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Neha Sampat - Co-Founder and CEO at Contentstack, an API first, headless CMS, tells us how they grew to revenues of $26 million with 160 staff in three years. Neha talks about how they spun the company out of their services business in 2018 after identifying a gap in a stagnant market, and grew by retaining a team of expert engineers and problem solving for clients fed up of the competition.
Hear how successful B2B SaaS companies and agencies compete - and win - in highly saturated categories. No fluff. No filler. Just strategies and tactics from founders, executives, and marketers. Learn about building moats, growing audiences, scaling businesses, and differentiating from the competition. New guests every week. Hosted by Peep Laja, founder at Wynter, Speero, CXL.
How Neha Sampat pivoted from services to SaaS to launch Contentstack
Neha Sampat (00:01):
Services revenue is kind of like crack, like it's hard to walk away from, right? And shifting that mindset from a profitability mindset to an investment mindset, not everybody can make that shift. And, even if you can make it, you still have to prove that you've made it, in order to raise capital and in order to be taken seriously.
Peep Laja (00:21):
I'm Peep Laja. I don't do fluff. I don't do filler. I don't do emojis. What I do is study winners in B2B SaaS, because I want to know how much is strategy, how much is luck and how did you win.
Peep Laja (00:33):
This week, Neha Sampat, founder and CEO at Contentstack, an API-first, headless CMS for digital content across multiple channels. Since being founded in 2018, they have grown to a team of over 160 people, with around $26 million in revenue. In this episode, we'll talk about identifying and prioritizing your best product. We hear about disrupting the established competition by offering a superior problem-solving and after sales care. And, we hear about attracting ambitious clients with changing needs in a stale market. Let's get into it.
Peep Laja (01:13):
What was the opening in the market that you saw that led you to start Contentstack?
Neha Sampat (01:19):
Contentstack was formed and incubated essentially as a part of my digital services agency that I was running at the time. That company was called Raw Engineering. And, we were tasked for several clients, mostly Fortune1000 companies, with helping them figure out how to think about cloud computing, which was new, and how to think about mobile, which was also kind of new, especially bringing mobile apps to work and building mobile apps for the enterprise. In doing that, we implemented several different content management systems across the board, Sitecore, Adobe, Drupal, WordPress, you name it. And, what we learned is that most of those systems were built 25 years ago and really built for web. And, we were trying to do things that were a bit more innovative, and new digital channels were coming about. And people cared about doing things quickly and dynamically and more personalized. And so, we found that there wasn't a simple API-first way to do that, that could go to the omnichannel oriented.
Neha Sampat (02:18):
So, originally, we built this very simple CMS, actually back in 2011, to address some use cases that were specific to our client base. And then, we kept adding some functionality. And, 2012, 2013 came around. We started to sell it as Raw Engineering CMS. So it was one of the first, if not the first, headless CMSs in the market. What we found is, as things evolved, and people were going through their digital evolutions in their organizations, they were finding that they needed more and more of these omnichannel use cases to bring to life. And so, headless content management or API-first content management became more important. And, as a result of that, we decided that there was so much demand and there was so much happening inbound to us for the product, that we decided to spin it out of Raw Engineering. That happened in January of 2018.
Neha Sampat (03:06):
By the time we spun it out in 2018, it was a full-fledged CMS that could compete with all the incumbents in the market.
Peep Laja (03:17):
The demand for headless CMS wasn't always there. It was created over time. To inspire change in great demand, focus on how things can be better instead of what's wrong. Otherwise, you risk your audience taking your message personally, interpreting that you are suggesting they're wrong or stupid. Putting your audience on the defensive is not a winning persuasive proposition.
Peep Laja (03:39):
To do a better job at sending the foundation for messaging and the stories to tell, craft a point of view. But, instead of trying to push your views onto the audience, you welcome them into a new and exciting world. Change is the only constant thing, so what has changed in the world? What is happening today that needs our attention? Paint the picture of the opportunity in front of them. Share your excitement. Show your leads how change equals possibility. Give them a clear vision of the destinations and specific steps to get there. Bring your best evidence that the changes you speak of are true, and those who adapt to change reap the benefits. You want people to nod their heads and go, "Yeah, I've been saying this for years."
