Chris Bryce: All right. We are live with episode 44 of Beyond the CMS. It's been a little more than three years now. Thanks to everyone who is making some time during their lunch in the Eastern time zone, and to folks who are checking this out later on in the future through our Spotify, Apple, and YouTube channels.

Chris Bryce: Really appreciate it. This is Beyond the CMS, where we chat about the future state of content operations and trends in content. If you are listening in now, we're live on LinkedIn, and we have some technology that will allow us to see your comments if you post anything. That usually works, and we'll do our best to answer any questions you might have.

Chris Bryce: The idea behind the show started out, it's kind of lifted from the car guys, a couple of guys on National Public Radio who answer people's questions about their cars. We have a number of both our customers and our prospective customers, who are typically CMOs or VPs of marketing, asking me similar questions over and over again.

Chris Bryce: And I really wanted to create an environment where we could talk about the technical nature of content and ideas in kind of a low key space with really rich ideas. My name's Chris Bryce. I'm the CEO of Dotfusion.

Chris Bryce: And each episode we have a really special guest, and today we've got Derk Majoewskij from Storyblok joining us to tell us about all the great things going on at Storyblok. Well, let's get going. Do you want to introduce yourself? And thanks for joining from the other part of the world. You're in Lisbon, I understand.

Derk Majoewskij: Thank you for the warm welcome and the introduction. Yes, hi everybody. My name is Derk. I work at Storyblok as product strategy and story lead, so I'm leading our product owner team, making sure that we build the right thing. So we're doing a lot of customer calls, discovery, prioritizing our roadmap, and so on.

Derk Majoewskij: Then making sure that we build it in the right way, validating it with customers, working together with the engineering team, and eventually shipping it as well, and syncing with all the other teams involved. And on the other way, I try to communicate our roadmap and our vision as much as I can.

Derk Majoewskij: So, having roadmap sessions with customers and clients, doing these kinds of podcasts, sometimes a presentation at our own JoyConf, for example, last year. So yeah, just trying to bridge the gap between our product and the market, kind of. Very nice to be here.

Chris Bryce: Super cool. Well, why don't we get started off with, maybe in your words, telling us a little bit about what is Storyblok? I kind of phrase it this way because later we turn these into smaller bits of content, but that's really important, and it'd be great to hear it from your point of view.

Derk Majoewskij: Yeah, that's a really nice opening question. So what is Storyblok? I've worked here for longer than four years now, so I've been there for quite a while. And from my experience, Storyblok has always been, it is a headless CMS, so a content management system where the front end and the backend are taken apart. So it's super flexible to integrate it with all the front end frameworks your development team might have, which gives the developers a huge benefit.

Derk Majoewskij: Therefore, it's mainly from a technical side that people really like headless solutions. They can integrate it with all sorts of solutions they have in their tech stack, et cetera. But our two founders, Dominic and Alex, when they founded the company, they saw this headless solution coming up, but they really saw the gap that those headless solutions, as the front end and the backend were taken apart, didn't really work for the non-technical team.

Derk Majoewskij: So the marketing teams couldn't really get a good preview of what they were working on. So they really wanted to jump into that gap as a headless CMS that works really well for both the technical teams by being headless, but also really well for the non-technical teams by bringing a visual editing experience to the table.

Derk Majoewskij: So that was their initial main feature that really made Storyblok stand out as a headless CMS with this visual editing part. But I feel that since then, we've really tried to double down on that user experience by being, we now call it joyful. We kind of trademarked that term a while ago, but we call it joyful, meaning working with your content shouldn't be a pain.

Derk Majoewskij: It should be easy for people to understand, especially now with the world going so fast, your content needs to be live as fast as possible, be updated really fast, and so on. So it's very needed for everyone to have a content management system that's easy to understand, easy to use, and easy to get their content to market.

Derk Majoewskij: So that's really the gap we're still kind of trying to fill in, being the CMS that works really well for everyone.

Chris Bryce: Awesome. And just for the record, would you mind giving your definition of headless?

Derk Majoewskij: Ooh, good question. When I started at the company, in my onboarding, I think in the first week you needed to write an article on what is headless and what your take on headless is. I think I used Headless Nick, from the Harry Potter series, the guy who takes his head off, and I used that as an analogy. But my take on headless is actually that you have your content in one place and you can do with it whatever you like. You can publish it everywhere, you can integrate it with all the tools you have in your tech stack.

