12 - 14 months too early for a landing page?
Product hasn't been developed yet. Idea will take roughly another year to get to the first beta (it's complex). One-man show. All those things aside, is starting a landing page, asking people to join a mailing list that far in advance too far in advance? Is it better to get people interested as early as possible and feed them interesting tidbits along the way to keep them interested? Or wait until it's nearly ready to roll?
Talk to customers before you dedicate a year of your life building something they might not even want. If you already have, then yes get it up and build the email list
I'm totally on board with this comment.
Start validating your ideas asap, (a landing page could be a good starting point) and start delivering. Working for a whole year on a complex idea without really knowing if it's going to be well adopted could potentially be a major waste of your time.
Totally agree! OP shouldn't even be focussing on one large complex product. Small features are the in-thing nowadays.
This. Coming from experience, I would launch the landing page first (or at least after building a MVP within a minimal amount of time).
Don't do this unless you're creating a hardware product and even then, that would still be a stretch.
Take your idea and break it down into mini-features. Create a landing page and try to gauge interest then just start by implementing the feature that garnered the most amount of "wows".
If I were you, I'd only focus on one feature and start shipping (after carrying out landing page experiments). Don't build something that people have zero interest in. Doing the landing page early on helps you realize whether your product is actually useful and needed.
Happy coding. Get shipping!
Start validating idea asap, (a landing page could be a good starting point) and start delivering. Working for a whole year on a complex idea without really knowing if it's going to be well adopted could potentially be a major waste of your time.
go for it. Now I would be eager to find out what that could be :) Can you give us some hints? Not that I want to steal your idea. Specially if it would take me at least a year to build it :D
lol
Personally, I'd build the landing page and start sharing updates every other week at most, and once a month at the least. Three quick updates, what you've accomplished since last update, what you hope to accomplish by next update, and what you need help with. 3-6 short paragraphs per update, nothing TL:DR
Write a blog post instead
I think it's better to do both the things simultaneously. For example I am building a no code AI SaaS and the landing page can be found at bit.ly/codenull-ai I get regular sign ups, talk to customers and understand their needs, while also continuing my dev process side by side. I'm also a solo founder btw so we're very similar. We also have a discord community at https://discord.gg/6rcQbAEB
I would say that it's very important to validate your idea before spending time developing your product, but you can do so by posting about your product in some communities to get people's feedback. And then, a few months before your release, you can launch your landing page (go back to the communities where you had posted before to onboard those who were interested). You would be close enough to the launch to be able to keep them interested by providing more specific content about your beta, even some visuals, to build excitment ahead of launch day.
You need to be validating your idea and your progress early and often so that you know you're on the right track. A landing page or a newsletter can be part of that, but there are more than enough horror stories on IHers and Twitter from people who built waitlists and blogged for months or years and then released and it failed to meet people's needs. Just ask yourself 'what is the tiniest fraction of value I can deliver that is aligned with my overall vision', and try and release it in weeks or a couple of months. Everyone says their project is complex, and I'm sure yours may very well be, but I'd still recommend trying to break it down somehow :)
I don't think so! It can be used as a means of validation along with connecting directly with potential users/customers. We built our landing page 1.5 years before our product was commercially available.
I agree with everyone in the comments. It is never too early to start working on distribution. Start blogging, tweeting, collecting emails, etc., and have a landing page so people know what you're up to. I would imagine you'll get a lot of useful feedback while building, which is much more valuable than coding in a vacuum. Good luck!
build out your landing page, create a blog section on it, write a few SEO optimized blog posts. through out the development period keep writing blog posts. By the time you launch your SEO would be good