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Launch HN: Payload (YC S22) – Headless CMS for Developers

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Re: Launch HN: Payload (YC S22) – Headless CMS for Developers

#71

Post by TheMiddleMan »

sneek_ wrote: post #50
TheMiddleMan wrote: post #47

This is great, I can stop emailing markdown files back and forth with my content writers. Would this work as a sort-of wiki, for crowd-sourced documentation and translations? Or is it a bad idea to let the public edit things?

You can absolutely do this. You can bake in any type of "review" workflow you can think of, and Payload comes with versions / drafts out of the box as well. It's easy to control who can update the "main" published doc, vs. who can submit drafts. Would love to see if you gave this a shot, and we'd be happy to help along the way on Discord!

Wonderful! What a great product, well done. Thanks.

Re: Launch HN: Payload (YC S22) – Headless CMS for Developers

#72

Post by jobsdone »

brycelarkin wrote: post #65

This looks great! We use Strapi for our marketing site at https://articleasset.com and have been bitten by the lack of conditional logic before. Is there any plan to support serverless deployment? We use Nextjs with incremental static regeneration, so will only need to query the cms service a couple times a day.

Serverless has been asked for quite a few times and we've gone back and forth on it. We want to keep an open mind, but the business case to build it isn't there at the moment. That could change if somebody wants to sponsor that development or some OS devs open a PR or build some porting plugins.

It could simplify deployment and have some other benefits, but we always go back to the fact that even with a sleak serverless architecture, you're still hitting a centralized DB. It really weakens the argument for going serverless.

Re: Launch HN: Payload (YC S22) – Headless CMS for Developers

#73

Post by tootie »

billyhoffman wrote: post #14

Nice job getting to launch. However I'm really confused about the value prop. > There's no point competing in that noisy market, so we're undercutting it instead, by treating developers as first-class citizens. Who is the target market for this? who are the users and what is the job function in their company? The vast majority of CMS use is by Marketing departments building the public web presence of their company. M…

This guy CMSes.

I worked in consulting for many years doing a lot of CMS projects for Fortune 500s. They always bought their CMS products based on the marketing pitch to marketers. It was mostly bs, but the pitch was always focussed on engagement, testing, analytics, funnels, acquisition. I always came with the perspective that your CMS need not and usually should not be responsible for any of that and you can manage all of that in the application tier via a tag manager product or the like. The current kind of this space is Adobe. They built up their "Marketing Cloud" vis a series of acquisitions and sell it as a fully-baked product that does everything you'd ever need and then attach an 8-figure price tag and hand you off to integrators (like the companies I worked for) to do the (also very costly) implementation. And it's really very hit and miss to get adoption after you've delivered them such an ornery beast to manage 30 pages of brocureware.

We managed to push a few clients towards Contentful which is headless and a lot more dev friendly but they also are pretty sneaky with pricing and get fairly expensive with anything beyond basic usage. I actually begged their sales team to do a better job selling to marketers because their pitch was too tech focussed. I think the sweet spot is to not just say "developers like it" but rather "it will require far fewer developer hours to implement" which will resonate a lot more with budget holders. Also, my firm belief that building a suite of marketing tools by picking and mixing the best products is likely still easier and cheaper than buying any all-in-one tool that isn't great at anything.

Re: Launch HN: Payload (YC S22) – Headless CMS for Developers

#74

Post by s_severus »

Hi James, congratulations on the launch!

The website looks great, your pitch is compelling and the vision is very similar to what I've been doing with vendure.io, which takes the same approach but towards ecommerce rather than CMS. Namely: open-source, headless, Node/TypeScript, dev- and code-first.

In our experience, your thesis is correct in that there certainly is a niche for a great, dev-first, self hosted version of what is otherwise seemingly already handled by SaaS products. We see users moving to Vendure from closed SaaS commerce platforms for reasons like: full control over the code & data, integration requirements, need to support unique requirements, wanting to build their own platform etc.

Furthermore our business model is similar - MIT core and paid enterprise plugins, and exploring cloud. Notably enterprise support and SLAs is also becoming a major area for us.

So it's great to see a kindred product getting some attention here on HN!

If you are interested to swap insights or discuss potential collaboration (many of our users are looking for a good CMS...) feel free to drop me a message at m.bromley at vendure.io :)

Re: Launch HN: Payload (YC S22) – Headless CMS for Developers

#75

Post by brycelarkin »

jobsdone wrote: post #72
brycelarkin wrote: post #65

This looks great! We use Strapi for our marketing site at https://articleasset.com and have been bitten by the lack of conditional logic before. Is there any plan to support serverless deployment? We use Nextjs with incremental static regeneration, so will only need to query the cms service a couple times a day.

