Landing pages are dead

The title is slightly provocative, but I wanted to collect a few observations about the psychology of discovering and adopting new products in this new age of software development.

If I think about the tools I've personally adopted as daily workhorses – ChatGPT, Cursor, Devin – I was not convinced to try them by a landing page. I was convinced to try them by strong word of mouth. The landing page for these products was essentially a formality, one whose principal job was to give me access to the product I already wanted to try.

I've noticed something similar with other breakout AI products: Lovable, Bolt, Replit, Boardy... To drive adoption, the message via word of mouth can't just be "I like this product," but instead, "You have to try it."

Driving word of mouth that specifically says "You have to try it" will be increasingly important for a couple reasons:

• First, the supply of software is growing dramatically. There's seemingly a hot new AI tool every day. Most people don't want to try new software daily, or even weekly. Our bar for trying new software is going up.
• Second, vibe coding a landing page is easier than ever. In fact, text-to-product tools like Lovable and Bolt excel at creating landing pages, while they're less good at creating production-grade applications. I think we'll see an explosion of landing pages with similar designs, selling similar products with similar taglines (e.g. "Cursor for slides" from the top of Product Hunt). These landing pages increasingly won't sell, and the sale will instead need to happen upstream (esp. through word of mouth).

There are some exceptions to this. Enterprise software adoption is less driven by word of mouth and more driven by marketing / targeted outbound to executives. Enterprise software landing pages may remain important because, for example, they can cover lots of the questions enterprise buyers ask of their software and convert warm leads.

But increasingly for most software adoption, the key will be creating a magical product experience that drives your users to say, "You have to try it."