SGD Labs: a brand home for two SaaS products

At a glance

• Client: SGD Labs, my own product studio (in-house)
• Role: brand, copy, design and build, end to end
• Stack: Next.js 16 static export, React 19, Tailwind CSS, MDX from files
• Shipped: first version on July 3, 2026
• Live: next-sgdlabs-five.vercel.app (the sgdlabs.tech domain is being connected)

The problem

By this summer I had two live SaaS products: LinkinUp.io, a link-in-bio page for creators, and ATSResu.me, which checks a resume against a specific job posting. Each had its own site and its own pitch. What they didn't have was a place that answered the questions people ask before they trust a small company with their money: who's behind this, why is it priced like this, and is anyone still working on it?

That's the job SGD Labs does. It's the brand above both products. It tells the founder story, explains the pricing thinking, and sends visitors on to the right product. It doesn't sell anything itself.

The constraints I set

I treated this like a client project, which means writing the rules down before touching a pixel.

• Fully static. No server routes, no database, no logins, no payments. Everything that transacts lives on the product apps. A static site costs almost nothing to host, has very little that can break, and has almost no attack surface.
• One source of truth for products. Both products, and the "what's next" slot, live in a single list. The home page and the products page both read from it, so adding a third product is one edit.
• Accessible colors, not just pretty ones. The brand pastels come straight from the logo, and they fail contrast checks as small text on white. So the light tints are for fills and accents only, and anything text-sized uses a darker shade that passes WCAG AA.
• Plain language. Copy a senior engineer who hates marketing fluff would say out loud. No "AI-powered" as a selling point, no inflated claims.

Design

The palette comes from the full-color logo: teal, mauve and coral, plus a deep plum for text. The teal-to-coral gradient is the signature, and I kept it for exactly two jobs: the hero headline and thin accent bars. Used everywhere, it would stop meaning anything.

Type is Chakra Petch for headings, which has a slightly engineered, lab-equipment feel, with Inter for body text. The layout is generous with white space and leads with screenshots. Each product card opens with a real capture of the live product, because a screenshot does more to prove a product exists than any adjective.

Build

• Next.js 16 with static export. Every page is plain HTML generated at build time and served from Vercel's edge.
• A blog without a CMS. Posts are MDX files in the repo, read at build time. Read time is calculated from the word count. Publishing a post means committing a file, which is exactly the right amount of process for one writer.
• Share images made at build time. The site has a branded 1200×630 preview card, and every blog post gets its own with the post title on it, so shared links look intentional.
• Almost no JavaScript of its own. The mobile menu is the only interactive component. It traps focus while open, closes on Escape, and returns focus to the button when it closes.
• Legal pages from Markdown, rendered with the same styles as blog posts, so there's one prose style to maintain.

Voice

The about page ends with a short "stands for / stands against" list. It gives the whole brand a spine: affordable pricing as a feature, plain language, and Black presence in STEM as an outcome rather than a banner. On the other side: bloated platforms, cheap-until-they-raise pricing, dark patterns, and "AI-powered" as a marketing crutch.

Where it stands

The site is live on Vercel and the first post, Building SGD Labs in public, is up. Next on the list: connecting the sgdlabs.tech domain, adding a sitemap and RSS feed so search engines and my social tools can pick up new posts, and publishing on a steady schedule.

Need something like this?

If you have a product (or two) and need a site that explains who you are, why you're priced the way you are, and where to go next, get in touch. This kind of fast, low-maintenance brand site is exactly what I build.