The Shift to an AI-Native Web
We had two options: either we see a competitor, an AI-native CMS, being created in front of us, or we decide to create our own competitor that could become our best ally. The web was mostly built by humans for humans. I think the web is going to be built by agents, mostly for agents and humans, and that is the big shift. Currently, 90% of the code is being AI-coded. Compared to what we used to do with Strapi, what would have taken two weeks now takes two minutes.
I think it is great for the role because I do not like to see Product Managers (PMs) spending their time doing tasks that can be done by AI. Your real value is about making the right decisions. The market window is right now; it is not tomorrow, and it is not in two or three years. That was Aurélien, who co-founded Strapi in 2013 as a student project. Today, it powers content for the websites of Apple, Adidas, and IKEA.
With $50 million raised and millions of users worldwide, he launched a brand new company called Fimo two weeks before we sat down together. Fimo.ai is an AI-native website builder built on one specific observation: every existing tool out there can build a website, but none of them were designed to let AI maintain and evolve it over time. In this conversation, you will hear about how 10 years of running Strapi gave him the exact insight to see what everyone else is missing. You will also hear what building Fimo in six months with a team of five taught him about what it actually means to be AI-native.
From Student Project to Powering Global Brands
We started as a student project in 2013, which is where I met my co-founder while doing my master's degree. At first, we were just three freelancers working on different missions, mostly building websites. We were working at the same time that mobile apps started to rise. Our customers liked to build websites but also mobile apps at the same time, and the content was the same. We were using WordPress at the time, and it was not a good fit anymore for those products and projects.
So, we created our own product, Strapi. It had another name at first; I think the first name was Wisti or something like that. That is exclusive news, as I have never mentioned that time before. We built it for our own customers and published it on GitHub. We hoped to get some traction, but it was nothing serious—just a few hundred stars on GitHub. At the end of our studies, we decided to create a company and give it a try.
The three of us were engineers and entrepreneurs. I started to code at 13, so I have mostly an engineering background, but we still have different skills. Pierre, the CEO, was clearly the best one for doing sales and managing the company. I was the one better at managing projects and building a product. This is how I ended up being the CPO. Now we are a company of 70 people, fully remote. We launched Strapi 10 years ago and launched a new product called Fimo two weeks ago.
Why Launch Fimo Now?
It was a tough call to start something new while being the CPO at a successful company. Strapi is working well; we are doing millions in revenue and will be profitable in less than six months. We raised $50 million with the best US VCs, and we have millions of users, including most of the big corporations in the world. If you go to most of the websites built by Apple, Adidas, Victoria's Secret, or IKEA, those brands use Strapi for their main websites. It is huge.
However, AI is redefining pretty much everything in our industry. We had those two options: see an AI-native competitor created in front of us or create our own. It is not easy when you have a product that is 10 years old; it is like a big cargo ship that is not easy to change direction. We have very long-term contracts with companies and millions of users. If we want to make Strapi AI-native, it is going to take some time.
The market window is right now; it is not tomorrow or in two or three years. We decided it was faster, better, and certainly a better decision to start a new product from scratch. We can learn from it, apply those learnings directly into Strapi, and avoid failing with the major product. It is better to fail on a small product and apply those learnings to a mature one. We will see how it goes with Fimo.
The Agentic Web Shift
When I pitch Fimo, people get it. I spent the last three months of 2024 in San Francisco to be in the right mindset to build an AI-native product. The pitch for Fimo is pretty simple. We think the web is going to be different in the sense that it was mostly built by humans for humans. This meant digital agencies and freelancers were coding manually, and the web was mostly browsed by humans clicking and typing in forms.
In the last two years, we have seen more AI coding tools and agents like Claude, Replit, and Cursor developing websites during the night while we sleep. You wake up the next morning, and it is done and working. The web is going to be built by agents, mostly for agents and humans. We call this the agency shift, meaning the decision-maker is changing. Most decisions will be made by agents.
They are the ones coding, and we think this applies to websites as well. They will be the ones maintaining those websites. They will add pages, update content, and notice drops in analytics. An agent might suggest trying something else for the homepage because a competitor just released a new feature or changed their pricing. We should react with a defensive approach or fight back.
With Fimo, we are going to help people build the first generation of autonomous, proactive, and intelligent websites. This is completely new. Right now, when you test Fimo, we have just built the first brick, which is the website builder. We are currently working on the agentic part. I think most people will understand where we are going in a few weeks.
When Content Management Breaks at Scale
I am interested in what breaks when a company goes from 10 pages to 10,000 pages. Content management is like any company; when you have only 10 people, it is easy to share information in a room. When you are in a big group of 10,000 people, there will always be someone missing, sick, or unable to attend a meeting. The bigger you are, the more communication debt starts happening.
