I Launched My PRE ‘Pre-Launch’ Page Yesterday
Some thoughts around this momentous occasion.
Feel free to skip to the bottom for the main bullet points on what I learned making my first PRE pre-launch landing page.
Sharing stuff you’re working on with others can be scary. For the perfectionists out there, it can be downright terrifying: BUT MY PROJECT’S NOT PERFECT YET! THE WHOLE WORLD IS GOING TO JUDGE AND THINK LESS OF ME.
Well, the good news is that ‘sharing’ doesn’t necessarily mean you have to expose your half-written backend and embarrassingly bare UI to a bunch of strangers. That’s what landing pages are for!
What’s considered a ‘landing page’?
Landing pages come in many forms and serve varying purposes. For example, what some people consider a ‘landing page’ might be a full-fledged website that showcases and walks you through a ready-to-market product with a pricing section and everything (aka everything but the product itself, which may be a web and/or mobile app):
A landing page can also be a simpler “coming soon!” or “pre-launch” page with static screenshots of the product, explaining the product’s value prop and giving people a nice visual preview as to what this thing’s gonna look like when it’s finally launched:
OR, in my case, a landing page can even be used as a PRE ‘pre-launch’ page, if you don’t yet have static screenshots that you’re ready to share with the world but still want to get the basic concept/value prop of your product out there and start collecting some email sign ups.
As simple as my pre pre-launch page turned out, it was a surprisingly harrowing experience (I am a perfectionist, after all…) with lots of choices I didn’t expect to have to make along the way (seriously, SO many choices).
Based on my recent experience with this, here are some things that might be helpful to remember when building and launching your pre pre-launch landing page:
You’re not actually showing this to the whole world
It might be hard to believe, but remember: you’re not actually showing this landing page to the entire world. In fact, very few people will probably see it at first, and THAT’S OKAY! You probably want to keep it as somewhat of a ‘closed release’ anyway, sharing with people within your network — rather than firing on all fronts and using all your chances/efforts/goodwill to drive strangers and friends alike to what is, in the end, just your pre pre-launch page.
Who you decide to share your page with also comes down to your goal or single main purpose, i.e maybe you’re just trying to drum up enough emails to get a solid base of 20–30 beta testers for your MVP, but more on that later.
Anyway, if you can get over this daunting thought, it makes it much easier to just start building shit.
Pick appropriate tools (that you can handle using)
Once you feel ready to start building shit, congratulations — you have about 12039820384341 choices ahead of you. These might range from “which website-builder should I use?” to “should I transfer my domain from GoDaddy to something less gross like Google Domains? to “is a Rails app complete overkill for a landing page I just want to use to collect some emails?” (For me personally, btw, the answer to the last question is yes. But if you want to practice your coding chops then totally go for it.)
After going through all of these decisions on my own and spending numerous hours researching/trying stuff out, I decided to go with the following tools for my landing page:
1. Website Builder: Squarespace
I compared Squarespace with the offerings of Wix, WordPress, Weebly, etc. and after reading numerous discussion boards / visiting each of their sites, my gut told me to go with Squarespace. #science.
2. Domain Registrar: Google Domains
I had originally registered my domain with GoDaddy, but then my tech lead asked me why I was putting myself through the torture and had I not heard of Google Domains. To be honest, I actually didn’t know that Google had its own domain registrar (and it’s self-proclaimed to be in beta), but hey — it’s Google. I knew I could expect a much cleaner user experience, and I was not disappointed. Another bonus: they make it really easy to set up email aliases.
3. Email / List Manager: Mailchimp
Squarespace forms integrate really nicely with Mailchimp. Mailchimp has one of the nicest user experiences out there, in my opinion. I’ve seen a lot of my friends use Mailchimp for their projects and a lot of well-known startups seem to use Mailchimp too. Done deal.
My basic strategy was to go with tools that felt appropriate for my particular needs and purposes (for example, I didn’t even need to consider comparing the best e-commerce site builders), with usability that I could handle. There’s no point coding a Rails app, for example, if it’s going to take you 3 months to ramp up to learn Ruby.
It also turned out that most of the tools I went with are also some of the best-known and most popular choices; not a coincidence?
Focus on the single main purpose
For my pre-launch, I decided that the single main purpose for my landing page was to collect emails and contact info via sign ups:
In fact, I decided my goal was to collect approximately 20–30 emails from people volunteering to be beta users, so I could have a base to work with and reach out to when my MVP was ready for some feedback. Not only did setting this goal help with expectation management (i.e I won’t be disappointed if this landing page doesn’t make it to the top of HN), but it also ultimately helped me decide which website-builder to go with.
Since I knew that forms + email collection were my main priorities, I just had to go with the option that did that well with few distractions — hence Squarespace.
Sidenote: based on some of the feedback I’ve gotten on my simple landing page, it apparently really is okay NOT to have static screenshots or views of your product. At first I thought this would be a terrible idea / make my page look boring and bare, but some people have told me they really like the page and that it looks ‘just right’. In fact, their positive feedback is a big reason I decided to write this post and share my experience!
Make it look nice
You don’t have to be a world-class designer, but it’s no excuse not to make your landing page look nice. One of my favorite Medium posts about design and beautiful UI is this one by Eric Kennedy, who says “every artist should be a parrot until they’re good at mimicking the best.” Basically, it’s okay to take inspiration from and ‘cherry-pick’ stuff on the Internet that you like.
I’ve always felt ‘visually inclined’ and was once a pretty good art student, but by no means would I consider myself a designer. Still, I feel capable of identifying visually appealing design when I see it, and make deliberate efforts to mimic UI and styles that I like in my own work.
For example, to build my landing page, I cherry-picked and tried to recreate some of my favorite elements from products like Airbnb, Spotify, and Robinhood. The first two — Airbnb and Spotify — I chose because I love their fonts: you can have little else on your page, but a great font will go a long way. After some light investigating (aka Chrome inspector, my best friend), I found that they use ‘Circular’ and ‘Proxima Nova’, respectively. So I researched the closest free alternatives and landed (no pun intended) upon ‘Montserrat’, an awesome free Google font.
Robinhood I chose because I just love their fresh, signature minty-teal color. That’s what their color conveys to me — young and fresh — qualities I wanted to convey about my own product. So I took inspiration from them and chose a similar but different shade of minty-teal (Robinhood uses a slightly greener #21ce99; I’m using a slightly bluer #22ccbb).
Other good sources of landing page inspiration:
1. One Page Love
Nice examples of “one pagers” that you can browse via tags
2. Land Book
Lots of examples of pretty websites and landing pages
To summarize the key points:
- Remember, you’re not actually showing your pre pre-launch landing page to “the whole world” — so just get started already!
- Define the single main purpose of your landing page (i.e are you ready to drive sales, or is this just to collect a small batch of emails first?)
- Pick solid tools with usability that you can handle to build your page (i.e does a simple form + button really warrant a Rails app? could you do it quicker with Squarespace + Mailchimp?)
- Make your page look nice (you don’t have to be a designer; there’s no shame in borrowing elements you like from other designers/sites/pages! also one nice color + one good font go a long way)
- Have fun! You’re building your pre pre-launch page and sharing it with people in your network because you’re getting them excited about the real product that’s to come! Don’t lose sight of that. Remember to have fun ☺
Thanks for reading! If you found this post useful, I’d love if you’d hit ‘recommend’ so others may stumble upon it. It would mean a lot to me ☺
What am I working on anyway? It’s called Kyndrd, if you’re interested ☺
Find me on Twitter if you want to chat! @SostephOh
