So welcome everyone to today's webinar, which is kind of a first birthday party for experience by Kentico. We will defer to our guest here whether he wants the prototypical smash cake to devour with his hands or not, maybe at some other point, but I am Matthew McQueeny from Konabos. Just a quick housekeeping if you have any thoughts or questions as we move along in this great conversation, please type them in the chat and we will surface them right here, whether you're on YouTube or whether you're most likely on LinkedIn. Watching this, we appreciate it. Especially appreciated is our guest here, Sean Wright, the lead product evangelist at Kentico. Love that title. Of course. Welcome Sean. We have had probably 10 hours of unrecorded podcasts in our time, so we'll try to consolidate it here and give the audience something, but you have a great history with Kentico, and can give us some of that information now, which helps sets the stage for our discussion on the we'll call it the first birthday of the versionless SaaS, based offering from Kentico. So I'm going to kind of go into this slide. Found this in a nice podcast you did, I think, over at American Eagle, you rival any other guests we've had in the gear as well. You have a sure microphone. So Sean, tell us about your professional background and your history with Kentico. Yeah. So my background is definitely a kind of a traditional, technical one, where I graduated from University with a degree in computer science and math, so very technically focused, went into it and software development, and worked with a advertising company for a little while, and then got a job with a digital marketing agency, and I didn't really know what that was, but they needed a software developer, and I could kind of do some of that. So I joined up with them, and they told me they used a product called Kentico, and this was about 12 years ago now, and they taught me how to use Kentico, which I understood to be kind of a content management system, and I was familiar with some other products in that space at the time, like WordPress, and I think maybe.net nuke was a thing. Remember then? Yeah, so I was a little familiar with the idea, but I really didn't know what I was doing. Anyways, I worked for that digital agency for about 10 years, learning all sorts of things on the technical side, and more and more, on the customer relationship, sales, solutions, architecture side, and I kind of developed into A role there of leading that agency's technical decision making and helping our clients really achieve success with Kentico as a product. And over that time, I learned more about the Kentico community. I became a Kentico MVP, which I was for four years. I established relationships with other Kentico partner agencies. And if anyone knows anything about the Kentico community, it's that there's a lot of great, strong relationships, even between competing agencies. And I really like that. And I felt a certain point, after 10 years with this agency, that there was a time had come for me to decide what I want to do next in my career. A couple options available to me.

 I could kind of go down the technical route and really focus in on that, but I saw an opportunity with Kentico where maybe I could get more into the marketing side of things. And I found that to be exciting and kind of scary and challenging, so I decided to go that route, and I joined up with Kentico as lead product evangelist about two years ago now. So my responsibility these days is to reach out to customers and our partners and the broader community and help them understand what experience by Kentico is and what the value of the product is, how to execute with it, and how to understand kind of the where we've come from, and what the long term vision of the product is. I like it. So a few questions off of that, because I know you and anyone should go back and listen to Sean's Coronavirus podcast episode. We went over an hour, and there was a lot of great stories, and I think this one's in there too. How did you get your job with Kentico? Yeah, so at the time that I was trying to figure out what I was going to do next, I felt like there was a role that was not filled at Kentico, and it wasn't a role that they had. It was just one I felt they maybe needed, or one that I could contribute some value to. And so I reached out to Dominic, our CEO, and a couple other people in leadership at Kentico, and said, Hey, I have this crazy idea send an email with my thoughts about what type of job I could fulfill. And then a couple weeks later, everything had been agreed on and I had joined up. So it was, it was pretty quick going once we all figured out what type of contribution I could make to the company, that's a great one. It's a good networking tool too, right? I mean, or lesson too. Sometimes there's not always a position on my work day or whatever, but you see something, and if you have the connection to go to the top, and they're going to listen to your email, and it talks to Kentico as well, just the leadership, I think, and how, how receptive they are to good ideas and, You know, ways of working and kind of futuristic opportunities, the other two things that came up here. The first one, your agency. So you said 12 years that you were at, how did they come across Kentico and then make it the backbone of their tech stack, in a way? Yeah. So that's a an interesting question that I think would resonate with lots of long term Kentico partners. Yeah, 12 years ago, what was Kentico? It was a very value into oriented, feature filled CMS product. It really focused on selling to technical people, because CMS management was traditionally in the, let's say, cio area of a company, and you had to be able to speak to technical people and tell them, Hey, look at all these features. We can really accelerate, like your development team to get a CMS product up and running for the marketers, because the marketing team typically didn't run the product itself or make decisions about product selection, and so Kentico was really well oriented to speak to developers as built in.net it had so many features, basically every feature you could ever want. You could build forums, you could build commerce sites, you could build marketing sites.

