Holly Guevara (@hollylawly) on X

I do love a good teaser, but let's just start with what everyone wants — the stats. All of these are compared to the previous 4 months. Signups — 103% increase Qualified inbound — 57% increase Pageviews — 101% increase

So no, we haven’t stopped trying! In fact, this redesign was very intentional. PlanetScale solves some very hard database problems. Problems that only really start to feel painful once you’ve reached a certain level of growth. Our audience is made up of all the engineers that

The product and our solution is now front and center. I strongly believe that PlanetScale is the best cloud database platform on the market. We don’t need to hide behind fun animations. The technology can speak for itself.

PlanetScale was built by a ton of ex DBAs and infrastructure engineers who faced the exact problems that we solve. Built through experience. And I’m thrilled that we were able to show that off with the redesign.

Another important piece of this redesign is alignment from the very top. Everybody on the PlanetScale Marketing team is technical. Our designers code. Our CEO ran large Engineering teams at GitHub and Facebook. We have all directly faced the problems we solve, so every single one

We’ve found that when a stressed out SRE or overworked DBA is trying to find a solution to their database problems, the last thing they want to do is sift through a bunch of fluffy marketing material, vague taglines, and gated content. There is no level of fancy animation or

Now before I analyze the metrics, I do want to say we actually didn't necessarily care about any of these numbers going into this. We didn't set out to increase signups or conversions. In fact, the only metric I really care about for my marketing team is revenue.

But if our bottom line isn’t going up, it’s the clearest signal that we have a problem. If users pay $40 to sign up but never import a database and churn the next month, we may have an onboarding problem or our docs suck. If people are coming inbound with problems we don't solve

But back to those metrics. As it turns out, the quantity of these metrics — signups, views, etc — don't necessarily affect revenue. The underlying quality does. So even if the vanity metrics are improving, it doesn't mean success. So how do we measure success?

One way that’s easy to measure is what the people are saying in their messages when they fill out our contact form to chat with Solutions. We offer a managed database platform that solves problems for SMB, mid-market, and enterprises that are often experiencing fast growth and

Naturally, if someone mentions sharding, Vitess, scaling, or any similar terms in their contact request, we feel pretty confident we’re a good fit for them. So we looked back at how those requests changed in the 4 months that our rebrand has been live versus the past 2 years with

A whopping 1718% increase in mentions of sharding and Vitess! This is a great indicator that we’re improving our messaging and branding in a way that resonates with our target audience. The audience that has the problems that sharding, Vitess, and an ultra-reliable database

We’re very happy with the current direction of the website. However, it’s not all rainbows and sunshine. Most of the feedback has been around readability, especially on the docs. So that’s something we’re addressing. We’ll be adding a new table of contents on the docs to better

To wrap it up, the redesign did exactly what we wanted it to. Show off PlanetScale’s tech, communicate that we solve difficult database problems, showcase our customers who we have helped, and present it in a way that gives you all the answers you need upfront.

Also here's an easy-to-read link to the full thread on my second fav app Notion: