How Mindvalley cut down development time by 50% for their multilingual websites

• Headquarters: Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
• Technology Stack: GraphQL

Mindvalley (opens in a new window) is a successful personal growth platform with 20 million students worldwide. The team wanted to simplify website usage for customers and page creation for their team. Storyblok helps cut development time by 50%, allowing faster website changes, and supports 8 languages.

Shifting from monolithic, homegrown, and headless CMSs

Mindvalley went through three phases before choosing Storyblok as their headless CMS solution. They first tried WordPress and Drupal but needed more customization options. This led to them creating their own system called Ignite.

Despite this, Ignite did not have an interface. This made it hard for new hires to learn and needed heavy maintenance. It also was not component-based, so non-technical users had to edit code line by line. Marketers had to depend on developers to make any content updates. This raised concern among developers about managing changes.

Mindvalley then developed Site Builder as an internal headless CMS. 'Site Builder' needed significant maintenance and drew developers' attention away from crucial projects.

The company realized they needed a change. Specifically, a SaaS headless CMS that would handle all maintenance.

The main requirements was to find a CMS that:

• Allows them to reuse content blocks to maintain consistency and follow their branding
• Lets developers use familiar programming languages such as Javascript and Vue.JS. This lets them begin projects easily. Developers save time on development instead of maintaining the system.
• Allows marketers and designers to make changes to the website without needing help from developers. They would also not need to know how to code. This would help them work independently and get things done faster.
• Supports easy deployments across a multilingual page setup. This is applicable for various product and vertical pages.

Why did Mindvalley choose to bring on Storyblok as their CMS?

Mindvalley began searching for a headless solution in 2017. Yet, limited resources caused a delay of the transition to Site Builder.

In early 2018, most people in the company wanted to change to a new system from Site Builder and Ignite. However, 90% of the company's revenue was still being generated from pages on Ignite. The move to Storyblok was a necessary change that the company agreed upon. It provided their developers and marketers with a new system they could learn from and enjoy.

Mindvalley moved its content from Ignite and Site Builder to Storyblok in 2019. They made this decision after witnessing the difficulties faced by the team. In the long run, this hindered the company's growth.

With Storyblok, Mindvalley can:

• Make it easier for non-technical users to manage content
• Use reusable content for different pages (opens in a new window) and adapt content elements easily
• Use drag-and-drop capabilities within the Visual Editor (opens in a new window) to make easy changes to content
• Deploy content faster and easier across Mindvalley's websites in 8 languages (opens in a new window)
• Roll out a localized strategy across their different landing pages
• Migrate many product pages to Storyblok

On the frontline of Mindvalley's Storyblok migration was the acquisition team. Mindvalley's content and product pages were key in the Storyblok migration. This is divided into pre-login and login segments. The acquisition team is part of the pre-login process.

Mindvalley users can access various features and content pages. This is found in the pre-login section, which uses a custom-built plug-in. The plugin extracts data from their GraphQL API. This joins a few extensions, helping to manage various product pages and sites.

Empowering Non-Technical Teams

Not all developers wanted to learn to code with Ignite to create new pages. Doing so consumed a lot of time. It also took focus away from their core development responsibilities. Storyblok set Mindvalley up for success for all its users. The team wanted to ensure that the headless CMS could also benefit everyone's career growth.

Switching to Storyblok allows marketers and designers to focus on their projects instead of learning to code to make edits. Today, non-technical users can change pages and campaigns without coding.

The acquisition team aims to create valuable and adaptable components for the marketing and design team. In return, the design team can now concentrate on their projects using the integrated design system and style sheets on Storyblok.

Speaking in the Audience's Language

Internationalization at Mindvalley covers the brand's eight language sites worldwide. Before, languages had separate repositories. Today, translations can simultaneously be updated for all sites in one location.

Marketers can enter the appropriate language for each page in Storyblok. This by using a drop-down field type feature on the Visual Editor. Users are able to avoid switching between pages when managing multilingual pages.

Development has become more user-friendly across the entire company. Storyblok's documentation has helped guide new hires on how to work with the CMS.

Bringing Storyblok to Mindvalley was a big win for their development team. Having a framework agnostic CMS helped facilitate their skills, and push for career growth. The previous systems made this difficult. In turn, this also damaged the retention of developer, marketing, and design talents.

Mindvalley can now launch twice as fast as their previous setup, and cut down development by 50%. With Storyblok, developers, designers, and marketers can easily handle multilingual product pages. In the process, Mindvalley have also simplified their go-to-market approach.