S17 E4: Stop Building Landing Pages by Hand...Here's What's Next

Welcome back to Limited Supply, the podcast where we get deep into the tactical and strategic side of e-commerce, digital marketing, and building consumer brands. I'm your host, Nick Sharma. I've spent the last nine years building, scaling, and investing in brands, and through this show and my weekly newsletter at nick.co/email. I'm here to share everything I've learned. The wins, the losses, the experiments, the tactics, and the insights. Also you can unlock your next $100,000 in revenue. This week's episode is a good one, but before we dive in, let me tell you about our chosen sponsor for this week's episode. Here's the problem with most TV platforms. You only get access to about 20% of the inventory, which is the programmatic slice, and you can't measure it the same way that you measure meta. Tatarri fixed both. Direct publisher buys across linear and streaming, and next day attribution against CAC and Rhoaz, which is why 400+ D to C brands like Manscape, Tacovus, and Chime all run Tatarri as a TV performance channel. You should see how they do it. Check out nik.co/tatri. That's nick.co/tatarri. Welcome back to another episode of Limited Supply. And today, today I just want to ramble a bit and mainly talk about something that has come up a couple of times in the last two weeks. So I've kind of shared a little bit of what I've got going on. A little bit of it is consulting, working with brands of different sizes on just a couple of different things that I'm mostly focused on, which is usually landing pages or growth or building a better system. Sometimes it's putting a better process in place, but all in the world of D to C. The other thing is working on bringing a couple of products to market. And then the other thing I'm spending all my time in is the world of AI. So being in that world of AI and also then consulting with brands on things like landing pages or growth or whatever it is, I find myself kind of figuring out a lot of things on my own. And I think one of the fun parts about this podcast is then figuring out how do I bring those ideas to you guys and kind of just share what I'm working on. And a lot of times I find that when that happens, people go and test it out because if I'm able to do it, most people are able to do it. So people test it out and they get some cool results out of it. So that's what we're going to do today. I kind of want to just actually talk through this whole landing page building process. So I've talked about AI landing pages in the past on the podcast. And every week that goes by, there's new updates that come out in the world of AI. And there's a joke that you have to basically be unemployed to who stay up to date with the world of AI, which I guess I am a little bit to some degree. So that's why I'm here to tell you what to focus on out of everything that came out that I saw. So a couple of weeks ago, or maybe it was maybe even a month or two ago, when we were talking about AI landing pages, I think it was basically at the point of, okay, these tools are now out and you can build individual pieces of this or multiple pieces and then kind of ship it. But it wasn't like tried and tested and true. So for the last couple of weeks, I've actually just been going super deep in this. There's been a bunch of other updates. So GPT 5.6 came out, which is the latest open AI model. That model has three different versions of the model, kind of like a light, medium and heavy, which that heavy one is 5.6 sole. That competes with Claude's Fable 5, which famously got banned for two, three weeks after it first came out because it was so powerful. So that's like open AI's model that came out and it's actually very, very good. It's the first time I've connected a model into my Hermes agent, Jet, who I've talked about before and felt like, okay, Jet is now thinking two steps ahead of me. When I say something, if I ask for something or if I'm working on something, he's actually thinking two steps ahead of me and getting me more things or bringing things to me. Anyways, so those new models came out, which are also very good when it comes to design and especially very good when it comes to imagery, very hyper realistic photos with your product or your bottle or your capsules or your clothing, whatever it is, right? So that's one big update. The other one is, oh, and by the way, what's cool is one of my sponsors recently was this company Journey in my newsletter and J.U.R. and I've talked about them probably six to eight months ago before there was any kind of relationship with a newsletter. But there are a tool that I heard about from Cody Ploughker where he was saying that he was creating like listicles and hero product bundle pages using Journey. And then I checked it out and used it for a brand and thought it was pretty phenomenal. But what I actually, I guess, want to talk about too, is today how this whole process of what Journey does. Well, I guess what it is more elongated out kind of like into the process that I use. But then also which parts of that should be done by you as the marketer or the brand and which parts of this should be done by, you know, external vendors, whether it's a freelancer or an agency. So the first time this whole idea came about of, you know, how to think about this new approach of building landing pages was a few weeks ago with the Shopify additions. And more recently, you know, last week I had two phone calls. One was with a supplement brand that, you know, is doing I think 300 million online. And basically looking to figure out how they kind of cracked the code again on meta like they used to. The second one was with a brand that is doing about half a million dollars online. And you know, they've got a agency that they hired to basically help them optimize some of their web pages. And you know, the difference is I guess like the 300 million dollar brand here. They're basically, you know, they're spending a bunch. They're they're playing this game of like you acquire subscribers through meta and, you know, make money on the LTV, which is a great game to play. They have a fold like internal design team, they develop their stuff internally. So for them, their restrictions are not really like the people