Paul: Hi there and welcome to PodRocket. So today we have an exciting guest with us, we have Simen from Sanity, and hi Simen, how are you doing? Simen: I'm good, how are you? Thank you for having me on the podcast. Paul: Thank you for coming, it's morning over here, so I am refreshed and excited to get into what we have to talk about today. Is Sanity your first big project that you did? Is that the first open source platform driven project that you embarked on? Simen: Commercially, yes, but actually I had an opensource motion control system back in the days, that was just opensource because that's like it was free-hosting on GitHub at the time. That system ended up, I ended up finding that in almost all kind of DIY grade 3D printers in the world for a moment, so that was- Paul: That's really cool. Simen: ... A huge success but I benefited absolutely zero from. Paul: Oh, you benefit in the spirit, right? It's kind of cool to think... Simen: Absolutely. Paul: That's pretty awesome. All right, sliding that little note in there. We're really excited to talk about Sanity in particular today. So I'm probably going to not get this correct in one little elevator pitch here, but it's a CMS platform that's kind of bringing the bridge between data and what we traditionally understand as content, and allowing us to access it and manipulate in all sorts of ways. And we'll get into a more refined definition about what that means when we give you the stage here. Paul: But personally from my point of view, this is a very exciting piece of technology because I'm coming from the WordPress land, where you have everything that sort of like all right, you can get it made up for you and you can put in content with the GUI and use it with WordPress, and everybody knows that, its been done it kind of pigeon holes even to their platform. Seeing this, it's kind of very open, we have a lot of APIs to use and a lot of interesting ways to view data and new query languages, even that we haven't touched on before. Paul: Please help the audience understand a little bit more from my definition about what Sanity is, and what exciting things that you're bringing to the table with your team. Simen: Yeah. So at the simplest use case, you can use Sanity just as a very simple content authoring system. It has a lot of useful features like realtime collaboration, teams can write together. It has all these kind of beautiful authoring tools, the content bubbles are really rich. Any kind of thing you want to be able to show in your frontend, you can model that in Sanity very naturally. These are in a sense huge things that are very hard to pull off, but also when you squint, they all become this kind of pleasant backdrop that makes working with Sanity at it's simplest, as a kind of replacement for WordPress. Very pleasant, very efficient. But also this leads into a lot of other opportunities that kind of making content into, making sure content is in a form that can be used in several different designs and platforms, and many different media, is a very powerful thing. And to make sure the people creating the content are still working natural without being necessarily aware of that opportunity. Simen: But then there are a number of other things that we felt the need to have when we kind of... If it's okay with you, let me take us back to where we felt the need to create Sanity, because we didn't actually want to be a startup. We were super happy as this kind of small boutique design agency. We were- Paul: You started as a design agency? Simen: Yeah. Actually, yeah. We were this- Paul: Let's go back, that's a good idea. Simen: That's way back in 2015, 2014, we had this table in Oslo, our plan was, this is the biggest our company will be. We will be, it's like we could sit around this company and we'll know how to run it. And the only way to grow is to become- Paul: Sounds nice. Simen: Yeah, it's very nice, and the only way to grow then is to have more and more richer and richer clients, I guess. You can do more work, you just have to do more valuable work. It was exciting, we were getting some really, really fascinating customers at this point. And it was a company the OMA, Office of Metropolitan Art, they contacted us. This is the agency of Rem Koolhaas, a very famous architect that... This was mind blowing to myself and my co-founder Even because we've been, we have all his books. We've been fans of Rem Koolhaas since we discovered him in our early 20s. This is like, he knows about our existence, he contacts us. He's seen some of our stuff in some book, and we were like, that's incredible. Simen: Of course, it wasn't actually him, it was one of his partners. But fair enough, it was like, we got to work for him. And when we... They have been working, creating kind of seminal buildings and concepts since the early 80s, late 70s. This is all kind of, everything is monumental, beautiful, and there is, our dream for them was to create this as a repository of, yes it's their brand site, it's what like builds and explains their, like what OMA means in the world of architecture and the culture at large. But also, this is like a repository of everything they've done. Simen: And then we realized that to them, the website was actually mostly important in order to talk to people like us who weren't actually buying very expensive buildings, but just needs to know about them. And then to talk to the actual customers, like they have nation states as customers like Portugal and China. And for them, it was like designing bespoke books. They actually sat every day, so people were sitting creating, designing specific books for specific clients. Simen: Then they had this process where when you ask for an offer, let's say we wanted