Built a profitable startup in 1 night
Now don't get me wrong I've had my fair share of failed startups. I've thrown away thousands of dollars into ideas that were never going to work and came out the other side feeling like I've learnt absolutely nothing. However... about a week ago I got a text from a friend linking me to their startup that I've seen variations of a thousand times before. It'd been launched for a while but wasn't seeing any paying customers come through the door. He was convinced that he just needed a few more weeks to clean things up and that his landing page is the greatest interface to grace the internet. As if it was only a matter of time before the subscriptions came pouring in. I text back saying "Good luck" and that's when it hit me...
Before wasting his hard earned money to bootstrap this to likely fail, he needed to hear the truth! I design for a living so I sent back another text saying "pay me and I'll roast your landing page, let's keep this transactional so there's no hard feelings". After a while he got back to me with a payment receipt and the chains were unshackled. I let loose on his landing page and roasted his countless hours of hard work, reducing the front page of his startup to dust. I sent him back over the brutal feedback and waited... the next day he responded saying "done". He had stayed up that night making the changes and when I saw the improvements he'd made I was super impressed, he did it all within a matter of hours.
I'd accidentally just validated my startup. I put my phone down and opened up Framer, a web design tool I knew I could rapidly use to build a landing page and whipped up a site in a couple of hours - Roastd.io I spent another few hours cleaning it up and thought to myself I'd post it on Product Hunt for fun. Within a few hours I'd got my first paying customer, finally! Years of what felt like an unbreakable curse clinging to second grade ideas and sinking money into them had been broken. It's been 2 days now since launch, I've got a small backlog of customers and my friend made his first sale based on my roast. Life is good.
Love how you organically found a problem and then immediately figured out how to turn the solution into a paid version.
Went to your website and definitely think you'll want to constantly improve your landing page in order to grow your customer base.
BUT honestly your copywriting on the page is great! Really makes me feel like you'll give me a great roast!
I'd also recommend playing around with different pricing tiers. For $70 it's a pass for me unless I can see an example. But maybe you could sell mini-roasts for $25?
Also maybe you could make a roast template to showcase what people would get from you and also to collect email on your website?
Really like the idea and again really love the copy on the page!
Thanks so much. It's definitely not perfect yet as mentioned I really just wanted to test out an idea and taking it as an iterative approach. Thinking of other roast ideas too but for now I'm testing the waters with customers who have purchased already to see if its viable. It's looking good! Like the idea of the roast template, might steal it thanks.
No prob! Looking forward to seeing more of Roastd! :)
Maybe you should start by getting your own LP roasted in the 1st place? Where is the LP of your friend? Why don't you put it in your portfolio? Oh wait, you don't have one!
Collecting social proofing as I go and asking companies in the meantime if they'd like to feature on the site.
i like it, <a href="https://essentialsclothing.co/"> Essentials clothing</a>
Great story and execution of this idea!
Now we only need another design roasting service to give you some honest feedback. 😅
Im always open to feedback
The only thing smaller than the gap between that hideous floating menu pill and the top of the window is your manhood. Put some margin up there ffs.
That roast was free. You’re welcome 🙂
You’re hired
This looks like a lot of fun, but here's some feedback:
Hey this is awesome thanks! Which payment link isn’t working? I’ve tested them and they seem to be fine?
The one in the "You're here for a reason" section, the url is also different from the one in the hero section.
I've re-entered payment URL's, would you be able to refresh and see if you're still getting the same error? I really appreciate this by the way. Also I've used your suggestion and added some of the types of feedback people can expect in the 'Proof of tears technology' section :D
Also your page might be cached since I recently updated the links, if you try in an incognito browser, just go to roastd.io it should work.
I just checked in my initial browser and the links have been updated and work properly. Now there are also two plans, which is cool.
An idea might be to introduce a 3rd plan at some point to make use of the Decoy Effect.
Awesome glad its working for you now, you've been a huge help! Btw I've just created a promo for 20% off so if you do buy a roast make sure you use the code ROAST20 :)
That’s awesome - I’m good right now, but maybe someone in this thread can benefit from it :)
Roastd.io is genius because it'll help devs thicken their skin before hitting the market. I appreciate your ingenuity and love the concept.
Glad you like it!
Great story, SP. If I may, it's not that you built a profitable start-up in 1 night, rather it took you a long time, through hard-learned experiences, to get here. Well done, mate. Keep going.
You're completely right, thank you.
Great story. I think you're onto something here. Best of luck and please keep us posted on your progress.
Will do, thank you!
Legendary
Great job, and it's always nice to see sales so quickly. My only concern would be you are trading time for money since you have to do all the reviews manually. If you could figure out how to scale to get other people to do the roast, that would be awesome!
Do you have any example roasts? It would be nice to add to your homepage so users know what they are getting.
I love how you're already thinking about scalability. May the roasts reign on
I won’t need to scale yet until serious traction comes in and that’s what I like to call a good problem 😄 Yep I’m considering the example thing
Added some examples of types of roasts given out so far roastd.io
Nice, I'm buying a roast from you right now.
You did, awesome!
Loved the idea and you executed it really well!
Very kind, thank you.
Well done! Congrats.
