The Journey of Storyblok: From Software to SaaS with Dominik Angerer

Hey everyone. Welcome back here to Tech Trunk tv. I've got a new company and a first time guest to introduce you to, uh, a new company to us here on Tech Trunk.

Um, let me introduce you to Dominic. Dominic is the CEO and co-founder of a company called Story Block, and he's gonna tell us all about that in a second. Dominic, welcome to Tech Drunk tv.

It's great to have you on. Thank you so much for having me, Alan. It's, it's a pleasure.

My pleasure. Um, so Dominic, before we talk about Story Block, let's talk about Dominic. You're the CEO co-founder, you know, tell us your story.

Yeah, happy to do so. I mean, I'm a first time founder and the first time CEOI mean, I'm now 30. I literally just turned 30 couple months ago.

And Good for you. Thank you. Yeah, I mean, I'm like, you're 25 years, you don't know how 30 feels like.

So like, it's, it's, it's a hard, But, and at 30 you don't know what 50 and 60 feel like. So it's okay. It's, it's a constant learning curve.

Forget, But I have to say, I mean, in the last couple of years, so many things have changed. And, um, just to give you my background, uh, I'm a software engineer. Uh, I've been trained as a software engineer back in frontend as well as databases.

I've like really built, um, enterprise solutions, enterprise e-commerce solutions for larger prints such as Adidas and Reebok. Um, when they were part, uh, for customer for agency back in the days in 2015, uh, I worked on things like a 3D yacht configurator where you have an Oculus Rift on, you can walk through, uh, and then select interior that you want. I mean, that was 10 years ago, and about eight years ago, we then realized there's more to a problem that we had in the agency, which later on became storybook.

But I really made that move from soft engineer to, uh, leading a department in the agency, then found story block and bootstrapping it first, and then late on hiring people. And now we are 270 people across 47 countries. Wow.

Have customers of like 130 countries as well. We operate globally, fully remote, so no offices, all, all remote work and no, it's, it's been been a crazy journey so far. And we are driving to hit a hundred million in er in the next couple of years and, uh, really like hit, hit balls running.

I mean, we raised 138 million, uh, just 80 million in the end of last year to really grow in the us So we have just built our US team by now. And I'm, I'm super excited because I'm originally from the, from, from Austria and, uh, for me to fly over to New York or Boston or San Francisco, it's just amazing feeling to be on the ground as well. So, really loved it.

Good for you. What a great story, man. I love it.

So story block itself, how old is just story block? Yeah, so the product started in two 15, end of two 15 because at about 10 years time. Yeah, exactly.

The start of the product. The company itself is eight years now. So we started it after we built the first prototype.

I love it. So you original, well you still headquartered, I guess, in Austria or, you know, founded in Austria and now, you know, customers at 130 companies, you've gotta love the internet, right, man? Yeah, it's Just crazy.

They're having, um, having like 200,000 customers now and all of them are scattered 130 different countries. It's, it's mind blowing, but really nice. It really is.

It really is. You mentioned that, you know, when you made the move from software engineer to running the agency, let's call it, or a department, the agency department, you saw that there was a problem that you guys had, and this is a very common theme I hear from founders, right? I have this problem, I'm sure I'm not the only one who has this problem, this is a problem for all of us and I'm gonna fix it.

What was that problem? Yeah, first, the, the immediate one, uh, was actually to say we, we are not gonna fix it. We actually plan to not build this EMS.

Like there was a huge goal that we had to not build one. And the reason we actually then started and were pushed into that direction is that we were using an enterprise content management system from the Austrian press agency exclusively at that agency. And, you know, like we are working with them for multiple years.

And, uh, I think it was okay, it was not the best system on the market. It was really old, it was older than I am. Uh, and I mean, that says a lot, but at the same time it was okay.

It was really expensive, but okay. And one of our customers, they had a small issue where a button was somewhat doing weird stuff from time to time, not always, but from time to time. So we just filed a bug report, uh, in like mid 2015.

And we sent them, Hey, could you fix that? Um, it's not a high pressure topic, it's not high priority, but it's annoying for a customer. Please, please fix it.

And we actually expected a reply of like, yeah, sure, we'll put it the backlog. Six months, months. Yeah, yeah, exactly.

The reply was, oh, actually we're gonna shut it down in six months. Please find something else. So we just signed two deals, five year deals with them, like literally a month before that.

And oh my god, big surprise. So Alexander and I, my co-founder and I, we, we basically looked at that email like, they must be joking, right? So we called them and tell 'em no, they, they were actually realizing, okay, it's end of life.

