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Comment by lbotos | Hacker News Reader

If you are a fullstack dev, I think you should learn a simple growth hack strategy that is helpful:

- Take your idea, build a simple UI (not the app at all, just the UI)

- Take that UI, and get a sign up modal on it

- Take that and run ads that point to it.

- See if you get enough conversions that justify you actually building the thing. What's that number for you? Dunno, but you'll learn quickly. And then you'll have a small mailing list of beta testers.

You can toil away and build a thing, or you can find an audience, and then build a thing that those people will pay for.

Everything will follow from that.

(or if you are going for a 'global scale' leveraged play -- you need to get users, cover the costs of the platform, and then get VC backing to figure out your monetization strategy)

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as a backend dev, it's very hard to make a UI and landing page that looks presentable, especially in 2021

I'm probably going to get some downvotes for this, but take half a day to go through the learnin resources at tailwindcss and you'll be able to make a (albeit generic) landing page and UI the day after.

generic isn't good enough to catch a user's eye and get them interested though

It's not even talking about an app. Just a sign up page.

even then, even a slightly janky looking page signals a lack of trust

Outsource it if you have the money?

But since you mentioned landing pages, I can recommend this great talk by one of the “Refactoring Ui” folks. He explains how he built the landing page for Tuple - https://youtu.be/hlI6xGfBjkQ

Overall, the Refactoring UI folks have done a brilliant job of demystifying visual design.

For the UI you might have to find someone to do that for you. But if it's just a mock-up and not an actually UI it might be for a reasonable price.

Search for landing page templates. There are a lot that are free, some you have to pay for (but not that much).

Another option is to find a design co-founder.

So when you say sign-up do you mean sites that say something like "register your interest and we'll email you news when ready"?

(not OP) Yeah, something like that. Status updates or something, hopefully more involved than just no contact until shipped. You may want to use those people to help shape what you're building.

Exactly right. You'll want to work through some wording to get conversions, but also, that's a skill that you'll need to build anyway.

People will also even put a credit card form on the site. See if people are actually willing to put down money. If you decide not to pursue the startup, just email them and tell them you are refunding their money.

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