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Up front: congratulations on shipping. Shipping is hard. My impressions from looking at CosmicJS are not super positive, though, and maybe this will be of some
by eropple 8y ago
Up front: congratulations on shipping. Shipping is hard. My impressions from looking at CosmicJS are not super positive, though, and maybe this will be of some use to you.
WordPress has problems. Big parts of WordPress sucks. But WordPress-the-thing is hard to argue with. It doesn't demonstrate a need to conflate sites with apps (maybe that impresses low-information folks but as a developer and a content creator I am left asking "so what?") and it doesn't need to hide its brain as a revenue model--they make a lot of money despite WP/WPMU both being open source. And somebody who has spent a decent chunk of time and money wrangling CMSes--I don't see a ton of value to a CMS I can't audit and can't just run myself. The `and` is important there. I'm happy to pay for support--and sometimes for operationalization, I've paid WPEngine a decent amount of money over the last few years--but I pay for support once I've validated the use case.
Perhaps I'm not the target audience. But I'm asking "why would I use this?" and coming up kind of empty. Beyond that, what does trouble me is the way in which you're intensely attempting to slag WordPress (which, tbh, rings hollow; "flies don't bite a man who's sure of himself" and all that). You can use WP as an API these days, and it's not bad. Not perfect, but not bad. But you can also do that with other headless CMSes, and I'm not really catching much differentiation between CosmicJS and those, either? The whole thing is coming off like low-information-targeting to me and that immediately makes me ask "OK, where's the grift?". I assume that isn't your intent, and I'm trying to give you the benefit of the doubt. But that's kind of the message I'm picking up here, and that might be something to work on.
- tonyspiro 8y agoThanks for the feedback. Our target customer is a team of developers and content creators that have experienced the pain of building and maintaining an installed CMS (could be any number of installed CMS systems WP being the most popular). If you haven't experienced that pain / are ok with it as a trade-off, that's fine. You're probably not a customer. And I spent years building WP websites, made a career out of it for a while, so it's not anything against WP and certainly don't intend to come across the way you described. So really Cosmic JS was built to satisfy my own needs that I didn't get from an installed CMS.
- eropple 8y agoFair enough. Good luck to you. =)
- snazz 8y agoThis clears it up. Still, how do you plan to find and reach your target audience? Most of the people who I know use WordPress aren’t too technical and like the premade plugins and themes. Conceptually, I think it alleviates many WordPress issues, but I’m having trouble thinking of someone I know personally who has the issues you describe.
- tonyspiro 8y agoOur target customer is not a consumer, there are plenty of consumer CMS choices in the market. We're trying to solve the problem for teams of developers and content creators who don't want to waste time diverting developer time to CMS management.
- snazz 8y agoWhen you say “developers”, you mean developers of another product, who want to add a blog or something? If that’s the case, I can better see the audience.
- superchink 8y agoIt looks like he's talking about developers, in the sense of individuals or teams that build content sites (read: deploy and configure Wordpress or other CMSes) for customers as a business.
- plausibilities 8y agoI think these dudes have it in their head that they just wrote the next React/Vue-tier JS framework, but in the CMS space.