I've spoken to 100 founders in the last couple of weeks about their products' landing page. More than 50% did not have a site for their product prior to launching 😱! They were missing out on interactions with real users, opportunities to validate their product idea and much more! Let's talk about why your pre-launch landing page is so important and how you can get one up quickly.
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!