Wind back the block to Microsoft and Apple, and those guys were super scrappy, not an ounce of polish at the outset, yet they made their dent in the universe.
Now everybody's fronting like they're making a dent, but maybe it's just a slick template from WordPress again.
I started my business a year ago, and there is no "we". There's me and (at this point) enough clients for comfortable living. I went completely scrappy on my website (https://dahlke.tech). Felt rebellious in this day and age, but it doesn't seem to hurt.
I don't think that stuff matters in the beginning, clients see right through it from what I've heard. Some people get off on trying to look and feel like "a real company". I find there's joy in accepting that my company is not that, not yet, and putting all of my energy into getting there.
All the apps today look all the same, made on electron, single page landing page, same live chat/support, same style of charging, same flat design, same email campaign styles.
Everything is set up from a SaaS or tool to help deploy it so rapidly the polish and self character is almost non existent. Everything is rushed to the point they all look the same.
With NeuML (https://neuml.com), the website is a simple HTML page. On social media, I'm honest about what NeuML is, that I'm in my 40s with a family and not striving to be the next Steve Jobs. I've been able to build a fairly successful open source project (txtai 6K stars https://github.com/neuml/txtai) and a revenue positive company. For me, authenticity and being genuine is most important. I would say that being genuine has been way more of an asset than liability.
Now it's easy as hell to get something that looks polished, but that's all it is: visually polished.
If you talk about actual functionality, I don't think I've ever seen so much half-baked shit being sold as a product as in this day and age. Every startup I see is taking the "fake until you make it" a bit too literally. It's basically only the fake part.
I believe the bigger story here is that individuals are now capable of doing much more than before. I'm a product designer. And over a decade ago I started my career building Wordpress themes. I'm starting to redesign my personal website—and I'm not going to build a theme from scratch like I used to. I'm going to use the Wordpress block editor because it's just easier.
So expectations are higher and individuals are more capable than ever before.
The experience is really different now. It has become really easy to get the design and content 80% there with free tools. We’ve used goHugo with a template at first, it was faster than writing our HTML/CSS, but then discovered webflow and it was REALLY faster. Our non-technical co-founder could do really powerful customizations in there too without diverting efforts from the product. (Result here: https://www.hellodata.ai)
In essence, I don’t think people necessarily spend more time on their landing page now, but given that you can get 80% there by spending a weekend or two on your website, not doing it would almost feel sub-optimal.
We got a bug report once that „the website is not loading“.
Because the cost and complexity of implementing technology has improved orders of magnitude.
Also, people starting startups are flush with cash from the longest bill run in modern history, so tend to spend.
Why do people feel the need to launch with a big “feel” when their companies are still small?
Market incentives and startup advice all explains this phenomenon. Look big, be big. Look small, stay small.
Why do they all look the same?
I’ll take a #3 with fries and a milkshake. Can I get extra salt on the fries?
Truth is, the technology industry has spend the last 10-15 years optimizing the heck out of its technology platforms for delivering small innovations, and not whole new product categories.
There was a time where every site had to be hand coded and custome built, but now companies are really focused on just the small part of the tech that’s different, which is often a small component of the overall infrastructure.
The lower value stuff ends up just being more and more off the shelf and less custom, and therefore less custom looking.
The rise of SaaS in particular really incentivized everything looking the same, because the “same” was the way to get people started with the least amount of ramping.
The whole “show instant value” means “use familiar interfaces” et al.
My 2c.
But as a point of reference to maybe give insight to your question, the last time I joined a start up was 21 years ago. Here are some differences I have noted:
- Stunningly vast array of high quality, open source tools, platforms, and frameworks. Some of this stuff we had to pay for. A lot of it wasn’t very good or limited. Even more of it we had to invent ourselves.
- Cloud services. I, all by myself, can write some YAML and have an industry-standard, production-ready stack published to the Internet and ready for traffic in a couple of hours. Of course, I’ll pay out the nose if it hits big, but compare this to the extremely high barrier to entry when I spent weeks or months planning out infrastructure, procuring and deploying hardware, configuring endless firmware/software, tuning, testing, building out failover, backup strategies, and a billion other things, not to mention the actual software I want to deliver.
- Available talent. Extraordinary engineers and developers have always been hard to find, but good enough ones are fairly plentiful, especially now that you’re no longer limited to hiring or moving people local.
- Freely available knowledge. You younger folks shit constantly on Stack Overflow and the likes, but y’all don’t know how good you have it now. Blogs, vlogs, online and often open courses, SO/reddit, ChatGPT, etc. enable you to go from zero to hero in minutes, where I often had to spend days or weeks to figure something out for myself or to find some wizard in a dark cave to share their arcane knowledge.