to build a park, let's say we were running Dubai and we want to build a park with a bridge and some retail space. We'd go to these architects and we say, "What have you done that's kind of relevant, that's kind of something like this?" Actually there was a department in the company whose only job was just to remember the history of the company, you go to them and you'd ask them. And of course, this is very inefficient. So we told them we should probably create this repository, it will power the website, it will be the source of these books, and it will have a powerful search tool. So these people who work on these kind of RFPs, as it's called, they can focus on the really specific, really hard creative work and the generic like, give me bridges with retail space, that's a two second job. Simen: So we actually sold this job, priced it just expecting that of course content tools can do this. WordPress has evolved, right? This is all now a thing. And as we started researching the implementation, we realized that nothing could do this. We needed a content system that was very intuitive to the content team, to the digital teams, still ended up as a database for the developer perspective, it should be a proper database. It should be possible to mix data and text. So if you define let's say a datatype for a building with a location and a name, and a city, and these kinds of thing, you should be able to use that anywhere in your data, also as a part of a running text. This should be a very expressive data model. And then we should be always safe that this model can be represented in any form, so if you create this content, you should be able to create it, like render it into the website, but also in the book, and also as this kind of business development tool. Simen: And in a sense, we realized that we had to create Sanity in anger and disappointment. The first version was almost like a defensive. Then we kept using this tool. We used it for MIT, we used it for [inaudible 00:09:02] in New York, and I think it was MIT who asked us, "This thing you're using, it's actually better than anything we can buy. What is it?" And then that's when we connected the dots, and like, we should probably be the people making this system, not the people making these websites. That's when we inverted the business model and its been a very interesting journey because now we are talking to all these huge incredibly impressive brands, and they are all struggling with creating these kind of integrated experiences. You have a history where you have like you say, you deploy your insular Shopify solution, your WordPress deployment. You have separate tools for each touchpoint for your customers. Simen: Very often this ends up being separate teams, and creating a cohesive experience for your customer is very hard. This goes regardless if you are a media company, a retailer, you will struggle with this. And trying to integrate these experiences is both about integrating of course the touchpoints for the customers. It's about bringing teams together, like giving them a single pane of glass to understand what kind of experiences are we creating for our audiences. And then of course being able to bring the data together from the various sources. Very often, content is not only the things you write, it can be your merchandise. It can be if you're a real estate developer, it might be your developments like might come from different systems. Bringing all that together in, we call it a content lake. Bringing that together, bringing the teams together and integrating that, that's something that I didn't know how hard it was when we started this, for people to actually pull off. And then coming to the market with a tool that really lets companies do that, and being in a sense alone in that space right now. Simen: I feel that our struggle right now is the companies don't know to expect it. It's like, we need to help companies understand this is actually possible, the tools exist now, or maybe it's just us, I don't know, that's how at least I see it, of course. But a lot of companies don't think its even possible, don't know to dream about that, so we just assume we'll just have 100 different WordPress deployments, and we just king of wrangle it. Paul: I feel like you hit a sweet spot at this time in history because we're dawning on a new age of digital literacy, where people understand how to use Graphql, they understand how to use Next.js. So the idea of stepping out of a cookie cutter platform like WordPress and giving you the power saying, "Listen, you go figure out the tools what you want to use," that actually has the carbon power to catch on now, because people know how to really build these rich interfaces and you don't have to be a masters computer science student, or somebody who's been grueling away in their basement for years to really understand how this stuff works. So, that's probably another great thing that you guys have going for you. Paul: And I'd love to touch on, one of the key features here, the key paradigm shifts is that data and content are fused into one understanding, because you're saying content can be real estate developments, it could be censored data, who knows? It's all one body of data that we can use to create postings and articles, then go use in another of our application, completely separate. Paul: What was one of those difficult challenges, because you said, "I had no idea it was that hard." It's that hard to bring this data together. What made this so hard that makes me spinning up a Postgres RDS not hard? Simen: Yeah, exactly. One of the first things we actually did when we realized we wanted to make Sanity into a company, was just talking to various companies about their