By Michael Semer
By Michael SemerWhat you’ll learn:
- Why your hero section answers a question nobody asked, and what the reader actually came looking for.
- The five-second test that catches Featuritis before a prospect does.
- An example rewrite, plus the campaign that proves it out.
There’s a strain of homepage copy I’ve come to think of as Featuritis: an inflammation of the hero section brought on by too many engineers sitting too close to the whiteboard for too long. Symptoms include “unified orchestration layer,” “AI-powered enterprise platform,” and a strange compulsion to describe eighteen months of architecture in the first twenty words a stranger will ever read about you.
Nobody sets out to write it. It just happens, the way, well toenail fungus happens — slowly, then all at once, then you’re wondering how it got this far.
The buyer never asked what you built
Here’s the thing about the person who lands on your homepage: they didn’t come looking for a platform. They came looking for relief from a Monday. Somewhere between the third status meeting and the fourth broken spreadsheet, they typed something into Google out of sheer exhaustion, and your homepage is one of the things that showed up. It has about five seconds to prove it understands their Monday migraine before they bounce back to the search results and try someone else.
Instead, most homepages open with the org chart’s version of events. A unified AI orchestration layer for enterprise data pipelines. Reads like it was drafted in a standup and never touched again.
Nobody in the history of B2B has ever thought, finally, an orchestration layer, and felt seen.
Nobody in the history of B2B has ever thought, finally, an orchestration layer, and felt seen.
Gartner’s research on B2B buying journeys backs this up with something more useful than my irritation: buyers who feel unsupported by a vendor’s digital content are more likely to regret the purchase later, whether or not they still go through with an engagement. The homepage isn’t a brochure hanging in the lobby. It’s evidence in a decision the buyer is already halfway through making without you.
And they’re further along than you think. 6sense’s 2025 B2B Buyer Experience Report puts buyers at eight to nine prior category evaluations on average, with preferences largely locked in before anyone picks up the phone. By the time your homepage loads, the reader has already ruled out three companies that made them do the translation work — turning “platform” into “the thing that fixes my Monday” — themselves.
Ask a tired person to do your job for you and see how long they stick around.
The rewrite is not a redesign
Compare:
Platform-first: “A unified AI orchestration layer for enterprise data pipelines.”
Problem-first:“Your data team spends more time babysitting pipelines than building anything new. This stops that.”
Same product. Same eighteen months of engineering. The second version just bothered to find out what the reader’s Monday actually feels like before describing the fix.
April Dunford’s positioning framework starts in exactly this spot: you can’t write a word of homepage copy until you know what the buyer would be stuck doing if your product didn’t exist. Skip that step and the homepage falls back on describing the product, because the product is the only thing left in the room to talk about.
The test that costs you nada
Five seconds. No scrolling. Show the hero section to someone who’s never heard of your company and ask what problem it solves. If they hand you back the product category, “uh, some kind of AI platform?”, hey! You’ve got Featuritis. If they name something a person could actually be annoyed about on a Monday, you’re fine.
This is the first question in every Messaging Friction Audit I run, and it’s the cheapest diagnostic in the whole process. No dashboards, no analytics pull, just one honest stranger and a stopwatch.
I ran it on Vendavo during a campaign that eventually pushed content-sourced MQLs up 5,815%. The fix wasn’t a redesign, a rebrand, or a new CMS. It was retiring the hero line about the pricing platform Vendavo had built and replacing it with the pricing problem their buyers already knew they had.
Run the test on your own homepage before you run it on a competitor’s. Most people find the platform first there too.
FAQs
How do I tell if my homepage is problem-first or product-first?
Run the five-second test: show the hero section to someone unfamiliar with your company and ask what problem it solves. If they hand you back your product category, it’s product-first.
Does fixing this require a redesign?
No. It’s usually a rewrite of the hero line and subhead, not new layout or new CMS.
What’s the difference between positioning and messaging?
Positioning is the strategic work of knowing what a buyer would do without you. Messaging is the sentence on the homepage that reflects it. You can’t write the second without doing the first.