Derk Majoewskij: So it really gives you the flexibility to use your content in any kind of way you want. That's how I would briefly describe it.

Chris Bryce: Okay, yeah, super cool. I just have a collection now of different people's opinions on what headless is. And you brought up a really interesting point. Kind of back in the day, six, seven years ago, when there was this concept of pure headless, man did we ever have a hard time chatting with our marketing clients. Like, how do we see what we're posting here? We've got to push it on a development server or go over there and look.

Chris Bryce: I think Storyblok is known for its visual editing interface and your design studio there. Do you want to talk a little bit about the evolution of that and where that's heading?

Derk Majoewskij: Sure. As I said, from the start that was kind of the main feature, the visual editing experience, so the marketing or the content editors could actually really see what they were doing when they had the CMS. And we also launched, a couple years ago, I think it was in 2022, Storyblok V2, which was a completely new UI of our app, but also of the visual editing experience, where we also wanted to make it way easier to collaborate with your team within the visual editing experience, so you can leave comments in your content. And you can translate it way easier.

Derk Majoewskij: So we really wanted it to be super easy for someone who works on the content to see what they're working on and make changes together with their team. That's how we envision it. And also, in the future, what we're actually having on our roadmap is inline editing. So currently you're making changes on the right hand side and you see it on the left hand side in your preview, but we really want to move to that kind of inline editing where you're actually making changes in the preview itself.

Derk Majoewskij: So we really envision this to be that you're actually working on the actual content that will go live. So the gap is so little there, and it should be super easy to find your way within the editing experience.

Chris Bryce: Okay, yeah, that's the feedback we get from our clients. Storyblok is a joy to use. And that's one of our core value words as well, we should be a joy to work with, the tooling should be joyful. And of course we need to create a joyful intersection with AI, creating all kinds of opportunities for efficiencies and creativity. I know that's a big part of your roadmap, and I'd love to hear more about your vision for what's in store for Storyblok.

Derk Majoewskij: Yeah, sure. So in the last couple of years we've already brought some quite significant updates to our AI capabilities, but mainly they were within our tool, like AI translation, so you can translate your content with the click of a button, AI alt text generation, AI SEO, so meta tag generation through AI, also bringing new models to our AI solutions. We recently launched Claude, by the way, so we can now empower those features with Claude.

Derk Majoewskij: But also what was really requested back then was bring your own AI branding. So you want to tailor the output of AI slightly towards your brand and your tone of voice. So we got a lot of requests around, can we give the AI tool some inputs through Storyblok, so you could say, this is the audience, this is the tone, use emojis or not.

Derk Majoewskij: So we launched those kinds of things, and we launched an ideation room. There was kind of a Google Doc space within Storyblok where, with the help of AI, you could draft content and immediately sync it to our actual pages within Storyblok. But more recently, that whole conversation, of course, like in the rest of the world, got blown out of proportion and got a lot bigger.

Derk Majoewskij: So we recently launched FlowMotion and our MCP server, just to integrate AI tools directly with Storyblok. And how I see this is, previously it was like you were working on your content within a CMS and you were making the changes yourself, so your content was actually static, and you would make the changes.

Derk Majoewskij: But how I see this is your content is living within your CMS, it's automatically updated through automation tools. It's automatically, by Strata, which we will dive into more deeply, searchable for AI tools. So it gets optimized for AI search, GEO. So it actually kind of lives through agents and through searchability.

Derk Majoewskij: So the human is more the human in the loop in the whole process around content, instead of doing all those things itself. That's where I see AI.

Chris Bryce: Yeah, I just coined a new term, and I'm going to send it out there to see if it catches on, but I spend a lot of time with some pals on mountain bikes and bicycles, and the amount of electric assist happening out there is kind of mind boggling. So we're calling our operations AI assist, it's in there helping out. We're making sure that we've got tight reins on everything that we do.

Chris Bryce: But stuff that we've been super stoked on, we're really excited about how you work with the CMS, and we were chatting a bit earlier, like, we've got five different ways of getting content from an idea into the CMS. One of them, that is just one of our favorites, is kind of an automation and workflow shop. It's the FlowMotion tool, and the gang at Dotfusion had some early access to play around in there, but it's more than just n8n under the hood.

Chris Bryce: It's built right into the platform, which takes away so much DevOps and IT overhead, just managing all that hosting. You want to do a bit of a deep dive there?

