distrofit.com - what survives the squint?

What is working - keep all of this

• The output is visible before the input. The dark panel at x=772–1239 shows a fully worked report - 288 customers needed, 14 a month to stand still, a £174 CAC ceiling, and a green/red strip across 19 channels - before the visitor has entered anything. Most calculator pages make you earn the payoff. Showing it first is the reason this page has a chance of converting cold traffic.
• One CTA, unambiguous, and the only button on the page. There is exactly one button on the fold, "Run the report", and it is the only blue button on a page whose only other colour is the small blue eyebrow and the panel's green and red strip. No newsletter box, no "book a demo", no secondary link competing for the click. That discipline is rarer than it should be.
• Sensible defaults in every field. Solo, Monthly, £ GBP, 29, 100000 and 5 are all pre-filled, so the form is already in a valid state on arrival and the sample report corresponds to those defaults. The visitor's job shrinks to editing two or three numbers rather than filling seven blanks.
• Honest about what it does not do. The page states plainly that it does not estimate traffic, rankings or conversion, that the £80 cost floor is "an assumption, not a benchmark", and exactly what gets stored and how to delete it. For a technical audience, admitting limits does more for credibility than a testimonial would.

1 · The squint test

Blur the page and look at what survives. Try it yourself:

👁 Squint at it

What survives the blur: That this is an interactive tool, not a brochure: the form block reads unmistakably as inputs, the single blue button is the only colour anchor on the screen, and the dark panel beside it reads as output. Blurred, you know there is one thing to do and roughly where to click.

What does not survive: What the product is. Blurred, the headline is just two heavy black lines and the dark panel is texture - you cannot tell whether this is a pricing calculator, an SEO tool or a distribution report. The eyebrow that names the category is 10 px tall and does not register.

2 · Annotated walkthrough

The fold

1. The headline block sits at y=221–348 in the left column only; the region to its right (x=800–1240, y=100–460) is empty white - 4 ink pixels in 158,400, roughly 440×360 CSS px of unused prime space.
2. The dark report panel (x=772–1239) is the most persuasive element on the page and it starts at y=476, so 424 px of it are above the fold - the three result numbers and the green/red channel strip are in view, and the panel is cut at the fold edge in the middle of its Structure row.
3. The only button, "Run the report" at x=228–358, y=756–798, is the only blue button on the page; the only other blue is the eyebrow, and the only other colour the panel's strip. Good focus, no competing CTA.
4. "Free. No account." sits immediately right of the button, at x=373–474 - the friction objection is answered at the point of decision.
5. The eyebrow "DISTROFIT TOOLS · CHANNEL REPORT" is the only thing naming the category, and it is set in 10 px blue caps above the headline.
6. Nothing above the fold explains the word "gates" used in the subhead; its definition appears only in the "Three gates" section further down.

Mobile

1. The nav wraps onto its own row under the wordmark: wordmark at y=18–32, nav row at y=52–64, and the header rule at y=79.5, so 80 CSS px of the 844 px viewport go by before any content starts.
2. The headline renders at y=177–247.5 in two lines and the subhead runs three lines to y=339 - clear and legible, no truncation.
3. The form card begins at y=364.5 and the fold cuts through it: the last visible element is the "Target / year" input, which starts at y=811 and is cut at the screen edge. Churn, "Run the report" and "Free. No account." are all below the fold.
4. The sample report panel - the single best reason to trust this tool - is nowhere on the mobile first screen.
5. Tap targets are a touch short: the Solo/Small team and Monthly/One-off toggle tracks are 42 CSS px tall (the selected pill inside each is 34), and the text inputs are 42 - two px under the 44 px guideline for touch targets.
6. The desktop logo mark (the black square glyph left of the wordmark) is absent on mobile; only the "DistroFit" text renders.

3 · Copy critique, with rewrites

4 · Structure, CTA & proof audit

The page is a tool page pretending to be a homepage, and mostly that works. The structure above the fold on desktop is: header nav, blue eyebrow, a two-line black headline, a two-line subhead, then a two-column block - an input form on the left (x=200–771) and a dark sample report on the right (x=772–1239). That dark panel is the strongest thing on the page. It shows a real output - "Customers needed 288", "New customers a month, just to stand still 14", "Most you can spend per customer £174", plus a green/red channel strip and the Arithmetic/Capacity/Structure breakdown. A visitor sees the payoff before typing anything. Most calculator pages hide that behind the submit button; this one doesn't, and it should be the thing you protect in any redesign.

The leak is upstream of it. The headline says "Stop guessing your distribution." and the subhead says "Your price and target decide two of the three gates on the spot." Neither tells a cold visitor what the tool does. "Gates" is DistroFit's internal vocabulary - it's defined properly further down in the "Three gates" section (Arithmetic, Structure, Capacity), but at the fold it's an unexplained noun. The concrete facts that would sell this in one line are already written elsewhere on the page: it scores 19 marketing channels against your price, your revenue target, your team size and what your site actually emits. That belongs at the top, not in the results panel.

CTA focus is good. There is exactly one button, "Run the report", in blue on a page whose only other colour is the eyebrow and the panel's strip, with "Free. No account." sitting next to it. No competing secondary CTA. The friction cost is the form itself: two toggle pairs, a currency select, a URL, price, target and churn - seven decisions before the button. Defaults are pre-filled (Solo, Monthly, £ GBP, 29, 100000, 5), which softens it a lot on desktop.

