How to Use One-Person Landing Page Tests to Find Your Differentiator (ITS Classic)

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Why This Episode Exists + Nerdy Stuff Not In The Pod 💡

Todays episode digs in on how to use landing pages to validate customers.

Landing pages tend to be a big blocker for people that haven’t done them before. They seem intimidating, so we need to make them easy.

The One Person Landing Page does this - it forces you to think in terms of a single customer and convince them you’re worth their time. Then, if you are worth their time, you find more people like them.

One Person Landing Pages often help founders jump to the next step on the entrepreneurship staircase.

Pod References

• Tacklebox

• Owl City - Fireflies

• Daniel Priestley

• Unbounce

• Score

Pod Timestamps:

00:51 Intro - Landing Pages
03:21 Circles
10:00 Smooth Jazz
10:32 The One Person Landing Page + ELU
17:45 A Chronic Pain Startup’s One Person Landing Page Test
24:56 System + The End

Transcript - Feel Free to Read it Like a Long-form Article:

Today, we’re going to help you start closing the gap between what’s in your head and your customer’s reality.

I always think about startups as a game of ping pong between you and your customer. You hit the ball to them, they hit it back, over and over. You put some stuff out in front of them, see how they respond, then do it again. That feedback loop gets you closer and closer to a thing that can work, aligning you and your customer into the same reality.

Your business, then, is a system that allows that feedback loop to scale - that helps you get more data points with less effort so that you can make decisions about what your customer actually needs. If your system helps you to know more about your customer than competitors do, you have a really good shot at building something better than your competitors can. Whoever has the clearest picture of their customer before, during, and after they interact wuth problem you’re solving wins.

Today, we’re going to talk through one of the first scalable tools that’ll help you get these critical data points- a landing page. You’ve certainly heard of landing pages, you’ve probably tried them, and, if you’re like most of the founders I speak with, you’ve done them wrong. And that’s fine. Most people think about landing pages the wrong way. After this episode, you won’t.

The right way to use landing pages is to help you make the most important early decision:

“Which customer should I start with?”

A great first customer will help you get momentum. And the most important characteristic of a great customer is that you can find them and convert them from a stranger to someone interested enough to give you an email in under six seconds.

Everything else is downstream of this moment. If you can’t find your customer and convert them, nothing else matters, so, we need to start there. The product comes after the customer, not before. If you can’t get customer’s attention, your product won’t matter.

Landing pages vet your potential customers to help you find the ones worth your time.

So, that’s what we’ll do today. We’ll go through a simple framework that’ll help you build great landing pages that test your ideas and customers and we’ll talk through a few I made for the chronic pain startup.

By the end of the pod, you’ll be the type of entrepreneur that uses landing pages to learn things about customers. You’ll be someone with a process - a system - something working while you sleep. You’ll use your landing page to tell the story of your customer.

If I were in your crocs, I’d use this pod to get a couple of landing pages up and running by the weekend. We’ll cover everything you need.

But first, we’ve got to talk about circles.

And to do that, we’ve got to go back in time.

<saved by the bell music>

The year was 2013. Diamonds by Rihanna was the top song in the country, followed closely by that Owl City you probably forgot about and I definitely forgot about but still holds up and I’ll put in the show notes. Avengers and game of thrones were the most popular movie and show because time is a flat circle, and buzzfeed tells me that the top three trends were wedge sneakers, terrariums, and mason jars.

And amidst all of those popular glass enclosures, I was running Find Your Lobster, a facebook driven dating app that started off as the only player in the space only to quickly and forcefully be joined by Tinder and Hinge and about a thousand other apps.

Things weren’t going great.

I’d moved from the city back into my parents house to save money, and our app’s differentiator - diving deep into people’s likes and interests and goals to make meaningful matches with a high probability of working out - didn’t… really matter. My grandpa always said that to be a difference a difference has to make a difference, and ours didn’t.

We’d send you a couple high quality, vetted matches each day, but, as one user summed it all up nicely in a review - “I stopped using the app the second I realized you only get three matches a day. You could get three thousand on Tinder. This ain’t rocket science.”

