Less Code, More Impact: How Mindvalley Delivered Global Content 50% Faster

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

Level up your mind, body, soul, and career with daily 20-minute micro-coaching sessions from over 100 of the world’s top programs for personal growth and transformation. Mindvalley (opens in a new window) empowers its 20 million students worldwide to get into the best shape of their life—whether physical, mental, spiritual, or economic—delivering an unparalleled virtual learning experience across mobile, desktop, and Apple Vision Pro. But until they switched up their CMS setup, the Mindvalley developer team wasn’t exactly feeling zen. A problematic custom-built CMS demanding a lot of maintenance and an entirely developer-reliant content workflow meant the team had to undergo its own personal transformation project with Storyblok. One that led to a 50% reduction in development time, improved launch speed, and easy multilingual management across 8 languages.

Monoliths, homegrown builds, and SaaS solutions

You know what they say, third time’s not always a charm—and Mindvalley’s CMS journey is no exception. The team trialled 3 CMS options before finally arriving at Storyblok: starting out with WordPress and then giving Drupal a go before recognizing that they needed more customization to deliver the digital experience they aspired to. This led them to create their own solution, Ignite. 

However, despite its customization capabilities, they soon realised that Ignite wasn’t quite making the cut in other areas. It didn’t have an interface, which made it difficult for new hires to learn and required heavy maintenance from the development team to keep things up and running. It also wasn’t component-based, so non-technical users had to edit code line by line (you know where this is going), resulting in marketers having to depend on developers to make any content changes, large or small. This developer-reliant workflow quickly raised concerns among the team about mounting workloads and limited resources; the team needed a solution. 

To combat the problem, in true innovative spirit, the Mindvalley team developed Site Builder, a custom internal headless CMS. But even this had its drawbacks as it still required significant maintenance and pulled developers’ attention away from other, more crucial projects—namely, Mindvalley’s hundreds of online programs. They decided it was time for a change, something that worked for their team and their business objectives. More specifically, they wanted a SaaS headless CMS that could handle all the maintenance itself…I wonder who that could be? 

Mindvalley’s CMS non-negotiables were:  

• Reusable content blocks to maintain consistency and implement their branding.
• Allows developers to use familiar programming languages such as JavaScript and Vue.js to get projects started easily.
• Allows marketers and designers to make changes to the website without coding or developer intervention, empowering them to work independently and get things done faster. 
• Supports easy deployments across a multilingual page setup applicable for various products and vertical pages.

Migrating multilingual content: is it worth it?

The search for a headless CMS solution began in 2017, and by early 2018, most people at Mindvalley were championing change for a new system to replace Site Builder and Ignite. Even though 90% of the company's revenue was still being generated from pages on Ignite, the team had set their sites (pun intended) on a move to Storyblok, and the company agreed that their developers and marketers needed a CMS they could rely on. 

Mindvalley migrated their content to Storyblok in 2019 and since then, have welcomed tangible benefits and been able to achieve so much, including: 

• Simple content management for non-technical team members. 
• A component-based approach, leveraging reusable content for different pages and adapting content elements more easily. 
• Using drag-and-drop capabilities with our Visual Editor to make accurate, speedy changes to content.
• Deploying multilingual content quickly and easily across Mindvalley's websites in 8 languages.
• Rolling out a localized strategy across their different landing pages.
• Migrating multiple product pages over to Storyblok from their old setup—more technical details below.  

Their content and product pages, in particular, were vital to this migration project, divided into pre-login and login segments. Mindvalley users can access various features and content pages found in the pre-login section, which uses a custom-built plug-in, led by the Mindvalley acquisition team. The plugin extracts data from their GraphQL API and joins a few extensions, helping to manage various product pages and sites seamlessly.

Empowering non-technical teams to own their content

Not all of Mindvalley’s developers were eager to learn to code with Ignite in order to create new website pages. Doing so was time-consuming and took their focus away from their core responsibilities, along with frequent requests to update and publish content from the marketing team and beyond. Mindvalley wanted to set up all of their users for success when selecting their next headless CMS provider. Switching to Storyblok enabled marketers and designers to work autonomously, update content effortlessly on their own, and focus on valuable projects instead of learning to code just to make simple edits. 

Nowadays, making changes to pages and campaigns is a breeze for Mindvalley’s non-technical users, freeing up their technical counterparts to focus on building bigger, better experiences for its millions of subscribers. Meanwhile, their acquisition team aims to create valuable and adaptable components for the marketing and design team to use across the website. In return, the design team can now concentrate on their projects using the integrated design system and style sheets on Storyblok to maintain a dynamic but unified user experience.

Speaking the audience's language: simple multilingual management

Internationalization is a key to many long-term business strategies today, but to tap into any new market successfully, you have to speak the audience’s language, quite literally. For Mindvalley, their international reach currently covers 8 language sites, which pre-Storyblok required separate content repositories for each. An approach that wasn’t exactly scalable; after all, no one wants to be updating multiple individual repositories whenever they need to make a content change.

But nowadays, their multilingual content workflow looks pretty different as the Mindvalley team can update every language site simultaneously from one location—get the technical details here. Marketers can head over to the page they want to edit in Storyblok, then, using the drop-down field type feature in our Visual Editor, they can easily edit the content on every language version of that page.

They can even leverage our AI translator feature and allow Storyblok to do the hard translation work for them, while they focus on making sure the content narrative is on point. Building a world-class digital experience for their personal development courses has never been easier; the whole Mindvalley team is able to contribute efficiently and confidently with a newly refurbished content workflow that allows people to actually do their jobs. Even new hires are able to get to work in no time with plenty of documentation and how-to guides to show them the ropes of Storyblok. How’s that for scalable multilingual content?

Levelling up web development to deliver Mindvalley to the world

A framework-agnostic CMS with a simple user interface that empowers developers and marketers alike to do their job well, and do it efficiently—Storyblok is officially a win for Mindvalley. Their previous systems made workflows sluggish and frustrations high, damaging job satisfaction and retention rates across their developer, marketing, and design talent—but that’s old news now. 

Nowadays, Mindvalley can launch twice as fast as it could with its previous setup and has reduced development time by 50%. In a nutshell, go-to-market has become a whole lot easier and faster, and Mindvalley is able to deliver great content to its millions of subscribers and beyond in record time. Now that’s what we call self-improvement.