Headless CMS – Dominik Angerer, Storyblok

This is texturing TV. Hey everyone, welcome to techstrong TV. I've got another guest.

It's actually first time we've had this person and their company featured here on techstrong TV, so we'll do a little background on that for you. But let me introduce you to Dominic. On Yahoo!

Finance that I apologize Dominic is co-founder CEO of storyblock. That's s t o r y b l o k. No see bloke story block.

Hey Dominic, welcome to techstroke TV. Thank you so much having yellin my pleasure. First, let's get it out of the way.

You say your last name because you say it much better than I do. Yeah, it would be angular. It's an Australian really hard to pronounce anything else in German.

All right, I'm here and Austrian. So Dominic give us the background on story block and maybe a little bit of your own background. Yeah.

So storyblock is a headless content management solution and to be honestly, we didn't want to start a Content management solution product or company back in the days, but when Alexander and myself Alex microfunder, we had some challenges in the agency back into 2015. So it's been seven years by now. And seven years ago.

We used to Enterprise solution. They basically run out of business. So we tried to find the new home for all our clients back in the agency and we tried to find something to combines.

Yeah developed by and marketers need and to one product so visual editor for marketers, but at the same time a purely API data driven application for developers to use that content and guess what island there's nothing or at least there wasn't so we started doing that into us since yeah 16 with the first prototype. They give it some clients the lofted we give it some more clients to love it as well. com without a c because the domain was already gone.

And yes soon after that we had about 1,000 customers then 3,000 three months later profitable after the first month, then we start to 25,000 customers in two years until 2019 and then we got our first round and Today, I'm really happy to announce the raised 47 million additional funding as a total 58 Million by now and we've grown the team from two people to 200 people with grown from 20,000 customers 220,000 customers worldwide. So really fast congratulations maximum should be very proud very proud of what you've done. Dominic let's talk a little bit about storyblock So when you say to headless CMS It means basically.

It runs anywhere. Nope, no interface. What exactly do we got here?

Yeah. So headless comes from the idea of separating the display layer the visual part of how the website looks like how the absolutely the app looks like or even isn't a website or web kind of thing either like it could be anything and this visual layer this display layout. This is called the Hat.

And since we do not provide that so we only provide the data and stop there. We are so called headless content management solution because we are not a page builder where you can track and drop your design together. We are headless content management solution that allows you to manage the content for those sites photos applications for iOS applications Android applications or 3D kind of environments as well.

I got it. So that's interesting because I mean look obviously we who doesn't you see him. That's right, but here in text junk for instance.

Yeah, we have I don't know but does in a dozen and a half different. websites and properties and you know finding a CMS that kind of this we're kind of unique like that. Right?

We have all these different brands and stuff. It's hard. It's it's hard.

It's hard to find the right solution and there are there's open sources commercial. There's all different kinds of solutions, but one that scales one that allows you the freedom to kind of do what you want while also. providing You know the the quality that you need.

In terms of performance and scalability and that it's hard. So it's a hard thing. Why do you think the attraction like why storyblock grown so quickly and had this excited that it's that?

Yes, you mentioned already for you. It's really hard to get all those unique different sites and yeah challenges and designs and maybe even different content areas and structures into one solution and the problem for us at the agency back in days was always that we tried to fit everything into one suitcase of how it can be built. But what we did with storyblock is we try to reverse that process of hey you get the tool and you define what kind of content models you want reusable components a repeatable components as far and you define even the fields and how they should behave for your content structure exactly your content structure.

And once you have that defined not coded just fine. We can arrate a complete management interface for you, which is the CMS part of us. So storyblock is a complete management interface of content models that you define content types that you define and the cool thing is why does it work for so many different clients and so many different Use cases because we exactly don't do that additional step of going for the digital Parts the display layer now, we stop at the data level.

So all your the whole team of yours and can create multiple spaces which basically multi-tenancy now, we've seen story block One account one user account and you can just create multiple spaces. And depending on the space you define a different content model and suddenly you have all your complete content properties into one solution. And the best thing is all of this is accessible through apis, so you can mix and match you can write create update leads and even have a complete read only API as well globally at maximum speed and that makes us different to normal CMS because you can Define and create it your way red and I'll tell you how to build it.

