Episode 41: Beyond The CMS #41 - Chris Bryce (Dotfusion) with Mike Vertal (Crafter CMS)

Chris Bryce: All right. We are live for episode 41 now of Beyond the CMS podcast, all about content platforms and the future and current trends in content management. Thanks everyone for taking some time out of your day, lunchtime in the Eastern time zone and a bit earlier out on the West Coast. The format of the show is just very conversational.

Chris Bryce: I will be monitoring the chat on LinkedIn. If anyone has any questions, just jump on in. And if you're watching this in the future, thanks for tuning in. So let's get rolling. Super special guest today, Mike Vertal from Crafter CMS is joining us. Really great to have you on the show, and thanks for taking time out of your day to join us.

Chris Bryce: Maybe I'll let you introduce yourself.

Mike Vertal: Thanks, Chris. Yeah, sure. First I'd like to thank you for inviting me here on the pod. Really excited today to talk about CMS and digital experiences, and especially with respect to everything going on with AI. For everybody else out there, good day. I'm Mike Vertal, CEO here at Crafter CMS.

Mike Vertal: We're an enterprise grade headless content platform that powers major sites like eBay.com and Papa John's mobile app for ordering pizzas, and Marriott's global extranet, and many others. My background is in building digital experience solutions. Prior to Crafter, I was CEO and co-founder of a digital agency, like Dotfusion. We built websites and all kinds of digital experiences for large enterprises. We sold that to Capgemini a few years ago, so they're now a partner of ours here at Crafter.

Mike Vertal: And actually, Crafter started as an open source project within Rivet Logic. We started it to overcome many of the challenges of traditional CMSs back in the day, things many of your audience out there still struggle with, I'm sure, things like how content teams get bottlenecked by developers, developers get constrained by legacy technologies, and how generally everything is built around databases, which introduce complexity and other hurdles with respect to content operations, team collaboration, security, performance, and scalability.

Mike Vertal: So other headless CMSs have come along to address the developer problem, and like we do, provide a rich set of APIs, allow developers to build any type of digital experience using any type of front end technology. But that's kind of where many other headless CMSs leave off. We've taken a fundamentally different approach, where these other vendors still build their content around databases. We built our content repository around Git, and that has several advantages, including, it turns out, AI is very friendly to it. AI tooling, AI workflows are very well suited to operating on files in a Git-like repository. So happy to dive into all that today.

Chris Bryce: Yeah, right on. So your product, Crafter CMS, is mainly serving kind of larger enterprises in North America, maybe beyond. I mentioned earlier that the majority of folks that listen in, kind of now and into the future, are kind of CMOs, marketing folks, pretty high up in the decision making process, that are kind of tasked with making a fairly technical decision. How do you speak to that? What is it that would really have a CMO find a lot of interest in your product?

Mike Vertal: Yeah, well, we look at it from an architecture perspective, not so much from a feature perspective. A lot of RFPs and evaluations look at feature by feature. We think it's more important to look at the underlying architecture, because that's what powers the overall capability and sets you up for the future, especially with respect to AI powered experiences.

Chris Bryce: So, from an architectural perspective, you mentioned Git as your underlying content store. Can you explain that a little bit?

Mike Vertal: Yeah, yeah. So Git is our underlying content repository. That means as editors are creating content, populating metadata, dragging and dropping experiences, building experiences, everything is stored as a file in Git. Git is very popular, used by software developers for source code and version control. We've adapted it for content management, so we store all content, configuration, content types, scripts, and CSS files, everything as files in Git.

Mike Vertal: And what that introduces is it really streamlines team collaboration, because developers and the content teams are operating on the same underlying distributed repository. So as developers are adding new features down in their environments, they can pull production content down using a simple Git operation that they naturally use every day, and we do that transparently. So as they move code up to staging, QA environments, and ultimately to production, the content teams don't need to freeze content, or even worry about it, because it's a seamless operation. Everything's operating within a unified model.

