CXL Blog

They don't release their exact statistics, but Conversion Rate Experts are pretty authoritative on the subject of scrolling vs. fold.

http://www.conversion-rate-experts.com/scrolling-tips/

In split tests, long pages often beat shorter pages.

As a rule of thumb, your page should contain at least as
many words as you’d use when selling your product or
service face to face.

The winning page we designed for SEOmoz was six times
longer than the control, which it outperformed by 52%.

Whenever someone tells you that they’d never buy from a
long page, remind them how long Amazon’s pages are.

Long pages are effective, but only if your users know that
they can scroll and are given compelling reasons to do so.

http://www.conversion-rate-experts.com/crazy-egg-case-study/

The redesigned page is about 20 times as long as the
control... new page outperformed the control by 30%.

http://www.marketingexperiments.com/improving-website-conversion/long-copy-short-copy.html

In our initial micro-test, long copy outperformed short
copy by 40.54%. Click-through traffic sent to the short
copy page was unprofitable (-14% ROI), while traffic sent
to the long copy page produced an ROI of 21%.

http://conversionxl.com/4-cases-where-short-home-pages-outperformed-long-home-pages/

Short copy performs better when there is low perceived
risk, low cost, and low commitment... when the customer
has an emotional, impulsive, and “want-oriented”
motivation.…

I'm commenting on the marketing aspect as a marketing analyst:

I would:

1) Change the navigation of the site making About 2nd.

In About, I honestly find it daunting that there is seemingly only one person behind it. The number of people behind a product doesn't matter so much, but it does matter how this is displayed. So for instance there is no info about Gary on who he is or to his twitter or linkedin. This kind of information is like a validation mechanism like testimonials and doesn't hurt to add. If anything, it makes the team member seem more real and accountable even if most of the users will never contact them through it.

The founder - Dominic St-Pierre is mentioned but there is no info about him at all.

2) Change your about page by:
a) Adding all team member profiles to the page
b) Providing more info about each team member
c) Adding twitter & linkedin links to the team member profile

Example: https://hootsuite.com/about/leadership
Even larger companies like twitter and twilio do something like this - http://www.twilio.com/company/management https://about.twitter.com/company/leadership

d) Put the team members at the bottom and the text from the founder at the top. If possible, add a story about why this company was made to solve what pain points for which audience.

3) Add a call to action button to 'Try Osmosis' in the navigation bar next to Login.
Your call to action on the homepage is very prominent which is great, but on other pages you need to scroll…

I have no question that people who have built brands believe that it was successful. We can even look at "big brands" like Coke -- they sell sugar water + a brand -- surely that must be real.

My nuanced take is that a brand "exists" in the sense that we are able to understand it, what it represents, etc. What we do not know is if that's the best way to spend resources. All the money that went into Intel Inside -- what if they spent it on something else? No marketer can know that; the question as a marketer: "is this the best thing I can do with my resources?" Nothing about "building a brand" provides objective feedback or testable predictions about the usage of that dollar.

Suggesting that TV advertising can't be a scam because so many people have put so much effort into it is another fallacy. Old school TV advertising was done by people whose jobs dependent on the revenue stream -- even if branding were completely ineffective; if they got paid, I wouldn't consider that irrational.

Brands happen. They can have value, but we can only try to prove that value after the fact.

Direct response, on the other hand, tends to be less full of b.s.

https://conversionxl.com/blog/cro-vs-branding/

While it may be possible take the frequentist approach to AB testing, Bayesian inference is becoming the way to go with this.[1] Instead of directly setting up a yes-no hypothesis test with the nearly impossible to use correctly p-values[2], Bayesian approaches aim to directly estimate whatever quantity you want. With the Bayesian approach, you get estimates for A, B, and A-B (or whatever combination you want, e.g. (A-B)/A). Each of those estimates are properly called posterior probability distributions and describe the range of possible values. The end result is that instead of saying "A is better than B (p < 0.05)" you get a probability distribution of A-B. From that probability distribution you can answer any question you want: the most likely difference between A and B (the average), the probability that A is better than B (just integrate the area above 0), or whatever is needed to make a decision.

[1] https://conversionxl.com/blog/bayesian-frequentist-ab-testing/

[2] https://www.amstat.org/asa/files/pdfs/p-valuestatement.pdf

> "70% of businesses don't do user research... and this is basically constant over revenue buckets from $0 to $50M+."

> I think there are a surprising number of things you could replace for "user research" here, in that meat-and-potatoes things that are well-written-about seem like they're technologies which should exist everywhere... but they're not.

> Also worth noting that there are many businesses which have several genres of meat-and-potatoes things missing but they do one or several things well enough to cause success in spite of that.

If this is accurate shouldn’t it be possible to go from nothing to charging $10,000 per consulting engagement in under a year? Do one of the shorter coding boot camps that will actually teach you a useful amount, like App Academy, then do a course on conversionxl, like their conversion optimisation “mini-degree”[1] and then do a lot of sales calls?

[1]https://conversionxl.com/institute/

Be sure to check out http://conversionxl.com/blog/ for marketing how to's/tricks/growth hacks - it's one of the best sources.

I like the idea. I'd suggest some effort be put into the grammar on the website and blog because small things like that create a negative impression for some people.

Example, from:

Poucher lets you generate discount vouchers, for the restaurant or bar you like. The more Poucher users in a restaurant or bar means more discounts. So pick the nearest venue with highest population and enjoy your live discount.

To:

Poucher lets you create a discount coupon for the restaurant or bar you visit. The more Poucher users in a restaurant or bar, the higher discount you'll receive. Get Poucher now and start enjoying your live discounts! *Disclaimer: Discount coupons are only available for participating venues and valid for the visit - (see our list for participating venues near you.)[link]