Interview with Alex Shyba co-founder of Uniform

in this video i am interviewing someone i have looked up to for a long time his name is alex sheba and he is the co-founder of uniform uniform is a startup that works in the enterprise spheres where they actually inject stuff that is normally not really ready or used in enterprise because the systems used for enterprise are a little bit behind so they're doing the jam stack they're enriching the digital experience platform with all these kind of cool headless approaches and we have personalization we can use nuxt and all of the stuff and uniform is kind of making sure that this this is standardized and it works its skill and you know i do this on a daily basis i struggle with these systems and how to get it to be modern and they did a startup and they actually made it happen so it's now something i can use every day and you know what that makes me super excited so in this interview we talk about how did he start uniform why did he want to start it why did he leave his really comfy job at a super cool cms vendor but also he will show us some of the software itself this is what i'm really excited about and you should be too because this is going to change the game for big e-commerce and for big cmss so without further ado this is the interview with alex shiba this is post processing tim and tim i have a pro tip for you when you interview someone press the freaking record button why didn't you press the record button that's like the main thing you do when you make a video anyways you'll be seeing me looking that way when i ask questions because that's the reference cam i have for alex and so it's it's kind of off and my video feed is not as nice but it's good enough so enjoy the interview while i sit in a corner and cry and think about my mistakes hello alex how are you welcome to the channel what a privilege to have you hey tim all good good really nice to be here so cool i've actually wanted to interview you for probably a year because you've been helping us out at work with a lot of stuff that for us was like super hard to do and you were like oh it's like this just do that and you're like the black magic you know it all so it's super cool that you have you here and what i actually ask every guest is can you say your name the way it's supposed to be said and then maybe tell us where you're from stuff like that i'm happy to happen too so my name is alex sheba uh some some pronounce it as shaiba which is kind of funny because in in in russian this means uh hockey puck so that's that's kind of yeah so when i get that i i i crack up so yeah and are you like alexander or sasha or are you actually in alex i'm actually alexander a ukrainian except ukrainians spell o every time uh they see an a just to piss off russians so that's how that's how it works and you know what this is why i ask this question every time because i get this kind of stuff this is perfect and also i love we work with people from ukraine a lot so you just clicked right in and spoke with them on their level which really worked so that was cool yeah they're from the same hometown as me which which also really yeah that definitely helps because it's exactly it's a huge country so but now you're in the u.s right yeah i've been here since 2006 so based on average uh kind of stay of in san francisco uh i'm i'm i'm local practically yeah exactly you're basically um local to the place if you're there for that long and i can imagine that a lot of people are there like if you're there for four years you kind of become local because so many people are there from so many different places you have to right yeah it's it's sort of became in recent few years a very transient city uh which i i cannot recall that in late 2000 so things started shifting quite quite fast with with all the all the growth here that the region experienced in tech it definitely affected sort of the city mindset and attracting different sort of folks that are here to come and may not necessarily want to stay oh yeah i can imagine because you are there because well you started it differently but now you work at uniform which you co-founded right so would you mind explaining to our guests you know what probably a lot already know uniform because when we tweet about this people will really like to see it but can you still explain what uniform is and then maybe after that like why did you think you had to start this startup what what was there in the in the market that make you feel like oh there's an idea let's do this yeah that's a good question our mission is to uh bring jamstack to enterprise scenarios enterprise customers we we've been fans of jam stack for quite some time and um what we realized is that there's these technological bubbles that did not necessarily intersect and jam stack has a lot of benefits um that that would be i mean critical um super useful and and real painkillers to enterprise users this is where i'm coming from right uh working with psycho for 13 years i've been exposed to quite quite a lot of enterprise scenarios and the pains that enterprise customers experiencing are pretty much what jamstack is is all about so it became clear that the intersections are creating the venn diagram out of these two bubbles is needed and we've done a couple months of consulting after starting the company and it became clear that these are the real problems that we need we need to start addressing and there needs to be sort of a conduit system and maybe a middleware so to speak something that connects the existing world of enterprise cmss and digital experience platforms and a