Slap AI

Slap AI is a deliberately simple pre-launch product website for a novelty desk product inspired by frustrating or confidently wrong AI answers. The site is designed around validating interest before adding unnecessary backend complexity.

Context

For an early-stage physical product, the website has a different job from a mature application: explain the concept quickly, make the product memorable, capture demand, and give marketing experiments a measurable destination.

My role

I designed and developed the pre-launch website, conversion flow, analytics setup, signup integration, deployment, and launch-oriented content structure.

Engineering challenges

• Keep the site static while still supporting signup and preorder-oriented workflows.
• Connect an external signup endpoint without introducing a full application backend.
• Add analytics and consent handling without slowing down the landing page.
• Configure GitHub Pages and the custom domain reliably.
• Keep the product story focused enough for traffic from social posts and ads.

Architecture

The public site is built with Astro, HTML, CSS, and minimal client-side JavaScript. Signup data is handled through an external endpoint rather than a dedicated application database, which keeps the pre-launch stack small while still supporting demand validation.

Related writing

• Building Slap AI: an Astro pre-launch site on GitHub Pages
• GitHub Pages custom domain and HTTPS lessons from Slap AI
• Static website form to Google Sheets with Apps Script