Lord-Lieutenant’s Entrepreneurs Challenge Finalist 2026

Baack made an appearance at our first ever trade show stand in May as a finalist in the prestigious Lord-Lieutenant’s Entrepreneurs Challenge at the 140th Hertfordshire County Show.

Despite soaring temperatures, both days featured great interactions with attendees at the show and the judges, including Lord Lieutenant Robert Voss CBE and Sanjeev Bhavnani. Being selected as a finalist was hugely appreciated as it allowed us to use the event as a platform to demonstrate how Baack enables companies to build unique experiences quickly.

As Baack is predominantly an API product, and with 35,000 attendees, we anticipated few might be using content APIs. Therefore, we built two demo apps in the week leading up to the show. These mini apps showcased how Baack's capabilities allow companies to rapidly build unique experiences. We also enjoyed the very inspiring presentations from various speakers.

Understanding the YuMove story

One particular highlight was hearing John Howie's story about the early days of YuMove, which has taken off since then. A key strategy they employed early on was focusing on a highly targeted group of people.

While YuMove supplements are helpful for many, if not all, pets, the initial focus was on owners who take part in agility competitions. Because these dogs are working more, they have a greater need for joint care. Focusing on this very specific market was a critical step in their Go-To-Market strategy, which later also involved discussions with major UK retailers.

Creating engagement

Showing digital products at a trade show is always challenging. One of the apps challenged attendees to solve a riddle with the chance to win a voucher for a local business:

While a simple concept, the app definitely helped attract passersby as an icebreaker. To build the app, we used a number of Baack's capabilities:

• Customer Relationship Management to capture contestant contact details using the identity, person’s name, telephone number and email address endpoints.

• Membership Group to track participants, with those who answered correctly being subscribed to receive an email if they win.

• Content for the app using a single entity using text items, markdown for longer form content and image items to handle visual assets.

As the app was built in an evening before the event, there were inevitably a few content issues live on the day which one contestant spotted. The joy of having a simple inline editor that works on mobile meant I could fix the content issues live, serving as the ultimate demo of the power of separating content from presentation.

The Hacking Lab: Bringing ‘Farm View’ to Life

Since the entrepreneur challenge was held at a county show, I anticipated many attendees might be landowners, farmers, or somehow connected to agriculture. While you might question what a digital platform offers a farmer, you would be overlooking the ever-expanding digitization of farming.

As part of a separate project, I am also supporting another platform business in the produce industry. To explore some concepts and build a compelling prototype for a longer pitch, I also built a ‘Farm View’ app. This app allows growers to monitor projected yield, handle trades for their surplus onto a platform, book quality assessments, and generate transport passports.

I used AI with prompts to build the app quickly, including multiple screens and workflows for some of the farmers' most common pain points. The app used a hypothetical arable farm in Hertfordshire growing wheat and oats, which represent around 70% of the agricultural activity in the region.

Powered by Baack

The point of the prototype is to showcase how much of the app was powered by Baack as a scalable backend for a niche prototype, including:

• App Content via the CMS: General layout content and templates for rendering grain passports, etc.
• Farm Content: Descriptions of fields and the grain that power the grain passports and compliance certificates.
• Tasks: Organizing work like field treatments and capturing treatment details. Tasks also powered assigning work for external contractors to carry out soil assessments and treatment analysis.
• CRM / Identity Management: There are many people involved in the farm's everyday upkeep, including the farmer and staff, merchants purchasing produce, hauliers shipping surplus, soil treatment consultants, and auditors. Each of these stakeholders needs different roles, responsibility, and visibility into the farm's content using fine-grained role-based access control.
• Payments / Invoices: Used to model offers and accepted trades ([full API coming soon]). While the platform does not have a specific model for grain, it is clear that the capabilities used for this app are the core needs of practically any app, which is why we built them first. These core capabilities are the 'backend plumbing' that allows apps to focus on their core product problems. Simple tools can solve complex collaboration challenges for small to medium businesses.

