My Story: 21 Years of Building Agility CMS

I Design Systems. Technical Ones and Human Ones.

For over twenty years, I've been building the same company. Not because I got stuck, but because I kept finding new problems worth solving. Agility CMS started as a consultancy called Edentity in the early 2000s, and somewhere along the way we realized the product we were building for our clients was more interesting than the projects themselves. So we bet everything on it.

That bet has shaped most of my adult life.

The Early Days

I studied English at the University of Guelph. Not computer science, at least not at first. I ended up adding a minor in computing to my degree starting in my second year. I think about that a lot, because it turns out the hardest problems in technology aren't technical. They're communication problems. They're about understanding what people actually need versus what they say they need, and then translating between humans and machines in both directions.

I started building for the web in the late '90s, back when "web developer" wasn't really a job title yet. Worked my way through a couple software shops, building CRM platforms and doing solution architecture for enterprise customers. By 2005 I'd landed at what would become Agility, and I never left.

The Agility Story

Here's something interesting: Agility is bootstrapped. Always has been. In an industry where our competitors have raised hundreds of millions in venture capital, we've been profitable and self-funded for over two decades.

That wasn't an accident. It was a choice, and not an easy one at times. When folks are raising multi-million dollar rounds and you're trucking along with steady (but not astronomical) growth, the FOMO can be really tough.

When you don't answer to investors, you answer to customers. Your incentives stay permanently aligned with the people who use your product. You can think in decades instead of quarters. You can make the right decision even when it's the slow one.

Around 2018, we made the biggest bet of our history. We decided to stop building websites and go all-in on being a headless CMS. We sold off existing contracts to fund the transition. It was terrifying and it was exactly right.

Today, Agility is recognized as a leader in headless CMS on G2, a leader in customer experience on Gartner Peer Insights, and a member of the MACH Alliance. We've won Best Cloud CMS from CMS Critic. And in 2025, I won the CMS Idol competition in Montreal, live-coding an AI-powered solution in six minutes flat using tools I'd built myself.

Not bad for a bootstrapped Canadian company that nobody gave permission to succeed.

What I Believe

I believe simpler is actually harder, but absolutely worth achieving. The technology world keeps getting more complex, but the experiences people want keep getting simpler. Bridging that gap is incredibly difficult, but something that I continue to strive for.

I believe AI is about to fundamentally change what a CMS is and does. Not in the "slap a ChatGPT wrapper on it" way that most vendors are doing, but in a deeper, structural way. AI agents are becoming both the primary processors AND consumers of content. The content management systems that understand this will thrive. The ones that don't will become legacy infrastructure within five years.

I believe the best companies are built by people who care about each other. Culture isn't ping pong tables and pizza. It's people deciding to spend their most precious currency, time, on each other's growth.

What I'm Building Now

At Agility, I'm leading our work on AI-native content infrastructure. We've built an MCP (Model Context Protocol) server that lets AI agents interact directly with our CMS. I'm exploring what happens when content isn't just managed by people using a dashboard, but processed, optimized, and consumed by autonomous agents operating at scale.

This is the most exciting technical frontier I've encountered in 25 years of building for the web. And I think we're still in the first inning.

Speaking and Sharing

I've been fortunate to speak at conferences around the world about where content technology is headed. My current talk topics include AI-native content infrastructure and what happens when machines become the primary consumers of your CMS, the realities of building a bootstrapped software company that lasts, the honest version of composable architecture, and vibe coding for CTOs who want to understand AI-assisted development.

I've presented at FITC Web Unleashed, Boye & Company conferences in Montreal and Aarhus, GatsbyConf, CFE.dev events, DX3 Canada, and the MACH Alliance. I've also been a guest on podcasts including CMS Critic's "The Critic's Corner," the "Beyond the CMS" podcast, and others.

One of my proudest speaking moments was winning the CMS Idol 2025 competition at Boye CMS Connect in Montreal, where I built a working AI-powered solution live on stage in six minutes using Claude, GitHub Copilot, and an MCP server I built myself. That wasn't a party trick. It was a preview of how software gets built now.

The Other Stuff

I'm a dad to two amazing humans. That's the job that matters most and the one I'm least qualified for.

I've coached high school football. It taught me more about leadership than any business book ever has. When you're working with teenagers, there's no faking it. You either earn their trust or you don't.

I've directed musical theatre in my community, and I've spent considerable time on stage myself as an actor and singer. If you want to learn about building something from nothing with a group of people who showed up voluntarily, try putting on a show. The parallels to building a startup are uncanny.

I live in small-town Ontario. Third spaces matter to me: the places where people show up not because they have to, but because they want to. Theatre rehearsals, football fields, coffee shops. These are the places where real community happens.

Let's Talk

I'm always up for conversations about where content technology is headed, what it means to build something that lasts, or how AI is going to reshape everything we thought we knew about digital experience.

You can find me on LinkedIn or visit my personal site at joelvarty.com. If you want me to speak at your event, check out my speaking page. And if you're working on something interesting, I'd love to hear about it.