Why do we fail to gain some traction?

Hi there. You've got some great copy in some places on your site, and your landing pages for the different use cases are to die for, but your home page content has some structural issues and some copy problems, so I put together some observations and suggestions to see if they might be useful to you.

There might be a bit of repetition here, as I'm just figuring out how to break down issues where there are multiple problems with the same section, so please forgive me if that happens! Also it might be long ...

First: structure.

1. You’ve listed the features clearly, but without joining them immediately to clear benefits.

Front and centre on the home page, you offer:
“Free Online Screen Recorder
Works in any browser. Create online screen recording without installation and share it with a link”

This is great, says exactly what’s ‘in the tin’, and underneath you’ve bulleted the features.

However, you have a line of text below that section that appears to quickly list some benefits, but in a very vague way. While it’s important to state the features of a product, it is the benefits – the emotional tug – that will give them reasons to believe they need your product.
From looking at your landing pages for each of the ‘Use Cases’, it’s clear you know precisely what the benefits are, so this vague line of text is redundant.

2. Your audience segmentation section ‘Boost your efficiency’ contains great benefits that are lost halfway down the page.

This is an interesting section. While it is clearly a way to segment your audiences, you could draw on some of this for your benefits – or use it in its entirety - and bring it up above the fold. There’s nothing wrong with segmenting your audience early and getting them to their relevant landing page sooner. I'll come back to this in the Copy section below.

3. Your how-it-works section is too low down the page

This how-it-works section is perfect. But so low down the page. It seems more important than as a simple convincer tool – so would be more useful above the reviews and recommendations, and possibly under the feature-benefit section, just below the fold.

Okay, so under Structure, my recommendations in a nutshell are:
a) Move your 'boost your efficiency' section up, above your features (adjacent to your 'click to start' CTAs) - you may need to tweak it
If you didn't want to do that, you could write your features like feature/benefit - i.e. this feature is great because you can ... or I have a further suggestion below.
b) Move your features down below your benefits
c) Move your Record your Screen Instantly up, above your Reviews

Second: Copy

1. Use of title case.

Use of title case isn’t necessary online, even for titles. Best to use sentence case for headers. This goes for all headers, including things like ‘Record your Screen Instantly’.

NB: Lose this line, it's clunky: What is important with a Free Online Screen Recorder?

2. Use of title case to make keyphrase stand out

You’ve also used title case for the keyphrase within other parts of the copy. This is not recommended. See below for comment about replacing those instances with the name of the product. If it’s necessary to use title case to make the product stand out on the page, that’s a case for the use of the product name instead.

3. Lack of use of the product's name! / Overuse of the keyphrase for SEO purposes

While you probably want to score highly for SEO on the keyphrase Free Online Screen Recorder, the whole front page has overdone this, making the text less reader friendly. In the first 100 words, you’ve used that phrase four (4) times. This isn’t necessary and suggests that any online screen recorder could do the job, so why bother with Calipio?
Using the product’s name more often, however, could make it a better sell to your human audience.

For example: “Calipio works in any browser. Create online screen recording without installation and share it with a link.”

4. Vague benefits copy squeezed under the well-designed features section
   That line under the features section – as mentioned above, is redundant in the face of your ‘Boost your efficiency’ section, provided you put that section above the features on the home page.

if you don't want to use that copy verbatim in that position, I would suggest collating a bunch of tightly written phrases for your benefits. You've got them on the site - on your use case landing pages for example. The last shot of your video for QA for example. Perfect.

5. Boost your efficiency copy - titles loaded for SEO but not human reader friendly

The titles of this copy are loaded for SEO, giving a clunky reader experience. It would be slicker to segment your audience through simple titles:

Education
Quality Assurance etc.
The copy underneath is great. You are clearly aware of the benefits for each group.

6. Subscribe to the Newsletter
   Give me a reason to subscribe! What can the reader expect? Why should they let you into their inbox? Is it purely to gather an email list or are you going to provide interesting updates, news, or what?

7. Random copy
   You've used some great button microtexts for your CTAs - I love em. But you're overusing 'use cases' (menu and page). While not meaningless, it's close to that when it comes to your audience recognising themselves.

Okay, so in a nutshell, my recommendations for the copy on your home page are:
a) Get rid of title case
b) Lose this line, it's clunky: What is important with a Free Online Screen Recorder?
c) Replace (in most cases) Free Online Screen Recorder with the product name. You don't need that much SEO, it reads weird and devalues your individual product
d) Write some amazing benefits copy for above the fold
e) Stop loading your copy for SEO. There are key positions you can put it in (H1, H2, a few places in the text), but you don't need to pepper the text with a four-word keyphrase.
f) Give a reason to subscribe to the newsletter and describe what it's going to be.
g) Reconsider the use of 'use cases'. It's a technical / development term, but not a marketing one.

