Converting website visitors into leads and engaged customers have always been a challenge for B2B and B2C organisations.

With the vast online marketing tools available, some tend to focus only on driving traffic to their website. While attracting site visitors is very important, you have to continue to lead them to do something. Otherwise, it's just like bait-and-release fishing.

The solution is to boost your landing page conversion rate.

Think of your landing page as the entry point of your brand. It serves as the first conversion funnel - a powerful tool that allows you to turn website visitors into high-quality leads and sales.

Let's dive right in.

1) Make your headlines shine

Hook your website visitors right away with a killer headline.

Remember that you only have a few seconds to capture your visitors' attention. With a strong, attention-grabbing headline you'll create that much-needed interest. It gives you the chance to keep them on your website and take action.

The key to creating a high-converting headline is to be specific. Focus on one thing that will be highly desirable for your audience.

Try these formulas to give your headlines a lift:

• Get bold! Make your visitors notice it right away
• Infuse it with a teaser to spark curiosity, and hold back the rest to get your audience to click
• Spell out your value proposition clearly, making sure to highlight how you can solve their pain points
• Use the "how-to" magic key - get them from A to B or show them how to do something

2) Offer something free

Compelling offers make people act right away.  

You can do this by providing your visitors something that's practically irresistible and hard to refuse. It can be a free template, a downloadable guide, tips, or anything valuable. This is an easy way to move them through your sales funnel.

Your offer is something you give in exchange for your lead’s personal information. This lead magnet helps you generate leads online by offering an "ethical bribe" to keep people interested in your business.

Consider these points as you craft an offer:

• Make the offer as risk-free as possible to remove any fears, doubts, and worries that they might have
• Leverage exclusivity to increase the perceived value of your offer
• Use emotional motivators so customers will have to take advantage of the opportunity

Getting your visitors' contact information is extremely valuable. Nurture that opportunity as it's a winning way to turn them into customers.

3) Add a captivating video

Since today's consumers are more interactive than ever, they are likely to engage with a landing page that features even a short-form video.

Videos are proven to be a huge conversion booster which can increase conversions by 64%.

Reinforce your headline and content with an emotionally-captivating video that customers can relate to.

When done well, adding a video will even double your conversion rate. You'll get to give your visitors an engaging and informative experience. This makes them remember your brand and your message.

Follow these quick tips to make your videos more effective:

• Keep it short - focus on one main point and cut out any distractions
• Find the right style for your target market
• It’s best to avoid autoplay but test constantly
• Make your CTA permanently visible in the video

4) Refine your CTA (Call to Action)

A simple form or button is an important landing page element. This is the opportunity to make visitors take the desired action and close the deal.

Make your CTA easy-to-spot and stand out from the rest of the page. It has to instil a sense of urgency or need in your offering.

Here are quick takeaways for optimising your CTAs:

• Be brief - make it specific and straightforward
• Create a sense of urgency - include time-related words such as "Sign-up now", "Start your free trial today"
• Use action-packed words, such as "Reserve your spot", "Download your free book"
• Keep testing your CTA - your conversion depends on it!

5) Highlight social signals

A great customer experience starts with building trust. With proofs and badges, you'll get to win the trust of your customers and showcase your authenticity.

Social proofs show that your offerings truly deliver results. Let testimonials, feedback, and reviews from satisfied clients and people you've worked with speak for you.

Social proofs can also come in different forms, including:

• Media mentions, awards, and rankings
• Estimated number of clients you've worked with
• The number of customers you currently have
• Case studies that strengthen your credibility
• Trust seals that reassure site visitors and customers

Adding social proof on your landing page is one strategy you should not overlook. These bring a huge difference and create conversions nothing else can.  

6) Make it easy to digest

You don't have to stuff everything on your landing page. Too much information can overwhelm your audience. Keeping your form short and your content concise are the keys.

Ask only what you need in your lead form. Remember that all you need is to make them sign-up and click that opt-in button. Simplify the signup process and stick to that.

You can also try using scarcity and a sense of urgency to create a stronger effect.

Keep in mind that an effective landing page must have a single-minded focus on the CTA. Don't pitch several products on the same page. Everything else is supporting elements to make people click on it.

Also, make sure to maintain the same style and tone the same throughout the page.

7) Showcase the benefits

Your visitors want to know, "what's in it for me?" Instead of showing your product features, highlight how your offerings can provide value to their experience or solve their pain points.

