Comment by rollcat
5 days ago
IMHO many "open source alternatives to" should drop that tagline.
This sentence is the first thing I read, and likely the last.
I don't know what "Trello" is. I don't see what your project or app could do for me. Even if I knew Trello, I wouldn't know why does it need an alternative. (Trello was (is?) great for personal use, by non-technical people.)
"A powerful, flexible kanban app that helps you organise work, track progress, and deliver results—all in one place." This is your selling point, not what your app isn't.
I would be careful suggesting this as a universal truth. I think it really depends on the receiver of the message. "An open-source alternative to Trello" is by far the best one-sentence pitch possible for me. It's something that I've wanted for years so I immediately noticed and clicked into it. Obviously I already know what Trello is, but my suspicion is the most interested people in this project are former Trello users.
"A powerful, flexible kanban app that helps you organise work, track progress, and deliver results—all in one place." I would not have even clicked in. "An open source Trello" tells me way more about the app.
Consider also how many apps are described as "the uber for <xyz>". For people who don't know what Uber is that message falls very flat of course, but a lot of people do know what Uber is and saying, "The Uber for handymen" immediately conveys the point of the app.
If the marketing doesn't work for you, then it's not that it's bad marketing, it's that you simply aren't the target market.
Yeah the tagline is leaning on the context, saying what it replaces instead of what it does.
Trello was a popular, free, simple sticky note kanban board. It was too nice, maybe competing with Jira, so Atlassian ate it, leaving a void again.
Kanban https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kanban