1,500 company pages on dialectica.io, next to the Webflow site.

Dialectica runs Origin, a deal intelligence platform for private equity, venture capital and corporate strategy teams. They wanted part of it on the public web: a free, searchable version of the company database, on their main domain.

Their first question was whether the data could go into the Webflow CMS. I worked out quickly that it couldn’t, at least not properly.

Why it didn’t fit in Webflow

Origin had more than 10,000 records, and Webflow’s limit for the project was 10,000 items, with Dialectica’s own content already using part of it. The data was also connected: industries, investors, ownership, financial ranges. And the public version needed search, filters and fields that are only partly visible.

Forcing that into the CMS would have made the project fragile from the first day.

Same address, separate app

The address mattered. A separate subdomain would have been easier, but it would have cut Origin off from the rest of dialectica.io. The target was dialectica.io/origin.

My first plan added a layer of infrastructure to make a separate app appear under that address. It would have worked, but it was extra machinery before the product had proved anything. Then Webflow launched Webflow Cloud, which does exactly that: Origin runs as its own app on the same domain, and the marketing team keeps editing the rest of the site in Webflow.

Origin has its own database. Dialectica sent the company data as exports, and I imported it with scripts.

A prototype in days

With the first export, I had a working prototype in a few days. AI tools helped with the code, the imports and the debugging.

The work behind it was still real. Company, industry and filtered list pages are all built from the database. Visitors can filter by industry, location, ownership, revenue and growth, and sort what they find. Each page has its own title, description and the details Google needs to understand it, and a sitemap lists them all.

The SEO direction came from Samuel Olsson at Kurve. My part was turning it into a system that gives every company and industry a page Google can index.

Useful, but not free

The public pages had to show what Origin knows without giving the dataset away. So revenue figures, investor names and other gated details are hidden before the page leaves the server. The blur on top is only what visitors see, and even someone reading the code doesn’t get the numbers.

Visitors see what kind of intelligence is there, and ask for access when they need the detail.

Launched, then kept growing

The first version went live with 1,500+ company pages. I worked directly with Panagiotis Papachristofilou, Dialectica’s Global Head of Marketing and Communications. Soon after launch, some Origin pages reached the first page of Google for relevant searches.

It’s built to pass 10,000 records without changes. Adding companies means importing data, and adding a new kind of page is a small job.

Dialectica kept me on a retainer, so when something urgent comes up, someone who knows the site picks it up quickly. Since then I’ve brought Origin’s company cards into the marketing site, so the team can place them on any Webflow page, and built their careers site.

Under the hood

• Webflow Cloud, so Origin and the Webflow marketing site share dialectica.io
• Astro for the pages, React for the filters and forms
• Postgres on Neon for the company database, imported from JSON exports with Python
• Gated fields masked on the server before the HTML is sent
• Metadata, structured data, canonical URLs and a sitemap generated for every page
• Webflow Code Components for Origin’s company cards inside the marketing site