Dominic Angerer (2:36)

Happy to do so. So my name is Norrigan. I'm one of the two founders of StoryBlock and the current CEO. I've been starting the whole thing about eight years ago, together with Alexander. I'm a software engineer myself that turned into that what, what we call CEO now. But there's so many different facets in last eight years that I went from selling to marketing, over back to product all the way. But in my heart, I'm still a software engineer.

Greg Kilstrom (2:58)

Nice.

Dominic Angerer (2:59)

Nice.

Greg Kilstrom (2:59)

Great. Well, yeah, so let's. We're going to talk about a few things today, but I wanted to start with the first aspect is that aspect of joy in products. I mean, I think a lot of us that, you know, we use software day in, day out. I won't, you know, name names necessarily, but, you know, they're not exactly sparking joy all the time. You know, at best, functional when they work and, you know, at worst, you know, causing frustration. But I think it's a fascinating thing to look at. And the research that I mentioned highlights the emotional response of marketers using StoryBlock. And so, you know, beyond the anecdotal, you know, why is understanding the joy factor so important in the context of enterprise software?

Dominic Angerer (3:46)

Yeah, for us, it all started with us not wanting to lose customers because as you know, acquiring new customers and making them happy should be anybody's number one priority. And if you keep customers for a long time, usually it's cheaper for the business to run as well. And, you know, I want to build a sustainable business, therefore, for us, looking into what makes people be happy about what you're using and be happy what you're offering to them. Joyfulness by itself is the winning piece. And fast building that image or the message around joyfulness started actually based on feedback we received. It wasn't something that we planned out in the beginning, but if you have a below 1% churn rate over the past eight years, you somehow question your customers about, like, hey, why, why are you still around with us? And they really like it. So that's the background on our side.

Greg Kilstrom (4:32)

Well, and that's great to hear that it originated from, you know, there was something there already that you built on. Right. It wasn't just like, hey, let's, you know, let's, let's target this thing and, and, and which, you know, it's admirable enough, I guess, to want to spark that. But, like, it sounds like there's already, there's already joy being delivered there and, and, you know, so you capitalize on it. To me, that feels more authentic as well. Do you think that, I mean, this, this concept is something that we're gonna see more of? Like, how. I mean, again, I think Some companies have a ways to go to, to get there, but like, do you think this is something that, that will be more of a trend?

Dominic Angerer (5:12)

I hope so. I mean what you see right now with all the AI enabled software that you can find out there, these joy moments are becoming more and more, I mean all of us have played around with ChatGPT, maybe some of you have played around with lovable and so on and just typing in a prompt and getting something, I would say 80% there and playing around with it to get it 100% functional. It's quite cheerful to bring your idea to market really, really quickly and like fast. It's the same thing. What we want to enable is to have developers and marketers, both sides, to be really quick in getting their idea, the content out there. And turns out that this works for many. And I believe if your system or product you're building right now is not doing that, you will have a hard time. So I hope so. I hope so. Yeah.

Greg Kilstrom (5:53)

Well, and to, to go into that a little deeper, the, I think the, the, for me, the, the generative AI thing part of it is that you're co creating, I wouldn't say completely creating if you're, if you're using AI to do it, but you're, you're co creating. And for a lot of marketers in particular, I mean I fall more into that camp than engineer. So like for a lot of marketers we've been kind of, we've had our hands tied and because we've had to ask engineering for something and we've, you know, and so the, having a little more, you know, control is one thing, but also having a little more power in the, in the creativity and creation of things. I can imagine that that's part of, part of the joy, right?

Dominic Angerer (6:36)

100% in fast. At Storyblok, we are a content management system, right? So for us the main idea is how can we get your content into format without you doing like a database work and then you can use it actually. So like how can we make that bridge between your content and whatever you want to create? And there is more to come. At troyconf, we have a conference coming up, our very own first one. But the idea is really that we bring in content in various kind of places. And since we know who our customers are and we know what their tone is in terms of how they write content, how to produce content, we can help them make even more impact and help be more creative. Not just writing more content, but proper content, healthy content, updating the article that was written 10 years ago that nobody touched because nobody wants to do those chores, but there is some potential to doing that. Right? Yeah. Nice, nice.

