Let's Talk about About Pages
This is a very tactical post, with a little seasoning of strategy.
In general, about pages are the second-most visited page on a company’s website. It seems logical that website visitor would go from homepage to solution page, but particularly on a first visit to the site they usually click on the about page first. So about pages are important.
Yet an astounding number of startups I encounter really flub there about pages. The reason I find this astounding is that a decent about page takes little investment of time or money, so there’s no reason a pre-seed company in which the founders still have day jobs can’t do a good job. Here are the mistakes I see, and how to fix them.
You’re not a faceless corporation. You might aspire to being an impersonal, faceless corporation in the future (really?), but as a startup, even a large startup at Series C/D, you aren’t. Tell me who the founders and leadership of the company are. Tell me a tiny bit about why they founded this company. Ideally, you’ll have photos, but the most important thing is that the about page communicates who is behind this startup, why they built it and why someone should trust them to know what they’re talking about.
You have opinions and this is a good place to talk about them. I’ve talked about owning and articulating your point of view on issues related to your project/product/industry before. Points of view should be ‘should’ statements, they should be things people can disagree with, and they should be, to a certain extent at least, differentiating. Your about page is the best place to explicitly say things like “we think any open source project directed at data engineers should be written in Python,” or “developers should be able to understand and control how their work impacts user privacy.” These opinions belong in your about page, and they should replace what I usually see, which is:
Completely uninteresting, bland, BS value statements. Here’s what this looks like:
“At XYZ company, we have the following values:
Be kind
User-obsessed
We ❤️open source”
Whenever I see a company say that ‘be kind’ is their most important value, I stifle a laugh. First, because no one would ever say ‘we value being jerks.’ Second, because if you have to talk about how much you value kindness, it actually makes me think you are protesting too much — truly kind people don’t have to talk about how kind they are, just like truly funny people don’t have to tell people they’re funny. And the open source stuff? I know your whole team sleeps with Linux penguin stuffies, but it’s the same as the kindness stuff: your feelings about open source should be immediately obvious from your product structure, your GitHub page and your interactions with the open source ecosystem. If you have to talk about it so directly, it makes me suspect you’re hiding something.
Here’s how I feel about about pages: They should be human, and focused on the humans behind your project and your company. They should tell a story about you and why are started the company that is going to make me, as a visitor, more inclined to trust you and your expertise (and I mean you, as an individual human). They’re a place to explain your point of view(s), and you should expect your point of view to turn some people off.
Your about page is a sales page. It’s human-centered, but it should still be focused on differentiating you from your competitors and telling the story behind your project. Don’t treat it as fluff, and don’t fill it with fluff.