Just One Page

When building a product we tend to love the building part.

The problem is, products don’t sell themselves if nobody knows about them. So what we need is a 24/7 sales person to explain what you do to potential buyers.

This is also known as a website ;-)

However, if you’re anything like me, you don’t enjoy “marketing”.

Which means we don’t do it. And we get nowhere.

The trick is to convince your brain you’re not actually marketing.

How?

We engineer our marketing.

A marketing site is your storefront

Without a place, nobody knows you exist or what you do. And more importantly, without one, you have nowhere to direct your future customers to!

So the first thing you should do is create a simple website for your idea. Even if it’s just one page. Even if your product isn’t “ready”. Even if you aren’t ready.

The process of creating a simple site will help hone your thinking on who your product is for and how to present it to others.

The goal is v0.0.1.

Then iterate on it, just like you do with your product.

Treat your marketing site like your product

I update my landing pages dozens, if not hundreds, of times while iterating on an idea. Sometimes it’s just a single phrase, other times it’s entire sections or pages.

By having an artifact you can chisel away at, it brings you closer to something people (i.e. the market) will want.

Practical tools to get started

I’ve used dozens of website builders. Most suck.

The best one for simple landing pages I’ve found is Carrd. It’s $19 per year for custom domains and 10 sites. Not per month, per year.

It won’t be your forever site, but it’ll get you up and running quickly so you can start iterating.

Alternatively, you could throw something together with your coding agent of choice, but you still have to host it somewhere (Cloudflare hosting with workers is a great option).

However, unless you have decent design chops, your site will look vibe coded. Which could make it seem like your entire product is vibe coded and instantly loose credibility — not the best first impression.

The solution to this is to ground the agent in a design system.

My system of choice is Vuetify, and is why I built Nuxtify on top of it. This is what I use for all my sites (like this one) and is fully open source.

So there you have it. Two solid options for engineering your marketing.

And remember, start with just one page.