🗞 What's New: Validating with just a landing page

MVPs are typically the gold standard for validation:

• But don't underestimate the value in validating with just a landing page. It's faster, easier, and requires less resources. We share best practices in the guide below.
• Recent developments in AI are opening up white-collar and skilled trades. Here’s what top investors are excited about in AI!
• Founder Bruno Hiis smashed his goal of $1,000 in monthly revenue, recently hitting $1,200. Below, he shares which marketing channels he found the most success with, and how to play ball in a competitive market.

Want to share something with over 110,000 indie hackers? Submit a section for us to include in a future newsletter. —Channing

✅ Validating With a Landing Page

by James Fleischmann

We all know the importance of validating a product before investing significant time and energy into it. MVPs get a lot of hype in this regard, because they're fast and can validate products with a high degree of confidence. But it can be more useful to validate your idea before even spending time on the MVP.

The tried-and-true way of validating an idea is with a landing page. I know indie hackers who swear by it, and some of the big guys too. Dropbox, Robinhood, and others started this way. So, if you've got an idea that needs validating, here's the quick way to do it!

Validation as an iterative process

Simply put, validation is the process by which we figure out whether a product is worth working on. It's often looked at as an absolute concept: The product is either validated or it isn't. But these days, I tend to think of it as an iterative process.

Each step in the validation process tests whether the product should move to the next step. And, while a landing page generally won't provide enough validation to justify spending months or years on a product, it often provides enough to justify building an MVP. Then, the MVP will tell you whether or not to continue building.

So, with that in mind, validation via landing page is likely the best way to go, unless you're able to build an MVP in roughly the same amount of time as a landing page.

A validation landing page checklist

When you've got an idea that you'd like to validate, here's how you do it:

1. Document the product: You'll need to have a really solid idea of the product in your mind. Outline the features and keep it simple. This is about the core functionality. Complicating it with a ton of possible features will only make validation more difficult.
2. Nail the problem, solution, and value proposition.
3. Identify your target market.
4. Come up with a name, and buy the domain.
5. Design a visual representation of the product: This may not be a need-to-have, but it's certainly a nice-to-have, as it'll provide more context to potential customers. A simple wireframe will often do the trick.
6. Identify your goals and metrics for validation: What conversion rate would feel like validation to you? There's no set number here. Among other things, it will depend on where you're getting traffic from. Ads will probably have lower conversion rates than organic, for example.
7. Create a landing page: I'll include some best practices and tools below. Design-wise, lean heavily on templates to save you time and creative juice. Include the representation of the product that you created. If you need design inspiration, check out One Page Love. My post about design might help, too.
8. Write copy: Keep it concise. Include the pain point, solution, features, benefits, and social proof (if applicable).
9. Add a signup form: Your CTA should ask people to provide their email address. Add something like: "Join the waitlist for first access." After they provide their email, you can also ask a quick question. Usually, it's a question that will identify what customer segment they belong to. Keep it short, though. You don't want to add friction.
10. Determine your ad strategy: Choose the ad platform you will use, outline your budget, determine which keywords you'll target, etc. If you're using Google, check its keyword planner to decide on keywords. Keywords like "[competitor] alternatives" are often a good choice. Don't bother targeting a keyword with fewer than 100 searches per month.
11. Create ads: If you're going with Google AdWords, which is what most indie hackers use, you'll just need to put some copy together. You'll want to create different ad groups for different types of keywords to test different types of customers. Keep your copy similar to the copy on your landing page, but add a CTA.
12. Launch the landing page on your socials, email list, etc.
13. Begin your ad campaign.
14. Reach out to people who sign up: This should not be an automated email. Be a human. Also, ask if they'd be open to jumping on a call in order to have a say on the product. I'd recommend reading The Mom Test before doing that.
15. Analyze the metrics and adjust as necessary: If conversions are low, consider trying keywords that target other niches. If you're getting conversions with AdWords, it's worth noting that organic conversions will likely be higher (eventually). Remember that a low conversion rate doesn't mean that the product is a bust. It could mean that your messaging, positioning, targeting, or something else is problematic. So, tweak the experiment. If the conversion rate is good, that's validation to move onto the MVP!

Landing page best practices

Include an attention-grabbing title, product description (who, what, and why), how it works, pricing tiers, contact, and transparency around the product's availability.

Keep the important stuff above the fold. Remove friction wherever possible, and only ask for what you need.

Create a place to collect emails. I'd suggest positioning it as a waitlist offering early access to the product when it's ready. Some landing page builders will have their own solution or integrations for capturing emails, but you can also do it with a Zapier webhook. Of course, you'll need to stay in touch with them about your progress (or lack thereof).

Connect your landing page to analytics so you can track what's happening. Some landing page builders have their own analytics solution, but I'm personally a fan of Plausible, since it's privacy-first.

Landing page builders

Here are a few solid builders to get you started. Most have a free tier, but those tiers don't allow for custom domains. This is a problem, so I'll also include the next pricing tier up:

• Webflow is by far the most recommended landing page builder for indie hackers, from what I've seen. $14 per month.
• Carrd is simple with free options, and it's only $19 per year.
• Unicorn Platform is a solid builder. $8 per month.
• Mixo uses AI to build a landing page in seconds. $9 per month.
• Launchrock is a solid one that's been around for a while. Super simple. $29 per month.
• Versoly is $19 per month.
• Bubble was mentioned a few times, but I think it's overkill for a landing page. $25 per month.
• Weebly has been a big name in the space for a while. It's more general use, rather than being specifically for indie hacker types. $10 per month.

Have you validated through a landing page? Share your experience below!

Discuss this story.

📰 In the News

from the Growth Trends newsletter by Darko

🤖 Google has announced AI tools for retailers.

