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12 Comments

Simplify?

Woke up last week with an amazing SaaS idea, that I validated and already sold to two companies.

Now, I want to simplify my time to market. Here is what I need to create:

  • Website/Homepage. Can be a one-pager + legal pages.
  • The SaaS-app itself

Normally, I would code all of it from scratch, but this time I am looking at splitting both into two different sites. I am thinking of the following:

  • Wordpress + Theme for the frontend. This gives me max flexibility in creating a blog and add plugins etc. to the front end without having to invest a lot of time on things that convert visitors into paying customers. It'll be easier to iterate and A/B test different versions without coding sessions.
  • My own framework for the SaaS backend.

Now, this obviously has some drawbacks, as the frontend and backend will not look identical and that I won't have the ability to customise my frontend with information in regards to if a user is already logged in to the SaaS backend or not.

How do you tackle this or am I overcomplicating it? Adobe combines frontend and backend, Salesforce doesn't, Microsoft combines, Clearbit doesn't, etc.

Any suggestions or thoughts on Pro vs. Con?

on July 3, 2021
  1. 2

    It 's really not a big deal to have your saas app on a subdomain. You can host your main site using Wordpress or Ghost and your application on a subdomain like app.example.com I don't think most people even realize there is a subdomain.

    For my projects I setup Ghost because its fast and handles SEO and Open Graph tags, sitemap, amp and then the application on a subdomain. On sites that I need everything on the main domain I'll use Ghost for the admin and the Ghost API to display data. (This works great but still took more time than I anticipated)

  2. 2

    You should do one index.php and call it a day 😛

  3. 2

    Don't combine.

    Spoke to so many founders who regretted it.

    The second you want a feature for your website you have to custom code it.

    I built https://versoly.com/ to solve it, WP is a huge headache.

    1. 1

      site down...

        1. 1

          versoly.com ... it is up now though :).

          1. 1

            Interesting do you remember what the error was? We have multiple uptime monitors checking lol and can't see anything our end. Thanks.

            1. 1

              It looked as if the server was completely down. But I wonder, where do you host the landing? is it not a S3 or similar? (which could basically never go down).

              1. 1

                I see it points to an ec2 instance... who knows maybe it was down for a moment or some DNS issue. But interesting that you do not run it on S3, I guess you have good reasons :).

                1. 1

                  It is hosted on s3 then served from an ec2 instance. Due to having to serve custom SSL.

                  Very odd.

                  1. 1

                    Got it. That's a limitation in route53 that is quite disturbing actually.

  4. 5

    This comment was deleted 5 years ago

    1. 2

      comfirmation bias achieved. thank you!