Make your landing page value-focused. Align this with your potential customers' expectations.  With this approach, you'll get to reinforce the key benefit that your target audience will get from your product or offer.

For instance, instead of "To know more about our services, Click Here" try using, "“Yes, I want to Increase My Email Subscribers!".

In other words, make sure that your landing page brings value to your visitor's experience.

8) Ditch the distractions

When people arrive at your landing page, their first reaction is, "What am I supposed to do here?" Thus, you just need to draw their attention to your CTA.

Avoid confusing website visitors with what action to take. Make sure that nothing is getting in the way of your message.

Keep your landing page free from distractions of any kind. Remove any element, image, or information that would divert their attention from converting.

An effective landing page is free from visual clutter. Giving your target customers several choices will kill their ability to make a decision.  Those distractions are hurting your lead generation strategy.

Here's the key takeaway: Clear the clutter and convert the lead!

How can you create a landing page that converts like crazy

Remember that every single visitor on your landing page is a potential customer. Even the best product or service can be crashed if your landing page is plagued with poor messaging, slow speed, or flawed user experience.

Generating leads takes time and effort. There's no single or best way to achieve 100% of the visitors to your site into customers.

With a compelling landing page, you'll have more chances to turn visitors into warm leads.  By trying out which works best for your business, you're sure you get as many new customers as possible.

You can easily create one right here! And if you get stuck, I’m here to help.

Before your product is launched, it's imperative to have a landing page up to validate your product idea with real users. Olly Meakings, the landing page guru, confirms this in his 100 ways to get your first 100 users and I couldn't agree more. It's important to validate it as you could be at risk of building something which has no demand, or building something that would never be used by real users. It's easy to get caught up in building, and we know it's fun to build, but it's far more important to build a solution to a real problem.

Putting up a landing page early can also help you to gather a following by encouraging email sign ups and/or social media follows. A lot has been written about building a community, I particularly enjoy learning from Rosie Sherry who currently leads the community at Indie Hackers. One of the easiest ways to start building a community is by gathering people that share a common problem (this problem should be highlighted on your landing page to help resonate with the reader). You can also connect with this community in the future to send out regular updates and gather feedback on your features, MVP or anything else you want to share. It can also be super motivating for you and your team to have a community rooting for you as early as possible.

Putting up a landing page is actually one of the forms of launching. The copy on your landing page is very important because it will drive the connection between your product and users and get them excited about your solution. We can't deny it though, good copy is hard and takes lots of work and time! It's not going to be perfect the first time you write it but getting an initial version published as soon as you have your idea will help you get to something good much faster than if you were to iterate quietly on your own.

If you're still not convinced that it's the right time to get your landing page up, check out these quotes from founders who built their landing page after building their product:

"I’m doing it now after I’m almost done with full implementation, but for my next product I will do it the first thing."

"I actually do it after I’ve been using the product myself for a while and I’m confident that I like using the product. I feel like I should do it right at the start, to begin gathering a list of interested users, as having interest from other people would be hugely motivating."

"I used to build my landing page once I'd defined my MVP but that was a huge mistake. I'd advise to do it as soon as you can!"

After hearing this feedback from founders, there was only one thing to do at everypage - we built a pre-launch template! We made this template to make it as simple as possible to get a landing page up as soon as you've come up with your brilliant idea. You can see how simple it is in this demo video:

As you'll see in the template below, we've included questions to help you highlight how amazing your product is and why your readers should be interested, and ultimately sign up for access. You may find them hard to answer, we certainly struggled to form our answers and nail down our copy, but remember that the questions are there because the questions are what your readers need answers too. If you're able to proactively address what's on the readers' minds, you will be able to connect well with them and encourage them to sign up.

Of course it's only right that your landing page copy and sections will need to change whilst you build and iterate your product (we're launching more templates for these stages soon). In the meantime, we really want to increase awareness on the importance of building your landing page prior to building your product. This will significantly help you to iterate your landing page once your product is launched.

I hope this has encouraged you and your teams to get your landing page up asap for your product. I'd love to hear from you and see your pages, feel free to connect with me on twitter or drop me an email. Thanks!

As part of StartUp School, this week we watched Kat's video on How to launch again and again (slides).

TL;DR Our key take-away from this was that we should not be thinking about a single "launch" where fireworks go off and a choir sings. We should be finding customers, signing them up (or getting feedback) and iterating. Every time we try something new we should think of it and treat it as a launch - measuring the outcomes and looking for ways to iterate.

