2021: A year in review (ssr)

Written by Magnus Hillestad

Missing Image!

As we review what we achieved this year, it’s clear that 2021 was a banner year for Sanity. Come learn how we grew and engaged with the community, improved our content platform, and leveled up our team in 2021 to help deliver on our mission to be the most versatile system for delivering digital content across channels.

A Unique community

Shipping new features are exciting, but what we really find rewarding is when we see what people do, and the problems they solve, with the features we create. We’re proud to continue to foster a welcoming space where Sanity users of all experience levels can participate, contribute, and learn together. Here are some highlights from the community in the past 12 months.

Passed 100K users

Over the summer, we surpassed 100K users of Sanity, and are well north of that number today. We have a thriving Slack community that has around 10K people in it, and the Sanity Exchange is home to 100s of guides, plugins, starters, and schemas that have been contributed by members of the community.

Best content platform satisfaction

For the second year in a row, Sanity was chosen as the content platform with the highest satisfaction rating, according to the Jamstack community survey. The survey, which polled 7,000 people, also showed a 48% increase in usage across the Jamstack community when compared to the previous year. In addition, Sanity has the highest rated satisfaction on G2, a software review site, for the Headless CMS and DXP categories.

Sanity-hosted events

We held two Open House events this year that attracted hundreds of attendees from around the world. In March, we hosted Content is Data, where we launched Content Lake and highlighted different ways our community and customers get value from using structured content. In December, we opened our doors once again, this time focusing on how to create Delightful Editorial Experiences while releasing several new features built with content teams in mind.

Our meetup series started back up in the summer and we hosted four meetups to celebrate new launches and showcase projects from the community.

Participation in industry events

We presented at many different conferences and meetups this year, we:

Instructional content

This year we partnered with leading organizations and thought leaders in the space to create several pieces of instructional content. We worked with FreeCodeCamp to create a Next.js for Beginners course that walks you through everything you need to know to get started with one of the most popular frameworks. We collaborated with Ania Kubow to create two videos – building an AirBNB clone with Sanity’s platform for structured content and Next.js, and a deep dive on structured content. Finally, we engaged with JavaScript Mastery to create a course to show how to build and deploy a modern full-stack social media app.

Pricing updates

In December, we updated our pricing to provide unlimited free admin users on all plans! That means you get as many all-access users as you want at no extra cost. If you need more restrictive permissions, each plan comes with a set number of non-admin users included and roles you have access to. Plus, you still have the ability to create as many free projects as you want! We think this will help increase the adoption of Sanity across our growing community of developers, designers, content creators, and marketers.

Product to next level

This past year we released a number of new features and enhancements to our platform to improve the experiences of developers and editorial teams that use Sanity to manage their structured content. Below you’ll find some highlights from 2021.

Content Lake

In March, we released Content Lake, our real-time database for structured content during our Content is Data Open House. We felt it was the approach the industry needed, so we built it ourselves, from scratch, over the course of 10+ months.

Roles system & new management interface

In June, we released an improved roles system and a brand new project management interface. The roles system provides more control over what resources a user can access and what actions they can take inside Sanity Studio. And the new management interface offers more intuitive navigation, more robust reporting, and Activity Feed for customers on the Business and Enterprise plans.

Conditional Fields

In August, we released Conditional Fields, allowing you to programmatically show or hide fields based on arbitrary logic. This streamlines the interface for your editorial teams to reduce cognitive load and increase efficiency.

GROQ-powered Webhooks

In October, we launched GROQ-powered Webhooks at a Jamstack Conf Lightning Launch. GROQ-powered Webhooks provide fine-grained triggers that let you take action on document-, field-, and even query-level changes to your content. And with our customizable projections, you can filter out the noise and send only the information you want to external systems.

SSO SAML & roles improvements

In November, we released SSO SAML support and made managing roles available in the management interface. These two releases provide better security and easier administration for your teams.

Sanity available on Shopify

In November we also released a set of solutions on Shopify, and some were built using the developer preview of Hydrogen, Shopify’s new frontend React framework. The solutions include an app on the Shopify marketplace, a demo store app, and a query connector plugin. They let you combine Shopify products with marketing content so you can build experiences that convert.

Building delightful editorial experiences

In December, we launched several new features designed to empower developers to build delightful editorial experiences for their content teams. We migrated the Studio to Sanity UI and released References in Place, Field Groups, and Conditional Fields improvements. We also demoed the features during our Open House.

