[vinaykuruvila]

I like the concept.

We recently A/B tested the hell out of our landing page at Sidelines (http://sidelinesapp.com), so there are some interesting things we learned that may be applicable to you:

1. Coming up with an effective single-sentence explanation of your product will affect your conversion more than anything else. I don’t think you’ve quite nailed it with “An app for you and your campus.” Figure out what the most compelling use-case of your product is and make that clear on your landing page.

2. Make sure your landing page looks great on mobile browsers (especially since yours is a mobile product). Right now, on Safari on my iPhone, I don’t even see the map.

3. I would get rid of “Exclusively at Stanford University”, since I think it will turn off people from other schools. You should experiment with removing it or even better, showing it only if the IP of the person clicking the ad is in the Bay Area.

4. I would get rid of the “What do you want to shoutt about?” I think for most people using these kinds of apps for the first few times, they start of as consumers of info/content and you later have to convert them to producers of content. Your value prop with “What do you want to shout about?”” here is all about the producer side, and I think that may not be as appealing for brand new users. Look at Twitter for example. Their landing page is all about the consumer value prop, and doesn’t mention the sharing aspect (“Find out what’s happening, right now, with the people and organizations you care about.”)

5. A launch date and countdown would be awesome.

6. Get people to connect their FB accounts instead of just giving you their email. This way you could potentially send them FB notifications as well when you launch.

7. Try putting your messaging front and center instead of to the bottom left. We got great results with this.

8. Experiment, experiment, experiment. Anything I or anyone else here may tell you would just be intelligent guesses at what we think will work. You’ll get way better results from doing some quick A/B tests. We went from about 7% conversion to our landing page to about 55% conversion just by running a series of A/B tests.

Good luck!

[lionel_lei]

I don't agree with 4. I think the the name "shoutt" suggests that the app is heavily focus on content producing. The animated dot on the map further reinforced this impression. So I don't think it's necessary to tailor to the content consumption aspect. My understanding is that this app is strictly for expressing oneself, so who wants to "shoutt" if everyone else is shouting and nobody listening? There is still value prop in this case, if the app is intended to aggregate what people shoutt about and somehow connect people with that? Still have to see the demo video to find out exactly what it does.

[mansigandhi]

Hey vinaykuruvilla. Thanks for the awesome feedback. We'll start A/B testing soon. Your landing page looks great btw.

We checked the landing page on a mobile browser (Safari & Chrome - iPhone) and maps loads fine. I think the server is getting overwhelmed with the response from HN.

[ilovecars]

If I were you, I would keep "Exclusively at Stanford University". The more niche you can make your target market, the easier it is to market and gain traction. If I was a Stanford student, I would be way more likely to submit my email. This is how Facebook first got traction.

[lionel_lei]

I learn a lot from this reply that I think I could use in my own projects, thanks a lot for sharing.