If you are “vibe-coding" prototypes for products, check out how Baack can help accelerate taking your app from clickable prototype to a real system in no time.

Utility Launch of Free Unbranded QR Code Generation

To bring our signage to life at the show, we used a QR code so contestants could submit their answer to the riddle to enter the competition for a free prize. We also packaged up our QR code generator mini-app.

While other free QR code generators exist, this capability was already underway to support an upcoming feature. We launched it as part of our commitment to providing high-utility, unbranded tools for developers and startups using our platform to reduce initial costs.

A Technical Leap: Webhooks Everywhere

In the last few days, we have been staging what is likely the biggest step-change in our offering in some time: webhooks for practically every core API concept, with over 80% of the API surface now covered.

Few people are likely aware that our founder worked on webhooks at Meta and actually built the first webhooks in a novel infrastructure for Threads. Webhooks help provide great experiences for businesses. In industries where managing or moderating content in real-time is critical, webhooks are a table-stakes feature. The challenge is often that the way they are built leaves quite a lot of room to be desired.

Fine-Grained Subscriptions

While asynchronous integration can be really powerful for real-time applications, not every product needs to consume the full stream of events. We have made subscriptions fine-grained to individual subjects so your integration can listen to just the events it needs (e.g., only listening to message thread post creations). Each subject supports subscribing (dependent upon support) for listening to create, update, and delete events, or 'all' events for the subject.

Configurable Authentication

Most webhook offerings support only one authentication mechanism, which means apps have to build bespoke solutions for every integration. We have adopted a standards-based approach with support for HTTP BASIC, DIGEST, and BEARER authentication. We also included an HMAC-SHA256 signature as standard so you can verify the integrity of the message. This is in addition to the usual timestamp, SSL requirement, and nonce approaches to avoid replay attacks.

If your application requires mTLS, please get in touch. We will be arriving soon and would love to find integration testers.

Reliability of Delivery

From experience, we know the biggest challenge for webhooks is if they are unreliable or seem unpredictable in their delivery. Our webhooks are built in a way that means replay and debugging become a breeze, with the full delivery logic ([coming soon]) also visible in our API. The very first webhook we built was the webhook subscription so you can keep updated on changes in the state of your subscriptions, as being unsubscribed due to delivery failure is one of the most common causes for integration failure.

The platform works on delivering ‘fast then slow’: we aim to attempt delivery of the first notification (starting to connect to your system) in less than 100ms from updates being committed to the platform. If delivery fails in a retryable way, we will try again in a ‘back-off’ approach that gives you increasing periods between delivery attempts for around 24 hours. If we ultimately cannot deliver messages, we will stop the subscription.

Another aspect we think makes our webhooks unique is the fact that you can inspect the trigger, which is included in the delivery. This opens up a refreshingly simple way to develop your integration with trigger delivery replay ([coming soon]). The intention is that if you build your integration to handle replay based on idempotency keys, timestamps, or representation versions (where available), you can thoroughly test your integration. In the event of an outage, you can then just replay triggers to catch up.

To avoid overload, we have also incorporated outbound rate limiting (built for our other integrations with restrictive QPS limits) to avoid our platform overloading your system. You can configure rate limits on a per-subscription level with requests-per-minute throttling for the initial delivery attempt. If your integration requires over 6,000 deliveries per minute at peak, get in touch to discuss scaling options.

API First to Webhook First

Webhooks are often an afterthought for many platforms; however, we want to make them universally available. We started as we mean to continue by building the webhook for listener subscriptions first. This guarantees you can stay up-to-date with changes to your subscriptions.

As we are API first, our UI is still catching up, but the full capability is already launched via the API.

What this means for integrations

We believe using webhooks to move from a “pull” model to real-time, event-driven integrations, whether you are building in Next.js or a native app, will enable you to build faster, more efficient experiences. Webhooks empower even solo founders to connect their data on Baack with minimal friction.

