Sitesauce
A static site for your dynamically-generated website
I posted about how I had hit $630 MRR two days ago, and yesterday we hit another big milestone!
Since we launched on May 1st, we have grown 833,2% (according to Baremetrics) and reached $1k yesterday.
I'd like to say thank you to everyone who has supported us, from the people who helped beta-test the product before it was ready to everyone to shared it on launch day and especially everyone who decided to try it out and ended up sticking till the end of the trial.
If you're curious about the rest of our metrics, you can view them in our open page.
It's now been a week (and two days) since Sitesauce launched, which also marks the end of our 7-day trial for all consumers who signed up the first days. In the last two days, our MRR has grown a mind-blowing 334% and reached $630/month today.
If you're curious and want to see more metrics you can do so in our open page.
-
4
Fantastic idea + great execution. 👍
$19/mo seems extremely cheap though versus the value you’re providing. I think you could 5X the price and customers (the kind you want at least) wouldn’t bat an eyelid.
-
0
Congratulations, for not only getting a product into production state but also for generating revenue.
Enhorabuena, un saludo
-
-
2
Wow, amazing for someone your age man congrats! I love the concept, you are first to market and you should definitely take full advantage of it, all the best!
I also checked out your personal website I think it is very well designed, and loved how you openly shared abandoned projects. Good luck with sitesauce! Ps. I already shared it with all my colleagues who use WordPress and have speed issues. ;)
-
1
Can i make laravel app with mysql database a static website using Sitesuace
-
1
Wow! I loved your website ( the UI part ) and your offering.
Also, learned about this 'Open Startup' concept what you shared here - https://sitesauce.app/open
By the way, I was reading about your monthly cost reports. Here you didn't display any hosting charge. Is Zeit completely free even for the Commercial project like this? I thought it works only for the individual's projects.
Or maybe you have officially partnered with Zeit. Right?
-
1
Sitesauce uses the customer's Vercel account to host sites instead of a shared one, and we make use of the Hobby plan for all our sites.
-
-
1
I know nothing about website development, what are the benefits of converting dynamic to static? I understand that dynamic websites are more useful for serving up different content and being to change stuff across multiple pages in one go e.g. nav bar
-
1
Congrats on the milestone.
How does this compare to something like running the free cloudflare dns/caching, with the wordpress plugin notifying cloudflare to refresh?
-
1
Hi Miguel.
Site looks great, could you clarify why users wouldn't host directly on zeit now themselves? Or if its a static site with api's on a s3 bucket?
whats the advantage of sitesauce?
great name btw.
thanks
Ricky-
1
If you already have a static site you can go ahead and host it wherever you want, no Sitesauce needed 😉
Sitesauce takes care of sites that aren't static but want to, like WordPress websites and so on.
-
-
1
This product is awesome! great idea, great execution...good job :)
-
1
This is great dear !
Congratulations. :)
Quite encouraging. -
1
Very nice!
-
1
That's amazing, what do you think led to this increase? :)
-
1
Amazing milestone, congrats! I love your headline btw, super clear value prop.
-
1
Wow! Congrats, this is amazing work and is going to be very big indeed. good luck and keep us posted on progress!
-
1
Congrats Miguel!
-
1
Congrats on your achievement! :)
-
1
This comment was deleted 6 years ago
-
2
One person (me!) in around eight months, although the last two were more focused on beta than actually developing the product. Here's an article with more info on the journey:
-
Today, after eight months of working on Sitesauce, it's finally out for everyone!
I'm super excited to share Sitesauce with the world. It's probably my biggest thing yet and it has already helped many people and will hopefully help many more.
You can check Sitesauce out on ProductHunt or learn more on the new Sitesauce website
-
7
Isn't the design just a rip from https://www.designjoy.co ?
Honestly the product looks good and it's normal to take design inspiration, but every page section is the same and you've used the same icons and illustrations
-
6
Hey guys, thanks for looking out. I really appreciate it. I've addressed this with Miguel over email and asked that he make some changes when he has the time. I've made mistakes like this at a much older age than Miguel, so no hard feelings at all. :)
-
1
Hello, I'm wondering how you built your website, is it all no-code tools?
-
1
Yes, all done in Webflow!
-
-
1
Glad to hear it!
@m1guelpf - your product is great and making mistakes is normal. You clearly have an eye for design with some of your typography and colour combinations, so you'll end up with an awesome design regardless. Best of luck :).
