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Comment by steffoz | Hacker News Reader

Totally agree, that's exactly what we did. As a web agency, we tried every CMS out there and struggled with all of them for different reasons (quality, maintenance, pricing, scalability, development speed), so we built our own. The key thing is you need to genuinely identify with the people you're selling to. Without that connection, every doubt (and there will be tons) becomes nearly impossible to overcome.

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I'd wager that most agency devs have wanted to do this too. CMS's never work the way you want them to as an dev.

Thankfully, the work you have done (along with your competitors) in making headless CMS's viable not just for devs but also for content maintainers has made CMS work far more enjoyable.

It's awesome that you not only built out the dream most agency devs have, but made a successful business out of it at the same time.

That is a really nice comment, thank you a lot

To be fair, 10 years ago was still a reasonable time to do this (build your own CMS). In the early/mid 2010s the commercial CMS market was dominated by some pretty terrible large enterprise incumbents still stuck in the early 00s.

Would you agree (bias aside, being a CMS provider now) that in 2025 it's probably _less_ advisable to try to build your own bespoke commercial CMS product?

It feels like the CMS market is pretty crowded now, with lots of modern, high-quality open source and commercial products.

> It feels like the CMS market is pretty crowded now, with lots of modern, high-quality open source and commercial products.

I don't know, I feel like it's crowded with options but no options are high-quality and ready to be used commercially. Things like Strapi gets somewhat close, but then fucks up the operational parts by being complex to handle with multiple environments, bad history tracking and much else. So the space of "high quality production-ready open-source CMS" is less crowded than you think, particularly if you aim for a specific niche.

That was one of our early fears. Wanting to continue to remain small, will we be swallowed up by larger competitors, who will devour the entire market? Turns out, it didn't happen. The websites space is really huge, I think there is still an endless number of niches you can attack and optimize for and get a pretty interesting revenue from.

Totally, I think people miss the trees for the forest because VC-fueled startups always have the "all-or-nothing" and "eat the world" attitudes, so people grow up thinking those are the available alternatives. While in reality, getting enough profits to support a team and their "modest" dreams (in comparison) is often more than enough.

I did say both open source and commercial, in the context of "starting a business around a new CMS", so you may be correct about the open source side of the market but that wasn't really what I was asking about.

The commercial/SaaS side specifically is quite crowded now, with lots of good options for businesses of all sizes.

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