Le French Product - The web you know is about to be rebuilt - Aurelien Georget (Founder of Strapi & Fimo)

Transcript

Intro

0:00 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. The web, I think, is going to be built by agents, mostly for agents and humans. And I think that's the big shift. 90% of the code is being AI-coded. Compared to what we used to do with Strapi, which would have taken like two weeks, now it's taking two minutes. I think it's great for the role, actually, because I don't like to see PMs spending their time doing tasks that can be done by AI, where your real value is about making the right decisions. The market window is right now. It's not tomorrow; it's not in two or three years. Now, that was Aurélien. He co-founded Strapi in 2013 as a student project.

1:00 Today, it powers content for the websites of Apple, Adidas, and IKEA. $50 million raised, millions of users worldwide, and two weeks before we sat down together, he launched a brand-new company called FIMO. FIMO.ai is an AI-native website builder built on one specific observation: that 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'll hear about how 10 years of running Strapi gave him the exact insight to see what everyone else is missing and what building FIMO in six months with a team of five taught him about what it actually means to be AI-native. Here's our conversation right now. Brilliant. Thank you so much for being on the podcast. As you know, I'm already a big fan of Strapi, and you just launched FIMO, and we're going to get into it. But before we dive into it, tell me about your journey. How did you end up as the CPO of Strapi and why did you go into content management?

How Strapi Was Born • From student project to powering Apple, Adidas & IKEA

2:02 Yeah, thank you for having me first. It's a pleasure to be here. And yeah, we started as a student project in 2013. And this is where I met my co-founder during my master's degree. And at first, we were just three freelancers working on different missions, mostly building websites.

2:22 And we were at the same time that the mobile app started to rise. So our customers, they wanted to build websites but also mobile apps at the same time, and the content was the same. So we were using WordPress at the time, and it started to not be a good fit anymore for those products and projects. So we created our own product, Strapi. It had another name; I think the first name was Wisti or something like that.

2:51 Nothing? No, I've never—I don't remember that time.

2:53 It's exclusive news.

2:53 And we built it for our own customers. We published it on GitHub and hoped to get some traction, but it was nothing, just a few hundred stars on GitHub.

3:04 Nothing serious.

3:06 Yeah.

3:06 And at the end of our studies, we decided to create a company. We should give it a try, and we were the three of us, entrepreneurs. And the three of us were engineers. I started coding at 13, so I have mostly an engineering background, but we still have different skills. And Pier, the CEO, was clearly the best one for doing sales and managing the company. And I was the one, I think, better at managing projects and building a product. So this is how I ended up being the CPO. And now we are a company of 70 people, fully remote. And yeah, we launched Strapi 10 years ago, and we're launching a new product called FIMO two weeks ago. So, yeah, super excited to talk about this.

3:52 That's amazing. So why launch FIMO now? You're already a CPO at a successful company. So why now and why start something new?

3:58 Yeah, it's a tough call. I think we had two options when Strapi is working well. We are doing millions in revenue.

Why Launch Fimo Now? • The cargo ship problem and why starting over was faster

4:14 We are going to be profitable in less than six months. We raised $50 million with the best US VCs. So, yeah, it's a successful company, and we have millions of users. We have most of the big corporations in the world using it. If you go on most of the websites built by Apple, if you go on adidas.com, if you go on Victoria's Secret, IKEA, all those brands, they use Strapi for their main website. So it's huge. But AI is kind of redefining pretty much everything in our industry.

4:48 And we had those 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. And this is what we decided to do. It's not easy. When you have a product that's 10 years old, it's like a big cargo ship; it's not easy to change direction. And also, we have very long-term contracts with some companies. We have those millions of users. So if we want to make Strapi AI-native, it's going to take some time.

5:24 And the market window is right now.

5:26 It's not tomorrow; it's not in two or three years. So we decided it was faster, better, and certainly a better decision to start a new product from scratch, learn from it, apply those learnings directly into Strapi, and not—we can fail with Strapi, but it's better to fail on a small product, apply those learnings on a very major product, and maybe something is going to happen with FIMO. We will see how it goes.

5:52 Awesome. Awesome. And so when you first pitched, did you pitch FIMO to investors and product leaders, or how did you go about it? What was the reaction, and did they get it immediately compared to what we're used to, like a lovable replit build?

The Agentic Web • Who builds the web next: agents, not humans

6:09 Yeah, I think when I pitched it, people got it. I spent the last three months of 2025 in San Francisco to actually be in the right mindset to build an AI-native product. And yeah, the pitch with FIMO is pretty simple. We really think the web is going to be different. In the sense that the web was mostly built by humans for humans. So it means digital agencies, freelancers were coding manually on their—like coding tools. And the web was mostly browsed by humans, us clicking, I don't know, typing forms, all of that. And now, in the last two years, I think we have seen more and more AI coding tools, or we have more agents like Cloud Code and Cursor, developing websites during the entire night when we're sleeping. They develop the websites, they develop apps for us. And when you wake up the next morning, wow, it's done, it's working.

7:10 So the web, I think, is going to be built by agents, mostly for agents and humans. And I think that's the big shift we used to have. And we can also call this the agentic shift. So it means who is making the decisions? Who is the decision-maker? And most of the decisions are going to be made by agents. They are the ones coding. And we think it's going to apply also for websites. So they're going to be the ones maintaining those websites.

7:35 Yeah.

7:36 So they're going to add pages, they're going to update the content, they're going to see, "Oh, I see a drop in the analytics. Maybe you should try something else for the homepage." "Oh, I can see that your competitor, they just released a new feature, or they added this to their website, or they just changed their pricing. I think we should react. We should have a defensive approach, or we should maybe fight back."

7:57 Yeah.

