Chris Bryce: Welcome to another episode of Beyond the CMS, where we do our best to talk about trends and technologies that are impacting the way digital content is shared. And we always have a special guest. And today we have Daniel Serrano from Griddo, calling in from Spain. And we were just talking about how beautiful things are in Spain right now. Thank you for joining us. I really appreciate it.

Daniel Serrano: Thanks for having me, Chris. I'm absolutely delighted to be here with you today and with your audience.

Chris Bryce: Oh, wonderful. So the way this all started out is that our customers, who are typically CMOs or decision makers who are choosing a content platform, they typically have a lot of other stuff to do, and then they were just asking a lot of questions about the right platform for them. Does it fit their industry? So we thought, why don't we kind of create a show or a podcast, and we take snippets of this later and share that out afterwards. But we've themed it on the Car Guy Show, which is a show on national public radio in the United States where people call in with questions about their car, and you know, you ask us anything, and that's really the format of this show as well. So anyone who's taking some time out of their day here on a beautiful Thursday, anywhere in the world, please feel free to ask us anything. But really this is a show all about you and Griddo, and thanks for joining. Please ask us questions, I'll be manning the chat on the side. But Daniel, let's start off, tell us a little bit about yourself and Griddo, and then we'll learn more.

Daniel Serrano: Yeah, well, about myself, I don't like to speak too much about myself. That's one of the things that most people tend to fear. But, well, I'm an austral engineer inside a designer's body, I would say, or a designer's mind. And that has led me through very different paths. And in this late stage of my career, I started working again in the digital industry. First consulting for Field, then in Secuoyas. And from that experience, well, I've worked with plenty of different customers and different industries. But one of the industries we were working a lot with was the higher ed industry, universities. That's something that happened particularly at IE University. So from there, we started thinking about all the needs that these universities had, and kind of conceiving the need for a particular platform that could solve the problems, that was not an off the shelf platform, 'cause usually people don't think about universities in that way, but they are extremely complicated organizations, with different stakeholders and stuff.

Daniel Serrano: So I brought all this knowledge that I had, and the company had as well. And at some point we were working with one of our clients, IE University. And we realized that it was sort of a changing point in time where technology was changing a lot. They were facing a very hard problem that needed to scale really quickly, their new digital presence, 'cause basically they've come from being a business school to become a university. So lots of things needed to change at the time. And that idea of scale and speed was something central to what we were doing with them, right? So that's kind of the real starting point for Griddo as a CMS, or a digital experience platform, 'cause there are some differences between both kinds of problems. But the thing was that we perfectly understood the problem, the needs that the marketing department had and many other areas of the university. And with that know-how we thought about creating something really, how do you say that, empowering for the team that we're working with. 'Cause when you spend a lot of time working with the universities, and you can have this kind of step-back vision, you see that there is a lot of efficiency gained from a usability standpoint, from a data structure standpoint, from the content and the way we work with that as well. And still, all of that in a new platform was something that was kind of the goal at the beginning.

Daniel Serrano: Now, because we had this baggage in Secuoyas, and as well from working with a particular human-centered design way of doing things, one of the things that we thought was really important was to really get something that could be empowering, as I said, for these kind of people that we're working with it. So from there, we set off a goal for Griddo, and the main goal was to transform the chaos that usually the universities have, in the form of a fragmented digital landscape with hundreds of sites, out tools, security risks, and get all of these and transform that chaos into a single, unified ecosystem. And that this ecosystem could fundamentally give that true autonomy, that freedom to the marketing and content teams. So that was kind of the idea and how we started building it. And that shift from powerless to powerful for these kind of people has a massive ripple effect at the scale that a university has. If you think about it, when you empower one person, well, they can launch one page faster, but when you empower hundreds of different communicators across marketing, admissions, alumni relations, I don't know, every single academic department actually, you fundamentally are gonna change the digital metabolism of the entire institution. That's why we like to call it like an ecosystem, 'cause you feel that the university behaves a little bit like that.

