Request for feedback (well, help really, since I am so green with this)
Hi!
It would be great to get some feedback from the good folks here at IH.
I've just re-developed my front page, with the aim of articulating my value propositions, and calls to action (which is, really, just to try out the demo product).
Edit: sorry! It’s for https://search.hindsights.io
I would love to hear what the good people here think of it - how the page looks, whether the value propositions / calls to action are clear.
Oh, what do you think about including a "pricing" page to measure engagement, even though I think I'm at least a fortnight or so away from even launching it as a discounted beta product?
Thank so much,
JP
Pricing: There's a an old story about how Joel started Buffer. He did his landing page test with a pricing page to make sure enough people clicked through to a paid plan -- before starting to write any code. https://www.slideshare.net/saintsal/leanspark-sofia-2011-buffer-case-study
I did something similar with Strategyzer's launch (official Business Model Canvas tool). Since the Business Model Canvas was already getting a decent amount of traffic, we could get around 200-300 qualified clicks per day, so we tested a whole bunch of pricing plan combinations. (You can search for a "chi-square" calculator to see how much traffic and difference in results you need to be confident that one option is better than another.)
Oh wow. So he was testing "will people pay for this" through the landing page, I guess?
Strategyzer! Haha I was one of those people who used your business model canvases.
That's super interesting. Thank you :)
Yeah, in both cases we were looking to get people as far along a regular buying process without taking their money.
It still wasn't enough to "prove" or "validate" the product, but if the opposite were true, and zero people chose a paid plan, we knew we were on the wrong track and had to change the product idea, who we targeted, or the acquisition channel.
The most important part of all this though wasn't counting people, it was talking to them. Both Joel and I made it a point of personally looking up everyone who pre-registered, and starting an email conversation with them to learn more about who they were and why they were interested. I even had phone calls with at least 10 people per week.
That's what busted our big assumptions and gave us the insights to know which features were important and how to describe them so our conversation rate rocked.
Aaaah I hadn’t even thought of that. How did you find the initial target customers, and did the conversations change the target customers as well as how you approached them?
For Strategyzer, it was traffic from people searching to download a PDF of the business model canvas.
For Joel, if I remember right, it was from an HN post. But it must have been more than that, because I remember this went on for 4-6 weeks, so he must've been getting traffic from elsewhere too.
I also did a similar test for Leancamp. I got traffic mainly from event listings and from sending a message to the London Lean Startup meetup, which I ran.
I understood the product from " Find the right patents, faster. Similarity-based & iterative searching." So I'd try that as the main headline instead of "Welcome to Sighter:
Patent Tools for Humans"
Got it; I guess the current headline doesn't really tell people anything substantive about the product.
Hi JP, looks like a cool product!
A couple of things I noticed on mobile is the different sized buttons and the lack of white space between them (search engine + patent landscapes), also at the bottom of the page there's very little left margin which looks off (for the "Patents hold valuable information.
Let us help you extract value with the right tools." Text) Other than that looking very nice!
See screenshots in this link https://photos.google.com/share/AF1QipOif-uaFgpHFysbuc9xvriQnojsURRF192C_m44-dn9RMZCU-lMSQNqq04OCQNcQQ?key=c19BYlJXR1U4OGpvLTVrbGY4OE5Hb3czd3VCTF93
Hi Jesse,
Thanks for taking the time to have a look and the detailed feedback! I certainly hadn't noticed those before and I've made changes to fix them up.
I didn't realise the min width on my desktop Safari was wider than the mobile Safari haha. Cheers!
This looks great! One thing I would add in the header — especially since there's so much white space on the right side — is a screenshot of the product so people can see what it looks like. And I'm personally all for having a pricing page so you can start testing your pricing early. I didn't finish reading your comment before opening the link and was trying to figure out where the pricing was.
Good tip on both. Yeah I think having a pricing page is going to be one of my priorities, if nothing else to test out some hypotheses & engagement levels.
Thank you. :)
For other people's benefit, I assume this is for - https://search.hindsights.io/
Thank you so much haha.