Proof is where the page is thinnest. There are no testimonials, no user counts, no customer logos, no named author, and no link to a real generated report. What stands in for proof is intellectual honesty - "The £80 floor is an assumption, not a benchmark", "DistroFit does not estimate traffic, rankings or conversion", and the storage disclosure under the tool. That earns trust with a skeptical technical reader, and it's the right instinct, but it's all self-attested. One public example report link would convert better than another paragraph of caveats.

5 · Prioritized fix list

Ranked by expected conversion impact against implementation effort. Do the top three this week.

1. Say what the tool does above the fold.

   The fold currently reads "Stop guessing your distribution." plus a sentence about "three gates" that aren't defined until further down the page. Replace or supplement it so a first-time visitor learns, in one line, that this scores 19 marketing channels against your price, target and site. See the headline and subhead rewrites.

2. Get the CTA and a payoff preview onto the mobile fold.

   On the 390x844 mobile viewport, the last thing visible is the "Target / year" input at y=811, cut by the screen edge. "Run the report", the "Free. No account." reassurance and the entire sample report panel are all below the fold. A mobile visitor sees a form and no payoff. Move a compressed version of the result panel (the three headline numbers and the green/red strip) above the form on mobile, or collapse Currency/Churn behind a "more options" toggle so the button moves up the screen.

3. Say that the report panel is live.

   The dark panel showing 288 customers, 14 a month and a £174 ceiling is unlabelled, and a visitor can't tell whether it's a live preview reacting to the form or a static example. It is live - the numbers change as you type - and nothing on the page says so. Add a small caption above it, "Live preview - updates as you type", so the first thing a visitor does with the form is watch the answer move. Ambiguity here wastes your best asset.

4. Add one piece of external proof - a public example report.

   There is no testimonial, no user count, no customer logo row and no named author anywhere in the page text. The cheapest fix that fits this product's tone: publish one real generated report at a permanent URL and link it under the CTA as "See a finished report". It doubles as proof and as a preview for people who won't fill in a form.

5. Cut visible form fields from seven to four.

   Seven inputs sit between arrival and the button. Defaults help, but the Currency select and Churn field are the two most likely to stall someone. Consider defaulting currency by locale and hiding Churn behind an "advanced" disclosure with the 5% default applied. Fewer visible decisions, same output.

6. Move the privacy reassurance next to the button.

   The privacy paragraph - storage under an unlisted link, price and target never shown, delete from the report footer - sits below the tool. That's exactly the objection someone has at the moment they type their product URL and their real revenue target. Put a one-line version directly beside "Free. No account." and link the full text.

7. Use the empty right side of the desktop hero.

   On desktop the area from x=800 to x=1240, y=100 to y=460 is empty white - about 440x360 CSS px of nothing beside the headline. That's prime real estate. Pull the three headline result numbers or a one-sentence "how it works" up into it so the fold carries both promise and evidence side by side.

8. Attribute the tool to a person.

   The page's credibility rests on being unusually careful - it says outright that it does not estimate traffic, rankings or conversion, and that the £80 floor is an assumption. That reads better with a face behind it. A single line near the footer or under the CTA naming who built it, linking to About, converts honesty into trust.

6 · What the page ships, and what the tool says about ours

This section is outside the engine's reading. The engine is given two screenshots and the page text, so it cannot type into the form, read the markup, or run the product; these findings were measured directly against the live site on 2026-09-10 and are the reviewer's work, not the engine's.

The panel is live, and the form already does one of the fixes in one mode. Typing £9 into the price field changes the panel's first line to "At £9 a month, aiming for £100,000 a year" and re-computes the three numbers in under a second. Switching the "How you charge" toggle to One-off changes it again, to "At £9 one-off", relabels the price field "Price, paid once", and removes the Churn field altogether - so in one-off mode the form is six decisions, not seven, and fix 5 is half-built. None of this is visible to someone who has not touched the form yet, which is why fix 3 is about one caption.

The page is real HTML. The raw response is 34 KB and carries the H1, the subhead, every form label and the whole sample panel as text, so a crawler, a reader with scripts blocked and our own free checker all see the same page. Eleven scripts follow it, 622 KB on the wire, plus two stylesheets and no third-party fonts; a search engine that renders nothing still reads everything. The structured data declares a WebSite and nothing more, and there is one meta description, at 133 characters. The one thing this page shares with the previous entry in this library is a nav that does not collapse on a phone; it costs 80 px here, not 150.

What the tool said about our page. The maker asked whether the tool is useful, so we ran it on squint.page: solo, one-off, USD, price 19, target 10,000 a year. The arithmetic came back right and uncomfortable - 527 sales a year, 44 a month with nothing carrying over, and a CAC ceiling of $19, "the whole price", which closes every paid channel - with 7 channels open, 3 that would open on a product change, 8 closed and 1 it could not check. Two of the structure reads were wrong about us, in ways the About page explains: "pricing model: not detected" on a page whose title says $19, because the crawler reads a /pricing route and ours is a section of the home page; and "email capture not detected outside login", because ours sits on the free-check result page rather than the homepage it fetched. The verdict was still the most useful sentence a free tool has said to this business: at a one-off price the acquisition budget is the whole sale, and anything that brings a buyer back changes the arithmetic more than any channel does.

Scouting note: this entry closes the ten-maker giveaway this library ran through September; the standing runner-up is whichever maker launches next and asks for eyes on the page itself.