Launching

I've launched a lot of things and each time it's come with a sense of apprehension - what if it's not enough? what if people hate it? what if ...?

And every time the results are almost exactly the same - nobody cares!

Kat's main focus in this talk is that there is no such thing as a single launch; each product has many launches and each launch is an important step in the journey. She stresses that you should be launching all the time, as early as possible. It definitely fits in with YC's general ethos of getting something in the hands of users as quickly as possible. But it's more than that. I think the takeaway here is that what we think of as a "launch" is actually many small things we are mentally grouping together - but the time at which these things occur can be very different.

We need to stop thinking of the single launch and think of how we can be getting something out to users (new features, new messaging, new ideas etc) and gathering data on it. Kat notes early in the video how terrible it is to see founders take ages to launch anything - don't spend 6 months planning for something, you will probably be dead by then!

A common phrase in the startup community these days is "always be shipping" and this is echo-ed by Kat in the talk as "ideally you are never NOT launching". It makes perfect sense in the context of always talking to customers and getting their feedback.

To help us understand, Kat breaks down what founders commonly think of as "launching" into these types:

Silent launch

Just whip up a landing page - we are very firm believers in this and it's a huge reason we are building everypage.

You want to show people what you are building and you should have a call to action, usually one that gathers some data. This could be as simple as an email sign up (so you have an audience for every iterative launch) or you could throw up a google form to gather information about the problem your solving or any other way of getting something from the visitor.

Friends and family launch

As soon as you have an MVP get it out to your friends and family.

The example Kat gave of reddit was great - they got their first users by sharing it in the YC founder community which allowed them to get loads of feedback and start building their own community. The caveat here is to not spend too much time in this "phase", mostly because your friends and family are a) possibly not your target audience, and generally not early adopters and b) going to be nice to you.

Even if they aren't really target users though, you can always learn something by watching peoples reactions to your product, so get in front of them and show it off. I had the harrowing experience once of trying to demo my product to a non-technical friend and whilst demo-ing I forgot how to use the product because I didn't have my own computer where all the shortcuts were saved. It's great to get these hiccups out the way and also highlight areas that you might have overlooked since you are so deep in the product everyday.

Stranger launch

Find people that have the problem you are solving and get your product in front of them.

Again, the example Kat gave here was amazing - the founders of a furniture delivery company called Lugg waited outside IKEA, looked out for people struggling with their furniture and offered their service as a solution.

It's always nerve-wrecking to talk to strangers and even more so when you are putting your MVP (which you can probably find lots of holes in) in front of them. But it's so important because it really gets you to work hard at a) finding people that actually have the problem you are solving and b) succinctly describe your solution in their moment of need.

Online communities launch

Find communities of people who would like your product and share it with them.

This seems like one of the most common approaches now, but as Kat says in the video it's very unlikely to result in the "amazing" outcomes we so often hear about. The advice from Kat there was to understand what the community actually wants and not just go into random groups and spam them.

Looking at the results, I think this works best when either a) you have a product that is truly "viral" and everyone wants to talk about (but, let's be honest, you probably don't) or b) you have solved a problem for yourself and you share your product in the communities you hang out in.

This isn't always easy though. Earlier in my career I built a product for location based message (Kites). I built it for myself as an easy way to get recommendations for friends, but I couldn't think of who else would want it. I didn't share it to hacker news or the sub-reddits I was a part of because I thought "why would programmers want this?". So I shared it with travellers. It initially took off very well, but as a non-traveller myself, as the product iterated, it started to loose touch with travellers too. I think the moral from the episode was to not iterate too far away from the initial problem i.e. fall in love with the problem, not the solution.

Kat also highlights "Don't use jargon" or just "Speak like a human". I think this is super important, but again super hard. I've always tried to use the "friends and family launch" to try and get rid of all the jargon I can. One way I found to do this was to ask my friends to explain the product back to me or ask "what would you use it for?".

Request for access launch

Building viral loops into the product can get more users to your door quickly.

I've seen this pattern a lot recently and it definitely seems to work for some products. Kat gives the example of superhuman, who add a "sent with superhuman" line to your signature resulting in all your contacts seeing it. We have something similar in everypage, where sites made with the free account have "everypage" branding added to the bottom to lead visitors. In a previous product I asked the user for permission to post to twitter whenever they create content in the product and that worked relatively well too.

