Strapi Casts for Growth in the Headless Sea: A Conversation with CEO Pierre Burgy

I’ll say it: the word “headless” isn’t exactly a great catch. Or catchy, for that matter. 

I’m not alone in this opinion (or malady, take your pick). It suffers a multitude of problems, but mostly a basic lack of brand appeal. 

We all get it. The idea of “cutting off” a head – be it from a fish or a presentation layer – is intuitive enough. But can’t we do better? Isn't rebranding a great way to reenergize products and categories? 

Just take seafood: most fish fans would salivate over the catch ‘o the day being Orange Roughy. But if the marketing folks hadn’t gotten hold of it, you’d be ordering Slimehead from the menu.

Yuck. 

Don’t panic: I’m not suggesting we toss “headless” back in the drink and start trimming bait. Even if you find the word less-than-appetizing, its impact on the CMS landscape is undeniable. Over the last few years, new platforms have been biting like Bluefins as frontend options continued to expand and composable stacks captured the market zeitgeist – hook, line, and sinker. 

But 2024 is getting mighty fishy, and the term “headless” is starting to taste a little different.

There are several reasons for this. First, headless vendors are endeavoring to compete more aggressively and deliver greater value to customers via expanded features (think visualization, hosting, DAM, the whole tackle box). This means they look less like “pure” headless platforms, and more like, well, CMSs. Of course, it makes sense to build on what you’ve got, especially if you’re well-funded and beholden to growth expectations. 

At the same time, more traditional CMS and DXP platforms have been repositioning their products to be more… er, “composable,” or at least some permutation of the word – even offering headless features or entirely separate headless CMS offerings. There’s real value to this transition, as Gartner observed in its latest MQ report for DXPs, but we’re still trying to catch a big one doing composable in the true spirit of the word.   

So what’s a headless CMS to do when everyone is “racing to the middle” to win? Double down on what you do best and listen to the customer. This is exactly where Pierre Burgy is netting success. 

As the founder and CEO of Strapi – a leading open source headless CMS – he's building on the same community focus that made his platform scale beyond expectations. 

Don’t take his word for it (or mine). As of January, Strapi had reeled in 60,000 GitHub stars, amassed 1,000 contributors, and topped over 12 million downloads – making it the most popular open source headless CMS on the market. Oh, they’ve also secured $45 million in funding along the way.

With numbers like that, it might sound like a fish tale. But it’s really a love story, one that started a decade ago and has grown into a fervent community of international users.

As Pierre and company look ahead, the conditions are indeed changing. Competition and confusion plague all sides of the CMS market, so Strapi is getting ultra-clear on its offerings and providing a succinct roadmap for new features. This includes live editing, something they hope will fix the broken promises of the headless CMS experience.

That last bit reflects a trend I’m seeing across most headless platform vendors. Each has its own approach to addressing what Preston So (VP of Product at dotCMS and an industry thought leader) once referred to as a broken social contract with headless consumers, describing the rift as an “uneasy alliance” between personas. Digital experience composition and visual builders have backfilled some of the gaps, but market forces have finally persuaded vendors to pursue their own solutions. 

In our conversation, Pierre shared a bit about his epic school-to-Strapi journey and how that experience prepared his company for the next chapter. It's a tale of passion and patience, of building something that scales in all directions and stands the test of time. 

As the market shifts and change accelerates, he's eyeing it all like a skilled fisherman, testing the waters and looking for the best spot to drop a line – and catch success. 

From side project to headless champion

Like so many content management platforms before it, Strapi emerged as a bootstrapped framework built out of necessity, coalescing around a blend of APIs and CMS. Even the name “Strapi” is a shortened expression of the phrase “Bootstrap your API,” en français.

In 2014, Pierre and his pals Aurélien Georget and Jim Laurie – now respectively the Chief Product Officer and CTO – were still attending university in France, looking for paying gigs as hired code slingers. Little did they know how their idea would explode.

“It was very much a side project,” he reminisced. "We three co-founders were students at the time, and to make some money, we worked as freelance developers. So we built a lot of websites using traditional CMSs.”

That was around the time that new frontend frameworks like React were becoming vogue libraries in the dev toolbox. He and his colleagues thought this was cool for obvious reasons, speed being one of them. But they also loved the way they were leveraging APIs to power expansive projects like mobile apps. 

“Because we were students, we were like,let's build a community!Back in the day, we weren’t even used to having a salary, so we were comfortable having very little money and we were so bullish on the project.”

Suddenly, they wanted to use JavaScript everywhere and not rely on opinionated CMSs for frontend PHP. They also wanted a better developer experience to reflect their needs as builders. Unfortunately, there weren’t tools available to meet their explicit requirements.

“So we said, well, let's build our own CMS – one that’s API-first and based on JavaScript,” he said. “We got started using the project for our clients and realized that every developer, every company [we were working with] was wanting to build on it. We then wanted to make this tool available to more people. And for us, the best way to onboard developers was to make the project open source.” 

