How to bootstrap a nice enough landing page and get early adopters for a ChatOps tool?
Hi,
I have been working on a ChatOps tool and have been using on my current company. I feel like the tool is helping us a lot and is already mature enough to get other users to give me feedback and help me build it.
What is the fastest/cheapest way to get there? I don't have good design skills and always end up struggling for too long when building something like landing pages and promotional texts, while I could be working on the tool itself.
Thanks
Head to themeforest.net or any one of the other theme marketplaces.
Buy one (make sure you get the commercial license if it applies)
Write the least amount of copy you can that explains the value of the product. Give yourself a time limit on writing the copy. Have
Don't reread it because you'll entangle yourself into a perfection spiral (not good, you have better things to do)
Launch
Thanks Josh.
I have bought a few templates on themeforest before. While they work well for admin templates, I could never make them adapt to landing pages. Most of the times the images or icons there don't fit the purpose well and I don't know how to proceed.
About the launch step, any suggestions on how to put the word out there?
Ideally I would love to find early adopters (around 5 to 10 now) without having any landing page or anything.
Thanks again
I've found that the base template styling is good enough to get by. Spending $100-$200 isn't so bad on Fiverr for some custom icons or graphics. Also doesn't hurt to try graphicriver.net and see if they have graphics there that fit.
I wouldn't go too hard too quick: First find where the chat-ops trend-setters hang out and email them. They'll be more than willing to give you a try and give you valuable feedback.
After that feedback I think you'll have a good idea as to what direction to take to get a better marketing push :)
I've personally used https://www.launchaco.com/ to create a quick and dirty landing page. Its very limited but worked pretty well when I needed something done in a day and the dev's respond pretty quickly on twitter.
In previous ventures I've used Squarespace, but to be honestly I found it being more hassle than it was worth.
This. I've been using launchaco for a while and it really did save me a lot of time.
It has some limitations, but in some way, this forces you to keep things simple, also there's nothing that you cannot tweak by embedding some js.
If I want something quick, I would definitely go with this instead of using time choosing a premium theme, customizing it, dealing with hosting, etc.
Grab a Bootstrap template from on of the many free template sites .
Deploy it somewhere like Netlify (or just in an S3 bucket if you can do some AWS)
Get some copy up, and test it with this community. Once you're getting good feedback, post it as a Show HN on Hacker News.
In both cases, stay in the forums / on the thread and actively engage - answer questions and so on.
P.S Beware of the templates from template sites that aren't free, but are cheap, like $50. If you read the small print they usually say that it's $50 if you're making a personal site, but that any commercial use requires a Pro license for about $400.
P.P.S the best way to validate many ideas is to take money for them, by taking initial deposits / pre-orders / discounted advance signups; if that's something that resonates with you, try https://trolley.link :)
I'm a front-end developer by trade and also found myself wasting too much time procrastinating with landing pages. I realised I just wanted something simple so I could actually focus on the product itself.
So, I used a product that was posted on here[1] very recently - https://unicornplatform.com/.
I used their beta to generate something for www.albertrm.com and tweaked it a little bit to make it work with my branding.
It was a very quick and easy process. Maybe a couple hours total.
Their pricing is way too much for me but great that their beta is free right now.
I deploy using automatic deploys from GitHub with Netlify[2]. They have a fantastic free service which is perfect for static landing pages.
Hope this helps.
[1] https://www.indiehackers.com/product/unicorn-platform
[2] https://www.netlify.com/