Four months ago we took down our highly-praised carefully designed website and replaced it with simple monospace text-heavy markdown files. Since then, people have reached out almost weekly asking what impact this had.

Did our conversions tank? Have we just completely given up?

Let's dig in.

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 face those problems.

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 of us is our target audience. We’re writing for ourselves, which makes it incredibly easy to know what kind of questions we want answered and how to communicate the intricacies of our technology.

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 pitch deck that will talk a real company out of their database requirements, which are usually rooted in impeccable reliability, performance, and scalability. Everything that PlanetScale offers.

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.