-
-
1
The illustrations are part of Scribbles, a pack of illustrations created by the DesignJoy team for public use, and the page sections are similar to DesignJoy as they are with many other SaaS pages, I just browsed through galleries of landing pages like this one and kind of took inspiration from all of them. I'm also working on a new version of the icons giving them a design that fits the rest of the landing more.
-
4
The layout is identical - Designjoy was crated from scratch and not from a template. I use landing pages for inspiration too, I think everyone does, but normally you grab a little from each one rather than just copying the whole page.. if you load Designjoy and Sitesauce, the illustrations in the top banner hardly move, and then you have the arrow animation landing into the next section, with the exact same icons as Designjoy, plus the same button style. If you track down the page, every single one of your sections has an identical layout from Designjoy, with exception of the FAQ.
I'm not gonna lecture you about it - I saw on ProductHunt that you're 18 so take this as a learning experience, I made a lot of mistakes at that age, don't take it to heart, making mistakes is a part of the process
-
-
1
Maybe they both used the same template? I would like to give the benefit of the doubt. Can the creator weigh in?
-
1
Response posted. Thanks.
-
-
-
1
Well done Miguel!
I've just seen the video and the site - looking really good.
I'm curious as to what the paid users as using this for? Is it just cloning dynamic to static? Is it more dev focused?
What is the primary use case for using this tool from what you've gathered?
(Sorry about the 21 questions, just was very curious)
-
1
Very nice job Miguel!
-
1
Nice! Just upvoted this.
-
1
Thank you!
-
-
1
Congrats! What made you change the design from the previous version?
-
1
I was not entirely happy with how it looked (and honestly was procrastinating on the launch).
-
Jason Fried famously said he only listens for feedback from customers who just bought or people who just cancelled. If someone decides your service isn't worth it anymore, you probably can learn something from them.
That's why I've designed a simple and optional form that shows right after you delete your Sitesauce account and asks the user a simple question. Here's a video of the new flow in action.
-
2
Not related to your post but I wanted to mention you have a really wonderful website, congrats on your design and layout. But I wanted to let you know it took more than 5 seconds to load! You should try to cut down that time.
Also just an idea I had: As some one who already generates their own static sites I am turned off by your monthly pricing. But if you instead offered a one time payment plan for like $20-$30 I would definitely keep this service in mind. I don't know if that's feasible or something your are interested in but that's the first thought that went through my head when I saw your pricing.
-
2
Nice!
Got a recent anecdote on this:
Last week I sent out an email campaign and noticed that someone left a note in Mailchimp when he unsubscribed saying in essence: "I like what you're doing but the email is a bit overwhelming"I sent the guy an email thanking him and got more feedback on the deprocrastination extension, negative feedback - too many concepts, too many UI elements in settings... led me to re-design a bunch.
Super valuable feedback that I wouldn't have gotten without a simple thank you email.
-
1
This is indeed a strategic move in capturing crucial feedback. As Jason Fried noted, gaining insights from customers who have decided to move on from your service can provide invaluable information for enhancing and improving the product or service. The simple and unobtrusive nature of the form ensures that it doesn’t add to the frustration of the leaving customer and keeps the door open for potentially valuable insights.
-
1
How do you handle deletion: is it actual deletion? Is it irrevocably gone forever?
I ask because in the early days of StatusGator, I started the trend of actually deleting the user and all associated data. As we have grown, I wonder if that is still the best practice. I notice it skewing numbers since deleted users and all their activity no longer shows in all our reporting. How do you handle such cases?
-
3
Yeah, I remove the user and all their data from the database. It's true it might be skewing numbers, but I care more about privacy than I do about having accurate metrics :D
-
1
Thanks for the insight. I agree. I am just thinking about maybe leaving the records in place but removing all the data like name, email, etc.
-
-
Yesterday I invited Peter Suhm from Branch CI to the Sitesauce private beta.
He initially reached out to me asking if Sitesauce would work with their WordPress site, to which I responded with a link to a generated static site for their site. He was instantly sold, and I gave him access to the private beta to get their website to production. In less than five minutes, their static website was up-and-running on their main domain.
I've done other onboarding sessions before, but this was the first one where everything truly clicked from the start. He went from registration to production in around a minute with no roadblocks and no questions. I'm starting to feel like Sitesauce can really help people!
