I argued that people should read the contract. Then nobody read my landing page.
Launched Hardbook on Product Hunt last week. #5 for the day, 219 upvotes.
On launch day I got into a long thread with someone who hires freelancers. His argument: it doesn't matter what's in the contract, because nobody reads the contract. Put a field on the signing screen and it gets skimmed under commitment pressure, then argued about in week three anyway.
I pushed back. If the menu lists the onions and you order it anyway, that's on you.
Then three separate people in the same comment section asked me whether taking a deposit at signature was on the roadmap.
It's in the demo video. It's written on the page. It's the second thing the product does.
They weren't careless. They watched a video, read a listing, formed an impression, moved on — which is exactly what a client does with a contract. I was arguing about attention while losing the same argument, in public, in real time.
What I think now: being present is not the same as being received, and you don't get to be annoyed about the difference. Repeating it louder doesn't fix it. You get about one thing that's impossible to miss, and everything else is optional reading no matter how you format it.
So here's the ask, and it's the same test I just failed. Open hard-book.com, give it fifteen seconds, and tell me what you think it does. Not whether you like it. What it does.
That title is funny because it exposes the same problem most landing pages have.
People don't avoid reading. They avoid reading things that haven't earned their attention yet.
I've looked at a lot of SaaS pages where the copy is solid, but the first few lines don't give me a reason to keep going. Once someone mentally checks out, it doesn't matter how well the rest is written.
I'd love to know whether the biggest improvement came from changing the headline or from changing what people saw in those first few seconds. That's usually where the biggest surprises show up.
interesting