Growth & Strategy
Personas
SaaS & Startup
Time to ROI
Medium-term (3-6 months)
For the first few years of my freelance career, I was the architect of what I now call "digital ghost towns." I poured my energy into crafting pixel-perfect websites for SaaS startups and e-commerce brands. Every client left our initial meetings thrilled about their upcoming digital transformation.
I treated each website like a premium sales representative for the company. The messaging was sharp. The user journey was seamless. The design made competitors look outdated.
But here's what I discovered after tracking results across dozens of projects: I was essentially training world-class sales reps to do door-to-door sales in an empty neighborhood.
The harsh reality hit when I analyzed my client portfolio. Beautiful websites? Check. Professional brand presence? Check. Actual visitors coming to see it? Crickets. These websites had become expensive digital brochures—impressive when someone stumbled upon them, but nobody was stumbling upon them.
This painful lesson forced me to completely restructure my approach to startup website design. Here's what you'll learn from my expensive mistakes:
Why "design-first" thinking kills startup websites
The fundamental mindset shift that transforms websites from costs to assets
My exact framework for building websites that actually drive business results
How to avoid the $15K+ mistakes most non-tech founders make
The testing infrastructure that makes your site a growth engine
Industry Reality
What every design agency will tell you
Walk into any design agency or browse through award-winning portfolios, and you'll see the same philosophy repeated everywhere: "Great design drives great results."
The traditional website design process looks like this:
Brand discovery - Multiple workshops to define your "brand essence"
Visual exploration - Mood boards, color palettes, typography systems
Homepage hero perfection - Crafting the "perfect" first impression
Page hierarchy - Building navigation around company structure
Mobile responsiveness - Making it look good on all devices
This approach exists because it's how agencies sell projects. Beautiful mockups get clients excited. Award-winning designs justify premium pricing. The process feels thorough and professional.
Design agencies will show you case studies of "20% conversion rate increases" and "50% more engagement." They'll talk about user experience principles and conversion psychology. Everything sounds logical and data-driven.
But here's where conventional wisdom falls apart in practice: most startups don't have a traffic problem that good design can solve - they have a traffic problem that good design can't solve.
The fundamental issue is that traditional web design treats your homepage as the front door. It assumes people will find you, land on your homepage, and then navigate through your carefully crafted user journey. This works great for established brands with existing traffic and brand recognition.
For startups? It's like opening a beautiful store in the middle of an empty desert and wondering why nobody's shopping.
Consider me as your business complice.
7 years of freelance experience working with SaaS and Ecommerce brands.
When I started working with a B2B SaaS client as a freelance consultant, they perfectly embodied this problem. They had a gorgeous website - clean design, clear messaging, professional photography. The kind of site that would win design awards.
But something was fundamentally broken. Despite having a solid product and decent initial traction, their website was generating almost no leads. Traffic was minimal, and the traffic they did get wasn't converting.
My first instinct was to optimize what existed. I improved the hero section, refined the call-to-actions, added social proof elements. The conversion rate went from 0.8% to 1.2% - technically a 50% improvement, but still terrible in absolute terms.
That's when I realized we were treating symptoms, not the disease. The real problem wasn't conversion optimization - it was that we'd built a beautiful sales representative and stationed them in an empty building.
The client had fallen into the classic startup trap: prioritizing aesthetics over accessibility. Their site was designed like they were Apple or Nike, with the assumption that people would seek them out. But startups don't have that luxury.
The breakthrough came when I analyzed their actual customer acquisition. The few leads they were getting weren't coming through the website at all - they were coming from the founder's personal LinkedIn content and direct outreach. The website was just a validation tool after initial contact.
This disconnect between how we thought people would find them (through the website) and how they actually found them (through personal relationships and content) revealed the fundamental flaw in our approach.
That's when I developed what I now call the "Distribution-First Design Framework" - a complete reversal of traditional web design thinking that prioritizes findability over beauty.
Here's my playbook
What I ended up doing and the results.
