We Killed Our Highest Converting Landing Page for ThiS

You see heaps of advice online about landing pages, how to make the perfect one to convert for your business. Not all advice you read online is going to be perfect for you at any one time. And right now, I am tasked with redesigning the ClickFlow homepage. Couple of reasons for that that I'll get into. A lot of the messaging in this page that we created, it clearly talks to pain points that users have. It doesn't match what we're trying to communicate right now or want to communicate for the relaunch. Everything that we see here is really targeted towards specific pain points. You should probably never redesign a landing page that's converting well. If it's converting well, keep pumping money into it. We designed a landing page using all the typical rules of conversion optimization and it worked really well. We were getting as low as $11 a conversion, which if we were charging for the software, the payback period would have been I mean it pays itself off in the first month. Great. Sounds good. not perfect for us right now. I think a lot of the things that we've done in this landing page, we're going to come back to and readress and reo the same work again with all the same language later on down the track. However, just like most advice you see online or read online, watch online, it's not necessarily right for your business at the current time. So, why would we redesign a homepage that's converting really well? All of the messaging on this site that you see here is all very painpoint oriented and it's all designed to describe the problem that we know people are having and it proved a lot to us by funneling money into ads that spoke about uh YouTube and content creation team problems and the broken nature of the current systems and that there was no system that was addressing these problems. Well, we definitely validated that there are people who are aware of this problem and want a solution to it, which is all really good, but we're still going to change it. And there's a couple of reasons why. Basically, the early adopters program that we ran was wildly successful in our eyes. We wanted about 200 people using it to get feedback from, and we're ending it very soon with over 1,000 signups. We've got over 1,000 users in the system. Now, of the 1,000 users in the system, only about 200, maybe 250 actually really used it. I think in a lot of cases, people were maybe just bookmarking, essentially bookmarking the free tier so that they could use it later. Totally fine. They didn't really want to use it immediately, but it didn't give us the feedback we needed. Out of those 200, there's probably about 50 60 people who gave feedback and who use it, still using it to great effect. However, a lot of the early users, I don't think they're really aligned with what we're optimized to build for. So, in our past business, we built product in a space where repetition and the value of tiny improvements over that repetition had a huge outsized impact. We could create leverage, like massive leverage for businesses by operational efficiency. And if you're making one video a week, you're going to get a lot of benefit from bloat, but you're not going to get the same benefit as someone who's putting out 600 pieces of content a week. So what we want to do with the rebuild of the landing page is get more of that type of user because we believe that if we can get heaps of that type of user, every improvement we make, all of the user signals we listen to are going to be much more steered towards the benefit for the people of high volume, which trickles down to being incredibly valuable also for people on lower volume. However, the people on lower volume might have different pain points and problems they want solved. and we don't want to get sort of distracted between the two, especially when we think we're uniquely able to build in a really flexible way to suit the workflows of the high volume people. So, this is a shift from the general creator. So, when Clipflow first launched, it was for YouTube creators, long form. Then we realized that any YouTube creator worth their salt was also doing short form. Then we realized that the people who actually have a business behind them, they have a capital outcome that they're using their content to deliver people into the business. Those are the people who are going to get the most benefit from something like this. And they're also the people who obviously when you have you're getting value from something, it's worth more to people. And at this point in time, we need to get money into the business so that we can build a team and scale and make it into this massive thing that we all have in our heads is like we can see what this product needs to be. We need people using it, running high volume through it to get that. So redesigning the web page, we're closing down access. We're not going to have it like anyone can just jump in and try it out. Mainly because we want to validate that people are the right users for it. So instead of just a sign up, do whatever you like, it's going to be request access, go in a wait list, and we will check people against a questionnaire if they're the right type of user that we want to get into the platform and testing. And this goes against a lot of conventional wisdom, which is to reduce friction for people signing up. However, I think a lot of that conventional wisdom is designed for people at different stages of a business to what we are now. We actually want to increase the friction now to improve the quality of the person that's coming in for the feedback we need at this point in time. So we're looking for the kind of people who, you know, they they're really on the cutting edge of content. Whether that be they're making the best content out there or they're leveraging AI tools, NAD workflows, using AI to various degrees and they're doing it with purpose to build a business. These are the people that are trying to make the current systems work for them and they really want operational leverage and they're going to get maximum value from what we're building right now. So the strategy behind changing this landing page which was performing well is we don't we're ending the early adopter program that's ending. It's going to be closed and it's going to be beta with request access. We need this to feel like something people really want to get into because right now it feels very open and friendly and accommodating. And I think that this brand messaging will suit the business in 2 years time in a way that it's not serving our actual goals right now, which flies in the face of conventional wisdom because if you're getting $11 conversions, you might think, well, let's just throw more money into it. However, I think from what we've seen is that we have enough of a drop off of the type of user coming in that it's just not quite right yet. And to be fair, most of that marketing spend was spent before we rebuilt