Roast My Landing Page
Turn more visitors to your SaaS landing page into customers
I reviewed 100 leading SaaS landing pages to help founders and makers identify trends around design, policies and sign ups, get started with benchmarks, and know what their competitors are doing.
- Here's some interesting stuff
- Only 10% of startups require a credit card to be entered to sign up
- 48% of startups had a free trial - for most it was 14 days
- 23% of startups had their first sign up field embedded on their landing page
- Blue was the most common CTA colour - by far
- 50% of SaaS landing pages have a chat bot
- 78% of startups had testimonials on the landing page, 75% had client logos
Want the full results? V1 contains:
👀 Headline
📏 Headline length
💬 Chatbot?
🚨 CTA phrase
🌈 CTA colour
😶 Word count
🗣 Number of testimonials
🤝 Use of client logos
Download it 100% free: https://www.roastmylandingpage.com/100pages
On May 13th a Roast My Landing Page blog post trended on Hacker News.
The post, what I learnt roasting 200 landing pages in 12 months (http://blog.roastmylandingpage.com/landing-page-roasts/), remained on the Hacker News homepage for over 24 hours, generating 684 points and over 230 comments.
This lead to 40,000 blog visits and £10,000 in revenue in 48 hours.
Read the full outline of what happened here: https://blog.roastmylandingpage.com/hacker-news-homepage/
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Go Olly!
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Thank you @chddaniel
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Wow 🤯
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Thanks @Jojokelly_
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cool, i had similar visiting numbers but didnt monetize it :D
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Congrats on the achievement Olly. It is certainly an inspiration. I was searching for that hacker news post link & found it here - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27140440
Before submitting or after the submit process have you done anything special like submitting the hackernews thread to any other communities/groups for more visibility?
curious to know..Well, it seems like there's an opportunity that we have for working together. Would like to connect & discuss. 🤗
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Hey! So if you read the full post here you'll see exactly what happened:
https://blog.roastmylandingpage.com/hacker-news-homepage/
Spoiler: it wasn't me that submitted the post!
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Making good progress on Roast My Landing Page and generating amazing customer feedback.
I've just hit $20,000 revenue in one month. This is an amazing milestone for the business and brings me close to what I was earning as a freelancer.
The majority of new revenue came from my blog post (https://blog.roastmylandingpage.com/landing-page-roasts/) hitting the homepage of Hacker News - will share more on this soon. This drove a lot of revenue and 100s of mailing list and YouTube subscribers, loads of customer feedback, and 1000s of site visits.
Other wins including really strong word of mouth, community outreach and upselling customers into other services like landing page builds.
In worse news I have been ill for almost 10 days which has created a backlog of work that I am slowly catching up on. This is a real risk for a business like mine, and the most ill I have been in years. I'll need to put a plan in place for next time.
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Nailing it Olly! Must be a good feeling knowing that your bet on Roast My Landing Page is paying off :))
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It is a great feeling, thanks for the support :)
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What a boss, good progress there Oliver!
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Exellent, I like everything about what you are doing.
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Get well soon!
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Oh man, that's great news to hear!
I remember seeing this project at the very beginning and I thought it was a great idea!I'm so glad it's doing well!
Keep it up Oli!! -
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Congrats Oliver! 👏🏻
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Very cool; congrats. I saw a lot of ads for your site; perhaps because I engaged. Did you spend a lot on that?
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Also I hope you feel better soon!
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Congratulations 👏
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Congrats! I do like how you realize what issues you being missing might mean. Not only out of your health (hope you recover quickly) but that also means you can't even go on vacation really and have your business still function!
I would work on getting the help you need in the places you need it so you can continue to grow your business while also enjoying your life.
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What you mention in the end is definitely a key important thing. Have you thought of any steps that you could take to keep the business running in the event something similar happens again?
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@ItsKev I have started to reach out to people who could offer the roasts when I am not around for travels, illness or holidays.
