It's usually not appropriate to compare your site to 37signals.<p>I suspect that a lot of their visitors are already familiar with their products or have seen 37signals' name in several places.  Therefore, these people are more inclined to read 37signals' long homepage prose, they've already been sold on the idea that it's worth reading and learning more about.<p>Your website/brand probably isn't as well known.  So you have a shorter window to capture your user's attention.  You need to control exactly what they read and what message they hear.  It has to be short and sweet, preferably only a couple of sentences that hopefully new visitors will actually read.  If they're interested, provide ways for them to learn more, but they're not going to take the time to parse and understand what you do if it takes more than 2 seconds. You need to make sure that the gist of your message is conveyed in these 2 seconds.