My Landing Page obsession killed my SaaS product.
The Spark: Why I Quit My Job
About ten months ago, I was still working at a telecom company, developing software for WLAN systems. It was my second year out of college.
To be honest, I hated the telecom industry. The shrinking profit margins and vanishing bonuses were constant reminders that this was a "sunset industry." My heart was getting restless.
The turning point came from a friend. He started a Shopify store selling niche gadgets and business was good. But what shocked me was that he paid an agency $1,000 just to set up the site. After looking at his website—which was incredibly simple—I realized that becoming a Shopify agency might be a profitable opportunity.
So, I handed in my resignation and started my first entrepreneurial experiment.
The Reality Check & The Pivot
In the first three months after quitting (Months 1-3), I built a niche e-commerce social media account and grew it to 5,000 followers. I even got a few orders for Shopify site setups.
But reality hit me hard.
Most clients knew absolutely nothing about Shopify. 95% of my DMs were just people asking free questions with zero intent to buy. I was trapped in "free consulting" hell. For those who actually wanted to buy, 80% wouldn't accept a quote over $200.
Although setting up a Shopify store isn't hard, it is tedious. I realized that even if I worked 24/7, my income would barely match my old salary.
I needed a pivot. I looked at the Shopify App Store and saw SaaS apps making healthy profits. I analyzed my DMs again and realized: Clients don't need expensive full-site builds; they usually get stuck on specific styling tweaks.
So, I decided to build a SaaS to help Shopify store owners break through template limitations. "ElemSprite" was born.
The Brutal Lesson
I forced myself to become a full-stack founder overnight—learning UI design, frontend/backend coding, marketing, and taxes.
- I spent 2 months (Months 4-5) building the core product.
- Then, I spent 3 months (Months 6-8) just on the Landing Page and payment logic.
The Landing Page consumed an enormous amount of time. I had heard that "the Landing Page is crucial for conversion," so I obsessed over every pixel. As a backend developer with no design experience, this was torture. I scrapped and redid it countless times until I was finally satisfied.
Finally, in Month 9, I launched. I ran social media campaigns and did cold outreach (I even built a system that found 1,200+ precise leads per day—remind me to write a post about that later).
In one week, I got 50 signups. But zero paid conversions.
I thought I just needed more time. Then, the unthinkable happened.
Shopify released an update. They introduced a native AI feature that allowed users to change styles directly in the dashboard. It did exactly what ElemSprite did—but better, and completely free.
That was my darkest moment. Six months of hard work evaporated instantly. I felt completely lost.
The Post-Mortem
After a few hours, I calmed down. I told myself: If I quit now, I truly fail. I must learn from this.
I analyzed the entire ElemSprite launch and found critical errors:
- Development cycle was way too long.
- Skipped the validation phase.
- Chose a "hard mode" cold start.
- Poor user onboarding.
- Built on a platform dependency (Sherlocked by Shopify).
Points 2-5 are easy to fix next time. But Point 1 was the real bottleneck. Why did development take so long?
I realized that the Landing Page took up a disproportionate amount of time. For a "non-professional frontend engineer" like me, coding UI from scratch was a productivity killer.
Saving 90% of Landing Page Dev Time
The solution? "Borrow" existing designs.
Instead of writing frontend code from scratch, modifying existing, production-ready styles would drastically cut development time.
I tested most tools on the market, but they only provided static, messy HTML (like saveweb2zip).
I thought: Why not build a tool that helps indie founders clone "Production-Ready Code"? Like Lego blocks, you should be able to snap different components into any framework.
So, I spent 1 month (Month 10) building this tool: Lift.
Learning from my past mistakes, I didn't build the whole thing in isolation this time. I want to invite fellow indie founders and small business owners who share my pain to build this with me.
If you want to stop wasting time on Landing Page like I did, come join the Alpha. I'm giving a huge discount to the first batch of users who are willing to help me test and improve the product.
Good story. Real scar tissue. But the core failure wasn’t the landing page.
It was late validation + platform risk.
You spent months optimizing presentation before proving:
someone would pay for the job-to-be-done
Shopify wouldn’t ship this natively
the problem was painful enough without polish
The LP work didn’t kill the product ....it delayed feedback.
Lift makes sense if you flip the order this time:
validate demand with ugly + manual first, then automate.
If you can get founders to pay to save time before they care about design, you’re onto something.
Yes, your summary captures exactly what I've learned, and I'm actively trying to apply that mindset now.
While the Landing Page wasn't the root cause of the failure, it remains an inevitable time sink that almost every founder falls into. It is incredibly difficult to find the right balance between optimizing for conversion rates and managing the time spent building it.
My current project is actually born from this exact perspective—trying to provide a solution to this specific trade-off.
I have been there and honestly this is what scares me the most about building a product. Crazy thing is, a validated idea is not even guaranteed to boom, people are kind of reluctant to part with their money on a new company.
My suggestion is (and I am solving this same problem for myself right now) make a lot of contents on social networks. Develop authority while you are developing the project.
I made this indiehackers group to discuss things like this. We still need 6 more members for the group to be live.
https://www.indiehackers.com/group/saas-onboarding-workflows
Yes, I also realized this problem.
