Humor me for a second. What is a landing page? At the core of things, it’s a website where your potential customer has arrived. You must have done something right to entice them there, so congratulate yourself on that part. (Maybe your marketing features a killer product pitch!) So what do you do with a potential customer once you have their attention? How do you advance from just having their attention to also having their money?
It’s actually very straightforward. Tell the visitor why they should give you their money — in exchange for something valuable — and then make it really easy for them to do that. I mean “really easy” in the most practical sense. A highly visible “BUY NOW” button is ideal, although it’s worth toning down the tackiness if you can. Require as little information from the customer as is practical. (Still, don’t disregard the lesson Candy Japan learned about credit card fraud.)
A landing page’s primary purpose is to present a certain action to the user and convince them to do it. Therefore the most essential element of any landing page is the button. A beautifully clickable button, bright pink or green or purple! That button might say “subscribe” or “add to cart” or even “pay $57.65” — the specific message is not the point. It’s all about the principle! Think Nike:
You should aim to give your website visitors the opportunity to JUST DO IT. If you don’t provide that option, even the most eager would-be users won’t be able to fork over their money. And remember, that’s your goal! Sweet, sweet scrilla $$$ ;)
A minimum viable landing page features a button for the user to click, and a reason for them to do it. It’s up to you to provide that reason.
Perhaps it’s a bit disingenuous for me to say that the button is the key thing, since it’s useless without a compelling pitch to the user. You really need both elements. (Sorry — most of the time, shortcuts are a distraction rather than a time-saver.) It’s so simple but so crucial and so much more difficult than it seems on the face of things: explain why the product you’re selling is worth paying for!
“People don’t buy software because of what it does, they buy it for the positive change it will make in [their] life.” — Patrick McKenzie
Here are some reasons for a user to buy something, in decreasing order of importance:
The product will help them make money.
The product will help them save money.
The product will eliminate their pain or frustration.
The product will cause them joy.
Ideally: all of the above. When you’re writing your landing page, you need to spell out how your product performs one of those four functions. If it doesn’t, you need to go back to the drawing board and keep working on what you’ve built.
Disclaimer: blatant liberal bias ahead + this post won’t make sense if you’re not familiar with Fiddler on the Roof.
Zero Mostel performing “Tradition” on Broadway (1964).
I grew up listening to songs from Fiddler on the Roof, so the music and lyrics are firmly ingrained in my brain. But I didn’t grok the political implications until after 1) watching the movie, 2) learning more about history, and 3) observing human power relations. Just as an example, my childhood interpretation of “To Life” didn’t incorporate longstanding Russian antisemitism. I had no concept of how radical it was for Russian soldiers and Jewish peasants to dance together.
In the very beginning of Fiddler on the Roof, Tevye addresses the audience:
“A fiddler on the roof. Sounds crazy, no? But in our little village of Anatevka, you might say every one of us is a fiddler on the roof, trying to scratch out a pleasant, simple tune without breaking his neck. It isn’t easy. You may ask, why do we stay up there if it’s so dangerous? We stay because Anatevka is our home. And how do we keep our balance? That I can tell you in one word: tradition.”
Doesn’t that sound pretty damn parallel to the segment of America without white-collar skills, the segment increasingly devastated by technological progress? From what I hear, the Rust Belt hasn’t picked up much since heavy industry and manufacturing emigrated.
Go ahead and imagine it. You can’t get a job, or maybe you can only get a crappy job. The government is full of elites whose priorities diverge from yours. (This is where the analogy to Fiddler on the Roof breaks down, since obviously the Russian czar was genuinely oppressive. Which is not to say that the American government isn’t genuinely oppressive, but it targets different demographics.)
Amidst this uncertainty, you cling to your traditions, because that’s all that remains from the days of relative prosperity. That includes intellectual traditions (also explored in Fiddler on the Roof). So any deviation from antiquated Christian biblical-ish morality is perceived as a threat.
Think about copywriting as a type of design. The goal of design is to make things usable and delightful, right? Words can jump-start the process. Effective copy explains the point of your product to people who haven’t tried it yet. Clear descriptions and calls to action can prompt readers to purchase your product, download it, set up an account, or [insert desired action here].
Thousands of people make products that they want other people to try. A small but meaningful subset offers something useful, something worth people’s time or money. My guess is that the majority of entrepreneurs who’ve built a useful product get stuck at that stage, because they don’t communicate what it does or how it will solve people’s problems. Product-market fit is meaningless if you can’t convince the market to pay attention!
(Throughout this article I’m going to use “product” as a blanket term for “thing or service that you’re selling or trying to convince people to use”. Fill in your own blank. “Landing page” should also be interpreted expansively — it might be your website, your App Store listing, or even a Google search result.)
Here are the three essential components of a new or unknown company’s landing page:
Concrete explanation of what your product or service is. Don’t be afraid to be literal.
Value proposition, AKA why potential users should be interested.
Call to action, ideally a form that can be filled out without navigating to another page.
