Chris Bryce: Hello, and happy lunch hour for those of you in the Eastern Time zone. Thank you for taking some time out of your day to join Beyond the CMS, our rebranded version of our web tech talk show, but we're keeping all of the fundamentals the same. Just before I get into it, I want to shout out to everyone who is joining on all the different channels. I think we're broadcasting on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram. So hey, this whole idea started by me sharing the joy I had listening to The Car Guys, which is a call in talk show where people would wonder about what's wrong with their car, and you'd have a couple of guys there giving their insights on how to get things fixed. We wanted to create an opportunity for anyone to ask us anything. We do have a little bit of a bias around web technologies and CMSs, and of course AI is impacting our lives everywhere we look, so that's a hot topic. So thanks for joining today. Super special guest Barry Darcy from Storyblok is joining us today to share what's going on with composable content and AI and all kinds of cool stuff. So, checking in from Dublin, Barry, thanks for joining us today. Do you want to just introduce folks to what you're up to?

Barry Darcy: Thank you very much for having me. First of all, Chris, I'm very excited to join you today, and welcome to all of the visitors. I'm not on the East Coast lunchtime, as you mentioned, I'm in Dublin in Ireland, so it's a little bit later in my day, towards the end of the day, but very happy to join. So, maybe just a quick introduction to me. Hoping many of the viewers today are familiar with Storyblok. Storyblok is a headless CMS. We were founded in 2017 out of a small place in Austria called Linz. Our two co-founders, Dominic and Alex, are both actually still with us as CEO and CTO, so we've been around for quite a while. I guess most of your viewers are familiar with what a headless CMS is, but maybe we can go into that a little bit later and just give a quick overview of exactly what we mean by that. And of course we'll talk a little bit about the exciting stuff that we're doing over here at Storyblok as we go through the different questions the audience might have today.

Chris Bryce: Awesome, great, and a good segue into encouraging anyone who's listening in live to really ask us anything you want. We have a great production team, Marie and Natalie are manning the system behind the scenes and helping take questions and put them into a channel here. But I thought we might just get started by picking up on what you were mentioning, and just by the way, Storyblok is a content platform, it's typically called headless or composable. Barry, maybe I'll turn it over to you to describe, in layman's terms, what that means and how it compares to the old school way of producing web content.

Barry Darcy: Yeah, of course, thanks Chris, and that's definitely a topic that's good for me. So ultimately, people are familiar with a CMS, I imagine all of the viewers here know what a content management system is, where you put your content that you're generally sending to your digital assets. In most cases, that's a website. But a headless CMS is a slightly different content management system, where the backend, where your content is stored, those fields where you input your content, is separated from the front end and how it's displayed. So instead of being tied to just one delivery, one website layout, it's delivered through APIs to many different devices, platforms, or different types of content delivery. Traditionally that would be a website, it could be an application, a digital display, an Apple Watch, but ultimately omnichannel delivery to any sort of asset. And what that does is it gives developers full flexibility, and it also gives marketers or content editors the scalability and speed they need to pivot into new markets or add new technology. So in a nutshell, that's how we like to explain headless CMS.

Chris Bryce: Over here at Storyblok, you mentioned giving developers flexibility, and I'm kind of stoked because we're just about to launch a really cool new website on Storyblok, and I'll show a quick demo of that. But something that we promote when we're introducing a customer to headless or composable technologies is the opportunity, in the future, to not have a reliance on a suite of developer capabilities, they really only need to focus on the front end. Do you want to talk a little bit about how that kind of frees up an organization in the future to resource the ongoing management of sites?