more modern decoupled cdn driven approach with with modern javascript static site generators and pretty much connecting these big dots this this is obviously it was obvious to us this was needed and that we have the right recipe to do it because we know the the world of enterprise digital experience platforms really well and passionate about jam stack and uh so sort of became natural to us that this is something we need to do and solve what i like about this is that basically you just described my everyday job but i just answered with frustration right so i work on these huge platforms or e-commerce or cms or whatever it is and we put in place like all these things to make that front-end actually modern performance all of the things we want as front-enders right but then it's really hard to do so but the fact maybe that you guys are in san francisco you're like but we can also just do a startup to solve it rather than the european approach that i have like just complain and try to work it in and it's actually kind of cool that you now when this thing launches like big you're solving everyday problems of so many front-end developers i think that's super cool i think that's it was needed it was time for this yeah thank you that's that that's really music to our ears and uh the the trick with enterprise is that that we realize is that they cannot necessarily afford a big transition to like the usual suspects of jam stack stack um so they politically invested into these marketing platforms they technologically invested and that's usually five seven maybe more um year investment and sort of just turning off and move completely different direction and may not be feasible and even if you do um your marketing folks may sort of miss out on some of the capabilities of of this integrated marketing systems they are monolithic they've they've asked but they they have quite quite rich feature set and they were appealing to business users marketers for for past decade right so this is what those users expect so sort of we identified two two problems is kind of bringing which manifested in this bi-directional strategy that we have as to bring this capability such as personalization um into the world of jamstack and and that's that's largely a missing piece now but also make this uh systems uh enterprise digital experience platforms like psycore compatible with the world of jam stacks so sort of bring everything together from two different directions so digging tunnel from two different sites exactly i was thinking like if we go to a gemstack website now let's take my website i wouldn't know how to start to do the personalization that you're about to show off a bit later i wouldn't know how to do it so you're also enhancing the gem stack world next to enhancing the enterprise world so there's actually this whole extra thing and so why do you think those traditional systems are no longer successful in this whole world because i know [Music] i have not seen it work properly so do you know what is the difference here why are you so successful and they are not even though they've been here for years and years i i think the there's there's a few things happening the goal post has shifted in terms of what a performant web page is and what the users your visitors expect a fast site to be like right so so they're sort of spoiled by blazing fast experiencing coming up from from google from startups that that have the luxury of greenfield project execution using the latest technologies really optimizing towards end user experience and and and deliver sub second page page loads enterprises they they've been lagging so i think there's this expectation gap between what the users uh want from your uh brands to deliver and and reality often and tooling uh it's people process technology right uh all all three really factoring in so more i would say tooling and processes and people would usually would catch up and and and learn and adopt new new stuff if the tooling and processes is in place so tooling sort of been lagging behind because the front end uh the javascript revolution right in the open source uh really pushed the envelope of what you can do with javascript and like if you would be building a website now using some sort of dotnet based server sites uh html baking technology is probably not something you would not consider right so no no no no javascript is is the way to go but yeah um the role of cms this also means that the role of cms is changing and it's it has no business of managing presentation layer and sort of impacting how you want to go about building your front end right so full freedom of expression on the front end sort of created a need to reduce see content management to the essentials and one of those essentials is providing content uh and providing business users with ability to assemble experiences from uh modern front-end components i guess um and all the marketing layers and on top of that that's sort of tbd uh where is that responsibility i think philosophically it we're sort of arriving to linux based philosophy winning over win a windows based philosophy where you get software in one package you have everything you need in there but in terms of kind of best of breed it's really not not there because you're gonna you have you have a big monolithic piece of software and it's just harder to uh making sure every single capability is the best that you can ever have well with linux based philosophy it's more like an assembly of best of breed uh technologies and that mindset is winning in in content in enterprise content management digital experience platform probably