That’s all you need! Hopefully every one of these three things is visible without having to scroll down. Put your short copy on top and push any longer copy below. Go ahead and write the longer copy if you think it’ll be helpful, but make sure it doesn’t supersede the crucial message on top. People should be able to look at your website for ten seconds and understand:
What your product is and how they would interact with it.
Why they might want to do so. What’s the benefit?
The next action they should take if they want to go forward.
In fact, setting up an effective landing page is a lot like designing a billboard. Mattermark does a great job:
“Join over 500 companies using Mattermark to discover high quality leads, prioritize prospects, and better track their customers. Get started today.” Plus, obvious search bar is obvious. The only thing I’d change is putting a suggestion in there, e.g. “Start your search with [example term]…” Screenshot taken 3/21/2016.Unfortunately, not everyone is executing as well as Mattermark. Many novice startups try to emulate the landing pages of highly successful companies — to a fault. Copying the winners seems like a common-sense move, but it misses the key difference between what a giant like Google and Facebook needs to communicate versus what an obscure startup needs to communicate.
Google.com can be a search engine with no onboarding because its use and purpose is common knowledge. Similarly, Facebook.com doesn’t need to explain its social network because most of their website visitors arrive with at least a rudimentary understanding of “friending” and the News Feed. Facebook could skip straight to the value proposition, although their logged-out landing page is actually pretty concrete:
Facebook’s landing page is nearly perfect, except for the emphasis on search, which I object to on dual grounds. Facebook’s search is garbage and it’s beside the point — their core value proposition is about connecting with people you know. Screenshot taken 3/21/2016.
I also want to give an example of someone who is doing it wrong, in my estimation: Refind, a service for saving links. I already pointed this out on Twitter, and to the company’s credit, their founder was very open to criticism. I’m not trying to pick on Refind, but their landing page is a great demonstration of damaging vagueness. Before I explain what the Refind service does, here’s their landing page:
“Discover the web. Refind is a community of founders, hackers, and designers who collect and share the best links on the web.” Screenshot taken 3/21/2016.
From their blurb, I can gather this: Refind is a link-related service and they’re targeting people who work in tech. But I have no idea what the product actually does! “Link-related” is a huge space. My first guess was “Reddit meets Instapaper” — nope, totally wrong. If you’re pitching people on a product, this is a bad reaction to get. Website visitors should not be making wild guesses about what your product is. Communicating that should be your top priority. Here’s how I would rewrite Refind’s blurb:
Use our browser extension to save valuable links, and we’ll insert them into your relevant Google searches later. Join a community of founders, hackers, [and so on].
Below that, a cleaned-up screenshot of what a Refind link looks like when pre-populated into Google results. For example, you could save the article that you’re reading right now and tag it “copywriting”, “product description”, etc. If you searched adjacent terms in the future, Refind would offer you this link again.
That’s it. The concepts are fairly simple. I’ll reiterate the list of top priorities for a new entrant’s landing page:
Concrete explanation of what your product or service is. Don’t be afraid to be literal.
Value proposition, AKA why potential users should be interested.
Call to action, ideally a form that can be filled out without navigating to another page.
My thesis here is that website visitors who don’t understand what you’re offering are far less likely to pull the trigger. Thus the emphasis on specificity, and connecting all the dots for people right away. Make it easy for them to make a decision. Again, this is how copywriting can be thought of as a type of design — it guides the user toward your desired mindset and shows them what they should do.
“There are thousands of hedge funds with all types of capital requirements, strategies, and performance metrics. It is a largely unregulated industry and lumping the most popular multi-billion dollar funds together and then making blanket claims about ‘hedge funds’ in general is entirely unfactual. […] To be fair, it is popular opinion and you aren’t doing anything that many other people already do. Even Buffet and Seides are doing it. But that is a common problem with long-term investors and wealth managers, they tend to ignore all other forms of investing/trading and market participation until it fits their narrative. Always keep in mind, these people are in the business of selling themselves.”
“Investing in a [hedge] fund is just an allocation of wealth that you did not want to be correlated with the rest of your broad market exposure. […] This obviously developed through the years as strategies became more complex however the name remained the same. Someone might invest in a global macro hedge fund to hedge their exposure to large cap domestics, etc. […] The word hedge in the name has nothing to do with the specific strategy of the funds assets and everything to do with the fact that the reason you allocate to one is to hedge your other asset allocation.”
“This makes no sense. Hedge funds don’t necessarily hedge at all; they might take any kind of strategy or risk. Seides does in fact argue hedge funds will beat the market, if his ten-year bet is any indication. And the conclusion claims the real benefit of investing in a hedge fund is you can pull your money out whenever you want… what? Most investors are bound by one or two-year lockup periods, plus redemption notice periods lasting weeks or months. How does that hedge liquidity risk better than an index fund?”
I want to push back on part of that — Seides doesn’t argue that all hedge funds will beat the market; he argues that the best hedge funds will beat the market. While that’s probably true, he apparently can’t pick ’em.