It is the same for content management. If you have a website with 10 pages, it is easy to maintain. If you have a giant website like Adidas, they have 10,000 or 100,000 pages. It is hard to make sure you do not have contradictory information or to ensure a new tone of voice applies everywhere. Even with an army of editors, it is not easy. This is where AI fills the gap.
AI is excellent at manipulating text and browsing your website to identify and fix gaps. Most users find it easy to build a simple website but hard to maintain it. Maintenance is what we often forget. When a website has been live for months and you change your pricing or positioning, problems happen. Software and traditional CMS design were not truly solving that problem. AI changes the game because you need to do human-like work at a scale a human cannot achieve.
The Limits of AI Autonomy
I was writing an essay about this recently. Imagine that in three years, during the Christmas season on Apple's website, an AI agent decides to remove all products except the AirPods. The AI knows that during that season, those products sell the most and have the highest margins. If the agent's goal is to maximize revenue, is that a bad decision?
It reminds me of when chess or Go players lose against AI. There was a famous move, move 37, where everyone thought the AI made a mistake, but it turned out to be the smartest move ever. If an agent makes a decision based on millions of data points to meet a company's goals, I do not know if it is bad. It might be a bit sad, but I do not know where the limits are.
Some companies would never let an agent manage their homepage without permission, but for most pages, you might not care. If the tone of voice is great and the AI has constraints, we can let agents do most of the work so we can focus on something else. Regarding branding and the general feel of a website, I have not seen AI successfully replicate that yet. There are emotions and identities that AI does not get.
In industries like perfume, where the creativity is unique, I do not think AI will replace human creativity soon. However, for a SaaS company, the tone of voice is often friendly and concise, which can be reproduced well. CMS platforms need to adapt to these different situations. A part of the web will still be managed by humans, but a majority will be managed by agents. If agents can be as good as humans, it means we should focus our value on the creativity part.
Workflows and the Reality of Shipping Content
Regarding review and approval workflows, we do not have that feature on Fimo yet, but it will come. One learning from Strapi is from Adidas. When you browse their website, you see content produced in a Strapi application. They have 15 people working on it and customize everything. They produce and write content 18 months before publishing it.
That is a unique publication workflow, but it is an exception. Most people think they need strict reviews and workflows, but they actually do not. They need them to reassure themselves or to check a box during the procurement process. In reality, they do not implement them. They need boundaries to ensure they do not publish to production without a review, but they do not need a strict, complex workflow.
Most people manage small to medium websites with only one or two people. Only big corporations truly use those high-end features. In our customer base, only about 15% of enterprise customers use them, and across the entire user base, it is less than 1%. It is almost ridiculous how little they are used.
The Signal to Build Fimo
I remember a board meeting at the end of 2022 where AI was the main topic. We asked if we should go all-in on AI then, but it was before ChatGPT, and we decided the tech was not ready. Then came the revolution in 2024 and 2025 with coding agents getting better. A major signal was when customers told us during negotiations that they would just recode a specific feature themselves.
Coding is one thing, but maintenance is another. Maintenance is cheap now. If a developer who built a small CMS feature leaves your company, you do not care as much because an AI coding agent can maintain it. Before, you would worry about lost knowledge and documentation. Now, that matters less. If people start recoding the features we sell, those features are worth less.
We decided to create an AI-native CMS that embraces AI at its core from the beginning. The website building market is a giant market, worth billions and growing 10-15% per year. You have different categories: IDEs like VS Code, CMS platforms like WordPress, visual platforms like Framer, and builders like Squarespace or Wix. All these categories are being hit by the vibe coding category.
Vibe Coding vs. Traditional Builders
Do you really need a visual editor if you can constrain the AI to use your brand? Do you need a CMS if you do not need complex workflows or 13 different languages? You do not necessarily need an engineer if an AI agent can do it for you. Prompting is so easy that using Wix or Squarespace feels limited because they all look like templates.
If a doctor wants to create a unique website, they can just prompt it and get something that looks personalized. This creates an IKEA effect where building it yourself is more rewarding than finding a template. The vibe coding category for building websites is going to be huge. It is a consumer mass-market opportunity, not just for professionals.
I have seen creators who lacked hard skills now launching amazing things. There used to be a gap between the idea in your head and the materialization in real life. Now, you can use natural language to get a result for $50. Before, you had to find a freelancer and pay thousands. It is faster, cheaper, and gives you more control. That is unbeatable.
Fimo vs. Lovable and Replit
There is a lot of noise in the AI builder space, but Fimo is different. Tools like Lovable are great, but they are designed to build apps, not websites. A website is about promoting content and a brand, not building a tool to learn Italian. If you build a website on Lovable, the content is often static in the code unless you specifically ask for a database.
