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Are you asking only about SaaS apps? For ecommerce, the whole site should be the marketing site. For a mobile app, website is the smallest piece of the marketin

Are you asking only about SaaS apps? For ecommerce, the whole site should be the marketing site. For a mobile app, website is the smallest piece of the marketing puzzle. Frankly, I think marketing is much more important than technology for success. And I say that as a software developer. It doesn't matter how good your product is if nobody knows about it. It doesn't matter if it's better than the competitor's if the competitor is better at telling people why they should use their product. I currently work at a SaaS business. Our app and marketing sites are one and the same. Some of that is for historical reasons, but I believe that for us it's an advantage. We grow steadily in part because the product team works more closely with the marketing team than with anyone else in the company. Exposure, conversion, and retention are baked into every feature and every decision we make. We could never do that nearly as effectively with an outsourced marketing department. One caveat: we are a mass market B2C company. I wouldn't be surprised to find that there's a sliding scale for how closely marketing and product need to be integrated depending on how high-touch the sales process is. An enterprise B2C where there's no way to try the product at all without a custom-negotiated contract has no reason to integrate the marketing site with the product. That said, I'm always skeptical about outsourcing marketing entirely. See the first point above.

mymmaster 9y ago
Thanks! I'm interested in both ecommerce and SaaS though I suppose you're right in that ecommerce they will always be one in the same. Does everyone on your eng team share that same belief in the importance of working with marketing? I ask because I've been in situations where engineers would've rather worked on juicy technical challenges of the main application. Marketing "asks" for a new analytics tool or CMS were viewed as a nuisance and sometimes outsourced to a Wordpress agency.
- cimmanom 9y ago
  To be honest, aside from some moderate scaling issues, the technical challenges of our main application aren't all that juicy. Like a lot of SaaS, we're mostly glorified CRUD. Our biggest technical problem is generally around keeping complex business logic from breaking when we extend it. But anyway, we try to avoid hiring prima donnas. We hire people who are focused on making the product and the business succeed, not on scratching their personal technical itches. There are plenty of engineers out there who get their satisfaction from knowing that their work is being used or helping users or the business or their co-workers, rather than from playing with algorithms. I've never heard a complaint or even a foot-drag from anyone on this team, nor the previous one I worked with (medium-high-touch B2B with a separate marketing site managed in-house). If you have a deeply technical product, you still need someone who's going to build out dashboards and other UI. Just make sure you have at least a few people on your team who are willing to work on the stuff that maybe you don't find glamorous.

mymmaster 9y ago

Thanks! I'm interested in both ecommerce and SaaS though I suppose you're right in that ecommerce they will always be one in the same. Does everyone on your eng team share that same belief in the importance of working with marketing? I ask because I've been in situations where engineers would've rather worked on juicy technical challenges of the main application. Marketing "asks" for a new analytics tool or CMS were viewed as a nuisance and sometimes outsourced to a Wordpress agency.

cimmanom 9y ago
To be honest, aside from some moderate scaling issues, the technical challenges of our main application aren't all that juicy. Like a lot of SaaS, we're mostly glorified CRUD. Our biggest technical problem is generally around keeping complex business logic from breaking when we extend it. But anyway, we try to avoid hiring prima donnas. We hire people who are focused on making the product and the business succeed, not on scratching their personal technical itches. There are plenty of engineers out there who get their satisfaction from knowing that their work is being used or helping users or the business or their co-workers, rather than from playing with algorithms. I've never heard a complaint or even a foot-drag from anyone on this team, nor the previous one I worked with (medium-high-touch B2B with a separate marketing site managed in-house). If you have a deeply technical product, you still need someone who's going to build out dashboards and other UI. Just make sure you have at least a few people on your team who are willing to work on the stuff that maybe you don't find glamorous.