In general this launch works well for use-facing (mostly consumer) products, but it's difficult with larger b2b products. At my work we used blogging and "thought leadership"-type content to drive traffic to our products but the results were mixed. When you are pitching to large companies for a relatively expensive product, tactics like this come across as gimmicky.

I've seen many products that try the "wait-list and share to bump your place" approach. It's important to remember that these only really work when the demand is already there - either you have influencers talking about your product, or the problem is felt so widely that everyone just really wants one. Both of these were true for superhuman and also for hey.com, where the strategy worked very well.

In general this tactic is best avoided unless you find a natural fit within the product. Don't look for ways to add it on, like adding a wait-list to your new note-taking app - people won't care enough.

Social / media launch

Getting bloggers and influencers to talk about your product in a relevant context can drive lots of traffic.

Getting your product into TechCrunch is still one of the most "launch"-y things you can do (although somehow this doesn't feel as big as it did 5 years ago). When I used to talk about launching this was the perfect scenario I imagined.

Kat's example was a product that build wedding websites. They got into a few wedding related blogs and it drove a significant amount of their traffic. This really changed my thinking - she barely even mentioned TechCrunch! It seems obvious now - for getting customers it's much better to get featured in a blog (or something similar) where the domain is actually related to your field. The TechCrunch articles seem great for hiring and getting your brand know in the tech world, but I can't imagine many of their readers are looking for wedding website building advice.

On the the key takeaways here was something I fought with a lot on previous projects: "Don't pay for it". Kat suggested to find creative routes to get your product out there, don't use up what little capital your startup has.

Pre-order launch

If your product is physical, getting pre-orders is a great way to find customers.

The stories of how Pebble, Exploding Kittens and Sheertex (Kat's example) did well on pre-order sites like Kickstarter are very inspiring. To me the real lesson here is in how well these guys have validated their products before building them.

It's a bit tougher for software, especially when your first instinct as a technical founder is to write code. Even for me, having worked on products for close to 10 years now throwing away so much beautiful code, it's difficult to resist the temptation. It's definitely possible though and as many of you would probably know, writing code once you have users is so much more rewarding than just writing it for yourself!

New feature launch

When you add something new to your product, "launch" again!

Kat's example here was Stripe. Whenever they launch, they get involved in the community really well. As a developer I've defintiely noticed this and am always impressed with how well the founders and employees of Stripe address everyone.

I think the unsaid thing here is very important - you can't be spamming your community with every small feature you implement. With everypage, we are trying to build in a micro-products architecture (ye, I made this up!). Our plan is to re-launch small products as supporting pieces for everypage.

For small updates, it's best to launch within your own community. This could be as simple as having a weekly newsletter with the features you added this week. Courtland Allen does this very well with indie-hackers - they announce new features within into the community on indiehackers itself. It works very well because everyone there is already invested in the product (they wouldn't see it if they weren't).

Build a community

Finally, Kat briefly mentions that it's always great to build a community before hand. This has been talked about a lot.

Honestly, I struggle with this one as I'm not a generally social person. Whilst I would love to have a huge twitter following and a huge mailing list, I don't. But it's not going to stop from trying to build one out - from what I can tell the key ingredients seem to be clarity and consistency. So people should know what community they are joining when they sign up, and they should hear from you at some frequency.

Conclusion

Launching is often thought of as a daunting process. After hearing Kat's talk I'm convinced that we should be launching something every week - launching our product by talking about it out loud, launching a new pitch to potential users, launching a new pitch to a new category of users, launching a new feature to existing users, and so many more.

One of the questions you are asked very week as part of StartUp School is "Have you launched?". Now that I've watched this video it seems like a trick question - I launched the moment I spoke to anybody about my product. We will, of course, be filling in "yes" from next week on.

For everypage, our key takeaway is to continually be trying new things and measuring the impacts. It's easy to see how many new people visited your site from TechCrunch when they write about you and yes, it's lovely to see the analytics graph. It's harder to measure the impact of how well users are responding to your new messaging (and changes like this), but we will be analyzing these a lot more going forward - as if each one was its own launch.

We're finally ready to show the world our beta of everypage 🎉. Before we do though, I thought it'd be good to document our journey to MVP so there's something to judge the results of our beta "launch" against.

