By Lucie Sáblíková | 2.3.2022

GetSnack: How we built the website for our first own app

Product – 5 min read

We recently celebrated an important milestone in the history of Applifting–we launched the first version of our first ever custom app. It's called GetSnack, and it helps to manage corporate or team snack bars. We shared the process of its creation through a live case study that mapped the steps and thought process from user research to validation to legal aspects. In a new series of articles, we share more details of this personally groundbreaking project. And we'll start with the “making of” of the landing page

GetSnack was born of our internal Fridge app, where we keep track of all the snacks purchased at the office. It helps our front office colleagues with administration, billing, and stock management. During 2021, we were sharing information on social media about this nifty little piece of software, and based on the positive feedback and interest shown in a similar solution, we decided to create our first custom app for commercial use.

A bet on the fake door

The product team consisting of Martin and Roman, supplemented by our UX designer Tomáš, started implementing the steps necessary to transform our internal system for managing company snacks into a commercial app called GetSnack. 

At the very beginning, we were operating with nothing but a few people who expressed their interest in an app like this, and we needed to find out what the market was saying about it. We decided to use a landing page and a technique called fake door. What is it? In a nutshell, it's about creating the illusion that your idea already exists in the form of a product, service, or app feature. But in reality, it's all just on paper, and you're trying to see if there is any market interest to begin with—that is, before you go into expensive development or production. That's usually done with a simple website that helps you measure future user response based on their actual behavior. This is exactly what we used.

Want to know more about the fake door test and its potential risks? My colleague Roman shared his experience in a separate article

Finding the right balance

Apart from the appropriate tone of voice towards potential consumers, we were mainly concerned with how far we would let the users go within the landing page, or how much of an illusion we would create about our non-existent product. In general, the larger the illusion, the more likely people are to get angry at the moment of awakening. But on the other hand, it's also true that the further users go through the site, the stronger their interest.

The line is very thin, and we had to find a balanced and at the same time sufficiently conclusive solution. In our case, we had the prospect continue to a button with a specific quote that they had to click on—only then we got the conversion we needed. This was the moment they discovered that the app wasn't ready yet. To continue working on GetSnack, we needed to collect a few contact details as well, so we opted for an honest form of communication.

How to build a landing page

Once this was clear, our UX designer Tomáš could get to work. Being new to the team at the time, he wasn't exactly sure how GetSnack (internally Fridge) worked. So we took our current process, broke it down, and then put it back together so that its basic mechanisms could work in other companies with different setups but similar needs. We figured we'd have to find a way to make it independent of our internal management system, Corplifting, which our Fridge is tied to. And find a way we did. In addition, we also defined all the roles entering the process and the information they needed to know in order to perform any given action. All of this helped Tomáš in building the website he designed in Figma. He then created the site in Webflow. 

However, the most challenging part turned out to be localizations—German and English—because Webflow can't natively redirect to the sites we needed to get users to. This is where Filip, one of the founders of Applifting, helped us by writing the domain redirection in JavaScript. We worked on creating the fake door landing page during the summer holiday months, and in terms of graphic design, it took about two weeks of pure time.

We then had to get the landing page out to the public. That was, however, a job for our marketing team. What channels did we use and what results did we end up with? You will find out in the next article soon.

In the meantime, you can read our live case study.

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