Peep Laja (04:22):
Your brand now becomes a tour guide through this new reality, and your job is to help them see the world from a fresh perspective. You show people what is possible now. When people believe that your brand story is really their story, you have a big advantage.
Peep Laja (04:39):
How long did it take you to build it, to get it market-ready?
Neha Sampat (04:43):
It's kind of an interesting timeline, because the definition of market-ready sort of evolved over time. And so-
Peep Laja (04:48):
When you call it, "it's good enough to release"?
Neha Sampat (04:52):
Officially, 2013 is when we started to sell it as a licensed-based product, usually attached to a services contract. And, by the time we started to sell it independently of services, it was probably late 2014.
Peep Laja (05:06):
So, started as a services company, building custom stuff for clients, and you found that existing solutions were not good enough for the modern world where content can live on all kinds of devices. And so it was really a product-based approach wherein you guys were doing innovation essentially.
Neha Sampat (05:26):
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, we're product nerds, my co-founders and I, and so, we would try to solve problems with products or minimal solutions, especially when things didn't exist in the market off-the-shelf, and even sometimes when they did, if it was easier or faster for us to just build something. And so, that's what it started as. It was just addressing a need that had grown and that we were seeing, not just in one account, but pretty consistently across the board. And so we just solved it with something that was just a very simple form-based API CMS. And it evolved into something much bigger over time.
Peep Laja (06:01):
So in 2018, when you launched officially as Contentstack, what was the competitive landscape like back then?
Neha Sampat (06:09):
It's super interesting, because at that time, I would say we were just before the chasm, in terms of adoption. And, there was still a lot of education happening on what is headless CMS or what is API-first CMS. And it was definitely not mainstream. It was more, a lot of early adopters or folks that had very specific use cases that were additive to their core content infrastructure. And so the competitive landscape, there was three or four players, including us that were the leaders, and that were consistently brought into opportunities when a company was trying to do something super innovative that they couldn't do with their existing platforms. And, of course, that evolved from there, but that's kind of how it started for us.
Peep Laja (06:51):
Your first prototype is everyone else. Whatever problem you're solving, look for people or companies who've solved it before and start there. This unlocks so much speed. Stack your own ideas and the innovation on top of that. The Innovation Stack by Jim McKelvey is a great book, highly recommended for founders and product leaders. Here's a word from Jim.
Jim McKelvey (07:11):
The innovation stack is simply a way of interweaving inventions together, sometimes very simple inventions. But put enough of these together and they start to take on their own life, and they create new industries. So if you look throughout history, at the great industries that have started, almost always, there's an innovation stack at the beginning. But, I didn't know any of this. So when we started Square, it wasn't like, "Oh, I'm going to build an innovation stack." No, I had no idea that any of this was happening.
Jim McKelvey (07:40):
But, it turns out that there's this thing, this process that can happen when you start to solve a perfect problem, something that has not been solved before. Because most of what we do is copying, and most of our tools and training and comfort is with solutions that exist. When you get out of the world of copying, you can build something that is truly different. But the process is different. And, it creates this thing called an innovation stack. If you build an innovation stack, at least in my studies, your company will dominate the world. It will just run whatever business you're in.
Peep Laja (08:17):
You can and should compete in features and capabilities. In fact, innovations are the most reliable way to quickly grow your market share. But, you need to realize that these are transient advantages. While you're ahead, you need to invest in moats and innovation stacks.
Peep Laja (08:34):
A lot of professional services companies start out thinking that, "One day, we'll be SaaS and software." But they never get there, like very few successful examples. But most are never able to transition over. How did you guys pull it off? And what would be your advice for how to do that successfully?
Neha Sampat (08:51):
We kind of joke, and people say this and anyone in the services industry will understand this, but services revenue is kind of like crack, like it's hard to walk away from, right? I mean, it's hard to scale, obviously, but you're profitable from the start and from the get go. And so, shifting that mindset from a profitability mindset to an investment mindset, not everybody can make that shift. And, even if you can make it, you still have to prove that you've made it in the market, in order to raise capital and in order to be taken seriously in the market.
Neha Sampat (09:19):
And so, the main thing I can say is, if you're contemplating it, just give it a shot. And the one thing that I learned is you have to separate the people that are working on services, from the people that you've got in your incubation engine. They have to be sacred. Don't pull them in just because there's a deal. And that's the only way to make the transition happen, is to be really diligent about that and deliberate about who's working on what, in order to set yourself up, to be able to do that kind of a transition.
