Hi, I’m Sam, co-founder of GenPage—a SaaS tool for creating personalized landing pages that boost cold outreach and ABM campaigns. This is the step-by-step journey of how we launched GenPage, gained traction, and learned invaluable lessons along the way.
Step 1: Identifying the Problem
We were running cold outreach for our first startup but struggled to convert. The market was crowded with list-building and outreach tools, making the process easier than ever, yet the results we got were underwhelming.
Our discovery:
- Generic outreach doesn’t convert.
- Deep personalization is the key to standing out.
- Affordable personalization tools didn’t exist—most solutions were expensive (5-figure+), enterprise-grade platforms like Mutiny, Drift, or Uberflip.
Our decision: Build an internal tool to create personalized landing pages that would speak to every single prospect individually. It worked so well for us that we decided to develop it further and offer it to the market.
Step 2: Building and Launching GenPage v1
How we started:
- Reused boilerplates from a previous product (Zaap AI) to build a functional MVP quickly.
- Focused on design-led branding to differentiate ourselves in a crowded market.
- Designed a clean, fluff-free UI/UX to help users get value fast.
- Added AI-powered onboarding to recognize company data, prefill fields, and reduce user effort.
What we prepared:
- Beautiful product visuals and marketing materials with our UI/UX designer.
- Automated workflows using HubSpot’s API to sync demo bookings, collect feedback, and analyze user behavior.
- SEO-optimized landing pages based on competitor keyword research with SimilarWeb and Ahrefs. Make sure to pick your top keywords and stick to them within your page’s content, meta title and description, and FAQs.
Step 3: Launching on Product Hunt
We quickly launched GenPage v1 on Product Hunt to gather feedback and early adopters.
What worked:
- Garnered 200+ upvotes and several hundred signups despite not breaking into the top 3 of the day.
- Received insightful feedback from early users to refine the product.
Lessons learned for a successful launch:
- Hire a hunter to promote your product.
- Outreach is key—mobilize your team to contact potential supporters across LinkedIn, Facebook, Telegram, and WhatsApp groups.
- Prepare your "coming soon" page 1–2 weeks ahead to build anticipation.
- Use strong visuals (logos, product screenshots, and launch videos) to boost visibility.
- Product Hunt is a 24H sprint. Get your coffee ready and be relentless with outreach and answering questions/comments on your launch page.
Step 4: Talking to Customers and Refining the Roadmap
After the Product Hunt launch, we:
- Identified our most engaged users through product analytics (e.g., activation rates, logins, and paid subscriptions).
- Talked to these users to define our ideal customer profile (ICP) and prioritized their feedback.
- Created a public roadmap using tools like Featurebase to show users where we were headed and encourage feature upvotes.
Pro Tips:
- Overcommunicate with early adopters. Let them know you’re invested in improving for them.
- Regularly update your changelog and notify users of new features via in-app alerts and email newsletters.
Step 5: Launching on AppSumo Select
A few months later, we launched GenPage on AppSumo Select, which proved to be a game-changer. Appsumo gets some flack from some founders for being unsustainable, but if your business model allows it (price per customer and usage doesn't scale too greatly), go for it. We find it to be an invaluable source of feedback and early usage of our platform which is hard to get in the early days.
What made it impactful:
- Professional beta testers from AppSumo identified critical bugs, UX issues, and feature gaps before the launch.
- Generated significant cash flow and an influx of early users.
- Leveraged AppSumo’s audience and feedback for further growth.
Tips for a successful AppSumo launch:
- Ensure your backend can handle the traffic spike.
- Have support and sales teams ready for the increased activity.
- Ask for user reviews early to boost visibility on the platform.
- Run ads to your AppSumo listing to maximize revenue potential.
Step 6: Scaling Post-Launch
With two successful launches under our belt, we:
- Used feedback to refine our roadmap for the next 6 months.
- Focused on traditional marketing channels like PPC (Meta and Twitter), email, and LinkedIn outreach.
- Optimized cold outreach with tools like Clay, LGM, RB2B, GenPage (of course) and Instantly.
Results:
- An 8% conversion rate from outreach contact to demo—a huge win for a bootstrapped team.
- Clearer understanding of our ICP and product-market fit.
Tips:
- Try many different acquisition methods at the beginning of your journey. Results vary greatly depending on your product and industry.
- Don’t get lost in vanity metrics. Measure everything, but measure efficiently. We focus only on ad spend, clicks, conversions, demos, new customers, and revenue.
- Scale what works, eliminate what doesn’t and move fast.
Key Takeaways for Founders
- Do One Thing Really Well: Keep your product clean and focused. Simplicity is your competitive edge as a small team.
- Invest in Branding and UX: A design-led product that looks and feels great can stand out in crowded markets.
- Leverage Automation: Tools like HubSpot, AI, and other integrations can save you time and improve onboarding.
- Chat GPT is Your Friend: The hours saved from mind-dumping core ideas and value into Chat GPT and letting it do the formatting and wordsmithing are invaluable.
- Talk to Customers: Early adopters are your best source of feedback and advocacy. Overcommunicate and keep them engaged.
- Create Product Documentation Early: Document everything and turn support tickets into self-learning docs to reduce the strain on support resources. It is so important early-on to be able to focus on selling and scaling rather than troubleshooting.
- Bootstrap Smartly: Launch fast, iterate often, and reinvest revenue into scaling efficiently.
What’s Next for GenPage?
We’re continually refining GenPage to help teams achieve better cold outreach results. If you’re in sales, marketing, or ABM, we’d love your feedback on our launch and how we can improve GenPage further.
Let’s build something great together 🙌
