Landing Genie has a special place in my heart. It’s the first non service based business I’ve created that actually generated revenue. Not much, but still more than a $1.

However, it’s 7 months post launch and now I run my own web development agency. I’ve learnt a lot. About business. Web development. And Marketing. So I can now say it. Landing Genie wasn’t great nor good.

If you’ll let me, I’ll walk you through what I did wrong and my hero’s journey to redeem Landing Genie from the ashes.

The landing page

BORING

WHITE, WHITE, WHITE. The styling is bland.

And the copy - look the headline is clear but god the sub text is the most bland words I’ve ever written. Which I doubt I did. At that point Sam Altman’s robot wrote 90% of my copy.

A landing page generator with a bad landing page. Incredible stuff Alex.

Pricing

Initally I offered a free generated page to anyone. Rightly, a lot of people have spoken out about how freemium only works at scale. As soon as I switched off freemium two of you made a purchase.

For some reason, I also decided the lowest tier of pricing was going to be $32 USD. Silly. Who in their right mind was going to pay $152 USD to generate unlimited pages.

Functionality

Truthfully, I knew then and I know now that the pages that were generated weren’t great.

Also I used magic links and one time passwords as the only auth. Any authentication process that requires users to leave your website is going to stunt conversion.

Bruh, I used to work in Conversion Rate Optimisation, am I dense.

Finally, for those of you who wanted to actually use and deploy a landing page. The steps were as follows:

1. Find the code button.

2. Click it.

3. See the generated HTML

4. OK. OK. OK Let’s just stop there.

Delusional. Too much work. Too much effort.

Marketing

Just like every other developer, marketing is my horcrux.

My method was a hail mary. Post it on product hunt and hope for the best.

Somehow, the website “There’s an AI for that” picked it up and I received over 3000 different visitors.

The Comeback, aka my todo list

• Improve core functionality.

• Buildout new themes and improve upon current themes.

  • Podcast page generation has a lot of search traffic potential.

• Allow for editing of pages.

  • Editing copy

  • Adding links

  • Adding components

  • Uploading Images

• Deploying

  • Add another paywall for users to deploy their landing page as a subdomain. e.g. swan.landinggenie.com

  • Manually deployed to begin, if people like it I’ll automate.

• Pricing

  • Try it out: $9 USD just one landing page - no editing allowed.

  • Entrepreneur: $39 USD unlimited landing pages.

• Marketing

  • As a friend suggested, I’m going to develop generators that are based off influencers in the indiehacker space.

    • For example, A Marc Lou landing page generator and one for Levels.

    • I’ll be able to then to do multiple product hunt posts for each new page generator I create.

    • Hopefully I’ll be able to hop on the hype train and get a bit more traffic by piggy backing my favourite Europeans.

  • New verticals.

    • Again for each new theme/vertical generator I create I can then post on Product Hunt.

Yes again, I’m relying on Product Hunt but it works. It works to get 1000 users. Which for me is enough to evaluate conversion rate. If then the product is able to generate substantial revenue (anything over $300 or 50 cents per user). I will focus on SEO and Paid ads.

Thanks for reading all of that and stay tuned for the relaunch. Let me know if you enjoyed reading this or if I sounded like your local crack head.