7:57 And this is what we're going to do with FIMO. We are going to try to help people build the first generation of autonomous, proactive, and intelligent websites, which is completely new. And I think people get that. They also see what I see and what we see. And yeah, that's what we're doing. But right now, when you test FIMO, we just built the first brick. So we are only providing the website builder, but we're working on the agentic part. So I think most people will get where we're going in a few weeks.

8:27 Gotcha. Gotcha. And so you're seeing this wave of AI code generation tools, and instead of thinking, "Oh no, this is going to disrupt everything we do," you're thinking, "Yeah, there's a massive gap that needs to be filled." So let's talk about what you learned at Strapi that helped you see that gap. So what I'm interested in is what breaks a company that goes from, you know, 10 pages to 10,000 pages, and when does content management start falling apart?

9:01 Yeah, I think we were talking about this before, but I think content management is like any company. When you start to grow and when you have only, let's say, 10 people, it's easy to just go in the room with those 10 people and share information and say, "Okay, we need to do that, we need to update that."

9:17 When you're in a big group of 10,000 people, there will always be someone missing, someone that's sick, someone that's in a sales call, or someone just got that can just not attend that meeting. So you—the bigger you are, the bigger the communication gap starts happening. And I think it's the same for content management. If you have a website with 10 pages, it's super easy to maintain all of them. But if you have a giant website, you can think about adidas.com. They have so many pages. We're talking about maybe 10 or 100,000. It's super hard to maintain those pages, to make sure you don't have information that's saying the opposite, or making sure that the new brand guidelines apply everywhere on every page. And even if you have an army of content maintainers, writers, editors, it's not easy. So this is where AI is going to fill the gap. AI is so good at manipulating text. It's so good at just browsing your website, and it will notify those gaps and fix them for you, or at least tell you, "Okay, you have a gap here and there."

When Content Management Breaks • What Adidas taught Aurélien about scale

10:25 Yeah.

10:25 So, yeah, this is exactly what we're seeing with most of our users. It's easy to build a simple website, and it's really hard to maintain. I think the maintenance is what we often forget when we build a website. We're thinking, "Oh yeah, I'm going to use that tool. I'm going to create those pages." It's super easy because you have a clear idea of what needs to be done. But when this website is live for three, four months, and you need to—"Oh, we just changed the pricing."

10:50 "Oh, actually, we changed the positioning, or we need to completely update our images because they are not fitting the brand anymore because the designer decided to do something else." This is where the problems happen. And we have seen that for the last 10 years. And I don't think software and the way we built and like designed CMS were truly helping to solve that problem. It makes it easier to do bulk actions. But I think AI is going to really change the game for that problem because you need to do human work, but at a scale that a human cannot do.

11:29 Yeah.

11:29 And.

11:31 Yeah.

11:31 Of course, that makes sense. And so if you take traditional CMS platforms, they were built by humans, you know, creating every bit of content. And what needs to change now, as you said, sometimes people are not going to be there. But how do you—what do you delegate to the AI versus the side of the humans? We were having—I saw this discussion this morning with Jonathan from Upstream. You know, he was saying, "Hey, I'm discussing something on LinkedIn, for example, and he could see that he was talking to an agent because he could see he asked two different questions, and there was a smiley face in the middle of the answer, a rocket at both ends for no reason." And just the way it felt, you know, it felt like it was an agent. So, of course, he was saying, you know, relationships, you're not going to change that. And of course, there's a human side that you have to do.

12:38 I commented that now it's getting pretty scary because now you can actually say, "Match the tone of voice," some things that you would say. Sometimes you can actually prompt them to make mistakes or whatever. And but when it comes to content, all these things, where do you think AI is going? And where do you see the limit? You know, I don't know. I was actually writing an essay about this. Imagine tomorrow, we don't manage the website in the same way we're doing it right now.

Where's the Human Limit? • The Apple Christmas thought experiment

13:09 And in three years, during the Christmas season on apple.com, an AI agent decides to remove all the other products except the AirPods.

13:21 Yeah, because the AI knew, or knows, that during that season, those products are selling the most.

13:29 This is where the margins are, the highest. And this agent has only one goal: increase or maximize the revenue.

13:37 Yeah.

13:37 Is it a bad decision? It's—when you're also looking, I don't know if you watched those games where the chess player or the Go player loses against the AI made by IBM. Um, we—I think this is a move, like move 37, that's super popular because everybody was commenting, "Oh, this is a huge mistake, the AI is going to lose." Actually, that was the smartest move ever. We just didn't know at that time that, "Okay, this is a new move, this is something new." And if you apply that to content management, that move of just showing the AirPods, is it bad if the goal of Apple at that time and the company is just to increase the revenue and maximize the profit, and this agent is making the decision based on a lot of data points? Maybe it will end up meeting their goals thanks to that decision made by an agent. I just don't know if it's bad or not. Maybe it's a bit sad to see that, but I don't know where the limits are. I think some companies, you would never let an agent manage your homepage, or at least you would just let the agent make proposals of what could be updated. But I don't want you to make any decisions. But I think for most of the pages, actually, or maybe you can just identify some pages that are critical for your business. I don't want you to update the feature pages. For me, I don't want to update the contact page.

14:58 Um, do not update the homepage without asking for permissions. But I think for most of the pages, you don't care. If the tone of voice is great, if the AI has a lot of constraints, I think we can let agents do most of the work. And I think we can focus on something else.

15:17 Yeah.

15:17 Well, I think when it comes to branding and the general feel of the website, so far I haven't seen anything super successful that can be replicated. There's emotions, things that it doesn't get yet. Even though it has data points, it's hard to create a real identity to the brand and leave that completely to the AI.

15:55 Yeah, I think there are some industries where it doesn't apply, like think about perfumes. The way you sell a perfume is so unique, and each word is super important. I don't think we're going to have an AI building the creativity of a human pretty soon.

16:01 Um, but for a SaaS company, like, often the tone of voice is not that important. It's always the same: it's friendly, it's concise.

