
Launch HN: Cosmic JS (YC W19) - API-first drop-in replacement for WordPress - tonyspiro
Hey HN,<p>I&#x27;m Tony, one of the cofounders of Cosmic JS (YC W19) (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;cosmicjs.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;cosmicjs.com</a>). Cosmic JS is a drop-in replacement for WordPress that can power content for any website or app. We provide a web dashboard to create content and API tools and resources (REST and GraphQL) to integrate content into any new or existing project. Commonly referred to as a &quot;Headless CMS&quot;, this eliminates the need to build and maintain your own CMS infrastructure. For a monthly fee, you use our CMS infrastructure and can focus on what really matters: building great products and user experiences.<p>My cofounder Carson and I met at a digital agency where we built and managed WordPress websites. We noticed that lots of development time was spent building and maintaining the CMS itself, sucking time away from core application development. Plus we encountered the same CMS problems over and over: automatic updates caused sites to crash, a client would decide to install a bunch of plugins that caused the site to crash, comment spam was a never-ending battle. We began looking for a better way to manage content.<p>This was 2014 and API services were becoming more popular (Stripe, Twilio, SendGrid etc were gaining traction in offloading non-core dev tasks), and it made sense that using an API could be a viable way to deal with content as well. So Cosmic JS was created to be the solution that we wanted to use: one click to add a new project, unlimited projects with a single login, a simple web dashboard to create content, and API tools and resources to integrate content into any new or existing website or app. No CMS infrastructure needed.<p>After much beta testing, we eventually released to the public in 2016. We&#x27;re now powering production websites and apps for hundreds of teams around the world across various use-cases.<p>We know the market for a solution to this problem is big because WordPress, as of this posting, powers 30% of the web. That’s 75,000,000 websites (source: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.whoishostingthis.com&#x2F;compare&#x2F;wordpress&#x2F;stats&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.whoishostingthis.com&#x2F;compare&#x2F;wordpress&#x2F;stats&#x2F;</a>). Plus the need for dynamic content extends beyond websites. Mobile, IOT and other emerging tech are increasingly requiring dynamic, easily integrated content.<p>This is a hard problem to solve because a CMS has to satisfy the needs of both developers and content creators. We&#x27;re different than other headless CMS providers because lots of effort has been made to make the CMS admin dashboard and content integration process as easy as possible for both the developer and content creator. We’ve been told “it doesn’t get much simpler”. We’re also very committed to education and community. We&#x27;re the only headless CMS that comes with a community of developers built-in providing hundreds of apps, extensions, and integrations to learn best practices and teach others. You can get up and running with a variety of use-cases in just a few clicks. And we have a free plan that rewards contributors with a free personal Bucket forever.<p>Check out some of the apps built with Cosmic JS: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;cosmicjs.com&#x2F;apps" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;cosmicjs.com&#x2F;apps</a>.<p>We&#x27;re excited to be participating in Y Combinator for the W19 batch to help more teams avoid the pain of CMS infrastructure management so they can focus on building great products.<p>We&#x27;d love to hear your feedback and learn more about your personal experiences building content-powered websites and apps!
======
claytongulick
Going to be a hard lift to compete with the likes of
[http://strapi.io](http://strapi.io) when you aren't open source.

I'm all for the headless CMS space, but I'll never recommend a solution to my
clients that causes vendor lock-in and that I don't have the ability to
operationalize myself.

Most folks in this space, wordpress included, follow a model of "open source,
but pay us to scale and operationalize it for you".

They follow this model because it works.

As a CTO making decisions for my company, I'm not going to take the risk on a
startup in this space without an open source fallback plan.

~~~
dpcan
Exactly, after 15 years of web development, I never lock any customers into
any proprietary anything. The cost, time, suffering, that come with the
failure of a company we rely on is no longer worth it.

We have dealt with this a couple times with shopping cart providers, mls idx
search systems, do-it-yourself website systems, captcha systems, cms systems
(paid-for, now with no upgrade path for things like PHP5 to 7), payment
processing systems, and more I probably can't think of at the moment.

If it's not open source, and self-hosted, then we walk away.

The only things we kind-of lock into now are hosting providers, email
providers, and domain registrars. But we use pretty big and established
operations for these just so we hopefully don't have to move things.

