Lean Startup – concept validation (Unbounce vs Launch Rock)

Yeah I know, I said I would NEVER do another “start-up“.

“Lean Startup” principles actually force you to think of a startup like a serious business.

Popularized by Eric Reis, this is a disciplined framework to build innovative products in a systematic way so as to reduce wastage by identifying what would work and what wouldn’t as early as possible and then focus on things that make your product click.

At each stage, we must make a hypothesis to test our idea against. Then we should make the most basic product (MVP or Minimum Viable Product) that can validate the hypothesis.

So, to get the ball rolling, all we should do it to see if our broad idea has any takers or not. We cannot just ask our friends and family, we need to get some real user feedback. So we can  write up about the idea and take it to customers to see if they will sign up for the service.

In my case, I designed simple landing pages for the next product that we want to build. We will advertize and get some users to these pages and analyze their behavior. See if they “sign up”

Match Social - This is a private match making platform where people can find matches for their relatives/friends within their own Facebook network. We ensure privacy and intelligently recommend matches.

I had a few options when I was designing this.

• Build ground up with HTML/Javascript
• Use WordPress
• Use some tool like Unbounce or Launch Rock.

I chose to go with Unbounce. Here is why:

Ease of building:

HTML is simple but time consuming. You have to worry about getting the CSS right for all the elements. For WordPress, I would have had to find the right theme and then customize it. That takes some time too. There are simple “Coming soon” kind of themes too but they are insufficient for this test.

Both Launch Rock and Unbounce were amazingly easy to use to design the page. You could select the template and tweak it – add images, add text, customize form fields and post.

Quality of Landing Page:

Here Unbounce was the clear winner – by a big margin. Launch Rock only has a simple landing page with a box in the middle where you can write some text and get user email address. This is similar to the WordPress themes I was mentioning. Unbounce comes with a whole bunch of templates that don’t essentially have a “coming soon” look. You can make your page look much more real with Unbounce. This was, for me the clincher. I would probably have gone with Launch Rock if they allowed me to build better looking landing pages and collect more data.

Statistics:

This is primarily why I ruled out HTML or WordPress. I would have to manually integrate with so many services to get proper statistics. Launch Rock has amazing integration with Kiss Metrics. Kiss Metrics is hands down the best web usage analytics tool. It also has a simple way to measure social sharing statistics from Facebook and Twitter. If you care about how many people promote you socially, Launch Rock is the tool for you.

Unbounce has some nifty features too. It makes a/b testing so sexy that you would almost have an orgasm. You just create all variants and assign a percentage to each and Unbounce shows different varients proportionately. With their built in conversion goals, you can compare conversion rates for things that matter to you – could be anything from number of clicks on a button to number of times forms filled. You can also create a complete sales funnel (I didn’t try it)

Email integration:

Again, HTML and WordPress stood no chance here.

Launch Rock has its own email service. You just configure a welcome email and everytime someone signs up for your site, the email is sent. I did not try it so I don’t know how detailed their email reporting is.

Unbounce allows you to seamlessly integrate with powerful third part email management services like MailChimp. You start building proper contacts lists and use their superb templates to send professional quality emails on sign up or any other event.

 My wish list:

• I wish these services created facebook apps landing pages too or atleasted allowed users to use facebook connect.
• If Launch Rock had better templates it would be awesome
• Unbounce should have a process where we can set common properties for all pages – it is frustrating to go to each page and set the google analytics script, etc. or even stupid copyright tags

So…..

Since last night, I have designed some 12 different pages. Now I am running ads on Facebook and promoting on some blogs to see if people bite the bait

I have the wireframe designed and have researched the tech stack that I want to use to build match social. We will run this campaign for a week and if we see enough people interested in the product, we will build start building it – MVP style – one step at a time.