We recently talked about the benefits of skipping the Coming Soon page and putting up the landing page for the product instead. Joel Gascoigne published an interesting post of how he went one step further to validate his idea before implementing it. He put up a landing page with a Price Plans page before he had anything mocked up or implemented for the actual product. It was just an idea at that point. The aim of this approach was to figure out if people were willing to pay for his product idea.
He created a landing page which outlined the product idea in three easy steps:
People that were interested would click over to the price plans page:
People that were really interested would click through on the price plan to get the page where they could leave their email to be notified when the product is launched:
Gascoigne used these three pages to test whether people had interest in the idea enough to click through to a price plan and leave their emails. Many folks were clicking through and leaving their email, a small amount of people were actually clicking on the paid plans. As a result of this test he felt more confident about the idea:
After this result, I didn't hesitate to start building the first minimal version of the real, functioning product.
Notice how low investment this approach was for Gascoigne early on to validate the idea before implementing it. That's hot! We are huge fans of verifying an idea before you implement it, we built a whole app called Verify around this concept so that we don't even need to create a live site.