Studies
Fieldnote
A journaling app’s launch page, priced in three tiers and written to convert.
The brief
A study. Fieldnote is not a real product. It was built as a pre-launch page — the specific job of persuading someone to commit to software that does not exist yet.
A launch page has one conversion and no proof to lean on. No reviews, no user count, no free trial. Everything has to come from how clearly the idea is explained and how credible the pricing looks.
The constraints
- Nothing to demo. The product isn't built, so the interface has to be shown rather than used.
- No social proof of any kind, and inventing some would be both dishonest and, on a launch page, obviously false.
- One action. Every element either moves someone toward the waitlist or is in the way.
The decisions
Two mockups instead of a feature list
The interface is shown twice — the main view and a week view — because a journaling app is a look-and-feel purchase. Two honest mockups do more than twelve bullet points about what the app "empowers you" to do.
What it costs: mockups set an expectation the eventual product has to meet.
Pricing appears before launch, in three tiers
Free, a paid tier, and a one-off lifetime option. Most pre-launch pages hide pricing, which loses the people who would have paid and collects addresses from people who never will.
Showing it also lets the middle tier do its job: a lifetime price makes the subscription look reasonable, and the free tier makes signing up costless.
What it costs: fewer waitlist signups, and a public number that is awkward to raise later. Better than a list of people who evaporate on launch day.
The FAQ answers the objection, not the feature
What happens to my data, can I export it, what if you shut down. Pre-launch questions are about trust rather than capability, so that is what the section addresses.
What it costs: it raises risks a visitor may not have considered. Raising them first is how you get believed on the answer.
Built with
- Hand-written HTML & CSS
- Inline SVG mockups
- Native details/summary FAQ
- Cloudflare Pages