Mike Vertal: So that's kind of a fundamentally architectural difference with databases. There's a lot of database administration and syncing that has to go on between environments, and then on the production system you've got security, performance, and scalability issues with databases, and we eliminate all that.

Chris Bryce: Interesting approach. Are you the only option that has that kind of architecture for large scale enterprise systems?

Mike Vertal: Yes. There are Git-based CMSs that are suited for just simple sites, and just operate like on GitHub or GitLab. But as far as embedding Git in and supporting large scale websites, like I mentioned, well, maybe I didn't mention it earlier today, we run sites like eBay, Papa John's, and Marriott, and many others, large scale enterprise systems. I think we're quite unique in that regard.

Chris Bryce: And you mentioned headless, and I always ask this question, how do you define headless, for those of you who don't know? And then maybe tell me a little bit more about your front end architecture.

Mike Vertal: Yep. So headless, to us, let me step back again. Another important architectural decision we made is to build a decoupled system. And headless gets conflated with the term decoupled, because people think of decoupling the front end, the web experience, from the back end. We think it's more important than that, which is decoupling the authoring system from the delivery system.

Mike Vertal: Both of these are separate infrastructure, separate systems. Both of them are API first, headless platforms. For the authoring system, we provide a very user friendly WYSIWYG application for the content teams to create content, edit, preview, publish, workflow, and so on. But underneath that is all the power that you get there. And then the delivery system is just a very fast runtime, API first headless platform for developers to build the site experience on top.

Mike Vertal: So both are headless, meaning API first, and you're not constrained by any technology. Even our authoring system, if you don't like it, you can extend it. It's a React app, so developers can just extend it, and we have a plugin framework for that, or you just build your own. So headless to us is just API first, a rich set of APIs, no constraints on either the authoring experience or the delivery, the site visitor experience. That's, to us, what headless is.

Mike Vertal: Now, I would also say headless solves the developer problem I mentioned earlier, but it kind of leaves the content teams behind, and if you're built around a database, you're still gonna struggle with these other systems. So we call our system a headless plus system, because it has some additional features and capabilities that we think are important. We embed search into both platforms, authoring and delivery, so we have OpenSearch built in, again for the authoring experience, for authors to quickly find, reuse, and repurpose content. And for developers to create search driven experiences, we have a backend scripting layer so you can script or customize your APIs. So these are all part of the plus features, beyond just simple content APIs, which is kind of this headless-only perspective.

Chris Bryce: Yeah, it sounds super flexible. I love that idea of being able to extend the authoring experience or just build your own on top of it. We've gotta talk about AI. I know you're working on a few different projects, but for the CMS project itself, what's your roadmap, or what are you thinking as far as AI goes? What's your approach to managing all this?

Mike Vertal: Right. Well, I think it's important to make sure we're talking about the right thing. There's three different categories: there's AI for content authors, there's AI for developers, and there's AI for your site visitors. Each one of those has different patterns, different technologies. There's this alphabet soup of AI technologies, right, and people are like, what do I do with MCP and A2A and AI skills and all this stuff.

Mike Vertal: So if we break that down, just look first at content authors. I think that's where a lot of the energy is, a lot of vendors putting AI agents and chatbots into the authoring experience to help draft content, metadata, personalization, personalized content for A/B tests, translating content, that whole content authoring experience. So what we have there is MCP integration, that's Model Context Protocol support for the authoring interface, to extend that, and also just a native agent chatbot interface right within the authoring experience, what we call Crafter Studio. So again, to help with drafting content, populating metadata, SEO, GEO these days, making sure you're following best practices to get visibility within the public LLMs.

Mike Vertal: Then you have the developer. AI for developers, I think that's outside of CMS, that's probably the number one use case for AI right now: Copilot, OpenAI Codex, Cursor, and others, just for all kinds of software development. Well, software development happens for mobile apps, web experiences, websites, and so forth. What you want to do is enhance those AI tools with what's called AI skills, at least from Cursor's perspective, one of the leading software development IDEs backed by any number of public large language models. You can enhance those with an AI skill, teach it about your CMS, how content types are defined, or what front end framework you want to use, and then it will collaboratively work with a developer to create entire sites, pages, and new components, along with making that CMS enabled.

