Startup Growth Stack

One of the first things people will check is your website, so it needs to look good and load fast.

If you’re technical, you might be tempted to say, “Why not just vibe-code the site using Lovable and Cursor?” spinning up something custom in Next.js or whatever your go-to stack is.

But here’s the thing: your marketing site isn’t a dev project, it’s a function of marketing.

From writing and updating copy to running A/B tests and optimizing SEO, your marketing team needs to move fast and for that, they need a CMS (to write and manage content) that they can actually use. Every time they need to wait on an engineer to make a tweak, that’s friction, lost time, and likely lost conversion.

Resist the urge to build from scratch. What you gain in control, you lose in flexibility and speed especially once you’re trying to scale. Use something built for marketers.

We recommend building your site in Framer or Webflow. Both tools enable your marketing team to spin up landing pages without relying on engineering—making iteration fast and efficient.

• Framer is the easiest to get started with. It’s highly intuitive, visually driven, and perfect for launching a clean site quickly using pre-built templates.
• Webflow offers more flexibility and control, but comes with a bit of a learning curve, especially if you’re not familiar with CSS. It’s great for teams that want pixel-level customization and are willing to dig a little deeper.

Your startup’s site is your primary landing page for conversion, and one of your most important SEO assets. It should be easy to launch, simple to maintain, and scalable as your team and goals grow.

We actually started out by building Efficient App in Webflow to MVP the idea. It allowed us to move fast and scale into what we are today. And we’re not alone. Huge startups like Upwork, Lattice, and even Dropbox Sign have all built their marketing sites on Webflow.

Next up: all the product emails your users expect but you probably forgot about — password resets, onboarding nudges, feature updates. These aren’t “nice to have,” they’re critical. You need a tool that is developer friendly, not one that will be a headache to integrate with.

Tools like SendGrid and Postmark were built for a different era, when all you needed was reliable delivery and some basic templates.

The UI is dated, setting up event-driven flows is manual, and you’re stuck stitching together separate tools for marketing vs transactional emails. Want to send a product update and a password reset from the same platform? Good luck. Need to test logic or personalize onboarding flows? Not happening without writing a bunch of glue code.

And sure, they deliver email. But everything else? Feels like a chore.

You end up spending more time managing the tools than sending great emails. And that’s the gap modern platforms are closing.

If you’re sending product emails, like password resets, onboarding messages, or invoices, Resend is a great option. It’s fully developer-focused, with a clean API and React email support. Everything lives in code, which is perfect if you don’t need a visual layer and want total control through your stack.

But we use and recommend Loops. We started with it for our marketing newsletters, but quickly realized it was perfect for transactional emails too. Loops gives you a visual flow builder, event-driven automation, and the ability to manage both product and marketing emails in one place. It’s built for SaaS teams that want powerful features and a great writing and design experience.

Speaking of emailing your customers, let’s talk about how to get more of them through affiliates.
Affiliate used to have a bad rep but more founders are realizing: people buy from people.

But if you want people to start sharing your product, you need the right tools to power that.

Here’s what happens with most startups:

They want an affiliate program, but they don’t want to spend money, so they sign up for something like Rewardful, Cello, First Promoter, or Impact or hack it together themselves.

Then they spend weeks integrating it… only to roll out a half-baked program. It’s clunky. The dashboard lives on a random domain. Creators need a separate login just to see their stats. And worse?
No one’s checking it.

And when payouts lag or tracking breaks, it just feels amateur so no one takes your offer seriously. Then what? You write off affiliate as “not a real growth channel.”

Oh and speaking of payouts, sure, you can use PayPal and Wise with one of the cheaper platforms mentioned, just don’t forget: you’re on the hook for all the tax compliance they’ve quietly offloaded. That means collecting and filing W-9s and W-8BENs yourself.

PartnerStack has long dominated the SaaS affiliate space—and to be fair, they’re better than most. But platform costs alone start at $15K–$30K/year (with an annual commitment), plus 3–15% on all payouts (the full 15% if they source the partner).

That pricing structure completely locks out most startups—and that’s why we’re big fans of our favorite affiliate tracking solution: Dub Partners. But it’s not just because of price.

Dub starts under $1K/year (with a monthly tier available), and scales gradually as your affiliate program grows. They handle global payouts, tax compliance, and charge lower payout fees on average compared to PartnerStack.

The real reason we love Dub is the attribution. They started as a link tracking tool (think Bitly, but built for performance) so attribution is baked in from day one. Every UTM is tracked with precision, letting us see exactly which content, videos, or channels drive the highest-quality sign-ups.

Dub was built in public, fully open-source, and offers the best developer experience we’ve seen. You can white-label it, and their robust APIs are designed with partners in mind not as an afterthought, but as a core part of the product.