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Comment by javery | Hacker News Reader

Use these with caution if your audience is fairly technical. I ran across a SaaS site the other day and liked how it looked, clicked on the "designed by" link and realized it was a template design. This dropped my confidence as anyone can throw up a cheap template design, what kind of attention to detail was put into the rest of the app? Is there even an app or is this just a credit card form and a nice looking template? If you are serious about your business drop the couple thousand to get a nice site designed.

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Isn't the point of the MVP that you're putting the cart before the horse on purpose? The $2,000 on design should come after you've found if there's a market for your product.

I agree on using caution with a technical audience though... perhaps using a cheapy $30 template with a little customization so you don't have to have an attribution link and it doesn't look like everything else?

Honestly I don't know why you even need a marketing site like this if you are just working on your MVP. I am working on my MVP and am just collecting emails and working directly with potential customers.

Spending a day on a brochure site gets you out there immediately. Combine it with a $50 adwords budget and you've got 2 things:

1. A concept web site to help explain what problem you solve 2. A source of leads to early adopters. Potentially invaluable.

You don't need wordpress or any cookie cutter themes to do that. Here is my page: http://adzerk.com - it cost me about $75 with my designer (although the logo design was more).

And when it comes to feedback, the handful of customer I have talked to in person (you know the customer development part) has helped me 1000% more than the hundreds of emails collected here. (most of which will never respond to your email when you send it out).

Maybe. I should go into design. Does a paragraph of text a text box and a button really go for $75?

If you think that is bad imagine how much Nike paid for just three words. (just do it)

Volume is a poor measurement of effort and value when it comes to design (and coding for that matter).

I agree. But a "couple thousand" are probably not an option if you're bootstrapping. Such templates might just work until you can invest in a custom one.

If your a technical founder and building the product yourself I don't see why you couldn't spend a couple thousand to do it right, cutting corner in design is one of the top mistakes technical founders make. Spend a week consulting and it will cover the design and more.

I smell a designer.

To your customers, there is no difference between your "design" and your "product". If I had to choose between scrimping on design and scrimping on features, I would choose the latter hands down.

Very very far from it. I pay someone to do all of my design work.

While I definitely agree that a couple thousand isn't that much, it's still more expensive than a lot of "night and weekend" entrepreneurs can afford right away.

Moral of the story: remove the "designed by" link unless you're required to keep it. The problem wasn't the template design, but that it still had the advertising link.

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