Moet u een bestemmingspagina maken voordat uw product gereed is?

Pagestead , een hulpprogramma voor het ontwerpen van slepen en neerzetten, verdiende $ 30.000 aan pre-sales wanneer ze een landingspagina publiceerden maanden voordat het product gereed was.

Oprichter, Mattijs Naus zei:

"Je kunt geen betere validatie en motivatie krijgen om verder te gaan dan dat. Ik denk dat het belang en de waarde van het zo vroeg mogelijk betrekken van klanten niet genoeg benadrukt kan worden. Het plaatsen van een landingspagina stelt u in staat om dat te doen ".

Amy Hoy, epische bootstrapper en oprichter van Freckle Time Tracking zegt:

"Het creëren van een succesvol softwarebedrijf vereist 90% marketing en 10% programmering".

Vreemd genoeg is het bouwen van het eigenlijke product het gemakkelijkste deel van het proces. Interesse verwerven is veel moeilijker. Ik stel voor dat je daar meteen naar toe gaat om de pijn later in de ontwikkeling te verzachten.

Soms hoor ik mensen zeggen dat ze het moeilijk vinden om hapjes te krijgen op een bestemmingspagina die niet van het product is.

Als ze hun productidee hebben gevalideerd - en de voordelen hebben gecommuniceerd waarvan ze weten dat ze nuttig zijn voor kopers; het probleem is niet de bestemmingspagina, het is het productidee!

Je moet bevestigen dat het publiek het product eigenlijk wil voordat je iets gaat bouwen.

Focus on solving real problems, for real people, rather than focusing on ideas. Talk to real people, find out their problems and then give them a solution.

The reason you should build a landing page first doesn’t really have anything to do with market validation (you should have already validated the audiences need for your offering). It’s more about security, both financially and the peace of mind derived from knowing that your audience research is accurate.

Considerations for an effective landing page

In my experience there are 3 very important aspects (aside from design) to developing a landing page that will make you stand out to any prospective buyer.

Publish it 3–4 months before product launch

Don’t risk the bad Ju-Ju of putting up a landing page and then not delivering a product for a year or more. My advice is to publish a landing page 3–4 months from your estimated launch date.

If you’re genuinely killing a big pain, people will wait patiently for its release.

Interact with pre-customers

Interacting with pre-customers is absolutely essential. Get to know them, keep them engaged in your product, your story and how their lives will be improved once your product is ready. Just show empathy, answer their questions, show that you care, give them no opportunity to ditch you. They may well become the best customers you ever have.

Keep it simple though. Don’t go overboard on asking them questions.

Wait for them to come to you with a question and then engage with them. Let them have the control in the conversation and they’ll always feel like the hero.

Contrary to many small businesses, your job isn’t to be the hero, it’s to be the guide that shows the hero the way.

Donald Miller, author of Building a Storybrand: Clarify Your Message So Customers Will Listen says -

The customer is the hero of our brand’s story, not us

Think of your brand as Yoda and the customer as Luke Skywalker. You’re not the hero of the show, but without your guidance the customer won’t ever become a hero.

Do proper product research

Product research is so so so important! I can’t stress this enough. Unfortunately, books such as the Lean Startup advocate guessing what the market wants over and over again, until (after 50 attempts) you finally hit gold.

Doesn’t that sound ridiculous to you?

Especially for indie hackers, bootstrappers and solo founders.

How on earth are you going to find the time to test 50 different variations of your product?

Leave that to the VC-backed startups. What you need is something more precise.

What you need is Sales Safari.

Amy Hoy, the Freckle founder I mentioned at the beginning of the article teaches this in her 30x500 course on product development.

Instead of relying on the unpredictable user surveys that have become standard practice across the corporate world, you lurk in forums and communities online to find out what people are struggling with.

It’s how we came up with the idea for Pilotfish. By being present in the nomad community, engaging honestly with clear intent and learning from the feedback of the people we meet digitally.

This is the reason that Amy Hoy says you should sell to your current audience. Don’t start exploring new markets like law and accounting firms, if you’re a creative in advertising.

In the beginning, sell to your own, you can always expand later.

Here’s a video of Amy Hoy teaching Sales Safari in her 30x500 course:

I’ll publish an in-depth article about our process for doing this type of audience research in the coming weeks. If you’re interested in learning more about it in the meantime, please feel free to email me at joe@josephpacks.com

TL;DR

• •Do proper audience research to find out actual problems from real people.
• •Use that newly found knowledge to create a solution to people’s problems.
• •Build a landing page that communicates how you will solve that problem.
• •Validate you were right via pre-product sign ups. Build the damn product.