Greg Kilstrom (7:25)

So the study that mentioned also talks about AI features being a highlight for participants. You know, touched on that briefly here. How do you look at this and how does story block look at utilizing AI to enhance the user experience, but also to drive those joyful moments that we've been talking about.

Dominic Angerer (7:44)

So we actually launched way more than what we tested back in that study. By now it was not just an EI text generation and the co collaboration feature that we had in our ideas room and we have now extended that with AI translation. So usually our customers have a team of translators and maybe some other external tools to work around on. Like really translation workflows, we probably down to one button click.

Greg Kilstrom (8:06)

Wow.

Dominic Angerer (8:07)

So you can literally translate your whole content pieces, all of them with one button click into any language you want. And it's actually that easy. It's so nice. And when you are in a, in a pitch situation or when you talk with Marketer and they are telling you, oh yeah, I need to manage 52 languages for like 900,000 pages because it's a large brand, multiple teams working on that and like. Yeah. Or you click that button and like what? And I can. Then they go into the app and the screen share because of course we want to see what they did. Yeah. On the top right corner you see the translate button. Hit it and this really works. Yeah, Click it. So they clicked it. Suddenly everything translating like this is really amazing. So then they started doing workflows and trying to get the translation to a perfect case, you know, but just seeing them being able to do like a month's work of work in like a button click, that's what AI should bring you. And it doesn't stop there. You know, translation is like the immediate thing, but there's the European Accessibility act already coming in full force. Right. And I'm a huge fan for bringing content to everybody, no matter if it's visual or auditive. One of the things that we tried to enable our customers is when they upload images that we generate the alternative text and translate them immediately so they don't have to do it by themselves, they only have to check them so they can then use those information on their website, on the apps to make it also accessible for people that have visual issues, I would say. So I'm really looking forward to see that more enabled. And like 90% of websites out there have problems with alternative text. So There's a huge, huge potential there.

Greg Kilstrom (9:39)

Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, so I think with both of those examples, I mean, I think with the translation example, I mean, certainly, you know, in my consulting, I work with multinational organizations, they have often, you know, they'll have a team that works on translations. And so, you know, it's saving a lot of time. But I think the other thing that can be highlighted with both that as well as the accessibility is that there are a lot of teams that are not yet doing translation or not yet doing accessibility like they should be doing it. So in other words, it's not only, you know, it's saving some cost and some, some resources and stuff, but it's also enabling companies that don't have the resources to do translation to reach more. And I think this is kind of brings me to the next topic, which is, you know, there, there is a lot of talk, talk about AI, you know, replacing jobs and, and, and I'm not going to say that it won't ever. It already, you know, it has to some degree. But I think there's also an upside to that as well as, again, enabling, you know, the, the positive side is enabling companies to do more than they ever could without having to extend resources or anything. But I, you know, from the research standpoint, you know, did, did the research touch on any of those, you know, concerns and anxieties or, you know, how, how was the overall sentiment?

Dominic Angerer (10:57)

So the overall sentiment is actually pretty good. So we actually checked that AI doesn't scare any, any marketers whatsoever. Actually. It, it brought them choi. We tested the ideation room, which was at about 60% Choi fullness, and the translation was like an uptick of 44%. So it was actually quite a big jump when it comes to like, oh, wow, that's crazy.

Greg Kilstrom (11:19)

Yeah, wow, wow, that's great. So, want to talk a little bit more about StoryBlock and some of the other things there. So, you know, storyblock is a headless cms and you know, we've talked a bit about headless and composable on the show, but, you know, for those that are a little less familiar with that term, can you explain what does headless mean and what does it mean for the user experience as well?

Dominic Angerer (11:43)

Yeah, of course. So the term hatless comes from the idea of removing the hat. The hat meaning the front end, so the website, the app, or whatever kind of channel you want. And it comes from the idea of having one content repository, which is your cms, and publishing it to an omnichannel world, whatever. Channel you want, you can publish it. And you do that by providing an API, a content Delivery API, as we call it. And this is purely data, so any kind of developers, and now of course, all the AI agents and MZP server can utilize that. And you have one central place where you have your whole marketing content, content and content that you want to get out into the world. And back in the days it was about free technology choice. It was about how can you build something quicker with the technologies your team knows and have an API available to them. And by now it has evolved into the idea of having one central place and publishing it everywhere, including LLMs and giving perplexity and similar, using ARG to really get content and context. This is now a really, really nice place where we can. Can check that essentially as well.

