Our Story
From CRO consulting that generated tens of millions in revenue — to the platform that puts that methodology in your hands.
Ryan Johnson
Founder, Growth Roadmaps
Started as a Web Developer
Ryan's journey began building websites from scratch — learning HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and the technical foundations of how the web actually works. That hands-on development experience became the foundation for everything that followed: an understanding of site architecture, performance, and the technical levers that most marketers never learn to pull.
Deliberately Learning Sales & Direct Marketing
Rather than staying behind a screen, Ryan took jobs specifically to learn sales and direct marketing — face to face, on the phone, and through direct response campaigns. He wanted to understand what truly drives customers to take action, not just how to build the page they land on. This combination of technical skill and sales psychology became his competitive edge.
First Major Success: The Dentist Case Study
The first real proof came from a local dentist who was getting roughly 1 new patient per month from their website. Ryan applied everything he'd learned — SEO fundamentals, conversion-focused copy, clear calls to action, and a site structure designed around how patients actually search for dental care. Within months, that practice was bringing in over 30 new patients per month. It was the first time the methodology produced a measurable, transformative result — and it proved the approach worked.
Founded the Consulting Business
With that proof point in hand, Ryan launched inthevine.ca as a full-service CRO and SEO consultancy. The business focused on helping companies diagnose where their sites were leaking revenue and build prioritized plans to fix the highest-impact issues first — a structured approach that would later become the backbone of Growth Roadmaps.
Personal Coaching from Peep Laja
Ryan sought out and received personal coaching from Peep Laja — widely recognized as the #1 most influential conversion rate optimization expert in the world and founder of CXL. That mentorship sharpened the analytical rigor behind the consulting methodology: structured research processes, evidence-based prioritization, and the discipline of testing assumptions rather than acting on intuition. It was the difference between doing CRO and doing CRO systematically.
Tens of Millions in Added Revenue for Enterprise Clients
The consulting practice scaled to work with major retail and travel brands — Silver Jeans, Warehouse One, Ricki's, Fresh Tracks Canada, Adventures Abroad, and others. Across these engagements, Ryan's methodology helped generate tens of millions of dollars in additional revenue through a combination of conversion rate optimization, SEO strategy, and systematic testing. These weren't incremental improvements — they were step-change results driven by a repeatable framework.
Recognizing the Automation Opportunity
After years of running the same consulting playbook across different clients, a pattern became clear: the research, analysis, and prioritization steps were remarkably consistent. The methodology was proven, but it was bottlenecked by human time — audits took weeks, analysis was manual, and clients couldn't afford to run it continuously. Ryan began building tools to automate the most time-intensive parts of the process.
Created Growth Roadmaps
Growth Roadmaps is the full consulting methodology — Ring Model analysis, PXL scoring, prioritized roadmaps — turned into software. It gives every growth team access to the same system that drove results for enterprise clients, without the enterprise price tag or the weeks of waiting. The platform doesn't just give you data — it tells you what to do next.
The Framework
Growth Roadmaps isn't generic marketing software — it's the direct translation of a proven consulting methodology into a platform. Here's how the framework that drove results for enterprise clients became the product's architecture:
Ring Model Analysis
In consulting, Ryan analyzed funnels from the inside out — starting at the point where users are closest to converting and working outward. This counterintuitive approach ensures you fix the highest-value leaks first, not the most visible ones. In the platform, Conversion Research automates this same analysis using your actual GA4 data.
PXL Scoring
Every consulting engagement used a standardized scoring framework to rank findings by potential impact versus implementation effort. No gut-feel prioritization — every recommendation had a score. In the platform, every SEO issue, conversion finding, and test hypothesis is automatically PXL-scored so your team always knows what to work on next.
Prioritized Roadmap
The final consulting deliverable was always a ranked action plan — not a list of issues, but a sequenced roadmap ordered by impact. In the platform, your Growth Roadmap is that same deliverable, generated automatically and updated continuously as new data flows in from SEO audits, conversion research, and testing.
Person → Method → Product. The consulting framework became the software architecture — which is why Growth Roadmaps can deliver the same quality of analysis that used to require weeks of expert consulting time.
Why Software Instead of Consulting
After years of running the same methodology across dozens of clients, Ryan faced a choice: keep scaling the consultancy one engagement at a time, or build the system into software so every growth team could access it — not just the ones who could afford a senior CRO consultant.
The problem with consulting was never the quality of the work. It was the bottleneck. Audits took weeks. Analysis was manual. Clients couldn't afford to run it continuously. And the teams who needed it most — the ones without a dedicated CRO resource — were the ones least likely to hire a consultant.
Growth Roadmaps exists so you don't need to hire Ryan — or anyone like him. The platform runs the same research, applies the same scoring, and produces the same prioritized roadmap. The difference is it does it automatically, continuously, and at a fraction of the cost. Your team gets a system, not a service.