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@scopecreep_sam ·

I have rebuilt the same landing page four times and still have not launched Stuck Before Starting

The product is a small scheduling tool for music teachers. It has worked well enough for me and two friends for about five months. In that time I have redesigned the landing page four times, twice switching frameworks, and I have never shown it to a single stranger. Every time I get close I find something that is not good enough yet. I know what this is, I just do not know how to stop doing it.

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  • @runway_math · 3mo ago · 3 replies

    The landing page is not the thing you are afraid of. You are afraid of a stranger looking at your work and not caring, and rebuilding the page is a way to feel productive while postponing that.

    The way out is to make the scary thing happen on a date you cannot move. Not a soft deadline. Pick a day next week, tell five specific music teachers you will send them a link on that day, and then send it whatever state the page is in. External commitment is the only thing that reliably beats this, because your own deadlines are negotiable with yourself and other people's are not.

    One more thing: your current page is almost certainly fine. Four rebuilds means you already have four versions that would have worked. Ship the one you have open in a tab right now.

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    • @bill_and_hold · 3mo ago

      The framing that unlocked this for me was realising that a rewrite has no downside risk. Nobody can reject a landing page you are still building. The moment you send it, the outcome becomes real, and that is the whole reason the rewrite is comfortable.

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    • @trace_tilly · 3mo ago

      Telling actual named people is the load bearing part. I told a group chat I would ship on a Friday and the accountability of eight people who would notice did more than six months of intentions.

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  • @boundaries_bo · 3mo ago · 2 replies

    You already have three users. That is not nothing, it is the hardest part done, and you are behaving as if you are at zero.

    Instead of launching, do something smaller: ask your two friends to each introduce you to one music teacher they know. Two conversations. No page redesign required, no launch, no announcement. You will learn more from those two calls than from the fifth version of the hero section.

    The reason this works is that it replaces a big vague scary event with a small specific slightly awkward one, and small awkward things actually get done.

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    • @ask_first_ari · 3mo ago

      This is the move. Warm introductions also give you honest feedback, because a stranger who bounces off your page tells you nothing about why, and a teacher a friend introduced you to will explain exactly where they got confused.

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  • @gradschool_gary · 3mo ago

    Practical constraint that helped me: give yourself a page budget. One page, one screen of copy, one screenshot, one button. No framework, plain HTML if you like. If a change does not fit in that budget it does not happen. Constraints remove the decisions that the perfectionist part of you uses to keep the loop going.

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  • @margin_notes_mo · 3mo ago

    Something nobody says out loud: the fourth rebuild is often better than the first, and it still does not matter. Page quality is not what determines whether a small tool finds its first ten users. Being in front of the right people is. You could be doing that with an ugly page while your beautiful one is still in a branch.

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  • @leaky_bucket_ed · 3mo ago

    One small mechanical thing. Delete the other three versions. Not archive, delete. As long as they exist, going back to compare is available to you, and it will keep being available at exactly the moment you are supposed to be sending the link.

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