 It even came with pre built like themes or sites built into the product that you could just one click up and scaffold out and be up and running with, with a CMS product, kind of where a lot of products like WordPress are today. That's kind of the space that Kentucky competed in. But this was, yeah, 1015, years ago, and the agency I was working for was looking for a way to move from custom software development into building solutions faster for their clients, and speak more to that CIO role, get in with those IT departments at larger organizations, and say, Hey, we can build you a solution quickly. And Kentico really fit well in that space. So you the second question on that is, being in this space for is 12 years a score? I think it's a score, right? Yeah, so yeah, being in this for a score? Do you find that same proposition to be pretty much true with today's company who might start working with Kentico, or evolve with Kentico, I would say there's a lot of shared DNA there and shared perspective, but Kentico as a technology company has evolved over that time period, and we focus much more on the digital marketer today. And of course, Kentico as a CMS product back then, was enabling a marketer, a digital marketer, but Digital Marketer responsibilities were kind of different then, and they were there was much less in the MarTech space to enable them to do the types of things they want to do, whereas today there are 1000s and 1000s of products, so the focus is much more on the marketer and enabling them to get done what they need to do. So I would say our product, experienced by Kentico, has a very powerful content management focus, right? And that's what we traditionally have always been great at. And over time, we added to our past products, digital marketing features, an experience by Kentico today has kind of like a two core capabilities in the product. One is that content management and content, data and information, and the other is customer data and digital marketing capabilities. And these things aren't split in the product, but they're two core pillars, and they're interwoven like very organically throughout the whole product. So we are trying to enable marketers to do their content management and allow developers. To build robust and feature filled web, email and headless experiences, but we also have that deep focus into enabling the marketer to do all the different types of things they want to do, and content management is just one of those things. So I would say to an agency that maybe knew us back then in 2008 2010 and hasn't heard about what we're doing today. As a Who are you talking to? As your customer? If you're still talking to the CIO, then maybe there's other types of products that would be a better fit for you, and you know, doing rapid application development for internal IT tools or those types of things. But if the person you're talking to at your client today is the marketer, fantastic, we're probably going to be a great fit for you. You said an interesting thing before when you talked about taking the job at Kentico, that you were a little bit anxious, excited about a marketing kind of role. Has that been almost an evolution that's helped you with customers as well? Like taking more of a marketing role, you're now in their spot, you were more technical. What have you seen there with the product as well? Oh, absolutely. And that idea touches on a topic that I'm very passionate about in the, let's say, digital marketing space, and that's that I had a very traditional technology background, but I feel like my branching out into the marketing realm has helped me to have more insight into building better technology solutions.

 So that's something I try to encourage the developers that work for our customers and partner agencies to, you know, really invest in their technology skills, because that's what they were hired for. But do not exclude the digital marketing knowledge and insights that you can gain from communicating with other people on your team or clients if you're in a partner agency, because what a developer working with experience I can take it was really doing is they're building a technology solution for digital marketers that is the, you know, the customer or the stakeholder, for the developer. And so if they understand that digital marketing mindset and some of the work that the marketer is trying to accomplish, they will be much more successful in their technology solutions. And this is something I've experienced myself, where I went from a role that was very much in the technology weeds, focused on just coding up something that worked, to branching out to understand the struggles and opportunities for people on kind of both sides of that spectrum, the marketing side and the technology side. And I like to see that that blend in, that blending of perspective, has really helped me grow in my career and also grow in my ability to help people. That's great. We'll hit on a bunch of those other themes as well, but we also have a just for those watching, if they want to hang around. We will have some demoing at some point during this we're not sure when we'll make the call. You know, kind of a live show here. But let's talk about x by k, as the cool kids call it. What is it and how is it different from your previous offerings? So experience by Kentico is our, let's call it next generation digital experience platform product. So in the past, we've had different versions of Kentico. The product was named after the company. So we went from Kentico 12345, blah, blah, blah, all the way up to Kentico 12, and then we kind of rebranded the product a little bit to feature that digital experience platform, differentiation from a traditional content management system with the 13th version of our product. And we changed the name to Kentico experience 13. At that point, that technology that was backing the product was kind of split. And without getting too deep into the technology weeds, we had, we were supporting Microsoft's modern.net framework, and that was version 3.1 up to we're now at eight, and half of the product also was built on Microsoft's older versions of their.net framework, and that's the version 4321, going back into the past. And we realized one we would need to be fully built on modern a modern technology stack to have the agility to move at a pace. We wanted to with new features and capabilities. Additionally, we had 20 years of history with our older generations of products that gave us a ton of insight into how to enable digital marketers and what a great content management and customer data management experience looked like. But we still had features in the product that were many years old and were less relevant to what our customers needed today. So the motivation to switch technology foundations aligned with the motivation to build a solution that really matched what our digital marketing customers needed today, and also what our technology or implementation partners, our partner digital agencies, what they were asking for in a solution that could help them deliver solutions to their clients faster and more consistently and Keep up to pace with the changes in the marketing strategy of their clients in the technology landscape. So we have these two constraints. We need new features, capability of a product that's more aligned to what we're doing in 2024 and also technology foundations that needed changed. And with those two constraints, we saw an opportunity for a new solution, which was experienced by Kentico, rebuilt from the ground up, using modern.net right now it's running on.net eight. 