Barry Darcy: Yeah, that's a really important topic. I lead the partner effort here at Storyblok, so a really important topic for me is how we can drive efficiencies for agencies that are using Storyblok to deliver for their customers. And of course that heavily overlaps into enabling developers to have the tools they need to be able to go quickly, right? The flexibility that an API led, headless CMS offers is that you're ultimately front end agnostic, you're not tied into any particular mode of development, any particular coding language. You have full flexibility as a developer to use whatever front end framework you see fit. Generally speaking, with headless CMS, we're seeing more edge front end frameworks, more modern front end frameworks than you might be familiar with using an older monolithic system like a WordPress or an Adobe Experience Manager. It allows you to connect to any front end technology you need with ease, being API led driven. So giving the developer that flexibility drives a ton of efficiency. But then it also comes back to organizations or agencies that are trying to recruit developers that fit the model of creating these assets that we're all working on together, you're able to find people with a more diverse skill set, someone that understands JavaScript well and can deliver into whatever front end framework that particular organization needs. Having that flexibility is really important when it comes to content delivery, and we like to deliver that here at Storyblok.

Chris Bryce: Awesome. You mentioned a term that some folks are also a little bit unfamiliar with in this, I guess, more modern paradigm shift, you mentioned edge networks and publishing on an edge. What does that mean?

Barry Darcy: Yeah, so ultimately you're given the flexibility to host your website in many different ways. With a lot of the old monolithic systems, you might be tied into a select few hosting options, and a lot of more traditional industries would often go for on-premise hosting, for security reasons or for different reasons coupled together. But ultimately, you can deliver Storyblok through more modern edge hosting solutions like Netlify or Vercel, which gives you a very flexible and instantaneous way to deploy your digital assets across those omnichannels that I mentioned earlier. So you're ultimately able to be front end agnostic, and you can also be somewhat agnostic when it comes to the server side rendering and the requirements you might have to deploy into multiple locales or multiple device types or applications, websites, watches, digital displays, whatever that might be. So having speed there, and a little bit of agility to choose modern technologies coupled with a modern CMS, I think is a real benefit.

Chris Bryce: Yeah. Something we really love about the whole stack architecture is that the end product is essentially a flat HTML file, there's nothing to hack into. It's kind of there, published, all that information flattened, it presents quickly on different devices, and there's a lot of security benefits as well. Yeah, absolutely. I've got to mention AI, of course, I know your whole team is rapidly deploying lots of new features and functions within the platform itself. Would it be cool to ask you to talk a little bit more about what folks can expect from Storyblok?

Barry Darcy: Yeah. AI, hot topic, right? I think everybody's ears perk up a little bit when we mention those two letters together, and for sure it's very important to our roadmap here at Storyblok as well. I would say right now we're sprinkling some AI into some of the features that we already had, and we're focusing on AI when it comes to some of our collaboration features. In January we launched a new feature called the Ideation Room, there's some AI in there. People who are familiar with using content management are definitely familiar with this cumbersome task of having to first put your content somewhere, wherever that may be, generally in a Word doc or a Google Doc, and then you're trying to figure out how to migrate it into your CMS fields, and that can be a very clunky exercise. But we've developed an in-app feature within Storyblok where you can have that kind of free content editing experience contained within the application itself, and within there we've sprinkled in a little bit of AI so you're able to change the tone, everything you'll be familiar with from using a ChatGPT or an OpenAI feature, or many of the other products out there, are sprinkled now into Storyblok. So when you're writing that content, you can have the freedom in-app to really use that AI power to deliver a more succinct and more impactful message through your content. You can then take that content quickly in-app and transfer it into the right components of your website, so you're getting the speed that comes with AI in your editing experience, and you're not having to leave the application to bring content from one place to the next.

Barry Darcy: Another interesting use case we have for AI is language translation, which is a very important part of content management. My own background is actually on the agency side, and I guess ten plus years ago I remember these really tricky projects, even if you're looking at four or five different languages. I remember one project in particular, I won't name the company, but we were working in five or six languages, working with translators in all of these different countries, and then you're trying to keep all of that content in sync, trying to make sure that the tone is still the same. With Storyblok now, you can use AI to handle all of those translations. And of course with AI, it's still early days somewhat, there's so much power there, but there's still a world where I believe we have to have good governance over that content that's being created through AI. For that we have a lot of workflow features also contained within Storyblok, so we're not just creating that content and shipping it straight away, publishing it, we're able to put that into workflows where it needs to be approved, it needs to be reviewed, but ultimately we're getting to that point a lot quicker. So that's just a couple of the things we've sprinkled a little bit of AI on in Storyblok, but plenty more to come in our roadmap for 2025 and beyond.

