Michael Schmitt

With Storyliner, creatives and content teams conceive communication strategically on one platform. You create concepts in minutes through creative content blocks, inspiration, and constant feedback on your quality.

Working on innovation projects, I realized the tools for creating product and marketing copy just didn't cut it. In 2020, I started Storyliner, a creative platform designed specifically for creatives and content teams. The SaaS platform empowers you to create compelling content with the creative support of artificial intelligence. You can compose concepts faster and collaborate more effectively.

The project is bootstrapped with a Next.js app and built as a progressive web app. One highlight from a developer's perspective is the real-time multiplayer editing experience built on top of Slate.js, with Redis and Yjs as CRDT implementation giving users a collaborative experience like Google Docs or Notion.

The Felss Group GmbH is a solution provider in the cold forming of tubes and solid materials for the mobility sector. With over 900 employees worldwide and represented in five countries, the machine builder and process developer provides holistic and customized solutions.

Due to the COVID-19 crisis, the need for internal communication increased rapidly at the machine builder. As a freelance creative technologist, the Felss marketing team and I decided on a multistep approach to development.

First, we designed and deployed a blog to provide employees with essential information about the ongoing crisis within weeks. Later, the blog was expanded into an information portal with mobile apps and authentication. The portal provided internal news and relevant documents to moderate the ongoing transformation process.

I knew right from the beginning that there are more features on the roadmap than just a blogging function, so we decided to use a headless CMS to manage the content. This allowed us to use the CMS as a single content source and develop different user interfaces like a Next.js web portal and blog and React native-based iOS and Android apps.

my.Felss is now the mobile-first intranet that connects everyone.

SIGMUND TALKS is the personal assistant for marketing. As a chatbot, it advises and accompanies bloggers and small and medium-sized marketing teams to achieve their goals. Thanks to artificial intelligence and a unique co-creation process, users create more diverse content in half the time.

As chief technology officer, I managed the chatbot's product development and technology integration.

Chatbots were one of the hype topics in 2018. There were isolated projects, frameworks, and platforms but little empirical data on which technologies ran stably or were particularly well suited for the chosen use case.

The user interface was developed with React, styled-components, and Apollo Client and deployed via Firebase. The user input was processed using the Natural Language Understanding platform Google Dialogflow.

All server-side tasks were packaged into individual modules or microservices and bundled in a GraphQL API. To further process the briefings and the generated concepts, users could download the content or export it directly to any service of their choice via the Zapier web service.

The Echogramm is a social news app for businesses. The app aggregates and curates the most relevant content in your industry.

I built the Echogramm as an indie project with the production framework Next.js. The app was developed as a progressive web app (PWA) for mobile, tablets, and desktop clients. This way, it provides a native app-like experience without high costs for maintaining different apps for different platforms.

The React front-end retrieves data from a GraphQL API based on an Apollo server connected to several microservices and a web scraper.

The marketing platform for opticians makes campaign and content sourcing as easy as online shopping with a standardized briefing process and manufacturer content offers. I have accompanied Foconn since the startup phase with my former design agency. I designed the technology architecture, prototyping, product development, and launch and testing platform as a creative technologist.

The MVP was created with the full-stack JavaScript framework Meteor.js with a React front end for rapid prototyping. Meteor provided the authentication system, user management, and a Node.js back end with a direct MongoDB integration. As for the styling layer, Sass and Materialize.css were used. For the marketing website, we used the static site generator Gatsby.js. The app and website were both deployed on AWS.