Case study / 2025
Vestd
A messaging audit and hero rewrite for a UK equity platform losing people in the first seven seconds.
Services
Audit / Rewrite
Result
Two options offered. They took the bigger one.
Visibility
By request
The situation
Vestd makes share schemes work for UK companies. Real product. Real traction. FCA-regulated, B Corp certified, the works.
The homepage opened with “Own your future. Grow with Vestd.”
Read that cold. It could sell a self-help course, a pension, or any SaaS with a growth chart in the deck. Founders arrived carrying a specific fear, losing their best people, and met a headline that recognised none of it. Seven seconds later they were back in the search results.
The Invisible Pattern
Every claim on the page was true. None of it was felt.
The audit walked the full scroll, section by section, and found the same pattern in six different costumes: the page led with what Vestd does before showing founders it understood what they were afraid of. Competence first, conviction never.
A few of the findings:
- Forbes, Financial Times and Yahoo sat far down the page while smaller client logos carried the opening. The strongest proof, buried under the weakest.
- Visitors were asked to sort themselves by company size before anyone had given them a reason to stay. Segmentation before belief.
- Twelve feature tiles promised a single source of truth and read like homework.
The hero, before and after
What founders met
Own your future. Grow with Vestd.
Clear. Not compelling.
One of the three rewrites
Is your team as invested as you?
Simplify equity management.
Belief dies in spreadsheets. When equity’s invisible, it stops mattering.
Three versions shipped: one that dropped straight into the existing layout, one SEO-led, one fully emotion-first. The team got to match ambition to constraints instead of taking one writer’s word for it.
What shipped
- An audit covering six problem areas, with observations, principles, and a prioritised fix list.
- Three strategic hero rewrites, from drop-in to emotion-first.
- A page-by-page map of what to cut, keep, and sharpen.
Two options on the table
The proposal offered a quick diagnostic and a full treatment with the rewrites included. Vestd reached past the smaller one.
That choice is the quiet metric of this project. When a lighter option exists and the client picks the heavier one, the first page of the proposal has already done its job.
Want to read it?
The full audit is a real working document, down to the typos it flagged in the live copy. Shared on request.
Seven seconds is plenty when the first line knows who it’s for.