Chris Bryce: You mentioned your agency background, and I think it's important to highlight how Storyblok allows agencies to be more efficient. One of our challenges in a migration of a large site with tens of thousands of pages is our ability to use AI to restructure meta and schema data, for example, and import that. Do you want to talk a little bit about the features and benefits Storyblok has for agencies managing their efficiencies?

Barry Darcy: Yeah, I could talk for hours about the benefits for partners, that's literally my day job. But let's highlight a few things. Thinking back to my agency days, and CMS in general, back in my agency days we used to use a more clunky system when I started, a long time ago, and what I remember as a real pain point was the handover of a website to the customer. I remember working on these kind of brochure sized instruction guides about how you can update and edit your website. With Storyblok, this kind of enablement of the customer is super fast, you can very quickly show them how to use the product and they'll be able to pick it up quickly by themselves. We don't need those big manuals about how to work your website anymore, so that makes things super easy for the content editor, for the marketing people, to be able to go fast. But the efficiencies that come from the agency side, we've mentioned a few earlier, being able to hire developers with a multifaceted skill set and still be able to deliver, the efficiency really comes in handover, making your customer more self-sufficient in how they manage their website. I'd say that's one of the main gains we're getting agency side at Storyblok. We want to enable our partners, agency implementation partners globally, to understand the whole feature set well and understand how they can deliver the best products for their customers. That's a huge focus for me and my team, but tons of efficiencies we can gain there together.

Chris Bryce: Super cool. One second here, we've got a question from Natalie. She says happy Thursday. She works mostly with SMBs, and she asks: does a headless CMS make sense for that audience, or is it best kept at the enterprise level, or does it serve everyone? Maybe talk a little bit more about your product and how you serve both, or all, markets.

Barry Darcy: Yeah, no, really we do serve all markets. We are an enterprise grade CMS at our core, we focus a lot on security and compliance, making sure we're fully accredited for large enterprises and that we have a fully scalable feature set for them. When it comes to going into new markets, languages, locales, being able to do that quickly, that's where we're really a focused, enterprise ready product. But of course there's an entry point for all, we do operate across all business sizes. We have a number of different price points and different plans that we offer to the market that really fit every business type, right from the local business to the SMB, up to enterprise. I think everybody needs to have a digital presence, as we know, and I guess everyone listening today knows that quite well, but there really is a fit for everybody. Within our pricing model we have a focus on our community, our developers, so they can really try it out, check it out, figure out how to use Storyblok and how it could potentially be valuable within their organization or agency. But we do focus quite a bit on having our product enterprise ready, so while it does fit for everybody, enterprise grade features are really where we're focused in terms of our future development plans.

Chris Bryce: Awesome. You touched on it lightly, but if you don't mind expanding a little bit, some of the questions our customers have, they're kind of medium enterprise, what are your security and compliance levels? How do you manage data in different countries? Can you talk a little bit, in more detail, about security?

Barry Darcy: Yeah, no, absolutely. So we're fully ISO accredited, and we're very proud of that. We have a full team of security experts here at Storyblok, and we're keeping up to date with all of the latest security and compliance topics we need to, so that's a really important part of what we need to do to stay enterprise ready. Server location is often a very hot topic for enterprises too, so we have a number of server locations around the world. We have a server even in mainland China, behind the Great Firewall, and we have servers all the way in Australia. We obviously have US and Canadian servers, and in Europe we're generally hosted out of Frankfurt, but for enterprise customers we do offer that flexibility to host your content wherever you need to for compliance reasons. Connected to that, a lot of enterprises require a very strict uptime SLA, so we're able to offer that too on our enterprise plans. Now, let's be clear, as you mentioned earlier, this type of technology is ultimately throwing out flat HTML front end code, which is super secure, almost unhackable, as you say. But there are other things that are important too, and additional features, you can find everything on our website, and I'm sure we'll share a little bit of a takeaway about our compliance. There are some other cool features there that enterprise orgs like to use, such as single sign on, to make sure things are super secure. At the same time, we do offer two factor authentication for our SMB customers too. So security is important, not just for enterprise, but we really focus on those detailed requirements for our enterprise customers.

