We all have the SAME problem?!

I talked to 12 people in total. I had 15 scheduled 3 dropped out / no-shows. I have 3 more calls scheduled, overshooting the target.

I want to keep having a few calls every week to keep the learning coming my way (if you're interested please hit me up!)

12 people and I have the same problem when building a landing page.

But before I tell you how insightful it was, let me first tell you what I'm doing.

I'm building a SaaS in public, posting progress every day. I'm also adding lessons from my mistakes and learning from current events. If you're interested, you can binge-read all the past updates in my newsletter.

I started my user interviews to verify and hypothesis:

"People are willing to pay for a product that makes it easy to create high-converting landing pages."

After a couple of calls, I found out that my hypothesis was terrible. I was trying to confirm an obvious problem

Of course, people will pay for something that makes them more money. Who wouldn't?

Lucky for me, the questions I asked aimed at the wider problem and not only the hypothesis.

After 3 or 4 calls I had enough info to do 2 things:

- Start building an MVP

- Figure out a better hypothesis

I've already posted this but these questions so this time I'll add either data or learning from each of them:

- "Please tell me, how you do create a landing page today?"

- 50% of the people built pages themselves

- 50% use low-code / no-code tools

- The big winner was WordPress, mentioned 65% of the time.

- "How long does it take for a landing page to be created?"

- the average is 1 week. this has changed from last week when the average was 1.5 weeks.

- if more than 1 person is involved (e.g. designer, copywriter, asset creator) the average is 1.5 weeks

- "What is the hardest thing about creating a landing page?"

- This is the most shocking part, I'll cover this below

- "How often do you need to create a new landing page?"

- the vast majority said not that often

- BUT almost everybody mentioned the desire to build more. this makes me think that if is easier to do, they will build more

- "Why is it important for you to create landing pages?"

- unsurprisingly, the overwhelming majority said "because it drives more business"

- "How much does it cost to create one or more landing pages right now?"

- This needs a post on its own to cover it but costs ranged from 19$ to 159$ a month.

- Almost nobody factored in the cost of their own time

- "What if I could make the problem disappear? How much would you pay for this?"

- This was the magic question: the answer is "It depends".

- the good part, everybody followed with a list of features or ideas that they would be interested in paying for.

The universal problem

For every single person, the hardest thing about creating landing pages was ONE.

Knowing what to put on the landing page.

From the structure to the copy itself that was the hardest thing to get right.

Worth mentioning that "assets" were in a close second. Images videos etc

How do they solve the problem right now?

I summarised it in 3 main ways and created an easy-to-download PDF. This PDF is only available to my premium subscribers. You can subsc...

JOKING!

I wish people would pay for what I have to say, but honestly, I wouldn't right now.

I will list the ways of solving the problem and the pros and cons.

1. Using AI. Unsurprisingly AI was mentioned by a fair few people. The sad part is that the same people mentioned how much it sucks.

Pros: relatively cheap, incredibly fast, can iterate as many times as you want.

Cons: the output doesn't convert

2. Using Copywriters. Relying on a professional figure is always a smashing way to go.

Pros: They know what they are doing. In general, business increases when a copywriter is involved in the process

Cons: expensive, at times slow, iteration expensive too

3. I do it all myself. I did this one too!

Pros: fast speed of iteration, cheap (just need time)

Cons: conversion is almost non-existent most of the time

Worth mentioning here that I and another person started studying copywriting. After doing that our landing pages started converting. Skills issue!

The heroes

I cannot thank all the people I've interviewed enough for their help.

I have 1 new addition to the hero roster. Of the 3 people I interviewed in the last couple of days:

• 1 wanted to stay anonymous

• 1 didn't send me a link to their stuff so I'll mention them in another post.

The new hero

Alan Budyta - Runs Lil' Baby Cakes. Give him a follow on LinkedIn and check out Lil' Baby Cakes

And let's not forget the heroes who helped before:

Richard Holmes - Owner @ Ampersand Studio. Give him a follow on LinkedIn. Also check out Ampersand Studio

MysteriousShadow - developer of Grammarsen. Check out the product, is brilliant! (We only chatted on Reddit so I won't link a profile as I haven't cleared it out with him)

Jenny Prochoryceva - Founder of Potenic and business strategist. Give her a follow on LinkedIn and check out Potenic

Progress update

- I sent a demo to a handful of people for early feedback, it was well-received, and got some positive signals from them

- I have a goal to have a production-ready page by the end of the week, there are 3 areas to work on:

- The page generation itself, making sure it has all the right sections

- The analytics part: making sure that is easy to understand

- The boring tech stuff: SEO, performance, etc. I made no progress on this

- making progress on all of them a bit at a time. At the end of the day, I'll have half of the sections working.

- I bit more than I could chew when doing interviews. I spent a long time doing calls yesterday and did not much progress on the MVP.

It's ok at this stage but I need to keep an eye out for it. There is a real risk of spending too much time validating and not building.

Celebrations

now we're cooking!

- BIGGEST growth on the newsletter. 5+ people overnight. MIND BLOWING!

- The LinkedIn newsletter is growing too. The are 131 subscribers now!

- Unexpectedly a fair few people started following me on X that's awesome thank you so much! The main reason to follow is that I almost did a pullup with +40kg today and I posted the video

I cannot thank you all enough for your help and support, you're all legends!