Chris Bryce: All right, we are live for another episode of Beyond the CMS, episode 34. We've got a great special guest today. The whole idea around this podcast was to mirror the spirit of the car guys. That was the show. I don't know if folks know that, but you call in and ask questions about fixing up your car.

Chris Bryce: And these guys would do their best to come up with the answers. And here we are today talking about all things related to content management platforms. If you're a CMO or a digital marketing leader, this is your moment to ask us anything essentially. And we're super stoked today. We've got a special guest.

Chris Bryce: Michael Sonier from ButterCMS, who is going to join us for the next half an hour. We're going to talk about trends and what's going on in the world of CMSs. But Michael, thanks a lot for making time in your afternoon. I know we were having a really good baseball chat there, and this is kind of the Blue Jays edition today.

Chris Bryce: But let's focus on you. Do you want to just introduce yourself and say hello?

Michael Sonier: Yeah, sure, great to be here, Chris. Congrats to the Blue Jays, we're all watching this weekend. But we don't want to digress into baseball too much, because that would be a very easy thing to do.

Michael Sonier: So, Michael Sonier. I've been in the content management technology space for upwards of fifteen plus years, mostly around the commerce world, so commerce platforms, trying to give our retailers, merchants, and customers control and flexibility of their content. I would say content commerce platforms are really good at a lot of things, but maybe still to this day not the best at content management. So I've always worked with customers trying to get more control and flexibility of their website, whether it be their marketing website or their commerce website. And then I joined ButterCMS almost a year and a half ago.

Michael Sonier: I was excited to join ButterCMS because I think that market we're going to talk about, we're using the headless world, we won't use the H word, but we'll talk about it. It's all about giving those CMOs control, power, flexibility, and autonomy to move fast in this world of AI that we'll talk about.

Chris Bryce: Awesome. Why ButterCMS? Tell me, where did the name come from? Why Butter?

Michael Sonier: Well, who doesn't like butter, right? I guess we love our brand. But why Butter is, in this world where there are a lot of great solutions out there, a lot of CMS options out there, all of which are powerful and can do a lot of great things.

Michael Sonier: Where we tend to get our highest marks with our customers and prospects is, we use the word approachable, easy to use. Those marketing folks need to feel comfortable with the tool set, the learning curve needs to be short, the ramp time and migration, we don't think of this as a big IT project, right?

Michael Sonier: It shouldn't be. We want to get you managing your content quickly, and we want you to get trained up and enabled and using a tool that you feel comfortable with. Because otherwise it defeats the purpose, right? We want the marketing team, the marketing ops, the CMO, to have a tool that they're very comfortable with, that's intuitive but yet brings the right functionality for them.

Michael Sonier: So again, there are a lot of solutions out there in the space, but the highest marks we get are around ease of use and also being a really good partner. That's something I'm super proud of, just as a company, agency partners and customers, when they start onboarding with ButterCMS, we get high marks in terms of our responsiveness, and we are a true partner as you try and enter this world of modern CMSs.

Chris Bryce: Awesome, yeah, and I wanted to get into that. Typically we have two audiences for this show, now and later, when we repost this as a podcast on YouTube. That's CMOs or digital decision makers who are looking to modernize the stack and learn a little bit more about contemporary web technology, but also partners and agencies looking at this content afterwards.

Chris Bryce: We've seen quite a shift in how evolved the management of the relationship is between partners and platforms. I'm representing a digital agency myself, and it's just so important to stay top of mind. If you're open to it, before we get into the tool itself, do you want to talk a little bit about your partnerships?

Michael Sonier: Honestly, it's a really big focus for me and our next phase of growth for ButterCMS. We've had a great foundation and we've been in the market for almost eight years, maybe even over eight years. We consider ourselves one of the first movers in this modern CMS world.

Michael Sonier: But we kind of went it alone. And we know the next phase of our growth, and we are anxiously and actively building those partnerships with the agencies that are really the ones that are going to bring the content management solution, they're going to bring the digital transformation to life, right?

Michael Sonier: We're a SaaS product, but it's really about the solution that our partner can bring to life. So you're going to hear us expanding and bringing more partners into our marketing efforts. We'd love to work more tightly with Dotfusion as well.

