🍗 I will LIVE roast your landing page TODAY in partnership with Indie Hackers [link added]

Live notes - Jul 9 @ 11am EST

Legend:
✔️Pros, and things that's done well
🍖meat on the bone, things to improve
🍗 🍗 🍗 final thoughts and side bar nuggets of gold!

• Scrapeowl https://scrapeowl.com
  feedback:
  ✔️ targetting early adopters
  🍖 buyer persona too broad
  rationale: limited budgets in early stages so focus on a niche
  ✔️ great idea, can see the tool in action right away
  🍖 include testimonials
  🍗 🍗 🍗 final thoughts: schedule a demo, try our API -> try to stick to one action

• Tractific www.tractific.com
  feedback:
  🍖don't understand the headline
  ✔️the request beta button
  ✔️saying no spam is good
  🍖question: what data are you analyzing, and how much conversion?
  🍖 lots of competition in the analytics space
  🍖 what make you unique/differentiated would help
  🍗 🍗 🍗 sidebar: what makes a good persona?
  let's give them a name
  "olly is a freelance marketer... olly has access to a company credit card... olly needs to achieve XYZ..."
  🍗 🍗 🍗 parting thoughts: interview your users

• Divjoy divjoy.com
  🍖 persona: devs who want to build their MVP faster
  🍖 questions: is it no code? what tools would they use to achieve their objective? what doubts do they need? what will they prioritize personally?
  🍗 🍗🍗 olly made a great post on buyer persona. check his blog for more details: https://www.roastmylandingpage.com/blog/buyer-persona
  ✔️quantification: 9158 codebases created -> demonstrating ability is great
  🍖 a hero image may a good idea
  🍖 not getting the wholistic picture right away
  🍖 a demo near the top would help
  🍖 then i would understand that templates meet tech stack
  🍖 embed the payment on the page. how well does the current purchase button on this page convert?
  🍖 an exit intent pop up may help
  ✔️templates are nice to look at
  🍖 a screengrab of the builder, or an abstraction of this on the homepage would help
  🍖 are these self-hosted templates? looks like it
  🍖 going back to the persona, we can quantify this as "all the grunt work for you... before divjoy, you will need to set up your services, build up your landing page, etc, etc."
  🍖 focus on benefits -> save yourself time, quantify it e.g. 50 hours per project
  🍖 people want to see and feel things before they understand it

20 minutes in, we're going to start speed these up

• JBtemplates jbtemplates.com
  ✔️selected it because he said no mercy!
  🍖 the header needs more work
  ✔️the template list looks good, bring this to the top
  people can infer from the pictures what you're trying to do
  ✔️the jokey tone "buy me a beer" is good, maybe put that call to action on the side
  ✔️payment is fully integrated, that's good
  ✔️tongue-in-cheek tone on the landing page is good for devs, indie hackers will drop $5, mom may not, of course, mom's not the buyer persona
  🍖 suggest real testimonials instead of "random dude" will improve your copywriting

• HackerStash hackerstash.com
  ✔️persona: this is a person that has an operating business and does not want to give up equity, clear
  ✔️some people in the consideration stage, or have existing funding so now comparing alternatives
  ✔️it looks like a gamified methodology of raising money
  🍖 concern is what if you never get to the top, never get money put in
  🍖 for someone who is incentive driven, would this be concerning?
  🍖 scrolling may be a bit much
  🍖 explore further how funding works, versus accountability, vs. community
  ✔️CTA action button says join 199 people-> good
  🍗 🍗 🍗 parting thoughts: "totally ignore everything i said, and get on calls with those 199 people - they will tell you the problems they have with raising finance, and the challenges they have. then your wording will resonate with them"

• PackBrand packbrand.co
  ✔️good to hear v2, v3
  ✔️because landing pages isnt 1x a year update
  should constantly be updated, and have a couple for different personas
  ✔️sad to see startups that havent updated their landing page for 6 months
  ✔️so this is good that you're iterating
  ✔️democratizing packaging for the masses is good
  ✔️beautiful landing page and a great product
  🍖 great marketing opportunities for a business like this
  🍗 🍗 🍗 3-step advice:

1. find sellers with etsy, give packaging for free with packbrand watermark
2. use paid advertising
3. target those who set up shopify or etsy stores, a few hundred units of packaging if they tweet about it and talk about the nature of running and etsy business
   one of the strongest animations on your hero banner
   🍖 bring the customer logos and testimonials up
   🍖 rather than pop up for early access, maybe include it inline on the page
   🍖 and include a sample of branding - a single graphic next to the early access subscription

🍗 🍗 🍗 sidebar question: is the persona clear on the page?
show who you play nice with. are they letterbox friendly? ideal for sellers on etsy, etc.

