Seriously, Use LaunchRock
Seriously, if you are building any kind of web application, you should be using LaunchRock. LaunchRock is a service that creates a viral “Coming Soon” page that you can use to collect potential users. Sounds simple, right? Too simple? Actually… yeah. But the return on investment is just huge. Let me explain how it worked for me.
The Need
I had gotten to a point in building Self Compete where I was going to begin testing a feature that posted to Twitter and Facebook. This only way to test this feature (as in posting to Twitter and Facebook), is extremely public. If I was going to be doing testing that everyone was going to see, I better have something for them to look at. So I began to design a sign up page, hoping to turn the interest of these public tests into some sort of user base. I spent a few days designing something that I felt looked good and began working on a script to collect emails. Then I realized the headache that entails. “I have to convert this design to HTML”, “I’m going to need to pay for hosting to host a page”, “I’m going to have to write a script to store the emails that are entered”, “I’m going to write a script to display or send the emails that are stored”, “I’m going to have to market this page constantly”. For such a small page, with at most 2 fields, there is a lot of work to be done. That means a lot of time spent NOT working on my application which I need the sign up page for!
