Show HN: Burner Page – Validate ideas with burner pages before you code
burnerpage.com
burnerpage.com
Anyways, good luck, I'm sure this will be a successful.
By the way, our working alpha name until we chose BurnerPage was KingsLanding.Page. This was never intended to be commercialized for obvious legal and branding problem reasons, but sure was a fun pop culture shoutout. :)
* I don't get workspaces. I assume they are for projects but currently there is only one workspace available so maybe a small explanation is in order.
- If I create a new page and hit the top-right Save button on the first guide page, it publishes the page with a public URL. I was expecting the app to save the current setup for further work.
- I'm not a fan of the two-column design for the dashboard as it implies there is a direct relationship between the columns, which isn't true (I'm probably thinking of a three-pane UI in Outlook where the second pane is a list of emails and the third is the contents of a specific email). I don't really see a reason for having two columns as the main layout for the dashboard.
+- I REALLY like that you can customize the sharable page URL when setting up a new page. However, the app allowed me to enter a custom slug without being on a plan (step 4), which got silently ignored and a randomly generated slug was displayed. BUT I was still able to go back and enter a custom slug in the page settings (step 4) and have it actually work as an public URL.
- Some of the pop-up windows have "Close modal" as the close button text.
- Almost every page - when in list view - has two buttons that do the exact same thing only the buttons have different designs and positions. Example: on Manage Pages (/[uid]/page), there is a purple "Create page (resume)" button at the top right corner AND a gray "+ Create a new Page" above the list of pages.
- On Manage Pages (/[uid]/page), Create a new Page gives the impression of being disabled as the text is gray set against a gray background. The same design issue occurs on other admin pages.
- I was able to set up a domain with an empty name field on https://admin.burner.page/[uid]/domain/create. I think it broke stuff because now I have one "unnamed" domain on /domain page.
- The CSS file for my test page is a whopping 500 KB.
+ I like that you can easily add a background image using Unsplash...
- ...but the Unsplash image version chosen is the biggest one, resulting in a image file that's 3.38 MB @ 6000x4000px.
- On Manage Upload, when in List view, images cannot be deleted from the drop down menu (the option is disabled).
The other issues are now in my list to address. Thank you so much for collating these. Please send me an email - I would love to send you a premium account as a thank you.
We do have a managed campaign service that helps do this part as well, as I recognize this is probably the hardest part of the learning curve in idea validation.
My goal is to let people build these pages in under 60 seconds, as I demonstrate in this video: https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/r_QHvDCsb4U
Why it matters
I think there is a good segment of entrepreneurs and product managers who don't do proper validation before running with an idea and investing their time, energy and resources in it. This is wildly risky. I can tell you from experience that if you are not using burner pages or some other form of upfront validation, you are probably not as successful as you could have been, likely by orders of magnitude.
The entire point of the app is speed and efficiency through intentional design of a single type of workflow. Instead of needing to separately learn and piece together a webpage builder, a survey builder, an analytics tool and reporting functionality, and an ad campaign manager, everything takes place in one single workflow designed for this experience.
With no code experience you should be able to:
1. Build a responsive page in under 60 seconds, with a survey and performance metrics already built in. In short, see if your target audience is actually interested and then go deeper on the learnings with them.
2. Deploy it to different ad networks via the managed campaign solution.
3. Measure the results, export the data if desired, and iterate on to the next page.
Who it's primarily for
- Founders who want to properly validate an idea or market before investing any time or money in it. Example: reseller drop-shippers on Amazon and Shopify, who are thinking of expanding into new products and want to verify user response and acquisition cost.
Who also can benefit
- Investors who want to properly diligence a specific market before investing in startups servicing it. As an angel investor myself, I can tell you that market numbers and assumptions of demand are almost always inflated in pitch decks.
- Product managers at bigger companies who want executive buy-in on new feature ideas. I was recently CPO at a publicly traded company and can tell you that this was a very big issue. Having data to back up assumptions would always win meetings.
- Growth marketing managers who want to optimize their landing page content to increase conversions with no-code A/B Testing. No need to bother the dev team if you can rapidly deploy new page ideas yourself to test content efficacy.
Why I built this
Before BurnerPage, I co-founded Worth1000 and Aviary, both successful startups. After selling Aviary to Adobe and spending a few years in corporate America at companies of different sizes, I decided to get back in the startup game. With Aviary, I had used several smoke tests to validate ideas and functionality - the best example being the fake screenshots we showed prospective customers before pivoting to the successful rocket ship that accumulated 125 million installs / 10,000 partner apps and 70 million MAU across our network.
As I was exploring new startup ideas, I needed a way to rapidly validate them and found the experience I described above to be pretty painful and clunky. So as a learning project to dust off my coding skills after more than a decade, I built a prototype and got so much benefit out of it, decided to make this app my focus to help others.
HN, how you can help:
I'm looking for some case studies, so please let me know how you have used burner pages in the past (not my service obviously, but any type of fake landing page to test and iterate). Was it successful? How did it impact your business?
Try out the app (no sign up needed if you follow the Try a demo link on the homepage!) and let me know how quickly you can build a page? Is it actually as fast an experience as my video shows?
Thanks!