Every once in a while, we pull our heads up from the fray of running a two-person marketing agency, and wonder to ourselves, “what is X talking about?” Not like, in a rude way, like how our teenaged children say it, but seriously, out of curiosity, what are they talking about these days? In this new series, we’ll look at a new company’s website each week, and write around 200 words worth of our honest feedback about it.
Today, we’re talking about one of the most successfully ascendant software companies of the 2020s, particularly in the database space – PlanetScale. It’s kind of a trip to take a look at this page now, because we helped out with their messaging way back when they did their first public launches. A lot has changed since then, and the posture that the team wanted to take at launch – that this was the ultimate MySQL database platform, is now true, because that’s what it says right as soon as you hit the web page:
The ultimate MySQL database platform
PlanetScale is the world’s most advanced, fully-managed MySQL database platform.
And then the CTAs: Sign up and Contact us
To evaluate all of this in terms of messaging and positioning, and leaving any personal history that I may have with the company out of it – this is clearly a cool, collected, and very confident stance to take. PlanetScale is in it’s “middle period” – not at the beginning stages where it’s completely necessary to explain both the category and the product to everyone who visits your website, but not quite in the stratospheric Enterprise mode where your H1 talks about magic quadrants and how you helped Samsung save 4.7B by switching to your product.
Above the fold we also have a strong set of logos, and notably, no imagery at all. A spare and interesting choice, design-wise. There’s also one more sort of “cheater” H0, a trick we also like to use at Reify, which says Scale, performance, and reliability powered by Vitess – more social proof, and a very strong technical backing at that.
PlanetScale’s homepage assumes that you already know what PlanetScale is, you’re probably shopping it against only one or two major competitors, and you’re on the fast track to trying it out as soon as you can. At this rate, we can only assume their H1 will be refer to the case study of a multinational corporation within 18-24 months.