Peep Laja (09:51):
I built a services company in 2011, and used its profits five years later to start an e-learning business. And three years later, used the profits of both to start a software company. A lot of companies started services businesses because it's the easiest, least expensive way to start a business. They think maybe later they'll add on software as a service company or whatever, but never get there. It's too hard. They're typically always working on client stuff, and there's no bandwidth to work on your moonshot projects.
Peep Laja (10:19):
Having done this successfully twice, I have two key pieces of advice here. One, the new initiative needs a 100% dedicated team. It can't be that some team members do both. You need dedicated people using all of their mind space to build the new thing. And two, someone with experience and authority needs to lead the new initiative, ideally, the founder or one of the co-founders, if there are many. People have tried bringing in a product manager for these things, but founder is a different type of animal. Building, essentially, a brand new company, even if grown from inside another, needs an entrepreneur to lead it.
Peep Laja (10:59):
So when you guys were now Contentstack, you started with already a roster of customers, right? It wasn't like you're starting... It wasn't day zero, really?
Neha Sampat (11:08):
Yes, for sure. And, it's interesting because not everyone has the luxury of starting that way. But we had the credibility of an existing customer base, customers that were really excited to continue to work with us, a little bit of revenue that was attached to that, and a little bit of cash that we were able to spin out with. So, we had a head start compared to others in the market, which meant we weren't in a rush to raise capital. We wanted to do it very carefully and with the right partners. And so it gave us the time to figure that out.
Peep Laja (11:37):
You guys raised a pretty significant series A, like more than $30 million. The number indicates that you had pretty significant traction by then. What was the gap between the launch and you guys doing the series A?
Neha Sampat (11:49):
It's interesting. I actually learned a ton about how to think about raising capital, especially our first round. And, if anything, I think when I spun out the company, I thought I was ready for a series A immediately. And I started to have conversations about raising $5 or $7 million. I still had to prove myself to the market as a SaaS founder and a SaaS entrepreneur, and not a services mindset individual. And so, that took a little bit of time.
Neha Sampat (12:15):
So we actually ended up buying some time to demonstrate that we had figured that out, and also to increase the value of the company. And I did that by doing a small seed round, and that gave us a little bit of extra runway to hire or go to market leaders, and start revving up the engine for higher growth. By the time, almost a year and a half later, when we raised the series A, we had essentially delivered on the promise of that growth, added to our customer base, built a go to market team that was humming. And, that led to an increased valuation.
Peep Laja (12:49):
Tell me more about that early success. What specifically did you guys do to get the traction? What worked for getting customers? What kind of product strategy did you have in place?
Neha Sampat (13:02):
The most important thing on the Contentstack side that always stood out with us, and I think this actually comes from the consulting mindset, is that we had a consultative mindset in our sale, in our pre- and post-sales kind of relationship. And, what that has done, even fast forward to three years into the journey, is we've got over 99% retention of customers. And that means, when a customer comes on board, we take good care of them. We do it in as much of an automated way as possible, because you want it to scale, but the high touch is there when it needs to be there, and the care comes across very authentically.
Neha Sampat (13:37):
And it's just who we are and it's in our DNA, and I think that's probably the most important part of our strategy so far, and our understanding of the complexity in enterprise and being able to navigate some of the hairy things that happen, not just from a product and technology perspective, but also cross-functionally. There's different competing agendas. And, we actually understand that really well because we come from the services side of the world. So we've built the product and our processes and our sales process and the POCs and our post-sales process to address some of those challenges that enterprises have.
Neha Sampat (14:12):
But, along the way, there's also been just sort of things that have happened in the industry that have led to changes in the product or growth in the product. We have thought about multi-cloud very often, because some retail companies don't want to just work with Amazon. So that's an option that we have now. We've had to think about incorporating a lot of integrations, because in order to be really successful and a microservices approach, you need to be able to integrate with the best of breed of all the services that surround your ecosystem.
Neha Sampat (14:42):
So Contentstack being sort of the core hub of content infrastructure inside an organization, you want it to be able to attach to the best personalization engine and the best translation engine. And so we've put a lot of effort and investment into what we call a catalyst ecosystem, which is our partner network of technologies and SIs that help bring a solution together for a company. And so, that's been a lot of it, where the decisions and investment have gone over the last couple of years.
