Clever

Clever was founded in late 2017 on a relatively straightforward premise - help homeowners save on real estate fees when buying or selling a home. The founders, Ben and Luke, wanted to do this while still providing great agent services, and a consistent source of leads to their agents. Working out of an apartment, Clever's founding team defined a strong culture in its early days. In particular, they cultivated tenacity, a passion for learning, and personal-growth in their team, and those values have served the company well. Today, Clever is a remote team of over 30 employees spread across the United States, all of whom share responsibility for helping hundreds of homeowners save over 26 million in Real Estate fees - so far.

As Clever was hitting its stride in early 2018, they brought on Donovan King to spearhead their efforts to migrate off of their old WordPress website. Donovan knew they were looking at migrating toward a more modern tech stack. Because Clever's solutions were handling loads of customer data on-site, in addition to managing their own content, they were not going to be well served by a traditional frontend and CMS. Gatsby and the Jamstack was the future of their site, and they needed a Headless CMS that had the flexibility to grow along with their solution.

How they use Cosmic

Selecting a Headless CMS wasn't an easy decision. Donovan compared Cosmic to some of the leading competitors - Contentful being one - but ultimately, Cosmic came out on top. Why? Donovan says among other things, he liked our free trial options; because he was able to play around with the free personal plan, he realized the MVP features they'd be setting up would work best on an unopinionated, no-holds-barred CMS like Cosmic.

As Clever has rapidly grown, so too have their web applications. Cosmic has kept pace with their solutions the whole way. As they began managing more of their website content through Cosmic, Clever made use of Cosmic's plugin features to support their content team in their web content creation. Donovan decided he needed a more complex set of scripting libraries for Clever, and Cosmic's API access provided him everything he needed. Today, Clever is managing all of their website content through Cosmic, and is rapidly expanding into one of the leading real estate tech companies in the industry.