Launch · Lesson 7 of 8
A landing page structure you can write in two hours that says the thing plainly and gets out of the way.
4 min read
Before the next lesson
Most people who hear about your product will only ever see one screen of it. The page is not marketing wrapped around the product — for the majority of your visitors, the page is the product. Give it three hours and treat the writing as the work.
Six blocks, in this order, and nothing else:
That is the whole page. No testimonials you do not have, no logo bar of companies that have not used it, no FAQ answering questions nobody has asked yet.
The single most common mistake is naming your category instead of stating your outcome.
| Category | Promise |
|---|---|
| AI-powered expense intelligence | Photograph a receipt, get an expense line |
| A modern hiring workspace | Paste a job description, get five interview questions |
| Repository insights platform | A one-page summary of any repo, for new hires |
The right-hand column is longer, plainer, and beats the left-hand column every time — because it can be understood by someone who has never thought about your problem before, which is everyone you are about to send this to.
Say it the way you would say it to a friend at a table. Then delete the first three words, which are almost always throat-clearing.
One button, one verb, repeated verbatim at both ends of the page. "Try it free" or "Paste a link" — a description of the next physical action, not "Get started", which describes nothing.
Every additional choice on this page costs you people. A second button competing with the first does not double your options; it halves the strength of both. Save the newsletter signup, the pricing link, and the Discord invite for a version of this product that has earned a second page.
If the product can run on the page itself, let it. An input a visitor can type into converts better than any description of that input ever could.
If it cannot, use one real screenshot — cropped tight to the interesting part, taken on a real device, with real data rather than "Lorem ipsum" or "Test User 1". Fake data in a screenshot signals that the product is fake, and no amount of copy recovers from it.
Cut these on sight: seamless, revolutionary, leverage, empower, solutions, cutting-edge, game-changing, unlock. They are load-bearing in a pitch deck and dead weight on a page. Every one of them can be replaced with a specific verb, and the specific verb is always better.
Read the whole page aloud. Anything you would be embarrassed to say to a person's face comes out.
Set the page title, description, and an Open Graph image. When someone posts your link, this is the entire first impression — and a link that unfurls as a grey box with a URL for a title reads as abandoned, no matter how good the page behind it is.
A plain image with the product name and the promise on your background colour takes ten minutes and does the job completely. Then paste the link into a message to yourself and confirm it actually renders before you paste it anywhere that counts.