[rmason]

What is really bad is wasting months building software no one wants. Or finding out after the fact that your cost of acquiring a customer is too high to make the idea viable.

Sure there are people doing it wrong, but done correctly its a powerful tool that raises the odds that your startup will become a success.

[bbwharris]

In a lot of cases the cost of acquiring customers is high in the beginning. Thats a business scaling issue that you solve when you determine that you have a real business.

The landing page trend is just for early adopters, I would venture a guess that it has little to no impact on the success of a startup.