I Built Five Landing Pages So I Wouldn't Have to Launch One

You'd think a landing page is one page. It's right there in the name. Singular. A page that lands. A reasonable person builds it, ships it, and moves on with their finite life.

I am not a reasonable person. I am a founder, which is a reasonable person who has discovered that building things feels better than finishing them.

So I built five. There was the dark, brooding one that says "we are serious infrastructure." There was the light one that says "but also approachable!" There was a monochrome one for when I decided color was for cowards, and then — and I want to be clear that this happened — a second monochrome one, because the first monochrome one wasn't monochrome enough. And there was a swipeable card-deck version, because some part of my brain had decided the bottleneck in enterprise revenue software was insufficient swiping.

I was A/B testing against zero people

The truly magnificent part is that I would sit there comparing them. Squinting. "Does the dark one convert better?" Convert whom, exactly? The traffic to all five pages combined was me, on localhost, refreshing.

Perfectionism is just procrastination that went to a good design school.

I told myself I was "exploring the design space." That's the phrase. It sounds so responsible. So thorough. What I was actually doing was building a beautiful, elaborate wall between me and the moment a real person sees my work and is allowed to be unimpressed.

Each new variant pushed that moment back another day, and each new variant felt like progress, because pixels were moving and my hands were busy. Busy hands are the great anesthetic of the anxious founder. You can't feel the fear of judgment if you're picking a hex code.

The math I was avoiding

Here's what I eventually admitted. The difference between my best variant and my worst was, optimistically, a few percentage points of some conversion rate I had no data for. The difference between any live page and no live page is infinite. I was agonizing over the small number while ignoring the one that was literally undefined.

Five polished pages that no one has seen is worth exactly as much as zero pages. The polish is real; the value is imaginary until a stranger loads the URL.

So I did the thing. I picked one. Not by running a sophisticated framework — I just picked the one I'd be least embarrassed to put my name on, made it live, and let the other four rot in a folder as monuments to a very productive-feeling week.

You're reading this on the survivor. It won by being shipped. That turned out to be the only criterion that mattered.

— Ridha, who still has four landing pages in a drawer and thinks about them