You'll be done reading this post in 3 minutes or less!

Listen, I know you’re in a hurry. This won’t take but a second. You’ll be out of here in a few minutes, tops.

Let's talk about an interesting phenomenon in SaaS companies’ web design. Ever noticed that everybody wants to tell you just how just how totally freaking quickly you’re going to be able to sign up for their product?

I did some poking around in Less Annoying CRM’s general web ecosphere (i.e. other small business CRMs and services), and pulled a few examples from other various sites. I should take a moment here to say that I’m not attempting to denigrate any of these fine companies—we actually have a partnership with the lovely people at Fetchflow—I just find the prevalence of this particular language fascinating.

Some examples, in alphabetical order:

If you believe what each company says, you could sign up for all of those services in less than 10 minutes! Do you feel like you're saving time already?

This stuff works—and I know it works, because I am a complete sucker for it. We're all used to being made to waste our time filling out complex forms, most of which ask for unnecessary personal information we'd rather not divulge. If you're willing to put a timer on it, I believe you when you say it's not going to take long, and I'm much, much more likely to keep clicking.

In the spirit of full disclosure, our homepage at Less Annoying CRM employed this same tactic until our recent re-design. It's entirely possible we'll go back to it at some point, depending on how the new site fares. We'll see!

What do you think about this kind of language? Are you seeing it all over the web like I am? Let me know via Twitter if you see any interesting examples, I'd love to see them!