Q1 2024

Speaker 0: Yeah. Hey, everybody. My name is William Friedman, director of customer success and support here at Directus. Many of you have seen my face on either kickoff calls or, definitely seen my name flying by in emails and support tickets. Acting as customer success manager for a lot of our cloud, enterprise cloud customers and engagements.

Really here just to make sure that all of our customers, you know, whether it's BSL supported, cloud enterprise, or cloud professional, are having a good experience with our software. Their questions are answered, and that we're partnering together to ensure that you're getting the most return on investment out of your investment with us, and that you're having a great experience, building software and applications, for your company. Features set wise, there's a there's a few things that we've put out, over the past year. You know, some of the notable ones being content versioning in WebSockets. I mean, we'll admit those are kind of MVP versions of those features.

Right? So I know we've gotten a lot of feedback on on many calls over the past few weeks about content versioning. How can we make it better. So, although we we believe and we know that that that's a feature that a lot of folks wanted, and we think that, you know, the first cut of it is, you know, done well. There's definitely a lot of features, that we can add to make it more robust and and fit a lot of different use cases that we're seeing out there.

Same goes for WebSockets too. Right? 1st cut of WebSockets, there were a lot of things people were looking for and and asking. And, you know, I take all that feedback from all of our customers and pass that up to our product management team and our engineering teams. And, you know, that kind of shapes the the road map for the year and and and what those features are going to look like.

That being said, I I think, content versioning is probably, the the biggest feature that we've put out. It's it's really a staple of any content management system. We had some some workarounds that that worked, in the past, but content versioning is is is really, like I said, a staple of of any content management system, and I'm excited to see, where that goes in the in the next in in this year. I know we're we're I don't have the dates off the top of my head, but I know content versioning 2 point o was what we're kind of dubbing it internally is is, being defined and and will be released this year. So for this year, there's a lot of cool things on on our road map.

We've kinda finalized, at least the major pieces of that, for both our core and cloud products. As you guys know, Alexandre Chopin has come in, to help, you know, on the engineering side in terms of kind of direction, management, leadership. Rike isn't going anywhere. He's our CTO, our our our fearless leader on the engineering side. He's gonna be diving into the code a bit more, and he's, you know, still there and helping push the the direct us from from a from a product side, from a vision side of things, and and kind of, you know, not just this year, but, you know, thinking about some of these major features that we're working on that, you know, may come out early in 2025.

As far as kind of things, how I like to think about it from from kind of feature set and upcoming things, is we we kinda have 2 separate roadmaps. We have our our cloud platform, so Directus Cloud, where, you know, users can go online and, you know, spin up professional cloud projects in a self-service fashion, and and then our enterprise customers can go and kinda view details about their project. And then we also have the core side of things, which is, you know, direct the the core software, which is outside of, the cloud dashboard. A lot of exciting things coming up on both of those. As mentioned earlier, on the core side, I'm actually you're gonna see my eyes divert here because I'm kinda looking at at the road map, live here.

For the core side of things, we've talked about it a lot, but, like, our our MVP of marketplace is gonna be coming this year for for for core. So, I think, there's a lot of promise, a lot of excitement around the marketplace that MVP is gonna be coming out this year. As mentioned, we also have content versioning 2 point o. We're kind of finalizing all of the things and features and changes and updates that are gonna be in that. So so keep an eye out for that.

And, another one that that all kind of tease here that's been asked about a lot is multiple roles per user. So it might not be exactly multiple roles per user, but we're essentially gonna be rolling out, like, a new roles and permissioning system that will address the multiple roles per user, question topic feature that that we've gotten quite a bit. So, those are just some of the things on the core side. When it comes to the the cloud side, custom domains, something that, you know, we've been working on. We've we've kind of beta trialed it with with some of our existing customers now.

