Comment by le-mark
1 day ago
The website is pretty good. My initial reaction was “A CMS? How can yet another CMS be profitable”. The copy on the homepage explains it pretty well. Congrats on the success.
1 day ago
The website is pretty good. My initial reaction was “A CMS? How can yet another CMS be profitable”. The copy on the homepage explains it pretty well. Congrats on the success.
It’s funny because I have no concept of why this kind of infrastructure is needed and by whom.
Replicating this success would be impossible for me because I wouldn’t understand that there are people out there with this need, and how to find them.
Not that I need to replicate it. It would be cool to have that cashflow. But the chances of getting it are slim.
> Replicating this success would be impossible for me because I wouldn’t understand that there are people out there with this need, and how to find them.
What is your industry/profession? The best way I've found to find problems worth solving, is working literally anywhere else than "software development shops". Basically any profession/workplace out there is filled with various inefficiencies, but you cannot ask people to point it out themselves, you have to be there and experience it yourself to actually fully understand what the problem is and what a correct/good solution actually looks like. Otherwise you end up with the typical "faster horse" problem-solving.
Once you're there, with the mindset of improving things, you start noticing a ton of areas things could be improved. Then just use your best judgement and start thinking why/how/when.
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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> DatoCMS started in 2015 as an internal tool for our italian web agency.
Just trying to sit down and come up with a successful business is really hard. The few friends I have who have made it are engineers who left a company to do something related to what they already did. I even had a few who took funding and sold to the company they left.
> Replicating this success would be impossible for me because I wouldn’t understand that there are people out there with this need, and how to find them.
I feel the same way. Distribution avenues are shrinking with AI. Earlier, you could rely on search engines to send people with specialized needs by targeting adjacent interests. That is no longer true. With AI, it is difficult to get placement in content if you are new or if you do not already have a lot of proof in whatever they consider an authoritative source.
My initial reation was 'What is a CMS'? Naming your company or an initialism and never saying anywhere in the product description what the initials mean is not welcoming. Now I know that anyone who does not know that a CMS is a 'Content Management System' is probably not a likely customer, but you never know, and expanding the initials somewhere shold probably be possible.