Michael Sonier: I'm a believer in ecosystem-led growth. My time previously was at a company called Magento, which was an open source solution. Everything we did was around our partners, our agencies, our system integrators. We grew through and with that ecosystem, and that was something that was amazing to see, the flywheel. I want to bring that mentality to ButterCMS.

Chris Bryce: Super cool. And I had a hunch maybe you wanted to say it. I'm creating an archive of what does headless mean. I know ButterCMS is a headless CMS, and that's something we talk about from an industry perspective, but as a marketer and someone who has to make these larger digital decisions, you've got monolithic and headless. Maybe I'll turn that over to you if you want to describe the benefits of the headless stack.

Michael Sonier: Yeah, you and I had exchanged notes on this. I think if we had a nickel for every time we had to dial back the word headless for a marketing person, we might have a few dollars in our pocket. I try not to use the word headless, because the reality is headless is an architecture, and for a marketing team the architecture is really not important. What's important is the value that a modern CMS approach brings to that marketing team.

Michael Sonier: What is that? I think of it as there are five jobs to be done that a marketing team has, and I think these jobs to be done are still relevant in the world of AI. They probably become more relevant, they become different, but they're still the things. You need to move fast. You need to lower the barrier of development involvement to update content on your website. There are still plenty of people out there involving developers for everyday website changes, still a lot of people working on a homegrown or hard-coded website. A modern approach to CMS is giving the marketer autonomy and control to move fast, reducing the barrier, reducing the dependency on developers. So that's number one.

Michael Sonier: And obviously, setting you up to move faster in this world of AI. Are you AI ready, with all the content proliferation that is happening? That's step two. We're starting to see now that with AI tools the involvement of developers is decreasing even further. You used to need to call a developer to create a new data schema, you may need to bring them in at some points, but now that barrier to developer involvement is going down even further. So a modern headless CMS, I said headless, is kind of the foundation to get you AI ready to move fast, is how I think about it.

Michael Sonier: We also talk about omnichannel. Delivering content across channels is a key thing around a modern CMS, that's web, mobile, multi-locale. We've been doing translation for our customers, multi-locale sites is a critical use case for having a modern headless CMS, and we have translation tools that are AI enabled. We're already bringing AI tools to our customers now, and that's going to proliferate.

Michael Sonier: But as we talk about channels, I think the next channel we're all going to be talking about is the non-human channels of agents and large language models. Are we ready for those channels? Those channels are consuming this content. We can get into the topic of AEO or SEO, that's another big driver, but I think the whole world of channel, and having the ability to serve up content to multiple channels, is even more critical now than ever. That's a huge value proposition of a modern CMS.

Chris Bryce: Yeah, totally with you. And from the agency perspective, we kind of see the productization of AI in content platforms really serving the marketers and the content creation teams, but also the dev teams. Are you building MCP servers? Are there API connections through n8n backbones? We're doing a lot of work with content platforms strictly through n8n, we're not even having devs in there, and there's all this new stuff going on.

Chris Bryce: Can you tell me a little bit about how you're serving the mindset of a marketing person who maybe isn't that technical, that should have you on their consideration set when they're looking for a new CMS? How do you speak to their mindset, and in more plain language, how do you promote ButterCMS to them as a great solution?

Michael Sonier: Yeah, it goes back to that, to use your car analogy, we want to present ButterCMS to the users as, can you see yourself in the driver's seat of this product? Do you feel comfortable getting behind the wheel and using ButterCMS on a day-to-day basis?

Michael Sonier: It has to be intuitive, it has to make you feel comfortable that you can manage content. You're right, the developer is the enabler to get the CMS in a great place, but then we really want to make sure the marketing team has the non-technical tools available to manage content, optimize content, and scale content across channels.

Michael Sonier: So the whole goal is that it's a platform and a technical solution that feels very comfortable to a non-technical audience that just wants to create good content at scale.

