Designing a Startup Teaser Page

Recently, I have been working with Add2Paper on creating a teaser page prior to the Add2Paper U.S. launch.

Add2Paper's Website

Our purpose is to discover the level of interest in the American student market and, in particular, the level of interest by individual university.

To accomplish this goal, we need to explain to students exactly what we do in a clear and interesting fashion.

To that end, I have been scouring the web, learning everything I can about startup teaser/landing pages.
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One of the first stops I made was a Smashing Magazine article titled "Building an Effective 'Coming Soon' Page For Your Product" (http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2011/05/24/building-an-effective-coming-soon-page-for-your-product/)

This article walks through the steps of establishing an effective teaser page, focusing on four aspects of the page in particular:

• Memorability
• Virality
• Desirability
• Data Collection-Ability

I won't go through the specifics, but this excellent article goes over each topic in depth, offering a large number of examples in the process.

Another Smashing Magazine article, titled "Elements of a Viral Launch Page" (http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2011/09/01/elements-of-a-viral-launch-page/) was also extremely helpful. 

This article intimates that all launch pages should have three basic elements:

1. A clear value proposition that interests people.
2. If your strategy is stealth, then why should people care?
3. A notification form, with a bright call-to-action button

Using these two articles and several other resources as a springboard (Quora is also extremely good, so start from here if you're interested: http://www.quora.com/Which-are-the-best-startup-prelaunch-pages), I then went to work on organizing a list of the best startup teaser pages on the web.

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I first went through as many teaser pages as I could find, filling out everything I could, and clicking on all the social media links.

Here's Wooplr, a social discovery and shopping site

Bottom portion of the landing/teaser page

After inputting my email: many teaser pages are
utilizing these 'sign up your friends
and receive something' reward systems

Default tweet that Wooplr offers to
send out after clicking on the twitter link

I organized the pages, taking pictures during each step of the process, and saved them to my hard drive:

I included some folders for services that allow
you to create your own teaser pages, like
KickOffLabs, Launch Effect, and Launch Rock

Services that can be useful for teaser page designers:
MailChimp (email marketing and list manager),
 Olark (live chat and monitoring of your website
visitors), etc...

After going through dozens of these sites, I came to a certain realization: I prefer the simple, uncluttered ones the best.

Enter Cloudring, a service for managing your personal
online information: note the simple, elegant teaser page
UI design

After inputting my email, a small, unobtrusive message
pops up informing me that the beta is currently full

Cloudring log-in page

Another thing to consider are the stealth mode teaser pages, so named because they don't actually tell you about the startup's service/product.

TechCrunch has a great article about a stealth mode teaser page for the startup Hipster, titled "How a Startup Named Hipster Got 10k Signups in Two Days, Without Revealing What It Does" (http://techcrunch.com/2011/01/17/hipster-2/)

Hipster's hit stealth page, with the mysterious "Something
Cool is Coming to San Francisco" in the title

Another stealth teaser page made by the startup Lifepath was actually charging users $10 to create an account, without revealing what it was about:

Eventually, I decided to choose the best teaser pages, and place them in their own folder.

But how do you define best where teaser pages are concerned?

I came to the conclusion that there were three different ways: 

• Design (well designed teasers, all the way from the front page to social media interaction, emails, log-in pages, etc...)
• Function/Innovation (teasers that offer unique experiences or offerings, such as early access, sign-up discounts, interesting user forms, discounts, etc...)
• Mixture of Both

My best teaser folders, organized
by Design, Function, and Both

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Best by Design

Stripe is in my list of Best by Design because of its
easy, simple lay out. The one stripe across the page
really emphasizes the name and draws viewers to
the short one sentence description and email form.

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Best by Function/Innovation

Forkly entered my Best by Function/Innovation list
because of its popular viral invitation system

After leaving your email...

...the service mentions that you can attain early access by
inviting 3 of your friends through copying/pasting the
unique URL. Forkly was really a pioneer of this process
that has since become rather standard for many teaser pages.

