🎉 Made it to 500 founders saved from wasting 3000+ hours on building useless landing pages!

Spoiler alert: clicking No on any of the questions will result in "you don't need a LP".

Yep - the value is in the questions, not the answer ;)

I get it, you're in the "go do sales before you ever write a single line of code for your product" camp.

Not necessarily.

But I am confident that - if you can't answer those questions with a 'yes' - you almost certainly won't be able to put up a well-performing landing page.

Good point. When I find time to update it, I'll definitely add that in!

I actually made 150k revenue last year and still don't have time for landing page.

BTW, that sounds super interesting - would you come on my podcast and talk about it?

I have a few thousand founders who'd love to hear how you did it...

In addition to what other folks have added, I think part of it is that we seem to substitute how a landing page performs in place of actual 'market validation'. If you haven't spent the time upfront doing customer research, it could still be a potentially useful product but you may not be talking about it on a landing page in the right way.

A landing page will only tell you if someone signs up or not. Other means of research and sales (one-on-one conversations for example) will be able to get more into the 'why' behind those decisions and make a landing page that much more effective further down the line.

I think there have been some good answers here so far already.

I'm curious to why building a landing page early in the idea phase is a bad idea?

So this is actually pretty easy to answer.

In the very early stages, there are a lot of things that could be wrong...

• you might be building the wrong product
• not solving a real problem people are willing to pay for
• targeting the wrong people
• etc etc

Now basically, when you go out and do sales, you can unpick and isolate each of these variables by pulling information from your (potential) customers.

In other words, you can quickly work out where you're going wrong, and in many cases ask your customer what you should be doing instead.

BUT...

When you add a landing page to the mix that early, it has three (negative) consequences...

1. You add a layer of abstraction between you and the customer. By doing direct sales, you get rich data back as information. With a landing page, the feedback you get is binary --> "yes everything is right and I want this" or "no, something is wrong and I'm leaving your site". This leads you to draw the wrong conclusions and just generally slows you down
2. It's just 2-20 hours of unnecessary work you could have spent doing sales instead
3. You get into a mindset of 'pushing product' onto the world, not solving pain for an audience

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So, when should you build a landing page?

When you have all of the information you need to be able to build a good one!

That's the point of the questions I put together in this tool.

If you can answer all of the questions with 'yes' for your product, you probably have the information necessary to build a landing page that can make you sales.

If you can't answer all of the questions with 'yes', your landing page would almost certainly do more harm than good. So why waste time building it (yet)?

Landing pages, technically, are fine. But the concept has been hijacked by marketing gurus as a one-size-fits-all bandaid for customer acquisition. In reality it's just a tiny sliver of the entire process of making a sale.

I think the point of this project is that sales are more important than any single particular marketing method - and a landing page isn't a magic button for success.