~~~
ryanwaggoner
Not just the failure of a vendor, but the "success" too. They build the
product out with a low-cost self-serve model and an army of loyal and
enthusiastic customers, but then they get greedy / raise money / realize that
they could be going after much bigger fish and they jack prices to the moon to
shed all their current customers who are "holding them back". See Segment,
Drip, and an endless list of others.

~~~
tonyspiro
FYI we have and will always grandfather in early customers.

~~~
benatkin
This is the same sort of promise app.net made

------
eropple
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
Thanks 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.

~~~
snazz
This 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
Our 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
When 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.

~~~
plausibilities
I think these dudes have it in their head that they just wrote the next
React/Vue-tier JS framework, but in the CMS space.

------
JesseAldridge
What does "drop-in replacement for WordPress" mean exactly?

At first I thought it meant I could maybe go to cosmicjs.com, enter a url and
the username and password for my WordPress site, hit a button and have my site
magically migrated to something that was 10x better.

But I guess what you actually mean is "WordPress clone" which doesn't seem as
exciting.

~~~
tonyspiro
We offer a web dashboard to create content and API tools and resources to
integrate content into any new or existing website or app. We actually do
offer a way to import your WP posts
[https://cosmicjs.com/extensions/wordpress-
importer](https://cosmicjs.com/extensions/wordpress-importer)

~~~
eropple
It sounds like you're describing something that one could port to, not a
"drop-in" replacement. Wouldn't a drop-in replacement not provide the
WordPress REST API?

------
tmikaeld
I have a hard time justifying the pricing here.

Wordpress is "free" vs CosmicJS is 49$/mo minimum without backup and only 3GB
space.

For 49$/mo you could get a cloud VPS for Wordpress, including backups and even
high-availability with no request limits (API limits in CosmicJS).

I know it's not straight comparable, but..

~~~
tonyspiro
Developer time is expensive. Allowing devs to focus on the core-product
instead of CMS infrastructure is a big time/money saver. This is the value
prop for most all API-first services: Stripe, Twilio, Algolia. Why would you
build your own "free" payments processing / telephony / search service when
these focused services have done a really good job solving the problem for
you?

~~~
Aeolun
Because all of those are hard, and CRUD is easy?

I mean, I see your point. I’m just not convinced it’s enough given the
availability of a thousand other (free-ish) solutions.

------
o_____________o
Now would be a good time to come for Wordpress and their huge failure in their
new editor called Gutenberg.

Gutenberg promises to have WYSIWYG editable React components, which is a big
deal, but they made insane decisions like storing the attributes in HTML,
rendering HTML in the database, and requiring component developers to keep an
array of deprecated changes when they want to modify anything on the
component. In other words: you want to add a new CSS class to your component?
Need an entirely new component for that in addition to maintaining the last
one. Failure to deprecate will result in something like a fatal error in the
editor that the user can't recover from. It's like PHP-era decisions with
modern promises.

People are thrashing around in Github Issues, but the team seems unbothered. I
would pay $$$$ for someone to unseat them.

~~~
tonyspiro
Great! A vote for Cosmic is a vote for change
[https://cosmicjs.com/pricing](https://cosmicjs.com/pricing)

~~~
o_____________o
It doesn't look like you support visually editing custom React components (?)

~~~
tonyspiro
Currently, we don't offer a visual editor for React components. However, this
can be done using an Extension.
[https://cosmicjs.com/extensions/](https://cosmicjs.com/extensions/)

This may be something we or our community may make available soon with enough
interest.

------
codegeek
What is your plan to beat WordPress or get people to switch to your CMS away
from WordPress ? There are plenty of other CMS providers out there who are
doing a decent job but no one is able to take out the giant that is WordPress
due to its market share and the community of support and plugin eco-system.

Also, terms such as "headless CMS" does not mean much to a regular user who is
looking for a "site in WordPress". So is your intended audience primarily
developers and freelancers/agencies ?

