Magnus Hillestad: We want to be ubiquitous. We quickly saw that if we really got to succeed, we need to be true to the community, we need to be able to deliver something that gives you instant gratification and gives you a lot of value in a small scale, but never holds you back when you want to scale this up to Fortune 100 company. Eric Anderson: This is Contributor, a podcast telling the stories behind the best open source projects and the communities that make them. I'm Eric Anderson. We are pleased to have the team from Sanity join us. So we have Magnus Hillestad and Even Westvang. Why not the two of you introduce yourselves also, so we can get your proper pronunciation. Magnus Hillestad: Yeah. Thank you. I'm Magnus Hillestad. I'm a Norwegian based in the Bay Area, CEO and co-founder of Sanity. Even Westvang: And my name is Even Westvang. I'm one of the co-founders that did product and marketing throughout the bootstrap and until our Series A. Eric Anderson: Fantastic. Great to meet you both. Well, I've met you before, but great to have you on the show. As is customary, start us out with explaining what Sanity is and then we'll go into the history. Magnus Hillestad: Yeah, thank you. So Sanity is a platform for structured content. We help businesses accelerate content velocity by treating their content as data to distributed at any application or device or channel from a single source of truth. Eric Anderson: Awesome. And that's a kind of an abstract, but also apt explanation. I mean, when people hear that you're a content store, they might ask if you are a CMS, which is like this thing that we're used to talking about storing content, but notably, you didn't use those words, which is interesting, right? Magnus Hillestad: Yeah. And of course, a content management system and we're a content platform. So we cover everything that a CMS covers. Historically, CMSs been very publishing oriented, become legacy. They are most often monoliths that treat both content authoring and actual presentation layer together with some source of content storage inside there, of course. But the problem is that when the requirements for businesses are changing and they're pushing their digital agenda, they're no longer looking just that websites and HTML. And then definitely don't want that webpage builder to be included in the content software. So then to solve that part, you get headless CMS, which also didn't use because headless CMSs are CMSs, still a lot of the similar thinking in terms of how you treat content, but now you separate it and decouple the presentation layer to an API. That's all good enough. Of course, that's needed. Magnus Hillestad: And of course, to that definition, you could also call us a headless CMS, but the challenge with that is it only liberates one factor of the challenges that you had with his old systems, because what really happens when businesses start to invest massively into content and they started investing massively into various kind of presentation layers, you need to have content integrity, you need to be able to interoperate your content with other sources of truth in the company, being product data, customer data, pricing, or what have you. But also most important, you need to be able to treat this as a single source of truth and distributed to any application or device from a single source of truth. That requires you to treat content programmatically. And that's a part of the development that has never happened on the CMS side. And people don't think about on the CMS side. Magnus Hillestad: And we also don't think it is a content management system. It's a platform for building your content infrastructure, for building your integrations with other data sources that should be treated as content and to treat content as data, and then to distribute it to anywhere. And, of course, most of the time that are web applications and websites, but more and more, you see people using applications, people using this for other mediums, such as voice, but it doesn't really matter. The point is that you should separate the presentation and design. You need to separate that from content so that you can iterate on however you're presenting the content while still storing your content from a single source of truth. That's what we're providing. I'm still abstract. Maybe Even should tell you how we're actually doing this. Eric Anderson: It's appropriate to say in the abstract. I mean, these terms have a lot of baggage. They mean a lot of things to people, and that's not what we're talking about here. So I appreciate the kind of re-invention and the vocabulary, because it's necessary. Even, we should get to you and your explanation on how we do this, but maybe I can interrupt. And let's take us back to the beginning. What inspiration led you to this? Maybe some of the story of Sanity are either of your stories, perhaps. Tell us what led to Sanity. Even Westvang: Sure. I can speak to that. We used to be a consultancy working out of also for institutions like Diller Scofidio and Renfro that made the High Lane park in New York City for sort of MIT, we used to be like people that built websites for sort of people and reading people's brand identities. That was one part of our business. And the other part of our business was building infrastructures for media companies. So we had like operations and more like larger scale ops in sort of house. Even Westvang: And I think when we didn't build websites or we built bespoke software for very many years and then when we went back to building websites, we thought that this market had changed. And then we went and looked at the offerings and we were kind of like, why? Because at that point in time, the logic of APIs had started to assert itself, the idea of having content in databases, I