An idea is born

Over the lockdown, my wife and I (together we are Kiba Labs 🦍) decided to build a side-project together. Before the lockdown we had planned to work on Kiwi, a product to help engineering managers encourage better documentation throughout their team. It was a classic case of scratching your own itch as this is a problem I've thought about a lot in my day job. The first thing I did was buy a landing page template and throw it up as a GitHub page. We intended for Krupali to own the product-related aspects of Kiwi and this started with the landing page content. We hit a wall immediately though, as she hadn't had experience with html, css or js. I couldn't believe I hadn't questioned it before, but why was it necessary to know html, js or css to edit a simple landing page template in this day and age. The more I looked at it, the more I was upset that the copy of the landing page was so deeply coupled with the structure and styling of it 🤮. I would never do this with anything I built myself, why is it happening here?! And so everypage was born...

My first instinct was to build this with simple templating - something like jinja2 - but as I thought about this more and more I realised just how annoying a problem this was. At work we had external consultants who handled our landing page because we felt it wasn't a good use of our software engineers valuable time. This was mostly because landing pages often require many, many iterations - change the text, change the colour, change the layout so this section is first, oh change the colours again - it could drive anyone crazy!

In contrast, for the product we actually sell at work, we had designed an awesome component library that allowed us to change themes and structures without having to worry about the underlying CSS freaking out every time we moved a button. This was my inspiration - surely landing pages are a subset of this problem. Our hypothesis is that there are thousands of developers out there who want a landing page for their product but don't want to become entangled in the web that is modern css and javascript, let alone the difficulties of supporting various browsers - backend developers everywhere: it's not fun 🤯!

Whilst I was thinking about the technical intricacies, Krupali went and checked out how non-developers build landing pages. All the usual suspects came up; Wix, carrd, landen, webflow and even a few I hadn't heard of before but looked great (like unicorn platform). But as a developer I couldn't bring myself to using tools like this - I like version control too much. On top of that these platforms are all closed and own your page - even if you exported the page you would be left with html, css and js, you can't just import this into another platform. When she described this to me I knew what we needed - a new specification for the building of landing pages!

Designing the MVP

The solution as we saw it was to have a system that allowed you to declare "sections" for your page (i.e. the layout) as json. The content of the page and the theming of the page would be json too. This meant that everything is committable to version control, editable anywhere json is and would reduce the problem of learning how to build a landing page to learning what the various sections are and how they could be used. It's intended from the start that this be an open specification i.e. we simply declare the "schema" for a header-signup component as something like:

{
    "type": "hero-signup-1",
    "titleText": "string",
    "logoImageUrl": "url",
    "subtitleText": "string",
    "formAction": "urlMethod",
    "formTarget": "url",
    "inputName": "string",
    "inputType": "inputType",
    "inputButtonText": "string",
    "formAdditionalInputs": [{
        "name": "string",
        "type": "inputType",
        "value": "string"
    }],
    "inputPlaceholderText": "string",
    "inputSuccessMessageText": "string"
}

and then implementation is left up to the library used. Obviously everypage would be the first (and possibly only, but we're hoping not 🤞) library to implement this specification. The theming would be achieved by having a UI components library that could be used by all projects that implement the schema specification (but of course anyone can implement their own UI library too).

This would mean landing pages in everypage are "transferable" to any provider you want or could easily be moved in house without the person in charge of spec-ing the structure and content having to care. Perfect 👏!

An example would be something like this:

{
    "type": "hero-signup-1",
    "inputName": "email",
    "inputType": "email",
    "titleText": "Create your beautiful landing page in minutes with a declarative API",
    "formAction": "POST",
    "formTarget": "<api url>",
    "logoImageUrl": "/assets/everypage-wordmark.svg",
    "subtitleText": "Our easy to use landing page generator builds your landing pages with perfect performance, SEO and accessibility built in.",
    "inputButtonText": "Subscribe",
    "formAdditionalInputs": [],
    "inputPlaceholderText": "Go on, you really will love it 👀",
    "inputSuccessMessageText": "You're signed up 🎉"
},

to create this section:

The plan for the initial MVP was to create all the sites we have under Kiba Labs in everypage and then release it so at least websites similar to those could be created. I've worked on a lot of side projects e.g. Word Magic, Kites and Scopie all with their own landing pages so this would definitely be a challenge, but overall it sounds pretty simple so far!

Getting some validation

Pretty much anyone you ask now will say you need to have some validation before you start building anything. As a developer this is hard to swallow and harder still to follow but as a seasoned maker it's obvious - don't just build stuff unless you are doing it for fun.

