Roast My Landing Page

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/

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.

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

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.

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.

1. Upsell existing customers into other services
2. 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.

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

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.

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.