I am considering the concept of a marketplace but it's very early days right now.
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Yea. Would you say the main selling factor is that "you" are the one doing them? Or do you think customers wouldn't mind who the individual is, but care more about the expertise and advise they could offer?
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Nice @olly! Great to hear about the HN post!
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Thank you :)
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🔥🔥🔥🔥
I noticed that the majority of Roast My Landing Page bookings come from communities and organic social media. I am still struggling to generate meaningful conversion through paid ads.
As a result I have massively increased the amount I contribute to communities and my social accounts. I think people finding me organically through social media is a great starting point for buying a roast.
A twitter thread detailing what I learnt after roasting 200 landing pages went semi-viral - generating 490 likes, 100,000 and 100 extra followers for my account: https://twitter.com/helloitsolly/status/1390310904563224581
It also drove interest from multiple communities including indiehackers and some Facebook groups.
Some thoughts as to why it did well
- I didn't promote anything - just posted what I learnt
- It was insights focused - specific and granular
- I used visual examples to illustrate each point, which I annotated
- I asked for RTs at the end
My next step is to try and publish valuable, insightful threads at least three times a week to drive followers and awareness. It seems that the people that 'get it' then naturally explore the other things I've published and ultimately book a roast.
200 roasts, £70,000 in revenue and 642 cans of Diet Coke later
12 months of roasting landing pages
Over the last twelve months I've roasted the landing pages of 200 startups. Landing pages from indie makers, VC-funded scale-ups and profit-generating enterprise organisations, across multiple industries and audiences. With an average of 25 mins a roast, that's over 3.5 full days of roasting pages to increase conversion.
What is a roast?
Each roast was a personalised 20-minute video review of a landing page, identifying fixes to convert more visitors into customers. Based on best practice, testing insights, and my work as a conversion rate optimisation expert.
But what did I learn about high-converting landing pages? And about running a productised business? And what can you learn from me? It turns out quite a lot...
Why I started Roast My Landing Page
Roast My Landing Page started as a pandemic side-project to allow me to support early-stage startups while generating a second-stream of income outside of my freelance marketing work. It ended up generating me over £70,000 of work, over 2,000 email subscribers, and an ever-growing list of insights into the pains and challenges of early stage businesses and the amazing people that run them.
It's all about the founders
And it has really been about the founders! Every single person comes with their own story, passion, and ideas. They were eager to learn how to do justice to their product, service or email list, and showcase it to the world in the form a high-converting landing page.
Here's a Twitter thread with 16 ideas to increase your landing page conversion based on auditing 200 websites: https://twitter.com/helloitsolly/status/1390310904563224581
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I read one of your posts about doing this a while back. I’ve been looking forward to an update- massive congrats!
Honestly, I wondered if you’d be able to sustain momentum or if it would feel too repetitive and less rewarding over time. However, reading this post it’s clear how personal and rewarding each landing page is to roast.
Thanks for sharing the insights too, congrats again
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the funny thing is that i did this nearly a decade+ ago... and it worked! keep going. love seeing this. damn.
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Congratulation Oliver for your milestone. You have creatively and uniquely monatise your skill.
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Excellent progress!
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Good work!!!
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Congratulations Oliver! This is a great business you have. I can't wait to see where you take it.
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Brilliant to see how well you're doing @olly! Been following your journey from the start and really cool to see how far you've come
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@jbsedd Thanks, still lots to do! :)
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Amazing to see this doing so well @olly! I've found all your tips invaluable for improving my landing pages 🙏🏽
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@christina_p Thank you! I've seen the changes you're making - looking good.
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Last week multiple IHers suggested I can grow revenue for my project by offering new services to my existing customers.
I introduced three news services into my project's client area: landing page rebuilds, conversion analytics setup and copy rewrites.
Since then existing customers have booked:
1x landing page rebuild
1x copy rewrite
1x conversion analytics setup
This totals £2600 in extra revenue from my existing customers.
