My toddler is learning letters, which mostly means I am learning how strange letters are.
Last week the sticking point was b and d. Then, somewhere in the middle of getting them wrong, the complaint turned into an observation: it is the same letter, just turned around. A circle and a stick. Put the stick on the left, you get b. Put it on the right, you get d. Flip the whole thing upside down and you get p and q.
Then the numbers. 6 and 9 got the same treatment, because they are also one shape and a rotation.
Then the part I have not stopped thinking about. Zero and the letter O. Same shape, but one of them lives in the alphabet and the other lives in the numbers, and nobody had mentioned that they were allowed to be in both places at once.
Adults do not see any of this. We learned the alphabet as twenty six separate facts, memorized them, and stopped looking at the shapes. A kid who has not memorized them yet has no choice but to actually look, so they see the connection first.
I do the exact same thing to marketing.
Twenty six separate facts
Here is the list I had written down for our homepage, before the letters thing.
- A product demo, so people can see it work.
- A social proof section, because nobody has heard of us.
- A lead capture form, because we would like to talk to people.
- A template or starter, so someone can copy what they just saw.
Four items. Four builds. Four sections stacked down a page, each one doing its own small job, each one requiring me to write copy explaining what the section is for.
That is the memorized alphabet. Demo, proof, capture, template: four separate facts, because that is how every landing page teardown has them listed, and I stopped looking at the shapes.
The letters are one shape and a rotation. So is that list.
One widget, four letters
The section on our homepage now, the showcase at #see-it-live, is a single interactive widget built with Fugte. Real owners submit their website through the form, and the wall renders the submissions live. That is it. One widget id, one embed snippet, the same snippet a customer gets.
Rotate it and you get the whole list:
b, the demo. It is not a screenshot of a form. It is a form. A visitor can type in it and watch their entry appear, which proves the invisible half of the product: the submit endpoint, the spam screening, the storage, the display. Screenshots cannot do that. That is the entire reason we made the demo a form in the first place, and I wrote about the three sharp edges of letting strangers post to your landing page when we shipped the first version of it.
d, the proof. A wall of real websites from real owners is social proof that fills itself. No collection process, no permission emails, no quote carousel that took two months to assemble. Every person who uses the demo leaves the proof behind as a side effect. It passed twenty submissions in the first week, and the interesting part is not the count, it is that they came with their own one line pitches attached: a prompt engineering tool, a construction cost estimator, birdwatching tours, an automotive parts business, a value investing research app. I did not write a word of that section. The people using the demo wrote it.
p, the capture. A submission is not a signup, and I am not going to pretend it is. But it is a person who has now used the product from the visitor's side, seen their entry go live, and has a reason to come back and look at the wall again. That is a warmer start than a form that says "join our newsletter."
q, the template. The same widget is a starter anyone can install. The demo is the product is the template. Nothing had to be rebuilt to make that true, because there was only ever one thing.
One build. Four jobs. The savings are not really the build time, they are the four sections of explanatory copy I did not have to write, and the four things I did not have to maintain separately.
This is what I now mean by a marketing widget, and it is not the usual meaning. Not a widget that advertises the product. A widget that is the product, doing the marketing.
The 6 and 9 rule
Here is the test that keeps this from being a trick.
An asset only works this way if it reads as valuable from both sides. To us, the wall is proof our product works. To an owner submitting their site, it is their business shown on a page that gets visitors, for free, in about twenty seconds. Same object. Two readings. Both true.
That is a 6 and a 9. It has to be a 6 to you and a 9 to them, and neither of you should have to be told which one you are looking at.
The test is easy to run: cover up your own reason for building the thing. Does a stranger still want to touch it? If the answer is no, you do not have a rotation, you have a screenshot with a submit button on it. Most "interactive demos" fail this. Nobody wants to touch a fake dashboard with fake data in it, because there is nothing in it for the person doing the touching.
The 0 and O rule
The zero is the one I keep coming back to, because it is the only one of these shapes that belongs to two systems at once.
The wall is made of the product, not just about the product. It runs on the same widget engine, the same submit endpoint, the same spam screening our customers get. So it belongs to the product system and the marketing system at the same time, and improving one improves the other. When we hardened the endpoint, the demo got better. When we cap the height so the wall does not eat the homepage, every customer with a long wall gets the same fix.
Update once, live everywhere. It turns out that applies to our own marketing too.
Anything you build that is only about your product will drift from the product. A screenshot goes stale the day after you ship. A recorded demo video goes stale the first time you move a button. The zero does not go stale, because it is not a copy of the thing, it is the thing, standing in a different alphabet.
What it costs
Not free, and I would rather say so.
A public wall on a public internet collects junk, and some of it needs deleting by hand. I also budgeted for the wall staying sparse and slightly embarrassing for a month, because that is the honest risk with anything that fills itself. It did not, but it could have, and the version of this post where it stayed empty would have been a much shorter one. And the section is below the fold now, on purpose, because a hero has one job and asking a first-time visitor to submit their website before they know what we sell is a rotation too far.
There is also a temptation I am trying to avoid: once you notice this pattern, you start trying to make every asset do four jobs. Most assets should do one job well. b and d being the same shape does not mean every letter has a twin. Four of them do. That is why it is worth noticing.
Finding your own rotation
If you want to run this on your own site, four questions, in order:
- What is the one thing you would build anyway, even with no marketing reason?
- Which of your planned marketing sections could that thing replace, rather than sit next to?
- Cover your reason for building it. Would a stranger still use it? (6 and 9)
- Is it made of your product, or only about your product? (0 and O)
If a thing survives all four, build that instead of the list. If nothing does, build the list, and stop feeling clever about it.
My toddler still writes b when he means d, for the record. Knowing two things are connected is not the same as knowing which one you are holding. But he looked at the shape, which is more than I was doing with my own homepage.
Go add your site to the wall, and if you want an interactive widget of your own, this one is a starter.
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