Positioning inlang.com as a marketplace

This is an internal memo I sent on November 8, 2023. We since adopted the inlang.com as marketplace approach.

Hey everyone,

This is not supposed to turn into a discussion. It's an "I hope my explanation clarifies my reasoning" email.

My strong pushback for a "classical" landing page is the acknowledgment that inlang tackles a problem that is too large to be communicated as "a single product". This is great. We are entering an over proportionally large market with different personas, workflows, requirements, and, ultimately, products.

Positioning inlang.com as a marketplace with multiple products now seems to set us up for more growth in the future, even if we sacrifice short-term growth due to "complicated communication". We should, at all costs, avoid falling into a "local maximum" trap by positioning inlang as a single product. Users should perceive inlang as an ecosystem today, push us to enable products for all sorts of categories, and ultimately lead us on the path of becoming "the operating system to go global".

I specifically say operating system here. Building the platform e.g., Android, that provides the tooling for products built on it is the most exciting and lucrative path we can take.

in bullet points

- inlang is not a single product. inlang is an ecosystem full of a variety of products.

- thus, providing a "getting started" for "the single product inlang" is not possible

- communicating inlang as a single product is misleading, confusing, and will hurt our growth

note the difference in the following "landing pages"

- The left page has a variety of products that target different personas, categories, needs.

- The right page focuses on one specific category with "top up products" like "fraud protection" that can all be used from a single dashboard.

I am pushing for the left version for inlang.com because inlang is about so many things: translations, designers, i18n, developers, documents, future:email, future:customer support, figma, the list is endless.

Inlang.com is more like the left pages because we don't have a single "unified" product.

my reasoning leads me to the following inlang.com structure, which I am "felsenfest überzeugt" will drive the most growth

1. inlang.com -> search and find the product you are looking for

• we will improve this site over time; no worries!

• ofc (!) we can include explainers how inlang works as an ecosystem but the goal is search -> find.

• overtime inlang.com will be established as the go-to place to search for globalization products. this is THE killer move. if we achieve this, we will become ubiquitous for every company in the world (just like amazon.com when you order a physical good)  

We are so close. IMO only the welcome to inlang section needs to have an explainer and THEN we pimp the product pages. People will automatically understand that they can to inlang.com and find globalization products over time.

2. product pages -> sell and adopt a product

ladies and gentlemen, HERE ARE THE LANDING PAGES! why here? because communicating a single product that a user is interested in is much easier and much higher converting than the entire inlang ecosystem at once! inlang.com's job is to route me to the correct product page. the product page will do the rest much better than inlang.com ever could!

compare the taglines:

• "the best i18n library for the web"
  vs

  "the ecosystem to expand to new markets. get started -> do you want to use the i18n library?"

• "supercharge your i18n dev experience"
  vs

  "the ecosystem has a vscode extension for great i18n dev experience"

I know which taglines and pages convert me more.

On that note, the editor should be re-branded to a dedicated product because:

a) branding the editor provides further growth opportunities as we do with paraglide at the moment. 

b) inlang should not be perceived as one product (see reasoning above!)

c) we will have multiple editors, e.g. a document editor

3. developers.inlang.com -> explain how inlang works and how to build products on inlang

I hope my emails explain my reasoning! Let's build the platform/operating system to go global that other developers can build and sell products on.

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Best,

Samuel (not Sam) Stroschein