Just published on Illumination — "My 18 Tips to Improve Your Landing Page for More Conversions"
I have just got my article published on Illumination — "My 18 Tips to Improve Your Landing Page for More Conversions"
Written after manually roasting hundreds of real founder landing pages and running AI-powered audits.
These are real patterns from real pages — not theory.
Would love your feedback — anything missing from the list?
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The one most "landing page tips" listicles miss: the page should let a stranger guess your ICP in five seconds. Most conversion advice optimizes elements (hero, CTA, social proof) while the page still tries to speak to three different buyers at once. No amount of CTA tuning fixes an ICP-confused page.
The tell: pricing tiers that imply different customers ($9 solo + $99 agency on the same page = the page doesn't know who it's for), or testimonials from wildly different industries, or a hero that hedges ("for teams and individuals and enterprises").
Second one usually missing: hero describes what the product IS, not what the visitor GETS. "AI-powered collaboration platform" vs "ship your design review in a day instead of a week." Mechanism vs outcome. Most pages lead with mechanism because founders are proud of how it works.
Both are upstream of the tactical stuff — you can nail all 18 elements on a page that's still positioned for nobody specific.
Spot on. You just pinpointed why so many founders fixate on button colors or rewriting copy while their conversion rate stays flatlined. It’s exactly what you said: trying to fix an ICP-confused page with tactical tweaks is like rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.
That '5-second stranger test' is the ultimate brutal reality check. If a visitor has to squint and do mental gymnastics to figure out 'Is this actually built for me?', they’re already clicking the back button.
To add to your second point about Mechanism vs. Outcome—as a designer turned founder, I see this trap everywhere. Founders fall in love with their database schema or their AI architecture, so the hero section reads like a technical documentation preview. The visitor doesn't care how the engine works; they just want to know how fast the car goes.
Upstream clarity always wins. If the positioning is broken, the elements don't matter.
The "designer turned founder" angle is exactly why you see it clearly — designers are trained to make things look intentional, so a page positioned for nobody specific physically bothers you in a way it doesn't bother an engineer who's just proud the thing works.
One last layer, since you clearly think about this at the structural level: the ICP confusion and the mechanism-over-outcome problem usually share the same root cause. Both happen when the founder writes the page for themselves instead of the buyer. "Here's what I built and everyone it could help" is the founder's view. "Here's the one thing you get" is the buyer's. Fix the point of view and both problems tend to resolve at once.
Good thread to have surfaced this in.
Here's what I built" vs. "Here's the one thing you get." That is the absolute gold standard for landing page philosophy.
You're completely right—as an engineer or builder, you're so close to the metal that you want to scream about the cool database architecture or the slick AI loop. But the buyer is just sitting there thinking, "How does this make my life less painful today?"
Shifting the point of view from the founder's pride to the buyer's reality fixes almost every structural copy issue upstream. Really appreciate you adding this layer to the thread—it's a masterclass in one comment.