Table of Contents
- 1. Tell us about your product and what inspired you to start it?
- 2. How long did it take you to acquire your first 50 customers, and what was your growth strategy?
- 3. Which technology stack are you using and what challenges and limitations does it pose?
- 4. What are some of the most essential tools that you use for your business?
- 5. What have been some of the biggest insights you've gained since starting your entrepreneurial journey?
- 6. Your recommended books/podcasts/newsletters etc.:
Momcilo Popov is the founder of BCMS - API-based content management system for developers
1. Tell us about your product and what inspired you to start it?
As a digital product development studio, we often needed a powerful content management system that is extensible and flexible. However, it must be well-designed and intuitive for our clients. Existing solutions either sacrifice convenience for developers (too difficult to set up and use, weird development workflows...), lack functionalities (too basic, good only for simple blogs), are horribly designed (sorry, but most dev tools are), or are way too expensive.
When we introduced the first version of BCMS to our existing clients, they were super happy to migrate. BCMS is a headless CMS, build with and for a modern and straightforward stack. Since we had their trust as a creative studio, they clients trusted us to migrate and stick with the tool.
2. How long did it take you to acquire your first 50 customers, and what was your growth strategy?
At the time, we were doing a lot of marketing website development projects for medium and large companies. Those companies brought us a lot of initial users and customers. You know that moment when a client asks you to add their 50 team members to the CMS, so they can all edit specific parts of the website? :)
Those initial users helped us polish the product extremely fast. Word of mouth and existing client base helped us quickly scale to dozens of customers. At the time, we were selling the lifetime licenses as a "thank you" for the support along the way.
The first 20-30 customers helped us tremendously with feedback and saved us a lot of time and trouble. Also, since we envisioned BCMS to be used like a Lego, with several "abstract" features, helped us achieve so much by combining existing features instead of entering the never-ending "we need a new feature for this" loop. So we could spend time educating clients and gaining feedback.
3. Which technology stack are you using and what challenges and limitations does it pose?
In a nutshell: Vue and Node.js. And a lot of TypeScript. It's a really powerful and scalable approach.
4. What are some of the most essential tools that you use for your business?
Nuxt.js and BCMS (obviously) for our website, Vue 3, and Node.js for the BCMS instance and cloud. A lot of TypeScript and Dockers.
5. What have been some of the biggest insights you've gained since starting your entrepreneurial journey?
Uh... Marketing a DevTool is a totally different kind of marketing. Actually, we realized it is a much more natural and straightforward way. Or at least it is so for us - technical people. But it takes time to unlearn all the fluff we got used to over the years. So it's not that marketing to developers doesn't work; it's just that you need to learn to speak their (our) language. It's funny how we developers become something else when we try to sell our products.
The approach is refreshingly straightforward and to the point. Yet, it can be challenging to break free from the unnecessary complexities that we've grown accustomed to with traditional marketing methods. It may take some time to streamline the marketing strategy. We are still learning.
