Payload CMS
TypeScript Headless CMS
Today, we are thrilled to announce that Payload has been accepted into the Y Combinator S22 batch and has secured its first $500K in investment, which will ensure that our team will be able to continue to build Payload into the most powerful developer-first headless CMS available.
Since we started building Payload in 2018, our mission has been crystal-clear: finally give developers a better choice when it comes to working with a CMS. We've poured our hearts and souls into the architecture of Payload for almost four years, trying to realize our goal. Now, Payload is live and being used around the world. We're so happy to see such positive reception from the developer community, and that positivity fuels us to commit ourselves more and more every day to making Payload as great as it can possibly be.
The team at Y Combinator sees the value in what we've built and understands the potential for Payload to be developers' first choice when they select a headless CMS. They've officially given us a vote of confidence that we have what it takes to complete our mission, accepted us into their S22 batch, and invested $500K in our vision.
With this funding, we're going to catapult Payload to the next level.
We've got a lineup of extremely exciting announcements coming over the next few weeks—so keep an eye out for a ton more from our team!
Our blog post can be viewed here: https://payloadcms.com/blog/announcing-yc
The roadmap is live!
https://payloadcms.com/roadmap
The product is gaining enthusiastic users by the day. We are past the initial validation phase and are starting to really grow the product based on a growing community. Users are engaging and offering up feature ideas and we even have even published Payload plugins for useful features like cloud storage integration.
We were hunted by Wes Bos to reach all new audiences on Product Hunt!
Since the launch we've added loads of useful features and fixes to the product and we have had some user success stories from our customers.
With that ready it was time to go mainstream with our proven product. Join the discussion. https://www.producthunt.com/posts/payload-cms
After 2.5 years of development, we decided to do a soft launch in order to garner feedback on the product and the pricing model.
The initial feedback has been great. We're slowly giving out dev licenses in order to get more specific feedback on the entire developer experience.
Payload put in-use for a handful of client projects. This allowed us to validate the product's direction and features. Many features were added or refined and many bugs were worked out.
Once these projects were concluded, we were wholly confident in Payload's ability to meet our needs for all future projects.
Payload CMS was awarded a $20k prize as one of 10 Grand-prize winners of the Start Garden’s 100 Ideas Initiative.
Ten entrepreneurs were awarded $20,000 each Tuesday through a competition run by Start Garden, a West Michigan-based organization that backs new business ideas.
After struggling to shoehorn WordPress into a headless CMS, we started exploring other solutions. Node.js is our preferred framework, and all existing CMS solutions were lacking in one way or another.
We gathered a team and set out on a mission to build the best Node.js, headless CMS out there.
4 Comments
Well done! What do you think helped you most to get inside?
Thank you @Denis_Shatalin,
YC is excited about the tech and our website, they told us this much. Beyond that, I think it is our willingness to pivot. See, before getting into YC we've had steady MRR growth from our propriety license model since launch. However, the overall adoption rate didn't represent the growth we envisioned for Payload. In our interview we were direct about our plan to trash our subscriptions and go open-source for greater opportunity from other revenue models.
With that we are 100% MIT now and the announcement goes out tomorrow!
Congrats! 🎉
Thanks @melinda99!
This comment was deleted 3 years ago