My savvy friend Gerald Leung also commented at length on Facebook. Here’s an excerpt:
“The purpose of hedge funds is to manage risk in investment. But that in itself is just a technique, one that could be used for the purpose of ‘beat the market’ (in regards to index funds, a growth purpose) or for the purpose of ‘make money consistently regardless of the market’ (a stable income purpose). And there’re hedge funds that do both of these as well as many other purposes. […] Likewise, funds, any kind of funds be they index funds, mutual funds, investment trusts, hedge funds, are intended to just make money. And that’s a very broad range of possibilities […] The main thing is that hedge funds have fewer restrictions and thus a wider range in whatever they decide their investment purpose to be, be it growth or income or any degree in between.”
Edit: I posted a follow-up with comments from people who disagreed with me. If you’re just curious about hedge funds, read that first.
NPR’s Planet Money podcast recently ran an episode about a bet between legendary investor Warren Buffett and Ted Seides of the hedge fund Protege Partners. In 2006, Buffett proposed a ten-year wager that an index fund would outperform any hedge fund. Seides took him up on this, and he’s lost pretty spectacularly. Currently, about two years before the deadline, the index fund is up ~65%, whereas the hedge fund is only up ~20%. In other words, the index fund has done three times as well as a bunch of smart people picking stocks. However, during the 2008 financial crisis, the index fund was down ~45% and the hedge fund was only down ~25%.
These two types of investments performed differently in different environments, demonstrating why both exist. An index fund indexes long-term economic growth. The point of a hedge fund is also right there in the name: it’s for hedging your bets. If you’re a person with a lot of money invested, it’s useful to have an account to pull from that’s rising (or at least less devastated) when the rest of the market is doing badly. That way you can access some of your funds without solidifying your losses — the rest of the money can be left to hang around and recover. If it turns out that you never need to access your invested money during a crash, having chosen a hedge fund will mean that your returns are lower than they conceivably could have been. That’s the tradeoff of mitigating liquidity risk.
Warren Buffet, chairman and CEO of Berkshire Hathaway, looking pleased. Photo via Getty Images.
“Initially, their aim was to produce a positive, or absolute, return in all markets by going short (betting on falling prices) as well as going long (relying on rising prices). For example, a hedge fund might bet on BP, an oil giant, by buying its shares, while shorting the market as a whole. The hedge provided by the short allows the firm to place a bet on a specific company while insulating the fund from the risk of taking a loss as a result of a broad decline in the market.”
The magazine goes on to point out that modern hedge funds do various other things too, but that’s the gist. Investopedia has a perfect one-liner: “Even though hedging strategies are employed to reduce risk, most consider the practices of hedge funds to carry increased risks.” Exactly. And hedge funds are too expensive to justify the opportunity cost — they don’t provide high enough returns relative to other options — unless you need to hedge liquidity risk. Warren Buffett wrote:
“A number of smart people are involved in running hedge funds. But to a great extent their efforts are self-neutralizing, and their IQ will not overcome the costs [read: fees] they impose on investors. Investors, on average and over time, will do better with a low-cost index fund than with a group of funds of funds.”
The key phrase there is “on average and over time”. If you need to extract money at a specific disadvantageous time, having invested in a hedge fund can be useful because of its ability to short the market.
“Having the flexibility to invest both long and short, hedge funds do not set out to beat the market. Rather, they seek to generate positive returns over time regardless of the market environment. […] For hedge funds, success can mean outperforming the market in lean times, while underperforming in the best of times. Through a cycle, nevertheless, top hedge fund managers have surpassed market returns net of all fees, while assuming less risk as well. […] There is a wide gap between the returns of the best hedge funds and the average ones. […] Funds of funds with the ability to sort the wheat from the chaff will earn returns that amply compensate for the extra layer of fees their clients pay.”
To summarize: Hedge funds try to make money all the time, regardless of the market’s overall state, instead of riding out the downturns. Really good money managers can outperform index funds on behalf of their clients — even after you skim their fees off the top. (Ironically, that’s potentially true of Warren Buffett but demonstrably false of Ted Seides, at least over a ten-year span.) Basically, Seides is saying that the best investors can do better than average, which is sort of a tautology. The problem is that finding the best investors is very difficult, and “best” is an uncommon attribute. Most hedge funds are useful for, well, hedging, not for growing wealth.
Seides’ cogent explanation of how hedge funds work, despite eliding the obvious objection, makes it really weird that he took the bet, and even weirder that he told Planet Money that he’d take it again. On the show, Seides asserted that Buffett just got lucky, which is frankly insane. Maybe this was an oddly angled PR move for Protege Partners? Or perhaps Seides really does think that he and his ilk are exceptional money managers. The results say no, but people cling to high-prestige identities. It still seems strange to me that he believes in his ability to pick winners when the evidence shows that he can’t.
Epistemic status: I’m roughly 65% confident of my analysis. But it’s very possible that I don’t understand the vagaries of finance well enough to write any of this. Not that I would ever let that stop me! ;)
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