Hello World - Welcome to Contento

Surely the last thing the world needs is another content platform or content management system (CMS)?

You’d be surprised. What is evident from our collective experience of working with hundreds of B2B SaaS websites is that there is definitely room for one more.

That is why we have built Contento - a Headless CMS [What is a Headless CMS?] for growing websites (often growing SaaS / tech companies).

But first some context.

Decisions about website builders or content management systems are largely taken by one of two types of people.

The “tech person” or the “marketing person”. 

Let them choose separately and the odds of them aligning on the same decision are remote. 

In many instances one of them does indeed choose, locking the company into a platform that may meet their individual needs but not the needs of the other. 

How often have you heard someone say (in relation to “the website”) that

the tech team loves it but marketing hates it.

With nearly every B2B SaaS client we have worked with over the years, we have found that no matter the platform most were unhappy with the CMS powering their site.

When a technology lead had chosen the CMS the marketing team complained it was impossible to manage and maintain themselves. On the other hand, when a marketing lead had chosen it, the tech team was invariably unhappy with developer experience, site instability (often caused by third-party plug-ins), the difficulty of making the site performant, or the template-based look and feel.

Whereas developers will often prioritize speed and flexibility, the marketing team is likely to prioritize a strong visual experience, married to an easy-to-use / intuitive interface to manage new pages without “the need for tech”. Based on the choice, one side is often left frustrated. 

Surely a solution that meets the needs of both exists already you may wonder? 

And yes several providers claim to do just this. 

However, scratch below the surface and we found that many only solve this in part. A cursory review of G2 or Capterra reviews indicates a degree of over-selling and under-delivering by leading Headless CMS providers.

It's so complicated on the back end that only our developers are allowed to approve changes.

What about the market leader WordPress you may ask? 

The list of issues with WordPress is significant.

While this platform has evolved over the years - it is now nearly 20 years old. It also relies on a gallery of over 55,000 plugins on the WordPress Plugin Directory alone, with many new options added daily. It is a perfect fit for many, but when it comes to growing B2B SaaS websites it falls short.

Instead, if you look at what some of the leading Unicorn websites like Stripe and Intercom are now building on, you get a clue as to the direction we are headed.

Headless CMS is emerging as a new way of managing content and powering websites. 

A headless CMS is a “back-end-only” content management system that acts primarily as a content repository. A headless CMS makes content accessible via an API for display on any device without a built-in, front-end or presentation layer.

—Source:Wikipedia

When we spoke to several other B2B SaaS leaders who shared these problems we decided to solve the challenges by creating a CMS that sought to address the issues that the warring factions were describing.

What if we built a CMS just for marketing websites, tech companies and B2B SaaS websites to support lead generation?

We could keep the 'tech camp' happy if we ensured 

• A blazingly fast end-result website

• We supported the latest cutting-edge front-end tech

• We offered developers the flexibility in how the model their content

• The SEO was baked in from the start

 We could keep 'marketing camp' happy if we ensured

• Beautiful UI/UX

• A genuinely easy-to-use application the marketing team enjoyed using

• Native integrations with all the key platforms they needed to run their B2B SaaS sites

• A dominant use case of powering a B2B marketing website (not omnichannel)

This last point is a key one.

Unlike all other Headless CMSs that are more of an open box, we are making certain assumptions. The primary one is that the dominant use case is powering a marketing website. Making this assumption means we can design our platform around the use case so elements like SEO, concepts of pages, and URL's are all "baked in" rather than being plugins.

So this is why we’ve built a brand new cloud based Headless CMS called Contento, with one core use case in mind. And this last point is crucial. Pretty much every content management platform up to now has been industry agnostic - offering a solution spanning every industry sector. We believe that vertical SaaS is the next big growth wave where you focus on meeting the needs of a narrower market, in this instance marketing websites, and B2B and SaaS companies. 

It goes against all the rules. Certainly, if you have tried to raise capital in recent years, conversations often turn to appraising the size of the Total Addressable Market (TAM). 

While this may have been the case for the last 20 years we believe that this rule no longer needs to apply.

We are using our years working in B2B SaaS to focus on the requirements of one specific use case - powering websites for B2B SaaS companies - rather than try and create a solution that tries to do everything.

Unlike other headless CMS providers we have a razor-sharp focus on bespoke websites, and with all of the co-founders having worked in building B2B SaaS websites for a combined 50+ years we feel we can bring the benefit of that experience to bear on the creation of a beautiful Headless CMS.

We know there are hundreds of website builders out there ranging from WordPress to slightly more modern versions based on templates like Webflow, Squarespace, and Wix. 

However, these are all horizontal offerings meeting the needs of every business under the sun. Even the growth of Headless CMS (the category we fit in) has followed similar lines offering an approach for all. We are different. 

Our team brings the best of what marketing needs and the best of what technology needs under one roof. Hence our feature set (and product roadmap) are designed to meet the needs of a specific vertical we know well.

If you are a growing company and want to learn more about how we can help you optimize for growth get in touch to learn more.

Finally, I thought it would be useful to conclude with a quote from our CTO, Josh Angell as to "the why?" of Contento.

It doesn't matter it is Headless. A Modern CMS should be Headless. You want to future proof your website build and not live to regret it in a few years. Marry in the benefits of SaaS and all of a sudden the proposition is compelling. However, there is one big issue - most Headless CMS are too complicated for most companies. And that is where we come in. We help you to get started quickly. We make sure it is easy for marketing to use. Sure you can output your content where ever you want but we assume the primary use case is for a website. Sure for composable purists we are breaking the rules, but we are doing so for a very good reason. Enjoy the benefits of Headless - rules can be complicated - but in some instances they should be broken and this is one of those scenarios

Get in touch to secure your early access invite with complimentary concierge migration support included.