I believe that the idea is good overall, but I have some doubts about using the specific term 'Roast.' It sounds challenging and gives negative vibes - this is not good for everyone. However, the service essentially conducts audits for landing pages or other pages and using the roasting concept as a marketing strategy could be effective. 🤔
On the other hand, I think that offering an A/B testing platform to compare (even building - refactoring - launching) landing pages with and without
roasting, and then pricing the service based on the success of the roasted pages, could create a highly valuable - easy (10x) experience for clients.Thanks for the feedback, I have nowhere near enough battle tested what I’ve currently got yet and have already made a bunch of changes since launch. I appreciate the idea but won’t be doing something like this any time soon.
This is genius! Not only is the tool itself great, but getting paid to be sarcastic and blunt is a dream come true. Well done!
A cool idea for the future: open it up to other design/UX/UI experts and create a gig type marketplace where freelancers can sign up to be the "roasters". That could help you increase capacity, and you could pay the "roasters" a service fee per roast, redesign, etc.
I've thought about this actually, right now I've simply started a dedicated discord for people to join where they can roast each others work: https://discord.gg/ZqwDzq3H
I don't want to keep expanding the service too much yet without seeing more traction but it's definitely something I've considered and thanks for the kind words :)
Awesome! Glad you're one step ahead of me lol.
That's also a smart move given that it's only been a couple of weeks! There's no point in expanding yet. This just seems like a really great idea and, hopefully, you can expand in the future if that's what you end up wanting. Having that discord with tons of other designers and what not is an really smart, lo-fi first step :) Either way, good luck!
OK this is soooo dope. Have you considered branching out? This would be fire for the advertising industry (Art Directors and Copywriters).
Could you explain more?
the nice idea got it thanks for sharing a story I got a new idea from your project and definitely will work on it.
great story
It's a great service with a very hard honest, I have never seen any of this service in the past 2 years but I like it.
Seems like a great service, well done. One obvious way you could expand on this in the future would be to offer a full roast for an entire website or application. Obviously roasting an entire application would be tricky without a deeper understanding of the product, but roasting a website would be a good natural progression (a certain number of key pages for €xxx).
Keep up the great work!
Yeah its a possibility but for now I want to optimise what I'm offering until I know people get a high amount of value from it
I love it, especially "It's probably worse than you think."
Having a sense of humour about the process is a really good idea. It's not a roast if the criticism doesn't land with a funny, yet honest, punch to the gut.
Do I get a refund? "Lol, no." 😂
Legend! How much revenue so far?
Amazing concept. Really loved the idea and Roastd.io looks really neat.
you nailed it!
you heat iron with your emos, you forge the magicwithout loosing steam, you ship; one night gig for which you habe practiced for years.
Congratulations, it's a pretty nice concept.
You've all given such great feedback and awesome comments, I've just created a promo code to return the favour if anyone was considering getting a roast, just go to Roastd.io and add ROAST20 at checkout for 20% off.
Only 50 codes available. Enjoy!
I think you should remove the testimonials section, until you get some actual testimonials. I liked everything until I came to the testimonials section.
Also in FAQ, or somewhere else, give a more detailed description on your own background, along with how many hours will you spend with me. When I pay you 99$, I will also expect you to spend time with me on giving suggestion on how my site should look, so more transparency on how many hours you will spend would be good.
Added legit testimonials now that I have them and also updated the FAQ to say 48 hours. Thanks
Great idea and brilliant copy!
Make them cry 😈
This is a real problem you're solving for indie hackers without a design background.
The copywriting is on point!
Much appreciated
Your payment page is broken when I click "Buy Now" I get the following message from Stripe.
Can't open link
The payment link you tried is no longer active.
Had to update the payment links, if you refresh the page do you still get the same error?
Same error
Also your page might be cached since I recently updated the links, if you try in an incognito browser, just go to roastd.io it should work
Super confused, I just relinked them both again to make sure, can you refresh and try again? Thanks so much for this btw.
Yep works for me now on incognito, good luck! 🔥 design btw
This is the best LP I have seen in years, you are so crafty and creative, it made me laugh and kept me engaged and entertained, awesome idea and great job 👏👏👏
So surreal and such a nice comment thank you
Well done! Great niche you've found.
Looks incredible, congrats on the success!
Can you explain a bit more your process on how you intend to grow?
Haven't figured it out yet, I'm currently testing the waters to see what's working and isn't, all the feedback in this thread is awesome and helps me cut through the noise much quicker. I've added another pricing package too since a few people have requested more than a single page to be roasted so I'm taking a very rapid iterative without thinking too far ahead for now.
Haha! I love this
You proved, One night is really enough!
One night after 6 years of lots of failures maybe but it's still very early days. Pretty happy so far!
That’s impressive. How does my MVP post compare to your experience? Phil… https://abitgamey.substack.com/p/making-a-minimum-viable-product
Lovely idea but what I miss on that landing page is the reason why should I get roasted by you in particular?
Let's say I don't know you, might as well show my LP to my parents, get a free roast and still not be sure if the feedback is any valuable.
You're right, thanks for the free roast. I've added a little more detail to the site with years of exp and will continue to add companies that want their logos on the site as we grow. Since I launched 2 days ago I'm still considering ways to display reviews etc, perhaps tweets for social proofing. Thank you
Were you inspired by roastmylandingpage.com?
Truthfully I never knew it existed, I built the site with such quick turnaround I didn't bother to look what was already out there. I only found out about it a few days after launching but I wish Olly all the best with what he's doing :)
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