the entire thing from the ground up based on user feedback. So, we might get better results just pumping more money at this. But, we're going for like a specific feeling. So, what I want to be able to do is create a bunch of real banger videos that go out there and give people this like hint of what it is. is I want it to be a lot more clear on what the software does currently and a lot more suggestive into what the future of this category or space can be if people jump in, join the ride and help us build it together. We're going to filter out the type of people that are coming in really fast and get a different category of user coming in. We're going to vet those signups. We're going to look at the content volume they're putting out sort of the intent of the content because while any creator can benefit from this, the creators that are going to benefit the most are high volume and high intent. So they might have a very good reason to be creating content and it's the type of people that we have typically always helped in the past. So we think we'll be better at framing and addressing their problems in a really effective way. This is ultimately to build something that's for the highv value users first and then worry about the scale later. Worry about this type of page and this type of content which is like the painoint agitating stuff later. So this was all around like storytelling, social proof, really friendly language, really heavy on like here's your pain, sign up now and we'll fix it. And what we want to take it to is like a strong product showcase. We wanted to feel a lot more serious, a lot more advanced, less warm and friendly, like we we're all creators in it together, and more like you're a slick operator who wants the right tool to do the job. And you don't care like you don't care about it being 100% like it absolutely holds my hand and makes it really clear what I do as much as you care it's incredibly flexible to suit my workflow. And it's something that I could jump into now knowing it's going to be flexible enough to adapt to how content is going to change in the next 10 years. It needs to look and feel like something that's worth discovering and learning about and worrying if you're not in there that you're going to get left behind. So, it's going to be very techfocused, really built for the operators and confident and a little bit mysterious. I want to do like I want to paint the picture of what we see the future of this product being so people can really like get on board with the idea of what it's going to be. This is sort of like the vibe of the thing we're going for. You know when like these things just blow up because they have that like oh it's a little secret tool that I have to be using to be on the forefront of my job. One of the things that we've built into Clipflow is the file explorer which sort of came from an exploration around the idea of an IDE is an integrated development environment and we wanted to be like an integrated content engine or ICE something like that which sort of created its own platform category which you'd be like CMS all of those sort of things have their own little categories and we sort of wanted to get into that without trying to do it too much because you don't want to be inventing like a new category ultimately. If you had to train everyone on what that was, that would be detrimental or expensive. But we do think that by sort of owning the space of content OS and command center for content, we could be in a really good position to land grab the market share there. It's pretty dangerous and expensive to invent categories, but we also sort of think that the way users have been talking about the product and the way users have been using it, it is its own thing. Like businesses are seeing now more than ever that as much as marketing used to be a key pillar of the business, content is now a key pillar of the business. And we've seen this for us, the difference of having someone dedicated to content has just absolutely blown up. Like the results we're getting on our ClickFlow crew channel versus what we were getting before, it's like 100x what it was getting. It's insane. And that has a knock-on effect, not of immediate sales. You can't attribute it like meta ads where it's like the conversion's $11. Great. That's cool. it has such a material impact to the business over the long term and we think it deserves its own category. We don't really want to be the ones inventing it, but we want it to be very clear that that's the positioning that we're in. So, I will probably avoid saying things like content operations deserved its own category, so we're inventing it. But essentially, that's the message I want to get across. So, I've got that text there as a placeholder content in command. But this is the sort of vibe I'm want to go for. It's like here's the product. Here's what it does, but it's still a little bit mysterious because it's not something that everyone's familiar with. It's not a website builder. It's not a CMS. It's not a e-commerce platform. It does have to be described in a way that most pages aren't going to describe it. And that sort of ties back into what I was saying about the original website is like no real landing page design advice online is going to tell you how to manage this unique use case because for most people this works and it would work if we keep doing it and we kept pumping money into it. However, I don't think it'll get us the best users for where we're at right now. So I think it's just a a wrong stage to be doing it. So we want to own this category of like a technical tool that operators of big content engines use. That can be in-house agency, agencies, creators with businesses, whatever it is, we want to own this category and get out there as the owner of this category as fast as possible. So the important thing is as this category because like we've seen inclinations that other people think this is important too. We've seen the way that bigger channels are operating and the tools they're using and the gaps in the tools. We want to own the category so that we have the head start. We can be the place that people think of and always compare other tools that come out against us. And we're going to go for a very open accepting of all workflows. You just sort of you pick and choose what you are and aren't using of Clipflow and you use the other tools that you need to when you need to. Obviously, we will eventually have the sort of tools that other people are using, but we won't be like strict on, hey, you can't get your data out of here because you want to send it to a thing that we also have a tool for. It's going to be more like we have the tool, you want to go use other tool, that's cool, too. This is going to position us in a really defensible place. We want to keep optionality for any workflow so that people are very comfortable bringing their operation in here and very comfortable they can get in and out. We will be