A Hard Landing Page Lesson
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Dan Sutera
Startup Stories
A Hard Landing Page Lesson

A Hard Landing Page Lesson

That time I got my ass kicked in a landing page competition by a hardcore Google backend engineer

👊A vs. B Smackdown

I saw these tweets (below) the other day about what you really need for a landing page to perform. It reminded me of a few years back when I was VP of Product at Yext.

After about 2 years we had probably performed about 100 AB tests on our landing page and gained 1% each time. So we were feeling pretty good about our performance.

Then our CEO Howard put out a company-wide challenge for anyone to come up with a fresh idea to AB. I felt pretty confident, especially because most of the people submitting ideas were from the engineering team and the designs they were coming up with were TERRIBLE.

The worst one came from one of the hardest of hardcore backend engineers at the company created a white page with a giant input and button. Which of course DESTROYED mine by a huge margin. 🤣

I still contend that some TLC on branding & design should factor in, but you can't argue with (humbling) results!

* Note: this was LONG time ago so I had to recreate the landings but the images above are pretty close replicas...

A: My Landing Page
A: My Landing Page
B: The Winner
B: The Winner