Sanity in 2022: Transforming How Teams Work With Content (ssr)

Written by Magnus Hillestad

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We founded Sanity because we believe that there’s a significantly better way to create, manage, and publish content. The status quo of monolithic content management systems, with slow static content, served us well for years — and for some use cases, they still work just fine.

But we’ve seen first-hand that many businesses have complex needs. They’re stuck with a “one size fits no one” solution when what they actually need are flexibility and solutions that adapt to their needs: custom content types, custom workflows, and the ability to automate content operations in a way that traditional CMSes just aren’t built for.

After five years of evangelizing change, 2022 was the year we doubled down on sharing our knowledge on how organizations can prepare for the challenges of a new era by launching content, guides, videos, and events to get the word out to a broader audience.

Bringing people together at events

The first big milestone was our Structured Content 2022 conference in May. When we started talking about structured content back in 2018, only a few people knew what it meant. But over time, word spread and we saw more folks acknowledging the problems created by unstructured content and the opportunities that arise when you start by thinking differently about how you craft digital experiences.

More than a thousand people joined us in person and virtually to share best practices and nerd out for two days about how structured content can drive incredible business results. We were joined by speakers from so many impressive companies: AT&T, Shopify, the New York Times, Morning Brew, Burger King, Spotify, Vercel, and more. 

Check out all the recordings.

Learn how to get started with structured content.

And in December, we brought hundreds of community members together live for Sanity Product Day, where we further elaborated on how the world of digital experience is changing — and how the Sanity Composable Content Cloud can help.

In the omnichannel era — when consumers began interacting with content across multiple channels and devices — businesses responded by adding digital stores. But these stores were just a layer outside of their existing business model. The organizations didn’t change how they worked, and content was still siloed, channel-specific, and stuck in static workflows.

But now we’ve entered the composable era, which means simply adding a “digital layer” is no longer enough. Your audience’s expectations are higher than ever: they expect highly personalized experiences based on wherever they are in their journey, no matter what digital surface they engage with.

Timeline moving from the web era to omnichannel era to composable era

Content has moved from a static supporting role to a core revenue driver crucial for attracting, engaging, and retaining customers. To grow, you need to adapt quickly to the market, with the power to compose and recompose your business, technology, and the content that sits at the heart of your digital strategy.

Check out the keynote presentation.

Read more about content in the composable era.

Evolving our product

We strongly believe that composability is the direction that this industry is headed in. In fact, our conviction is so strong that we redefined how we talk about our solution, from "Platform for Structured Content" to the "Sanity Composable Content Cloud." Here are some highlights about what we’ve released over the past year that will help your business thrive — now and in the future.

The Sanity Composable Content Cloud

The Sanity Composable Content Cloud is based on three principles: composability, customizability, and content as data. It includes three components that power content operations:

Sanity Studio v3: the most customizable content workspace available

The latest version of Sanity Studio takes customizability to the next level. It's now easier than ever to run content-driven experiences at any scale, from a small startup to a Fortune 500, needing a platform for content serving brands with complex content needs and millions of visitors.

Find out more about Sanity Studio v3.

GROQ, our open-source query language for content, formalized as a working language specification

We invented GROQ because we realized most so-called "Content APIs" out there were poorly executed. GROQ provides unprecedented freedom in how you power content-driven experiences. Developers can rapidly produce digital experiences for any channel, thanks to the more flexible design approach GROQ provides when working with structured content.

Read more about GROQ.

Shared Content: helping companies increase content velocity

When content can easily be reused, it helps teams develop experiences faster, unlock creativity, and free up time for people to work on what matters. Shared Content, available on an Enterprise Plan, provides a single source of truth for content, so teams across departments can deliver a great digital experience to their audiences faster.

Learn more about Shared Content.