Soon, when.net I comes out, we'll be supporting.net nine. It's built on React. And a lot of the legacy technology constraints that we had, they're gone. We're fully built on new, modern technology. Additionally, the product has been re envisioned, redesigned to focus on what we view our customers are challenged with today, which is managing content and customer experiences across multiple digital channels. So we went from on the left in the screenshot that you see something that was very focused on websites like that was the centerpiece of the solution. And that's because, yeah, 15 years ago, the foundations of that product were just trying to enable people to build websites, which was a difficult thing back then. Now we have products like Wix and Squarespace and even WordPress, where you can just do one click up and your website's built with a template that came out of some template selection site. Building website is not the difficult thing to do anymore. What's the difficult thing for marketers? It's managing consistent experiences with a consistent message brand design across multiple digital channels like web and email and channels driven headlessly, like maybe a digital billboard or a mobile application. Marketers, we see them using multiple different products today to accomplish that type of ecosystem of technology and products that they're using, and that means they're doing things like copying and pasting content between different products. They're having inconsistent branding and messaging going out to their customers, and because of that, their customers are having a poor experience. In some cases, that just means the brand doesn't really resonate with them. They feel like it's kind of clunky. They go to the mobile app and it like it's different content, it's different information, it's a different design, even than the website. And then there's a micro site they land on through some PPC campaign, and that looks and feels different. Like do I even trust this brand? They can't even keep their message, their identity, consistent. Are they someone that I want to buy a product from or invest in? They don't feel like they're that digitally mature, and the bar has been set for organizations to have great, seamless customer experiences across multiple channels. So we want to create a product that really enables marketers to be able to do that, and that's what experience by Kentico has you manage all of those channels and all the content that is delivered through them in a single solution, in a single platform, and we also allow those marketers to collect and engage, collect information about and engage with those customers across all those digital channels, and what they gain is a central store of activities and engagement that those customers have with those messages, with those experiences in that product. And so you can do amazing things like track the engagement of a customer in your mobile app and then personalize the home page of your micro site that they would have then seen through a PPC campaign to change what they saw in that microsite based on how they engage with the mobile app, and then use customer data from an email channel where, you know, maybe a customer subscribes to a newsletter and their engagement there to additionally change. You should the homepage of the website that you're pushing them to, or maybe some of the content displayed there. So once you have this centralized management of your entire ecosystem of channels and content and customer data, they can all support and build on each other to enable marketers to accomplish things that allow them to deliver great experiences for customers. Now, the interesting thing to me in following the story of this, and talking to you and leadership and everybody there about this, is that for Kentico, moving to x by k is a revolutionary change. 

It is a disruption in that kind of MBA way of thinking, right? But it's also in a way, so it's revolutionary, but it's also evolutionary in the way that it's not going all the way and falling for some new thing. It's well thought out as to who you are as a company in your 20th year now, and going in those new directions in SaaS and headless but in ways that stay true to who the company is, right? Yeah, yeah. So much of our DNA and the knowledge and experience that we've gained over the past 20 years of building, content management and marketing technology for our customers is still in experience by Kentico. So you know, from a marketer's perspective, if they've used past products of ours, they're going to look at experience by Kentico and say, oh, okay, yeah, this is still Kentico. And if I'm a developer and I'm have experience with, let's say, Kentico 1112, or even Kentico experience 13, and I jump into a brand new experience by Kentico solution that someone on my team created. I'm going to look at it and say, oh, okay, yeah, that's Kentico. Are things going to be different? Absolutely, because we're trying to achieve a different type of solution based on the challenges we see our customers having today, which is different than it was 15 years ago, but that knowledge that we've gained over that time, we didn't throw it out, we used it to build an even better product for our customers. Do you ever go back and look at the first shipment of x by k and to remind yourself of how far you've come in this year or two. Oh, absolutely. So I've been writing blog posts about our refreshes, inexperienced by Kentico for about a year and a half now, and a refresh is what we release every single month, that is all the new features and capabilities that we're shipping in the product. So we don't have these annual or every 18 month release cycles that allow you to do a giant release of all these features and capabilities, but also is a disruption to customers and developers, because then they have to learn all of these things all at once. There's typically a bunch of breaking changes. Sometimes customers get stuck at an older version, because adopting all this new stuff is a lot more difficult than they wanted. We release monthly, and that allows us to innovate quickly, because we can listen to customer feedback and get changes out in the product much faster than that 18 month or 12 month release cycle would allow, additionally, it keeps the scope of each of these refreshes smaller, which means they're much easier to adopt. And for several months now, we haven't even had a single breaking change in the product. And when we do have breaking changes in the product, typically they're small API changes, developers can accommodate those in 1520 minutes and get that refresh applied to their solution and deployed out for their marketing team. But I was saying that for the past year and a half, I've been writing these refresh blog posts where I describe the value of what we're shipping to marketers each month. And sometimes I go back and look at some older posts to reference, when did we release that? 

