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In the second Woo Perspectives, I bring back my co-hosts Brad Williams, Jonathan Wold and Mendel Kurland to talk more about Woo builders. As you will see, these episodes, unlike the discussions we have with specific builders in the space, are more open conversation around a topic. In other words, we never know where the discussion will go. I would suggest listening to the show it get a flavor of what to expect on every other Tuesday. Thanks to our sponsors Download the PayPal extension on the WooCommerce marketplace to offer buy now, pay later options. Start your next career in WooCommerce at WooCommerce.

Thanks to our community sponsors Sarah has been using WordPress for a lot of years. She moved from the fashion industry to Skyverge, and then to WooCommerce/Automattic. We have a chance to talk about her transition to Automattic, a bit around the space of subscriptions and, of course, her active role in support at WooCommerce as a Happiness Engineer. A Chat with Sarah In episode 82, Brad and I talk with Sarah about: Those early days and going further back with helping her mom blog in the 1997What she experienced moving from a smaller company to working at AutomatticThe challenge of juggling timezonesHer experiences in supporting WooCommerce productsThe overall feedback she is getting from people who use WooCommerceWhat she is hearing about WooCommerce and Gutenberg in the support channelsThe requests they get for expanding subscriptionsWhat Sarah has found in her experience of a unique way someone has used subscriptions There’s a lot of gems in the conversation. And if you are a company who wants to understand the way to deliver support, you will need to listen to Sarah as someone who loves her job. Connect with Sarah Sarah on Twitter @fevered Download the PayPal extension on the WooCommerce marketplace to offer buy now, pay later options. Start your next career in WooCommerce at WooCommerce. The Conversation Transcript Email Download New Tab Brad: Hey, everybody. Welcome to another fun episode of Do the Woo. I'm one of your co-hosts Brad Williams and I'm joined as always by Mr. BobWP. Hey Bob, welcome to the show. Bob: Hey, it's always good to be here, especially when I have electricity, it's even better. Brad: We're recording a day later because Bob lives on an Island in the middle of nowhere. And if someone sneezes, it knocks out the internet. Did I get that right? Bob: Right. Except it's on the beach actually. It's not an Island. Well, it's a peninsula, if you want to get technical, but yeah, it's basically the ocean sneezes and that's what happened. Brad: The oceans sneezes, there you go. Well we're glad we were able to make this. We got a really fun show today. Before we get into it, definitely we want to thank our sponsors. As always, we have WooCommerce. Maybe you've heard of it. I hope so. That's what this podcast is all about. Go to WooCommerce.com, a lot of great resources over there and obviously check out the product because that's what we talk about every day on the show. And I also want to give a big shout out to one of our newest sponsors, PayPal. And we had a great episode. What was that? Two weeks ago, three weeks? Time is kind of blurring together for me, but I had a really cool episode about PayPal not too long ago. And we just really dug into their Pay in 4 service that they offer now, which I think anyone running a store, or even if you're an implementer, you support a store. It's something you should bring to the store owners is an option because if you accept PayPal, this is already available to you and it basically allows your customers to buy something and pay it off in four payments. And PayPal takes all the risk and responsibility around that. So you get paid in full and PayPal handles collecting the payments from the customer. So it's kind of a no-brainer. If you run a store and you accept PayPal, definitely look at that Pay in 4 from PayPal. So let's dive in. I'd like to officially welcome our guests, Sarah Rennick to the show. Hey Sarah, how are you doing? Sarah: I'm doing pretty good. How are you doing better? Brad: Good. We're excited to have you. It sounds like you have a fun, detailed story about how you got into WooCommerce. So we're very excited to hear how you Do the Woo. The journey to Woo really started in 2004 Sarah: So yeah, I'm going to give the detailed version of how I got into WooCommerce, which of course starts with WordPress. So I started using WordPress in 2006 because my mom had a blog that she started in 1997. And then when WordPress came out, she was like, "I'm going to move to it." I was getting interested in web development around 2004-ish. So she was like, "Hey, why don't you try this?" So I set up my first WordPress site. I got started with that and basically just have been using it ever since I started going to word camps in like 2010-ish. So I've been around for a little bit, but I had been working in a job in front-end development, not for WordPress stuff, but I got that job like right out of college, went to college for something called digital media, which is like game development and coding and stuff like that. And some like video stuff, which is pretty cool. And then got a job, was there for like five years, got laid off from that job. And then I was like, "I'm going to get a remote job in WordPress. And I was looking at all these like different jobs online. And I found this company called Prospress and their job ad really intrigued me. And they are a company that developed WooCommerce subscriptions and they had a support opening. So I applied for one of those. Because I was like, "this company sounds awesome. And I've used WooCommerce before, I think I bought like a one site that had WooCommerce on it. So I was like, "Oh, this is something new." Because I was like, "Let's start a new job that's on something that I haven't used much before." So got that job. And that's how I got into WooCommerce. A blog in 1997 Brad: That's actually a pretty cool story. Like you said, you've been around the WordPress space for quite a while. Maybe we go back to what you said about your mom having a blog in 1997. She's like a trendsetter. Because that's early. Like, I don't know anyone that had a blog back then. Can we just talk about that for a minute? I'm very curious about one, what your mom was blogging about and how was she doing it? Do you know what service she was using at the time? I don't even know what was available back then. Sarah: I can't remember, but yeah, she started a blog in 1997. Her and my dad met going to college for programming. Like computer programming. Met, had some kids, got married, all that stuff. So she started a blog because she was like, "Hey, this internet thing, I could like start a blog." And the things she would post about is I was homeschooled along with all of my siblings. So she would post about things and updates for family like homeschooling stuff. Eventually she went on to start a multi-site network. So it'd be similar to WordPress.com, but just for home schoolers. So people could go sign up for a free homeschooling blog, which was pretty cool. But yeah, sometimes the things she posted, it would be funny. Like there was a post that was house rules, which were things like no playing with string longer than six feet, no live or dead things in the house. Brad: I like it. That's awesome. I think so it's almost inevitable that you were going to end up in WordPress knowing that story. The path to get you on WordPress started way back in 1997, maybe before that. But the fact that your mom was blogging kind of at the start of all of it. To be honest I didn't start a blog until 2006 and I knew I was way behind. I felt behind at the time, like everybody had a blog, but in 1997. That's some old school blogging there. It's probably very much just straight up writing the HTML files and uploading them to the server. Sarah: I'm pretty sure that's how it started. Yeah, it was just HTML files, but yeah. Brad: That's very cool. Thanks for sharing. And, and then you mentioned on your path was Prospress, which is a company I'm familiar with. I know Brent, the owner of Prospress and the subscriptions extension that you mentioned, I think is one that anyone that's worked with WooCommerce is probably somewhat familiar with. It's probably crossed their paths a few times because it's ... I mean, I don't know if it still is, maybe you know this, but it was like the most popular commercial extension that WooCommerce had for years. I'm assuming it still is. Sarah: Yeah, it still is. As far as I know anyways. What Sarah does as a Happiness Engineer Brad: Yeah. So that was the, if you're not familiar, it's basically the WooCommerce extension that allows you to have paid subscriptions and it works really well. And it works really well with other extensions, which is probably even a bigger benefit. It just works well on the WooCommerce ecosystem, which I'm sure was a big part of why Automattc purchased or acquired Prospress and want to bring that in house so they could help kind of shape the future of that product as well. So I'm curious to what ... in terms of Automattic, I know your official title is support engineers, is that right? Sarah: Happiness engineer. Brad: Happiness engineer, sorry. Sarah: That's like the public title. You can pick your own like internal title. So mine is internet wizard. Brad: I like that. So what kind of happiness are you actually officially like in your profession, like at Automattic for your day job? Are you supporting WooCommerce? Sarah: Yeah. So basically WooCommerce core, all of the extensions that we have on the marketplace, any of them that are owned by WooCommerce, we do support for. Any third-party ones, we do the pre-sales questions for. So that's like a lot of extensions to know about. I obviously specialize in subscriptions. I also spend a lot of time talking to people, if someone's like, "Hey, can anybody do this in subscriptions?" I'm like, "I know the answer." I also am a co-lead of our documentation team, which means that me and a team of happiness engineers make sure the documentation doesn't blow up or anything. Brad: The thankless job of documentation. We've talked about that in the past, haven't we Bob. It's one of the most important things and the most overlooked things in software development is documentation. That's a thankless job. So thank you for leading that because people need documentation. I need documentation and it's helpful. So it gets people on the platform. It gets them comfortable with the platform that they know there's good docs out there. How are people feeling in general about WooCommerce? So you're on the front lines of support. That's always an interesting place to be because you hear everything, you hear a lot of stuff, right. And probably a lot of it coming from a point of frustration, because obviously when you're reaching out to support, generally something's not working right. Or you have questions or whatever, you can think of a million different reasons. But I'd love to know, by and large, the people that come to support, look for support and help, what's your takeaway in terms of their outlook on WooCommerce whether they ... and I know it is a bit of a general answer because you're talking about a large group of people. But do you see some kind of a sense like, "By and large, most people really love it. They just get stuck in a few places." Or does it come from a point of frustration because the product itself is too confusing or is it somewhere in the middle? I'm just curious, if you have a pulse on it, if you could say like an average support customer or client, what are you hearing? Sarah: Most people really like WooCommerce. Sometimes I'll get done with a support interaction, they're just like, "Love WooCommerce, love your support. This is great. It's a great platform." Generally, people that come in, that might have an issue that's frustrating them. Or they're like, "This is really way too complex." It's not with WooCommerce core. It's like with a particular extension, for example, sometimes subscriptions. It's like, "Why are my renewals blowing up or something like that." And for me, it's lucky that I usually know the answer. I can understand why it's sometimes frustrating because people are like, "I didn't get all my payments this month or whatever." But there's definitely one of the good things about subscription is there's ways to get those payments. So that's super useful now. Brad: Yeah. And I would imagine a lot of that's educational too. Because you mentioned the frustration of it's not WooCommerce, it's a plugin, it's an extension. Maybe one probably not official, right? It's maybe a third-party offsite and that starts wreaking havoc. Like that's a common struggle with just WordPress in general. I'm sure as you know being on support and working with WordPress, as long as you have. Why you see that plain old white page with the database error WordPress can get a bad rap sometimes for things that are completely out of its own control, which is isn't really fair, but it's just kind of the world we live in. So a lot of that's just kind of educating the masses on, "Well, yeah, there is a problem, but it's not actually WooCommerce it's this or it's that." I remember Matt Mullenweg years ago explained, and I don't know why this stuck with me, but it kind of lines up with what you're saying. He talked about why you never see the error connecting to a database message on WordPress. If WordPress can't connect to the database, it's just literally text on the screen that says — error establishing a database connection. There is nothing, it's literally just big text on the screen. And somebody asks the question of why isn't that branded? Why isn't it say like, "WordPress and here's the problem and make it look really good." And he said, "The challenge is if we did that, then everyone would make the assumption that WordPress broke. Something's wrong with WordPress when it's actually not WordPress' fault, it just can't connect to the database." So it was a conscious decision not to brand that as WordPress, because it would fuel that negativity around, "Oh, the site's down. WordPress is terrible, it's got these problems and it must be something to do with WordPress." Like, "Nope, just keep it generic data. Can't find the database. Let's not blame anybody here. Like, go fix your connection." And so that kind of always stuck with me when people talk about WordPress, getting a bad rap for maybe some bad code that was put in there. Thanks to our sponsor PayPal. In time for the holiday season PayPal has launched a new pay later option called Pay in 4. This mean that your clients can offer their customers the option to purchase over time in 4 interest-free payment. This feature is one of two option from PayPal for pay later with the other being PayPal Credit which gives store customers more purchasing power through flexible and transparent choices in how and when they pay. This second option is subject to consumer credit approval. So offering those payment options is good business. Did you know that 64% of consumers surveyed say they are more likely to make a purchase at a retailer that offers interest-free payment options. And 56% of consumers that responded agree that they prefer to pay a purchase back in installments rather than use a credit card. Well, this seems like a no-brainer to me. Clients can grow their sales and get paid up front with no additional risk or cost. All you need to do is download the PayPal Checkout extension on the Marketplace at WooCommerce.com. Just head on over, click marketplace and search for the PayPal Checkout. Suggesting that to your clients will certainly open up sales opportunities for them. Thanks for PayPal for being a community sponsor at Do the Woo. And now back the conversation. The experience of first-time support Bob: I'm curious, going back to when you joined Prospress, and you said that it appealed to you. Was that your first experience going in full-time into support at Prospress. Was that your first experience doing that? Sarah: Yeah. So before that, I worked at an agency that built their own CMS for people in the fashion industry. And I was basically the person who built all of the websites for these clients and stuff like that. So they had their own backend CMS. I developed a front-end site. It was similar to WordPress in that each client had like their own folder or whatever, they had their custom theme stuff or whatever in it that I built. And it was connected to a CMS. And I had built my own like WordPress sites and stuff like that. So I was definitely very familiar with the structure, but it was the first time that I was like, "I have a full-time job doing WordPress stuff." Bob: What was your first experience ... not actually literally your first experiences in support. But when you got into it, did it throw you any surprises? It was like, "Oh, this sounded good. And now I kind of have to wrap my brain around this a little bit differently." Or what was that initial reaction to dropping into support, having done what you did before? Sarah: So I thought it was really cool because one of the really nice things about support, is most people who work in support are extremely helpful. And if you have questions, even stupid ones, they're totally willing to help you out. So when I started, there was a training period and stuff like that. And a lot of cases in support what'll happen is you'll get like paired up with someone and they'll pick tickets for you to answer. So they are, "Hey, answer this. If you have any questions, let me know. If you're not able to figure it out ..." Usually it's something that they already know the answer to. That would be like, "Hey, it's this." So I never really found it was like super challenging or, "I don't like this," because one of the things I really like is figuring out problems. If someone's says, "This website's broken, tell me why?" I'm like, "It's like the best thing to happen to me.” What is the word about Gutenberg and WooCommerce via support? Brad: We've been talking for good reason, like a lot about Gutenberg and especially as it started to kind of make its way into WooCommerce and with the blocks plugin. I'm sure you've talked a lot of people through support or just in general of people that are starting to use that. What's the general reaction? I know with WordPress, when Gutenberg was first rolled out, it was pretty jarring to users that didn't know what was coming. There was obviously a learning curve and it just changed the game in terms of how WordPress works. Now that we're seeing that more in WooCommerce, what are people's reactions? Is it positive? Is it negative? Are you getting good feedback? Is it a point of frustration? How are they feeling about the Gutenberg stuff that's starting to come into WooCommerce? Sarah: I think that people really like it because sometimes there'll be like experimental blocks released and people will immediately be like, "I'm trying to use it. But it won't work with this specific thing." Since it's an experimental block, like it's not supposed to. For example, the cart and checkout block only supports a certain number of payment gateways that like we've added support for. So sometimes you'll get people who are like, "I really want to use this, but have this other payment gateway and it's not working with it." I definitely think since Gutenberg is already a thing, like people are just like, "Cool, like this is just adding onto the experience WooCommerce." Brad: Yeah, the cart stuff is interesting. Awhile back we were talking about the idea of that coming, being able to use Gutenberg around the checkout, around the cart. And that was, in my mind, a pretty big step forward for Gutenberg in general, because it took the idea of the block-based editor away from the post and content screens. And took it into a place that's generally more static, but giving people the control to actually make some adjustments there in very critical pages, right? Like cart and checkout pages are by and large, clearly some of the most important pages on an eCommerce website. If somebody's made the decision to buy, you don't want the cart or the checkout process to become a barrier to do that. But I think it's fascinating to see that that's moved in that direction. We're obviously going down that path and to see people start to use it and kick the tires a bit. It's been pretty exciting because Gutenberg has a lot of potentials. So to see it kind of creeping out of the post screens and out of the page screens and other areas of WordPress and WooCommerce, it's pretty neat to see. So I was just curious if people ... and I know a lot of it is, if not all of it is still kind of opt in. Like you have to install the extension or whatever. But I'm sure like you said, more people are dabbling with it and get antsy for it to show up. And I guess that's an easy to support response though when you could just say just say, "Yeah, it says right here it's not supported in the documentation." Sarah: Yeah, that is pretty awesome. Brad: Yeah, that's an easy answer, right? If you read the documentation. Sarah: Well, what can I say? I work in support. Brad: What's the old acronym? RTFM, how often is that? The response that you get to people in chat. Sarah: Never. But sometimes if someone's like, "I've read the documentation, but I don't get it," that's definitely a case for advice. I always say to people, here's the documentation link, but I am definitely happy to walk with you through it. 'Cause I know sometimes I talk to people and they don't even know how to install a plugin, but if they're willing to learn, then it's like, "Yeah, I'm totally happy to help you.” Plugin support through the marketplace Brad: Yeah. That's cool, and you said right now you just support the kind of Automattic owned extensions. I know there's other extensions in there as well, right? Like vetted, third-party approved extensions as well. Bu that supports handled via the third party directly, is that how that works? Sarah: Yeah. So if you go to any page for an extension on WooCommerce.com, it will say who supports it. So it'll either say supported by WooCommerce or for example, memberships is supported by SkyVerge. Brad: Yeah. I remember back when the marketplace first launched, we put a couple of extensions on there, my company and at the time, all the support was handled by ... well, at the time it was WooThemes unless it got to a certain level, they had to escalate it back to the developers. And I always thought that was a very risky business model for support. Like you're going to support the customers for something we built? Okay, cool. All right. As a developer, I was like, "That's great." If I remember right, we had to pay out more in commissions though, because of that, but it made sense, right? Because they're handling that frontline support. But I think that makes a lot more sense, the set up that it is now, like if somebody else built it, then they need to support it, right, so. Sarah: That's especially good, because then if someone's like, "Hey, I found a bug," the person who actually developed it, them or their support team is looking at it and they're much more familiar with possible issues and stuff like that. So they're going to figure it out faster usually. Brad: Yeah. The transition from a small to large remote team Bob: Yeah. For anyone out with a smaller team or ... I won't say small team, but they're with a, yeah, smaller team compared to Automattic and they're thinking of, "Oh, I want to go work for somebody like Automattic that just is large," or Automattic. For you, you were remote in both of those positions, how has that transition personally to go from that size of a team at Prospress to suddenly even though I'm sure you have a smaller team you work with, but to be on such a larger team. And, you know, everything's kind of opened up from what you did as Prospress and the products you did there were a lot more products. So how did that go for you? Sarah: It was really good actually. I was really worried about joining a larger company because the previous company I worked for too was also quite small. There was only about 20 employees. So, I was like, "Man, I'm joining a company that has a lot of people that work for it." But the WooCommerce support division itself, isn't very large. And a good example is, I will talk about meetups I've gone to and stuff like that with the whole company also, like my friends here in real life stories. And then I'll be like, "Oh, yeah, my company employs over a thousand people." And they're like, "Oh, it sounds like you know everyone that you work with." And it's like, "Yeah, I do, like all the people who work in WooCommerce. I feel like I know all of them and it's really nice." Brad: Yeah. That's cool. I was actually interested in that too Bob, I'm glad you asked that, 'cause I think anytime, somebody goes works at a company, that company's acquired and by a much larger company usually, right? And then the process of that transition I think is always interesting because I think initially it can be ... I'm sure it's scary, right? Like, "Well the company I worked for got acquired, what does that mean for me?" And which is rightfully so, you know, that's exactly what you should be thinking. And the fact that you stayed clearly kind of speaks to the fact that it must have went well for you, because why would you stick around if it didn't? But I'm always fascinated as an outsider looking in when those transitions happen, especially the companies I like and respect like Prospress. So, I was glad to see you end up in a good spot. And it seems like by and large, everybody was very happy with that acquisition, it went smoothly. Sarah: Yeah. Brad: Again, outside looking in, but it is always fascinating to hear those stories. Sarah: One of the things that helps a lot too is since WooCommerce was also acquired, a lot of people were like, "Hey, we've been through this. If you want to chat or anything, just let me know." So that was really nice. A couple of other things too, is the people on our support team mostly stayed on the same team. So, a lot of the people that I worked with at Prospress are still on the same team that I'm on. Some of them moved to different teams because of time zones, and we've had some new people join our team, which is exciting. Juggling timezones And then another thing that actually worked a bit better for me is when I worked at Prospress, I was the only person in my time zone. And so everyone else, there was one person who lives in Europe who, I would come on maybe at the end of their day. And then everyone else that was in the U.S. would start a few hours after me or whatever. But now I have people that are in the same time zone as me and lots of people who are working at the same time as me and now, instead of it being like, oh, I'm on and everyone isn't on yet, it's like, that's kind of like when the most people are on are during my working hours. And I'm like, "I don't feel alone anymore." Brad: Yeah. That actually had to be kind of challenging because it's one thing to be working from home. It's already can be somewhat isolating depending on your setup. You know, obviously right now we're kind of in unique times, but before the pandemic and everything ... 'cause a lot of people work at home, their spouses don't, their kids go to school. So you're home alone, right? So your team, your online team is who you ... like you said, work with, obviously hanging out with, are the people you're interacting with. But if you're by yourself all day, 'cause your team's in a different time zone, that sounds tough to me. That sounds very isolating. And I think just mentally for myself, I think I would struggle with that a bit. Sarah: Not that it was a really bad situation before, but it was definitely a nice change and I have people around like, "Hey, we're in the same time zone, isn't that awesome?"Because I am an hour ahead of Eastern time in the U.S. so it's not often that people are in the same time zone as me. Brad: Yeah. That's cool, that's interesting. I think a lot of people probably like just kind of hearing your story of how you just set your mind to, "I want a remote position," you made it happen. I like stories like that too where people are just like, "You know what, I want to make this happen and I'm going to make it happen," and they do. And then, you know, years down the road everything's worked out really well, so, it's really cool to see. Thanks to our sponsor WooCommerce You may be just starting your journey as a Woo Builder or well into your journey. Or perhaps you have WooCommerce talents that you want to bring to a team as you look to make a switch in your career. WooCommerce has several roles open that will likely fit your own goals of growth. You will be joining the larger Automattic team, a diverse and distributed group of individuals with a passion for WordPress, and yes, WooCommerce. If you want are looking for make that career pivot and love working from home, check out all their open positions over on our Job Listing at DotheWoo.io. Trust me. I know the company and a lot of the people. It's a smart move. Thanks to WooCommerce.com and their support as a community sponsor. Now let's head back to the show. Bob: I want to just swing back one more time to support in kind of overall what people are asking you- Brad: Bob actually has some questions about his website- Bob: Yeah, really, I got my list of ... I think I was trying something with subscriptions, anyway, no. Support, how-to vs. troubleshooting But seriously, where's the balance in support and maybe you can't really even tell between people that basically say, "Okay, how do you do this?" And you say, "Dah, dah, dah." You give them maybe two, three steps or something like that versus this is screwed up and you have to get into the troubleshooting and go through and figure out why it screwed up as more people are coming to you on that troubleshooting level, versus I don't quite know how to set up this particular part or this part confuses me. Sarah: So most of the people that I talk to are kind of at least somewhat technical. So, usually I can be like, "Hey, here's some documentation on troubleshooting," of course there's a whole guide on troubleshooting, the documentation. And I'm like, "If you have any questions about any of these steps, just let me know." But a lot of the times they're like, "Yeah, it looks good to me. I've done this before." Or people will be like, "If you tell me how to do it, I can do it." And I'm like, "Great." The only cases where it's like you really would need to handhold someone ... well, handle would be if they're like, "I'm a store owner and I have a developer that I work with and they do everything on my website." And usually in those cases, they're contacting us because they own the subscription to the plugin so they can access the support. And sometimes what I'll do in cases like that is be like, "Hey, do you want me to make a ticket for you and put your developer on the ticket so they can handle it for you?" And people are usually like, "Yes, I would love that, 'cause I don't want to deal with it 'cause that's what I pay my developer to do." Bob: I never thought of it that way that, 'cause I've actually never had a developer. Probably I could have used some several times, but the fact that you do offer that option, I mean, that's a good idea. I don't know if there's ... you know, every company that has support is thinking that way, but that's something rather than struggling with it. You know, this poor store owner that's like, "What are you talking ..." which is typically me, when support people are talking to me, there's a point where I'm just like, "I need to get somebody in here to help me understand even what the heck you're talking about because it's beyond me at this point." So, that's pretty cool. Sarah: As long as people are being nice and willing to learn, I'm happy to walk anyone through anything. 'Cause one of the best parts of my day is if someone says to me, "Thank you for taking the time to talk to me about this. I learned something today." I'm like, totally makes my job awesome to hear something like that. Brad: Yeah. I think that's good advice for really anyone. If you're online support, really anybody, right? Like you want to be nice, want to be respectful. Like don't go in guns blazing, like, "My site's broken." It's not their fault, they're there to help you. So I always try to make sure I keep that in mind, and even if I'm frustrated to be very respectful of anybody because it goes a long way, right? Sarah: Yeah. Brad: Just use thank yous and then they'll probably want to go the extra mile for you versus making demands and talking in all CAPS and exclamation points, and they're going to be like, "You know what? Nope." Sarah: Yeah. Basically the nicer you are, the more we will be willing to do for you because definitely there's things that are up to my discretion if I want to go the extra mile to help you. And if you're being nice, the chances are more likely that I will do that. What people want with subscriptions Bob: With the subscription, going back to that, and that's where all your expertise lies, you've been living and breathing that thing for a long time. Are subscription's kind of at a status quo where they're plugging along and you don't hear a lot of people coming up with "Boy, it'd be great if subscriptions could work for this or work for that, or are the things that are on people's wishlists or stuff that hopefully some time they'll be able to integrate." Or you might even have your own ideas of what you think you see subscriptions going to or what direction they're going in. Sarah: So there are lots of things that people want subscriptions to do that it does not do. One of the things that WooCommerce does have is there's an ideas board, which is basically if you have a feature request, you post it there. And subscriptions has like hundreds of suggestions there. One of the really big requests I see is having a shipping and billing schedule that is different. So, basically like say you want to charge them every three months, but ship it to them every month. That's something that subscriptions on its own doesn't handle. There's a couple other plugins like AutomateWoo and make it do that. But a lot of people are like, "I just want subscriptions to do that.” An interesting subscription example Bob: Well, okay, here's our last question. Let's do this, and of course you'd have to answer with something you could share that wouldn't be too bizarre, but through all of this time with subscriptions, has there been one that really stood out? You thought, "Wow, that's a really interesting way to use subscriptions. I would have never thought of selling this kind of product or service in subscriptions." Anything coming to mind? I know I'm kind of putting you on the spot there and I don't want you to have to share something that's you know, maybe not PG rated or something, but. Sarah: I do have a PG rated example. There's lots of non PG rated examples. At this point, if I'm like looking at someone's site, I'm not even paying attention to whatever they're selling, I'm paying attention to what's happening on the site. But this is actually a local-ish to me site, in the next province over there is a fish market that sells a subscription to fish. And basically what they do is you can subscribe to get fish regularly, and there's a pickup in my city, for example. So, if I wanted to buy fish regularly, I can subscribe to fish at this website. Bob: I'm just thinking about that, is it a variety, the fish of the month or something, or? Sarah: I don't remember, 'cause it was a couple of years ago I was looking at their site, but I was just like, "That's so cool." So, I live in New Brunswick and Nova Scotia is our province that's connected to us and there's a lot of different fishing for example lobster, lots of lobster fishing here. So, like for example, you could probably get a subscription to lobster. Brad: Bob, you're at the Northwest over there, you got a lot of fish, a lot of fishing. Brad: Yeah, clams, everybody digs clams here. I won't go out and do that, but they dig clams. Brad: Oysters? West coast oysters? Bob: Yeah, they're the big clam diggers on our beaches is what it is. So, people love doing it. I can watch them from afar and think of how wonderful that is standing out there in that weather, yeah, whatever. Brad: Well, if you could subscribe and they would just show up at your doorstep. Bob: Yeah. Sarah: Exactly. Bob: Exactly. Alrighty, well, yeah, this has been cool. I knew this would be fun, and we had to end it with something a little bit fishy or something, but anyway, whatever that was bad. Brad: This is going downhill quick. Brad: Yeah, this is going downhill quick, I think it's time for Bob to wrap this up here actually. So, before we head out first, let people know where they can connect with you. Connect with Sarah Sarah: On Twitter, my username is @fevered, and that's usually the best place to reach me. Bob: Excellent, cool. Well, let me just do a quick thank you again to our sponsor, WooCommerce. As Brad said, you can find a lot there and you can find Sarah there, that's even more special. So, next time you go on support, you never know. You may be getting the prize gem over there in support. Well, I'm sure there's wonderful people in support, but maybe you'll be lucky enough to get Sarah. And then of course PayPal, do check out their Pay in 4, Brad went over that very well at the beginning. But yeah, if you are a builder and you have clients, this is a no brainer. In fact, it might even make you look pretty cool to them if you bring that up and say, "Hey, let's drop that on there and see how those conversions go." So check that out. And then, yeah, as far as what we have coming up, we have Woo Perspective coming up next week. Brad will be on there with my other co-hosts. We'll be talking more about this site and what's going on with the site as we launch that ... I'll be launching that podcast or that additional podcast seriously here now, moving forward. So, I think that's it. And appreciate Brad, I know you had a little bit of a break there. We had some things going on. There was election you had to go to and all sorts of stuff, but I'm glad to see your face around. In fact, you're going to be around for the next couple three shows. Brad: Yeah. You're going to get sick of me. Bob: Yeah. And Sarah, thank you very much for coming on. Brad: Thanks Sarah, that was a lot of fun. Sarah: Thank you for having me, it was great. Scroll back to top Sign up to receive email updates Enter your name and email address below and I'll send you periodic updates about the podcast. powered by