Derk Majoewskij: Yeah, so FlowMotion is our automation layer within Storyblok. It's based on n8n, but it's directly within Storyblok, as you said. So, as you explained it, an automation tool, it kind of connects a lot of triggers through nodes with each other. So you can set up a whole lot of automation flows that you want. That's also a challenge with this, right? Because the possibilities are kind of endless. So where do you start, and what are the best use cases? That's also something we needed to find out before we launched, because it's so kind of endless.

Derk Majoewskij: But a really brief example is that you have dedicated Storyblok triggers through FlowMotion. So let's say you publish a story or your page in Storyblok, this triggers an action, that the story gets automatically sent to, for example, a localization or another translation tool that you have integrated. The story or the page gets translated, it goes back to Storyblok, it gets published, and you automatically get a Slack notification through an integration as well.

Derk Majoewskij: So just with one click of a button, a publication, you get a translated page publishing in return, and you get automatically notified of it. So that's a really short and high level example, but that's how we see automation working with your content.

Derk Majoewskij: And I think with these kinds of tools, with content, there are so many cumbersome and time consuming tasks that need to be done in order to stay relevant and to make sure that your content is actually profiting your business.

Derk Majoewskij: And I think this is really relevant for CMOs and marketing people. The time it takes to get proper content to market is still, there's still a lot of work that needs to be done. And through these automation tools, you speed up the whole process, and it's less error prone. It just makes life so much easier from a marketing or content editing perspective. So that's really where I think this whole CMS world is going. There's way more room for the marketing teams to define a strategy, and all the operations get done by these automation and AI tools.

Chris Bryce: Yeah, it's really cool. I just want to point out to anyone who's listening now or later, and also a shout out to anyone who's making some time to listen in live here, we've been building automations for a while, and we've had some conversations around, well, why don't we just build our automations outside of Storyblok with webhooks or whatever. And it's like, just for enterprise, that doesn't work that great. If you're building n8n stuff outside, you've got all kinds of IT issues to deal with.

Chris Bryce: And I just wanted to emphasize how cool it is seeing that whole node interface. And also, I believe there's custom Storyblok stuff that you get with FlowMotion that isn't out in the wild. Do you want to talk a little bit about that? Because I know I have folks wondering about FlowMotion, and I'd love to have...

Derk Majoewskij: Yeah, so the main benefit is that you have custom Storyblok triggers and actions already within FlowMotion. So you don't need to set up anything, you can just select them, and you have them integrated within FlowMotion. So it's super easy to get going with FlowMotion straight into Storyblok. And as you said, you don't need to set up anything through n8n, it's just everything in one platform, having the right triggers and actions already in place and just setting it up and getting going. So also there, it comes back to that whole ease of use that we always want to dive into. It should be easy to work with content, and, in this case, with automation as well.

Chris Bryce: Yeah, and I can just attest to that. Super easy to use, and the infrastructure is awesome. So always looking forward to the new releases your team has, but that was one of our favorites by far, because we're like, yeah, let's get in there. And we've been making some cool videos about how to use it too, so be sure to check it out.

Derk Majoewskij: Can I ask you what is one cool example of a flow you made?

Chris Bryce: Yeah. Well, we've done everything from multi-stage video production, grabbing different assets from different places and compositing videos and making outputs. We do a lot of stuff internally that are more notification based triggers. So if something is moving down a content supply chain pipeline and hits a block somewhere, we have some pretty advanced agentic tooling. Let's say we're running an AEO formatted blog post. Well, our process isn't just, hey, write a blog post.

Chris Bryce: We have a tool set of five agents that will run a workflow to create that post. There's a research phase, writing, editing, heavy duty governance, fact checking, like anytime we say, hey, we did 70% of something, it's like, really, can you back that up. There's a bunch of phases there. We're not watching while those happen, they're kind of on autopilot if they move through, but we have tolerance indicators. This is all controlled through n8n and pinged through Slack. We got a block over here.

Chris Bryce: But what's really cool is, now that we have that, let's call it the post created, then we go through what we call a refactoring stage. On our blog we probably have 17 fields in our content model for what a blog is. So we'll go through a refactoring phase where all the meta, all the schema, the FAQ, all that stuff kind of gets refactored. And then it's pushed in one direction, into Storyblok, ready for someone to just hit publish.

Chris Bryce: But then we go, okay, we need three LinkedIn posts refactored, and we need an image created. Go to Nano, create an image, tone of voice. So that's a really long chain workflow that really just starts with, write a post about what our AEO analyst, which is another agent, says we should write about, based on competitive access to Google Search Console.

