The problem
I joined Site Studio, formerly known as Cohesion, with a new title: Senior Frontend Designer. The problem I was hired to solve was simple on the surface, teach individuals and entire companies how to build websites with our product.
Site Studio was solving a real problem within the Drupal ecosystem. Good Drupal developers are hard to find, and building websites on Drupal is equally difficult. Site Studio offered a low-code site building solution built on top of Drupal. However, it was still a technically complex product. Users needed to understand how to build component libraries sensibly, and still required a solid grasp of front-end UI development. My job was to bridge that gap.
Becoming an expert
One of my first challenges was creating a self-serve tutorial video series. These videos would form the foundation for teaching users how to build an entire website with our product. To do this properly, I needed to become an expert myself. I designed and then developed an entire site using Site Studio from scratch, so I could teach others to do the same from a place of genuine experience.
Once I had that depth of knowledge, I created a full suite of tutorial videos covering everything a new user would need to go from zero to shipping a site with confidence.
Teaching and pitching
Becoming a product expert opened up opportunities well beyond creating training materials. At the time I joined, our only customers were our partner agency. We needed to find and land customers outside of that. To build traction, I visited companies alongside our Head of Marketing to demonstrate the product in person, ran webinars to hundreds of prospective users, and even built entire websites for prospects over the course of a single day to demonstrate the speed and power of Site Studio. These sessions were recorded and sent directly to the prospects afterwards.
This combination of education and live demonstration became one of our most effective tools for showing the value of the product to people who had never seen anything like it before.
Landing our largest customer
As time went on we had discussions with two of the largest pharmaceutical companies on the planet, but nothing had converted. Then on a Friday evening, a Senior Director of Solutions Architecture at Acquia told us that one of these very large pharma companies was close to buying licences for Site Studio. We just needed to show them the value. Monday morning.
The Product Design Director and I got to work immediately. Over the course of the weekend we designed and built a prototype representing the pharmaceutical company's brand, using Site Studio. We knew what was at stake. For a 12 person startup, a £1m deal was enormous.
Monday morning, what we had built stopped the room. The pharmaceutical company were blown away, and so was the rest of our own team. We landed the deal. The client had over 1,000 websites to migrate to our product over the course of the following year, and we helped them do that too.
Being acquired
Landing that customer changed everything. Very quickly after, our directors entered discussions with Acquia and we were acquired. Acquia recognised the revenue potential of our customer base and understood that Site Studio was a genuinely unique product in the Drupal ecosystem. Acquiring us meant their competitors had no foothold for Drupal hosting deals. It was a clean and logical outcome to what had been a remarkable few months.
Results
The work I did in this role contributed directly to two significant outcomes. We landed a £1m ARR deal with one of the world's largest pharmaceutical companies, and the business was acquired by Acquia. The pharmaceutical client went on to migrate over 1,000 websites to Site Studio, validating both the product and the training infrastructure built to support it.
End notes
I have left out a lot of detail from my time in this role. There is honestly enough for its own book. Visiting other countries to train teams, designing and building sites on stage at live events, and pitching the product to some of the biggest companies in the world. No two days were the same.
As much as my title was Senior Frontend Designer, the role demanded far more than that. I was a designer, teaching companies how to build proper design systems. I was a developer, demonstrating front-end best practices. And I was a salesperson, pitching a product I genuinely believed in to customers who needed it. It remains one of the most rewarding periods of my career.