Transcript

Everyone always asks me, as the CEO co-founder of DevHub, like why should I work there? What are you guys actually trying to solve for? What is the real opportunity?

And I've explained it in basically the same way every time. The thing that we're going for is a platform that can live forever. The main thesis of why DevHub even exists today is we never wanted to build a technology that was ever scared of what the next technology was.

For the last almost 18 years, it's always been Google. And the last two, it's all the AI interfaces we are all used to now. ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Grok, all of them.

And the more and more I say the big opportunity for DevHub is to be the standard, the standard of what a CMS is, the standard of what the future of websites is, is this little pinhole of light. You know, if you put your fingers like this, maybe you can see it through my hat. That if we can be that standard, similar to like what a Cloudflare did, similar to, again, unrelated to websites, but you get it. Like where it's like if we are built within the DevHub structure, we never have to worry about redesigning a website. We never have to worry about hosting a website. We never have to worry about is it findable, viewable, discoverable within AI, within Google, within whatever interface and the future alongside of where AI is going, as we've interacted with it, as the consumers are interacting with it, right? By either being a supplement or a helper to the work that you do every day, or again helping you solve problems around the house.

We believe that the CMS you choose now can be forever. Except that it fundamentally changes how you think about a franchise website today. It's not I need it to be designed in this incredibly pretty fashion whatnot.

CMS Content and Brand Voice

Because again the future of an AI agent looking up what they need to look up, it's data. They don't care how it looks. Does the content exist? Does the funnel exist to take the action? That is what DevHub is built for.

And that's why we believe that the franchise CMS you choose now can be forever. And it's being overlooked today by how brand leaders, how anyone is thinking about their website today. Obviously, there's a subset of people out there today who believe that the website itself is going to go away.

It's not. Period. It's the brand voice. It's still the content. It's still all the technologies that integrate with a website from scheduling to pricing to reviews to all the things that the consumer might want to understand from a brand. Again, I'm not talking about products. I'm not talking about e-commerce, even though that's part of this. I'm talking about within the home services realm, wellness realm, child enrichment realm, gyms, spas, all the things where someone's like, "Hey, I need to put my kid into a school. I need to find out if this home services company can come out today because I have a leak. I need to get carpets cleaned. I need something, landscaping, pool maintenance," whatever it is. That has to exist on a website.

The AI models today are scraping the web, right? Web access through however they're accessing it, whether it's Google or some other weird back channel. And what are they looking for on the web? Again, you can say they're looking for the Google reviews. They're looking for whatnot that exist on Google. Ultimately, the number one source of truth is the website.

Built For Change Over Time

So the CMS you choose now can last forever. And again, if you go back in history, what we're talking about here is, if you can remember the GeoCities days of those websites, to the drag and drop builders of Squarespace and WordPress, not even WordPress, but Weebly and Wix, to obviously the blogging platform behemoth that is WordPress.

And then you have DevHub. You have us, who has been innovating on the technology of what a CMS is for emerging midsize and enterprise brands since 2007, behind the scenes.

And with that, never scared of what the new SEO Panda update from Google, if you remember that, right? Or what was another big one, when mobile responsive design and responsive design was like the huge thing. Never scared. None of our customers were ever scared. And we have customers that have been with us for almost 17 years.

And so the CMS, we believe at DevHub, and again what's being overlooked by several brands, is the idea that it is essentially the data content model that AI is pulling from. So is it in the right structure? Does that structure change? If you're on DevHub, we are changing with the times, not "oh, we got to go back and fix what's broken on the platforms of yesteryear."

And so as you think about that, it's like, how are we more qualified than anybody else? We've been in the game. We've been innovating for again almost 18, 19 years now. I'm lucky to have a co-founder who is our chief innovation officer who's kept DevHub up to speed. And it's not just I need a new website design. It's about how the content is.

Avoid Service and Agency Lock-In

So again, I understand that, you know, choosing a CMS sometimes for a brand leader or whoever's making the decision, we're just going to build on WordPress. We're going to use Shopify. We're going to use whatever the tool is that they think is probably the biggest thing. The biggest thing that they're trying to avoid is this idea of being locked in.

And so let's talk about that a little bit. And we're not talking about the contract kind, right? Because most people think that a CMS lock-in is essentially they're going to raise prices. I'm stuck. How about if I need a developer? I want to own everything. And while those are real concerns, they're just not true.

Because today, if you're switching WordPress, if you're switching agencies, and your website's on WordPress today, you're just inheriting someone else's. You're just moving to others that people say they can clean up. But how can they read the minds of why someone did something that way without getting rid of something that could have been legacy SEO, without getting rid of that plugin that you thought was working the whole time that wasn't?

And so when you build on a CMS, you're not choosing a service. You should be thinking about it as a technology. So you're making decisions about how is the content actually structured and tagged. How do the pages relate to each other within the entire ecosystem of your brand? How does the brand hierarchy work? Right? Corporate to regional to the location, how is that all there? Who are the stakeholders? Is there an agency still running content for you? How are the templates built? Not just designed, but how are they actually structured? How do your internal teams actually operate on this technology? How do they publish? How do they approve? How do they update content?