Mike Vertal: We just published a YouTube video a few weeks ago where we took, we just went to one of these theme garden HTML template sites, took an HTML5 template, and Crafter-ized it. You pull it into Crafter with all the content types, a working operational system that's fully enabled with our Experience Builder, so authors can drag and drop, WYSIWYG, and edit. We did that literally in minutes. So what used to be days and weeks to go from HTML designs or Figma designs into something a content author in a CMS can operate on, we've collapsed that. And then just this last week we published another one on migration. We're doing a migration for a customer, and we showed how, with an AI skill teaching it how to go from one CMS into Crafter, those migrations that usually take months, now we've collapsed down to days.

Mike Vertal: So you've got AI for developers, and this is fast evolving, and we're learning as well. It's quite fascinating. We also found that these public LLMs, like Cursor or Claude Code, operate quite effectively with Crafter, because we're an open source project. All our documentation's online, so they've already been trained on our code, our APIs, our documentation. We just enhance it with an AI skill, teach it a little bit more specifics about what we want to do in terms of a migration or site development, and we're quite pleasantly surprised how fast it operated.

Mike Vertal: So that's two: authors, AI for developers. And then you've got the site experience. It's probably the most transformative over the next five to ten years, and that's adding a conversational agent to your site, to every site, and every digital channel: mobile apps, Slack channels, and whatnot. What we're doing there, I think what you want is a custom agent that knows just your content. It's trained on your content and anything else you feed it, your website content, any other documents, product specs, competitive information, whatever else you want to add that may not be on your public site, and have that agent constrained to just that data set. What's the number one limitation of public large language models? They hallucinate, make stuff up. So what you want is a custom conversational agent that knows just what you give it, and if it doesn't know, it says, I don't know, ask me something else, or can you clarify that, something like that.

Mike Vertal: So we're building an agent platform for that use case. We think every website needs it, and it's not just gonna be for Crafter CMS websites, it runs across everything. We have Squarespace, Shopify, you name it. We've got 50 beta customers now, just over 50, and the results have been very good.

Chris Bryce: And this is your other product, right?

Mike Vertal: The whole new product, new brand we're building, called Crafter Q. CrafterQ.ai is the site. The wait list is open, the beta program's been running, and we'll be launching this within the next month or two to the public.

Mike Vertal: What we're finding is engagement's much higher, bounce rates are lower, time on site is higher for more marketing sites and e-commerce, higher sales conversions, more sales. And probably the number one insight or benefit people get is support. They're like, we would always get these emails asking the same thing, and we have to answer this over and over again. We reduce that, because you can have this agent on your site, and you can pre-populate it with canned questions, your most popular questions. They press a button, get the answer, and that reduces the support load on your internal sales and support staff.

Mike Vertal: On the back end, you get an admin console where you can customize the expressiveness, the tone, the personality. We've got B2B companies that want a more professional tone. We've got sports clubs, motorcycle racing clubs, that have more of a personality. They're like, you need to be snarky. So even if you ask it a basic question like, aren't you being a smart ass today, whatever personality you want, to reflect your brand.

Mike Vertal: I see ChatGPT and other websites where you can ask ChatGPT to have a conversation about your site. That's okay, that will interrogate your site, but you don't control that overall experience, and you don't get the backend insights of what people are asking about. To me, that's the number one benefit on the backend, in this admin console. You don't get that from analytics, what people are searching your site for. You get to see what they're asking about, and it identifies gaps in your content. It's like, wow, we don't even have that on our site. You go to the CMS, publish, or right within Crafter Q you can create a text source, so if you don't want to put it on your public site, or you've got a CMS that takes forever to publish, you could fix it right then, it gets trained, and it's gonna answer that question much better, immediately.