• Zenplates zenplates.co
  🍖 before you say businesses of all sizes, pick a niche
  because you have a budget in mind too
  🍖 some easy product marketing wins here - target zendesk users
  ✔️copy and paste, not rework and waste - great rhyme
  🍖 move product hunt away from CTA button, people who havent heard of PH may confuse it with a button
  ✔️the resuable elements -> the abstraction of your product is great

Calling Jim @mrdavenport - Olly would love to have a Zoom call with you to get into details, to talk through the business live on Zoom

Currently on Zoom with salesbot Salesbotdepop.com
✔️ like the animation
✔️like automation products
🍖 currently not using phantombuster anymore but look at automation on other platforms like linkedin
🍖 debating long form vs. short form
🍖 not tracking conversion at the moment
🍖 personally don't like google analytics, quite manual to set up
🍗 🍗 🍗 conversion tips: use Heap -> is good to segment by source, or use hotjar🍖 use product copywriters, run an experiment, take a list with top 200 sellers, email first 5, by Monday you will know if your email outreach worked, then email the next 5

going back to roasting

• KettleFit https://Kettle.fit
  ✔️great market, esp. during lockdown and people are focusing on their fitness
  🍖 is the persona for people who cannot do in-person fitness?
  🍖 a bit of a wall of text, is overwhelming, where to focus my energy
  🍖 there is no product screenshot
  🍖 now that we see is in beta stage, say a note to improve conversion, beta testers get it free for example
  🍖 looks like a hybrid landing page, half for landing, and half for B2B conversations
  🍖 more and more people are trying online courses
  🍖 as an anecdote, Olly's yoga teacher moved all online, is good to understand how teachers can scale up. a lot of teachers though do not care about technology. they are simply-minderd about their relationship with client, and they will even stick to whatsapp
  🍖get an MVP in people's hands, and get those
  ✔️page looks pretty
  🍖focus on the differentiation, your USP
  🍖look at use-case, for pilates, and so on

jumping jacks time ;)

Finishing off with 1 more landing page, and then a live review with Robert on Zoom

• QuirkMoney https://quirk.money
  ✔️look likes custom made graphics, can tell you're designers
  ✔️a bold landing page, it focus on the lead magnet with "Take Test"
  ✔️the first step in financial independence is to understand your finances, so the test is good
  🍖 how do you translate people into understanding the finances
  🍖 show the spending table in maybe an app mockup image
  ✔️you focus on understanding who you are, before education. because everyone's personality is different, so this is good
  ✔️self-actualization is a big part of personal improvement
  🍗 🍗 🍗 split your page into two: 1) the take test page, put ads on Facebook. you may get referrals from friends esp. if you make the outcomes hilarious. 2) the app - use some design elements to make it clear that these are app screens

Final call with Robert coming right up

Nikos from Quirk Money on Zoom live

Intro, paraphrasing: "QM is help people get out of debt. Clarno (sp?) is buy now, pay later. Overdraft fees are ridiculous. There are lot of open-banking apps. People are still turned off from an engagement point of view. We want to make it more fun, which is where the research from academic partners came in. It's part education, and lifestyle choice."

Re-framing how people talk about money, because financials are personal and sensitive. Then QM contextualizes the advice so it's less prescriptive and nagging, and more empathetic.
For example, during onboarding, budget is called "spending".
Spending recommendation is a slider, may start at 20%, but can be customized.

2 hours strong... Final roasts coming up

• Makisu Makisu.co virtual tasks
  🍖want a specific example, like drop $5 by signing up right now
  🍖"the page is quite clinical and doesn't give me the right vibe in signing up" needs some personality
  🍖I want an example of someone, no need of a photo, just a bio and what tasks they are good at

• NSCode's Side projects book https://gum.co/side-project
  🍖 say how much you sold the startup for. it's not what the book is about but people need that validation
  🍗 🍗 🍗 parting thoughts: need to have good reviews, even if they're image uploads. if you're looking to do a course, show that you're running one and funnel buyers into joining that after.

break time

• BuildFaster buildfaster.co
  🍖 Crowded space, speak to those personas, look for commanalities and explore your message to find out how you can be the fastest and fitting into the existing developer workflow
  🍖 Move the CTA up, where the scrolling thumbnails are
  🍖 Don't like the scrolling thumbnails, better to have quality over quantity, highlight 2-3 to suit their needs. Get me into a theme as quickly as possible. I prefer the column layout for the themes.
  🍖 Video on shaded background doesn't look too great
  ✔️I like the energy of the video
  ✔️Trending selection is a good idea
  🍖Use a trending badge on the themes
  ✔️Since you mention clean code, and devs really care about that - something that web builders may not do well - talk about that more.
  🍗 🍗 🍗 Parting thoughts: What's the differentiation?

