(I know it was kind of broken under all the traffic earlier.)
Usually the demo is what makes people "get it".
It's been surprisingly difficult to find a sentence or two that describe Sandstorm in a way that is effective on everyone. For any text we use, different sets of people get it or are confused. :/
People on the internet are easily distracted and have short attention spans. You want them to get interested enough to actually run your demo. I'm not going to take 10 minutes to delve deeper unless you hook me to begin with.
Also, you don't need to have text that appeals to everyone (there is no "average" user), but you should be able to write text that appeals to at least one of your groups (individuals, developers, enterprise). The two sentences you have currently are so generic that they don't say anything at all. An open source platform? An open source platform that does what?
Target the group with your messaging that you are targeting with your platform. Sure, sandstorm could be used by any of them, but which group is MOST important to your platform?
10 minutes? The demo allows you to set up a Wordpress blog in literally 10 seconds (it's four clicks and no typing or scrolling -- not even to log in). I'm not sure why that's so onerous, even for folks with short attention spans.
That's such a great line that you just wrote: "You can setup a WordPress blog in 10 seconds". Why don't you say that under the demo link? Or say, "Try our demo. It takes 10 seconds to install WordPress" or whatever app.
It's not onerous at all, but you have to get people to the point where they're actually at the demo. My "10 minutes" was based on the thought process that goes through my head when I see a "try our demo" link. If the demo takes only 10 seconds, that's highlighting a major selling point of your platform, so make that explicit.
Looks good! I would think about replacing your main tagline with that sentence, or something like it. Not to be overly harsh, but your main tagline doesn't say anything.
Edit: Actually, I think if you said something like "Sandstorm is an open source app platform for personal servers" that would be a major improvement. The whole "app" part is missing from the main tagline. Then, your sub-tagline goes into more detail about what apps.
Edit 2: Actually, I would remove the open source part altogether. It's redundant if you have a github link somewhere on your page, which you do, and I think the developer community you are targeting would assume that it's open source. Or, just keep "open".
Actually, the words "open source" are a recent addition to our header, whereas we've always had the github link. We discovered from feedback that many people who visited our page had no idea that it was open source, since most people don't look at nav bars, and this of course completely changed their perception of the project (for the worse, obviously). When we put "open source" into the header, we saw a marked increase in interest.
Thanks for the feedback, though! We'll think about inserting "app" in there.
"... Usually the demo is what makes people "get it"...."
Kenton, I'd agree with this approach.
The killer approach is for newly created applications, ported to sandstorm to take advantage of the isolation, security and scalability.
So one area to look at, might be extra tools/paths to port, maintain and expand development.
For cough, Microsoft (platform), it was VB, the killer app. For Linux (platform) it was Apache (killer app). So "the path" to get applications on Sandstorm (platform) to create a killer app, might be the answer.
==== background ====
In fact, one way would be to ask what apps people (HN for example) already use and what problems they have. You need a feel for the numbers of applications companies/startups use. Is it technical? Is it business related? Is it cost?
Install it (if it's ported) and work a discussion around it. For example the reader who chimed in on creating a page on Wordpress - show the path to do that.
Another one I'd suggest as a side-business/demo is a collaborative editor (hello etherpad). [0] I know for a fact google, for example, use some crappy Doc editor (sans the nice editor features) to screen candidates. So there's a demand there.
For the technical minded, poking around https://capnproto.org/ really explains what sandstorm servers can do.
There's this idea around that people don't read text. What if it's just that most text sucks? Web designers end up writing web pages with text that isn't really designed to be read, so people don't read it, and then it get optimized away. The result is often really weird. It's this blank pastel page with some vague promises and a SIGN UP NOW button. Zombo.com all over again.
I thought your Cap'n Proto page did a good job of this actually! It tells the story.
