Look, most SaaS homepages are vague on purpose. Not strategy. Accident. The page is trying to talk to two readers at once, hedges every claim to keep both interested, and ends up speaking to neither. You scroll through three sections of soft verbs and abstract nouns and walk away with no idea what the software does. That is not your fault as the reader.
It’s natural to feel frustrated. The page stole your time.
A Line, Dissected
Here is a homepage banner I’ve seen some version of a hundred times:
Empower your teams to do their best work.
Read it. Now tell me what the product is. (Go on. Try.)
You can’t.
Every word is a placeholder. “Empower” is a feeling, not a mechanism. “Your teams”… which teams? Sales? Engineering? Legal? “Best work” by whose definition, against what baseline? The sentence is built entirely from words that survive any audit because they commit to nothing.
And it is doing exactly what it was designed to do. It does not exclude anyone. A chief financial officer can squint and imagine cost savings. A head of infrastructure can squint and imagine governance. A practitioner can squint and imagine a better Monday. All of them are squinting. None of them are nodding.
That is the safe middle. Copy that survives the approval cycle and dies on contact with a buyer.
Why This Keeps Happening
The homepage has two readers, and marketing keeps pretending it has one.
There is the user. The practitioner who will live in the product if it gets bought. They want to see the work. They want to know if the tool fits their hand. They look for screenshots, specific verbs, the shape of a day with this thing in it.
And there is the buyer. The exec who signs the contract. They will never log in. They want the outcome, the risk, and the mechanism that makes the outcome believable. They look for proof, scale, control.
Two readers, two kinds of evidence. So marketing splits the difference. We write a sentence the buyer cannot disagree with and the user cannot picture. We call it “value-led.” It is neither.
Then the approval cycle finishes the job. Legal sands off a claim. Product asks you to soften a verb. The CMO wants it to sound a little more “platform.” By the time it ships, the only thing the headline asserts is that the company exists.
This is not a copywriting problem. It is a go-to-market problem dressed in copy. We pick “broad reach” as the goal and accept “says nothing” as the cost. And we keep doing it because the next vendor’s homepage looks the same, so the bar feels normal.
It is not normal. It is the genre eating itself.
Where to Refocus
You can write for the buyer without abandoning the user. It is harder. It is not impossible. And the payoff is a homepage that someone outside your industry could describe back to you after thirty seconds.
Start by accepting that the homepage is not a billboard. It is the first stop on a multi-stop trip. The hero says what the product does, in nouns and verbs the buyer recognizes. The outcome, and the mechanism that delivers it. The next section shows the work. The specific motion a practitioner makes inside the product. The buyer reads the top. The user scrolls. Both find their evidence on the same page, in the order they care about it.
That is more work than the safe middle. You have to name a buyer. You have to name an outcome. You have to write specifics that a reviewer will want to soften, and then defend them when they try. Some of those specifics will narrow your audience. That is the point. A homepage that says something to someone beats a homepage that says nothing to everyone.
Write for the buyer. Show the user. Cut the words that survive only because nobody objected to them.
If your homepage could be your competitor’s homepage with the logo swapped, it is not written for anyone. Pick a reader. Then write to them like they are sitting across from you.