challenges. I just walk around like, I wonder why our eCommerce experience is so drab, why are the... You used the word cookie cutter, I use that term a lot when I talk about these types of experiences. It's a lot about this feeling of content being just like data record that you put into a template, and then you're kind of done. And then this leads to- Paul: That's how it's done. Simen: That's how it's done. If it's like a 40,000 dollar bracelet, or it's a one dollar bandaid, it looks the same in your store, it has exact same picture, exact same layout. Same thing goes for if you like... I was reading New Scientist for a long time in their app, and I couldn't, in their digital form, I did not know there was a special issue because the articles always look exactly the same. And I would look in the paper version on the network and I realize, oh, this is like a special issue about quantum physics. I didn't realize because the layouts didn't carry over. They don't have tools to have this kind of express and control when I'm in the digital domain, which is weird. It's where everyone is. We still keep building these kind of beautiful content stores, but we don't bring that care and attention to the digital space, which is kind of mind blowing. Simen: And then I was asking different companies, why, I was expecting some kind of rational explanation like yeah, we test it or people don't care, or it's different, the competition is about price and delivery, stuff like that. That's what I would expect. What I got was a lot of, it's just very hard, we are building our own CMS, or how much is Sanity, we want it. These kinds of answers is clearly everyone wants this, it's just too hard with the current set of tools. And I think like you said, a beautiful thing right now, one thing is of course, I'd say Sanity makes this possible, but you're right. One thing is just the competencies coming together. This is possible now because like you said, it's easier to build these kind of tailor made front ends because development work is easier. So it's easier for someone whose kind of have a designer mindset to also be a developer, because I think at this point we need to just bring those kind of mindsets together. Simen: Designs have to be receptive to the content, so they have to have a little bit of logic in them. This is becoming possible. I think it seems to me in the research that a lot of the challenge is about almost just bringing the tools together. Like I have my huge kind of hybrids or commercial cloud deployment which is doing the kind of shopping experience, and then I have all my content that would connect this, like help me understand the products better. They are over here and they are separated, and there is, like you said, the content. There's one thing we keep saying, content is data, I don't know if it resonates with everyone who should understand the concept. The point is like you said, content is more than what is created and authored by a content team. It is in our conception, it's everything that an organization wants to present to its audience. Simen: So it might be, and the reason you want to bring these things together is because often you want to contextualize, you want to tell a story about your other pieces of data. Let's go with the real estate developer, I'll have all these developments, they will be in a different like system, where I know about them, I know about their existence, I know what's available, the locations. Maybe I even have architectural drawings. And then if I could put all of that online and then let people just figure it out, but of course, much more powerful thing is I'm telling the story about this realtime. This is Hudson Yard, this is for a specific kind of retail spaces. I'm building a story around this and laying it out. And in order to do that, I need an integration between these kind of data sources and the content teams are going to put the storytelling together. Let's say, one of these things have been rented out for five years, I want this thing to disappear, even though I kind of create a storytelling around it, like thank you, that content has done its work but I want this to automatically go down now, because that thing is sold. Simen: These kinds of things will, for an audience, for someone kind of interested in my product, in my storytelling, in having a relationship with my company, they will feel the presence, they will feel like we are there, we are as if in a good retail experience, in a good store, I feel there is a presence of someone helping me. This is so often absent from the current product experience. And then I'm talking about retail now because that excites me a lot and it's very easy to see there. But this goes for the New York Times experience, the New Scientist experience, I'm sure if they have been able to move that kind of care and attention from the paper based designs and into the digital space, making it a little bit harder to have that relationship with their product. Paul: Could we go over for maybe a use case example. Let's say I ran a store and I was using WordPress and my writer that I hired on the weekends to put out new things about my products. Simen: What's your products in this fantasy? What are we selling? Paul: Let's sell board games. Simen: Board games, perfect. Paul: Yeah. There's a standardized type I guess there, so we could wrap our heads around and there's a lot variability- Simen: Exactly. So we have this kind of a curated store of lesser known board games. We've Scar Kickstarter, we have these kind of games that you can't get everywhere, that's our store, we have that. If you wanted special kinds of board games, we have it. Simen: Like you said, we're probably are on Shopify in this example