What are your thoughts on building landing pages before the product is available?
There's lots of advice on the Internet which suggests that building a landing page before even starting your product is a good way to validate a new business idea . As I understand it, the idea is to build up a list of potential customers and talk with them about their needs as the product evolves. I see how this could be a smart strategy, but it feels like having the landing page up creates an expectation that the service will exist relatively soon and I'm not sure having that time pressure is a great idea.
I'm starting my first company, and I'm bootstrapping by myself while I continue to work full-time as a software engineer. I like the idea of generating leads ASAP with a landing page, but it will take a while (6+ months) to build the product because of my limited time investment. Should I hold off on creating a landing page until I have a usable product, or am I worrying too much and should just get it out there now?
With Pagestead, we went even further and started taking pre-orders even before we had the product. We had this pre-order/landing page online for almost a year, resulting in $30,000 in pre-orders.
You can't get better validation and motivation to move forward than that. This does indeed add a bunch of pressure, however that' sometimes a good thing. Even though the collected credit cards wouldn't be charged until the official release, we still had pre-order customers reaching out regularly to ask when we'd finally launch.
I think the importance and value of having customers involved from as early as possible can't be stressed enough. Putting up a landing page allows you to do just that.
I truly believe that, when starting from scratch with a project with the goal of turning it into an actual business, a landing page which somehow validates the assumption that people are willing to pay for your product should the first move. Not diving into coding the product on day 1.
How were you marketing the product? That seems like a really great number of pre-orders.
Although the $ amount seems pretty decent, the actual number of pre-orders was 58 (just looked it up). Still a pretty solid start, I must admit.
We already had a product portfolio with a number of products in the same space, and we were able to drive some traffic from there. The remaining traffic came from our mailing list, search engines, word-of-mouth and social media.
In the months leading up to me putting the pre-order page online, I had numerous talks with existing customers, new leads, people in our audience and in my own network about what we were planning to build. Due to these efforts I knew had a pretty good chance to turn this into a viable business.
Ah, OK, so you weren't starting from scratch. I sort of am but I think I need to go back and rely on my network a little more vs rely solely on digital marketing. I'm in pre-launch mode for Biz #1 now with about 120 subscribers, and my validation goal this week is to convert 5% to paid (though I don't have the product yet....too early to try?).
How were you able to charge for your product users weren't able to see and use it for themselves, if you don't mind me asking?
This is the landing page we were using: http://pagestead.com/old/.
As I previously mentioned, we did not charge when a pre-order was made. Instead, we (through Gumroad) would collect the payment details and get permission to charge the customer when we released the software.
Wow! That’s a great result. I really appreciate hearing about real-world experiences. I hadn’t thought about taking pre-orders and not actually charging the CC until release. Sounds like a great compromise between getting potential customers to commit money, while not getting into a situation where someone could feel burned.
This is exceptionally good feedback! I myself am in a similar situation. I would love to take pre-orders if possible. How do you recommend going about it legally? Did you provide a 100% return policy in that pre-order?
I would personally not take any money until the official launch, as doing so would put tremendous pressure on you and put you in a legally tough spot. So a money-back guarantee wouldn't be needed.
We used Gumroad to collect pre-orders. The way that works is that when a customer pre-orders, they will provide their credit card info which is stored by Gumroad and the customer gives permission for us to charge them when we release the product. The way I see it, this is a perfect solution since you do force people to hand over their payment info, making it very real. Yet, at the same time, we're not taking money right away, giving you the freedom to decide to back down, push back the release date, etc.
I was not aware of Gumroad. That is an insanely good way to get people to commit to pre-orders but not feel trapped.
I think there is a bit of a disconnect here. There is no pressure to ship a product once you have signups. You're not obligated to do anything.
Of course, be honest and communicate with people but you're just trying to prove a minimum level of interest before you invest more time.
I have signed up on lots of landing pages, within minutes I've forgotten that was the case. I'm certainly not waiting by my inbox for it to be launched. People have got crazy short attention spans.
The advice to launch a landing page at the beginning is actually advice to just cut straight to the hard part first - getting interest. Building the product is strangely the easy bit.
