Separate marketing site— do you do it?
What's everyone's opinion on whether to have a marketing site from your app?
This tweet (https://twitter.com/tylertringas/status/1250521285630836741) started a conversation with my co-founder and I.
I think the answer is almost certainly, it depends. But I'd be curious to know what it depends on for you 😊.
I agree 100% with Tyler that you should separate the two. Having a simple link and/or banner on your marketing site for your customers to click to go your app is simple enough. At MemberSpace, we haven't experienced any customer confusion with that UX and we can sleep easy knowing both sites are separate in case one goes down.
Thanks Ward— that's helpful to hear, especially from the perspective of an accomplished company like MemberSpace!
Yep! I’m also with Tyler on this one. We’ve went through so many agencies, and freelancers on our outward facing site. It’s so nice not having to make the marketing folks worry about the product.
As a solo-founder I’m happy to have my landing page and app under the same codebase. It’s easy to do with Next.js and convenient to be able to share styles and experiment with exposing app functionality on the homepage. If you’re part of a larger team that contains non-devs then separation might make sense. At the very least you’d want a headless CMS so they can update marketing content without asking for a code change.
Totally— I think the headless CMS route is a good middle ground!
At launch you can get away with having them in the same codebase but you're just adding future pain with every new piece of content assuming you are even moderately successful. As you grow you'll want non-technical people to add review or add content to your marketing site and will want to make updates at a different cadence to code releases and a migration when you have 100 indexed pages is more effort than starting on the right track to begin with.
That said, choose a low maintenance marketing site option is possible. I've used self-hosted Wordpress in the past and dealing with the security issues and version upgrades took a real toll. Something like netlify or next.js with static site generators feels like the way to go right now.
At ScrapingBee things are just split in two:
App on a subdomain: app.scrapingbee.com.
Blog and marketing site on the same domain: scrapingbee.com. This one is important for SEO (1). And with Netlify it allows us to not care about the traffic spiker coming from Reddit or IH. It also handles the whole CDN / assets compression thing perfectly.
Also, it allows you to do many marketing experiments without touching your main codebase (A/B test, promotional banner, chat popup, ...)
Source:
[1]
https://buttercms.com/blog/blog-subdomain-or-subdirectory-hint-one-is-40-better
https://www.searchenginejournal.com/subdomains-vs-subfolders-seo/239795/
We keep all of ours totally separate.
All literally run on separate servers in different parts of the world. We try and keep a common look and feel through most of them (marketing sites especially)
Hey, is there a particular reason you chose to keep them separate or did it just develop that way?
Just kind of happened that way, but we also wanted to maintain separation so that if there was a major outage in one region or provider, other assets would stay up that we could use to inform our customers. Also, as we are now growing, we can hand over whole assets (e.g. marketing website) to particular teams or contractors to work on without fear that they will break anything else (e.g. app).
Ah yeah, makes sense 👍
Cent percent true for SaaS businesses that want to grow. Very little effort to get this is done at the beginning, but saves a ton of time in the future.
I read Tyler's tweet and all the replies, and after a lot of thought, I'm going with one site/codebase.
The main reasons are:
The only hesitancy I have is that even as one person, I don't like having a single deploy path for both the app and website, but that's a compromise I'm willing to make given the points above.
That makes a lot of sense— especially since you're both marketing and dev 👍
I use Next.js, so I don't mind having both the landing page and the app under one codebase. In fact, I might actually prefer it in the early stages - it simplifies things.
It's useful being able to detect logged-in state on the landing page and share components. It's also super simple to experiment with my landing page since it's just code. There aren't any real downsides for me, since I don't have a marketing team that needs to update the landing page, and pushing code to production takes a trivial amount of time.
If your app is successful and you start to hire people, however, then you should definitely use some kind of CMS to update your marketing site so changes don't need to go through a developer. In the early stages it doesn't really matter.
100% agree with Tyler as well. I couldn't imagine having to push code to production just for a landing page tweak.
The goal as a startup should be to move fast. I have seen people build custom pages, blogs etc just so they don't have to talk with customers.
Lol, common excuse to not talking with customer :)
Yep, talking with customers is hard.
Coding is easy compared to it.
Yes, in the begining I think coding was hardest thing to build saas, but marketing and sales way a lot harder :)
Yep feeling that now.
What got us to where we are won't get us to the next stage.
Yes, keep learning :)
It depends, for these kind of things I often check the SEO benefits first. Since I do code splitting on route level right now it doesn't matter that much for performance