Chris Bryce: Awesome. Just touching on that, maybe it's a good time for me to remind everyone that we're pretty unscripted around here, and also if you are listening in, thank you again for making some time in your day, and really feel free to ask us anything. I wanted to bring up a topic that is the one challenge we have with headless or composable, as an agency, we're expected to give the client a pretty clear sense of the overall budget of a project, and composable technically means that you're able to compose a variety of different services into your website. Let's say that service could be search, or a PIM, or some other bit of technology that's all incorporated. What are your thoughts on how to get around the agency challenge of giving the customer a total cost of what the site is, and maybe touch on how we, as an agency, can work with Storyblok in understanding a consumption model, what is the road to getting to the right level for them to choose which level of your product they need?

Barry Darcy: Yeah, really good question. I guess the true answer is it's really on a case by case basis, we really need to understand what the requirement of that customer is and find the right home for them in terms of our packages and what we can offer from our product. But of course, total cost of ownership is a really hot topic, and it's something we see as super important in how we position ourselves through our customers and also through agencies. We try to be extremely predictable in how we present our pricing, how we present our plans, so businesses don't just see a price for the first year, they see a price that they're going to scale with. We give a number of different packages, we have a couple of enterprise options that are really tailored based on the requirements, how many locales, other consumption based features, but it's only the consumption features that would actually elevate the price, and everything is super clear from the get-go in terms of what that would cost. So ultimately, the only unpredictable element to a scaling cost with our CMS is if you have a higher volume of users, need to go into more locales, or have a higher demand, which is ultimately a sign of the success of the digital asset, right, you know it's performing well if you're getting high demand on it.

Barry Darcy: But when it comes to total cost of ownership, back to the start of your question, in the past, with a monolithic system, you're kind of trying to squeeze everything into that one product and trying to make everything work through one platform. Composable technologies, or best in breed as we like to call it, allow you to choose the best technologies to fit your needs, you're not just trying to shoehorn everything into one product that you paid a massive budget for. You're able to spread that budget across the correct technologies that make sense for you. We have a large technology ecosystem, around 40 integrations with other API led technologies, other edge hosting platforms we talked about earlier like Netlify or Vercel. But also, if you think about an e-commerce store that needs a complicated search function, we'd very often connect with e-commerce tools like BigCommerce or Shopify, and couple that maybe with an enhanced search tool like Algolia. We marry those technologies together, and we work with those technology partners to present a more combined price into the market, and we're often able to refer our customers over to those other technologies to avail discounts too, through our partnership. So when we couple those technologies, we're able to again try to deliver some predictability into what that cost will look like from the get-go, and how it will scale with the success of the platform.

Barry Darcy: But ultimately, TCO is a hot topic, stay tuned, we're also doing some work with our analysts this year on what that looks like. We did a large study last year into return on investment with Storyblok, and we had some really good results, you can check that out on our website, and just see how quick you can go. There's a huge cost saving there on its own, right, but coupling that with the total cost of ownership, not just return on investment for the product of Storyblok, but everything else that encompasses your project, it's a real key to making the customer feel secure with that choice. Because it can be more choices to be made than with a traditional system, but you're ultimately getting a more bespoke technology stack that really meets your needs, and that can be super powerful. The beauty of that, as I like to say too, is that because composable technologies are, in some ways, plug in, plug out, in the example I mentioned earlier, if you wanted to take out search and add a PIM, for example, if you wanted to grow your stack in that way, you're kind of holding the technology vendors accountable to have a good product, because you're not tied into these kind of big, bulk, long term contracts like you may have been with an older system. You're able to have the flexibility to hold that vendor accountable to deliver what they said they would at the beginning of the deal, or the beginning of your customer journey. And that's what we try to stay focused on, making sure we're really delivering value to our customers at the early stages, and more importantly, as they scale.

