Please help validate my landing page and my app idea
Hi folks,
I just published the landing page for an app I’m building called Quotient. You can see it here: https://onquotient.com
With Quotient, you can see your net worth, chart your financial progress, keep track of your retirement goals, and do more.
If you are on IndieHacker, that means you want to start your own venture so you can have the freedom to do what you want in life. A growing number of people are starting on this path. My app is aimed at helping those people navigate to their financial freedom and reach their financial goals.
What do you think about the landing page? Does it convey the overall message well? Would you signup for a service like this?
Thanks for all your inputs.
- Swamy
Hey @swamyg! Congrats on taking a step in that direction.
Here it goes. Every product that succeeded, did so because it offered something people wanted. So, my first question is, what is your hypothesis about what people want regarding their financial plan? What is the problem?
Not every idea is a good BUSINESS idea - some ideas are just great side projects to flex your coding / design muscles for fun. So my next question - have you identified your ideal customer? You can't please everyone. You must have a clear customer avatar. Have you talked to 10-20 of them and asked them if they want to pay for a graph that shows them how they spend/save their money?
Next - competitive landscape. There are free tools like Mint (https://www.mint.com/) and more professional tools like QuickBooks online, etc. Where do you fit in that landscape?
Charging monthly fee for manual data entry is like charging people for restaurant meals and then making them cook it in the kitchen.
Next is your brand trustworthiness. Asking people to pour their financial data to some random website is super fishy. There are no credentials. There is no information about founders - are they scammers from Nigeria or ex Big Bank execs with Forbes magazine profiles? A big red flag.
There are a plethora of free "retirement and net worth calculators" out there on every bank website, so, why?
As for visual identity: it's cute but generic. The angled background treatment is kind of Stripe-y. Icons are a little too heavy handed and generic.
Features / App Features = redundant titles.
Same with FAQ / Frequently Asked Questions.
Black type treatment of the logo doesn't stand out on the purple background.
I totally understand that your attempt is to see if people sign up, but from where I stand, the problem is way, way upstream than the landing page design.
Would be happy to talk more - just let me know.
Thanks @startupdude for the reply. To address some of your comments:
This app idea came about because of a personal pain point. I have used tools like Mint & Personal Capital (PC) before and din't want them to have my passwords. Also, I couldn't enable 2FA for any of my financial websites, since doing so will make them not work on Mint or PC.
It started from there, and evolved into something like I want to help people specifically in the Financial Independence (FI) community to keep track of their finance and their goals. I am very much part of that community and hangout at /r/financialindependence and goto FI meet ups in the Bay Area.
The data entry is a bit of a pain, but there are 1000s of folks who are already doing that on Excel spreadsheets to keep track of their assets.
The manual entries would be done only probably once a month or so (unless you are a Day Trader, in which case you probably or not my target audience).
The advantage over Excel is that my App would keep historical data (I'd persist daily asset price and the ups and downs) that currently is not possible with Excel or is very tedious to do. That means you get better analytics with those data. It could very well be possible to even calculate Tax Loss Harvesting (something I'm looking at).
You bring a good point about trust worthiness. I will add an about page. My target audience is FI folks, and most of them have side projects and side incomes. So as a solo founder who is working towards FI myself, building side projects will (hopefully) resonate with the community.
Thanks for comments about design of the website, will do some re-factoring over the weekend.
You should put that on the landing page. That's a pain that your tool can solve.
Try to read this guide, it can be quite useful: https://www.julian.com/guide/growth/landing-pages
Will do, thanks for the link.
This is spot on advice imo
"Data is entered manually by you"
Please convince me why I should switch from excel to your website to manage my finances.
Copy pasting from previous comment I made here:
The manual data entry would be done only probably once a month or so (unless you are a Day Trader, in which case you probably or not my target audience).
The advantage over Excel is that my App would keep historical data (I'd persist daily asset price and the ups and downs) that currently is not possible with Excel or is very tedious to do. That means you get better analytics with those data. It could very well be possible to even calculate Tax Loss Harvesting (something I'm looking at) which could save the customers some money per year.
Betterment does this, but you have to invest with Betterment. I and many other Financial Independence people choose to manage our own investments rather than going the Robo Advisor route.
This comment was deleted 8 years ago
This is a very good point. If a tool is going to help me do a better job of helping me manage my financial future...asking me to do manual input better get me some amazing value back. What is the one thing you can guarantee for someone once they put in their manual data? Or do you provide value back each step during the manual input process? Or is there value you can provide right away up front via some calculator or financial planning tool?
I do like the overall vision and goal for what this is trying to provide though. Helping people better plan and manage their finances for their future :) Most people don't start saving early enough for many many years in their retirement and this is one real problem worth addressing/solving
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Hi!
I would be more specific on your header text. "Quotient can get you there". I know what "there" means because I 've read your post, but it can be confusing to new visitors. Maybe something like "Quotient can get you to your financial freedom". That's powerful and descriptive.
Good luck! ;)
Beat me to it, uh, I mean you got there faster... :)
That was exactly my first thought when I wrote it. But I felt like it had a sense of intrigue because people would ask "get me where?". I was hoping reading the text below that title would explain where that place is (and you're right it's financial freedom).
But may be it makes more sense to be direct.
We don't have to play the intrigue game here. People will keep reading if they feel that we have the solution to their problems, they don't want to solve a puzzle. If you're telling me that this is the definitive tool to achieve my financial freedom, and I'm a person who really wants to achieve it, this is going to generate enough intrigue on me to keep reading.
Two things could happen if we try to generate curiosity in this webpage:
-Maybe some people get curious and keep reading, but if they aren't our target, this is useless anyway because they are not going to buy anything.
-Maybe you lose potential customers of your target because they scan the header and they don't eat the bait.
Cheers! :)