Chris Bryce: I love the idea of approachability. When you look at Sitecore, AEM, and these systems, they're not particularly approachable. You can set them up, but it takes a little while, and I think speed to market is important as well. You were touching on AI a little bit, and that starts to relate to personalization, that always comes up in conversations we have with customers. Do you want to just share your thoughts on personalization, where we're at these days, and where we're going?

Michael Sonier: Yeah, I think personalization is one of those top five jobs to be done by the marketing team. Personalization is a term that's been used for fifteen, twenty years, I remember it was machine learning before AI, it was personalization machine learning tools.

Michael Sonier: Now with the more powerful tools we have with AI, personalization is at the forefront. The average consumer or visitor to a website actually expects now to have a personalized experience, probably years ago that might have crept people out, but now they expect a very tailored experience. You almost get dinged if it's generic. So the demand to deliver that personalized one-to-one experience is super high, and the power to do so has never been more available, with the power of AI.

Michael Sonier: I still think the solutions to get to personalization are varied. We've got personalization engines out there, we've got CDP-based solutions, you've got CMS-based solutions. The solution to personalization I still think is not one size fits all. So our mentality is, to your point, a robust integration framework that can serve the needs of how each individual customer wants to solve the personalization piece. I don't think there's one size fits all, I think everybody's trying to deliver it in their own way, and we want to be there to solve it, whether you've got a personalization engine, a lot of people in this space have acquired these things, whether it's a personalization tool or a CDP. We don't want to lock people into one approach, but we want to be there for them to solve that as they need to. It's part of their bigger MarTech stack solution, really.

Chris Bryce: It makes a lot of sense. What we found is there's enthusiasm around personalization upfront, but then when you look at all of the content variants and asset variants, you're right, you need a personalization manager to get the results from it, right?

Michael Sonier: Yeah, it does still come down to, that's one of the biggest challenges, do you have the variants? Do you have the repository of all the content you need to actually execute on the concept. We're in this content space, and I still think content is king, and having those variants of content is still key to achieving personalization.

Chris Bryce: Spot on, yeah. Absolutely. And you spoke a little bit about an integration ecosystem, how does ButterCMS work with integrations? Do you have a marketplace? Are you just exposing your APIs and you compose things how you like?

Michael Sonier: Yeah, that's the next vision. Our agency solution partners, we are working pretty aggressively on the foundation of this marketplace in this new world that you just mentioned.

Michael Sonier: Some names like n8n and MCP, these are the next evolution that's going to speed up and simplify the concept of marketplaces. We see that, and we're looking to accelerate and simplify these integrations, and bring a no-code, low-code kind of concept, because I think of the CMS as a hub inside of this MarTech tool set.

Michael Sonier: Integrations is one of the key value propositions of headless, because one thing we say about headless, if we don't use the word headless, which is an architecture, we say API first. So now in the world of AI, is your API set MCP ready, n8n ready, right? We're getting our APIs ready to proliferate the AI workflow integrations that are right at our fingertips right now, it's happening daily. I had a call just before this to talk about our roadmap there, so that's exciting times. I think the barrier to simplify and streamline the workflow is going down so fast.

Chris Bryce: Totally with you. Just to share some thoughts and challenges we have as an agency, we're proposing API-first architecture, and what seems to catch the financial team off guard is when you start composing systems together, and they're looking at us as the agency to be forthright and fully disclosed when we're putting together estimates and things.

Chris Bryce: Scope is a whole issue in and of itself for us. We're recommending, we're going to use Algolia for search and Cloudinary for asset management, and they're like, oh, well you didn't tell us this, why doesn't it just do everything? So we're kind of talking about the benefits of the composability of it all. What is your approach to solving that total cost of ownership question?

Michael Sonier: It's a great question, because if we could sit here and talk about all the benefits and value props of this composable approach, the obvious challenge is that it increases total cost of ownership. It includes not only cost but complexity to maintain. So our mentality is a couple fold. One, we try to be a very cost-effective, simple solution that doesn't provide sticker shock. But whenever you get into this, the debate of best-in-breed versus all-in-one is not a new debate, we're always going to have that.