Because it feels like it's been the product for a long time. Oh, okay, yeah, that was a, let's say November last year. And I think back looking at that blog post, what was the product like then? Well, it almost feels like a different product, like so many capabilities have been added in that period of time, that it's something you take for granted when we move consistently at this pace and keep shipping new capabilities for customers. But you look back and it's, oh, yeah, it's been, it's been 12 months of new capabilities. How much stuff is in there? There is a lot. And so the product today has both grown organically and evolved organically, but it feels like a different product. And so we're going to go into the, you know, this one year in idea what we've learned. But. What you brought up there. I don't want to go to a challenge first. But has this been, has that been a challenge in that you can't start with the full suite and you're starting a project or a product again, kind of from the from the start, in a new framework and way of doing things again, with the personality of the company and what you've learned. But has that been a challenge in Kentico, 13 was probably really fully featured in the minds of the end customers, yes. And you're almost like, it's coming, it's coming, it's coming. And in that period of time, you probably are like, it's like holding back the door, like ho door, you know, when everyone's coming at you, has that been a real challenge? And what? How do you how do you work around that? I mean, I see you're very visible on all the slack and all that to always be answering ahead of it. But is that really the key? Yeah, I feel like that has been a challenge, and the way I've communicated to help solve it has changed over time as well. So Kentico experience 13, our previous flagship product, had a history going back, let's say, 18 years in the product of features. That's a long time to build features, right? Imagine any product company today, technology company, and you tell them, all right, you have 18 years to get the product ready to sell. They would say, we can build anything in 18 years. Okay, that's the expectation that existing customers and partner agencies had for experience by Kentico when it was released. And we told them, hey, you know, it's only been like a year and a half of this product when it was kind of in a beta phase where we were looking for early adopters to prove it out and give us feedback about the product. But that's a very different type of history behind the product than the 15 or 18 years that we had in Kentucky experience 13. So my job at the time was to help people understand that, yes, there are feature and capability differences in some ways experienced by Kentico is far more mature than Kent co experience 13, because of that new foundation and new vision behind it allowed us to achieve some things from day one that we could Not in older versions of Kentico, we just could not move and turn the ship with experience by Kentico. We have the agility to do that now. But there are other areas of the product where something has been in, let's say, Kentico 1213, for a very long time, and we did not have that yet in experience by Kentico. So I had to tell people, hey, look this one thing you're looking for, it's going to be in the product. It's on the roadmap. Take a look, and actually, we can switch over to the roadmap real quick on my screen. So here@roadmap.kentico.com anyone can take a look at what we are planning to do. And this is completely public. We're transparent with what we are building and what our vision is. We also take feedback from customers, so if you want to submit an idea, you can let us know what you're looking for in experience by Kentico, and that helps prioritize what we focus on if we get enough feedback about a specific need or challenge of a marketing team or a developer, but this roadmap tells you what we are planning to deliver next. 

So I would tell people that were looking for that thing, that they had an older version of Kentico, they're looking for it and experienced by Kent. I'd say, go take a look at the roadmap. It's, you know, the next month or two or I might say, look, we've planned for that. We don't have a hard commitment date for it, but it's on the roadmap, and it's part of our vision and our strategy for the product. So you can rely on the fact that it will be in there at some point now. Sometimes that's good enough because it's a nice to have, or it's a we need it at this point in the future, but not today. But for other customers, they need that thing right now. And for them, we would say you can adopt experience by Kentico when the feature and capability set meets your requirements, which is maybe going to be different than it is for other partner agencies or other clients. When that time is it's kind of different for everyone. And that was really the message, let's say, a year and a half ago. But today, the message is, what are you trying to achieve? Because a lot of people have a deep history with our products, and they built solutions and delivered them to customers in a specific way, or customers purchase them directly from us and their IT. Teams have built solutions on Kentico for 15 years, and they built them a specific way, and they come to me and they say, Sean experience by Kentico doesn't do this thing that I need to do because I did that in older versions of Kentico. And I would say, what are you actually trying to achieve? What's the problem you're trying to solve? Because I've found that there are ways to solve. The types of challenges that are different than there used to be in older versions of our product in experience by Kentico. So sometimes it's just about shifting perspective. We have a solution already in the product for you, you just have to look at it differently. And so I'm spending a lot of my time now helping people think differently about experience by Kentico, because there it's being adopted by many customers and many partner agencies as the primary solution that they deliver to their clients. So they really just need to shift their perspective in a couple of different ways. One, the product is not 100% focused on websites. Websites are one of the channels that we enable marketers to manage, but there's also email and headless we also really focus on content reusability for consistent design and message across those channels. And that's very different from older versions of Kentico, where things were much more focused on pages and websites, and that was kind of what you had to work with. That was the one tool. So if that's the tool you always work with, you come to experience by Kentico, and you say, I just want to put everything in websites and pages. And we say, take a step back. What are you trying to achieve? What's your marketing strategy? What types of channels do you want to manage an experience by Kentico? How can you improve customer experiences, to make them more consistent across all those channels. So shifting that perspective on what the product enables, also, in the past, people would look at the product and say, Kentico 11 didn't include that feature that I really wanted. Now I have to wait 1218, months until it ends up in the product, and people get very frustrated when they wouldn't see that one feature that they absolutely needed. Well, today, if the feature isn't in the product right now, it might be in there in a couple of weeks, because of that very quick, iterative monthly refresh cycle, we are able to respond to those needs of customers, and we've actually had that happen a couple times. So here you can see on the roadmap, we have versioning. So version history for content.