reducing churn by not by introducing dark patterns of like you can't get your stuff out. It'll be reducing churn by just being the best damn tool that there is out. So what we've got so far and one of the reasons that this website needs to be redesigned is a very established product that works really well. We're using it for all our channels and we need to get it out there. we have a highly functional product and this website doesn't really demonstrate to me that there's a highly functional product behind it. It's very like oh yeah, you could probably see that maybe the tool exists and it does some of the things like it's targeting having tasks and it's targeting media review and those things are really cool but they're not the sum total of the whole product and the page needs to handle the sum total of the whole product. So the first impression of this, if we do a sick video, a slick video that says like this is the future of content creation and you need this content engine to function. You come to this website and you go like, oh, this is a bit airy fairy. It's not quite the mysterious solution to the problem that I was imagining. I was picturing some new exciting tool and you want that hype cycle to come up. So part of this is going to be the closed beta launch. um we're going to roll it out and it's going to have a couple of months, maybe three months, maybe six months of closed beta where you can't get in unless you're invited or you pass through our request access questionnaire. So the first impression has to be really strong through both design and the messaging and that's where rearchitecting the homepage is coming in. We want to be able like want to be able to inspire confidence in people that this is something you can jump on that's not going to disappear tomorrow. we are in this for the long haul and we need that to be communicated in this which I think personally early adopters and betas etc don't necessarily convey that it's something we're going to fight with for a long time until we're like the established player in the space but I think the early adopter program definitely makes people think like oh this isn't ready for the prime time and I don't want people to think that I want them to think it's ready for the prime time you just can't get in yet essentially and obviously adding like you can see here adding in that we raised money. It's VC backed, so you can trust it. Like, we're here. We've got money. We're not going to blow up overnight and disappear. And that should reflect the maturity of the product pretty well. And the idea as well, it sort of validates the idea and gives people a bit more confidence when they land here that damn, you got to like sign up to that weight list straight away. So through the quality and the execution of this page and the other pages around it and the marketing messaging, we're hoping to increase conversions or signups in the type of user we want. So once this page is done, there will be a whole bunch of videos around it. Thinking like Twitter and YouTube, and we want the homepage to mirror the vibe of the videos. So, I want it to feel like the high-end tool that it is, that it's a product that is very serious, not necessarily accommodating to a a brand new YouTuber. Like, this isn't stuff that someone who's never touched YouTube before is going to take as they need it. I don't want that. It has to be something that people who've been operating channels and creation businesses for a long time will be like, "Dude, I just I need that thing in my life." We are going to be breaking the traditional rules of what the current tools do to do it in this way because we think this is the best way while adapting to everyone's workflows and we want the homepage to hint towards that of like this is something different. You haven't seen anything like this before. So that involves join the weight list is going to send you to a questionnaire. This is increasing friction which should reduce conversions. We understand that you wouldn't typically get advice online like you should be reducing the number of conversions your website gets, but in our case, we think it makes sense. You do want to validate people, make sure they're the right people, save yourself time in like watching user sessions of users who shouldn't be high signal. And this is going to allow us to avoid building the wrong features. And everything that we do build is going to be for daily power users. So things that people will benefit from every day because those are the kind of problems that are worth money to be solved. So once we've tested this idea of this new homepage um and we've launched to the private beta, we'll probably do a public beta as well like another series of months after that. One of the other reasons to break it down like this is for marketing messaging. So we get to have time horizons s they're simulated time horizons but they are real too because there'll be different benefits for each stage. So, this closed beta is probably going to look like a 90% or 95% off the organization that you sign up with, which is a huge discount, and it's still hearkening back to the early adopters package in that there should be a net benefit to a user for being an early starter, someone who jumps in and gives things a shot. And then these other segments, so the open beta and the public launch, will have less and less discounts as time goes on. And then obviously the marketing messaging the website that can scale horizontally if it needs to to go back to the messaging of like hey it's a tool that competes with framer and notion. So if you want to see what the current page looks like that was converting well because I think it probably is a good example of like if you're an established product go and look at that because I think it does a good job of aggravating a painoint talking about the solution showing that we can solve the problem and it clearly converted very well for what it was. However, it might also be gone by the time you click the link. If it is gone, you'll see the new version once that's built. If you've watched this entire way through because you're interested in the marketing message or you're interested in the product that we're building and you want to test it out, you can go to the link in the description and sign up. Whether or not you get a free early adopter or a discounted rate if you request access, I don't know. Depends what time you're watching the video. If you think that you want to work in this space, get in touch as well. I'll put a link down below of how you can do that. Most likely it'll look like submitting a link to a YouTube video on our website somewhere to say, "I want to work for you." If this sort of problem space excites you, we always looking for new team members if they're exceptional people. Bonus points if you've already got a channel or you deal with content in some way already. And that's pretty much it. I'm going to go design the rest of this homepage. face.