LampBuilder
Create a startup landing page in seconds
After launching on ProductHunt and Hackernews, what next? We got some initial traction, but maybe it is a false positive? What should you do next?
We got some feedback on feature requests and suggested improvements. While working on the improvements, we decided to start building up an audience that is specifically interested in tools/solutions for validating and launching start-up ideas using AI.
We decided to start a newsletter that is focused on the role of AI in startups. By exploring topics in this domain we can see what interests founders and how it translates to tools like landing pages.
The strategy is a bit of a two-in-one. We get to go deeper into the domain to understand what the customers want, while also building up an overlapping user base. We are also trying our best to pay close attention to other needs in the problem space of starting startups.
The main article took about 3 days to write. Part of the process was figuring out what to write about and curving out a theme that could open more questions later on. I decided to go with an 'out there' topic titled: "Autonomous AI Founder: Can AI Be A Startup Founder" (https://aisuperfounder.substack.com/)
Over the first 10 days, we have reached 43 subscribers and 1,5K views. I was able to write 7 articles during this time while posting across Twitter, LinkedIn, Hackernews, and Reddit. The long-form post is still doing the best with 628 views.
Since launching the newsletter we have seen a 20% growth over the initial 10-day period.
Michail posted LampBuilder on Hackernews earlier this month which gained a surprising amount of engagement compared to previous posts. [30 upvotes, 12 comments]
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37051358
We more than doubled the number of sites generated from 700 to 2000. It was interesting to see how people are using it in unexpected ways. The most interesting was a user creating a landing page for their GitHub repo. We had a positive comment about the on-page editing feature. Users also asked about pricing.
After launching on Hackernews we realized that people were finding it valuable, but we needed a consistent way to reach our target audience.
After launching on ProductHunt we posted on a couple of social channels to see what the response looks like.
It is always tricky posting on Reddit and making sure it is relevant to the community. I find it useful to ask a question where you may include a reference to your project to support the question. Out of the 5 posts in various Subreddits, this one performed the best with 5K views in r/SideProject:
Unfortunately, none of the posts generated significant traffic to our site, but we did get some comments that were useful. I avoided including any direct links otherwise the posts get banned, but then also limit any traffic.
I think posting on Reddit is all about consistency, building up a reputation, and finding useful angles for the community. If you can figure that out, it could be a valuable traffic driver. After posting on Reddit I decided to rather create useful content that I can share with the various communities and take it from there.
We did not want to spend too much time with a ProductHunt build-up and decided to get the product ready in its basic form, post it on ProductHunt, and ask a couple of friends to test it out and upvote if they liked it.
Here is a link to the launch: https://www.producthunt.com/products/lampbuilder#lampbuilder
ProductHunt is really a great way to get your product in front on users. It may not be your ideal target user, but it is great for getting user feedback.
Our ProductHunt metrics:
We reached out to about 50 friends on the day.
-119 upvotes
-26 comments
~1000 unique website visitors
~500 sites created
- 34 users registered
- 2 hosted sites configured
This is not a blow away ProductHunt launch, but interesting to see the level of engagement from potential end users. The initial feedback on feature requests helped validate what we should work on next.
We did not want to spend too much time with a ProductHunt build-up and decided to get the product ready in its basic form, post it on ProductHunt, and ask a couple of friends to test it out and upvote if they liked it.
Here is a link to the launch: https://www.producthunt.com/products/lampbuilder#lampbuilder
ProductHunt is really a great way to get your product in front on users. It may not be your ideal target user, but it is great for getting user feedback.
Our ProductHunt metrics:
We reached out to about 50 friends on the day.
-119 upvotes
-26 comments
~1000 unique website visitors
~500 sites created
- 34 users registered
- 2 hosted sites configured
This is not a blow away ProductHunt launch, but interesting to see the level of engagement from potential end users. The initial feedback on feature requests helped validate what we should work on next.
Playing with this idea as a side project, we decided to message our founder/startup friends to ask if they had any parked domains or ideas that wanted to test with our landing page generator.
We reached out to 30 friends on LinkedIn and Twitter. This was the response:
10 engaged in conversation
5 requested a preview
1 configured a custom domain
Although the results weren’t great, we managed to get some feedback:
Easily edit the copy
Upload their own images
Asked for more components
We decided to proceed to the next step by adding the edit functionality and making it easy to set up custom domain hosting without contacting us.
We joined the Chat GPT Plugin Hackathon at Shack 15 in San Francisco. We did not really know what to build and joked about getting an AI to build startups. We thought what if we started with a landing page generator to test startup ideas.
We all have ideas or maybe even parked domains that we don't get time to spin up and let loose into the wild. Sure, it is easy enough to spin up a static landing page using Wix, Cardd, etc. Some may even prefer their own stack. However, on our experience using existing tools takes between 15 min to and hour to write the copy, pick images, add waiting list and set up custom domain hosting.
The problem we are trying to solve is minimizing the manual effort involved to help testing startup ideas. Does an AI landing page generator make it x10 easier that doing it yourself? At this point we weren’t sure yet, but liked how it is a starting point for an AI that builds a startup.
At the hackathon, our goal was to see if we could generate a landing page that is good enough and requires no/minor editing to publish and drive a clear call to action: join a waiting list, schedule a call, early subscriber, etc.
We set out the create the initial features:
- Generate copy from a text input
- Find and match images/icons
- Populate an existing set of components
We finished the project the day after the hackathon and was quite pleased with the results. It was interesting enough for us to test it out with friends.
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