Ask HN: Feedback on SaaS marketing sites as a service

[revorad]

Hi HN, I'm launching a new service next year for hosting marketing sites for SaaS products.

It's a lot of work to design, build and maintain a marketing site for a product, in addition to building your actual product and selling it. I was surprised that the only alternatives are Wordpress and generic site builders, nothing specifically for SaaS products.

So I decided to build one. If you run a SaaS product and want to give it a go, sign up here - http://gini.io/saassites

If you have any questions or feedback, please comment here or email me.

Thanks!

[phantom_oracle]

I hope you don't mind my feedback. It isn't generally harsh, but I can nitpick from a broad end-user perspective. So let's begin:

"SaaS marketing site": This won't make sense to most users hitting the landing page. Why? The answer is in my last sentence. "Landing Page" or "Product website" should be in there (or any other words that explain what your site is going to do, better than what you've explained currently).

Show some pictures below the signup that can pop-up. People love pictures and if you have 2 eye-catching photos of product sites for SaaS businesses, this will increase sign-up potential as there is evidence of what can be done

"Sign up" button: Maybe alter the colour of the button a bit so that it stands out against the rest of the page. It will also direct eyes to it.

[manishsharan]

I could not figure out what your service does .The context is that I do use a/b testing service for marketing . Is your site similar ?

[revorad → manishsharan]

The service is for hosting your marketing site, say like Weebly or Shopify but specifically tailored for SaaS businesses. So we'll have high-quality themes with your typical SaaS pages, like a landing page, customer testimonials, pricing matrix, ToS, Privacy policy, etc.

You can easily edit in a WYSIWYG interface, no need for code or Wordpress knowledge.

Then you can focus more on things like A/B testing.

Does that make it clearer?

[jf22]

Do you have another SaaS product besides this one?

[revorad → jf22]

Yes, I have another one here - http://gini.io/customerwall

[revorad]

Clickable link to the landing page - http://gini.io/saassites

[jefflinwood]

Hi,

You've got a misspelling of January on your web page.

What makes this different from SquareSpace?

[revorad → jefflinwood]

Thanks for reporting the typo. Fixed now.

This app is essentially a specialised version of Squarespace, designed only for SaaS products. I haven't seen any Squarespace templates for SaaS. Yes you could hack together one, but the whole point is to make it instant.

Once the basic site is there, I can add more SaaS-specific integrations like subscription billing, lifecycle marketing, metrics, etc.

[marioluigi → revorad]

You are on the right track there. I have been thinking of something like this for a long time. You are essentially building a SaaS framework as a service. I do not know how easy this would be to build, but I do believe this could have a real future - especially when you make it super easy for a small company to create a SaaS app.

It is interesting that the first module you plan to build is the marketing site. I may have started with something more core to the SaaS experience. But then again, you might be correct in doing so.

You also do not need to build all the parts of the ecosystem yourself. You could integrate with apps that provide very specific SaaS services like baremetrics for saas metrics, getdrip for lifecycle emails etc