Chris Bryce: Interesting. We've invited some folks who are managing technology for higher ed to the show, we'll see this now and later. I'm assuming there are some folks that may just not know that there's a very specific CMS tailored to higher ed and their needs. Can you talk a little bit about what's the difference, like what's unique about the needs of higher ed when it comes to a content platform?

Daniel Serrano: Yeah, well, there's one thing that has to do with the scale, what I mentioned before. It's not that there are not other businesses that had a scale issue, but they have that scale issue for different, or they have to fix different problems here. What is, when we think about a university, one of the things that is really astonishing at the beginning, when you start understanding how they work, you get your, you rub your head around that and then you understand it better, but is the sheer amount of different stakeholders you have to cover. It's huge. Governments, parents, students, of course, prospective students, professors, all the faculty in itself, research centers. You have plenty of different stakeholders, so there's a lot of different requirements to organize all this content. And at the same time, there's a need to, or different needs to gather these different audiences that you have, right? So what this ends up producing most of the time is an ecosystem that exists that is really fragmented, as I mentioned before, because that's the way people have found out to solve their problem, every department probably, or even, that's one of the things that we found out when we were mapping out the whole IE University ecosystem at the beginning, when we started with Griddo, was that you have schools that had their website, but also masters within that school that had their own website, and then you start digging down, and it was sort of a fractal, you know, you keep like double clicking and boom, you have another thing, and boom, you get another thing. And that's really particular from that industry, I would say, from the hiring industry. Then another thing is that they have some very important requirements from a legal standpoint. And that's something that I think is really, really important. The way you see that some folks are changing their roles in the United States, particularly when it comes to different things like, for example, accessibility. So accessibility was something that you did because you thought it was good to do that, and to get to different users, but not everyone did that. So all of a sudden you have a government that is kind of forcing some minimum requirements in order to provide that accessibility. But that's just one example, you have other plenty of further requirements from the government. So that in itself makes the whole idea of the ecosystem of a university something that it's complex.

Chris Bryce: And you mentioned multi-site capabilities, 'cause a lot of people don't think about that, that a university website is really a cluster of many sites, often one for faculty and there's different departments. Do you wanna talk a little bit about, from a practical perspective, within Griddo you can clone a site, or maybe just talk a little bit about some of those editorial kind of workflows of creating sites and managing content?

Daniel Serrano: Yeah. So one of the important points that you were mentioning is like this sheer size, right? And when you think about it, the main problem is that every, the problem has tried to solve their own problem by themselves. So what's the problem that this produces? What we see as a consequence of this behavior, which is by the way really tied to the philosophy within the university, 'cause I didn't mention that before, but if you think about it, one of the particularities in universities is that they have a very particular way of governance, if you want. They kind of have flat structures, from that point of view. And the budgets are aloid to these structures as well. And that brings some dynamics within the industry. But again, you have this huge structure, and the one, a very important thing that you may think when you want to tackle the problem as a whole, is that you need to give this empowerment to the teams so they can actually create the website they need, so they can actually put those things out there very easily. Now, yeah, there's a drawback with that, and is that you have to keep some very important things for universities in mind. For example, the brand, right? And the good thing about having everything in a single platform is that you can manage that at that level scale. So you can create a whole bunch of different construction elements that allow you to cater to all these different audiences within the university, but keeping your brand tone or your brand identity in the right place.

Chris Bryce: Could that be something, I think we used to call it lock and publish, where maybe the header is always the same, and it's controlled at a more, a higher governance level? It's, it's something...

Daniel Serrano: Like that. What we did was to take a very different approach to that. If you think about most of the CMSs that you have out there, they're built with a very limited amount of content presenting units, and that's the template. And usually, when you want to put a new page out there, you are gonna choose from a limited amount of templates that you've got. But what we see when we are working on that is that these templates have to fit very different needs and requirements from different parts of the organization. So that's a nightmare for them, because most of the time they have to feed the content to the template and not the other way around. And that was a really important insight for us when we created Griddo. So the idea was that, first of all, we need to modularize all of this, and we have to allow the editors to build the page they need. So it's basically, the idea was kind of, let's build a Lego, right? Where you can put the pieces where you need them. But the thing is that, you know, when you think about the Lego, you have different parts with different sizes and stuff, but you have a limited number of colors, because that's the kind of brand that they really, from there, so. If you take this analogy, what we do is that we have a full design system within Griddo that is something that's really different from other platforms. That design system is really flexible, but it's completely tailored to the brand guidelines. And then from that, we start building those modules or microformats that you can work with within a page in that way. From the point of view of Griddo, a template is a starting point, is like the template of a PowerPoint, for example, or a Word document, right? You get a template, you get a starting point, you can modify things within that template. Well, the same thing happens in Griddo, that's kind of the idea behind that.