Peep Laja (15:08):
So being a CMS, that naturally lends to some stickiness because companies don't want to change their CMS every year. So, switching costs as a moat is baked in by definition. But what else, specifically, have you done then to increase that retention to 99%? What are some examples?
Neha Sampat (15:30):
Yeah. So, it's interesting because the switching costs, there's pros and cons to it, right? You're always competing with status quo, and content management, as you said early on, isn't brand new. You're always competing against something that's already there, right? So, there is the switch, but there's also the opportunity cost if you don't switch, and that's where the value sell really comes in.
Neha Sampat (15:50):
And so typically, what we do is, we help uncover a project where we can deliver value really quickly in an organization. And, the way that we do that is through the selling process. We'll ensure that you're able to get something built in a POC, something that delights both the business user and the tech user. And then, we're able to then turn that into the first engagement. And, that time to value is so fast, that eventually, there's always just going to be growth in the account, because people want to do more once they understand how the product works, and they uncover ways to use it. And so, a lot of that is organic, to be honest, because it's just so easy, compared to what people are used to. But, they kind of have to get over the hump of believing that that's real.
Peep Laja (16:34):
Is your customer acquisition mainly inbound or outbound?
Neha Sampat (16:37):
It's a combination. But, for the early days, it was mostly inbound, and that's what led us to believe we're sitting on something really big and important. And, the demand has just been growing, and so inbound is certainly where we get our first and highest propensity to buy leads. But, there's also an outbound motion, because we are still educating the market, and especially, in emerging markets, trying to open up people's eyes to a new way and a better way.
Peep Laja (17:07):
It's so much easier to be in a space where there is existing demand for your product. If you're doing something new where you have to explain what it is and why somebody should use it, you're going to have a way harder time selling and growing. You can't rely on inbound marketing as much, because nobody knows to search for it. And then the game is all about market education and creating demand.
Peep Laja (17:29):
The downside of selling a product with a lot of existing demand is more competition, so speed of execution becomes essential. If it's an emergent category, lots of pieces are up in the air. There's chaos. But there's also opportunity. Once the dust settles and the pieces fall back down, the opportunity is gone. So going into the opportunity with deep pockets, an army of developers or whatever other cornered resource, is a major advantage.
Peep Laja (17:56):
Those customers coming to you, are they feeling a certain pain? What triggers to sign up? And then how do you make the case then to go with you instead of the competition? What's the differentiation play?
Neha Sampat (18:08):
There's usually pain point. Otherwise, people wouldn't be shopping, right? And typically, that has to do with time to develop something, because a lot of the systems that are incumbents or that were built previously, they require a very specialized skill set, or they just take a lot of time because of the way that they were built and constructed for just a suite-based approach to things. They're just not as agile. And so, usually, it's some kind of a time constraint.
Neha Sampat (18:33):
And, one example of that, we had a big retailer who was going into holiday season, and for the second year in a row, wasn't able to make their mobile app work with their incumbent top tier market player in the CMS space. And so they came to us with a very short window, to see if we could help them fix it. And they were able to build on Contentstack within a couple of months, their app that would go to market for Cyber Monday. And, by doing that, that quickly, they realized that they're sitting on something really exciting. And the fact that they were able to do that, get the support they needed, go live and run through all of Cyber Money without a hitch and actually increase their revenue as a result, that's time to value.
Neha Sampat (19:16):
And so, when you can demonstrate that over and over again, it just automatically leads to more business, and companies are starting to hear those stories from their colleagues. And they're starting to see, "Okay, somebody else used [Helis 00:19:28], or somebody else used an API-first model, or they architected it differently, or they're utilizing these microservices that work better than our incumbent. We don't want to be left behind." And so there's also this drive to not settle, and to be able to lift what your ideas are to a new level and actually bring them to life, which they haven't been able to do, because technology used to be a constraint for that.
Neha Sampat (19:48):
And then the other side, I would say, is, over the last couple of years, there's a lot less education happening on API-first and headless, because it has become more mainstream and people now at least have heard of it or know conceptually what it is. And, when you have Contentstack in the top quadrant of IDC MarketScapes and Forrester Waves, it automatically leads to that kind of credibility, plus being able to talk to customers who've been successful for more than just a year on the product and talking to them about growth. That credibility is what really lends itself to winning in our deals.