Thanks to our community sponsors Alex has been in the WordPress and WooCommerce community for several years, helping WooCommerce product builders through his company, Ellipsis Marketing. Alex has the pulse of this space and a lot of great insights to share. A Chat with Alex In episode 81, Jonathan and I talk with Alex about: Starting in the early days with both WordPress and WooCommerceWhat in Alex’s opinion has stood out in the product space during this last yearThe level of maturity of the landscape of Woo product businessesWhat is going well in the product ecosystem and where improvements can be madeSupporting the Woo product ecosystemHow products are moving toward either expanding features or narrowing down to more defined nichesThe growth and what industries and markets play in in the vertical integration using WooCommerceThe risks in both the WordPress and WooCommerce business industryHow product builders in the space perceive AutomatticSocial cause donations vs. giving discounts on Black FridayPricing and discounts and what Alex has experienced around discountingMonthly vs. yearly subscription for extensions and plugins A lot of questions are asked about pricing, discounting and the overall product space. Alex has firsthand experience with those businesses, and whether you are seasoned, have just started or thinking about the next product, you will get some great insights that will help you. Connect with Alex Ellipsis MarketingAlex on Twitter @AlexDenningMasterWPPress Marketing Download the PayPal extension on the WooCommerce marketplace to offer buy now, pay later options. Start your next career in WooCommerce at WooCommerce. The Conversation Transcript Email Download New Tab Bob: Hey, everyone BobWP here, episode 81 Do the Woo. And I have my great co-host who was going to do a harmonica solo, but we decided against it. But we may just close out with that way if he gets the urge by the end of this. Jonathan, how are you doing? Jonathan: Bob, I'm doing really well. It's taken a turn for the cold, which I like. There's snow outside, but I got the snow tires on just in time. So I'm in good shape. Bob: We're getting a bit of a chill here too so, and then with the wind off the ocean it makes it for interesting times, but staying warm. So thank you to our sponsors before we head on into the show, because we have a really good show coming up. PayPal yes, our sponsor Buy Now, Pay Later. A couple of great options, but I've been focusing a little bit on the Pay in 4. Really it's very interesting, because I'm finding a lot of people in this space that are wow, I haven't even heard of this, and they are jumping on it right away. In fact, our other co-host Mendel already put it on his site. So once people are finding out about it, it's an option, especially if you have PayPal already installed. It's really easy and a no-brainer, So check that out. And WooCommerce, yes, 4.7 did come out and a minor update. They didn't want to get everybody too freaked out about putting a big update in with Black Friday, and all that fun holiday stuff around the corner. So a minor update where everything should go smooth, unless you've got five billion plugins that you got from some guy in a basement. Other than that, I think you're good to go. So we're going to dive into the show. I am excited to welcome Alex Denning. Hey, Alex, welcome to the show. Alex: Hey, thanks for having me. Meet Alex Denning Bob: Now, Alex, you're a man of many talents, and I thought one of them has got to be ... You've done a little bit of Woo. So in a sense, how do you do the Woo in your business, and what do you do? Alex: So I run a marketing agency called Ellipsis Marketing, and we help people who make WordPress and WooCommerce products do more of whatever they're trying to do. So recently my doing of the Woo is helping out WooCommerce product businesses with their marketing. But I've been involved in WordPress for a long time. I remember the post on Woo Themes when it was a thing, so we go back a little way. Bob: How did you get into WordPress, but then how did Woo start to play into your space? Alex: I got into WordPress because when I was in high school I had a website where I reviewed video games. This was a great hustle. It was early enough that making a website was difficult enough, but you could still call yourself press. So I got free video games. And obviously the site was built on WordPress, and I was trying to work out how to do stuff. And I remember finding about there were two or three WordPress tutorial websites at the time, and I remember finding one called Hack WordPress. Jonathan: Obviously. Alex: Which was the precursor to WPTavern. I remember staying up all night reading it, and I thought this is great, I'll do this. So I made my in store site. One thing led to another and I ended up running that for a couple of years. The story is the old terrible, and I didn't know what I was doing. But I guess I was figuring things out as I went along. And that led to me finding more about WordPress. And at the time theme shops were the dominant forces in WordPress. I remember trying out WooCommerce shortly after it was released by then with themes, and one thing leads to another. And yes, these days it's an important part of my life. What is standing out in the product business around WooCommerce Jonathan: So one thing I'm really curious about you work in marketing, you specialize on marketing for WordPress product businesses, WooCommerce product businesses. So from my point of view, and you have a newsletter that you keep up to date, you did this black Friday post recently. So you're in this special position of having a better than average pulse, if not one of the best pulses of what's happening across the space. And as you look at this past year, I'm curious, what insight standout? Are there anything that surprised you, as you look at what's happening? And this year in particular. Alex: Sure. So the big thing obviously, is the pandemic. We saw a massive increase in people looking for our clients solutions around WooCommerce and that started March, April. In terms of searches, there was about a 50% increase in WordPress search terms, and a huge amount of that was driven by WooCommerce. The searches for WooCommerce per month went up by hundreds of thousands and month on month. And also year on year, they were up a significant amount as well, so that was obviously a big thing. So people were looking to get there, but it seems like an acceleration of digital transformation. And people who had stores, which did not have a web presence rapidly wanted to get a web presence. And we saw a very large number of people choosing WooCommerce to do that. For our clients who are selling functionality that lets both solutions that let people do things with whatever their site is set up to do, things scaled pretty nicely as you'd expect in a product business. And so that's driven a lot of growth within the ecosystem. The maturity level of WooCommerce product businesses Jonathan: So let's take WooCommerce product businesses, specifically people who build plugins, extensions, themes, SaaS connectors, whatever have you for Woo. When you take in the landscape as a whole, how would you describe its current maturity? Is it really young? Is it mid? What's the level of maturity that you're seeing across the space? Alex: We're not quite the wild west of a couple of years ago. Say three to five years ago, you could build pretty much any functionality driven WooCommerce extension, and either sell it through woo.com or sell it through your own site, or a third party platform. You could pretty much make anything and make a lot of sales. It's not the case that there are loads of things that should exist which don't exist at all these days, which is what happened there. And most of the time there is existing functionality, but there's certainly to the flip side a tiny bit of maturity. But we're probably five, 10 percent of the way there. What is going well in the space Jonathan: A couple more questions in this vein then, what's your sense when you take in the landscape as a whole of the WooCommerce product businesses? And there's some maturity there, still very little. What's going well? What do you see going well? And then where are the opportunities as a whole to improve? In terms of what you see how folks are approaching product businesses in the WordPress context. Alex: So the product businesses are getting more sophisticated, because the obvious opportunities have gone. We need to work out how to add more value, that makes a lot of sense. We're going to continue to see that, and I think we will continue to see more niche solutions, more niche by higher value solutions, focusing on different industries. That will happen in the short term. In the medium term, the huge opportunity is to look beyond the WooCommerce this label. Currently its just like you can do this, but it's also bolted on WooCommerce and that's what my product is. But as Woo becomes a more dominant player, I guess even more dominant player in the e-commerce space, and Woo itself becomes more material, Then suddenly it's not just hey, it's this WooCommerce plugin, it's an obvious part of your store in a much more SaaS like way. That's really exciting. Jonathan: You mentioned Woo's maturity. I'm curious for your thoughts, so this year brings a lot of different things, Woo's growing like crazy. At Woo, earlier we shared some of the numbers it's a lot. Not quite double, but just based on what we can see its significant growth. You also have a lot of maturity happening around the product release cycle we're up to ... I'm going to butcher this you might know Bob, I should know this, seven releases so far this year with 4.7 and it's a lot. Opportunities to support the Woo ecosystem We're picking up a pace there, there's an overall confidence that's starting to permeate more about how it's being dealt with. So there's definitely maturity happening there. I'm curious from your perspective Alex, as you're working with WooCommerce product businesses and looking at what's happened in the Woo space you see the growth, you see how it's being managed. What's good? What's gives you confidence? Where some of the opportunities you see there from the Woo perspective, to support the ecosystem? Alex: So in terms of things going well it's easier than ever to make your own e-commerce site, and that's great. Everything that's happening on the lines lap. I think the opportunity is to make it even easier. So a lot of the work that I do that we do is content marketing to help people get started with solve a problem with one of our clients products. And we can do two types of that, we can go inside WooCommerce so people searching for how do I do this with WooCommerce? Or we can go outside, which is how do I do this with my e-commerce website? If we go outside, we have to cover 10 preliminary steps about here is how you spend half a day deciding on your hosting company and your domain name. You have to explain all of those things. It's not simple. It probably should never be simple. There's always been a bit of friction there and that's probably fine and good. That's interesting. The marketplace for distributing extensions, reviews. Bob, you're saying in the intro line unless you installed 5 million plugins from someone in a basement. That's still possible, as a consumer you don't necessarily know is this good? Is this bad? That's a really interesting opportunity. The niche and more features vs. doing one thing well Bob: I was wondering when you talked about the niche, that's where we're going at. And I deal with a lot of people coming to me with their extensions. You can have so many extensions that do improve checkout, or so many extensions that do cart, whatever. With the niche, are you talking more about if somebody's got a product and you're looking at it, and they're thinking I've built this product, and I'm going to just keep adding things because nobody has all these things and all these features on the product. On the other hand, I see others that are saying, I'm taking other people's products and pulling out one little thing, and I do one simple thing and I do it well with my plugin. And that's where a lot of times I gravitate towards, because it's like I had this one need, I didn't need these 20 other things. And that particular plugin does that. Is that what you're seeing, is that shift to that? Alex: Yeah, I'm seeing a little bit of it. I don't see it enough to call it a trend, but I think that's where a lot of the opportunity is. It's like for this type of business, you've got your custom check out for things that need to be collected in person, or whatever it is. The focus on particular industries and markets Jonathan: What about do you see opportunity in just more vertical integration, where they say we're going to focus on farmers markets for instance, and provide a solution where this hybrid of offline online, et cetera. I just really do that. That's what I've been curious about interested in for a long time. I don't see as much of it as I'd expect to at this point. I'm curious, do you see that? Is that something that you see more of? Are people going to focus on particular industries and markets? Alex: Yeah, so just going back to this inside outside perspective, that if you go inside you just have to focus on the WooCommerce stuff, you've got nowhere else to go. If you go outside though, you can go horizontal or vertical. And then suddenly, you can start opening up lots of more opportunities. So it's how to do this, how to manage your inventory for your farmers market, whatever it is. Vertical integration Jonathan: The opportunity that I see in vertical integration, when you take farmers markets for instance, or restaurants in a particular country, or whatever it might be, is that you can abstract away a lot of those getting started complexities, the domain name, registration, hosting, et cetera, et cetera. You can either manage it all for them, or have very explicit guidance and recommendations on how to get those things started. There's pros and cons to those approaches but to me, it seems like as there's an opportunity here with e-commerce is growing in general for there to be more focused solutions that have the benefit of being built on an open source base, we're able to combine some of the positives of that SaaS focus. And SaaS will tend to have more vertical integration or very clear horizontal. It's going to be interesting. I'm really interested to see. We've talked about this previously, on Do the Woo. This thing of COVID really just seems to be an accelerator of trends. And it's going to be interesting, we have this opportunity to almost look into the future, where is this? Where would this stuff have been going anyway? And now we're just getting there faster is what it seems like. Alex: From the marketing point of view, definitely an acceleration. The way I'm seeing things, there's been a bit of change in direction, I think which comes with that base is the rockets mainly gone in a straight line, rather than ... This rocket analogy doesn't work. Risks in the WordPress and WooCommerce business industry Jonathan: If you think about the WordPress and the WooCommerce product business industry, what are some of the risks? What are the things that people need to be wary of I think just in general? Alex: Great question. Love that. We don't talk about risk enough. Most of the initial work we do with clients covers existential risk, and no one's talked about it, so let's talk about it. So from the independent product creator point of view, the biggest risk of building your product around a platform is if the platform does something that doesn't let you work. If you build such a great feature that it comes into core. Sorry, you're not going to make so many sales. And of course, in a WordPress context, that happens a lot. And oftentimes you find actually you've got a three year headstart, and you can just add on to that functionality anyway. So it works out. But that is a major risk and we have seen a lot of price competition recently. I think people see it as a space to be in too to make money quickly. And so a lot of new Woo market entrants, some of whom are happy to compete on price. That is probably good for consumers, but is a risk for storing it for product makers. They have to find ways to differentiate, or to compete on price, or add values in other way. I think otherwise, it's in a pretty good situation. How product makers view Automattic Jonathan: I'm going to put you on the spot a little bit. I'm curious when you're talking to folks in this independent maker space, how do you tend to guide them as far as Automattic goes? When you think about automatic and the role that we tend to play in this space. And how do people think about Automattic? It's a bit of a potential elephant in the room, what if automatic gets into some things? We also have products and plugins that we're selling in the space. So how do you tend to think about that? Alex: To be honest, for the average product maker, they don't think about Automattic and that's fine. They're focused on how do I get my next customer, rather than is my business going to be eaten by a competitor that I can't compete with? So I think at the smaller end, but small and medium size end, I don't think people are too worried. There are so many things to be done around WooCommerce extensions that I think that the problems that your small or medium sized creator is going to solve, aren't problems that you would solve at the enterprise level. If you're building a thing around payments, payment processing whatever, something like that you would worry about it. But that's not something that a company of 10 people can or maybe they can, certainly not with this attitude. Jonathan: It's a delicate thread, because there's this work on how do we ... I think in an ideal world, the work that we do at Automattic and Woo is just sort of make the pie bigger. Work on some of the hardest problems. A lot of our motivation to get into payments for instance, is that its a hard problem to work on. And it's something we think can really move the needle on making Woo more accessible. And in theory, if we do that well which is our intent, it opens up a lot more opportunity for the ecosystem as a whole. So I think that's when things go well. Obviously, we're dealing with humans, so we're imperfect and mistakes happen and people get misunderstood, et cetera. But I think it's something important to keep an eye on in general. We thought of it. I tend to think of the work that Woo is doing as working on the operating system and continue to do that well. And sometimes you have to bring in something into core because it makes sense, but most of the times let's keep this as lean as possible, and then support people building the software if you will for the operating system. And at least from my perspective, which I have the disadvantage of being fairly potentially insulated, it feels like that's going well overall. But then that's a question that's good to continue to ask, is do independent creators in the space feel supported, feel that there's opportunity where they can really carve out something for themselves? Alex: I think that's where the market place opportunity is really interesting, because then you start to see aligned incentives financially. Thanks to our sponsor WooCommerce You may be just starting your journey as a Woo Builder or well into your journey. Or perhaps you have WooCommerce talents that you want to bring to a team as you look to make a switch in your career. WooCommerce has several roles open that will likely fit your own goals of growth. You will be joining the larger Automattic team, a diverse and distributed group of individuals with a passion for WordPress, and yes, WooCommerce. If you want are looking for make that career pivot and love working from home, check out all their open positions over on our Job Listing at DotheWoo.io. Trust me. I know the company and a lot of the people. It's a smart move. Thanks to WooCommerce.com and their support as a community sponsor. Now let's head back to the show. Black Friday, deals or social causes Bob: This is a total flip. The only reason I'm flipping over to this is because Alex, you sent me an email about all this stuff about Black Friday. So I perused it and I know we're at a point where a lot of decisions can be made to twist and turn. You had a lot of good stuff in there, and I've been biting at the bit to play a devil's advocate here. This is something that because I've dealt with nonprofits for decades and work with nonprofits, one other thing you mentioned in it, the social angle is really important this year. And that was as a result of one of the plugin there. Instead of doing Black Friday, they're going to give 50% to social cause. And I'm not talking social media, I'm talking social causes here, to clarify. Now, as I look at that and I think back and in my days of working with them, and at this point that's a great thing. At this point, I feel like we also are inundated with needs. It's been a few months of this, where this is coming left and right. And then you're at a point also as somebody that can donate, where there's so many opportunities to donate. So you can be really picky on what touches me, and maybe it's a specific area or a nonprofit specifically. So I'm looking at people also on the flip side, on the other side of thing, I'm looking at people right now that are biting at the bit, because it's time to get a discount there. It's tough, they're trying to get things going, they're trying to get to online whatever, all these different reasons. This particular instance, is it really a more of a ... I don't want to say this, but not so much, I'm looking to really make a killing with this and give a lot of money to these nonprofits. But it's kind of a feel good thing on the side of the business to say, this is what I'm doing instead of this. It doesn't really matter what plays out in the end as far as sales, and how much I give is just more of a thing I want to do. So it's not really a pump to get a lot more sales, because honestly I feel a lot of people at this point in time would. Personally, I've given a lot and I look at something like that, and I go unless I really need that, it wouldn't be an incentive for me to buy it. And I know it's a very convoluted thought process I'm going through here, but when I saw this and then I saw yours, I just wanted to hear your thoughts on it. And you can just rake me over the coals with that one. Alex: So the specific instance you're referring to is a company called Weglot, which does multilingual WordPress and WooCommerce translations, websites, stores is on the Cyber Monday and the Black Friday, they're donating 50% of their revenue to a number of charities, which I think is a great thing for them to do. That's a big chunk of revenue. It's not profit, it's what you're paying them. And I thought that was great and I thought it was bold of them, and I thought it was different, I haven't seen that before. You're right as an incentive to buy their product from a consumer point of view, this is not going to do it for me. And I'm sure they know that. There have been some other approaches I've seen people taking off on those increasingly, people want a social element to their sale. So it's for every purchase we're going to do this, which is a nice way of doing it. You also see commitments like 1% for the planet, or something which is year round things where people are committing in some cases, 1% of their revenue to whatever causes. All those are good things from a branding point of view in 2020, that is a thing which is good. You're right there that without a discount as a consumer, that's not probably not going to influence my decision. Jonathan: So if I'm looking at this externally, it's like if you have a pattern of doing discounts year after year. I've seen a lot of me too in the space, we struggle with this a bit of Woo. You'll notice that we're slowly not doing as many sales as we used to. We're experimenting and exploring that because then you get people used to it. If you want to break that pattern, you can't just ignore it. We're just not doing anything at all this year. And so there's an opportunity to say hey, we value something differently here and we're not ignoring this. So from my perspective, it's great to see people experimenting and trying different things. Some of it is going to work well and you have to know why it's working, because if you are trying to do an approach like that to drive more sales, you're probably not going to do it. If you're doing that to stop a cycle of setting people's expectations to discount, I could see a message like that being a great way to do that. And then long term, it's probably a better at least in my point of view I'm not a big fan of discounts, period. I think that can end up hurting the brand's value in the longer term. Sweet spots and dangers with discounts Alex: You see companies like Kinsta who I'm sure hosts a lot of stores, don't discount, and they make it really clear, because they get asked we don't do it for this reason. I think that helps. I'm sure they will lose out on some sales to their competitors on that day in November, but they are going to get increased customer loyalty from that, because they're not offering new customers a better deal. They're not punishing their existing customers. And the one we're on, they're going to associate their brand with quality with higher prices, but value et cetera. And those are all good things. And certainly not everyone should do a discount. Bob: On that same train of thought, one thing I wanted you to touch on a bit is I'd heard somebody talking about who will survive in this Black Friday? And I'm sure they were maybe looking at the bigger picture beyond WordPress and WooCommerce and extensions and plugins. But essentially probably still touching on that, their thoughts were that yes, people are going to need to do very deep discounts 50% or more. Now, in your newsletter, you said lower discounts are in, and you had some reasons behind that which also makes very much sense. So why don't you touch on that a bit, and tell us a little bit more what your thoughts were around this idea that really the lower discounts are going to do the trick this time. Alex: So this ties back to maturity in the space. And also what Jonathan said about people meeting. I think in the past people would run sales, in response to what the biggest person who'd run a sale the previous year had done, we're just starting to move away from that a little bit. The earlier someone emailed me about their Black Friday sale, and how to do it this year was April, so more complexity going into it and which is good. I think a side effect of not thinking about your sale is just to go sure 50% is massive, the 30% I'm a big fan of. 30% is the biggest small discount you can do. And anymore can be a fairly high margin space digital products. I love that represents the discount. If you discount at 50%, you have to make 40% more sales than if you discount at 30%. And so the question comes for people with extensions, am I going to make 40% more sales just to make the same revenue? Probably not. Jonathan: To me, it seems the difference when you get into this world of discounts and all the hype around it. A big thing is are you focused on short term or long term thinking? And discounts can seem really good and attractive, but there's all these other things you mentioned support. There's the whole renewal thing, there's the whole how do your other customers feel right now? Because it's like I bought two weeks ago, and now it's 50% off, and then some of those people will ask for a refund. There's this whole process, you'll go through a lot more consequences than just the short term burst. Alex: I know you're a Seth Godin fan Jonathan, I have a great quote, cheap is the last refuge for the marketer who can't figure out how to live better. Jonathan: And that's completely right. Black Friday, should I buy or should I go (wait) Bob: That's interesting, because I had to buy a plugin yesterday, there was a plugin that wasn't working on my site to do the Woo site. So I had to find another one and I found it, and at that moment it wasn't that much for the year it was 57 bucks, 58 bucks or something. So it wasn't a big, but I was looking at it and I thought for a moment I thought what if they have a sale here in a week maybe. But the thing I really didn't want to wait a week and I went ahead and got it. And maybe I'm not the normal person, but also I was in the position where it was like, is it worth waiting a week on the per chance? And at that much are they really going to give a huge discount? And I thought all these things, is it really worth it? It was way too much thought I put into it, and I just finally just bought it. Alex: You're probably right though, those decisions go on. And if you knew that, that store discounts every November without fail and there's a discount that you wanted, you would have waited. But that's why I like Black Friday overall, because it gives you a chance as a seller to pick up on those price sensitive customers who do care about the price. And they may not buy from you without that. So you're quite happy you got the thing it was for work. It's an expense not worth waiting. All those people certainly in the past, but if I didn't need the thing or was on a budget, they are going to wait. And it's a good deal for everyone, or it can be a good deal for everyone. Thanks to our sponsor PayPal. In time for the holiday season PayPal has launched a new pay later option called Pay in 4. This mean that your clients can offer their customers the option to purchase over time in 4 interest-free payment. This feature is one of two option from PayPal for pay later with the other being PayPal Credit which gives store customers more purchasing power through flexible and transparent choices in how and when they pay. This second option is subject to consumer credit approval. So offering those payment options is good business. Did you know that 64% of consumers surveyed say they are more likely to make a purchase at a retailer that offers interest-free payment options. And 56% of consumers that responded agree that they prefer to pay a purchase back in installments rather than use a credit card. Well, this seems like a no-brainer to me. Clients can grow their sales and get paid up front with no additional risk or cost. All you need to do is download the PayPal Checkout extension on the Marketplace at WooCommerce.com. Just head on over, click marketplace and search for the PayPal Checkout. Suggesting that to your clients will certainly open up sales opportunities for them. Thanks for PayPal for being a community sponsor at Do the Woo. And now back the conversation. Jonathan: I'm curious Alex, so you see what's happening in the space, and you've been doing this black Friday post up, how long have you been doing this now? Alex: Three years. What should happen in the future when it comes to Black Friday Jonathan: That's awesome. If you could wave a magic want and just improve how the product business space as a whole treats Black Friday, what are some of the things that you'd like to see happen more of or less of going forward? Alex: I'd like more randomness about predicting sales, expecting sales, mix it up. Great way of breaking that cycle. I'd like that, but simultaneously I'd like more predictability week to make a purchasing decision is good. So you see all sorts of people, this is a thing that feels really important. So I think people put a lot of thought into it. But do I start my sale the month before, the day before, the Monday before? I love that and run until the end of the site Monday. And it gives people enough time to make an informed purchasing decision, but also if I have a list of five plugins, which is a thing people do, make a list of here's what I want to buy, let's see what's on offer. You help the consumer do their little budgeting, and I think that's a good outcome. I would love to see just more thought into the discount levels. Part of this post I did last year, it was every discount increment at 5% increments between 10 and 90%. People are just picking numbers out of the air from 10, 15, 20, all the way out to 90. If you're taking 90% off a plugin, then what are you selling? You got 90% margins on an e-commerce plugin, that feels disingenuous. So we could think about that a little bit more. Bob: I think if I saw something at 90% off, I'd have to really think about this. What exactly I'm I getting? How much are they actually making off this thing in the first place? I'd start thinking all weird things. Alex: No, you're quite right, those are the things you do not want your customers to be asking. Products and underpricing Jonathan: So my last question for now on this pricing thing, what's your take pricing as a whole across let's take just the WooCommerce product space? Obviously, you see some competition, but if you were to step back for a moment, how are we as a whole? Is the space under priced, is it overpriced? Is it about right? Alex: Massively under priced. So whilst the range on any individual bit of functionality might be three to 10 times, those numbers start so small, but it might be from 30 to $300 for one year. It's fine. I'm sure a lot of people are getting a lot more value, especially at the higher end. There will be functionality that it makes sense to pay a lot of money for