Your homepage is vague because you won't name the alternative

The homepage that mentions no one

In February I sat in a flat above a bakery in Karlín and read a founder's homepage out loud to her. Eleven sentences above the fold. Not one of them named a thing her buyer would otherwise do. The product was a scheduling and notes layer for physiotherapy clinics. The headline said Modern practice management, built for growth. I asked her where the last five lost deals went. She answered in about four seconds: two to a Czech incumbent, one to a rival's free tier, and two to a shared Google Calendar plus a WhatsApp group run by the receptionist.

She knew. The page didn't. That is the defect, and it is the most common one I see. The founder holds a precise map of the buyer's alternatives in her head and publishes a page written as if the buyer arrived with no history and no habits.

Buyers never arrive that way. Every purchase is a switch away from something, including from doing nothing. If your page does not acknowledge the something, the buyer has to do that work themselves, in a browser tab, at 11pm, with low motivation. Most of them do not bother.

Why the page goes quiet

There are three reasons founders refuse to name the alternative, and only one of them is honest.

The first is legal nerves. Somebody once told them that naming a competitor invites a letter. In practice, in the UK and the EU, comparative advertising is lawful if the comparison is accurate, verifiable, compares like with like, and does not denigrate. I have written competitor names into dozens of pages. I have never seen a letter arrive over a factual claim.

The second is sales superstition: don't give them ideas. The buyer has the ideas. They had them before you. Search your own brand plus "vs" in Search Console and you will find people typing the comparison you refused to write. If you don't publish it, a review-aggregator site with an affiliate deal will, and they will frame it.

The third reason is the real one. You don't actually know what the alternative is. You know your named competitors because you see them in deals, but you have never asked a lost buyer what happened next, so you have no idea whether you lose to a product or to inertia.

If you cannot name what the buyer does instead, you are not selling a product. You are selling a category, and the category leader wins every sale made at the category level.

The alternative is usually not a company

I keep a log of win/loss reasons from the founder weekends and from my own consulting deals. Across 63 logged outcomes for early B2B products, the alternative the buyer chose broke down roughly like this: a spreadsheet or a shared doc in 22 cases, a named competitor in 17, an internal build or a scripted hack in 9, an agency or a freelancer in 8, and nothing at all in 7.

So in about two thirds of cases the winning alternative was not a company you could put in a comparison table. It was a Google Sheet with four tabs, or a junior analyst who spends Thursday afternoons on it, or the absence of a decision.

This matters because the three types need different pages. Against a spreadsheet you sell the cost of the manual step and the class of error it produces. Against a named competitor you sell one dimension of difference and you name it. Against nothing you sell the cost of the current month, in money, and you make the first step cheap enough to say yes to on a Tuesday.

Most vague homepages are vague because they are trying to speak to all three at once. The copy dissolves into the intersection of three arguments, and the intersection is always adjectives.

Get the name out of your own pipeline

You can recover the alternative in about a week. Take the last ten closed-lost opportunities and the last ten closed-won, and ask each one a single factual question. Not an opinion question.

1. "Walk me through the two weeks after our last call. What did you do about the problem?"
2. "Who else was in the room when the decision got made, and what did they say?"
3. "What were you using the week before you first contacted us?"
4. "If we had shut down the day you signed, what would you have done on the Monday?"

That last one is the highest-yield question I know. It forces a named substitute out of a buyer who is otherwise happy to be polite about your product. Founders who run twenty of these come back with a list of alternatives that is shorter and stranger than they expected. Often one alternative accounts for more than half.

Write the answers verbatim into a sheet. Count them. The alternative you name on the homepage is the one with the highest count among the buyers you actually want, not the one that annoys you most.

Putting it on the page

The pattern that works is three lines and it goes near the top, not in a comparison section 4,000 pixels down.

Name the alternative. State the specific failure it produces, with a number or a unit. State what switching costs, honestly.

For the physio product, the original hero said Modern practice management, built for growth. The version she shipped in March said this: "Most clinics run on a shared calendar and a WhatsApp group. That works until two therapists double-book the same room, which happens about twice a month per clinic and costs you the slot. We import your calendar in an afternoon and keep the WhatsApp group. £39 per therapist per month."

That is not elegant prose. It is legible. A clinic owner reads it and knows in six seconds whether it is about them. Enquiries per session on that page went from 1.8% to 4.1% over the following six weeks, on roughly 3,000 sessions a month. The traffic did not change. The claim did.

Notice what the copy does not do. It does not say the WhatsApp group is stupid. Your buyer chose it, and insulting the choice insults the buyer. It says the alternative works, states the boundary where it stops working, and offers to keep the part they like.

The substitution test

Here is a check you can run in two minutes on any page you have live.

Delete your company name from the hero and paste in your nearest competitor's. Read it again. If it still reads as true, your hero is not positioning. It is category description, and it is doing nothing that a buyer could not get from a search results page.

Run the same test on your three feature headings. Run it on the first line of your pricing page. In my experience most early-stage pages fail on at least three of five. The fix is not better writing. The fix is a fact only you can claim: a named alternative, a measured failure mode, a specific buyer, a number.

The reason this is hard has nothing to do with copywriting talent. Naming the alternative is a commitment. It says out loud who you are for and who you are not for, and it forecloses the fantasy that the enterprise deal and the solo practitioner both convert on the same page. Vagueness is how founders keep every option open. It is also how they convert nobody.

Do this before Friday

Open your homepage. Run the substitution test on the hero and write down whether it passes. Then send four emails: two to buyers who signed in the last quarter, two to buyers who did not, each asking the Monday question. Book fifteen minutes with anyone who replies.

When you have four answers, count the alternatives and write the three-line block for whichever one wins. Ship it as the hero. Leave the old page live on a second URL and split the traffic if you have the volume; if you do not, just ship it and watch enquiries per session for three weeks. You will know quickly. Pages that name something move; pages that describe a category do not.