 Originally, this was maybe a bit more long term on a roadmap. We knew we needed to have it, but we thought there was a higher priority for other types of capabilities. But we got feedback from our customers and our partner agencies that said we need versioning. We said, Okay, we'll reprioritize it. It's not going to be x many months out like it would have been with a big, large version release that comes out every 12 months or so. Instead, we can iterate much more quickly and bring it closer to when our customers need it, which is today. So changing that perspective as well, has been something I've been trying to focus on with customers and developers and partners. Yeah, no, it's, it's a good point, and we have a we've been building our first experience by Kentico project, which is at the launch phase. We're just waiting for the day to launch. But, you know, just so people can hear discreet example I'll put, I'll put this back on, just for the moment. The there was one feature you might, you know, you might see in a constant contact with landing pages, all that where, when somebody fills out a form, the form information goes to a distribution list or an email for somebody to know that it was notified that it was there, and also to see the data, because they might not log back into the CMS, right? And we were like, Oh, it doesn't seem like we could do this. I reached out right away. You're like, well, there is a way to do it now, and it's on our roadmap upcoming, and that's a better answer than we don't have it, yeah, but it's one of those things where you can see the prioritization of this idea of 18 years versus 18 months. It that's a little weird thing. It's not a massive thing, yeah? But when it's the thing you need, you're you notice it a lot, but then you're saying be you can be vocal. If multiple customers are vocal about this one thing, you'll prioritize it. So I think there is a clear kind of path to how you work that out. It is a little bit of a paradigm shift in thinking, yeah, and there is always a good answer for it. It's almost like, if you're, if you're a vegan in the 1960s or something, right? And you're just, you're waiting for the market to catch up with, with offerings, but it is where things are going the so we have a lot of questions in here that hook into some of my questions. So I think maybe we let our users ask them, because I have them here. We had your, your nice, great stuff, Sean from Michael Tipton, we have this one, which I'll just show as a comment before, before a question. The monthly refresh approach to continuous updates has been very innovative, rather than the challenge over large upgrades. How has this more rapid feedback loop changed the way. Kentico builds its software platform. That's a good question. Yeah, I could probably give some insights here that maybe not everyone has. So when you have kind of a date in the future, and it's 1218, months from now, then the goal of building a product and delivering like a new version of it at that date is trying to plan out 18 months ahead of time and know how much time it will take to build feature x and y and z, and add up all that time and the amount of people on the team and say, yep, we can or can't do that set of features, and maybe one of them you have to trim down to hit that date. But as any team knows that works on a technology solution for that period of time, it is very difficult to estimate accurately how much time things will take, how many resources in people you have available to accomplish something. 

You know, people move in and out of a company over 18 months. Basically every company has this happen, and that kind of makes you have to constantly re evaluate those estimations and expectations, and it can really throw a project into a difficult position. So with this more iterative approach, we get a lot of the benefits that teams get when they adopt more of an agile mindset to delivering solutions. We have plans for the next five years for the product, but they're very big picture, right? And as we kind of zoom in on smaller and smaller time frames, we get more and more refined ideas of what we're building, what the scope of it is how much time it will take, and we found that that monthly release cycle fits really well with the pace at which our partner agencies and customers can adopt those new features. And it also helps us to be able to give good estimates about how long something is going to take to deliver additionally, sometimes things take more than a month. So there are some features which we can work on in the scope of the month before we deliver the new feature in a refresh. Other times, things will take three, four or five months. Some of these really big things can take maybe six months. But we don't want to just have our development team in the product team working on something for six months over here in a corner, and then you finally get it out, and it turns out, oh, that's not what customers actually wanted, or it doesn't work well with the other things we've built into the product. So we even release larger features iteratively. And you can see examples of that, pretty much everything we've released over the past year. A good example is automation. So we've added automation to experience by Kentico in the past two or three months, and each month we release a new enhancement to automation. So if you're familiar with older versions of Kentico, the auto marketing automation capability was like huge, like the size of a Titanic, absolutely giant right, all these different knobs and dials that you could turn as a marketer and a developer to create these really complex automations. We knew that to reproduce that, if that was our goal, would take a very long time, instead of trying to reproduce it in whole and then release it as one big feature, we decided, let's just break it up. We'll get the foundation out there. We'll have one or two scenarios that we'll start with, and then we'll add on iteratively from there. And so each month since we released it, we've had new improvements for automation, and over the next several months, we're continuing to release new enhancements to automation to build it up into something that's more fully featured. But by not holding it back for six months, we were able to solve challenges for customers today that maybe only needed that one small piece, or that was the priority for them and all the other things that we'll add on to it in the future. They're nice to haves, but they just needed something solved today. We didn't block them by waiting, you know, 612, 18 months to get that capability out to them. And it might not have even been right, right, because you, you do get people to test it and stuff, but if you deliver it fully featured in your mind, yeah, it might miss the mark, potentially, Yep, yeah, and we get feedback from customers as soon as a refresh is released, yeah, their team will try it out. 