think for a lot of builders, Ruby on Rails showed the way to this setting up a Postgres database to treat your content to build websites with. And we were kind of like, "Why isn't this available as a commodity infrastructure for people who want to do this right?" When we looked at what these customers were doing, it's kind of like for a lot of people, your website just becomes the database that you have. It becomes the way you structure your information. And if it's a bag of WordPress pages, that's the database that your company has. Even Westvang: And we were working with a company in the Netherlands called the Office of Metropolitan Architecture, who are a world renowned architects, and they really didn't have a database of their work apart from their website. So when they came to us, we were kind of like, "What if we rebuilt your website, but we're not going to do the website first. We're going to create you this pristine archive of all of your information. And then we're going to express that as a website. We're also going to express it as business development tools, coffee table books, anything else that you guys might need." That was the sort of start. And that was the MVP. Then we finished the website, we finished the business development tools. Even Westvang: And then they came back and asked for books and we were sort of like, "Sure, we can reformat your website to books. It's easy." And that's what we did. So we made like print-ready PDFs from that website. So that's where the... So I think we just sort of, I think it was just a part of our practice that we were kind of like, why isn't this super easy? Why can't we just as a commodity treat content as data. Eric Anderson: Got it. And to be clear, so Even, you've been doing this for years as part of the operation beside Magnus, you were along for the ride, is that correct? Magnus Hillestad: No. Actually, this was before my time, and Oyvind and Simen and Even, my tree co-founders were still running the agency here in Norway. I'm a weird recovering private equity professional, who age 35, got tired of numbers and wanted to learn code. So I started coding. And one thing led to another and I left and thought, I'd learn more technology and maybe start a company. So I met Simen and Even and Oyvind around launch by the end of 2017. And they were still operating the agency and juggling the project of Sanity in parallel. And after some time, we found out that it was a great match in the way we think in terms of culture. And I'm not a content person, but you could do backends where I used to work bought Sitecore. So I had some knowledge of the space and we also used Episerver. And when I stopped being a finance professional, I actually moved over to the IT department and built some applications on top of Epi, which was a mixed experience. Magnus Hillestad: So basically, what we saw that it was a market with fundamental problems to be solved. There was a way of going to market and a product that lent itself very well to product-led growth to focus on delighting users and customers very quickly. And that is something where we all started. We just put it out there. And then we went together and we formed the SaaS company, Sanity, moved over all the eight employees, seven employees of the agency and started building. And we went out in Oslo to do our first pre-seed round. That was in March, 2018. Magnus Hillestad: Then subsequently, well, already then we knew that if we were going to be successful in this, we had to go pretty, pretty big because the world is full of local, vertical focused CMSs. Building a CMS isn't that hard. Building a platform that could really go broad and people can build on is much harder. And there are some in the content space had done that successfully historically in different kinds of shapes. And obviously, WordPress is one of them. The opportunity we have with the approach that we take to content is exactly that, and must be exactly that, even goes beyond that, because the way we treat content programmatically, it lends itself much more to sharing between organizations, which would lead to different ways of thinking about content than you did have in the HTML-centric world. Eric Anderson: Got it. So Even, you got this wealth of kind of in the trenches experience that we're so happy for because now we all get Sanity. And Magnus, we appreciate your midlife crisis and how it [inaudible 00:10:37]. So got it. So you have the core team together, you've built some code or you had a couple of projects until you've got some code line around, you formed this other entity, raised a little money. Was the vision clear then? I mean, you knew you wanted a content platform, you knew you had these ideas, but we're going to get into some of the concepts that you're kind of pursuing today. How quickly did all those emerge? Even Westvang: I think I can say we spent quite some time in the bootstrap because we knew that we needed to get these things right. Because it's sort of like in the philosophy of the product, it's about getting the fundamentals right. And then when you look at the problem, you're kind of like, because the first MVP had the user experience parts of it and aspects of the API is right, but it didn't have the entire package that we knew that we would need to ship. And if it's one thing that you know with software, and especially software platforms that other people build on is that they very quickly harden around the original intentions you had, they really sort of just all ossify, they just sort of you're stuck with, especially when people use your stuff in production. You might think that you're going to add things at a later point, but it doesn't happen. Magnus Hillestad: It doesn't. Even Westvang: No. So we actually spend quite a lot of time doing