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28 Comments

Roast my landing page (I'll roast yours in return)

We're experimenting with a new landing page and we would love to have some feedback from real people. Please be honest and don't worry about my feelings :)

I can review your page in return if you would like.

https://stage.so/

  1. 3

    Not a page roast but about your pricing - I would NOT give people 3 projects for free - I would give one - free should just be a test drive for this app because it's used briefly for the most part. I honestly wouldn't give it away for free at all - it's too immediately useful.

    1. 1

      Hey,
      Thanks for your advice. Extremely useful.
      I would be happy if you try Stage and share your honest feedback with us.
      Cheers!

  2. 2

    Hello! Here are some of my thoughts:

    1. There are some prominent grammatical errors in your text, some sentences seem incomplete and some spellings are wrong. You can run it through tools like Grammarly and get it sorted out.

    2. The page dimensions are not adapting well to my device. The buttons on the top left and right are getting cut, so you can correct that. Haven't tested the mobile site but you can have a look at that in detail as well.

    3. I feel you can add some warm tone colours to your page to make it more appealing visually.

    4. Some of the text feels repetitive. You can probably word it better to make it sound better. Writesonic can be a good tool to use for that.

    I enjoyed the visuals you've put up though, and your product looks interesting!

    I'm working on Cove Identity (https://coveidentity.com/), would love to hear your thoughts on our landing page. Thanks :)

    1. 1

      Thanks for your feedback! We'll definitely devote more time to the wording.

      I like the whole appearance, the whole wording looks promising and I definitely have the feeling that your app is secure.

      I really liked the set of features that you pointed out in every block, it catches the eye and explains the main benefits (Decentralised Storage, 256 Bit AES E2EE)

      I was not fond of the visuals this much, the one within the first screen is in a low resolution, and it's tough to check out the app's interface.
      ORGANISE gifs also don't illustrate much, I didn't understand the block, so I had to read the text, same with the SECURE. I did like SHARE illustration though, very nice and clear.

      Google play total ratings equals 4.1. I think it's not the number that you could be proud of and show it on the landing page (4.5+ plus usually indicates that the app is good). For me, it was a negative sight that app has this kind of total rating. You may consider working on your reviews or hiding total rating (single reviews from real people works great for me)

      1. 1

        Thanks! That helps. Appreciate your feedback :)

  3. 2

    It starts off saying:

    "Stage makes creation process easy for everyone..."

    This is prominent - first 3 words - and, to me as a lifelong American/native English speaker, it's noticeably clunky.

    I don't think it really works and I notice it right off the bat - it's almost my 1st impression.

    Change to "Stage makes the creation process easy..." (best) or "Stage makes creation processes easy..." (awkward, but better).

    1. 2

      I would even argue that that whole sentence is redundant, since it is basically a repetition of the headline and doesnt offer any new information. I would suggest simply removing it. The next sentence ‘visualize like a pro...’ is much better; value based and straight to the core. Removing the first sentence also makes the paragraph easier to scan for the reader. Now the paragraph just has slightly too many words to read in one glance.

      1. 2

        That's really interesting, thanks.

        We also thought about reaching out to our audience and replacing 'everyone' with 'non-designers'. Do you think this sentence would sound better?

        Stage simplifies the creation process for non-designers

        1. 2

          Yeah, I think that's a good one! More concrete and specific. I think it's a good line. It definitely deserves a place on your landing page somewhere. Maybe you'd like to specify 'creation process' a bit more when you use out of the context of your hero section, as it could mean a lot of different things.

          Another suggestion might be to have the text elements in your hero align to the left, so you can make place for the great animation of your product on the right. In that way, the user can see the words 'mobile prototyping', 'non-designer', 'simple' + a visualisation of what that actually means in one single glance. I think that would help people stay interested, because I think the animation is a real asset on your page. It looks very cool!

          Also: Stage.so looks like a very cool product, very nice work!

          1. 2

            Big thanks, we really appreciate your feedback! ❤️

            1. 2

              No problem! Looking forward to following your proces!

    2. 1

      Hey Julian, thanks for your feedback, it is very helpful for us non-American founders to receive such feedback!

  4. 2

    Great idea, and looks like great execution. I'll try this out and will probably recommend it to a lot of people. I wonder about the pricing model and who your target audience is?

    For the landing page, I would consider the following:

    • Add more whitespace

    • try a friendlier font

    • using a white, lighter, or warmer background

    • for the messaging, try to make it a bit more aspirational and focused on the benefits. Think about the profile of the person who will sign up for your program and speak to them. Again this comes down to asking -- who is your target user?

    I would also think about having a set of example app prototypes that the user can click through on the front page below the fold to show them what is possible with the app.

    ---

    Here's a quick mockup of what I'd test above the fold :

    https://imgur.com/a/eTJmRaS

    ---

    If you're interested in more feedback on the product itself, i'd be happy to send some over once I've tried it out.

