Landing page conversion case study exercise

The scenario

A founder spent a weekend building a landing page for an AI tool that turns project notes into client proposals, then posted about it in a relevant Reddit community and went to sleep. By morning, the post had 200 upvotes and a full comment thread. Over the following days, 847 people visited the landing page and 31 signed up for the waitlist. Every signup got a welcome email. Four replied. Two agreed to a short call. Neither person who took a call ended up using the product.

The landing page itself leads with speed: a headline promising proposals generated 10 times faster, bullets about saving hours and exporting to PDF. But the Reddit comments tell a different story about what people actually care about. One commenter says their best proposals are the ones they wrote themselves in a panic, not from a template. Another asks whether the tool helps with pricing at all, since that is where deals are actually lost, not the writing. A third says they would pay immediately if it learned from their own past proposals, since they already just copy and paste from old ones anyway.

Three separate drop-offs happened here, at three different stages, for what are probably three different reasons: 816 people who read the page and left, 27 of 31 signups who never replied to the welcome email, and two people who took a call and still did not use the product. Treating those as one undifferentiated failure misses what each one is actually telling you.

What you are asked to do

The exercise has five connected steps:

• Diagnose each of the three drop-off points separately and specifically, naming what likely failed at each stage rather than a single explanation applied to all of them.
• Read the Reddit comments for who they reveal the product's real ideal customer to be, distinct from who the founder originally built for, and write a one paragraph description of that person and the specific moment their pain shows up.
• Rewrite the landing page headline in 8 words or fewer, without using the words fast, faster, quick, easy, smart, or AI, leading with the real pain instead of the product's speed claim.
• Identify the weakest of the three original bullets and rewrite it as a specific, concrete outcome for the real ideal customer, not a restated feature or time saving.
• Write the re-engagement message to the 29 signups who never replied to the welcome email, honest about where things stand, asking for one specific thing rather than a generic check-in.

What a strong answer covers

The exercise's own objectives set what a strong submission has to demonstrate:

• Does the diagnosis treat the three drop-off points as genuinely different failures, each with its own specific explanation, rather than one generic story about weak messaging?
• Does the real ideal customer description come directly from language in the Reddit comments, rather than a generic restatement of the founder's original target user?
• Does the rewritten headline actually fit the word count and banned word constraints while leading with a real pain point from the comments?
• Is the rewritten bullet a specific outcome that would not have happened without the product, rather than a repackaged feature or time claim?
• Does the re-engagement message stay honest about the current state of the product, avoid over-apologizing, and ask for one specific, small thing rather than a vague check-in?

Skills this exercise practises

Separating a launch's failure into its actual stages instead of one general verdict. Reading unstructured public comments for the real customer profile hiding inside them. Rewriting copy under a hard constraint to prove you found the real insight, not just softened the old one. Writing an honest re-engagement message that asks for something small and specific instead of pretending nothing went wrong. These map onto the bootcamp's own curriculum on idea validation, defining your ICP, and launch narrative and positioning. For the discovery skill this exercise assumes, the AI discovery loop exercise from AI Prompting for Customer Discovery runs a comparable evidence-to-decision loop before a product ever launches. For the earlier validation step, see how to validate a startup idea and how to build an MVP as a solo founder.

Which bootcamp this comes from

This exercise is the practical challenge from From Idea to Launch with AI, a one week, two live session bootcamp on Builders Camp covering idea validation, defining your ICP, MVP scoping, and distribution options. Completing the practical challenge counts toward the bootcamp's completion requirement and its certificate, alongside the certification quiz.

Builders Camp runs this bootcamp both live and self-paced, included with the Builders Camp Membership alongside every other bootcamp, track, and masterclass.