And so every one of those decisions compounds. We've had several brands who have went to a WordPress agency, and it's not always WordPress, by the way. It could be Webflow. It could be a bunch of others. But went to a WordPress agency. Six months after moving, they're like, "Holy shit, we can't do 90% of what we were able to do before, or the agency's slow." And now you're like, "Oh my god, I'm stuck."

That is being stuck. With a platform like DevHub, with a CMS technology like DevHub, and maybe there's others, you've got a team that's trained to do all the things that we just mentioned, as well as have us as an entire company set up for it, as well as have approved partners that can help you. But again, you can operate it, we can operate it, your team can operate it, we can operate it together. And again, one day you can build your own AI agent, which you could do today actually, to actually do the tasks that potentially someone in your team is doing.

Open Technology and Agent Ready

And at this point, this isn't just a switching technology decision. It's actually, it is.

Again, think about it. A year in, you've got hundreds of pages structured around this technology. Three years in, you've got the integrations, native integrations, not plugins, with your CRM, your analytics, your local listings, your reviews are all wired in to the website natively. Natively. That's the difference with the CMS that's built for the long haul. A technology that's built for the long haul.

And so the question is, what's the easiest path? What is the easiest CMS to start with? The question is, what's the CMS that can grow to where you as a brand are growing?

And so again, we always say, look, when you're looking at DevHub or you're looking at a website rebuild, you should really be asking what is the technology infrastructure capable of? Not I just need a redesigned website. That is the fundamental shift for this entire episode.

Today it's similar to buying a car. You get a new website, when you roll it off the lot, it's old. With DevHub, a technology, a CMS or any like CMS, it is constantly evolving to what is happening in the world. And again, that is what we think can make this company, make our customers insanely successful, insanely aligned to their growth, aligned to our own growth. Which is, wow, what if you could build a website that lasted forever? And today we believe alongside AI that is the reality. And again, as you know, it's changing very, very, very quickly.

We have product teams. We have people. We have research. We are testing our sites within this world that we now live.

A Roadmap, Not a One-Time Redesign

And so again, it's funny sometimes when you talk to a brand leader and they're talking about website. "Well, we just need to move our website from here to here," or "we just need to redesign and we're looking at red." No, no, no, no. What about the website are you actually worried about or trying to solve for? And if it's just a design, you're totally capable of in this world of AI that we are living today. And again, the continuous improvement of the platform.

Now what we will say is, as you look for a CMS and what the opportunity really, really, really, really is, you want it to be open. So again, the idea that we don't want to be locked in. As long as you can operate it, we can operate it, we can both operate it, your agency can operate it, and there's a headless option, or you can build AI agents against the CMS, you are not locked in.

And again, one of the questions you should ask of a platform technology like DevHub is, what is your guys' product roadmap look like? And today when you buy a website through an agency, there is no product roadmap. It's just a service that they're fulfilling for your website. That's it. They're just building you a website, and it's a good website, but it's not a technology. It's not a product. It's not being innovated on. They're not figuring out what to do with partial form fills. They're not figuring out the new LLM replacement of like a robots.txt file or whatever. It's like an llms.txt file. They're not thinking about all of those things.

And so again, when you're looking at the website as a whole, you're looking at the content infrastructure, how is the governance of who's doing what when, how can you innovate against that? Even looking agent, the speed to publish, integration surface. So again, how is everything being integrated not via plugins but natively, so that as an agent is going to the website and clicking around, it's not being served popups. It's being served natively within the site, baked in. You're just basically building that longevity of what the site actually is for your brand. And then of course, again, what is that roadmap in general?

So this is actually why we built DevHub the way we did. The brands we saw hitting some of these walls growing past what their CMS could handle. Again, we went through partners for 16 plus years. You never even most likely heard of us, even though we were powering some of the world's largest brands. And that's why we came out from behind the curtain and basically were like, we need to be front and center. We need to be selling this directly to our customers, not through necessarily partners. Even though now we are working again with partners, but again without a white label saying you're powered by DevHub. You as a partner are choosing DevHub. So you as a brand can go through an agency and say, "Are you using DevHub? We want to use DevHub."

And we saw that importance, that a brand needed way more flexibility that again a lot of at that time agencies and partners were not willing to provide. So that's when we stepped behind the curtain. And I'm not saying DevHub is right for every single brand. What I am saying is that if you are running a franchise, if you are running a multilocation operation, you should be asking these questions of whatever platform you're evaluating, including us.

Key Takeaways and Next Episode

So essentially, here's the bottom line. The CMS you choose now will shape your digital operation for years. Not because you're locked into a contract, but because you're locked into a structure. And structures are hard to change.

Ask the hard questions before you commit. Evaluate for where you're going, not where you are. And make sure the platform you choose was actually designed for the problem you're actually trying to solve.

A new website is not a new design. A website should be infrastructure to where you are growing to.

And so that's it. That is the first in this series. The next episode, we're going to be going deeper into something that makes this decision even more consequential, because your CMS is about to become the most important layer in your AI strategy if you didn't get that whole teaser from this video. So if that sounds like a stretch, stick around and I'll show you exactly why it's not.

Peace.

If you're running a franchise or multi-location brand and these are the questions you're already asking, let's talk.