Greg Kilstrom (12:43)

Yeah, yeah. And so I know you touched a little bit on this, but, you know, how does this greater flexibility enable marketers to be more agile and responsive to, you know, the market isn't going to stop changing. Right. So how does it enable them to be more agile and responsive to all the changes that the market demands?

Dominic Angerer (13:02)

Yeah. If you're now using a monolithic content management system, the chances are that you're right now publishing just one channel. So most likely websites. And the moment you want to relaunch your website, you need to start from scratch because your cms maybe had 20 plugins that only worked for this kind of theme that you were building and it's basically not really maintainable after a long time. And just give an idea. We have been around now for 10 years since the first prototype. Now the company exists since eight years and even our first customer today is still using storyblok without needing to do a relaunch. Because what they're doing is they're really evolutionizing the website so they're adding more components. We found a really nice twist between a pure database, which most headless CMS systems are, and a visual marketing tool, because that's what we are. We are a mixture between both and where marketers can build their own component libraries. And think of it of if you print the design and you take a scissor and just cut it into different pieces, this is your components and then you have storyblock, basically mix those blocks and we allow you to tell a story with those blocks. And that's basically also the name storyblock. Right. Love it.

Greg Kilstrom (14:06)

That's great. Let's map out this week's amazing destinations and travel tips.

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Greg Kilstrom (14:19)

That's not the itinerary we're following.

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Greg Kilstrom (14:35)

Bon voyage.

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Greg Kilstrom (15:03)

So want to talk a little bit now about, I mean certainly, you know, you've seen a lot in your time at StoryBlock and seeing trends and upcoming things. So I want to talk a little bit more about the future of Martech and you know, based on both the research as well as your experience, what are some of the key trends that you're keeping an eye on and that you see shaping the future of Martech?

Dominic Angerer (15:29)

Yeah, so what we see right now is that it's all about marketers becoming more technical. So right now there's this term of like tech enabled marketers and it's only a handful of marketers that know where the content is if they have actually good content, high quality content, content health over a certain level. Sometimes marketers don't know if the tone of the old content is the same as the message they actually want to provide. And there's a lot of room for that. What we see now is the better and more structured your content is and the better your content health is. So how on prem is it? How active is it? Is it like 10 years old? And nobody updated that content piece. I can guarantee you right now there's an LM crawling your old content and you're going to be found based on stuff you actually don't want to be found anymore because search volume has dropped significantly. We have seen that with the HubSpot metrics. I mean all of us were like interesting and even fast. We can see now actually an uptick in signups but slowdown in traffic which indicates that they are coming from somewhere else. Right. In terms of a Google search volume and fast, it's quite clear they're coming from cloud, from perplexity, from all those AI searches and they jump over the website directly into the product. And that's what the new reality is like. You need to read where your customers are and you need to prepare your content through it in a proper way. And what we have seen now is the people and the companies that have prepared the content to have a higher quality level, not higher quantity, higher quality, they usually also get mentioned way more often. And not just mentioned way more often are usually also the ones that are being on top when it comes to actually receiving results from those, those geo kind of topics.

Greg Kilstrom (16:59)

Yeah, yeah, one, one more question along those lines too. To me that sounds like it's kind of a part of a continuum, you know, because Google, you know, was getting better about that too. Right? You know, I mean I remember back in the, you know, to date myself a little bit. You know, in the late 90s you could put keywords in a HTML and show up very, very high. I did a little bit of that myself back in the day. But you know, so I mean it's gotten a lot smarter over the years. So I guess for those like what do you see as the biggest distinction between, you know, because again SEO a couple of years ago was pointing in the direction of like make better content and stuff like generative AI a couple years ago was nascent so it was less of a AI, you know, AI slop or whatever you want to call it was less of a thing. But what, what for the marketers listening out there, like what's the biggest difference that you think, you know, that people should be thinking about their content versus again just making good content for Google a couple years ago, yeah, consistency is key now.

