Landing pages have been around for quite some time and they have proven their value to capture leads and validate a product (idea) early on. Now, we’re in the app business. We build apps, not websites and swapit is the perfect example for this. Yet, we launched a “landing page” at www.swapit.la to capture our leads and give folks the chance to join our invite-only beta of swapit.
Last week at the HK CoCoon Pitch Semi Finals (where we rocked!) we noticed an interesting phenomenon. Some folks who saw us there didn’t talk to us. Maybe they noticed our awesome T-Shirts or our pull up banner or perhaps even listened to my 5 minutes of “fame”. Yet, not all of them listened or read carefully. So they did not go to our website www.swapit.la to sign up for our beta. Instead they went straight to Google Play and tried to download swapit from there.
I can understand where those folks come from. “It’s an app. So it’s on the App Store, right?” It’s not what we had intended, but it’s the reality of things. So we sat down (actually, I was sitting on my desk, Jonas was standing by the door and Boris was leaning on a table outside my office) and talked about this issue – and it is an issue.
As our target audience is not necessarily tech-savvy, getting them to go on a website, enter name + email address and hitting submit, might feel cumbersome or even unnecessary to them. We came to the conclusion that it makes sense to pause our current swapit beta 4 development for a short while and create a quick app we can publish on Google Play.
Swapit Landing App
We call it the swapit landing app. Similar to a landing page, it simply makes the process of requesting an invite to our swapit beta program a notch easier. But it’s an important notch. So anyone interested can now download the Swapit Beta Request app from Google Play:
http://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=la.swapit
If you’d like to check out how the app looks like, here are some screen shots:
Future Proof
Our intent, first and foremost, is to make it easier for folks to request an invite to our private swapit beta. However, at the same time we need to make sure that we can easily update this swapit landing app. This is important to not only make it convenient for us, but it is also absolutely crucial to:
- Ensure existing beta testers can easily upgrade from the swapit landing app to the swapit beta app once they have been approved and entered into the beta program;
- Ensure existing beta testers will receive a notification from Google Play, once the final public swapit release is available on Google Play; and
- Minimize our customer support effort by minimizing friction during those upgrade procedures.
So we felt it was two working days well spent to build this landing app, and therefore worth pausing the development on the actual swapit beta, which has now resumed in full steam! Stay tuned for future updates on swapit. We’re working on exciting features.
If you’d like to request an invite to our private beta of swapit, you can download the swapit landing app from Google Play or go to www.swapit.la to request your invite.
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