things like, let's write our own query layer on top of the Go parsers so that you can get at the data and reshape it in the query language, let's have references like you have in SQL, but in a document database, let's make sure that it's real time. Because if it's one thing that's for certain, no one adds real time collaboration to a product that doesn't have that at a later point, because it's just too hard. So we spent a lot of time on these. And we knew that we wouldn't be able to ship the user aspect real time for another maybe year, but we made sure that the base APIs that we actually shipped had all of the right capabilities because we wanted to do it fundamentally right. And I think that's what also gives the platform its strength. Eric Anderson: Yeah. There's a lot of wisdom there. I face this a lot. I live in Magnus' old world, investing in companies and there's always talk of like, what if so-and-so incumbent does shifts their business model, their product to do. And that doesn't happen. It happens if you're in the core path of the current trajectory of the product, but you're right, I think it's ossify fairly quickly. That's part of the magic of software. It's really efficient to distribute because you build it once and then you sell it a million times, but you can't build it a million times. So great. You've got these core ideas that you could develop and tested. And then as you're building, now the product, I'm sure you have ideas about open source, you have ideas about proprietary. How do you think about not just that spectrum, but I'm sure there's others, SaaS model, how does the product take shape and what informs the thinking there? Magnus Hillestad: There was a lot when we started working together the fundamental principles and the kind of the first principles that Sanity's built on were already in place. And the fundament was there. There was a lot of vision around other pain points to solve and what we should do around the product, but there wasn't so much time spent on what's the product approach go-to-market, what's the go-to-market model, what's the distribution, but also what's the end vision and how do we get there? And other than making something big, I guess it's fair to say, what's our place in the world? What's really the application? How broad could this become? And how should we think about building that in a sustainable way and in a fast way? Magnus Hillestad: And this started, this was the fundament of us going together and creating the SaaS company then January, 2018, with the first client, with a client, a couple of times was the UN in New York. That was pretty cool. That was like end of consulting. We don't do any professional services. We do bunch of customer success for our customers, but we don't take money for data other than the SaaS costs that's normal. Magnus Hillestad: So what we found was that there was questions around enterprise versus SME businesses. There was question around open source versus closed source. There were questions around what direction should we take in order to get to this final product? And we also had big question about how do you build a company around this? Because at that point, we were 10 people in Norway, but we already knew that we had to move to the US. I currently live in the US, Even been living there up until now, just moved back. And we have other Norwegian colleagues in the Bay Area. And we've been building a team in the US. So roughly half of the company is in the Bay Area or in the US. Magnus Hillestad: And there were a lot of these things that we need to figure out early, but we fairly quickly came to a couple of big, important insights. We want to be ubiquitous, and this was maybe more pushed on the market by us. But we realized that from seeing the feedback we got for the first six months in market, we launched end of 2017. And the summer of 2018, we got inbound from very large companies that were calling us to say, we've been looking a year or longer for what you're doing, because we've been following the trends in the content space. And none of the solutions there serves the needs that we have. Magnus Hillestad: And we put out a study in August, 2018. It was still pretty early with a classical question, what would you do if we were gone tomorrow? And with some additional questions of what's your alternative, et cetera? And showed that half of the users of Sanity said the alternative was to build something themselves. So we very quickly saw that we had a different appeal than just showing that it's a classical CMS product. Magnus Hillestad: And already then we had people in the community, we already established a Slack community by then that now has thousands of users, but then started to have quite a few 100. And when we asked them what they think about Sanity and how they compare Sanity, they would answer, "Do you mean as a headless CMS, or do you mean the full product?" And that's still kind of a little bit stands with us because one of the challenges that we've been seeing us as founders is we know what we are and we know what we want to be viewed as, but there's this huge trend of focusing on JAMstack. And everybody's talking about headless CMS, which we 100% cover what you get from a headless CMS, but for us strategically, that's not what we really are. That's not the broad fundamental problem that we supposedly solving. Magnus Hillestad: So we've been spending a lot of time since we, and I think in particular, since we became part of Heavybit and moved to the US summer of 2019, started working with James Lindenbaum team at Heavybit. And later also with threshold when we did our Series A. We've been trying to reshape, how do we communicate this thing that we are? And how do we explain to people that this is fundamentally important