Please don't spend 6+ months building anything. Instead have a regular share > build schedule that repeats over and over and delivers value regularly and keeps people interested. Even better if you can work in public!
People are both less interested and more patient than you realise :) Test your ideas and see what happens!
This is a really important point, thank you so much! I also agree that 6 months is a long time to get something in front of people. I think I need to spend some time trying to shrink the scope of what I’m trying to do, in order to have something to show faster.
Unless you already have great channels (Twitter, email list, existing products), I have found it really hard to get many bites on no-product landing pages. For a prior product, I created a landing page, bought AdWords, and got, what, just a handful of pre-signs. Particularly nowadays, with the over-abundance of crap-to-great digital marketing, it's hard to get above the noise without a great product and/or great existing pre-baked leads.
I've signed up before on landing pages for products that didn't come out for over a year. I think it's best to put up a landing page a few weeks before launching, or as a way to get early beta testers. But putting up a landing page before even building the product, where you may be making promises you can't deliver, is bad juju in my opinion.
Now, this is a point that I'm surprised I don't hear more people making. I've always felt quite uncomfortable about the idea of seeming to promise what you may not be able to - or be bothered to - deliver.
I would say that the majority of people I run into still lean towards expecting an actual product to exist if you go as far as to create a landing page that suggests it does. From my own personal perspective, I'm not happy really to be presented with a mailing list signup page if the landing page didn't make it absolutely clear that the product wasn't get built/ready.
Some of the best advice I've seen on IH is from @louisswiss when he says to focus on solving real problems for real people, rather than focus on ideas. I may be interpreting the advice wrong, but my take is that you just got to get out there, talk to real people about their problems, and then build solutions for them. A pre-product landing page in this context has little relevance - at least not one that you'd be incurring AdWords costs to promote as part of some idea validation exercise.
Could this be better approached with some sort of market research survey, combined with individual conversations with people who respond? That's the approach I'm about to take with my project, and I would love to hear your thoughts about it.
Thanks for the kind words.
You summed up my thoughts on this subject pretty well.
For me, a landing page should basically function as a scalable version of your sales pitch.
It seems unlikely to me that one can create the scalable version (the LP, where it's difficult to get feedback) before understanding what one is trying to build a scalable version of...
Thank you for this. I’ve talked to enough people IRL that I know the problems I’m trying to solve are both real and common (enough), so this landing page idea isn’t as much of a fishing expedition as I made it sound. You’ve made me think more about what I’m actually trying to achieve with this landing page other than “get emails”. I like the solution offered in the GP of waiting until there's a beta or the product is nearing completion to throw up a landing page.
Actually I am in 2 minds about it. Of course a coming soon landing page generates customer leads for a product , so this is the primary objective. I think if it's done right, you can build enough initial brand momentum
You can design your landing page around the sign up, engage these sign ups and in general structure everything in the way people would receive some bonuses or similar after the sign up. And it will possibly give you an enormous amount of pre-launch sign ups.
But I would personally recommend to set up such page just prior to the product release. Our attention span is too short.. And as for release, wait until you’re completely ready. I mean focus on delivering what you have been promising all the time. Because it can ruin everything - deliver this product on time and stay active, don't stop the research
Good luck with it!
As you've pointed out, capturing leads early on is very useful as it can help validate and strengthen your product and customer base. Personally, I think that It's worth managing your future customers' expectations with updates on progress and realistic release dates.
It's not the exact same scenario but when we'd originally announced our Premiere Pro plugin for Filmstro ( www.filmstro.com ) we had NO IDEA of how long the development was going to be. In a private Facebook group we shared our development progress (to a certain extent) with our customers and constantly asked them for their feedback along the way - which really helped us validate features. The development process lasted 3 months longer than expected but because we were sharing our progress with our customers that were interested in the plugin, we found that the majority were very understanding about the delay between announcement and launch.
