I've been doing quick homepage reads for founders every day, and the same thing keeps coming up. It's not what most people expect.
Most pages explain what the product does just fine. "AI-powered X for Y" — people get the mechanism. The thing that quietly kills conversion is that you finish the 5-second read knowing what it does but not whether it's for you.
"The investor update tool" and "the investor update tool for pre-seed founders who hate writing them" describe the same product. But with the second one, the right person feels seen — and the wrong person self-selects out, which is good. You didn't want them anyway.
The pattern behind it: founders lead with the what because it's concrete and they're proud of it, and they bury the who in the third paragraph or leave it implied. But the who is the thing that makes a stranger go "oh, this is me."
The test: cover everything but your headline and subhead. Show it to someone outside your space for 5 seconds. Then ask them — not "what is it," but "who is this for?" If they can't answer, that's usually the leak.
And once the who is named, the fastest way to prove the what is to show the product moving instead of describing it — one promise, shown as motion, in the first three seconds.