1665 – Gaining Every Advantage with Uniform’s Darren Guarnaccia

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0:58with us right now darren guarnaca darren you are the president of uniform and you're on the web at uniform.dev darren thank you so much for joining us great to be here josh yeah what is uniform yeah uniform is a visual workspace that empowers digital teams to blend all their content data and technology together to build winning digital experiences. And, you know, today's, you know, today's competition is so fierce that every brand needs every advantage they can get to build really amazing customer experiences online. And we help them do it. So I guess help me understand like where, like help us visualize what this is that you're talking about.

1:46Is it a website builder? No. So it's a combination of channels, right? Every day as consumers, we use websites, we use mobile devices, maybe we talk to a chat bot. And all of those things need content. And all of those things really even need presentation, like, what is this going to look like? How is this going to behave? Is this going to personalize to me? And And all of those things require tooling that allows marketing teams and technology teams to kind of work together to build them. And so what we create is a visual workspace that allows teams to kind of assemble and build those amazing customer experiences in a collaborative way.

2:30Yeah. And so what happens if you have a team that's not leveraging a platform like this? Like how does stuff usually end up looking operationally? the the way that and the problem that the uniform really set out to solve was that oftentimes it's all kind of coded by developers and marketers can't see what it looks like and so there's a lot of back and forth you know the developer builds some stuff throws it over to the wall to the to the marketing team and then they you know it's not quite right they can't do anything themselves so they don't have any ability to self-service they're very frustrated because now they're constantly waiting for development to get to their stuff.

3:09And so there's a lot of this sort of back and forth and waiting and frustration. And teams just work better when they can collaborate super fast. And, you know, you can do the stuff that you're really good at. And maybe the developers can do the stuff that they're really good at and kind of divide and conquer. But right now, that's not how it really works. Like in a world without uniform, everyone is sort of waiting in their own little silos. and there isn't that same kind of speed. And what comes with speed is innovation. When you think about if you can move fast, you can learn fast. And if you can learn faster than your competition, you can outgrow your competition.

3:47And that's the name of the game nowadays is how can I learn faster? Fail fast, as they like to say, and try things, iterate. And the quicker you can cycle, the quicker you can win. Yeah. And so this is a platform now too that it's not like you're having to replace all of your other stuff. Uniform seems to be really designed to integrate well with a lot of existing tools. Can you talk like how that works? Yeah, absolutely. Nobody can just rip everything out. That world is past. Really today, the name of the game is how do you leverage all your existing technology? And so when I talk about our visual platform, letting you blend content and data, you know, we plug into all your systems.

4:35So you may have like old school content management repositories. You might have like new ones too. Like big brands usually have multiple content stores, right? Like they have like a couple old ones and some new ones. So you're going to use all of those. Maybe you're a commerce company and you've got product information and an ERP system or a product information management system. And maybe you have, you know, a digital asset management system for all your pictures and videos. So you want to be able to stitch all those together. And we have all these connectors. You know, we really believe in a world where that stuff should just be simple.

5:10That stuff should be like, you know, just clicks and not code. So we allow you to click those together, stitch those together, and then you use all that content everywhere. So we're plugging in all those systems. We're pulling all your customer data out of your CRM and your customer, you know, your CDPs, you know, your customer data platforms, and allowing you to assemble these rich user experiences, customer experiences. Now, again, doing this in a very no-code way so that marketers can do some of this stuff. And marketers can actually go create these experiences versus having to be totally dependent on developers.

5:44Yeah. And I would imagine, I don't know how the timeline looks, but how did your world change? Say, oh, I don't know. I think there were some things going on in the year 2020 that were kind of unique. How did that impact your world? Oh, massively. Because all of a sudden, everybody was working at a distance. all of a sudden we're all remote and two things happen the first thing that happened is we all had to learn learn how to collaborate at a distance remotely and and that became collaboration became really important like being able to work together the other thing that happened is that all of a sudden people can't physically go anywhere and so they had to rely on online services you know customer experiences became digital overnight I you know I always joke about like what really drove digital transformation wasn't the CXO or the CDO, it was COVID.

6:40You know, that is really what drove so many brands. So today, anyone who would not have ordered groceries online has absolutely ordered groceries online. And every digital, every business had to become digital so fast so that they could stay connected to their customers. So it drove the urgency of that. Now, there's still a lot of, I would say, duct tape and paper napkins still in place because we had to do this in about five weeks. So now companies are going back and brands are going back. All right, we've made it through. Now, how do we do this for the future? How do we navigate all this new tech that's coming out?

7:20I mean, who was using the words chat GPT a year ago? Nobody. But now everybody is. So how do you adopt that technology? How do you take advantage of all this new innovation that's happening? Apple's new AR headset, chatbots are on the seat now. So all this interesting technology is happening, and brands are now trying to figure out, how do I take advantage of it? Yeah. So help me understand what types of clients are using Uniform, what size are particular industries that work particularly well? Well, I would say in a nutshell, brands that really care about kind of their online experience or digital experience, mobile device experience, web device experience that really want to engage customers digitally.