The Sitesauce public beta will be dropping soon, so make sure to leave your email on our landing if you're interested to get notified when that happens! (and if you can't wait, DM me on Twitter and we might be able to work out something ;)
-
1
This is great -- well done here! Huge fan of static sites, but to others points about showing the value of a static site
What if you show an example of a popular site using WP and then a static'd version of it to immediately show the value of what a static site can do for performance?
Or better yet, allow folks to enter their site, run a job in the background and create this for them. Then ask for email of where to send the build to?
Both could go a long way to showing the value, and building a list.
-
1
Hey @jefff
Per your advice I've started creating some demos. I have the WordPress blog and a few other CMS, but would love some recommendations as to which sites would be helpful to have.
-
-
1
Congrats on the beta!
Looking at the "What do I get?" section, I'm not quite sure how this is different from putting your site behind a CDN. And based on the other comments here, I think this might be a common confusion and worth pointing out on the landing page.
-
1
Do you have any suggestions on how to improve this without using a giant wall of text right in the middle of the landing? How would you change the "What do I get?" section after reading the comments and hopefully understanding a bit better what Sitesauce does?
As you probably know, it's really hard to explain these things when you're really familiar with them, so if you could answer the above questions (especially the second one), that'd help a lot 😊
-
-
1
congrats on that onboarding. seems like a good niche to be in.
i'll second what @ycm8 asked, and would add, how is this any different than say running wp-rocket for wordpress? i understand there may be different use cases than wordpress, but then maybe not use wordpress as an example?
-
1
First of all, I tend to use WordPress in the examples because it's by far the most known CMS out there, but as I mentioned in the last paragraph of my response to @ycm8, it works for any CMS.
As for the difference with WP Rocket, Rocket just does some caching work while Sitesauce builds a truly static site and uploads it to a different static site host, like Netlify or Zeit.
-
1
Got it, thanks. So how do you deal with SEO, more precisely Redirects (301 and 302), GET-parameters, that may be used to pass different information from different landingpages and altering the pages? As well as First or Last Cookie Wins strategies?
example.com/pricing?coupon=indiehackers would look the same as example.com/pricing
Mind-boggling tech, really curious how this magic works. Would love to give it a testrun... Didn't find a demo/test plan on your site? Any chance, we the IndieHackers community, could get a 2-3 day demo?
-
1
Redirects can be configured from the Sitesauce dashboard, and you can keep page configuration via GET query parameters if you do it in JavaScript.
Sitesauce provides a 7-day trial, which isn't listed yet on the website because we're currently on private beta (as mentioned in the post above). If you leave your email on the landing, you'll get notified when the gates open!
-
-
-
-
1
what does it mean to convert a dynamic site to a static one? I read the benefits section, but does it mean there are two versions of the same website? how do they coexist?
-
2
Imagine you have your WordPress site hosted at
wp.yourdomain.com. With Sitesauce, you can serve a static version of your site atyourdomain.com. This allows your team to keep accessing your WordPress dashboard to manage content while you continue to serve an always-updated static version from your main domain.If you don't need your WordPress dashboard publicly available, you can also use our CLI tool to deploy your static site from a locally-hosted website, that is, a WordPress instance running on your computer that doesn't need to always be on.
Of course, Sitesauce does not only work with WordPress but with any backend-powered site, like Ghost, Statamic, CraftCMS, Laravel or Joomla.
-
1
Few q's:
If the users visit static site, how does the interactions with the backend work? for example, how does sending a form works on the static version?Also didn't quite understand the example - the
wp.yourdomain.comis the wp admin panel for theyourdomain.com?-
1
I'm still working on perfecting interactions with the backend. For now, you can keep using your backend forms by proxying the form endpoints directly to your backend, but I'd recommend to fully embrace the JAMstack and switch to something like @derrickreimer's StaticKit for forms.
And yeah, in the example
wp.yourdomain.comwould host a regular WordPress installation, whileyourdomain.comwould host the static version of that same site.
-
-
-
-
2
This comment was deleted 4 years ago
-
2
This comment was deleted 4 years ago
-
Sitesauce relies on a generator component that actually does the work of converting your dynamic website into a static site.
Until now, Sitesauce ran the generator on the server, then compressed the output and uploaded it to Zeit or Netlify. Yesterday, I experimented with running the generator directly on the Zeit build process, getting rid of two build steps and making the process 70% faster.
-
1
Could Site sauce be used to put a ghost blog currently on a subdomain, on /blog folder instead?
All the while www site is on other host.
