Case Study: GraphCMS and Startups.com

Distributing founders resources globally with GraphCMS - a safety net for agile teams who move fast but don’t want to break things

Startups Case Study with GraphCMS - Headless CMS for Knowledge Base, Resources, and Publishing

What AWS did for Dev Ops – GraphCMS is doing for app content management.

Aaron Fuleki
Aaron FulekiSenior Software Engineer at Startups.com

Startups.com is the world's largest startup platform. It helps over one million startup companies find customers, funding, mentors, and world-class education. The Ohio-based platform consists of six products: Startups.com, Clarity, Fundable, Launchrock, Bizplan, and Zirtual.

GraphCMS powers significant portions of the periodic content across Startups’ digital properties: news articles, interviews with founders, investors and expert advice. The team of Startups.com uses schema stitching to connect the GraphCMS API with the API of its own internal GraphQL server.

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Schema stitching is the process of creating a single GraphQL schema from multiple underlying GraphQL APIs. It enables developers to query all of the data as part of one single schema, and get everything they need in one request.

Startups.com wanted to move away from using a handful of content management systems – several interconnected Wordpress instances – to a single platform. The headless system had to support GraphQL and React natively narrowing down the choice significantly.

“We are not in the business of building and maintaining CMSs but wanted a flexible system that can grow with us while we focus on our own product development.” – Aaron Fuleki, Senior Software Engineer at Startups.com.

What mattered most to Startups.com when choosing GraphCMS?

  • Content used to be spread across different systems but with GraphCMS teams are able to store content all in one place. This leads to significant time and money savings.
  • In addition to storing all content in one place, Startups.com benefits from having more checks against mistakes during development. Previously, the developer team used to edit PHP files manually. Code was fragile, the integrity of data could easily be corrupted.
  • Now, GraphCMS acts as a system of “guard rails”. It warns programmers whenever they do a change that violates a previous constraint they have set themselves. This safety net allows Startups.com to develop and move quickly. This effect is increased by the ability to create and change even the most complex data models in minutes.

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