Our Philosophy
I've spent the last 15 years building web sites and web software of all shapes and sizes. The web is an amazing platform, and I love building on it, but there are some inefficiencies that still haven't improved in the 3 decades since its inception. Managing and changing content on the web is one of them.
I've worked on teams small and large, across several industries, and the story is always the same. When someone on a team wants to change text that appears inside a product or website, a rigmarole ensues. If you're lucky, the change can be made by a non-technical person. If not, there's usually a process to get it onto a backlog and routed to a team, followed by a developer making the update in the codebase, before the change goes through the testing, QA, and release cycle.
This can take anywhere from days to weeks for even the smallest copy changes. I've seen this happen in small businesses and tech startups, all the way up to Fortune 500 companies. If you are in the minority of companies for whom this is not a problem, great work, you might not need Editmode. If not, read on.
To date, we have had one category of solution to this problem - the Content Management System. Sometimes CMSes are the right tool for the job, but they've been around for so long that our ideas of what they should do and how they should work have become stale and entrenched. Most new CMSes offer incremental improvements on the previous ones, and most people building a new CMS start with the solution, not the problem.
Here's a short list of issues we see with traditional Content Management Systems:
- They are not optimized for storing key-value content (the kind of content most common in software).
- They mostly require developers to use a specific environment or language.
- They usually have a high developer learning curve.
- They have a high end-user learning curve, particularly for less tech-savvy users.
Editmode exists to solve these problems, and more.
Some of the things that drive us are:
- Doing more with less code: The way we build web software has evolved at a rapid pace. The range of things that can be done without needing to write a line of code has increased. We generally tend to reach for the solution that requires the least code first.
- Bridging The Gap: We agree with the notion that "Every functioning system has two forms: The abstraction that outsiders are led to believe, and the reality that insiders actually and carefully operate". We dislike the old cliché of "The Creatives vs. The Business people" as two distinct organizational species between whom friction is inevitable, and believe a lot of this seemingly inevitable friction can be avoided with 1. Better tools, and 2. Better communication. This idea is at the core of why and how we're building Editmode.
- Lowering unnecessary barriers: We dislike overly complicated technical solutions, jargon, and anything else that can prevent a newbie from becoming an expert. We want to make building great edit-friendly experiences accessible to everyone (that's you too, designers 😀).
We are a small team of talented creatives working fully remote, and for now, are self funded and nearly profitable. This is a problem we've wanted to solve for a very long time, which we're very passionate about, so we won't be going anywhere any time soon. If you believe in what we believe, whether it's as a customer, partner, team member or supporter, we'd love to hear from you. Please shoot us an email or reach out on twitter!