My first point of call was a few colleagues who are backend developers - in my mind this project would be perfect for them. Of course, they all nodded and agreed in earnest as I described the problem and how I plan to tackle it. Looking back though I definitely didn't do this right - of course they were going to agree, they don't actually have anything to loose 🤷‍♀️.

Krupali spoke to a different set of people and the one with the most useful feedback was the organiser of Weekend Club, a regular work group we attend. He had used many landing page builders so far and in general he found them relatively easy to use but found they didn't really offer much by way of guidance to what should be done (rather than what could be done - they all show off their awesome features!). This was great advice as it articulated what I couldn't - designing a landing page involves so many skills including design, copy and coding - having it all in the control of an engineer is so constraining. It's hard to create guidance that doesn't sound generic like "Don't make your sentences too long" because the tools people use to create their pages are all over the place and in the end have to be funneled through an engineer. In everypage we will try to remedy this - make the sections follow specific guidance by default - don't let people do bad things where possible and call out bad things where identifiable.

On top of this we also tried out a bunch of landing page builders. I gave up pretty fast because I generally dislike drag and drop builders that try to simplify complex interactions. Krupali kept going on and manage to build a site in a few of them. We did feel a bit overwhelmed here at the number of features these builders had when considering them our competition. The only way to get over this thinking was something I heard in a podcast - the competition isn't other tools, its people wasting time on doing it themselves. I had never considered using a drag and drop builder so why was I considering it a "competitor" now?

Once we looked up from all the "research" we felt super motivated to get started. Admittedly, we could have validated a lot more (so could everyone though, right?) but there was also the factor that I was itching to build something fun! So we started coding / designing our MVP..

Scoping out an MVP

I think designing an MVP of a new project is one of the hardest things for product people to do. Realistically, any mis-step can lead to the project failing. So we decided to really think about our framework for choosing "features" before we started to list them. The approach we decided on was fairly simple but seems super effective: We made a big list of features, ordered them by priority and draw an arbitrary line somewhere near the top that said "MVP".

The big idea though, was the this line was allowed to move as much as we want. As the only people involved (and the only people that would benefit) we fully understood the pros and cons of moving something above or below the line. As we developed over the next month and a half this allowed us to iterate on the idea as a whole rather than being to focused on specific features.

An example of this was initially we hadn't even thought about hosting but we quickly realised it was the only real way to get paid since nobody would pay for a open-source library directly. Having a hosting platform would also allow us to iterate on the product in a very visual way that Krupali could use too rather than just having a library for me to use. So another month of work was added to the MVP, but we knew this was for our overall good so we easily agreed on it and moved on.

Another example is custom domains - initially it was firmly on the "Not MVP" side of the list. As we got closer to launch, however, we both felt it tugging at us, wanting to be included. Once we both got to the point where we felt it must be included, we added it to the list and it felt great!

A final example - the dashboard has lots of areas ripe for improvement and a great example of this is the canvas. There are so many ways to make it more intuitive to use like having pre-made json objects for insertion and offering some overview of the schema so errors aren't just shown with now explanation. But these changes involve a lot of work, and whilst we agreed they had to be included at some point we decided it would be easier to have users contact us for support rather than implement these changes and release a month later.

After about 2 months of evenings and weekends, we finally agreed on what should go in the MVP and had built it 😋

In the end, we managed to build a lot more than we expected. It's far from finished but we're hosting our own sites (not all, but a few) on everypage and so far its worked a charm. It's a lovely feeling when you are positively surprised by how well your own product works - a feeling we always feel when we look at how fast sites update considering they are configured to sit at edge caches all over the world!

There's a quote people often say "If you aren't embarrassed by your first version, you launched too later". This seems a bit stupid to me - it's easy to look back at anything and be embarrassed because as you grow you learn more (and if you don't then you should be embarrassed that you haven't). Who would release something to the world with a real "oomph" if they weren't proud of it? Surely that launch is doomed to fail regardless of how good or bad the product is because the creators themselves don't believe in it? Saying that, I'm super sure we will look back at the screenshots of everypage now and be shocked at how basic it was, but at the moment we are very proud of what we have created and can't wait to show it to everyone!

So now we are ready to accept beta users to everypage. Our next post will be on how the beta period goes and what we learn from it. I expect there will be lots of think about in terms of how we chose features for the MVP, but we can't learn much more without launching! It definitely feels weird to be showing our baby to the world after holding it so close to our chest during development.