16:11 Yeah, I think it can be reproduced pretty well. I think it will depend. And that's why we need to build CMSs that adapt to all those situations. But yeah, that's why I'm thinking like a part of the web is still going to be, of course, managed by humans, but maybe a majority will be managed by agents. And I don't think it's sad. It's just that if agents can be as good as humans, maybe it means that we are not adding that much value, and we should maybe focus on the creativity part. And it was a tough—

Workflows Nobody Actually Uses • Why 99% of CMS users don't need strict workflows

16:43 Yeah.

16:43 No, that's fairly true. So you mentioned review and approval workflows in FIMO. What did you learn in Strapi about how organizations actually ship content, and do developers even want to manage content?

17:02 We don't have that feature yet on FIMO. It's going to come at some point. But one of the learnings is that we have one good example: Adidas.

17:13 Mhm.

17:13 When you are browsing the adidas.com website, you are actually seeing content that's been produced into a Strapi application. It's a giant one. They have like 15 people working on it. They customized pretty much everything in it. And what we learned is that they are producing and writing that content 18 months before publishing it.

17:35 Wow.

17:36 So it's huge when you are seeing content from a year and a half ago.

17:40 Whoa.

17:41 Maybe produced in 2024. Mhm.

17:43 So that's one of the best examples we have about, "Okay, they need strong workflows because they have this unique publication workflow." But that's an exception. Most of the people think they need reviews and workflows, but actually, they don't.

18:01 They need that to reassure themselves.

18:02 They need that to check a checkbox when they're doing research and discovering new CMSs. But to me, they don't need that at all, or they have it but they don't really implement it. So I think they need boundaries.

18:18 They need to make sure they don't publish something on production without having someone reviewing it. But do they really need strict workflows? I'm not sure about this. So, and most people actually managing like small to medium websites.

18:36 Yeah.

18:36 And you often have one or two people managing the content on it. So I think the time and yeah, you don't need that much workflows. Mostly big corporations, and this is mostly our target for the enterprise edition of Strapi, so they are using it. But even if they are buying it, they don't really use it. I think it's like 15% of them using it in our customer base. And if you look at the entire user base, it's like less than 1%. So it's kind of ridiculous.

19:07 Yeah. Gotcha. Well, sometimes you need those high-end features for some of your best customers.

19:13 Yeah.

19:13 For some of your best customers. I was wondering, when did you realize that AI code generation tools were missing something that was fundamental? And yeah, what was the moment that triggered that?

19:23 Missing in the sense that we—that when you created FIMO, you were already probably using stuff like Lovable, Replit, all these things, and you know, what was the moment where you realized, "Hey, that might start eating part of Strapi, of what we do?"

19:41 Yeah, I think it's even earlier than this. I remember having a board meeting at the end of 2022 where AI was one of the main topics of our board meeting, saying, "Should we go all in on AI right now and be like the first one?" It was even before ChatGPT. And with the board, we said, "Oh, maybe it's too early, the tech is not ready." And that's true. So it's not easy to set up LLMs, or yeah, we didn't have any API that was so easy to use right now. And then came, okay, huge thing, huge revolution in 2024, 2025. We have seen those coding agents getting better and better. And this is, okay, I think one of the signals we got is that some of our customers started to tell us during the negotiation process when they were buying the enterprise edition of Strapi that, "Oh, I'm going to just recode that feature." And I think coding is one thing, but the other thing that we missed, and I keep repeating myself on this, is the maintenance. And the maintenance is also cheap right now.

The Signal That Started It All • When Strapi customers started saying "I'll just recode that"

20:56 Yeah.

20:56 If your customer that developed a small CMS or a small feature in the CMS left your company, you don't care anymore. You can still ask an AI coding agent to maintain that feature for you.

21:14 And before, it was, "Oh, we don't have the documentation, he left with all the knowledge." But right now, we don't really care about this anymore. So that's, I think, the shift that, "Okay, if people start to recode the features that we are selling, those features are actually worth nothing, just a little." And how do we fix that? What do we do? And this is how, "Okay, what if we create an AI-native CMS that embraces AI from the very beginning, at its core, instead of trying to put AI on an existing product where it's going to be slow, etc.?" So I think that was, yeah, the signal. And yeah, I—it's the website building market is a giant market. We're talking about billions of dollars of revenue each year, and it's still growing like 10-15% per year. So it's huge. The number of websites being published every day is just increasing super fast. And you have different categories. You have the people that were manually—the IDE category, like people using VS Code and Cursor, building their websites manually. You have the CMS like WordPress, where you can build a real website using it. You have the visual platforms like Framer, Webflow.

Vibe Coding Is Eating the Market • Why Wix, Webflow & WordPress are all under threat

22:31 Yeah.

22:31 And you have the website building website builders, mostly like Squarespace, Wix, Odoo in France, and many others. And I think all those categories, which are subcategories, but you have the main one, which is the website building category, they're being eaten by the vibe coding category. And actually, do you really need a visual editor if you can constrain the AI to use your brand? Do you need a CMS if you actually don't really need workflows and you don't manage a website with 13 different languages, and you have only one or two people going into the administration panel editing the content? And do you need an engineer to be involved in the creation of your website if AI coding agents can do it for you? And also, prompting is so easy that using Wix, Squarespace, that's great, but they all look the same. You are using a template, and you can personalize it a bit, but it's quite limited right now. If you are a doctor and you want to create your own website, or a chiropractor, I don't know, and you just prompt it, super easy, and you get something that sounds unique or looks unique to you, that looks personalized. So you have this IKEA effect of, "Oh, I built something," so it's much more rewarding than going on Wix, finding the right template, and saying, "Okay." So I think for all those reasons, the vibe coding category to build websites is going to be huge, and maybe bigger than the entire market because it's not only for professionals; it's a consumer mass market opportunity. And we don't know where this is going, but this is my belief right now.