Now, I force myself to post at least one post on social media every day, while I'm also trying to shoot videos and write articles.
Additionally, I joined this group, it sounds interesting.
It was painful to read this. ~
I have repeatedly found myself in the same boat: helping with the polish of the landing page because it feels a bit more progressive while dodging the uncomfortable part that involves speaking to users and validating the core problem.
Your timeline is a wonderful reminder that devs can quietly become a productivity sink through continued time spent on UI. It is obvious work but it is not always valuable work.
A guideline that I make an effort to follow nowadays.
If the product is not used by anyone yet, the landing page just needs to be “clear”.
The mention of Shopify shipping a feature natively hurt. The risk associated with platforms is very real.
They are able to move far faster than any solo hacker and it’s easy to underestimate their power.
After a similar setback, I was able to solve the problem by breaking up the work.
Testing demand through conversation with potential users.
Construct a product interface polish.
Every week, I had to get the validation before getting “permission” to code.
When you look back, what do you think was the first sign that you were over-investing in the landing page, instead of the problem?
It’s a good idea to borrow other designs as well. I’m now doing the same with templates and component libraries to not have to reinvent UI.
A very useful lesson to share, albeit a hard one.
To be honest, there wasn't really a specific "first sign" for me.
As others have mentioned, spending time coding (whether it's the product or the landing page) is infinitely more comfortable than talking to customers. It gives you a false sense of being "productive."
Cold outreach, on the other hand, gives you immediate, raw feedback. That feedback can be scary—it makes you question your product and even your own abilities.
I think many technical founders struggle with this. It was that subconscious desire to "hide behind the code" that trapped me in a time sink for so long.
This hit uncomfortably close to home.
The distinction between conversion optimization and problem validation is something I wish more founders talked about. It’s easy to hide behind landing pages because they feel productive, measurable, and “safe,” even when the real work is talking to users.
Also appreciate the honesty about how much time went into things that didn’t move the needle. That’s the part people usually skip.
Curious — if you were starting again today, what would be the very first validation step you’d run before writing any landing page copy?
Actually, that is exactly what I am doing right now.
For my new project, Lift, I haven't coded a custom landing page at all—I'm just using a template for validation.
As I mentioned to @yamamoto7, I’m using a Market Research → Warm-up → Alpha framework to validate three key questions in order: Initial Market Analysis, "Do users need this?", and "Are users willing to pay?".
I’ve intentionally put full product development and custom coding on hold. I will only advance these aspects step-by-step after passing each validation gate. My goal is to build just enough to meet the current stage's requirements, rather than aiming for perfection from day one.
The timeline breakdown is useful. 2 months on core product vs 3 months on landing page is a brutal ratio for a backend developer. That's a common trap — perfectionism on the visible parts while the product-market fit question stays unanswered.
The Shopify "Sherlocking" scenario is tough. Building on someone else's platform always carries that risk. The faster you can validate and get paying customers, the less exposure you have when the platform inevitably absorbs your feature.
A few observations on the post-mortem:
Validation before building — You mention this was skipped, but the DM analysis ("clients get stuck on specific styling tweaks") was actually a form of validation. The gap was going from insight to product without testing if people would pay.
Landing page perfectionism — The irony is that conversion rate matters most after you have traffic that wants what you're building. A rough landing page with 100 interested visitors beats a polished one with 0.
Platform dependency — This is harder to avoid than people admit. Every niche tool is at risk of being absorbed. The defense is speed: get enough users and revenue that you can pivot or expand before the platform catches up.
For Lift: how are you validating demand this time? Posting here is a good start, but curious if you've gotten pre-orders or commitments before building the full product.
Hi, thank you for listening.
Let me first address your questions regarding Lift's market validation. Given the hard lessons I learned from ElemSprite, and to avoid sinking time into a dead end again, I’ve decided to adopt a staged validation process to answer two core questions:
I have structured the roadmap as: Market Research → Warm-up → Alpha → Beta → Launch. This isn't my invention, but a standard development flow used by many successful products.
Each stage is designed to validate specific hypotheses:
Next, regarding my responses to the post-mortem:
Finally: Your points about "perfectionism on the visible parts while the product-market fit question stays unanswered" and "The faster you can validate and get paying customers, the less exposure you have when the platform inevitably absorbs your feature" were incredibly helpful.
Thank you for the reminder.
Long story short: He is selling course.
If my master plan was losing $30k to sell a course, I should be fired as a businessman.
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Man, it must have been so tough, months of hard work becoming useless overnight.
If you want help with copy for your landing page for Lift then make sure to reach out to me.
I'd be happy to write a free high converting landing page for you, I just wanna help you because I think you should be rewarded for persisting rather than giving up after your initial failure.
Thank you very much, this should be very helpful to me.
I am currently in the validation stage, and I would be happy to connect with you.
Appreciate that and I’m glad it resonates.
Validation first makes total sense. Happy to connect.
What I can do is put together a quick landing page draft for your idea so you can test messaging + waitlist conversion without spending weeks on it.
No rush or strings attached, just something practical you can use during validation. Let me know 👍