Making the Baack Launch Official

With the addition of Webhooks and our wider testing, we are confident to have an official launch of Baack on the week of the 2nd of June 2026!. You can find our launch on DevHunt and we have also recently listed our platform on ProductHunt. Please help us get noticed by voting on our launches!

In the fast-moving SaaS world of 2026, agility is the only real competitive advantage. Yet, many startups find themselves trapped in a "Franken-stack": a headless CMS for content, a separate CRM for leads, and a project management tool like Jira or ClickUp to coordinate it all.

This fragmentation creates a hidden "Integration Tax"—the thousands of dollars and hundreds of developer hours spent just making your tools talk to each other.

At baack.co, we believe your infrastructure should accelerate your growth, not tax it. Here is how the legacy headless platforms compare when you’re building the next great SaaS application.

1. Contentful: The Enterprise Weight

Contentful is the industry veteran. It’s powerful and reliable, but it’s built for massive corporations with massive teams. For a lean SaaS startup, Contentful often feels like buying a semi-truck when you just need a sports car.

• The SaaS Trap: It’s a "content bucket" and nothing else. You’ll need a dedicated developer to wire it into your CRM and set up webhooks for every single marketing automation.
• The Reality: Once you scale past their free tier, the pricing becomes a significant barrier to entry for early-stage companies.

2. Sanity: The Developer’s Sandbox

Sanity is incredibly flexible. Its "Content Lake" treats everything as data, which developers love. However, that flexibility comes with a high "Developer Tax."

• The SaaS Trap: Every marketing change—from a new landing page layout to a simple A/B test—usually requires a developer to push code or update a schema.
• The Reality: In a startup environment, this creates a bottleneck that kills marketing momentum.

3. Strapi: The DIY Project

Strapi is the open-source champion. It gives you full control, but it also gives you full responsibility.

• The SaaS Trap: You aren't just building your product; you're now managing infrastructure. You have to handle security patches, scaling, and database maintenance.
• The Reality: Every hour your team spends on CMS DevOps is an hour not spent on your core product features.

The baack.co advantage: The Unified DXP

We didn't build just another headless CMS. We built a Unified Digital Experience Platform (DXP) specifically designed to help SaaS startups scale without the friction.

By unifying your CMS, CRM, and Task Management into a single engine, baack.co eliminates the "Franken-stack." When your marketing team builds a page, they can see CRM-driven insights and manage editorial tasks in the same dashboard where they hit "Publish."

Having all of your tools integrated means you can also richly integrate them into your product with ease.

2026 Headless CMS Comparison Table

Why baack.co is the leader for SaaS startups

Zero integration tax

In other platforms, "integrating your CRM" is a multi-week project. In baack.co, it's the foundation. Your customer data lives where your content lives. This allows you to serve personalised content variants to different user segments (e.g., Free vs. Pro users) without writing a single line of custom middle-ware.

Native productivity

Most startups lose days waiting for "sprint cycles" to update a landing page. baack.co includes a native task and ticket automation system. You can move an idea from a brainstorm ticket to a live, localised campaign in minutes, not days.

Content creation using baack.co content model is effortless as the semi structured content model let's you create any content you need quickly. Your app or page template then just picks the content fields it needs for it's layout.

Built for the 2026 dev stack

While we empower marketers, we haven't forgotten the devs. Our high-performance API is built for modern standards: global edge delivery, 99.9% uptime, and instant updates across web, mobile, and email apps.

We also provide webhook coverage across almost our entire API surface to let you integrate custom experiences at lightning speed.

The Verdict

If you have a massive enterprise budget and 50 developers to spare, Contentful or Sanity are fine choices. But if you are a SaaS startup that needs to move fast, stay lean, and convert customers, the choice is clear.

Stop managing a "Franken-stack" and start building your brand. It’s time to come baack to what matters: your product.

Ready to see the difference? Get started with our free startup tier today.

