LaunchRock
March 19, 2012 in 3 out of 5 stars, Free, Landing Pages, PR and PublicityWhat is it?
LaunchRock: A service that provides a pre-launch page for your startup (you know, the "signup to be notified when we launch" type of site).
Heres the one I created for a project I'm working on for startup founders (and those aspiring to be).
Who makes it?
LaunchRock
Why is it the killerest?
In addition to a nice pre-launch page, it has good social integration, encouraging those who sign up to share it with their friends via Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Tumblr or email.
There are also some modest stats telling you your conversion rate, which can be helpful.
It's fairly easy to use, and they've thought of a lot of details like a confirmation email, social integration where you can pre-seed what they say when they share, an ability to export all of your subscribers for easy loading into your favorite email sending system, and domain mapping (i.e. you can point your own URL to your page).
If you feel too constrained by their limited template, you can embed the form on your own site, where you have more latitude.
What could be improved?
They offer a very limited ability to customize the design and layout for the fully hosted version. They have custom CSS "coming soon" which should help immensely. I was able to work around some of these limitations by using inline HTML and inline styles - which seem to be supported. It's fairly amenable to a little lightweight "hacking."
How much does it cost?
Free
Rating?
Reviewed by Carson McComas
p.s. see also: Launch Effect which I liked a bit better. It's a WordPress theme with the same purpose.