tinysteps for tinysale: landing page done!

Posted on December 11th, 2012

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!

tinysale landing page

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!

Ajmal Afif

I’m looking for an email newsletter processor (or whatever term that suits best), so thanks for sharing that SendGrid link.

Have you look at https://github.com/scosman/betakit though? I find it more appealing since it has referral points, and integrate-able with other Rails app if needed to be.

MailChimp is nice but I stumbled upon one of the alternatives (used s3 or aw2, im not too sure) but can’t find em anywhere.
- Natasha Murashev
  
  Betakit looks pretty useful just for landing pages, but I’m planning to fully integrate email into my app in the long term. I chose SendGrid b/c they have a pretty good API and lots of users (they’re not going out of business tomorrow).
  
  It does have a horrible user interface, but getting used to it. I’d rather use MailChimp b/c it’s a lot easier to use on the front-end, but I think it’s more expensive and they don’t have as nice of an API. This is all I had to do to automatically add emails to sendgrid: http://sendgrid.com/docs/API%20Reference/Newsletter%20API/emails.html.
  
  Also Sendgrid is better for marketplace transactional emails vs MailChimp is better for marketing: http://www.quora.com/Which-service-is-better-SendGrid-or-Mailchimp. My app will be pretty transactional, although with some marketing down the road.
  - Ajmal Afif
    
    It never occur to me, that both has different use and context in terms of purpose.
    
    Today I learn the difference between those two. Thanks.
    
    I came from marketing and design background, MailChimp looks attractive to me, on the surface. Looking into SendGrid and how I can use it for my landing page.
Charles @ CodeConquest.com

Looking forward to it.