Landing page before building product?
Many founders advise that you build a landing page before building your product to test for demand (sell before you build).
But
- what metric would signal that there is demand? % of users who submitted the form? If so what is the success percent? 1%? 10%?
- during the test you will only be able to get enough traffic from Google or facebook if you want test quickly. But if so your targeting introduces another margin of error (how good you are at targeting/marketing). How do you isolate that factor?
I'm yet to see a convincing process on landing page testing. Could someone with experience share some of their stories?
When starting a business, you have to solve multiple problems.
Two of them are:
The idea of a landing page before product is solving 1 before 2. The big reason I also recommend this strategy is because if you are solving for #2 first, the probability of building a product that the customers from #1 will pay for is lower.
I also don't think you have to do it via a landing page. You could cold call/email, go through friends and family to meet these customers, speak at an event to meet these customers, etc.
For example, my last company, we pre-sold our product at a realtor "lunch and learn" for $5000 in pre-sales. At that point we were confident we could make money from it and we also knew we could attend more lunch and learns to make more sales. It was a couple months later that we actually fulfilled all those orders and could do more sales.
As for your question about what good demand is, its unfortunately just going to depend on your business. What would be best is looking at acquisition cost. Let's say you get 1 sign up after spending $100 on ads. But its an enterprise product and they are going to be 5-10k a month. If you talk to that sign up and they are really serious about it, that could well be all you need. If however, its something that you'll earn $1 a month from a customer and you spend that $100 and only get 1 signup, at your current customer acquisition cost it would take 100 months to return your investment, that's 8 years and probably worth working on Sales and Marketing first, before product.
I think the most important reason to have the landing page before building is to explain to the world how your product will work and get feedback on it.
1: Having enough data to make meaningful insights is pretty tough (at this stage) unless you already have a huge audience and can get hundred or thousands of signups. I think the most important thing here is to capture people that are interested so you can start a conversation with them and understand them as potential customers.
IMO - At this early stage, it's more about gut feel than achieving certain metrics.
Out of all the validation tactics out there, there is no substitute for talking to potential customers. I couldn't imagine talking to/emailing a prospect and there not being a landing page for them to look at
You have good questions, but what is the other option?
Spend hours, days, months on a product you don't know anyone wants?
I think having a landing page is a good idea. When you talk to friends and family, you have somewhere to point them for updates.
When you share about your experience online, you have somewhere to point people.
At the beginning I don't think the % matters as much as the fact that a real person raised their hand and submitted the form and said 'I am interested'. You should just talk to them directly. Ask their use case, their pain points, why they are interested.
Good luck!
The fact that many founders do advise this, doesn't tell you anything. When and how did this work for them? What was the exact situation and can you exactly recreate the same conditions. Spoiler: no, you can't.
In the end your landing page is as good as the targeted traffic you get and even then: what does a subscriber mean? I've built landing pages in the past. One with loads of subscribers and one with only a handful. Guess which landing page became a financial successful product?
Don't build a landing page before you build.
Building out landing pages didn't work for me at first. Not a single idea I implemented had any 'traction'.
But one of my projects started out as newsletter (landing + mailchimp) and now has grown into a full-blown site - http://fbamonthly.com
We managed to get ~ 50 subscribers with just guerilla marketing tactics. And we decided to put more of our time into it.
Not a huge success story, but traffic is picking up :)
Great question, i've been wondering the same thing.
Im not entirely sure how I would go about driving traffic to a landing page for a future product without spending a fortune on adwords.
Im also not convinced a few posts on social media, reddit, quora etc will do much. But that is just my uninformed opinion since I haven't used the landing page before product strategy before.
My current thinking is, what does it hurt to put up a landing page along with an email signup for news. I certainly wont be spending anything on adwords for a landing page. But other than that, I suppose it's worth giving it a try for no real downside.
It'll take a couple days to design a good landing page, but if you're not willing to spend money (or time) to drive traffic to it then it's a waste of effort.
I also haven't figured out a way to drive traffic in a meaningful way (e.g. 1000 visits should be enough, but that might cost more than 1k$ on traditional channels like adwords and fb; unaffordable if you need to validate several ideas).
I don't hear this advice as often anymore. I think it is much more approachable when you have the money to drive traffic to the page - and enough to quantify. It could still be a good idea, esp. as part of a larger plan.
The more common advice I see now is (from people like Alex and Amy on IH -- don't remember the usernames atm) to join communities, start attracting an audience, talk with people, understand their pains and then decide on the product. I could see building a site/landing page as part of this strategy. And if at all possible, make it something you deal with already.
It’s worth doing this just to see how easy it is to describe and “sell” your concept.
If you build for months, then get to making the landing page and end up writing things like “the easiest way to do x” or “x that doesn’t suck,” you might realise you didn’t understand the problem you’re trying to solve as well as you thought. I’ve made this mistake a few times!
How can you measure how easy it is to sell the product from your landing page? What is the outcome that would make you go "I've got something here, I'll build it".
Assume your product is an email marketing saas (like MailChimp). Assume you got 5 sign ups out of 100 visits. What is your conclusion here?
I've seen an alternate version of this which I think is better. I've heard of having a "Buy Now" button (or whatever would be appropriate for your business), and when they click just inform them that they can join the waiting list. There are tradeoffs to this. Sure, some people might get upset at the sudden switch from "I'm buying" to "I'm waiting" (which to me seems like a good problems to have in a test). Also, you'll likely also get fewer email addresses overall. But IMO the point is to see people attempting to buy, since an email does nothing for me if the value proposition isn't right. Give and take there though.
I’m not even thinking that far ahead, what I mean is that if you try make a landing page and struggle to clearly explain why anyone needs what you’re making, it’s better to know that before you start building.
I dont subscribe to it. sell before you build is a ridiculous notion. sell what exactly? a promise? you expect people to pay you for something that does not exist yet just because you said it will be available in a year? thats what kickstarter is for, thats the only place where this notion will work, nowhere else.
idea validation, product market fit, etc. are important things and should be part of your market research. you definitely need to do your market research before starting to build something but you dont have to start selling it before you started building it.
It's not a requirement to make people pay from day one on a landing page.
You can "sell" a spot on your waiting list for the price of the customer's email. This helps you identify people that actually want your product that you can talk to.
Exactly! See the guys who produce the Art of Product podcast for this idea in action.