From building to selling - EP.07

Welcome to day seven of the Crossroad build journey! This series follows my journey of indie hacking a product from building to selling. If you missed day six, you could check it out here. I also uploaded today's Twitch stream to YouTube if you want to watch the replay.

Designing the sales page. 💰

With the product as good as finished last week, it’s time to answer “how can people purchase this product?”. Well, for that, you need a place on the internet where people can hit a “buy now” button!

Content first. ✍️

Most of the time, I am tempted to jump straight into Figma and try to come up with a design. Taking this approach usually results in spending a lot of time making something look pretty while you don’t even know if the design matches the story you want to tell.

So today, instead of opening Figma, I opened up Notion and thought about what story I wanted to tell on my landing page.

I want to bring across a couple of unique points for crossroads;

1. It’s a one-time purchase product, so you aren’t paying for another monthly service. I am interested in seeing if I can persuade some Linktree users to migrate to Crossroad.
2. A link in bio page can be more than just some social media links and a couple of buttons.
3. You can bring your framework, as this product is split up into blocks that are easy to turn into components inside any framework.

With this information in mind, I started to work out the content for the page. What I came up with is the following structure.

• Header, show an example and right of the bat let people know they can save on their monthly fees.
• • Video, show the lead that even if they can’t code, it only takes a couple of minutes to set up your page. To take away any doubts about “this is too difficult for me, I can’t code.”
• USPs, going more in-depth about how Crossroads differs from other links in bio templates and services.
• Pricing, section with links to Gumroad.

I think the flow of the page works pretty well. It takes the lead through the product, shows them how easy it is to set up, gets them excited with the USPs, and asks them if they want to buy the product.

Beyond the landing page. 🧑‍🚀

Besides the landing page, I also want to set up a page that showcases all the blocks. This way, people know upfront what blocks are part of the lite version and which are part of the pro version.

I think this can prevent confusion, which might lead to a couple of sales for people who are otherwise doubtful about what blocks they are otherwise getting. Heck, someone might even go to the block page and gets some inspiration which leads to a sale.

Providing an upgrade path. 📈

People who purchase the lite version might eventually like to upgrade to the Pro version to get access to all the blocks. I have decided to use Gumroad for selling this product, which doesn’t include upselling, which sucks.

To still offer an upgrade path, I will let people know that they can email me for a discount code. Not the most convenient way in the world, but better than not providing an upgrade path.

Working on the designs. 🎨

I want the landing page to look similar to the product's design. That means using the same design system/language. I don't want to create a disconnect between what people are expecting by looking at the landing page to get and what they receive with the template.

When I started working on the designs, I thought to myself, "I can't do this; I am a horrible designer." I always go through this phase every time I start a design project.

At the end of the day, once I started adding more images and polished the spacing a bit, I remembered; that it's all about iterating over and over when it comes to designs.

Sometimes you are just a couple of tweaks away from having a "this is more like it" moment.

Just keep swimming. 🐟

More designs. ✏️

Tomorrow I’ll continue working on the designs. Looking back on today, we merely made one design after working on a couple of wireframes.

I want to finish the design that we started with today, iterate over it a couple of times, and once that’s done, I also want to make one or two variations of it.

Besides the design, I am also working on the refactor off stream. Don’t worry; it’s nothing more than refactoring the CSS and renaming the blocks—meaningful work but a bit boring to share on stream.

Thanks again for reading this build log. Have a great day, and I’ll see you tomorrow (or in my stream today)! 🚀

If you want to stay updated in the meantime, give me a follow on Twitter.

With love,

Twankrui