Chris Bryce: Yeah, and I think, so what that kind of means, or another way of saying it, is the beauty of headless is it allows you to plug in different systems, and as your organization matures and has greater demands for different systems, you can swap them out. And I think the flexibility is a greater advantage than the small investment in time in figuring out the total cost of ownership with Storyblok. Can you start on a small plan and kind of migrate up, or how does that work?

Barry Darcy: Yeah, absolutely. As I mentioned, we have a number of different models, right down to the developer community, where we want to encourage them to be able to play around with Storyblok. But as I mentioned, our focus is on delivering value to enterprises, large, mid-size business, up to enterprise. But yes, absolutely, there's a starting point even at enterprise to start with a smaller space requirement, that's what we call projects at Storyblok. And depending on how many users you have, we've got some really good success stories where we've had this land and grow model, where we've gone in and maybe worked on an internal project or a smaller project, and then that's the beauty of it, again, holding yourself accountable to the quality of your product, when users start to engage with these modern technologies like Storyblok, they find it hard to go back to the older systems, so they'll tend to advocate to use it across more projects. So absolutely, we've seen many customers come in, play around with things, and then expand onto bigger requirements that require more of an enterprise feature set. And that's when you can come in, and maybe you don't have a full requirement on enterprise, but you may scale towards that in time. But there really is a home for everybody, and I'd encourage listeners to check out our pricing and package page on the storyblok.com website, plenty of information about tons of features we offer to everybody at different levels.

Chris Bryce: Wonderful, and at the conclusion of this we'll get your contact information in the comments area, of course. Time flies exceptionally fast having these chats, and there's a whole bunch of stuff I want to ask you, but I wanted to touch on two more topics. Can you talk a little bit about any of the customers you serve, or the industries you excel at? I'm just thinking if folks are listening in now, or later, in the archives of our podcast here, do you want to talk a little bit about some key customers?

Barry Darcy: Yeah, I think a really interesting one, a really interesting customer segment for us in general is retail. One of our customers that we're super proud of, and one that I really like to talk about because it's very much triangulated through our partner channel here at Storyblok, is the National Retail Federation, or NRF, maybe some of the listeners or people tuning in later will be familiar with NRF. They're basically the world's largest retail trade association, and they came to one of our agency partners, RDA, based out of Baltimore, and they had a very big challenge. NRF, every year, has a huge event called The Big Show, which was hosted in Manhattan this year, I was actually there, it was a great event, 50,000 industry professionals come together to network and to learn from each other about innovation in retail. NRF actually became our customer, so we were already attending NRF, and it was really nice then to go back this year and talk about them as a customer.

Barry Darcy: They came with a number of different challenges, a number of different requirements. They had an extremely tight timeline that was obviously tied to the event launch. They had a lot of stakeholders that needed to contribute content, so having the flexibility within Storyblok to have those workflows, to have approval flows, was an important requirement for them too. They had a high traffic requirement, so again, coming into that more modern hosting technology stack was an important requirement for them too. Together with RDA, we talked about why Storyblok, and told them all of the cool stuff about how you can be on this headless architecture, how you can be API first, and the ease of use that comes through the content teams. And a really important aspect for them, when we started to demo, maybe they were evaluating some other CMS platforms, was the visual editor capabilities that we have in Storyblok, and that was a real game changer for them. It allowed NRF and their marketing team to update their content directly and preview it in real time, and this ultimately helped them with their requirement on that extremely tight deadline to get all of the content approved and executed quickly.

