Nobody buys features, they buy stories

If you think a good product is what you need to be successful, consider the fact that there are dozens of brands of water available for purchase in your local grocery store or gas station, and that like any other consumer, you probably have your preference for your favorite one!

When researchers put this to the test, over a hundred people tasted four brands of bottled water blindly and did only slightly better than random at telling which was which. Some people even preferred the tap water, and there was basically no relationship between what a bottle cost and how highly it was rated.

So yes you have your preferences, and those feel real and substantial to you. And you may even think the preference is coming from the product itself. But the truth is, as evidenced by the water bottle experiment, it's not coming from the substance itself. It’s coming from the packaging, the name, the ad you saw once, and how the brand makes you feel about yourself.

Most software today is a commodity anyway. Anyone can build almost anything. The thing that will set you apart is not your ability to build, but your ability to instill a sort of vibe and theme in your customer’s mind.

You do this by storytelling. Every page on your website’s landing page needs to be written as if you were an author designing a fantastical character. This character will have a manner of speaking and a personality. And if it’s similar to yours, great, this will be easy, but if you find your own manner of writing too boring and plain, you’ll need to level up your imagination.

Now when thinking about how to make your landing page, your temptation will be to start with the homepage itself, from top to bottom. But that's not how you want to start.

You want to start with your About page.

Everything else on your site is constrained. The hero (which is the big splashy part of your website at the top) has to fit in about eight words. The pricing page has to presumably talk about money. And the feature list has to talk about features. If you start with one of those you’ll end up writing something generic, because there isn’t enough space in any of them to work out what you actually believe.

Once you have a solid About page, everything else on your website, like what to say in your hero, becomes a matter of compression instead of starting from a blank slate. The hero is just your about us page squeezed into eight words, essentially. And the pricing page is the same beliefs but applied to money.

The next few lessons focus on building this page, starting from figuring out what you do actually believe. You'll do an exercise to get this out of your head, because it will be kind of buried, and then you'll have AI turn your newfound vision into compelling copy that sells.