what doesn't exist yet. Jonathan: Just a comment there on the enterprise Woo is growing in the enterprise, and that's a loose term. It can mean a lot of things, but basically you're seeing more big stores, especially folks coming over from Shopify world, where they're like we don't want to give this cut anymore. And I've seen this a few times where people are shocked at the price and not in a positive way, where it's like wait a minute, this is mission critical functionality for my business and you're telling me this is a $200 extension. And so I think I would love to see more high end maybe productized services around some of these things. But the bottom line however it works, is that sometimes the price is a negative, where sometimes you're not doing folks a favor. And I see this a lot in the mid to upper end, where it's this is our business we're talking about here. You're telling me that this critical plugin, the most that I can do with this developer is paying a small amount of money for a license, what if I need more. So it feels like there's a lot of opportunity there. And the more successful Woo becomes, and the more stores succeed, the higher the stakes go, and the more people are going to care about the infrastructure that they're using. Alex: I think that point about the stakes is really important, because then it's not uncommon for functionality, which is critical to stores to be maintained by one to 10 people, which is not all of the people. And it would be really interesting to see what products could do with significantly more resources. And as the stakes get higher, QA is going to be increasingly important. Jonathan: My instinct there would be to see folks do enterprise versions of their software, which could be a higher support tier, it could be some special functionality. I'm curious, do you have any thoughts on that? If you recognize that's a problem, the stakes are going to get higher. And there's a difference between value alignment and accordingly incentive, because if you're selling a low end plugin, there's only so much you can do it's a volume game. How would you recommend folks approach that? How do you serve the higher stakes? Do you do it on features, do you do it on support? Alex: People don't want to solve that problem, because it's a lot more difficult. And where there is volume opportunity, you can see how it doesn't necessarily make sense, but it's not attractive in the same way. You start needing relationships, sales, confidence to support service level agreements on whatever you're offering. And I think unless you've got that experience, which is probably fair to say that the vast majority of people don't, exalts a daunting thing to tackle. Which means there's opportunity for someone to come in and do that. A spin off from my WooCommerce agency, we customize extensions for high volume stores. Jonathan: So I'll leave it at that. I think the opportunity because it is tough, I see that. And I could see that the volume it's not as attractive because you are getting more into the productized service realm potential where, an enterprise we'll buy this thing we'll buy the enterprise version. And we want to know that we have someone on call if we need help, et cetera. It can be very lucrative for those who are willing to set up the processes and systems and accept the responsibility. My only recommendation for anyone looking at that is you probably need to charge a lot higher than you're thinking. So it's something that you got to make sure that it's worth it. And for some of these businesses, it absolutely is worth it, because we're talking about a lot of payment volume going through these things. I guess it's worth than paying for. Monthly vs. yearly subscriptions for extensions and plugins Bob: I'm going to apologize to my listeners, because I was going to leave it at that, but I have one more question. And this is just going to turn into a long podcast sorry, but this is pricing. And there was a conversation somebody had on Twitter and just I can't say in a nutshell, because there's probably not such a thing for this particular topic. But around the fact of questioning, why aren't more extensions and plugins monthly versus a yearly fee, because that helps people that can't afford that yearly fee? But I think I know the answers to this and I think understood it, even before I started hearing people reply to it. But just some quick thoughts on that as far as what you think there Alex? Alex: So in the WordPress and WooCommerce product space, monthly pricing is a nightmare, it doesn't work right now. We have seen instances of when clients switch from monthly to annual pricing, and even kept the prices ballpark the same. They massively increased their revenue. So currently consumers are responding really badly to monthly pricing for our best products, and annual performs significantly better. It's very hard to do that. Not hard but it's rare to do the genuine SaaS component, which I think people feel justifies the monthly fee WooCommerce. I think that's the major blocker. Jonathan: I think that happens each month, and if it's just the license, they're not seeing a thing come happen each month and it's really hard to like what am I paying for. Alex: And sometimes if your extension is coded brilliantly, you don't need updates for it. But it's the thing that does import this, it doesn't need to change it just works. Where to connect with Alex Jonathan: Alex, thanks for joining us. It's been great having you. If folks want to learn more about what you're up to, where should we send them? Alex: It's been a real pleasure. Thanks for having me. My professional life lives at getellipsis.com. We have a blog that covers some of the stuff we've talked about, and a monthly newsletter called press marketing, which is pretty good. Jonathan: That's great. Alex: That was the Black Friday stuff Bob mentioned. I also run a weekly newsletter, if monthly is not your thing. MasterWP It's a weekly newsletter for WordPress professionals. I'm on Twitter. It's just my name, Alex Denning. Bob: We'll just give a quick shout out to our sponsor, before we close out PayPal, do check out Pay in 4, that's the numeral four. As I mentioned both in the ad roll and at the beginning, you know the benefits so there's really a no brainer to give it a try, see if that's what your customers are looking for. And WooCommerce of course.com do update to the latest version, keep things all nice and secure. I think that's it. So we are good to go. Again, thank you Alex, for joining us. It was a total pleasure. Alex: Thank you so much. 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Thanks to our community sponsors When we have a developer on the show who is passionate about what they do, well, we always end up taking a deep dive into the topic. This was the case when we invited Geoff Taylor, from XWP and developer of WooGraphQL. Mendel runs with it this time and there is a lot of info jammed into this episode. A Chat with Greg In episode 80, Mendel and I talk with Greg about: How he became interested in server-side data and APIsWhen he used his experience to take his work and use GraphQL with WordPressWhat it means when people say “headless”How it compares to using hooks, filters and endpointsThe real power behind GraphQLUsing GraphQL and why even still use WordPressMultiple ways to do your WordPress front-end with GraphQL and APIHow the GraphQL and the REST of API worksWhether performance and data retrieval are more performant using GraphQL than it is when using standard WordPress through a themeUsing WooGraphQL vs the WooCommerce RESTWhat the future holds for GraphQL If you are a developer wanting to learn about or dig deeper into GraphQL and WooCommerce, this is a must-listen show. Greg really knows his stuff. Connect with Greg Greg on Twitter at @kidunot89At kidunot89 on GitHub and WooCommerce SlackXWP Download the PayPal extension on the WooCommerce marketplace to offer buy now, pay later options. Start your next career in WooCommerce at WooCommerce. The Conversation Transcript Email Download New Tab Bob: Hey, everybody. BobWP, and we are back with Do the Woo episode 80. 8-0. And of course, I have one of my co-hosts, one of my favorite co-hosts. In fact, all three of them are favorite. But hey, Mendel Kurland, how you doing? Mendel: Hey, what's up? Hey, Bob, it's okay, I know it's public, so you have to say that you have three favorites, but I know where you stand. I know where you stand. And it's cool. It's cool. I'm sure they know too, deep down inside. It's good to be here. I'm excited about this conversation. It's going to get nerdy. It's going to get geeky. And I feel good about that. I feel really good about that. Bob: Yeah, Mendel, you certainly will be in your element. So let's go ahead and move on into the show here. But before I do that I want to thank our great sponsors. First of all, PayPal. As I've been talking about since they became a sponsor, their Pay in 4. It's a pretty sweet way that your clients, customers, make purchases on their sites between $30 and $600, and they get four interest-free payments. That really is nice, because talking to them, they fit it every other week. So it fits the model of the person that gets paid every two weeks or twice a month. Mendel: Bob, I want to double your shout-out for PayPal, because I installed the new PayPal plugin on my website, and I enabled the Pay in 4. I didn't even have to enable it. It just came out-of-the-box, it was enabled. And it's incredible. It automatically takes the cart total and allows you to allow somebody to pay in four payments and it's interest free. It took me five minutes to implement. So just go do it. The holidays are coming up. Might as well. Bob: Yeah, no doubt. If Mendel did it then ... Mendel: That's right, anybody can do it. If I can do it, anybody can do it. Bob: That's it. Then there's WooCommerce.com. Let's see, 4.7 RC came out the last week. So just want to remind everybody get that testing wrapped up for the release of the 10th. Very, very minor updates, because they did not want to break your site before these holidays. So you can be rest-assured that everything will go very smoothly. Well, as Mendel said, we have a great guest today, Geoff Taylor. Geoff, how are you doing? Geoff: I'm good. Yourself? How Geoff does the Woo Bob: Doing really good. And like Mendel said, we're going to get geeky, and I think the best way to do that is figure out what the heck you do with Woo. What do you do with WooCommerce? Geoff: Well, right now I work primarily as a consultant and just work for a specialist, XWP, and I also am the developer of WooGraphQL, which is the GraphQL's API functionality for WooCommerce. I'm typically a consultant/developer as far as on a couple of different WooCommerce projects that are coming up and being released and have been released. I specialize primarily though in just data management on the server. So improving the request speed and performance for service side requests when it comes to data management for headless applications. Bob: Cool. Wow, that's a mouthful. That is some serious stuff. Geoff: Well, it's just a really fancy way of saying I make stuff go really quickly. I make stuff faster. The interest in server-side data and API’s Mendel: So I want to start at the beginning of your API journey though, because we're talking GraphQL, right? And now we're talking APIs. And there may be some people listening to the Do the Woo Podcast that have no idea what GraphQL is, that WordPress even has an API by itself, right? That WordPress didn't used to have a native API, and now it does, but then GraphQL augments that, and what GraphQL is versus the native API, right? But before we get into that, because we're going to need your help with that, before we get into that let's back up, and how did you even get interested in data, or in server-side data, or in APIs? Geoff: Well, initially I started as, I guess that you could say I was a freelance web developer, and at the time I worked primarily on the LAMP staff using PHP, then whatever CMS would work for what I needed at the time. Then one time, I had a need for WordPress at the time, I was trying to make a front-end JavaScript application, which is now known as headless in the community, which is typically where you take a WordPress back-end and let that provide the data on the front-end. But I needed something other than REST. At the time I hadn't even really looked into REST. I actually came across the plugin WordPress-GraphQL before I even looked into using REST. And the beauty of that was it was still a growing project. It looked far less scary than it does now, and I was easily able to get on and just start using it and contributing. Then through contributing I met and got in touch with Jason Bahl, the developer, and it just snowballed from there with me working on several different plugins and uses for it, taking and using it in several applications, because it turned out to be really versatile. I had already had experience and known about GraphQL at the time, but I hadn't been using it in WordPress. Mendel: Got it. GraphQL and WordPress Geoff: When I went to Jason Bahl's project and I started using that, I found that now only was this extremely convenient, it made setup really easy for creating a new application. I just had to install WordPress and then install this plugin. Then from there my journey was all JavaScript, which is typically if you are a theme developer of any kind or something like that, you prefer just to only have to worry about the visuals. And this really gave me that opportunity. Funny thing is though, as I got into developing more of the API I found I had less time to develop front-ends. So initially, I was a full stack developer, but my focus had never really always been back-end logic. It had become that in developing this, and it turned out I'm really good at it. So I stuck with it, and it wasn't even that I had a personal need for WooCommerce at that time. What brought me to making the WooCommerce functionality was, I had finished up all my projects, I was still working sort of as a consultant at the time, but not for WooCommerce yet. Just for GraphQL and WordPress, the combination of that. But there was a demand growing for two things, ACF support to the GraphQL API. ACF is a humongous plugin in the WordPress community. Mendel: Advanced Custom Fields for those folks that don't know. Geoff: Yes, my bad. Advanced Custom Fields. And WooCommerce. Jason had already actually started developing the Advanced Custom Fields extension and was already about to start selling it as a premium plugin. Then I started developing the WooCommerce plugin, because there was a demand for it, and I also wanted to build up my reputation that I did not have in the community. I was a nobody. I was trying to get better remote work, because at the time I was working off of place like Upwork, or Freelancing.com, which I could find work, but the quality of the work and the pay, it was really not making ends meet. So as I started to build out the WooCommerce API, I built connections. People started coming up and using it. I got consultant work through it, and it not only improved my ability with building WooCommerce extensions, it improved my ability with WordPress development. It improved my ability all across the board on every part of the spectrum, because I made sure I was testing and implementing and making sure it worked from all facets. And here I am now, like a year later. I only started it back in March 2019 and it's become what it is now. Mendel: Cool. Yeah, that's awesome. It's awesome to hear how you got into it and how you got excited about it, and then how you started to get work from it, which I think is something a lot of people don't recognize. That becoming an expert in any field means that you've done enough in that field, you have a large enough body of work that's been successful that people start to notice and that you can use as your own self-reference. I think a lot of people maybe sell short their personal experience, or their small business experience, or their freelancer or entrepreneurial experience. And there's real value in that. So I think that's a cool takeaway from that story. I want to talk with you a little bit about why somebody would use an API to begin with, or GraphQL to begin with, with WordPress. So WordPress, for a lot of people you install on a server, you go into the back-end, you manipulate some data, right? And essentially the back-end is just a UI for a database that does some super complex queries and joins and all this stuff, and then you save those states, right? Geoff: Yeah. Mendel: With a whole bunch of data. Then on the front-end you have users interact with the website, right? And they might manipulate data in a database. So that's like a front-end interface for a database. So you can do a lot with WordPress. You can do a lot with WooCommerce. You can theme it. You can make it perform, even with the application. So what is this headless thing and why would somebody be interested in it? What is this headless thing you talk about Geoff: All right. When you think about just a WordPress front-end you come up with, I guess now, the modern day of three scenarios. You have a WordPress theme. You still have that same WordPress data, it's just showcased through a WordPress theme. And there're pros and cons to this. The pros are the WordPress theme tends to be the code for that, tends to be bundled with WordPress installation. You have everything together. It tends to be neat and seamless. But the con to this the data's baked into the layout, there's very little room for customization without making it really unwieldy, and any form of realtime JavaScript application implementation is made that much harder and complex. So if you want to go to something modern, scratch that. You want to do something really impressive or really unique, scratch that. You'd have to gut the whole theme altogether, making it pointless. Hooks, filters and endpoints Mendel: I want to break in right there on that point and just say, I think a good example of this is like using hooks and filters and things like that to add things into the output of the site. Geoff: Oh, not even just that. Think about it from this endpoint. Say you want to make a menu that performs a little bit differently and you want to style it in a way where you don't have to use the complex PHP walkers. You just have the menu items, the menu locations, and you just want to split that out. Doing that through the WordPress theme is made that much more complex, because all of that is tied into the WordPress code. I don't even want to say it's made impossible, it's made just not user-friendly all through it. If you have to come in and learn a bunch of stuff, that if we're not completely sure it won't be depreciated years from now, a lot of it is just built-in baked-in WordPress functionality that's only used specifically for this menu part. It's just a con all around when you look at it in comparison to the other alternatives. Then the other way is using WordPress REST and a JavaScript application just to retrieve that data. This allows you to have greater versatility, but it opens your site up to, for one, people have access to the data through another endpoint unless you lock it off. You may have to build a bit more in the way of structure on specific points. You lose a lot of that WordPress built-in functionality, but you get the capability of truly doing whatever the heck you want. But the downside to this is REST does not allow for a lot of versatility in the size and shape of the request. So you'll be limited to what data you get back and where, and those requests can get big and you might not always need the data for every little bit, every little part of the application where you'll be making those requests. What GraphQL really does Mendel: And it sounds like that's where GraphQL comes to the rescue. Geoff: There you go. And GraphQL, it works similar to REST. You'll be able to make whatever you want, retrieve all this data. However, you can fine-tune the request to only grab what you need off those data objects, cherry pick only the fields that you need at that time. And a lot of the tools on the JavaScript front-end allow you take advantage of things such as caching, no retrieving of data you already have, keeping track of state as well as also manipulating said data within the confines of your application just to modify right here and keep to yourself only for what you need. There's just so many advantages of being able to control the request size and request data to such a fine-tuned point that you easily notice the different in an app that is using GraphQL over using REST. Thanks to our sponsor PayPal. In time for the holiday season PayPal has launched a new pay later option called Pay in 4. This mean that your clients can offer their customers the option to purchase over time in 4 interest-free payment. This feature is one of two option from PayPal for pay later with the other being PayPal Credit which gives store customers more purchasing power through flexible and transparent choices in how and when they pay. This second option is subject to consumer credit approval. So offering those payment options is good business. Did you know that 64% of consumers surveyed say they are more likely to make a purchase at a retailer that offers interest-free payment options. And 56% of consumers that responded agree that they prefer to pay a purchase back in installments rather than use a credit card. Well, this seems like a no-brainer to me. Clients can grow their sales and get paid up front with no additional risk or cost. All you need to do is download the PayPal Checkout extension on the Marketplace at WooCommerce.com. Just head on over, click marketplace and search for the PayPal Checkout. Suggesting that to your clients will certainly open up sales opportunities for them. Thanks for PayPal for being a community sponsor at Do the Woo. And now back the conversation. Mendel: Now, when we're talking about headless and we're talking about using GraphQL, just for, again, the benefit of the listeners, we're talking about creating apps, we're talking mobile phone apps. Geoff: The beauty to all of this is you can access REST or GraphQL from any device you can make a HTTP request from. This can be a phone. This can be a game app. This can be a game console. Mendel: Apple TV. Whatever. Geoff: Apple TV. Anything. You can make an app that will be supported from a WordPress site back-end using Wordpress-GraphQL, using GraphQL or REST. That point doesn't really matter. You'll just get a performance boost that is incomparable from using GraphQL. If GraphQL can do all that, why even use WordPress? Mendel: Now, I want to take it a step further, and we're going to tread into uncomfortable territory here, because I'm going to ask you, and I want your honest opinion on this one. Although you don't seem like a guy that would not give your honest opinion. I want to know why even use WordPress at that point then? Why not just roll your own, right? Geoff: Because I've done this before. Allow me to explain to you the problem of rolling your own versus using an already built community maintained application. Yeah, WordPress may seem unwieldy and different from, it might not even look like it's the top of the line, but WordPress is a Swiss Army Knife. If you need to get through the forest to do what you need to do, WordPress will get you there. You think about it, WordPress at its core is just a basic blogging site. All the plugins come in and add features and functionality that WordPress allows for, and you can create objects to shape whatever you want. The reason you would use WordPress is, if you go and try and make an API just from scratch you lose the validation at WordPress, you lose the possibility of the functionality that the plugins provide, because one of the things that WP-GraphQL and Woo-GraphQL and a lot of the plugins we've built, is we've tried to make it to work with as many plugins that simply want to add data to the scheme or manipulate the scheme. We've made it work with as many plugins as possible. Like right now we a plugin that works with CPTUI. So when you want to make custom post type, there's another extension you can use that will add those plugins, create it through CPTUI to the GraphQL APS scheme. Same thing with WP Tax and Meta Tax query. You can do complex queries for Tax Meta through the GraphQL API. We've made plugins that add specific features that would make it so even the reason you would use it is because all the support that WordPress provides out-of-the-box and respective in that same way, the support that both the REST API as well as the GraphQL API use will provide out-of-the-box. Your argument can be that this might be a bit much, or why even use it if you got to alter it this much? But look at the alternatives, because when you think about it, the setup for a WordPress back-end is as simple as installation, install a plugin, walk away. You have your back-end set up. If that is considered to be a bit much, at that point what is the point? Because typically if you were going to build a WordPress application or a WordPress site the traditional way, you'd do the same thing. You'd install, plugins, modify your themes. This almost no different, except that the process that you are doing to create the front-end just is different than creating a theme. It's really almost no different than modifying a WordPress website. You just need to do things a little differently at specific points. Bob:I'm not a developer, but I did design and build WordPress sites for many years, and even thinking back on the site I just redid, and how you just explained it to me, it's like, "Okay, I've got the knowledge and the power to build it up to a certain point, but till I need or have a requirement of a certain functionality that I don't want any more or any less and I want it to be quick, then that'd be the time I'd have somebody come in and take care of it using GraphQL. More on headless Geoff: Yeah, and to go back to your point too, the beauty of headless WordPress that it gives the capability of doing, you can start from design first, something you can't do through the traditional method. You can design your whole site the way you want it and then build it in HTML, and then bring in WordPress to back that front-end that you have created. That is something that you traditionally can't do with the WordPress application. And something that I was actually recently able to do recently and realize the side-by-side difference in being able to start from design first, not worry about WordPress at all until afterwards, and then go create it, as opposed to having to shape your design to what WordPress's base theme printouts are. That's something that you really can't do otherwise. Mendel: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. So I'm sitting here, I've written APIs, I've played with APIs, I've built sites using APIs, and one of the things that comes to mind when I think of WordPress is getting my head around all this fits together, right? So let's say you're building a website. I'm sure you've built a website with something with GraphQL. We don't need to get more complex than that. So what does the architecture look like when you're setting something like this up? And I'm talking like directory level. You have a WordPress installation. Your WordPress installation comes with a front-end, right? Geoff: Yeah. How to set it up so that you can consume GraphQL API coming from WordPress or WooCommerce Mendel: So how are you setting all of this up so that you can consume the GraphQL API coming from the WordPress or WooCommerce site? Geoff: Well, there's a multitude of ways you can do your WordPress front-end, and there's been several ways that are being implemented right now. As I'm sure you've heard of Gatsby. One of the big ways that a lot of Gatsby sites are doing because the speeds you get from the static site build is they will set their front-end up at a specific domain using LFI and then they will use Gatsby to build the site by querying for all of those pages and everything in their application to create those pages with the Gatsby code. That's one way of doing it. Then another way is, because you're not necessarily locked to the WordPress front-end, your domain, wherever you point it, that's your front-end, regardless of where WordPress is at. Mendel: We're putting the WordPress installation and all of the data maybe on a different server, a different domain, something like that, and we're just querying back and forth. How the GraphQL API and the REST API works Geoff: Let me explain really quickly how the GraphQL API and the REST API works. When the REST API's activated, or the GraphQL API's activated, they provide an end-point where wherever your WordPress site is hosted, slash, in the case of WordPress, WP, I think dash version two right now, JSON for whatever thing you want to grab, or in the case of GraphQL, Slash GraphQL, and then you send your request through either a POST request or a GIT request, which are variables, and you get back a response in the form of a JSON. You can make that request both service side and client side and it will respond to it. The beauty of being able to remake service side is the fact you can get SSR support for your applications, and then one of the advantages is you get to use Helmet, and you can combine Helmet and Yoast to spit out your research as SEO metadata. It's wonderful. That's a common thing that people have been doing recently with Next. If you're familiar with Next.js. They've been building static site front-ends using Helmet to process the header meta provided by Yoast in the header and using that for SEO coverage. Another way that you can do it, though the only person I've known that's actually done it is me, is you can actually use the PHP-V8 extension to process your JavaScript, and within a GraphQL, because you can shove your JavaScript application, your headless application, in a WordPress theme. That is actually the way I like to do it in all honesty, because I like the self-containment of WordPress, but you wouldn't be able to get SSR support. It's a JavaScript application. To get SSR support you could use the PHP-V8 engine to process the React beforehand and create an SSR spit out on the initial build in the service side request. And that can work perfectly fine. There are a number of ways you can create a headless application, both self-contained and it's broken out into different parts where you're front-end's at one point and your back-end's at another. Another thing is, if you change in the WordPress settings the current site address, whenever you try to navigate the site address it'll redirect you to wherever you put that at. You can put that on your front-end application, and then from that point anytime somebody tries to navigate to your back-end it'll redirect them to that front-end application, unless they send a post request to your GraphQL back-end, which will still be recognized. Mendel: That's pretty interesting. That's a fun little trick actually. I like that. Geoff: Don't do it during development, it will mess things up a little bit and you won't be able to make it up. But it will still react to POST requests and to GraphQL. So your front-end application can still send those requests. Another thing that you can do also is preview support. If you're using the classic editor currently Gutenberg will not let you do it. You can if you're editing a POST preview it in your front-end application with a few minor tweaks to filters and changes and stuff like that. It is very much possible. We've been trying to implement that and Jason's been adding more support for the draft posts that are created through the editor to help you display previous support. But headless, there's not too much you have to do extra in the way of the basic installation of your WordPress site, it's just how you set up your front-end. Separating data logic and display Mendel: And this goes to the whole idea of separating data code and display, right? Geoff: Yes. Mendel: Or sorry, data logic and display. And I think it's an important paradigm to look at, I think as you build more complex functionality and as you create more performance sites, because troubleshooting performance is really difficult when you're ... I'd be lying if I said I wasn't guilty of putting output in PHP, outputting it using PHP. Geoff: Oh no, I can tell you all the little tricks. There's var dump, WPS in JSON. There is absolutely nothing wrong with dumping stuff that way when you want to debug. In my opinion, use whatever tool necessary to dump when it comes to debugging. And in development with a lot of these APIs, I try to help with that also, helping people debug their solutions, because I'm a big believer in testing. I am a humongous believer in testing, because I hate having to go back and fix things. Everybody does. Even if you want to complain that you're doing it for a client, it'll get you more money, I care about my time. So when you want to make customizations to certain stuff and stuff like that, there are multiple ways you can debug your issues and troubleshoot when it comes to all the GraphQL extensions. Thanks to our sponsor WooCommerce You may be just starting your journey as a Woo Builder or well into your journey. Or perhaps you have WooCommerce talents that you want to bring to a team as you look to make a switch in your career. WooCommerce has several roles open that will likely fit your own goals of growth. You will be joining the larger Automattic team, a diverse and distributed group of individuals with a passion for WordPress, and yes, WooCommerce. If you want are looking for make that career pivot and love working from home, check out all their open positions over on our Job Listing at DotheWoo.io. Trust me. I know the company and a lot of the people. It's a smart move. Thanks to WooCommerce.com and their support as a community sponsor. Now let's head back to the show. Performance and themes Mendel: So I want to touch on performance, and then I want to give things back to Bob, because he's let me take over a little bit today. But I'm curious to know, forget the fact that you can make a more performant theme, okay? I'm talking about data retrieval. So is data retrieval more performant using GraphQL than it is using standard WordPress through a theme? Geoff: Through a theme? I'm going to say yes and no. It depends on the page specifically. That's why I'm going to say yes and no. It depends on the page being queried. WordPress-GraphQL is designed to cache specific requests and only query specific things when necessary, and resolve and N+1 problems where you would be querying individual things over and over again. WordPress-GraphQL goes through that, but the base design of a WordPress theme in those queries aren't polluting. Unlike REST where you will get data you might not need, that's pretty much never the case with the WordPress theme. They only are going to provide the data in the query that you need. Now, if you are doing a custom theme where you might create an extra loop in your theme, yeah, we're going to shit on you in performance when it comes to GraphQL. You're doing an extra query for no reason. Yeah, we're kill you in performance in that way. When you think about the traditional method, if you were to go and get the 2020 WordPress theme, we're not going to beat that in performance in GraphQL. Probably not. Unless, but here's the thing you also got to think about, there're images being loaded. It depends on the request itself. Matching that request, we could probably match the speed, we can probably beat the page on loading when it comes to the request, especially if it's something where you have SSR support. But out-of-the-box it's just going to match if you just have the 2020 theme or something like that. But a custom theme where there tends to be extra things added to your layout and your appearance and extra cores for different types of data, or if you might bring in ACF fields, your speed, there will be variations, and I'm almost positive