Chris Bryce: So this is all this big 140 node chain of stuff. And something I think would be cool to point out, because I explain this a lot too, with all of this AI stuff, you can get extremely high quality, amazing stuff at that 99% awesome level, but right now I basically say it takes 25 times the amount of time that you would spend to write one normal, awesome blog post to create the workflow and the AI infrastructure to get it right. But if you invest that time, you're now released for the future, never doing that again, really.

Chris Bryce: I do really recommend folks spend time learning to be a bit more architecturally minded, because the mainstream chat interface has got people believing, like, what's for dinner, okay, here's what's in the fridge, make this stuff. But there's a real opportunity for folks to become architects, you know? So that's our favorite kind of stuff.

Chris Bryce: We also have some interesting things that work particularly well with Storyblok, where we'll run some nodes that reference out. Let's say we have an opportunity to migrate a WordPress site over to Storyblok, as a sales opportunity. We have a fairly advanced workflow that will go into a WordPress site, recreate all the React components, well, definitely not React, rebuild it in Storyblok with editable blocks, and we just hit a button that says, go make this site over there. And we're on a call saying, hey guys, we've got this setup, it's 80% out there, we've got some work to do, but it just shows the power of automation.

Chris Bryce: Awesome. That's a lot of fun. One of the challenges that we've had as an agency with headless stuff is this concept of composability, and what is that whole stack, if the CMS is just content, we've got maybe search, maybe some other components, pin management or whatever it is. It's always tricky to help upfront assess that kind of total orchestration of everything. Search being one of the most important, and I know you guys have been working on something that addresses search right within Storyblok. I don't know if you're able to chat about that at all.

Derk Majoewskij: You're talking about Strata?

Chris Bryce: Strata, yeah.

Derk Majoewskij: Nice. Yeah, with Strata, last year at JoyConf, our own conference, we announced two major features. One was FlowMotion, and the other one is Strata. Strata is our built in vector database that we're actively working on now. I cannot give any release dates at this moment, but we're definitely actively working on it.

Derk Majoewskij: And with this, we believe that, especially with the whole GEO search happening at the moment, because if you type in what is the best CMS in your AI tool now, this is completely different than SEO was before, because with SEO you just had 10 blue links where you would maybe pay for and it would rank the highest.

Derk Majoewskij: But with these AI LLM tools, they scrape your whole content repository. They scrape not only what you're actively promoting, but your entire content repository, including maybe the blog articles you wrote 10 years ago. So you need to know, as a business, if all the content you have live is still relevant. Is it still up to date? And we really believe that you need to understand all your content.

Derk Majoewskij: And through that vector database, which essentially means that you're able to give your content meaning, so it doesn't work with exact keywords anymore, but it understands your content. So if you say, can you give me all the articles I wrote about freezing weather, it doesn't need to necessarily have freezing weather in it, it understands that it's about that topic and gives you all the articles around that topic. So it's way easier for you to understand your content, to find your content, and to also optimize your content for those AI tools.

Derk Majoewskij: So that way you're able to rank much easier, higher, in those AI GEO search tools that are taking off at the moment. So we really believe that through that vector database, in Storyblok, you're way better at understanding your content and making it legible for the AI LLM tool to understand your content as well, and to get your content to the top of the outcomes there. So that's what we're aiming for with Strata.

Chris Bryce: Very cool. We'll be watching closely, and I can't wait for that to come up myself. I'll put myself on the line a little bit, because this video's going to live on. I think currently, if you type in best headless agency Canada, we're number one. So it's a tricky world out there right now, with all this AEO stuff, and people claiming they can get you ranked, buy their program, this kind of thing.

Chris Bryce: We've spent the better part of two years figuring out what is the right amount of activity and how you manage content, and what's important to get found. We do a really good job of that for ourselves and our customers, but I can tell you our number one recommendation is to be on basically a tech stack of Next and React, and that essentially is headless, is Storyblok. This keeps things clean, it presents data beautifully when it's organized properly to the bots. So it's a kind of a moving target, but it keeps things interesting for sure.

Derk Majoewskij: Yeah, definitely, definitely.

Chris Bryce: So you're essentially responsible for product and the vision. Can you tell us a little bit more about what's down the road, what are you guys thinking about? Is there any...

Derk Majoewskij: Yeah, so of course, as you can tell from the conversation we just had, we're diving heavily into that whole content operations through automation and AI, as we really believe that's the future. But we also really want to emphasize on the usability, because I think that's one of our key strengths. So this can make it all very complicated, all these tools and automation layers, but we really want to stay the joyful Storyblok CMS.