So go check it out at https://www.everypagehq.com 👀, the free tier is more than capable for any experiments you'd like to run and there is no credit card needed to get started!

Kevin Hale's video on 'How to evaluate startup ideas' was the first video we watched on our Startup School journey. It was a great lesson which gave us actionable steps to take, so we thought we'd share a summary in the spirit of learning and growing together 🤓

Check in 1 - Are you even a startup?

Your first step is to confirm that you are looking to grow your company, this means you're working in a startup. If you're not looking to grow your company right away then you wouldn't consider your company as a startup, rather a new company where growth isn't your primary goal. Of course this is perfectly fine, and this initial check in helps founders to understand their initial position.

Check in 2 - Is your startup idea complete?

You know you want to grow your company and your startup idea is a hypothesis, how do you prove it?

Problem

The 'best' problems to solve should fall into one or more of these categories - Popular, Growing, Urgent, Expensive, Mandatory, Frequent. The more categories your problem falls into, the higher the chance of success as you'll be solving a problem which is high in demand.

Your users' behaviour will be impacted by Motivation + Ability + Trigger - all of these need to happen at the same time. The problem is the motivation for your users searching for a solution. Your startup provides the ability to solve the users' problem. The trigger is to get your product in front of your users at the right time which is where some startups can struggle.

Solution

The only advice here is - don't start with the solution!

Avoid SISP (solution in search for a problem) - no great product was created by starting with a solution! Always start with the problem.

Insight

You need to know that your startup holds an unfair advantage. This is usually seen within the categories below:

• Founders: you need to be 1 out of 10 specialists in a given field (99% of startups funded at YC don't fall into this bracket)
• Market: the market for your product should be growing rapidly, roughly at 20% per year, so that you can be confident of the consistent demand
• Product: aim for your product to be at least 10x better than alternative products available to your users - this will increase the likelihood of investment
• Acquisition: ideally your growth should be organic and cost $0 - paid acquisition can be a growth driver but is not sustainable
• Monopoly: you want to grow your startup in a way that prevents competitors entering the market

Check in 3 - Do you have the right beliefs?

Threshold belief is the minimum requirement to make your startup succeed e.g. can you build the solution to your problem? This belief has to be met and isn't the most important one.

Miracle belief is where your focus should be e.g. can you build a solution to your problem which takes over the market you're addressing? This belief will ensure your company is able to sell well and can convince customers that you're the best.

How we applied this to our startup

For everypage, we had considered our problem and solution when starting to build out our product however we hadn't considered the most crucial aspect - insight! The video from Kevin reminded us that we needed to highlight our unfair advantage which we've shared below.

Problem: current landing page builders are all drag and drop solutions - they don't fit into a development workflow, they're hard to version control, hard to maintain different versions at the same time, etc. Many of these tools also require the users to be creative themselves and don't really help in terms of how to write and structure content and optimise for SEO

Solution: a landing page builder that is more like a library than an online tool.

Insight: if the tool allows users to declare their page in a simple format, it can be version controlled, which brings along all of the great processes seen in software engineering.

Are you ready to grow your startup?

I hope this summary has helped you to validate your startup idea. I know it certainly helped us have a better perspective on everypage, particularly in how we can succeed with our insight on a common problem with landing page builders. I'd love to hear any thoughts you have on your startup idea, feel free to share with me on twitter or email.

I've spent a lot of time in the last few months reviewing landing pages, in preparation for the launch of everypage. Each time I see a new landing page, I'm reminded of how important the hero of a landing page is. So I thought I'd share some of my insights and learnings, starting with the headline which is just one part of the hero.

1. Keep your headline to 6-9 words

Having a succinct headline gives the reader an opportunity to understand your product in a few seconds. This is incredibly important because even though people may not like it, first impressions matter matter! I'll use our own product as a demonstration of this.

It's not perfect yet but we can all agree it's much better. The shorter headline covers what we do and how it can benefit a user, whilst the longer header doesn't give more clarity to the product and leaves the visitor less engaged. We moved all the other information, such as potential use cases, into the sub title below so if the visitor wants to create a beautiful landing page with an API, they will read on and see all our great benefits.