because that's easy to do, we can just upload our images and our... That's our first version. We just grab those images from our suppliers, we put them on Shopify, we set some prices and some inventory and then off we go. This is version one, there is not content, basically just the product description. Paul: So just you hand upload. Simen: Yes. Your stringer has kind of just taken, copy pasted things from various sources, tried to wrangle them to some similar form like your tone of voice, which will be very generic, and okay, our store is there. Hopefully, we have something unique, so people will, a certain kind of people like high, let's call it highly engaged people, will find it. They will talk about on Reddit, and on Twitter, and they know oh yeah, you know these games that are only possible to get on Kickstarter and they are now sold out, you can actually get them, there is a place for them. Paul: Board game fanatics, they'll be coming. Simen: They will be coming, right? To a certain extent. But maybe we discover that board game fanatics, they already have these games, at least the ones they want. So they say, this is grand and then little happens. Simen: We realize we need to buy some AdWords, and we buy some, maybe we record some Instagram things, we put them on Instagram. We buy some eyeballs. We get some of those, but not hyper fans, not fanatics. Some of them will come in, we'll see our sales increase, but now we will do some kind of informal research. We'll talk to people and we realize they don't, they see it looks exciting, but I feel like, is it hard? I don't know. Is it suitable for kids? I don't know. Is it just for hyper nerds? Is it like Dungeons and Dragons? I remember that, that's kind of like, oh I'm too old for that. Simen: So we realize we need to frame this. There is a storytelling job we have to do. And actually, we also realize that the fanatics, at least the people we do resonate with, they keep forgetting about us because we just have, they see us as just this repository, we were nothing more to them. They will still go just to Google for the game and yeah, happily find our listing there, that we pay for and maybe buy it. But we just keep having to buy that attention over and over again. So we realized we have, this is where we decide to do the storytelling. Simen: We set up bespoke content, integrating Shopify and some content. In this example, we will do it from Sanity. We realize that we have games in certain groups, some of them are casual games, others suitable for kids and family, some of them are deeper games that take a week. So what we'll do, we don't have enough, a lot of time, so we'll create these kind of guides. We'll say that, this is for the kind of if you want to go deep, this is the guide. Maybe we can even personalize it or tell the story about this is how, this is kind of marketing. I'm telling a story and I'll link into these different games in the store, and now I have this way of contextualizing that set of games. So I'll tell you a story about, as a customer, you arrive and you don't only find the game, you'll be helped to see this is the game for people who are looking for this, but actually next to it, it will be a different guide, like casual games, like pick up and play games. I'll go there and they will tell me a little bit about those different games. Simen: And right now we have created very little content where we can link it to every, because it's structured content, we can say this is the text, it links to the products. Our frontend can discover for every product, this is the guide that this kind of specific product goes into and I can tell you about the other products that kind of is related to this. But not as a kind of other customers who looked at this, looked at this things as well. That's feels absent and mechanical, this is someone, someone took some care, and our collection. We have 107 games, so we have time to contextualize basically 70% of our collection, and the rest will go in as like the same category like casual cardigans. We'll be able to put them up at the end of our guides. Simen: This is a very simple kind of story, we didn't create a lot of content, but we kind of integrated the content experience, the shopping experience. What we discover now is like, oh, people related to our tone of voice, they kind saw our storytelling. We are building a relationship with an audience. They keep coming back and they are not going to Google, they are coming to us and they're expecting more from us. And now we are kind of, we realize we have now a little bit of an audience. We should probably create our own games now. Maybe we can take some of these ideas we had, and we have 100,000 people are coming to our site every week looking for stuff that we don't, we're missing certain things. The market hasn't provided certain things that we think we would be able to sell. We see we don't have enough casual games, we'll create a number of casual games. Simen: And now we're building this kind of community around us, and I think that is something that almost every organization needs, even if you're a government organization doing forms for social services, you want to have a certain kind of relationship with an audience, to ensure that you're present there for them, that what you experience is a human connection, it's not just like a mechanical system that leaves everything up to you. Paul: Yeah, I would love to check in and ask, where we're at right now, is we're selling games and we're getting intel on the games. So we're looking at what happened to what we manually posted at first and making some insights, reorganizing how we present things to the user on our front end interface. And this kind of continuous