What a SaaS or AI marketing site needs at launch

If you’re a technical founder writing your first marketing site, the temptation is to start with the visuals or the stack. Start with the words. Most of what makes an early SaaS site work is a clear sentence about what the product does, a price, and a reason to believe you.

The pages you actually need

• 01Homepage: what it does, who it’s for, why it’s different, one clear call to action.
• 02Pricing: even "from" prices beat "contact us" for most early SaaS products.
• 03Sign up or book a demo.
• 04Security or trust page, if you sell to companies.
• 05Docs or a changelog, if your buyers are technical.
• 06About: who’s behind it.

Skip at launch: a blog without a plan, careers, a press page.

Pricing deserves a note. Early teams hide it because it might change. It will change, and that’s fine. A visible "from" price tells buyers whether they’re in the right range before they spend time on a call, and it gives AI assistants a number to quote when someone asks what you cost.

The trust page is the one technical founders underrate. If you sell to companies, someone will ask where data is stored, who can see it and what happens if you shut down. A plain page that answers those questions saves a round of email in most deals.

What should the homepage say first?

• 01One sentence: "[Product] helps [who] do [what] without [pain]."
• 02A product visual that shows the real thing, not an abstract illustration.
• 03One primary call to action.

Test the sentence on someone outside your industry. If they can say back what the product does, it works. If they say back your category name, it’s too vague.

Below the first screen, answer the next questions in the order a buyer asks them: how it works, who it’s for, what it costs, why they should trust you. Give each one a section with a plain heading. A visitor scanning headings should get the whole pitch without reading a paragraph.

If a stranger can’t say back what the product does, the homepage isn’t done.

Proof when you have no customers yet

• 01Show the product working (a short video or real screenshots).
• 02The founders: who you are and why you’re building this.
• 03Specific, checkable claims instead of big adjectives.
• 04Early users’ words, with permission, as soon as you have them.

Avoid borrowed proof. Logos of companies that once tried a free trial, user counts nobody can check and stock-photo testimonials are easy to spot and hard to recover from. Small and specific beats big and vague: "Exports to CSV and syncs with your calendar" is more believable than "Works with all your tools."

Make it readable for AI assistants

• 01Answer-first copy that can be quoted.
• 02Prices written in text, not only in images.
• 03Structured data (Organization, Product or Service, FAQ) and an llms.txt.
• 04Pages rendered on the server so crawlers see the content.

Many buyers now ask an assistant before they visit a site, and the assistant can only repeat what it can read. We’ve applied all four of these to our own site. The writing side is in How to make your work legible to AI.

Should you pay an agency or build it yourself?

If you can write a clear homepage message, a template plus a designer’s review can work. If you can’t, that’s what to pay for first. A template gives you a layout. It doesn’t tell you what to say, who to say it to or what to leave out, and those decide whether the site works.

For reference, our websites start at US$10k, designed and built. If the product and the brand need work too, a Launch sprint starts at US$12k and includes positioning and a landing page. Everything we do is on the services page.

A launch checklist

• 01Homepage sentence tested on someone outside the team.
• 02A pricing page with at least a "from" price.
• 03One primary call to action, the same on every page.
• 04Real product screenshots or a short video.
• 05A trust page, if you sell to companies.
• 06An about page that says who’s behind the product and why.
• 07A title, meta description and share image for every page.
• 08Structured data, a sitemap and an llms.txt.
• 09Content visible in the page source, not only after scripts run.
• 10Analytics on sign-ups and demo requests, so you know what the site is doing.

If you want the homepage message and the site worked out together, send your brief.

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