LaunchRock – Notice Of Your Impending Arrival

Building excitement is a key aspect of launching a successful online company these days, and LaunchRock is a tool that people can use to get that ball rolling. The easy-to-use web-application helps people create customized landing pages that promote upcoming site launches and collect important visitor data that can be used in future marketing efforts.

Promote the upcoming launch of your own business by heading to the LaunchRock site, typing in your email address, and clicking “Go.” You’ll immediately be directed to the LaunchRock Site Builder, where you can create a “coming soon” page that reflects the aesthetics and purpose of your upcoming site. Choose a theme, a background image, and the text you’d like to display. Next up is the Sharing Page, where you’ll select widgets for all the social networking platforms you’d like visitors to use to spread information about your site. All users who visit your LaunchRock page will be prompted to input their email addresses to find out when your site officially opens for business, so you’ll want to create an automated message that goes out to confirm when people have signed up to receive those notifications. After putting all the final details into the system – like a Google Analytics ID and tags, for example – you’ll want to decide whether to use LaunchRock as a hosted landing page or a widget that integrates into a site you’ve already built. Preview your creation and then hit “Launch!”

Unlike the basic “coming soon” pages you’re used to seeing before new websites have gone live, the landing pages created by LaunchRock do much more than just serve as placeholders. By using LaunchRock, you can build an email list for marketing and advertising, provide incentives for visitors to share information about your new site with their friends, and get to know certain demographic information about your visitors before your site has even gone live.

Practical Uses:

• Create a landing page that people will see before your site launches
• Collect email addresses from people who find your landing page online
• Encourage visitors to share information about your site with their friends
• Email visitors to let them know when your site has officially launched

Insider Tips:

• Users can collect demographic data and traffic information from their LaunchRock sites
• Add a Google Analytics ID to the back-end of LaunchRock to track even more data
• Create various incentives to encourage people to share information about your site
• New sites are featured on LaunchRock’s “discovery network”

What we liked:

• Anyone can build a professional looking landing page with LaunchRock
• People who’ve already developed their own landing pages can use the LaunchRock widget to collect visitor information
• Site updates and announcements can be shared on the LaunchRock status bar
• LaunchRock automatically sends confirmations to people who enter their email addresses

What we didn’t like:

• Because there is no email verification system, some of the email addresses companies collect could end up being spam

Alternatives:

• Capturely – http://www.capturely.com
• LaunchSoon – http://launchsoon.com
• Unbounce – http://unbounce.com

Company Info:

• Launched: November 2011
• Privately Held
• Headquarters: San Francisco, California
• Founded by: Jameson Detweiler, Zachary Melamed, Stephen Gill, and Thomas Knoll
• Web site: http://launchrock.com

Costs:

• Free