I am having hard time imagining who's going to pay $5 a month for this and yet don't bother using registrar's own page editing tools, which are routinely available for free.
RSS and maillist support are nice, but I don't think they add to much value to the proposition. If I am expecting a pre-launch hype, it likely means that I have a marketing budget and therefore I can certainly host temporary landing page myself.
In other words - I'm not sure about the customer acquisition and conversion strategies. I just don't see qualified paying customers between your potential users.
Not sure if the page is a joke, but randomly I thought I'd mention you might not want to publicly "sell" equity for a venture. I don't think that goes over well with US regulators if you're in the US (I'm no lawyer, but that's what I've heard).
On http://www.launchsplash.com/designs, don't reset my color selection when I change the template selection (unless the selected color isn't available).
Tried to click on the 'register now' link, and waited about two minutes for something from 'engine27.woopra.com' to load, and got impatient. The page never loaded.
I don't want my potential users to have this kind of experience.
I would have been a potential customer, but no thanks.
the designs aren't that good, its a good idea to have a splash page, but I think its better if you do the actual design yourself. That way it'll have the same theme as your actual website. + you can provide more info like screenshots etc.
If it cost $1,000 to do it in-house and $5 to outsource it then that would definitely increase my trust and comfort level regardless of whether I was a customer or an investor.
I agree. I should have added the caveat that "if an investor or if a customer knew how you were handling this aspect of your business".
Fact of the matter is that customers and investors only see these kinds of expenses in very summary form if at all. So it's generally impossible for them to make a decision based on this kind of information.
On the other hand the total expense picture is always a factor in pricing and investment decisions and this one would play a small part in that.
However, a manager that was spending $1,000 for a launch page he/she could have deployed for free or maybe even $5 a month that manager is probably having problems with other aspects of expense management and this would show up in the final pricing and investment picture.
I'm bootstrapping my current startup, and putting up a splash page would have taken me a couple of hours to set up a slicehost server, install a simple php script, or web framework du jour, and then code and design the splash page with the "put your email in here" form.
At this point, on my day job, my time is worth $75 an hour. So, if I can save 6 minutes, I've saved myself $7.50. By spending $5 a month on launchsplash, I've saved myself about $250 worth of my time.
It's not a matter of having to use the service. It's a matter of expediency. The quickest/cheapest way to get from point a to point b for me is to outsource my splash page and email collection right now. It's not a core competency, why not outsource it?
OK. OK. I got a little carried away with my cost estimates.
But, you have to understand some of the developers I've worked with over the years. No question they would have that much into before the darn thing worked right.
RSS and maillist support are nice, but I don't think they add to much value to the proposition. If I am expecting a pre-launch hype, it likely means that I have a marketing budget and therefore I can certainly host temporary landing page myself.
In other words - I'm not sure about the customer acquisition and conversion strategies. I just don't see qualified paying customers between your potential users.