What we learned from auditing 90 small-app marketing pages.
A long winter spent reading the marketing pages of independent app studios, mostly UK and EU, mostly under £2M ARR. A pattern emerged that nobody is talking about — and that the well-funded competition is, slowly, starting to imitate.
Between November and February, I spent perhaps two evenings a week reading the marketing pages of small independent app studios. The sample was, in the end, ninety studios. The criteria were loose: independent ownership, no significant institutional funding, between three and forty employees, and a product that I could plausibly describe as either an app or a piece of software with a meaningful app component. The geographic skew was towards the UK, with a substantial minority of EU studios and a small handful from elsewhere.
The exercise was not, in the beginning, intended to produce an essay. I was, in candour, looking for examples to feature in the magazine's regular teardown column. What happened over the four months was that I started noticing the same handful of design and copy decisions appearing across studios that had no apparent connection to each other. The pattern was, by the time I had read perhaps fifty pages, clear enough to be worth writing about.
What follows is, accordingly, an essay about what small independent app studios have, collectively and largely independently, started doing on their marketing pages — and why I think the bigger, better-funded competition is going to be doing the same things within a year.
The first pattern: the hero section that names a problem
The conventional hero section, on a SaaS marketing page in the early 2020s, was three things stacked vertically: a short marketing headline, a one-sentence subheading, and a "Get Started" or "Try Free" button. The hero copy was, almost universally, about what the product was rather than what problem the product solved.
The pattern that emerged across the small-studio sample is different. Roughly two-thirds of the ninety pages had hero sections that began with a named, specific problem. Not "Manage your team better." Not "The all-in-one platform for X." The hero sections name a problem the way a user would describe it: "Spreadsheets stopped working when we hit fifteen people." "The handover from sales to onboarding kept dropping things." "Customer interviews are useful and almost nobody does them properly."
The problem-named hero is, in my reading of the sample, doing something that the product-named hero does not. It is selecting, on the user's first interaction with the page, for the subset of visitors who actually have the named problem. The visitors who do not have the problem leave quickly. The visitors who do have the problem are, by the time they have finished reading the hero, already engaged.
The second pattern: the "what this is not" section
I want to spend the most time on this pattern because it was, by far, the most surprising thing I found.
Roughly one-third of the pages in the sample include, somewhere below the fold, a section that describes what the product is not. The section is usually short — three to six lines — and it is usually phrased as a series of explicit non-comparisons. "We are not a CRM. We are not trying to replace your project management tool. We do not do invoicing." The section is almost always followed by a brief explanation of what the product does instead.
This is, by the standards of conventional SaaS marketing, almost transgressive. The standard advice is to position the product against as many adjacent categories as possible, to maximise the number of buying contexts in which the product can plausibly compete. The "what this is not" section does the opposite. It actively narrows the set of buying contexts. It tells the visitor, in plain English, that the product is not the right choice for several of the situations they might be considering it for.
"The 'what we are not' section is, on paper, the worst marketing decision you can make. In practice it turns out to be one of the best. It selects for the customer who actually wants what you actually built."
The studios that include this section, when I asked them about it in follow-up conversations, gave consistent reasons. The section reduces the rate of inbound enquiries from prospects who are not a fit — which, given that small studios have limited sales capacity, is a significant operational benefit. The section also, the studios told me, has a positive effect on the prospects who are a fit: the willingness to be explicit about the product's limitations reads as trustworthy in a way that conventional marketing does not.
The third pattern: the explicit pricing transparency
I have written elsewhere in this issue about the return of the long, explanatory pricing page. The pattern I want to mention here is adjacent but distinct. Roughly half of the pages in the sample have, on either the pricing page or the homepage itself, a section that explains the reasoning behind the price.
The explanations vary in length and detail. Some are a single sentence. Others are a paragraph. The longest one I saw was about three hundred words and went, in considerable detail, through the studio's cost structure and the margin they were targeting. The willingness to be open about the economics behind the price is, in the sample I read, a distinguishing feature of the small-studio marketing page in a way that it is not on the well-funded competition's pages.
The fourth pattern: the named team page
Roughly 70 per cent of the pages in the sample have a team page that includes the actual names, faces, and short biographies of the people who work at the studio. This is, again, unusual by the standards of conventional SaaS marketing, where the team page is increasingly a small "About" section that emphasises the company's mission rather than the individuals who work there.
The named team page is doing two jobs, as far as I can tell. The first is signalling. A studio that puts the names of its staff on the website is signalling that it is a real, small, accessible operation rather than an anonymous corporate entity. The second is recruitment. The named team page is, several of the studios I spoke to told me, one of their most-visited pages by job applicants. People who want to work at a small studio with a particular character are using the team page to figure out whether the studio is a place they want to work.
The fifth pattern: the long "story" page that nobody asks for
Roughly 40 per cent of the pages in the sample have, somewhere in the navigation, a page that tells the story of how the studio came to exist. The story is usually written by one of the founders, in the first person, and is usually quite long — several thousand words is not uncommon. The story is, by the studios' own admission, not a high-traffic page. It is, however, one of the highest-converting pages on the site for the people who do read it.
The story page is, in my reading, doing one specific job. It is converting the visitor who has already decided they like the product into the visitor who has decided they like the company. The conversion from "I like this product" to "I like this company" is, in the small-studio context, surprisingly important. Customers who like the company tend to be more patient with bugs, more willing to recommend the product to others, and more loyal in the face of competing offers. The long story page is, in effect, a one-time investment in a deeper relationship with the customer.
What I think is going on
The five patterns I have described above share, I think, a common structural feature. They are all decisions that reduce the breadth of the marketing's appeal in exchange for an increase in the quality of the relationship with the visitors who do convert. The problem-named hero filters out visitors who do not have the problem. The "what we are not" section filters out visitors who want a different product. The pricing transparency filters out visitors who would have churned at the first invoice. The named team page filters in visitors who care about who they are buying from. The long story page filters in visitors who are willing to invest some time in understanding the company.
This is, in aggregate, a marketing strategy that the conventional growth-marketing playbook would not recommend. The conventional playbook is about widening the funnel. This is about narrowing it, deliberately, in the belief that the narrower funnel produces healthier customers. The studios in my sample are, by their existence and by their results, evidence that the narrower funnel is — at the small end of the market — a viable strategy.
What I expect to happen next
I will be honest about a prediction. I expect a significant number of the better-funded SaaS companies, over the next eighteen months, to start adopting elements of the small-studio playbook. The "what we are not" section, in particular, has — I think — a strong chance of becoming a mainstream marketing-page convention by 2027. The named team page is already on its way back. The problem-named hero is, in my view, on its way to becoming the new default.
What I do not expect is for the larger companies to be able to adopt the full package as effectively as the small studios have. The small studios can be transparent about pricing because their pricing is, in most cases, simpler. They can name what they are not because their product is, in most cases, more focused. They can put real names and faces on the team page because the team is, in most cases, small enough that the team page is not a vanity gesture. The patterns I have described work as a package, in a particular kind of business, of a particular kind of size. They will be imitated. They will not, in most cases, be replicated.
The methodology for the audit — sample definitions, evaluation criteria, the spreadsheet — is available on request. The list of studios is not; several of them asked, reasonably, not to be identified individually as part of a published sample. The patterns above are, however, drawn from a sample that was as systematic as I knew how to make it, and I have a high degree of confidence that the patterns are real and worth writing about.