Daniel Serrano: And that unlocks many things, because if you think about the different pieces of content that you have to publish as a university, right, think about, I don't know, a course on mathematics compared to a course on art, right, very different things. Do you sell them exactly in the same way with the same template? Well, that's kind of hard, and that's what's been done so far for the sake of, you know, kind of speed and scalability. But there's better ways to do that. And that's what we did, we thought about, while doing Griddo, bringing that knowledge that we have in the domain and being capable of giving the institutions the flexibility they need from the platform, so Griddo can become a very tailored solution for them and for their brand, not a rigid system that they have to work around. And from that point of view, our job is to provide that robust, hazard free environment, so that teams can focus on creating great content that beats their brand and not fighting with the technology. That's kind of it.

Chris Bryce: Just speaking about teams and design systems, and I guess the structure of the platform, what does the team look like to stand this up? Is this developer intensive? How much resources do we need on the university side? Can you talk a little bit about that? And I'm saying that kind of answering a question that a decision maker might be interested in.

Daniel Serrano: Sure. They are, they always ask that question, and there's a reason for that, because it changes fundamentally the way you're working. So you wanna know, what would I need now? 'Cause if I change all this method, system, well, I would need different things. And one of the things that is important is to understand that, obviously, the platform needs to be integrated within the university. There's different layers of integration. One is the brand, we talked about that a bit extensively, but there are other things you need to connect to, other systems within the digital ecosystem of the university. If you think about it, you have the LMS, you have the student information system, you have the CRM, and very important, when you're thinking, you have the DXP, that is the voice of the university somehow.

Chris Bryce: Can I ask you a question, I'm sorry to interrupt, it just always comes up, and you just touched on it. Can you describe in your words the difference between a CMS and a DXP? What's your version of that?

Daniel Serrano: Yes, the difference between a CMS and DXP. Well, CMS is a very well established category within the industry. And what a CMS tries to do is to manage the content, right? So you can find headless CMSs that just try to manage the content and don't care about the presentation layer, that's, for example, Contentful. Or, well, many CMSs are going to the headless approach and architecture, and that makes sense for many different applications. There are some other CMSs that are capable of managing the content but, at the same time, giving this presentation layer, right, that's the case of WordPress, for example. Now WordPress does it in a pretty analytic way. And what we did was to build a system in a very composable way. So you can, the main thing is that you can connect to many different systems within the university. And that has a huge advantage. The advantage of that is that not all the information is content that you actually manage in the content management system, right, it's content that you need to recover from other systems, like, for example, I was mentioning the student information system. And there's other content that you need to push to these systems, for example, to the CRM, every time you have a, I don't know, a foreign field, for example. So from the point of view of the DXP, there are some pieces that tend to think, and are aligned to create a digital experience for the people that are actually going to consume that. So a headless CMS is not gonna provide the consumption layer, is just that, right, the DXP is gonna, of course, provide that experience that the users are having, but it's not concerned about just managing the data by itself, but getting the data from very different sources in order to do that.

Chris Bryce: And Griddo is a DXP, I think that's...

