Quietly launched new landing page

With an entire rewrite of Unearth in the works, I decided to start simple and begin the entire process by redesigning and launching a new landing page!

The reason I quietly launched the site is because I'm not totally ready to give this thing all my effort. Have recently been feeling the effects of being stuck at home for a year due to the pandemic and my mental health just isn't all that great—the last thing I need is to promise something to a bunch of excited people then drop the ball by not delivering because I overworked myself.

Regarding the site itself: I'm not that great at writing marketing copy so instead of trying to do that, I instead opted for a more personal approach where I include a "manifesto" or letter to potential customers with an email capture form at the end. This manifesto explains what's wrong with Reddit saves, what core principles are driving the development of Unearth, and a few value propositions that I hope will hook potential customers enough to sign up for the waitlist.

I'm not the first to use this long-form copy approach; below are some of the sites I took inspiration from when writing Unearth's manifesto (which is an ever-evolving and living document):

I'm also not the best designer in the world so I'm still trying to come up with a simple logo that'll look good in a small format (i.e. as a site favicon).

For those curious, I went with TinyLetter for the email capture, the main reason being I liked that:

it's free, and
their 5,000 subscriber limit is more than enough for me

That's about it for now. The next update might not be for a while—next up on my plate is to actually redesign the entire architecture of the app and start building the thing. Maybe I'll post about that stuff if there's any interest, but until then! 👋