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Ask HN: How do you build pre-launch landing pages?
I'm building an concept web app at the moment and I'm looking to launch a simple pre-launch landing page to start gauging interest in the concept.
What are some tips that you've used successfully?
NB: I have done plenty of research on the topic I'm just looking to hear from the community here.
- kang 11y agoGithub pages plus mailchimp to do it for free
- foxpc 11y agoRegarding the design part: I usually find a couple of landing pages that I like and create something similar with the colors I prefer. Or buy one from ThemeForest. Back-end: Whatever I prefer at the time. If you're building a project with RoR, it does not mean that the landing page has to be done with that. A simple PHP/NodeJS app works great since it can be much faster to build. All in all, I try not to spend too much time on the landing page. Usually, more time is spent figuring out what's best to show on the page itself than building it.
- shubhamjain 11y agoWe are building Bouncelytics[1], an analytics platform to give users more insights about when and why visitors are leaving. We built the landing page about two months back after we had finalised the features we are going to include in the first version. My co-founder is a designer so we didn't have a problem in building the page and we used Github Pages + Mailchimp + Cloudflare to host it for free. Our expectations was we would just start an Adwords / FB campaign and leads will start pouring automatically but it didn't happen - either we don't ran the campaign well or it isn't easy to target for early adopters. What worked for us, was posting on subreddits (30+), Betalist (100+) and a bit of manual reach out. In the end, we managed to about 180+ emails who were interested. Now that we are almost ready, we have about 20 people whom with we can get started in polishing our product and get initial sales which sounds encouraging (although still quite low). So my advice would be, to build the landing with minimum saleable features you can build in a short time, promote the landing page in relevant subreddits and among people who might be interested in the product and take feedback from them about what problem is they are looking to solve with your product. [1]: https://bouncelytics.com https://bouncelytics.com
- teapot01 11y agoI like the blog and post marketing strategy and to be honest. I doubt I will drive much traffic with paid adds, remains to be seen though.
- siquick 11y agoForget coding your own landing page and try these services. http://www.unbounce.com http://www.unbounce.com and http://www.instapaper.com http://www.instapaper.com are paid http://www.launchrock.com http://www.launchrock.com is free Spend all your time optimising the landing page and getting traffic to it, rather than coding one up. Read these for landing page optimisation http://unbounce.com/landing-page-articles/the-anatomy-of-a-landing-page/ http://unbounce.com/landing-page-articles/the-anatomy-of-a-l... and http://unbounce.com/landing-pages/7-elements-of-a-winning-landing-page/ http://unbounce.com/landing-pages/7-elements-of-a-winning-la... If you're a consumer product then well-targeted facebook ads can drive strong traffic. http://okdork.com/2014/03/04/how-to-start-advertising-on-facebook/ http://okdork.com/2014/03/04/how-to-start-advertising-on-fac... !!Make sure you get the users email address on your landing page!!
- Gustomaximus 11y agoAs comment on Facebook. In 10 years of marketing for many companies, I've rarely seen Facebook outperform Google Adwords for pure paid traffic. In a world of limited budgets I'd suggest anyone putting their money their first. Also use a expert if your spending more than a few thousand $$. I often see small business tell me how 'advertising doesn't work' where typically they tried setting it all up them-self on the cheap and got little return on the investment.
- teapot01 11y agoI've looked into the feature sets of the above previously and while they are good, efficient solutions, they don't necessarily meet my requirements in terms of information capture. I'm building a relatively simplistic landing page server to manage the backend, and while it will not give me the flair and user interface of the options above, it will deliver the information I want, how I want. I'll probably just open source it when I'm done for others to use as an alternative. In terms of design - I've done a fair bit of reading on design and layout, and I worked with one of the design guys at in my sharespace to build the concept. I'm just trying to capture tips and tricks (the little stuff I might not have thought of).
- iworkforthem 11y agohttp://wishpond.com/ http://wishpond.com/ - buy traffic, start build your list. write blog posts, repeat.