S17 E4: Stop Building Landing Pages by Hand...Here's What's Next

0:00Nik:Welcome back to Limited Supply, the podcast where we get deep into the tactical and strategic side of e-commerce, digital marketing, and building consumer brands. I'm your host, Nik Sharma. I've spent the last nine years building, scaling, and investing in brands. And through this show and my weekly newsletter at nik.co slash email, I'm here to share everything I've learned. The wins, the losses, the experiments, the tactics, and the insights, all so you can unlock your next$100 ,000 in revenue. Today's episode is a good one, but before we dive in, let me tell you about our chosen sponsor for this week's episode.

0:34Nik:Here's the problem with most TV platforms. You only get access to about 20 % of the inventory, which is the programmatic slice. And you can't measure it the same way that you measure meta. Tatari fixed both. Direct publisher buys across linear and streaming, and next day attribution against CAC and ROAS, which is why 400 plus DTC brands like Manscaped, Tecovas, and Chime all run Tatari as a TV performance channel. You should see how they do it. Check out nik.co slash T-A-T-A-R-I. That's nik.co slash Tatari. Welcome back to another episode of Limited Supply. I'm your host, Nick Sharma. and today uh today i just want to ramble a bit and mainly kind of talk about something that has come up a couple of times in the last uh last two weeks so you know i've kind of shared a little bit of what i've got going on a little bit of it is consulting you know working with brands of different sizes on just a couple different things that i'm mostly focused on which is usually landing pages or growth or you know building a better system sometimes it's putting a better process in place, but all kind of in the world of D2C.

1:45The other thing is working on bringing a couple products to market. And then the other thing I'm spending all my time in is the world of AI. So being in that world of AI, and also then consulting with brands on things like landing pages or growth or whatever it is, I find myself kind of figuring out a lot of things on my own. and I think one of the fun parts about this podcast is then figuring out how do I bring those ideas to you guys and kind of just share what I'm working on. And a lot of times I find that when that happens, people go and test it out because, you know, if I'm able to do it, most people are able to do it.

2:27So people test it out and they get some cool results out of it. So that's what we're going to do today. I kind of want to just actually talk through this whole landing page building process. So, you know, I've talked about AI landing pages in the past on the podcast. And every week that goes by, there's new updates that come out in the world of AI. And, you know, there's a joke that you have to basically be unemployed to stay up to date with the world of AI, which I guess I am a little bit to some degree. So that's why I'm here to tell you what to focus on out of everything that came out that I saw.

3:07So a couple weeks ago, or maybe it was maybe even a month or two ago, when we were talking about AI landing pages, you know, I think it was basically at the point of, okay, these tools are now out, and you can build individual pieces of this, or multiple pieces and then kind of ship it. But it wasn't like, you know, tried and tested and true. So for the last couple weeks, I've actually just been going super deep in this, you know, there's been a bunch of other updates. So GPT 5.6 came out, which is the latest OpenAI model. That model has three different versions of the model, kind of like a light, medium and heavy, which that heavy one is 5.6 soul that competes with Claude's Fable 5, which, you know, famously got banned for like two, three weeks after it first came out because it was so powerful.

4:02So that's like OpenAI's model that came out. And it's actually very, very good. It's the first time I've connected a model into my Hermes agent, Jet, who I've talked about before, and felt like, okay, Jet is now thinking two steps ahead of me when I say something, if I ask for something, or if I'm working on something, he's actually thinking two steps ahead of me and getting me more things or bringing things to me. Anyways, so those new models came out, which are also very good when it comes to design, and especially very good when it comes to imagery, very hyper realistic photos with your product or your bottle or your capsules or your your clothing, whatever it is, right?

4:49So that's one big update. The other one is, oh, and by the way, what's cool is one of my sponsors recently was this company Journey in my newsletter. And J-U-R and I, and I've talked about them probably six to eight months ago, you know, before there was any kind of relationship with a newsletter. But there are a tool that I heard about from Cody Plofker, where he was saying that he is he was creating like listicles and hero product bundle pages using Journey. And then I checked it out and used it for a brand and thought it was pretty phenomenal. But you know, what I actually, I guess, want to talk about too, is like, today, how this whole process of what Journey does, well, I guess what it is more more elongated out kind of like into the process that I use.

5:35But then also, which parts of that should be done by you as the marketer or the brand? And which parts of this should be done by, you know, external vendors, whether it's freelancer or an agency. So the first time this whole idea came about of, you know, how to think about this new approach of building landing pages was a few weeks ago with the Shopify editions. But more recently, you know, last week I had two phone calls. One was with a supplement brand that, you know, is doing, I think, 300 million online. And basically looking to figure out how they kind of crack the code again on meta like they used to.

