Hey there,
I've worked on this for a few months now and so I'm a bit blind to how a new user would see my landing page. I'd appreciate any feedback and especially topics that are confusing!
Here's the landing page 👉 https://lastcast.fm
Does it look friendly, inviting or too technical? What do you think would be the main benefit of signing up? I have the feeling that it might be a bit too text heavy or too dark?
Super grateful for any feedback! Thanks!
it's confusing...
it scattered with lists of features, but not a sold solid benefit of why it would change my life or at least one thing I do..
Good feedback, thanks! It looks like I have to condense it down to a small number of important features for the landing page.
Hi Philipp,
I think your product is interesting and your webpage is not confusing (if you invest time).
But that's something that shouldn't happen to much (that your reader has to concentrate). Try to communicate your points more clearly. Most important: add space, add graphics. The human mind is regarding to some points quite simple. If something looks complex, most people just turn of, no matter if they would actually like what they could see or not. Try to easily set the focus of the user to the things you want and make it as light as possible. So your users can grasp on what you want to tell them with one simple look. After you got the attention you can start to go deeper. But still keeping it simple remains the most important point in my opinion.
(One minor other point, I think the gray immage on top might not open up a happy impression, but that's probably a personal impression).
I hope I could help you :)
Don't worry you will get there, this is a continous process :)
Sometimes it helps me to have comparisons, so here is my webpage from getMage.io. Feel free to return any feedback as well!
Hey, this is very insightful. Thanks for that! It's always tricky to find the balance between "see how many things this can do" and still being lightweight and inviting. I'll probably just try to build a second one from scratch and see what I can do.
Good to know you are seeing the image the same way, I have to find something that makes it a bit happier.
Thanks again for writing all this up!
I think I understand, but I agree with the others that it is confusing. You propose too many diverging things with words that connect to different audiences. Track and Follow your podcasts is something any podcast app does. As soon as a new episode is out, Sticher lets me know, so that sentence makes no specific sense.
From the text, you have a very long sentence, but only the last part is useful:
And the wording can be made more compelling, for example:
That is weird
Or when you say:
We don't know why you would want to do so, but with our app you can
You mention last.fm and trakt.tv too much. Are you actually targetting ONLY users of those services? I don't think so... If I don't know what last.fm or trakt.tv are, I feel left out immediately, but that is up to you to judge.
I don't know what are you targetting, but a social network for podcast listeners would be awesome. Strava let's me find where my friends run, why not letting me know what are they listening to? Or to discover new things based on their recommendation, etc. I would be an early adopter of such a platform, but I use Stitcher...
I just played around a bit and came up with this: https://i.imgur.com/foLSEg7.png
My main objective was to simplify the wording, give text a bit more room to breathe and not focusing too much on "features" but which problem it could solve.
Hey Aquiles! Thanks for all the wording suggestions, I definitely have to work on the copy it seems. Good point about last.fm / trakt.tv - originally that was my inspiration and the whole reason we built this but I think you are totally right that it's maybe not the main point that users have to know. I think I'd still mention it because it's a bit the audience we target but maybe it doesn't have to be featured that highly on the landing page.
I'm a bit conflicted with branding it as a "social network" (even though it kinda is) as these always seem a bit un-inviting if you don't have a lot of friends that listen to podcasts or it's very popular and known already. I have to think about that a bit.
This was really helpful and I'll address these issues in my redesign.
Thanks again for taking the time!
Sadly social networks have bad reputation, I agree with you on that. But you can always use it as a discovery feature (i.e. Follow people's recommendations), and easilly recommende episodes to others
Hi, I just took a quick look on your website.
I think it would be better if you move the "Reasons why you might want to use Lastcast" to the top so that it would be clear to the user how your product benefits them.
Thank you! After watching orliesaurus's video I also noticed how small the text actually is on a big screen so I have to increase that too to make it clearer.
My 2 cents: I listen to a few podcast episodes every week and my first thought was - how would lastcast track my podcasts differently than the google podcasts app that I use. Also, I think there is too much text on the landing page, you could try deleting some of it and/or highlighting some key phrases rather than having several lines of uninterrupted text.