iteration of going back and saying, here's our photos, here's a description and here's our data from that. Here's the frontend that we're going to create. Paul: Doing that, so what Sanity is doing, is it's unifying that whole iterative process into a single data lake that we can call it, right? That allows us to go back and forth easily, not just on the design and front end, but for people who may not be as technical minded, and they can interface with that data as well. Would that be fair? Simen: That's absolutely fair. That content lake within this context, it would integrate content from the Shopify experience and from whatever we've come up with as our content concepts. Being able to then combine them, and for someone designing the actual front end experience can now grab these guides, can grab these products, can mix and match them in ways that seems to engage our audience and connect with people. And then actually we can take all that content because it's now in the media, in the public forum. We realize we actually we want when we buy ads for this, we actually have all the assets, we can just script all of that. We can basically just take all of that carefully crafted content and convert it into Instagram ads and Google AdWords, I will have our content. Simen: And as we as a super small content team sit and look at our empire, we will be able to understand this as one kind of, even though our customers are seeing us several different places, maybe even on Amazon, maybe we even have, what do we call it? Like a Z-shop, I don't know, maybe we're everywhere. And we can run all of this from one centralized place and understand what we're doing, and our customers will be all over the place. They will, when we don't do this, we will, suddenly someone will tell us, you have this weird thing, like this AdWords I found, how can I miss that because we're not running this as an integrated experience for us, so the experience for our customers kind of starts falling apart. This kind of, you can say it's a small thing, but to a customer or to someone that kind of wanting to relate to our product, it kind of is this little crack that shows that we a little bit don't care about them and their particular experience with us. This is about showing care and presence, and the two connect. Simen: I often say when you invest in a solution like this, the way to frame it in a sense is to feel like we're connecting, as someone implementing this, if I'm a developer working or a designer working on creating an experience like this, I should frame it like, I'm not creating a consumer experience, I give my content, people some tools to put stuff in there. I should think of this like I'm connecting a team of humans to an audience and I want these people to feel connected. I want their content team to understand what's going on, hopefully surfacing signal from what's going on in our products, and then having ability to create and respond to things that happen in the market, be able to rename products if they realize that, that's not working well. Be able to respond to pop cultural events maybe even in a quick way, in a real way that touches all my touchpoints. Simen: These things, they have been, it's kind of the promise of the digital experience management dream, but because these systems are so centralized, they are so, like you talk about WordPress, it has some of the same properties, it's very easy to set up and run, as long as you don't need to connect things in a more non-favorable way. But almost everyone needs that at this time. Paul: Yeah, great. We need flexibility, that's the paramount feature here, flexibility and intra-operability between your data and your history of owning and organizing that data. I think that's what's really exciting here is like, as a developer myself, that excites me because I can put data in and then repurpose it using paradigms and other tools that are familiar to me. I can go take that data, I can run analytics on it if I wanted to, you can really do whatever you want. Emily: Hey, this is Emily, one of the producers for PodRocket. I'm so glad you're enjoying this episode. You probably hear this from lots of other podcasts but we really do appreciate our listeners, without you, there will be no podcast. And because of that, it would really help if you could follow us on Apple Podcast so we can continue to bring you conversations with great devs like Evan You and Rich Harris. In return, we'll send you some awesome PodRocket stickers. So check out the show notes on this episode and follow the link to claim your stickers as a small thanks for following us on Apple Podcast. All right, back to the show. Paul: So I think I'd love to talk about why that has not been done before. You've said once or twice now, that's hard. It's hard to take this data and just throw it in the lake, it ain't that simple. So, why hasn't this done before? Why is it a difficult problem? And what's one of those hurdles that your team had to jump over they didn't expect to? Simen: Yeah. So one thing, we did a number of things very early on that you'd normally do late in a company's history. We knew that we wanted Sanity to be a proper data platform. We felt that one of the things that annoyed us with the headless space, was that they provided this specific content APIs that put a lot of expectations on how I would use them. In a sense to be kind of, at least back in those days, I would call them, they would be like blog APIs. I would get a content type and I would get a number of them sorted by date or something. They were very limited and very specific, so I felt like it needs to be, from a developer perspective, that needs to feel like a database. It needs to be doing all the things