Your homepage isn't the problem

The head of marketing at an AI startup came to me with a homepage problem.

The hero section saying "all-in-one continuous intelligence” was followed by a feature breakdown, social proof, with clear CTAs. The page was well-structured, professionally designed, and, unfortunately, not doing its job.

Most marketing leaders I talk to have been here before. They’ve overseen a rewrite that looked right and ticked the boxes, but didn't move the numbers. It’s tempting to blame this on the copy and design.

In this case, the copy wasn't good enough but it wasn’t really a copy problem.

The homepage was a symptom of the underlying problem

During kick off, I like to get a demo from the sales team. The rep for this AI startup said they were "all-in-one continuous intelligence” matching the homepage messaging, but I followed straight up asking how he’d describe the product to a friend at a BBQ. I then asked what words their users would use to describe them. Neither answer was "all-in-one continuous intelligence.”

Because I’m nosy, I kept asking questions: What do buyers already know when they join your calls? What questions do they ask in the first 10 mins of a demo? What problems do they say they’re trying to solve? What was the straw that broke the camel's back?

Turned out prospects arrived at sales calls with almost no understanding of what the product solved for them specifically. So the sales team spent the first chunk of the call doing orientation work that the website could have done.

“All-in-one continuous intelligence” sounds cool. But it’s all about the product and it’s written in the language of the people who built it.

This is what the curse of knowledge looks like in practice

The founding team knew the product in full. The CTO understood the architecture. The head of product understood the use cases. They all shared opinions about the website messaging, and what they contributed came bundled in with all the context they had.

The closer you are to the product, the harder it is to communicate its value to someone who's never heard of it.

The prospects who landed on that homepage didn't think in platforms. They thought in problems and jobs-to-be-done. They had very specific needs and workflows that the product was perfect for. But calling it “continuous intelligence” gave no hint that the product could actually help them.

Just rewriting the copy produces a better-looking version of the same problem

When I work with clients, the first thing I’m looking for is not whether the homepage is well-written, but what it was written from. A homepage built on internal assumptions will always drift toward describing the product. A homepage built on buyer research will describe the buyer's situation, showing them you understand their pains, triggers, and goals.

Changing the former into the latter isn’t as simple as changing the words on the page, though.

When the input changes, the output changes

The homepage is where the messaging gaps become visible but it isn’t the source. A prospect lands, reads a few lines, and leaves. A sales call starts cold, needing exposition from the sales team. 

When the foundation is right, prospects arrive on calls already knowing why they're there. Sales spends less time orientating and more time qualifying.

The foundation also makes your decisions more defensible internally. Someone questions your messaging choices? You point to the research, the exact quote in the exact transcript, the aggregation data. Your website messaging discussions move away from taste and assumptions to evidence.

With a foundation, the website becomes something you can point to that’s contributing to pipeline, and stops being a problem to fix.