Derk Majoewskij: So we will always keep on focusing on those topics as well, as I said, inline editing, but also workflows easier, translations easier, history features easier. So we really want to keep our product as simple as possible and as easy to use as possible for all the teams.

Derk Majoewskij: And what we also are heavily focusing on is the core of the house, so stability, enterprise needs, security needs, especially in this time, security is a hot topic, of course, right? So we know all those challenges, and we're also definitely focusing on these, let's say, less sexy needs, but that's also a big topic on our roadmap, to make sure that the basics are always still in place for our bigger enterprise clients as well. So yeah, that's mainly what's on the roadmap.

Chris Bryce: Awesome. We didn't talk specifically about the MCP server. I'd love to have a little bit of a segment around that. I've got some cool examples of what we've been doing, but do you want to just explain what that is, kind of in layers of...

Derk Majoewskij: Yeah, it's very simply that you can connect your AI model with your Storyblok space, so to say. So let's say you want to give an action through Claude to your Storyblok space, you can just connect the two with each other through our MCP server. We have a webpage where it's explained fairly simply how to connect them. And then you can do all sorts of things based on Claude, you can say, search for this story in my space, update it, and so on and so forth. So it's a way for you to work with your AI tool directly in your Storyblok space. I'm curious what you have been doing so far with it.

Chris Bryce: Oh, well, one of our great use cases is we really acknowledge the fact that, at least in our world, folks aren't typing anymore. It's some kind of dictation. So it's really weird where we're hanging out, like, are you talking to me? And, no, I'm talking to Claude. You need almost a different tone.

Chris Bryce: But what's great about MCP is, let's say, for example, I don't know, you're a quick serve restaurant chain, and you really want one out of the 500 franchises you have, every week, to be posting something live from the store. Well, in the past, that'd be such an awkward thing, someone's got to do it, they've got to take a notepad, run back to the computer, type it all in.

Chris Bryce: And now our idea is, well, have an ambassador from the store, for two hours once a month, be live in the store at lunchtime, just with their phone on voice mode, going, hey, I'm at the place and we've got all this activity, I'm going to go have a little interview with this customer, boop, upload that. FlowMotion grabs it, whips it through a whole governance model that repurposes it without losing tone and voice.

Chris Bryce: Crazy. And then you've got beautiful little blog posts that create really interesting content for people, not the kind of boring out of the can thing, because it's unique. And that's the kind of stuff we really love, because our customers are like, dude, that's such a great idea. And it speaks to the whole idea of FlowMotion, where we've got motion in the content. Whoa, how cool is that?

Chris Bryce: And we just had a chat yesterday with a large chain of shopping centers that's really struggling for content, for that exact reason. They've got one marketing manager at the property, and they've got all kinds of stuff to do with their day. We're just like, have her do a mall walk for one hour a week and just say some stuff. There's probably five beautiful little sparks for content there.

Derk Majoewskij: Yeah, it's cool. We have to be careful that we won't get too lazy now that we can automate all these things, and keep an eye on things as well.

Chris Bryce: Yeah, we've got some ideas around what's going on with our imagination and impact here. But, okay, well, we're running out of time here. I did want to just create a little bit of space for you to let people know, how do they onboard? Can we get a demo? Who do they talk to? How do they reach out to Storyblok?

Derk Majoewskij: Yeah, so you can always contact us through our website, through our sales team, support team. You can sign up yourself for our Storyblok application through storyblok.com. I definitely recommend you to. We recently revamped our whole onboarding self-service trial journey. So if you want to try it out, you have 45 days to try it out on our Growth Plus plan for free. So I definitely recommend you try it out yourself. If you like it, you can always contact our sales team or support team. So yeah, let's get going.

Chris Bryce: Awesome. And if you have any questions about onboarding, want to see a proof of concept, that's what Dotfusion's all about, getting people exposed to Storyblok and seeing how awesome it is. We've got tons of different components and interesting workflows and stuff set up, and examples on our YouTube channel, so that's always cool. But we are going to sign off. Derk, thanks a ton, you just made episode 44 super remarkable. I appreciate it.

Derk Majoewskij: Thank you so much for having me again. And likewise, thank you so much for the questions.

Chris Bryce: Awesome, awesome. I'm going to click end here, and catch you in just a moment. Thanks everyone. We'll see you in the future. Bye bye.