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Why so many Founders hate their website... and the Holiday Margherita Pizza Problem
It’s been four weeks since I set up SIDIN, my one-person comms design firm for early-stage companies. And since going public, things have been… hectic. I’ve spoken to dozens of founders, pitched for lots of projects, and booked half a dozen paying customers. All over the world! Not bad! Touch wood. (Thank you to everyone in my network, especially investors, who’ve connected me with potential clients.)
I like speaking to founders. Sometimes, amidst all the hype and hoopla, it’s easy to forget that most founders are placing ultra-high risk life bets on ultra-low probability business outcomes. It takes a special type to do this with sincerity. And I like talking to sincere people.
And as Founders open up to me, I can see interesting patterns in the problems they have with company story. (And other broader non-story problems also.)
Let's talk about one pattern today.
Time and time again I meet Founders who really dislike their business website. And it’s not just people who’ve had a design for many years. Often I meet Founders who’ve JUST completed a redesign and still hate it. And at least once a week I meet a founder who has relaunched their website six times in as many years. All with negligible impact on business.
Why does this happen?
Well, founders love optimizing for channels. It’s very addictive.
“I have a kick ass new way of posting on LinkedIn!”
“I have an amazing new hack to post on Twitter!”
“I am going to ripoff the Linear webpage for my SaaS thing!”
Sadly, this is often the wrong way to go about it.
Let me explain with an analogy. Redesigning your website before you design your story, is like optimising for the cover of your book, and the social media marketing plan, and the retail plan, and the book website… all before you’ve actually written the book.
All of those things are actually fun to do... but you have to write the book friend!
Do not optimise for distribution before you’ve optimised for what you’re distributing.
When "website" comes up on a call I usually ask founders how they went about making their latest iteration. And most of the time the say something along the lines of: “We hired an agency…”
So what ends up happening? The agency asks you a bunch of questions. Maybe you write a bunch of documents. The agency makes a few mocks. And suddenly you’re hunched over Figma arguing over fonts, colours, motion graphics etc.
In fact, you spend days sweating over the design details… when you’ve spent no more than an afternoon thinking of the actual content.
The agency, of course, follows your instructions. Your new website is ready. And you immediately know you’ve just spent a ton of money without actually telling your story well.
The problem only gets worse if you have multiple opinionated founders. In the effort to please everyone’s choices—usually about trivial things—you end up with what I like to call the “Holiday Margherita Pizza Website”.
This is the scenario: You’re on holiday with friends and family. It’s dinner time. There is no consensus choice for dinner, so you end up going to a boring ass Italian restaurant, and ordering the most boring ass pizza.
Increasingly, I see a tell when Founders have been through this: Companies that ship weak websites almost inevitably end up having pitch decks that tell the story wayyyyy better. Because the pitch decks are often a reaction to the website.
So what should you do when you're making your website? I am glad you asked.
1. Write down what sucked about the old one. And be brutal. And promise to never make the same mistakes again.
2. Write down your story. I could tell you the framework I use to do this with my clients. But that would not be good for business.
3. Everyone must agree on the story in black and white, before a single Figma thing happens. I use Workflowy to create a simple bulleted outline of the story. (Bulleted lists are the greatest form of compact storytelling.)
4. Take this to your agency as the actual problem: here's our story, these are the chapters, this is what we want to convey. Show us how you'd design this as a website.
5. Every single time you review any output, check for story fidelity before anything else. (Because a bad website with a clear story will have a better chance of succeeding than a great website with a banal story.)
6. Pro-tip? Simultaneously make a pitch deck for sales. Or for investors. Or for new hires. See if your website tracks them closely.
7. Want an even better litmus test? Once you have a website that is close to complete... try and pitch your business using only the website. Do a mock pitch at work. Really. Go for it. Can you pitch your business to a customer/investor/talent using just your website? If you can't talk an audience through it, there is no way the website can do it without you around.
And voila. You now have a website that tells the story you want to tell. That actually pulls weight. And that you don’t immediately hate afterwards. And now you iterate.
I hope that helps! Thank you for your reading. Next time we talk about why early-stage companies can be handicapped by emotional memories.
BTW I'd love to chat with you Founders about your company story. Link in bio for a relaxed, pitch-free conversation.
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