GraphQL will beat you on that front. Mendel: And it is interesting you can bring in component pieces of data as you're painting the page. So you don't necessarily need to bring in a huge payload all at once, because you have the ability to cherry pick the data, right? WooGraphQL versus using WooCommerce REST Geoff: Not to toot my own horn, but using the WooGraphQL versus using WooCommerce REST, no matter what you are doing, WooGraphQL will beat it in speed. The basic product query grabs every piece of data on the product object every time. And there is a lot of information on those product objects. We're talking names, prices, sale prices, sale dates, things like that. You're not going to need that if all you want to do is showcase possibly the image, picture, sale price or price. You're going to need maybe 10 variables or 10 pieces of data related to the product, not all like 50 fields. So when you put it into perspective and look at what you're building performance-wise, GraphQL is always going to win. Performance-wise you're never going to grab anything that you don't need, so you're always going to win. WooCommerce Rest, you don't have a choice. You're going to get whatever the endpoint can provide you, and you're going to have to filter through that. One thing I've noticed is that with GraphQL we make multiple requests. We make a request at every component that we need the specific data for, instead of making one giant request and then building all the components from that data. Now, if you're looking at this from the React front-end, that means that somewhere you have another place where they're catching the data and sending it, and are forced to send it to whatever component needs it. While on the flip coin with the GraphQL, you're going to do requests and only get the data that you want at the level of that component. Cleaning up your code as well as cleaning up your performance. I believe a few years back it said that it was better to make multiple small requests than one large one, that somebody said that. And that's still true, as far as I know. Like no one came out and refuted that. Mendel: Well, you can probably also add a higher level of concurrency then too, right? Geoff: Yeah. Mendel: So you can be pulling price and you can be pulling description, and you can be pulling name all at the same time. Geoff: And one thing is GraphQL, and sequentially WooGraphQL, support batching. So batch requests and stuff like that, it's supported. It'll just take all those requests and run those on the spot and send them back as an array of JSON data that whatever thing you're using that sent out the batch request will process. Mendel: Got it. Geoff: So batching and stuff like that to speed up on the front-end is also supported. Bob: I find it fascinating, because I'm actually starting to learn more and more with our guests on here, and definitely I think this is something to keep on top of you think, Mendel? You think we should? Mendel: Yeah, it's the future. I don't think it's something to keep on top of, I think it's something that is going to be imperative to know in the next five, 10 years of building sites as people demand faster sites, more complex sites. The future of GraphQL Geoff: Yeah. I won't deny that I've seen some kinks that still need to be worked out in the process. Like with the Gatsby build a lot of people have been having issues, especially specifically with clients I've had where they have a lot of content. And every time you make a save to Set-Content it'll trigger a new build. So while all these features I will say are the future, the kinks in their use are still being worked out. So I don't believe there is a super hurry. And like I said, there's so much versatility in how you can make your front-end that I feel like a lot of people are still going to be, just for a long time, trying to work out what's the perfect way to create a front-end. I spoke to a client yesterday who told me with almost a single button click they can create a new store, and they can vastly change the appearance by just tweaking a styling theme sheet with variables of their CSS styling. There's been so many different ways to tackle the front-end, and it gives you so many options that I don't think ... That while I do agree with you, this is the future, I think there's no rush to learn it right away. There's going to be so much growing in this space that nothing is going to be finite in the way that it's laid out right now. Bob: Cool. Mendel: Makes sense. Bob: Well, I think that's a good way to wrap things up. Mendel, what do you think? Mendel: Yeah. I've really enjoyed talking APIs and GraphQL and enjoyed talking to Geoff even more. Geoff: Oh, thank you, sir. Mendel: And I guess with that, I might as well just help us close out the show. Before I do that I just want to mention that WooCommerce, it's awesome and also happens to be a sponsor of this podcast. So if you haven't joined the WooCommerce Slack, I know I mentioned it a couple weeks ago, there's a channel for anything, any question that you might have about WooCommerce. Now, pro-tip, don't post the same question in every single channel on the WooCommerce Slack. But if you have a question go and look through the channels and figure where it fits and ask that question, because there are a lot of helpful people there that are interested in helping you figure out the answers. Geoff: And avoid using the channel tag and the header tag. Mendel: That's right. And the second thing I would say is if you have the PayPal plugin installed on your website and you installed that maybe a year ago or two years ago and you've been updating it like a pro, remove it and put the new PayPal plugin on your website. The one that you can download, surprisingly, at WooCommerce on the WooCommerce website. And use that plugin, because when you enable it, first of all, it's way easier to connect than the old way, but the second thing is you can use this for Pay in 4, which is really cool, especially as the holidays are coming up and people are going to want to buy things for their loved ones and maybe they don't have all the cash on hand right now, but they will in the next month or something like that. It allows people to pay in four payments, which is just pretty cool. And there's no risk to you. Super easy to set up. And they're a sponsor, by the way. I forgot to mention that. They sponsor this podcast. I don't want to leave that out. So thank you to PayPal and WooCommerce. I'm done gushing all over them. Where to find Greg Tell us, Geoff, where can people connect with you if they want to say, "Hey", or they have a question? Geoff: Twitter I guess, @kidunot89.com. Though I rarely talk. I'm more of a listener, and I respond to questions. You will find me all over GitHub, all over Repos making commits and reviews and whatnot, again, at that same name, @kidunot89. And on the Slack channels on WooCommerce Slack I am there. You'll find me at Geoff Taylor, although I think it's @kidunot89 again. On WooCommerce Slack as well as the WPGraphQL Slack and several other Slack channels, GitHub or Twitter. You can find me at kidunot89. Mendel: I appreciate so much your knowledge and you being on the show today. Geoff: Thanks. Mendel: And I appreciate your contributions to the community, because that's what makes things better, that's what helps us all upgrade our technology, our skills and the way we help clients and ourselves. Greg says to contribute and shares the value he has found Geoff: And also on that same coin, I also think people should contribute. Just like you said, with the giving back to the community. A lot of people just think about Open-Source and see it as you're giving away something for free. It is a great way to refine your skillset. As much as people will like to say that a commercial product is better or something because somebody's being paid to do it, it's not going to beat a community of people that are just, "Hey, we're doing it for fun, but we're bringing our skillset to it." And contributing can easily help you refine as a developer as well as improve in just communication on projects and everything. I contribute. I'm trying to encourage others to contribute, and I think it's made me a better developer. I think it can make anybody a better developer. Mendel: Cool. Yeah. Contribute, everybody. You heard it here first. Geoff does it, and if Geoff does it you should do it. That's all for this information-packed week. If you're enjoying this podcast please, please, please consider dropping a review over on Apple Podcasts. It would help us out. It'd help Bob out. It would help the community out. All those things. So go ahead and leave a review, and we'll see you next week. Scroll back to top Sign up to receive email updates Enter your name and email address below and I'll send you periodic updates about the podcast. powered by

Thanks to our community sponsors Earlier this year Dave Lockie and his company, Pragmatic, merged with Jimmy Rosén at Angry Creative. Their work with WooCommerce was going to focus on client support and maintenance. But that is only part of the conversation. When you get a couple of agency owners from the WordPress space who have been around for a while, you may be surprised at what a deeper dive into WooCommerce, WordPress and Open Source can look like. Trust me. There is a lot to unpack in this episode. A Chat with Dave and Jimmy In episode 79, Mendel and I talk with Dave and Jimmy about: Their separate journeys to WordPress and WooCommerce with Jimmy starting in his dorm and Dave looking at a way to make a living to save up for his wedding.What they have seen as big changes in the industry, how shops are built and the ways consumer interact— and a look into the future. Dave, a futurist, especially expounds on this one.How they met, what brought them to merge and how it ties into their common vision for the future.The decision to build up the strength of WooCommerce support and maintenance for their clients as they merged.What each values when it comes to contributing to the community beyond working on core. As I mentioned, this goes deep. We filled 50 minutes of conversation with our guests and the show notes only touch the surface. It’s worth a listen if you run a business in the WordPress or WooCommerce space. Connect with Jimmy and Dave Email Jimmy at jimmy@angrycreative.seDave on Twitter at @divydovyEmail Dave at d@pragmatic.agencyPragmaticAngry Creative Download the PayPal extension on the WooCommerce marketplace to offer buy now, pay later options. Start your next career in WooCommerce at WooCommerce. The Conversation Transcript Email Download New Tab Mendel: Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to episode 79 of Do the Woo. I'm here with BobWP, the famous Bob, and a couple guests, which I'm really excited to talk to you. But before we get into it I want to see how you're doing, Bob. Bob: Hey, I'm doing good. Mendel: Yeah? Is it getting cold over there in Seattle? Bob: Actually since we're on the ocean we're a few degrees warmer, but we've been getting down here. I think we got down in the 30s actually a couple days ago. So it's been a bit brisk. But I'm good with it. Mendel: We're that cold too. I went out for a walk this morning and I walked back inside. Then I was typing and I noticed my fingers, they went slower than normal. So that's how I gauge the temperature outside. Bob: I gauge it by the wind here. Mendel: Awesome. Well, before we get into the show I just want to thank our sponsors today. We've got WooCommerce.com. Now, Bob, I don't know what you're doing on the last Thursday of each month at around 18:00 UTC. It's super specific, but it's important, because you don't want to miss the monthly community chat on the WooCommerce core Slack channel. It's the last Thursday of each month at 18:00 UTC and it's a great way to hear the latest updates from the Woo Team, or the WooCommerce Team. We also want to thank PayPal, who's a sponsor. Hey, the holiday's coming up and there's this cool new thing, maybe it's new, I don't know, new to me, that PayPal's doing, which is called Pay in 4. So you can have your clients pay in four installments, giving your customers another option for their purchasing power during the holiday season. So go visit WooCommerce.com. Go check out PayPal's Pay in 4. Make sure and check out the core Slack channel chat. It's fun. It's cool. You'll learn a lot. And with that I think we'll get into it. Meet Jimmy and Dave So we have with us Jimmy and Dave. Now, these two guys, these are simple names, okay? They are simple names, but they are not simple people, because they have a lot to share with us. You can't see it, but they're both saying, "Ah, I don't know. We might be." Anyway. I would love for each of you to introduce yourself. This is kind of a rare thing where we have two guests on the show at the same time, and you're going to see how their lives have kind of weaved themselves together. Maybe they didn't want them to, but they did. So, Jimmy, Dave, welcome to the show. Jimmy, you want to start out and introduce yourself? Jimmy: Yes. Of course. First of all, thank you for having us. Great pleasure. I am Jimmy Rosen and I'm the CEO and Founder of a company called Angry Creative, and we are a, well, WooCommerce and WordPress Specialist originally based at least in Sweden. Mendel: Excellent. Well, nice to have you, Jimmy. And we're going to go more in-depth with you in a second. Dave, introduce yourself. You're newly Dave. You used to be David, but now you're Dave. Dave: I like to keep things fluid. Mendel: I like it. Dave: So I'm Dave Lockie, or David Lockie, depending on the day apparently. I'm Founder and CEO of Pragmatic. We're a U.K. based agency, specialist in WordPress. And I'll leave the story there for now. Mendel: Excellent. Well, welcome to the show, you two. Bob. Bob: Yes. Mendel: I know you have a pressing question for these two, and it's a question I've heard you ask many times before. But I'm going to step out of the way and let you ask this question. The Journey to WordPress and WooCommerce Bob: Okay, cool. Well, we'll head back to Jimmy. And essentially what we want to hear is a little bit of your journey, it can even be to WordPress, but then how you ended up getting involved with WooCommerce. Jimmy: All right. Like for me personally? So I found, kind of by mistake, WordPress when I was in my dorm room. This was like 05, 06, something like that. It was really early on, very early on. It was a simple enough CMS that I could hack basically with my, well, novice PHP skills I guess. I did that and I did all kinds of other freelance gigs. But in 06, 07, I started only doing websites as my main freelance gig. This was like during my university studies. So it wasn't full-time. Then in 09 I graduated and had to become an adult real fast more or less. I had to get myself a job, and that during kind of a similar situation to now, during a raging depression in the economy. So that was fun. But I stuck to it, and in 2011 I did my first hire. From there I've been working hard to make this a great firm since then. Bob: So how did you get into the Woo space? Did it just come naturally, or did you segue into it because you wanted to get into the eCommerce part of things, or how did that play out? Jimmy: To be honest, first off, in the beginning it was simple websites and then more advanced CMS websites. But I think it was in, what was the year? It was pretty early on that we did our first WooCommerce site. It was 2013 I think. We did a subscription service, but most of our gigs were WordPress only. But then that kind of snowballed and we found out that, well, the clients have a lot higher purchasing power and definitely they stick with you. In the CMS space its kind of a race to the bottom, if you're a tech firm at least. You get less and less of the gigs where you can put lots and lots of hours into just perfecting it. The space for that is really crowded. So it just came natural. Like our WooCommerce clients, they really need skilled people to help them grow and to keep their main business, while being their website, alive and working and optimized and all of that. From there just all of a sudden we more or less only had WooCommerce clients, and a bunch of really, well, larger CMS clients for like multinational companies. But other than that, that's a kind of the client in itself. But the rest of them, more or less WooCommerce. In a sense a CMS site, it helps you trade in terms of what it gives the client, it's those leads basically. But eCommerce gives you a lot more than that. So it helps you trade a lot better. And since it's open-source you can modify it. We have clients selling everything from funerals to phone gadgets to whatever. It's a big space and with the power of open-source you can sell anything and create any kind of custom checkout flow, more or less, making you sell anything in a nice way to the end clients. Bob: How about you, Dave? How did you get into this? Dave: So I guess it's pretty similar to Jimmy. I was already graduated and working on some startups with some friends out of university, working on promoting clean tech, fuel cells, hydrogen, that kind of cool stuff. But way back before there was any money in it, which takes a while to figure out. But along the way I learned from some really good developers how to do some basic coding. This was all in the classic ASP days. Then was getting married and I needed to save a bit of money up for buying wedding rings and stuff, because we were doing a startup. So we were all pretty poor. I remember, I'd done a couple of just like from-scratch HTML sites, and then, you know how it is, you suddenly need to go back and just change something in the header, or just change something in footer and you suddenly had to add in like nine different text files. I was like, "This is stupid. There's got to be a way to template this stuff." And sadly there wasn't a good way to do HTML templating. So I got down the route where I had to find the CMS, and up until last week in fact, I've always been like a Windows guy, and basically WordPress was the only CMS I could get running. WordPress is also very good for what I call Brute Force Coding, because you can just like be a monkey with a typewriter and eventually it'll work. PHP's very forgiving and very accessible. So I started making some websites for friends and family, doing that. Eventually I realized I could make more money doing that than I could in my day job. So long story short, I quit that and started freelancing full-time, got super busy. I think it was probably when we were like a micro business, like maybe two or three people, and the golden rule was always like, "Never do eCommerce with WordPress. You do pretty much anything else, but just never touch eCommerce." Then Jigoshop came along, and Jigoshop was the first version of eCommerce for WordPress that just kind of made sense. It wasn't like totally forced into WordPress, it felt like a natural kind of fit in lots of different ways. So I think we even did like one or two projects with Jigoshop. I was always like a big child themer. That was like my WordPress way. I think I started with thematic, and I must've built like 50 different sites with thematic. Then I started using a WooThemes Canvas. So I was already super familiar with Woo and I knew their code quality was really good and their support was good as well. And I remember meeting the team for the first time in Leiden. I think that was the first WordCamp Europe. The team were really cool as well. So we just kind of naturally fell into using WooCommerce when we had eCommerce requirements come through. We never seem to get the nice easy projects, the, "I just want to sell caps, or T-shirts", and they're like, "It's small, medium and large." We'd get like the, "I want to build a personalizable book where I want people to be able to upload images and write their own thing." So we always used to get these insanely complex WooCommerce projects. Like we pretty much built Airbnb with WooCommerce at one point. I think we probably only charged about 20 grand for it as well. So ever since we've used WooCommerce as one of our trusted stable of plugins, and we've done all kinds of exotic things for clients large and small. So it's been a really good part of our journey. Although, it hasn't been as cool as it has been to Jimmy until recently. Thanks to our sponsor WooCommerce You may be just starting your journey as a Woo Builder or well into your journey. Or perhaps you have WooCommerce talents that you want to bring to a team as you look to make a switch in your career. WooCommerce has several roles open that will likely fit your own goals of growth. You will be joining the larger Automattic team, a diverse and distributed group of individuals with a passion for WordPress, and yes, WooCommerce. If you want are looking for make that career pivot and love working from home, check out all their open positions over on our Job Listing at DotheWoo.io. Trust me. I know the company and a lot of the people. It's a smart move. Thanks to WooCommerce.com and their support as a community sponsor. Now let's head back to the show. What’s going on now and in the future Mendel: So I want to go back to those Jigoshop days. If we can think about what eCommerce was like then and what eCommerce is like now, and where eCommerce is going in 20 years. Now, I know as a fact that Dave is a futurist I think in a way. I don't know about Jimmy, but if Jimmy and Dave are buddies then I'm guessing that Jimmy probably has some of that in him somewhere. But, Dave, we can start with you, and where have things been and how have things changed? What have you noticed as far as big changes in the industry and the way shops are put together and the way consumers interact with shops, and then maybe where you think things are going to end up? Dave: So I'm going to zoom out a little bit first, and then I'll zoom to the future. So going back. Trade's basically the foundation of humanity as we know it. The necessity and attraction of commerce is what's allowed people to overcome the fears of different groups, different countries, different tribes, whatever it is, to work together and create almost unimaginable value. Even the Roman emperors would blush at what people have access to these days, even the most modest household. And more than anything trade is what stitches together human society. It creates mutual interests, and that makes corporation and trust overpower conflict and fear. And the need for that, I'm sure, is never clearer than at the moment. So today eCommerce is an incredibly important part of global trade. It allows anyone to sell anything to anyone else at any time. So I believe this kind of power and freedom is vital for our continuing mutual prosperity. That trade is one of the reasons that there is much less war now, because it's just not in each other's and different nations' interests to go to war, because they have too many vested trade interests. And open-source is a really important part of that. It's vital to oppose this increasing centralization of power and protect individual freedoms in this sort of ever more connected world. That's why we love WooCommerce. It's the most powerful, the most popular open-source eCommerce platform. And by supporting every client to achieve success with WooCommerce, we are contributing to global prosperity and harmony, and I really believe that. It's nothing short that. As to where eCommerce is going, I think there's some really interesting macro trends. One, which I think is super powerful is the whole kind of No-Code movement. There's just some really incredible tools coming out with those, Airtable, or Workflow, or Bubble. We really must pay attention in the WordPress space to what's happening now, because we're definitely losing deals to No-Code, and these aren't necessarily small mom-and-pop store deals. Obviously Shopify's been super successful. But some of these, they're kind of enterprise gigs where actually they can do everything they need to with Webflow. So No-Code's really important as a trend. I think ALA, it's just like this massive gaping void of different technologies and potential impacts, both good and bad, on eCommerce, but I think out of that you start to see things like personalization, you start to see things like integration with additive manufacturing, 4D printing, so that it's not so much a case of, "What have you got to sell other people?", but, "Can you build what other people want? Can somebody come to their site and tell you what they want and you can make it for them?" So no code, AI, and I'd say personalization's sort of a pretty big micro trend within that as well. Because you're right, Mendel, I love dreaming about where things are going, and before I ramble on too long I'll hand it over to the man. Mendel: So we can probably dissect every sentence of that and turn it into its own essay, because there's a lot there. There's a lot packed into those statements. So thanks for that, Dave. What about you, Jimmy? Jimmy: Well, obviously, especially with the coronavirus, I think we've taken a huge leap into digitalization for what was bound to happen, had to happen real fast, and everyone is changing the way they do business basically. These days we're getting people at hardware shops, "We have to do eCommerce, because otherwise we can't manage." And basically we have kind of a productized version of WordPress, and that's basically like a theme, a set of plugins and a concept of how to do the Woo I guess, that we sell as a fixed price starter project, and we ship that off to many of the simpler clients. And we can just sell that, boom, fixed price, "Here we go." But building on top of that, we obviously do customizations, and that's our main business, doing customizations. What's happening now is that everyone is having to question their business model, and it's not only the dreamers that Dave built a 20K Airbnb for. Sorry to say it, but, Dave, you got hustled. Dave: That's happened a lot to me. Don't worry. Jimmy: It is what it is, yeah? Dave: But to be fair, that client, although we didn't make a great profit out of that project, if any, I recently read an article in like a mainstream newspaper about her and her business is a success and we built the first version of that. So whether or not there was much profit in that project, it created immense value for her and in turn everyone else. I always find that, no matter how painful a project is, as long as you get it past the post then you're creating value, and that's what keeps me in the game I think. Jimmy: Yeah, man, that's good fun. And just that kind of project is what we're seeing popping up everywhere. So how can we deliver value to our clients? And small mom-and-pop stores, they can't compete with the really big businesses. They have to have business models that lift other things than just price. Then can they use Shopify? Well, maybe not. Then they have to customize, and how can they do that with Shopify? Well, they can't. So Open-source, boom. There you go. So there's been an immense increase in the amount of clients that are turning to Open-source, because they can't go on proprietary platforms. Obviously like everyone is making a buck here, especially the big platforms that ship standardized stuff, but we in the Open-source community, like customization is our bread-and-butter. We don't charge for licenses. We charge for customization. If you can't be on a super standardized product, it's a nice thing to take a standardized product and customize it, and that's what we do. The move to a partnership Mendel: So, Jimmy, the two of you made the decision earlier this year to do business with each other, to combine forces and to create a stronger agency experience I'm guessing by merging your two agencies. And the name of the two agencies, Pragmatic and Angry what? Jimmy: Angry Creative. Mendel: Angry Creative, okay. So Angry Creative and Pragmatic, which these are kind of also oddly opposing ideas. Anyway. So I'm curious, and then I'll give it back to Bob to ask some more questions, but I'm curious how the two of you met, and then clearly you have some common vision for the future and some common tread on your tires from the past. But you met. How did that happen, and then how did you eventually come to combine forces? Jimmy: I think we met at some WordCamp. It was the usual after party thing I guess. There might have been a stiff drink or two involved, might have. But we're never late to the day after when the second day of work happens. We're never late. Just to be clear. That does not happen to us. We're there eight sharp, boom, no matter what happened the day before. Anyway. That's basically it. Then Dave invited me to a group of like-minded individuals. So it was basically a group of WordPress entrepreneurs where we exchange ideas and, "What works for you?", and, "What do you feel about this?" It's been a really great group. Obviously this year we haven't really had the opportunity to meet. But that's where our friendship was evolved I'd say. Dave: Yeah, that's definitely my recollection too. Then to pick up the story, the lockdown threw a lot of challenges in a lot of different ways to a lot of businesses, and it became pretty clear to me that this was a longterm thing and that eCommerce was really a very sensible place to be. With almost all other avenues of trade closed, eCommerce just seemed like the obvious place to start paddling towards that, plus some other things like LMS, which Angry Creative already did. So I think basically how it happened was we had a client come in, like a client inquiry, and they're like, "We've got this high volume eCommerce site, it keeps going down", and I knew that. So Jimmy's kind of underplaying the productization that they've done, and it's really sophisticated down to an infrastructure level. So it's a very integrated product. And we got to the point a couple years ago where if it was like scaling eCommerce we would always give that lead over to Angry, because they could do a better job, and I can't take somebody's money if I think we're going to do a second rate job. So I basically phoned Jimmy and I was like, "Look, I've got a lead for you." He's like, "Well hey, you should just sell your business to me." I was like, "Well, actually maybe there's something in that." So we started talking and basically figured out that together we could solve a lot of our combined visions as well as accelerate the journey of our focus away from the more volatile CMS project space to the far more stable and fertile, definitely in the current climate, WooCommerce retainer and sort of itched the improvement space. So it just seemed like the right thing to do. Maybe it would've happened eventually anyway, but coronavirus is definitely an accelerant there. Focusing on support and maintenance Bob: So that kind of involved the whole thing that you had mentioned in the press release when you first announced this, that you were moving in the direction of support and maintenance? Then that probably wasn't just WooCommerce, that's probably WordPress and WooCommerce. Was the real motive behind it, so you could expand or move in that direction, and were you doing much of that, either one of you, before that, or how did that evolve where you said, "Okay, this is the direction we're moving in"? Dave, why don't you take that? Dave: Because Jimmy was already there, right? So Jimmy didn't have to move, he just had to plan to help us move very quickly to what they were already doing. So I'd say that the overlap, the Venn diagram, I love Venn diagrams, what we did as businesses was pretty much 100% overlapped, but it was about the waiting. So where we were kind of 80% project-based and 80% CMS-based, Angry were almost the opposite. They were more like 80% WooCommerce, almost 80% retainer. And when we look at the impact of COVID and lockdown we see, "All right. If we ignore some sectors got absolutely hammered, then project losses versus retainer losses were much worse in terms of pipeline and projects being put on pause." So it was a much more fragile sort of commercial outlook. Plus WooCommerce being a sort of growth space. I'd like to think that everything's around the Pragmatic way of doing things, which means that together we are building a business which is different together, but in terms of focus and business model we're paddling far more over to Angry's way of doing things than they're coming this way. Thanks to our sponsor PayPal. In time for the holiday season PayPal has launched a new pay later option called Pay in 4. This mean that your clients can offer their customers the option to purchase over time in 4 interest-free payment. This feature is one of two option from PayPal for pay later with the other being PayPal Credit which gives store customers more purchasing power through flexible and transparent choices in how and when they pay. This second option is subject to consumer credit approval. So offering those payment options is good business. Did you know that 64% of consumers surveyed say they are more likely to make a purchase at a retailer that offers interest-free payment options. And 56% of consumers that responded agree that they prefer to pay a purchase back in installments rather than use a credit card. Well, this seems like a no-brainer to me. Clients can grow their sales and get paid up front with no additional risk or cost. All you need to do is download the PayPal Checkout extension on the Marketplace at WooCommerce.com. Just head on over, click marketplace and search for the PayPal Checkout. Suggesting that to your clients will certainly open up sales opportunities for them. Thanks for PayPal for being a community sponsor at Do the Woo. And now back the conversation. Bob: Anything to add there, Jimmy? Jimmy: We, over the years, haven't had a very data-driven way of doing, well, business I guess. We've set up a business that we're very keen to improve ourself and we're very good at measuring things internally. That means we can see the value optimization, not just with our clients, but also within ourselves. So that's why over the years we've moved towards a model that looks like this. If you do a CMS-type build, only the top tier clients, they will let you take the support, let you do that, do the maintenance and have a nice operation going on. But most of these gigs, you go in and you do the job and then like, "Okay. Thank you. Bye. Maybe we'll see each other again." What can I say? It's like being young and hooking up with people in a bar basically, and what we're doing with WooCommerce is more like growing up, having a steady relationship where you have a true relationship. So we help them grow, we help out with their maintenance, because a CMS-type client will be like, "Yeah, whatever. If the site breaks, it breaks. I don't care that much, and it's a quick fix anyway", basically. You can make a good business there, but that has to be mainly automated. You have to be like ManageWP or have something like that in order for that to be a valid business model. But for eCommerce you have to have that stability that you as a business vendor, you know that you can call us 24/7 and if your site has a problem we'll have people working on it 24/7, 365 days a week. So you can count on just pushing that traffic through your site, and that's the kind of responsibility you need from a partner if you're pushing business down an eCommerce funnel. We had huge publishers that we work with, and they were like, "It doesn't really matter if the site goes down. As long as the content is still there an hour from now. Eh, stuff happens." But for an eCommerce vendor, they measure that downtime in minutes and loss-per-minute more or less. So for them it's really important to have that. Open-source has a problem, and that's basically, "Who's responsible?" So from a client perspective, you are given a lot of free stuff. You get free updates, free features and all of this free stuff, and you see just stuff are pouring in. But like, "Who's responsible for that really?" That's you as a client. There's no one else responsible. You can blame your agency as much as you want for like, "Oh, it should