EarlyBee - From idea to launch in 3 days: Landing pages to get Pre-orders, Emails or Votes

TLDR: Create a quick landing page to for your project at EarlyBee.io.

Day #0 — Scratching my own itch

Since I’m currently working on a Directory Listing Builder, I thought that I could get beta testers by having a private beta. But what if I got many emails? I thought that having a pre-order price would be better. But why not having both?

A few weeks ago my initial domain idea was Waitlister.co, where I’ll create a page like dircraft.waitlister.co so I immediatly bought it, talked to my wife about it but she didn't like the domain. So we decided for EarlyBee.io 🐝 as in early bird.

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Day #1— Friday night idea

I asked GPT to validate it

Check out the full chat log I had with GPT here.

Before I started my chat, I created a custom GPT called SaasRock Portals GPT Assistant giving it a bit of context about SaasRock B2B2B portals. This way GPT already has some basics:

• I'll use SaasRock to build the SaaS MVP

• My customers will manage their portals (in this case Landing Pages) at /app/:tenant/portals/:portal

• The portal (landing page) will be available at {subdomain}.earlybee.io (or using a custom domain)

I bought the domain

My wife and I came up with a better domain name: early*Bee*. The domains .com, .so, and .co were already taken, but .io was available.

I asked GPT to generate a logo

I also asked GPT to generate a logo for me:

1. I used Adobe’s PNG to SVG converter.

2. Then created the icon and logo in Canva.

End result:

Such a cute be 🥹.

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Day 2 — Proof of concept (4 hours)

Motivated enough having a great domain name and a beautiful logo, I hacked the following demo in 2 hours. I basically started with the Portal application (what the end users will see):

TLDW: These are some landing pages I tested.

I always like creating the end-product first, by not touching the database. For example in this case I have a specific files to have example data at app/modules/earlybee/utils/fakeLandingPage.ts:

My time spent on the portal (7.5 hours):

Time tracked for the end-product

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Day 3 — Build, Market, Manage

Once I was happy with the portal, I started implementing the root application, which is where the makers will sign up:

Setting up Postmark to send Transactional Emails

Click here to watch me configure a Postmark server from scratch.

Once your domain is verified, it will look like this:

And you should be able to get receive emails from your domain:

Setting up Stripe to get Payments and Subscriptions

Now, to quickly allow users to pay or subscribe to a plan, I need a Stripe account, put the secret key on my .env file, go to /admin/settings/pricing, click “Generate all plans”, and that’s it! Visitors can now subscribe at the /pricing page.

Click here to watch me set up Stripe.

My time spent on the landing page management app:

Total hours: 2 hours

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Pre-launch Day

My checklist today:

• ✅ Post EarlyBee on YouTube presenting the product

• ✅ Tweet about it

• ✅ Create a Product Hunt teaser

• ✅ Send 210 emails to SaasRock newsletter subscribers

• ✅ Send +1,000 emails to my Gumroad subscribers

• ⌛ Write this blog post

This is the design I came up with:

Let me know what you think!

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...Couldn't launch! Unexpected Stripe Acccount Activation Error

I just encountered the following errors while trying to activate the production Stripe account:

Verify an identity document

“Wait 24 hours to try again”, feels like I may have to reschedule the launch for Wednesday 8th. Stripe support was not able to help in time:

So I couldn't actually use Stripe connect, not even in development mode, which is essential for EarlyBee.

And they actually never responded, twice. The next day I tried again and it blocked me.

So I kind of cheated: I had an pre-activated unused Stripe account (the one for this app) so I just renamed it and changed the website details 😅.

Things happen 😄. But as of today, May 7th, it’s live:

This is how my inbox looks right now (1 min before PH launch):

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Conclusion

I’m sooo excited that I was able to complete this project in such a short amount of time and effort. All possible because of the new SaasRock feature: Portals.

Some examples:

• Get pre-orders: kickstart your project

• Collect emails: start a newsletter

• Get upvotes: validate a product

Learn more about building B2B2C apps in saasrock here.