~~~
tonyspiro
If you look at trends in the CMS space, WordPress is losing favor:
[https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&ge...](https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&geo=US&q=wordpress)

63.2% of developers voted it most dreaded in the 2018 Stack Overflow survey
(narrowly beat by Windows Phone)
[https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2018/#most-
loved-d...](https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2018/#most-loved-
dreaded-and-wanted)

Our customers benefit by avoiding the pain of building and maintaining their
own CMS infrastructure so they can focus on their core product. And we have a
growing community that is adding more value through education and resources
for every new user.

You're right, our target user is not a consumer who has many options for a
consumer CMS. Our target customer is a team of developers and content
creators.

~~~
aaronjorbin
> If you look at trends in the CMS space, WordPress is losing favor:
> [https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&ge...](https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&ge..).

In the last year, WordPress grew from 29.9% of websites to 33.3%. Is that
really losing favor?
[https://w3techs.com/technologies/history_overview/content_ma...](https://w3techs.com/technologies/history_overview/content_management/all)

~~~
snazz
You have to remind yourself to take this kind of figure with a grain of salt,
since every measurement technique has some kind of bias. The StackOverflow
survey specifically targets SO users, Google Trends might overestimate
languages that receive lots of queries due to less experienced programmers or
poor documentation, and it is truly impossible to scan the entire web to find
which CMS powers each site (especially since customized CMS installations
might not have telltale signs that others do).

------
nickthemagicman
Because you're closed source and charge outrageous amounts for a service
that's been done a billion times.... I actually hope Wordpress puts your
company out of business.

I would hate for naive people to get trapped in your ecosystem and continue to
get overcharged for no reason.

------
jtippens
I'm currently using Cosmic JS for a personal project, and so far I've been
really impressed -- I was able to launch my site in under an hour, and that
was starting completely from scratch with no prior knowledge of Cosmic and
having never used a headless CMS before.

One thing that helped a ton was the availability of pre-built templates; there
happened to be a node app template that fit my frontend use case perfectly, so
I was able make the tweaks I wanted and launch.

------
ddri
Congrats on the progress so far. I can attest from spinning Corilla out of Red
Hat and the journey we had with it, that there's always a niche for CMS or
knowledge management tools.

Especially in the Series A to Series B segment, where ability to change, and
necessity to remove complexity, meet the sudden availability of funds to
assist. That's where your example of "you can pay X and hour for your engineer
or Y a month for us to handle it" works well. How will you pitch this moving
further up-market? Especially where the opex exists that dev costs are less
important. And vendor lock-in (or likelihood of existing in five years)
becomes an issue?

And further up the enterprise scale, the greater the demand for a robust open
source community. Is this on your roadmap? If not, why not? Especially given
you use Wordpress as an example, and most of the industry itself using open
source as a basis for content engineering tools. It's now the default
expectation. Even moreso with the likes of near competitors like Strapi being
open source. Thoughts?

Your app library is nice, but much like Gatsby or Hugo... it's not "wow". Any
plans to ramp up the devrel? How will you stand out from all the other
headless CMS products? Especially with the likes of Contentful so well funded.
Are you worried that the lack of open source cuts off the lower end of the
market and community growth, and the war chest of competitors at the higher
level of the market constrains your customer base somewhat?