Dominic Angerer (18:02)

So if you have outdated content that is not on brand anymore, that is not valid anymore, that is using different messaging and different contexts, this is actually hurting you. So in the past with Google that didn't matter. It got downranged because it doesn't get searched for and you are not going to get any traffic for it. But you still had it on your website. Not just on the website. Maybe you even had like old pricing tables somewhere in a PDF and you launched it and it got indexed. It doesn't matter so much on Google because they down rent it. But right now this stuff is getting indexed, this stuff is getting used to be trained with an LLM. So the moment you have inconsistent content because it's a statistical model like all the LLMs out there is just large language model, it's about statistics, it's about building up consistency across data points if you have not valid, proper, healthy content and consistency throughout it in terms of messaging, in terms of wording used, story used, essentially you are actually hurting your business. It's time to clean up the mess that you have created in the last 20 years. Sounds bad, but we all have done that. So there's still an article from me in 2018 on the website. We need to update that as well. But that's the thing we now need to do because otherwise we're going to have a really, really bad time.

Greg Kilstrom (19:12)

Yeah, yeah, I mean, and that runs counter to, I mean I think some have thought of like just volume of stuff out there somehow gives you credibility or whatever. But like this is definitely counter to that. Like wow, I gotta dust off a few things myself after, after, after we finish this interview. But yeah, no, that's, that's great, great advice there. And I guess, you know, just as, as we wrap up here, just another piece of advice, you know, do you, do you have another piece of advice for marketing leaders that are maybe struggling with some of those legacy monolith systems or other things? What would your advice be to them?

Dominic Angerer (19:47)

Yeah, don't be afraid from migrations. I mean that's the, the holy, holy cradle of everybody. Like, hey, let's do migration. I think we find. And then it doesn't have to be like that, right? There are options where you can start small. You fix the things that are right now your main issue and you go through your content and you only transfer the stuff that actually makes you money. If you focus on the 20% that makes you money and you removed 80% of what actually hurts you, now you're already good. You don't need to get all of that over to a new system or into a migration project. Try to fix the stuff that you actually know that makes you money and makes your business grow and then you can still add more of the flavoring stuff later on. And I've seen that now multiple times and companies that have done that, they've been so much more successful and it's counterintuitive to reduce stuff as you mentioned because back in the days it was a quantity, quantity, quantity. But now it's all about high quality content that can be consumed in an easy to and also in a consistent way across all the different channels.

Greg Kilstrom (20:47)

Well, Dominic, thanks so much for joining today. One last question for you before we wrap up. Like to ask this to everybody. What do you do to stay agile in your role and how do you find a way to do it consistently.

Dominic Angerer (20:58)

We do have coffee chats inside Storyblock, So we have 270 people now here at Storyblock and we have a random connector between everybody. And I literally just jump on a coffee chat with random people in the business and try to understand it. And for the last 12 weeks I was literally driving and flying across whole Europe and the US to meet customers, partners and talk to as many people as they can to understand where the pain points are, where the fear points are. And man, there's a lot out there that can be discovered. What I do is I talk to a lot of people, try to get it in into our product vision and then set basically our next three years. And that's what keeps me grounded because of course you want to understand what's currently going on on their side, plus you want to understand what's going on on the technical side. And if you combine that, that's how you should get updated and focused essentially.

Greg Kilstrom (21:48)

Well, thanks again. I'd like to thank Dominic Engerer, CEO at StoryBlock for joining the show. You can learn more about Dominic and Story by following the links in the show notes.

Greg Kilstrom (21:59)

Thanks again for listening to the B2B Agility podcast. If you enjoyed the show, please take a minute to subscribe and leave us a rating so that others can find the show more easily. You can access more episodes of the show at www.b2b agility.com. that's b2bagility.com while you're there, check out my series of best selling Agile brand guides covering a wide variety of marketing technology topics. Or you can search for Greg Kilstrom on Amazon. Until next time, stay focused and stay agile.

Podcast Guest or Advertiser (22:34)

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