tl;dr - We should call the market-validating pre-launch landing pages people make “prospecting pages”.

Everyone says it, it sounds trite, but I had to figure it out for myself – 0-1 startups are many times market discovery vehicles.

Smarter entrepreneurs enter existing markets and do something better than existing incumbents, but I think even that could be phrased as “market rediscovery”. Either way, I’ve learned that I’m not one of those smart entrepreneurs!

I have learned this though – for software startups, the hard thing you’re going to be doing is finding and interacting with customers.

Yet another trite saying that I had to figure out myself and still flaunt to this day to my own detriment, never build before your validate. So some examples:

• Find 10 real customers (cold emails, phone calls, bug them in person, etc)
• Get 20 emails from a landing page (maybe this should be 100 to really be high quality signal, honestly)

I’m here today to discuss that first bit – the pre-launch landing page. It’s a possible first step in wider market validation, and I found that it doesn’t have a good name.

The simplest, laziest version of this is a page that introduces the product and asks for the user’s contact details (usually an email) or tries to collect personal information some other way.

These pages are built to validate markets (are enough people interested enough to put in their email for updates?), but I think we should call them “prospecting” pages.

I came across this because I’m adding it to my playbook for ReadySetSaaS (an API server and crop of template projects that I’ve been using to launch stuff), and I needed to figure out what to call the container (ex. landing, front-office are other programs in containers that generally need to be built/scaffolded). The “Prospecting” page (similar to the “landing” page) sounds like a good fit!

Anyway that’s it, that’s the whole post, go about your day, and next time you put up a marketing validation page, call it a “prospecting” page!