How to score a SaaS hero in five seconds
A five-second hero check is a founder exercise, not a hidden LandingCrush score. Cover the logo, say who the page is for, and find the action before you submit.
Picture Elena, a founder in Mexico City, setting a phone timer for five seconds on a Wednesday and then cheating. She knows the headline. She wrote it. The timer runs out and she can still recite the sentence, which proves nothing about a stranger. The five-second check is a way to stop being the author for a moment. It is not a feature inside LandingCrush, and it does not produce the crush rate. The crush rate happens later, after real people swipe. The check happens first, on your side of the table, so you do not submit a hero you cannot explain with the logo covered.
Do it on the capture a voter would see. If you are about to paste a URL into /submit, do it on that page, desktop and phone. If you are looking at someone else's public homepage on the Hall of Fame, do it on their capture before you borrow anything. The critique version is in how to critique a Hall of Fame homepage. This article stays on your hero.
Set the timer and cover the name
Open the first screen. Cover the logo with a thumb or a scrap of paper. Start a timer you cannot see, five seconds, and look at the page the way you look at a sign on a highway. When the timer ends, look away. Write three lines from memory. Do not peek.
Who is it for? If you wrote "companies" or "teams" or "everyone growing," you did not get a buyer. A buyer is a person with a job. Finance lead. Support manager. Founder of a company that invoices. If the page did not give you a noun, write "nobody named." That is a score of fail on the first line, and it is the most common fail.
What changes if they act? This is the outcome, not the category. "You close the books on Tuesday instead of Friday" is a change. "AI-powered platform" is a category. Categories feel like headlines because they are short. They do not tell a stranger what would be different on Monday.
What are they asked to do? Quote the button if you can remember it. If you remember two buttons, write both. A hero that asks for a demo and a free trial and a newsletter in the same glance did not choose. One call to action is the follow-up when this line comes back messy.
Score each line pass or fail. Pass means a stranger could have said it from the screen. Fail means you needed memory from the writing process. You are a harsh grader on purpose. You wrote the page. Your memory is contaminated. If you want a cleaner version of the same exercise, ask a teammate who did not write the hero to do the timer once, out loud, without you helping.
Score the phone capture as a separate hero
A desktop hero and a phone hero are different pages when the stack changes. Run the timer again on the mobile screenshot. Cover the logo again. Many SaaS heroes keep the headline and drop the proof, or they keep the proof and push the button below the fold of a phone. Write what you actually remembered from the phone, not what you remember from the wide layout.
LandingCrush stores desktop and mobile captures when a submission has them. Voters can meet the phone frame. If your five-second phone score fails and your desktop score passes, you have a mobile hero problem. Do not average them into a gentle maybe. Fix the capture you care about, or submit both and read comments that say "phone" as their own cluster. The roast workflow in how to turn comments into an edit starts after strangers have seen it. The timer is how you avoid asking strangers to discover a blank.
Look at contrast only as far as the timer reveals it. If you could not find the button because it matched the background, that is a fail on the action line. You do not need a lecture on color theory. You need the action to be findable in five seconds by someone who is not hunting.
Write the fails as edits, one at a time
Each fail becomes a candidate edit. Do not fix all three in one submission if you want the next vote to be readable. Pick the fail that makes the other lines impossible. An unnamed buyer makes the outcome line float. Fix the noun first. Then run the timer again. Then submit.
Keep a before and after in the same note as the three lines. "Before: The operating system for modern teams. After: A collections inbox for finance leads who chase invoices in email." The offer should still be true. You are not allowed to use the timer as cover for a new strategy. If the five seconds revealed that the strategy is the problem, stop and have that conversation. Do not hide a pivot inside a headline test.
You might be thinking five seconds is a gimmick and serious buyers read. Some do. The first screen still has to earn the next second. A hero that only makes sense after the third paragraph is a document. It may be a good document. It is a weak thing to submit if you want a swipe vote on the first capture. LandingCrush votes are reactions to the homepage you submitted, weighted toward what the capture shows. Give the capture a job the timer can verify.
Run the timer on the Hall of Fame page you admire, too, with the logo covered. If you cannot say who it is for, you were admiring the finish. Do not import the finish. The four-question critique is the longer version. The timer is the five-second version you can do in a hallway.
Submit only after a clean pass, then compare notes with voters
When all three lines pass on the capture you are submitting, then submit. Approval comes before votes. When comments arrive, compare them to your three lines. If you wrote a buyer and the comments say the buyer is missing, your pass was author-vision. Believe the comments. The timer is a rehearsal. The swipe is the show. Reading the crush rate keeps you from throwing the hero out for a thin sample while you make that comparison.
If Blind Mode is on, the logo you covered with your thumb is covered for the voter too. That is a related check, not the same one. Your timer is private and instant. Blind Mode is a vote setting other people turn on. Use the timer even when you never ask for a blind session. Use a blind session when you suspect recognition is inflating kind feedback from people who know you. The steps are in how to use Blind Mode.
The AI critique that runs after approval scores hero clarity from 0 to 10, along with the call to action, visual hierarchy, and mobile. That score is a model's note. It is not your timer and it is not the crush rate. If the model says the hero is clear and your timer failed, fix the timer fail. You could not say who it was for. Clarity theater from a model does not overrule a blank noun. If your timer passed and the model complains, read the suggestion, and do not reopen the page unless voters say the same thing.
Keep a record so the next hero does not restart from vibes
Date the three lines. Save them with the screenshot. The next time someone says the hero "feels off," pull the note. Either the three lines still pass and the feeling is new information you should test, or the lines were never clean and the feeling is the old problem. Teams relitigate heroes because the last check lived in someone's head.
This exercise will not tell you the conversion rate. It will tell you whether you can explain the first screen without cheating. A stranger on a phone has less context than you do in the hallway, not more. If the hallway fails, the swipe will spend real votes to tell you the same thing more slowly.
Can you say, without looking, who your hero is for and what they are supposed to do next?
Common questions
Q: Is the five-second score part of the crush rate?
A: No. It is a check you run yourself before or beside a submission. Crush rate is the share of community votes that are crushes after the page is approved.
Q: What if I can recite the headline but not the buyer?
A: That is a fail on the first line. Name a person with a job, then run the timer again before you submit.
Q: Should desktop and mobile share one score?
A: No. Time them separately. Ship the capture that matches the screen you are asking voters to judge.