from the editor's desk
The pages all say the same thing.
If you read forty B2B SaaS landing pages in a row, a strange thing happens. The pages start to merge. They use the same six adjectives — fast, easy, powerful, seamless, modern, intelligent. They name the same five integrations. They have the same three-column "Why us" section with the same three icons. After page ten, you cannot tell whose product is whose.
The pages aren't bad, exactly. They are unwilling to commit to anything. They describe the category instead of the product. They name "modern teams" instead of senior PMs at Series B startups. They promise to "transform workflows" instead of saving twenty minutes on the Tuesday playbook review. The writing is generic because being specific feels risky — and being specific is the thing that would have helped the visitor decide.
a typical hero, marked up
The Modern Platform for Workflow Automation
Run your customer-success playbooks without copy-pasting between Slack and Notion.
This was always a problem. It is about to be the only problem. Three observability launches on Show HN this week all said variations of "observability that fixes your bugs." None said whose bugs, which kind, for which engineer. Category copy on every one. Anyone can ship a SaaS product in a weekend now. The product itself is no longer the moat. The page selling it — the writing, the structure, the restraint, the willingness to mean one thing instead of six — is what will distinguish a business worth paying for from a business that fades into the category.
a typical bullet, marked up
Powerful automation workflows
12-step playbooks that run while you're in a meeting.
That distinguishing thing has an old name. It is taste. You can read it on Linear's homepage, where the hero says "Linear is a purpose-built tool for planning and building products" — a sentence that names itself, names what it does, and refuses to promise an outcome the visitor would have to be skeptical of. Taste on a landing page means committing to one buyer instead of "modern teams." It means choosing four claims that are true instead of twelve that sound impressive. It means refusing to add a logo bar of Series-A startups nobody recognizes. It is, mostly, the discipline of removing things until the page says one thing well.
a typical CTA, marked up
Get Started Free
Send me your URL — I'll have a Snapshot back to you Wednesday.
Stet does that work. Founders send us their URL. We read the page closely, grade it on the same ten dimensions every time, and send back a written diagnosis — and, if you want it, the new copy already written. We don't take calls. We don't make decks. We send writing that reads like someone meant it. The framework is the same on every page; the eyes are careful; the turnaround is days, not months.
field notes
May 21 — read 12 Show HN launches today. Eight used "platform" in the hero. Two of those used it correctly.
— Stet · May 2026