24:01 Yeah, I agree. I've seen many small creators or young or old that were missing a certain amount of hard skills, and now they're able to actually launch things that are crazy because there used to be that gap between what's in your head and how does it materialize in real life. And usually, that used to be the gap. I've worked with a bunch of doctors, and I know doctors always have crazy ideas about—this thing, this thing. But putting it from the idea to production, even finding the proper talent, like finding good developers that will be able to tell you, "Hey, this stack is the right thing for you," because you don't have to have something crazy. Now, honestly, you can just go and use natural language and get something out of it. Plus, as you said, you get the satisfaction.

25:10 Yeah. You build something, and for like $50.

25:14 Yeah. Which is ridiculous.

25:15 Before that, you had to find an engineer, a freelancer, that would have maybe cost you a few thousands. So it's super cheap as well. It's faster and cheaper, and you have more control. So I think that's unbeatable. You can't fight that.

25:30 Agree. I agree. So, here's where we get into the meat of what FIMO makes different. And I want to be really precise here because I think there's a lot of noise in the AI builder space right now. Everyone's promising fast websites. I think they're promising assistance also. But you're making a very specific claim: that FIMO ships a real content structure that AI can reason about and manipulate. And so that's the thesis. So let's sort of unpack what this exactly means. If I need to, let's say, launch a product line landing page, landing page, pricing, FAQ, in four languages in two weeks, walk me through FIMO versus Lovable, let's say. And then what happens three months later when I need to update everything, pricing, all those things?

Fimo vs. Lovable • The real difference between building apps and building websites

26:32 Yeah, I think I'm going to share where this is going to be once we developed FIMO in six months. But yeah, if you do it with Lovable, that's a great product. What they're doing is amazing, actually. But it's really made to build apps, and apps are different than websites. So a website is about displaying content, promoting content, promoting your brand, promoting your product. It's not there to build an app that helps you to—I don't know, translate or learn Italian.

27:03 This is not what we're doing. We're helping you to build marketing, corporate websites, or personal websites. So if you do it on Lovable, you will prompt it, it's going to work, you're going to have a website. The UI is going to be okay, good. They kind of all look the same. I think we're better on the UI aspects. And the content is going to be generated during the code generation. I think it's going to be kind of aligned with what you had in mind. It's going to create the pages, and if you enable Lovable Cloud, you will have your content maybe saved in the database if you ask for it.

27:42 So the first thing is that if you don't ask Lovable to store your content in a database, the content is static in your code. Also, the way the websites are coded are not optimized for SEO. So it means they're not optimized for AEO, so it means search engine optimization. So it means your content is not going to be visible in ChatGPT.

28:03 So first, their websites are not optimized for visibility. The content is always stored in the content, except if you ask for it to store it in the database. And if the content is in a database with three different languages, you just have access to—by the way, it's using Supabase. So you have just a very raw interface that's mostly made for developers to edit your content. You don't have any rich text editor. You cannot easily make some part of your text bold or italic. So formatting of the text is quite difficult. You don't have a media library. So all the assets are going to be not easy to manage. If you want to replace one, you need to always upload as the AI. So you're going to burn a lot of credits.

28:45 Yeah.

28:46 So that's the current experience with Lovable, but it's the same with Replit, Vercel, and all the others. When you use FIMO, what we—what changes really is that we build a website. I think we are offering a better UI, and we have three different agents working in the background. There's one doing the design of your website, this one coding your website, and there's another one managing the content.

29:07 So the content created is not exactly the same. It will better fit your brand, industry, and goals. And we always store the content in the CMS. So in a database, but with a way better interface to manage it. So you will be able to see it, edit it, you will have rich text, you will have lists, you will have selects, you have a real CMS interface to manage your content at scale in many different languages. And we also offer a media library. So you will see all your media in a clear tab. You can replace them.

What Makes Fimo Actually Different • Structured content, three agents, and autonomous websites

29:42 You can generate new ones. All of that. And because we have made the content structured, we can play with it. So this is how we always—the view of your entire content on your website. And if there's a competitor, like I was mentioning this example of that updated their pricing page or updated their homepage or their positioning, we can compare with your entire content because it's something that's available as a context.

30:11 Yeah.

30:11 For the agent, which is not really the case for Lovable. It's just part of the code, it's the static text.

30:18 But no, we can manipulate that content, and we can do whatever we want with it. We can translate it easily. We can change the entire tone of voice on all the pages at the same time. It's not part of the code; it's something outside that's being injected. So it's faster and easier to play with it. So that's the main thing. And then we will have these agents that are going to watch the web for you, watch your competitors. If you add, I don't know, a good discussion in a thread on Slack, you can ask FIMO directly in Slack and say, "Okay, convert this thread into a blog post for the engineering category." And then you have a preview URL coming back, and you can see, "Okay, that's amazing. I have my blog post ready." Or you can say, "Okay, every two weeks, I want you to write a blog post about all the updates that happened on our GitHub repository."

31:16 Those things are really optimized for marketing corporate websites. Lovable is never going to offer that. It doesn't mean you can't do it with Lovable. You have to create your own agent. You can do it, but not everybody wants to build their agents. We are the ones maintaining the prompt. We are the content experts, and we are doing the job for you to optimize your visibility. It really depends on the goals of your website. That's something we are actually going to capture: Do you want to optimize signups, the number of demos? Do you want to maximize activation or MQLs?

31:50 You will tell us, and the agents are going to react to those goals.

31:55 Yeah, that's funny. How do you use analytics to actually base your decisions? And as you said, there's the content itself, but then the content usually serves a purpose. So how do you make sure that the agent understands what the goal is, what the funnel looks like, and then what metrics to play on?