to execute or get the project going, but rather, you know, how do you actually like what is it that we're testing and then why and how do we measure it and how do we do it? And then the other brand is more like, you know, they're much smaller. So they have hired a external agency to essentially help them figure out like how do they just build better higher converting pages. And so, you know, as we started talking through it, I started to realize that today in today's day and age, like you could previously have done this whole thing with an external agency. But unless that agency is actually really good at the strategy and insights and research piece, you're, you know, you're very likely not going to have something that converts like it should as or it would if, you know, those pieces were done internally. And then it just got me to think like, well, with where, you know, where we are with these AI tools, it's actually a lot more restable to do most of this now in house. So, you know, when I think of landing pages, I think of this process of, you've got the idea, right? So, what's our idea for the page? Or why did it even become an idea? Then you've got the strategy. So, you know, when I think of strategy, I'm usually thinking about the angle. Who is this page for? What's the page's purpose? You know, how is this going to be different basically than other pages? And then you do the research. Now the research is where, or actually, I'll go through these pieces more in depth. But, you know, then you've got research and then you've got copywriting and then you've got UX design and then UI design and then development and then QA and then, you know, iteration. So, starting with the research piece, you know, research is where you need to dive into a bunch of first and third party data sources. Now, what are examples of this? First party data sources here would be like your customer reviews, your comments in any of your ad platforms, whether it's Facebook or TikTok or YouTube, your customer service inbound messages, whether it's questions or complaints or concerns. You know, all those three are actually very valuable to understand because, you know, you're basically trying to crack the code on what is the mindset or what is going on in people's head as they're in this journey of buying with you. Instagram or TikTok or really any social platforms, DMs, great place to source basically all the information of what is it your customers are actively thinking when they're about to make a purchase or they have concerns about kind of very similar to customer service. But I think it's a bit more, you know, closer to the battleground in terms of like what are people actually thinking in real time. If you do any events. You know, those are usually a great place to grab quotes or understand how people perceive your brand or product And then the other one I'll say is if you work with creators like if you've got whether you've got your own kind of creator army Or you just work with large influencers Or even small ones, but you know a lot of times when these people talk about your product or they're posting They're actually getting real-time feedback as well from their community about what it is that you're selling So if you're able to grab and hold on to and you know basically use any of that all of that is So those are actually all just examples of first-party data Third-party data sources, but oh, sorry. I was gonna say all of that is what you want to feed in to your to this like AI brain or in your for me it's jet for you it might be your Hermes agent It might be just cloud code or codex whatever it is Third-party data sources you want to add in well the ones I like to think about are well first I just go straight to TikTok and I'll just search the brand name of the product and I'll just start watching videos and You know you'll find ones that are really insightful and you'll find ones that are just kind of silly But what you want to do is basically grab patterns so you know either feed these into jet or your Hermes agent or whatever your AI system is I want to just start saying jet So if I say jet just receive that as you know your your AI system of choice So I usually feed that right into jet And then have jet like monitor that you can do the same for Twitter same for Reddit and then you know and YouTube of course YouTube's a big one and then of course just go to Google and just search for other places that people are talking about your product it might be like bodybuilding.com You know might be these third-party forums. It might be reviews on e-retail sites So you know maybe a different website is selling your product and you can grab the reviews from there But in either case once you find these sources you can again tell jet Hey continue to monitor these sources and see if there's new things that pop up So that's where I like to do the research or rather grab the data sources for research and then the second part of that research is You know creating like a doc. I usually like to create a Google doc that has all of the notes of the things you want to grab So for example if there's things about how you know if there's patterns of what people are saying in the reviews that they enjoy most Write that down in great detail in this Google doc if you've got a pattern of certain traits people recognize in customer reviews positively or in customer complaints through You know gorgeous or customer service then note that down as well because you want to make sure you have a counterpoint for that in this doc This doc is basically kind of like your Manifesto for this landing page and you want to put more that more things than you think you would probably need Then fewer because you want to give you know We're giving this all to jet so we want to give jet as much information as possible and as much context Because the more context it has the more it'll start to be able to think like us and when I say think like us I mean more like you know when you think about putting something on a page It's because you have that additional context right from before so the more context you can give the better chance that has to Get to those conclusions on its own Now after the research phase you've basically got this massive Google doc and The job is to then