This is an important moment in the company’s arc. In October 2015, the trio – still a tiny cabal of freelancing students – published the project on Github and started scaling users. They maintained it as a labor of love, working nights, weekends, and holidays to keep pace with the demand. 

From a business perspective, success came quickly, with a pre-seed round in 2018 and a Series A the following year. That led to a Series B of $31 million in 2022, a significant raise that has scaled the organization to 75 people across multiple continents – and ample funding to build a roadmap of new features, including Strapi Cloud and Strapi Market.

Strapi’s team assembled at an international company offsite in June of 2023

Open source helped scale Strapi's success, but its highly extensible and rich, customizable features have made it an attractive platform for hundreds of enterprise customers. This includes IBM, Accenture, eBay, Walmart, and others. That said, the most remarkable growth has come from its burgeoning user community of 21,000+ members on Discord – something that Pierre insists was a guiding principle from the beginning. The Strapi Forum is a great indicator of its active and vibrant user base. 

I asked him about the journey to build such a dynamic ecosystem, and as founders, what advantages existed being so young and early to the game.

“Taking this kind of risk was important," he recalled. “Because we were students, we were like, let's build a community! Back in the day, we weren’t even used to having a salary, so we were comfortable having very little money and we were so bullish on the project. We wanted to be something huge but we weren’t that focused on money. We [only] started making revenue in 2020, so five years after the first release on GitHub. Later, we had the chance to work with investors who are very much aligned with our vision.”

Clearly, it’s paying off. Today, Strapi is helping its customers adapt to a rapidly changing digital economy, one that was thrust lightyears ahead due to the pandemic. By providing a more composable platform to future-proof applications, they’re able to support the growing shift towards omnichannel experiences, where complexity is part of the bargain – and simplifying things is central to Strapi’s mission. 

Mending the Editorial Experience 

As Pierre pointed out, Strapi has cultivated a strong relationship with developers. This is completely logical because he and his team are cut from the same cloth.

“We were developers, so we knew how to talk to developers,” he exclaimed. “And that's why we've been very family-focused on those specific personnel. We’re much more comfortable chatting with them.”

“I think developers love headless CMS because there is a strong separation of concern between the front end and the CMS. But we need to fix the editing experience. This is our primary focus – and we're going to innovate a lot around it.”

And herein lies one of the biggest challenges with modern headless CMSs. As Pierre explained, headless has huge advantages, and it’s easy to connect with a multitude of platforms. But from the get-go, headless broke the editing experience. 

“I think developers love headless CMS because there is a strong separation of concern between the front end and the CMS. But we need to fix the editing experience. This is our primary focus – and we're going to innovate a lot around it.”

Pierre underscored how this pain has been a known variable. When conversations occur with developers – as they do at the company's StrapiConf event – there’s very little complaining about the product or experience. But in chats with content editors, it’s clear that more work needs to be done. 

To that end, Strapi’s mission for 2024 is to enhance the editing experience, and it looks promising. The “milestones” include link-to-edit features that provide direct access to components, side-by-side editing that offers a lightweight CMS panel in real time, and live editing – a collaborative tool for editing content with teammates.

Simplicity is driving everything, and that’s evident in the manifestation of the UI. 

“We want to bring the content and the CMS in the same tab, so editors can review the different components on the frontend and click on them to be redirected to the exact same place in the CMS,” Pierre explained. “And every time they type something, it will update the content in the preview environment – so they have a fantastic editing experience.”

Strapi plans to implement these features by the end of the year, but it’s already clear how passionate Pierre is about the potential. They're endeavoring to solve the core issue of a broken editing experience, but they're also listening carefully to their users and tuning into what really matters. 

A roadmap for growth

While the editing strategy is front-and-center for Strapi, it will continue building on significant momentum from 2023. Last year saw big progress with the expansion of plugins across its Strapi Market – including Apollo Sandbox for GraphQL, Telegram Bot, and a helper plugin for migration that received community support. 

Additional milestones include bulk publish capabilities, expanded TypeScript support, and a rich text editor. This all rolled up into the release of Strapi v5, which launched its beta in early March. The full release – due between May and June – offers new draft and publish features, quicker build times, releases to manage scheduled publishing, content history for instant rollbacks, simplified plugin creation, and more. 

As the swell of new headless players begins to crest, features are but one dimension of a competitive posture. Vendors will need to do more than just stay in parity, and pricing is a one-way elevator to commoditization. Users weigh the vision, community, and other intangibles as part of their evaluation. That includes the ability to handle complex governance, something only established platforms tend to grasp.

I asked Pierre what “aces” Strapi might have up its sleeve when facing this dense competitive landscape. He was quick with his answer – and as it turns out, it’s a card that’s already on the table. 