32:15 Do you have integrations with proper analytics software, or is it coming? First, we want to build this agentic layer that brings autonomy to the website. And then, yeah, we're going to bring the data that helps this autonomous part to be even better. So it's going to come in different milestones. Um, but yeah, it's going to come.

32:36 Yeah, this is super cool. And so, like, if you take Lovable, Bolt, Replit, they're fast. They're getting traction, obviously. Why can't they add a content layer in V2?

32:50 They could, but they didn't think their product this way. They're not targeting exactly the same audience. As you said, it's more applications rather than content websites.

33:01 They're building apps. Bolt is great to build mobile apps, for example. They have a great integration with Expo. Lovable is mostly going on replacing software engineers. We spend a lot of time on the UI part. They could do it as well, but you don't have the same kind of UI for a marketing website and an app where you need a dashboard, all of that. We have some exclusive partnerships for the media. Our media look better than the others. And yeah, when you start seeing what needs to be done, okay, we need to optimize the SEO. So the way we generate the website is not the same. It's costing much more than the way they do it. We will need analytics. We need to have those autonomous agents that are going to—we need to collect specific information about your competitors, your industry, your goals, your main topics, like the critical pages that you need, the tone of voice, the SEO. Those are like, we are doing a verticalized software optimized for building corporate marketing websites.

Why Can't Lovable Just Add a Content Layer? • Verticalization as a moat

34:10 If they could do it, but I think that's not their play. And I think the market is so big that there's a place for everybody.

34:18 Yeah.

34:18 And so one of the things that I love about doing this podcast is we can extract lessons that go beyond the single product and talk about the entire industry where it's headed. And I think FIMO represents something way bigger than just a website builder. It's also a bet on how AI will fundamentally change what we're building and how we manage digital products. I think it's a bet on what it means to be AI-native, that we talk about so often.

What Does AI-Native Really Mean? • Concrete principles at Fimo - no blank pages, vibe-coded QA

34:55 So to you, what does it mean to be AI-native? And can you give me something concrete that you do at FIMO that you couldn't if AI was just bolted on it?

35:09 Yeah, I think any product can be transformed or translated from a non-AI-native product to an AI-native product. We could have done this on Strapi, and we're actually doing it. It's just going to take a while because you need to change the UI/UX of your product so much, and when you have tons of customers and users, it's just slower. You can't change everything radically. People are not going to like it, and you're going to lose trust and all of that. One of the—we have some principles at FIMO. For example, we never start from a blank page. So you never have this feeling of, "Okay, I want to create something new," and, "Okay, all the values, the fields are empty."

35:52 No, we always say, "Okay, what do you want to generate?" Either it's an entry, a new post, or a new image. Tell us what you want to do, and we are going to generate the first version for you, and then you can iterate over and over. So I think that's the first thing: AI can avoid the blank page, which is something that happens very often when you use a product. You click "add" on a Notion page, for example, and it's blank. You have nothing. You can use their templates, but I think it's way better when you click "add new page," "Okay, what do you want to build?" "Okay, I would like to talk about this, but I don't know how to structure it." This is why AI is so good at helping you to structure your ideas into something tangible for the users.

36:40 The other thing, I think, is the stack is so different compared to another product. We don't use the same billing system. We don't use the same observability systems. I think 90% of the code is being AI-coded compared to what we used to do with Strapi. The way we work also, in the way the product is being built, we don't open tickets in Linear to do QA. Like our engineers, our designers, even myself, we all V-code and fix the issue when we see them. So, "Oh, like, there's like this button is not correctly positioned. There are like two pixels missing." Okay, I'm just going to V-code and do it and ship it. Which is completely new compared to, "Oh, before that, I would have opened a ticket in Linear. I would have recorded a video or taken a screenshot, and I would have posted that in the sprint or in the backlog." And an engineer, like, a week later, would have, "Okay, is this you sure this is this button or the other one?" So you start to have a discussion, and it's been shipped for the next release. So it would have taken like two weeks. Now it's taking two minutes. So I think it's not only about the product itself and how you—of course, the UI/UX changes a bit. The economics around the product change. The mindset, how you build the product, but also the processes are completely different. And we have been able to redo a lot of the features that are available in Strapi with a team of three engineers, one designer, and myself in six months. So, yeah, when you compare to how much time it took to create something like Strapi. But also, we learned so much from Strapi. So we apply all the learnings and all those years. So I think you can't really compare. If we were starting from zero and we had to build a payment billing system, we would have—even with AI, it would have taken years. So I think it's not fair to compare it this way, but still, you are faster, and you are doing it, building those products completely differently, but it's by the mindset mostly.

38:45 Have you noticed a shift because you said now you can do it super quickly?

38:50 Have you noticed a shift between engineers and product people? I know that at Lovable, I think they have this concept, I forgot what it is, but there's—yeah, it's product engineer, I was going to say product builders or whatever, but yeah, product engineers in the sense that now everyone's building. But have you seen a shift in ownership between what devs usually did and product? Is there something that developers value, or is this something that they fear? You know, because everyone's having this discussion about—I think when we talk about product, it's this mix of engineering, product, and design. And I mean, everyone's having this discussion about who's going to die first. I think we're going into more of a hybrid final product, let's say, and people are just going to have better skills or stuff like that at some point. But what have you seen in terms of shift?

39:49 I don't think those roles are going to merge, but definitely the scope of each role is being reduced. So it means that a product manager, product designer used to never code or rarely, even if they have some technical skills. Right now, they can code and fix the small issues, or they can improve the responsiveness of your product. This is doable for them using AI tools. So it removed those—I think where the engineers were not adding a lot of value.

40:21 It removed those tasks from their backlogs so they can focus on something else. But they're also not only doing more on the deep tech side, but they're also taking—they have more time to think about the products they're building.

