I also run a B2B SaaS and I could have written this word for word.
The only exception is that I do get a decent amount of word of mouth because many of my customers are individual franchisees in national networks, so they tell their peers who they don’t compete with about me. But that’s not really so much about customer support as the product itself.
The main value I get from doing customer support myself is the same that I get from doing sales myself: learning. I have my pulse directly on what my customers need, like, and dislike about the product.
Secondarily, I do think it helps with both close rate and retention to be able to talk to the business owner, but this might be less true in other niches.
From my perspective, it's more that he used to be competent, but something has changed over the last 5-10 years, and now he's essentially coasting (or more nefarious things) off the massive amount of wealth he's piled up. If you or I could come up with many better ways to accomplish Musk's stated goals than he seems to be able to execute, why would I not conclude that something has changed and he's no longer as competent as he once was?
Or maybe I'm just blinded by partisan hatred. Who knows, but I'm still not interested in supporting anything Musk produces these days. I guess we'll see in another few decades whether I'm seeing it correctly.
We're decades away from no one being allowed to drive manually, but people don't actually like driving. They like the autonomy of a car. That's not the same thing.
If there's a button in people's cars that they can push and then play on their phone for the rest of the trip, 99% of people are going to push that button.
And after a few years of that, and insurance rates being higher for manual driving, we'll start seeing some areas be automated-driving only, which will then expand...
We've all been reading this exact comment for years now. Maybe it's actually different this time, I don't know.
What I do know is that I took multiple Waymo rides last week where those "gizmos" delivered a safe drive with no one in the driver's seat and zero unsafe exceptions. "Very rare exceptions" isn't even close to good enough for me to put my kid's life at stake.
Why would I care whether Tesla has maybe gotten closer to what they've been promising for a decade, but still having "very rare" extremely unsafe exceptions, when Waymo is objectively delivering full level 4 self driving to hundreds of thousands of people per week with an essentially flawless safety record?
OK, I rarely comment here anymore, but your post caught my eye so I spent a few mins checking out the site. Here are my honest thoughts:
1. I really admire you posting here looking for feedback and taking it with an open mind, without getting defensive. Not an easy thing to do!
2. You've built and launched something, which is way more than most people. Be proud of yourself.
3. The majority of successful startups were once where you are now. This is what it looks like to be pre-PMF.
4. I agree with most of the other feedback here: there's something that's off about your overall visual design. I know that's vague, but to me it feels like a template design, which isn't a bad thing, but parts of it feel like the boilerplate copy on a template that you didn't bother to change. My advice: go look at 100 homepages for B2B SaaS companies in your space, and get a feel for which ones are good and which ones aren't. This is more art than science tbh.
5. There's way too many animations going on for me. You've got the page title that's changing the browser tab constantly, that annoying chat thing in the nav bar, your typing animation in the headline, etc.
6. Social proof is powerful, but can backfire. "7 people signed up this week" is not comforting to me. Nor is a list of startups using the app that I've never heard of.
7. Too many calls to action. Do you want me to put in my email? Click that chat thing? Click to meet June? Schedule a demo? Calculate my pricing?
8. I don't like the personalized pricing thing. It just feels like work, and an immediate signal that this is going to be expensive. Plus the pricing flow has 8 steps! I'd be shocked if hardly anyone finishes it, especially since step 3 has a scary empty text box that wants to know about my business. Why do you need that to figure out how much this costs? My advice: just do two pricing tiers and have a "enterprise: contact us" tier as well to cover anything else. I still have no idea what your pricing is, but my gut would be that this should cost like $29-99 / month on the starter tier, and around 2-3x that on the higher tier.
9. This product feels like it's trying to do way too much. You've got eight features listed there, and most of them are competing with entire huge startups. I'd really figure out what your core differentiator is, and just focus on that. The rest of these features should mostly come via integrations, imo. I don't feel super strongly about that though, maybe these features are fine, but the marketing here makes this product feel complicated. Make it feel super simple.
10. Who is your target audience? Startups? Way too broad. Pick a niche. This ties into #9 below. What single core feature can you offer a hungry niche audience?
11. The "from the founder" section...sorry man, but you should rethink this. That picture isn't great for this (weird expression and wearing a tux?), and why are there five stars shown? That's what I mean when I say it feels like a template where the default content hasn't been fixed.
12. Your domain name and the "[email protected]" email both scream red flags to me. Smarketly isn't the worst startup name I've ever heard, but you need the .com (or .ai or something else that legit startups are using right now), and your email should be "[email protected]" or whatever. Similarly, it's not fair, but unless your target market is startups in Ghana, that phone number is doing you more harm than good. I'd drop it entirely; your target audience is unlikely to call you.
13. Drop all those footer links that go nowhere. They just make this seem unfinished or something.
So, if it were me, what would I actually DO at this point?
1. It sounds like you've had some conversations with your audience, so that's good. Keep doing that.
2. Drastically simplify this homepage. You should end up with about a third as much as what you have here. Make it super simple, get rid of all the stuff I mentioned above that is hurting the initial impression, and make your call to action super clear and singular.
3. If your target audience is companies that would already have a website or social media (which I would think they would), then I would consider having your CTA be letting them drop in their website or social media accounts, and then you crawl that in the background and build them some demo content. Not easy to execute, but it makes it super easy for them to immediately see the value of your product. You could do a thing where you generate five pieces of content, show them the first two, and blur out the last three unless they drop in their email for a free trial.
4. Make it dead simple to understand this product and get immediate value from it. You're selling automation, but right now your landing page just makes it seem like figuring this out and setting it up is going to be MORE work, not less. What would it look like if I could spend literally 60 seconds setting this up, and then never touch it again? That might not be feasible, but it might be useful as a brainstorming exercise.
5. Remember that what you're trying to do here is HARD. Creating a product like this is not easy, and getting actual customers to enter their credit card and give you money is even harder. Adjust your expectations, and decide if this is something you really want to grind on for months.
OK, that was a lot! I hope some of it helps. You can drop me an email if you want to chat more, my email is in my profile.
There is no perfect place to live. Everywhere has trade-offs, and I bet we could both come up with 100 things more important to our quality of life than whether you need to lock your car door or not.
”They haven’t made an argument as to why we should do that just for them…”
What “we”? They’ve already raised billions, and I suspect they’re about to succeed at raising tens of billions more, despite the skepticism of random HN users.
Initiatives like this haven’t seemed to work in Sweden, among other countries. I don’t know if any countries have successfully reversed a plummeting birth rate, but it doesn’t seem to be for lack of trying.
Maybe the reality is that, given the choice, most women don’t want to have more than one or two kids under any circumstances?
I work at one that is definitely not megacap, nor do we pay at the top of the market, and that’s below our range for senior, which is more like $300k-500k, depending on specialty and geographic area. Staff is more like $500-700k.