(from the latest issue of the Indie Hackers newsletter)
Looking to build or update your landing page, but not sure where to start?
Want to share something with over 110,000 indie hackers? Submit a section for us to include in a future newsletter. —Channing
I'm looking to build a landing page for my project, and I'm not quite sure where to start. How much time should I devote to it? What are some essential elements to include?
Any tips or tricks you've learned along the way would be greatly appreciated!
Richard Gao provides a quick guide:
To give an example, check out the pre-launch page for Evoke, my AI-as-a-Service. I'll admit that it's not beautiful, and the newsletter signup is off-center. But you know what? No one who has joined my Discord has had any questions about what the product does, because it was all answered on the website.
Jasper Kense recommends including a banger:
From my design experience, I would recommend starting off with a banger. This is a good image or video that explains your product. What you are trying to convey should be clear within seconds.
Next, test it with others. Show it to friends without telling them about the idea. Ask them what they think the purpose of the website is. If you designed it right, they should be able to understand it within a few seconds.
From there, add a call-to-action (CTA). This has to be clear, easy, and precise. Think about some of the most popular websites:
These websites all have one specific CTA, and they repeat it as much as possible. Visually, it comes through.
Your product, target group, and goals may evolve, and so will your website. This method has helped me reach my goals for my SaaS. You'll see that, as long as I am developing, I will be questioning the website. And yes, it will change. A lot.
Muneeb Awan offers a list of top tips:
The best place to get feedback on your landing page is from the people who visit it!
*Bonus tip: Test your landing page on different devices, giving special care to making it compatible for mobile.
What are your top tips for building a successful landing page? Share below!
Discuss this story.
from the Growth Trends newsletter by Darko
💰 Twitter now wants to become a payment platform.
💡 A hack for finding content ideas.
💝 Key insights for your 2023 Valentine's Day campaigns.
🚗 Driving adoption for your product.
🍪 Google wants to kick its cookie habit by Q3 2024.
Check out Growth Trends for more curated news items focused on user acquisition and new product ideas.
Ideas are cheap, but implementing them is not. Most indie hackers don't have the luxury of building all the features they may want. Choosing between features is one of the toughest things we have to do.
Here's how indie hackers are making the choice!
Don't focus on the features. Focus on the problems.
Feature requests are pretty much inevitable once you've got traction. And that's a good thing! When it comes to feature requests, focus on your actual customers. These are the people who are all about your product, not the ones who are on the fence. Eventually, you'll want to understand how to bring the stragglers into the fold, but that can wait until you've got more time on your hands.
Founder Matt Naus breaks it down:
Ideally, your product will have actual users who are providing you with feedback.
If you do not have actual users yet, you will need to collect data based on conversations with your target audience (and you should be doing the absolute minimum to turn these people into users).If you’ve got no users or audience, you should not be building any features. At this stage, you should not be thinking about features, nor should you be doing any development.
Here's some solid advice from Reinder on talking to users:
Keep in mind that users own the problem, and you own the solution. This means that you should not ask them what to build, but question them about the problems they experience. Create your backlog based on the solutions that you see.
Surveys, interviews, or allowing users to vote on new features can help, too. If you're going to do interviews, I'd highly recommend reading The Mom Test first.
Of course, it's important to validate that this feedback is actually good. The last thing you want is to build things for customers that don't actually push the needle for your business.
Ultimately, there are three good reasons to add a new feature:
Don't do it because someone told you to. Don't do it because you're avoiding marketing, which happens more often than most would like to admit. Don't do it to keep up with the competition, unless it actually benefits your product. I could go on, but you get the idea.
So, the first thing indie hackers have to do when considering new features is to determine what they need to achieve: Is it user acquisition, paid conversions, or retention?
Once you know your "why," you have to figure out whether the feature you're considering actually moves the needle for it.
When thinking about new features, consider a few things:
Once you've made a decision about whether something is worth trying, test an MVP of the feature before building the whole thing.
Here are four frameworks for prioritizing features:
Before you even think about adding new features, make sure that your current features are in a good place.
From there, add them to your project management or to-do tool. I'm personally a fan of public roadmaps, so if you are too, add the new features to yours with a reasonable timeline. Then, get to work!
How do you decide on when to add new features? Let's chat below!
Discuss this story.
💬 Are we in an AI hype bubble? Posted by Ben Katz.
🛠 Go-to tools to launch a startup in one week. Posted by Kristof Szabo.
😖 Why do you want to escape your 9-5? Posted by Daniel Dramond.
🏝 Retirement for indie hackers. Posted by Gregarious Hermit.
🤔 Anybody doing 12x12? Posted by Vlad.
📧 Automating drip emails. Posted by Rajatsx.
Want a shout-out in next week's Best of Indie Hackers? Submit an article or link post on Indie Hackers whenever you come across something you think other indie hackers will enjoy.
by Sergey Bunas
Hey, indie hackers! I'm Sergey Bunas, and I built a side project in one day, went viral on Twitter, and earned $1.1K+ in two weeks.
Replai.so is a GPT-3 Chrome browser extension that generates human-like Twitter replies in seconds to help users grow their audience.
*Replai's interface and example of a reply in "Joke" tone
Here's how I did it!
Pain point: One of the main ways to grow your audience on Twitter is to reply to tweets from more famous people. In order for this method to bring results, certain conditions must be met:
Solution: With Replai.so, you can generate human-like replies to tweets with a single button.
We use GPT-3 to reply to tweets and, with the help of the Chrome extension, we embed it into the Twitter page. This reduces friction, since there's no need to go to another site, copy-paste the tweet, and reply.
I created the first version of the extension in four hours, and immediately submitted it to the Chrome Web Store for review. After three days, our extension was approved, and published to the public store:
The extension has two main parts:
The first version of the product did not have a paywall or a limit on the number of replies. We wanted to test the hypothesis as quickly as possible, and let users touch the product.
When the extension became available in the store, my friend tweeted an example using it. The tweet went viral, gaining 95K views and 140 retweets, and we landed our first ~500 users.
We continued to tweet under the hashtag #BuildInPublic about the progress of the product, experience, insights, and mistakes. These tweets gained views, increased awareness, and fostered word-of-mouth.
We were featured in various Twitter, AI, and productivity collections, and received great comments from our users:
After four days, we saw that the bills for requests in OpenAI reached $6 dollars a day. We had 500 downloads at that point. We decided to create a paywall, and to be quick with the payments, we used Gumroad. We created a landing page, and added payments to the extension:
In two weeks, we reached the following milestones:
ChatGPT and GPT-3 provide significant benefits: Easy to integrate, cheap, and amazing value created for customers (if done right).
Chrome Extension embeds into the habits that users have already developed, allowing you to significantly increase retention. By combining these technologies, you will have fantastic opportunities to create new products!
Discuss this story.
I post the tweets indie hackers share the most. Here's today's pick:
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Special thanks to Jay Avery for editing this issue, to Gabriella Federico for the illustrations, and to Ashutosh K. Singh, Darko, James Fleischmann, and Sergey Bunas for contributing posts. —Channing
Thanks for sharing these amazing tips for creating the landing page.
https://stfchamber.com/