I've been working with a startup for a few years now, and we've gone back and forth a lot over the years on the actual product, what it is, who our target demo is etc. We've solidified our position now as a white-labelled Saas B2B2C product, in that we've identified and signed contracts with several customers for that.
Up till now our sales plan involved a lot of in-person networking and demo's by the CEO. The team + CEO agree that we should move to a more passive approach to sales via the website/homepage, but that's where things sort of devolve. I'm assigned with designing said homepage. Here are some of the issues I'm facing as the UX designer.
1) It's a B2B2C product, so while our end-end users of the product are consumers, our paying customers are businesses. We have roughly 10 customers currently, and they're based in different countries. It's very difficult to really profile them in any meaningful way. The CEO knows them personally, but he's really off the mark when it comes to describing people, and often will just give me a flippant answer like "They're just a bunch of know-it-all engineers. Make the website really full of esoteric information"...As you can imagine, that's not at all helpful for creating personas. I've started sending out surveys just to try and get some insight into how they chose our product, what they like about it, why they chose us over the competition, etc. but that still doesn't help me very much in creating a persona for future customers.
2) The CEO also strongly believes that we need to remove information from our current homepage design, as the competition is stealing our ideas. His proposed solution is to have a very very minimalist homepage which really just acts as a gatekeeper, wherein visitors who are interested in the product must request a link to the more informative, but hidden website (argh). So essentially, after 5 years of being public, and now that we actually have had some success, he wants to go back to stealth mode.
3) I've looked at our homepage stats, and a) the traffic is very very low and b) there's nothing to suggest that competitors are visiting our site to steal information. In fact there's nothing concrete at all to suggest that in general, except what he's heard through hearsay in the market.
TL;DR - I have very little means of conducting meaningful user research into potential customers, and our CEO wants to change the homepage into a gatekeeper to block competition, rather than sell the product. HELP.