be you that ...". That's why a lot of agencies, they do the project and then they run, because they don't want to end up in that situation where they have to take on that responsibility. So early one we figured out like, "Hey, let's be that kind of business. Let's solve that problem in Open-source. Let's put a fee on like a monthly cost, and no matter what we'll cover it. If there're crazy bugs, we'll cover it. If there's this-and-that, we'll cover it." That way, sure, it's a premium service, but if that gives us also incentive to like if there's a crazy bug in the core, we actually have the budget to fix it. We like to call it Sustainable Open-source, because we actually take money from our clients that we can use to help support the Open-source industry. And sometimes we do. We'll help fix a couple of really serious things in WooCommerce, and a lot of the times it's working with plugin authors, and that can be a bit harder though. Contributing beyond core Mendel: So you've built sustainable businesses that contribute back to the ecosystem when it makes sense. You've worked your butts off to both make great agencies yourselves. It sounds like you've collaborated with other like-minded agencies, people that have been coming up, people that are more experienced than you and people that are in your same lifecycle. And now you're collaborating together, and it sounds like the future is extremely profitable and bright for this joint venture. It seems like you have it all, and I guess my next question is, what can people do, agencies like you, or organizations in general in the Open-source world, what can they do to give back? Specifically I'm thinking about Grant for the Web, right? But there are other places that people can help to contribute and give things back when they finally reach that level of success where they're comfortable, but they still have interesting challenges that don't keep them up at night because they need to buy their next loaf of bread, but they keep them up at night because they enjoy the challenge, and there's something interesting there. So what is there on the web that can help contribute back to Open-source more than just core contribution? And not just. Core contribution is a big deal, right? But what do you think, Dave? Dave: So I'm going to come back to Grant for the Web if we get time, because it's super interesting. I'll tell you one of the things that really is on my mind a lot at the moment is helping to create opportunities for people, supporting people to learn a trade and to make sure that those opportunities are open to people from all sorts of different backgrounds. And we do a lot of work in ensuring that they're an equal opportunities employer, especially from a newer divestee perspective. I think one of the things that I love about the WordPress space is that it's actually really a very inclusive community, but there have been some sort of recent notable exceptions to that. But I think in general it's an incredible global community and everyone, whether they're young or old, whatever color they are, whatever background they're from, it feels like much more of a meritocracy than many of the places that I see around the world. In a lot of ways I go back to the WordCamp Europe in Seville where the feeling was like the values that have helped us build WordPress and WooCommerce as a community, "What else can we do with this? How can we take these things out into the world and help make the world a better place?" And I do think that our community is very special in that way. So I guess we focus a lot on that, right? I'm lucky that I get to spend a lot of time thinking about the future and how that's going to impact us and our clients in our community, and I hope they're giving back some of that as a contribution personally. But I think probably the most important thing we do is, outside of supporting our clients, is creating opportunities for people to have interesting rewarding valuable careers where they can help other people, as well as contribute to this Open-source project, which is a legacy of us all to future generations. Then if you think about it, there aren't that many things in life where you can do that for the greater good of people. Mendel: Cool. What do you think, Jimmy? Jimmy: First off, I'd say what's most easy is being engaged in events, meeting other people, creating interest for what we do. I'd say that's a first, and that's pretty easy. You just show up in one form or another. Just online or not, whatever. You just show up. Showing up, that's the first step. But from a larger perspective, obviously it's having that sustainability built into your business model, right? Meaning that actually not taking all of this for granted. So I live in a small town called Norrkoping in Sweden, and like 10 years ago there were basically no other firms doing WordPress. It was only me from my dorm room basically. So that was it. That was the WordPress community in this town, period. But what happened over a couple years there was that WordPress gained traction. Actually I started having meetups and then WordCamps locally. Then one-by-one the other bureaus, they just switched from their home-coded proprietary CMSs. Even the companies that only engage in proprietary CMSs started up a WordPress section. It just exploded everywhere. Then all of a sudden there were 150 people locally on my events. I was like, "What? It was only me, and I was alone in my dorm room. How did this happen?" So just engaging and speaking out on like how things should be done. Obviously all of these firms now, they are part of the WordPress community, but they're not fully engaged in it, because they're not at that point yet. You have to make a commitment to being a sustainable Open-source business in order for actually helping Open-source. And you can do it in several ways, but I think what's most important as an entrepreneur is actually having that sustainability in your business to actually seeing that. There's a lot of people doing this, and we shouldn't only hope for people to give you free updates, we should actually have them on payroll to do those updates. That's what makes sense, and that would create sustainability in the long run. I think more companies need to do that, first of all, because it's the right thing to do. Second, in the long run, A, you'll have better people, and B, you'll have a better product and everyone will benefit. But also if you want to stick to doing WordPress then you kind of have to, because when you're a big enough firm you have to start pushing that time into like pushing the product onto where you want it to go. and certainly it will be hard for a business of roughly 70, that's where we are now, to push that to make as big a dent as maybe automatic, obviously. But we're 1000s and 1000s of people working with this, and if everyone would build into their business model we would also have a business standard basically. Like 10 years ago no one did maintenance over here. Now everyone in the Swedish scene sells maintenance. Everyone does that. We were probably the first who did that, and we've been very open with how we do it and how much it costs roughly. It's all on our website. I can go to any competitor and just check out like, yeah, that's basically my pricing there that they just copied and put on their site, but they're free to do that, because that creates a business standard, and if we all had that standard and all think like, "Okay, let's have a sustainable Open-source business. So this is what we charge usually, and we will make a commitment to actually ... If we find a problem in one of the plugins that we use for like our 200 websites, whatever, then we'll commit to actually pushing a fix upstream." That's how businesses should be designed, and if I can help other businesses be designed like that, that's great, because I will benefit, they will benefit, and our community will benefit, because it will become a standard. And we need standards, because as a community we're fractured. Some people do this, some people do that, and Open-source get a lot of shit from like the larger firms saying that basically, "These guys aren't serious. Who can be serious with Open-source?" And if they have huge funds they can like, "Yeah, whatever. We'll just go with this super proprietary stuff, because they are professionals and these Open-source people are not." So if we have a common business standard and we take that responsibility and we help the community, it will help our businesses and it will also help everyone pitch to clients that Open-source is big business, Open-source is the real deal, and we can do really great stuff. You don't have to use these proprietary products. Bob: Well, Mendel, I'd say that we have shows that have gold nuggets and we have shows that are a freaking goldmine. So I think we kind of hit the latter here with this one. Wow. A lot of stuff to digest, and a lot of great information. In fact, I'm going to spend some time on the transcript just taking in more of this. Of course, I won't hear those wonderful accents, but I can listen to it as well. Well, I'm going to quickly thank our sponsors one more time before we shoot out of here. WooCommerce.com, as Mendel mentioned. Check out the community chat the last Thursday of every month. I believe it was at 18:00 UTC. And do check out PayPal's Pay in 4, a great way to spread out four payments over every other week. And come holiday time you may need that to budget in for those few extra gifts. So check them both out. Jimmy, let's start with you. Where can people connect with you on the web? Connect with Jimmy and Dave Jimmy: You can email me at jimmy@angercreative.SE, and that's my main email. And I'm a very private person, so I'm not really on social media. Dave: I'm more open. I'm @DivyDovy. D-I-V-Y-D-O-V-Y, for reasons lost to the mists of time. Mainly on Twitter. Also on Instagram. If you want to talk work then basically Twitter or D@Pragmatic.agency. Always super happy to hear from anyone and keep the conversation going. So look forward to hearing from you. And, Bob, Mendel, thank you so much for having us, guys. Thanks for doing this podcast and keeping the good word of the Woo out in the world. Jimmy: Thank you for having us, it's been great. Bob: All right. Well, let's call it a wrap then, and we are out of here, you can check this out on your favorite pod app. And until next week, Do the Woo. Scroll back to top Sign up to receive email updates Enter your name and email address below and I'll send you periodic updates about the podcast. powered by

Closed captions available. Thanks to our community sponsors Two weeks ago, the virtual conference WooSesh shared two days of invaluable learning for WooCommerce builders. To kick it off, there was a presentation from WooCommerce, aptly named, State of the Woo. To introduce the new addition to the Do the Woo podcast, Woo Perspectives, I asked my co-hosts Brad Williams, Jonathan Wold and Mendel Kurland to join me for this introspective chat. Unlike the Thursday episodes of Do the Woo, every other Tuesday, Woo Perspectives brings thought-provoking conversations around WooCommerce and its ecosystem. Of course, one of my co-hosts, Mendel, had to throw in an extra curveball at the beginning and end with his own topic. The first was the fact that WooSesh was only available post-event behind a paywall. And the second, totally unrelated, was about inventory and WooCommerce. But as a co-host, I let him get away with it this time What We Talked About First off, Mendel brought up a couple of things we wanted to talk about: WooSesh and post-event access to the videos.The diversity of the Automattic team on the State of the Woo. I shared three audio snippets for my guests to give their own thoughts on. Allen Smith, Developer Advocate shared the results of a survey that gave us a clearer picture of who a WooCommerce developer is.Elizabeth Pizzuti talks about what is coming to the WooCommerce home screen for vendors and their own onboarding for site owners.Alana Weinstein dives into the marketplace and improvements for vendors there. And to close it out, Mendel brought up a final discussion around the current state of inventory and expense management for inventory in WooCommerce. The State of the Woo on YouTube If you would like to see the State of the Woo from WooSesh, you can watch it on YouTube here. Get All the Videos Plus More for 60% Off You can get access to all the WooSesh videos as well as all the other great content on WPSessions plus get 60% off using the coupon code: DOTHEWOO here. Download the PayPal extension on the WooCommerce marketplace to offer buy now, pay later options. Start your next career in WooCommerce at WooCommerce. The Conversation Transcript Email Download New Tab Hey, everybody. BobWP here. You are maybe, or maybe you're not looking at us. This is a new perspective on "Do the Woo Podcast," where I bring in two to three people that are a lot smarter than me and... well, you know, there's always those special cases. But most of the time, I bring in two to three people that are a lot smarter than me and we just talk about two or three topics in the Woo space. I'm simply here to get them talking. You won't hear me talk a lot, except at the beginning and end. Yeah, it's just get their insights or perspectives. Just kind of go from it. And I'm going to... we're going to actually go around a particular subject area this time, which I'm going to dive into as soon as I thank our sponsors. WooCommerce.com, if you're looking for, you know, a career in WooCommerce, you wanna use all your Woo talents. Go to DoTheWoo.io, just click on Jobs and there's actually three very cool jobs there right now, so. We'll be building that out, there'll be more people, more agencies, more people advertising in that, putting up job listings so check that out. And PayPal, that is our newest sponsor. They just recently were on the podcast last week and might want to listen in. They have the Pay in 4 for excellent... Well, this is almost a nobrainer and Brad, who's here, he said that actually on Twitter today. What it allows you to do as a merchant or your clients if you're a builder, is to have people break up their purchase in four payments. Four equal payments every two weeks. No interest, no risk on you as a merchant, no risk on you as a builder. Suggesting that your client do this. PayPal takes all the risk so it's a pretty sweet deal. So check that out. You can go to Paypal.com, look for Pay In Four. We are going to move right along. Well, I'm going to first, I'm going to have my esteemed guests, which you know they're esteemed in a sense that they're also voices you're very familiar with, my cohost. With that, I kick off "Woo Perspectives" with my cohost and I'm gonna have them go around do a quick intro just because some of you may still not know them. Or at least, now you can, if you're watching the video, tie a face with a name. Brad, why don't you start? Sure. I am Brad Williams, the original cohost of "Do the Woo." Just remember that when you hear from these other guys after me. During the day, I am the CEO and cofounder of Web Dev Studios, WordPress design and development agency. So we have a lot of experience building out ecommerce sites specifically with WooCommerce. So happy to be here, Bob. Cool. How about you, Mendel? Who are you? Well, actually, when you were saying esteemed, I was just thinking, "I'm mostly esteemed "in Austin when it gets hot during the summer." Sorry, I couldn't help it. You know what? I am, I don't know what number in the birth order I am for hosts, but I don't care because we're all great. And I'm a WooCommerce advocate for agencies at Nexcess, a liquid web company. So that's what I do. I help agencies be successful with WooCommerce. That's it. Good job, good job. You do a good job of it, too. How about you, Jonathan? I know you work for somebody we all know and love. I'm Jonathan Wold, I lead community initiatives at WooCommerce. Which can mean any number of things but a lot of my time and energy is focused on supporting the existing WooCommerce community and helping it grow in our global and our local spaces. Cool. Alrighty, well, all three of you I don't know if all three of you, but couple of weeks ago, WooSesh did... WooSesh was online, virtual conference. A yearly, very cool event. Two days of a lot of Wooness. It was focused on primarily builders and one of the things they started out with was state of the Woo. So I thought what would be fun is to go in and grab three snippets from that, three audio snippets, and just lay it on these three guys and play them and have them, you know, talk about it a little bit. And they went over a lot of stuff in the state of Woo so we're covering very little. You can go over to WooSesh, join their membership over there, and actually get WooSesh, and all the other things, videos from WP Sessions. So you might check that out if you want to hear it. And I think there's going to be as few scattered videos on Woocommerce.com, and I don't know if there's anywhere else but a few of them, they're going to be putting out free that you can listen to. First one I want to play is from Alan Smith, the Developer Advocate over there Hey, Bob, before you start that, I want to bring some controversy into this conversation. Are you okay with that? Okay, I'm fine with that. So, what do you want? So I attended a WooSesh and I thought it was awesome, as I'm sure everybody on this podcast did. I found a couple of things interesting and I wanted to get everybody else's take on it. Number one, State of the Woo. Awesome. It was super cool. Lot of new, cool stuff coming. I thought it was interesting that it was in the walled garden of WooSesh, rather than a public forum, or a more public forum. Number two, I thought it was interesting and quite cool I'm gonna give a little bias to this quite cool that there was such a diverse group of people that were presenting pieces of State of Woo, unlike State of the Word, which is primarily done by Matt. Which nothing negative about that, just thought it was kind of cool that there were multiple groups. So I'm just curious what everybody else thought about the format and the way this information was disseminated. I'm gonna go to Brad first because I have a lot Whatever you said, Jonathan, but. Yeah, I got plenty I can say. Yeah, I mean, overall, I think it's... The idea of WooSesh and WordSesh. For those of you that don't know, I was one of the original organizers that helped with WordSesh when it was first started however many years ago. I'm not involved anymore, but I used to be. So it is near and dear to my heart. I mean, obviously virtual events are very common now, right? But WordSesh was originally founded on the idea of being a virtual event that anyone in any time zone could attend. It was originally 24 hours for that very reason, right? So not everyone had to be forced into U.S. working hours or whatever that looks like. Now they've changed that a bit, but understandably because that was a bit difficult to run as an organizer for 24 hours straight. So overall, the idea of like it's just another virtual event, I guess. Some people might look at it that way, but the fact is it's been doing this for much longer than just this year, right? This was like, the first, really big WordPress virtual event out there, in terms of WordSesh and then WooSesh kind of stemmed from that. So I love the format of that, being online. It's very accessible to anybody. I believe, correct me if I'm well no, it was free for everyone while it was live, which is cool. I definitely get your point, Mendel specifically, around the State of Woo. Now that it's past, my understanding is you have to pay to get access to it. I do think that particular presentation should probably be opened up outside of the pay wall just because of it's important to the whole, you know, community, builders, users of WooCommerce that they have access to that without having to necessarily pay. But there's just a lot of great content. Like, I like the diversity of the speakers, I like for the State of the Woo specifically and just the whole event, right? There's just some really intelligent, smart people here talking about some really interesting things. So I mean, overall, I think it was an amazing event. But I understand the point you're making To be clear, I'm not knocking the event at all. I thought the event was killer. And I'm not even actually knocking anything, I'm just posing the question out there. All right, so I'll jump in on that. I was responsible for programming and sort of making sure that things went smoothly for WooSesh this year on our side. I hadn't thought about it too much, but I agree, it does bug me a little bit, too. Let me say this. First, it's important that we like, WooSesh is a community event that we're sponsoring and supporting, right? So that was part of where all this starts from is like, I think Brian, Patrick, I love what they're doing, we wanna support it. Ultimately, like we were even a little bit uncomfortable with this idea of calling it like, the State of the Woo because you know, there's historic precedence, it was fine at the end of the day, but we do see us like doing more of our own things in the future. At the same time, it's really important to us to support and be involved in community initiatives. As far as the content itself, I'll talk to Brian about it afterwards, we've only touched on it briefly. My preference would be for like, that particular piece to just be publicly available. If for some reason he doesn't wanna do it, I'll make a version of it 'cause it was all prerecorded so I can stitch something else together. Yeah, I love what they're doing and for us, great opportunity to support something that's happening. The content, though, is something that we'd want to be available. Very happy to support the business model but for that particular piece, the intent has been to make it available. Just a matter of what's the best way to do that? Right. And I love the fact that there's very popular and really valuable events that are not spearheaded by automatic, to be honest. Because not everything has to be and I think people kind of generally fall in that rut of well, if it's... you know, if automatic's not involved, like, does it really should we do this? But I think that's a good thing, right? Like, to an extent, I think it's a good thing that it's not all coming from automatic, it's communitydriven in a sense. So I definitely like that. And that's one of the reasons I've always liked things like WordSesh and WooSesh, and even some of the other events like like PressNomics and some of those other ones in years past that were very valuable events, really great events, but they weren't under that automatic umbrella. Or at least the over 'cause word camps aren't necessarily automatic ran, but they are being overseen by you know, some components of automatic so... And for good reason. But I like a mix. It should not all be coming from one company or fall on one company, right? It should be the community. And this is a good example of it, so. [Jonathan] I agree. I would go as far as to say that this was... and granted, I didn't see all of the virtual events for WordPress and WooCommerce this year. But I would say that this was the best content and delivery of the content that I've seen at a virtual event all year. Which I totally appreciated because as a WooCommerce professional and WordPress professional, having something captivate me and pull me into the screen all day long for two days, that's surprising, right? 'Cause I run away from the screens these days. So yeah, it was cool. Cool. Well, wait 'til you see the Do The Woo Conference. You know, it's... Well, I haven't told you three about that yet, but. No, just kidding. Anyway, so thank you for that, Mendel, little bit of interjection there. That was a good segue into it. Going back to what I was going to play, just to remind you, and I could just surprise you anyway, but it is Alan Smith, a question they had asked developers. So let's listen into this and then I'm going to have your feedback on this. [Alan Soundbite] So who are Woo developers? In July of this year, we sent out a survey to folks who selfidentify as quote, unquote, "WooCommerce developers," and I'll tell ya, we learned a lot. What we learned is that WooCommerce developers are not just developers. We asked people this question, "How do you use WooCommerce? "How do you interact with WooCommerce on a daily basis?" And we learned all sorts of interesting things. For instance, 75% of people who build or extensions, they also build and maintain stores for merchants. And vice versa, 70% of the people who build stores for merchants also build and maintain extensions or plugins. There's a certain subset of people who are theme developers out of that group as well, but what I think is really interesting is if you'll notice the overlap between the people who build a maintain stores, the people who build and maintain plugins, they, themselves are also store owners. So these are people who have direct experience not just with merchants that they build for, but they have direct experience as a merchant themself. So. Talk amongst yourselves. No, let's start with... I'm going to start with Brad. And I think what I want is to, you know, how do you concur with this as far as, you know, you're an agency, all three of you work with agencies, you work with developers, you know other developers, does this kind of jive into what you're seeing? And any thoughts on why that may be happening or why you see this more diverse and not pigeonholed developer definition? Yeah. The stats are very interesting, right? 70% of devs who build stores also build extensions. You know, that one, I think is a little more, maybe a little more obvious, you know? And on our side, we're an agency, we build stores, we build extensions, right? So I guess we would fall into that particular bucket. This goes back The first thing I thought about when I started hearing that is when you talk a WordPress developer in general, that means a very different thing than just a developer or a programmer. And on the surface, it may not, or you may not be thinking that, but as someone who's hired a lot of developers over the years, it absolutely does. And I think this probably falls into that kind of bucket, where a developer, when you say WordPress developer or even WooCommerce developer, it doesn't just line up with what traditionally people think of this like, hardcore, you know, just writing code, you know, expert at PHP level type of person. Yes, those do fall into that category, but it also is hobbyists fall in that category, or would consider themselves maybe a WooCommerce developer by installing and configuring a bunch of plugins and setting up a store, right? Same way with a WordPress developer. We see someone says, "I'm a developer," and we start digging in their experience and realize well, they're good at setting up, you know, putting a bunch of plugins together, configuring those plugins, and getting things to work from that sense. Which that does take a talent and a skill. It doesn't necessarily mean they're a developer in the sense of how we would traditionally think of it of actually writing code, building extensions, working with APIs, you know, really getting into the zeros and ones of it all. So I guess when I hear stats like that, that's kind of what I think about these terms of developers in our community and our space with WordPress, with WooCommerce. I think they're much bigger like, bubbles of people than we might traditionally think of. And I think maybe that's kind of the point we're hearing here is you know, a builder, the fact that they have that many builders also running stores I think is pretty fascinating. And I'd be curious to hear stats like that on other platforms because I bet that's not really the case with things like Shopify and stuff. I bet it's really because of WooCommerce and specifically because of the open source nature of the projects. Maybe, who knows? But that's kind of what I was thinking as soon as I heard that clip. How about you, Mendel? You know, kind of coming from the hosting and dealing with a lot of different developers, agencies, et cetera. Yeah. You know, if you're an agency, you eventually come across a situation where you need to customize something that you can't customize out of the box. Right? And so, I think... like as far as agencies go, I would say that almost 100% of agencies, once they reach a certain level of business, are always going to be a plugin, addon, custom code developer. So that's on one side. On the other side, if you've ever hired a plumber or an electrician to come to your house, you can find plumbers that are not certified, that they know how to put pipes together. And they might be really good at it. They might not follow every safety protocol. They might not have experience under their belt that teaches them that putting a pipe in one part of the house, you shouldn't use that same type of pipe in the other part of the house, right? And then you have plumbers that are like, masters at their craft, right? They have like, 62 different certifications and they build, you know, complex systems, and they can do commercial, and all sorts of stuff, right? Plumbers and developers or electricians and developers are very similar because I would argue that a plumber that doesn't have a certification or a base level of information is a different type of plumber than a commercial plumber, right? Like, there are many different types. And I think that developers are very much the same way. You can call yourself a developer the second you learn one line of code. And that's fine, and that's valid, and it's awesome. It's also important to realize that when everybody calls themselves a developer, that you have to look for the nuance in what that definition is for them. And I think that that's what we're seeing in some of these numbers as well, is, you know, if you know, somebody that has hacked a little bit of code in the core, that person's a developer, right? And if you know somebody that's built a you know, a headless interface... or an interface for headless WordPress or WooCommerce for an enterprise, like Disney or somebody like that, that's a developer. And so, knowing what those grades are or what those definitions are is important and I would love to see... I would love to see some data on that in the future because knowing that would help us level up people from one... from being one type of developer. You know, maybe a new developer or developer that doesn't code within the WordPress or WooCommerce standards to becoming a, you know, a developer that does, you know, runs tests and does things according to, you know, the scaffolding that is suggested within the projects and things like that so. Yeah, it's super interesting. I'm not surprised by the numbers, but I do think that the industry as a whole, whether it's WordPress, or WooCommerce, or Magenta, or whatever, deserves a little more rigor in those classifications and numbers so that we can understand who's building on our projects. Cool. Now, Jonathan, what's your thoughts on this? I had a lot of thoughts. Two are standing out. So, one of the first things that I focused on I've just now passed a year in this role. One of the first things I focused on, especially with our meetups program is putting more and more of our emphasis on store owners and merchants, the entrepreneurs versus developers, while at the same time acknowledging that it's... kind of, there's a continuum there, right? Like, I think because of Woo's open source nature, a lot of folks will say "I want to build a store," and then they get into it, they do something for themselves I know a number of folks who've done this And then they end up becoming a developer, they enjoy it, and they'll do more for others and go from there. So on the one hand, like, I think one of the things that we're working hard to do at Woo, like overall, is make more and more of what we do be focused on what's best for the store owner. And like, how do we make the user experience easier? Et cetera. This point of differentiation, it's really interesting. So part of this idea of calling... you take the term "builder," for instance, there's a lot of flexibility inherent in that term because there can be someone who is not using any code and they can be building a Woo site for clients, which I think is fantastic and really important to the future of this ecosystem. And then when it comes to the extensions, though, you know, and doing more complex things or the fact that Woo is growing in the enterprise. Like there's a different set of needs and capability required there. So, one of the things that we're working on and have been for a bit is the... is figuring out what does the next version of the Woo Experts program look like? And I think that's where there is a particular opportunity, is to offer this... there's a number of things that were changing about it. One is to remove the pay structure entirely so that there's not any sense of like, pay for play happening. But, I think there's an opportunity there for there to be this sort of standard around this idea of art. You're a Woo expert and there's some expectations that come with that, whatever that looks like. There's some opportunity there that I'm excited to see us explore further and get more input on. And I think if we can have some clear lines of demarcation, that without putting like, an optin versus like, a negative, right? Where it's like people can, who want to grow and want to get better can sort of distinguish themselves further. So I think there's some opportunity there and I'm excited to see us explore that. Thanks to our sponsor, PayPal. In time for the holiday season, PayPal has launched a new pay later option called Pay In Four. This means that your clients can offer their customers the option to purchase over time in four interestfree payments. This feature is one of two options from PayPal for pay later, with the other being PayPal Credit, which gives store customers more purchasing power through flexible and transparent choices in how and when they pay. The second option is subject to consumer credit approval. So offering these payment options is good business. Did you know that 64% of consumers surveyed say they're more likely to make a purchase at a retailer that offers interestfree payment options? And 56% of consumers that responded agree that they prefer to pay a purchase back in installments rather than use a credit card. Well, this seems like a nobrainer to me. Clients can grow their sales and get paid upfront with no additional risk or cost. All you need to do is download the PayPal checkout extension on the marketplace at WooCommerce.com. Just head on over, click marketplace, and search for the PayPal checkout. Suggesting that to your clients will certainly open up sales opportunities for them. Thanks to PayPal for being a community sponsor for "Do The Woo." And now, let's head back on over to the conversation. Alrighty, cool. Well, home screen. WooCommerce home screen. One of the things they talked about is the changes to that, what's kind of happened, and then they talked about version two, which is going to be the next phase. One specific part that Elizabeth had spoke on was some of the features that are coming to the vendors, the plugin developers as far as onboarding people and you know how WooCommerce onboards. So I want to play this. And she just goes over a few of these features, I want to kinda get your thoughts on this. She's already talked about it, she's leading into, and these are the features for some of the vendors. [Elizabeth Soundbite] One of the things that I definitely want to touch upon is extensibility. So ways that extensions can plug into the home screen. Number one, are in the setup tasks. So once an extension is installed, the extension author can trigger a setup task that could help the merchant with onboarding to the extension or other things. Another area where extensions can plug in is in the store management car. So there's a section here for