Make 💰💰💰, not landing pages...
https://www.doIneedalandingpage.com
👉 "Landing pages should come last..."
Really enjoyed this insight from @adamwathan's IH podcast episode last week.
I see so many founders - especially indie hackers - make this mistake...
Building useless landing pages when they should be doing sales and customer discovery instead.
So here's a solution to make sure you don't fall into the same trap...
Great tool! Reminds me of this piece Paul Graham:
Do things that don't scale http://paulgraham.com/ds.html
When are you opening the course again?
Some time in the next 2 months probably.
Still working on some improvements to keep the value/impact high while making the pricing more affordable!
This comment was deleted 7 years ago
Isn't this what Dropbox did before they built their product? Aren't landing pages a form of validation (if you can sell fake features with a mailing list wall then isn't that a form of customer discovery)?
No idea.
It's a (bad) kind of validation of your product, yes.
In the sense that you make hundreds of assumptions (audience, copywriting, pricing, product, pain etc) and get a single binary answer back...
If you're the 1 in 1000 who nail it first time by sheer luck (or maybe you're just your own perfect customer), then a landing page can work. Maybe that's what happened for Dropbox.
But in the other 99.9% of cases, you'll be left knowing that something isn't right, but no idea which of the many, many assumptions you made are wrong.
Not a good way to build a profitable business anytime soon.
This is really interesting, would love to see the data behind these things. We recently just put up a makeshift site (small boutique studio hate dropping the link but if your interested in text first example --> http://trypixel.co) but we hardly ever get traction on it and all of our clients are referrals anyway so I can see your point.
For Saas, maybe its different??
Cool idea.
This comment was deleted 3 years ago
What does a "better product" mean? The discovery process in this case isn't to validate the market, it's to validate the "better" part of your sentence. There is an endless backlog to any product, and you need to have a method to prioritize what gets built to make sure you're actually delivering the right value to the customers.
Is better more features?
Is it fewer features?
Is it a faster interface?
Is it self-hosting and white labeling?
Is it making it work on additional platforms?
One more thing: switching costs are typically very, very high. Your product needs to have the perception of being 10x better than the competition in a dimension that matters.