With the arrival of spring, we've rolled out numerous feature releases and updates, including a preview of the much-anticipated message threads for chat.

Messaging and Chat Threads

We have just released a preview of our message threads support. This capability has been highly anticipated and has already been integral to our Xero to HubSpot migration, handling invoice histories for some time. Now, the functionality is moving towards general availability, with a preview of the messaging features accessible via the API.

Message threads (or chats) are built upon the existing group concept. This was a logical evolution, as groups already support creating membership lists with associated notification settings. This allows you to effectively capture both the participants in the message thread and their notification preferences.

Utilizing a group for the members of a chat thread allows you to manage the semantics of how participants interact with the message threads. Group membership history is a complex problem for enterprises that often need to know not just the current members but the group's full history. Our group membership model allows the capture of the full membership life-cycle within a group, including states for when a person has opted out or been banned.

In the upcoming full release, you will also be able to use a thread notification representation to track unread threads and the count of unread messages for users, particularly when integrating in a 'pull' model via the native RESTful API.

Building towards the next phase: Webhooks for Push Delivery

While not all integrations require webhooks, it's true that most integrations eventually rely on events to trigger experiences. Therefore, we believe that comprehensive webhook coverage across the platform is a critical feature for companies looking to build rich experiences. Webhooks allow your product to receive updates whenever there is a change to your data, which, in turn, enables you to build more efficient, faster, and ultimately better experiences.

We will soon be offering webhooks across the majority of our API surface. If you would like to be an early tester, please get in touch. With the recent launch of messaging threads for chats, offering real-time integrations via webhooks seems like the clear and necessary next step. If you require a streaming interface, please contact us, as work is already underway for streamed integrations.

Content experiment variants

As mentioned in our post last month, we have been creating variants of our content to showcase how to use variants to personalize your customers' experiences. We will soon be launching new insights to demonstrate how different content variants influence the effectiveness of your sales.

We are developing new insights into the lifetime value of content variants so you can clearly see how they directly impact your bottom line.

Performance boost for content views

The entity view endpoint provides a fully rendered view of your content, including markdown and templates. We continuously monitor and track how quickly our service delivers content.

By profiling some of the most popular content views, we identified an opportunity to speed up content rendering. We were able to speed up our service by 30%, meaning you will experience even faster content delivery.

Admin tools

As we work toward offering content customization with just a few clicks, we have also expanded the content type support in our admin application.

We have added support for images to our UI editor, bringing our admin pages up to par with the API. Our approach is API first, and the user interface is rapidly catching up!

The last month has seen a lot of changes for Baack. We have been working on new client support and improving the admin experience as well as defining our pricing packages.

The early stages of any company can always see a lot of pivots and it's inevitable that many lessons need to be learned. Thankfully we have had the support of a stellar ex CMO as an adviser who has really helped to provide some meaningful improvements to our product offering which we hope you will also benefit from.

Personalised content demo

Personalised content is important for modern marketing teams and we have built in support for content variants as part of the content entity model. To showcase this we have built an alternative version of the home page content with a totally different take on our homepage for a developer reader. Writing for everyone can mean having to focus on just one audience at a time. When building media campaigns insights about the customer can be used to change the experience they receive to engage them more effectively.

Content variations are easy to use and supported in the management API and the content consumption API to make launching and using variants effortless. We have also added a helpful feature to the admin site to allow non-developer users to create a variant of any content entity in seconds. We believe that speed is important to let teams innovate at the pace of their ideas so making the content variant process fast was a key priority for us.

Pricing live

We are happy to also share that our initial pricing offering for our services is live. Our pricing includes an option for startups / charities who may have modest needs in terms of capacity however want to start strong with their content and engagement.

