For SaaS and developer tools
three products wearing one logo.
You have a marketing site, a docs site and a dashboard. They were built at different times by different people against different deadlines, and they disagree about what a button is, what an error sounds like, and whether a table row is clickable. Your buyer crosses all three in the first ten minutes.
The expensive version of this problem is not the inconsistency. It is that the dashboard — the part people pay for — is the surface nobody has ever designed, because every screen in it arrived as a ticket. Forty columns, no empty state, and an API key dialog somebody built in an afternoon.
Patterns a devtool actually needs
- dense tables — sorting, filtering, 40 columns, 400k rows
- the state before there is any data to show
- roles and permissions, and what a viewer sees instead
- API keys: created once, shown once, revoked loudly
- errors that name the exit code and the fix
- usage meters, quotas, and the mail before the overage
- parity between what the CLI says and what the dashboard says
- the path from signup to first successful call
one system, three surfaces.
The tokens are the same on the marketing page, in the docs and inside the product. That is the whole trick, and it is worth doing in that order: the marketing site is the cheapest place to settle an argument about type scale, and the dashboard is the most expensive.
I write the components too, which matters more here than anywhere else — a data table is a design problem for about a day and an engineering problem forever, and handing a Figma file of one to somebody else is how you get a table that looks right and sorts wrong.
Where the work lands
- Marketing
- the cheapest surface to settle the system on
- Docs
- same tokens, so the code blocks stop being a third brand
- Dashboard
- tables, permissions, keys, quotas, empty states
- Shipped as
- Figma variables and production components
- Build rate
- $6,000 → $5,100 when the system is mine
what it costs.
every line item, priced →Launch
$5,800$5,300
you save $500
brand core + website + social kit
Product
$11,300$10,500
you save $800
brand core + website + design system, standard tier
Everything
$16,400$14,900
you save $1,500
Product + the build at the system-owner rate
start by finding out what’s wrong.
$500, five days, a recorded walkthrough and a written action plan — and it comes off the project if you book one.