A visible prompt can outperform a more creative landing page

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

1. 18:16

   Ego is an applied AI research lab building personal agents indistinguishable from humans. Okay. All right, what do we think? So first off, I mean, it's cool. Here's the thing that I think people miss about landing pages in general. The real metric to track is does it convert? And I obviously don't know if this is converting or not, but my sense is like, I don't know, it's not accessible. I don't know where the CTA is.

2. 18:42

   Is the CTA Ronin? yeah what do you think they want us to do here i mean my initial reaction is like i should just keep scrolling yeah right um one interesting thing that we've learned about our own landing page is you know everyone that has a vibe coded tool has that input or to prompt to get started and for a little while we removed it to try and be more creative and our conversion rate totally tanked we learned why people do that right and so i always encourage folks to think about like what are you ultimately trying to do here okay so then there's like an app in there yeah i guess i'm halfway down the page and i'm still unclear what is this and who is it for i guess there's a wait list so maybe it's not live yet yeah let's see and now they're getting into more of the description it's a voice agent with a personality a memory and a mind of its own

3. 19:34

   that feels like the kind of thing that should have been all the way at the top right like the site should start here with this because this is the call to action which is join the waitlist but we had to scroll down pretty far in order to even get to this point totally and i'm kind of laughing here that like this main cta to join i had to do there was an interaction there that's another almost an example of something that maybe was potentially vibe coded ai agents they love I love adding animations and things like that, right? Overly animating. And so, you know, why not just start it with that, right?

4. 20:08

   Yeah, that's actually interesting. We ran some tests at my company, Creative Market. And when you had the input form visible and expanded directly on the page, conversion rate was much higher than requiring somebody to click through to then put in an email address or pop up a window or get to the form or something like that. So I would recommend whenever possible, yeah, just start with the text box open and people can just type right in it.

5. 20:35

   It's pretty shocking how that actually significantly impacts conversion rate of people entering information there. Yeah, and that's what I encourage. Like, think about the human. I think AI agents, there again, they're rewarded of doing fun things like motion and overly animating, right? But the human is not going to spend a lot of time on your site. They're in a rush. yeah we see a lot of there's blinking dots everywhere and um i don't know if music is playing but it looks like there's some type of you know like music faders or something going there um and so yeah it's it's kind of hard to tell what's going um i like the overall vibe it's it's like it's got this kind of dark mode red it feels very like 80s video game kind of um which i think is is interesting um but it's also hard to read some of the things like it actually looks

6. 21:26

   like maybe there's an input box or something over on the right hand side. And I almost missed it because it's not clear to me that it exists. Yeah, this is another kind of vibe coded smell that I commonly see. As you can see, my mouse here is letting me interact with this, but I can't actually type anything. Right. And so, you know, and then I'm like, well, what's going on? Yeah. Yeah. There's a pattern that I've seen where sometimes you have actual UI elements embedded in the page, but they're actually real and interactive. And that's cool to be able to do that. That's something that I think agents make a lot simpler now that was much harder to do before. And so it can feel very interactive and like you can actually try out the product live on the page and that's super cool. But yeah, the flip side is when it looks

7. 22:12

   like something like that and it becomes misleading and you think that you can interact with something, but you're actually not able to. Yeah. And I think it's important to talk about like, why does this matter what does it matter if there's a vibe coded smell on the website right and i think it matters because you can notice how distracted we are by this input trying to type and we're distracted from the core thing which is whatever the cta is supposed to be i guess in this case right it's join the join the wait list yeah it's cool if you scroll down you see um the pictures of the people they match that vibe that kind of 80s video game throwback vibe which i think is cool um you know they had that eyeball up at the top which is like very provocative um it creeps me out a little bit there's like an eyeball looking directly at me but um but it's

8. 22:58

   interesting and it becomes memorable if that's the vibe that you're going for but yeah it just wasn't obvious to me what this is until we got halfway down the page and so um i think just a little more about what it is and what's the action that you want people to take even that call to action in the top right that button it just says ronin right i don't know what ronin is the company is called ego i guess it says here ronin launching september is ronin a product is it a model is it it's not clear to me what this is and so i think ultimately i'm just left very confused this is another vibe coded smell by the way it says scroll right here i'm naturally going to scroll like i