I'm building an concept web app at the moment and I'm looking to launch a simple pre-launch landing page to start gauging interest in the concept.<p>What are some tips that you've used successfully?<p>NB: I have done plenty of research on the topic I'm just looking to hear from the community here.
Forget coding your own landing page and try these services.<p><a href="http://www.unbounce.com" rel="nofollow">http://www.unbounce.com</a> and
<a href="http://www.instapaper.com" rel="nofollow">http://www.instapaper.com</a> are paid<p><a href="http://www.launchrock.com" rel="nofollow">http://www.launchrock.com</a> is free<p>Spend all your time optimising the landing page and getting traffic to it, rather than coding one up.<p>Read these for landing page optimisation<p><a href="http://unbounce.com/landing-page-articles/the-anatomy-of-a-landing-page/" rel="nofollow">http://unbounce.com/landing-page-articles/the-anatomy-of-a-l...</a><p>and<p><a href="http://unbounce.com/landing-pages/7-elements-of-a-winning-landing-page/" rel="nofollow">http://unbounce.com/landing-pages/7-elements-of-a-winning-la...</a><p>If you're a consumer product then well-targeted facebook ads can drive strong traffic.<p><a href="http://okdork.com/2014/03/04/how-to-start-advertising-on-facebook/" rel="nofollow">http://okdork.com/2014/03/04/how-to-start-advertising-on-fac...</a><p>!!Make sure you get the users email address on your landing page!!
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.<p>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.<p>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.
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.<p>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.<p>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).<p>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.<p>[1]: <a href="https://bouncelytics.com" rel="nofollow">https://bouncelytics.com</a>