

Ask HN: The "Launching Soon" Page - query

Pardon the completely n00b question, but I'm hoping to get answers.<p>How do you come up with the webpages that simply collect email addresses for beta testing?<p>I see a lot of sites with very similar UIs:<p>1. http://ipadinterfaces.com/
2. http://www.nugrove.com/<p>Is there a simple template that is used to manage beta signups? I know Prefinery is one. Any others?
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charliepark
We coded up a very basic one in HTML for ours. (I don't know of any template
services.)

The core thing you need is an email signup list. We used Campaign Monitor
(<http://campaignmonitor.com/>), but I've also heard good things about
MailChimp (<http://www.mailchimp.com/>). They'll give you the code for a form.
It's really simple, and it outputs to a page of your choice. We had ours
output to /thanks.html, and on that page, we had an iframe with a survey from
Wufoo (<http://wufoo.com>). You can see ours in place at
<https://monotask.com>.

So what happens is that the user comes to the page, maybe signs up for a beta
account, and then is taken to a survey, where you can gather info about them.

Joshua Porter actually wrote up our approach, here:
[http://bokardo.com/archives/using-your-sign-up-form-as-a-
qua...](http://bokardo.com/archives/using-your-sign-up-form-as-a-qualifier/).
I don't think I'd seen anyone talk about tacking a survey on after signup
before we did it, but it makes sense, right? Interested people sign up. If
they've exhibited at least some modicum of interest in your service, get info
on how to tailor it to their needs.

Note, on our survey, there's an "ideal pricing" section. If you're planning to
charge, you should have this section. It helps your users know that the
service won't be free, and it also helps you evaluate their input, so you can
see if your pricing model is wildly off from their expectations.

One thing I wish we'd done differently with our survey is to include the
user's e-mail address on the survey itself. I know they just entered their
info, but when we set ours up, Wufoo and Campaign Monitor weren't integrated.
So if there's a particular survey response you want to follow up on, you have
a harder time of manually matching it up (using the Wufoo survey submission
timestamp) with the timestamp in the Campaign Monitor database. Pain.

Since we built ours, Campaign Monitor announced that they're now integrated
with Wufoo, so it might be even easier to build in follow-up surveys.

Back to your question, our "holding page" directory had a grand total of three
files: index.html, thanks.html, and logo.png. Really straightforward.

