My role
I had two jobs at Site Studio. Until the acquisition I made people good at the product and helped sell it: I learned it inside out by building sites with it, taught it through videos, webinars and training, and demoed it to prospects, including the weekend prototype that won our biggest deal. After Acquia bought us I moved into engineering, and spent nearly five years as one of the two front-end engineers responsible for the whole app.
What I owned
5A self-serve tutorial video series, taking a new user from nothing to a shipped site
Demo sites designed and built in Site Studio, including whole sites built for prospects in a single day
Webinars for hundreds of prospective users, and training for customer teams
The React component library the whole app used, built in Styled Components
A Cypress end-to-end test suite covering the whole application
What I shared
5In-person demos at prospects' offices, with our Head of Marketing
The weekend prototype that won the Bayer deal, with our Product Design Director
Helping Bayer migrate over 1,000 websites onto Site Studio
Rebuilding the whole app in React, with one other front-end engineer: over 100,000 lines of AngularJS migrated and the architecture redesigned
The visual page builder, built from scratch by the two of us
What others did
3The lead came from a Senior Director of Solutions Architecture at Acquia
The commercial deal and the acquisition were handled by our directors
The product's interface design, by its original designer. The other front-end engineer and I built it in React
Site Studio after the React rebuild. The product's original designer designed these screens, and the other front-end engineer and I built them.
The problem
Good Drupal developers are hard to find, and building websites on Drupal is hard too. Site Studio offered a low-code way to build Drupal sites, but it was still a technical product. To get good results, people had to know how to build a sensible component library and understand front-end development.
I was hired as a Senior Frontend Designer to bridge that gap: teach individuals and whole companies how to build websites with Site Studio.
Becoming an expert
My first big job was a self-serve tutorial video series that would teach users how to build an entire website with the product. To do that properly I had to be an expert myself, so I designed and built a whole site in Site Studio from scratch first.
With that behind me, I made a full set of videos covering everything a new user needed to go from nothing to shipping a site with confidence.
Teaching and pitching
Knowing the product that well opened up work beyond training. Our only customer at the time was our partner agency, and we needed others. I visited companies with our Head of Marketing to demo the product in person, ran webinars for hundreds of prospective users, and built entire websites for prospects in a single day to show how fast Site Studio could be. We recorded those sessions and sent them to the prospects afterwards.
Teaching plus live building turned out to be one of our best ways of showing the product to people who had never seen anything like it.
What else the job involved
My title was Senior Frontend Designer, but most of the job was teaching: showing companies how to build a sensible design system and front end in Site Studio. I also trained teams in other countries, designed and built sites on stage at live events, and pitched to some of the biggest companies in the world. It's still one of the most rewarding stretches of my career.
Landing our largest customer
We'd been talking to two of the largest pharmaceutical companies in the world, and nothing had converted. Then on a Friday evening, a Senior Director of Solutions Architecture at Acquia told us one of them, Bayer, was close to buying Site Studio licences. We just needed to show them the value. On Monday morning.
Our Product Design Director and I got to work straight away. Over the weekend we designed and built a prototype in Site Studio using Bayer's brand. For a 12-person startup, a £1m deal was enormous, and we both knew it.
We presented it on Monday morning, and we landed the deal. Bayer had over 1,000 websites to move onto Site Studio over the following year, and we helped them do that too.
Being acquired
Soon after that deal, our directors started talking to Acquia, and Acquia acquired us. A customer of that size made our revenue easy to see, and nothing else in the Drupal world did what Site Studio did.
Rebuilding it in React
After the acquisition I moved from design into engineering, as a Senior Software Engineer. Site Studio's front end was written in AngularJS, and there were two of us responsible for all of it.
Together we rebuilt the whole app in React. That meant migrating more than 100,000 lines of AngularJS, and we redesigned the architecture as we went rather than porting it line by line. At the centre of it was the visual page builder, which we built from scratch: complex, stateful, interaction-heavy UI for content editors and site builders.
Alongside that I built the React component library the whole app used, in Styled Components, and a Cypress end-to-end test suite that covered the whole application. I didn't stop designing either. New features usually started with me in Figma, and I prototyped the interactions before building them.
Results
- A £1m ARR deal with Bayer, one of the world's largest pharmaceutical companies, at a company whose only customer had been our partner agency.
- The client moved over 1,000 websites onto Site Studio.
- Acquia acquired the business.
- The whole app rebuilt in React by two of us.
- Over those years, Site Studio grew to more than 1,000 customers and $45m in attached revenue, from hosting deals that included it.