everywhere but do you think maybe uniform is kind of the glue between those best of breeds because this is i'm trying to define it for myself also because you do a whole bunch with like making it jam stack but uniform itself doesn't do a jam stack thing right or does it i'm i might know this actually already but i'm asking this because probably some viewers will not really know like how that connects because you're also doing the personalization thing but it's kind of a layer in between to make it work right is that a correct assumption yeah so philosophically we are very much aligned to the best of breed and being the nervous system of your digital experience solution which includes a content management system maybe a digital asset management system maybe a combination of both some sort of content provider aspect a marketing layer that that orchestrates you know what what piece of content particular visitors should see at this right moment um and and everything in in between so that's definitely what what we're building um is the enabling technology to to get there sort of uh conceptually zapier for dxp or mulesoft for for dxp space something something in between those those lines but the the challenge is before we get there because that's that's quite a journey the challenge here is how do you address the current pain points of these companies that already bought in with monolithic dxps and how do you incrementally uh decouple the the frontends and move them towards jam stacks so they can clearly see the path forward and it doesn't have to be another six month or a year re-platforming expensive re-platforming yeah i guess i've seen you guys change things around in like four weeks and everybody around then they're like what okay this is possible right and this is nice about if you are a bit smaller company with a whole bunch of smart people you can go really fast and this is super cool so you know what how about we just show it would you mind maybe just um showing a little demo so people can see like the uniform interface and how it all works i absolutely would love to yeah i guess you do you know what i'm also quite keen to see it because i've seen some demos but i feel like yours now might be slightly scoped differently so yeah let's let's do it the the process starts with onboarding experience where we guide users through these three different steps of setting up your site offering you to deploy from a starter kit that also comes with a preset content setup and pick your stack so contentful netlify next gs could be your stack next step we would connect with contentful this would actually provision a brand new content for space it will install our app and it will install the content from start kit it's completely optional but this sort of food fast tracks the whole process yeah cool towards going to personalization right um so in the content model you see everything comes from from our starter kit including page models and we'll see the site in a second so in this page models we model components as a reference to multiple variances so here you can see uniform is actually a plugin that extends contentful um ui we'll connect the site to kind of entering traditional jam stack flow right we have a starter kit we put the site name key repo credentials we'll push a repo to your github connect with netlify in this case and it will start deploying the site so this this is sort of the jam stack journey will involve fetching content from contentful um and um also content from uniform which we'll we'll see in a second so the web hook here will do a handshake between between uniform and in netlify so we'll need to make sure we set up that web hook so every time we do a change of personalization configuration will trigger netlify webhook so here we're talking about different intents that we can figure for personalization so we have call for papers campaign registration developer marketer this is a fictitious conference site so let's say we have a campaign with utm query string unfrm conf which identifies as potential speakers so that's a campaign we can push out and you can see we can start personalizing it personalized straight up on the site as fast as possible without any back-end calls same thing we can do with a cookie let's say we drop a cookie when we register on the site we go back to home we can see our homepage here is changing to thank you for joining because of that cookie has been set so that's configuration as a part of this intent configuration we have set up as a part of the starter and more interesting behavior so we can actually use the tracker part of uniform to identify your behavioral profile in this case developer go visit the developer page go back and you can see here in both the list of talks is personalized based on who i am i go to marketer refresh marketer page one more time now the marketing i'm scored more marketed than developer so i'm seeing marketing talks and marketing hero so it's doesn't it only do cookie based query string but also rich behavioral based personalization if i want to create a brand new one this let's say would be for visitors coming from your channel yeah i'm going to be doing this later you know this right we'll do a query stream based keep it simple um so source equals tim tim's channel um we'll be able to use that within contentful when we provision brand new variants for our hero so because it's very jam stack friendly approach we publish and at that point all the configuration of your personalization becomes a static file that will be embedded within your app during the natlify build process so we published