How do you approach setting up a landing page?
Hey guys,
I am interested to know how do you approach setting up a landing page for your product? What is your step-by step process?
I would really like to get some insights from serial indie hackers, but I appreciate any input.
Here's my step by step as an example:
- Get a DO droplet, configure it, install docker
- Set up the DNS records
- Put together a simple server with Node and Typescript, usually Handlebars for the templating engine
- Code the front end, hook up the mailchimp API, throw in mongo (if needed)
- Configure automated deploys with Jenkins
Voila.
Let me know your process! I'm interested to hear about different approaches, and especially how less technical founders approach this topic.
Sounds overkill :)
There are 2 ways I recommend
Template:
Landing page builder:
Other good solutions:
Thanks for the great input Volkan, extactly the type of information I was looking for!
No problem I have been studying them for 9 months :)
We use Webflow for all of our stuff at 8base. It hasn't limited us so far. Here's a recent post one of our guys did about adding code blocks into Webflow if this is relevant https://dev.to/sebscholl_26/adding-code-blocks-in-webflow-cms-with-language-highlighting-4ci6.
Thanks Albert, I keep hearing about webflow but never really gave it a shot. I skimmed through the article, seems interesting.
Congrats on 8base, great job with the product!
Thanks, Andrei.
For hosting: Google App Engine all the way. Yeah, data transfer is kind of expensive, but it's got a decent CDN built in, and it doesn't even spin up instances for static content. Also use deploy on push with their CI service. I build my applications there anyway so it's a good fit for me.
For mailing lists: I don't use Mailchimp personally. Instead, I feed data from form submissions directly into a Google Sheet and use GMass to send out messages. It's works well for small lists (~100 emails) but I wouldn't use it for anything bigger.
Google App Engine sounds interesting, I've been meaning to give it a shot just to see how serverless works :)
Highly recommend. It's not technically serverless (there are instances), but it's serverless in the ways that matter: scale-to-zero, autoscaling, managed runtimes, etc..
Before I would have made a complicated system, or worse, built the product. This time round I just have the default Wordpress DO instance and a customized wordpress theme where I only added a new page style for the main landing page. All this behind CloudFlare of course.
Works perfectly, its simple and only took me a few hours to get everything set up. Now I'm focusing on content and seeing which channels get me most signups before I continue working on the rest.
Interesting approach! thanks for sharing Patrick, and the product idea is promising as well :)
I would definitely go with a landing page creator. I was a bit overzealous in my own project and did Gatsby from scratch, but ultimately probably not worth it.
The thing I really wanted was an easy way to add pre-launch sign ups to the site that redirected users to an Airtable form. Thought I bet either Carrrd or Versoly must have something like that by now.
Sorry to clarify, we wanted signups to create users in our Users DB so that we could continue to use that DB once the app was ready. Anyways, that's why we built Midtype in the first place to make stuff like that super easy haha.
Midtype looks great! 👍👍
Awesome 👏
Oh interesting, thanks for the input! I was always hesitant to go the landing page creator route, because I felt like I won't have enough flexibility and control - but at the end of the day a landing page is just that, and there are only a handful of features you'll need.
Midtype looks great btw, congrats!
I’m ashamed to say I have nothing live on carrd or anywhere else these days :(
Great insight, thanks! Can you show me an example you built using it?
Here's an example of one I did in Carrd. https://yesterdaysweather.com/
The important factor is that site took probably under 2 hours start to finish, and it costs $9/year to run (which is basically just so I can use a custom domain... it can be free).
I've done the DO route (what I always used to do), and I've used Squarespace, Webflow, and others. Carrd is definitely the least friction, but it also has a few limitations.
I recommend any of the no-code builders over setting up your own servers (for a landing page at least).
Nice 👍
Hey Drew, thanks for the insights - I see that carrd.co is quite popular, I'll have to check it out!