And.. wat will CosmisJS look like in two and five years? What I love about CMS
teams is the creativity and intent of the awesome people who run them, so I'd
love to hear more about the big vision too! :)

~~~
tonyspiro
Thank you. These are all great questions and things we consider a lot.

> How will you pitch this moving further up-market? Especially where the opex
> exists that dev costs are less important. And vendor lock-in (or likelihood
> of existing in five years) becomes an issue?

We believe that developer experience is table stakes now. It's becoming less
the case that the CIO buys the tech and hands it to the development team.
Developers are more and more making these technology decisions for their
organizations. So it's our goal to empower the developers to help champion
Cosmic for their team.

> And further up the enterprise scale, the greater the demand for a robust
> open source community. Is this on your roadmap?

Absolutely, that's why we're continuing to offer open source example apps,
extensions, and integrations that can power complex business logic and to
satisfy these types of customers.

> Any plans to ramp up the devrel?

Definitely, it's a big priority of ours to stay active in the developer
community to listen and respond to use cases, technologies, extensions, and
integrations that our customers will find valuable. This is our David /
Goliath strategy. When you don't have a war chest to spend on marketing and
sales people, you have to be resourceful :)

> And.. wat will CosmisJS look like in two and five years?

We've got an ambitious roadmap, so stay tuned! Simply put, our north star is
to provide the most value for our customers by being the best solution in the
era of API-first services.

------
csbartus
Is it me, or the latest YC batch is rolling out negative surprises?

First, a magazine startup with sloppy design when design should be their
foremost asset (after content):
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19320608](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19320608)

Now a WP replacement which showcases and labels a sloppy editor as Delightful
Experience ... [https://cosmicjs.com/headless-cms#features--content-
creators](https://cosmicjs.com/headless-cms#features--content-creators)

Have you checked Gutenberg, the lates WP editor? It does blocks, like
Contentful, Strapi and the other few dozens competing on the headless CMS
scene.

Headless CMS is in equal part about content creation and content delivery ...
a REST API and Graphql is not enough.

Sorry for the harsh words again but ... I do Wordpress since the beginning and
I’m actively searching for a replacement. Yet dissatisfied again with a YC
startup, the second disappointment in two days.

Tell me it’s coincidence.

~~~
tonyspiro
I'm interested to hear more about what you're looking for in a dashboard
experience. If you are looking to find a replacement (and not just blast
another YC company) what features would you like to see?

------
dimitry12
If anyone is interested in a much-much more basic version of headless-CMS
(micro-CMS): check out
[https://www.dropconfig.com/](https://www.dropconfig.com/) \- we built it as a
collaborative repository+hosting for JSON files.

You can use it to manage all variable things in your app, including content
itself, of course.

It literally takes less than a minute to get started, because you can create
an "anonymous" dropconfig without signing-up.

------
artpar
Shameless plug

If you are looking for a self-hosted opensource MIT licensed option, checkout
Daptin

[https://github.com/daptin/daptin](https://github.com/daptin/daptin)

I have been working on this since about a year and half, use it across a bunch
of my own personal sites and desktop apps.

Would love to elaborate if there is interest :)

------
tmikaeld
In Wordpress we can combine plugins to create a "whole" system, but your app
directory looks like a ton of separate applications - which means, you can't
pull together a bunch of plugins to create a complete system like with
wordpress.

Or am i missing something?

~~~
tonyspiro
That's right, Cosmic JS apps are fully-built websites and apps.

Extensions are more like WP plugins:
[https://cosmicjs.com/extensions/](https://cosmicjs.com/extensions/)

~~~
tmikaeld
Ah, so i was missing something ;-)

Thanks!

------
harrisonjackson
How do you position yourselves against someone like
[https://www.contentful.com](https://www.contentful.com) ? Seems like a
similar product, though less targeted directly at Wordpress Devs.

~~~
tonyspiro
There are a few headless CMS players in the space, but we're different in our
approach. Compare other headless CMS dashboards and APIs and you'll notice a
lot of work has been done to make our solution as simple as possible. Content
creators get the easiest dashboard to create content and developers get the
most intuitive API tools and resources to quickly integrate content. We've
been told "it doesn't get much easier".

Plus we're set apart in our commitment to our community and education. Our
community contributes apps / extensions / open source code / learning center
articles to help others with their specific use case. Our goal is for each new
user to benefit from previous work in our community by offering pre-built
apps, extensions and tutorials they can use to build a great product faster
and easier.

------
laurynas-s
I was looking something like this when I wanted to add a blog for my React SPA
apps. I didn't want WordPress, but I wanted a simple backend just for editing
the blog posts.

However, I realised that it is going to be bad for SEO as I cannot do
serverside rendering this way.

I cosidered adding a WordPress blog, but eventually just ended up with a
simple markdown rendering from the files - 1 file - 1 post.

If you manage to find a easy way to support serverside rendering, the product
is going to be good.

