How we think about our website

Storytelling

A fancy website with no substance is like a beautiful car with no engine.

We believe that a well-crafted narrative has the potential to transform a mundane URL into a memorable experience.

That's why we put a lot of effort into crafting a compelling story that can be told as you scroll down the page. This should be reflected not only on the home page, but in every page.

Just like a good book, a good website should have a beginning, a middle, and an end. What content to include is as important as where content should be placed.

Memorable and authentic

Many people ask us why we have a rotating Rubik's Cube on the home page.

We value technical excellence, we value design and craft, and we value being doing things differently. We could write down all of those things on a separate page that talks about our company mission. Or we could demonstrate those values in the most important real estate we have on the web.

Because we're in a highly competitive and extremely crowded market, it's crucial that we stand out. We do this in many ways, including our website.

“A great company must be able to impute its values from the first impression it makes.” - Mike Markkula, first angel investor for Apple

Care and attention to detail

During our trip to Portugal, Jonni Lundy said he had an idea for the website, but it was too silly to share. We insisted, and he said: “What if we changed the title based on the time zone of the user?"

We all stopped and agreed that it was a fantastic idea.

This is the end result:

If you open the website from 9am until 12pm, you'll see the morning messaging, then the afternoon messaging, then the evening messaging. If you visit the website from Friday at 5pm until Sunday at 11:59pm, you'll see the weekend messaging.

If you pay close attention to the icon, you'll notice that the direction of the light changes based on the time of the day. For the morning icon, the light comes from the left, the light for the afternoon icon comes from the center, and for the evening icon, the light comes from the right.

Most people won't notice those details, but for the ones that do, it shows that we care.

Playful and interactive

Although it's possible to tell a fantastic story with only static text and nothing else, we believe that the more interactive elements we can add, the more rich the story can be.

“There are three responses to a piece of design. YES, NO and WOW! Wow is the one to aim for” - Milton Glaser, designer of the ‘I Love NY’ logo

We avoid having a "wall-of-text" with large amounts of text presented without breaks or visual relief, such as paragraphs, bullet points, or images.

The web is a visual medium, and we want to take full advantage of that canvas. That's why we like to explore different animations, hover effects, and other interactive elements.

Cross-functional effort

When building a product, you need a multitude of skill sets. The same is true for creating a website.

As a small team, we won't have world-class domain experts for every skill needed, so working with contractors for specific projects is a pretty effective strategy.

As a reference, here are the people involved in the launch of our website.

• A 3D artist for the WebGL objects
• An industrial designer for the illustrations
• A brand designer for the Figma mockups
• A design-engineer for the implementation
• The CEO writing content and storytelling

The website is the sales team

We don't have a team of account executives who build and maintain customer relationships. What we do have is a product that people can use and buy by themselves.

When we first built our website, it took many months to ship and a lot of investment. There were times when we were skeptical that all that effort would actually be worth it.

After we launched, we realized the impact it had on sign-ups, and we understood that our website is actually our sales team.