So in fact merging two subdomains into 1 www subdomain?-
2
You'd need to make a few changes, but it's definitely possible (and in fact, I'm using a similar setup myself). Email me at hello+slashblog@sitesauce.app 😉
-
-
1
Nice!
-
1
That rocks 🤘!
-
2
Thank you!
-
I took the weekend to build a CLI for Sitesauce and got everything working!
This is exciting because, until now, you needed to keep your dynamically-generated websites (like a WordPress blog) hosted somewhere (like on a subdomain) for Sitesauce to generate your static sites. With the CLI, you can just open your project's directory and run sitesauce deploy to upload it to Netlify or Zeit, no server required!
As I mentioned, I'm really excited for this, because it reduces the friction of getting ANY CMS-powered website online to zero, just run a command in your local site and it's up, for free!
-
1
What happens if I use it with a website made with bubble, webflow and other tools? Does it work? Do I need to still pay their subscription for the website to work?
-
1
This is really awesome, were "statifying" wordpress sites all the time manually using scripting and it's a struggle!
will give this a try !
-
1
Hey @zfou! I've also felt the struggle of manually "statifying" sites (Ghost in my case), that's why I started Sitesauce in the first place! It's amazing to be able to just change things locally and know that the static site will be automatically updated :D
-
The Sitesauce UI was originally designed during the MVP phase, and hadn't really been updated since then. It had a few stylistic issues and wasn't responsive, so I set out to rebuild the entire UI in the weekend. Overall, I was really happy with how it turned out! Here's a video preview.
-
1
Wow! In just one weekend?
-
1
Looks good.
- For the landing page I would add after the hero section a list of sites it works with ghost, wordpress and any other major CMS.
- Would move the how does it work up
- Add an FAQ (Zeit offers 20gb and that isn't actually that much)
- Get rid of early access if the product works it works :)
- Testimonial from your first customer would be good
Going to be interesting to see what you do with pricing.
Also why did you pick tidio?
-
1
- If you wait a bit you'll see the list of supported CMSs is included in the hero.
- Wouldn't you say it's more important to say what Sitesauce offers you than how it's done?
- I'll add a FAQ to the landing an an extended FAQ to the documentation that's now in progress
- I'm keeping early-access 'cause I want to manually onboard people for now to make sure everything's smooth & ready to go before opening it up for everyone
- I was actually going to ask them today, so expect that really soon!
I picked Tidio because I wanted to try it out, and can always switch it over later.
-
1
- I think if they're coming to the site they know the benefits of a static site? But they might not know how you will do it.
- It looks like I can just sign up?
-
1
I'm not sure what the old design looked like but I really like the new design.
The only issue I noticed was the videos next to the "1. Add your site" and "3. Configure your domain" sections are not very readable. I had to open them up in a new tab to really see what's going on.
Lastly, as a user it's a little difficult for me to imagine how I might benefit from the product if I had a Wordpress site. In my experience, most Wordpress sites are already hosted somewhere and all the content is created in a hosted database. The question kept running though my head, would I be able to make new blog posts without needing to pay for Wordpress hosting?
-
2
Thanks! I need to update the videos and work on making them more readable :D
For now you'd still need to have a hosted Wordpress instance somewhere (tho you could use a smaller server) but I'm working on how to eliminate that requirement.
-
-
1
I like it, it's clear and simple and it looks nice!
Only one think, but i think it's a personal one. For me the header (navigation and to part below) is a bit to height. In my opinion it eats up to much space in comparison to the advantage, especially on small screens.
But in general nice one!
-
1
Thank you!
-
-
1
This comment was deleted 2 months ago
-
1
Not really, I've been using it for two years now and completely love it!
-
After hitting the first customer milestone last week, yesterday I got a my second customer (and I haven't even began inviting people to the private beta yet). This is exciting for two reasons: firstly, this customer wasn't someone I knew before starting Sitesauce (whereas the first one was a friend). It also means I'm one customer away from covering all the running costs and making Sitesauce profitable.
You can check our stats in our open page
Sitesauce is now an Open Startup, which means its revenue, costs, analytics & usage data are public for anyone to see. It feels great to be able to give the community deeper insight into how things are going from the inside.
Visit our open page to learn more!
-
3
Interesting. What do you see as the advantages of doing this? I know the benefits of turning Transparency up to 11 (see GitLab), but usually not details of financials. Just goodwill, or something more tangible?
-
3
I was definitely inspired by Pieter Levels and Baremetrics' own open startups page. I think it's a great way to add more context to the story you're sharing with the world.
