How to launch a side product for a site hosted on Vercel

Question

We have a site in a niche space that is going to be completely ready to launch by end of October. In the meantime we want to launch a side product to gauge interest and to build some basic brand recognition. The way we are planning to do this is by having a subdomain off of our regular domain, hosting this product there and have a "Coming Soon" page as the homepage of our regular site. I have 2 questions regarding this:1. From a marketing/SEO perspective is this the correct way to go about it? What are some SEO considerations we should keep in mind with something like this? We don't want a situation in the future where our subdomain ends up being more popular than our regular domain. 2. How can we best do this through Vercel? As I understand it, projects on Vercel can only have one production domain. I can create another project and then link the same repository to it but that is causing its own set of problems. Is there a way to add a second production domain on Vercel or some other method that Vercel/Nextjs provides that we can use?

solardev · Accepted Answer

Not sure about the SEO... probably the subdomain will get clumped under the main one or show up as a separate listing, but there's no guarantee it will show up lower in the results. It just depends on what people are searching and Google's mood that day =/ There are probably queries that will cause the side product to rank higher (which makes sense). You can also move the side product to a subfolder instead of subdomain later on and 301 the old URLs if you want to. Not sure though.
But on the Vercel side, I think you can just add them as two separate projects, one with the root/www and the other with the subdomain? https://old.reddit.com/r/nextjs/comments/itudpi/separate_app...
Why would the two sites even share the same codebase? They sound like entirely different sites anyway? If you really want them to be in the same codebase but render something different depending on the URL, maybe https://nextjs.org/docs/pages/building-your-application/depl... or https://medium.com/@jfbaraky/using-subdomains-as-paths-on-ne.... Or ask Vercel support; even on the free plan, I've found them to be pretty helpful.