• Solfej solfeg.io for music theory and ear training
  ✔️Love the product image and the intro
  🍖Can I play with it? Can you include a web view before I download it?
  🍖 Pique my curiosity a bit. Like Quirk Money's test. With B2C, you need people to really love them. To get tohigh number of of downloads, you need that advocacy.
  ✔️I like the illustrations

• Plyian https://www.plyian.com/ nocode memberships
  🍗 🍗 🍗 Summary: Check out memberstack.io for ideas

• Try Job Alerts https://tryjobalerts.com.
  🍗 🍗 🍗 Parting thoughts: Need to have some curated jobs not found on HN, Indeed, LinkedIn. Start your customer interviews. What do people not like about the current process, etc?

Question to audience:
What are your favourite landing pages?
Mine is dollar shave club's
Some users online suggested Stripe's new landing page
And Notion's

🍗 🍗 🍗 Sidebar - Notion's landing page review
Where you are in the life of your startup matters
Notion for example changed their messaging as they grew
They also focus on enterprise, with social proof from the logos on their page. Of course, they introduced a few tier for that part of the funnel.
The use cases on their page is great. Team Wikis, docs, etc.
They have quantified the number of teams
They repeat their CTA buttons
This is a long, long landing page. You need to test long vs. short - opinions are mixed.
A larger enterprise may care about compliance, uptime and things that startup founders are not prioritizing.

Which landing page builder do you recommend?
Olly is a fan of the Unicorn platform
He advises that technology not be a blocker for your landing page, but there are hundreds... Unbounce, InstaPage and WordPress themes are some of his suggestions.

5 minute break... we're at the 3 hour mark now :)

Hi @olly

site: https://scrapeowl.com

Buyer persona: Developer working on data scraping projects, e-commerce sites looking to scrape prices, any other type of business looking to scrape any type of data, or those who already do scraping but find it difficult to maintain chrome instances or proxies.

I'd love to see your roast on our site.

Thanks,

Athar

Great idea Oliver, my goal is to optimize my eBook's landing page:
https://gum.co/side-project

Buyer persona 1: Maker that builds side-projects for fun but doesn't monetize.
Buyer persona 2: Maker that loves reading fellow makers personal journey to get insights.
Buyer persona 3: Reader of books that share founder insights (books like Shoe Dog, Outliers, etc).

Thanks 😄

buildfaster.co - HTML themes made easy as pie

Buyer persona: A web developer who needs a beautiful website fast. My themes are very easy-to-setup and even web developers with beginner experience can do it 👍

https://depopmate.com/ and https://botzzz.com/ please

https://focuslite.app - For people who have hard time focusing on work! (Due to internet.)

Not a landing page, but please comment on an app:
https://www.amazon.com/Mobile-Market-Queue-Prime/dp/B0845RW7GZ

Thank you.

hi @olly !

website: https://www.solfej.io/

buyer persona: The general audience would be anyone who is interested in learning music theory, and ear training. This includes music producers, guitar players, piano players, and anyone with a beginner/intermediate knowledge of music theory.

The app caters to beginners, and the buyer persona reflects that heavily. 80% of the user base is beginners or people with no knowledge of music theory.

stoked to hear your thoughts!

Hey Oly, thanks for doing this.

Please roast this: https://www.readrecall.com/

Buyer persona: Oly, who reads a lot online and struggling to remember and recalling what he reads.

Hi, we would love to get our landing page roasted like a well done steak: www.tractific.com
The key buyer persona is small to medium digital business founders.

Pitch: Modern, easy-to-use job board software.
Site: https://niceboard.co

A website where you can use your webcam to try on lipstick:
https://www.trylipstick.com/

Hi @olly,

Thank you for taking the time to help the community, appreciate it.

Site: https://www.practical-devsecops.com/

Buyer Persona:
Information security engineers who want to learn how to embed security best practices as part of DevOps/Agile/Lean startup methodologies.

Background:

• Senior or Principal Engineer (mid-career)
• Atleast 4-5 years of experience

Demographics:

• Skews Male
• Age 27-45
• Income > 50k USD

Goals:

• Upskilling him/herself
• Get promoted to the next level

Challenges:

• Lack of time
• Competing work priorities stopping him/her from learning the latest in the industry.