-
1
I think it's cool as a consumer looking at these data (for fun). But as an employee, instead of financial metrics, knowing salaries/equity of my coworker would be much more beneficial. *I hate how it's the employee against the company but it's also employee vs employee for no reason.
-
-
-
1
Do you really need that expensive hosting? For where are you now I see cheaper options.
-
1
It's not an issue at the moment because it's covered by Google Cloud credits. Once I run out of those, I'll try to optimize my setup as much as possible.
-
-
1
How long did it take you to build a website generator and if you do not mind, what technology you used? I am in interested in creating a shopify like application for inventory management.
-
1
I'm actually not using a custom site generator but crawling and processing pages on-the-fly, so I don't think I can help you sorry
-
1
No worries. I was thinking about using a message broker to send a command to execute the process--something like rabbitmq. Then the process would be offloaded to a different application (written in rust Lang) and the script would use a template to generate the publicly accessible website.
-
1
Sounds like a great plan!
-
-
-
-
1
Congratulations Miguel!
-
1
Thank you Fajar!
-
33 Comments
Did you run Twitter ads? Don’t you mind me asking what audience works well for this kinda projects?
I don't run Twitter ads or use any other kind of paid acquisition technique, just rely on word of mouth for social media diffusion. I honestly don't know what "type of audience" my audience is, I just started posting about my journey as a maker and people seemed to enjoy it.
Congrats! This is awesome. Your website looks fresh and I love it!
Love the idea. Can this be used in eCommerce space with platforms like Shopify and woocommerce?
Nice work Miguel! As companies grow, many things start happening. The first method of maintaining business growth has to do with mindset, and the inevitable shifts it makes.
Very impressive!
Miguel, why ppl need Sitesauce? What goal do they achieve using it?
Moving their website to a static site with Sitesauce would allow them to make it faster with not much work on their part, be prepared to scale infinitely, and also make their website more secure since there is no backend people can hack into.
I had the same question in my mind as @iamarsenibragimov as I'm not really a tech guy. I'm glad you clarify that 😉. Let's say I have a Blog with a lot of traffic, if I start using Sitesauce will this boost my SEO (with ultra fast pages)? Will the URL be the same or would I need to create 301 redirects. Thanks, abrazo mi hermano!
The speed you get depends on how your blog is set up, but it will be faster for sure. Also, you shouldn't need to create any redirects, as you can just keep your existing blog in a subdomain (so you can still edit the content from the dashboard) or host it locally in your machine.
Congrats Miguel!
Awesome stuff @m1guelpf! Everything looks real sleek and polished, congratulations.
Having an option to deploy from local is just wow.
The pricing is also too good but i'm sure you'll adjust it later on !
Btw, I'm hitting a 404 on your /open page.
Thanks for letting me know, fixed the open page now😅
your rate of growth is super inspiring to see
Thank you Oscar!
Great website and a really good idea. We moved off WordPress a few years ago because we didn't want the headache of security and didn't want to put it on a subdomain.
Would a static site need to be hosted on a subdomain or could we set up a pipeline for it to go to our existing hosting?
The static site can only be deployed to Vercel at the moment, but you could perfectly set it as your main domain and move WordPress to a subdomain, or use our CLI to deploy from localhost and not expose a WordPress installation to the internet at all.
Amazing
Congrats
Amazing! So fast! I wish you 10x revenue in June! 😃😄
Congrats! That's pretty awesome in such a short time, plus your costs are remarkably low :)
Congrats Miguel!
This is amazing @m1guelpf. Congratulations.
Congrats! Very professional landing page!
Well done! 👏
Congratulations, that is an impressive feat.
Congratulations. $1K in 12 days is amazing. Quick question - What has been your best source of traffic.
I think a lot of people build useful stuff, where most ppl slip up is getting the word out. That is especially true for me.
Twitter with 13K, followed by HN with 9.3K. Launch went crazy on Twitter, with the launch tweet getting quoted by people like Adam Wathan, which was amazing.
P.S: In case you're curious, we've made our analytics public, so you can take a deeper look by yourself.
Woah congrats. Did you have a pretty engaged Twitter following before your launch announcement? Is that something you invested in pre launch?
I've been building an audience for years now, having reached over 4.000 followers recently, and I had been sharing Sitesauce updates with my audience for a while.
Nice!
Thanks for sharing this.
That's also where I get lost haha