40:34 And what I'm seeing is that yes, they are much more involved in the discussion. They are challenging the UI/UX even more. The designer can really also talk. I think it just kind of balances the discussion between the tech and the non-tech people. And we just go in the fastest way. But yeah, I think it's not—we're not replacing those roles; we're just—they're getting closer to each other. And there are, of course, roles that are kind of disappearing. For example, so far, we have no one managing the documentation. It's being generated by AI.

41:14 Yeah.

41:15 I still think we need someone to have a view on the documentation. And you still need to think about the way you structure it, all of that. But most of it can be AI-generated. And I think AI products are so easier to use compared to other products. So you don't need that much documentation. And most of the roles, I think, especially the product management roles, are being kind of automated. You have more time thinking. You are not writing a transcript of your meetings. You're not doing the triage or the categorizing of your different problems and feedback you got. You're not writing user stories anymore. You're not opening tickets and doing like very long backlog reviews because everybody can just ship and do their own stuff. So you have saved so much time with automating your role that you can really talk with more users. You can have more time to really know your competitors and test the product, so you can develop your product sense even more. So you have more time to just fill your market and make better decisions. And I think it's great for the role, actually, because I don't like to see PMs spending their time doing tasks that can be done by AI, where your real value is about making the right decisions.

The PM Role Is Being Automated • What PMs should stop doing and what they should do instead

42:37 That's true. That's true. And what skills do you think that PMs have to have to build currently, and where you want to be AI-native, let's say, and not for traditional products? What's the difference? And what are the unique failure modes, let's say?

42:58 Yeah, I think it's—we are just going back to the roots of those roles. You need to control where your product is going without controlling it.

43:08 Yeah.

43:09 So without controlling your team. So you just need to set a clear vision.

43:14 So that's why it's super important to know your market, to know your competitors, to have what they call product sense. Only the senior PMs have it. And that's funny because they—you don't need to do a lot of user research. If you have an idea, you build a prototype. If you have 10 customers that are saying, "That's amazing, I want to buy this thing," it goes to production, and they develop it. And but only the senior PMs that really feel the market can work this way. But yeah, I think as a PM, you need to embrace AI. You need to automate all the boring tasks. Even if you maybe like to write user stories, stop doing it. You're just wasting your time.

43:55 And it's more about being nostalgic than actually helping your company add value.

44:01 Yeah.

44:01 Um, I think—I think each PM should have a suitcase of agents, full of agents. And whenever a company you're going to work for, you have your agents, you can address them to the company's workflow, but automate your job. Spend more time looking at your competitors, spend more time understanding the market, test all the new products, all the new stuff that are actually being released, not only in your field, but there's so many things happening in the AI field. This is what I'm telling to the PMs at Replit: it's okay if you spend two hours doing an active watch on X, on LinkedIn, or Product Hunt, all of that. It's going so fast, you need to keep the pace. So if you automate your job, you have more time to do those stuff. And you're just—yeah, try to make sure the engineers are super motivated, they have the right mindset, they really understand the product, they really understand the audience. Because that's always the same thing: they're going to be super proactive, they can ship super fast, but if they ship in the wrong direction, you're just losing time. So make sure that they know who is going to use my product. For example, at FIMO, we had this example that was like a small quick learning for us: the engineers were shipping so much that they loved the code part. So we have three or four different tabs in FIMO. You have the preview where you see your website, you have the content where you see your content, like the assets where you see the media, and you have the code where you see the code. And the engineers loved to do so much stuff around the code part. You have like super search, you could follow other engineers and follow them coding. That was amazing. But none of our customers are actually coders. They don't know how to code, they don't care about coding, they just want to build websites. So it makes no sense to develop this side of the product right now, just more to maintain something where we can have issues. And if people see that it's going—we're maybe going to receive feedback about, "Ah, maybe we should do that," when none of our people paying for it actually care about this. So I have to do my job and say, "Okay, that's the wrong direction," and we need to remove those features. Actually, this is what we have done. So the next day after the release, we removed those features because that was not matching with the customer profile at all. And so, yeah, that's still our job as PMs, said the director.

The Skills That Matter Now • Product sense, market feel, and a suitcase of agents

46:24 That's true. That's true. And what what skills do you think that PMs have to have to build currently and where you want to be like AI-native, let's say, and not for traditional products? What's the difference? And what are the unique failure modes, let's say?

46:37 Yeah, I think it's—we are just going back to the roots of those roles. You need to control where your product is going without controlling it.

46:50 So without controlling your team. So you just need to set a clear vision.

46:55 So that's why it's super important to know your market, to know your competitors, to have what they call product sense. Only the senior PMs have it. And that's funny because they—you don't need to do a lot of user research. If you have an idea, you build a prototype. If you have 10 customers that are saying, "That's amazing, I want to buy this thing," it goes to production, and they develop it. And but only the senior PMs that really feel the market can work this way. But yeah, I think as a PM, you need to embrace AI. You need to automate all the boring tasks. Even if you maybe like to write user stories, stop doing it. You're just wasting your time.

47:30 And it's more about being nostalgic than actually helping your company add value.