extensions. Lastly, extension authors also have the possibility of sharing information with merchants via inbox messages. Okay, that is it. That is it. So that gives you an idea of what home screen 2.0 is going to be happening as far as, yeah, having a little bit more for the vendors as far as what they're putting in there or when people add stuff. So, Mendel, I'm going to start with you. Your thoughts on that? I love the inbox. I think it's super cool. I love the direction all of this is going in. The one question that I should probably raise in the WooCommerce Slack is you know, will there be the opportunity for organizations that might have a slightly different onboarding process to change the onboarding messages, rather, not the onboarding messages, the default messages that exist as soon as you turn on WooCommerce? I think in some cases, it can lead to more confusion if there's a slightly different onboarding process or there are new technologies that are augmenting and making the experience WooCommerce better. But overall, I think it's awesome. I think that notifications have been the sore spot in WordPress as a whole. And I think this is a good step in the right direction. Cool. Let's swing over to you, Jonathan. I remember seeing the preview for the first time. We did an early, sort of design call for feedback, which I've really liked. It's been a pretty open, transparent process. And I was a little bit, a little shocked at first. I've been in WordPress for such a long time and you get used to the way that things are. So I, you know, even... like I had to take a moment like, "Okay, this is pretty different." But as I started to watch the feedback and as I sat with it a bit, I showed it off to just like, some store owners at my local meetup and just began to gather feedback. And just seeing how positive the reactions were and the focus on how do we make this user experience more straightforward, less intimidating, lower the barrier of entry, like, that's the right focus, my own sort of initial reactions aside. As I sat with it longer, I really liked the direction. There's a tension there to navigate, to Mendel's point, about how you balance well, first, just the frank reality that this is an open source project. And if someone doesn't like something, they could figure out a way to do something and to get around it. That's just a fact. But we want to force people into that position. So how do you balance this like, guided, curated, more userfocused experience that's designed to help more merchants succeed with giving people flexibility to do things that frankly, you can't anticipate? Which is the beauty of extension. So it's going to take iteration and feedback. I have a lot of confidence in the team working on it and their just desire to get input and make it the best that it can be in consideration of all the possibilities. It's going to continue to be a process, though. And I think like, Mendel's point's a great one, there are folks who are going to take Woo and WordPress and create different types of onboarding experiences and we want to give them the ability to do that. So Mendel, I think to your point, I would just make sure that you raise it loudly and that it's recognized and... I usually don't have a problem with loud. Yeah, we know that. Yeah, for sure. Brad, how about you? Yeah, I mean, you know, overall, I like it. I like the fact it's just enabled for everybody now with the latest release. Everything with WordPress extensibility is always, you know, should be at the forefront 'cause that's the whole core of WordPress and why it's so popular is that you can... you know, anyone that has the ability, developers either that they work with or themselves that they can do it, can customize these things, you know, to their needs. I think to me, it's definitely a step in the right direction, it's a step forward. I mean, to your point, Jonathan, like, change is always weird, right? Like anytime something you're used to seeing changes, like, the initial reaction, I think for everybody is skepticism, I guess, is probably the best way to put it. I'm seeing it now with like Facebook, everyone's been, you know, in the last few months everyone's been getting a new Facebook. And I enabled it like six or eight months ago and I was like, "Well, this is terrible." I was like, "But I'll stick with it 'cause I know that's probably "just my initial reaction," and now I don't really care, you know? It's fine. The, the way I look at this... the home screen, you know, the dashboard, or whatever you want to call it, like, this is... It's kinda like that first impression thing for new users especially, right? Like, when you look at a dashboard for an ecommerce platform, WooCommerce or otherwise, like, that's kind of your initial impression of like, what you're going to see as a store owner. This is where I'm going to live. Like, how do I feel about the way this looks, you know? Is this giving me the information I need? Is it overwhelming? Is it underwhelming? Is it right in that sweet spot? And it's gonna be different for everybody, but it's certainly a better experience right out of the gate, I think, than what was there previously, right? And the fact that, you know, Jonathan, I think you made the point of we've gotta iterate, like, you know, it's getting the new version out there, getting people comfortable with it, getting extension developers onboard to, you know, hook their extensions into it in a way that's thoughtful for their users and not just, you know, pushing upsell messages or whatever, but actual good data that a store owner would need to see, is just gonna make it that much better. So I think it's absolutely the right direction to go. And it looks great. Like, I think it's just a really clean experience and gets you the data that you wanna see right there on your dashboard. So I'm excited to see where this is gonna end up in a year, a couple years from now is it's not only the dashboard and home screen grows, but the extensions really start taking advantage of it. That's where I think we're gonna really see the power of it. Alrighty, well, we are on to the last one here and this is the marketplace. And I thought this was interesting because I know personally I get asked a lot and see people asking out there, you know, "Oh, should I put my extension on the marketplace or not?" And I've always, you know, I know from experience with as much traffic I get on my other site, BobWP.com, that it's a trusted place. Now, they're adding several benefits to the marketplace so I believe it was Alana was talking about it. And she got to a point where she pretty much laid out, it's a couple minutes here, but it's all the different things that now are gonna be available for vendors when they, you know, put their extension on the marketplace. I just thought it was interesting and want to get your feedback on that. But this is a couple minutes long so we'll play this one here. [Alana Soundbite] So firstly, we'd like to make our onboarding experience a lot smoother and more efficient. We'll be building out an onboarding wizard that will allow us to automate and streamline this process and we'll be providing a lot more granularity into the reporting in the dashboard as well. So a big one here will be a Google Analytics integration, which I know is a highly requested feature. And this will give you insights into your product page performance. And not only that, we'll be utilizing this increased granularity in the metrics to offer up smart suggestions to better your product page performance overall and to surface potential marketing and promotional opportunities in the marketplace. We'll also be delivering feedback from merchants directly to you as a vendor within the dashboard. This will include things like ratings and reviews, net promoter score, customer satisfaction score, access to refund reasons, which I know is a big one for many of you, and the feedback portal, which I keep alluding to and we'll dive into next. So now, I'll finally dive into the merchant feedback portal. So we're super excited to announce that we're bringing a feedback portal to the marketplace to open up the feedback loop and to better connect merchants with vendors. This is another way that we're hoping to improve upon the ability vendors have to communicate with their users directly. So in the first iteration of this, we'll have links to the feedback portal on product pages, allowing merchants to easily provide feedback to vendors. This will include the ability to comment back and forth and for vendors to provide status updates for features requested. The longer term vision for this includes the ability for a user to subscribe to a request or to follow a vendor's updates, the ability to vote on a request, and for vendors to send messages out to followers. So with that all said, is it... Now, if you were talking to somebody and they said "Hey, you know, "do you think I should put my extension on the marketplace?" With that in mind, and your own experience, and what you've thought or talked about in the past around the marketplace, what do you think? I'm going to the internal route here first with Jonathan and then we'll head to Mendel and Brad. I got a lot of thoughts. I think a lot about marketplaces and... First, overall, I love what the team is doing. I think what I love most is just the energy, attention, and care being put into it. We still got a long ways to go, we're still behind in a number of things. More my perspective. But I love the direction, I love seeing the growth, I love that there's... We're taken a much more open approach to it. Historically, we had this approach that was like, oh, we only want one of each kind of thing. And I don't know, there's something about... For me, a marketplace has lots of choices and there's this appropriate mix of curation guiding people. Like right now, one of the challenges with the plugin directory and WordPress in general is that there's so many options. And anyway, I love this focus on it being usercentered, like how do we get things that are useful? Yet, this conscious, deliberate investment in how do we improve the experience for people creating these extensions? How do we give them more feedback? How do we make it better? So I'm really optimistic. I love the energy and I'm looking forward to seeing how it continues to develop. Yeah, Brad? Yeah, I mean, I think it's a good question. It's a tough answer, I think honestly. Like I think the default, the easy answer is, "Yeah, absolutely," right? "Put it in the marketplace." I think for most people, that's probably the right answer. You know, you gotta factor in the net revenue payouts. It's like, what? 60%, if it's exclusive. Meaning that's the only place you sell it, is what you'll pull in from the net revenue and 40% if it's nonexclusive. Meaning you maybe have your own site you sell it on as well as the marketplace. I mean, in my opinion, if you don't have a name out there, if you're not an established player in the plugin space, trying to promote your own WooCommerce extensions on your own site is gonna be a very long, hard, uphill battle. And so putting it in the marketplace would make a ton of sense because people just don't know you. And even if they find you, are they gonna trust your product, right, if they don't know you? Now, there's a handful of companies out there that, you know, have a reputation, and a name, and a number of products and I think just by them putting something out there, it's instantly gonna be validated and have a ton of customers, but that's few and far between. So I think by and large for most people, the marketplace does make a lot of sense because it is... if you're exclusive, too, it kind of takes that selfmanagement of your own website and all that stuff off the table to an extent, right? Like, yeah, you might still have a site and you probably should and certainly have some documentation, but in terms of the sales funnel process, in terms of the you know, all of that, that's really taken care of for you, right, through the marketplace there at WooCommerce. And ultimately, that's where you're gonna get the most eyeballs being in the marketplace, you know? And no matter how big your reputation is or how far your reach is, you're never gonna compete with the core product in terms of people seeing it, right? I think for most people, it makes a lot of sense to go in the marketplace. There is a few outliers that maybe they might consider not doing it or doing the nonexclusive option. But I think for most people, they should. Aright, Mendel, what about, you know this is a little from the hosting perspective because you're kind of looking at it from a different angle and also, you know, is it these different added features what they really add value to the vendor? Yeah, just a few thoughts from you on the whole thing. Yeah, so often my, my perspective from a hosting perspective is the same as the perspective, you know, from a nonhosting perspective. Because at the end of the day, it's people winning, right? And trust and discovery are the two biggest factors in selling anything online. The marketplace provides that. And I say just do it. And I would even go further and say it's super cool to see an organization focused on the wellbeing of commercial players in the space. Right? That are going to upload their extensions, and try to sell them, and giving a platform. There are places with far more restrictive requirements or policies. If you have ever sold on eBay, then you know that putting a link to your website in an auction is a really bad idea because it'll get you banned from the entire site, selling. I think it's... I don't see a downside. And even for the people that are, you know, selling like crazy on their own sites, what a great discovery engine. Because new people are being minted every day, right? New builders are being minted every day. And to have a place to hook them on one of your plugins and then, you know, market to them and sell them another plugin directly from your site. Like, it's not an eitheror in my opinion. I think it's great. I mean, is Mendel talking about selling plugins and extensions or dealing drugs over here? He's talking about like, gateway extensions to get them into your... Hey, man, WooCommerce is insidious. [Jonathan] Gateway extensions, no pun intended. Yeah, exactly. Who's your sponsor again, Bob? Is it PayPal? PayPal, yeah. Is that a gateway extension? Oh man, we're ruining that sponsorship for you. Yeah, we are, you know? Okay, we rewind here and start over. No, seriously. Well, I don't know if... I have one more controversial thing to bring up. Can I bring up Okay, I was gonna say I was gonna say go ahead and do that. Please do. Okay, it's not actually, it's not that controversial, but I did wanna kinda find out Brad, Jonathan, maybe even Bob, I know Bob's opinion hasn't been in here much but, I want to know what you think about the current state of inventory and expense management for inventory, right? So how inventory is managed in WooCommerce. And then how expenses are calculated. So cost of goods and things like that. If it seems like that should be a third party extension that, you know, augments WooCommerce to handle that in a more sophisticated way? Or if this is something that you think WooCommerce core should approach. And the only reason I bring it up is because I've seen this in site, after site, after site, you know, integrating with like, Ship Station, right? Or not Ship Station, Trade Gecko and inventory management third party solutions like that. And nothing is as good as native, right? Even if you try and be, so. I'll speak to that. It's a very challenging tension to navigate. I'd say from our perspective, and this is just sort of my current understanding, which is fairly wellinformed, is this that we're ultimately focused on the quote, unquote, like "happy path" for new merchants. Like, in terms of what we prioritize in Woo, it's how can we lower the barrier of entry further? That's very much in sort of support of the mission, right? At the same time, the strength and power of Woo is the autonomy with which you can like, do what you want and the extensibility. So I think in general, as we get clearer and clearer on what matters the most to that... to especially to the beginners, I think that's the expectation is extensions are going to take care of those things. Where I hope to see a lot more progress and something I've been passionate about for a while in WordPress, is to really improve what it means to make an extension. Like, let's teach people how to make more native extensions, right, they're far from being equal. This has gotten a lot better in WordPress in recent years, we're seeing more like, companies come in and build firstclass extensions, we need more of that in Woo. I think the marketplace is really going to help with that. But there's definitely a gap there. And a number of different places where it works, but it often is not the smoothest experience. And I think we'll continue to make the overall experience smoother. And if it comes down that having a better way of dealing with expenses and inventory is something that matters to the majority, then it's going to be something we do in core. If it's not, then it's, how do we make it easier for folks building extensions to build like firstclass experiences that just take care of it and that feel effectively native? That's what we're after. Yeah, I mean, I've actually talked about this topic on the show with one of the areas I think that I I struggle to recommend WooCommerce is really complex warehousing and inventory type of systems. Is it doable? Sure, but I don't know if the effort's worth the reward when there's other systems that are very much larger, way more complex, way more expensive for, you know, obvious reasons. But I don't think this is something that, to your point, exactly what Jonathan just said, like, if the majority of people need something like this, I don't think the majority of people need, you know, advanced inventory, you know, multiwarehouse tracking capabilities. It'd be interesting to see some stats, but I would bet the majority of WooCommerce users are a much more basic setup, right, when it comes to inventory levels. I know there was release recently, I forget which version it was, but introduced some enhancements around inventory tracking, like if someone was buying something, it would kind of hold onto that piece of inventory for a period of time so it didn't get double sold. So those advances, I think, are really great in core, but I think you get to the more advanced stuff, I think core is probably not the place for that. It's like having a more advanced like, email marketing system in WordPress core. Like, could it do it? Yeah, but there's companies like, dedicated to that, you know? Things I think of specifically are things like the small business jewelry maker that, you know, wants to sell online and they also want to sell from their store. And that can be handled, you know, a bunch of different ways, you know, POS integration, or square integration, or whatever, but, you know, part of me wonders when you're a merchant, trying to go into a place to manage a thing, do you go into WooCommerce? Do you go into a third party? Do you go into your POS? Do you go into square? Where do you go, right? So that's the only reason it comes up in my mind. Not something super complex, like, you know, multiwarehouse inventory management and stuff like that. But I also get your point in not complicating things. Well that's a good example, like, when you have to manage a bunch of different systems, it comes down to like where's the single source of truth for your inventory? I'm gonna jump on that one because when we think about like, we think about WordPress more and more like an operating system, right? And if you take Woo, like, it's an ecommerce flavor of that, right? Like it's built on WordPress. So overall, when I think of a firstclass, like a first class experience with extension and my guide is to folks building is like bring it into the WooCommerce admin, bring it into WordPress. Figure out a way to solve that where folks can they can leave if they want to, and I've seen this happen better and better more recently. I like the work that Hub Spot's been doing more recently, bringing more of the elements directly into the admin. But I think that's like, people should be able to get the majority of the things done there and if there's more specialized things that they need to do or just really advanced, then send them off to a different interface, but I feel pretty strongly about that. And I think the ones that succeed the most are the ones that really have a native feeling experience. Well, all I can add to that is since WooCommerce has been on my site for eight to nine years, we can look at the fact that I've never sold a single physical product. So, I'll just leave it at that, you know? I'm not qualified to answer it because of my sheer neglect to worry about shipping anything from, let alone one Bob WP block that I had in my brain as far as a product to several blocks, so... So, let's leave it at that. But good point there, Mendel. I can always count on you to throw something into the mixer and I appreciate that. All right, well I think that does it. I think we've talked. We've talked the talk and I hope this gives some indication to what can be expected, which will be, who knows? I mean, episodes of this, this will happen every other Tuesday. If anybody's listening and wants to get on here, if they're, you know, deep into Woo and they want to get on and talk about stuff with a group of other cool guys, or gals, or whoever is on here, I would suggest reaching out to me and letting me know. Yeah, we're hoping to have and I'm sure, you know, three of these cohosts will occasionally pop in. I know they, you know, I work 'em to death anyway, but they may wander in aimlessly as some point or other. So I appreciate the three of you joining us. And I just want to thank our sponsors again. WooCommerce.com Again, Jobs. Everybody wants a job. Everybody wants to work. Everybody wants money. Wants to make a living in this tough time so check out, DoTheWoo.io under Jobs and you'll see some excellent opportunities there and PayPal. Yes, a gateway extension, as defined as we didn't talk about, or we did talk about. But yes, PayPal. Check out their Pay In Four. Good stuff. Yeah, like, again, no brainer. Wanna get you clients on that or if you're running your own store, you're a developer and you're running your own store, according to statistics, hey, you know, you might wanna put that on there. In fact, I'm gonna put it on for the Doo The Woo friends and see how that goes. So anyway, that's it. Real quick, where can people find all my wonderful cohosts? Brad? Yeah, find me on Twitter. WilliamsBA. Mendel? You can find me on Twitter. At IfYouWillIt. And you can check out Nexcess at NEXCESS dot net. Cool, Jonathan? You can find me on Twitter at SirJonathan and some of my writing occasionally on JohnathanWold.com. Alrighty. Well thanks, everyone, for tuning in to the first "Woo Perspectives" and we will see you in a couple weeks. Of course, you can always tune in to all the Do Woo. 'Til next time. Scroll back to top Sign up to receive email updates Enter your name and email address below and I'll send you periodic updates about the podcast. powered by

Thanks to our community sponsors Traditionally, consumers like to be given the opportunity to make purchases with payments. In today’s world, with the number of people who are facing financial challenges and uncertain futures, it is even more critical. Here today to talk about Buy Now, Pay Later is Greg Lisiewski, VP and GM of Global Pay Later Products at PayPal. We chat about the industry, the benefits to consumers and merchants and the newest addition to the family at PayPal, Pay in 4. If you build sites, this is another weapon in your arsenal as you educate your clients and suggest solutions to meet their needs. A Chat with Greg In episode 77, Brad and I talk with Greg about: The history of Buy Now, Pay Later and how it is growing in today’s economy.The options that PayPal offers for their Pay Later Products and what those mean to merchants and consumers.How Pay in 4 touches the lower-ticket purchase and what makes it a great option for Woo builders, merchants, consumers, and stores of all sizes.How buy now, pay later is accelerating spending and conversions.The benefits of no additional fees or risk for merchants.How PayPal hit on the sweet spot of 4 payments and the repayment schedule.How to use it with WooCommerce to take advantage of a payment option that is already there and easy to set up with their PayPal Checkout extension. Connect with Greg Greg on LinkedInEmail Greg at gregl [at] paypal.com Buy Now, Pay Later options from PayPal Download the extension on the WooCommerce.com marketplace to offer buy now, pay later optionsLearn more about buy now, pay later options at PayPal Download the PayPal extension on the WooCommerce marketplace to offer buy now, pay later options. Start your next career in WooCommerce at WooCommerce. The Conversation Transcript Email Download New Tab Bob: Hey everyone. Welcome back. We're here with Do the Woo. I'm BobWP, episode 77. I'm joined by my esteemed cohost, Mr. Brad Williams. How are you doing, Brad? Brad: Doing great. How are you doing, Bob? Bob: I'm doing good. And I'm wondering, are you missing summer yet? That's a question I always have for you. Brad: I mean, fall is my favorite season by far, so I'm loving life right now. It's nice, getting some cool weather, the leaves are coming down, watching Halloween movies every night. I already dug into the Halloween candy, which was a big mistake. I'm enjoying it. It's a great time of year. What about you, Bob? Bob: The fall is one of my favorites too, but I also really like all seasons. And I'm guessing that I'll probably ask you again in the winter if you miss summer and probably hear something a little bit different there. Brad: I'll have a different answer when snow starts dropping. Bob: I'm sure you will, Brad, knowing you. Well, let's go ahead and move into the show here. We have a very special guest and I'm excited to get into that. But before we do, I'd like to thank our sponsors. WooCommerce.com. I would recommend that if you are a developer to check out their developer resource portal. There's a lot of information. A little bit ago, they revamped that and they're really building that out, so take advantage of it over on WooCommerce.com. And we have PayPal. PayPal is our newer community sponsor. Looking forward to having them as a partner over the next few months, and been talking a bit about the buy now, pay later options they have, in particular the Pay in 4, and as much as I'd like to share that information with you right now, I think it'd be even better if I moved into introducing our guest, because he will be able to even give you more insights into that. We have Greg Lisiewski from PayPal. Really excited to hear what he has to say. How are you doing today, Greg? Greg: Doing really good. Thanks. Great to be here. Meet Greg Bob: Well, Greg, you have quite a background. You're upper management in PayPal in the buy now, pay later space. Could you tell us a little bit about what you do and a bit about your background? Greg: Yeah, sure thing. I manage our Pay Later products for PayPal, so the VP and GM of global Pay Later products. My background, as you alluded to, I've spent a lot of time in the intersection of technology product and credit and have been focused on this buy now pay later space for the better part of 15 years, starting with Bill Me Later back in 2005, 2006, which was eventually acquired by PayPal. Here we are all these years later, continuing to reinvent and push our products and value prop forward to help merchants and consumers. Bob: What I'd like to know is before we get into the specifics of what PayPal is doing in this space is in this industry, it's an interesting time right now, especially with the history of buy now, pay later, and I'm sure you could make a lot of comparisons, but what I'd like to do is have you give us in a nutshell what you see this industry is doing at large right now as far as around growth and how people are acclimating to this idea of buy now, pay later. The history of Buy Now, Pay Later and What it means to eCommerce today Greg: Yeah. There's been quite an acceleration of the adoption of buy now pay later, pay later products, particularly online over the last couple of years. And really driving that has been the rise of better solutions from a technology perspective and the intersection of that with platforms like Woo that allows solutions to get out to far more merchants than previous products were able to. Typically, it was limited to bigger retailers. Banks were the primary provider of loans. It really was Bill Me Later 15 years ago that pioneered this online point of sale finance, alternative finance, you know as now referred to FinTech, buy now pay later category that went dormant for a while coming out of 2008 and the last cycle we had until the last few years. There's been consumer shifts happening for a couple of years and in the pandemic over the past six months now has just driven even a broader and more massive acceleration between the shift online, as well as the fact that consumers are looking to spread a dollar and anything that gives them an ability to spread out or manage their cashflow in a more prudent way is well-timed. The options of Buy Now, Pay Later Brad: Yeah, I mean, it kind of makes sense when you think about it with everything that's going on, like you said, in the last six months and how just financially, I think a lot of things have changed for people and how they're spending their money and making sure that they're maybe being a little more thoughtful about it. The idea of spreading out payments I think has always been a very interesting thing for consumers, especially larger purchases. It makes it more doable, I guess, in a sense, right? And that's really where financing came back whenever it was invented in the first place. In terms of PayPal. I wonder if you can break down the different options here, because I'm familiar with the idea of the buy now pay later through PayPal to an extent. When I started doing some research for this show, I actually learned some things that didn't realize you were doing over there. I thought just for the listeners, anyone not familiar with what PayPal is offering and what the different terms, I've seen buy now pay later and the Bill Me Later and PayPal Credit. Are these all the same options? Are these different options within the overall PayPal platform for builders or even merchants? What is available through PayPal that they can offer their customers? Greg: Yeah, Brad, great question. We've long been in the buy now pay later space, but historically we've had one flagship product, which started out as Bill Me Later, and then as part of the acquisition and some branding changes became PayPal Credit, but the core offering of that product has always been six months no interest on purchases over $99, which is a fairly low order value, but it's really been aimed at more medium sized purchases, three, four or $500 and up, and that's been available for a long time for both sides of our network. Merchants have been able to promote that on their website earlier in the shopping journey, help convert browsers to buyers, drive up order values, et cetera, and then consumers, whether a merchant's promoting it or not, can have that as a funding option in their PayPal wallet and use it essentially virtually anywhere PayPal is accepted. You were talking about seasons, so I'm in the Mid-Atlantic here, so if I'm looking to get a snowblower for the season, I can buy it online and use PayPal credit and pay for it after winter is over, or if I'm planning a trip in the early part of the year, I can purchase my airline tickets ... maybe not a great example in the pandemic, but purchase my spring break tickets January, February, and then time out my payment when I actually use it. Pay in 4 is he low ticket purchase anchor However, as we've looked at the space and consumer behavior shifting, we thought it would make sense to bring additional value props to market. We want to create essentially a suite of buy now pay later solutions. PayPal Credit is the six month offer as an anchor, but for lower ticket purchases, the Pay in 4 product is the one we're rolling out now. And you alluded to it earlier. The history of financing has tended to be around larger ticket purchases. But one of the shifts we're seeing in consumer behaviors is the desire to budget out even smaller purchases, $100 purchase or $150 purchase. Now if you want to pick up $100 pair of sneakers or a $100 accessory for the thousand dollar grill, giving consumers a choice where they can make four payments of $25 all automated, very lightweight, light touch, frictionless process. That's our newest offering and helping consumers payment choice, we think we can help merchants sell more. Payment options bundled with PayPal And that's where merchants through platforms like Woo or developers who build solutions on behalf of merchants can work with our, with our SDKs and whatnot to allow merchants to deploy these offerings, this dynamic messaging, when someone's looking at a purchase or a product rather, and say, "Hey, it's $100, or you can pay for it in four payments of $25." If it's a $500 purchase, it will dynamically change the message and say, "Hey, take six months of no interest for that purchase." And these are really proven tools to help convert sales. And in our case, it's bundled with your PayPal offering, so no incremental costs, no incremental risk, no new backend processing, et cetera. It's just a matter of deploying messaging where it helps convert sales. Brad: Yeah. And that's what really stood out to me because I think my assumption before I started doing all the research is that there would be a cost for something like this, because it is an awesome deal, right? Being able to offer financing through my store, if I'm a small business or any sized business, but specifically a small business, I think my assumption would be that, "Well, this is a very cool offering, but surely there's a catch, right? As the merchant, I must have to pay into this. There must be some kind of a transactional fee or interest that I'm paying or I might have to be maybe at a certain tier or something," but it sounds like there are no additional costs and it's available to anyone that is running PayPal payments through their store. Is that right? The merchant pays no extra costs Greg: Yeah, that's exactly right. As we accelerated our efforts this year in light of the pandemic, we really want to think about how we can help merchants in a time of uncertainty, and many are fighting to survive, help them any way we could. And given that we're a payment processing business as our core business, your ability to bring an offer like pay I four, it's not our main profit driver, right? In helping merchants sell more goods, we get more processing volume and that's how we make our money and we don't have to price it a premium for a financing product where standalone solution providers typically do have to price quite a premium to normal processing rates because they're all getting a fraction of the sales and it's a different monetization schema for them. And we're pleased to be able to offer it as part of your PayPal bundle. Brad: Yeah. I was just looking at the screenshots on the website. It couldn't be more clear, right, when you're selecting that option. Just seeing that option on the product screen or the checkout process I think is really enticing for someone that's maybe on the fence of whether they're comfortable spending that $100 right now or not and that's clearly the thing that could push them over the edge to make that conversion and to purchase that product. But I love how it just kind of lays out your example of $100 and it just shows you're going to pay $25 today and another $25 on a specific date. For the consumer, the