I hope this helps :)
You basically have nothing to lose. When I was talking to one of my friends about strategies I was thinking of for the first launch, they said "nothing you do right now really matters", which is more true than you think. It's easy to over-analyze the process of getting to the initial launch, but in reality you can pretty much try anything since you don't have any current audience to worry about.
If you do something wrong, you won't get signups. You'll learn quickly and try something else. Maybe you still won't get signups. But you can try a lot of different ways to get potential customers to bite, since there's nothing to lose.
Chances are if you put up a landing page and try a bunch of stuff to market it, at least one of those things will be successful and you'll get people looking at it, and maybe a few signups. From that you'll get a feel for how valid the solution is.
Putting a landing page up and putting just a small amount of effort trying to market it while you're working on it is surprisingly illuminating.
Sometimes I hear people say they find it hard to get bites on a non-product landing page.
If they’ve validated their product idea — properly — and communicated the benefits that they know are helpful to buyers; the issue isn’t the landing page, it’s the product idea!
You have to validate that the audience actually wants the product before you start building anything.
Focus on solving real problems, for real people, rather than focusing on ideas. Talk to real people, find out their problems and then give them a solution.
The reason you should build a landing page first doesn’t really have anything to do with market validation (you should have already validated the audiences need for your offering). It’s more about security, both financially and the peace of mind derived from knowing that your audience research is accurate.
Product research is so so so important! I can’t stress this enough. Unfortunately, books such as the Lean Startup advocate guessing what the market wants over and over again, until (after 50 attempts) you finally hit gold.
Doesn’t that sound ridiculous to you?
Especially for indie hackers, bootstrappers and solo founders.
How on earth are you going to find the time to test 50 different variations of your product?
Leave that to the VC-backed startups. What you need is something more precise.
Instead of relying on the unpredictable user surveys that have become standard practice across the corporate world, learn from forums and communities online to find out what people are struggling with.
If you're interested, I wrote an expanded version of this here, with some examples that are included in this thread - https://josephpacks.com/should-you-build-a-landing-page-before-your-product-is-ready-28971eff68e
I do not think that a landing page is the proper tool to validate your idea. Customers may tell you "Yes, this is a great product, I will certainly buy it" countless times - but yet when you actually start selling these same customers simply do not come to buy ....
If you do not have at least some kind of prototype or demo of your product that can be touched and played with - it seems pointless to me to collect emails for a mailing-list or credit cards for pre-orders.
Humans are really bad at reading each others minds - you may talk as much as you want but customers will always have different expectations than what you actually plan to build.
I'm only going off my own experience with this and it works very well. The most exciting thing about business is the fact that it's always different for each person and therefore testing and experimenting become extremely important.
That's the danger with best practices in business. I'd say they need to be avoided if possible.
I totally understand your reasons for not wanting to go down the Landing Page route, but I've found that when I conduct the proper research I can get a very good idea of what the customer wants. I'd never want to launch to an empty audience.
I agree that most of the time it is an individual experience and that it is rather inaccurate to define or follow some "best practice". People change their mind and behavior all the time - what was "best" yesterday is no more today ....
I do not object your opinion in any way. I would like to clarify mine instead. I read somewhere that there are only 3 fundamental paths for success in the business:
a) find an existing product or service which has one or more bad flaws that you know people are complaining about - and then offer an improved version without the flaws
b) find an existing product or service which is targeted to VIP clients only - and then find a way to offer the same quality (or above) for half the price (or less)
c) solve one or more of your own problems which you find quite frustrating
From my own experience [c] is the most suitable for software developers, then [a] - but [b] seems to be rare. In all cases it helps if you have a source of information in any kind of business that needs some kind of automation - e.g. small manufacturing companies or repair shops.
In my opinion, when you are solving a problem (I mean by using software) that you experience by first hand - you will usually have a pretty good idea of what the solution must look like. I believe that the best products and services mostly happen when you are customer of your own software.
Strongly support it!
Having a solid mailing list at launch, as well as awareness for your product, will be a boost to your initial sales and traction.
In the era of tools, email is becoming more and more "algorithm-proof".
"The old, becomes new again" :)
I also doubted the idea of landing page before product launch (because I believe no one would signup). But I decided to give it a try anyway.
