Should I remove my landing page and immediately show my signed-in content ?
My startup is a language learning startup that is kind of a cross between Duolingo and Memrise, but where all of the content is video: http://www.seedlang.com
My part-time partner on the project is a well-known German teacher on Youtube who has 200k+ subscribers, and we are about to release a video on her channel introducing Seedlang. I expect that we will get 10s of thousands of visits so I'm thinking alot about our signup funnel.
But what I've been wondering lately is why do I need a landing page at all? The thing you always hear is that "I want to try it before I register" and in a web app like mine, why not show it and allow people to use say the first 1/3 of any flashcard deck before registering. It seems like their understanding of the product would be far greater than through an explainer video, and they might appreciate this open approach to showing the product.
However, none of my competitors do this. Which gives me pause to wonder if this is just startup 101: landing page, optimize, get that email son. :) . What do you think? (And unfortunately I don't have the time to A/B test this atm)
Do both and measure it!
There's no way we can tell you what will work better than just doing it and quantifying the results.
As a side note, Is it just German or are there other things, I suspect not but that's how I read it.
As an outside user who's never heard of it before, I'd be more likely to sign up/be a return user if I stumbled across someone else's video flashcard (for javascript, or history, or whatever), and then when I tried to search for others or browse other topics it asked me to sign up.
I also think creating really awesome topics of these and posting them to the associated subreddits could do well.
Hi Grant, thanks for the comment! It's just German for now. But yeah I think doing both and measuring it is the way to go. I was debating making a big move this morning in anticipation of this Youtube video, but I think being more deliberate and analytical is the way to go.
Btw, I'm not completely understanding what you mean by stumbling across other people's content. We make all of our own content, and the place for us to promote it is on Youtube channels and subreddits associated with language learning. Did I misunderstand anything?
Maybe we have different concepts of what a landing page is but I very much view seedlang.com as your landing page, especially if you don't have one. I mean, if you created an "actual" landing page, how different would it be?
Ah I think my title is misleading. My point is that I am thinking of removing the landing page that you see when you go to the site, and instead you would immediately see the signed in page with some small changes (ie a welcome notice at the top).
Gotcha! I think the reason why we often have marketing heavy landing pages is because they are better at persuading people in a way that just using an app isn't. You can have lots of content that people wouldn't normally find in your app, content like testimonials, explainer videos, opt-in forms, etc.
Maybe you can add the flashcards on the current landing page in the form of a mini app? Could be embedded, could be in a pop up.
Yeah I guess it will come down to A/B testing the hypothesis, but I'm just having this feeling that the product would sell better than words about the product. But that might be typical founder overconfidence in his product, we'll see :)
I'm think he means one of those funnel type landing pages.
Yeah, I get it but if he's currently funneling his visitors to the homepage, it kinda becomes the landing page, doesn't it?
Hey Jeremy, would a live demo get the best of both worlds? You could link it to the homepage, and that way people can see the landing page to get an overall idea of the product, and click the live demo to be able to play around with it a little, before having to register. For example, Baremetrics has a demo page (https://demo.baremetrics.com/) that lets you see what the dashboard looks like without having to register.
Hi Manasvinik, yes this is what I'm thinking as well. Baremetrics is a great example!
Another example is Dynalist - https://dynalist.io/
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You might see more success by allowing logged-out, unregistered users to start using the site. Then after every step offer them the opportunity to save their progress by registering. (Just make sure you keep track of all their progress before they register!)
I’d say keep the landing page as is, but when hitting ‘get started’, take the user into your app with a limit as you suggested. It’s a much nicer flow for the users to get a feel for what you’re offering rather than asking them to sign up straight away.
And on an unrelated side note, please, for the love of all things touch screen, do not override the default scrolling behaviour. Using your site on my iPad felt super janky since there was zero inertial scrolling.
Thanks for feedback James. And yeah I've seen that issue with an iphone before, even when the landing page was just static text! I'm not sure why it's doing that, but I'll look into it further..