Payload CMS goes Next, Supabase, Heroku, and Kontent AI

This newsletter used to have separate sections for front-end, backend, and devops. But everyone wants to be an all-in-one "platform" now'days, so half of the product launches I featured broke that scheme.

I dumped those headers, and now the newsletter is easier to read, without artificial categories.

Let's get into it...

Hot Product Launch

This is a first. Instead of a launch, I'm highlighting an exciting roadmap announcement. Payload CMS is adopting Nextjs as a dependency.

I've read a lot about Payload, and I can't tell what makes the tool different than open-source headless CMS's like Sanity, Strapi, or Hygraph.

Each CMS that I named is straining to make itself as compatible with Nextjs as possible. That's because Next is more than a React framework, it has become a distribution channel for other developer tools.

But "compatibility" for the other CMS's usually means starters and tutorials. Payload is aligning its roadmap to Nextjs, and hoping to become the default option when a developer fires up a new Next app.

Payload's Nextjs roadmap announcement

Video: "Should Payload move to Nextjs?"

Payload founder, James Mikrut on SyntaxFM

Payload's growth chart on NPM Trends

Product Launches

✨ Planetscale updated its database monitoring tool to include an anomalies section. "There, you’ll find a graph representing your database’s health over time, as measured by the number of queries that took longer than expected."

✨ Supabase made a dx improvement to their CLI, "using the browser instead of copying the API keys from the dashboard manually". The lead engineer on this feature offers a walk-thru of how he implemented it.

(I call this marketing tactic the "Factory Tour". You explain the unique benefits of a feature or product by showing how its made. More devtools startups should consider adding Factory Tours in their go-to-market toolkit. Here's another Factory Tour example from Builder.io)

Also, congrats to the Supabase team for hitting 60K stars on GitHub!

✨ Kontent AI held a webinar to demo upcoming AI powered features, such as asset repurposing and tagging, automated language translation, and draft creation.

Enterprise Watch

✨ The Heroku sales team is all smiles today - "we’re excited to announce that Heroku is available for purchase in AWS Marketplace through the Private Offers program".

Now prospects can quickly pay for Heroku out of their firm's existing AWS/cloud budget, instead of running it through a long procurement process.

Learn more about AWS Marketplace Private Offers

Need help planning your next impactful product launch? I offer single day consulting sessions to work out your messaging and channel strategy, so you can land more sales. Hit "reply" to this email, and let's talk. - Hashim Warren