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44 Comments

Does my landing page value proposition connect with you?

  1. 3

    Assumption: Your target customer is a non-technical person

    • Build an audience without any coding skills.

    The value-prop "without building a backend" doesn't tell me that I get a turnkey solution.

    1. 1

      The audience are front-end developers. Do you think I could make that clearer?

      1. 0

        In that case the question you need to ask yourself is that why would frontend developers need your service? Most of the frontend devs I know can can easily build an API client to Google Sheets or any other API that is connected to to a database.

        1. 2

          I’m full stack and I’d use it for mvps. But I would want a view engine too. Just forms is not enough. I’d also want to pay monthly not the whole year at once.

        2. 1

          Ok I guess I was a bit brutal in the last comment. My suggestion would be to automate the full stack as a turn key so that anyone can cut and past the code in their website and they are up and running.

  2. 2

    Love the landing page. Easy to understand what you do.
    Here is how you can make it better.

    • Add CTA underneath the Hero.
    • Add a simple FAQ Section.
    • I understand that you have a separate pricing page. If possible add a pricing section or a Special CTA for users to navigate to the pricing page.
    • Footer is ugly. Redo it.
    • Try increasing the font size, spacing, image size throughout the page. I have quickly tried editing it out for the hero section.
      Hero Text Size
    1. 1

      Great feedback! Thank you. Love the improvements here.

    2. 1

      Great genuine feedback. I'll apply them to my landing page as well. Increased Font size and spacing make it easier on the eyes.

  3. 2

    Hey Levi - cool idea! My feedback is that it takes a little detective work to figure out what your service even does.

    "Use Google Sheets as the no-code database for your front-end." — This makes it sound like your service enables devs to use Google Sheets as a general-purpose DB, which isn't true. You need a simple one-line description above the fold. Something like: "Add easy, customizable forms to your website with no back-end code. Collect responses in Google Sheets."

    Checkout a competitor's website https://formspree.io/ - it takes about three seconds to understand what they are offering.

    1. 1

      @Allotropic Hey Griffen, thanks again for your feedback. I've done some work to update the landing page to, hopefully, clear up how the service works. Do you think this is clearer or still too hard to quickly grasp?

      http://sheetmonkey.io/

      Thanks!

      1. 1

        💯 — your new copy is way more clear. Edit: in checking this, I noticed that the layout is pretty broken on mobile. It would be worth fixing that. Responsiveness isn't really optional these days!

    2. 1

      Awesome feedback! Formspree is a great resource. Thank you! Let me know if you ever would like a free unlimited account.

  4. 2

    My reactions:

    Page seems to look pretty, but feels very cluttered and hard to read and quickly understand what it is about.

    Build an audience without building a backend.

    So I need to build a frontend?

    Use Google Sheets as the no-code database for your front-end.

    This part was really hard to see and I was still confused by the previous text. I think it's hard to see because of the small size and weird spacing from the main title.

    Give your front-end superpowers

    I have absolutely no idea what this means, sounds like buzzwords.

    It mentions like 5 times that it connects to Google Sheets, I understood that. But once it connects, what does it do? I didn't see a short explanation.

    Sorry if the feedback sounds harsh, but I assume you want to know the things that could be improved. 😊

    1. 2

      Super helpful, thank you!

  5. 1

    Small feedback : Landing page is not properly responsive , appears cropped when viewing from mobile.

  6. 1

    It's a very cool service you are providing. I'm making a nocode website builder https://www.indiehackers.com/product/pazly Could you imagine a featured component for your service?

    1. 1

      Palzy looks cool too. I'll take a look but feel free to hit me up directly at [email protected]

  7. 1

    The visual elements are good. But I don't know how it's different from formspree. By the way, did you design the page yourself?

    1. 1

      Hey Benny, yep. I designed the page. (For better and worse. :-D ) It looks like the key difference between Sheet Monkey and Formspree is that all Sheet Monkey data goes directly into Google Sheets. Formspree has an intermediary backend.

  8. 1

    🐒 I absolutely love the monkey in the far bottom right (:

    I'm guilty of failing to trim down my own landing pages to the bare minimum. I'm just too attached!

