Enterprise CMS Market – Nishant Patel, Contentstack

This is texturing TV. Hey everyone, welcome to another text drunk TV segment. My guess for this segment is the shot Patel Nishant is the shots pretty well known person in the CMS World content Management systems working with things like headless Ems for decade.

He's also with content stack and he's gonna tell us all about that in a second as well as a little bit of his own Journey. Hey Nishant, welcome to text drunk TV. Alan thank you.

Thanks for having me here. So Nashawn diet, you know, I I mentioned that I referenced a little bit about kind of your background, but why not? I can't tell that story.

Well, why don't you tell people your story? Yeah, sure. So yeah, I'm Nishant Patel on the co-founder and CTO at content stack and contents that kind of came about about 10 years ago, you know be this is just right after that event of the cloud we were you know, I was implementing cms's like the old cms's and trying to migrate them to the cloud and just it was extremely painful from an Ops perspective from sort of the personas, you know that we were catering to like the editors and and the developers it was pretty painful for them as well.

And so we thought of an idea of just to kind of use the cloud and basically just write something from scratch. You know, we we build we started to build this EMS from scratch like API first completely in the cloud whether you know, the developers don't have to worry about all the operational issues and I think Some point that was coined headless, you know API first and CMS. So we were one of the pioneers and kind of changing this, you know, the whole way of sort of managing content and then delivering content as well because prior to you know, the mobile world.

It was just the web and all these older cms's were so the catering to just the Web Channel, but with the API first headless EMS, you could kind of you know deliver that content do not just a the web but like mobile and kiosk and digital signage and you know, whatever Channel you want to so yeah, that's my background. You're not being added for 10 years. We're one of the pioneers of something called headless CMS and it's a new way of managing and delivering content for for you know, big brains.

com. Yes. Yeah.

com. absolutely, and you know, so The Sean I've been using CMS systems for well for a long time. Okay, let's say that.

and to me when I When I hear the term headless CMS. It was about a CMS system that was designed to manage. Content that wasn't just like web pages and blogs.

Yeah, right. I think that many well for me personally when I first started using CMS is when you know, I've been blogging since like 2004. 2003 something like that.

Yeah, and you know, I've always Associated content Management systems with my blogs. Because with my blog I had sorted that title page and then I could put articles I called them blogs, you know articles whatever you want to call them individual pieces of content and they would be in chronological order but they would searchable you could group them by category. Yeah, you can manage you can manage all the media that went into those articles and stuff like that.

But you're right. It had a very web Centric view of the world right that people were gonna man view my content via the web page whether you were looking at it on a mobile device or a desktop or what have you you would looking at it, you know in a URL as a web page, right? but with the world of headless CMS, we began to realize that you know, what there's a there's a crap load of different kinds of content and you know of content out there that organizations need to manage.

And not just manage where they store them but manage where they go to right where they're accessible how they're accessible. And so to me, that's really what headless CMS is more than I think is that right you you yet for sure. You know, it's it's kind of a new way of managing content.

But you know the Omni Channel sort of story is key here, you know before and maybe just go a little bit into the technical stuff where you had the front end, you know, which is the web web page the code that you had to write for that was very tied to the content that you were entering in that system. Right? So that whole CMS was kind of build as one when you do that.

It's it's hard to take that and put it into different channels like mobile because the front end of the mobile is very different than the front end of the web right to look and feel the aspect ratios this the layouts all those things are different. So if you hardcore it together with the content, you can't deliver that content to Different channels and I think headless CMS basically decoupled that right. So you you decouple the content so you you know in your case you write blog so you can just write blogs and just write content and leave it up to the developers to figure out, you know, how to kind of tie that content with the different channels and you know, the Headless EMS is give you a very easy tools to where you could you know, kind of create that that front end experience completely disconnected from the from the content itself.

And you know, this is a it's a major Change and if you look at any brand today, you can't just be on the web. You got to be at least the web and mobile and then you know, there's our gaming customers their own consoles, you know, and and there's a retail customers they put content on kiosks, but they don't want to create content. For each and every channel.

They just want to create the content once and then just deliver it to these different channels. So that was one big. Sort of benefit you got from head to CMS.

And there's a couple of other benefits as well. It's it's basically, you know prior to the Headless EMS World CMS, you had to install individually and manage it. So there was a lot of operational costs in maintenance involved in all those things that kind of you know going now with headless humans.

Absolutely. Experiences the shampoo that I come Small Potatoes larger organizations are using headless EMS large Enterprises. Let's talk about maybe some of the unique challenges.

Or ways there utilizing this to to you know, go to market. Yes, so like in your case you talk about the blog right? That's one type of content.