Furthermore, those websites are not optimized for SEO or AEO (AI Engine Optimization). If the content is in a database like Supabase, you only have a raw developer interface. You do not have a rich text editor, a media library, or easy formatting. You burn a lot of credits asking the AI to replace assets.
When you use Fimo, we have three different agents: one for design, one for coding, and one for content. The content is always stored in a real CMS with a proper interface. Because the content is structured content, we can manipulate it. If a competitor updates their pricing, we can compare it with your entire content because it is available as context for the agent.
The Power of Structured Content
In Fimo, content is not just static text in code; it is something outside that is injected. This makes it faster and easier to translate or change the tone of voice across all pages at once. We will have agents that watch the web and your competitors for you. You could even ask Fimo in Slack to convert a discussion thread into a blog post, and it will provide a preview URL.
We are verticalizing software specifically for corporate marketing websites. While you could build your own agents in Lovable to do this, most people do not want to build their own agents. We are the content experts maintaining the prompts and optimizing for visibility. You can tell the agent to optimize for signups, demos, or MQLs, and it will react to those goals.
We want to build the autonomy first and then bring in the data like analytics to help the autonomous parts perform better. Other tools like Bolt or Replit are targeting different audiences. Bolt is great for mobile apps with Expo integration. We are focusing on the specific needs of marketing sites, which require different UI, SEO optimization, and media handling.
What It Means to Be AI-Native
Being AI-native is a mindset. Any product can be transformed, but it takes a long time for an existing product like Strapi to change radically without losing user trust. At Fimo, one of our principles is that we never start from a blank page. AI can avoid the blank page by generating a first version for you to iterate on.
Our stack is also different. We use different billing and observability systems. 90% of the code is AI-coded. Our process is different too; we do not open tickets in Linear for small QA issues. If I see a button is off by two pixels, I just "vibe code" it and ship it in two minutes. Before, that would have taken two weeks of tickets, screenshots, and sprint planning.
We recreated many Strapi features with a team of three engineers and one designer in six months. We are faster because we apply years of learning, but also because the mindset is different. Roles are not necessarily merging, but the scope of each role is changing. A PM or designer can now fix small technical issues using AI, which removes low-value tasks from the engineers' backlogs.
The Evolution of the Product Manager
Engineers now have more time to think about the product and challenge the UIX. Some roles, like managing documentation, are disappearing because AI generates it. AI products are also becoming easier to use, so you need less documentation. PM roles are being automated in terms of writing transcripts, categorizing feedback, or writing user stories.
PMs now have more time to talk to users, study competitors, and develop their product sense. I believe PMs should have a "suitcase of agents" to automate their boring tasks. If you automate your job, you can spend two hours a day on an active watch of the market. Things are moving so fast that you need to keep the pace.
Your job is to ensure engineers are motivated and understand the audience. At Fimo, our engineers loved the code part so much they built a "code tab" with advanced search and social features. However, our customers are not coders; they do not care about the code. I had to remove those features the day after release because they did not match the customer profile.
Lessons from the Fimo Launch
One surprising thing is that our first customers were from China, using Fimo behind a VPN. We expected European users, but our customers are mostly from China, the UK, and the US. Our first customer was a consultant helping businesses import to China. It was not a startup landing page like I expected, but a very simple business website.
Another learning is that none of our customers are good at coding. They are not afraid of code, but they do not use it. We also have zero churn so far. On tools like Lovable, churn can be high, but because Fimo is a hosting and management platform, there is a better hook. If you want to keep your website live, you stay on Fimo.
If I have one regret, it is that we should have launched even earlier. Even when the product was unstable in November, we should have shipped it. You always fear that a bad first impression will hurt you, especially when you are not the first in the market. But you cannot wait. You have to ship and iterate.
Advice for AI-Native Founders
For founders, do not optimize your economics right now. AI product margins are not like traditional SaaS margins of 80-90%. You might have zero or negative margins for months while you seek usage and traction. Optimize for usage first; give your users as many credits as possible to see what they do. You can optimize the models and costs later.
If you have an existing company, innovate with a small, compact team. We pulled three engineers and a designer into a private room for six months, isolated from the rest of the company. This protected them from the distractions of the support, documentation, and sales teams. We have zero support tickets for Fimo because we did not over-engineer the support process before launching.
For PMs in non-AI-native companies, your fight is to talk to leadership about the market window. You have to ask if you have enough time to change your current "cargo ship" or if you need to start a side project from scratch. In the US, 80% of companies are making this move, but in Europe, we are more conservative. We need to see the risk differently.
I believe the web will be completely different in five years. It will be full of agentic content, and we might not know what is real. This will create trust issues, but it might also push us toward more real-life experiences and creativity. I want Fimo to be known for creating this new generation of autonomous websites, moving beyond the static and dynamic webs of the past.