6:18The second one was with a brand that is doing about half a million dollars online. And, you know, they've got a agency that they hired to to basically help them optimize some of their web pages. And, you know, the difference is, I guess, like the$300 million brand here, they're basically, you know, they're spending a bunch. They're playing this game of like you acquire subscribers through meta and, you know, make money on the LTV, which is a great game to play. The, you know, they have a full like internal design team. They develop their stuff internally. So for them, their restrictions are not really like the people to execute or get the project going, but rather, you know, how do you actually like, what is it that we're testing and then why and how do we measure it and how do we do it.

7:09And, and then the other brand is more like, you know, they're, they're much smaller. So they have hired a external agency to essentially help them figure out like, how do they just build better, higher converting pages. And so, you know, as we started talking through it, I started to realize that today, in today's day and age, like you could previously have done this whole thing with an external agency. But unless that agency is actually really good at the strategy and insights and research piece, you're, you know, you're, you're very likely not going to have something that converts like it should as or, or it would, if you know, that those pieces were done internally.

7:55And then it just got me to think like, well, with where, you know, where we are with these AI tools, it's actually a lot more reasonable to do most of this now in-house. So, you know, when I think of landing pages, I think of this process of you've got the idea, right? So what's our idea for the page? Or why did it even become an idea? Then you've got the strategy. So, you know, when I think of strategy, I'm usually thinking about the angle. Who is this page for? What's the page's purpose? you know how is this going to be different basically than other pages and then you do the research now the research is where or actually i'll go through these pieces uh more in depth but you know then you've got research and then you've got copywriting and then you've got ux design and then ui design and then development and then qa and then you know iteration so starting with the research piece you know research is where you need to dive into a bunch of first and third party data sources.

8:54Now, what are examples of this first party data sources here would be like your customer reviews, your comments in any of your ad platforms, whether it's Facebook or TikTok, or YouTube, your customer service inbound messages, whether it's questions or complaints or concerns. All those three are actually very valuable to understand because you're basically trying to crack the code on what is the mindset or what is going on in people's head as they're in this journey of buying with you. Instagram or TikTok or really any social platforms, DMs, great place to source basically all the information of what is it your customers are actively thinking when they're about to make a purchase, or they have concerns about kind of very similar to customer service.

9:50But I think it's a bit more, you know, closer to the battleground in terms of like, what are people actually thinking in real time? If you do any events, you know, those are usually a great place to grab quotes, or understand how people perceive your brand or product. And then the other one I'll say is if you work with creators, like if you've got Whether you've got your own kind of creator army or you just work with large influencers or even small ones. But, you know, a lot of times when these people talk about your product or they're posting, they're actually getting real time feedback as well from their community about what it is that you're selling.

10:27So if you're able to grab and hold on to and, you know, basically use any of that, all of that is. So those are actually all just examples of first party data. Third-party data sources, but sorry, I was going to say, all of that is what you want to feed into this AI brain. For me, it's Jet. For you, it might be your Hermes agent. It might be just Cloud Code or Codex, whatever it is. Third-party data sources you want to add in, well, the ones I like to think about are, well, first I just go straight to TikTok and I'll just search the brand name of the product and I'll just start watching videos.

11:08and you'll find ones that are really insightful and you'll find ones that are just kind of silly. But what you want to do is basically grab patterns. So either feed these into Jet or your Hermes agent or whatever your AI system is. I'm going to just start saying Jet. So if I say Jet, just receive that as your AI system of choice. So I usually feed that right into Jet and then have Jet monitor that. You can do the same for Twitter, same for Reddit. And then, you know, and YouTube, of course, YouTube's a big one. And then, of course, just go to Google and just search for other places that people are talking about your product.

11:48It might be like bodybuilding.com. You know, it might be these third party forums. It might be reviews on e-retail sites. So, you know, maybe a different website is selling your product and you can grab the reviews from there. But in either case, once you find these sources, you can again tell Jet, hey, continue to monitor these sources and see if there's new things that pop up. So that's where I like to do research or rather grab the data sources for research. And then the second part of that research is, you know, creating like a doc, I usually like to create a Google Doc that has all of the notes of the things you want to grab.

12:22So for example, if there's things about how you know, if there's patterns of what people are saying in the reviews that they enjoy most, write that down in great detail in this Google Doc. If you've got a pattern of certain traits, people recognize in customer reviews positively or in customer complaints through, you know, Gorgeous or customer service, then note that down as well because you want to make sure you have a counterpoint for that in this doc. This doc is basically kind of like your manifesto for this landing page. And you want to put more things than you think you would probably need than fewer because you want to give, you know, we're giving this all to Jet.