If you can take an example of let's say right games, you know, they they have content that they have to constantly deliver to the consoles. So that's one use case, right? They could they also use it for let's say the website and in the website has different sections, you know that you definitely have the blog but there's a bunch of other sort of pages that go on a website you could have, you know on the e-commerce site you could have, you know product data.

So for every product you want to enrich that product with a bunch of product data, so you can deliver that to the to the web page. So what headless EMS allows you to do is you can model that content whatever it is, whatever use case you have you can kind of model that content and we basically just provide a very simple form for the content Editor to fill out in terms of You know just just take your sort of example again, you know a Blog Page you have a title in the description and maybe a couple of other fields. But if you're sending some content to a gaming console, you might have different fields that you have to fill out but for the for the editor experience, it's very simple.

It's just a form and and we also provide a bunch of tooling around like content tooling like spell check and all those sort of stuff that you typically see with like what editor we provide that as part of the editor experience. So for editors is pretty easy. They just filling up bunch of forms.

And then for the developers, they take that and basically couple it with that front and experience and deliver it wherever they want. So the whole tooling chain also becomes very easy. So if you if a brand comes to contest again, you know, we go across the industries.

It's not just one industry and and they you know, The like a e-commerce vendor their content is very different than a gaming vendor, right so they can come into our product and then model the content. However, they want and then just provide it to the editors to to enter the content. actually and that Look, that's simplistic.

But that's really we want to be right we want to be able to just enter the content and let the editors do what they need to do with it to display it and distributed. Whatever serves the You know the corporate need and and be done with it. Aren't that management systems then that the shark is there's the analytics aspect of it and security to name two talk to us about content stack around that as well.

Yes, I'll be work alongside a lot of our ecosystem Partners, right you want to work with sort of the search providers, right? You want to search your content? So there's companies that are specialized in that like algolia and and Constructor there is a e-commerce vendors.

So they provide so the the car experience so we work with that right? And so we last year sorry this year. We release something all automations where we let customers basically automate things between our System which is the content management alongside all these ecosystem partners and there's many, you know, there's also the hosting site.

So where do you host the front-end experience? So there's companies like versaille and Natalie Phi and Gatsby. So we work alongside them as well and provide all sort of the the Integrations and and things you need to sort of make that whole stack work, right?

So yeah to your point content sack is, you know about managing and delivering content, but there's a bunch of other things that customers need that there is companies out there that specialize in those needs and we basically work. We you know, we provide all the Integrations with those with those vendors. There's also sort of you know, all the other things that you would want from a typical CMS, like workflows and governance and you know access controls and all that sort of stuff is also built in within the CMS.

So you don't, you know, if you think about the old systems you had all those things that you still carry that forward with the Headless EMS as well. Absolutely, just because someone had listed I mean you kind of lost your head, you know what I mean in terms of functionality in that way. So look, you're at this 10 years Nishant.

If I ask you to look ahead at the next tenant and ten maybe too far five. What else do you see sort of coming down that really could be if not Game Changer, but you know critically important to users. Yeah, I think well, there's there's a there's a lot of things happening on the content space.

So if you think about Brands today, right the way they get their message out it's through content and and through different channels. So what we're focus on is how to make that whole thing easy. There's one aspect which is you know with some of these Brands and during the pandemic.

It was very clear like for for example, our gaming customers, you know, the pandemic sort of March 12th or whatever. It's kind of started in two weeks, you know, people are saying at home playing games. So all of a sudden they're content requests kind of just shut up, right?

In the older days, the customer would have had to have the whole team kind of sit there. And and figure that out in literally like a day or two right in this world like the Headless EMS World Contents. I kind of took care of it and it just Auto scale to that.

Right? So it's we're working on some of those technologies that just make this whole experience easy. So our customers should just be focused on you know, creating that unique content in the unique experiences and we just want to provide the tooling that not just like helps them sort of enter the content into our system but also helps with delivering their content as well as scaling, you know, so none of that stuff has to be sort of our customers problem.

It's just, you know contents actually just kind of figuring that out and for the next five years. I just see this face just continue to sort of grow because content is basically how we as humans consume experiences. And you know we talk about the the metaverse and in some ways in very simplistic way.

You can just think about it as different way of consuming content, you know, so it's we're looking at ways of how how can we provide the tooling for our customers to to provide those experiences in you know in a new thing like metaverse as well? You know what we say it here all the time around here. It's all about the content.

Yeah and shot. We're about at a time. But for people now they've heard about it.

They may want to look more into content content stack. com, right? com Thank you.

Hey, good luck with content stack. Keep us posted come back and give us an update. Thanks.

I'll appreciate it. Thanks. Thanks for having me on here.

My pleasure. Sean Patel content stack here on texture on TV We're gonna take a break. We'll be right back with our next guest.