3
11 Comments

Landing Page for TurboNav. I'm ready for a critique!

Howdy Indie Hackers!

I recently quit my job and have been working the last month on a concept browser extension using Figma. I'm a software engineer by trade, by no means am I a designer, but I thought it would be a great learning experience. I plan on being an indie hacker for years to come and having design skills will definitely help in the long run.

If I'm being honest, I started off coding before any validation but I'm fighting that engineer habit of mine. We've all heard that advice to validate your idea and although this is a project that will scratch my own itch I still want to make sure I'm listening to user feedback as early as possible.

So now onto my first project, TurboNav! https://turbonav.com/, it's a chrome extension tab manager. Recently I took up some part-time consultant work doing Technical Discovery and managing tabs for research I've done gets overwhelming rather quickly.

It's a pain point I know many people deal with. Current extensions in the market focus mainly on how to organize your tabs with very little context of the user's "Active Session". TurboNav will focus on making it easy to organize your "active tabs" by leveraging Tab Groups. But, that's just the beginning, the extension will be feature-packed with Commands in order to quickly create groups, save for later, schedule Routines, move tabs to a different group, the possibilities are endless. Think Superhuman for your tabs.

I think the three main differentiators against competitors are:

  1. Create Routines this is a concept I haven't seen anywhere. Schedule to read links at a convenient time
  2. Commands to efficiently call actions navigate with your keyboard
  3. Open TurboNav from any webpage. Not just on a new tab. Making the experience frictionless

Hopefully the Landing Page makes that clear. I'm super excited for my first batch of feedback! Thanks for reading

peace! ✌️

  1. 2

    Being a digital minimalist with mild OCD means this probably wouldn't work for me (Although I do like the idea of a command key combination to make browser actions!). That said, I have a couple of things you might want to look at to improve your products marketability through the website, I hope these help!

    • The sign up button in the header gets lost amongst the other navigation links. It's become common practice to move this to the far right of the links and make it a button with your main brand CTA colour.
    • I have a feeling the grey you've used on links and buttons wouldn't pass an accessibility test and could be hard to read for some people.
    • The tabbed links under the features heading get a bit lost on the page. Are they needed?
    • Alternate the text/image image/text for each of your features. It helps to make the page a bit more interesting visually rather than the same repetition.
    • The blue underline on keywords works great for links, but the features have them and they don't link anywhere. The behavior is inconsistent.

    Good luck!

    1. 2

      @graphicscove thanks a bunch for the feedback all great points. I'll look at implementing them this weekend.

      I'm curious, you say you're a digital minimalist, as a "digital hoarder" 🤦‍♂️ I've aimed to achieve that level of minimal usage with digital products, but I end up with a mess that's hard to manage. Especially with tabs, hence why I'm building TurboNav to address my personal problem. I have certain spaces where I've been able to manage somewhat but not something I would be proud to show off.

      Do you have tips or best practices to aim for a digital minimalist lifestyle?

      1. 1

        Specifically for managing tabs, I always use the 'Start on a blank window' option in my browser, so every time I start up it's fresh. If I work late and want to continue where I left off, maybe once every few months, browsers have the 'restore last session' option.

        Start by thinking about why you have so many tabs open. Are you in the middle of something, are you keeping hold of a service that might be useful, or something you might read eventually? It helps if you understand the intention of the tab, which in turn helps you decide what to do with it.

        So as an example, anything I want to read either gets read there and then, or gets added into Instapaper. If I like the look of a website I add it to an inspiration collection I keep in Notion. The same with any tools that would help me do my job. They get added to a list and then the tab gets closed. Any tabs that aren't useful get closed when I'm done.

        Of course it doesn't help if you keep hoarding away things 'to read'. Make sure you have time to read them.

        With the inspiration collection for example, web design changes a few times a year so I go through and delete anything that's not relevant anymore.

        I also have a task in Todoist to do a Digital Cleanup on December 28th every year. Things I haven't used at all that year can be deleted. I'd say doing a digital review every quarter would be a good start for somebody who needs to get on top of their current situation. My yearly review does everything (PC apps, mobile apps, scanning and organising important documents, deleting old backups etc..) - It used to have 'unsubscribe and clean up email inbox', but I've got so used to doing that daily I always have inbox zero.

        Whatever your situation is it might look daunting, but approaching anything with intention and taking a step forward every day will help you get to where you want to be.

        1. 2

          A little late, but this is super awesome! Thanks for a detailed description of your system.

          You provided some great tips, I like the task you have for Digital Cleanup. That's super neat. I can see that being useful on a quarterly basis.

          Thanks once again, I'll look at implementing this in my hopes of reaching digital minimalism

  2. 1

    Nice color scheme and font choice. I would change the capitalizaton for your last header "and much"... the other headers start with a capitalized word, so that one seemed a little out of place.

    1. 1

      Thanks for the feedback! 🙏

  3. 1

    Hey mate,

    Just to say - I like the idea and have that problem all the time - just a bit of positive validation for you.

    With that said, I might be bias as I even thought about doing myself (as I feel it as a real pain every day) - I just couldn't figure out a model to significantly monetise it (or guard against the very real risk of Google adding the features themselves to chrome).

    Great idea and useful tho!

    Best of luck!

    1. 1

      That's really great to hear! Thanks for the positive validation.

      I 100% agree that there's a risk Google could kill the extension entirely. Take Apple for example, they've killed entire startups with a new feature embedded directly in macOS or iOS.

      Recently Safari and Chrome have teamed up to standardize their extensions API which I'm totally on board with. This year, Safari is upgrading the web experience by introducing Tab Groups and tab syncing to all Apple devices. This is huge but also begs the question. What will they introduce next? Could they introduce a feature that kills my product?

      Only one way to find out!

      Recently I posted my mission: "Achieve Inbox Zero with Browser Tabs". Let's see if that's what Safari and Chrome will do next, I'll just have a head start 😜

      1. 1

        Haha - best of luck mate!

  4. 1

    If anyone is curious:
    The landing page was built in a week: Using https://super.so/.
    The experience has been great since I write my content on Notion and it's live in a matter of minutes.

    The CSS was a bit tricky, I'm not a CSS guru so I had to google how to get the landing page looking right

    As for the designs, that took the longest. Probably 3-5 weeks. I could have kept going but I had to stop myself in order to proceed with validation. I'm not a big fan of how the Notes feature turned out, but that's not the point of validation, is it?

    ---
    As far as the next steps:

    • I'll be tweaking the landing page to get the right message
    • Working on MVP for Routines
Trending on Indie Hackers
How I grew a side project to 100k Unique Visitors in 7 days with 0 audience 47 comments Competing with Product Hunt: a month later 33 comments Why do you hate marketing? 28 comments $15k revenues in <4 months as a solopreneur 14 comments Use Your Product 13 comments How I Launched FrontendEase 13 comments