Infrastructure security hero concept

Your SaaS company’s funding announcement probably sells harder than your homepage. The press release names the customers, the numbers and the plan. Then people click through to your site and find the version from before the raise.

Hero concept for DesignVerse

Spent part of this morning clicking “try for free” on a few SaaS tools. Most of them wanted an account first, then sent me straight to the pricing page. I don’t mind paying for good software. I just don’t like being told it’s free when it isn’t.

When you’re just trying to finish the design before the meeting but forgot you’re in the new Tesla 😂

Hero section redesign concept for DesignVerse Before → After What changed: - Changed the layout to create a much more impactful and long lasting first impression - Made the industry they work in more prominent and obvious - Added trust signals with partner logos - Rewrote the supporting copy to name the problem they solve

If your SaaS button says “try for free”, people expect to actually try it Not make an account just to land on a pricing page It’s the very first thing they do with your product, and it starts with a lie

Some of my recent work

People landing on a SaaS homepage are already a bit sceptical. They’ve heard every big claim before. So don’t just tell them. Show them the product, then the proof that it works, and it stops sounding like another empty promise.

Your product is the most convincing thing your SaaS company has. Put it front and centre. Let people see what it actually does. Then back it up with numbers, logos, awards, whatever you’ve got. The product makes the claim, the proof makes people believe it.

Hero redesign concept for Axoflow

Hero section redesign concept for @AxoFlowIO Before → After What changed: - Swapped the low-res video for the actual product, so visitors see what they’re getting in the first second - Broke up the wall of text on the left, the headline, copy and buttons now each get room to do their job - Cut the copy in half and built the numbers into it, 50% lower SIEM spend is a reason to book a demo, a feature list isn’t - Moved “from the creators of syslog-ng” to the top, it’s the strongest trust signal they have and it was buried - Made the demo the one clear next step instead of three buttons competing for attention Happy to walk the Axoflow team through the thinking behind it

When your SaaS company is moving fast, skipping the design foundations might feel like saving time. It’s not saving anything. It’s borrowing it. Every page you add on top makes it harder to fix later, and one day you pay it all back at once.

When I built my own website, I rushed it. No design system, nothing organised, every page built quickly. Fine at first. Then I couldn’t find anything, and every small update took ages. Fix one thing, something else breaks. Weird bugs I couldn’t even trace. Ended up having to rebuild it from scratch. And that was just my own small site. On a SaaS site with a team shipping every week, skipping strong foundations costs a lot more.

Started going on morning walks to keep burnout away Feels good not to start the day straight in front of a laptop

Buyers comparing SaaS tools won't scout your website for proof. They give the homepage a minute, maybe less. If your best customers and results aren't on it, chances are they'll never know. Finding them isn't the buyer's job. But showing them is yours.

A big mistake I see on SaaS sites is leaving the best proof off the homepage. Buyers won't go looking for it. If it's not on the landing page, as far as they're concerned it doesn't exist.

Your menu shows how fast your SaaS company grew. Year one the menu has 4 links. Then you launch new features, open a new market, hire a sales team, and every one of those gets a link of its own. Nobody goes back to look at the whole structure, so the site ends up showing how you grew and not what the buyer came looking for.

A messy SaaS menu is usually a history lesson. New feature? Add a link. New team? Add a link. Marketing wants a page? Add a link. Nobody's doing anything wrong, it's just years of quick fixes stacked on top of each other. But the buyer doesn't see the history. They just see a site that's hard to find their way around.

I've watched founders go back and forth on Framer vs custom code like it's some big technical decision. It's not, at seed stage. The site changes weekly, and whoever's doing marketing needs to just open it and edit, not file a ticket and wait on someone else.

At seed stage, your site needs to change quickly and regularly, new positioning, landing page tweaks, copy updates. That's marketing's job, not an engineer's. Framer means marketing can just do it. Custom code means someone's waiting on dev time for what should be a minor change.