Feb 19, 2023
Starting out
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...
Realisation
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.
Getting it done
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.
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Ollie Efez