for how you build your content strategies, which is a core part of your digital strategy for years to come? This is not a trivial decision you're making. And we quickly saw that this really speaks, of course, to developers, it speaks a lot to, I would say, highly technical product managers and digital executives and those sort of first users, those sort of first customers, but both from smaller organizations and big organizations. Magnus Hillestad: So again, pulling it back to the point of ubiquitous, we quickly saw that if we really got to succeed, we need to be true to the community, we need to be able to deliver something that gives you instant gratification and gives you a lot of value in a small scale, but never holds you back when you want to scale this up to Fortune 100 company. Eric Anderson: Fantastic. Let's pause the history because I think we keep bringing up the fact that you have these unique approaches. And I don't know that we've brought that fully, we fully grounded what it is you do this unique, and I don't want to spend some time on that. So let me throw out what I understand are some themes that you tackle and we can walk through these, and let me know if these are the right way to talk about it. So one, in your traditional CMS, information is always stored in a data model relative to how it is intended to be presented is my understanding. And you throw that out the window. You're like, let's not store data how we intend for only one purpose to present it, let's store it in a way that describes what it is fundamentally. And then when you want to present it, you pull it out and do whatever you want with it. Even Westvang: I think that's the central point, right? And I think the historical parallel here is what sort of relational databases did. Relational databases, it's basically the idea that you can store information. And then according to local business needs, you can transform that information to different views and make it valuable, given your circumstances. And relational databases show up and give us things like SAP and just in time and organizations like sort of Apple. Even Westvang: And I think what we're trying to do here is saying sort of like, what if you instead of describing your website could describe the domain model of your organization? What if that was what you were actually doing? And what if editors, what if for the people doing this sort of work, the editors could feel like they're doing exactly the same thing? The abstraction level doesn't change. In fact, the abstraction level goes down because they're no longer creating an employee page or making an employee template with some random stuff in it, some specific layout. They're just like describing the employee, they're describing, for a consultancy, they would be describing an employee. They would be describing the employee's case, the employees educational background, they would be describing case studies, customers. They just described what their organization is doing. And then you materialize aspects of that as a website. And then there was the question that is sort of like, what specific characteristics does the system have to support that kind of usage? Because that's what we spend all of that time building. What does that entail? Eric Anderson: I'm going to throw out a claim here, maybe it's contentious, but I'm going to say that CMSs aren't wrong. They're just dated. There was a time when we only were building one website. And if you're only building one presentation layer, then it makes sense to put the content in the one form it's going to be presented. Magnus Hillestad: Not even necessarily dated for some use cases. And I think headless CMS can work well for a bunch of use cases, although I think there are some principles of how you efficiently should put those experience to market that we see still people come to us because of code first and because of the flexibility you get, but not everybody needs to solve the complex things that we can solve. So there's a spectrum of things that would start, starting all the way with the low code webpage builders. Even Westvang: Yeah. I also think that there's an important thing here that is sort of like, I think writing systems optimize around circumstances. So I think sort of like when you have a page-oriented web, that's then your writing tools optimize around authoring one on one page. What's happening here is that value is created over APIs and businesses are assembled from networks of APIs. And this means that you then, if you have content represented and authored in a sort of way that captures value in a way that makes it amenable to being transported over APIs and transacted over APIs so that it's much more valuable in these networks, then the logic of authoring suddenly changes. And then these representations make sense. Even Westvang: I don't think Sanity as a system would have made sense 10 years back. It certainly makes sense now because then the richness of the data models and the accuracy of the representation matters. And it's sort of like, can you update the documents in real time? Can you use it in an event-driven, non-ETL sort of enterprise hub? Does that actually work? Can you text? All of these design decisions actually matter for how much value capture you actually get. Eric Anderson: I'm imagining the cognitive dissonance, if I'm building a one site system, WordPress or whatever feels very comfortable. And then if, say, I'm an e-commerce company and then I want to connect to Amazon and send some of that content to Amazon. And then I feel a little cognitive dissonance, I'm like, "Do I need to make another kind of branch of this CMS to fit their needs?" And then I'm repeating myself and then the frustration sets in, where I'm like, "I wish I just had a central store