Daniel Serrano: Exactly the right way to put it. Yeah, and as well, there are some DXPs that tend to have different, or if you want, push the information and the presentation layer to different touchpoints, that you can do that in mobile, for example, and you can do that in web and stuff. And there's a big difference there between some DXPs and others. So in our case, because everything is API based, you can push the information wherever you want. But from the point of view of what we are doing right now at Griddo, the presentation layer basically is gonna happen in the web and in the landing pages. So we started with that, 'cause that way you can build almost all the experience that you wanna provide to the future students, and as well to the present students, and so on. So from that point of view, that was the main channel for having this interaction with the users. There are other channels that you can think of, for example, you can think about social media, right, and you have the content management system that you can push to social media as well. But that's not something we are dealing with right now, just 'cause it's too, you're in the awareness phase of the product, and that has to do a lot with basically the kind of budget and campaigns, and it has a very different dynamic than what you get when you're more in the middle part of the funnel, if you want to think about it that way. But that nurturing phase, and conversion phase, and then all the services that you're providing when you have a client or a student within the university, right, 'cause you have plenty of them, if you think about it, from dorms to certificates, there's plenty of different things that you have to provide, interfaces that you have to deal with, right? So all the ones that are web-based are something that we try to serve with Griddo.

Chris Bryce: And lots to think about, eh. So we haven't talked about AI yet, always a fun topic, and I'm sure that's on your radar. Do you wanna talk about what you think about AI, and what you're considering to use it for in your roadmap?

Daniel Serrano: Yeah, well, we started to invest and learn about AI pretty early in the current state of AI, 'cause AI has been there for a while, right, but in the current state of AI and how these things have been evolving for the past three, four years, we've already been tiptoeing on that a lot. And we started to introduce AI services to Griddo about two years ago. Quite frankly, back then, the AI, particularly the ones that are generating content, it wasn't quite ready for production. So there were some things that it was really good for, and we started to work on that. And those things were, for example, for metadata. And that's a very important part of what you're doing, 'cause humans, we don't like to work on metadata, but AI doesn't mind, and on the other hand, it does it pretty well. So we started to work on integrating these services as wrappers within Griddo, and keep learning from that. And as well, to learn how we could create a user experience that can interact with AI in a pretty seamless way, if that's possible. We didn't wanna be AI, we just think about how do we improve this process, and if we can improve it with AI, so be it, but it's not about the AI by itself. So we were introducing those services, and from there we started building more momentum, just in the know-how of what we could do, and at the same time learning about what was going on in the industry, because chatbots have evolved a long way, LLMs, if you want, have evolved a long way in these two years.

Daniel Serrano: So one of the things that we started to do was to think, hey, we have centralized all the content of the university within Griddo, and we have a database that is completely structured and that can be perfectly useful for search, for example. So instead of relying on external search systems, we can do it ourselves, and we can even build a chatbot with all the know-how that you have in that huge database, where, for example, you have, well, let's say, all your commercial proposal value presentations there. You have plenty of information from that point of view, so we can work on that. And we started to build a small search system based on AI. Sometimes our clients want it to be interactive, like a chatbot, sometimes they just want it to be a search box with some kind of results, or something more similar to what search engines are doing right now. Once we worked on that and had that solution, we thought, okay, that's a very good point as well to feed personal content, 'cause at the end of the day, what you do with an LLM is ask a question and you want a personal answer to that question. So what if we put these two things together, and we are working on that, to create a real personal experience. So we can not answer the question in a very, how do you say that, written way, but trying to give you the right content, the ones we believe are gonna fit your profile better, the way you are navigating, the kind of things you're searching, the kind of things you're looking for. We can track that and give you the things that are more related to what you're looking for, because we have this sort of vector database that is relating these things. And that's something we are starting to test with some clients. I gotta say that this last idea of the real personal experience is something that is kind of freaking out a little bit the marketing people.

Chris Bryce: Okay. Yeah.

Daniel Serrano: It's curious, because I like that, you know, it was something that we didn't expect. Just a parenthesis on that, every single thing that we do, we test with our clients before rolling it out, so we're thinking about them, or it's an idea of theirs, you know, and we test it with other clients, and we try to be, from that point of view, very user centric. But that idea was very difficult, you know, to kind of convey from the needs of the clients, we were more like, oh, let's build something and let's see how it works, and try to push it, see what happens. And the learning is like, well, you have backlash.

Chris Bryce: Yes. Yes.

