I’ve been asked to teach a class at a local startup incubator (with bootstrappy leanings) on any topic that a) I’m qualified to talk about and b) would make sense for their audience.
Since I recently gave a presentation to a business networking group on “3 Common Website Mistakes,” I suggested a similar talk to the inclubator and they liked it. But it’s of course one thing to take a plumbing company’s shitty website and optimize it for lead generation, and another thing entirely to take a SaaS app with no brochure site and tell them what they should build.
So I’d like to ask you: what in your opinion are some common SaaS brochure site mistakes? Perhaps you’ve made a mistake or two of your own.
Mistakes I made include:
- No list-building mechanism
- Bad domain name (e.g. sniphq.com instead of snipsalonsoftware.com)
- Ill-conceived value proposition
- Inadequate pricing information
- Lack of screenshots, videos, etc.
- Asking to “get married on the first date”
- Unclear CTAs
- General SEO ignorance
- Simply not having a website at all for the first year
- Choosing a limiting CMS (in my case, Rails instead of WP)
- No contact form
Wow…that’s fuckload of mistakes. Curious to hear yours. I also welcome any suggestions you might have on how I could/should structure this class. It’s a one-time, 2-hour class.