turn this into You know a wireframe with copyrighting on it now. This is usually the part that Well that not usually but well this is yeah This is usually the part that you would have to get a designer involved and You know a lot of times I would just try to build this part in Figma myself Without a designer and my wireframes are always looking super messy because you know I'm just adding in basically rectangles at text But what it did do is When I would work with the designer on the UI portion of it everything was already snapped into place How I wanted it so there wasn't this kind of back and forth of getting the wireframe in a place where it looks good and Reasonable like from my point of view as a marketer and then also doing the same for UI or sorry UX and then UI so Now what I've started to do is basically put together that you can do this two ways What I did one way where I drew it out on a piece of paper use that to turn that into a brief with Codex or a cloud code and then I'll give that to Manus to actually build the wireframe The other way to do it is you basically you know use whisper flow or willow one of those apps that are text or speech to text with AI and You basically just ideate this page and kind of speak it into Codex or cloud code turn that into a brief and then give it to Manus But in either case I found Manus is probably the best tool for helping to build wireframes More so than Claude or codex um, and I think it's just because the way that Manus works is you know Manus doesn't use its own it doesn't it's not its own model like Codex use open AI models and cloud code you use etharotic models But Manus sits on top of all the models and will take your task of building a wireframe and then divide that task into 70 sub tasks And use different models for different sub tasks to create the best possible final product and then it uses its own AI to put all those pieces together There are a lot of ctv platforms claiming they'll unlock growth for your brand But here's what most marketers don't realize. They're not all the same And choosing the wrong one is expensive most of them are programmatic ctv only which sounds good until you realize that's only about 20% of what's actually on air Tatari is different they run convergent tv which is direct streaming and linear together in one platform So you're reaching more customers across the full tv landscape on premium inventory not just a programmatic slice That's exactly how brands like man scape liquid IV and chime are driving both performance and real brand scale at the same time See how they did it at nick.co/tatari So Manus is phenomenal for apps and web pages and you know wireframes Where Manus is not good and I would say most AI is not there yet Although I think we're just Weeks or maybe a month or two away from it is much better UI design So this is usually where I would recommend so basically this process up until now right idea strategy research wireframe And copywriting that should all be done in house by you And that's kind of the punchline here of this episode is you cannot outsource this piece Because no one knows your brand better than you no one has as much context as you And I'll give you a quick example the second brand I talked to last week The they showed me a figment design of what their agency put together and then you know she showed me a Design that she put together in clawed code herself based on what she knows about the user and not only was You know from like a copywriting or just a fundamental You know page angle and punchlines like from all those standpoints It was it was way different But even from a UX standpoint like how people go about thinking through their variant selection Or you know the step-by-step process of that or what you need to know as you're going into an ad to card button All those things were fundamentally different like completely different not even close to what the agency put together And it was just another example of why this it's so important to do this piece in house if you're spending you know 10,000 to a hundred thousand to a million dollars to 10 million dollars a month on Facebook And you're driving it all to a page that you are not taking the initiative yourself To go and perfect and you're just putting it off to an agency to do This is all your fault you cannot blame the agency for not building you a high quality page right An agency is really good at the process of Executing that page but if you're if you're bringing in an agency and especially Just bringing one in for the purpose of building a landing page These are people who have not worked with you before maybe have never tried your product or even heard of your brand Then there's no way you can expect this agency to out of the blue, you know knock it out of the park They might have been able to do that for other brands, you know, maybe the people involved have domain expertise on something similar But again, they don't know your brand so that's why I can't stress enough how important it is For this whole process up through the copy And the wireframe to be done internally and especially now with Manus or Claude code you can do all of this stuff and You you barely have to lift the finger in fact you can speak most of it and it'll all get done The next piece of it is where I'd recommend you bring designers in so whether you use a freelancer a contractor You have an agency you already work with for web work You have internal designers You i design you want that to look really nice really premium really luxurious really bougie and And it also you know good you i design it's it's like a good lifestyle image on your product pages It just sets the mood, it sets the tone, and you know. It's really a big trust signal, which is something I always like to say too. That part you should do with a person, for sure. Dev highly recommend also probably doing that with a person. The only exception would be, you know, if you've already got a design system built out, like for example, we've talked about brands here who rip landing pages, you know, rip up new landing pages and get them going relatively quickly. It's because they've got a design system already in place. In that case, they don't even need the UI designer because everything's already built out. They're