Stop Looking at Websites From Bigger Companies for Reference, It Doesn't Work! (+ What to do instead)

The Basics

Looking at websites from bigger companies is EXTREMELY biased, be careful!

In this article, I will teach you why you shouldn’t look at most sites from bigger companies, what your website should include and how to find great reference for your website.

You see, these companies are more well-known in their niche, they don’t need to explain everything perfectly and use their website to get all the leads which is the exact opposite of what you might need right now.

Here are a few reasons why “bad” websites still work with bigger companies:

• People might already understand who they are and what they do. That wasn’t the websites job, it came from YEARS of marketing.
• They have more resources and they don’t depend on their website to capture most of the leads.
• They have the means to keep an expensive funnel using paid traffic, even if it converts at 0.0001%. They can afford to keep failing and experimenting.
• They might have a lot of salespeople closing the deals that website can’t do by itself.
• Even if they do a lot of testing they test for their circumstances, not yours!

Unfortunately, if you are not a big company or have a ton of funding on your belt, none of this will work :(

Stay tuned, I’ll teach you how to do this later on in this article! OH...and a Bonus with a free video course to help you get a great Landing page in 5 steps (even without design skills).

Websites you might like but are useless to you

Although some of these are very well designed, they are not very clear about how the product works and addressing objections potential customers might have. 

You REALLY shouldn't follow their example.

Slack

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This hardly explains anything about what Slack is, how it works and how valuable it is, in fact, this is nearly their entire landing page if you add some logos below it.

They can get away with this because a ton of people already know Slack and this page just serves as a simple signup form.

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Optimizely

What?

Look at that headline? Did you understand anything of what they do!?

If you do this you will get 90+ % bounce rate and most people won't bother to continue browsing below this. Your chance to convert a customer is gone...

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Jira Software (from Atlassian) 

Don't use "We are the #1 at X thing", especially at the beginning. 

I don't believe anyone can pull this headline off, it just sounds like bs to the more serious potential customers!

Look at all this real estate waisted not explaining the value of their solution and defining the right expectations, it's one of the biggest mistakes you can make.

However, you should mention throughout the page if you won any awards (or something similar) since it's other people saying your product is #1, not yourself (aka real social proof).

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✅ What your Website needs to do at an early stage

• Explain what is, how it works, how it can be valuable and how they try/buy it right now.
• Help you improve Product-Market-Fit by letting you test markets or new plans/services much faster and more effectively. You don’t have to worry about the problem being from the market-fit or from the website that’s not converting properly which can save you a few months of time and runway.
• Be able to explain your product enough for potential customers to move to the next step, for example, a sales call, a signup, a free trial or any other form of lead you might want…
• Answer the objections of potential customers
• Replicate the buying experience of your first customers in a scalable way.
• Enable you to focus on the product and on marketing as the website will get you the lead if you drive traffic for you.

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How to Find Great Reference for Your Website

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Landing page inspiration/reference

I recommend lapa.ninja since it has a bunch of categories that you can select online the other unsorted websites (or with useless filters).

How to do it right:

• Only use as reference from companies that really need their website to get sales.
• Try to search for pages in the same category of your landing page since there is a chance you share similar objections.

💪 Pro-tip:

Look at websites from companies you don’t know and see if you can understand what they do. If it was clear to you try to figure out why and what part made you understand the value they were offering and then implement it in your own website.

Use the Wayback machine

Slack in Aug, 2014

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See! Might not look nearly as clean or pretty but back then they made an effort to explain how Slack can increase a team's productivity.

Let’s talk about slack again, take a look at this more detailed explanation (images above) on how slack works and how it’s better, unlike nowadays, they couldn’t get away without it!

How to do it right:

• Figure out when they launched and see how they were promoting it.
• Notice the differences between when they launched and when they started to get some traction. If you search for a well-known company you could even search for articles to get more context on what was happening at the time.

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Look at the best launches on Product Hunt

Let's look at Privacy.com for example...

3,134 Upvotes! To give upvotes people need to understand what it does.

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As expected the website is clear on what it does and why it's useful even at the beginning of the page!

If people upvote it is because they understood the value they were offering and were extra excited about promoting it.

Warning: Ignore launches from big companies or big audiences they can simply use that to get upvotes. The “New and Upcoming” type of thing is the ideal reference for you!

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