8:11So I think that's number one. One, brands that care deeply about their content is probably the second thing that indicates a good fit for us. I'll give you an example. Luxury goods. luxury goods like if you're if you're you know a luxury manufacturer um and or a branded manufacturer that that has a very curated experience you really want to make sure your digital experience is amazing and is on point with your brand so like a luxury travel maybe it's travel and hospitality anyone where the customer experience and and the online experience is so important to your brand those are are the kinds of brands that work with us yeah uh and and where did Uniform come about?

8:53Like, what was the, it was kind of the origin story. Yeah, it was, it was three founders who had, had come out of a bunch of marketing technology companies and they were doing a bunch of consulting actually. And they were working with a bunch of these brands and they just, they were just, you know, kind of horrified by this sort of new world that we found ourselves in where, you know, marketing teams were totally siloed from development teams. you know they were i call it stuck in the backlog you know they were you know they were in backlog hell they'd wait like six to eight weeks to get anything done super frustrated so they're consulting with the clients and realizing someone's got to fix this this is this isn't right like this market you know disempowering marketing siloing these teams we're in the middle of covid we need to be working close together faster together not slower and more separate and so So that was their intention is to solve that problem.

9:44And then they also saw just a ton of waste and technology spend and things not being upgradable or things taking six months just to upgrade. Things like that really frustrated them too. And they set out to fix it. They set out to fix that marketer to developer kind of connection, really get away from all this money pouring into tech and not giving you any value. you, they knew there was a better way. And that's what they really wanted to solve with Uniform. You know, I want to point this out, too, because there may be someone that's listening that either has a point of contact or could be a potential partner for Uniform as well.

10:24So one thing that that Uniform seems to be, you seem to integrate well with others, right? And so you've got technology partners, solution partners. Can you talk a little bit more about that? And not just technologically, but it seems kind of philosophically that this seems to be pretty intentional. There's a word that is used in this industry that they call it composable. The word composable really means a couple of things. One, modular. It's sort of modular. Think like everyone uses the example of the Legos, but like Lego bricks, everything's modular and you can unassemble and reassemble. So this idea that you can bring a lot of these things together in what I call best of need style, meaning just what you need.

11:11You're not buying like this all in one everything solution. You're buying just enough and just what you need. So this idea of modularity and that you can compose or assemble what you need. That idea is what started all of this. And that means that we do a lot of connections. We connect a lot of your data sources and we connect a lot of your content sources. We connect a lot of the pieces that you want to assemble, you want to compose. And then we really believe, and this is, I think, the uniform special sauce, that needs to be done in a way that's super easy to plug it in and take it out because you're testing and you're learning.

11:47And maybe this thing didn't work as well is another one. You want to maybe try this or try that. And that idea of being composable and staying composable, staying flexible, staying modular is super important. So everything we do is about connecting, connecting people together, connecting teams together, connecting technology together, because it's about people, process, and technology at the end of the day. The website, uniform.dev, to our friend that's been listening to our conversation, and maybe this conversation is kind of part of their buying journey, and now they're wondering, well, where do I go from here?

12:23What would you recommend? I think the uniform.dev section under learn has so much good content. We have a huge library of content there that you can learn about, you know, how to get started, how to do this. We've been producing some really interesting assets about how to buy some of this technology. You know, it's a lot of times people want to start with, let's say, a content management system. And there's a lot of them, like hundreds of these things on the market. So we've gone through and helped create buyer guides and how to actually select these things, how to implement these things. There's a lot of learnings there.

12:59We also have a ton of courses on headlesscreator.com. That's a sister site that we support that really teaches people how to do some of the work and the very more practitioner level information. So if you're trying to learn how to, say, get started with content modeling or how to architect things in the right way, there's a ton of classes and certifications that you can actually get there. So lots of learning, lots of ways to get started and really learn from experts. Yeah. And are folks able to test out the platform before they buy? Yeah, absolutely. We work with customers all the time. We like to guide them and teach them how to do it and best practices.

13:37So we'll work with you. But absolutely, we do tons of proof of concepts. We'll help you understand how to get started and train your teams and really help them prototype things. Because one of the nice things about a platform like that is because it's super easy to get started. You can just try five or six different kinds of technologies. And we actually, in many cases, become like a prototyping layer for companies that want to try five or six different CMSs, two or three different digital asset management systems. And it's really easy to assemble those things. Yeah. Darren Guarnaca, again, president of Uniform.

14:10The website is uniform.dev. Again, highly recommended you click on learn. you've got like, you've got a lot, there's a lot of great documentation, a lot of great articles, a lot of great resources here. So certainly you could spend, you could spend days learning everything you need to learn about. And then of course you can, there's a button right there, it says request a free demo and certainly can take a look at that. So Darren, it's been great having you on the podcast. Thank you so much for joining us. Great to be here. Thanks.

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