In the first edition of our Original Thinkers series, our co-founder Juliet Stott sat down with Toni Hopponen, founder of LandingRabbit and former CEO of Flockler, to explore how AI, customer insights, and smarter workflows are reshaping the way SaaS marketers build landing pages that actually convert.
Welcome to the first edition of Original Thinkers, a new interview series where I speak with bold minds shaping the future of content – founders, strategists, and creators who are reimagining how we tell stories, drive growth, and build brands in an increasingly complex digital world.
To kick things off, I met up with Toni Hopponen, a seasoned entrepreneur, product strategist, and longtime advocate for solving real-world marketing challenges through smart, scalable tools. Toni is best known as the co-founder of Flockler, a platform that helped brands curate and publish social media content, which is where I first met him. Over the past decade, he’s worked closely with SaaS marketers and growth teams to help them craft better digital experiences.
Now, with his new venture LandingRabbit, Toni is tackling one of SaaS marketing’s most persistent pain points: the slow, fragmented process of creating high-converting landing pages. His goal? To make it radically easier for marketers to go from insights to execution – turning transcripts, support chats, and research notes into smart, personalised pages in minutes, not weeks.
In this conversation, we dive into why landing pages are still essential in an era dominated by large language models and AI discovery tools, what separates forgettable pages from those that convert, and how AI can augment, not replace, the creative process. We talk about structure, tone of voice, internal politics, stakeholder approval, and the tricky balance between scale and personalisation.
Whether you’re in SaaS marketing, content strategy, product, or growth, this Q&A is packed with tactical advice, behind-the-scenes learnings, and plenty of food for thought.
Juliet Stott: Why are landing pages so important for SaaS companies?
Toni Hopponen: For SaaS specifically, landing pages help sell. Whether it’s through marketing, support, or sales, they allow you to create very focused messages. When I was at Flockler, I made about 100 pages a year that were very specific and tied to particular customer needs.
Why? Because if someone is Googling something niche like “CRM for startups” and lands on a generic Salesforce homepage, they’ll get lost. You need a targeted landing page that speaks exactly to what your customer is searching for.
JS: Are websites and landing pages still relevant in the age of AI and large language models?
TH: I think websites are still necessary. We use tools like ChatGPT to get recommendations and discover products, but at the end of the day, people still want to see the product for themselves. Especially in SaaS, after someone gets a suggestion from an AI, they’ll still go and check your website to make sure you’re real. It’s about trust. They want to see the interface, understand the value, and decide whether it actually fits their needs.
JS: How do you see SEO changing now that more discovery is happening through AI tools rather than search engines?
TH: With LLMs and AI tools, SEO is shifting. It’s not just about getting to the top of Google anymore – it’s about making sure your content is out there and structured in a way that AI can actually surface it. If your product solves a problem but you’ve never written a landing page about it, an AI might not even mention you. Worse, it might recommend your competitor because they’ve done a better job of spelling things out. That’s why it’s critical to build landing pages that cover all your key use cases and audiences – even if no one is clicking on them today, you’ll benefit when AI takes on more of the discovery journey.
JS: Should companies build landing pages for every micro-segment or persona?
TH: Yeah, exactly. There’s no limit. As your product grows – with new features, use cases, industries -your landing pages should evolve too. It’s not about how many pages you have; it’s about how helpful they are to your buyer.
People often forget that in SaaS, there’s not just one buyer. There’s usually a group -10 or 15 people – each with a different angle. Someone finds your product and thinks it’s useful, but now they have to convince the CEO, finance, or IT. Landing pages that are targeted to each of those stakeholders help people do the internal selling.
JS: What if you don’t have permission to use customer logos or publish case studies?
TH: It’s even better if you can get that approval and include the customer’s voice. But getting just one case study can be a lot of work. So, what we did at Flockler and what we do now is use words from sales discussions and support chats and turn those insights into pages. Sometimes you don’t need to name the company. And sometimes your product is so public – like in my old company – you can just show examples because everything is live anyway.
JS: What kind of structure and storytelling do you think works best on a landing page?
TH: It really depends on where the audience is coming from. If they’re coming from a Google ad, the page should match that very specific intent. But if it’s from something like a LinkedIn post, they probably don’t even know what they’re going to find.
The important thing is: if someone only reads the headlines, do they get the story? You’ve got maybe 30 seconds to hook them. You’re not going to sell right away in SaaS or B2B – it’s more about starting the conversation and helping them understand what you do.
