> From building to selling - EP.08

Welcome to day eight of the Crossroad build journey! This series follows my journey of indie hacking a product from building to selling. If you missed day seven, you could check it out here. I also uploaded today's Twitch stream to YouTube if you want to watch the replay.

Finished the design. 🚀

When I looked at the designs, I made yesterday, I noticed what was not working. The dark background colors made the whole page feel closed and depressed. I needed to open things up, so that meant that I had to get rid of the background color and start using whitespace.

You can follow this link to see the final design.

As you can see, I went in a completely different direction with this design. More whitespace, a light green theme, and making the video an even more critical part of the header. The scribbly lines also make the page feel like you are following a path, the path to purchase! 😏

However, the design isn’t perfect yet. For example, the Crossroad “logo” in the navigation needs to be 2x bigger, and I need to create better images for the content. While the spacing is way better than yesterday’s version, I can make it a bit more consistent and the line height of the text.

Maybe I’ll update the design tomorrow, but I think I’ll make these changes while working on the front-end for the sake of time.

P.S. Did you know that Figma released dark mode this week? It’s incredible, dark mode everything!

Using my own product. 🛳

While working on the new header, I thought, "If I was buying any template, I am not interested in the marketing page until I've seen it in action." So, since this product is built because I have to scratch my itch (and some people on Twitter), I will create links.twankrui.com as the first site using the Crossroad template.

To prove the product works, I will set up my link in bio page before I am going to launch the product. This way, I can include the "show example" button so people know the product is actually already used in a production environment.

I plan to add a "showcase" section once other people start shipping their link in bio pages.

Offering a free version. 💲

Besides creating an income for myself, I am also learning about marketing. I need to deepen my knowledge of the field to get better at making stuff that sells and actually selling it.

I am reading a Book called "Commonsense Direct and Digital Marketing" recommended to me by my father. It's a pretty dense book, and thus far, it's been a great read.

Today I read about how companies give away free stuff to gather email addresses for leads. Sometimes, people are likely to buy from you after getting something for free. This isn't new for me, but I had to read this to come up with an idea for Crossroad.

In the pricing section, I am going to add a free option.

I need to develop a template that both include enough blocks to use as your link in bio page, but also makes you want to buy the pro version for more blocks.

This option will allow me to gather the email addresses of the people who got the free version, and then I can start to talk to these people to see if I can convert them to the lite or pro version. If not, I can still get some value in the form of feedback.

Maybe they are looking for something in a link in bio tool, that even Crossroad doesn't offer. If so, I want to know what it is.

Let’s build the landing page! 🔨

Tomorrow I am going to start coding the landing page. We’ll set up the NextJS environment and also research how we can implement the documentation for the template. Ideally, I want to have those in the same project.

So, back to coding, it is!

Thanks again for reading this build log. Have a great day, and I’ll see you tomorrow (or in my stream today)! 🚀

If you want to stay updated in the meantime, give me a follow on Twitter.

With love,

Twankrui