Plus, we were charging. They were free. We thought that people would pay for quote better matches, but no one believed we could do that because our messaging was thin - what the heck does better actually mean? Am I really going to pay more because someone else also likes the show Lost?

People didn’t, and I wasn’t delusional - I knew I wouldn’t, either.

But that was the strategy - it was how we’d built the product and the team and pitched our investors. And we were running out of cash. So changing seemed more daunting than sticking it out and dying a slow death, hoping for a miracle. The brain is funny that way.

After a particularly rough investor update, my mentor, former boss, and current investor invited me to get burgers at a place near his home in New Jersey. As we sat down with our food I blurted out how bad things were. I was terrified. I was probably going to lose this person who meant so much to me’s money.

He listened - seemingly unfazed - shrugging his shoulders here and there, and then picked up his massive burger.

“You probably just need another circle,” he said, then he took a giant bite. He kept talking as he chewed - “yeah, most problems with startups early on can be solved by adding another circle.”

I waited until he was done chewing to ask the next question -

“What are you talking about” I asked

Before he answered he took another bite. Damnit.

“Well, no one seems to think that what you do is all that great.” he bluntly, chewing. “That happens to most startups at some point early on - it’s not a big deal. Just a sign that you need to add a circle. You’ve got a good problem - people care about dating. You just need to focus on different people.

Think about each potential customer as being made up of a bunch of circles. They’re single - that’s a circle, they’re on facebook - that’s another, they live in NYC, they want to meet someone that they’ll like. Any others?”

I thought for a second. Not really.

“So your customer is the intersection of all of those circles. And that intersection isn’t very unique. It’s easy to compete with if you’re another app, and it’s easy to ignore if you’re a customer. And, you’ve got no real expertise there.”

He continued.

“You need another circle - another characteristic that matters that’ll make you significantly better for the person with that characteristic. Think about people who were successful using your app - tell me about a few of them.”

I brought up maybe 4 or 5, talking about why they liked the app, and right away we saw a glaring similarity. Nearly everyone who’d met someone they were happy with was an ex college athlete. Both sides of the couple had played college sports. This isn’t as weird as it sounds - our whole team at find your lobster were ex college athletes so the early networks on the app skewed heavily towards that.

My old boss took another bite - “It sounds like one is a friend - call him.”

“Yeah, I probably should,” I responded.

“No… like… now. On speaker. I’ve got a question to ask.”

So, we called a friend who’d used Find Your Lobster to find his now girlfriend.

“Hey,” my boss said after a pleasantry and explanation for the odd call, “why was Find Your Lobster better for you than Tinder?”

My friend thought a second, then answered. “Well, I always wanted to date another high level athlete, and the filter lets you say you like people who were college athletes. Can’t do that on Tinder.”

We got off the phone - well, there’s a possible circle, my boss said.

“Build out a landing page for a dating app that helps ex college athletes meet other ex college athletes, along with all the other circles you’ve already got, and send it to that guy. Let’s see what he says.” A day later, I had.

He responded thinking that I’d actually shifted the business to only helping ex college athletes, and he was enthusiastic “amazing - great move - I just forwarded it to all my teammates from college and my high school teammates that played in college - they’re going to love it. A bunch of people already responded saying they’d signed up for the waitlist.”

Within a week, we had more people signed up to that waitlist than we had Find Your Lobster users.

We’d added a circle.

Landing pages test your circles. They give you a space to test out different combinations of circles you’ve got in your potential customer base on a bunch of different pages and get some context as to how they perform. They give you accountability - if you build a landing page for a person and they aren’t interested, that’s a sign you can’t explain away.

Most importantly - unlike with me and find your lobster - you can do this before you’ve made the mistake of targeting the wrong customer. You can lead with this to make sure that when you do build a thing, people are excited about it.

Today, we’ll talk about building landing pages fast. In an hour. We call them OPLPs - one person landing pages - and you’ll get quick with them. They’re the first part of your system that’ll scale and give you data and help you make the big decision:

Which customer is worth your time. Which customer will overpay for something if we build it. Which customer has a bleeding neck problem we can solve.

