We got frustrated with how long it takes to build a site to get a creative project off the ground, so we built something better! Whether you're launching podcast, workshop, book, or company, you can now build a page for free in just a few minutes.
I'm pretty excited to share this project with you all! For the last couple years I've been frustrated with how hard it is to spin up a simple landing page for a new project. After the free landing page solutions died off and the paid products turned enterprise, I decided it was time to build our own, and make it free!
Everyone's always thought of ConvertKit as email marketing for creators, but now with landing page it's the easiest way to launch your next creative project!
A few features included at launch:
1. 30+ templates for launching your next event, podcast, book, or anything else
2. Custom domains: use our .ck.page domain or bring your own
3. Thousands of free photos directly from Unsplash
4. Thank you pages for upsells and additional actions
5. Mobile friendly designs
6. Collect additional info about each subscriber with custom fields, tags, and checkboxes
Long-term we've got a ton of new improvements planned, such as:
1. A direct integration with Instagram to pull in your photos
2. More templates (we're releasing one per week)
3. A direct integration with YouTube to bring in your videos
4. More options for background patterns and color palettes
We've had this free plan launched for free for about 5 weeks, but today we announced a brand new flow where you can build a landing page _before_ you create an account.
The landing page builder also got a cool mechanic built in where if you invite a friend then you both unlock email sending for up to 100 subscribers. Invite another friend and you'll get 100 more. Dropbox-style.
I'd love to answer any questions!
@nathanbarry I hate it when I am forced to create an account before I can see the value of a product. Kudos to you for the accountless landing page creation!
Among all the positives that this has (i.e. speed, design, simplicity) it also gets you on the runway for building THE asset for you...your email list!
If you are just starting out, these landing pages are a must!
If you have been in the game a while (like myself) these make it super quick and efficient to put together pages for JVs, webinars, and new services.
Thanks to the team there for all the hard work on this @nathanbarry
@rezzz Thanks Jason! It's been fun to see all the pages you've built for clients.
It's kinda funny, I know design and code so I could build these pages myself, but I find myself turning to ConvertKit landing pages to get it done much faster and with a better end result. Even those who know how to code are all in on no-code!
This has been such a fun project to work on! We built a system that allows us to serve a virtually unlimited number of landing pages with incredible performance, release new templates with little development effort, and continue to add new features to quickly launch your next project. If you have any questions on the technical side of things, feel free to reach out!
I got to work on the infrastructure of this product. It's a really cool problem to solve. The majority of the product is serving static HTML, js, and CSS from nginx but the most interesting part (in my opinion) is how we allow custom domains and SSL using lets encrypt.
We have some clever ways to authenticate a domain that tell us if we should or shouldn't be issuing a certificate. After passing authentication we reach out to Lets Encrypt for the certificate. We store the certificate in the filesystem and replicate it to all the necessary hosts in our fleet. Once the certificate is stored and replicated, the landing page will start handling requests immediately.
If anyone has any questions about how we have scaled, or how we will scale, this product in the future, please feel free to reach out.
Thanks for sharing @krishamoud! It was an interesting challenge to make sure we could scale to millions of pages. When you and Brendan figured out how to generate SSL certs on the fly with Lets Encrypt it was a big milestone! It's great to be able to make those work on any subdomain (e.g. nathan.ck.page) or any custom domain the user brings with them.
I love this these landing page templates.
One of the downsides of other landing page tools that I've tried is that they all sort of look the same. Which gives them that "landing page template" look.
On the other hand, these look sharp and super original. Nice work!
@backlinko Thanks Brian! We're adding more templates all the time. We partnered with a bunch of incredible designers to get a wide range of designs, so hopefully they don't look too much like templates or like they are all the same.
I work on the marketing team at ConvertKit and am so excited to share our new landing page product with you all! Over the past few years, we have seen so many new creators struggle to get their creative project launched. Other solutions have been either too expensive, overly complex, or simply not built with creators in mind.
