Hi {{first_name}},
Button, then headline. Now the rest of the first screen.
Here's the test. Open your landing page, don't scroll. Everything you can see right now is all a visitor gets before they decide whether to keep going. Look at it and ask: what on this screen proves that the headline is true?
Not decorates it. Proves it.
I ran this on four companies everyone knows and two that launched this month.
Notion puts the actual app on the first screen, a Kanban board cut off by the fold so you scroll to see the rest. Underneath, a row of nine customer logos: OpenAI, Figma, NVIDIA, Toyota. Two kinds of proof: here's the product, here's who uses it.
Linear does one thing. A full-width window of the real app, dark, cut off by the fold. No logos, no numbers. The product is the proof, and it's big enough that nothing else fits.
Stripe shows no product at all. What it shows: seven logos (NVIDIA, Ford, Google, Shopify) and a live ticker that reads "Global GDP running on Stripe: 1.7%", updating as you watch. Proof by other people, proof by a number. The product itself is somewhere further down.
Then two startups from this month's YC batch. I'll keep the names out.
Startup one: a blurred gradient across the entire screen, a headline, a button. Below that, a line that says "Our team comes from" and four logos: Apple, Harvard, Berkeley, Y Combinator. That's proof about the founders, not the product. It's what you do when you don't have customers yet, and it's honest, but it's the weakest kind.
Startup two: an abstract diagram. A card, a sphere of dots, lines fanning out to nine tiny graphs. It looks like a product. It's an illustration of a concept. Cover the headline, and you couldn't say what this thing does or that it exists.
The Sorting Rule
Everything above the fold is either proof or decoration.
Proof comes in three forms: the product itself, the people who use it, a number that's hard to fake.
Decoration is everything else: gradients, 3D shapes, diagrams of how it works, stock photos of people pointing at screens.
Decoration isn't a crime. Figma's first screen is a stack of cards with 3D gems on it, and Figma is doing fine. But Figma is doing fine for the same reason Webflow could get away with a slogan last time: you already know what it is. If you're not Figma, the first screen has a job.
Proof in practice: Chaser
When building the homepage for Chaser, I skipped abstract decorations entirely to let the product build instant trust. For a complex B2B product, teams expect immediate clarity - so I brought functional UI workflows and real product logic front and center, taking up maximum focus above the fold. Showing clear product logic right from the first screen eliminates friction for leadership and drives direct conversions. You can see how this structure looks in practice here: mykoladesigner.com/cases/chaser
Try it today. Screenshot your first screen, print it or just look at it, and circle what's proof. If nothing gets circled, you don't have a hero section. You have a cover.
Next time, the last one in this series: the sign-up form, and how many fields it actually needs.
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