customer it's crystal clear exactly what they're getting into by doing this. And I think just the idea of keeping it to four payments also helps keep it really simple, right? It's not trying to do some algorithm based on the purchase, a number of months and days or whatever. It's just four payments. Divide by four and here you go. Greg: Yeah, it's straightforward. It's all automated. You don't have to worry about coming back and making the payment. That said, we'll make sure you know that when we're going to pull a payment from a credit or debit card of yours, we'll send a text notification. We really tried to blend the ability to drive conversion for merchants with something that consumers could really understand and take advantage of without having to put a lot of thought into it after the fact. And to the earlier part of the conversation for those bigger ticket purchases or for people who want to do multiple spends, we do have PayPal Credit available as well. Thanks to our sponsor PayPal. In time for the holiday season PayPal has launched a new pay later option called Pay in 4. This mean that your clients can offer their customers the option to purchase over time in 4 interest-free payment. This feature is one of two option from PayPal for pay later with the other being PayPal Credit which gives store customers more purchasing power through flexible and transparent choices in how and when they pay. This second option is subject to consumer credit approval. So offering those payment options is good business. Did you know that 64% of consumers surveyed say they are more likely to make a purchase at a retailer that offers interest-free payment options. And 56% of consumers that responded agree that they prefer to pay a purchase back in installments rather than use a credit card. Well, this seems like a no-brainer to me. Clients can grow their sales and get paid up front with no additional risk or cost. All you need to do is download the PayPal Checkout extension on the Marketplace at WooCommerce.com. Just head on over, click marketplace and search for the PayPal Checkout. Suggesting that to your clients will certainly open up sales opportunities for them. Thanks for PayPal for being a community sponsor at Do the Woo. And now back the conversation. What made the number of 4 payments such a sweet spot Bob: Yeah. I was curious, that sweet spot of four, because I think there are people that, especially we don't know what's going to happen a few months from now and to get tied into a long-term credit payback. Is that part of the strategy behind it and how you came up with that, number four is some people do want to still have that opportunity to spread it out, but they don't want to be stuck into payments for a long, long time. And of course, no interest is a bonus to that, but was there research done to get to the number 4? Greg: We do lots of research. We have multiple markets. We have other markets outside of the US where we run similar products. And when we talked to consumers, interestingly enough, four ... I think Brad was mentioning it ... it's pretty easy math for folks to do. It lines up with the traditional, not the always, but the traditional payment schedules in the US in terms of biweekly pay. Some regions have monthly pay. And in our case, it's four payments every two weeks. Other markets, we're looking at every 30 days, because they get paid on a monthly basis. And outside of that, we didn't want to overthink it. We wanted just to keep it simple, clean, and as Brad was alluding to, something someone could look out six or eight weeks and know there was a finite period that they were going to be done with paying back that purchase they made, whether it was a want or a need, at any given moment. Making it easier for the consumer to buy and spend more Brad: Yeah. It was mentioned on the site as well, you see basically these websites that have messaging around pay over time are seeing an actual increase in the average order value, which isn't something that I really thought of but when you hear that, it makes perfect sense, right? When you realize, hey, I could maybe splurge a little bit, maybe add that extra thing in my cart that I didn't think I'd be able to, because now I have the option to spread those payments out, which work for me, like you said, on that biweekly schedules against payday so that I can get that extra thing that I wanted to get maybe my kid for Christmas or whatever it might be. I think that's really interesting for any store owner to really understand that and to dig into that is offering this type of messaging and this type of service can actually just increase the overall cart size and the order, which is ... I mean, that's a huge win, increase that cart size. Greg: Yeah, Brad, I agree. And when you step back and think about it, which most of us don't because we're not living in payments and immersing ourselves in payments all day, but it's everywhere we are, especially in a normal environment, right? If you just pay attention on a Saturday driving around or walking into various stores, you'll see that there's financing in all sorts of categories, sporting goods, hardware, furniture, stereo, et cetera. And it's been a tactic for retailers for decades to help convert sales because consumers like flexibility in payment and they like to borrow other people's money to make those purchases. Online, it sort of has the same effect, but I think any retailer is comfortable with the idea of putting a messaging persistent on a product page, which every pixel is sacred. Just took a while to gain traction because you hadn't really proved out the incrementality. But I think that box has been checked. And now it's really a sort of trusted way of driving conversion, because it does give customers an opportunity to close a sale today that they may have waited a month for or your example, they'll add something extra to the cart that they were going to come back for. And that's what we're trying to do. And we're trying to do it responsibly. We're really conscious of making sure we're extending credit, even in these sort of smaller micro amounts to folks who can afford it. And we feel good about our capabilities given our long history in this space. Bob: It makes a lot of sense just because when you're buying something, whether it could be a TV, a computer, whatever, having that fact of, "Oh, now I can break this into four payments and maybe I should throw in that little option. Maybe I should get some speakers for my TV now that I'm doing it, because this is going to be a little easier to handle." So yeah, that's good stuff. Brad: I was just going to point to these type of conversations and these types of features, especially really for ... and we talked pre-show how this conversation is really going to tread both sides of the house, right, from the implementers, the developers, but also the store owners. Just having this knowledge of these things you can implement, services you're probably already using, I mean, every store we launched already has credit cards and PayPal. That's just a requirement, right, because so many people want the option and it's just the standard and what you do. Knowing that PayPal has some of these additional features available to you and how that can help with conversions, with cart size growth, these are things that a lot of the eCommerce sites out there, they're not run by massive corporations that have teams that can really ... You talked about how important those pixels are. A small business, they're lucky enough to be able to sell a product online and actually ship it out and make that whole process work, because this is all new to them for many of them, or it's just a side revenue to get some product out the door. But as implementers, having this information and bringing it to your clients and bringing it to your shop owners and saying, "Hey, you should turn this on. This is going to help grow sales and this is the benefit of it, and you're already using PayPal, so this is why you should do it," you're just going to be that much more of the expert and honestly the superhero in their eyes, because if you can implement some very simple things, flip a few switches and you make more money for them, why would they ever want to work with anybody else, right? They're only going to want to work with you. It's like the abandoned cart stuff, right? Abandoned cart has a clear path of how it works. It converts. It brings people back that had otherwise walked away. And there's a lot of services that you can implement very quickly and easily that can convert those people. And to bring that to the table for your customers is huge in my opinion and it really solidifies you as the expert and that's why they hired you. It's good to have this knowledge. It's good and understand the different services that are available, especially from platforms like PayPal that you're already working with. It's good to research and really dig into this. This is fascinating. A payment option already there Greg: Yeah, Brad, I think it's a really excellent point. And that's what's so great about platforms like Woo is you simplify getting from idea to launch greatly. In this case, it takes a merchant who, to your point, is just trying to get the basics right. And given that it's on a platform they're already working with with a payment option they're already turned on, it really becomes a couple more settings in your admin console and suddenly the merchant has as sophisticated and merchandising machine as a top 100 e-tailer might have, as it relates to buy now pay later capabilities, without taking on any additional costs. It's not suddenly that a fraction of their transactions are now going to cost one, two, three percent more. It's already tied in with what they were already paying from a payment processing perspective. And given PayPal's reach, I think the stat we use now is two thirds of US adults have made a purchase with PayPal in the last three months, so we have a wide customer base already out there looking for the PayPal mark. We appreciate your perspective there. Benefits all sizes of stores Bob: Yeah. And I was going to say that it seems like a small ... Somebody, let's say they have five or 10 products and they're thinking, "Well, this is cool. This really opens up other options for my customers." On the other end of the spectrum, somebody that has hundreds of products may ... whether you're a merchant yourself or somebody building a site for somebody, you might say, "Well, does this really make sense for the larger business?" But as you said, it sounds like it really is a win-win situation, whether you're smaller or larger or all sized businesses. Greg: Yeah, Bob, it is, because consumers are all the same, right? Whether they're shopping at a small merchant or a large merchant, a medium merchant, they're all looking at a purchase decision in the context of how will that impact my cashflow, now more than ever in these unusual times we're living through in 2020. And one of the things we're also excited about at PayPal is there are a handful of providers of similar solutions and it's sort of fragmented across the merchant landscape and given the ubiquitous sort of coverage of PayPal, we certainly want to promote the capability to merchants that merchants turn it on for the shopping journey so that customers are seeing it while they're making their consideration of buying something or adding something additional to the cart, but we'll also be doing a large consumer push as it will be a feature of the PayPal wallet as well. So we'll start to build the expectation with consumers that if a merchant doesn't get to the point of messaging Pay in 4 on a product page, that as long as PayPal is on that site, it'll still be there for a customer to take advantage of and we'll help create customer pull through even just by having the PayPal mark and remove the uncertainty that might exist in a consumer's mind of, "Well, if I'm shopping at merchant A today, which offer will I see, and if I flip over to merchant B, will I see a different offer?" Because they're doing relationships with different vendors. In our case, we think we'll become the e-commerce standard for pay later solutions given our wide coverage on the merchant side. Brad: Yeah. I mean, what'd you say, two thirds of adults are paying with PayPal? Greg: In the last three months. That's right, yep. Brad: In the last three months. That's an amazing number. But I get it. The beautiful thing about PayPal is it's easy. Whenever I'm clicking a random ad on Facebook, laying in bed and buying something I probably shouldn't be buying, PayPal is easy. One click, I'm logging in and boom, order placed. Greg: Yeah. You're not tracking a wallet down in the dark or waking anybody up, right? Yeah. Brad: Ease of use is always ... especially from the mobile perspective, that's the biggest thing for me is I can't tell you how many times I've wanted to maybe buy something on mobile and the experience was so bad I just stopped and I never went back, but the idea of if it is a good experience from the shopping experience, but then you go into checkout and it's PayPal, then you know the payment's going to be easy too, because you just log in and away you go. It makes it very easy from a mobile device, which I love. Thanks to our sponsor WooCommerce You may be just starting your journey as a Woo Builder or well into your journey. Or perhaps you have WooCommerce talents that you want to bring to a team as you look to make a switch in your career. WooCommerce has several roles open that will likely fit your own goals of growth. You will be joining the larger Automattic team, a diverse and distributed group of individuals with a passion for WordPress, and yes, WooCommerce. If you want are looking for make that career pivot and love working from home, check out all their open positions over on our Job Listing at DotheWoo.io. Trust me. I know the company and a lot of the people. It's a smart move. Thanks to WooCommerce.com and their support as a community sponsor. Now let's head back to the show. PayPal removes the risk for merchants I do have one last question, and I guess this is on the what could go wrong side of the house, but obviously there's credit in play here, right? Basically if somebody buys something, the example we had, $100 on my site, they spend the $25 today, if I'm understanding it correctly, me as the seller, I get paid in full, is that right? And then PayPal is essentially in charge of collecting those additional payments? What happens if somebody doesn't pay? Does that come back to the merchant or PayPal assume that responsibility? What happens in that case? Greg: Yeah, that's a great question. From a retailer perspective, it looks like every other dollar spent on PayPal. You get paid upfront, all the normal processing, and PayPal does own and takes the risk on collectability. And there's no further exposure that the merchant has once the is complete outside of normal fulfilling goods and whatnot, but from a credit risk perspective, that's all on PayPal. And one of our advantages relative to others is with 350 million active consumers plus or minus globally, and having done point of sale lending for the better part of 15 years now, we have lots of data and algorithms and whatnot to make good decisions. And that's how we'll manage the business on our side and are able to bring it to merchants as part of that bundle pricing they offer PayPal without that premium, while having fairly high ... I hate to use the word approval rates because it's not quite a traditional loan, but essentially, there is a point in the process where it is technically a loan, So we do run some evaluation of risk. Given our history and our data, we have pretty high throughput, I guess is the way to say it. Brad: That's great. I mean, I think, and again, another reason why it's kind of a no brainer for stores to consider and ultimately offer this because they're not taking on that risk, which I think would probably be one of the first questions a store owner would ask, like, "Well, what if they don't pay?" Greg: Yeah, that's right. Brad: To hear that it doesn't come back to them, and there aren't additional costs, like you said, I mean, then I don't see any reason why a store wouldn't want to implement this. Greg: Yeah. It's no risk, no cost. And given the Woo platform and the way PayPal and Woo are integrated together, very little work as well. I mean, saying it out loud does make it sound like one of those, "What's the catch?" And yeah, I'm happy to say that the catch is simply we've been doing it a long time and engineered a product and a solution that just works without a lot of calories on any front on the merchant side. Easy to use with WooCommerce Bob: From the perspective of everything we've talked about and getting down to the technical clarification, just for everybody knows, they may be sitting there thinking, "Okay, I know when I hook up PayPal to a Woo site, it's pretty straightforward. We do it. Bam, bam, bam, put in few things." As far as this goes, no more bells and whistles, no more having to do a bunch of extra things. They just use the existing extension that's on WooCommerce and that takes care of it, right? Greg: Yeah. That's exactly right. Woo and PayPal have done the work to connect the platforms and now if you are managing your site or you're managing a site on behalf of the other merchant, you can go into the Woo console and activate the buy now pay later offerings from PayPal and it'll show up on product pages and the like to help start driving those incremental sales. Simple as that. Bob: We like it easy. Greg: And still time for holiday season. We're in October, so I think that's holiday season now. Brad: Yeah, I mean, it's coming in hot and heavy. Greg: Hard to believe. Brad: Next thing we know, it'll be Black Friday. Now's the time. I mean, now's the time to make sure your store's in shape if you haven't already been getting ready for it, which I would imagine most store owners are because this is a tradition as the businesses that when we get knocked over in certainly November for online purchasing. Plus I'm sure just overall, clearly online purchasing is up across the board in the past six months given everything going on. Bob: Yeah. And I imagine what better than to get a great Black Friday deal than be able to do it in four payments. I mean, no interest. It definitely adds some sweetness to the pot. Well, Greg, is there anything we haven't really touched on? I just wanted to make sure there isn't something else you wanted to add to the mix here before we close out the show. Greg: Not really. I mean, it's clear you guys did your research. I appreciate the thoughtfulness of the questions and I'll just emphasize the last couple of points we were making, which is PayPal and Woo have really partnered up to make this as simple as it possibly could be and it's live now. I think if you're so inclined, it's a great time to go and activate the offering. And really, it would be a competitive parody with others who have implemented more complicated solutions without paying any incremental costs. I appreciate the time and look forward to more. Bob: Yeah. Cool. All right, Brad. Well, why don't you do the official Brad closing out of the episode? Brad: Yeah, this was great. I really appreciate the time Greg. Again, we want to thank our sponsors. Head over to WooCommerce.com. It's the platform we're always talking about. Also check out DoTheWoo.io and the job listings there. Click on jobs at the top. And of course DoTheWoo.io is the new home of the podcast. And it looks like we've got three different job openings for WooCommerce, at WooCommerce. So if you're interested in working on the actual platform or working with the platform, go check it out, DoTheWoo.io and then click on jobs at the top. And of course we want to thank PayPal our new sponsor. I appreciate you coming on, Greg, and telling us everything about buy now, pay later, Pay in 4, PayPal Credit, a lot of good options. And I've learned some things, which I always love about this show when I can take a few interesting nuggets away. It seems to be a pretty obvious feature that most people probably want to implement. I'm sure everyone's already using PayPal so why not flip it on and give your customers some options? Greg, if people want to find out more information, where should they head? Just head over to paypal.com? Is there a specific section of the site we want to point them to? Greg: Yeah, they can go to paypal.com and look for a pay later section. It'll have links out to ways to activate it, including a quick link over to WooCommerce if you're on a Woo platform. Brad: Awesome. Definitely check that out. Of course, yeah, WooCommerce.com has a lot of resources as well. Anything I missed there, Bob? Bob: No. I think you are set. Any place that you want people to reach out to you directly, LinkedIn or anything, Greg, where they can find you? Connect with Greg and learn more about Pay in 4 Greg: Anyone's welcome to reach out to me on LinkedIn, or I'll even throw my email address out there, gregl@paypal.com if anyone wants to talk buy now pay later. And just to make sure I didn't completely botch where to go on paypal.com, the simple way to find the solution is simply paypal.com/paylater will bring you right to the section that talks about our solutions. Bob: Perfect. Brad: Awesome. Well, with that, Bob, anything coming up, any special announcements, events you want to mention before we wrap up? Bob: No, I can't think of any. I think we have the holidays, which is in everybody's mind about as special as it can get. They're going to creep up on us real fast here, so no, I think that'll do it for now. Brad: All right. Well, for another episode of Do the Woo, thank you, Greg, and thanks everyone for joining us and we will see you next time. Greg: Thanks guys. Scroll back to top Sign up to receive email updates Enter your name and email address below and I'll send you periodic updates about the podcast. powered by

Thanks to our community sponsors The year of 2020 has been challenging and at the same time, provided a chance for some opportunities for growth in the eCommerce space. We asked Chris Lema to come back to the show and reflect on the year so far, with both perspective and insights. Together we take a look at the bigger eCommerce space and then narrow it down to the Woo builder community. You’ll find a lot of gems in this one. A Chat with Chris In episode 76, Jonathan and I chat with Chris about: 2020 and thoughts on the eCommerce spaceOpportunities in the space— despite of the challengesSome of the challenges that presented themselves How builders are handling the growth in the interest in online sellingThe twists and turns that come with streamlining the opportunitiesWhat Chris expects we will see this Black FridayHow builders can help Merchants navigate the myriad of hosting options What he has seen happening in the subscription space over the last several monthsAdvice from Chris for devs entering the WooCommerce space to build sites or products Connect with Chris TwitterLinkedInYouTubeNexcess.net Learn more about the Buy Now, Pay Later options for your clients. Start your next career in WooCommerce at WooCommerce. The Conversation Transcript Email Download New Tab Jonathan: Welcome to Do the Woo Episode 76. I'm your co-host Jonathan Wold, and I'm here with the fantastic BobWP. Bob, how are you today? Bob: Hey, I'm good. We got a little bit of a wind storm here, so I always cross my fingers. Of course, we have wind storms all the time on the coast. Is the electricity going to go out, Bob disappear suddenly? That only lasts three or four months, so it's no big deal, ha. Jonathan: I think we may have the same thing happening over here, because I'm only a few hours away from you and it's pretty gnarly outside right now as well. But the Internet's working? That's what I tend to care about the most. Bob, how's the launch been going? Bob: Good. A lot of good feedback. Yeah, actually pretty amazing feedback. I mean, a lot of people are really excited about it. A lot of people want to get involved. I had a few new Do the Woo friends. Jonathan: I think it's worth saying as well that you did a lot of it yourself, which I was pretty impressed by. Did you get your fill of working on websites? Bob: Yep, I don't want to build another website for approximately seven years. I've set a new goal, so I'm not going to touch that again. Well, before we have you introduce our guest, I'd just like to thank our sponsors, WooCommerce.com 4.6 came out. Just a lot of good stuff going on over at WooCommerce. If you missed all the good stuff on WooSesh earlier this week or just the last couple of days, you can go over there and get the recordings. Join Brian Richards and WPSessions and he'll get you lined up. So visit WooCommerce.com. We're excited to have a new sponsor, PayPal. Yay, PayPal. Anyway, what can you say about PayPal? PayPal is PayPal. I mean, we're all using it. One of the things I'll be talking about and we will be talking more about during their sponsorship is their Pay in 4, that lets customers pay for their purchases over time and for interest free payments. They introduced that a little while back, kind of a cool thing. I'll actually be telling you more about that a little bit later in the show. Jonathan: What I love about PayPal is they have been here a really long time in the space. Many of us have done eCommerce installations on PayPal and they're continuing to do new things. So there's a good continuity that's there. So that's been great. I'm happy to see them involved in this community space. And they're a big part of the eCommerce ecosystem. Bob: I totally agree with you. I'm looking forward to having PayPal as a partner and learning about a lot of their cool stuff going on. So let's go ahead and get started with this show. We have someone that I could say, well, maybe many people don't know our guest, but that would be very untrue. So Jonathan, why don't you introduce our guest? Jonathan: We've got Chris Lema, who needs little introduction in this space. Chris has been contributing valuably to the WordPress ecosystem since... Was it 2005, Chris? It's been a long time huh? Chris: Yep, long time. Jonathan: You know the space well. You've been involved in a lot of things. Today, amongst the many things that you're doing, you're serving as the VP of products over at Nexcess/Liquid Web. Chris: Yeah. Jonathan: Yeah, so thank you for all that you're doing there and thanks for joining us today. It's great to have you. Chris: It is great to be here. Jonathan: We started out with the weather. How is the weather in your neck of the woods currently? Chris: I think in Houston, which is where my house is now, it is warm. I am currently in Atlanta for a couple of business meetings and it is not what you would call cold. Either way in both these parts, we're not seeing the storms that you guys are seeing up in the areas that you're in. I think we're good. But the truth is, I spend most of my days indoors, right? So I actually have to venture all the way to a window and look outside to know what's going on. Jonathan: Both the downside and the upside of being able to have a flexibility to work where you want to work, right? Chris: Yep. Jonathan: Excellent. Well, Chris, it's always great to have you. Chris: It is great to be here. I'm wearing purple, but not because of WooCommerce and not because I just did a session on WooSesh, but because the Lakers won their championship and I've waited 10 years. So all week is a purple week. Every shirt I'm wearing this week is all purple. Jonathan: It's a good week. A first look at the ecosystem in 2020 You've been in this ecosystem for a long time. You've seen a lot sort of come and go. This particular year seems especially loaded. There's been a lot happening. Chris: Yeah. Basically, if you're an analyst for eCommerce, every one of your projections was wrong, right? Because you know how people do their projections, right? They're linear progression, line just keeps creeping. Whoever said, "Oh, well, I think that in 2020, we're going to see eCommerce grow by whatever the percent you were thinking." I think we were seeing eCommerce in the US moving a couple percentage points every year. Whoever predicted 2020 was way off, right? They were just like, "Oh my God! What's happening?" McKinsey was like, "Oh, we've seen 10 years worth of growth in three months." So nobody was ready for this. There's been a lot of downside in a COVID related space; businesses closing, families hurt by unemployment, people not able to pay rent. I mean, the list goes on and on of all the negative things. The one, maybe silver lining in all that has been massive growth in eCommerce. Adoption in every form and every trend. And so if you're in that space, that's been the good news. Opportunities seen in this space Jonathan: So Chris, you've been in this eCommerce industry for a bit. And for those of us just kind of looking broadly, it's easy to see the growth, and it's easy to see that there's a lot happening. From your vantage point though, being at a company that does manage WooCommerce and having good connections in the product space, has there been anything that stands out to you, particularly in terms of maybe some of the opportunities that you're seeing in this space or some of the challenges? I'm just curious what you've been seeing over the past six months or so. Chris: What I've seen mirrors what we're reading about in the industry trade mags and everything else. I think we've noticed that there is very little brand or store loyalty out there, right? When you get caught and you don't know where to buy toilet paper, you stop worrying about brands, right? Or if you always buy at Amazon and all of a sudden Amazon delays its shipping timelines, you start buying at other places, right? Walmart was like, "Thank you for being you, Amazon. We're happy to drive this." But it wasn't just the big box retailers, right? It was everyone under the sun. So we've seen stores, we've seen retail, we've seen folks who have just pushed into a space that was previously owned and dominated by one 800-pound gorilla. And it's dispersed, it's distributed. People are making money online even if they're not the biggest name, because brand loyalty is not what we expect it to be. So we've definitely seen that. We've seen a lot of requests come into us as a host and who does manage WooCommerce hosting. Requests that we can't perfectly solve for groceries. "Hey, can we host a grocery store online?" You're like, "You can, but there's a lot more to it than the website. You got to worry about inventory. You got to worry about shipping." I mean, it gets complicated pretty fast when you go all the way out to groceries. But online groceries is one of the biggest growth components that we've seen, right? Both grocery and what we've seen out in the rest of the data points. The US and Portugal had super high growth in that, right? And I'm like, "I don't know what US and Portugal have in common, other than they both enjoy wine." But you're like, "Wow! Okay." We're seeing massive growth in that space. We're also seeing that for every store that closed down... And again, as a hosting company, we get those phone calls where people say, "I can't run it anymore. I got to close down." For every store that was closing down, every website that was closing down, we saw one or two stores that popped up, right? People were attaching eCommerce to a previous non eCommerce store. You might've had a blog, now you want to merchandise it with a T-shirt. You had a physical store, now you want an online store. We've seen quarters of this now; of definitely more closing than we've seen on a normal basis, but massively more growth and openings than before. The challenges and risks 2020 has brought to the ecosystem Jonathan: One more question I'm curious about in this vein of thinking, so we see a lot of opportunity in the eCommerce space which is generally sort of a positive thing, but what are some of the challenges or risks that you're seeing to folks in this space? Chris: Oh, yeah. I mentioned Amazon a little bit ago, but I'll tell you, we started working with ShipBob, one of our partners, because people who had previously counted on Amazon for their fulfillment services, were suddenly told, with almost no notice, "We are not going to accept your shipments anymore." What Amazon did to mitigate the fact that so many people were buying household items that were cleaners and those supplies, they couldn't maintain that while accepting all the rest of the inbound stuff that was going to be for Amazon stores. So you can imagine, right? We've had five years of people telling anyone who will listen, "You should spin up an Amazon store. You should use Amazon buy fulfillment. You should do." On and on and on. So let's say that you finally bought into that. Okay, great. You send a whole pallet of your products to Amazon and Amazon says, "We're not accepting it. And by the way, for whatever you have in stock, we're putting a delay on it because we're shipping these other things." We redirected a whole bunch of people to ShipBob and ShipBob opened up thousands of square foot of new warehouse space and just started processing stuff, right? And it's hard when you count on the main player, and that main player is external to you, right? You count on someone else, and then they change rules on you, which they were doing for their own good reasons and I get it, but it can affect your business dramatically. The tidal wave of people who want to sell online and how if affects the builder Bob: One of the things I was wondering, Chris, has this added this layer of stress on agencies? For example, all these businesses that are hurting right now and they want to go online. And some of them, it's a natural segue, "Yeah. Hey, we'll do it." But then I imagine a lot of these agencies are getting people coming out of desperation. "I have this physical brick and mortar store. I need to get online." The agency's looking at their business and thinking, well, that's going to take some creativity because obviously not everybody you have can adapt to online. Have you heard that from the agencies that they're getting more inundated? Chris: Yeah, we're seeing pressure in a lot of different ways, right? One pressure is, we need this up fast. We need it faster than we've ever asked before. I don't have nine months to get something up and online, right? If you're talking about a really big and complicated WooCommerce or a really big Magento store, and the agencies are like, "This is our normal process. We'll do it in six months." And so there's pressure on an agency that says, "Tell me what you can get done in one month or two months. I need this up fast." So there's that pressure. Second pressure is, some of the folks that are asking for this stuff have fixed budgets, right? You're asking for some of the most complicated stuff at some of the most inexpensive price points. And that applies pressure to agencies as well, right? And some of the best agencies will regularly go into, "Well, let's do a phased approach. Let's get you up and do phase one, and then we'll use the revenue from phase one to put into phase two." And so there's definitely ways to manage it, but they're seeing the second pressure, which is price points, right? The first is timelines, the second is price points. The third pressure is that... And it's not different than we've ever had. It just becomes more pronounced when those first two pressures exist. And that's when agencies are asked to do things that, frankly, they're not even sure they know how to do, because Amazon's doing it or Walmart's doing it, right? Imagine you're like, "Hey, I want to spin up an online store." "Okay, no problem. We can do that." "Well, and I want it to have inventory and track it based on both what's being sold online, but also what's being sold offline in the physical premise." You go, "Okay, that's a little hard, but we can do that." "And I also want to know what parking spot you just pulled into so that I can make sure to deliver your order to the