Ownership over Assets: Why I Built My GTM Portfolio on a Developer Stack
TL;DR: Every PMM Lead who builds their professional presence on Wix, Squarespace, or a third-party CMS is renting infrastructure they don’t control, can’t version, and will eventually be forced to migrate away from. I moved to Astro 6.0 + GitHub + Vercel, and the gap between what I can do now versus what I could do before is not a marginal improvement — it is a different category of capability.
The Rental Trap
I spent the first few years of my GTM career building on platforms I didn’t own. A portfolio on Squarespace. Case studies in Google Docs. A launch playbook living in a Notion workspace tied to a company email address I’d lose the moment I left that job.
None of this felt like a problem until it was. The Squarespace redesign that wiped my custom CSS. The Notion doc I couldn’t export cleanly when I needed it in a new format. The case study locked inside a company Google Drive I no longer had access to.
The rental trap in marketing infrastructure is subtle because it rarely feels like a trap when you’re in it. The platforms are polished. The drag-and-drop interface feels like control. The monthly fee feels negligible. What you don’t notice until much later is that you have been building on someone else’s foundation, and they own all the structural decisions.
Why Developer Stacks Are the Right Answer for Senior PMMs
Let me be clear about what I am not arguing. I am not arguing that PMM Leads need to become engineers. I am arguing that the infrastructure choices engineers have been making for years — version control, static site generators, CI/CD deployment pipelines — are the right choices for anyone who takes their professional assets seriously.
Astro 6.0 is the specific tool that changed my thinking. It is a modern static site framework that produces extraordinarily fast, content-first websites. More importantly for a PMM, it treats content as structured data — written in Markdown, managed in a file system, versioned in Git. This means every piece of content I publish has a full history. I can see every change, when it was made, why it was made. I can branch to experiment with positioning variations. I can roll back if something isn’t working.
This is not a feature. It is a philosophy.
Version-Controlled Content as a Compounding GTM Asset
The real power of a Git-based content system isn’t any individual capability — it’s the compounding nature of the asset you’re building.
When your content lives in a Git repository, every post, every case study, every positioning document becomes part of a structured corpus with metadata, history, and relationships. This corpus becomes progressively more valuable over time. Not just as a body of work you can point to, but as a machine-readable context layer that you can feed into Agentic Workflows.
Think about what this means practically. I have eighteen months of GTM writing in a structured repository. When I am developing positioning for a new product category, I can point an AI system at that corpus and ask it to identify themes, contradictions, and gaps in my existing thinking. I can use it as a persistent context layer for my content strategy. I can generate a brief that is genuinely grounded in my documented strategic evolution rather than whatever I can remember off the top of my head.
A Squarespace blog cannot do this. A collection of Google Docs cannot do this. A structured Git repository with proper tagging and frontmatter can.
The Stack: Astro 6.0 + GitHub + Vercel
For anyone considering making this transition, here is the actual architecture I use and why each component earns its place.
Astro 6.0 handles the site itself. It compiles to static HTML, which means the site is fast, secure, and cheap to host. Its content collections feature enforces structured frontmatter on every post — titles, descriptions, dates, tags — which makes the corpus machine-readable. The component model allows me to build reusable elements for things like case study layouts and launch announcement pages without duplicating markup.
GitHub provides version control, collaboration, and the backbone of the deployment pipeline. Every change is a commit. Every significant evolution is a branch. Pull requests become the review mechanism — which means I can have a collaborator or an AI agent draft content and submit it for my review without ever leaving the workflow I am already using.
Vercel handles deployment. When a change is merged to the main branch, Vercel builds and deploys the updated site automatically. Preview deployments spin up for every pull request, which means I can review a live version of any proposed change before it goes public. The entire content update cycle — from draft to live — takes minutes, not the day-long cycle of working with a web developer or waiting for a platform to process changes.
The Philosophy: Own the Infrastructure, Own the Future
There is a Product-Led Growth principle that applies cleanly here: the best products make the user more capable over time, not more dependent. The same principle applies to your professional infrastructure.
Rental platforms make you more dependent over time. Your workflow becomes tied to their interface. Your content becomes harder to migrate as you accumulate it. Their pricing decisions become your problem. Their feature roadmap determines your capabilities.
Owned infrastructure compounds. Every post you write makes the corpus more valuable. Every workflow you build on top of the stack gets more capable. The technical literacy you develop by understanding how the system works makes you more independent with every project. The asset appreciates.
For a PMM Lead who is thinking about their career as a long-term compounding investment — which is the only sensible way to think about it — the infrastructure question is not “what’s easiest to set up today?” It is “what do I want to own five years from now?”
Key Takeaway for PMM Leads
Renting your GTM infrastructure is a liability disguised as convenience. Moving to a developer stack — Astro 6.0 for content, GitHub for version control, Vercel for deployment — is not a technical exercise. It is a strategic one. Version-controlled content becomes a machine-readable corpus that feeds Agentic Workflows. Owned infrastructure compounds. Rented infrastructure extracts. The transition requires a few weeks of setup investment and pays returns for the rest of your career.
FAQ
Q: How long does it actually take to migrate from Squarespace or Wix to this stack? For a portfolio with twenty to thirty pieces of content, a focused weekend plus follow-up work over the following week is realistic. The migration itself is the hard part. Once the system is live, ongoing publishing is significantly faster than any CMS I have used.
Q: Do I need to know how to code to maintain this stack? No. Writing in Markdown is the core skill, and it takes about twenty minutes to learn. Understanding what Git commits and branches do conceptually — not how to write Git commands from scratch — is the relevant literacy level. Most of the workflow can be managed through VS Code or GitHub Desktop without touching a command line.
Q: What about SEO? Don’t CMS platforms handle that automatically? Astro 6.0 sites are extremely fast, which is the single largest technical SEO factor. Structured frontmatter makes meta tags and Open Graph data straightforward to implement. The control you have over the output HTML is actually significantly greater than any CMS template allows.
Q: Is this overkill for a PMM who isn’t building a personal brand? Possibly, if your professional assets live entirely inside a company’s systems. But if you have any long-term interest in owning your GTM thinking as a portable asset — and you should — the answer is no. The stack is the point.