Ask HN: What is your “SaaS website stack and workflow”?

9 points by vvram 4 years ago | 6 comments

Inspired by https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27525819

As a non-technical looking into building a new SaaS venture, I would like to request advice on tools and workflows you use for building Saas web properties to include main website, campaign landing pages, marketing micro sites, blogs.

Ideally, I am trying to understand what’s the least friction workflow a non-technical person like myself use to publish and maintain content surrounding a Saas web property. Appreciate any and all insights.

kevinful 4 years ago |

We used to build marketing sites for startups, and are now building our own Saas.

First thing to know is, a lot of Saas companies acquire most of their customers through SEO/content marketing (and direct sales on leads that often come in through content).

So a lot of your ‘marketing’ time is going to be spent creating content, like email updates, blog posts, feature announcements, guides, help docs, customer case studies, comparison landing pages, etc.

The best tool we've found for marketing sites is Webflow. In previous companies we’ve used wordpress, then static sites (Gatsby, Hugo, etc) hooked up to a headless CMS, and both were pretty much horrible for this use case.

Wordpress is great at content publishing, but a giant pain in the ass to setup and create new landing pages with. Static sites are fun to set up and easy to create landing pages with (if you know front-end dev), but are a nightmare for content publishing workflows.

Webflow can do both fairly well (and is friendly for non-technical founders), hence why most YC companies create their marketing sites on Webflow now.

The only downside of Webflow IMO, is that Wordpress does offer a better content publishing experience and great email marketing integrations, so we built a tool to solve that for Webflow, and are currently turning it into a Saas (shameless plug): https://audienceful.com

ecesena 4 years ago |

If your plan is to experiment a lot w/ website, landing, other sites and blogs then probably investing into something like wordpress will pay out eventually. Or hosted solutions like squarespace/wix.

For landing/micro sites specifically there's plenty of tools out there, mailchimp and hubspot both support landing pages.

For blog there's the usual diatribe host yourself vs use medium for extra distribution.

quickthrower2 4 years ago |

I’m a fan of Wordpress but it can be a little technical sometimes (to setup, eg backups) so if you are completely non technical you might need to get hands on or hire some help. Hopefully the SaaS technical people can help.

oliverx0 4 years ago |

Hi there! Author of the post you mentioned. I have also been thinking a lot about this, and recently came up with the following tooling / workflow for the main website:

- Read Julian Shapiros's Landing Page guide. It contains a great structure and process for coming up with a landing page: https://www.julian.com/guide/growth/landing-pages

- Create a very basic mock-up of your landing page using Excalidraw: https://excalidraw.com/

- Once you have the right structure and copy, it is time to go into design and development. First, I would recommend you purchase SystemFlow: https://www.systemflow.co/. The guys behind it created a wonderful process for creating websites quickly using Figma + Webflow.

- Before diving into the design though, I would recommend you choose a good color palette for your website using https://coolors.co/

- You should also decide the kind of images you want for your page. If you want something quick, you can use: https://www.whoooa.rocks/ Otherwise, you can hire an illustrator from Fiverr or Upwork to make them for you based on your copy. If you would rather create simple product images, you can use Pixelmator Pro.

- Finally, choose the fonts for your website. I recommend you just go into another landing page you like and copy those fonts or similar if they are available on Google Fonts.

- Now is time to dive into Figma, using SystemFlow, to create your design. Make sure to watch the SystemFlow University's videos first. I also recommend the following plugins for Figma.

For icons, Hero Icons: https://heroicons.com/.

For background patterns (they really add a nice touch to designs): https://www.heropatterns.com/

- Once you have your design ready to go, publish it into Webflow (again, using SystemFlow).

This advice is mostly for your main website / landing pages. For the marketing micro-sites and blogs, I think https://www.audienceful.com/ (mentioned in the sales stack thread I posted) has a lot of potential, I requested access and hoping to hear back soon.

EDIT: You mention you are non-technical. I would still take the time to learn HTML + CSS properly to really get the most out of Webflow.

kevinful 4 years ago | |

Thanks for the shoutout re: Audienceful! We're hoping to open more to beta testers very very soon.

vvram 4 years ago | | |

Thanks for the specific details