Other improvements

Other improvements we made in 2022 include:

Thank you to our partners and community

Our community has always been at the heart of everything we do, and it continued to thrive in 2022. Here are some incredible stats about what people are doing with our platform:

Check out the hundreds of showcase projects shared by our community on the Sanity Exchange, and join our Slack community to share ideas and learn from the thousands of developers there. We also host monthly virtual meetups, with topics ranging from building a Sanity plugin to learning how the official Dutch Covid dashboard was built with Sanity and Next.js.

Find all the videos on our YouTube channel.

Agencies, consultancies, and system integrators have always been significant users of Sanity. In 2022, we took some first steps to formalize our partnerships with these companies. We launched the first version of our Agency Directory, where new agencies are added weekly. If you work at an agency using Sanity but aren’t part of the program yet, you can apply here.

We continue to engage with other innovative partner companies. This year we announced a strategic partnership with Shopify, solidifying that Sanity is the best content platform to use in conjunction with Shopify’s commerce platform. Many of Shopify’s largest customers and agencies have already moved to Sanity!

We also continued working closely with Vercel, sponsoring and speaking at their Next.js conference, and with Netlify, sponsoring and giving a talk at their JAMstack conference.

Speaking of Jamstack, we were honored to be voted by 7,000 respondents to their community survey as the content platform with the highest user satisfaction score for the second year in a row.

Jamstack survey

And on G2, we received several awards; most recently, we were ranked as the #1 leader out of 77 companies in the Headless CMS category and #1 for personalization and user satisfaction. See all of our reviews on G2.

In 2022, as in all the years before, we were humbled by the organizations that trust Sanity to be their partner for their content strategy. We continue to work with companies such as Puma, AT&T, Burger King, Tata, and Figma. And we’re establishing new relationships with companies such as Skims, Sonos, Polaroid, and Semafor.

Team Sanity is still growing.

Despite the changing macro environment, Sanity continued to grow strongly in 2022, doubling headcount year over year. With solid results, amazing customers, and a very strong balance sheet, we will continue to expand our team in 2023, although more conservatively. We’re always interested in talking to passionate people who share our values and want to make a difference at a thoughtful, intentional, international company. If you’re interested in working with us, check out our Careers page.

It was super impressive to see all the hard work that each person at Sanity contributed to making 2022 a success — and we made sure to bring folks together to celebrate, recharge, and connect. For the first time in many years, we finally managed to gather the whole team in Hemsedal, Norway, in June — just three hours from where Sanity was founded.

The Sanity team in Norway

What’s next for Sanity (and your business)

For many businesses, 2023 will be a challenging year. However, a challenging macroeconomic environment is actually the best time to invest in your composable architecture.

Now is the time to rethink your resources, priorities, and competitive advantages. To evaluate your ability to meet the requirements of the composable era. There has never been a more critical time to invest in the digital strategy you need to drive your business and customer experience forward!

Although we mainly think about Sanity as a revenue driver that enables you to execute your most crucial strategic initiatives, we also see customers gaining notable cost reduction benefits from implementing a state-of-the-art content platform. Many of our customers have been able to get rid of old monoliths that are costly to implement and so inefficient that you wind up spending more time and resources on your content operations than you need to.

We’ve taken significant steps with our platform and community in 2022, but we’re only getting started. As the world continues to innovate, we'll find new ideas and ways of using content.

Sanity’s composable nature enables us to quickly take advantage of other technological advances. Most significant societal changes are profound but take longer to unfold than we expect, and we do not expect generative AI to take over the content space in 2023. But we already have use cases and prototypes for GPT and image-generating services inside Sanity — and you can expect to see more of this in 2023.

Sanity is great for small teams and individual developers and ideal for mid-market businesses and Fortune 500 enterprises. Composability and customizability let you make Sanity whatever you need it to be. We’ll continue to invest in our community in 2023, and we’ll also continue to develop solutions that make it even better for larger companies to thrive in the composable era.

Questions? Feedback? Want to learn more? Reach out on our website, Twitter, LinkedIn, or in our Slack community.

Thank you for all the support in 2022 — and all the best for 2023!