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Best by Both

Dabble has so much to offer: an incredibly
cool, interactive landing page....

...an interesting user name competition, whereby the
person who gets the most signups wins the right to use
their chosen name (though they weren't the first to
implement this kind of feature)...

...and an interesting stealth mode teaser video.

Some other great teaser sites that have a great mixture of both function/innovation and design include Evertale (https://evertale.com/) and Sumazi (http://beta.sumazi.com/).

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Using these teaser pages as an example, we have been hard at work creating our own.

Because we want Add2Paper's U.S. teaser page to be simple and direct, a stealth mode page is out of the question, especially because the service has already been running in Korea.

However, we now firmly believe that a proper mix of design and innovation is absolutely fundamental to the success of a teaser page.

It's all a question of finding that balance.

Ajou University Presentation: May 17th

On May 17th, 2012, I was invited to give a presentation about Korean startups at Ajou University (아주대학교) in Suwon, south of Seoul.

 My presentation was part of a special seminar series featuring Dr. Moon Kim and a New York based patent attorney, Mr. Ron D'Alessandro.

The Seminar Space

I focused my presentation on my experience with Korean startups, divided into three main areas: characteristics of Korean startups, obstacles facing Korean startups, and advantages that Korea has as a country/advantages that Korean entrepreneurs possess.

The seminar started at 5 p.m. and lasted until about 7:30 in the evening.

Beneath are some excerpts of my notes from the presentation, plus my entire presentation in SlideShare format:

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My Presentation Begins

Hierarchy Confusion

-Hierarchy just means ranking system; I am talking about the way Korean business people rank their status at a company, like you have the 대표님 then 부장, etc

-But this is can be a problem at a startup company, should you address the other members of your business by their rank? What if the CEO is the youngest person?

-What language should you use at a startup (if people are younger and older, or if you’re their boss?) 높음말 or 반말?




Tied to Organizations

-The next thing I noticed is that people in Korean businesses seem to be very closely tied to the organizations they are affiliated with

-First, here’s a picture of SKY

-Being a member of one of these universities, or a another very highly rated university like Ajou, is very important in Korea, and people will rate you sometimes based on this

Early Stage Capital

-The next obstacle I want to talk about is venture finance in Korea, especially getting early stage capital

-Entrepreneurs in South Korea often struggle to raise capital

-Here are some of the top VC companies in Korea; Stonebridge, Softbank, and IDG

-Here’s a startup investment stage graph, and most of the money going to startups in Korea is going in at Round 2, Round 3, Mezzanine, even later

-These are much more conservative investments, and it’s really tough for a new startup to get capital

Path to Follow?

-The next obstacle I want to discuss is the path for startups to follow

-In the U.S., there are a number of ways to find the right path to follow if you’re a startup
.....

-All of these services help companies benchmark against other companies and track where they should be with key metrics like:

Speaking about the Path for Korean Startups to Follow

1) Customers

2) Product

3) Team (How much equity should CEO and Founders have? How about the CTO?)

4) Business Model

5) Financials (How big of an investment did this similar company get when it was at your stage? How many users did they have at the time?)

The Beginning of Dr. Moon Kim's Presentation

Advantages: Korea

-Well, I’ve been talking a lot about negative things and obstacles facing Korean companies, so for the last part, I want to talk about some of the advantages that Korea or Korean entrepreneurs have

-I think Korea is a deceptively large market,

-Many people say the market is small, but it’s not, it’s huge

-I think a lot of companies think they can solve their market problems by trying to move to a bigger market, but I think Korea is a great test bed for services, a large, very dense market with lots of purchasing power

-Now is a great time to test and scale your product/service in Korea

-The Korean government is putting a ton of money into startups, 

-Look at these government agencies like:

-Kocca, SMBA, SBA, the Seoul Metropolitan Government, Kotra, NIPA, MKE

-Many of them are involved with giving money, seed money, incubating space to startups

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Ajou University-Startups in Korea

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