OnPillar’s OpenLaunch Post 1 – The Idea & Beginning Validation
What is OpenLaunch.io?
OpenLaunch.io is a platform created by /u/EOthmane designed for startups to document the journey from idea to launch of their new business. Be sure to check out their website and sign up for the newsletter at https://openlaunch.io
/u/EOthmane created the idea, and the first OpenLaunch by creating Savvit.io, a web app for keeping your saved reddit posts, organizing them and searching through them. His goal was to launch that web app’s MVP in 10 days and he met that goal.
A lot of people seemed to like the idea of OpenLaunch and wanted to follow his project from start to finish so, being one of the first official OpenLaunches after his I wanted to give everybody the same opportunity. We’ve X-posted this to /r/entrepreneur, /r/startups and /r/smallbusiness as we feel that these subreddits might show an interest in following a journey like ours.
What is onPillar?
onPillar is a customer support & communication platform built primarily for online businesses as a better alternative to email for communicating with customers.
It is the startup we will be starting as one of the first OpenLaunch campaigns. We will document our journey in great detail and answer any questions you may have along the way. Be sure to sign up for the OpenLaunch newsletter on their site and sign up for onPillar to get updates directly from us.
Getting the idea for onPillar
Ideas are born out of need, really. My business partner and I created our first business a year or so ago because of a need we had and because of that need we created Less Paper Co. – a business where we create custom work order management systems for field service businesses.
The idea for onPillar came in much the same way. Dealing with new customer’s system setups and current customers bugs, additions and changes we were running into problems using email (primarily) and phone calls as our main form of communication. With email chains in the hundreds during development we constantly had problems finding specific emails with information or emails with specific attachments in them. Many times we would spend 20-30 minutes looking through email chains trying to find a specific piece of information we talked about weeks ago with a customer.
We thought there had to be a better way and after not finding anything that worked like we were wanting it to we decided to create our own product. We figure we can’t be the only online service-providing business that primarily communicates with emails and has this problem of keeping track of conversations that can get quite lengthy.
And so the idea of onPillar was born. Our goal for onPillar is to have it be the ideal customer support & communication platform for online service businesses. Our target clients are web developers/designers, online marketers, graphic designers, copywriters, etc.
We will provide more detailed information on all of the features the onPillar MVP will have but the primary features are designed to make conversations easily viewable and searchable with all attachments saved in the cloud and easily accessible in multiple ways. You can learn more about some of the features on our landing page here in the meantime.
Beginning Validation – Landing Page Creation
Prior to spending too much time on developing a project you should always validate the idea. We have a list of ways we are going to validate the idea and will outline them below and post the results we receive from them in the next post.
Our Goal For Validation
Our goal for validation is to get at least 20 pre-registers (signing up for the invite list on our landing page) prior to beginning development of the MVP. We have set aside a $200 budget for marketing onPillar via PPC (see below) and will be doing some “free” (labor only) marketing as well via these reddit posts and content marketing via guest blog posts.
We understand we may not get the 20 pre-registers with only a $200 marketing budget and that we probably won’t even get 1 paying customer from the pre-registers we do get but should we continue with the MVP and launch the experience we gain from the trial run of the marketing budget will allow us to, hopefully, optimize our campaigns and lower our cost per conversion.
Validation Step 1: Create A Landing Page
In order to validate our idea we needed to have a landing page ready. To build a landing page we purchased the domain onPillar.com from Namecheap. We used to use GoDaddy for all of our domain names but have found Namecheap’s interface to be better and pricing to be much better than goDaddy. As our domains are close to expiration we will be porting all of our domains to Namecheap.
After purchasing the domain name we spent two days working on the landing page. We decided to create our own custom template using HTML, CSS and Javascript. It’s a simple site with a couple of sections explaining what onPillar is and how it can help businesses and their customers.
The hero background image was obtained through StockPhotoSecrets as we have the 99club package with them which gives us plenty of pretty decent stock photos for $99/year in very high resolutions.
We included a simple form at the top to collect email addresses for pre-registers that we will use to send weekly emails to with screenshots of the MVP to keep excitement about the product higher and to collect feedback throughout the development stages.
Right now we are using ZohoMail as our mail provider and will probably continue to do so as we really like Zoho products for their affordability and ease of use. The mail will mainly be used to answer any questions that come in, should any come in, and sending out the newsletters throughout the development process.
Next Validation Steps & Future Posts
Our next validation steps are going to be PPC campaigns through Facebook & Reddit along with some content marketing via guest blog posts, etc.
The next post we make will outline our targeting selections, ad creatives (with screenshots), etc, of our PPC campaigns and give results for how they went.
If you liked this post and are interested to see how things go please be sure to save this post & check for updates, sign up for the OpenLaunch newsletter and pre-register for onPillar for direct email updates with screenshots, etc.
Want to help us?
Right now we are a two-man team (myself and my business partner). Neither of us have experience in copywriting or marketing. If you have any suggestions regarding copywriting for ad creatives or our landing page please let us know. You can email us at info@onpillar.com or message us here on Reddit.
Are you an experienced marketer? Do you want to join our team? We are willing to give up equity in exchange for a marketing partner in the business – somebody who has experience in digital, social and PPC marketing. Contact us at info@onpillar.com if you think you might want the opportunity to join us as our Chief Marketing Officer. As we will be putting in the technical work for the MVP, website, etc, we would expect a CMO partner to provide some of the marketing budget until the startup is making revenue so please keep that in mind.
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May 07, 2017 at 12:56AM
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