Practical things I check when building a landing page for an AI or SaaS product — what a visitor needs to understand and do, without the hype.
Most of the AI landing pages I've looked at (and a few I've built) fail in the same place: the visitor can't tell what the product does in the first few seconds. These are the practical things I pay attention to.
Say what it does, plainly
One sentence that finishes 'It helps ____ do ____'. If the hero copy can't do that, that's a copy problem, not a design problem. Save the feature list for lower down the page.
Show the actual product
- A real screenshot or a short demo, not an abstract illustration.
- One concrete number if you have one — users, requests handled, uptime. Only if it's real.
- The main action (sign up, waitlist, book a demo) visible without scrolling.
Make the page load fast
A heavy landing page for an AI product is a bad first impression. I keep the JavaScript small, ship images as WebP, and make sure the layout holds up on a phone. Most of this is routine for any site; it just matters more when the product is supposed to be about performance.
A waitlist that asks one useful question
Beyond an email address, one extra field — like what they want to build or how they found you — makes the first reply you send much more useful. It also filters out casual signups.
Keep the AI-talk in check
- Jargon says nothing. Describe the result, not the technology.
- Don't hide the price or the signup behind a tour of the app.
- Make it readable on a phone; that's where most people will open it.
The part I can't skip
No checklist gets you a good page on its own. What usually helps most is deciding the copy first — one clear message, one clear action — and then building the design around that.
If you're building an AI product landing page and want it made from a blank page, with a design direction you approve first, that's what I do. Free homepage mockup before any code.