47:35 Um, I think—I think each PM should have a suitcase of agents, full of agents. And whenever a company you're going to work for, you have your agents, you can address them to the company's workflow, but automate your job. Spend more time looking at your competitors, spend more time understanding the market, test all the new products, all the new stuff that are actually being released, not only in your field, but there's so many things happening in the AI field. This is what I'm telling to the PMs at Replit: it's okay if you spend two hours doing an active watch on X, on LinkedIn, or Product Hunt, all of that. It's going so fast, you need to keep the pace. So if you automate your job, you have more time to do those stuff. And you're just—yeah, try to make sure the engineers are super motivated, they have the right mindset, they really understand the product, they really understand the audience. Because that's always the same thing: they're going to be super proactive, they can ship super fast, but if they ship in the wrong direction, you're just losing time. So make sure that they know who is going to use my product. For example, at FIMO, we had this example that was like a small quick learning for us: the engineers were shipping so much that they loved the code part. So we have three or four different tabs in FIMO. You have the preview where you see your website, you have the content where you see your content, like the assets where you see the media, and you have the code where you see the code. And the engineers loved to do so much stuff around the code part. You have like super search, you could follow other engineers and follow them coding. That was amazing. But none of our customers are actually coders. They don't know how to code, they don't care about coding, they just want to build websites. So it makes no sense to develop this side of the product right now, just more to maintain something where we can have issues. And if people see that it's going—we're maybe going to receive feedback about, "Ah, maybe we should do that," when none of our people paying for it actually care about this. So I have to do my job and say, "Okay, that's the wrong direction," and we need to remove those features. Actually, this is what we have done. So the next day after the release, we removed those features because that was not matching with the customer profile at all. And so, yeah, that's still our job as PMs, said the director.

When Engineers Ship in the Wrong Direction • The code tab nobody asked for

47:48 I remember actually, it's funny that you talk about that because I remember that was one of—I jumped on a discovery call with you because I don't remember if it was September or November, you said maybe November. Yeah.

47:57 You told me, "Okay, I'm building something, and just try it out." So I played with it, and then when you were looking at the result, what I'd done, you were like, "You're definitely not a coder," because I wasn't looking at all. And you were like, "We built this, and you're not looking at it at all." Um, but that's true. That's true. But again, like, you never know. Now I feel that you get a good grasp of who your customers are and where you're adding the most value.

48:15 Yeah.

48:15 But yeah, and that's why even if you let the team build stuff, you should let some space for that. You never know, it could be a great idea, and everybody can have great ideas, and they have their own way of feeding the product and feeling where this market is going. So you should let them do stuff. But you should always control, in some way, make sure they don't go too far in a specific direction until we get signals and we get the data points. But yeah, that's true. So maybe we're—let's say in the final section, and I want to make this as practical and forward-looking as possible. So you're in the middle of building FIMO right now.

48:50 The product is live, people are using it, and you're learning in real time. Let's talk about what you've learned and where you're going, and what advice you'd have for people that are building AI-native products. What's the most surprising thing about people that use FIMO? And what's one thing that was harder than expected?

49:15 I think one thing maybe that's surprising is that our first customers are Chinese, using FIMO behind a VPN.

49:25 Uh-huh.

49:25 Um, so we had some issues because of the VPN, and we had to fix them. And so that was unexpected. I didn't expect it because we mostly launched—we did a soft launch. And we mostly expected to have European users. Actually, all our customers are from China, UK, US. They're not from Europe. So that's one of the most surprising things. Um, the willingness to pay for those products is maybe not the same in Europe. Um, yeah. And the first customer is actually a consultant that's helping you to import your business in China. Mhm.

50:00 Um, and yeah, I thought we would have maybe a small startup or someone launching a landing page to get emails and leads. And no, we got just a very simple website of a guy promoting how to import a business in China. So that was surprising.

50:28 Um, the other biggest learning is that I was telling you, none of our customers—I know them all—none of them are good at coding.

50:36 Yeah.

50:36 They're not afraid of seeing code, but they don't code at all. And I kind of have this gut feeling that this will happen, but I was not sure, and the team was not so lame with that. They were sure like developers, some of them are going to use that. Actually, nobody's going to. So that's good. Another thing is about the churn. I expect people to convert, to buy, to get more credits, and actually churn. So far, we didn't get any churn. Um, because I know the churn on Lovable and all the tools was extremely high.

51:08 Um, but I think people are also seeing the value in the first use case. So, and I think we have a better hook because there's no way to escape from FIMO when you start from it right now. So if you want to publish a website, you need to stay on FIMO and you need to keep paying.

What Fimo Learned After Launch • Zero churn, a Chinese first customer, and launch regrets

51:23 Yeah.

51:23 Um, so yeah, those are the first learnings. And I think one—it's not a mistake, but something that I almost regret is that we should have launched way earlier, even if the product was not good. When you tested it in November, for example, you had tons of issues with it, it was not stable. But I think we should have launched it anyway. And even if I know that because I watch a lot of podcasts and listen to a lot of product experts, it's super—you always have this feeling that if I'm launching too soon, the first impression is going to be bad, and I'm not the first one on this market. So people are going to say, "This is not stable, fix your fix your thing and then go back." And you also want to do a good product when you know the first impression is going to be correct or good. But you're also going to be late. So I think we waited too much to have a product that was working well. But anyway, we got our thousand of users. We have our first customers. We're learning a lot. But yeah, this is—do not ship.

51:38 Do not wait. Ship.

51:41 That's always, I think, a rule in life, and especially when you're an entrepreneur. But now, as I said, you're seeing—I think daring is going to be what differentiates people who succeed from those who don't, because now you just have to try and iterate.

51:59 Um, what I feel with Lovable and other tools is that it can get to a point where you get frustrated, whereas you do a more consistent job. At least so far, I've seen that it's more consistent, especially when you want to build a website.

52:14 Um, and what, what do you think? I mean, for founders that are building, let's say, AI-native products, what's the first decision they need to get right? And for PMs, let's say, retrofitting AI into existing products, do you think that's a mistake to avoid?

52:28 Yeah, I think one thing is do not optimize the economics right now. So we know that on AI products, the margins are not like they used to be with SaaS. So do not expect 80-90% of margins. Mostly could be around—I know, for example, like Lovable, Vercel, they have negative margins for months before optimizing their systems. But yeah, that's something we're doing with FIMO. We don't have negative margins, but we have zero margin. We don't care about the margins. We want usage. We want to grow the usage. We want to see traction. And we know we could use other models. We could, for some tasks, stop using code and other models. So do not work on that, just optimize for the usage. So the more credits you can give to your user, the better.

