Business I'm building a next-gen CMS and need your help designing it (wishlist, features, gripes, ideas)

[brandonstills]

Hey guys. I'm currently working on building a paysite CMS and I need your help designing it.

I have my own ideas of what to build but I want to hear what is important to you guys so that I'm building something that is useful for you.

Roughly speaking, what I'm looking to build is a CMS based on the Software as a Service (SaaS) model. That means you just create an account, point your domain, and start uploading content. No having to install software, find and hire programmers, no paying for hosting, etc. Other than that, I'm pretty open to exploring all avenues.

If you could design the perfect CMS what would it look like?

What features would it have?

What are your frustrations with current CMS systems and what would you change if you could?

Right now I have a very early version (pre-alpha) that I am working with a few people to get some sites up and running. It doesn't have very many features right now but I'm adding to it almost every day.

Hit me up if you are interested in trying it out and shaping the direction of it. Email is best. [email protected]. I don't really use ICQ much these days. I'm only accepting a few more people at this stage because my time is limited and I want to focus on development for the time being. The ideal person for me is someone who has some solo model content, or a niche, and can handle the content production and processing on their own. They just need to upload it and enter the titles, descriptions, etc.

The first version I'm building is primarily geared towards solo models or people who have several models and want to build multiple solo model sites.

A little about me and why I'm building it:

So, I created my first adult paysite back in 2003. I've worked for lots of different affiliate programs full time and various site owners on a freelance basis since thenl. I've photographed hundreds of models in the biz, have friends who shoot content, and I see lots of people want sites to sell their content but few people are doing it successfully.

What I've seen is that there are large hurdles to getting a site up and running (getting a hosting provider, figuring out DNS, buying a CMS, installing it, hiring a designer, getting them to integrate it into the CMS, etc). It's just too much of a barrier for a lot of people who aren't programmers and don't have lots of time to spend.

Several of my content producer friends have wasted tons of money on servers and software that they were paying hundreds of dollars a month but never actually getting it to a point where it worked.

For a lot of models they don't have the technical expertise and just need something that is as easy as creating a Facebook account and uploading photos and videos.

So I mostly want to enable people to be able to create sites who want them. There's so many people that have content, or can shoot their own content, but aren't because, realistically, they don't have the ability to create sites for themselves.

The other thing that motivates me is that I cringe when I hear how much people are paying every month to run their sites. It really is a ridiculous amount of money. When I look at what they are paying and look at how much it would cost me to do the same thing it is crazy. Granted, I've worked on projects where we were spending more than $1 million a year in hosting alone, but it was warranted based on what we were doing.

So I want to create something that can be priced more realistically. I can get really good deals on servers and don't need managed hosting and all the other fluff that just makes things more expensive. Wholesale prices are much cheaper and I can build out cloud platforms with all the reliability, redundancy, and automation myself. I can use those economies of scale to have really low overhead and pass those savings onto you guys. I'm also not using decades old technology and can get much more performance out of a single server.

I don't have any exact prices yet but let me put it this way. Take what you are paying for hosting and licensing fees for your CMS and I can sell both for less than what most of you are paying for hosting alone and still make a good profit.

More selfishly, I've pretty much maxed out my income as a programmer and am tired of working in an office. I'm at the top of my field and unless some job comes along that offers me $250,000+ I'm probably not going to switch. Those jobs are extremely rare and even if I did find a few it probably won't be the kind of place I want to work at.

Currently I'm working on cutting edge stuff and creating new programming languages and paradigms. It's fun stuff and I like building innovative things, but I want to own my own business and I've been aching to build this platform for a while now. I like the adult industry. I've always felt at home here and it's easy for me create a lot of value here.

I'm planning on building up the CMS part time and eventually transitioning to it full time and then building out a team to take it even further.

So let me know what you guys think, what your frustrations are, what you're looking to build, etc.

I welcome any collaboration. I'm also open to any kind of partnerships or other opportunities if you can think of anything that fits well with what I'm trying to do. Feel free to hit me up.

[wankawonk]

/r/iamverysmart

[brandonstills]

Originally Posted by wankawonk

/r/iamverysmart

Lol. Sorry, didn't mean to come off that way. Guess I was in resume mode a bit. My excitement and desire to get this thing rolling got the best of me. Thanks for the honest feedback. I'll work on it.

[celandina]

Why build a model which is flavour of the month??? You want to make real money selling this stuff make it as:

1) membership site with all of the bells and whistles including a proper shop fucntions

Or

2) a site selling tangibles and also with a shop and all functions

[Adult IT]

I was actually looking at doing something like that, but i'm overwhelmed TBH and new to the adult industry in general.
Did you look at existing adult SAAS CMS, like StagCMS? How do you plan to do it better given that they are doing exactly what you plan to do, just with a few years head start? Don't want to discourage you just seem like a tough one to compete with. StagCMS even does static file hosting, pretty discouraging to compete with.

[brandonstills]

Originally Posted by Adult IT

I was actually looking at doing something like that, but i'm overwhelmed TBH and new to the adult industry in general.
Did you look at existing adult SAAS CMS, like StagCMS? How do you plan to do it better given that they are doing exactly what you plan to do, just with a few years head start? Don't want to discourage you just seem like a tough one to compete with. StagCMS even does static file hosting, pretty discouraging to compete with.

You should do it, the adult world needs more innovators.

I'm not discouraged at all. Facebook came around after Myspace was well entrenched, ModelMayhem displaced OneModelPlace. Rarely are the early market leaders the ones who dominate the market a decade later.

In terms of what I plan to do differently? I'm building it as a true Cloud based SaaS platform. From what I've seen, the existing solutions just take the individual software and install it on a managed server for you. That's not really Cloud and Cloud is a requirement for SaaS. They are doing managed hosting with the software installed for you so you don't have to do it yourself. That kind of model makes things really expensive when you need 1 server per customer. A true cloud platform means an individual HTTP request could go to any server really and you just add servers as needed to keep things performant.

Also, I'm focusing on ease of use. If the user has to use FTP then forget about it. It's an archaic protocol that nobody uses anymore and is riddled with problems and confusion for non-technical people.

Also, using a modern tech stack (Node.js, React). So it's a Single Page Application from the get go. That makes building easy to use interfaces much easier. Node.js is also extremely performant too so that means much less server costs. Competing against legacy PHP systems is like taking candy from a baby.

There's a lot of nice touches already. For the galleries, you just drag and drop your folder of files to the gallery page in the CMS and it queues them and uploads them. You can see the progress as they upload. When it is done uploading the file gets assigned to a job queue and processed on a separate server so it doesn't slow down real users. It then creates thumbnails for photos. Then uses pub/sub style push notifications over websockets to notify the CMS user the status of the processing. As thumbnails are created on the server they pop up in the user's browser realtime within milliseconds.

It was kind of cool because I was onboarding a model that lives in another state. She created a gallery within 2 minutes of me emailing her a login. And since there were push notifications I saw the gallery photos pop up in my browser at the exact same time she saw them as well. So I knew instantly that she figured it out.