Here's the exact framework I developed after this painful realization, tested across dozens of client projects:
Step 1: Start with keyword research, not wireframes
Before touching any design tools, I spend 2-3 weeks understanding how potential customers actually search for solutions. Using tools like Ahrefs and analyzing competitor content, I map out 50-100 keywords that represent real customer intent.
This isn't just about volume - it's about understanding the customer journey. What do they search for when they first realize they have a problem? What questions do they ask when evaluating solutions? What specific features or benefits do they research?
Step 2: Design the site architecture around search intent
Instead of starting with a homepage, I create an "entry point map." Every page is designed to be a potential first impression. This means:
Use case pages for different customer segments
Integration pages for every tool in their tech stack
Comparison pages against competitors
Problem-specific solution pages
Step 3: Build content before visual design
I write all the copy first, structure the information hierarchy, and validate the messaging with actual customers. Only then do we start thinking about colors and fonts. This ensures the design serves the content, not the other way around.
Step 4: Create a testing infrastructure
Every page gets built with experimentation in mind. A/B testing capabilities, heatmap tracking, and conversion funnel analysis are built into the foundation. The goal is to treat the website like a marketing laboratory, not a digital brochure.
Step 5: Measure distribution success, not design awards
Success metrics shift completely: organic traffic growth, keyword rankings, pages per session, and most importantly - qualified leads generated. Beautiful bounce rates don't pay the bills.
The result? Websites that work like search-optimized sales funnels rather than pretty corporate brochures. Every page has a job, and that job is bringing in qualified prospects.
Keyword Research
Start with customer language, not company jargon. Map 50+ search terms before any design work.
Content Architecture
Build information hierarchy around search intent. Every page should work as a landing page.
Testing Foundation
Design for experimentation from day one. A/B test capabilities should be built into the foundation.
Distribution Metrics
Measure traffic growth and lead quality, not design awards or aesthetic perfection.
The results from this approach have been transformative across multiple client projects:
The B2B SaaS client I mentioned went from virtually no organic traffic to over 2,500 monthly visitors within 6 months. More importantly, those visitors were qualified - their trial signup rate increased from 0.8% to 3.2%.
An e-commerce client using this framework saw their organic search traffic grow by 10x in the first year, moving from 300 monthly visitors to over 5,000. Their revenue from organic search went from essentially zero to representing 40% of total sales.
But perhaps most telling was the mindset shift. Clients stopped asking "Can you make this section prettier?" and started asking "How can we test whether this message resonates?" The website transformed from a cost center to a growth engine.
The approach also proved remarkably cost-effective. Instead of $15K+ design projects that generated beautiful PDFs, we built lean, testing-focused sites for $5-8K that immediately started driving business results.
What surprised me most was how this approach actually improved the final design. When you start with real customer language and proven content, the visual design becomes clearer and more purposeful. Form truly follows function.
What I've learned and the mistakes I've made.
Sharing so you don't make them.
After implementing this framework across 50+ startup projects, here are the key lessons that transformed my approach:
Distribution beats perfection every time - A "good enough" site that people can find outperforms a perfect site that nobody sees.
Every page is a front door - Stop thinking about homepage-centric user journeys. Design for multiple entry points.
Content strategy IS design strategy - The words matter more than the colors. Start with messaging, then build visual design around it.
Test early, test often - Build experimentation capabilities into the foundation. Your first design will not be your best design.
Customer language trumps company jargon - Use the exact words your customers use when searching, not the words you use in internal meetings.
SEO isn't a separate discipline - When done right, search optimization and user experience are the same thing.
Budget for iteration, not perfection - Allocate 30% of your design budget for post-launch testing and optimization.
The biggest mistake I see non-tech founders make is treating their website like a one-time purchase instead of an evolving marketing asset. Your first website should be your starting point, not your destination.
How you can adapt this to your Business
My playbook, condensed for your use case.
For your SaaS / Startup
Start with use case pages for different customer segments
Build integration pages for every tool in your prospect's tech stack
Create comparison pages against direct competitors
Design free trial flows that capture intent data
For your Ecommerce store
Focus on product category pages over homepage traffic
Build collection pages optimized for search intent
Create problem-solution landing pages for each customer pain point
Implement search-friendly product page structures