Because we only make money when a creator successfully grows their email list, I believe we are uniquely positioned to offer something very compelling in the landing page space. We don't need to place any restrictions on the number of landing pages you have or limits on the amount of traffic you can drive to your page/s like so many of our competitors do. All we care about is helping creators succeed! When you succeed so do we.
Give our new landing page builder a shot and let us know what you think. We can't wait to see what you create!
ConvertKit helped me take my course biz from 10k to > $60k in less than 3 months. I couldn’t run my business this effectively with Mailchimp and I’m so excited to see them continue to expand their tools for creators across the spectrum!
I love ConvertKit, and have been using it for years! I am so glad they have this option for people to sign up for free! What a huge move for ConvertKit. I've used many of these pages already, and know this asset will be huge for my business and many people who consider themselves creators.
I'm so happy I switched to ConvertKit last year.
Their focus, consistent progress on building the _right_ features, and openness / transparency have reaffirmed that I've backed the right horse. Happy to be a customer and friend.
While I'm still a curmudgeon and code my own landing pages, this is a fantastic new addition that makes adding email list ingress points easier than ever.
The new ConvertKit landing page builder is a huge improvement. 👌
Lots of variety of effective layouts that actually look nice too! Nice colour pickers, links direct to Unsplash.
Made the signup for MakeNotes.co super quickly, it’s getting a decent conversion rate too!
The gold in driving your business is all about list building. Landing pages are a must and especially if you don't have a website or unsure what content people need or want. I recently launched a landing page with a video that is super unheard of or usually really complicated because we all know that how it looks on a desktop might be slightly different on a phone and voila! Check out how sleek it looks https://bit.ly/2OJa0xM
LOVE LOVE LOVE and you don't need to be a techy guru to set any of the tools. Plus the ConvertKit workshops that not only tell you but shows you how to grow your list.
Whoop Whoop!
👋Hey, I'm Tyler from the ConvertKit team, and what I love most about this builder is that it lets the most beginner of beginner creators get started without spending a dime.
So many creators default to free tools when they're starting out because that's what their non-existent budget allows – and that's fine!
The problem comes when that free tool tries to be one-size-fits-all and can't grow with you once you've gotten that first taste of success and need a bit more power.
We see some creators coming over to ConvertKit from other free tools to make this transition, but there are so many more that stay with a tool that's not built specifically for online creators of all levels simply because switching is a pain.
Now they can have their cake and eat it too: Start out for free with a simple, uncluttered tool that's both perfect for getting started *and* can grow with you as you gain momentum.
We're already seeing many more brand new creators get started with the Free Landing Page Builder, and I can't wait to see where they take their new ideas and businesses!
Like everything that ConvertKit makes, these landing pages are fast, beautiful, and easy to use.
Having worked with almost every landing page builder out there, it's a breath of fresh air to use one that's so focused on results -- effectively getting users into your email funnel.
ConvertKit obviously knows what pains creators run into when building their landing pages, and have made every step of the way easy. Small things like the Unsplash image integration, mobile-first design and upsell support makes this a required tool for any marketer.
I can't wait to see what they bring out next.
Loving the landing page builder, the # of templates that are available and the easy to follow UI. Very excited to see how you continue to make this product engaging for creators.
One of the features that originally drew me to ConvertKit (I've been a customer since 2013 I believe!) was their nicely designed embedded forms.
@nathanbarry this new release with landing pages looks great! I've been advocating for folks to use landing pages as a way to gauge interest in their projects for a while. This makes it so much easier! 🙌
I'm the Marketing Design Lead at ConvertKit and I LOVE that we have this product available now! Being able to try something before creating an account is such a great experience and I'm looking forward to seeing how this new flow performs in the user tests I run on our marketing site.
(Plus, although I am biased because I work for ConvertKit, i also use these landing pages myself as a creator. So I'm always doubly happy when we launch new templates!)
@charliprangley It also means so many people on our team can build their own page without having to come to you! Which means more time for the most important projects.
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