DemoA fictional startup. Design, product and engineering by Built by Common Tongue

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Case study · MVP launch

Design, product and engineering, one studio.

Heirloom is a fictional startup. Common Tongue built its prelaunch site the way we build for real founders: one team shaping how it looks, deciding what it should do, and writing the code that runs it. No handoffs between three vendors, and nothing lost in translation.

01Design

As warm as a family kitchen

Bold, playful and a little handmade, so it feels like a recipe box, not a tech product.

  • Tomato red and butter yellow, with every text color checked for contrast
  • Young Serif for headlines, Figtree for reading, handwriting for grandma's notes
  • Recipe cards with tape, ink outlines and a slight tilt, like a real scrapbook
  • Drawn phone-first, because people join waitlists from a link in their texts

02Product

Join, then bring your family

A prelaunch page has two jobs: prove people want this, and get them to share it.

  • One email field to join. The recipe question is optional, and doubles as research
  • Invite three friends to skip the line, with a live spot number that moves
  • A sample card that shows the magic before the app exists
  • A founder dashboard: signups per day, where they come from, what they want saved

03Engineering

Ready to grow into the real app

Built on the same tools the full product will use, so nothing gets thrown away at launch.

  • Next.js and TypeScript on Vercel, with server-side checks on every signup
  • Referral links that credit the friend who invited you
  • Emails masked in the dashboard, even for the founder
  • Ready to connect a database, welcome emails and AI transcription for the app

A waitlist like this takes about two weeks.

  1. Week 1Kickoff, positioning and visual direction. The waitlist live on a real link by Friday.
  2. Week 2Referral loop, sample card and founder dashboard. Launch to the first 100 people.
  3. NextUse what the waitlist says people want to scope the first version of the app.

Want one of these?

A launch page like this starts at $3,000. Full MVP builds start at $15,000. You own everything.

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