Is this landing page ready for business?
Hello everyone,
I've just put together the very first version of Monitoro, a scraping service that monitors webpages for changes.
I would like to get your feedback and insights on the landing page, as well as understand the potential obstacles to sign up from your perspective.
Thank you for your time.
Hey Omar,
A few thoughts.
What's the use case that you're solving? I can see using this for testing and I can also see using it for watching a site for general updates, e.g. watching a price on a product from a retailer's site.
I'm asking because the messaging isn't explicit as to who would be using this.
Also, there is a lot of tech-speak/jargon in the copy.
Maybe your ideal customer is a very tech-savvy person who would speak using the same language. If not, I would tone down the copy to use a more conversational tone.
For example, your headline is jargon-heavy while being a little vague. Are the people that you're targeting going to know what "Monitor and scrape fresh data" means and why they need it? Are they sitting there right now thinking, "I wish I had a way to monitor and scrape fresh data"?
Your subheading makes me think not.
This makes me think that your customer is likely sitting there right now thinking, "I wish I could figure out how to get updates when this part of this site changes. I'm tired of checking it and refreshing the page."
A few other issues with the subheading - I can't put together why the bolded words are bold. In the first sentence, you talk about "websites" and in the second, you talk about "webpages". You also mention that Monitoro calls "your webhook" but later it sounds like you provide webhooks. Do I need to have my own before using, or do I set it up through Monitoro?
In your "how-to" section, you leave it up to the user to infer whether they have to configure the CSS selectors or Monitoro just figures it out for them.
I think I'd change the use of the words "automatic" and "every time". Reason being, you are setting up a monitor that runs on a set frequency that you say can be set "up to every minute". It may be an edge case but I could potentially deploy 2-3 times in a minute. If I changed the same value in each deployment, am I going to receive an alert for each change of am I going to see the delta between the previous time that Monitoro ran and the latest time?
I would comb through the copy and ask yourself whether your ideal customer knows and uses words like "scrape, structured data, webhooks, etc". I know seasoned QA folk who don't talk like that.
If QA/testing isn't your target market, then I imagine general web users are less likely to use that language.
Hi @dmontooth, and thanks for taking the time to review Monitoro.
Right now, the way I see it, Monitoro tries to be a new piece in the puzzle of automation, that acts as a sort of trigger, so you could use the data downstream in a service like Zapier, or push to Slack for example. The exact areas where it would shine are not fully clear to me yet.
I have a few hypotheses to validate. I think it's potentially useful for several segments:
1- competitive intelligence for marketers (price and portfolio watching)
2- changelog / release watching for developers and engineering managers
3- related to 2, allowing more flexible rules for ChatOps, such as knowing exactly when some data changes to another value (for example, when the availability from the status page drops below 99%) again for developers, devops and eng. managers
4- Watching candidate profiles, such as their current work place, or whether students have graduated already - for recruitement and sourcing agencies
5- Power users IFTTT and Zapier, who would use Monitoro in conjunction with one of these tools, to monitor specific websites and react to that. A use case in this category would be to watch a regional job portal, or a local e-commerce website for product availability or price changes
6- canary watching - for infosec and activists
While those are segments I believe would benefit from website monitoring and scraping, the demographic of users that I currently expect to use Monitoro range from Developers, Automation Engineers to savvy recruiters who are used to chrome extensions to scrape websites.
Since the project rely on a few moving parts (having the need to scrape, knowing what webhooks are and having useful ones...), I'm sort of trying to self-select the messaging and the service to people who already know they have this problem, and evolve in a similar tooling space already.
Once I have a better understanding of the space, find and nail an initial niche, I will try to move to a larger audience, hopefully assuaging the (valid) questions you raised.
Points taken, I'm iterating on the landing page based on the feedback and that's definitely an aspect I want to improve.
If the frequency of change is higher than the monitor's frequency, you will only receive the delta as you described. For <1 minute monitoring times (which I assumed were uncommon for public websites), there's an on-premise offer that provides frequencies down to the second (exploring the possibility of millisecond frequencies).
This is not provided in the public offering due to the risks of practically DDoSing websites.
I am nevertheless curious about the use case you mentioned, of deploying 2-3 times a minute. I understand it might be hypothetical, but could you describe how such a use case could be? (any rough example would do)
Thank you again @dmontooth for your time, and for your detailed and engaged feedback.
It sounds like you have some solid use cases. The copy may be a little challenging since there are so many potential customers. It's a little easier when you know that one person that you're talking to.
In my mostly hypothetical use case of deploying more often than the one minute monitor, there are times when I have deployed 2-3 times in a minute. Mostly during early stages when hastily updating copy or something small on a page, seeing that it created a bug and then pushing another update immediately after. It doesn't happen often but every once in awhile it does.
Hi Omar! Your landing page is clear and nicely designed.
I'm having a hard time figuring out a use case for the service though. Who is your target audience?
Hi @Nebulic. Thank you for your interest and for your kind words!
I have just described my current hypotheses for the use cases in a sibling comment here:
https://www.indiehackers.com/post/is-this-landing-page-ready-for-business-63965c34f0?commentId=-LrBRdbePO_nGc99ucyR
(It's the first half of the comment)
Would this answer your question? Do you think it's making more sense now?
It looks pretty damn good, I think it would definitely get your target audience interested. Might have to remember this for if I ever have a need for web scraping.
As a criticism, the almost random bolding of words is the one thing that seems amateurish.
I guess I was too bold 😅
It's fixed. Thank you @lewiscampbell for your input and your kind words.
The value prop is pretty clear above the fold. I liked it.
But what if there's an existing user coming to the page ? Do you have any nav bar menus because I think there has to be menu links on the top.
Neat page though.
Haha I loathe myself for overseeing that! Thank you @dssagar93 for this amazing catch (and save in Launch day!)
Cool. All the best.
I like how the value prop is clearly explained through the diagrams. I can see how financial services startups might want to use this to add secondary sources of stock pricing data from websites that don't offer APIs.
Hi @tweetzzzzz, thank you for your time and for your interest!
As I am validating the use cases for Monitoro, do you think we could exchange on this topic? (scraping for financial services)
Please write me an email at: omar -at- monitoro.xyz
Thanks again 🙏
Yep for sure
Neat and Very well explained value proposition.
Thank you very much. 🙏
Do you see Monitoro fitting in your workflow somehow? Or in test automation in general, maybe in a setting slightly different to yours?
Well not really, but if something comes to my mind, will let you know.. And all the best for your product.
Site seems to be down from here
https://sc.atymic.dev/6d0ea3.png
Yeah, just a little update that went wrong :D
Please try again now, it should work fine.
This looks great! Very clear value prop and enticing enough to get me to do signup for free at the very least :)
Also may I ask, did you build out this landing page yourself or was it a template? It looks amazing
Thanks! Any area of improvement you could think about?
The landing page is based on a template named "Grace", made by http://pasqualevitiello.com/
Sorry for not having a better link, I downloaded it a long time ago from indiehackers.com itself.
Hmm so this is minor, but in your three-part description I think you don't need to repeat Monitoro, aka "Monitoro scrapes structured data", "Monitoro watches data for changes" - it should probably be more actionable, like "Scrape structured data"
That’s a great point and I fixed that. Thanks a lot @mtndu!