Hate it with a passion, even to the point where now I make a note of them and try to use a competitor, assuming anything ever sees the light of day.

Virtually none of them have. After a few naive sign-ups I've learned better and never will again. Total waste of my time.

Does that answer your question?

Yes it does.

I'm the same and have signed up to a fair few but never hear anything back. I may be a sceptic but if I ever get a chance to put my first and last names in I always use the name of the company/website to see if my email address gets sold...

Only asking because I'm thinking of doing the same for a product of mine but don't want to annoy anyone!

@kisamoto, I understand your trepidation, I'm working on customer discovery (and the target market is startups / entrepreneurs), but posting landing pages with no utility seems a bit obnoxious - are you using Adwords / FB ads, etc to drive your TM to the landing page?

It's recommended by several people as a way to get sign-ups and gauge interest before committing time to something that may not have a market. I can see why that might be regarded as useful.

It also runs the risk of annoying exactly those people who might be your early adopters. If you think the people who are annoyed by it are just a small proportion of your intended market then it might be worth while. You have to not care about those first people - treat them as fodder to get the numbers you need to make your decision.

Feels sociopathic - it would be nice to have a method of assessing interest without something that smells of dishonesty.

Thanks for this Colin.

I think as my product is aimed at entrepreneurs and start ups it seems (albeit only 2 opinions at the moment) that this would be a negative thing to do.

Bad advertising can harm sales, yeah. But sociopathic? I think you're reeeeeeeaching too far, bro.

You've prompted me to go and double check, and here is what I've found.

Creating landing pages and implying that products exist when they don't, largely for the purpose of gaining sign-ups and assessing the potential market for such non-existent products is showing:

* a lack of empathy (they don't care how the user feels when they discover the "product" doesn't exist)

* cold-heartedness (similarly)

* egocentricity (they put their own concerns above others)

* manipulativeness (the landing page is specifically designed to manipulate the actions of the user)

* irresponsibility (implicitly claiming something exists, and not taking responsibility for their actions)

* a lack of remorse (they take the results and simply don't care).

These are many of the defining characteristics of a psychopath: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychopathy

Note that, as it says on that page, this does not imply violence, and should not be confused with being psychotic, despite the similarity in terms.

It also says in WikiPedia:

    ... the term sociopathy is preferred because
    it is less likely than is psychopathy to be
    confused with psychoticism, ...

So yes, such behavior in which someone completely disregards the effects their actions may have on others and proceeds purely on the basis of what they think is best for them is a defining characteristic of sociopathy.

@jacobedawson - No I'm not doing anything active marketing to pull users to the landing page. I definitely agree that it's obnoxious yet I spoke to a few friends of mine (primarily iphone app developers) who said it's good to get a landing page out there to get word spread early but I wanted to see what the community thought.

Thank you very much for taking the time to let me know. I think I'll wait until I've at least got a MVP before I put something there into beta.

There's nothing wrong with landing pages. Try to sell the product rather than just begging for signups though.

Bad landing pages will hurt sales, but you're all confusing the intent of landing pages with the quality of bad ones.

If they're solely giving you a landing page then it's just an advertisement isn't it? Just like those pesky ads you're tortured with on youtube when you really just want to watch a JB video...