from database, it needs to connect different pieces of content together for me on the service side, I don't have time to grab all of those pieces. Simen: I want to show the games, I want to grab the guide, I want to grab the author and creators of those games. I want to grab all of those piece of data from my main game page, and I will have the server, Sanity fix that for me, and then give me exactly what I want to show. And I want to be able to express that, and I want to be able to have that repository of content, I want that to be able to sync to everything. All of my other sources that I also care about, I want to be able to integrate all that content. For one thing, I want to present it to my audience, let's say we have, we're syncing, let's say we have the Kickstarter status on games that are coming online, we want to sync in the Kickstarter current status into our content, because that's part of games that are about to be published, that's one of our categories. Simen: So we're syncing in that piece of content, but this also is about them being able to have that in a place where the teams can leverage that. Like in cu, yeah exactly, they can curate that content, display that as part of their world, not just that it has been integrated in a system later, I have that as material as the content team. And the other thing is that, that particular place where the content team works, because we wanted that to be a realtime collaborative thing, we wanted it to be like let's say Google Docs for arbitrarily complex data structures, so we kind of did that very early on, even though that's incredibly hard for this kind of content. Paul: That must be, yeah. Simen: Yeah, it is really hard. Paul: You made Google Docs for content. Simen: Yeah. And these can graphs or content, like it's super complex, but we still can do, show me who did what to this document at any given time. This person moved the map marker, this person created a new reference. It was incredibly hard, but we felt like this needs to get in early because it's going to be harder and harder, we need to have that from the start. Simen: Then we wanted that kind of authoring experience, a place where... Of course everyone has a system where you can invest in the end user experience, and like you said, that there's no slows on new tools and its better than before. But what's often very hard is, you want to be able to invest in the content creator's experience as well. You want to create because if it's about creating this connection between a group of real humans and their audiences, that needs to be expressive and intuitive for them as well. And it needs to be integrated. Simen: So one thing we did very early on is, our entire studio, we call the authoring experience is an open source. We get all the source code for that, but it's also very plug-able, it's easy to plug new things in there and still be able to upgrade in a simple way. So it's like, even though you can do anything, it's not like WordPress where you have to basically reinvest everything over again when you upgrade. This is like a plug-in platform, but it also lets you integrate... This is something that we didn't realize in the beginning is important, but as a company you will create these different properties, like you have our store, maybe we have a specific sub-brand somewhere, we have different touchpoints. Being able to then have this studio bring all of this different- Paul: Sanity Studio, right? Simen: Yeah. Paul: Just so the viewers can make sure everybody is on the same page. Simen: Thank you. The Sanity Studio. Being able to bring all of the different properties into the same pane of glass and have the teams be able to see that as a one whole, was incredibly important for us as we realized what we were making. So these things, the kind of unification. The integrated experience for the end user, the integrated data platform letting you flow data in and flow content out, and on this integration of the teams being able to have a team, see the same world as the customers or the audiences, and having able to see what the other teams are doing in realtime, this is kind of the pieces that needed to come together, which is hard to pull off. Paul: And if I'm using Sanity Studio, I could go back to the board game example, I could go get those most recent updated Kickstarter that are coming games. That's in our data lake, that's something that as a creator I can go to Sanity Studio and say listen, this is just data in a database that is meaningful to us as telling a story with our customers with content. Let me pull that in and use a GUI to make a post. Let me, exactly, and that's kick-ass. Simen: Stay updated, right? If then the game that I just wrote about yesterday now gets funded, that will just be updated in our content lake. And let's say we have a synthetic page that shows games that were just funded that we're going to stock, they will now automatically go onto there. So there's a level of automation, and there is a level of curation and deliberate kind of, yeah. I think that being able to combine those is incredibly powerful and important. Paul: And on the topic of the live editing, in Sanity Studio, this comes out of the box, right? I could be working on our updated games page while my friend is, and we can see our live impending versions about what's going to be posted on that page. Simen: Exactly. And if I want to go in and add something to your post as you are working on it, you'll see my little face coming in, and you'll see that stuff pop up, and you'll be able to revert it if you disagree, easily. You could go see the log, see Simen added this new games to your guide, revert. Simen: And yes, this comes out of the box. And this is maybe