How Konsus use Sanity as a headless CMS to drive inbound engagement (ssr)

Written by Knut Melvær

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Every once in a while we talk to our users about how they came upon Sanity and how they make use of our services. This time it's Jing from Konsus – a Y Combinator (W16) startup.

What does Konsus do? What's your role?

– Konsus delivers on-demand outsourcing of Powerpoint design, graphic design, web design, writing, research and data entry. Combining top talents with a scientific approach to quality and efficiency. My role is as the CTO.

What was your setup before you started using Sanity?

– We hosted our own server with the Ghost publishing platform for our blog and FAQ. We were running into limitations with Ghost and couldn't do exactly what we wanted to. We then moved our content into JSON-files, and built a React-frontend, transforming the JSON-files to a website. The last 2 months before switching over to Sanity, we worked on migrating everything to the headless CMS Contentful.

What was it about Sanity that caught your interest or curiosity?

– We were meeting some limitations in Contentful as well: text areas had a limitation of 50.000 characters. A huge problem for us since some of our blog posts and landing pages have a lot of text. We also had difficulties attaching multiple tags to blog-posts, because of their limited query system.

Sanity solved this simply with GROQ and no field limitations. In addition, we also had a problem with the HTML editor in Contentful not being able to embed data, which was problematic as we had custom widgets on our blog. This was also solved in Sanity by having custom types in their text-editor that we could just connect custom renderers to.

How does Konsus use Sanity now? Does it make business sense?

– We use Sanity for our blog/FAQ and category landing pages. We also have an internal-app for our specialists and project managers where we display training documents filtered by their role. This has been good for us as:

• We can develop our front-end in React, and keep the good Pagespeed rating that we have heavily invested in.
• All our images are automatically scaled properly for the web.
• Sanity has improved our team's overall productivity, as the marketing team can build advance blog-posts/landing-pages without going through the tech-team.

Do you have any cool features or functionality on the roadmap?

We are working on building a brand-lab and chat for even easier and faster experience for our customers. We are also improving our internal-app with subscriptions to realtime-events for an even faster and more efficient handling of the projects.

Do you plan to use Sanity for more aspects of Konsus' infrastructure?

– We are thinking of building our Advanced Order-wizard in Sanity instead of having it in JSON-files. This means that by using the Sanity dashboard, we can build the entire forms functionality and text.

– Also, we are planning on extending our landing-pages with an automatic landing-page-generator. Also considering putting the settings (assets and template tree) for the brand-lab in Sanity, so that we fine-tune the optimal composition easily without going through engineering.

Visit Konsus to learn more about what they have to offer, and contact us if you want to know more about how Sanity could solve similar challenges in your organization.