This is the culmination of 2 years of effort from me and my team, and I couldn't be more proud of what we've accomplished.
Ecommerce retailers fundamentally all want the same things from their storefront tech, a storefront that's:
- Beautiful
- Fast
- Easy to use (as a marketer or merchandiser)
- Easy to extend (as a developer) with modern technology
- Cost effective and efficient to host
- Quick to launch, but easy to evolve to phase 2
Historically this has been a "pick 3" situation where you'd have to compromise on the other aspects. With Catalyst, we've built something where you can have it all.
We started, in an icy January in Austin, by making a list on the whiteboard of all the pros and cons of headless/composable builds and charting a course to keep all the "pros" and eliminate all the "cons", leaving brands with an architecture with no downsides.
The journey was a long one, but full of lovely memories, a few of which are:
- A seltzer-fueled naming discussion, late night at an AirBnB with David Linke and Nate Stewart, obsessing over about 30 "Glossary of terms" wikipedia tabs
- An eventful bar crawl with the Makeswift founding team (Alan Pledger Lindsay Trinkle Miguel Oller Andrew Reifman) that led to an acquisition of the best visual editor for Next.js, the key component of our vision to make a *visually* composable architecture
- Many trips to Atlanta, a city I now love, in order to bring that vision to reality
- A European roadshow of the product with our awesome devrel team, rubbing shoulders with some of my favourite partners
- Our first live customer, https://amidoro.com/ (shoutout to Amandeep Singh who was willing to bet on our technology)
- Validation of our approach from one of the brands I respect the most as innovators, Burrow, who has benefitted from Catalyst as a reference architecture to upgrade their existing Next.js build (shoutout to Kabeer Chopra for your partnership and feedback)
- Our first upmarket retailer to launch on Catalyst, Bealls, Inc.
- Our first big upgrade from Stencil, UPLIFT Desk (and shoutout to Daniel Burrow who has been willing to talk about his positive experience at NRF)
- Excellent partnership from the Vercel team, especially Jen Shumann Chang ?? who helped us find common ground between two "triangle" companies, Malte Ubl who supported us in areas where we put pressure on the Next.js framework to improve the experience for mutual customers, Guillermo Rauch for pushing us to keep a high bar on all aspects of performance and UX, and Alex Hawley and Matthew Lewis for answering hundreds of my questions :)
If you're a brand or retailer who's looking to up-level your storefront stack, take a look at Catalyst and reach out to me if you have questions or feedback - we'd love to hear from you.
https://lnkd.in/gtnCJyKn
https://www.catalyst.dev/
This week BigCommerce launched "The storefront that's setting a new standard for modern commerce". ?? The goal is to Empower marketers and Liberate developers.
Optimised for high performance and providing an innovative visual builder, this is the storefront your whole team will love! ?? #Catalyst really is designed with marketers and developers in mind, that enables teams to quickly create and optimise storefronts — without all the technical debt.
Link in the comments to learn more!