~~~
isthispermanent
My server-side React blog ([https://philandrews.io](https://philandrews.io))
runs on Cosmic. And it's easy. Given that your blog posts reside at the end of
a url, one GET request brings gets all the content you need to populate your
index or post page. Pair your React with NextJS, fetch your post(s) in
getInitialProps and you're good to go.

Here's an article I wrote about opening up a blog with Cosmic back in 2017. It
still holds... [https://hackernoon.com/language-agnostic-content-
management-...](https://hackernoon.com/language-agnostic-content-management-
with-cosmic-js-42b5dbe1880f)

------
smacktoward
Just my $0.02, as someone who's been building things on WordPress more or less
full-time for something like a decade now, and working with various other
CMSes for another decade before that.

 _> Cosmic JS is a drop-in replacement for WordPress_

I don't know what "drop-in replacement" means in this context. To me, a drop-
in replacement for WordPress would offer one or more of the following
features:

1\. Connect to my existing WordPress content database and use it as its
content store

2\. Use my existing WordPress theme to define its presentation

3\. Provide APIs that are 100% identical to the existing WordPress APIs (the
Plugin API, the REST API, etc.)

4\. Allow loading and running existing WordPress plugins without modification

I don't see how Cosmic JS does any of these things. Some of them it addresses
partially, an example being that there is a content importer available to pull
content in from a WP site. But that still doesn't feel like a "drop-in"
solution to me. A drop-in solution means I can pull out WordPress and replace
it with the new thing without having to think much or rebuild anything, which
does not seem to be the case here.

 _> We noticed that lots of development time was spent building and
maintaining the CMS itself, sucking time away from core application
development._

I don't understand this. WordPress famously installs in five minutes, and once
that's done you only have to deal with it by installing updates, which is
increasingly something it can do on its own without your intervention.

It may just be a matter of semantics - to me, "core application development"
on WP is everything you do beyond installing WP itself: designing content
architecture, selecting or building plugins and themes, etc. The "application"
in the WP context is the complete bundle of database content, first-party code
and third-party code you assemble to create a given site.

 _> automatic updates caused sites to crash_

I have literally never seen this. Never. If anything, my complaint on
automatic updates is that the WP core team has been so cautious to avoid
breaking sites that it's made getting automatic updates into the hands of WP
users a glacially slow process.

 _> a client would decide to install a bunch of plugins that caused the site
to crash_

Any sufficiently popular CMS that allows third-party extensions is going to
have this problem. There are going to be third parties out there writing
crappy code, and users out there who get dazzled by the marketing of that
crappy code and install it. If your solution to this problem is to tell users
they can't install third-party extensions, or to drastically limit what those
extensions can do, you're going to be at a severe marketing disadvantage to
systems that don't have those limitations. There are lots of dumb people out
there who desperately want to do these dumb things, and don't like being told
the reason they can't is because it's for their own good.

 _> comment spam was a never-ending battle_

Turn comments off (which you'd do on any non-blog site you're building with
WordPress), problem solved. If for some brain-damaged reason you _want_
comments, install Akismet ([https://akismet.com/](https://akismet.com/)),
problem solved.

