Interview with a CEO
Prepr CEO
Jouko Huismans
1. In one sentence, what does your company offer, and who do you target? Prepr is the world's first headless CMS with built-in personalization that helps marketers and developers create smart websites for exceptional customer experiences.
2. How did you make your way into the world of SaaS and start your company? We have a background in the Media & Entertainment industry. Here, we noticed how incredibly inefficient daily content management tasks were. After publishing content across different channels, no one recorded or acted upon relevant data. Simply because there were no tools available to capture data and make an impact. In short, we noticed amounts of scattered content, scattered data, and a lack of actionable tools.
We immediately knew we could solve this problem for both media companies and all other industries. After all, every business is currently a publisher. And when you create content, you want to manage it in one central place and effortlessly publish it across the web. The same goes for storing your data. So, with two launching customers, we started our business by building a cloud-based platform. It was a natural choice for us: SaaS is in our DNA.
3. What makes Prepr unique? We believe the future of content management is both headless and data-driven. With a headless CMS, you have complete freedom to publish content across the web. And working data-driven allows you to create the best experiences for your visitors, for example by personalizing landing pages and offers to individual needs. It’s this combination of being headless and data-driven that makes us unique.
4. As an early-stage company, what is your strategic focus after receiving the investment? We’re currently transforming from a tech-driven into a commerce-driven company. We have defined three strategic pillars: becoming a thought leader in data-driven content management, delivering a product with outstanding simplicity, and creating a high-performance team with an open and agile culture.
5. The war for talent heats up. What's your idea of attracting new talents? We’re convinced there is always talent looking for a new opportunity, hoping to work for a game-changer in content management. It’s a huge motivator to be part of our transformation. So when looking for talent, we highlight the challenge we’re facing today. This way, we hope to create a company culture that welcomes open-minded and forward-thinking people. Including new remote employees.
6. There is no easy path to success. What was the biggest challenge you went through and what was your biggest achievement? We had the ambition to build a new and disruptive content management product. So, we decided to implement graph database technology. Our biggest challenge was building a super-stable and super-fast platform that could meet the highest enterprise service requirements. We did it, though. Together, we succeeded in building a full-native graph platform: it’s something we’re tremendously proud of. We also acquired multiple premium customers who use Prepr to create new business value every day. We’re thankful to be a part of their process.
7. As a CEO, what do you know now that you wish you had known in the beginning? With Newion, we fired up helpful discussions about who our ideal customer is. We made huge steps, and the process of evaluating and sharpening our value proposition is still going strong. I believe this is something that we should have done much earlier. It puts all your efforts in the right perspective.
8. What advice would you give other founders in the B2B SaaS industry? Less is more. You don’t need many features to be successful, you need focus and a good value proposition for your ideal customer. So, don’t be afraid to kill your darlings.