    Cheers and good luck

    1. 2

      Wow that design looks pretty great. One thing I remember being recommended (missing both in the original and the update) is that it's helpful to make your copy -- even the ones in the hero -- super concrete instead of using abstract imagery with words.

      1. 3

        Yup, this is something you could/should test for sure.

        Whenever I've tested landing page copy:

        [1] emotionally charged
        [2] benefits-focused
        [3] short

        copy is generally best.

        You also want to consider that if everyone is doing things a certain way, that becomes less effective over time -- so hard and fast rules aren't hard and fast for very long (marketing and advertising are infinite games).

        With copywriting, we want to hit some emotional triggers early on for your target users. The persona I'm targeting here is someone who has an app idea but doesn't know how to take the next step. They've had their idea for a while and are stuck.

        When a new user is coming to your landing page, you want them to know right away what they'll be able to accomplish -- what is the major benefit to them? And since landing pages are a numbers game, your header should answer the question: what is the biggest benefit to the biggest number of (paying) users?

        I don't know if this is the right angle to take for this product; it's just one I think is worth testing (and surely could be improved).

      2. 1

        Hey, thanks for the feedback, didn't understand it quite well though. What do you mean is to put some more real-world examples of the app prototypes that could build with our platform instead of showing gray screens in these apps?

        1. 2

          No I think the images are great I meant more the word choice in your copy. Instead of something like "mobile prototyping made simple" it might be helpful to deliver the message in the form of outcomes.

          You include that in the sub-header text with "get a functional app prototype faster than ever" but I think that messaging could be delivered some way in the header. And then the sub-header explains how you'd do that.

    2. 1

      Hey @sobbuh, much helpful feedback, thanks a lot! We're concerned about the right messages to our target users (product roles, founders, other non-designers). If you have any suggestions on how to make it more straightforward, please let us know.

      We'd be super excited to hear honest feedback about the app, so please be free to express your feelings about Stage!

      1. 1

        Who are your main users now? What is most important to those users?

        That's what I would figure out now and use that to influence your landing page copy and your pricing strategy.

        1. 1

          Also, you said that you wonder about our pricing model, what's the thing that made you wonder about it. We think that pricing it's one of our weak spots, could you please share your thoughts?

          1. 2

            It depends on how people are currently using your product, but I'd guess there would be a significant number of people who would pay a fee just for a single app design -- or who are willing to pay more than $0 but less than $8/month for access to the full pattern library.

            Or maybe they could pay per screen for additional screens they want to use, something like that.

            --

            If you're targeting agencies, $99/yr is too cheap. So in that case I'd recommend having some sort of a "team plan" that's more expensive.

            1. 1

              We want to sell to product managers or founders directly, do you think $8/month is too much for creating prototypes like this?

        2. 1

          I would say entrepreneurs, project/product managers, UX-designers, other non-designer roles. People who are comfortable with Sketch/Figma tend to do all the prototyping/design there.

          Using Stage non-designers can create good-looking functional prototypes real quick, so yeah. Hope it helps

    3. 1

      Hey,

      I'm Yura, Co-Founder of Stage.
      Thanks for your review. We'll be more than happy if you find time to test it out and share your feedback with us.

      Yesterday, I added one app example in the "Make your prototype live" section. This week I plan to create two more examples to put them in a separate part of the website.

  5. 2

    No critique, I thought it looked great. Your product is also really cool. I am curious though, what did you used to build it and how you were able to create the gif (center graphic)?

    1. 1

      Hey! Thanks for your interest, We use web technologies like React for building the whole app platform.

      For building the website, we used https://readymag.com/ to iterate faster and don't waste time coding it.

      The gif: we recorded a video with the Mac default screen recorder and put it via video tag with autoplay muted loop="true" attributes.

      I hope it helps :)

  6. 2

    Just a handful of comments to help improve your site:

    • 'Product' link just takes you back to the homepage...
    • ...Usually people would know to click the logo to go back, but for some reason you've managed to link just the logo text. I don't mean like a standard hyperlink where you can click anywhere around the text and it links, you have to hover over the letter to navigate. It's really odd behaviour.
    • On the sign up page you need a way to differentiate a disabled state and enabled state. I saw you couldn't press the button until you completed the form, but it didn't change visually when the form validated so I wasn't sure if it was enabled.
    • The 'Help' link doesn't work when you're looking through the terms and privacy pages.
    • The scrolling patterns as you scroll down look like they can be scrolled on mobile but they can't. The behaviour probably needs to change for different devices.
    • There's no menu on mobile to get to the other pages.
    • If I forget my password, click through to fill in my email, but then remember my password, I can't easily get back to the login form.
    1. 1

      Big thanks! If you have anything to review in return, I'll be glad to help

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