Love/Hate with Landing Pages

TL;DR

In this episode of The Good Thing, Stefan and Jens review SaaS landing pages from leading developer tools. They praise strong social proof and clear calls to action, but criticize vague slogans, missing business value, and weak storytelling. From Sentry’s creative design to a self-roast of WunderGraph’s own site, the roast highlights what makes a landing page convert—or flop.

Sentry: Creative but Playful

The first stop was Sentry . Jens admired the interactive hero but questioned whether the playful tone fit a bug-tracking tool.

For something that finds bugs, I’m not sure—maybe it’s too playful.

Stefan countered that developers enjoy quirky touches, and the trust logos (Disney, GitHub, Cloudflare) made the page credible. Both agreed it lacked hard metrics like “40% fewer bugs,” which would have strengthened the pitch.

Prisma: Vague Messaging

Prisma’s hero—“From idea to scale. Simplified.”—left both hosts puzzled.

It means nothing. If I read it, I don’t know what the product is.

They noted missing business value, weak social proof, and overuse of vague terms like “magic”. For Jens, a landing page must show why a CTO should choose Prisma over AWS RDS.

PlanetScale: Ugly but Effective

Stefan praised PlanetScale’s stripped-down site, while Jens focused on its credibility.

The world’s fastest and most reliable relational database—it’s a bold statement.

They agreed the terminal-style design fit its technical audience, and tying the database back to YouTube’s scaling story delivered powerful proof.

Vercel: Proof in Numbers

Vercel won both hosts over with business-focused benefits.

Runway build times went down from 7 minutes to 40 seconds. That’s amazing.

Case studies with Adobe, Chick-fil-A, and Neo made the benefits clear even for non-developers. Stefan noted the smooth site itself was a testimonial for Vercel’s quality.

Retool: Clear but at Risk

Retool impressed with a simple hero—“The best way to build internal software.”—and a demo dashboard that matched the message.

I immediately know what they do. That’s powerful.

But they worried AI tools like Cursor could threaten Retool’s niche, making differentiation critical.

PostHog: Fun but Unfocused

PostHog's edgy copy and animations drew laughs, but Jens said it tried to do too much.

They expanded into everything—analytics, heatmaps, surveys. I’m not sure.

While objection-handling on the landing page was clever, both felt the site was more entertaining than convincing.

Apollo: Buzzwords Over Impact

The roast also took aim at Apollo’s site.

'API orchestration for the cloud native world’—it’s just a list of words.

They criticized inconsistent messaging (low-code vs no-code) and the lack of customer metrics. For Stefan, the missing business impact—time saved, debt reduced—was the biggest gap.

WunderGraph: Self-Roast

The roast ended with Stefan and Jens pulling up WunderGraph's site . Both admitted messaging was still a work in progress.

It’s so hard to do your own landing page—you’re too close to the product.

They noted gaps in clarity and impact: the page leaned too much on technical detail without showing how Cosmo saves time or reduces complexity. Jens said the real challenge is making the value obvious not just to developers, but to decision-makers signing contracts.

For them, the exercise was a reminder that even the builders of a product need outside perspective—and that landing pages should focus less on slogans and more on outcomes.