This is Launchday! Whaddya think?

A few weeks ago I started working on something new. I’m calling it Launchday. Over the years, I’ve probably designed ~100 product landing pages and most of them are based on a handful of building blocks. Launchday abstracts those blocks and makes it easy for anyone to arrange them to build a product site.

As an experiment, I’m sharing what I’ve built so far because I want to hear what you think about it.

I know this isn’t the proper way to conduct “product validation”, but I’m just looking to get some feedback earlier rather than later. Alright, here we go.

A Quick Preview of Launchday

The easiest way to show you Launchday is a video since it’s not ready for real users. I’m no Scorsese, so it’s just a sped up Quicktime screencap:

Already sold you? Sign up for beta now!

The site in the video doesn’t use custom styles, but if you’re comfortable with SASS, it’s easy to customize a Launchday site after downloading it.

Here’s a screenshot of a site I built in 15 minutes with a whopping 29 lines of SASS and appropriated media assets (though it will be achievable with no custom styles pretty soon).

29 lines is an overstatement too…it’s just 6 selectors and 6 declarations/mixins, but I add lots of space/comments

Here’s another site I plan on building with Launchday that I assume would be about the same in terms of customization effort:

Rdio logo courtesy of raddest music streaming service to ever be. RIP buddy.

So, as a recap, here’s how Launchday works:

1. Build the site: Stack some blocks, customize their style and content. This happens in the browser at launchday.io.
2. Download the code: Launchday sites are built on a small, unnamed SASS framework — think lightweight Bootstrap for product sites.
3. Customize the code [optional]: If you’re code savvy, it’s easy customize further since the download is bundled with documentation and built tools.
4. Ship it! For now, Launchday doesn’t have tools to push a site live, though I might add it in the near future.

In addition to what’s in the video, I’m planning on adding the following features before I ship a beta for Launchday:

• A much larger collection of blocks in each category (headers, features, values, testimonials, footers, etc)
• Site wide settings like colors, type, spacing, etc.
• A device/media mockup collection (phones, computers, etc) to make it easy to frame screenshots of your product beautifully
• Richer type control and a few other customization options
• Documentation for the Launchday framework
• Make all the blocks fully responsive (right now only about 1/2 are)

Would you use Launchday?

I’m sharing Launchday for a few reasons, but primarily to gauge interest, get feedback, and let people sign up for beta. Growing Launchday from its current state to a shipped product will be months of work. Before I go whole hog, I want to test the waters.

I’d LOVE if you’d shoot me feedback and sign up for beta.

For feedback, let me know what you think through either of these…

• Tweet or DM me: @dhg
• Email me: dave@launchday.io

👋 🎉 Sign up for beta here 👋 🎉

If you’re interested in some more context about why I started building Launchday, check out the other post I just published:

How Launchday came to be in the first place

Oh, and launchday.io is a splash page built mostly using Launchday’s code (though a much earlier version, so don’t judge).

XOXO,
Dave