13:03So we want to give Jet as much information as possible and as much context because the more context it has, the more it'll start to be able to think like us. And when I say think like us, I mean more like, you know, when you think about putting something on a page, it's because you have that additional context right from before. So the more context you can give, the better chance it has to get to those conclusions on its own. now after the research phase you've basically got this massive google doc and um the job is to then turn this into uh you know a wireframe with copywriting on it now this is usually the part that uh well not usually but well this is yeah this is usually the part that you would have to get a designer involved and um you know a lot of times i would just try to build this part in figma myself without a designer and my wireframes are always looking super messy because you know i'm just adding in basically rectangles and text.

13:59But what it did do is when I would work with the designer on the UI portion of it, everything was already snapped into place how I wanted it. So there wasn't this kind of back and forth of getting the wireframe in a place where it looks good and reasonable, like from my point of view as a marketer, and then also doing the same for UI or sorry, UX and then UI. So now what I've started to do is basically put together, and you can do this two ways. I did one way where I drew it out on a piece of paper, use that to turn that into a brief with Codex or Claude Code, and then I'll give that to Manus to actually build the wireframe.

14:41The other way to do it is you basically use Whisperflow or Willow, one of those apps that are speech-to-text with AI, and you basically just ideate this page and kind of speak it into Codex or Claude code, turn that into a brief and then give it to Manus. But in either case, I found Manus is probably the best tool for helping to build wireframes more so than Claude or Codex. And I think it's just because the way that Manus works is, you know, Manus doesn't use its own, it's not its own model. Like Codex, you use OpenAI models, and Cloud Code, you use Anthropic models. But Manus sits on top of all the models and will take your task of building a wireframe and then divide that task into 70 subtasks and use different models for different subtasks to create the best possible final product.

15:39And then it uses its own AI to put all those pieces together.

15:45Nik:There are a lot of CTV platforms claiming they'll unlock growth for your brand, but here's what most marketers don't realize. They're not all the same, and choosing the wrong one is expensive. Most of them are programmatic CTV only, which sounds good until you realize that's only about 20 % of what's actually on air. Tattari is different. They run convergent TV, which is direct streaming and linear together in one platform. So you're reaching more customers across the full TV landscape on premium inventory, not just the programmatic slice. That's exactly how brands like Manscaped, Liquid IV, and Chime are driving both performance and real brand scale at the same time.

16:22Nik:See how they did it at nick.co.totari.

16:29So Manus is phenomenal for apps and webpages and wireframes. Where Manus is not good, and I would say most AI is not there yet, although I think we're just weeks or maybe a month or two away from it, is much better UI design. So this is usually where I would recommend, so basically this process up until now, right? Idea, strategy, research, wireframe, and copywriting. That should all be done in-house by you. And that's kind of the punchline here of this episode is you cannot outsource this piece because no one knows your brand better than you. No one has as much context as you. And I'll give you a quick example.

17:16The second brand I talked to last week, they showed me a Figma design of what their agency put together. And then she showed me a design that she put together in Cloud Code herself based on what she knows about the user. and not only was, you know, from like a copywriting or just a fundamental, you know, page angle and punchlines, like from all those standpoints, it was way different. But even from a UX standpoint, like how people go about thinking through their variant selection

17:53Nik:or, you know, the step-by-step process of that or what you need to know as you're going into an add to cart button, all those things were fundamentally different, like completely different, not even close to what the agency put together. And it was just another example of why this, it's so important to do this piece in house. If you're spending, you know, 10 ,000 to a hundred thousand to a million dollars to$10 million a month on Facebook, and you're driving it all to a page that you are not taking the initiative yourself to go and perfect, and you're just putting it off to an agency to do, this is all your fault.

18:30You cannot blame the agency for not building you a high quality page, right? An agency is really good at the process of executing that page. But if you're bringing in an agency and especially just bringing one in for the purpose of building a landing page, these are people who have not worked with you before, maybe have never tried your product or even heard of your brand, then there's no way you can expect this agency to out of the blue, you know, knock it out of the park. They might have been able to do that for other brands, you know, maybe the people involved have domain expertise on something similar.

19:08But again, they don't know your brand. So that's why I can't stress enough how important it is for this whole process up through the copy and the wireframe to be done internally. And especially now with Manus or Cloud Code, you can do all of this stuff and you barely have to lift a finger. In fact, you can speak most of it and it'll all get done. The next piece of it is where I'd recommend you bring designers in. So whether you use a freelancer, a contractor, you have an agency you already work with for web work, you have internal designers, UI design, you want that to look really nice, really premium, really luxurious, really bougie.

19:50And it also, you know, good UI design. It's like a good lifestyle image on your product page. It just sets the mood, it sets the tone. And, you know, it's really a big trust signal, which is something I always like to say too. That part you should do with a person for sure. Dev, highly recommend also probably doing that with a person. The only exception would be, you know, if you've already got a design system built out, like for example, we've talked about brands here who rip landing pages, you know, rip up new landing pages and get them going relatively quickly. It's because they've got a design system already in place.