Thanks for your help!

Roast away, sir - https://quirk.money - entirely made on Webflow by non-coding designers.

Targeted at young adult / young professionals gaining financial independence from first/second job and interested in learning about and improving their personal finances.

Hi @olly,
Site: Passportlist.co
Pitch deck: Passportlist is a detailed list of visa-free, visa on arrival and visa required countries you can visit on your passport stress-free

Hi @olly

Site: https://blarebot.com

• A wizard walk-through / form to fill out as you think through your copy.
• One theme only.
• Handful of examples from other popular landing pages such as MailChimp, Stripe and DollarShaveClub.

Persona: SaaS founders looking to improve the copy of their site and ditch the design selection / paralysis for a minute.

Here's the launch on the early days launch on IH:
https://www.indiehackers.com/forum/7b792ade60?commentId=-LUbrO3yWfvt4qnigUvf

I'll admit I might’ve even done a better job explaining it on the IH preview than on the website.

Thanks in advance.

Hi @olly,

I would love to get feedback on https://simpleportfolio.app/

Buyer persona: A passive investor (investing in an ETF portfolio) who wants to keep track of their investments: they want to know how well is their portfolio doing (accounting for all the brokerage fees and currency fluctuations), what’s their current asset allocation and how to rebalance it, and a simple report for tax purposes. They use one or more discount brokerages with poor or no performance reporting and want to see all their holdings in one place. Finally, they are too lazy (as I am) to do all the work (keeping the data up to date and getting all the dividends and market price data) in Excel or a similar tool.

Thanks!

Jacob

https://shinypass.com

Persona: people for whom Stripe is too difficult to set up.

Site: heyslate.com
Persona: Freelance Designers/Developers who manage their client schedule in Google Calendar currently. They have overbooked themselves in the past and don't know if their client projects are actually profitable, or if they are on target to earn enough money this year.

Would love to get some feedback on SQLPracticeProblems.com. The buyer persona is someone who's perhaps taken a course or 2 in SQL, but realizes that the courses didn't actually teach them how to work with data in the real world, and how to approach and solve a data problem.
Thank you!
Sylvia

nomadpostbox.com ! Looking forward hearing your feedback

Hey Oliver, thank you so much for your job. At Cubbit we really need a feedback on this page order.cubbit.io/product. We're almost ready to launch our product on our e-commerce and we're trying to validate it. A feedback from you would really be appreciated. Thank you

ROAST ME - great idea, love this.

Site: Otherbrandsads.com
Persona: Marketing Folks, primarily focused on DTC brands, but also have some B2B clients. Basically anyone who spends significantly on paid social ads.

divjoy.com

Buyer persona: devs who want to build their MVP faster

Hey Oliver, awesome idea!

Cubbit for teams

Key buyer persona: Companies & professionals managing their customer's files and indirectly their reputation

--- Please note I linked a preview, so don't mind about the strange URL --

I'm writing a book and I have a landing page for it: https://themouseless.dev

www.fruitbowl.io

Marketing Agency Owners

https://pipfeed.com

Great idea Oliver 🎉

https://streakoid.com

Buyer persona: Someone struggling to be consistent.

jbtemplates.com
buyers persona: web developers
NO MERCY, show me what you got! ;-)

That's a great idea! A could really use an honest feedback. :)
I'm building DataGrab (https://datagrab.io), a web scraping service. As main audience, I would say data scientists looking to extract clean web data for statistical analysis, visualisation, etc. However, I could definitely see marketing specialists, researchers, real estate agents, etc. using it.

https://simple-web-analytics.com/

Buyer persona: Whoever maintains a website

https://mowned.com

No spoiler alert

https://upstamps.com Feature Flag Management Platform to separate code from different environments and projects. 🚀

Awesome!

Here's mine: https://app9.io

Description: create professional App Store and Google Play screenshots for your apps.

Buyer persona: app developers

What about this Olly? www.lunadio.com

Cool idea, @olly. It was also pretty sweet to see what everyone's working on here.

Hi. I'm Sunil Kumar. I'm planning to release https://landr.page soon. Any feedback is appreciated!

This is awesome @olly , we're just about to start work on v3 of our landing page (in preparation for launch...whereas currently it's to collect waitlist subscribers), we would love some expert input/roasting 😂🙌

https://hackerstash.com/

Buyer persona: Hackers and entrepreneurs looking for novel ways to fund the early costs of starting their businesses, without giving up equity.