Other improvements and updates

• We often talk about speed when it comes to our services as we want them to be faster to build with and use than building them yourself. This month we helped further that by putting our system on a 'diet' to make it faster to deploy with better memory usage.
• Security updates: this months routine security updates included a more complex scenario than normal. In the age of AI attackers automation of new vulnerabilities has become a major concern. A recent vulnerability in one of the integrated services (still live with the supplier) resulted in an un-patched attack vector from a dependency. The integrator has yet to fix their systems however we have applied fixes to ours in the meantime to mitigate the risk.
• We have made some small changes to our JS clients which you can find on GitHub . Please feel free to leave feedback and feature requests on the repo.

February was a major month for feature updates to the Baack platform with some highlights including:

New endpoints and improved API features

We are happy to announce the expansion of the API surface with new features to help developers building client side and embedded editing capabilities.

• Client context to allow both signed in users and API clients with bearer tokens to easily access their request context.
• Long integer content item to allow modelling integer type values in the content.
• Work task log to enable access to task change history.
• Standardisation of pagination representation.
• Addition of a user representation for client context metadata.
• Expanded support for searching Projects, Tasks and Identities.
• Added support for path based access to content entities on the view endpoint.

New functionality and clients

To help companies and their developers integrate content we have also been building new clients which use the Baack APIs to deliver experiences.

• Addition of a login flow to support logged in users accessing the platform in combination with browser clients.
• Javascript ES6 modules for core concepts including [coming soon to NPM]:
  • Content viewing for clients using server or browser side content delivery.
  • Content entity and content item editor module enabling developers to embed editing into their web experiences.
  • Task client module enabling developers to embed tasks into their web experiences.

Analytics improvements

In order to help content owners understand the gaps in their current content offering we have added new analytics insights into which content has unmet demand for translations not currently available.

• New view of top content entities accessed on the platform.
• New insights into how often the content delivered matched the requested language or a degraded language.
• New insights into which languages are the most requested but currently have no translation available.

In the modern landscape of Digital Experience Platforms (DXP), there has been a significant emergence of headless platforms. A headless Content Management System (CMS) fundamentally separates the presentation layer (how the content is delivered) from the back-end platform that stores the content and experiences.

This architecture offers numerous advantages. By using a headless CMS, organisations can manage their content centrally and efficiently deploy it across any digital channel. This decoupling empowers different stakeholders, such as the marketing team, to manage content autonomously. Furthermore, it benefits developers by enabling them to build solutions faster, while allowing content updates to be rolled out consistently and at scale across multiple channels.

In contrast, traditional CMS platforms often mix content and code, leading to content being locked into a silo. As a company expands and ventures into new digital channels, reusing existing content becomes increasingly difficult, and maintaining consistent, timely updates can become almost impossible.

By centralising content companies benefit from reduced overhead for content production by reducing replication. In the modern app world there are many drivers resulting in content changes and without centralising the content activities like translation, brand approval or even editorial can be duplicated or worse still missed. Having the content centrally managed means companies can maximise the value they achieve from every piece of content they produce.

What drives channel proliferation?

As your company grows and expands you will likely want to expand your products, your team and your markets. Managing your content also becomes more complex in the process. The typical drivers of this complexity are:

• Adding new distribution channels like mobile apps to an existing web only offering.
• Expanding your product offering into new markets and handling more translations of your content.
• Adding more content collaborators.
• Content experimentation, usually to boost conversion rates.
• Seasonality of content.
• Product and pricing changes.
• Short term offers.
• Newsworthy updates.

Given all of these drivers of content change it's typical that many companies will be updating content daily.

The rise of headless CMS

Headless CMS systems have been increasing in popularity over the last decade as companies seek ways to effectively manage an their content and brand in an increasingly omni-channel environment. Centralising content into a headless CMS allows companies to effectively manage the single source of truth for their content and experiences.

One of the challenges for companies to make this transition to having their content in a central system is structuring the content. Content in monolith apps is usually mixed with business logic and code and has to be formatted as the first step towards having a single source of truth for content. While this may seem daunting, as many companies find, managing content in an ever increasingly complex set of channels can be even more challenging.

