Product Led Growth with Thomas Peham & Julius Hemingway from Storyblok
Storyblok's two founders grew the product to 20,000+ users as a two-person team before hiring a single marketer — one of them running the company from Brazil, the other from Austria, fully remote since 2017. Thomas Peham's read: you simply can't hire that selectively if you tie yourself to one office.
Thomas Peham is VP of Marketing at Storyblok, a headless CMS used across more than 140,000 projects in over 130 countries, and Julius Hemingway is Storyblok's analyst relations manager, working with firms like Forrester and Gartner.
We get into how Storyblok scaled from a two-founder, fully remote, self-serve product to 220 employees without losing a single enterprise customer to churn, why they refuse to see marketing to developers and marketing to content teams as separate problems, and what a startup actually gets out of building a relationship with analyst firms.
The Q&A below is experimental — extracted from the episode transcript with AI. If you spot a mistake, let us know at jack@scalingdevtools.com.
Storyblok has grown remarkably fast. What's actually behind that growth?
When I joined in mid-2020, the whole company was about 20 people — today marketing alone is 30 people, and the company is around 220. Storyblok was founded in 2017 by Dominik and Alex, who worked fully remotely together from day one, since Alex moved to Brazil with his family while Dominik stayed in Austria. We're still fully remote today, zero offices, people across more than 40 nationalities — and I don't think we could have grown this fast if we'd tied ourselves to hiring within a single location's radius. The foundation is really about being able to hire great people regardless of where they want to live and work.
Beyond the remote-first culture, what else drove that early growth?
The product itself, and the underlying market shift. Since around 2015, we've seen an explosion of front-end channels beyond just web and mobile — AR, VR, voice experiences — and that immediately raises the question of where you actually manage content for all of those different surfaces. Storyblok emerged as a next-generation headless CMS addressing exactly that, serving both developers and marketing or content teams. Storyblok is self-serve — any developer can use it for free, with a lifetime free tier for individual users — and that free, developer-first entry point is what let Dominik and Alex scale to 20,000-25,000 users globally as just a two-person team before any dedicated marketing or sales existed.
How did the business evolve once dedicated go-to-market functions came in, starting around 2020?
We built out enterprise sales, both inbound and outbound, selling into mid-market and enterprise across e-commerce, fintech, and tech more broadly — which accelerated growth on top of the organic self-serve motion, and led to enterprise-specific features that developers on side projects don't need but larger businesses do. The third motion is our partner ecosystem — a lot of brands turn to agencies for implementation work like a website relaunch, since most don't have in-house developers and designers available for that. We now work with around 1,300 agencies, over 100 of them formally certified, meaning they have deep technical fluency in implementing Storyblok and often build integrations and use cases we hadn't even anticipated ourselves.
You've mentioned zero churn among enterprise clients. Does that trace back to early product-market fit?
Yes, and we're genuinely proud of it. I think traditional content management systems were built for an era when people sat at a desktop browser building websites — they were never designed for the explosion of front-end channels we see today. Because we found strong product-market fit early, everything marketing and sales invests in is really investing in a genuinely different, better-timed approach to a category that hasn't fundamentally modernized.
You've talked about breaking down the silo between developers and marketers as core to the product. What does that actually look like inside Storyblok itself?
It's not just a product decision, it's a company culture one. As marketers, we're constantly talking directly with developers about how something resonates with them before we ever take it to market. We deliberately avoid silos — we even have someone embedded in the marketing team whose direct responsibility is partners, sitting between both functions. That kind of cross-functional closeness is genuinely rare, and it's a big part of what attracted me to Storyblok in the first place, and something I still see paying off.
What advice would you give a startup that has to appeal to more than one distinct persona, like both developers and a non-technical buyer?
It's something we discuss internally constantly. I used to assume having multiple personas in the buying decision would be a huge pain point, but for us it comes back to a simple promise: deliver the best product for both developers and content teams simultaneously. For developers, the pitch is a headless, API-first architecture. For marketers, the pitch is being able to work independently from the development team, fully in control of content — a lot of businesses we talk to have marketers filing Jira tickets for developers just to make simple content changes. We don't think of it as needing to bridge two personas so much as giving each group the tool they actually need while keeping everything in one central content hub. When we explain to developers that their marketing team will be able to publish content without pulling them away from building new features, they immediately see the benefit for themselves too.
Julius, how would you summarize that same idea?