Mike Vertal: It's quite interesting. I think every site eventually is gonna have a conversational agent. It's really just the evolution: we went from browsing to searching, to now conversing, asking questions, getting better insight, better answers. And I don't think it replaces websites. I wrote a blog post late last year. All the headlines last year were, oh, websites are going away, everything's gonna be done inside ChatGPT. I don't think so. But this is a clear evolution.

Mike Vertal: It brings up interesting strategic questions for folks in your audience, like CMOs and so forth. You've gotta be visible in the LLMs, you've gotta be there in ChatGPT, Gemini, and others, but you don't really have full control within there. So you need visibility there, but you still need your own apps, your own sites, where you control this, and have an agent that reflects your brand and provides what people are looking for. The experiment ChatGPT just did with checkout...

Chris Bryce: Yeah, ChatGPT, that failed.

Mike Vertal: Failed. After a few months, it was only like 11% adoption from all Shopify sites, so they pulled back on that instant checkout thing. I think it's largely because brands want to control that experience.

Chris Bryce: Yeah, good point. With your Crafter Q product, what is the flexibility on the front end? Is that also a headless experience? Because I've noticed we've been experimenting with different chatbots, and our frustration has always been the styling of it. It was such a juxtaposition of look and feel, to what could be a beautifully branded site, and yet this kind of old Windows 98 experience in the chat. So that's great to know. Maybe tell me a bit about the flexibility of that.

Mike Vertal: Yeah, so everything we do is headless, API first. Not so much for the console, because this is a SaaS product, you're gonna get what we give you on the admin interface. But for the end user experience, absolutely, there's APIs and you could build your own customer experience on top of it. We're innovating there as well. We think this, it's not just a little chat bubble in the lower right that everyone's used to. We have that, and many people still want that, we found through the beta program. But our default is central, basically you put it in the footer of your primary page template, and run it throughout your whole site.

Mike Vertal: So you have that initial chat window styled with colors you can control, the branding, the colors, a flashy color, and then, with these pre-canned questions if you have them. When someone interacts, either through text or voice, we support voice, you can have a voice conversation through it, it kind of takes over the whole site, it brings up a full window. And the experience there isn't just text like a traditional chat bot. You can have images, videos, all the content on your site, other resources can be surfaced. We showed this to one of our customers, a cruise line, showing all the destinations and the cruise ships in the experience. Visitors are coming and asking questions about their reservation, or they're just browsing around, so having that controlled is absolutely gonna be critical. It doesn't replace the website, but it enhances it, and for that conversation you want to have that experience within it, that's very engaging.

Chris Bryce: Interesting. Yeah, I like how you phrased it, there's kind of browsing, searching, and conversing. I guess now it's a different way of finding what you're looking for. We talked a little bit about composable, are you guys part of the MACH Alliance? How do you fit into that larger ecosystem?

Mike Vertal: No, we're not part of the MACH Alliance per se. We are MACH compliant, we're a microservices based platform, API first. I think we incorporate other features that might conflict with some composable vendors, because we embed search and server side templating, but we support all the MACH principles. If you want to replace the search engine, you can do that. We haven't joined any industry alliance. My own experience back at Rivet Logic was, frankly, the industry alliances didn't result in much value for us. So we support it, we're very customer focused, we're an open source project, we really focus on our open source community and our customers, and not so much other ventures.

Chris Bryce: What's on your mind as far as personalization goes?

Mike Vertal: We have a basic content targeting capability within Crafter CMS. You can create personas, and set up arbitrarily complex content models where you target different content to different personas. We provide basic capabilities right out of the box. And then, of course, if you want to use a separate personalization engine, do A/B testing, all that stuff, that would be where we'd have an integration. We have a marketplace of integrations, over 60 integrations in our marketplace. Some of those might be in there, but you can easily integrate and take advantage of our content targeting capability that's built in.