20:28In that case, they don't even need the UI designer because everything's already built out. They're just swapping imagery and text usually. But unless you've got a modular system already built out, which I have seen some brands actually now doing with Framer, which is, you know, they'll have Framer kind of set up where they've built all these modules. And then the marketing team can go in and just move modules around or swap things out. And or they can connect Jet via API to Framer to go ahead and rearrange those pages or build new pages, etc. If you don't have that, do it with a real developer.

21:03Because again, it sets the tone, it sets the mood for the page. When you have a page that's properly designed and properly developed, it signals high trust, right? Because good brands would never have a bad page. Only janky brands would have janky pages. The last piece is QA before we go to iteration. So QA is, you know, you can give this one to AI as well because you can have it stress test the page on multiple device sizes and simulations. but also I just recommend you go in from Wi-Fi, non-Wi-Fi, iPhone, Android, small iPhone, the regular pro size iPhone, then the Pro Max as well and then of course different laptop screen sizes and then you know really here you're looking at like pixels, are events firing as they should, are they being reported back, you know if you have advertorial domains you want to make sure you've also whitelisted those domains in your ad platforms as well because otherwise they're going to get flagged.

22:01And then you're looking for, you know, all your buttons working and all your call outs. You know, if you've got an exit intent pop up on the page, that works. If you've got an offer that pops up as you scroll the side, you know, make sure that pops up. CTAs, floating CTAs, like all the whole works, right? And then the last piece is iteration. This is where you've now got the page live. It's you're driving traffic to it. And you've got something like a clarity or a heat map on it. You've got a GA4, you know, you've got, um, what, you know, basically all these tools that are tracking the page. And then, uh, you're feeding all this back into Jet as well.

22:39And Jet will say, oh, you know, well, heat map absorbed that these people were spending most of the time here, or that, you know, when people went this route, they were more likely to buy, or, you know, your email pop-up is causing people to, you know, not know what to do because the X is too small or it doesn't say no thank you so people just abandon the page but all these insights that you would otherwise not see because you're not spending you know time looking at the recordings or just the fact that Jet can do it in real time right instantly and then make these assumptions all these things can be done by AI and then it feeds right back in to when you wireframe the second time or wireframe the third time and it just makes it all smarter so that's basically the system that I would use to start cranking out these pages.

23:28Now, the pages, you can actually get them deployed in Shopify. You can also, like if you don't have a developer, but you want to get these pages live and you're building listicles or much simpler designed pages, then I would recommend you actually, one, build out your design system in GitHub, whether it's in a Claude or Codex. You can use either actually to build the design system. You can also use Manus to build yourself a brand book from scratch, like a true 80 to 100 page brand book, which is pretty amazing. You want to do this in general for any project you work on because then this becomes where you pull from.

24:11So for example, whenever I build a project, I tell any agent to pull the branding from identity.nick.co. And if you go there, you'll just see it's like a brand design book. for myself, but it makes sure that any of the projects I work on have design continuity across the board. So I would recommend you do that. And then you can actually use Manus to get, you know, it's not going to be a perfect UI copy of your site, unless your site's super basic, but you can get, you know, you can create advertorial pages or influencer specific landing pages that might be slightly off from, from your, how your main website works.

24:48And you can get these pages live pretty quickly. So yeah, so if you want, by the time this episode is out, it'll be Wednesday. Hopefully some of you can listen to it and maybe build a couple of these landing pages and DM them to me. I'd love to look at them and even give some feedback or pointers or tips. I've been doing a bunch of help just over Twitter DMs, which has been a bunch of fun getting back on Twitter around this kind of stuff. So if you happen to build a page, I'd love to see it, DM it to me. And And if not, then I'd also be curious to know, like, why not? What's stopping you from building out some of these pages?

25:27Is it like a political process thing at your company? Is it that you're unclear how to go about it? Because this is becoming a very, this is something that is coming up now almost every other day or every day. And it's something that's going to be resolved in the way that I just mentioned it, or even more consolidated and simple. So if you're not getting with the times now, then you might be in a bit of an uncomfortable spot later. So I'd love to help you get across that hump because I'm also going through it now. So we might as well all learn this together. All right, that was one big ramble for today's episode.

26:07I hope that it inspires you to build out a couple of these pages and test them. I spent a night at the office last week, basically literally the whole night until about four in the morning. I was able to crank out nine advertorials and two influencer landing pages in about five or six hours. And that was kind of learning the whole process from scratch there. So I think I'll be able to do it faster. And once I perfect this process, I'm happy to talk about it here too. All right, well, DM me on Twitter if you've got any questions, if you want to show me what you're building. And I'll see you next week.

26:45Nik:Thanks for listening. We'll be back next time to cut through the noise on CPG, retail, and e-commerce. If you enjoyed this episode, why not share it with a friend? And be sure to subscribe wherever you listen so you don't miss the next one.