Neha Sampat (20:25):
And then from a differentiation standpoint, it does come down to our enterprise know-how, which I talked about a little bit earlier. But that comes across really strong, not just in the product, but in the whole process of engaging with Contentstack. It's how we sell, how we have conversations, the consultative approach, how we take care of customers post-sale, how we connect them with partners that will make them successful, how we connect them with other customers or colleagues in the industry that have had success with Contentstack. That all comes across really strong.
Neha Sampat (20:56):
And then there's this equality by design, which is really about understanding both the developer and the business user in an organization, and ensuring that we've built the product to address the needs of both sides, which most CMSs will choose one or the other. They'll kind of go down the path of, this is a developer play, or they'll go down the path of, this is a WYSIWYG, easy to move things around play. And we've actually believed that, to be really successful, you need to empower both sides of the house, so that developers can be really innovative and build cool stuff, and business people can bring things to life and figure out how to monetize and engage their audiences. And so, that's been a big differentiator as well.
Peep Laja (21:35):
Those disgruntled customers of legacy companies, are you assuming that they're disgruntled, or have you figured out a way to pitch them throughout outbound, or...? How does that work?
Neha Sampat (21:47):
It's pretty obvious. I mean, you get it in, when you have your first call, and you have a conversation where someone says, "three years into our one year deployment of X", you can't be happy in that situation. And people become complacent because there was nothing better, and they sort of had to settle, and it was the only solution that they wouldn't get fired for buying in the past. That's no longer the case. And now we've created an alternative that is better. And, it's no longer arguably better, it's just better. And, people are seeing it and recognizing that. And now it's just a matter of time before they make the change.
Peep Laja (22:26):
Typically, what happens in categories, as they get more mature, every player, every competitor eventually has the same capabilities. If you look at like email marketing or CRMs, every tool does everything. And so, the product lead differentiation becomes minimal to none. So thinking ahead, 2025 and beyond, competitors are not sleeping, new people will emerge, lots of money going around, are you building any other non-product moats? Like brand moats, marketing moats, things like that?
Neha Sampat (22:58):
One thing that we recently announced, there's sort of two pieces to it. One is, this concept of care without compromise. And this goes back to our customer success superpower. But it's the idea that you can not only go down the stacks versus suite approach, but you can do it with the confidence that you're working with vendors that actually will deliver same or better value in terms of your customer care. And that's typically been a barrier, right? People want that idea of one throat to choke. They want to go to a single vendor and get everything, and have one support ticket and have that followed through. But the reality is, that doesn't work anyway, because there's disparate silos within any large organization when you have a big suite.
Neha Sampat (23:39):
And, in kind of contrast to that, we started to work with some of our closest catalyst technology partners, where Contentstack plus two or three other solutions work really well together as a blueprint. And we've added a layer of customer care, where there's a memorandum of understanding between all of the different vendors involved. And we ensure that, if we get a customer call, and it's about Contentstack or one of these other vendors, we'll take the first call. We'll have the conversation. We'll try to solve the problem. And if we can't, we'll do a warm hand-off to someone on the other side. And that gives everyone kind of a little bit more confidence. That's something that is no longer a barrier to entry for going down the stack approach.
Neha Sampat (24:18):
And then the other thing, just recently, we announced an acquisition from Raw Engineering, where we brought over 53 experts that were content management implementation experts into Contentstack, because they understand the product so well, that they'll help us improve how we actually build out that customer care. They've done integrations with a lot of the companies in our ecosystem, so they can help us to build out those blueprints. And then they can help our catalyst partners to get the training that they need to be successful at implementing Contentstack as well. And so, there's just a lot of investment. We're putting our money where our mouth is, in terms of ensuring that we can actually deliver on a vision, and not just a promise.
Peep Laja (24:56):
Contentstack have brought along and invested in people with a unique combination of experience working in both services and SaaS, people with deep enterprise know-how. This helps give them an edge over the competition, when it comes to sales and customer success, and one which their competitors would struggle to replicate. It's what Hamilton Helmer refers to as a cornered resource in his book, 7 Powers: The Foundations of Business Strategy.