 _> We're the only headless CMS that comes with a community of developers
built-in_

WordPress itself is _becoming_ a headless CMS. WordPress.com already provides
a REST API (see
[https://developer.wordpress.com/docs/api/](https://developer.wordpress.com/docs/api/)),
so if you just want to host your frontend and let a remote service host the
software and database, you can do that with WordPress. (You can also do it
with self-hosted WP, but the value proposition is less obvious there since you
still have to run and maintain all the complicated backend stuff.)

If what I really want is a headless CMS, and WordPress has already started
providing me with a way to satisfy that desire and is clearly going to be
doing even more along those lines in the future, why should I switch? What do
I get by switching that compensates for losing all the other stuff that comes
along with using WP?

 _> providing hundreds of apps, extensions, and integrations_

I guarantee you do not have as many of any of these things as WordPress does.

Please note that none of these things are issues with the Cosmic JS product
itself. (For all I know, it may be very good!) _They are 100% about the way
you are pitching and positioning it._ If you came to me, a guy who's
responsible for dozens of WP sites, and used this positioning to pitch Cosmic
to me as a replacement engine for all those sites, I would not find it to be a
very compelling pitch. A cursory examination of the product leads me to be
skeptical that it would really be an actual drop-in replacement -- and if I'm
going to have to rebuild those sites to use the product, then suddenly it's
not just competing with WordPress, it's competing with WordPress and every
other potential CMS I could rebuild them on. Now I'm doing what (IIRC) Joel
Spolsky called "the dreaded market survey," which means now there's a million
paths I could end up going down other than the one that leads me to buying
your product. You _do not want that._ You want to keep me focused tightly on
your product, not start me out window shopping.

So my suggestion would be to retune the way you pitch this product. If it
really _is_ a drop-in replacement for WP, make it clearer exactly how and why.
If it really _isn 't_, then don't pitch it that way. Find some angle that
Cosmic JS has that both makes it superior to WordPress and is clearly taking
it in a direction that WP can't or won't go, and lean on that.

I hope this advice is helpful, and that it is received in the spirit of
cheerful willingness to help with which it is sent!

~~~
tonyspiro
Thank you for the feedback. I built a career building WordPress websites as
well so I do have gratitude for the product and the ecosystem that it has
built. But for years I did encounter these problems myself, maybe you or
others have not, but this was my experience.

As for the semantics, you are correct, we are not proposing that you can use
Cosmic to connect to your WP backend. We provide a light-weight solution to
add dynamic content to any website or app. We offer a web dashboard to create
content and API tools and resources to integrate content into any website or
app. No infrastructure management needed. Our customers benefit from using
Cosmic because they can avoid the pain of building and managing their own CMS
infrastructure. But if you need that level of control and you like managing
infrastructure, that's fine, then you may not be a customer.

We are seeing more and more services that offload these non-core
infrastructure services: Stripe, Twilio, Algolia. They add value to
development teams that do not want to manage infrastructure. That's our
opinion on how content should be managed.

Hope this helps see things from our perspective. And I have taken your
feedback in a cheerful spirit, as I hope you have taken my reply :)

------
taytus
The page insight report is really really bad:
[https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=...](https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fcosmicjs.com%2F)

I mean, you are providing a CMS and your own page is this slow?

Shouldn't speed be the main focus?

~~~
snazz
The site isn’t actually that slow as a user, though. In the fourth frame of
the little “film-roll” view below the times the content has already loaded.
Most of that number comes from waiting for that little JavaScript-controlled
chat button in the bottom-right corner.

~~~
taytus
I wish them all the luck in the world, I just shared something that I thought
they might consider looking into as many CTO's would do the same thing I did.

But c'mon... It's giving me 14 secs to interactive. How isn't that slow?

~~~
snazz
Hmmm. I’m over a fairly high-latency, low-bandwidth mobile connection and it
loads pretty quick (more like 3 seconds than 14). You make a valid point if it
does in fact take 14 seconds to load, because that’s ridiculously slow.

------
taytus
Question: How was your traction before you guys joined YC?

>We're now powering production websites and apps for hundreds of teams around
the world across various use-cases.

