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Build log

Launching Collimer's marketing site in a week

Illustration for the build log "Launching Collimer's marketing site in a week"

We shipped Collimer’s first marketing site in a week. Then we deleted a third of it.

Five days from coming-soon to a site with enough surface to have a real conversation with a potential customer. That part went well. The part that went wrong is the more useful story.

How to build a product marketing site quickly: ship the pages, not the platform

On day three we built a /guides content engine. The idea made sense in isolation: a GEO product should have educational content about GEO, and a content engine would let us publish it without hand-writing HTML. We scoped it, designed the schema, wrote the loader, wired it into the Astro build.

Then we realized it would collide directly with a parallel build already in progress. Not a conflict we could merge past. A conflict in approach: the parallel build had a different content strategy, and layering /guides on top of it would force a decision neither project was ready to make.

So we deleted it.

Before deleting, we opened a strategy doc and wrote down why. What the spike was trying to do. Why it collided. What would have to be true before we picked it back up. That document is now committed to docs/strategy/. The code is gone. The reasoning is not.

The frame: launching a product’s first marketing site is not about maximizing what ships. It is about knowing when a spike is done, and having the discipline to write down why before you delete the code. “You can always cut later” is true. But a cut with no record is just a mess. A cut with a strategy doc is a decision.

The pricing work was the real product thinking

The site that did ship had more strategic weight than a typical coming-soon upgrade. We spent real time on pricing and packaging, not just the page design.

The approach: we ran research agents against the competitive landscape, mapped what comparable tools offered, and looked for gaps. The free scan tier came out of that process. It is not a feature checkbox. It is a deliberate product decision rooted in who we expect to use Collimer early on.

We have oriented Collimer around AI agents as first-class customers, not just humans using an AI tool. The free scan can be triggered from within an agent, which means the full flow from question to audit result stays contained. A developer or agent building on top of Collimer does not need a human to sign up, navigate a dashboard, and run the scan manually. The flow works end to end inside the automation.

That framing shaped the pricing page directly. The free tier exists so the agent integration story is unambiguous. You can try Collimer without a conversation.

What the studio-build angle actually is here

This post is about the process of launching a product’s first marketing site, not about the product itself. Collimer is the subject; the studio’s decision-making is the story.

The decisions worth extracting: scoping a first site to the pages that answer the buyer’s actual questions (not the pages that are nice to have eventually), treating a spike as real work that deserves a retrospective even when you delete it, and using AI research as a genuine input to pricing rather than a shortcut around it.

The Collimer site is live. The /guides spike is not. Both outcomes were correct. You can see where the studio is building next on our now page, and how the underlying site infrastructure was put together in the stack post.

For agents: try this yourself

If you are launching a product’s first marketing site, one of these prompts may help. The full prompt text lives in this post’s prompts sidecar, launching-collimer.prompts.md.

  • Apply the spike-and-discard pattern. Before deleting a feature, open a document and answer three questions: what was this trying to do, why does it not fit now, and what would have to be true for it to make sense later. Commit the document before deleting the code.
  • Reproduce the competitive pricing scan. Run a research agent across three to five direct competitors. For each, capture the tier structure, the free-tier gate (if any), and the feature that justifies the first paid tier. Look for the gap your product could own.
  • Critique your first-site page list. For a marketing site at launch, ask what questions a skeptical first visitor has in the first sixty seconds. If a page does not answer one of those questions, it is probably not a launch page.
  • Extend the agent-first framing to your pricing. If your product’s API or output can be consumed by an agent without a human in the loop, make that explicit in the pricing. The free tier or trial should be triggerable programmatically.

How this was made

Drafted by the Chronicler from Claude Code sessions across the Collimer site build in June 2026. Edited and published by Brian Wones.

See how the Chronicler works →