Hamilton Helmer (25:24):
So, if you have rights to certain resources, assets of some sort, and that those can't be taken away from you, and that they are materially valuable and sufficient, so that if they were transferred to another company, they would also enjoy the economic benefit of them, then that can be a source of value.
Hamilton Helmer (25:45):
The example I lose is my book is Pixar. What happened there was, in the early stages of Pixar, there was an early group that went through the hell of developing Toy Story 1 and 2 and Bug's Life, and learned how to work together in this incredible creative way. And each of those people involved in that became able to direct these amazing movies. And so Pixar ended up with this incredible string of successes, a really unparalleled and a movie business.
Hamilton Helmer (26:17):
But in this case, they were devoted to Pixar. If Dreamworks wanted to hire them away, they wouldn't go. And Disney, in fact, tried to hire back some of the resources and they wouldn't go. Though eventually, Disney bought them, of course. So they were a valuable resource that created the success of the company.
Peep Laja (26:36):
So, the customer success that you provide for customers, it goes beyond just, "Here. Software. Go nuts." You also help them implement strategy, things like that. Do you charge for that? Or is that comes with the software?
Neha Sampat (26:49):
Yeah. So we don't really have a services arm necessarily. We're more... The consultative approach is in our onboarding, so it's a part of the customer success process. So when you join Contentstack as a customer, you get a number of hours of onboarding services that's just included as a part of the initial contract. And that typically will be some kind of architectural guidance. We'll look at what you're trying to do and just make sure you're following best practices. And then, we'll do a developer training and an editor training separately. And then we'll just do a check in to make sure you're good to go. And then there's quarterly check-ins and sort of as needed. If you need to talk to a solutions architect, we just make that available. But it's not like a long services engagement or a paid-for engagement in any way, really.
Peep Laja (27:33):
Did you focus on building the partner ecosystem from day one? Was that like an obvious strategy to pursue?
Neha Sampat (27:41):
From a strategy standpoint, definitely obvious. But focusing on it from day one, it evolves, and we may have started with a couple of SI partners, system integrator partners. But over time, it's evolved into a much more strategic program, with a lot more parameters and certifications and badges and joint marketing. And so, it's been an evolution and an opportunity that we have to continue to invest in and continue to grow and expand.
Peep Laja (28:08):
And, if you think about your competitors, aren't they also able to do the same place with partners and customer success and enterprise know-how? How are you thinking of winning against competition here?
Neha Sampat (28:21):
On paper, you can certainly say that you're doing certain things, where it really comes across as in play. And, if you look at some of our customers that have moved from our headless competitors back to Contentstack or over to Contentstack, they've done it because they haven't been able to accomplish what they needed to with those players. And so, yes, those players can evolve and they can bring in the right expertise to do it.
Neha Sampat (28:47):
I think the difference is for us, it's in our DNA to be enterprise-centric and customer care-centric. And, that's something you can't take away. And, the fact that it's so organic for us, I think, is one of our core differentiators.
Neha Sampat (29:00):
I worked in enterprise companies. My co-founders have worked in enterprise companies, so we know the space. We know the pain points. We've been on the inside of that, and we've been the implementers of that. And, that's just an experience that you can't just automatically replace. And, when it starts at the top like that, it trickles to everyone. Everyone understands those pains, and they understand what the mission is and why we're doing it, and the fact that it's trying to empower people in their daily jobs to be able to do the best work of their career, by providing the best solution in the market.
Peep Laja (29:34):
Unless you're an innovator, when your target market is shopping, they're comparing you to a number of players in your category, especially category leaders. For example, if you are CRM, you can be sure they're also looking at Salesforce, Hubspot, Pipedrive, et cetera. Optimizing your website messaging for "why choose us", not "why sign up". If you pitch your tool by describing what you enable people to do, you're making two mistakes. You're positioning yourself as a commodity. There could be 30 other tools doing what you do. Two, when you describe basic capabilities, you're insulting my intelligence. You might be the first tool in a category I hear about, but unlikely. Here I am comparing 10 plus tools, and you're explaining to me why it's good to have a headless CMS. So when you make a case for yourself, lead with a differentiated position or narrative. Highlight your specific advantage, which use cases it's best at. Remember, soft innovation and emotional points of difference will go much further in the world of endless features.
Peep Laja (30:38):
Over the last three years, what kind of strategy bets did not pay off?