Serverless has been asked for quite a few times and we've gone back and forth on it. We want to keep an open mind, but the business case to build it isn't there at the moment. That could change if somebody wants to sponsor that development or some OS devs open a PR or build some porting plugins. It could simplify deployment and have some other benefits, but we always go back to the fact that even with a sleak serverl…

Understandable. Appreciate that you all have a monetization strategy already. One of my hesitations with adopting VC-backed open source projects is that a lot of them don’t have a clear business model.

We host Strapi on a server, so shouldn’t be a problem.

Re: Launch HN: Payload (YC S22) – Headless CMS for Developers

#76

Post by xenni »

jobsdone wrote: post #72
brycelarkin wrote: post #65

This looks great! We use Strapi for our marketing site at https://articleasset.com and have been bitten by the lack of conditional logic before. Is there any plan to support serverless deployment? We use Nextjs with incremental static regeneration, so will only need to query the cms service a couple times a day.

Serverless has been asked for quite a few times and we've gone back and forth on it. We want to keep an open mind, but the business case to build it isn't there at the moment. That could change if somebody wants to sponsor that development or some OS devs open a PR or build some porting plugins. It could simplify deployment and have some other benefits, but we always go back to the fact that even with a sleak serverl…

Depending on the startup time, you can use something like AWS Serverless Express and just wrap the application. If startup takes a little while you can store an instance above the handler code which will be kept alive across invocations of that serverless instance.

I've used this to great success in a similar project.

Re: Launch HN: Payload (YC S22) – Headless CMS for Developers

#77

Post by sneek_ »

tootie wrote: post #73
billyhoffman wrote: post #14

Nice job getting to launch. However I'm really confused about the value prop. > There's no point competing in that noisy market, so we're undercutting it instead, by treating developers as first-class citizens. Who is the target market for this? who are the users and what is the job function in their company? The vast majority of CMS use is by Marketing departments building the public web presence of their company. M…

This guy CMSes. I worked in consulting for many years doing a lot of CMS projects for Fortune 500s. They always bought their CMS products based on the marketing pitch to marketers. It was mostly bs, but the pitch was always focussed on engagement, testing, analytics, funnels, acquisition. I always came with the perspective that your CMS need not and usually should not be responsible for any of that and you can manage…

I resonate a lot with what you're saying.

> I always came with the perspective that your CMS need not and usually should not be responsible for any of that and you can manage all of that in the application tier via a tag manager product or the like

Totally agreed. A CMS should stick to managing content. And its flexibility should allow it to integrate with services that are purpose-built. In addition to those that you mentioned, a good example of this would be Algolia for search experiences.

> "it will require far fewer developer hours to implement" which will resonate a lot more with budget holders.

I also resonate with this, and I think this needs to be worked into our positioning more, because that, at its core, is what Payload tries to do -through- its developer friendliness. When you don't have to fight your software, you save an incredible amount of time. At the core of any larger content infrastructure is code, and the more efficiently you can implement it, let alone maintain it, the more time / money you can save.

Re: Launch HN: Payload (YC S22) – Headless CMS for Developers

#78

Post by sneek_ »

s_severus wrote: post #74

Hi James, congratulations on the launch! The website looks great, your pitch is compelling and the vision is very similar to what I've been doing with vendure.io, which takes the same approach but towards ecommerce rather than CMS. Namely: open-source, headless, Node/TypeScript, dev- and code-first. In our experience, your thesis is correct in that there certainly is a niche for a great, dev-first, self hosted versio…

Ah awesome! Thanks for the comment! I'd absolutely like to trade experiences sometime. I will certainly send you a message.

Looking forward to it!

Re: Launch HN: Payload (YC S22) – Headless CMS for Developers

#79

Post by sneek_ »

iamnatch wrote: post #70

Hi James, I'm really excited about V1 release of Payload, as well as the open sourcing of the project. I've wanted to use it in a project for a while and this news is definitely going to push me over the edge. I'm a huge fan of the typescript first approach, as well as local mode, and the thought that went into adding custom blocks and components.

Ahh thank you! You cherry-picked my favorite parts about Payload. So much went into having a proper custom block-based field type. That in specific is something that every single project I build has always needed and this is only the start. We have a lot of ideas that are going to take our blocks field to the next level.

Re: Launch HN: Payload (YC S22) – Headless CMS for Developers

#80

Post by sneek_ »

WaitWaitWha wrote: post #51

Congrats on the launch. What is the difference between this, and say a customized vBulletin et al. ? (or, did I misunderstand what the offer is?)

Well, at its core, Payload is a headless CMS / application framework. There are actually quite a few differences between either of those and a forum software like vBulletin which is deliberately geared toward creating online communities (moderation, comments, threads, etc.)

Payload could power the same use cases as something like vBulletin, but its use cases are significantly more widely applicable because Payload is not geared solely toward being community software. Instead, Payload delivers a content API and admin UI to power / manage just about any type of digital product you can think of, ranging from enterprise marketing websites, to native apps, to omni-channel content (think Spotify music), to SaaS app backends, to video games. Of course, forums are included here.

Does that help clarify?

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