something that I'm not talking enough about because one thing, even like all these things are obviously valuable, everyone who wants these things, the problem, the reason you don't do is because it's expensive, it's hard, right? So the big thing here is for these things to be very easy to get started on. Sanity is something you can set up in minutes, setting up like a Shopify connection, we have starters and integrations for that. That's a 10 second affair. Simen: So our dream was to have something where, because very often we're driven by tactical need, like the we need to sell more of those speakers, sometime we need to just tell the story, and that we have three weeks. Our dream was we want a system where you can do that, you can move tactically like that, but then later you can stitch it back up. If you see this thing become important, you can fold this into your, let's say your unified Sanity Studio, because these things compose well. And now you kind of say, now we're back to this single pane of glass. Simen: In a sense, we try to create something that's super easy, super convenient, but then lets you have this strategic investment over time because you can compose them. And of course this comes also from the headless aspect. This is also a feature of Next.js or Gatsby, and this comes with that composeability kind of idea. But very often in classical headless CMS, they are very much like one offering kind of space. One asset, like one property. There's no unification there, I can't stitch them together easily. That's one thing where sometimes you feel like the headless space is a little bit like putting JSON API on WordPress and that's it. Sometimes I want to be a little bit evil, but that's how sometimes I feel frustrated when we get compared, when someone calls Sanity a headless CMS. I get, yeah it is headless, but that's not kind of- Paul: It has that feature, correct. Simen: Obviously it is headless, everything is headless if it's relevant right now, that's just obviously, we didn't even know the word when we created Sanity, it was like, yes of course it's about APIs. Yeah, let's call it headless, I don't care. Fine. Paul: Right. We're running up on time here, but I have a lot more that I'd love to touch on about Sanity. We're going to have to power on through this. But to quickly start- Simen: I'll be shorter, briefly. Paul: Who is Sanity for? We're talking about CMS systems here, so obviously new sites, eCommerce stores, but it could be so much more. This is a back and forth system for the backend and the frontend, so to speak. So it could really be, where does your mind stretch when you're building this? What are some crazy use cases you could think about because even me building my personal website, this would be perfect. This would be perfect. Simen: That was our vision, so going back to, we wanted something that was... Our thinking when we realized we were going to make a content system was like, there's just too many of them. There's like a specific CMS that's popular with Nordic newspapers, and it's complicated enough as a whole career to learn it, and if you do, then you're making Nordic newspapers. If you're doing WordPress, it makes sense you'll be making marketing sites forever. If you're doing Shopify, you're making shops of course. Simen: Our thinking was, we want something where as a developer, I can invest in this and it's as good a thing to use for my boyfriend's recipe sites, as it is for multi, like a cosmic fast food brand, which is like what we have done. Some of the biggest brands in the world is using Sanity for this incredibly complicated and beautiful experiences, bringing them together. We talked about this integrated experience management. But it's also being used by loads and loads, our free plan is very generous. Most people who just want to make a small blog or something, it will be free. Our weird use cases, like its been, it's important to us that it's good for eCommerce and media. New York Times is using Sanity, also huge eCommerce brands. It is used for scientific publishing like science journals. It's being used for loads and loads, like I said simple personal sites, portfolios, stuff like that. Simen: It is being used for a number of non, what excites me sometimes is like when it's being used for non, first let's say non-web. People using Sanity to serve data into for example, send together content into DoorDash or Uber Eats, they have their content model, and they're able to feed that into other properties. But then even more fascinating is when it's not even digital like people making books that are just authored in Sanity and then basically converted to the designs via scripts sending design. And then you have people doing, there is a company doing training doll for first aid responders, and these scripts are created using Sanity. It's not even visual, it's a certain training scripts. There's all kinds of things that people are doing using Sanity. Paul: What if I had a Raspberry Pi that was taking the temperature of the different rooms in my house, and I want to store that somewhere and write a blog about my monitoring and what I'm doing. And I could have maybe life graphs or articles or something. Sanity could help me do that too. Simen: Oh yeah. Our foosball table at the office in Oslo, we have, it logs every match, it maps the skill level of each player and balances the teams when you join. This is all run on Sanity. We used to have a brewery that was run on Sanity. I know one of our developers, he ran his house plants using Sanity. He has a Raspberry Pi measuring the humidity levels in different plants, and [crosstalk 00:43:04] dashboard, and can water them with some Sanity magic. Yes, you can connect everything. Simen: