Create a landing page to validate your idea/product at earlybee.io
Support EarlyBee on Product Hunt!
Day #0 — Scratching my own itch
Since I’m currently working on a Directory Listing Builder, I thought that I could get beta testers by having a private beta. But what if I got many emails? I thought that having a pre-order price would be better. But why not having both?
A few weeks ago my initial domain idea was Waitlister.co, where I’ll create a page like dircraft.waitlister.co so I immediatly bought it, talked to my wife about it and we didn’t like the domain, so we decided for EarlyBee.io 🐝.
Day #1— Friday night idea
Asked GPT to validate it
Check out my chat, https://chat.openai.com/share/e81d3b4b-45df-48f2-b5df-26fd79a3d1de.
Since I created EarlyBee using SaasRock B2B2B portals, I created this SaasRock Portals GPT Assistant (that you can use) for this type of ideas, where the customer created end-user things: in this case a landing page that collects votes, emails and/or payments.
Bought Domain
My wife and I came up with a better domain name: early*Bee*. The domains .com, .so, and .co were already taken, but .io was available.
Asked GPT to generate a logo
I also asked GPT to generate a logo for me:
I used Adobe’s PNG to SVG converter.
Then created the icon and logo in Canva.
End result:
Such a cute be 🥹.
Day 2 — Proof of concept in 4 hours
Motivated enough having a great domain name and a beautiful logo, I hacked the following demo in 2 hours. I basically started with the Portal application (what the end users will see):
TLDW: These are some landing pages I tested.
I always like creating the end-product first, by not touching the database. For example in this case I have a specific files to have example data at app/modules/earlybee/utils/fakeLandingPage.ts:
My time spent on the portal (7.5 hours):
Time tracked for the end-product
Day 3 — Build, Market, Manage
Once I was happy with the portal, I started implementing the root application, which is where the makers will sign up:
Setting up Postmark to send Transactional Emails
Watch me configure a Postmark server from scratch: https://www.loom.com/share/2bcc953d09db405986c7614382599998
Once your domain is verified, it will look like this:
And you should be able to get receive emails from your domain:
Setting up Stripe to get Payments and Subscriptions
Now, to quickly allow users to pay or subscribe to a plan, I need a Stripe account, put the secret key on my .env file, go to /admin/settings/pricing, click “Generate all plans”, and that’s it! Visitors can now subscribe at the /pricing page.
Watch me set up Stripe: https://www.loom.com/share/4df4c39b9a584361a61bf20667f41941
My time spent on the landing page management app:
Total hours: 2 hours
Pre-launch Day
My checklist today:
✅ Post EarlyBee on YouTube presenting the product
✅ Create a Product Hunt teaser
✅ Send 210 emails to SaasRock newsletter subscribers
✅ Send +1,000 emails to my Gumroad subscribers
⌛ Write this blog post
This is the design I came up with:
Let me know what you think!
Unexpected Stripe Acccount Activation Error!
I just encountered the following errors while trying to activate the production Stripe account:
Verify an identity document
“Wait 24 hours to try again”, feels like I may have to reschedule the launch for Wednesday 8th. Stripe support was not able to help in time:
Things happen 😄. But as of today, May 7th, it’s live:
This is how my inbox looks right now (1 min before PH launch):
Conclusion
I’m sooo excited that I was able to complete this project in such a short amount of time and effort. All possible because of the new SaasRock feature: Portals.
Some examples:
Get pre-orders: kickstart your project
Collect emails: start a newsletter
Get upvotes: validate a product
Learn more about building B2B2C Portal apps in saasrock here.