Connecting your financial data from Xero to your new HubSpot instance is a critical step — but it shouldn't be a manual bottleneck. For developers and IT leaders overseeing CRM adoption, the challenge is maintaining data integrity while accelerating time-to-value.

Introducing the new Baack app, engineered to tackle this exact pain point. We provide a seamless, accurate, and automated solution for importing all your essential customer data from Xero directly into HubSpot. Our app will be launching soon on the HubSpot app marketplace. If you are interested in becoming an early tester please get in touch.

Why Baack is the Smarter Choice for HubSpot On-boarding:

• Precision Mapping: Our app goes beyond simple transfer. It ensures customer records, associated invoices, and key financial history are mapped accurately to the correct HubSpot properties, giving your sales and marketing teams a complete, reliable 360-degree view.
• Zero-Friction Workflow: Designed for a 'set-it-and-forget-it' experience, our integration reduces the development overhead and risk of human error associated with custom scripts or manual CSV imports. Focus on building and scaling, not on migrating data.
• Optimized for Scale: Built on a foundation of speed and stability, Baack is ready to handle enterprise-level data volumes, ensuring your transition is smooth regardless of how large your customer base is. The Result: A faster, cleaner HubSpot roll-out. Your teams get accurate data quickly, and you get to bypass a major time sink.

Get started

Please visit the Xero to HubSpot page to get started.

Welcome to Baack Software: Your New Best Friend for Building Awesome Digital Experiences!

Remember that feeling when you just wanted to build something amazing, but got bogged down in all the back-end plumbing? Yeah, us too. That's why on July 14th, 2025, we kicked off Baack Software with a simple, yet mighty, vision: to give small to medium businesses and their awesome software developers the power to craft sophisticated digital experiences without all the heavy lifting.

We're talking a full suite of content, relationships, and, soon, e-commerce tools, all designed to let you focus on what you do best: building your product and operating your business.What's a Digital Experience Platform (DXP) Anyway?

Think of a DXP as your secret weapon for building slick digital stuff fast. It's a powerhouse of back-end content and creation tools that help businesses whip up great experiences in a flash.

At Baack, we're tailor-making our DXP capabilities to fit exactly what you, our target customers, need. Here's a sneak peek at what's on the menu:

• Content Management System (CMS): And not just any CMS! We've built a super flexible headless CMS. No more wrestling with content; just pure, unadulterated creation.
• Customer Relationship Management (CRM): Keep your customers happy and their data tidy. Our CRM helps you manage relationships like a pro.
• Product, Pricing, and Payment Integrations (aka ERP Lite): Getting your products to market and getting paid shouldn't be a headache. We're streamlining this so you can focus on the fun stuff.
• Team Planning and Organisation Tools: Because teamwork makes the dream work, and organised teamwork makes it happen even faster.
• Internal and External Communications: Automate those pesky processes and keep everyone in the loop, inside and out.

Our ultimate goal?

To hand you a full back-end capability set on a silver platter so you can truly unleash your creativity on your products and business.Why Did We Start with Content?

Good question! We decided to dive headfirst into content management because, well, it's a challenge we totally get. We're building our own initial product, so we're right there in the trenches with you, battling the content beast.

Managing content can be a bit of a circus, right? Many companies tell us that content creation and management are huge roadblocks to their growth. Think about it: building any product needs input from a whole crew – sales, marketing, design, editorial… it's a lot of cooks in the kitchen!

That's why we've cooked up our content offering with some seriously powerful features: full history versioning (oops, wrong version? No problem!), A/B variants (test away!), and localisation support (go global!). We're here to make collaboration a breeze, not a headache.Keep Your Eyes Peeled for More Goodies!

Wanna stay in the loop about our upcoming capability launches and all the juicy news? Why not sign up for our pre-launch newsletter here!

We're also on the lookout for awesome early adopters and testers to give us feedback during our Alpha roll-out. If you're game to help us build something truly special, please get in touch!