Launching Micro-Tool MVPs using Webflow + Programmatic SEO | Sneak Peak of Next MVP Release
by vintuallyOver the past few weeks I've been hacking together a thesaurus of brands.
This all started because in January 2023 my team had trouble being consistent with a blog. The issue was that making good blog posts from scratch even with AI would take 4-10 hours (including research, writing, editing, posting, and SEO).
I was in a SAAS learning program and heard about the phrase:
Programmatic SEO
I had heard it a few times so I decided to begin researching.
It turns out A LOT of programmatic SEO websites are built using Webflow due to how Webflow allows CSV uploads to a database alongside building webpage templates for data in a database very similar to how Wordpress has page templates.
More info can be found on this article written by Webflow on how to create 300 landing pages in a week:
https://webflow.com/blog/programmatic-seo
After doing some more researching and planning my team helped me decide that building a thesaurus of brands would help teach my main startups customers what good branding is and why they need good branding.
As I started using Webflow I found it really really hard. After 2 hours of fiddling around in Webflow I decided to launch a quick and dirty coming soon page:
https://www.brandesaurus.com/old-home-2
Even though this coming soon page was whipped up really quickly (probably 30min in total) after doing some initial marketing we were able to get 40 emails from 400 website vsiitors. We also received really good feedback on platforms like Reddit and Polywork.
We decided at the start of March we want to launch an MVP.
My main startup took a lot of time from the week. So we ended up launching the website in its current state so that we could say we launched on time (which is what is most important to us):
After launching the new home page on the core domain we noticed A LOT of different things happen:
- People actually started exploring the website and we saw a rise in number of pages per visit
- We also saw an increase in time spent per visit
- Worst of all we saw a huge drop in email submissions.
The biggest worry for us is the drop in email submissions. It's still been pretty easy to drive traffic as we've refined a core value proposition, however, it seems like without a good user experience people won't trust the application enough to provide their emails.
Additionally we tried using waitlist software for our upcoming ProdutHunt Launch but no one seemed interested.
So the our biggest takeaways from listening to potential users and analyzing the data are
- We need to improve the usability so that the MVP can become a Minimum Lovable Product.
- We need to hone in more on the value proposition for after people land on the website (what do we provide for people who spend more time on the website)
- We really really need to get the email conversions back up before the ProductHunt launch
As I felt really motivated after launch the current version I've been able to spend time learning how to use Webflow better and now we have an updated interation coming out soon that's available for preview here:
Based on internal testing people are really liking the updated web page so the goal is to try to finish it off today/tomorrow so that by Monday we can switch the DNS settings over and point the domain to the new website :)
Hope this helps anyone looking to get into Programmatic SEO!
