Confident, not confessional

On the morning of 21 October I read the Vamiq website from top to bottom, as if I were a buyer seeing it for the first time.

Everything on it was true, and that was not the problem. The problem was that it read like a confession. Limits came before benefits. A careful caveat sat beside every promise. We had written it that way on purpose, because we never wanted to overclaim. But buyers do not read a hedge as honesty. They read it as risk.

So I set a new rule for every marketing page: say only what is true, and lead with it. Do not volunteer weaknesses, and do not cross into anything false either.

A sweep, not a tweak

We went through the whole site in all four of its languages: English, French, German and Spanish. The sweep found 282 places where the copy hedged, apologised or led with a limit.

Each proposed rewrite then went through an adversarial truth check, whose only job was to catch anything the product does not actually do. 279 rewrites passed, and they went live that afternoon in Release J.1.

The truth check earned its place. One of my favourite catches was tiny. Our new sub-heading said Vamiq puts a company's private apps on "every one" of its iPhones, iPads and Macs. The checker changed it to "on them", because an app built only for iPhone does not go on a Mac. Two words, and the line went from almost right to right.

Where the line sits

Confident copy is not the same as loud copy. These are the rules we wrote down.

• Lead with what the product does. Benefits first, in plain words.
• Cut the hedges that add nothing. If something is live, say so plainly. If it is not, it does not belong on a sales page.
• Never claim what we have not got. No certificates we do not hold, no customer claims we cannot prove, no features that are not live.
• Label demos briefly. Product screens on our pages and in our film come from a sample workspace, and two words say so: "Sample workspace".
• Keep legal documents exact. Privacy notices, terms and data-processing documents say precisely what is true, in full, however it sounds.

Pictures count too

The same rule applies to images. A product screenshot with an empty form and a row of zeros quietly says that nothing happens here. The new hero on vamiq.app shows one thing: a table of a team's devices as an app installs across them.

The result

The site now sounds like a company that knows what its product does, because it does. And every sentence on it is still one I would defend to a customer's face.

That is the standard I hold this website to as well.