Chris Bryce: Super cool. Yeah, that's interesting. Going back to your other product, Crafter Q, when will that be available? I'm just kind of creating a little isolated segment here too, so we can post this to everyone in the future. But when does that come online?

Mike Vertal: Yeah, that's what I keep asking every day. We're getting close, stay tuned everyone. We're right now in final testing of the billing system, so that was the last thing we had to do, being able to take your credit card and handle add-ons, cancellations, upgrades, and downgrades. I will say, price point, people are always asking about the price point. There's gonna be a free tier for very small sites, not many messages. We're basically pricing it based on how many agents, how many messages per month you're conversing with your audience, number of admin users, and how much content is in the brain of the agent.

Mike Vertal: So it's gonna start with a tier for very small, and then 30 bucks a month, a hundred bucks a month, and 400 dollars a month. So we're talking mass market type, like I said, every website needs this. We will have an enterprise tier as well, for those that want private hosted. We have some of our larger Crafter CMS customers, they're in Germany, they need to be in Germany, it needs to be hosted in Germany, they want a privately hosted LLM. We use a public LLM on the backend for the SaaS version, so if you want private hosted, much more security, no limits on number of agents and messages, we'll have that, and that would be much more expensive. But we're talking 30 to 400 dollars a month, and it will be available definitely by May.

Chris Bryce: Awesome. And I understand there's a, I'm gonna hop on the waiting list right after this awesome chat here. And maybe in the future we can have you on in more of a demo days kind of experience too, we'd love to show off our friends and partners' products as well.

Mike Vertal: Absolutely.

Chris Bryce: That's super cool. And as time goes by in this second half of these chats, I wanted to ask you, what is the situation like where someone should be getting Crafter on their radar? What's going on in their world? And then how do they get in touch with you? What's that onboarding process like?

Mike Vertal: Sure. Yeah, well, if you're looking to upgrade your CMS, if you're looking for an AI ready CMS, as I mentioned earlier, built from the ground up from an architectural perspective, not just add-ons or features that are bolted on, then give us a look. We're definitely more for mid to large enterprises. If you've got a couple users and a simple site, there are many other CMSs for you there. But for mid to large enterprise websites, mobile apps, e-commerce, intranets, all different types of digital experiences, give us a look. We're at CrafterCMS.com. I'm on LinkedIn, Mike Vertal, definitely reach out, love to have a conversation.

Chris Bryce: That sounds cool. And is your product something that teams can kind of download and sandbox a little bit? How would they talk to you, describe their situation?

Mike Vertal: Yeah, so many people start either by downloading our open source version. You just go to CrafterCMS.com, there's a download page under resources, and you can just download it, and it's 98% feature parity with the enterprise version. With the enterprise version, we have a few enterprise-only features, plus you get support, of course. And then we have a SaaS version as well. So there's really three different versions: open source, free, community support; Crafter Enterprise, where you're self-hosted, self-managed, you download it and run it; and then we have the SaaS version, where we run it for you, and you just get a turnkey SaaS. To get started, you could download the open source version, or we have a free trial, you could spin up a cloud trial and get started with one of our hosted versions.

Chris Bryce: Awesome. Thanks, Mike, super cool. We're just a little bit over time here. Is there anything else you'd like to say here for folks listening in today or later? I just wanna make sure I've covered everything that's important.

Mike Vertal: No, I would just say AI is gonna be transformative. As you're looking to the future, make sure you have a platform that will accommodate all three of those stakeholders, I talked about the authors, developers, and the site visitor experience, because AI is gonna transform all three of those in very positive ways.

Chris Bryce: Yeah, it's exciting times, eh?

Mike Vertal: Yep, yep.

Chris Bryce: So look for systems and approaches that have that capability from the ground up. Awesome. Well, thanks to everyone who made some time during lunch today to listen into our chat today, and thanks for listening in the future, if that's where this is taking place. Mike, super awesome to have you join us, appreciate it very much for the conversation. I'm gonna click end right now, and we'll see everyone in a couple weeks for our next episode. Have a great day out there.