Just how raw can a landing page be for an initial validation?

Honestly when starting, I now have the feeling that the beauty of the landing page doesn't count that much. What needs to be crystal clear is your message and the value that you're bringing.

Also releasing a non polished landing page can be a marketing statement in itself: you could appear more genuine than if you release a professional looking, more impersonal page.

There's also something to remember: big improvements are opportunities to redo your marketing! If for example you get some traffic from Reddit with a very basic landing page and then realize it's not good enough, you can just repost later your new shiny work saying "Hey my website just got 10x better". Starting non polished actually unlock opportunities to talk about your improvements.

Good luck :)

@mpodlasin As long as your landing page, in the beginning, conveys 3 things - (1) who is this for? (2) what is the pain that they have is being solved with your offing (3) value proposition; the rest of the things will not matter much.

In my experience in working on building traction for early projects (including an idea stage), what works is to get the attention of the prospects is targeting “ideal” users and reaching out to them manually, individually. The most common un-scalable thing you have to do at the start is to recruit users manually. You can't wait for users to come to you. You have to go out and get them. What this means is a lot would depend on your cold messaging when you reach out to them and there is a very little you are expecting from random visitors to the website.

This situation would change when you start transiting from predominantly "outbound" to more "inbound" marketing.

Depends on the online course. If it's a course about web development or design, you want the landing page to look great - otherwise, you're not selling the product very well! :)

If your niche is not up with the latest design trends, then following some basic principles and putting together a basic landing page is usually fine.

Another option is to use a landing page builder, some offer free trials to test them out quickly and see which ones have the type of template that you like. Some examples might be Instapage or Leadpages - I believe both offer a pre-sale / online course template set (No affiliation, just been looking recently myself!).

You should break the other question out into its own post really as it is its own beast: Should you pre-sell?
Personally I think sure, try to presell, if it fails, take it down a notch by just collecting a waitlist/interest list for the course, offer an incentive (discount) with both tests.

Peace.