Some episodes of Idea to Startup are storytime - kick up your feet and listen. This one is meant to spur ideas. At the end of this, I hope you’re motivated and ready to get something up and out. Today’s about executing.

So let’s do it … after …. alittle smooth jazz.

Emotion, Logistics, Urgency and The One Person Landing Page

The one person landing page is exactly what it sounds like. It’s a landing page for one person. This is a bit counterintuitive, because generally people make landing pages - or websites - so that they can attract lots of different people.

But that’s not the way to start.

The way we start is by picking someone we’ve spoken with, someone we’re sure would be a great customer, someone we’re compelled to help, hopefully someone we’ve got some unique knowledge on, and building a landing page just for them. One Tacklebox member described it as a love letter to them, which I don’t know if I totally agree with, but it’s definitely like an email. In fairness, I’ve never really understood that phrase. Someone called You’ve Got Mail a love letter to the upper west side when I’m pretty sure it was just a movie about fox books and the shop around the corner and the two greatest rom com actors of our time but what do I know.

Anyway, the one person landing page, or OPLP as we call if for short, will give us a lot of data.

The first thing we’ll do after we make it is show it to the person we made it for, without telling them we made it for them. We’ll get on a zoom call and watch them react to it live. What do they think? Is it compelling? If they aren’t interested, how the heck are we going to get anyone else interested? That’s our first test.

Then, we’ll put it in channels where we think we’ll find more people exactly like this person to see if there are more people with the same combination of circles, compelled by the same things.

The strategy for the contents of the page is driven by a framework called ELU, or Emotion, Logistics, Urgency.

There’s a guy named Daniel Priestley who I really like - I’ll pop some of his stuff in the show notes. He’s the first person I’ve heard lay out the Emotion, Logistics, Urgency framework for getting someone to do something, and I think it’s a great skeleton for a landing page.

You hook customers with emotion, you show how the logistics won’t take them far out of their existing structure or create any cognitive overhead, and then urgency is our wedge from last week - how can we create value immediately. If your page has all three, you’re in good shape. If you don’t know any of the three, go back to the subject of your OPLP and learn more.

We’ll go through each piece of the ELU and then we’ll do it. We’ll start with emotion.

—

You’ll have about six seconds to build enough trust with a customer to buy yourself another six seconds. We’ve talked about the components of trust in the past.

Trust is a see saw with specificity on one side and traction on the other.

If I see a bunch of my friends using a product and being successful with it and even if it doesn’t seem all that relevant to a problem I have, I might buy it. This is how everyone ended up with an air fryer they’ve never used. That’s the traction side of the seesaw.

The other side is specificity, and it’s the reason I have a shirt from a company that put up an ad I saw somewhere that said “you’re 6’5 and thin. An XL is too short, a double XL is too wide. We made you a shirt that’ll fit,” and I almost broke my finger purchasing it.

Specificity builds trust in the absence of traction.

I have a problem I thought was a secret - I’m a tall lanky thin guy - but their messaging told me they were in on it the whole time. And, along with a few other circles - style, pricepoint, fabric - the specificity of their messaging got me to trust them and buy a shirt.

Since you won’t have traction, you’ll need to lean into specificity to build trust. That’s where the unique circle comes in.

People love being chosen and people love being listened to and specificity indicates to your customer that you’ve done both.

The other side of emotion is understanding status level jumps.

Your customer is at point A and they’re trying to get to point B. The way to build trust is to describe point A, describe point B, and then tell your customer you’ll help them get there. Understanding all the pieces of the story they’re telling themselves will build trust.

For example, if I was making the tall guy shirts, I might say something like “you want to wear those collared short sleeve button down shirts your friends all wear to the beach, but every one you’ve bought ends up looking like a belly shirt.“ Describing a unique problem makes people feel seen.

The next pillar of an effective landing page is logistics.

Now, you shouldn’t have a product at this stage - but, you will understand your customer’s process and pain points. Especially since this is a one person landing page - you just need to describe how the customer solves the problem now, and promise you won’t take them out of that flow. You won’t create any cognitive overhead.

