How many people just throw up a landing page to see what happens?

I did that before and learned not to build the app.

Without the time and budget, it seems like a wast of time to me. I'd rather design 2-3 landing pages max, and then spend some time on finding the potential users on twitter/reddit/hackernews, etc. It's an interesting idea though and i'd be curious to see if with time and budget, that'd actually make a difference.

On a side note, @negative_zero, I'd love to send you a DM about an idea I have (hardware / iot related) that might interest you (based on one of your older indiehacker post). DM if you're curious (I can't DM you directly if you don't follow me)

Cheers.

Me

i used to do this but feeling less and less secure about it providing good direction. seems like still a good amount of effort in positioning that could be spent talking w/ people, writing an e-book, newsletter or slim MVP.

Depends on what you consider traction.
Are you looking for sales, or signups or emails or leads?

At the very least I'd say, start a newsletter in your category.

You can spin up free Landing pages for newsletters and promote it.

But even 1,000 signups for email updates isn't traction to some.

Save the money and run a design sprint instead

Thank you all for your insights. I really appreciate it. I think I will give it a go but with caution.

The more variations you have in a test, the more traffic you need for statistically valid results.

So while publishing a landing page before building your product can be a useful part of validating an idea, I wouldn’t take a “throw it at the wall to see what sticks” approach.

@negative_zero For one of my clients, we had included 5 landing pages for each product that went through paid ads. This made the CPC reduce by 40%. The engagement for the ad was very high. I think we should use more landing pages if the budget permits.

I think landing pages are not only for launching a product. The page should be used for driving any kind of traffic that you generate. It can be for paid or organic traffic. This increases your ROI.

@LeoNeo you are spot on the point "Converting users to a paid plan is the best validation". This point proves the effectiveness of the page design, copy and CTA placment.

I used to do that about 10 years ago, when I had lots of disparate (and weak) ideas, none of which worked out. My approach was to put up a landing page with a sign up button, then run targeted Google ads to see how many visitors came in on what keywords, how much the keywords cost, and what proportion of them clicked on the signup button.

While it stopped my pursuing ideas that had little traffic, it never lead to me finding a solid idea. However, some data is always better than no data, so you will learn something from it - if only, how popular the key words and phrases you're focusing on are.

@LeoNeo is a pro at this.