The SaaS Revolution Left Your Website Behind

A version of this post was originally published on PinTale

Software-as-a-service (SaaS) has fundamentally changed how businesses operate. The days of installing software upgrades and managing servers gone, replaced by seamless cloud-based applications that provide continual improvements.

SaaS has revolutionized software product development itself through rapid iteration based on customer feedback. Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment (CICD) is now the norm in software development. New features and fixes can be rolled out in days or weeks rather than months or years with traditional licensed software.

The result is a product that evolves with customers. I’d bet just about anyone under 40 can’t even fathom the alternative.

Here’s the rub:

While SaaS products themselves evolved, the way we tell their story online lagged behind. Your product marketer has been scrambling for at least a decade to try and figure out how to keep up.

SaaS marketing websites today work much like they did 20 years ago:

1. They are designed
2. Content is added
3. Content is optimized for SEO
4. They continue like this for a few years, before a full redesign becomes necessary

This made sense when software moved slowly, but today it causes a disconnect.

Offline, SaaS products rapidly improve thanks to agile engineering teams. Online, the story stands still after the initial launch. Sure, we shove in a bunch of new pages after the fact and tweak some copy here and there, but all of this is bolted on.

So we have all of this rapidly evolving product, technology and business strategy being communicated by, well, a mostly outdated and static billboard. Heck I’ve been a part of organizations where product updates were held back simply because we couldn’t figure out where it fit in the existing website.

Updating websites has always been too expensive and time-consuming to do routinely. Fragmentation and dilution of message is almost a given. Even with a great martech stack, evolving a site in lockstep with product development has been virtually impossible for most companies.

What if you could change that? What if you could have a website that evolves as rapidly as your SaaS app?

The Promise of an Iterative Website Experience

AI has entered the conversation. Yes, of course AI has been around for quite awhile, but we’ve crossed a chasm in the past 2 years. In the same way that AI transforms products themselves, it has the potential to revolutionize the way websites present the story of those products.

Applied correctly, AI can facilitate iterative website experiences that align with SaaS values of constant refinement and improvement.

Small tweaks would come fast and frequent based on the latest customer and market data. Pages and campaigns could be quickly personalized for different segments and geographies. New products and features could seamlessly fold into existing narratives.

This agility means your story can actually evolve continuously. An iterative website powered by AI lets you apply SaaS principles to your online story. Just as continual improvements keep customers happy with your app, continual improvements to the website can keep those conversion metrics up.

CICD Storytelling

Imagine a world where you never had to do a full gut redesign and repositioning of your website? Oh My!

Imagine if your content system was capable of Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment (CICD) of your latest positioning?

Delivering this vision requires rethinking the typical website marketing process. Most brands today work in lengthy cycles based around periodic redesigns:

1. Strategize messaging, positioning, etc.
2. Design and build new site.
3. Produce launch content.
4. Bolt on a few things here and there
5. Let it run for 2–3 years.
6. Repeat fully from scratch.

This made sense when websites relied entirely on human creators, and changing them was resource intensive. Artificial intelligence upends these constraints, enabling a process aligned with the more agile approaches of SaaS:

1. Set brand strategy and guiding metrics.
2. Launch lightweight site foundation adaptive to ongoing changes.
3. Continually test and optimize pages and content using AI.
4. Refresh and tailor brand messaging dynamically over time.
5. Provide AI with the core new ideas along the way.
6. Let the site and story evolve iteratively.

The key difference is a focus on continuous small improvements, rather than intermittent big bets. AI manages the heavy lifting of producing, shaping, and updating content. Humans provide high-level guidance and governance to ensure it remains on-brand.

What might this actually look like day to day? Imagine a future where:

• Marketers define the baseline narrative.
• As the company expands into new areas of business, markets or positioning, elements get added, removed or updated
• The software feathers all this together, keeping track of the latest positioning
• Websites dynamically customize layouts and content accordingly.
• The latest product features and releases fluidly integrate with existing narrative arcs.

This is the promise of an iterative SaaS website. It stays perpetually fresh, engaging, and tailored without ongoing intense human effort. The focus shifts from periodic site redesigns to continuous guidance as AI handles rapid updates.

Smaller and Smaller, Quicker and Quicker

One of the most amazing things that came out of the SaaS revolution, and the rethinking of software development that came with it was how the scale of the “deployable element” changed.

Originally deploys were managed tightly and generally involved large batches of highly tested code. If you screwed something up in a giant multi thousand line code update, getting back on track could cost a lot of time and money.

Enter the CICD revolution, and one thing it brought was the democratization and miniaturization of the deploy. Tiny updates that can be pushed to production by almost anyone. Small updates generally mean a small blast radius if something blows up. It’s not uncommon for larger teams to deploy 100’s of times a day.

This is where we are heading with our storytelling in an AI world. Testing tiny positioning changes to understand impact, with the ability to seamlessly weave in. Rapid ability to roll back and adjust at scale. All fair game.

Overcoming the Barriers

Transitioning to an iterative website model poses some real challenges. Changing processes built up over decades is always messy. To leverage the latest AI can deliver requires navigating hype, uncertainty, and gaps between ambition and reality.

Perhaps the biggest obstacle is simply institutional inertia. Most brands accepted the status quo of website redesigns as necessary evil, because that was the only option.

Another barrier is technology risk. Applying AI to marketing is promising on paper, but we’re still in the early days. FUD abounds.

This will subside over the coming months and years. Probably much quicker than we have ever seen with any other technology.

Act Now to Lead Tomorrow

Make no mistake, we are off the start line and the race has already begun.

Applied thoughtfully, AI can create a truly end to end iterative business for the first time. Start thinking about how you might reshape your thinking in this world we’re heading towards. Lay the groundwork today to reimagine your website as a continuously evolving platform, instead of static marketing collateral.

Is perpetual evolution risky? Absolutely. The known path is always safer. The ideas that brought SaaS to life were once considered too risky as well. Yet here we are.