Roast my page: https://simple-tracker.com

Freelancers & self employed consultants

Thank you!🎉

Hi Oliver,

I'm game!

https://tryjobalerts.com. Buyer persona: software developer or data scientist, contractor or full time. Age would typically be 25-40 but not really limited to that. Any gender/race/location in the world. Someone reasonably serious about their career.

I'd have to watch the recording as I can't make the live time though.

Hi Oliver!

We just spent 3 weeks working on V2 of our Landing page! We will most definitely appreciate your roast!

https://packbrand.co

Etsy Sellers/Subscription Box Shippers/Product company who sells physical goods

Hey Olly

I'm launching Zenplates (https://zenplates.co) at the moment and, given that you seem to know your stuff, would love to have it scrutinized by you.

Essentially it's a B2B offering: our customers are businesses of all sizes that need a branded Help Center but lack the time or resources to build a custom one in-house. We've hitched our wagon to Zendesk because it is (in our opinion) the best knowledge base platform in the market and offer both ready-made themes and a framework/toolkit for customization and building them from scratch.

Cheers
Jim

Hi Olly,

Thank you for doing this.

https://kettle.fit/

Key Buyer Persona: Certified Personal Trainers who want to sell and distribution subscription training plans online. They typically have little to no tech/dev background. They'll have a squarespace or similar website. They'll typically try to market through social media.

Best,
Brendan

I’m a little embarrassed asking this because I may be showing my age, but: How do I join/watch?

I don’t see a link or instructions in this post. All I see is a time in your CTA. Unless you were saying I need to follow you on Twitter before I get that info? I'm not sure.

Also, in what way is Indie Hackers involved? Is it going to be streamed on their YouTube channel? I'm so confused 😞

In other words, if this were a landing page I would be left unsure how to buy your thing. But maybe I'm just not in your target demo?

Thanks for your help!

I'm in if there is still space!
https://pagewatchd.dev
Web developers and agencies that just finished a site.

Guarantee you've never roasted a shittier landing page that has so many signups!

Spread.Software

https://www.spreadtech.online/

Content marketers and info-marketers :)

Roast mine.
Https://www.wickedtemplates.com
-------

You choose !

Buyer persona:

• Web Developers on a rush !

Awesome! I've seen one of your roasts a little while ago but couldn't afford to get one done. Looks like I'm in luck!

https://portabella.io - end-to-end encrypted project management.

I believe my buyer persona is currently a developer on a small start up teams (3 - 10 users) looking for a secure, privacy preserving alternative to Trello or Asana.

Hi Oliver,

It's https://www.mailmycustomer.com/.

Buyer persona: All Stripe users who are looking for a service to send emails.

It's a web app that connects with Stripe and lets you send automated emails to your customers based on predefined triggers like creation/cancellation of subscription, payment failure etc., It also helps you send marketing emails or newsletter. Basically, it'll be the one emailing app you'll ever need.

It's ready and I'm looking for early adopters.

Hi Olly - greatly appreciate your doing this. I'm just getting started w/my app but would love to get your feedback.

CrwdCoach.com

Key persona: anyone (I know - too broad?!) who participates in an activity that can be captured on video and wants to improve his/her performance (e.g., golf, fitness, acting/singing, public speaking, etc.) and doesn't have access, time, inclination or money to get private lessons / formal coaching.

Secondary persona: those who want to provide advice/feedback to others on their video-based performance

Thanks!

https://www.salesbot.co
Key buyer persona: Verified Depop Sellers ($3K+ revenue/mo). Depop is a vintage & pre-loved fashion marketplace app. Pain points for these verified sellers are slow sales and wasted time (multiple hours per day) performing repetive tasks to ensure visibility of their items on the app.

Hi Olly,

I'm sure there is more wrong with this landing page than there is right, so feel free to pass on this one if this thread gets real busy!

Had the pleasure of having you roast my whole marketing strategy (or lack of...) for a previous side-project in-person at an Indie Beers meetup last year. Was truly insightful and made me question many things in the proceeding days/weeks. Seems you had the foresight to know that one would fail before I did! 😂

Stay safe dude,
James

https://makisu.co

Hey Oliver, we literally launched yesterday. Glad to see that you're doing this!

Key buyer persona: productivity hackers or SME entrepreneurs in the United States who have used virtual staff before to grow their business. These people have probably read about Tim Ferriss' book, The 4-Hour Workweek and understand how task delegation works.

Secondary persona: people who have read about virtual assistants but haven't tried them out yet or are scared to try them out. These people believe that they can only do their own personal workflow by themselves.