They'll explore it, click around see if it fits their needs, and if it doesn't, they'll give us that feedback, and that allows us to make refinements and tune the direction that things are going. Because we haven't committed that, you know, six months, this is what we're doing. It's we really want to be iterative in how we enable customers and also get that feedback from so that we stay on the right path. That's great. So. We have a lot of good questions from Vasu here. What are the main lessons Kentico has learned from the first year of experience by Kentico in the market? He has our question right on the slide here. So I can't speak for the whole company, but I can speak from my perspective, and that's that there's a lot of education that needs to be done. And I think this is the case with any technology company that releases a product you gotta unless you're duplicating exactly what some other company has released and you're just releasing it at a lower price. There is some customer education to be done. And with experience by Kentico, we knew that we were shifting the mindset of what it is to be a digital experience platform. And I think at least for me, I underestimated how much education would be needed to help people understand what I got to see every day, working with the product, constantly talking with the product team, the sales team, the marketing team, the engineering team. There's a lot more that goes into it, and I think now we're getting to a place where I feel like that education is an outreach and messaging that is my responsibility is really bearing fruit. So it takes, it takes a bit more time launching a new product into the marketplace, even when people are adopting it from the outset, they're excited about this new thing that they thought would be possible, but they still bring along their preconceptions of what they expected it to be along with that. So you can have great customer adoption right when it's launched, which we did, and still have the challenge of education and communication of what you're trying to achieve. Yeah, there's a little bit to in my mind to like consumer electronics, even like Apple, right? And it doesn't seem like it's been as much of this lately, but where it's like, okay, the headphone Jack's gone, okay, we're putting in we're not going to have a top of the phone. There's going to be this island thing. And there were reasons why they're there. People would complain and go crazy, make jokes when it was announced, and then they'd get it, and you wouldn't hear a lot about it. And it's seamlessly. It's like, oh, they did kind of know what they were talking about, right? So it's like, we need a dongle. We need So there does feel a little bit about that now, from the point of view of customers partner experience, as we have here, I'm going to pull up another one of our questions here from Vasu. Thank you so much for all these questions. We could have had them host. Are there any specific challenges or common pitfalls that customers encounter with x by k, and how can they avoid them? So use that to kind of talk there and then also into just what other insights you might have gained from the customer and partner community. Yeah, I think this really depends on the customer or the partner. So we have a ideal customer profile that we target with what we're building, and we stay focused in on that to make sure that's who we're enabling. Now we might be a good solution for customers that are outside that ideal customer profile, but that's not who we're really targeting. 

We have customers come to us from different places. So are they coming to us from maybe a simpler type of technology like WordPress or on Umbraco, or are they coming to us from a much more complex technology like Sitecore? And nothing against any of these technologies, right? They're all good for the customer that they're designed for. But depending on where you're coming from, to experience by Kentico, and we've had many move from other platforms to us, you have different types of challenges. So if you're coming from something that's maybe a lot more complex, you come to experience by Kentico, and you wonder, where is all the complexity that I need to manage? Right? Because I have all these different options and settings and ways of doing things in these other products and experience, my Kentico has maybe a more streamlined approach. If you're coming from something that's much less complex, you might be looking at it and saying, Well, I just want to build a website. Why do I have all this concept about channels and reusable content? And we say, Well, look, our ideal customer profile is either growing into multiple digital channels. Let's just say it's two websites instead of one. They now have this need to share and reuse content across both of them. How do you do that with other types of solutions? If something is very web focused, that becomes a lot more difficult. Now you want to branch out into email. Well, stuff that's authored for the web isn't really appropriate for email. If you've ever authored emails and tried to embed a web page in it doesn't work out very well. So you have to start thinking about your content differently. So. So if you have this single channel web focused, very traditional type of approach digital marketing, then some of our capabilities might feel like complexity that you don't need, but we're really trying to focus on customers that are maturing into more complex digital marketing needs for their organization. So, yeah, there's it. So much of it is about the mindset, right? Like, again, with more complex products you come to experience back in to go, and you're like, where's all the technology that I need to stand up and run? 

Like, I need this three types of databases and 10 different web applications, and then this background thing, and then all this other stuff. And we say, No, it's just a asp.net Core application and the SQL Server database, and that's it. Yeah, like, what about all the other stuff? And no, that handles, that handles what you need if you want to add on to that and do more and have more complex technology. We scale to that, but things are a bit simpler over here, because we're really trying to focus on enabling the marketer and not just building like a giant suite of microservices and complex technology solutions for the sake of it. So Vasu also asked a good question that I'll put up here. It does sound like your ICP is more of a digital maturity kind of parameter of customer, more than it is in industry. But have you seen types of industries that have shown more interest in x by k? Absolutely. I'd say financial is one of our biggest so we have so many customers in the financial industry, like banks and credit unions, tourism, manufacturing, healthcare, these are all big industries for us. I think those types of industries are realizing and I would imagine most are realizing this, but those ones specifically are realizing that their customers have digital experiences throughout their whole life, like all areas of their life. So they're on the go. They want to check something on their phone. They want a mobile app. They're at home on a laptop or tablet. They want to be checking a website. They want to stay up to date with an organization. Maybe there's social media and there's content that they're sharing there, and that content should probably be the same as what they're saying on their website and that mobile app, oh, and the customer also subscribes to some emails, gets notifications about new products and things. The message should be similar there, so customers of ours that are in those industries are seeing either they're already using multi channel and they're spread out across multiple products today, and they're trying to consolidate that and simplify their technology footprint for security, ease of updates, consistency, or they're realizing those types of needs are on the horizon for them, and they're getting a little worried, how are we going to manage this? How are we going to achieve that for our customers, our visitors to our website, and different experiences? Well, then they look at experience by Kentucky, and they say, Yeah, okay, that fits well. So we've had a lot of the product has resonated really well in those industries that I mentioned. 

