Former COO at PLATFORM (www.plat4m.com), member of The Slovak Alliance for Innovation Economy. Award-winning executive with 10 years of experience building digital products for startups (web and mobile).
For the past 10 years, as an executive at PLATFORM (www.plat4m.com) I have been working with US leading brands and startups. My role was to manage the entire design process starting with Product Strategy, Information Architecture, User Experience, User Interface and QA. I have been advising our clients on Product Funnel Optimisation including Activation processes, On-boarding flows, Retention and Revenue models and other industry best practices along with the CRO (Conversion Rate Optimisation). My responsibility was to deliver the functional and great looking mobile/web application that was easy to use and met client's business goals.
Here is a short part of my LinkedIn recommendation from former VP & Head of Mobile at ESPN: 'Steve Jobs once told me I only needed 2 designers on my team at ESPN. I wish I had Filip on my team back then.'
As an executive at the leading design agency (plat4m.com) I have been estimating mobile and web project past 10 years almost on daily basis. I will help you to put together the actual requirements and advice you improvements and other functionalities/screens you might forget. You can then go and shop around or let me estimate the project with my connections of professional agencies or freelancers I have been working with for several years and have my trust.
I will help you to optimise your landing page and improve the way how it converts your visitors to customers. For past 10 years I have been helping successful startups and leading brands in US to improve their marketing pages from all kinds of industries. To mention some, I have helped a multi-million business from Oregon to improve their product landing page conversions by 50% and helped startup from LA to get traction which later resulted in $20m funding.
My suggestion would be leaning towards the simplification of the process. Require only very basic data (i.e. email) and let the user to have a great first experience with your product without unnecessary friction. (I strongly recommend FB or Google signup makes it one-step process and you get much more than just an email.) To build the quality of your user database, you can ask for more details later. It's always a good practice to offer something in exchange, i.e. if user has 100% profile completion you benefit them with premium feature for certain period of time. Engaged users will take action. Not-engaged users will at least look good on paper and perhaps tells you more about your acquisition activities. If acquisition part of the product funnel works, then shift your focus to on-boarding and retention. I don't want to say that capturing more data at the beginning and maintaining quality is not a goof approach. But it's likely to require more marketing efforts (both time and money) and that is a showstopper for many startups. But if have other channels how you drive the traffic and the brand is already established, than it may work.
I hope this answer will help you. Let me know what decision you have made. Also, please feel free to reach out.
Regards, Filip
Your Product page is your Landing page. But not the only one.
You should give it a try and create landing page for a category or sub-category (i.e. women winter collection - just guessing what it might be) where you present the products in different way than it's usually possible with standard e-commerce product page (videos, animation, story telling, video testimonials, interactive elements etc.).
Then evaluate the New Landing page performance compared to standard Product page (but make sure it's still optimized and treated as Landing page).
As a former COO of the leading European design agency I am familiar with this topic. We started super-small and then become one of the most influential companies of its kind. All in 10 years.
What has been mentioned in the answers above is true. Testimonials and Referrals from happy clients are always the key and you should have them no matter what.
Although, the tools and channels I have seen working the best along with providing quality services were:
• Publishing extensive amount of work on social networks for designers • Speaking on conferences about the latest trends • Running very specific and targeted online campaigns via AdWords and Facebook. • Winning awards for the work
If you would like to know more, let me know.
