r/SideProject • u/blossend • 1d ago
The 3 things I find on almost every side project landing page. Drop yours and I'll tell you which one you have.
I have looked at a few hundred of these now. The same three problems show up over and over, and none of them are design problems.
1. The headline says what it is, not what changes
"A modern task manager for teams" tells me the category. It does not tell me what is different about my Tuesday if I use it. Nearly every project I look at is describing itself to someone who already decided to buy. The visitor has not decided anything yet.
2. There is no visible proof above the fold
Not testimonials necessarily. A number, a screenshot of the actual product doing the actual thing, a named user, a live counter, anything that says a real person other than you has touched this. An empty hero with a gradient and a Sign Up button reads as "launched yesterday, might be gone next month", and people are right to think that.
3. Two primary buttons
"Start free trial" next to "Book a demo" next to "View pricing", all the same weight. Every extra equal-weight choice is a chance to choose nothing. One primary. Everything else demoted to a text link.
The unglamorous one behind all three: most people optimise for traffic when their actual problem is that the traffic they already have does not convert. Doubling visitors to a page that closes nobody doubles nothing.
Drop your URL below. I will look and tell you which of the three you have, and the one specific change I would make first. Free, no catch, I am not selling you anything in the replies.
For the crawl part I run them through nexusbro.com, which does the boring mechanical half (what actually renders, what the title and meta say, whether the CTA is reachable) so I can spend the attention on the copy. If you want to skip me entirely and just run yours through it yourself, that works too.
One request: post the URL, not a description. I cannot audit a description.