What are the best tools for creating landing pages to collect emails? Also is it the first thing that I should do?

I feel ya, Lucas. I'm deep in building out a funnel right now. Here's my take from what I've learned so far:

• Start with testing ads first (Meta is fast and cheap), before you worry about real landing page designs and a good domain name. Just make a quick janky one using any landing page service to start. Unbounce is kind of expensive and the de-facto standard, but I think it's worth it for the ease and time-saving it provides.
• For ads, test different value propositions and see what's getting you clicks. I find that building ads using Figma is fastest and easiest with a slight learning curve. It's also easy to organize/name them in Figma.
• You can use services like Unsplash for professional-looking stock footage depending on what you're building.
• Also suggest not narrowing your audience to start / keeping it as broad as possible. You can then dig into seeing if there are specific segments/demos that are resonating better.
• Budget maybe $40 and one week for each ad set.
• I would suggest using a different landing page for each value proposition and collect email addresses for each value prop, which you can pull on later. That said, at this stage I had minimal/no-luck getting people to give their email with such janky looking pages.

Once you know you can get people to reliably click with a promising or reasonable cost-per-click that works for your business model (note: do not confuse this with cost of customer acquisition, which will be much higher), then turn your attention to ramping up landing page design and focus on the next step of the funnel whatever that is.

E.g. do you want to collect emails as sales leads? get sign-ups for something? initiate a product checkout? At this stage you may also want to experiment with price-testing if it makes sense for you.

Some tips for this stage:

• Services like hotjar are great for analyzing landing page interactions (be sure to take advantage of their 1 free user research credit!)

• Run experiments with friends of friends who don't know you're behind the business. Basically have a friend ask their friends as unbiasedly as possible "Hey, I found this service -- check out this site, what do you think?" (without mentioning your involvement). Also a great way to see where people may be getting hung up in the journey.

• Add a chatbox and make yourself available. Tawk is free and they also have a mobile app so you don't need to be tied to your computer in case anyone tries to chat.