just swapping imagery and text usually. But unless you've got a modular system already built out, which I have seen some brands actually now doing with Framer, which is, you know, they'll have Framer kind of set up where they've built all these modules and then the marketing team can go in and just move modules around or swap things out. And or they can connect jet via API to Framer to go ahead and rearrange those pages or build new pages, etc. If you don't have that, do it with a real developer because again, it sets the tone, it sets the mood for the page. When you have a page that's properly designed and properly developed, it signals high trust, right? Because good brands would never have a bad page. Only janky brands would have a janky pages. The last piece is QA before we go to iteration. So QA is, you know, you can give this one to AI as well because you can have it stress test the page on multiple device sizes and simulations. But also, I just recommend you go in from Wi-Fi, non-Wi-Fi, iPhone, Android, small iPhone, the regular prosize iPhone, then the ProBax as well. And then of course, different laptop screen sizes. And then, you know, really here, you're looking at like pixels, our events firing as they should, are they being reported back? You know, if you have advertorial domains, you want to make sure you've both also white listed those domains in your ad platforms as well because otherwise they're going to get flagged. And then you're looking for, you know, all your buttons working and all your callouts. You know, if you've got an exit intent pop up on the page that works. If you've got an offer that pops up as you scroll the side, you know, make sure that pops up. CTAs, floating CTAs, like all the whole works, right? And then the last piece is iteration. This is where you've now got the page live. It's your driving traffic to it. And you've got something like a clarity or a heat map on it. You've got a GA4, you know, you've got, you know, busy, all these tools that are tracking the page. And then you're feeding all this back into jet as well. And jet will say, oh, you know, well, heat map absorbed that these people were spending most of the time here or that, you know, when people went this route, they were more likely to buy or, you know, your email pop up is causing people to, you know, not know what to do because the X is too small or it doesn't say no, thank you. So people just abandon the page. But all these insights that you would otherwise not see because you're not spending, you know, time looking at the recordings or just the fact that jet can do it in real time, right? Instantly. And then make these assumptions. All these things can be done by AI. And then it feeds right back into when you wireframe the second time or wireframe the third time. And it just makes it all smarter. So that's basically the system that I would use to start cranking out these pages. Now, the pages you can actually get them deployed and Shopify. You can also like if you don't don't have a developer, but you want to get these pages live and you're building listicles or much simpler, designed pages, then I would recommend you actually one build out your design system. It, you know, in GitHub, whether it's in a cloud, um, cloud or codex, you can use either actually to build the design system. Um, you can also use Manus to build yourself a brand book for scratch, like a true 80 to 100 page brand book, which is pretty amazing. You want to do this in general for any project you work on because then this becomes, you know, where you pull from. So for example, whenever I build a project, I tell any agent to pull the branding from identity.nic.co. And if you go there, you'll just see it's like a brand design book for myself, but it makes sure that any of the projects I work on have design continuity across the board. So I would recommend you do that. And then you can actually use Manus to get, you know, it's not going to be a perfect UI copy of your site unless your site's super basic, but you can get, you know, you could create avertorial pages or influencer specific landing pages that might be slightly off from from your how your main website works. And you can get these pages live pretty quickly. So yeah, so if you want by the time this episode is out, it'll be Wednesday. Hopefully some of you can listen to it and maybe build a couple of these landing pages and DM them to me. I'd love to look at them and even give some feedback or pointers or tips. I've been doing a bunch of help just over Twitter DMs, which has been a bunch of fun getting back on Twitter around this kind of stuff. So if you happen to build a page, I'd love to see it DM it to me. And, and if not, then I'd also be curious to know like why not what's stopping you from building out some of these pages. Is it like a political process thing at your company? Is it that you're unclear how to go about it? Because this is becoming a very this is something that is coming up now almost every other day or every every day. And it's something that's going to be resolved in the way that I just mentioned it or even more consolidated and simple. So if you're not getting with the times now, then you know, you might be in a bit of an uncomfortable spot later. So I'd love to help you get across that hump because I'm also going through it now. So we might as well all learn this together. All right. That was one big ramble for today's episode. I hope that it inspires you to build out a couple of these pages and test them. I I spent a night at the office last week, basically literally the whole night till about four in the morning. I was able to crank out nine adversarial and two influencer landing pages in about five or six hours. And that was kind of learning the whole process from scratch there. So I think I'll be able to do it faster. And once I perfect this process, I'm happy to talk about it here too. All right. Well, DM me on Twitter. If you've got any questions, if you want to show me what you're building, and I'll see you next week. Thanks for listening. We'll be back next time to cut through the noise on CPG retail and e-commerce. If you enjoyed this episode, why not share it with a friend and be sure to subscribe wherever you listen so you don't miss the next one.