I guess I don't understand why would anyone join an accelerator with this
level of traction. Seems that fundraising should be pretty straightforward.

~~~
tonyspiro
We had good traction before YC. But YC comes with many benefits, not just
fundraising.

~~~
taytus
I fully agree. What was the #1 factor for you to join the program?

~~~
tonyspiro
Hard to boil it down to just one. The dedicated help in improving the company,
the network, and others are the biggest.

------
seanwilson
Does this work with static site generators?

For the API requests per month pricing tiers, roughly how many API calls get
made each time a site build is triggered for a site with say 100 blog posts?

~~~
tonyspiro
Yes, you can get all of your content from Cosmic at build time for your static
site. Here are some resources that may help:

Gatsby source plugin: [https://www.npmjs.com/package/gatsby-source-
cosmicjs](https://www.npmjs.com/package/gatsby-source-cosmicjs)

Gatsby Starter: [https://github.com/cosmicjs/gatsby-
starter](https://github.com/cosmicjs/gatsby-starter)

Gatsby App: [https://cosmicjs.com/apps/gatsby-
blog](https://cosmicjs.com/apps/gatsby-blog)

Gridsome App: [https://cosmicjs.com/apps/gridsome-
blog](https://cosmicjs.com/apps/gridsome-blog)

For API requests: To get all of your posts, you can use just one API request
to the Objects endpoint.

Does this help?

~~~
seanwilson
Thanks! So you mean if I wanted to trigger a fresh build of a Gatsby site, it
would only take a single API request to pull in all the content needed for the
build? Even if you had thousands of posts and pages?

~~~
tonyspiro
That's right. You get up to 1,000 results (Objects) before you have to do
multiple requests on the API.

------
sbr464
Which database backend are you using? Apologies if it's been mentioned. Also,
does Cosmic support graphql subscriptions or streaming/live data?

~~~
tonyspiro
We use MongoDB. We have a GraphQL API
[https://cosmicjs.com/docs/graphql](https://cosmicjs.com/docs/graphql), but do
not currently offer streaming live data.

------
emilsedgh
This sounds amazing. Good luck Tony. Cosmic is very useful and I wish you
luck.

~~~
tonyspiro
Thanks Emil!

------
deepstream
you guys know you've got something important because there's an amazing amount
of pushback from hnow it alls here. a bit of a lightning rod for criticism.
well done!

------
dustindiamond
What is your current MRR?

------
thomasfl
Check out sanity.io. They have a somewhat similar product.

------
vamshi4001
Sounds very good by the description! I'll give it a try.

~~~
tonyspiro
Great! Let me know if you have any questions :)

------
ninja10
A lot of skepticism and resistance here. @tonyspiro, all the best at this. I
do follow what you're doing and see the benefit of this in comparison to and
also regardless of WordPress. At some point most things will be operating via
APIs, and via hassle free SaaS services anyway. I, for one would not want to
deal with installs, updates of any kind. It sounds like you've got some good
traction that can hopefully continue. I will though acknowledge a few
concerns:

1\. A proper import / export tool for risk management

2\. A slightly more refined message / call to action

3\. Why the JS centric name/brand? Can it be used outside of NodeJS based tech
stacks?

4\. The price poice does seem high for small teams. You mentioned that this is
normal for SaaS for some companies you listed. However, until you're
established, it sounds a bit high. Can you perhaps go for a discount for the
first X amount to time to entice potential customers?

Best! \- K

~~~
tonyspiro
Some answers to your points:

1\. We do offer a full data export. After you login, go to Bucket Settings >
Import / Export to get a full JSON file export of your Bucket.

2\. Thanks for the feedback. Anything specific?

3\. Early on we wanted to be able to add dynamic content to any website
server-side or client-side using NPM / React / Angular. And the domain name
was available :)

4\. Our target customer is teams, not individuals. And the value resonates
even more with larger teams because they experience more of the pain. We've
actually been told they would pay more :)