The best thing about this is that the only promotion for these services was a simple booking link in the email with the client's landing page roast video link.
I have struggled with CPA for roasts, but if I can grow revenue and profit through existing customers, I may have a much more sustainable business.
Most people know this, but it's worth remembering - selling to existing (happy) customers is much easier than selling to new customers.
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Hey Oliver, Congrats on the growth! How are you dealing with the CPA now ?
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Nice one @olly!
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Congrats @olly ! Very interesting what you said about upselling vs finding new clients, I ll keep it in mind for sure.
Btw you've inspired a lot to give UX audits a try (focus more on in-app UX flows and less on marketing-related screens) and got my first client by announcing it on Twitter! https://twitter.com/JimZarkadas/status/1387803362217717763
Thanks for sharing your journey and being open, here are some services I have for upselling that could may be helpful for you
- 1-1 UX coaching https://gumroad.com/l/UFWCR
- 4h design sessions for hands-on design https://jimzarkadas.com/ux-design-services/hands-on-design
Keep it up!
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Brilliant! Get the flywheel spinning.
i just came across what you're doing and checked Roast My landing page. Epic idea and super interesting following along with your progress.
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@mrlukecurtis Thank you :)
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congrats!
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Great work Oliver! You have a solid business on your hands.
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@IdeaEconomy Thanks :)
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Impressive growth in just a couple of weeks yo
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Early days but it's promising! Really enjoying it too, which helps :)
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So, after leaving my job to run roastmylandingpage.com full time about 9 days ago I've already crossed monthly revenue of $5,000 which is a great milestone.
I have been running test ad campaigns on all major platforms: Twitter, Facebook, Quora, Reddit and Paved.
The issue is that the CPA is super high. In fact each new customer is costing me about £110 - leaving just £40 profit per roast. Here you can see my exact progress: https://twitter.com/helloitsolly/status/1382272106306633736
Lots of people share revenue milestones as part of the #openstartups movement, but I wanted to share both revenue and expenses to show how challenging new customer acquisition is.
My goal is to get CPA down to around £50 per roast, leaving £100 profit but I also have some other ideas.
- Upsell existing customers into other services
- Build out my email list to nurture potential customers into buying
In fact I have already launched a few new products into my client area for my existing customers, including copy rewrites and page builds. If I can sell these to existing customers the CPA will be nominal.
I'll keep sharing what I am learning along my journey. I'm only in my second marketing sprint but I am shipping lots, learning lots and loving the support from other makers.
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Congrats on the great progress!
I'm with @mbuckbee—I think £150 sounds low, considering the value you're delivering. I'd raise your prices (significantly). £150 may be a lot of cash for a bootstrapped solo founder, but for established companies £150 is just a rounding error on lunch. In fact, I bet a junior marketing employee who manages the company website would get thrown out of their boss's office if they filed an expense report for £150 to hire some guy to roast the website, but for a £1,500 website conversion analysis it would seem like an excellent investment. :)
Another thought: can you change the pricing structure to turn this into recurring revenue? Booking one-off sales requires constantly feeding the funnel. Is there a way to do a follow-up mini-roast (quick bake!) every month to review progress?
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How did you come to decide upon a price of £150? That seems very low.
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@mbuckbee Testing - but it's ongoing. How much would you pay for a 20minute video audit?
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@olly I would stop pitching it in a way that makes it sound like it should be cheap. How about "how much would you pay for a concise but actionable audit by an expert that has reviewed websites for hundreds of corporations?"
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I don't see too much of a difference between 150 and 250.
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Increasing the price (as you would expect) decreases the conversion and profitability. I have tested multiple price points and the decision was based on that.
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How do you manage to sell your product to different customers? I am techie with zero knowledge about sales and marketing. I want to sell SAAS product but getting rejections may be I am not that good in sales. Any suggestions on how can I improve selling any product or SAAS product. Thanks
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Start by creating buyer personas. EVERYTHING works from that:
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Thanks a lot. This is very helpful. If you don't mind can I send DM? I have few questions to ask.
