremely low contrast to read if cursor is on them (which it typically would be if you click on it). Likely to be another pet peeve of the HN audience :)

I feel it is not expected behaviour for "Products" button to not do anything, only open your choice of specific product lines. My expectation would be that I can hit "Products" root button to see overview and comparison of your products. I don't want to chase them one by one - I don't have the information to make informed choice yet. Edit: Clicking those two links just scrolls me on the front page which is somewhat unexpected behaviour (it's structured to make me feel it's a separate page), but more importantly it's strangely slow. It pauses then scrolls then fades in. It feels like the automatic gearbox in older cars - nothing, nothing, oh wait did you press gas? Hmm should I do something about it? Oh! Yes! I'm a transmission! I should downshift! Yes! Here you go! ==* :->

With that in mind, the more I use the site, the more little delays accumulate. I feel like in 1998, netscape could instantly go to anchor inside the page. I feel like in 2023 on my Fibre gigabit, I'd expect clicking a button that does the same thing should be... like, faster than instantaneous :->

That being said, I cannot evaluate how good your product is - I did not interpret that to be the gist of your question, just the website itself.

> According to Google

For the first three words of the first sentence on the page, this feels unnecessarily defensive. It diminishes what's being said as a fact by making the reader work out if they trust Google in this area. It almost sounds like you don't believe it.

If API performance is important, you should state it, not pass along a rumour. If the work done to show that is someone else's, cite that in a footer.

The cards look pretty rough at certain widths https://ibb.co/CmWWdj9 (946x8690 in this example) and you have a horizontal scrollbar at all viewport widths below 768px https://ibb.co/dj4hB4K

1. Completely broken with javascript disabled. Which is to say, completely broken.

2. When permitted javascript, it appears to use it to... intentionally fill in page contents slowly? It's hard to fully convey how obnoxious this is.

3. I assume you're aware that the "Pricing" link at the top goes to a page that contains no information whatsoever about pricing?

4. For the FAQ page (which is somehow also the pricing page, despite the lack of pricing?), having to manually open and close each question is cumbersome and annoying. Or rather, it would be only cumbersome and annoying, except that you have once again introduced the "intentionally slow down displaying content" javascript, which makes it outright infuriating.

5. Clicking on "Products" does absolutely nothing. Hovering over "Products" brings up some obnoxious little micro-lightbox bullshit.

6. Clicking on either of the items in the obnoxious little micro-lightbox bullshit takes you to... the front page of the site. The entire site appears to only have two pages, so why are you insistent on pretending that it's four?

7. The fact that one of the first problems that this site with wretched UX claims to be able to solve is "Poor UX" is some absolutely top shelf comedy. My compliments to whichever troll managed to sneak that joke in.

Mobile site scrolling horizontally within the viewport, ie; scrolling is broken for mobile break-points.

The second section, just below the fold, was clearly designed by an incompetent idiot, as it renders badly on mobile. Same goes for section entitled How To Get Started. Comparison is misspelled. Section renders badly. Fire your designer, preferably into the sun.

1. Get rid of the JavaScript. All of it. If you need JavaScript, you're doing it wrong.

2. Information density is way too low, the entire page could fit on one 1080p monitor.

3. I don't know what I'm even looking at immediately after opening the page. What is the information you want to convey? Put it front and center on the page, make it the first thing I see. That interactive text box is useless to me, because I don't know what anything is.

4. Gray text on white background is an insult to peoples' eyes. Use black text on white for maximum readability. You're trying to convey information here, this is not an art piece for your high school project.

It doesn't load at all on Android Chrome. Just completely empty scrollable page. When refreshing, something blinks for 1 frame and then it goes back to blank page. Only after disabling RethinkDNS adblocker it loads.

Can you please answer these questions: What am I selling and how is it helpful?

I scrolled on mobile and took 3 seconds to appear. Awful ;)

It takes forever to load. I'd scroll down and think I'm at the end only for something else to pop up like 5 seconds later

The screenshots are tiny and show nothing of use. You could either remove them, or give them more space. Lose the window chrome/buttons, Mac screenshots are wasteful; just focus on the content.

Entering a long URL is cut off by the blue button.

Ensure that 169.254.x.x type URLs aren't being processed by your checker first.

Overall I think I like it, it does explain well what it does.

The FAQ section is seriously lacking color contrast. If you want people to read paragraphs of text, make it actually readable.

CTA is below the fold on mobile. Company name appears twice in large font on mobile. Hamburger menu animation time is too slow.

Two questions

1) Why should I care?

2) What are you going to do for *me*?

Features < Benefits

I just wanted to thank everyone again for your valuable feedback. We have addressed several issues, but I believe the most critical ones are the mobile fixes and improving the load time.

I personally upvoted, commented, and thanked each of you individually for your feedback.

To everyone - Thank you so much!

No-coding means it's focusing on not techies, then interface is 90's hacking terminal.

It's not consistent

My only comment is you have a lot of courage. This is admiral. I am terrified of doing the same.

The website doesn't respect prefersReducedMotion, making it extremely annoying to navigate.

This is my attempt at your tag-line/call to action:

API Performance Monitoring: Detect high-latency APIs.

Speed Matters

Two small remarks:

  * In the pricing page, you might want to remove the `.00`, to make prices easier to read
  * In the demo, there is a typo in the 'console' output: `defnitions`.

For me on mobile it was scrolled halfway down the page when it loaded. Agree with the other commenters that the slow-loading content is really annoying and caused me to lose interest very quickly.

1. Ai based load performance testing.

2. Slow websites stop users from using the system.

The tiny screenshots in the bottom of the page should be right at the top and bigger showing what this product can provide. Let your product do the selling.