I think that's a really useful thought exercise. FYI I posted this thread - could we interview you about this for our article? Just 10 mins. I'm at harry[at]embeddable.com.
I think this looks really awesome. Love the design. I would put the comments higher up on the landing page (definitely above the list of features / installation guide etc).
[I worked on the landing page] pier25, that's really great feedback, much appreciated. Will see what we can do to answer the questions you've mentioned.
If you have any examples of pages you particularly like to hand, I'd love to take a look.
If you know you won't be profitable for a while and require outside investment, then you need a longer runway as it can take a long time to raise money.
If things are going well, but you've built your business on a channel you have no control over, like facebook (and one change to their algorithm / one even cyclical change in costs can screw you - this happened to a 'previously' successful side project I created) then it's best to save as much as you can - at least if you want to / think you can find another channel.
If you're working on a startup and aren't planning on raising money, then sometimes a shorter runway is a good thing - i.e. you don't want to dedicate yourself to 'the wrong' project for years.
If you've found a growth machine and output currently equals 2*input, there's not much point saving money huge amounts today. Best to continue investing.
Just to jump in, this is really great information (not just for posting on HN, but for writing articles / sharing lessons learned, in general) - many thanks for taking the time.
Yeh we have it hooked up to Mixpanel so we know exactly where people drop off.
As for its effectiveness, this is always a bit tricky for SaaS, not least because the consideration stage tends to be quite long and people flick between devices, which makes attribution a bit of a nightmare. We’ve done some pretty obvious stuff, like comparing our sign up rates before and after adding the demo / recording whether people who sign up have done it etc, which is useful to know - though not always accurate.
More anecdotally, we spend a lot of time speaking with users and visitors and the demo comes up surprisingly frequently (including how we made it, which is why we wrote the post!) - it’s been a pretty quick, straight forward way of showcase Trevor’s interface.
Shortly, we’ll be adding several new steps that demo features that are commonly used by our existing customers.
Any thoughts about what else we might do / how others measure success?
This is slightly off topic, but I always thought that, if I were loaded, one thing I would do more of would be kitesurfing. Which makes me feel very lucky today (I am NOT loaded), as I already kitesurf.
However, only a terrible boss thinks their reports get paid to do what they want.