“We have one thing that really makes us stand out from the competition, and it’s that Strapi is open source, so it can be self-hosted,” he said. “We've been selling our Enterprise Edition, which is an extension of the open source product, and all of this is self-hosted. We have a phenomenal adoption in government, healthcare, banks, all of these regulated industries. And of course, especially organizations in Europe, but also in Asia and in many places that don't like to host their data outside of their countries. We’ve seen a massive adoption from these big organizations because they really appreciate the self-hosted components of our strategy.”

Scaling in the Strapi Cloud

Another impressive part of Strapi’s ecosystem is its Strapi Cloud, which launched last February. Since then, it has grown by leaps and bounds, with the number of active projects rising quickly. 

While self-hosted options are an ideal match for some enterprise customers, Strapi Cloud enables users to rapidly deploy to production in a matter of clicks – and minutes. You can deploy code from your Github repo, select a hosted region, and define usage parameters for consumption. Users can also launch seamlessly with a complete stack of Strapi resources, including DB and CDN, all with no management required. 

One of Strapi Cloud's biggest benefits is that it further simplifies the connection points for users. As Pierre pointed out, this is all tied to improving not just the editor’s experience but all facets of what Strapi delivers in terms of choice for its customers. 

“Certainly, our primary focus for this year is on the editing experience and [simplifying] the overall experience between the CMS and Strapi Cloud – our Platform as a Service. We want to simplify all of this.”

What’s ahead for Strapi Cloud in 2024? For starters, faster performance – powered by a cloud CLI – will take a user from zero to production in less than 5 minutes. SOC 2 compliance and enhanced developer experience are also on the roadmap. 

What about AI?

While Strapi is less directly entangled with built-in AI features, its open sourceness offers a range of options via its Strapi Market. This includes an Open AI plugin, an AI image generation plugin courtesy of Stability AI, and a ChatGPT Clone complete with custom routes and services to power chat apps. Being open source has provided the ideal levels of flexibility and customizability for these resources to manifest. 

I’ve long maintained that CMS users are a fickle bunch when it comes to content creation. Some (myself included) prefer to create exclusively outside the system, adding content only if it’s ready to edit or publish. But when the editing experience is really stable and the UI is elegant, users opt to create in the CMS itself. This is where AI has become a staple within certain platforms, particularly around workflows and guardrails for style guides. 

When I asked Pierre about his approach to AI, he took a “cart before the horse” stance.

“Content can be made in many different places, but I would say that you write content in the CMS only if the editing experience is great,” he surmised. “So I think the CMS needs to fix this issue first – and once the editing experience is absolutely fantastic, candidates will likely write the content and benefit from AI to write blog posts, for example.”

He went on to describe other areas where AI can prove useful in content management systems, specifically when defining content structure and accelerating content generation (think placeholders that might be used at the beginning of a project and replaced over time). He also reinforced the profound impact AI will have on personalized content and generating real time customized versions for website visitors. 

“I think AI is going to change a lot,” he predicted. Indeed.

Reeling in the future

If you didn't catch it on LinkedIn, the aforementioned Preston So recently proclaimed that the “pure” headless CMS is dead. 

For headless vendors, that might feel heavy-handed, but these kinds of titles are designed to stir conversation… and a little controversy.  

At the same time, we can’t deny that the headless CMS marketplace has become crowded, noisy, and commoditized, leaving buyers swimming in a sea of sameness. Sure, with so many frontend options, there’s been an abundance of room for solutions. But I talk to a new headless CMS almost every week – and that’s a lot. 

The real question is: how can the buyer cut through that noise and make sense of it all?

This is precisely why Strapi is hyper-focused on evolving its value. At the end of the day, it all comes down to following where the value chain leads – and that requires understanding the voice of the customer. Editors and developers both need tools that speak to their needs, and this is where the right vision and leadership can make a difference.

Despite the existential headwinds, Pierre Burgy is excited. His passion is undeniable, and Strapi's growth is a testament to his resolve. Maybe he’s been this way since his days as a student, still “bullish on the project” as he described. 

“I think it's a no-brainer that headless CMS is the future,” he said confidently. “There are strong challenges to solve things such as the editing experience, and there are technology innovations like AI that are going to change the industry, probably forever. But I'm extremely excited about the future – of the company, the products, and the industry. And we are here for the long term. Financially speaking, we raised our Series B months ago, and we’re growing very, very fast. Even more since the release of Strapi Cloud.”

Fishing is about having the right tackle and finding the best spot to drop a line. But it’s also about patience – something we don’t have an abundance of in the tech world. Platforms that have earned loyal communities know a thing or two about nurturing and cultivating, and if they’re listening closely, they can keep hooking bigger fish by delivering value. 

“We definitely listen to the community,” Pierre said. “They are the ones who are right. We have a lot of biases, and they might be helpful to innovate – but at the end of the day, the community is right, and that's one of the biggest benefits of open source.”

It’s never been harder to predict what’s in those deep waters. But if Strapi can teach us anything, it's that you can always cast further and wider with a fierce community by your side.

Who knows. Maybe you'll snag some Orange Roughy.

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