53:27 So that's, I think, my advice for the founders: do not work on the economics. Even if, and that's why maybe sometimes you need to raise a bit of money because it's going to cost a lot.

53:36 Yeah.

53:36 Uh, but yeah. And for the PMs, building AI-native products, I think you would have maybe to change your—if you're working in a company, like, depending on the size, but if, like us, you were like a Series B company, you are almost 100 people. You cannot innovate with 100 people being involved. That's one thing we have done right, I think, at—innovation always comes from a compact team.

54:07 So you need to have a very small team that's super lean, where you remove all the constraints. That's what we have done. So we pulled like three engineers, including our CTO, one designer, and myself, and we said, "Work for six months in another room, in a private channel," and work like in isolation from the rest. Because everybody wants to be involved. Everybody wants to test your product. You will have the support team that, "Oh, we need to set up the support."

Advice for Founders & PMs • Small teams, no constraints, and when to start from scratch

54:37 I'm glad we didn't do it. We have zero support tickets since we launched FIMO.

54:41 Yeah.

54:41 So I'm glad we didn't spend weeks with the support team setting up a new workspace or thinking about the workflows. Same for the documentation. Nobody's complaining about documentation. It's fully AI-generated. I spent just a few hours doing it. I'm glad I didn't involve our documentation team.

54:58 Into that process. So by doing that, I think I protected them from distraction, and they can actually focus on our main product, which is Strapi.

55:07 Um, so that's another maybe advice for founders. If you already have a company and a non-AI-native product, if you want to create one, create a small team aside. Yeah, a side team, and be okay if that team is not part of the process anymore.

55:23 For example, we have another bin system where we used to use Chargebee. I would not recommend that software, by the way. And we're using Appoline right now for FIMO. And it's the same for the support, it's another software. The same for documentation, it's another software. No constraints, small team, lean process. And for the PMs, I think if you are in that situation where you are working for a non-AI-native product, your fight might be to talk to the founders or talk to the people making the decisions that we have two options. And I think you're going to be in the same position as we used to be: "Do we wait if the market window is right now, or we have just two years ahead of us? Is it enough to completely change the direction of our current product, or is it too big already and it's too slow to change it? Or do we start from scratch with a maybe specific target, specific segments, small features?"

56:21 Um, I think that's where the decision is. And as a PM, if you feel the market, if you know the competition, if you know where this market is going to go and what's the direction, you might have to go on an upper level and ask the right questions to your leadership team.

56:31 Gotcha. You might not be able to do a lot of things at your current level because it's—I think for most companies, it's what we're doing actually with Strapi. When I was in the US for three months, I've seen like 80% of the companies doing the move we have done. And that's not something I'm seeing a lot in Europe. So maybe we are afraid, we are conservative. Conservative, yeah. We don't see the risk the same way, of course. Maybe.

57:00 And so maybe to wrap things up, what keeps you up at night? What are you most excited to ship? And I think I can't believe that the web is going to be completely different in five years. I even think about this idea: are we going to have a browser that only displays human-created content?

57:33 Mhm. Because I think the web is going to be full of agentic content, created like video, media. We just don't know what's going to be real. So I think we should—yeah, I don't know where this is going. I want to support this because I think there are a lot of benefits for the world from doing this. But at the same time, I just don't know how the web is going to look like in five years. So yeah, I'm not concerned, but I'm trusting the industry leaders to make the right decisions, and we're going to find solutions to our own problems. But what we're actually doing, we're creating the AI way to have this agentic web.

58:17 Yeah, I want to be part of it. But at the same time, I know it's going to create a lot of issues about, "Can we trust what we are seeing on the screen?" And I think the answer is no, you can't trust it anymore. So I'm—I think the creative jobs, like the real-life experiences, like the artists, they're going to have to play a huge role in offering something else for us citizens, humans, because what we're going to see on the web is going to be different. And maybe that's for the good, because it means we're going to spend less time watching screens, you know, hopefully.

What Keeps Aurélien Up at Night • A web you can't trust — and why that might be okay

59:01 Um, wrapping things up, I just have a couple rapid-fire questions.

59:06 Um, so what's the best product decision that you made in the last six months?

59:11 Um, like to fully delegate my job at to our product.

Rapid Fire questions

59:20 Oh, that's super important. If you could have one feature in FIMO, what would it be?

59:26 Um, like the full autonomy of websites.

59:32 Amazing. And what's one thing that you believe about AI that most people would disagree with right now?

59:38 Um, I think it's not going to replace jobs, but it's definitely going to redistribute the jobs. So if I can explain on that, it means that I think all the jobs are still going to exist, like they exist in the factories, all of that. It's just we don't need exactly the same skills to do the same job.

1:00:04 And so five years from now, what do you want to be known for?

1:00:10 Um, I think to have created a new generation of websites. I think we have those just simple static HTML websites. We then have dynamic websites, and we're going to have autonomous websites. And I want to be known for this.

1:00:29 This is great, man. Honestly, congrats for everything that you've done. As you know, Strapi, I was already a big fan. There are two companies that I worked for where I brought Strapi, and I think it made things completely different. Now, FIMO, it's great as well. So congrats on that launch, and I really hope that five years from now, you'll be known exactly for that.

1:00:51 Awesome.

1:00:52 Thank you for being here, man.

1:00:53 Thank you. It was nice.

1:00:54 And that's a wrap on this conversation with honestly one of the more grounded takes on AI I've heard in a while. No hype, just someone who's been in the trenches for 10 years and knows exactly what's broken. If this episode made you think differently about how websites get built and maintained, share it with someone who needs to hear it. And if you're not subscribed yet, now's a really good time. There's a lot more of this coming. Links to FIMO in the description. Go check out Building.

1:01:22 Thank you so much. I'm Cedric. This is The French Product. I'll see you in the next one.