They need to transition away. And they do it in the worst way possible because literally transferred so many clients into this solution that we then forced to find something, right? So we, we decided to find something that works for both marketers and developers, because Alex and I, we are both developers, same with the agency.

Many of like, we're like a team of 40 to 50 people working on digital projects, the in day out. And then we had customers, multiple hundreds of customers working in those systems every day. So we tried to find something that works for both ends and turns out then we then looked into open source solutions like WebPress type of free, which is also CMS.

Um, we realized, okay, they don't want to pay for maintenance, so we need, we should not host it ourself or have a third party host it. We, we also want to have more control of it. So we decided, okay, maybe open source is the right one.

So when the customers told us, no, we don't want to pay for it, it's way too much effort to customize it and to, to have the security bottle. Next there we decided to, okay, hey, let we look into the next one. So from Trooper, we then looked into Acquia, uh, Adobe Experience manager side, Sitecore, which are now our competitors, but they are the large sales, so digital experience platforms that have CMS, but also e-commerce surge and a hundred thousand of other, other components.

And reality is you use 10% of and and pay for a hundred percent, which is certain The truth that that's normal in software, right? 80 20. Yeah.

And we then realized, okay, maybe they need something lighter, something easier. So for the marketers, we ask them and to do a survey basically to understand what they want. They want management, they want the visual editor, they want components that they can mix and match.

So it is always on corporate identity and corporate brand, but they can still have the flexibility of moving things around. And at the same time, Alexander and I, we wanted APIs, we wanted data, we wanted purely just data, uh, at that point. And we then realized, okay, we can marry those two areas.

We can marry the idea of components, reusable content blocks for storytelling with an API approach a headless approach, so content management systems, uh, that actually deliver only data, not the visual part of it. And it turns out if you combine storytelling with three years, it were content modules, content blocks, storytelling blocks. That's how we arrived at story block, right?

Story Block. That's, That's essentially what we came up with. And we didn't want to build it first, but when we were having the needs to transition out of that solution, we figured we'll just combine everything into one large database first and then build a UI on top if needed, or we move it somewhere else.

So our plan was to not build something, but to transition to a product that is already there, but there was nothing. So we started building the prototype in 2016 and in thousand 17, we, we suddenly had all our customers on the system and everybody was super happy. So we decided to launch it, just the, the website and documentation.

And in September, 2017, and one month later we had 1000 users on a platform profitable, and we start kept in growing. So from 1000 people to 3000 users, then to 10,000 a year after 25,000, a year after that. Fully bootstrapped, no, no marketing spend, no nothing.

What a great story. Yeah. Good For you.

Then hit the ground running. Thank you. Good for you.

Good for you. Um, you know, I, I, so I spent most of my career in venture backed startups when I started what is today Techron. It really started as my blog.

I, you know, I didn't raise money before I even had a chance to raise money. We very similar story, we had sponsors and yeah, it was 12 years ago and we're still here doing this. Um, it's a great feeling to be able to do that.

Now look, I'm familiar with WordPress and some of the other CMSs out there. I never thought of the headless one. Like I, I kind of, and I'm not, I don't hold myself out to be a developer, though.

I could, I could develop websites in A CMS. Obviously you don't have to be a great coder, but, um, I never thought of the headless. Is, is that, is that, do you think the, a big selling point here?

Oh, for sure. I mean the, the real topic for headless Yeah. Has emerged the mo the moment mobile apps were on, on the ground as well.

Yeah. Because suddenly you had two channels where you get similar or even the same content. Uh, and now we have things like Siri or in general LMS that you want to get your data to.

You want to have a screen displays or, um, any kind of of displays in your company that wants to display, uh, data on or visuals on this all is powered by the same system and not 20 different systems powering each one channel. So the moment we stepped into this omnichannel kind of, of, of selling, that is the moment headless made sense because suddenly you have one solution that can cater all the different that Goes across The book channels. Yeah, yeah.

That, that was moment Sense to me. So Dominic, let me ask you, is story block is not open source? No, No.

We fought before hard about it, but Yeah. And look, I, I get it. You know, the, that has its own set of challenges.

There's rewards to it. I mean, there are plenty of people, but you know, basically then you would be doing a, a hosted version would be your money maker, right? Yeah, correct.

Um, is there a free version, a trial version, a test version? What's the story? Like?

What are the tiers? We, Yeah, so we, we, we thought a lot about open sourcing or not, because both Alex and I, we really believe like open source is, is something fundamental that we need to support. And here comes the twist.

I believe it's incredible hard to monetize, even with a hosted version, it's always hard to keep up with support and maintainance on that. And many of my friends actually run companies like YY from NNN, uh, that definitely have cracked the code on open source and a licensed host, uh, model. So it's amazing.