Barry Darcy: So RDA, our implementation partner, worked on it, they built out the project in record time, they cut the timeline on the previous project by half. Their dev team was able to be focused, like we mentioned earlier, on that front end experience, and the marketing team were able to focus on the content at the same time, giving again to that requirement of going fast. A couple of key results to mention from that particular case study: they were able to go live two times faster, they had a 40% reduction in their ongoing development costs from their previous platform, they obviously improved a lot on marketing team efficiency, they had less delays, they had these approval workflows so they could get their content out quicker and be more agile with that. And we actually have a really nice quote from the NRF team, which was that the content editing experience was intuitive and allowed the team to move quickly, again, speed and agility, these are all the things we like to focus on here at Storyblok. And we really feel this particular project showcases just how well a well orchestrated partnership between a forward thinking agency partner and bringing the right CMS technology, like Storyblok, can deliver those enterprise results, but not just deliver them, deliver them quickly and give them the results that they need. So a really nice news story there, and we're working with a wide array of partners, including yourselves, delivering these exceptionally quick projects to many customers across the US at the moment. So that's just one of many to highlight today in a quick update.

Chris Bryce: You're awesome. I'm going to ask for just a little bit more of your time than we expected.

Barry Darcy: Yeah, no, I'm good, I'm good, you can keep going.

Chris Bryce: Wonderful. We've got a question here from Janice, and she asks, a question that comes up with clients often as they explore the CMS world, how does Storyblok differentiate itself from the other players in the market? You have lots of great features, but what would you say is your secret sauce and compelling benefit?

Barry Darcy: Yeah, great question. I think, look, we've touched on a lot of the benefits today in general around headless CMS, and headless CMS in general is a great technology choice. But I want to touch on two things that I think set us apart here at Storyblok, I've talked about them briefly already, but the most important thing we see, particularly through the deals we're working on with our agency partners, is that predictability in pricing. When you, as a decision maker, are making a decision to take on a new technology stack, it's sometimes easier to do nothing, or easier to stick with the incumbent. We want to make you feel secure in the choice you're making, and that's why predictability, and proving the return on investment to you when we're discussing why Storyblok would be a fit, is a real key. I think that sets us apart, there are no hidden costs, we will tell you upfront what we believe you need, we want to create value for you with these features. And of course, like the question mentions, lots of great features for sure, but we want to make sure they fit your needs, you understand what they will cost, and, more importantly, how they will scale. Delivering that predictability to the decision maker is a real key to what we try to achieve here at Storyblok.

Barry Darcy: But on the product side, maybe a slightly more exciting answer connected to the feature set, is that we were first to market with visual editing capability. What I mean by that is being able to see your content inline, in real time, and not having to look at a large form on a page, I know I've learned how to use the CMS, I can understand which fields I'm populating, but then you're triggering that to a staging environment, you're previewing it, you have to go back, you're trying to find the right field. Being able to preview everything and work with everything in real time, side by side, content on one side, visual representation on the other, that's super powerful. There are other products out there that have some similar features, but we really have pioneered this, and we've been ahead of the game in terms of adding to that and making it a really robust feature.

Barry Darcy: To add to that, on the product side, I would say Storyblok is a collaborative product, so if you think about how we collaborate in a Google Doc, adding a comment, adding a note for somebody to check in on, we bring all of those features into Storyblok too, so you're not working in silos. A lot of us are working remote now, and you may need to write a blog and get it approved by your manager, all of this can happen in Storyblok. I touched on the Ideation Room too, but just really taking that full, encompassing content editing experience into one application, rather than having to use many, that's another key differentiator I'd say with Storyblok.

Chris Bryce: Awesome. For those people who are waiting to go get their lunch, maybe, these will be great things to share later, but I just wanted to talk about the future of agencies. Over here at Dotfusion, we've made a commitment to be agentic first, and even in our preliminary modeling and beta projects, we're able to create websites from two or three chat prompts, go analyze some Figma files, write some content. We have folks overlooking things that are in senior posts and are well tenured, other opportunities for us to create agents that might be able to speak directly to Storyblok and create the models for us. I know this may be putting you on the spot a little bit, but these are things we're thinking about for the future, and I know just fundamentally being API first is a great position to be in. Any thoughts on that at all?