of content around the, as you said, kind of native data model of the content." And then I can push it across to any outlet, to any API, to whoever consumer wants it. Magnus Hillestad: Yeah. And I think even more, Eric, also one distributed to many places, but when you just want to start to pull in some other data sources into your content experience, then you immediately see some of the problems that we're talking about, because, of course, you can do that flat as HTML, but you can't really do that from a single source of truth without having a support that thinks that way and supports that way. Magnus Hillestad: So what we're quickly seeing is that, especially companies that think about the red tread of the product experience that customers should have when they're experiencing your brand, your product, whether it be support, whether it be marketing sides, or whether it be some sort of onboarding or product support tool, you really need to be able to control that experience and make sure that you have content integrity and that you're able to iterate on those experiences so that you could react to all the feedback you were getting and optimize those kinds of experiences and change them because they're not static, maybe as a marketing webpage, it's a bit unfair to say that a marketing webpage or a website is static. But if you think about the old traditional not change it too much marketing website, that may be true. And of course, in the world we're living in now and we have customers like Figma and Brex and Netlify that do amazing things on their marketing stacks with Sanity as the content platform. Magnus Hillestad: So we'd love sanity for traditional marketing websites applications, but you quickly see the breadth of the product and the importance of creating content as data once you start to have other sources and you really want to push this product experience out, and that's especially true, I think for companies who come from the physical world and expand on their digital transformation, because then truly, this digital, whatever thing you're building becomes for them is particularly important that they really think about the approach they take. Eric Anderson: Now that we've covered thematically what Sanity is trying to do, maybe it's worth calling out some of the specific things it does. And I'll throw out a few of these as I understand it, but you tell me what are the important ones. Portable text is interesting. Is that core to the product? It sounds like it's useful outside of Sanity arguably, this is kind of a potential standard, right? Even Westvang: Yeah. I think it was a great discussion on Hacker News when we codified it as a standard, because then you've got this whole sort of like XML is better than JSON for some texts, which is a classic. I think it's, for us, it's really, when we looked at the, again, when you look at the fundamentals, you're kind of like, you can use markdown, you can use raw HTML or maybe rather, you need to make a format for encoding texts that makes it really easy to mix data with [inaudible 00:26:26] because it was sort of like, and we looked at this and we were kind of like, "Oh, we're going to need the ability to annotate block level elements." You're going to be able to need to be able to encode spans. And you're also going to need to have data structures that are kind of like, "I want to put five images in a gallery inside of a text. And then I want to have portable text in the description fields, but only allow for bold and maybe geographical and coding in spans." Even Westvang: It's kind of like when we talk to especially publishing companies, they become really happy because they can express anything that they need for sort of type setting or anything that they, because they're very text-intensive companies and they see that they have all of this freedom of expression. So we're really happy about that sort of effort. And we hope that we can make that both push that as a standard. And also, we have quite a lot of tooling for it in terms of converting from and to it, but also, we hope to launch standalone user interfaces that people can use to write portable texts within inside of other applications. That's something that we are interested in them being able to do. Eric Anderson: Got it. Yeah. Yeah. I think I saw that you wouldn't imagine in the future that people do a lot of editing of portable text directly. This is just kind of a transmission wire format. It's human readable, but- Even Westvang: Not very. Magnus Hillestad: That goes for all of Sanity and the way we treat content. It's JSON and it's technically you could read the symbols, but that's the whole point of the Sanity Studio, our open source editing environment that only works with our hosted content like is that you could easily see all this as Google Docs-ish kind of experience. So we don't think humans should be exposed to JSON, but we think everything needs to be structured on the backend. So portable text is a good example of that, of course. Even Westvang: I think also one thing about portable text. Also, when it's used within the Sanity infrastructure, all of your text also becomes a queryable artifact. If you link to another object, you will get a reference violation if you try to delete the thing that's being referred to. You can also query for anything that's in text because it's just a data structure and also. So it also along with everything else becomes a sort of in queryable asset. Eric Anderson: Got it. You get this element of kind of safety. I don't know if type safety is the right word, but also, dependency mapping and that you would hop from something structured. Even Westvang: Yeah. You get data integrity, but you also get the ability to query so you can ask sort of questions like, give me