That's going to be a self-service thing within the cloud dashboard. And, along with that, there there's a couple other things that we're gonna be implementing self-service capabilities for, that includes, you know, configuring your own environment variables, adding and removing users from your custom, custom extensions, GitHub repo in the cloud, self-service logs. Every week, more tickets and and customers are asking about that. So the ability to stream and view logs for your cloud project is also something that, we we have on the road map. So just a few things.

Lots more kind of going on, but those are some of the kinda key highlights that I think, you know, our cloud and and and other customers are gonna be excited about. When I got here a year and a half ago, you know, the the the number of customers that we had was was very small, because, you know, we're still kind of early stage start up, and we've we've kind of exploded in terms of growth, you know, the number of customers we have in in the 3 different phases. Right? So, you know, our customers that are, you know, adhering to DSL license, professional cloud self, service customers, and then our enterprise cloud customers as well. We're we're and and with that, we're we're kinda bringing on more resources, to to help manage that, not just on the customer success side, but on the support side of things.

So as of right now, you know, our default kind of support, responses are 9 to 5, and we're looking to kinda grow the team to eventually get to, you know, a more 24 by 5, 24 by 7 model. And as we grow and bring on more resources, the more we'll be able to, you know, meet the needs of our customers around the world. And then furthermore, on the customer success side, just, you know, more touch points. You know, we wanna provide more material for for for our our enterprise customers and our and our paying customers in terms of best practices, and just kinda making sure that they succeed. Right?

You know, I kinda opened this thing in my introduction talking about return on investment, partnering, making sure you're getting the most out of your applications, and, investing in our customer success side of the house is going to allow us to, interact with our customers more and and help them grow as we grow, along with them. I think Directus TV is is awesome. So kudos to the team for kinda pulling together and getting that up and running. I think a lot of the content in there, as you mentioned, there there's some entertainment value in it, but I really do think, there there's a lot of usefulness in there. The main one that I'm a fan of, and I think I've we've we've gotten a lot of feedback from customers, you know, end users is is is 100 apps in 100 hours, from Brian.

Most of you guys will know his face from our early on YouTube videos, kinda going through different use cases. You've seen him in and out of the out of the Discord community. But, I think it's the perfect blend of, as you said, entertainment, so you're not bored and, and and value for, you know, getting some learns on Directus. Right? He's building applications live in the hour.

He's, you know, it's not a splice video where he's cutting and we're we're editing. It's it's raw and uncut. He's building it live just as you would if you were building it. And, it's it's there's some pretty cool stuff in there that I think our customers and and anyone really that's using Directus can get value from, by watching those videos. But there's a lot of other good content in there, so I I would definitely advise folks that if if you have not seen it, to definitely check it out.

And, yeah. We're excited to for for for all the content we're releasing this year, under Directus TV. You know, I mean, we're we're we're constantly on the cloud side of things looking for, looking for ways to improve our infrastructure. If we have any, you know, you know, like I said, some of the some of the features that are coming, we we think are going to make your cloud experience more robust. So keep keep a lookout for for notification notifications from me in terms of, you know, new features coming out or, you know, updates to the cloud dashboard.

And on the core side, I would say, we mentioned some of the features that are coming, but we are always open to feedback. I know that we have an open, you know, our our open source repo. You can see all the code and and all the feature requests and discussions. But if you are, you know, one of our customers, you know, you have my email address. Reach out to me.

We're always looking to compile, feedback about the product, features that that we that our customers are looking for. So I can take that and and pass it up to our engineering team and our product team to to affect the road map. Right? If I don't hear that feedback, then then, you know, I I can't push it along to the team. So I'm gonna push what feedback I do have.

And, so, yeah, I I would definitely say, review what what feature requests we have in the portal and, you know, send those links to me. And if and if there's features in there that that aren't that don't have discussions or links, you can make those and or send me the feedback on those so I can pass that along to the team. We definitely want to make 2024 a year of focus for our customers and, you know, getting our, you know, our customer feedback, our trusted partners feedback into our roadmap and and make the product better, for for for those folks that are using us.