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independence4 unconnected · 3 more authors in those circles
standing

contested · 7 claims against 1

applies to

b2b and consumer, no audience needed

outcome not stated

confidence

high

evidence

8 claims · 7 articles · 4 receipts

window

2016-11-29 → 2026-04-08

4 builders who never spoke to each other · contested

Start from a bought template, not a blank file

Page work competes directly with product work, and a fifteen dollar theme buys layout, typography and responsive behaviour that would otherwise cost a week. Picking a common platform also keeps the site editable later by a designer who has never seen your application code. Take the template for its structure and replace the sample photography.

Where this splits

Riley argues against starting from a template at all, preferring to draft from annotated teardowns of pages already proven to convert.

7 claims against 1

Bhanu Teja · Corey Haines · Cory Zue · Justin Welsh · Nathan Barry · Tyler Tringas

Start the page from a cheap bought template

  1. 01Start the landing page from a bought template rather than coding it, so page work does not eat the time you need for the product.
  2. 02Get the first page live on the cheapest one-page builder you can find rather than waiting on a real site.
the objection · 1 claimDru Riley

Draft from annotated teardowns of pages that convert

Draft a landing page from annotated teardowns of pages that already convert, rather than from a blank canvas or a template.

  1. 03Take borrowed design rather than designing yourself: paid and open-source templates with component libraries and responsive layouts get you a credible-looking product faster, and you can make it distinctive later.
  2. 04Buy an inexpensive SaaS landing page template instead of building an elaborate marketing page with image sliders, pricing tables, full-bleed stock photography and testimonials you do not yet have.
  3. 05Pick a landing page template for its layout and typography and ignore the sample imagery, then fade your own background photo over a solid colour so the text stays readable.

What it returned

  • $15

    Built the MDX.one page from a Wicked Templates starting point plus Tails, a Tailwind block builder inside a $15 a month DevDojo plan.

  • $19

    Haines names Carrd at $19 a year as the quickest route to something in market, against Webflow from $12 a month when you need a CMS.

  • Uses royalty-free photos from Unsplash

  • The author notes there are tens of thousands of cheap SaaS landing page themes for WordPress but few for application frameworks, and that most designers cannot deploy a Rails app

Sources

the second source

Three plays a week, for the phase you are in

No roundup of links, no news. Three tactics more than one builder arrived at separately, with the numbers each one returned and the disagreements left in.

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More in landing page

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the second source

Three plays a week, for the phase you are in

No roundup of links, no news. Three tactics more than one builder arrived at separately, with the numbers each one returned and the disagreements left in.

963 corroborated plays to draw from · 3 a week

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