🔑 The key to App Store optimization.

🛍 12 new Google Analytics metrics for e-commerce.

🤹‍♀️ Diversifying your content marketing.

📧 Email marketing design tips that can increase your revenue.

Check out Growth Trends for more curated news items focused on user acquisition and new product ideas.

💻 Top AI Trends That Are Exciting Investors

from The Hustle newsletter by Ethan Brooks

The Signal: Famed investors like Reid Hoffman, Sarah Guo, and others recently discussed nine trends they're seeing in AI.

We called some of them months ago, like the importance of digital twins, and AI's potential in biological research.

Here are two other areas with exciting potential!

1. A copilot for every job:

Released to the public this summer, GitHub Copilot is an AI-powered code suggesting tool that was trained on millions of public GitHub projects.

In a recent survey of 2K+ users (mostly professional coders), a staggering 88% of respondents reported feeling more productive with Copilot. It's already being used to create a jaw-dropping amount of code:

*Source: Twitter

Not only that, but 60-75% of respondents said they were more fulfilled with their job and feel less frustrated when coding, and 73% say the tool helps them stay in the flow.

Reid Hoffman wrote:

Sonya Huang, a partner at Sequoia, agrees:

The basic idea here is to take something broad, like Jasper, and build a finely-tuned version of it for a specific industry or task.

Don't be fooled; while they started simple, these tools are increasingly capable of understanding more complex tasks. Just take a look at Adept's Transformer, which is basically Siri on steroids, and imagine what could be possible in the next few years.

*Source: Adept

Where to start: Both Sonya and Reid point to white-collar industries, like architecture and law, as potential options.

Imagine a Copilot-type tool for bankruptcy lawyers that could help draft briefs and summarize case law.

Or, you could examine industries with low satisfaction and high rates of attrition (like healthcare), and develop tools to ease the overwhelm.

For example, an AI-powered (and HIPAA-compliant) version of Doubletime could help cut down on the crushing load of patient notes that many practitioners must maintain.

2. Going beyond the cubicle:

Another area where investors see great need is in skilled trades.

Many skilled trades are facing current or imminent talent shortages, or severe disruption from years of COVID-19 shutdowns and uncertain material supply chains.

Construction is estimated to be worth $1.3T in the US. We've written before about opportunities in the space, but now AI is unlocking new segments of the value chain for disruption.

*Source: TechCrunch

To give one specific example, current estimates are that the US alone will be short 400K welders by 2024. Path Robotics raised $171M to develop truly autonomous welding robots that require no programming from operators.

Specific, high-value niches facing significant talent shortages include:

• Semiconductor manufacturing.
• Elevator maintenance.
• Interior design (see Pieter Levels' recent project, Interior.ai).

What AI opportunities are most exciting to you? Share in the comments!

Subscribe to The Hustle newsletter for more.

🧠 Harry's Growth Tip

from the Marketing Examples newsletter by Harry Dry

You've already done the hard work. Don't waste it.

Go here for more short, sweet, practical marketing tips.

Subscribe to Marketing Examples for more.

💰 Bruno Hiis Hit $1.2K MRR With 35 Paying Customers

by Bruno Hiis

Hi, founders! I'm Bruno Hiis, and last year, I set a goal of getting to $1K MRR. Today, we have 35 active paying customers, are doing over $1.2K MRR, and are growing faster than ever.

Some cool stats for 2022:

• 5.2K+ posts created on feedback boards.
• 11K+ accounts created to post feedback.
• 824 organizations created.
• 36K+ upvotes to posts.

Read on for more about my journey!

Best marketing channels for us

1. Word-of-mouth: This is underrated. Build a great product and offer outstanding customer service.
2. "Alternative to" marketing: Create alternative pages against your competitors, and drive SEO traffic to those pages. Post your product on AlternativeTo as well!
3. "Powered by" marketing: Our tool allows you to create public feedback boards and widgets to capture feedback. All boards have a small "Powered by Featurebase" button.
4. Integration marketing: We're featured on the Intercom marketplace and others. I really recommend this because it makes your product more useful, while marketing at the same time. Our Q1 goal is to double down on this.

Lessons learned

1. Product matters:

In a competitive market, your product comes first. You have probably seen tons of memes about how founders only focus on building new features, while completely ignoring marketing.

So, when launching our MVP, we went crazy with marketing. We tried over 10 different marketing channels, and...none of them worked.

We almost quit back then, since the general founder's advice is that, if people don't care about your MVP after a few weeks, you should probably work on something else.

The problem was that our product sucked. Therefore, any marketing efforts were wasted because there were so many better options on the market.

I believe that in a competitive market, success is 70% product and 30% marketing. If you have a bad product, you are essentially trying to multiply by zero.

In our case, we can draw a straight line between our MRR and how good our product is. I wish we had doubled down on making our product amazing before wasting so much time on useless marketing efforts.

2. Pick one marketing channel and stick to it:

Rather than finding the next shiny marketing channel that could magically 10x your MRR, just pick one that fits your target audience, and master it. Pierre from ScrapingBee has a great video on this that you should definitely check out.

3. It's much safer to build in a validated market:

If you're great at building products and design, this is the way.

There are niches in big proven markets that you could hop into. Pick a few features from a bloated tool, and do it much better.

Remember that most of the time, it's a big red flag when you can't find existing competitors to your new fantastic business idea.

Your experience might vary significantly based on the market you are in and hundreds of other factors!

Discuss this story.

🐦 The Tweetmaster's Pick

by Tweetmaster Flex

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 James Fleischmann, Darko, Ethan Brooks, Harry Dry, and Bruno Hiis for contributing posts. —Channing