Dunno if this is useful to you, but I really hope so!

I just used it and loved how easy it is to use, but something I like to point out is I know it's useful for me but immediately can't find out the use case and probably your product will not come into my mind when I might need to record something.
so you probably need to figure out that.
I get it, you sole purpose was to make it useable in minimum configuration, I did something like that a while ago but didn't work out for me.
My suggestion would be to make a browser add on or something.

BTW great product.

Hey @DanielCalipio! Thanks for sharing about your journey and struggles in such an authentic way.

I cannot answer the question why you are not getting traction, but I can give some thoughts on how to find out about it. Your post also mentions other topics such as finding a co-founder with experience in sales. I won't address this point yet in my reply but happy to discuss this point at a later time.

It seems to me that you have envisaged use cases for your product but do not have a clear understanding of who your customer is and what should be the core use case. At this stage I reckon you should stop developing the product further and instead try to speak with current early adopters to understand why they are using the product.

Additionally, if possible, reach out to churned users to ask what led them to trying your product, what problem they thought your product could help with, and what other tools they tried. Additionally seek to uncover why they ultimately churned.

What you should be doing right now is conduct more "generative research" in order to gain a deeper understanding of your use base and generate more ideas around how your product, positioning, and marketing should evolve.

To learn more about how do this, check out the blog post I wrote on generative research

Good luck!

Hey, I am in a very similar spot. When I was reading your post, I was thinking "Gosh, it's like me writing it". I am also a very technical person and I hate marketing.

My piece of advice would be to keep pushing no matter what and no matter how long it takes! There is no such a thing as start-up failure. There are only start-ups that gave up too early. By pushing I mean improving the product and doing marketing at the same time. At some point the product will inevitably start to get traction. It can take months, sometimes years.

In terms of marketing, I personally don't want to spend any money at this point. I think, I'll start spending money only when I start getting some revenue. Currently, my approach in terms of marketing is to build audience in LinkedIn, spread the word about the project on different platforms, do cold outreach in LinkedIn. I devote 50% of my time to marketing and another 50% to product improvement. I envision this process as a marathon not a sprint.

Some personal feedback from me. If I were looking for a screen capturing tool, I'd probably use Loom or something from the top Google search results for the keywords "screen recorder". I would want a popular tool that would reliably let me do the job with the least amount of hassle. But definitely, there are people who would want to try something new.

I think you should find a way to talk to your users. Then you might figure out if anything is missing.

Maybe privacy concerns. You can do this with free, installable software packages (record the screen). Cloud based for screen recording does open up some additional privacy concerns.

To preface, I don't use screen recorders. While I know they are super valuable to a lot of folks, I personally don't have any use case for them. So the following thoughts come from someone who's prob not in your target audience 😋

• In a few of the comments you mentioned that you see it as a tool for asynchronous communication. You also mentioned struggling to establish this new mode of communication. My take: Aiming to change how people communicate is a very ambitious goal. Sure, some companies like Slack or maybe Whatsapp, and to some extend Loom or Zoom did it.
  But instead of converting people, go for the ones who are already sold on the concept of asynchronous communication! For example there are explicitly asynchronous companies.
• You're trying to be the jack of all traits and cater to everyone: From education, over QA, to support teams etc. Pick one. Focus on one audience. Target your branding at them. Use the language they use. Show use cases specifically for them. Figure out the main one or two problems of exactly this audience and clearly communicate on your website how you solve them -- what they will achieve with calipio, not what your tool does.
• Your website looks quite... "old school". The visual aspect might be subjective, but I think it could also do a better job communicating the value of your product. There are too many items, too much text, and too much is left to the viewer's imagination. Your tool is literally made to be shown. So show it! Put a gif at the very top showing a calipio (is this a noun already? 🤣). Focus on one or two key aspects of the tool. E.g. is "cloud storage" and "E2E encryption" so important that is has to appear at the very top of your website?
  My personal approach would be: Find successfull competitors (Loom?), copy a lot of their overall page structure and insert your differentiation and your product's angle on the matter.
  I have done a very rough sketch just to illustrate how I'd roughly simplify the layout. Wording of course depends on the target audience you want to reach....

Hope that helps!