On taste, restraint, and what we read.
A small studio that grades B2B SaaS landing pages. Faceless. Editorial. We work in writing. We don’t take calls. The notes below are how we think about a page before we begin.
On commitment.
A landing page works when it commits — to one buyer, one promise, one verb. Most pages don’t commit. They hedge between three buyers and four claims, and end up resembling everyone else in their category. Our work is mostly the refusal of the hedge. The version of the page that ships is shorter, sharper, and more willing to leave readers behind than the draft the founder arrived with.
On the metaphor as spine.
The page that gives the product shape — a name with a working metaphor, a vocabulary that carries across product and marketing — has done most of the editorial work before the copywriter arrives. The studios we admire treat the metaphor as the page’s spine, not its garnish. When a metaphor is doing real work, we protect it. The moment a page translates the metaphor back into generic category language is the moment the reader stops remembering it.
On restraint.
Pages that try to say five things end up saying nothing. Pages that try to say one thing, with confidence, are read. Stet’s bias is always toward less. Cutting is harder than adding, which is part of why most pages keep their bloat.
On the writer behind the work.
This studio is intentionally faceless. The signature is the writing, not the founder. Every audit is read closely; every sentence carries the studio’s name. That’s the obligation. If the work has a voice, the voice is the studio’s.
what we read
The taste behind the taste.
A short list of writers, designers, and publications whose work shows up in ours, by way of how they think about restraint, vocabulary, and the discipline of leaving things out.
- Robert Bringhurst — The Elements of Typographic Style. The book that taught us why a paragraph is an argument about respect.
- David Ogilvy — Confessions of an Advertising Man. The original case for treating the reader as intelligent.
- The Talk of the Town in The New Yorker. 300 words doing what most pages need 3,000 to attempt.
- Stratechery, by Ben Thompson. Business writing that commits to a position before the second paragraph.
- The pricing pages of Linear, Stripe, and Vercel. Studied for how restraint reads as confidence.
The list is short on purpose.
— Stet · mmxxvi