tinysteps for tinysale: landing page done!
As I mentioned in my previous post, I’m having trouble finishing projects that I start. So, to make sure I keep going and finish my next project, I will take very small steps and document them along the way.
The Project
I’m currently selling my e-book – How To… Learn To Code. Get Your Dream Job. Change Your Life. – on Gumroad.com. Gumroad was really easy to set up, and it looks great, but there is one problem. They don’t provide good analytics. I can only see how many views my page got, and nothing else.
So I’m solving my own pain and building tinysale.co. Tinysale will have the functionality of Gumroad on the front-end but a lot more in-depth analytics on the back-end. For example, I should be able to see what sources all those views are coming from and how well each source converts into sales. I also want to add some A/B testing functionality so I can further optimize my e-book sales. Hopefully you get the point 🙂
tinysteps completed
During the past week, all I did was put up a landing page for TinySale, which collects emails of those who are interested in knowing when the product launches. As you can tell from the project description, it is a pretty substantial product that will take a while to build. Putting up a simple landing page made me feel really good about it – at least I have something out even if it’s nothing right now!
Here is what I did to put up the tinysale landing page:
- Got the tinysale.co domain
- Set up a Rails project with tests configured
- Added Twitter Bootstrap using the United Bootswatch
- Played around with different landing page designs – this took awhile since I’m not a designer. I was inspired by LaunchRock.
- Integrated SendGrid to automatically add any emails entered into the landing page form to a tinySale Launch email list – my project does not have any database migrations yet! It took about a day or two for SendGrid to unprovision my mailing account.
- Uploaded my project to Heroku and configured it to point to my new domain, tinysale.co.
- Set up a tinysale Twitter account.
- Added Google Analytics to start measuring.
Up Next
My next tiny goal is to put up the landing page for my ebook – tinysale.co/learntocode – and start selling!