all of the articles that mentioned the actor, Sigourney Weaver, as not only as free text, but the object, or give me articles that have more than five pictures, or give me articles that contain mathematical formula or et cetera. Eric Anderson: Got it. Now you mentioned the open source editor, the Content Lake. We've talked about portable text and the query language that goes along with it, allowing you to query JSON structured content. I thought the concept of transactions and patches is interesting. Even Westvang: It is. Eric Anderson: It almost feels good like. Even Westvang: It kind of does for us, these APIs arrived out of the necessity of many people editing the same document at the same time. And then you need like very atomic patches because they're all happening at the same time. So you have to be able to say, let Magnus moved the document position in the array from index two to three, that needs to be an atomic patch, Even edited a statistically probable piece of text in this running text here. And that's where all of these patch and mutation APIs came from that we needed to have this sort of changes that we apply. And all of those changes are also stored. And so all of the documents have a mutation log and a complete history down to debounce keystroke also, so you can roll. And there's an extremely compact format for these changes so that you can easily view them and quickly view them and also roll back any field to any previous state. But this really comes out of this real-time support that was a part of Sanity at launch. Magnus Hillestad: I think it's fair to say, Eric, that some of the things we do is a little bit the chicken and egg, because what we just spoke about in terms of portable text, in terms of real-time and the way we structured our backend, they're all needed in terms of delivering a good editing experience that is collaborative and that's real time and all that, but at the same time, they are the core components of treating content as data that scales into solving many other problems than just real-time content creation. Magnus Hillestad: And you can't really have a platform for structured content that really treats content as data unless the following things are true, content needs to be structured, which of course, you solve first step with JSON, which a lot of people would use on the backend. Second step, you need to make everything into an array of objects, so even texts, portable text. Then you need a really good query language so you can approach that and transform it and distribute it wherever you want it. But you also need really good query APIs. You not only need this for real-time aspect, but you needed to make sure that you can interoperate other sources of truth and other parts of your organization, but also bots, they're going to do work on that content because humans and machine needs to work together. And it's not only an editing tool, it's really a content platform. Magnus Hillestad: So in order to have that, you need to treat content as data, which then directly also gives you a real-time approach, which lends itself to proper collaboration without race condition, et cetera. And this is not really possible to treat without really giving people full freedom of the content model, as we discussed a bit earlier, which doesn't really make any sense if you don't give people an open source editing environment that they can easily extend and customize. So we treat a couple of different things here, but they all fit very neatly together inside the vision that we believe in, in how people should treat content. Eric Anderson: And I think it fits nicely in the vision of distribution. I imagine in times past, CMSs and related products were bought by marketing or IT. And part of the JAMstack revolution is empowering developers to pick their own tools. And I feel like if I were to build a content store from day one, as a developer, I'd want some of these elements. And I imagine these features speak to developers in a way that they maybe don't speak to marketing as powerfully, but fortunately, developers are empowered to buy infrastructure today because things are modular and they have opinions and they have more influence in the organization. Magnus Hillestad: Yeah. We see that a lot. And we see that the best organizations, they take full control over their experiences versus customers, which means that they insource developers or maybe they work extremely closely with some agencies, but most often, they would insource the developers. We also see this trend of marketing in certain organizations, marketing, losing some of the say of these experiences because it's really a convergence between product and marketing. And maybe this speaks mostly to more physical businesses that are transforming digitally. And there's an interface between marketing and product. So product people come in, they take charge this week. And we see that a lot. And they ask very different questions. Of course, they also have internal developers and they have different requirements for what they want to build. Magnus Hillestad: And in a way, you can say, Eric, every application has some sort of "CMS-ish" part to it if they're going to treat content in some way, but nobody would ever put Adobe or WordPress or Episerver as the backend for an application. They would use a database or something, put up some flat files somewhere or something. Now why wouldn't you use this content infrastructure with a very flexible and extensible studio environment to power your application? That's what we're seeing. How's the best way to present this [inaudible 00:34:40] startup that treats video filters and content? Even Westvang: There are presentation software for video conferencing that allow you to integrate your slides into the video