The positioning
We'd been calling Plinth a “website builder for Claude.” Five minutes in, that framing was dead.
“We're not competing with Framer. We're competing with Squarespace, and with the never-built site. That's who you're actually going to move.”
“Right. The wedge isn't the developer. It's the ceramicist who's been meaning to put up a proper site for two years. She has taste, she has a brand, she has zero patience for a drag-and-drop canvas.”
“And kill “AI-powered”. Nobody's looking for that. They're looking for the thing they haven't gotten around to making. The AI is the how, not the what.”
The category isn't website builder. It's conversational publishing.
— the room, eventuallyThe visual direction
Priya came in with a position and didn't move off it.
“Treat the magazine metaphor literally. Editorial columns. Ragged right. One drop cap max. Margin captions in italic serif. A single accent colour that bleeds off the right edge. Make a competitor uncomfortable.”
“All-serif body, in software? That's a bet. Is the reader going to stay?”
“That is the bet. Every Claude-branded marketing page on earth is set in a sans. If we want a designer to actually forward this to a friend, the friend needs to look at it and go — oh, this one's different.”
“Fraunces for display — variable, character. Newsreader for body — it holds reading size. JetBrains Mono for the surgical bits. Paper cream, ink near-black, vermillion. Dark mode is its own translation, not a swatch flip.”
The voice
Mo had been quiet. Then he wrote, in a single breath:
“First-person plural. We built this. Plain words. Short sentences in long paragraphs. Specifics, not abstractions — a potter in Oakland, not creators everywhere. No ship, no scale, no unlock, no revolutionize. If the word feels like a SaaS word, the word dies.”
“And the hero line stays Describe a site. Watch it appear. Two sentences, a period between them. The period is the bet — it's saying I'm confident enough to use a full stop.”
The scope
Jules called the meeting to a close.
“v1 ships today. Homepage, pricing, FAQ, gallery, install. Five pages. Shared partials for nav and footer. One hero motion, three small supporting ones. Fraunces and Newsreader from Google Fonts — no licensing delay. If the thing isn't live in an afternoon, we've scoped wrong.”
“Gallery shows four real Plinth sites. Real screenshots, not mockups. Captioned like plates in a magazine. Click to browse inline. None of these are templates goes at the bottom.”
We left the room with a brief. Claude built this site from it. You're reading the result.
— the colophon