Daniel Serrano: But why, that's the reason, the why is what's really interesting, is that, you know, the marketing people, particularly in digital, they need to know what works and what doesn't. They have all these analytics systems behind the scenes trying to understand what is going on with their content, what is going on with their processes and stuff. And when you put a couple of pieces that are gonna be random, from their point of view, I mean, they are particularly personalized for you and customized for you, but from the point of view of the tracking, it's gonna be a bit random, then it's gonna be very hard to just keep track of what was going on, what was the real reason that, you know, allowed this conversion, for example, and that freaks out the marketing guys.

Chris Bryce: Right?

Daniel Serrano: Right. But it's something that's happening. I'm pretty sure that we'll find a solution to that conundrum somehow. But right now, that's kind of the first reaction, and that's why we are not rolling out that functionality right away. We wanna keep testing it.

Chris Bryce: Perfect, perfect. Time goes by really, really fast when we get into a good chat. If you don't mind, if I just take up a couple more minutes of your time, I did wanna touch on your partner ecosystem. Do you implement these projects yourself? Do you work with partners? Do you work with internal teams? How does that work?

Daniel Serrano: Yeah, so, as I mentioned, we need to be implemented, right? So from that point of view we work with different partners. So we are actually in the phase of trying to find partners that want to implement Griddo. Right now we have a couple of partners, one in Spain, which is Secuoyas, which is basically where Griddo was created. And then we have one in Chile, which are the two nuggets that we are working on right now. We are about to enter Peru and Colombia as well, and we'll need to create that network of partners there. And while we are starting to think about other countries, obviously, that's something that has to happen, but we don't want to rush the process. We want to learn, tiptoe, see if the solution really fits the bill out there, and then go ahead. So that's why we are talking to different partners. That's how I basically met you, I guess, right?

Chris Bryce: Right. Yeah.

Daniel Serrano: And get to know if, you know, you guys, and by you I mean different agencies, that have the know-how that deal with that every day, can see the sheer value that Griddo can bring, not just to our partners, but to the university as well, right? So that's what we're doing. So it relates a bit to the thing that you asked, and we kind of changed gears a bit fast there, but it was, what is a CIO or a CMO gonna say, like, what do I need now? That comes to what we were talking about, the agency partners, what things are gonna change. So what I've seen is, for example, in the US there are a lot of universities that have their own capacity, like their own internal agency. Well, they can manage everything there if they need, just a matter of learning React basically.

Chris Bryce: Sure, yeah, yeah.

Daniel Serrano: And if, on the other hand, there's a collaboration with a partner, or a couple of partners, usually there's just one partner for that. Well, that's what's gonna change. So you are gonna have your people, more the editors, the people that are working on the content, they're gonna have way more time to think about the strategy, to be creative. And you guys about making the tweaks or the new modules that they need in order to tell the story, because the library is gonna be there. And, for example, with a university, they are creating websites at, I would say, a crazy pace, really fast speed, without even asking anything, because they have a huge library right now, and every time they need something new, and they're constantly thinking about new things and new formats to communicate, well, that's when they come to Secuoyas, in this case, which is the agency that's working with them, and they create those new pieces that go in their library, and then they can keep using them as they need. That's the moral, let's say.

Chris Bryce: Perfect, perfect. I did wanna say thanks, it looks like we have a question for Janice, we're running out of time, but maybe I'll just leave it as a thought. When you talk about personalization, it doesn't impact your analytics, you know, how do you track all this stuff with another layer of if that then this, but probably a topic for another day. We're a little bit over time here. Listen, to anyone who's watching this now or in the future, Daniel, if people want to get a hold of you, could we leave your contact information maybe in the comments below? It's griddo.io is the URL, and we'll note that as well. At Dotfusion, we've been building websites on niche and best in class platforms for 20 years. If you wanna work with us, you can always reach out to me. But most of all, just thanks a lot for your time, Daniel, thanks for joining in. It's probably near suppertime, as we would say here, but we're close, and for everyone who's made some time in their lunch hour on this Thursday here, we'll be back in a couple weeks, and just thanks again, and we're gonna sign off now. Have a great day, everybody, thanks.

Daniel Serrano: Alright, thank you.

Chris Bryce: I just have to find out where the button here is. Okay. Have a great day.