How to design a website to validate your startup idea?
How I launched a website that over 400 potential users to join our waitlist in 2 weeks?
Background 🤘🏾
The advocacy of a creator comes from the storytelling ability originating from the craft of content creation rather than social media following.
— Mackenzie
The year 2020 introduced the world to a new reality. The pandemic caused large-scale lockdowns which changed the way our society works and makes a living. This change in the way people make a living has led to the rise of the creator economy. In short, the creator economy is about enabling people to make a living from their hobbies and passion. Social media (and frankly, the internet) powers this new emergence.
Over the past 2 years, our team at Node App has compensated over 1000 creators for their passion for content creation around food, fitness, lifestyle, and fashion. In order to enable these creators to get compensated, we had to align our company’s incentive structure more in favor of brands than creators to provide creators with opportunities. Back in November 2020, we started asking ourselves:
Taking into consideration all of our experience streamlining collabs, how would Node look like if we changed our incentive structure to purely favour creators?
Story behind CreatorLoop
From our experience working with hundreds of creators, we learned that creators struggle in selling their services to brands. By analyzing the process by which they land collaborations, we decided to focus on how creators showcase their content through various online mediums. As a result, we decided to build a website that communicates our idea with the goal of validating and getting feedback from the creator community.
This project now called CreatorLoop is an automated Media Kit builder that you can use to connect with brands and other creators for the CreatorLoop community. Our goal for this web launch was to collect data on future users using a strategy inspired by Brian Balfour’s strategy. In this blog post, I will do a deep dive into the overall strategy behind the design and approach we took to execute on CreatorLoop.
I hope you learn from our experiment!
Ultimately, we decided to focus on validating our Media Kit builder idea.
The strategy behind CreatorLoop Website 🧑🏾💻
The 3 main goals of our experiment revolved around:
Effective communication of our ideas and value proposition (Focus of this blog post)
Validation of user problem and needs
Collection of data on user demographics and willingness to pay
Web Design Strategy 🖥
In the graphic above, you can find a breakdown of the design strategy used for CreatorLoop. The purpose of setting this strategy was to be very intentional when it came to execution.
Rhetoric
On the landing, you can find this very engaging GIF of what seems like two creators producing content and gaining engagement. The goal of this animation is to connect with our audience by illustrating key components of their content creation activity: production, distribution, and engagement. This gif also looks funny and relatable which sets a friendly tone for the website.
For Ethos and Logos, you will see that the website has product images, a featured creator (yes, JiaJia Kong is a real creator!), and brands that were previously on Node. Having product mock-ups that looks like a real live product help in making the concept more credible even though the platform hasn’t been built yet. All of these various aspects combined make the website credible and factually appealing.
Positioning
In order to effectively communicate this conceptual product, we decided to adopt a messaging based on the core value propositions, key visual displays, and descriptive vocabulary. JiaJia’s experience as a creator was key in understanding what vocabulary would resonate and the product offerings that would be compelling to creators visiting our website.
By operating Node, we learned that a major pain point creators are facing is to land collabs with brands. Therefore, providing a visual of how that problem will get solved helps in making the value proposition concrete. This visual is reinforced by the text which communicates the core “Whys” of the product.
Data Collection Strategy
After the creator enters their email, they get redirected to a Typeform page in order to fill out a survey. This survey helps us understand the demographics of potentials users as well as the problems they are facing and their willingness to pay for various solutions.
Extras 🙌🏾 🙌🏾 🙌🏾
Learn more about the design process and product strategy on DesignAlpha!
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Hello! Thanks for commenting.
The website took 5 hours to build. We marketed the website for 12 days, but ~90% of the 400 surveys were completed on day 8. So as you can see, the planning and execution were very fast and effortless. This project was not about design but market validation. The data collected from the surveys can then be re-purposed (as referred to in Brian Balfour’s blog post). When the goal is to convince other stakeholders (and yourself), it's always better to prototype it quickly, show it, and get feedback. For this project, we used a minimum marketable product (MMP) to validate our idea.
Also, just to be clear, this newsletter is about entrepreneurship and startup. So the goal is to help designers become founders. When it comes to starting a tech company, other disciplines/skills like engineering, data science, sales, marketing, legal, fundraising, HR, customer success... are all very important. As a result, the next blog posts will be about these other disciplines and how a design background provides unique insights.
If you are looking for "real UX designer" content (which I assume is pure design content), go check out my 2 friends Michelle Chiu and Tiffany Eaton on Medium :). They have great pieces.
As for The Design Founder blog, the next posts will be about product strategy, systems thinking, messaging & positioning, and digital marketing.
Very truly yours,
The Design Founder
If you are a real UX designer then you should know that you don’t need to build a website to validate your idea. This is bullshit marketing crap.