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If you post them here I can answer and everyone can benefit @aditodkar
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I want to know if my product is at initial stage then should I email or approach first 10-20 customers? Any suggestions/pointers for getting first 10-20 customers? Any good email template or any other techniques you would like to suggest for approaching customers? I have never done sales & marketing. So wanted to understand how to approach people and how to convince people?
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@aditodkar try my site www.first100users.com.
You have to test, learn what works, and do more of it.
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@aditodkar
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Not gonna get into the debate over the pricing but want to point out a major error in the thinking/wording above, for the benefit of people inexperienced in business:
That is not "£100 profit" it is just net revenue after the CPA.
You still have to take out the payment for the person doing the review (even if it is yourself) and gross this up if it's an employee, to cover their associated costs.
There's also amortising other expenses of running the site, although once at this kind of scale it's relatively minor.
Depending where you are and how you pay yourself, if this is a pty ltd company aka C corporation it will be independently taxed so you need to set aside 18% (UK) to 25% (Aussie) to cover taxes. In the USA it will vary by state (0..12%) on top of the 21% Federal tax. These taxes generally apply after all the other expenses mentioned above have been deducted. As an additional slug, in the USA, 8 states have a Gross Receipts Tax which kicks in before deductions (and they have the cheek to call the rest of us highly-taxed hah!).
If you have a sudden surge of income from a service like this and are close to end of a tax year, you may want to be strategic about when you take on any major new clients, if there's a chance to avoid revenue from them kicking in too early. In Australia, for example, the tax office will calculate an estimated tax liability in the next year and you can find yourself with an unforeseen bill that will take a year or so to reduce.
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@AndyDent Thanks Andy. I blended all business costs into the CPA. But yes, sadly I do have to pay tax.
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This would be a great business to optimize for organic search because it is so niche. I checkout out a couple of your articles and they are missing a meta description, the heading tags are not optimized, word count is low, etc. There are some quick wins there that can help improve traffic.
Organic traffic takes time, but you could really establish yourself as an expert with comprehensive and well-optimized content.
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Upselling existing customers into other services seems like a great way to go. One upsell I'd suggest is a landing page builders, like dorik.io (the founder is an Indie-Hacker too). You can collaborate and get an affiliate commission from him. Someone who's built a landing page for a SaaS will likely build another, be in the community of other like-minded SaaS founders who'd like a recommendation for landing page builders or may just want to rebuild his.
Another idea - let's say you see that a lot of your customers build on their landing pages on WordPress. You see that a lot of them miss a key component like a good-looking review section. You can build yourself a WordPress plugin to solve that problem and then offer that to that SaaS owner whose page you're roasting...
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What is CPA?
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Cost per acquisition, which is the cost of acquiring a customer.
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congrats!!
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@8bit Thank you
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Hey @olly, congrats on leaving the full time gig, have been enjoying following your progress.
Would love to hear more about acquisition channels (we work in a similar-ish but non-competing space) - how has Paved worked for you? Twitter, Facebook?
Happy to connect and share some learnings about optimising ads (I have a long background in Google Ads).
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@harvellocapello
Thanks for this. I share some more stuff about CPA on my Twitter, like this: https://twitter.com/helloitsolly/status/1382272106306633736
Broadly all paid channels are too high right now but performance is as follows from best to worst
Twitter
Facebook
Google Ads
Paved
Reddit
QuoraI am running lots and lots of experiments with small budgets and reviewing indicators and conversions.
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This comment was deleted 4 years ago
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@e1r0nd Thank you!
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Major milestone for me. I've made the decision to go full time on my side project, and I start today.
Let me share why I've made this difficult decision.
I've spent the last 6 months leading a brilliant marketing team in an extremely well paid freelance job. I've had a lot of fun experimenting with big budgets on new channels.
