Insight
Saarinen: Overly polished websites create misleading expectations for early-stage startups
“You might try to, like, build very polished or fancy websites very early on, but what that kind of, like, tells you is, like, it maybe sets the wrong expectation for the user, that if your product is just that, I don't know, you built it last month, and, like,…”
Insight
Saarinen: Early startups should use narrow category terms, not vague visions
“In the very beginning, what you're trying to sell is you try to find someone to actually use your product and like just understand what it is. So what we did here was that we wanted to put the issue tracking. We knew that that wasn't the, like, Long-term visio…”
Insight
Saarinen: Homepages should inform unacquainted visitors without overwhelming detail
“The way I think about that, that landing page, the first, the homepage is kind of like the front page. So like, you can't explain everything. Like, you can't explain all the features. You can't explain all the customer stories and everything. That's why there'…”
Insight
Saarinen: Enterprise startups cannot rely on landing page conversion rates
“The reason the conversion is slow, because you are going after enterprises, and it's like, there, there's probably no way to, like, increase that conversion flow, like, the conversion rate, really, Because enterprises are not necessarily coming to websites and…”
Insight
Saarinen: Pair standard body fonts with unique headline typefaces on websites
“It's not like you should just use one typeface, everything, because in small sizes, A lot of typefaces don't work. You probably have to use something fairly standard so people can read it. But for headlines and special points, you can pair it with something li…”
Insight
Saarinen: Highlight unique differences rather than directly comparing to competitors
“I don't think you should, like, make, compare it to yourself to the competition, like, directly, like, say, like, hey, we do better this and that, like, or something like that. But, like, I think you should look at, like, what are those companies saying? How a…”
Insight
Saarinen: Non-technical audiences need social proof and problem-solving, not feature lists
“Sometimes you can make pages very feature based or you can make them customer based or use case based. So depending on your company, like what might, I don't know what makes sense. Like our page is very feature based because I like that because I think our aud…”
Disclosure
Saarinen: Linear built its first landing page in one day
“We created in basically one day. We didn't want to spend weeks or months trying to create a website where we think like the actual effort should be put into the product itself.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Saarinen: Linear's purple website design was widely copied across tech
“The second one was the kind of famous purple website that was like replicated a lot across the companies.”
Insight
Saarinen: Landing pages should follow an inverted pyramid structure for clarity
“And like, I think like the website should be kind of like this, almost like this pyramid of like you start with, this is what it is. And then it's like, it's very like, as simple as possible. And then you keep going down. It's like expands on like, okay, well,…”
Disclosure
Saarinen: Linear focused on speed to win startup early adopters
“Two things. One is like the speed was one of the main problems we heard from a lot of people we talked to, that they just don't like the tools because they're slow. And it makes sense. Like a linear is kind of like this very, it's like almost like an email cli…”
Insight
Saarinen: Yellow is a difficult color to use for UI buttons
“I think yellow is a hard, like, you should go darker with it, or not use yellow, because it's a little bit hard color to use for button.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Saarinen: Linear was among the first post-Superhuman products with a command menu
“After superhuman, we were one of the Products to add this, like, common menu that, like, also makes things easier”
Insight
Saarinen: Excessive automatic page motion creates visual chaos and should be reduced
“There's also, like, a lot of automatic movement on this page, which I do think, like, adds to the chaos, so there could be some of that, but, like, I would, like, basically every section is almost, like, moving, and so I think it's, yeah, like, there's, again,…”
Karri Saarinen