Barry Darcy: Yeah, there's lots going on, I can tell you, in our roadmap around that agentic approach, and ultimately being able to talk to Storyblok through the API and ask it to do certain things, we're working on a lot of exciting stuff. We want to live in a world where you can take a design of a website and pull it into Storyblok with a build ready field structure, content schema ready to rock, that's the end goal. I can't really reveal a ton about our roadmap right now, but do stay tuned, and we'll share the link to our roadmap so everybody watching can keep an eye on that. But that approach is definitely the track we're taking, being able to use the power of AI connected to an API can allow us to do many things. With great power comes great responsibility, as the old saying goes, and we don't see AI, or generating, like that exciting approach I mentioned earlier of a command that generates a website, we see it more like a command that calls a structure of components together to formulate a webpage, or create a draft of a blog on a particular topic, that can be reviewed by a real person, by an expert, later. I think that's the phase we're at right now, and that's the type of feature set we'll be delivering in 2025. We all know we're moving very close to a world where things can be generated instantaneously, but I think there's still plenty of room for the experts to verify that content, similar to the example I talked about earlier with translations, there's still a place for manual review. But there's a lot we can do to speed up the process to make that content editing experience even more efficient for marketers globally.

Chris Bryce: Awesome. Maybe just a last concept I want to give you the opportunity to share, for folks that are listening in now, or later, that are partner agencies or prospective partner agencies, what is the process, and maybe tell me a little bit more about how you serve partners? I think that's a whole paradigm in and of itself, so to speak.

Barry Darcy: Yeah, no, absolutely, maybe we might need to do a separate episode on that. But the high level is: I come from an agency, and I lead the partner team here at Storyblok. Our two founders have come from an agency as well, agencies, implementation agencies, are in the DNA of Storyblok. We want to enable agencies to use Storyblok to deliver value for their customers, and for that we've got a very mature partner program, of which we have over 3,000 registered implementation partners globally using Storyblok. We have a separate, contained product within the app called the Partner Portal, where there are lots of education resources, learning paths you can take on getting yourself up to speed on how to use Storyblok and succeed with implementation, how to understand our pricing and position it correctly to your customers, and many other connected things. We also have a lot of in-house partner managers who are supporting our partner network globally to help them with anything they need connected to Storyblok. We have solution engineers who can deliver enablement on a case by case basis connected to particular projects. But because agencies are, like I mentioned, a part of our DNA here at Storyblok, we've invested in quite a large team, we're 22 or 23 folks on the partner team supporting that partner network globally to execute successfully, because ultimately, if agencies are delivering Storyblok at scale to their customers, doing it correctly and giving them the value of the feature set that we want them to, everybody's happy, Storyblok's happy with a happy customer, the customer's happy, and implementation partners using a great product and driving some of those efficiencies we talked about earlier will also be super important.

Chris Bryce: Well, that is an amazing way to wrap up this episode with you. You gave me some ideas, I'd love to have you back for a kind of demo day, where we can present that beautiful interface you have for authors, which winds up being a big cohort of the decision makers on these projects, and we go out of our way to use your sandbox environment, get people in there editing something, so this is what your day to day life is going to be like in the platform. So stay tuned for that, and I think we'll wrap it up here today with a little desire for more.

Barry Darcy: Yeah, sounds good, same on my side, I'd love to be back, I'd love to tell you more about any other connected topic, dig a little bit deeper into some of the things we talked about today, but also even talk about the partner program and the different benefits we can offer there. But like you said, there will be takeaways in the comments, I'll make sure I share a list to cover some of the topics we mentioned today: the NRF case study, the partner program, and some of the key features, along with our roadmap, so everybody tuning in can keep abreast of where we're headed with all of these new and exciting AI features, and non-AI features, but lots of cool AI stuff too, to keep everybody interested.

Chris Bryce: That's really wonderful, and a great example of our partnership and your willingness to come and get put on the spot a little bit, I really appreciate it, and you've added a lot to the show. For everyone who's stayed a little longer than normal, thank you very much for making time in your day to sit down with us and listen to some exciting stuff from Storyblok. Really appreciate it, and thanks for tuning in, probably your dinner time in Dublin.

Barry Darcy: Coming close, coming close, a little bit more to do, but thanks for having me, Chris, I really appreciate it.

Chris Bryce: You got it. Okay everyone, have a wonderful day out there, we're going to sign off. Bye now.