Freelance roles are addictive for me. They offer me routine, influence, connection to a team, the chance to get lots done. But as someone who tends to over-commit freelance jobs can cause real problems for my other professional goals. I am sure lots of IHers know this problem well.
For about a year now Roast My Landing Page has been a side project that has been significantly prioritised when I'm less busy, and totally ignored when I'm working with clients. Leaving me with too many 'what ifs'.
For the last few months I've had the nagging feeling that the opportunity cost of not giving my side project the time and attention it deserves is too big. So after a few sleepless nights, I'm pulling the plug on my freelance work completely.
For the next 10 weeks I will exclusively on RMLP with a goal to generate 1 sale a day at a CPA of less than £50 (a Roast is £150). That should mean about £3000/month in profit.
This goal will not get me anywhere near my freelance revenue BUT it will take me to ramen profitability 🍜
I want to know what I can do when I am fully focused on my side project. And that's what I'm going to find out. I'd love the support of IHers - will you join me?
Follow me story and all my metrics on https://twitter.com/helloitsolly
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Love this story. The £600/day freelance trap is real - the money is good enough that you never quite make the leap, but the opportunity cost of not building your own thing keeps growing. One practical thing worth flagging for anyone in the UK making this jump right now: Making Tax Digital kicks in from April 2026 for anyone earning over £50k. If you're transitioning from freelance to full-time on your product, your tax setup changes significantly and you need HMRC-compatible software from day one. We've been building free tools for exactly this kind of UK freelancer at landolio.com - MTD readiness checkers, invoice templates, late payment calculators. The whole toolkit came from watching people like Oliver navigate the freelance-to-founder transition and realising how much of the admin overhead could be eliminated with the right tooling. Hope RMLP is still going strong!
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How will you scale service delivery?
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3 roasts a day / 1 hour's work would be about 15,000 a month. Do you mean beyond that point? @evandempsey
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You saying you spend 20~ minutes reviewing 1 roast including recording/editing time? you're probably really good at your job, but I would hope to get more time spent on analysis then that.
Do you also include technical analysis such as FCP/CLS etc (google new metrics for page performance)
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@Rishi_Uttam The whole roast is one loom video with no planning and no editing. The focus is on acquisition and conversion. I do sometimes run speed reports live. I'm able to do this because 1. I am very experienced in CRO 2. I am able to think very quickly on the fly. The video is max 20mins.
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Yes. You don't want to be doing these yourself long term, do you?
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This is honestly one of the best concepts I have seen on IH. It is clear and useful, I wonder how scaleable it is since it relies on your knowledge and experience.
It's a great achievement to take the step to go full time, well done!-
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@FIENDISH Thank you. If you want to follow my story I am on https://twitter.com/helloitsolly
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quit that job! yessssss!
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Nice one Oli! Hope it goes well!
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Congratulations Oliver! I love this idea. Good luck.
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Love the concept! I'm curious to know what channels will prove useful to attract customers. Best of luck for the adventure!
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Can vouch that the roast was 150% worth it. Cheers and good luck @olly!
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@Jojo_Kelly Thanks JoJo
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That's really cool. I loved the idea. I'm trying to create the first concept (a conversion optimization audit for online courses sales pages). This boosted me my energy to just launch the productized service
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Nice, I must admit, I would have never thought this would work as an idea, let alone that high a cost.
Just goes to show you gotta try stuff. Good luck :)
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@kieronboz I wouldn't call £149 a high cost to have an expert review and audit your landing page. Just one extra customer could pay that back for most SaaS businesses.
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In my head I figure the hourly value I'd be getting and I wouldn't want to pay anyone £150 an hour, assuming each one takes an hour or less.
Not knocking it though, kudos, I was just surprised is all 😃
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I am not talking about this specific case, but what does it matter what the hourly rate is if, if the ROI can be 10x?
