[Day 8] Zero to MVP in 30 Days —Please rip my landing page to shreds

Hello all! If this is your first time here, you may be interested in day zero where I lay out ground rules, and day one describing my current idea.

Tonight’s the night! You all get to see version 1.0 of the bystander.io landing page. One note: NGINX and the droplet in general are very much unoptimized. I’ll spend a bit of time on that tomorrow.

As far as content goes, we’re lacking in social proof and testimonials, of course. But those key sections will be added in as soon as I get to a beta with some happy folks using the app.

I spent FAR too much time on my above-the-fold headlines, and I know I should spend even more time but that’s a deep rabbit hole to go down. If you’d like to see the bulleted list of options I was frantically brainstorming, you can check that out here.

From David Ogilvy:

On the average, five times as many people read the headline as read the body copy. When you have written your headline, you have spent eighty cents out of your dollar.

So spending about 80% of my time writing on those two headlines seems fair. Since I don’t have nearly the traffic required to A/B test headlines, I’ll probably use the social ads trick, and buy a few cheap CPMs at Facebook and LinkedIn to test out other headlines that may be a good fit.

For my primary headline, I wanted second tense headline that introduces the “what” and promotes a sense of urgency & intrigue while not being accusatory (I hope!)

For the sub heading, I wanted to hint at the “how” to foster that intrigue. But since this is kind of a new market, derivative from solutions businesses are already using in other parts of their workflow, I want this headline to be relatable. “You already do this for XYZ, why aren’t you doing it for this too?” I’m hoping this format is an efficient way to seed the idea of a/b testing error messages to reduce their cost and increase customer happiness.

I feel I need to add one more section of content, but I didn’t want to force out a bunch of fluff after being so deliberate with my other copy.

Instead I prioritized listing my features, but describing them from the benefits point of view. And following that I try to tell a story about the journey a broken costly error might take on Bystander.io to an error that has close to zero cost.

That’s all for today, I spent a fair bit of time spent prospecting and putting the finishing touches on this landing page. The Ghost blog for Bystander is installed, but untouched. And (predictably!) I ran out of time to start my outreach for guest blogging to Bystander’s audience on UX blogs.

Tomorrow, Day 9

• Take into account any harsh feedback you all might have on the landing page (this page goes out to prospects on Monday!)
• Fine tune some server stuff
• Choose a basic theme for the Bystander blog and clean up the filler/starter content proved by the Ghost install
• More, more, and more prospecting

Longer term goals, I want to have a pre-order option up by the end of week 2. Pre ordering will likely have a benefit to the tune of saving 50% for the chosen length of the pre-order.

If you take a look at the landing page and have any feedback, please, let me know! You can comment or email me from my homepage where this was originally published.

Cheers!

Forward to day 9: Torching some moneyBack to day 7