Yeah, that's great. So as we always do, we, we could probably go Joe Rogan, level, length, not, not content, sorry, length. But why don't we? I have some questions that have to do with, how is x by k different in terms of the day to day for customers, what is our roadmap looking like, and what is, what are we feeling for the upcoming Kentico connection in Miami, after Europe? But why don't we talk about these things through the prism of a little bit of a demo? Does that make? Yeah, sure. So we'll have you pull up the K bank demo, and then I think we've had a really good chat on many of those elements. And this will just give the audience a look, a look see, as they say, so I'm gonna, I'll add you to the stage. It looks like roadmap is still on there right now. You got your tabs, so why don't you? I'll take down. Vasu also had some good other questions, which we can try to get to, but let's do this, and then we can answer them after because they will be in the feed. He's had a lot of great questions. He could be a host, I think, sure, just before I jump in the demo. So next refreshes this tab here on the roadmap website. This shows all the stuff that we are planning in the very short term to release. So you can see the next two months planned is broader vision, bigger picture, and this will be over, let's say the next six to eight months and released. Well, this obviously shows all the different things that we've released over the past. Well, since experience by Kentico was launched. You can see there's a lot of stuff in here. Okay, so I'm going to jump over to the demo. And this demo is for regional financial institution called K bank. And K bank uses experience by Kentico to manage multiple digital channels. Here you can see they have three websites, personal banking, Business Banking, and a mortgages microsite. Additionally, they have emails that their customers subscribe to. They have an affiliate website that they don't manage, but they deliver experiences to with a car dealership connected to their auto loan product that they offer as a financial institution. And then they have a mobile bat, mobile banking app, which they will are planning to grow into, you know, full login and check your account and everything. But they started out with just content. So I'm going to jump over to the experience by kind to go dashboard. And what we see here is all the different capabilities in experience by kind of go that a customer would use. 

The things that the marketer would typically focus on are going to be channels, content management, digital marketing, and a developer is going to focus more on the development and configuration of the product. And you can see over here those digital channels that were I mentioned in that experience dashboard. They're all featured here. So we have those three websites, we have a mobile app, and we have emails. Now the way that these channels work is going to be different depending on the type of channel. So if we're, for example, on a website channel. We have a traditional web experience, and we have this visual drag and drop WYSIWYG kind of page builder experience here, where developers build these components for their marketing team, and these components have different options that can be designed by the developers working with the marketers closely to model both the content and the UX and the experience that the marketing team really wants to have. And this whole page is built with these components. You can see, I can come down here, and there's a full library of them that were built for this solution. This is the web experience. So what about like the headless experience? So I'm going to jump back over here, we're going to open up this mobile banking app. You can see here, this is, this is a PWA, right? But there's nothing about the technology behind it and that would prevent it from being a true native mobile app. It's just a lot easier to demo this screen than to hold up my phone to the camera. So we can see here we have information from K bank different types of products that they offer. Articles. Where is this coming from? Well, if we go back into the experience dashboard, we can go to the mobile banking app. We can see there's a bunch of screens here, and these screens model the experience delivered headlessly to that mobile banking app. You can use our headless channels to deliver experiences to all sorts of different types of end experience. So it could be a microsite, it could be like a marketing tool, digital billboard. Mobile App is a very common one for us, but you have the flexibility to model what this experience is however you want. And let me jump into this home screen. And we can see here that there are three products that are in the products list. 

Here we have Travel Guard mortgage and personal loan. And if I jump back over to the product screen here, we can see Travel Guard mortgage and personal loan. So the modeling that we're doing represents the application experience. And I can even open up one of these, and let's go ahead and open up the personal loan, and we can see that this is a screen in that mobile application, and it references this personal loan product. And here's where the magic happens with experience back Kentico, I'm going to click on this personal loan product, and this is all the information about the personal loan that we want to share and reuse across all those different channels. And this content is independent of any type of experience or channel. So this is the same personal loan information that would be displayed in an email promoting this product in that mobile application, in a website or multiple websites, the marketer can rely on this content being consistent across all those channels by reusing this single piece of content. And we can see here there's traditional types of text fields and an image and taxonomy, all the stuff that you would expect from a great content management experience. But we also have linked content items. So these are other reusable, shared content items in what we call our content hub. The Content Hub is a source for all of that information across all these different channels, and so what you end up with when you create content in experience by Kentico is a graph of interrelated pieces of content that can be retrieved by developers through any of these different channels, email, headless or web. And that graph of content can be tracked additionally so I can see this personal banking content, this product, where is it being used? Well, we have it's being used in different channels. It's being used in that mobile banking app, as we saw, it's being used in our marketing emails, and it's also being used in the personal banking website channel. So by experience by Kentico, managing kind of centralized all this different. Content information, we're able to enable the marketing team to have control content governance, insights into how that content is being used, give them one place to change and save and publish that content, and have that information change across all those different channels. Sean one question, not as a salesman, but just what you'll see sometimes in the industry, are each of these things their own price, or are they, for the most part, a part of your instance? Yeah. So we have kind of two dimensions of pricing experience by kind to go. One is the number of channels that you are using in the product, and we have two types of channels. So let me go ahead and create a new channel, and I'll call this Test website, and we'll choose a channel type. So be a website channel, and we can see channel size. We have standard and micro. So the different types of channels, these two have different prices. Micro channels are more limited in the number of items that you can have. Imagine a micro website. You probably don't have 5000 pages on it, right? So we limit micro websites to 20 pages in that page tree, as you saw in the website channel. Those cost less than a standard channel. Standard channel is like fully featured. Has all the bells and whistles. You can make as many content items as you want. Additionally, we have tiers of the product. So let me jump back to here, with the experience by Kentico. 