Of course the content lake is a realtime data platform, and you can either grab data as I'm reading this to render a page, but you can also subscribe for data. So you can say, I want to observe, let's say you're doing your temperatures in your house and you want to a realtime, I don't know if this makes sense, but let's pretend this is a good idea. So I'll be, when someone is opening that page, I want that content to update. I want to see, then this page can just subscribe to those temperatures, and when they change, when your Raspberry Pi writes, it will say yeah, there's a subscription for this category of temperatures, I'll ship a patch to the frontend about this. Paul: Do you see Sanity having a footprint at all in, I would call it the workhorse area of our modern computing space? Monitoring, logging, realtime updates from machines. I know that's kind of different than the content side of the world, and could be more realtime and more heavy. I wasn't sure if that's at all in the design scope right now. Simen: No. I would say, we say content is data and we think realtime is a huge part of that, being able to connect. Of course, in order to create a realtime offering, we had to create a realtime system. This also goes to delivering content in realtime. I think people will expect in the future that every piece of content that you have on your browser open, I come back two hours later, I expect it to still be current. I think it will update as I'm away. I think that's a huge thing to solve. In one sense, solving for what you're saying, is the thing the content space also needs to do, so yes, in that sense. Simen: We are very focused on, we define content as whatever piece of data you want to present to an audience, that's our framing. But within that, I'm seeing time series data, financial sites, maybe you are covering an election, loads of realtime data streams that you need to kind of curate and tell stories about, and distribute in realtime to your audiences. Sanity is really good for this right now and I think as we move forward, we will be even more fantastic. This is things that non-text, non-image content is a very huge focus for us going forward. Paul: And that's a whole new can of worms too because it's like well, it's really easy to pipe the data in there and it's really easy to know what it is in your human brain. But it's one hell of a task to tell the computer, "Hey, those 17 billion data points, I would love to draw a line on that." Simen: You just summarized that because this person only cares about 10% of that information right now, but in 10 seconds, he will click on something and he will care about every minute, because he wondered what happened to his savings right now, right at this minute because the federal reserve change the interest rate, and when did it happen, right? Paul: And when did it happen? Everybody needs to know. So it really sounds like Sanity is coming into an interesting position to disrupt pretty much every corner of how I would build a presentation platform for content and data that I might have in an organization. Sounds like we could traditional eCommerce, we could even step into monitoring and aggregations on data and time series, you said Sanity is good at doing that. Or even as a general purpose database. Paul: So, after our interview, I'm going to go check out your website, see what I'm going to be charged for if I have your cloud service. That's only, you have to look at, you can in certain use cases. But as you said, the free plan is very generous, so I guess we should wrap things up because you're going to have to go and, I know and myself are going to have to go. Is there any links or other resources that we should throw down this? We're definitely going to put in the Sanity Dev website, so viewers can go find it. Simen: Of course there is the Structured Content conference that I would really love people to come to. I don't think there is a lot of conferences in this space that is focused on the thinking around the content space, about how to work with the content, not specifically technically, but how should we think about this strategically, and how should we use that. And of course, how do we actually do it as developers and designers. And I would love for people to come there because I feel our biggest challenge right now, I said it at the top of this show that our biggest challenge, people need to understand the opportunities and learn to expect these things. We don't expect to be the only company providing this of course, this has to become a field. Simen: Hopefully, everyone who resonates with that message could come to that conference and help us build that field together. That would be my dream. Paul: That's a very awesome link to close with. So we have the structured data conference. Simen: Data content. Structured Content. Paul: Okay, content. Got you. Content. Keyword there. Simen: So we have the content lake, so it's a play on data lake, and we have the structured content. Of course, it's data that's structured, but it's content. Paul: So we'll definitely include that and the Sanity Dev website. I've been on their website myself, fantastic documentation if you want to get started. So we could, it's easily navigatable from the Sanity Dev website. If you're interested, go check that out, and thank you for you time Simen, it was great talking about structured data and this radical new way to build blogs and websites, and everything beyond. Simen: Thank you for your time, I love talking about this. Paul: Yeah, me too. All right, we'll see you around. Kate: Thanks for listening to PodRocket, you can find us at PodRocketpod on Twitter, and don't forget to subscribe, rate and review on Apple Podcast. Thanks.