Ask HN: Do HN users appreciate Landing Pages being posted?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4986539

by kisamoto • 14 years ago

4 10 14 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

Ship Early. Ship Often.

It's an idea that I am forcing myself to adopt as it seems a little alien at the moment (Why would I want to show users an unfinished product??) but I've always been in two minds about landing pages being submitted on HN. I much prefer 'Show HN:' to be things I can play with.

How do you feel about clicking on a link and getting to a Landing Page with simply a 'Sign up for notifications' or 'connect to Facebook' form?

ColinWright3• 14 years ago

Hate it with a passion, even to the point where now I make a note of them and try to use a competitor, assuming anything ever sees the light of day.

Virtually none of them have. After a few naive sign-ups I've learned better and never will again. Total waste of my time.

Does that answer your question?

kisamoto3• 14 years ago

Yes it does.

I'm the same and have signed up to a fair few but never hear anything back. I may be a sceptic but if I ever get a chance to put my first and last names in I always use the name of the company/website to see if my email address gets sold...

Only asking because I'm thinking of doing the same for a product of mine but don't want to annoy anyone!

jacobedawson• 14 years ago

@kisamoto, I understand your trepidation, I'm working on customer discovery (and the target market is startups / entrepreneurs), but posting landing pages with no utility seems a bit obnoxious - are you using Adwords / FB ads, etc to drive your TM to the landing page?

kisamoto3• 14 years ago

@jacobedawson - No I'm not doing anything active marketing to pull users to the landing page. I definitely agree that it's obnoxious yet I spoke to a few friends of mine (primarily iphone app developers) who said it's good to get a landing page out there to get word spread early but I wanted to see what the community thought.

Thank you very much for taking the time to let me know. I think I'll wait until I've at least got a MVP before I put something there into beta.

ColinWright3• 14 years ago

It's recommended by several people as a way to get sign-ups and gauge interest before committing time to something that may not have a market. I can see why that might be regarded as useful.

It also runs the risk of annoying exactly those people who might be your early adopters. If you think the people who are annoyed by it are just a small proportion of your intended market then it might be worth while. You have to not care about those first people - treat them as fodder to get the numbers you need to make your decision.

Feels sociopathic - it would be nice to have a method of assessing interest without something that smells of dishonesty.

kisamoto3• 14 years ago

Thanks for this Colin.

I think as my product is aimed at entrepreneurs and start ups it seems (albeit only 2 opinions at the moment) that this would be a negative thing to do.

ulisesrmzroche2• 14 years ago

Bad advertising can harm sales, yeah. But sociopathic? I think you're reeeeeeeaching too far, bro.

dynabros• 14 years ago

If they're solely giving you a landing page then it's just an advertisement isn't it? Just like those pesky ads you're tortured with on youtube when you really just want to watch a JB video...

ulisesrmzroche2• 14 years ago

There's nothing wrong with landing pages. Try to sell the product rather than just begging for signups though.

Bad landing pages will hurt sales, but you're all confusing the intent of landing pages with the quality of bad ones.

Ask HN: Do HN users appreciate Landing Pages being posted?

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