But at the same time, for a CMS where there are so many open source solutions already, we realize that the customers that we are catering to, which is upper mid markets to enterprise, they don't necessarily need it. 99% and higher. And this is what we then decide, okay, fast open source is something that we don't do with Story Block, but the money that we are making part of it, we distributes to the libraries and the components that we are using.

So for example, we are one of the, the backers of Few, we supported Next Chairs for a long time and many, many community conferences globally. And even right nowadays like 20, 25 different, uh, meetups that we sponsor every month. That's great.

So that, that is how we, we try to give back, even though we know the source that we are writing, it's not going back, coming to the pricing. Uh, so the pricing by now is, is fairly simple. We have a free version for developers.

One user, you can build as many things as you want, uh, and you can just get started on the free using tier. There's no time limit to it, but in the first 14 days, you can also access all the other features that we have that makes sense on collaboration. So it's completely free to use even after those 14 days.

Uh, but uh, as the moment you want to add new users, you will pay for those users as a usual software, as a service model. It's a monthly subscription and then you basically scale, we have some other parameters like, uh, projects that you're doing, so spaces as we call it, and consumption of traffic as an example. And depending on the size of, of your company and the size of like the, the usage of storybook, uh, the pricing basically gets down.

So the more users you purchase, the per user pricing actually goes down, it Goes, goes Down. So it's a recessive pricing that just helps you scale over time. So if you have larger needs, you can scale and we automatically apply certain discounts to then come to a point where it's scalable for you as a customer as well.

But the main idea is monthly or yearly subscription. And for enterprise customers, we do a three year contracts, five year contracts as well if needed for price stability. But yeah, that's the whole plan.

Got it. Now, is it, so do customers self-host this on their own infrastructure or in the cloud? Do you offer it as a SaaS?

Both, Yeah, it's a pure SaaS play. Yeah, it's a pure SaaS play. We do have some enterprise clients where we allow and manage hosting, where we manage in their own AWS instance, a story block.

So that is something we have allowed now on like a really top tier enterprise, EVA government, uh, or large insurance or banks. This is the territory that you're talking Sure, yeah. So price, exactly.

Yeah, it's a, it's a higher price tech, but at the same time, uh, the rest is usually the going for a software as a service approach. So we hosted it, paying a subscription and then just use our A PS directly. The website itself is unhosted by them.

It's not hosted by us. So it's completely in their controlled. Got it.

So to me, like look, you know, the big draw here, and I guess it's the reason behind the headless as well is, you know, right at once, use it everywhere kind of thing, right? So whether I'm using this content in my mobile app or my OTT app or my website or you know, wherever it's going to go today, and you mentioned even importing it, that data into an LLM for a, I guess an AI type of, uh, I implementation, it's fine. It's written once and it's used all over there via APIs.

It, it just goes out via API. Exactly. Is that Right?

That is a hundred percent correct. And the, the main thing, what makes it hatless is not that there's an API because then you can just call everything in API. Um, it's more that everything you do in the application, every action you take, all of that is done through APIs first.

So even we ourself, we build the API first on the management layer and also on the delivery layer, and then you build a UI on top and suddenly everything you can do in the ui you can also automate because it is all API, uh, because recently we saw the movement of the, the older D XP players who announced that they are headless, uh, and uh, always bring the competition. If you get a bike and you add two more, um, uh, tires to it, it's not becoming a car. It's still a bike with four, still a bike, four, four wheels, right?

So, uh, and, and that's the analogy I'm using. If, if you're not building a system from the ground up with the idea and the manifesto of API first, it's never gonna be the same as a solution that is really driven from that ground up. And that's a big differentiator towards other like, monolithic older players that really like try to, to scoop into the, the headless realm.

But, uh, yeah, I'd much rather get a car. Yeah, I get it. You know what, Tommy, we never mentioned the website.

Where do people go? com and really interesting, uh, block is not written like you think it is. It's not B-L-O-C-K, uh, it's BLOK.

So story block without a C uh, reason is quite simple. Alex and I were both software engineers, and to be honest, the domain with the C was already taken. So we decided to just, I've there done that.

I've been there and done that. Yep. Good for you.

What a great story. Dominic, thank you for coming on today. This, this is, you know, this is the stuff that white people get into tech, right?

Follow their passion, solve a problem, make a great company. com with a, there's no C-B-L-O-K Dominick. Thanks for coming on.

Hey, come back and keep us posted on this. We'd love to hear more about it. It's a great story.

Great, great, great experience. All right, we're gonna take a break here on Text Drunk tv. We'll be back in just a moment.