We have a standard tier and we have an advanced tier, and the standard tier is more limited in capabilities, and the advanced tier is kind of what a mature digital marketing team would be looking at to enable them to deliver experiences across multiple different types of channels and as many channels as they needed. And so there's different pricing tiers based on the tier of the product, gotcha. But when you say, like, the content hub, sometimes those would be priced as their own product. Like, there's a when you say bells and whistles, there's a lot included true with your even standard, right? Yep, so, and this is different if you're used to a like True Self Service SaaS product, where you just go and create the account. You never talk to a salesperson, right? So, like, I don't know, Gmail, something like that, or Google G Suite, or there's lots of content management systems that are like this. You just go and create an account and you spend it account and you spend it up. And what do you get? Typically, you get priced based on the number of users. So the number of seats for the product, typically you're priced based on the number of items that you create. So like the number of items in the content hub for experience by kinda go, We do not charge you based on either of those things. So you can have as many marketers in the product as you want an infinite number, if you wanted to, like, 100,000 marketers. I don't know how big your organization is, but maybe you're the size of Microsoft, and that's how many users you have. It's the same price. Additionally, you can see there's a lot of content items here in the Content Hub, 14 pages of them. In fact, you can load this up to a million content items if you want. There's no extra charge even at the standard tier. That's great. And then each refresh, I'm putting some pressure on you here. Do you have to make sure that those new features are in this demo? So we have a team that manages this demo environment for us to make sure that anyone like myself or the sales team has access to that latest refresh, and typically, that's accomplished in a couple days after it's released. That's great, cool. Well, I know we're coming down a little bit on time here, so why don't we thank you for that demo that was very useful. Why don't we end on Kentico connection coming up here in Miami in about a week and a half, actually? No, am I wrong? Yeah, a week or so, yeah, yeah. What? What can we expect from this, this event? Because you were at the European leg, I believe, earlier this month, what are we looking to expect, other than some nice weather in November, yeah. 

So we just had this event in Prague, in Czech Republic, and we will be having the North America event in Miami. And this event really focuses on our partner agencies to help them understand what we're trying to do with the product, enable them, get them the information they need, see that that kind of retrospective of what we've delivered, and make sure they're aware of what they can do for their clients with it, and also help them understand what we're going to be delivering in the future, what we're what our vision is, what our product strategy is, and again, that's really focused on our partner agencies. In the past, we've done events that are both for customers and partners, but this year, we're dedicated just to having a consistent message for partners, making sure that they are able to enable their clients as best as possible. If you're a customer, we're going to be doing more industry type events around the globe over the next year, and so you should be able to see us and attend one of those, see demos, ask us questions, and. We make sure we announce all those on kentico.com so stay tuned there, if you are interested as a customer and knowing where you can kind of see us and talk to us. And I think I just want to hit home one thing as a as a partner, that the access you, you gain to Kentico, its leadership. It becomes like one team, all hands together, even when there's sometimes an issue, everyone jumps in and I think that that's that is a real gain of a of a platform such as Kentico, that access to the minds and that care from the other side, from the from the vendor side, to enable and create the success that you need for your projects. You might not see that everywhere, and you will see that at these kinds of events. 

You know, we're out and hanging and having real conversations, maybe a beer or two, but it really is a special, I think group, and these events show that. And I think our friend Fauci here will just say, will the event offer any hands on labs or practical sessions? I think is there not as much as that, maybe as in Burlington, right? But, yeah, actually. So if you're looking for hands on events, depending on if you're a partner or customer, local meetup groups, we're trying to nurture and grow so that people can attend those in person, and, you know, have demos or workshops in person, again, those industry events, if you're a customer, that's going to be the place to reach out to us and engage with us. And if you're a partner agency, the Kentico connection conference is going to be the place to go, and we do workshops and tutorials and demos there as well. Great. Well, Sean, this has been fun. It's been like a live kind of multimedia show here, all kinds of visuals and shared resources across the both of us, and a good, really good demo there, and you've answered everything, I think, very clearly, like it's crossfire or something. But thank you. Thanks so much for the time, and look forward to seeing in Florida in a couple weeks. Yeah, thanks for having me on and I definitely look forward to seeing you in Miami. You