Hey love, it. It's great. So you mentioned when you did this there was there was nothing like it in the market.

I'm sure there are competitors out there now and and of course look everyone in Tech the last couple months was seeing the market. For the first time in a long time people are worrying about what they spend worrying about macroeconomic conditions such a wondering how you know, and here you are announcing a raise in the middle of all this right? How is this affected is it does it help storyblock?

Makes no difference. What do you think? So fuss as a company, it doesn't make a big difference because we are complete Social Service solution.

So we have recording payments and our customer base is actually growing quite fast even now it's might not be accelerated through that but the cool thing is given the current situation everybody wants to save money on processes. They want to be faster at what they're doing to get more output of it. They tends to go for solution that helps them achieve being faster.

And that is exactly what Storybook does as soon as you have something like storyblock in your yeah solution stick be it's competitors of the ours even whatever is headless allows you to move faster and so with storyblock customers like Education First, they're reduced like the deaf sites in 54 different languages and the brought it down for months of work to launch a new landing page to ours. And that alone is just a return of investment that you cannot really you. Can you can measure it quite well, but you don't really really expect to get from changing and CMS.

Now certainly not. What do you think Dominic like what are the what are the next killer features that people are looking for? Yeah, so the next free that we have identified actually is and it might not be actually surprising but it's just something you really want to nail down on how you can build it.

It's automation. So content automation content flows to other solution. It's localization localized linguals and like that but also just pushing your data and your content into other Solutions internal internets, something like that.

That's one like Automation in general like complete flow kind of filter. And the other hand we do have the extensibility people want to customize a platform even though it's a soft as a service solution. So we're going to open up and Marketplace for other people can build extensions on top of storyblock.

So you can really customize it basically everything you want. Now in the last thing that we see coming more and more is personalization. So personalization with headless is kind of interesting because headless CMS doesn't know where the content is displayed.

It's just provides data, right? So now we combining something that is personalization, which is actually happening on the site in the app on the platform that you're using with how we can deliver content and I guess those free features those free elements will be the next thing that accelerate this and actually we're building all those free right now. So really good outlook on it.

Absolutely. How often do you like type new feature new releases kind of thing. So we do have once a complete new major version has been shipped weekly builds.

So once a week, we publish something every two weeks we do have for Sprint done. So you can expect it's impact fixes new features every two weeks from time to time. There's one major release and actually in the second of August will have all of me to release which is a complete free, right?

Feature complete rewrites on a new technology. It doesn't need any or it doesn't need any migration and you really just click a button and everything works and I'm not kidding. That's actually what you need to do clicking a break.

Yeah. And yeah, I will tell you, you know, we're recording this but by the time it's played it'll probably be about August second. Which is it's just next week right next I think Tuesday.

So, you know for people watching this August 2nd or lady you can go check out. You know, what where can they go get information on this latest release? So I'll start practice come slash V2 that will also be online later on and yeah definitely need to be checked out because it's three times fasting the current solution.

It's even the higher performance if you have multi tap open, so if you edit content on multiple screen smarter windows at the same time, you can cross copy elements and components. So a lot of things that really speeds up having uses Who's the average customer? So be separate story blocking to two elements or areas one is in self-service site and one is on the Enterprise side.

In the self suicide, it's mostly developers that are building something for small s&ps and those prices for photos packages are between $99 and 449 a month. And then we have Enterprise that go from five figures a year to seven figures a year and that we have a mixture of teams from fifth 50 to 600 uses building Global interfaces Global different brand assets and yeah publishing different sites and projects which storybook Excellent Dominic. What a great story.

You guys are still based in Austria? Where are you based? So yes, I'm based in Austria.

But I also the company established in Austria, but or 200 people are sitting across 41 different countries. We have fully remote so we don't have offices even this or set up right now where we can see is basically just my home office and nothing nothing else. Very cool.

Hey, man, what a great story. Congratulations continue to success to you and all the storyblock. Folks come back on and keep us posted.

Okay, absolutely. Thanks so much of them. All right.

Storyblock with a K. That's s t o r y b l o k. Go.

Check it out. com V2 is the new version if you're interested this Alan shimmelon Tech strong. We're going to take a quick break.