JS: How important is a consistent brand tone of voice across the landing page and product experience?
TH: Definitely important. It goes beyond the landing page – you want the same tone of voice in your product, your support, your marketing. If you use a really fun, quirky tone on your website but your product copy is super dry, it doesn’t work. It’s better to have consistency – something that fits your culture and how you talk in real life.
This gets tricky when teams are siloed. Leadership might have one idea of the voice, product another, marketing another. You really need alignment.
JS: What are your biggest pet peeves when you look at SaaS landing pages?
TH: Often it’s internal politics – multiple products or agendas fighting for space. I’ve been on teams where even the hero section had to rotate between products because no one could agree on what was most important. That’s not good for the visitor.
Another issue is vague language. If your page is too general, people don’t understand what you do or why it matters. Also, if I can’t skim the page and get the gist by just reading the headlines, I’ll lose interest. And not showing your product – if I can’t see it or get a sense of how it works – it’s a big problem.
JS: Let’s talk about LandingRabbit. Why did you create it?
TH: In my previous company, building landing pages was always slow. We had a custom CMS, so I had to write the content, then design it or get someone to design it, and then hand it off to a developer. I tried using landing page tools, but they had other issues – editing, performance, or just not being flexible enough.
When I left, I started asking other marketers how they build and optimise landing pages, and most people said: “Honestly, just creating them is the hardest part.” So that became the idea – how do we make creating the page itself easier?
With LandingRabbit, the goal is to help SaaS teams visualise the page right away. Instead of writing in Google Docs and asking people to imagine what it might look like, the tool helps you create both the content and the visual structure together. It pulls in customer research, call transcripts, and content from your website – and helps you use all of that to write better, faster pages.
JS: Can LandingRabbit be used to check or improve existing landing pages?
TH: Not necessarily to check performance – we’d need more data to do that – but you can definitely use it to generate variations. You can create as many versions as you want and share them instantly to get feedback from your team, your client, or even customers. You can keep your existing structure and just improve or personalise it.
JS: What tools is LandingRabbit compatible with? Can it plug into a CMS?
TH: Right now, we have an integration with Webflow, and we’re working on a Figma import, so you can bring the layout into your design workflow. We’re also planning a WordPress integration soon. Plus, it works with no-code tools like Lovable, v0, and Bolt – you can give those tools the layout instructions, and they’ll build the page for you.
JS: What kind of skills or inputs does someone need to use LandingRabbit?
TH: You don’t need anything special. You just enter your company’s URL, and Landing Rabbit pulls in your layout, fonts, and styling automatically. Then it helps you plan the page, using AI to suggest who it’s for, what problem it solves, benefits, and features. From there, you can write and edit the copy, share it with others, and export when ready. You don’t need design or development skills to get started.
JS: How long does it take to create a landing page using LandingRabbit compared to doing it manually?
TH: If I’m writing a page myself, I might spend 15–30 minutes planning and thinking. Then the tool helps generate structure and layout. It’s about 50–80% accurate right away. Then I’ll spend maybe one to two hours refining the copy.
The biggest time savings come from not needing to go from Google Docs → Figma → Developer. You can also test versions easily, just by cloning and tweaking. So, your quality goes up even if your time doesn’t go down dramatically. You end up writing better pages, faster, without starting from scratch each time.
JS: Are people seeing a return on investment such as better results, faster workflows, or more conversions?
TH: Yes. Agencies tell us they’re finally able to move from content plans to live pages. One said, “Now my content doesn’t just sit in a do – it becomes real.” Some SaaS founders use it to build entire sites. Others use it for paid marketing or sales outreach, creating very focused, specific pages that improve performance.
One benefit is faster approval. Even if the AI-generated design isn’t perfect, it’s enough to say, “This is the story- here’s the hero section, here’s the message.” That alone speeds things up.
JS: Does LandingRabbit have a free trial, and what’s the pricing model?
TH: Yes, we’re in free beta right now, so anyone can try it out. When we launch paid plans, they’ll start at $29/month. We want it to be something individual marketers or copywriters can use -even if their company isn’t paying for it. It’s not going to be an enterprise-only product.
Eventually, we’re building a Slack community too, so users can share feedback, get help, and even ask about stuff beyond landing pages- like paid marketing or campaign strategy.
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