Ask HN: Why do startups use third-party landing page service?

mryan · on March 26, 2011

Two reasons I can think of:

1) Someone with no coding skills can put up a nice looking page without needing a designer or programmer. Market testing an idea then becomes a lot cheaper. This happens before there is an actual "startup" with a dev team.

2) It could be cheaper/easier than building it yourself. From a managerial perspective, this could make a lot of sense. Option A is taking your dev team off the core product so they can build a landing page, integrate with MailChimp etc. Option B is paying a few dollars per month and having it done in an hour or two.

_sagacity · on March 26, 2011

Thanks for sharing your thoughts.

Further to your reason 1)

It is perfectly understandable for cases where people just want to 'market test'. What my question really concerns is not such cases but those that are more or less ready with their actual service and still use third-party landing page services.

I mean, won't it be like loosing good 'branding' opportunities for such startups?