The definitive SaaS homepage framework

Anthony Pierri shares his step-by-step guide

👋 Hi, it’s Kyle and I’m back with a 🔥 edition of Growth Unhinged, my newsletter that explores the unexpected behind the fastest-growing startups. 

SaaS companies have at least one thing in common: they need a great website. While a great website is life-or-death in a product-led business, it’s also crucial for attracting enterprise prospects. There’s perhaps nobody who’s been as prolific or insightful about this topic as Anthony Pierri, a founder of Fletch PMM (although co-founder Robert Kaminski might give him a run for his money).

Anthony argues that most SaaS messaging is garbage. It doesn’t have to be. He’s now sharing his comprehensive framework for writing a SaaS homepage.

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Homepages are a bit like Product Marketing Managers: everyone expects them to do everything.

• Founders want them to reflect their big vision (to impress investors).

• Product wants them to show off the coolest features (to intimidate competitors).

• Sales wants them to display compelling ROI numbers (to wow prospects).

• HR wants them to demonstrate the amazing culture (to entice applicants).

In reality, the homepage is a marketing asset — and even more specifically, it is a product marketing asset.

For startups of all sizes, its purpose is to answer fundamental questions like…

1. What does the product do?

2. How does it work?

3. What does it look like?

4. When would I use it?

5. How does it help me make progress in what I’m trying to accomplish?

Until the majority of your TAM can answer easily answer these questions, you must resist the natural pull (usually from executives) towards vague, broad, and ambiguous messaging.

And if companies like Loom (valued at $6B), Notion (valued at $10B), and Rippling (valued at $11B) are still primarily doing product marketing on their homepage, you probably should be too.

With that in mind, let’s write a homepage together.

Step 1: Choose your audience

The first step to writing a homepage is choosing an audience. It can be helpful to map your potential segments across three dimensions: company type, persona or department, and situation.

Anchoring your messaging to a specific type of department (sales teams) or type of company (accounting firms) can be considered a “vertical” audience.

But what if your solution helps multiple types of companies and departments?

In these cases, you can anchor on a shared “situation” — what could be considered a “horizontal” audience.

The “situation” box can either describe a process (“I’m trying to patch a hole in my drywall”) or a desired outcome (“I’m trying to get more sales leads”).

For fans of Tony Ulwick or Bob Moesta, this is essentially the Job-to-be-Done box.

In both cases, the important piece is that this is something your target is actively expending energy to accomplish.

Once you’ve mapped out your audience options, you then can weigh the pros and cons of each to find the right target.

Some questions to consider as you prioritize:

• Where do we want our growth to come from in the next 6-12 months?

• Which group can we reasonably expect to reach given our current go-to-market muscle?

• Are we trying to create or capture demand?