You could pay someone experienced 10k$ to review your business and give you some life-changing tips in 30 minutes and it could still be worth for you in the long run.
It's just like this story: https://rosalynpalmer.com/knowing-which-screw-to-turn/
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how will you generate sales? what channels will you use? Are you going to leverage your own social media?
Otherwise, i saw your site, looks good! (ofc it does since Brett had hands on it lol)
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@OGben
I'm already running experiments on Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, Spotify, email, community and Google Ads.
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How have those results been? What kind of marketing/sales strategy are you using?
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@albertkim I'm an expert marketer - that's what I did before going full time on RMLP. I am seeing a CPA around my target which is £50. You'll need to test these platforms for your own product and audiences. If you need any more advice check out my site first100users.com
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Good luck Olly! Your roasts are the best - excited to see you run with this
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@christina_p Thank you! :)
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Good luck Olly! 🙌
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Thank you Iain @polevaultweb
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By your domain - does your 150 service include a guarantee of 100 users?
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@Scott322 What do you mean? The domain is roastmylandingpage.com
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yeah, he’s probably confused with your other domain :)
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My side project roastmylandingpage.com has now generated £20,000 in revenue. That's over 150 roasts of SaaS, ecommerce and B2B landing pages!
Thanks to everyone who has supported my side project. This community has offered advice, feedback, constructive criticism and kind words.
To celebrate I've implemented a brand new landing page design - cleaner, simpler, and more focused on the buyer. I used the same guidance I would with any client who booked a roast.
Would love to know what you think.
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it just fell over with a 500 internal server error.. page refreshed fixed that... thought it was a joke for a second.
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Haha!
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Congrats on making a good bit of dough! The site looks good. Only suggestion is to work on this testimonial:
This is great. Exactly what I was looking for! Paul B, Zap Websites
Very vague. What was he looking for?
Checked out the Twitter page too. Just my opinion, but I'd make your face take up much more of the space in the profile pic. Should hardly see your shoulders.
Also, using the exact same picture in the profile pic and in the banner looks weird. Maybe use a different picture in the banner. Better yet, use this line from your website:
Turn more visitors to your SaaS B2B landing page into customers and increase revenue and profits.
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Wow! This re-inspires me to start my SaaS review platform in public which I am still doing privately for Founders. :)
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@nanowhiz Awesome
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Congrats! Hope you don't mind me asking, but saw ads for it on Twitter, how did that work? Good ROI/CAC? :)
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@Carmen They work. That's all I'll say for now, but more soon :)
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This is a really great idea and service. All the best with it.
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@FIENDISH Thanks
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clever idea!!
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@8bit Thank you!
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Congratulations! I love this business model. I've just added it to my Unbundling Fiverr - Productized services post.
https://ideaeconomy.net/unbundling-fiverr-productized-services/
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I just realized:
In your featured video, You are reviewing a landing page which is designed by me 😀
It's a template I built called "Startly" and sold on Themeforest.
So, Technically, I'm featured on your website.
PPS: I have sent a DM on Twitter last week, but did not hear back.
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@surjithctly Awesome!
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This is so cool, How about tagging a company that provides design and development services. if you are interested let me know.
Thanks-
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@Mehedi do you mean to refer people to, after the roast?
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Well done, congratulations!
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@pupeno Thanks!
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This is genius. Congrats on the success!
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@ginad Thank you :)
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That's a huge achievement, Olly.
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Thanks @thearslankhalid
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Congratulations.
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@jamiuoloyede thank you ♥️
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My side project roastmylandingpage.com has now generated £20,000 in revenue. That's over 150 roasts of SaaS, ecommerce and B2B landing pages!
Thanks to everyone who has supported my side project. This community has offered advice, feedback, constructive criticism and kind words.
To celebrate I've implemented a brand new landing page design - cleaner, simpler, and more focused on the buyer. I used the same guidance I would with any client who booked a roast.
Would love to know what you think.
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