Michael Sonier: I used to work on order management systems, not everybody needs an order management system, but if you need one, you need one, and the ROI is there. If you need robust search, you need it, and the ROI is there. If you want to look at composability in general and look at all the line item price tags, that's one way to do it, but you don't need every composable piece of the architecture. What do you need? We say, in a CMS, if you're not updating content more than X times a month, then stick with what you've got. You've got to make smart decisions. If you're updating content more than once a month, the ROI, particularly when you're talking about moving faster and removing developers, becomes a pretty clear path.

Michael Sonier: But if you look at composability in general and look at the sticker price, it can get a little runaway. I don't think composability necessarily means higher cost or higher complexity, I think it means you pick the right things you need for the problems you're trying to solve.

Michael Sonier: And we also see, this notion of forklifting platforms is gone. If you need a CMS in certain portions of your site or for certain pages, you do it there, you've got to be smart on where you deploy these composable solutions. When you take that approach, the ROI becomes pretty evident, and the flexibility it provides you outweighs the perception that all of a sudden complexity is going to strangle you.

Chris Bryce: And somewhat related, from a decision maker perspective, what are the signals for that person or that team to put you on the consideration list? What's going on in their world, and when do you become really appealing?

Michael Sonier: Even though the space is maturing pretty rapidly, I think there's still some segment of the market that feels like what they're doing today, there's no better path. You still talk to customers who say, well, wait a minute. I ask, what's your content workflow? Well, I do this and then I call my developer and they make this change. There's a little bit of education needed there, the world could be better. So there's a bit of that, and that's a big part of the story.

Michael Sonier: Then the other story is the ones who are understanding of this new world, it's that value versus complexity. You mentioned the AEM world, I worked for Magento, we were acquired by Adobe, AEM's a fantastic tool, but it's a sledgehammer. What are you trying to solve? We literally start by talking about, what is your workflow? What portions of your site, or all of your site, would you like to have more control over? We try to enter at that level, let's just break it down and crawl, walk, run, if you will.

Michael Sonier: You could deploy ButterCMS and we could just run your blogs for a while, and then what often happens is they get used to using ButterCMS to just manage content-heavy sites like blogs, and next thing you know, you start to see the value light bulb go off, and we start to manage more portions of the site. That's how we tend to educate folks on what the value is of ButterCMS.

Chris Bryce: Is there a particular industry that you have a strength in, in particular? Or are you happy to share a case study or a success story?

Michael Sonier: It's interesting, I think our install base is pretty consistent with where the market is. I'd say about a third of our customers are in e-commerce, and the other two thirds are running marketing sites. A lot of folks are doing omnichannel with us, running mobile, either native mobile apps or mobile-responsive sites. So it's a diverse set of use cases.

Michael Sonier: I think we ebb and flow with the nature of the internet, all of a sudden we're seeing growth in financial services, or crypto, or blockchain, these are emerging businesses that are digitally native. Then there are the legacy businesses that are moving off of a homegrown CMS and making the plunge, we see those perhaps in the healthcare space or things like that. And then we see the digitally native folks who are probably going to their first website, and their first website is going to be this modern architecture. So if you ask me today, financial services is hot, and you can see some of our case studies on our site, but I think it's very much dependent on what the internet's doing that day.

Chris Bryce: I'm with you too, and we get that question, what industry are you expert at? And it's like, well, anyone should be considering a migration to composable architecture, it doesn't really matter who. You mentioned in the last bit of the chat there, about workflows, and that's something that's important for our marketing folks, each content team is a little bit different. Sometimes there's legal language translation, different countries have different compliance. How does ButterCMS fit into the workflow solution?

Michael Sonier: Yeah, I think that's yet again one of those key jobs to be done that we solve, and that a robust CMS needs to solve, understanding the content creation, approval, and publish workflow. Where does that content start? How does it enter into ButterCMS? What happens to that content? So workflows in terms of permissions to publish, commenting, almost like a Google Doc experience, tweaking content, tracking history, because we know content tends to be created outside of ButterCMS.

Michael Sonier: But once it gets into ButterCMS, we want to have an audit trail, we want to make sure we know what happened to that content. We can comment, tag people, put a note in Slack to say, hey, check this out. We want to have permissioning as to who can publish. So fairly robust roles, permissioning, and workflows, because in every vertical the ability to publish and the ability to review, the bar can change pretty significantly. We want to be there for that.