For example, one of my frustrations with buying nice clothes is that I can never wash them because I’m terrified they’ll shrink and turn into the aforementioned belly shirt. So, logistics might call that out - throw these shirts in the drier on hot with no fear - they’ll still go past your waist.

People make decisions based on emotion, but the logistics support that emotion - you’re giving customers the rationale for buying something they’re emotional about. It’s a potent duo.

Finally, urgency.

Plenty of people build products people want. Few are able to convert those people into customers. The answer is urgency. There are very few scenarios where people need to buy anything. Look for those scenarios.

Now, again, for the landing pages we’re building you won’t have a product yet. So, urgency is about providing value in exchange for someone’s email. And the way to do it is through solving a wedge problem.

So, again, with the tee shirts I might say something like “give us your measurements and we’ll tell you brands of hoodies and tee shirts that’ll fit your frame.” We’d collect their email, ask a few questions, then send a few brand options. Then, we have their email, can follow up, and are confident that they’re interested in the problem we’re solving.

So, the flow is straightforward.

1. Pick a customer you’ve spoken with and know well, and make them a landing page.

2. Use what you know about them to create a unique circle or two, and lean into the unique intersection to create emotion - you understand their distinct, unsolved problem and where they’ll be once they solve that problem

3. Lean into their current logistics to show that they won’t need to make any big changes - this is big for b2b products with established systems and workflows

4. Create urgency through a wedge product that they’ll get value from for providing their email immediately

5. Repeat for 3, 4, 5 customers with unique circles you’d like to test

Now, let’s do it.

The OPLP for Chronic Pain

I watched an interview once with a writer from the Simpsons, and the person doing the interviewing was clearly in awe of how many episodes this writer had cranked out. It was something like 20 seasons with 24 episodes per season.

How do you do it? they asked.

Well, the key is that writing is hard and editing is much easier. So, my process is to write out a draft as fast as humanly possible. When I reach a hole in the plot, I skip it. When there’s dialogue, I’ll write placeholders. I rush to get a draft done, because then I have a thing I can work on.

A blank page is scary. A crappy draft I can edit is not.

Landing pages are emotional. They’re scary. They’re usually the first representation of your business that you’ll put out in the world. The key is to fly through the first iteration so that you can start to edit. It’s also important to realize that the business will change so much from where you start to where you end up, and your first customers don’t need to have something perfect in front of them. It’s better if they don’t. Most founders never make it to the landing page. They misunderstand that the point isn’t to get something out that’s perfect, it’s to get anything out because the interaction with customers is what’s going to improve it.

I think of landing pages as a hunk of wood. Each pass we’re whittling away until you have something useful. Like a spoon.

This framework will make it easy to work fast.

So, here we go.

For the chronic pain idea I’m testing out - if you haven’t listened to a few previous episodes, the basic idea is that a huge percentage of people have chronic pain and I believe most can be fixed - I’ve run a bunch of interviews.

A few things - circles - keep popping up.

One, is scoliosis. Lots of people either have or had scoliosis, so they tell me that their chronic pain isn’t like other people’s and can’t be treated that way. Their spine pushes on their nerves and creates all sorts of issues. A few had surgery, others considered it. Most had bad chronic pain.

This was an interesting circle. So, let’s make a landing page for it.

There was a man I interviewed who I’ll make the page for. We’ll call him Paul, even though that isn’t his name. Paul had scoliosis and has chronic back pain that gives him headaches. He used to be really active - triathlons, marathons, college athlete - but he no longer is as the chronic pain has gotten too bad. He still sees himself as an athlete and hopes one day to get back to doing everything he did before.

So, Paul is the subject of our OPLP. The unique circles - aside from having chronic pain and being motivated to solve for it - are scoliosis and the identity of being an athlete that’s been taken away.

For today’s test, we’ll use unbounce as our landing page builder. It’s fine - they’re all pretty good. Just use whatever you think has the shallowest learning curve and will let you move fast. Unbounce is a good one if you haven’t done it before.

