It’s funny because I have no concept of why this kind of infrastructure is needed and by whom.

Replicating this success would be impossible for me because I wouldn’t understand that there are people out there with this need, and how to find them.

Not that I need to replicate it. It would be cool to have that cashflow. But the chances of getting it are slim.

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embedding-shape 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> Replicating this success would be impossible for me because I wouldn’t understand that there are people out there with this need, and how to find them.

What is your industry/profession? The best way I've found to find problems worth solving, is working literally anywhere else than "software development shops". Basically any profession/workplace out there is filled with various inefficiencies, but you cannot ask people to point it out themselves, you have to be there and experience it yourself to actually fully understand what the problem is and what a correct/good solution actually looks like. Otherwise you end up with the typical "faster horse" problem-solving.

Once you're there, with the mindset of improving things, you start noticing a ton of areas things could be improved. Then just use your best judgement and start thinking why/how/when.

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steffoz 3 hours ago | parent [-]

Totally agree, that's exactly what we did. As a web agency, we tried every CMS out there and struggled with all of them for different reasons (quality, maintenance, pricing, scalability, development speed), so we built our own. The key thing is you need to genuinely identify with the people you're selling to. Without that connection, every doubt (and there will be tons) becomes nearly impossible to overcome.

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apocalyptic0n3 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I'd wager that most agency devs have wanted to do this too. CMS's never work the way you want them to as an dev.

Thankfully, the work you have done (along with your competitors) in making headless CMS's viable not just for devs but also for content maintainers has made CMS work far more enjoyable.

It's awesome that you not only built out the dream most agency devs have, but made a successful business out of it at the same time.

	▲	steffoz an hour ago \| parent [-]
		That is a really nice comment, thank you a lot

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sbarre 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

To be fair, 10 years ago was still a reasonable time to do this (build your own CMS). In the early/mid 2010s the commercial CMS market was dominated by some pretty terrible large enterprise incumbents still stuck in the early 00s.

Would you agree (bias aside, being a CMS provider now) that in 2025 it's probably _less_ advisable to try to build your own bespoke commercial CMS product?

It feels like the CMS market is pretty crowded now, with lots of modern, high-quality open source and commercial products.

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embedding-shape an hour ago | parent [-]

> It feels like the CMS market is pretty crowded now, with lots of modern, high-quality open source and commercial products.

I don't know, I feel like it's crowded with options but no options are high-quality and ready to be used commercially. Things like Strapi gets somewhat close, but then fucks up the operational parts by being complex to handle with multiple environments, bad history tracking and much else. So the space of "high quality production-ready open-source CMS" is less crowded than you think, particularly if you aim for a specific niche.

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steffoz 43 minutes ago | parent [-]

That was one of our early fears. Wanting to continue to remain small, will we be swallowed up by larger competitors, who will devour the entire market? Turns out, it didn't happen. The websites space is really huge, I think there is still an endless number of niches you can attack and optimize for and get a pretty interesting revenue from.

	▲	embedding-shape 28 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Totally, I think people miss the trees for the forest because VC-fueled startups always have the "all-or-nothing" and "eat the world" attitudes, so people grow up thinking those are the available alternatives. While in reality, getting enough profits to support a team and their "modest" dreams (in comparison) is often more than enough.

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pdyc 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> Replicating this success would be impossible for me because I wouldn’t understand that there are people out there with this need, and how to find them.

I feel the same way. Distribution avenues are shrinking with AI. Earlier, you could rely on search engines to send people with specialized needs by targeting adjacent interests. That is no longer true. With AI, it is difficult to get placement in content if you are new or if you do not already have a lot of proof in whatever they consider an authoritative source.