Chris Bryce: Awesome. For folks listening in now or later, thanks to those making time during their lunch hour in the Eastern time zone, thanks for joining in.

Chris Bryce: Feel free to ask us anything. How does a person onboard with you? Do you have a demo? How do they go about getting a sense of it? Actually, it's a great idea, you should join us for a demo day sometime and we can really show off the product, because that's something that's relatively new. It used to be we're recommending a platform, but no one could see it until it was done. How does someone move into the selection process with you?

Michael Sonier: Yeah, so like many in the space, we have two motions to engage with ButterCMS. You can come to our site and sign up for a trial, we have what we call self-service plans, you can use ButterCMS in a free plan, or evolve to a plan that makes sense for you. We're all about making sure that experience is intuitive, that you can see value, it's time to first value when you get into ButterCMS. We want that time to first value, we talk about aha moments, we want those aha moments to be very soon in the journey of your trial or evaluation.

Michael Sonier: But you can also call us, and we will schedule a quick demo. We'll evaluate your needs, and again, to that good partner perspective, we get really high marks on the sales process. We'll build out a proof of concept with you, we'll customize our demo, because when you look at a website, you really have to relate to your website, your content, your pages, so we try to make it feel like, all right, what would this really feel like for me?

Michael Sonier: And then we also have a really great team for onboarding, training, and enablement, we're going to get you enabled and trained on the product pretty quickly so you can do it yourself. Call us, we like to take a white-glove approach, looking at your needs and building out a proof of concept to help you. When we get there, we always say this is not going to be an IT project, this is not going to be you replacing your CRM. We can get you to value much faster than you think, and we like to surprise and delight on that promise.

Chris Bryce: Amazing. Man, time goes by pretty quickly once we get rolling here. Two questions, take them in any order you want. Do you want to talk a little bit about your roadmap, and or, what do you see as the future of a CMS?

Michael Sonier: Let's take that second one. I think content is still going to be king. I'm reading articles about AEO, GEO, all the best practices to serve up content to those large language models. There are still best practices of content, your content has to be authoritative, you have to have fresh content, these are still things that matter. So what a CMS, what we want to be, is the content repository that enables you to bridge this gap into the world that AI is going to bring us to. That's content creation, that's integrations, you mentioned MCP servers, we want ButterCMS to be the beachhead for you to take the next step to leverage AI in all the ways it can be used to proliferate your content and get it into the hands of the world, now that AI is one of the audiences evaluating your content. So that's the short answer.

Chris Bryce: Awesome, awesome. We always have a little bit of extra time even though we're over, and just for a snippet for later, you've got to tell me more about the bats behind you. I do want you to speak about your side hustle, because I think it's really relevant to what's going on in the baseball world.

Michael Sonier: I'll try and keep it brief. We met earlier this morning, you had your hat on, and I thought, I'm a baseball guy. I enjoy disruptive technologies, I think ButterCMS is disrupting the CMS world in our view of being simple and easy to use. And I have a little side hustle where we're disrupting the baseball bat market, or have a vision to disrupt the baseball bat market with a new kind of baseball bat that brings all the tradition of wood and the performance of those metal bats. So that's the story there. But I love disruptive technologies, and I spend my time focusing on those things, ButterCMS is where I spend most of my time on disruptive technologies.

Chris Bryce: That's awesome, man. Well, let's try and get one of those in somebody's hands. Hey, it's been great chatting with you, and I really appreciate your time telling us a little bit more about ButterCMS. Looking forward to sharing this to the world as artifacts afterwards. If there's anything else you want to say, please do.

Michael Sonier: No, go Jays, go Blue Jays.

Chris Bryce: Awesome. Okay, well, thanks a lot. I'm going to hit the end streaming button, and just want to say thanks to everyone who's taking a moment out of their time to join us today. Thanks, Mike, I really appreciate it. I'm Chris Bryce with Dotfusion Digital, and we'll see you in a couple weeks for our next episode. Thanks, everybody.

Michael Sonier: Thanks, Chris. Thanks.