Company growing fast

In 2021, we leveled up our organization in several ways including closing a new round of funding, growing the team, and attracting new enterprise customers to our platform.

Team growth

We started the year with about 30 employees and have grown quickly by attracting high-quality talent across all departments. With our team now nearly 80 members we are extremely proud to see that our culture is as strong as never before. Our values are a fundamental part of how we work and how we treat each other, and also the foundation of how we expect people to be treated in our community.

We are also extremely proud that talented people from some of the worlds leading organizations are joining us: Markus Schork joined as Head of Customer Success & Solutions Engineering from Unilever, Marcus Sarmento from Fastly took on the role as Head of Product Marketing, Marty Henderson left a long career at Atlassian to join as Head of Engineering, Christian Kabrich joined as VP of Sales with invaluable experience from Sisense and Periscope Data, Carrie Hane joined as Head of Content Strategy Relations after years of working in the content strategy field, including co-authoring the epic book Designing Connected Content, and Ritwick Dey brings experience from Spotify and Medium when he joined as Head of Product Design.

Many amazing team members are signed and ready to start in 2022, and if you are interested in working with us to revolutionize the content management market, check out our careers page or email us at jobs@sanity.io.

1000+ paying organizations

New customers continue to come inbound to Sanity in massive numbers. More and more organizations like Unilever, Puma, National Geographic, Condé Nast, Figma, and Brex are using Sanity to accelerate their go-to-market initiatives, expand into new channels and mediums, and ultimately increase engagement with their end-users. Check out our recent case studies with DataStax and InVision to learn more about the value Sanity can provide your organization.

Series B funding

This past summer, we closed our Series B funding round led by ICONIQ Growth. This funding was a great validation of our unique approach to content. One that treats content as data. And we’re excited to continue pushing the boundaries of what you can expect from your content platforms next year and beyond.

Excited for 2022

As we are entering the final days of this year, most of our team is taking some time off to recharge and gain perspectives. As much as 2021 has been a good year, it’s little compared to what you should expect from us next year.

One of our key ambitions for 2022 is to continue to drive our community. We would expect the number of people using and engaging with Sanity to more than double. Most of you will not pay us anything but enjoy our free forever, as many as you want plans (now with unlimited free admin users). But you will contribute through our community, by sharing your work, helping others, creating tutorials, making plugins, and so much more. The community will continue to be our #1 priority in 2022.

Sanity.io is more than a software service. It’s more than a fantastic community. We want to be the foundation of a movement that changes how we work with content. Change how disciplines come together around content and collaborate on accelerating content velocity. Our fundamental philosophy around content extends far beyond websites and e-commerce (although arguably, our principles bring superpowers in those areas).

In 2021 we established a Content Strategy Relations team. Strengthening our efforts to evangelize Structured content and breaking down silos between teams working with content. In May 2022, we take one further step by hosting the inaugural Structured Content Conference, creating a venue for discussing and learning about Structured Content and how to use it to bring organizations forward in the world of Content as Data. Many share our philosophy, and we want to contribute to the development by establishing this meeting place.

We are devoting a significant part of our resources next year to make it even easier to use Sanity and easier to understand and apply Structured Content in your most relevant digitalization efforts. We are also working on groundbreaking features that in our view will become table stakes in modern content platforms.

To do all this we will need to more than double our team (again). Do check out some of our open positions. Send us an open application or pay attention as we open more positions in the coming months and quarters.

Thank you for all your support

As a final note, we want to extend our thanks to all those who have participated in our community this year. So many have been making plugins, examples, blog posts, or participated and helped others in our community slack. So many shared their joy, or frustration, and feedback online. We are deeply grateful for the support and energy you bring - our community is an important part of the Sanity experience. Looking forward to spending more time with you all in 2022!

Sanity is committed to working for increased diversity in technology, primarily by working for diversity in our own community and on our own team. As communicated in the talk ”Everyone is Welcome”, Lauren and Knut talked about how we are working for a more diverse community in Sanity. This work has just started and we have a lot we want to do.

Instead of sending gifts to partners, customers, community members, and employees, we have decided to make a donation to the Blacks In Technology Foundation (BIT). BIT is a foundation with a goal to “stomp the divide between Black tech workers and to fundamentally influence and affect change on an industry that has historically not sought parity with respect to Black workers.”

Thank you for a wonderful 2021, and all the best wishes for a magical 2022!