that part that that is the configuration now we need content so provision brand new uh hero for our variants and here you can see we'll tag it with this intent that we just created so that's the first class app extension to content for allowing marketers to keep content with personalization it's all inside the one place i love it exactly yeah contentful's app model is a sublime i mean we definitely had a lot of fun building this um so once uh here i'm fast tracking the build process you can see now hitting source tim and we have we have a personalized there we go so we we're going from um and and this part shows how we can do it actually during ssr on versailles so same developer behavioral match and here we disable javascript and reload the page and we'll see the same personalized page so there's multiple flavors of the execution part of this personalization we can handle it at the client side if the cdn is not running logic or we can run it on cdn level we support also various flavors of that running javascript at cdn level with something like cloudflare over cell but also on akamai we run um sort of in embedded markup mode as as another flavor so you have like cloudflare workers to kind of do um api kind of calls to do a server side render that that's what that does right yeah so it's leveraging next gss serverless target too oh yes of course rendering too yeah i'm a bit more into view world and i cannot wait because they're they're they're very close to doing that as well so that's going to be very cool so you leverage all of those cool features from the providers that most people use anyways for their jam stack right and i am so impressed by how easy that was that you just did but also that it seems like on hydration it knows what to show and that's a little bit of the magic that i'm i'm just gonna have to dive into some codes at one point to understand that but that is super nice thank you thank you well this is what we want to see right the team has done a great job uh getting this out so we will be announcing it really soon and getting it out into the market so excited to tell the story of like personalization in a few minutes right so if we contrast this with the current status quo uh in jam sec world personalization is somewhat of a kind of uh i haven't seen it not really and i also i have seen a lot of demos from [Music] and a lot of content editing and nothing happens because it's just too hard to set up it's too slow and this is really um a life saver for real marketeers that actually want to be doing this you're opening up a whole avenue also for agencies to consult on right it's super cool yeah we we believe that it's technology aspect is a big adoption blocker for personalization kind of bringing personalization into mainstream but also process like sometimes users really don't know where to start they you know talk about personalization uh but not really don't know you know how how where to start um so we our approach in that is not just building the tooling but also building the process so it's very easy get started to get started and you can kind of incrementally upgrade your personalization game um into it lars our co-founder he's been spearheading that whole initiative more around business enablement in his psycho days so he's very he has a board game about personalization so there will be lots of cool stuff coming out around more like how do you actually interface with with the system i think we can make it make it more much more fun but also on the i.t side like being able to not worry about infrastructure and scale because in this case this is a completely back endless way of executing exactly this is amazing we're going to need this so looking at this whole story but also where you came from you know your career a sitecore doing cool stuff already doing a bit of consulting now this if you look forward what would you like your kind of if you look at this field that we are in what would your legacy be what would you love your legacy to be yeah to be honest thinking about legacy maybe a bit too too early um but i always wanted to you know build build a business and uh build business with people i really enjoy working with and i really like and have a ton of fun doing that sort of figuring out this this recipe uh for myself and being able to to build something bigger right then than a team i i led a team at psycorp it was a lot of fun as well this is sort of a next challenge building building a business right and building a piece of software that becomes a company so as they say idea is not a product product is not a company right so you're gonna get through the whole cycle and that's that's the challenge that's something i want to have behind me and kind of know the recipe of how how to do it and hopefully if this works do more of this and and then see where the next mission is exactly i love it because you're kind of focusing on the process of just doing the stuff and doing it very well and i guess if you do something very well and you are able to kind of market that also things will just happen and that's why probably uniform is doing already so well so congrats on that i if i did this i would probably do it the same way so that's a very nice ending like that so thank you i wouldn't know if i have enough experience doing it myself but you know anyways that's future talk um listen man i really want to thank you for taking the time i know it's pretty early on your side i also know your early riser so i guess it's fine but thank you nonetheless for your time i know you're busy so um yeah that's it cheers no thank you cheers all right bye