What's your most embarrassing lesson so far?
We hear all about the crazy smart decisions others have made, but we rarely hear about the hilariously bad ones. So, I'd like to share one of our “genius” ideas. It was with the original design for our email hosting website.
It was a clean gradient background with elegant font and a single, solitary call to action that said, “Sign Up.” There were only two other tabs with a similar design as well. We were convinced that our minimalist approach would speak volumes, lol.
… It didn't.
Visitors landed on our page, got totally confused, and immediately left. The most embarrassing part was that visitors would frequently ask me, “When's the site gonna be done dude?” not realizing that the site was supposed to be minimal. The brutal truth was that nobody cared about the aesthetic when they had no clue what the heck we did. So, what did we do? We swallowed our pride, scrapped the minimalist style, and injected a ton of info that users actually wanted.
It's hilarious when I think about it now. It was like that awkward teen phase, except for a startup.
Let me know your own embarrassing lessons!
🔥 Roast My Landing Page
I run an anime and manga recommendation site. For the most part I've neglected analytics except user count and always designed based on my intuition and feedback from close friends. I moved away from that this year and the analytics revealed what I thought was intuitive did not translate to others the same (what a surprise... lol). I basically had this recommendation card that on click/hover, it would expand in multiple directions to reveal a lot more info. But users KEPT clicking the card once it was expanded. Whenever I saw this on session replays via Clarity, I'd wonder why seemingly everyone didn't understand that all the content they needed was already there after the card expanded.
Major learning point: Let the analytics drive your understanding, not your expectations of what will happen.
AB testing helped me a lot moving forward
Leaning on your gut can sometimes backfire, haha. Glad you jumped into analytics and AB testing.
Thinking I knew it all
A trap we've all fallen into at some point, even the best of us.
LOL I'm about to make / have already made the exact same mistake, that's wild.
I'm making a social accountability website, and the gradient, the two other tabs, it's all too familiar haha
You can check it out here: goalpacts.com
Haha, déjà vu. Just checked out goalpacts. Cool concept! Look forward to seeing its progress.
Hey there Sean! For me was to figure out how important is to build a community. I learned it on the bad way, but is was a lesson at the end
I totally know what you mean. Everything teaches us. How has community building been for you thus far? Always down to hear different takes on building a strong network.
Heheh well, let's say I choose the long path. Building strong relationships. It takes more time but it's also going very well my friend. One-and-one connection through different channels.
Nice. Glad to hear it
This is a great learning - finding the right balance between users who are confused about what the product is and keeping the call to action clean.
Trust is a prerequisite to pull off minimalism - Google is a good example of credibility required for a minimal landing page.
Exactly. Balancing clarity with a clean CTA is a struggle, but trust is mandatory. Google's minimal magic only works because everyone knows what they do.
No more impulse features
Couldn't agree more. Less is honestly more in building products. Save that precious time and effort.
Started a completely new B2B based on the interest of one client. We quickly built an MVP and then realized that damn, we're like the 100th project doing this.
Lesson learned: just because someone says they want something does not mean that the product does not exist. Always do your research.
Building an MVP only to realize the market's already oversaturated… man, I feel that one! I've got to hand it to you for jumping on the opportunity and testing it out. Research might've saved the initial rush, but hey, you learned something valuable. What did you end up pivoting into?
I appreciate you sharing your story. It's a reminder that content and clarity are most important.
Thanks man. I'm glad it resonated.
Don't tweet your new feature @TheVerge before you've triple tested it...unless you want to do a hotfix on Christmas morning
Oh man, that sounds like the setup for a tech horror story. You've got to share the story!
We want to know the story!
+1
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