
Ask HN: How do you build pre-launch landing pages? - teapot01
I&#x27;m building an concept web app at the moment and I&#x27;m looking to launch a simple pre-launch landing page to start gauging interest in the concept.<p>What are some tips that you&#x27;ve used successfully?<p>NB: I have done plenty of research on the topic I&#x27;m just looking to hear from the community here.
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siquick
Forget coding your own landing page and try these services.

[http://www.unbounce.com](http://www.unbounce.com) and
[http://www.instapaper.com](http://www.instapaper.com) are paid

[http://www.launchrock.com](http://www.launchrock.com) is free

Spend all your time optimising the landing page and getting traffic to it,
rather than coding one up.

Read these for landing page optimisation

[http://unbounce.com/landing-page-articles/the-anatomy-of-
a-l...](http://unbounce.com/landing-page-articles/the-anatomy-of-a-landing-
page/)

and

[http://unbounce.com/landing-pages/7-elements-of-a-winning-
la...](http://unbounce.com/landing-pages/7-elements-of-a-winning-landing-
page/)

If you're a consumer product then well-targeted facebook ads can drive strong
traffic.

[http://okdork.com/2014/03/04/how-to-start-advertising-on-
fac...](http://okdork.com/2014/03/04/how-to-start-advertising-on-facebook/)

!!Make sure you get the users email address on your landing page!!

~~~
teapot01
I've looked into the feature sets of the above previously and while they are
good, efficient solutions, they don't necessarily meet my requirements in
terms of information capture. I'm building a relatively simplistic landing
page server to manage the backend, and while it will not give me the flair and
user interface of the options above, it will deliver the information I want,
how I want. I'll probably just open source it when I'm done for others to use
as an alternative.

In terms of design - I've done a fair bit of reading on design and layout, and
I worked with one of the design guys at in my sharespace to build the concept.
I'm just trying to capture tips and tricks (the little stuff I might not have
thought of).

------
foxpc
Regarding the design part: I usually find a couple of landing pages that I
like and create something similar with the colors I prefer. Or buy one from
ThemeForest.

Back-end: Whatever I prefer at the time. If you're building a project with
RoR, it does not mean that the landing page has to be done with that. A simple
PHP/NodeJS app works great since it can be much faster to build.

All in all, I try not to spend too much time on the landing page. Usually,
more time is spent figuring out what's best to show on the page itself than
building it.

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shubhamjain
We are building Bouncelytics[1], an analytics platform to give users more
insights about when and why visitors are leaving. We built the landing page
about two months back after we had finalised the features we are going to
include in the first version. My co-founder is a designer so we didn't have a
problem in building the page and we used Github Pages + Mailchimp + Cloudflare
to host it for free.

Our expectations was we would just start an Adwords / FB campaign and leads
will start pouring automatically but it didn't happen - either we don't ran
the campaign well or it isn't easy to target for early adopters.

What worked for us, was posting on subreddits (30+), Betalist (100+) and a bit
of manual reach out. In the end, we managed to about 180+ emails who were
interested. Now that we are almost ready, we have about 20 people whom with we
can get started in polishing our product and get initial sales which sounds
encouraging (although still quite low).

So my advice would be, to build the landing with minimum saleable features you
can build in a short time, promote the landing page in relevant subreddits and
among people who might be interested in the product and take feedback from
them about what problem is they are looking to solve with your product.

[1]: [https://bouncelytics.com](https://bouncelytics.com)

~~~
teapot01
I like the blog and post marketing strategy and to be honest. I doubt I will
drive much traffic with paid adds, remains to be seen though.

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kang
Github pages plus mailchimp to do it for free

~~~
chadkruse
+1 for Github Pages and Mailchimp (or even TinyLetter). If you're looking for
pre-built themes, my go-to source is
[http://html5up.net/](http://html5up.net/).

Good luck!

------
iworkforthem
[http://wishpond.com/](http://wishpond.com/) \- buy traffic, start build your
list. write blog posts, repeat.