stream. Magnus Hillestad: That was well-put. And they use Sanity as a content backend to their platform. Even Westvang: They use it for the media assets that they use in the application itself. But I think we're seeing some of that usage and then we're seeing it in marketing. Some of the most interesting cases we see is when marketing integrates with product and data sources. So you have people like flowing data off of ERP systems into our backends, and then treating that to actually describe the products themselves, tie marketing collateral to it, and then stream that out over APIs to all of the services that they need to power to actually get the product sold. Even Westvang: So we're seeing some of these very integrated database like use cases. So we really see it as sort of like Sanity is used for everything from setting up a blog on a Wednesday Eve to powering some of these very business critical large infrastructures for very large companies. And they're basically using the same feature sets, but in a different way. And it's also leveraging the competencies, the everyday competencies of modern devs. It's just JavaScript and it's just JSON and it's just the technologies that everyone knows at this point. Eric Anderson: This is fantastic. I could go all day, but we should have you tell us about what you're up to today and what the future holds for you. And then we can wrap up. Magnus Hillestad: Yeah, we just closed our Series B funding round. We are very proud to get ICONIQ Growth with Doug Pepper on board, joining our board. Also, Lead Edge Capital is investing in the round. And it's a total round of $39 million. So we feel a bit grown up. It's something that was earlier than we anticipated, but roughly a year since we raised our A and we've been growing very fast, tripling our customer base, and really also meeting the goals we set in terms of starting building out sales, starting out building our customer success. Magnus Hillestad: And we were finding ourselves sitting, looking at the next leap of the organization. How are we going to build this organization that can help us move the product forward, the community forward, the marketing and messaging forward in all these things that we need to do to explain people how great a product this is? And we had a lot of interests. So we were lucky to close that round now recently. And it's mainly going into building the organization further. We have been inbound all the way. We don't really spend on marketing. Every customer that we have comes through our funnel, which is very data-centric. Magnus Hillestad: We've been broadening the vision of the product all the time along the way. And we will continue to do that. And we have some clear directions where we'll take the product that we will show you in over the months and years to come. But most importantly, we need to really build a sustainable company. We're all Norwegian, and Nordic is maybe not so known, but known for a couple of things. And one of the things we really want to make sure is that we build a strong culture in the company, really build a sustainable business approach because when we have really high ambitions for changing the whole way people think about content, we need a lot of people to subscribe to our vision. We're getting close to a 100,000 signups, but we think in orders of magnitude, and the next one is a million. Magnus Hillestad: So we really need to make sure that we build a team that continued to build the product, both in the aspect of the community and the enterprises because of our ubiquitous approach. And we need to continue to build with people who are great at helping us tell the story and lower the bar, because what we're doing is quite technical. There's a lot of people that could have a lot of joy from what we're delivering, but could find it somewhat hard to use or somewhat intimidated by, especially me as a noob dev could find things to do with Sanity quite difficult. Then the question is how difficult is Sanity? Well, hard things should have a lot to do in that direction. And then core part of our philosophy is to create a diverse community because only then could we become a diverse team that then create a diverse product. And that's, I think, fundamental to succeed on if we're going to succeed on our big goals. Eric Anderson: Well, you've clearly come a long way. It's an exciting time to be in the Sanity community. We mostly have open source projects on here and you have this open source editor, but I think what's really fitting though, is you have this vibrant community, which I've interacted some with and people seem excited about. Where do folks go to get involved if listeners are excited by what we're talking about? Even Westvang: If they go to sanity.io, there's an NPM command that they can use to install Sanity in 120 seconds. If they want to hang out with 10,000 other people who use the product, you can go to slack.sanity.io to sign up for our Slack community. Magnus Hillestad: To build a cool thing, I don't know if you've seen Sanity Exchange, where we have a publicly facing surface for showing all the cool projects that people are making, the cool plugins that people are doing, the people in the community. This is something that started less than six months ago. So it's growing, but it's a source of inspiration for what people do and what you can do with our platform. So there are multiple ways into Sanity and follow us on Twitter. Even Westvang: YouTube. Magnus Hillestad: Twitch. Eric Anderson: Fantastic. Magnus, Even, thanks for coming on the show. Even Westvang: Good luck to you. Magnus Hillestad: Thank you so much for having us. Eric Anderson: You can find today's show notes and past episodes at contributor.fyi. Until next time, I'm Eric Anderson and this has been Contributor.