KickoffLabs Review: I’m Impressed

Upon reading a TechCrunch article the other day, I happened upon a comment by Joshua Ledgard, one of the co-founders of KickoffLabs:

I visited the site and bookmarked it for later.

My other business venture hasn’t been gaining much traction in this off-season, so in my frustration and then burst of happiness yesterday (after finally making another sale) I came up with a new business idea to test in a related industry…

In the past, this would have involved setting up a landing page in Unbounce so I could have a page to test in a couple hours.  (I would then pay to send some AdWords traffic to the page and, based on the initial response, would quickly determine whether the idea was worth pursuing.)

But instead of Unbounce, I remembered KickoffLabs and decided to give it a try.  I set up a simple landing page using the KickoffLabs tool which prompts visitors to enter their email address to join the “early notification list”.

Here’s my experience so far with KickoffLabs:

• First off, the landing page editor itself isn’t nearly as customizable as Unbounce — but this is a good thing.  KickoffLabs provides a few templates and makes page creation as simple as coming up with a headline and short description.
• Extra customizations are easily possible.  They gave sample code for hooking up AdWords conversion tracking when someone clicks to signup (the signup is an Ajax event with no new page load — so I couldn’t just copy & paste in the AdWords script).
• I was also able to easily hook in Visual Website Optimizer code to test a few different headlines.  (I don’t want to prematurely abandon an idea because of a dud headline that gets no response.)
• Best of all (feature-wise), they’ve got the whole viral thing working seamlessly.  When someone signs up with their email address, they are immediately presented with a special referral link along with a Facebook “recommend” button to tell others.  (I put in an incentive that I’m hoping will really motivate people to tell their friends.)  This type of functionality would take hours (and hours) to program myself — and this features is nowhere to be found in Unbounce.
• I ran into an issue at about 10pm at night.  One of the co-founders of the company personally emailed me to make sure I got my issue solved.
• A few minutes later, I noticed that my site was showing up on their discovery page.  This is the page that showcases the different companies using KickoffLabs for their signup pages.  I don’t like the thought of random entrepreneurs reviewing my business ideas before I’ve had much of a chance to take action yet, so I emailed KickoffLabs support to ask them how to be removed from this discovery page.  I got an email back from Scott Watermasysk (the other KickoffLabs co-founder) 20 minutes later that this wasn’t possible, but they planned to add the feature shortly.  About 30 minutes later he replied back and said: “I just deployed a feature which will enable us to (manually) exclude individual landing pages from the discovery page. I have added [your site] to this list.“  That’s amazing support right there!

The customizations I’ve mentioned above (like editing the script headers) are only available on one of their paid plans.  Here’s a trick: sign up for the free plan first.  You’ll be able to immediately sign up for a paid plan at half price for the first 2 months.  There’s at least one other service I know of that helps you create similar viral landing pages, but I certainly doubt they have co-founders that are as committed to your success.

As you can tell, I heartily recommend KickoffLabs as the first step in starting any new business venture.

(Disclaimer: I’ve used my referral link above — they give me a free month of service if you sign up.)