- Established patterns. People have written voluminous books and blogs about precisely how to build large scale and high quality applications and systems, and as we discussed, a lot of the tools are readily available to you with little or no money involved.
It’s called commoditization. As for appearing to already have customers ready to go: I think the low barrier to entry allows people to more freely experiment with ideas closer to a potential customer, get it in front of them, and further build out from there fairly quickly and organically. That, however, is no guarantee it will be a sustainable business.
Well, the Personal PC did invent desktop publishing. Before that print brochures, what I guess you would take for polish, were expensive to produce and manufacture.
And the WWW largely replaced the desktop publishing world. Why print something you can’t change?
And today commerce on websites has clear solutions you can spin-up in turnkey fashion or DIY with Web frameworks.
You can call it polish, but I call it evolution. With all of these capabilities, why wouldn’t you do all of these things?
People make slick landing pages and try to get interest to decide if enough people sign up for a thing that doesn't exist yet, then "it may be worth building it"
But also potential customers are fed up of such tactics and want to actually try a product before signing up to another thing which may or may not ever exist.
So what happens in the end sometimes is that the developers may think "nobody signed up for it so I will pivot".
Would love to hear opinions and experiences about it though for success and failure.
The biggest problem i see is that the presentations are so vague/over-the-top/buzzword-heavy/Outlandish-claims/throwing-in-everything-and-the-kitchen-sink that i don't even understand what the product/company is supposed to do for me (as a prospective client). If you can't explain what exactly you do in specific terms, you are doomed to failure.
B2B means making sure our customers feel the weight of the value we deliver (why should they care), which means more emphasis on direct relationships beyond just our website. but we have learned considerably from our advisors and industry peers the right way to do a lot of things, meaning that we don't have to figure it out again. but there's always something new to figure out! the website should clarify the immediate value to the target customer profile, and pass the "surface" check so to speak.
part of this I think is also shaped by what those sly VCs are looking for, in that they have a higher confidence bar required to feel confident in the sales engine (underpinned by security/compliance, engineering, etc).
But Microsoft really was, too. There was some story about a shared tie that was worn to talk to the "shirts" at IBM in the early days. No idea about garters, which were also part of the IBM dress code at the time.
Not sure about Apple's early days, but there are certainly many stories of Jobs' "reality distortion field."
Now its easy to achieve, so it no longer serves as a signal of success. But if you still believe it signals quality as it once did, you will be confused.
In part it's users having higher expectations.
But in part it's also that no one takes you seriously unless you have a proper marketing website. And I don't mean customers but even providers or other companies for stuff like integrations. Everyone just ignores you.
That's not bad of course, it is how you win against competition or when the value you provide is a convenience or non ground breaking in other ways. The websites of the hard tech people are often less polished. They just come from a different DNA.
You don't see startups that are not like this because they receive less publicity and press.
Blandness is the common denominator, anything that is not fitting this schema doesn't fit to what the Web has become.
Edit: in part, the gatekeepers of the Web require this standardisation for their algorithms to handle human content.
If the website looks poorly executed, customers will walk. Think about it, if the site has zero reputation and looks really janky, would you put your credit card in?
Your average consumer will say no.
They also share the same stock photo of the smiling woman in red.
It's borderline fraud.
It's just easier to do nice web design now.
Instead we put the product front and center — and people seem to like it. After some tweaks, our conversion from unique user to “Loop Creation” is now at 40%(!)
It lacks polish, but we don’t put up a facade: https://magicloops.dev
Reasonable design and interactivity have become the norm with no-code tools, templates and frameworks taking a lot of pressure of those who may have struggled with design if starting from scratch.
This proliferation also increases the standards of users who expect a more polished feel of a product (even if it's simple and barely works with a dumpster fire backend). Notable mention of Craigslist though which is only able to buck the trend due to lock-in. People using your product is the biggest signal that you are on to something but if potential users bounce because of your lacking UI/UX you may be less likely to pursue the development of your product.
Of course this isn't everyone and some of us are more than happy to put up with a less-polished UI in favor of the product itself (I'm looking at you *nix users). 'Show HN' states 'A Show HN needn't be complicated or look slick. The community is comfortable with work that's at an early stage.' and I feel that may be a portion of the users here but chances are higher that even those of us who are willing to use early stage products would prefer cleaner UIs.
Personally though - as someone who likes to launch products - it can be quite disheartening. On one hand I don't want to spend too much time on design however I fear that if I don't it will hinder me. My approach is to apply the 80:20 rule. Educate myself a little in design and use pre-made stuff as much as I can.
And companies look for more experienced/bigger companies rather than startup-level ones, which have less trust, when it comes to cooperation/business.