Running a fast growing SaaS site solo
TwelveLabs sells video intelligence to enterprise teams in media, sports, and advertising. I've been the only person building and maintaining their site since December 2024, working directly with their marketing team while the product line, content, and traffic all grew at once. Active users roughly doubled over that period, and the site never became the bottleneck.
PROBLEM
A marketing site for a company at this stage never finishes. New products need pages. Content needs somewhere structured to live. What worked at ten pages stops working at a hundred.
They needed continuity. Someone who knew the whole build well enough to keep extending it without it turning into a patchwork.
SOLUTION
The constraints came with the shape of the job. No dedicated developer, no design team to hand things to, and scope that only grew in one direction: more languages, more products, more content, one person keeping it coherent. The design system came from Pentagram. They set the initial direction and the visual language, and my first job was implementing that system in Framer faithfully. Everything since has been built on top of it: new pages, new components, and new features that didn't exist in the original design, which I've designed and built myself while keeping them consistent with what Pentagram established.
The thing that's kept this workable is building for handoff from the start. Anything the content team would touch regularly got structured so they could handle it alone. Anything with logic behind it stayed mine. Drawing that line clearly is what's kept a one person account from becoming a bottleneck. We run on regular syncs with work tracked properly rather than through ad hoc requests, which matters more the bigger the site gets.
Where no ready made tool existed, I built it. Live job listings pulled into the site. Pricing logic across products that don't all bill the same way. Those weren't available off the shelf, so they got built from scratch.
DELIVERY
14 content collections, over 175 blog posts, dozens of case studies and sample apps, running in English, Korean, and Japanese. All structured well enough that publishing doesn't need me anymore.
IMPACT
Some numbers, with a baseline and the caveat upfront: the site doesn't get full credit for all of it.
Active users went from about 11,000 in late 2023 to 144,000 across 2024, before I started. Since December 2024 that trend continued: 283,000 in 2025, and 272,000 already through August 2026 with four months left. Tracked conversions nearly matched a full year's total in eight months.
There were clear spikes, October 2025 and July 2026 both around 59,000 active users, that line up more with company news than anything I shipped those months. Search is still the biggest channel by a wide margin, which probably has something to do with how much content the site now supports, though I wouldn't call that proven.
What I'll claim: the site scaled through a period of fast company growth without falling over, kept converting while traffic climbed, and never slowed the marketing team down.
RETROSPECTIVE
Extending someone else's system taught me to document as I go. Pentagram's design system covered what existed at handover. Every feature I added after that had logic only I understood, and for the first few months nobody else did. That's fine until you're on holiday. Now every custom piece, the job listings, the pricing logic, has a plain language note next to it explaining what it does and what breaks if you touch it. I'd start that on day one next time, not a few months in.
The other honest note: three languages on one site was harder than the paragraph above makes it sound. Text doesn't take up the same space in every language, and the first components I built assumed it did. I fixed those reactively. Now nothing new ships until it's been checked in all three.
MORE PROJECTS
A Fortune 500 team was bouncing between seven tools to get one piece of data. I led the design of the portal that replaced them all. Requests dropped from 12 days to 30 minutes.
Every spacing change needed a developer. I rebuilt the site in Framer, redirects first. Zero URLs lost, rankings held, updates went from days to hours.