Neha Sampat (30:43):
If you don't try things that sometimes don't work, then you're not trying enough things, you could argue. I think one thing that we grappled with is, how much do we go towards the independent developer? And some of our competitors are really good at this actually. And so, do you build a community for developers? How does that work? How much investment does that take? How do you ensure the same level or same quality of support if you do that? And so I think that's one area that honestly we haven't quite cracked yet, from a strategic standpoint. And we've looked at... We're definitely more enterprise-oriented, so how do we make sure that the developers that we bring into that ecosystem are enterprise developers? And it's not easy to do. And so I think that's one area that, from a strategic bet standpoint, we haven't quite nailed.
Peep Laja (31:25):
If you think about dominating in the future, what kind of bets are you now making, that you think will lead you to success?
Neha Sampat (31:33):
So, my take is that, the incumbents in the market are not innovating fast enough, and they're kind of leaving their customers to dry, to a certain extent, because they just can't do the things that they promised you can do. And, what that's leading to is, people are getting aggravated and looking for better solutions. And so, I think it's just a matter of time before people move off of legacy suites and start to adopt stacks. I mean, that's the big play.
Neha Sampat (32:02):
Now, it's a matter of, how do you do that in a way that brings everyone confidence and conviction that it's the right way and that we're the right solution? And for me, that's really investing in the ecosystem and investing in the blueprints and investing in sort of the marketplace that surrounds all of that. And so, that's the big strategic bet, is really just making sure that we understand the complexity of implementing a really strong content solution or the best digital experience platform in the market, and how do you be at the center of that and connect all the dots in the best way possible.
Peep Laja (32:34):
Building an effective community for developers is a strong moat for Contentstack competition. In fact, it is one of the things which has made category leaders in other areas, like Shopify and eCommerce, so effective. Here's their VP Growth Morgan Brown on how it worked for them.
Morgan Brown (32:49):
One of Shopify's incredible advantages is the ecosystem in which it exists, right? So, Shopify app developers, Shopify agencies, Shopify experts, there's a whole ecosystem of capability that takes this kind of core product and extends it in many different ways. And you get this really powerful flywheel of more people contributing to the ecosystem, which creates a stronger product offering, which creates a more compelling product to try and use and stick with. That's one of the big advantages that Shopify has.
Peep Laja (33:29):
A word of warning though, the reality is that many communities never take off and become ghost towns instead. You have to consider the time and costing of becoming the gatekeeper of a two-sided marketplace, with app developers on one side and enterprise customers on the other.
Peep Laja (33:46):
What are you doing to compete on brand and better marketing?
Neha Sampat (33:49):
We have a lot of fun things up our sleeve for next year, including our first ever customer conference. So, just getting the Contentstack brand out more widely. And, our customers, the ones that are allowed to talk about it, are such big fans, that really just telling their stories more vividly and helping to kind of get across the idea of what a really good digital experience looks like, and being able to tell those stories on stages and in use cases and on podcasts. And so really just a lot more customer marketing is where there's a lot of opportunity for us.
Peep Laja (34:30):
So, how is Contentstack winning? One, they first learned about the customers in the market by offering a service, and later managed to successfully transition from a services company to a software company.
Neha Sampat (34:43):
You have to separate the people that are working on services from the people that you've got in your incubation engine. They have to be sacred.
Peep Laja (34:51):
Two, they hopped on a market with a lot of demand and were perfectly suited to execute fast towards opportunity.
Neha Sampat (34:58):
Inbound is certainly where we get our first and highest propensity to buy leads. And that's what led us to believe we're sitting on something really big and important, and the demand has just been growing.
Peep Laja (35:10):
Three, they have a corned resource, deep knowledge about the enterprise, the audience they are serving.
Neha Sampat (35:16):
For us, it's in our DNA to be enterprise-centric and customer care-centric. And, that's something you can't take away. And, the fact that it's so organic for us, I think, is one of our core differentiators.
Peep Laja (35:28):
A final takeaway from Neha.
Neha Sampat (35:30):
The incumbents in the market are not innovating fast enough and leaving their customers to dry, to a certain extent. I think it's just a matter of time before people move off of legacy suites and start to adopt stacks.
Peep Laja (35:44):
And that's how you win.
Peep Laja (35:52):
I'm Peep Laja. For more tips on how to win, follow me on LinkedIn or Twitter. Thanks for listening.