For the imagery, I went to UnSplash and then edited some of them.
One of the interesting questions I got, and by interesting I mean infuriating, was “how much does it cost?” I listed in the marketing material in a bold header that it was free. See?
Other feedback I got revolved around how vague my description of the features were. What were the actual tools and functionality I was going to provide? Looking back, I should have mocked some up and taken “screenshots” I suppose.
I think another failure was putting the mailing list sign up at the very bottom. I assumed people would be so interested that they’d scroll through the entire page. In reality, people don’t scroll (my analytics say so). Maybe with the sign up near the top, more would have signed up to be notified.
Finally, I did share the landing page with local entrepreneurs, Product Hunt, and many other link-sharing sites. I noticed that a lot of those sites actually waited at least a month to share my site (or you could pay a premium to get it listed the next day - what a cool business model). So, that could also affect some of my traction. Looking back, I’d like to have submitted to them before I built out my landing page fully, maybe.
Just a small note on tech. I got to experiment with some Mailchimp sign up functionality as well as use one of my favorite CSS frameworks Bulma. I tried using Tailwind and gave up after a while. I didn’t want to think about the design, I just wanted things pre-designed for me.
What’s next is publishing this blog entry, letting the mailing list know what’s up, and closing down the landing page. But that’s not the end for me.
Ideas come all the time. It’s important not to let a failure-to-launch cause you to fail to come up with other new ideas. While I’m a bit let down about this particular project, I’m still trucking along on other ones (like The Dev Manager). Thanks for reading.