When I have a new idea, one of the first things I want to know is whether anyone else is interested in the problem I’m solving. And the easiest way I know to do that is to create a landing page and see how many people sign up.

At this stage, the goal of my landing page is to:

• Measure interest, as a way to validate that I’ve identified a problem people care about
• Capture interest, so I can market to those that are interested later on

Since I’m focused on validating if I’ve identified a problem people care about, I need to make sure I’m clearly communicating that problem on the landing page. Rather than trying to sell, my goal is to clearly communicate the problem I’m solving and for who.

Writing a clear value proposition

I do this by writing a super clear, one-sentence value proposition statement using a formula I learned back in my consulting days:

A [type of product] that helps [target audience] achieve [target audience’s goal].

For Harold, this would have looked like, “A habit tracker that helps people who have tried habit tracking and failed to stick with it track their habits consistently.” That’s pretty wordy, so I simplified it to, “A habit tracking method you can actually stick to. For real”.

Here it is, front and center on the first version of the Harold landing page.

For Promptly I did the same thing. My value proposition was, “An automation tool for consistently tweeting #BuildInPublic content”. Again, I simplified it because my target audience was “people building in public on Twitter” so I didn’t need to say that twice.

Creating a simple landing page is my favorite way to test for problem validation.

Value Proposition vs Storytelling Approach

The Harold and Promptly landing pages follow the same style/layout. It has the name of the product, the value proposition statement, a call to action button and not much else. It’s good that it’s simple because it’s allows me to measure the interest in the idea without any other variables getting in the way.