For me, it is important for the landing page to have the following elements (besides the subscribe button)
I posted on IH twice with not a single upvote or comment, but strangely I get 15 subscribers. I counted this as a win (at least I won't start with 0 potential customers when launched). I do wonder is 15 subscribers a good enough validation.
https://flowrabbit.com/
Hey @rjacks, I would say go for it.
I am the co-founder of https://weardulo.com and we opened our store in November 2017, after almost a year of product development. So, technically, we didn't have our product ready for a while.
I have recently realized how important it is to start creating interest early on. It is something we hardly did during our product development stage. And I guess we missed on collecting a lot of prospective customers. Having a landing page in place, that collects email addresses would have been really helpful.
What I have seen is that the people who were engaged with our journey over the year we were in development, were also our first customers after we launched.
But because we didn't put explicit focus on growing this group, we probably missed some opportunities.
That's why I would advise to create a landing page and start collecting interested people and talk to them. It's incredibly useful!
Did it. Would do it again. But do feel a bit guilty now that I'm going in a slightly different direction with a different timeline. Got hundreds of signups though.
I wouldn't do it 6 months ahead (ooops, maybe I just did by accident). I'd think more 90 days. I do agree about the crazy-short attention spans.
Interacting with pre-customers is invaluable.
I think the point is not so much to get usable leads as to validate whether people will actually click on the buy button, thinking there is a product. You dont even have to collect emails
I beg to differ. You should aim to nurture a relationship with your potential customers but that's a hard climb to begin that by using a paywall scenario. Perhaps starting soft is the good first touch for finding customers with interest. Having them pay for it is entirely a discussion based in the monetization strategy.
Completely pointless.
It's a good thing to do only when you're willing to give false expectations. It's a common marketing trap to suck some funds into AD campaigns, and you'll have to guess yourself where those money will lend in the end.
As the Rework book says: you have to show your unfinished drafts, instead of showing a complete picture - that's how you draw people's attention and show that you are trustworthy. You could charge some money ofc too, for pre-ordering or early access, as @chillyorange mentioned.
Look around - there's just too much ads of the unfinished products everywhere, which actually disgusts people a lot.
Having a landing page doesn't prove you're capable of giving a viable solution and making a trustworthy product.
So, keep it simple.
There's no need to build a space ship out of paper plains on your first rodeo: If you can't finish it in two weeks with all your knowledge and experience yourself - it just would be a waste of time.
p.s. Go check some nasty ORM'less stuff like EdgeDB or uvloop for instance, aka The Magic Stack, to get some understanding of the massive CRUD boilerplate around. My englishch might be crude from time to time.
Absolutely not completely pointless. Lots of businesses benefit greatly from this approach. Simply because you don't like it or agree with it does not make it pointless across the board.
If you were to take a look at the pre-order page we used for Pagestead (http://pagestead.com/old/), you will find that isn't a single false statement on there, nor were we raising false expectations.
I don't think anybody in this thread said it does? Typically, the aim of an early stage landing page is to validate assumptions, not to proof you're capable of delivering a solution to someone's problem.
May I suggest keeping somewhat of an open mind when approaching other people's methods? Of course it won't work for every single business out there, nor am I saying you should put up a landing page promising stuff you won't ever be able to deliver (this would be a pretty dumb thing to do, as it prevents the MVP from doing its job). But there's nothing wrong with putting up a landing page describing a problem and a way you're planning to solve it.
Mattijs, I agree 100% with everything you've just said.
I've been seeing empty promises for far to long.
The definition of Viability is very vague nowadays.
I had been through a lot lately: for some folks delivering 1/10th of their promises is already a huge success, but for the target audience it's a disappointment.
I've just wanted to say that it's batter to backup a landing page even with a semi-functional service, allow people to track your progress and leave some feedback, than rushing with a lot of bold statements and realizing that they're simply imposible things to do afterwards.
I'm really sceptical about site builders - it's just really a well developed market. Thus I can't really judge about any failed expectations, delivery rates and market pentration just by looking at the landing page.