(Just in case some Scylla employees see this YC News post)
Sigh...
I know this sounds like a nitpick, and I know it sounds like a broken record, and I know you probably work in a different team and there's "nothing" you can do about it...
But.
I went to your website, interested in your product. I'm your target market! This site needs to impress me, and people like me.
What's the first thing that I see? The website oh-so-slowly animates, sliding down to show some TechCrunch ad.
I don't care about TechCrunch. I care about high-performance databases.
But okay, I move to close it, but "No!" says your website, helpfully overlapping it with another animated slider asking me to accept your cookie policy so that I can be tracked by your marketing group.
Fine. I close both popups, and try to read the content of your site despite the animations every paragraph or so trying to distract me from the content. As soon as I scroll too far past the animations, a stupid chat bot pops up to overlay the bottom of the content as well.
I figure I'll just go to the meat of it, some whitepaper or technical documentation. Despite their miriad flaws, PDFs are thankfully not commonly animated.
The download link for your benchmarks asks for my contact details. It's not a link. It's a sign-up form for spam. I'm not an idiot. I don't want spam. I want to read about your database.
Your marketing team actively stops your target market from looking at your products. Perhaps that's an issue you should look into, because right now there are potential customers that simply never get to find out just how amazing your technology is, because their first experience of your products makes used car salesmen look upstanding and trustworthy.
It's also a product targetted at technical people, including people working at startups and also large enterprise.
No popups.
When you click the community edition download link -- bam -- it is immediately downloading! No form to fill in.
I don't even use their tools much any more, except for the Rust plugin. Nonetheless, I read through their "what's new" release notes, even for Java, because it is so well presented: https://www.jetbrains.com/idea/whatsnew/
Instead they have GIFs showing short, to-the-point snippets of exactly what each feature does. Note that these don't animate by default! You have to click them to play the clip. I love that. They're helpful without being distracting while I'm reading nearby text.
It also gives you an idea of what the product looks like in actual use.
You have no idea how much crap people wade through to find this! I often spend hours googling terms like "Product X Screenshot", "Product X real-world", "Product X tutorial" in the futile attempt to just find out what the heck to expect. Is it a green-screen terminal app kept alive like some sort of crime against nature? Is it a web application? Does it come with a Windows-only GUI? If so, is it at least a usable one? Does it have command-line tools? PowerShell? Tab-complete?
You go to a site like JetBrains, and you see exactly that! Real-world code being manipulated, showing you the product in all its glory.
So show this! Show ScyllaDB doing something. Don't just talk about how it's 47% more snazzy than a competing product I haven't used.
Show it doing a schema change nearly instantly on a terabyte of data, or whatever. But show me the product, or I walk away until I find a website that isn't afraid of letting me see what they're selling...
Good point on the video-first strategy. We're talking more about this internally.
Also: For Scylla Open Source downloads aren't gated -- no name or email address neeeded. We do need to ask what platform you're running on, because the way you deploy to each is different. e.g.,
Sigh...
I know this sounds like a nitpick, and I know it sounds like a broken record, and I know you probably work in a different team and there's "nothing" you can do about it...
But.
I went to your website, interested in your product. I'm your target market! This site needs to impress me, and people like me.
What's the first thing that I see? The website oh-so-slowly animates, sliding down to show some TechCrunch ad.
I don't care about TechCrunch. I care about high-performance databases.
But okay, I move to close it, but "No!" says your website, helpfully overlapping it with another animated slider asking me to accept your cookie policy so that I can be tracked by your marketing group.
Fine. I close both popups, and try to read the content of your site despite the animations every paragraph or so trying to distract me from the content. As soon as I scroll too far past the animations, a stupid chat bot pops up to overlay the bottom of the content as well.
I figure I'll just go to the meat of it, some whitepaper or technical documentation. Despite their miriad flaws, PDFs are thankfully not commonly animated.
The download link for your benchmarks asks for my contact details. It's not a link. It's a sign-up form for spam. I'm not an idiot. I don't want spam. I want to read about your database.
Your marketing team actively stops your target market from looking at your products. Perhaps that's an issue you should look into, because right now there are potential customers that simply never get to find out just how amazing your technology is, because their first experience of your products makes used car salesmen look upstanding and trustworthy.