    So I thought I'd do you a favour and show what it'd look like if you were to just ruthlessly chop chop chop! 🙈

    Before:
    before

    After:
    after

    1. 1

      Yep. Good suggestions, Andrew. Thanks!

  9. 1

    Really great product idea with poor marketing execution imo

    I dont think your customers are developers

    i think "smart sheets" type lingo is your future

    1. 1

      Definitely need to improve the marketing execution. I'll look into that. Never heard of "smart sheets" before but I'm intrigued. :-)

  10. 1

    Very clear to me what your website does, clean design, and love the artwork!
    But a service built on top and solely relying on Google product is kind of risky don't you think?

    1. 1

      Yeah. I'm not too concerned. If I was trying to build a huge business off of this it would probably be a risk. But intend to keep this small and focused.

  11. 1

    I really like the idea, I've done this on my own before, but now I use either an embedded mailchimp sign up form or a button that sends them to a mailchimp sign up form, just thought you should know that's out there.

    1. 1

      Yeah, that's a great option if you're a mailchimp user. I prefer having my mailing list data in something more flexible like a sheet and then syncing it to my email marketing platform. Hopefully there's enough people who want that too. 🤷‍♂️

  12. 1

    "Use Google Sheets as the no-code database for your front-end."

    "All it takes is basic html..."

    A lot of people won't get past the basic HTML bit. No code means....well, no code :)

    I think you need to make it way more obvious what type of person you want to reach and explain the benefit more.

    1. 1

      Yep. I agree. I was leaning into the no-code buzzword but probably need to directly speak to front-end developers.

  13. 1
    1. Love the art work! I also approve anything that has monkeys and bananas :)
    2. The first thing I looked at was an example of what you can do. Is there a way to "demo" the product? The message is not clear: do I need to build a frontend myself?
    3. Who is your target audience? I know I'm not the audience but I couldn't tell from what I read who might be
    4. "Audited and approved by Google". For real? Does Google actually do that?

    PS: Didn't read the other comments so apologies if I repeat other's message.

    1. 1

      Thanks, Victor. Yes, Google actually does audit you if you ask for elevated permissions before they let you OAuth.

  14. 1

    Personally I would focus on one of your user personas and explain the most typical use case for them, in image/diagrammatic form.

    E.g. Indie hacker making a landing page:
    Giant image of a sign-up form (or survey) with an arrow --> to the resulting data in Google sheets.

    BTW - Airtable does a good job of this, not sure what the distinguishing feature is?

    1. 1

      Good suggestions, Tristian. I'm hoping that there's enough of an audience in Google Sheets who needs this and I can just ignore Airtable users. We'll see.

  15. 1

    I like your monkeys but after 30 seconds it was not clear for me what the product does :(

    1. 1

      Thanks, good feedback. I need to focus this.

  16. 1

    You can swap the bottom and top halves.
    Do X, Y, Z without having to code or just using your Google spreadsheets.
    Check out these guys for some inspiration https://www.glideapps.com/

    1. 1

      Interesting idea. Thank you for the suggestion.

  17. 1

    Hi Levi
    Awesome product, I can definitely see how it can save developers time when developing a MVP or a landing page for quick market validation.

    Here are my first impressions:

    When I read the main tag line, I got little confused as I associate 'building audience' with some kind of growth either via marketing, community building etc. I had to read through bit more to understand that you were targeting front end developers. I would change tag line to something along the lines of - "Write in HTML, we'll connect it to Google Sheets for you." Then you can show examples of sample code below the main section to showcase a use case.

    All the best!

    1. 1

      Great suggestions. Thank you. Yeah, I think I need to make this whole page clearer and steer away from marketing speak.

  18. 1

    How do you grab the data from the sheets back into the JS?
    I.e. say I want to show a list of all the "submitted ideas" in a sheet on a page?

    1. 1

      Sheet Monkey is to help people collect data and build an audience just using HTML forms. Essentially it's a write-only database. The data that goes into it shouldn't be available for website visitors (emails, beta registrations, etc.).

  19. 1

    If anyone here wants to use the product, just let me know and I'll give you a free upgrade to the unlimited plan.

  20. 1

    This comment was deleted a year ago.

    1. 1

      Yeah, I agree. Need to refine that to be clearer.

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