2. Be specific

Your product is likely to have many value propositions and you won't be able to include all of these in your headline. Pick your most compelling and unique value proposition to help you focus your headline and engage your reader. This will encourage the reader to read on and find out more about your product and other value propositions. Let's say you have a product that allows users to upload audio and get a text version back. A good attempt at a headline would be:

The initial headline clearly covers lots of points about the product, but it's difficult for users to digest and move on - there's way too much going on which might encourage the reader to bounce at this stage. If multi-speaker audio is the feature you think differentiates you from your competitors the most, pick that and stick with it - like we've done in the improved headline. The other awesome features you built can then be put in the subtitle and other sections of your page.

One way to take this even further is to have multiple landing pages targeting different audiences. For example, we could have a landing page for the transcribing product which is specific to podcasts and the headline can be even more specific: 'Transcribe your podcasts with speaker identification'. I'll cover this in more detail in another post.

3. Structure your headline

There are some great formulas and templates out there to help you structure your headline. I personally like this one which I think helps your reader to understand your offering and why they should get this from you.

The optional numeric value in this formula could be the high speed of your product or the low cost of your product, or anything else numerically related to your product. Adding numerical values to this formula can, as shown in the example below, add good structure to your headline and encourage readers to keeping reading because numbers are (usually) easy to understand. Let's continue with the transcription example from above. A nice way to get numbers into the headline would be something like:

This cheats a bit by having 2 features in the headline, but since all products have a cost the user will be thinking about this so the headline works well as it shows visitors you are proud you can achieve good results at a low cost.

4. Show readers how you help them

This may sound like a tricky ask considering you've only got a few words to do this, it can be done though! Just like when you are designing your product, when you are constructing your headline it's important to address the user's key pain point. If they are interested they will keep reading to see all of your other great features. Let's use the example of a product that allows stay-at-home mums to do labelling work for AI companies.

The initial headline sucks for a visitor - it hasn't told them why they should do this and it's focused on why it benefits others (the AI companies here). With the improved headline, we have 2 two things. Firstly, we immediately give the visitor the benefit they would be getting from signing up. Secondly, we clarify the proposition for them by being very clear on what the work is. Even if there are many different types of labelling work, it's hard for a stay-at-home mum (who isn't in tech) to know what 'labelling work' would mean - make it easy for them!

5. Demonstrate your unique-ness

In most cases, there are existing providers (or similar providers) of your product. For this reason, it's important to show what is unique about your product and address any apprehension the reader may have. This guidance from Julian Shapiro can help you to understand how to highlight your value propositions whilst comparing to alternative providers. Let's take a fairly saturated market as an example - personalised t-shirts.

With the initial headline, we're immediately thinking that we could get this anywhere so we don't want to read on. When the headline addresses a common pain point with personalised t-shirts, such as delivery times, then we're much more likely to read on!

6. Connect with the reader

You want the reader to know your page is talking to them specifically. You can do this by connecting with them on an emotional level, for example addressing how they felt before they used your product, or how they will feel after using your product. You can also use the word 'you' in your headline, landing page guru Olly Meakings tells us that this powerful 3-letter word can make readers feel they're spoken to in a human sense which can encourage readers to read on.

We can see this demonstrated well by Brave who have highlighted what they do for you in their headline. Let's pretend they didn't address 'you' - as shown in the initial headline I made up - we can see (or even feel) the difference in connecting with the reader.

7. Speak boldly to pain points

Similar to the emotional connection just mentioned, if your product's value proposition is resolving a common pain point then we want to highlight this to the reader as early as possible - ideally in the headline! Following on from the Brave example above, we can see the current headline indicates that their product is better than other providers and the pain points are addressed later in the page (in their sub title in this case).

The alternative headline addresses a pain point that the reader may have experienced which increases the chances of them reading on to the sub title and further sections.

8. Avoid slogans

From the 100s of landing pages I've reviewed recently, I'm yet to see one where a slogan works! Slogans may work for well-known companies, however when you're starting out they can leave a reader feeling confused causing them to leave your page. If we consider the example of recipe boxes, a slogan might come to mind.

This initial headline could just as well relate to a delivery service from a restaurant, so the reader has to spend extra time to find out more and will most likely stop reading at this point. With the improved headline, we can incorporate the slogan whilst making it more relevant.

Time to engage your readers

I hope you're now in a better place to write your headline! Once you've written it, you can test out how powerful it is by answering this question:

If the visitor reads only this text on your page, will they know exactly what you sell?

I'd love to see your headlines, feel free to share with me on twitter or email. I'd also be happy to review your headline and homepages if you like :) or if you'd like a professional review then get in touch with Olly Meakings who has roasted over 150 landing pages and has proven results - check out his page here.