In simple terms, it's not asking people to do something they're not good at. We're not asking a developer to suddenly be good at marketing, or a marketer to suddenly be technical — we're telling both groups to focus on what they're already good at, and providing what sits in between.
How does the product itself support that kind of collaboration?
We recently introduced a new version of our CMS specifically focused on the collaboration layer — the same way Google Docs and Figma brought real-time and asynchronous collaboration into writing and design, we believe collaboration needs to sit natively inside a CMS too. You want to actually see the content outcome as you build it, but also be able to ask a developer directly for a new component you need for a landing page, all inside the same system. We ran a recent survey on the state of content management across the US and Europe and found that on average, six to seven different teams are involved in content management at a typical business — not just developers and marketers, but HR publishing job listings, sales managing collateral, and more. The goal is really empowering all of those groups with a system they actually want to use.
How do you actually collaborate with your agency partners day to day?
It breaks down into three areas. First, enablement — comprehensive documentation, SDKs, tutorials, and technical training so agencies can implement projects for their own clients confidently. The core value we offer agencies is faster, more cost-effective implementation, which is the real business case for partnering with us, alongside things like revenue share and co-marketing exposure. Second, partner success — a dedicated team working regionally with agencies on their specific priorities, whether that's landing a new client or getting technical support for a complex build. Third, partner growth — helping agencies scale their own business, not just our network globally. It's worth noting both our founders came from an agency background themselves, building large e-commerce projects, which is why a lot of what's in the product is specifically built to make agencies more productive.
You mentioned a partner marketing fund. How does that actually work?
We launched a $1.5 million partner marketing fund a few months ago — every certified agency partner gets access to around $5,000 a year by default for co-marketing activities, sponsoring a local meetup, attending an industry event, no complicated approval process required. We've also run competitions doubling that to $10,000 for specific initiatives. It's honestly a real source of inspiration for us too — the range of creative implementation ideas coming from agencies across Australia, the US, and Europe consistently surprises us.
You've also built out a broader technology partner ecosystem. Why does that matter for a CMS specifically?
Being headless means being genuinely composable — a content hub is only one piece of a business's stack. If you're in e-commerce, you're also thinking about your commerce platform, like Shopify or commerce tools; going international brings in translation management; personalization brings in a separate personalization engine. We built a tech ecosystem of integrations specifically so agencies and customers aren't limited to just us in isolation — feeding CRM data into the CMS, for instance, is what actually makes it possible to define which content different audiences see.
Julius, how does that composability connect to Storyblok's values as a headless business?
It comes down to making it easier for different technologies to integrate with each other, because flexibility sits at the very core of being a headless business. We saw a real opportunity to help businesses compose their own best-of-breed tech stack for their specific digital experience needs, genuinely collaborating with a wide range of technology partners rather than trying to lock businesses into using only what we prescribe — dictating someone else's stack would directly contradict what we consider core to being a headless company.
What opportunity do you see for early-stage dev tool startups in working with analyst firms like Forrester or Gartner?
Analyst firms can help a business avoid real mistakes early on — there's a huge amount of hard-won knowledge about growing a business that's genuinely difficult to access elsewhere, and it's often unclear where to even start looking for it. Analysts have the ear of your actual clients and a broader view of how the market perceives your category, so they can tell you things like 'headless just isn't well understood in this particular market yet,' which directly reshapes how you think about messaging and where education needs to happen first. The smaller the business, the more costly a mistake can be, so having insight-based confidence in a strategic decision, rather than relying purely on gut instinct or a blog post you read somewhere, genuinely matters.
Beyond avoiding mistakes, what else does that analyst relationship unlock?
You get real market and customer feedback — sometimes something as fundamental as which market category you actually belong in, which isn't always obvious from your first use case alone. Talking to business analysts can surface entirely different use cases your product already fulfills that you hadn't recognized. For a developer-first tool selling into mid-market or enterprise specifically, business analysts are a genuinely tremendous source of market and customer feedback that directly feeds back into product roadmap and strategy.
Julius, is there a category-creation angle to this too?
Definitely — if you're building something genuinely new that nobody else has quite built yet, analysts can help you figure out how to communicate that to the market and refine the positioning until it's as sharp as possible. But it requires a genuine willingness to actually take that feedback on board. Before joining Storyblok, I'd worked with businesses in the analyst world that weren't always willing to accept advice, or had already committed to a direction for months and weren't willing to course-correct. Credit to the people here — there's a real acceptance and willingness to be challenged, to justify a decision when questioned, and to actually correct course when the evidence says to.