Worked on that now, I cut down on a lot of text and added more images to hopefully make it a bit clearer. This is just a first draft so font sizes / style alignments are maybe not perfect yet: https://i.imgur.com/foLSEg7.png
Looks better! You can make the grey text above the Join Now button even smaller.
Thanks! These are good points, I'll reduce the text on the landing page. This was also raised in the other feedback I saw so it looks like it's an issue.
hi @dewey I took a glance at your landing page while I was doing my weekly landing page feedback live-stream today, I tried to give you some honest feedback and I've highlighted a few areas of improvement. I also took some time to do the timestamps in the video description, so it's easy to find! Check it out: https://youtu.be/SxyVsA58c34
I watched your video a bunch of times and tried to narrow down what makes it not feel like a usual landing page. I refactored that a bit and now it has the "Z" navigation you mentioned. I think it looks cleaner that way.
Do you think it looks less "unusual" now?
New draft: https://i.imgur.com/foLSEg7.png
so it's like "Friend-driven podcast discovery?" I see, mmmh I get it but what makes this more powerful than say, spotify's recommendation engine? I think you need to just mention how your product is game-changing
This is amazing, thanks! You raise a lot of valid points, I'm going back to the drawing board and see how I can restructure it.
I'm not sure what's the benefit if I "automatically" ( don't know what the ever means) track my podcasts. Am I going to get better podcast suggestions if I do that? I'm not sure what's the immediate benefit.
Thanks for the feedback!
The main benefit that I see is that I see for myself are:
I think the first two points are not that well covered by the landing page.
stop listing features, give me a single story
"Discover the best things your friends would recommend to you"
or something like
just a single message
you know the stories of I came for X but stayed for Y
Just give me X
Noted, thanks!
Hey I've built article tracker for the past almost 2 years so I know where you are coming from with lastfm. My experience has been this: tracking is a very very hard sell especially for consumer app.
In business case, people track because they make decisions based on the data (I imagine you come from the engineer bg).
Fitbit tracking works because people want to exercise better (be proud of their exercise). In my case, some people want to read more articles especially foreign people wanting to study English (tho it was a lot more niche than I initially thought).
As zerotousers mentioned, recomendation is the first thing people would say about tracking. And Lastfm's primary value prop is discovering music and check out your friends listen. They were unfortunately taken down by Spotify who on top of social and suggestion, they offer better place for the actual listening. So I think it does depend on what's available in the market at this time instead of drawing analogy from one particular apl. You'd likely compete with other social review sites like breaker I imagine if going with discovery.
In a nutshell, I think you have a few value props for users to focus on:
Anyway, that's been my learning so far. I hope it clarified some of your direction!
PS: I recently started on a new project (super early): AI writing assistant tool. I much appreciate your feedback!
Here's a question for you that's going to sound a little random but might be helpful to hone your product. I see that it's about tracking podcast listening habits. I have a use case for something related to that... but here's the question:
In what situation do you see someone struggling for which this product will come at a good time? What will be annoying enough or irritating enough that will cause someone to go on the lookout for this product? Can you vividly describe the "when"?
Hey Pascal, that's a good question. I was thinking about it and was reading more about it on your site. Very useful resource, thanks for sharing!
The primary goal of the site was to scratch my own itch which was "Someone is searching for a site where they can do what they already do for my music and tv shows: Track what they watch/listen". That of course is a pretty niche target group but it exists as last.fm/trakt.tv show that already exist for a very long time in internet years.
Another situation would be: "You just finished a podcast you liked that a friend suggested and now you are looking for the next one". In that case Lastcast can help you do just that as you can see what your friends liked.
So I'll recap the situation in this manner, correct me if I'm off:
Something like that?
To know whether something will resonate with people is to know whether there's a situation where a hard enough struggle is being felt -- enough momentum has been created by the struggle to carry the visitor through to switch away from the old "enough is enough" and toward the new reality they aspire to (learn smarter, learn fully, learn completely, learn broadly). No hard struggle, not enough momentum to switch.