5 Must have checks for a True Product Led Homepage

Published in

Pedestal Labs

4 min readOct 21, 2020

Pedestal Labs is a growth accelerator helping startups achieve growth through relevant interventions across Strategic Consulting, Product, Marketing, and Analytics. We help brands adapt, experiment, and learn through relevant interventions and achieve growth, scale sustainably, and in the process build a great brand.

“Product led growth (PLG) is a business model that relies on the product itself as the primary driver of customer acquisition, conversion and expansion. The product decisions are driven by the end user’s expectations and hence the PLG process is highly human centred.

We have been talking a lot about how to use the concepts of “Product Led Growth” to align Engineering, Marketing, and Sales teams to ensure sustainable business growth(here). However let’s talk about how to use the core concepts of PLG, to design the product’s website.

A website is the first digital introduction of the product. When a user lands on the homepage of your product’s website, they just need 50ms (less than a second) to make the first impression. Practically that’s how much time a designer has, to convince the user to stay. 50 ms is all we have!

1. Use Human Faces — Avoid illustrations

Research indicates that our brain is built to look at human faces. Humans are naturally drawn to human faces.

This is true in the case of websites as well. Appropriate images combined with the right background ad contrast can work wonders for the engagement metrics of your website.

Recently a lot of companies have consciously redesigned their webpages to replace graphics, illustrations and vector icons with human faces.

A brilliant example of this approach is Slack

Slack takes the concept of being relatable to one step further by “Localizing” the faces. So while in India the users see the page above, the US users view the faces that they can identify with.

A PLG masterstroke !

2. Include a Clear Value Proposition

A well designed homepage should welcome the user with the Product’s value proposition right away. The user should clearly understand how this product is better than the competitors. The copy should be cleverly worded to be concise and to the point.

Let’s look at how Invision’s homepage displays the value proposition of designing better, faster, together.

Effectively in one statement, Invision has made an impression in the user’s mind of being better than any other prototyping platform.

3. Nudge users to engage by Highlighting CTA

The visuals, images and the copy should together motivate the user to engage with the “Call To Action”. Hence it is imperative that the CTA is amply highlighted. The website can have multiple CTAs. In such a scenario the relevant CTAs should be designed efficiently as per the visual hierarchy.

growthmentor Uses the copy and value proposition to urge users to click on the “Learn More” link right away, without any other distractions.

4. Show your Product in action

A PLG design aims to show the product in action, right when the user lands on the homepage. If your design navigation wants the user to click their way to some inner page for seeing the product demo, you have effectively lost the user’s attention span.

An excellent example of this concept is Typeform.

While on the left side of the page, the value proposition is combined with the CTA, the right side is dedicated to a sneak preview of the different product features. Hence they let the user experience the some of the actual product, without any specific interaction on their part.

5. Don’t sell features, Sell benefits

A true PLG approach works for solving the user’s pain points. Hence the homepage should also inform the user how the product would make their life easier. A bland list of advanced features, might not make any impression to the user.

The best idea is to combine the features with the benefits that it offers to the users.

Freshbooks does an amazing job where the copy clearly describes the real user benefits.