I grabbed a generic template - one with a header, a subheader, three blocks of text and a call to action. I might not need all of the blocks- I might delete some - but this type of template is a good one to start with.

The first thing they ask for is a company name or logo. Damn. I hadn’t thought of a name. Come on punny name, come on punny name - Got it - I stand corrected - get it? Like… your back is fixed now? And you’re standing?

Editors note, that took three days to think of but I pretended I got it on the spot.

Moving on - don’t need a logo. Just bold font for our name - I Stand Corrected. As you might’ve noticed, don’t sweat the name. You will change it 5 more times, easily.

Now we get to the big first headline - the H1. This is our chance to lean into emotions - the circles.

I think of the H1 - the header of the site - similar to how I think of a book title. The most popular business books are the ones where the title describes the outcome the reader hopes to get after reading the book. The place the book will drop them off. So, the one person million dollar startup, or the book I’m reading now, how to not die. Would love to not do that.

Your H1 does the same. Describe the outcome with a healthy dash of the unique circle. I like writing out a bunch of options - the one I landed on, at least for a test, was:

“Overcome chronic pain stemming from scoliosis so that you can get active again”

I think this will resonate with Paul. But as I read it over, I’m not sure it’s specific enough.

“Solve your scoliosis-driven chronic pain and get back to being an athlete”

I think he more envisions himself as an athlete - that’s Point B.

The h2, the line under the H1, should balance out the emotion with some logistics. The big piece of logistics for this customer is that they think normal therapy for normal chronic pain won’t work. So, here’s my h2:

“We help people get over the specific types of chronic pain scoliosis creates without surgery or pharmaceuticals. Our goal is to get you playing basketball, running triathlons, and sitting through a full day of work without pain.”

This was a huge recurring theme from interviews, both from Paul and others - they wanted to be active, they didn’t want surgery or pharmaceuticals, and they had horrible pain throughout the day when they sat at a desk.

Now, for the sake of speed, I think I’m going to delete the other text boxes and jump straight to the call to action. I was stumped on them and they don’t matter all that much.

So, for the urgency bit - the wedge - what value can I provide Paul that he’d jump at?

We talked a lot about his ergonomic setup. He mentioned a few times that he knows he should have a standup desk or treadmill desk but hadn’t figured it out yet. Maybe that.

Here’s our wedge:

“Get a workplace audit for ergonomics for people with scoliosis.

Answer a few questions about your setup and we’ll give you suggestions on how to reduce pain while you work.”

I used a product called Score which I’ll pop in the show notes. It lets you set up a quick survey - ask a few questions, then deliver an answer. It collects emails up front, so you can follow up and see who’s interested.

I don’t have any images or design and I don’t need to. Not yet. The OPLP draft one is done and it took less than 15 minutes.

Now, I need to get it in front of Paul and hear exactly what he thinks. Then, I edit it and push it in a few channels to see if I can find more people like Paul.

Whenever I review the OPLP, I always ask one question:

How could I make this 25% more about the subject? What specificity could I add to make sure this person is interested? That always makes for a more compelling OPLP.

System and The End

The goal with these is to build a bunch of them. To swap out the subject of the OPLP and the circles that make up the target.

Getting them done and getting feedback will break down the preciousness of this part of the process - feedback is the goal, so we need stuff heading out into the world.

There’s a ton more we can do and do over at Tacklebox with our members, but this should get you started.

Here are the steps:

Add a circle.

Build a one person landing page.

Follow the Emotion, Logistics, Urgency framework

Do it all fast - recognizing that each iteration is slicing the wood away until you end up with that useful spoon.

And listen to that owl city song fireflies. It’s got 757 million listens on spotify and frankly that’s not enough. And after some digging, it looks like maybe in 2013 that guy was dating taylor swift? Talk about on top of the world.

Planet earth turns slowly indeed.

This was the idea to startup podcast brought to yoou by tacklebox. If you have an idea and a FTJ, head to gettacklebox dot com and we’ll go through all the early steps with you. Apply and we can be working together in 72 hours.