We Built a Brutal LinkedIn Roaster to Test a Hypothesis — Here’s What Happened

Hey IH 👋

I’m Julien, founder of Linkeme, a SaaS that helps solo founders and small teams publish content effortlessly thanks to AI.

But today I want to share a small (but loud) experiment we just launched:

Instead of spending weeks optimizing SEO or burning money on ads, we asked:

Can we generate traffic and brand awareness by building something weird, fun, and brutally honest — in public?

So we built a tiny tool:

An AI roaster that scans your LinkedIn profile and gives you raw, no-fluff feedback.

No “personal brand” jargon. No growth hacking advice.

Just the kind of roast your best friend should give you — but won’t.

✅ To test attention as a distribution channel

✅ To create something viral-adjacent without relying on luck

✅ To drive traffic to our core product (Linkeme)

✅ To experiment with personality-driven side projects that amplify the main brand

We posted it on Reddit and Indie Hackers.

We didn’t promote it heavily.

Still:

2,500+ visits in just a few hours
300+ users day 1
1 user every 2 minutes at peak
Clean OG previews → a lot of shares
And… strong reactions 😅
(Love, hate, memes, and plenty of purists offended by AI’s “tone”)

It’s too early to measure conversion to Linkeme.

But attention is definitely there.

And the experiment validates something we suspected:

If your product is hard to explain, build something easy to try.

Most advice says:

“Build SEO, write content, launch slowly.”

But sometimes, a small, focused, emotion-triggering project can do the same — or more — faster.

This isn’t just about virality.

It’s about creating surface area for discovery.

Letting people discover you by offering something engaging, risky, or funny.

If you’ve launched microtools to promote a larger SaaS, I’d love to hear what worked — or didn’t.

Try LinkedinScope if you want to see how kind (or cruel) the AI is 😅

Feedback welcome.

— Julien