right parking spot." And you're like, "Wait, wait, wait, wait. How do we get the parking spots?" You're like, "What? Okay, hold on." "And then I want a mobile app that will let me check in to the parking spot and give you the spot when I get there." And agencies are like, "Okay, we're going to have to think through this. This is not something we do every day." I think agencies are feeling three different kinds of pressures. We're hearing it, we're seeing it. And of course, that doesn't stop the normal pressures like, "I want it fast. How do I make it faster?" That's an everyday dynamic. Thanks to our sponsor PayPal. In time for the holiday season PayPal has launched a new pay later option called Pay in 4. This mean that your clients can offer their customers the option to purchase over time in 4 interest-free payment. This feature is one of two option from PayPal for pay later with the other being PayPal Credit which gives store customers more purchasing power through flexible and transparent choices in how and when they pay. This second option is subject to consumer credit approval. So offering those payment options is good business. Did you know that 64% of consumers surveyed say they are more likely to make a purchase at a retailer that offers interest-free payment options. And 56% of consumers that responded agree that they prefer to pay a purchase back in installments rather than use a credit card. Well, this seems like a no-brainer to me. Clients can grow their sales and get paid up front with no additional risk or cost. All you need to do is download the PayPal Checkout extension on the Marketplace at WooCommerce.com. Just head on over, click marketplace and search for the PayPal Checkout. Suggesting that to your clients will certainly open up sales opportunities for them. Thanks for PayPal for being a community sponsor at Do the Woo. And now back the conversation. Jonathan: What's interesting about that challenge too is that, because of the distributed nature of this ecosystem, that question is being asked of different agencies at the same time, right? The grocery store has been a great example of that. I want to be able to park in this spot. And if you zoom out, you say, 'Okay, it makes sense and it's also plausible." But then because it's not centralized, you end up having this frank reality that multiple people are working on the same thing, and there's some diffused effort there which has advantages but it also has disadvantages when it comes to speed. You guys are in a position where you get to see more of these types of things coming together. Streamlining the opportunities So I'm curious about how you as a host, think about the opportunities here because you want to continue to play to the strength of WooCommerce on WordPress as this distributed ecosystem where people have choice yet at the same time, there's opportunities to help streamline things. So I'm curious, how do you think about that when you see all these? Chris: It's a tight rope we walk every day, right? Let's say you come and bring a website onto my platform and you are like, "Hey, this is our WooCommerce store and it's on our platform." And then you say, "Huh, it's not as fast as you promise it would be. You said it would be fast and you gave me the whole pitch on why I should host it over here." And I go, "Yeah, it should be really fast." So I'm like, "Let me go look at your site." And you're talking to the agency that built the site, right? And the agency has built code that is not sound. What do you do, right? Do you say, "Hey, your chief technology officer or your chief architect or your senior engineer didn't do this right"? That seems like a hard message to pass. On the flip side, let's say they just spent money buying a plugin and you go, "That's maybe the 30th version of that feature that I would choose. I have three others I'd choose first." So we are in this constant, how do you define managed in managerial commerce hosting. And we believe that the answer includes some really honest and frank feedback, but in the context where you've asked for it, right, or in the context where we might give you a light note like, "Hey, we noticed site is performing slower than we would expect. We dug in a little, we noticed that you're having some issues with this thing." And then you leave it there and wait and see if someone says, "Well, do you have a recommendation?" "Oh, glad you asked. Here, we do." So you're doing this tight rope balance because we see code that isn't performed well, we see plugins that we would recommend others instead of them. So you do this dance of navigating that. But every single day, we see strange things. Especially when you're talking about stores that are really over-performing, right? You don't normally see that with a store that's struggling to do three orders a day. But if you're doing hundreds of orders a day and maybe for tens of thousands of dollars a day, and all of a sudden you're getting massive traffic and things are going sideways, that's where we'll dig in. But you don't want to dig in and go, "Well, the problem is you wrote the wrong code here." So you do a dance, right, and you say, "Well, would you like us to take a look at this code?" And then they're like, "Yeah, please. I want another pair of eyes." And other people are like, "Nope, I don't need you worrying about that at all." Okay, right. You take your guidance from the folks that are hiring you. Jonathan: There's an interesting tension that's there, right? Because part of the value proposition, when we see folks move over from say, Shopify to Woo, there's this, "We want the autonomy. We want the flexibility." With that, comes the freedom to do things that can mess your stores up. Chris: Yep. Jonathan: You want to maintain that because if you just take a lockdown approach, you're doing the same thing and playing a loop game. But I like that. It's a tight rope, right? You can sort of nudge and gently point like, "Hey, you want to do this?" Some people want it, others don't. Chris: Yeah, we're working on a feature that will roll out next year, where we can tell you what the potential cost of each plugin that you activate has on your site. Let's say you wanted to add a pop-up and you thought that pop-up would generate 10% more add-on revenue. And so you're like, "Okay." Well, your average order value is $150, and you think with this pop-up you can get 10% more. So it's 15 bucks and you do 10 orders a week, so 150 bucks a week. That's money, right? But if I show you that it adds three second delay and that will take 50% of your sales away, we should be able to do the math for you and do that calculus and say, "Do you really want this pop-up or not?" Jonathan: Nice. Chris: So it gets a little complicated, but we're working on that to really help redefine what manage means and to help our merchants. Jonathan: It sounds like you're going for an approach that's really about helping them make better choices. Chris: Yep. Jonathan: So you can show them those costs. If you can show them where like, "Hey, this is what we think. This gives you some perspective. You're making the choice. We're not doing it for you, but we're helping you make better choices." I love that. Chris: It helps you run down that tight wire that's right in between being too restrictive and too free, right, that you were just talking about. You're like, "How do I educate?" Even if the education isn't the merchant or the the store owner, it might be the developer. But we interact with developers who didn't know there were three versions of this plugin or three versions of this feature, didn't know that one of them was way better than the rest, right? And so you want to be able to go, "Okay, let me give you the data and then if you still want to run with it, that's okay. It's your car." Jonathan: That's great. Black Friday, what is to be expected Bob: I'm going to flip over to another subject. I had this question I thought of before we got on here. Black Friday's coming up. We're not going to talk about prepping for that because hopefully everybody's been working on that for a while. You see the predictions just generally out there, "Oh, it's going to be explosive. It's going to be amazing." Let's go to the WooCommerce builder that builds products and does extensions. Things like that, SAS, whatever. When Black Friday rolls around, what do you think that it's going to be for those particular products in this very niche? Is it going to be a big boost? Because what we have is, we have two audiences for them. One is the store builder, and one is the regular consumer, DIYer. That might be new to the space. They just build a site they don't really understand. Okay, I can get this deal where somebody else is a little bit more attuned to looking for them. I say, "Oh, I'm going to wait and get this." Do you think for those businesses, Black Friday is going to be business as usual? Do you think it's going to be a bit more because people are jumping on the eCommerce bandwagon or is it going to be huge... What do you think is going to happen? Or is there even any way to give any prediction? Chris: I think the only prediction I can tell you really seriously about Black Friday and Cyber Monday, is it's going to be up, way up, super up, and most sites will fail, right? Honestly, if I were owning a store today, right, I would tell you that last month was the time when I should have bought more infrastructure, where I should have been only focused on scale. We launched some new auto-scale features last month, specifically for this, right? Because we're like, "Hey, if you're not thinking about the massive traffic load and scale in September and October, it's too late when you get to November." It's going to be silly when you call on Friday and go, "There's a problem with my server." I mean, every host will help you, they'll try and do what they can, but that's the wrong moment to do it, right? So it will be up, way up. We know that eCommerce in general is up. We know that transaction dynamics are up. We know that we've seen between the folks that bought significantly more, and the people who bought slightly more, we're talking about more than 60%, right? 50 to 60% of the people fell in that category of, "In this time we're buying more online than anywhere else." And we know that when it comes to that particular weekend, stores will have the broadest, most significant discounts that they've had all year. You don't have to be a genius to be like, "We're going to see unprecedented numbers." But it won't matter if your website's down, right? It won't matter if just congestion has killed you. Jonathan: It's worth pointing out here too this is one of the softer spots within WordPress and Woo because if you go with a SAS platform that is typically, due to various degrees of success, abstracted out, they're handling the infrastructure. Whereas with WordPress and Woo, you do have to think about that or be working with a host who's thinking about it for you or like, "We've anticipated this, we're on top of this." Chris: It's no good. I mean, if you're with a inexpensive host, right? And by inexpensive I mean, less than $10 a month. And I know we have a promo right now that one of our 19 dollar plans is at nine. Generically, I'm not picking on a host, but if you're spending three, four, $5 a month in hosting, you are in a environment that is likely highly loaded onto a single server, right? It's high density shared hosting. And if you're in high density shared hosting, one of the sites out, of a thousand on that server, could have a really big run and every other site on that server is going to feel that pain. Even if you didn't do anything, right? And so when you're in that environment and you call up and say, "Hey, I'm not doing good. I want to move or whatever," you're talking about a migration. Even the best companies, it'll take you a day, two, three to migrate an eCommerce based store, right? It's not the same as running HTML from one directory to another. Jonathan: There's a lot of complexities to it. Are you going to take your door offline during that? You kind of have to. Chris: It gets really complicated, really fast. Our auto-scale gives people 24 hours and they don't have to be continuous. 24 hours of high traffic events, where the PHP workers, the maximum concurrent threads, you get the next plan up. You get it in your plan for 24 hours for free, right? Thanks to our sponsor WooCommerce You may be just starting your journey as a Woo Builder or well into your journey. Or perhaps you have WooCommerce talents that you want to bring to a team as you look to make a switch in your career. WooCommerce has several roles open that will likely fit your own goals of growth. You will be joining the larger Automattic team, a diverse and distributed group of individuals with a passion for WordPress, and yes, WooCommerce. If you want are looking for make that career pivot and love working from home, check out all their open positions over on our Job Listing at DotheWoo.io. Trust me. I know the company and a lot of the people. It's a smart move. Thanks to WooCommerce.com and their support as a community sponsor. Now let's head back to the show. Builders, hosts, merchants and navigating the waters Jonathan: Chris, the thing I'm curious about, the most of the people listening are builders themselves, right? I love what you guys do. There are a lot of hosts out there, a lot of options. How would you advise builders and developers, design folks working with merchants to help them navigate? Chris: The first phone call I'd tell you is call the host and ask, what kind of scaling solutions, what kind of growth can you handle if my site gets this traffic, right? Tell me blatantly. Now, some of those hosts will tell you, "I have this in place, or I have that in place." Others would say, "Well, we would recommend that you upgrade to another plan." And you may legitimately want to move to another plan. But then the next question is, "Great, let's say I move to that plan. What are the capacity challenge?" One of the things that we flipped on when we started working on this a year ago was, we had to stop talking about PHP workers, concurrent threads, et cetera. And we talked about maximum concurrent traffic, right? We started changing the language that people could understand, right? If your store has never had a hundred people on it at the same time, that may be your max and someone else maybe have a thousand at the same time. We just talked to a customer a day ago. Talked to a customer who every single time they send out an email with Klaviyo, every single time to 10,000 email subscribers. Not 50,000, not two million, but 10,000. They see thousands of clicks back to a single page within a three-minute span of the email going out, meaning everybody immediately opens the email and clicks the link. Thousands of people hitting the same exact page at the same exact time. And of course, if that's a product page and you have 30 dynamic queries running, you're going to slow that thing to a crawl. And that's on a regular day. That's not on the Cyber Monday weekend, right? So that's where you say, hey, if you're a developer, get on the phone with the host. They should be your partner, not just a vendor, right? Talk to them, ask them about capacity planning, ask them about growth and scalability. They may tell you right off the bat, "You need to be on a different plan if you're in growth." Jonathan: And if you don't do this stuff now, you're going to have a pretty unpleasant holiday because your customers are going to be calling you. They're going to be like, "Hey, what's going on?" Even if it's the host's problem, as a developer, you're in the position to be able to be advising folks and anticipate and it's like, you know it, you can see it coming. Cool. Chris: If the host offers you an ability to review the code base, review the products on your site or whatever, if you're a developer and the host offers a second pair of eyes, I would take it, right? We have some partners who are really serious hardcore eCommerce store builders and even with all their expertise, they're like, "Oh, yeah. Hey, take a second look." Because we see it so often, because we touch. And we see the tickets very often, right? And this is every host, right? Every host sees this; tickets, tickets, tickets, and eventually you start seeing patterns. And when you see that pattern, invariably, if you're a developer and you're like, "Hey, can you take a second and look at this?" If your host provides it, I'd take it. Because if you're using something that they know is going to give you a hiccup under heavy load, find out about it now, not later. Jonathan: It's great to think of them as a partner. I'm curious to switch topics to subscriptions. Chris: Oh, yeah. What about that subscription thing? Jonathan: There's a lot that could be said about this, but I'm curious for your thoughts and just the broad opportunities that you see in the subscription space. What are you seeing right now? Chris: Man, subscriptions, it's huge right now. When we talk about subscriptions, often in the WordPress space, we're talking about regular payment for content protection. Content protection, like a membership site, is only one kind of subscription, right? We just have to be like, "Okay, hold on a second." When everyday people talk about subscriptions, they're not often talking about access, right? They're often talking about curation or replenishment, right? They're talking about the Dollar Shave Club. I think it's called Dollar Shave. And then curation might be Blue Apron or Stitch Fix, whether you're talking about clothing or you're talking about food; where different people are getting different products delivered to them on a regular basis based on some level of decision-making and recommendation, right? And all of that is up into the right. Women have more subscriptions than men, broadly on the gender base, but men have more number of active subscriptions than women on average, right? 28% of women have three or more subscriptions. 42% of men have three or more subscriptions, right? And so that's always interesting, even though you're like, "Well, but women have more." And your like, "Backup, hold on a second." It depends on what we're talking about and it depends on how they're using it. One of my favorites as a shift in dynamics with subscriptions, is a company called Thread. If you haven't looked at Thread, it's really interesting because while it's not a subscription exact player, it's fighting the subscription players. We all know those companies that have clothing in a box, right? And especially for men, it turns out. I don't know why it took this long, but eventually we realized that men don't know how to dress, right? And so finally someone was like, "Well, what if we just hire one stylist who creates different styles, puts the clothing in a box, ships it to you, and we just tell the men to wear?" And boom, right? We went from one clothing subscription box company to 17 in less than 18 months. Men are thrilled, right? I'm a guy who's in a lot of airports and it's crazy when as people are walking by, I can go, that's this company, that's this company, right? Because they're all wearing the same outfits, right? But Thread did something a little different. Thread was like, "Okay, I want you to come over here and fill out your profile." And now I'm going to have a person who is a personalized shopper, who's going to read your profile and then make recommendations to you. And then I'm going to see the recommendations and choose which things I want or don't want. And I can buy them in a box, I can buy them in a kit or I can buy each one individually. Or I can just rate them. I like this, I don't like this. This is the notion of personalization in these subscription models. And it's huge, right? This ability for deep curation in a replenishment or product delivery on a regular basis. It's massive and it's interesting. I think it's the way of... We're seeing people adopt subscriptions more than not. And that's always interesting too. When you see subscription numbers go up, you got to understand it's counterintuitive because most of us hate the idea of recurring charges, right?. We hate that I have to buy something on a recurring basis. So the product I have to buy has to be super amazing for me to get over the hump. But when they deliver real value, right, and to see the numbers growing, then you got to be like, "Okay, well, what do I got to know about this?" And it turns out, whether it's media, buying access to downloads and stuff, or whether it's product replacement, or whether it's curated products, it's growing and it's worth people thinking about. For the longest time in the WordPress ecosystem and even in the WooCommerce ecosystem, it was mostly just access. Jonathan: Yeah, access. Chris: I think the model is starting to shift towards replenishment. And then when you start adding personalization, man, that's an incredible play. Jonathan: On the Woo side of things, subscriptions is right up there in terms of, what's most popular and what people are doing. And what I've loved personally to see is just the variety of builders who are coming in and building new plugins, new extensions, new themes to offer that. There's so much flexibility there, which has its downsides as well in terms of so many options to parse through. But I love seeing that. I'm looking forward to seeing more sort of streamlined. All right, if you're going to do this type of business, you do that, but here's the plugins that you're going to want to use. Here's the piece that you're going to want to use. I just see a lot of opportunity where some of these SaaS platforms are a bit limited. They have to pick the most popular one and sort of go that path whereas with Woo, you can have a lot more. This niche is focused on this type of business and this is the pack of plugins that you use in this over here. Chris: Yeah, you could not build what Thread has built. You cannot build it on one of the standard hosted platforms, just not going to happen. The level of engagement, interactivity, the flexibility you need in the business model, is not going to happen on SquareSpace. Even if they're now getting ready to start implementing... Oh, sorry. On Shopify. Even though they're now getting ready to start their subscription piece, they've always been hammered by the fact that they can't do it. They're going to roll out their first one. It's interesting, but it's going to be plain Jane, right? And most of the hosted platforms deliver a very plain simple version of this. And that's where you're going to go, "Nope, it's a different model." You need flexibility. The only place where you could do that today with hosted would be BigCommerce, where BigCommerce has enough of an API that if you pay for the enterprise side, you can basically run headless on BigCommerce and build anything you want. But WooCommerce and Magento are both places where, because of the open source nature, because of the community around it, you can build with flexibility, the kind of experience you want to have. Building entering the WooCommerce space, first step Bob: All right. Well, I have one last question. I don't know if you have anything else you want to touch on, but let me just swing this your way, Chris. A little bit of a Chris' advice here. So everybody I'm talking to, and probably everybody both of you talk to that are in the Wordpress space, building both products and agencies doing websites are saying... I see everybody when I say something about eCommerce, "Oh, I'm just starting to get into that. I'm starting to do more WooCommerce sites." Everybody wants to get in on it. I mean, it's obvious why they want to do it. I imagine for both of them there, it's a little bit different. But what's your initial? If somebody is saying, "Hey, I've been doing WordPress stuff for a while. I've been building WordPress sites. Now I'm ready to jump into WooCommerce and I'm going to start doing that for clients." What's your very first piece of advice you give them? Chris: So first of all, let me just say that it's wonderful that we're seeing WordPress folks who are getting into eCommerce. For many years, They didn't. They didn't touch it. They were like, "No, no, it's complicated. I don't know that I have the technical chops to do it or it's complicated. I don't know if I have the insurance premiums to handle what happens if a customer sues me. I don't want to be in a mission-critical business." And no matter what I would tell them, right? "You can do this. You have the skills, the tools are there. This is great. You're going to have a great time." People were like, "No, no, thank you." And I think we're finally at a place where people are going, "Hey, I think I can do this." You interviewed one of my good friends who, without calling her out, she was like, "I can't. I can't build a WooCommerce store." And then all of a sudden she did and then she's like, "Oh my God! Now all we do is WooCommerce store." And you're like, "That's great. I'm glad for you." So very happy that people are starting to embrace it and get into it. The first piece of advice I would say is, make sure that you have a really deep and robust conversation with the customer, right? That more often than not... And I gave a presentation at some point with 40 questions to ask for an eCommerce project before you scope it or price it. I'll find the slides, I'll send it to you somewhere. But what I know is that it's different. If you are just getting started with eCommerce, there's a lot of stuff you forget to ask about. And so you ask two or three questions, you get super excited, you know you're going to use WooCommerce and you put out a quote and you're like, "Okay, that will be $6,000." And then in the middle of it, the customer says, "Well, how do I interact with Salesforce?" And you're like, "What?" Or, "How's this going to work on my TradeGecko inventory?" And you're like, "Huh, that wasn't in the quote." You don't want to find those things out by accident. So the most important thing I'd say is, step one, get your list of questions ready, right? I had a friend who wanted to build a membership site the other day. And I said, "Hey, can we have a call?" They were going to talk to an agency. And I said, "I love that you're going to talk to an agency. Can you and I have a call first, before you have a call with the agency?" They go, "Sure, what are we going to talking about?" I said, "I'm going to give you all the questions you have to ask yourself. Here's all the questions you have to ask yourself. Do you want this? Do you need this? Do you want this? Do you need this?" And we just went through 40 questions or maybe 20 questions before she went, "Wow! I hadn't thought about any of that." I'm like, "Right, and the problem is, your agency may not ask the question, and then you're going to ask it 13 weeks into the project." And then they're going to say, "Well, we have to redo everything we did because we didn't know you're going to ask that." It's what I call marinading in the problem space. And most of us want to jump to the solution way too quickly. You got to marinate in the problem space. I'm from California. We don't really know barbecue. We grill. That means we put food on a grill and wait a certain amount of time then we take it off. The barbecue people know this. If you're going to marinate, you can't just take meat, throw it in a Ziploc bag, throw some liquid in it, zip it up, put it in the fridge, wait an hour and take it out. That's not marinated. And yet, unfortunately, that's what people do when they start doing a discovery process on a eCommerce project. If they're new, they just ask a couple questions. Great, they've isolated which extensions they want to use, and they're off and running, and they haven't marinated in the problem space. Time to sell products in the Woo space Bob: So how about somebody that wants to start selling products in the WooCommerce space? Any little bit of variation. I'm sure it's knowing your customers, but- Chris: I would tell you, do not make your target audience a developer. If you're trying to build a product in the space and you want to sell that, do not make it so that you're selling to developers. Because every developer who looks at your product, is going to say the same thing in their head. They're going to say, "I could probably do that in two hours." Which means, even though they couldn't, it means that they're not going to have the value on the price point, which means it's going to depress your price point, which means it's going to depress your revenue. And developers are going to immediately go, "Well, it's just this. Or you just have to do that." And I'm not saying developers are bad. I'm just saying, if I go to a contractor friend of mine and I start talking about building something, they're definitely going to be like, "I don't need you to do that. I can do that." The fundamental dynamic is, it's not magic to them, right? So if you want to solve a problem, solve a problem for a customer who doesn't know how you do it, and who says, "I need that, and I'm willing to pay for it." If you sell a tool to a developer and the developer goes, "I could build that myself," you're going to struggle to sell. You're going to struggle the close. You're going to struggle to get the premium price point. Bob: Well, as always, fantastic show, Chris. I know whenever I get you on a podcast and I've had on a few different ones, we could just talk and talk and talk. So that's why we keep having you come back. Chris: A lot of fun. Connect with Chris Bob: All right. Let's see. First of all, before I thank the sponsors, where can people connect with you, Chris? Chris: I am @ChrisLemma, C-H-R-I-S-L-E-M-, as in Mary, A. @ChrisLema on Twitter. And I think I'm Mr. Chris Lema on Instagram, YouTube and LinkedIn. You can find me in any of those places. Also, you can read riding my blog posts @chrislema.com and I also have several blog posts over@nexcess.net. You can find me online just about anywhere. Bob: Cool. Well, I'd like to thank our sponsors again. WooCommerce.com of course, that's what we're here for. We're here for WooCommerce and that's what we've been talking about for 45 minutes almost. So WooCommerce, you got to love them. PayPal, remember their pay later offers your clients a chance to get paid up front with no additional risk or costs. So that might be a good recommendation for that next project. Visit dothewoo.io, that is our new site. Been up for about not quite a little bit over a week or two. Is it just one week? I think. Oh my God. It is just one week. Anyway, it seems a lot longer than that. But do check it out and do subscribe to the podcasts in your favorite pod app. Again, thank you so much, Chris, for joining us. Chris: My pleasure. Scroll back to top Sign up to receive email updates Enter your name and email address below and I'll send you periodic updates about the podcast. powered by

Thanks to our community sponsor Creating support, feedback channels and documentation for developers is a critical piece to the puzzle. Allen Smith has taken the role of Developer Advocate at WooCommerce with drive to bring the best to the fingertips of the dev community. His global experience in platforms and community bring a fresh vision into the space and we get a chance to learn more about Allen and how he is seriously doing the Woo. A Chat with Allen In episode 75, Brad and I chat with Allen about: What the developer advocate for WooCommerce doesThe developer resources for WooCommerce and how they are taking shapeHow Allen comes from a diverse background of communities and languages with a fresh perspective on WooThe bigger picture of documentation around the WooCommerce developer communityThe challenges and solutions for keeping documentation up to dateWhere Allen is finding success in creating and managing feedback channels for the developersWhat options there are for jumping into the Woo developer community at WooCommerce Connect with Allen WooCommerce Slack Resources WooCommerce Developer Resources PortalWooCommerce Developer Blog The Conversation Yes, this is the transcript. But not in the traditional sense, transcribed word for word. We do not speak as we write. Often the flow of transcribed content is hard to follow. So I have taken it a few steps further by seriously editing, at times, the conversation and even using my editorial freedom to clarify some points. So enjoy. Transcript Email Download New Tab Brad: Welcome back to another exciting episode of Do the Woo. I'm one of your hosts, Brad, and I'm here with BobWP. Bob, what's happening? Bob: What is happening? Just a lot on the plate and keeping busy. So nothing really new, but new in a sense... Brad: Nothing new, Bob? Come on, you're being modest. Bob: Nothing new with having stuff on the plate. Brad: You could just rebrand and launch a whole new website. No big deal. Bob: Ha. Doing good. Brad: I know you've talked about it. We're going to have some deeper conversations, but DoTheWoo.io is live now, right? Bob: Right, right. We are good to go after all this time. I pushed the button. It's live. Well, I didn't push a button ... that sounds too easy. Brad: I'm going to need you to push the button. Somebody somewhere pushed a button and its live. So go check it out. DoTheWoo.io for all things Woo. If you're a builder, specifically, developers, designers, entrepreneurs, building stores, supporting a store, this is the resource for you or one of the resources because it's a great segue into our guests today. But right before I do that, I do want to give a big shout out to a href="https://woocommerce.com/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener" aria-label="WooCommerce.com (opens in a new tab)">WooCommerce, as always, our community sponsor. If you're not familiar, I would probably ask why you're listening to this podcast. Maybe you're just wondering what it is. So WooCommerce is really the leading plugin specifically for WordPress, to power your e-Commerce store. It has a ton of functionality. That's what we talk about each and every week on this show and have various guests on. This week, we're focusing on the developer side, which is really a direct relation to what you just launched here, Bob, and the changes with the podcast and with the content. This week, we've brought on Mr. Allen Smith. So welcome to the show, Allen. Allen: Thank you so much. Thanks for having me. Brad: I've teased it up in terms of WooCommerce development, but why don't you tell everybody? What is your official role within WooCommerce and how does that tie into the developer side of it? Allen Smith, Developer Advocate at WooCommerce Allen: Yeah, absolutely. I am a developer advocate for WooCommerce here at Automattic. My job is to make sure that the developer experience for people who are building with WooCommerce, be they builders, people who orchestrate by putting those together or people who build extensions that build on top of WooCommerce, it's my job to make sure that their developer experience is both delightful and that they have the things that they need to build the things that they're trying to build, to solve the problems that they're trying to solve for merchants. Brad: Yeah. I love it. I've written a number of books on WordPress development on the more technical side of working with WordPress for developers, designers, and basically people building sites with WordPress. One of the things I really stand behind is that if a platform is hard to work on, if you can't get the buy-in from developers, it's going to be much harder to get the users because ultimately, we're the advocates for the platform by and large. Not saying everybody using WordPress is a developer or has to be a developer. They certainly don't. But if the developers are really backing the platform, they're going to do a lot of the promotion. They're going to be the advocates, either directly or indirectly, just by using the platform. So having somebody in your role and really helping curate the knowledge, the discussions, the support on a platform as advanced, if you will, as WooCommerce, it has a lot of moving parts and a lot of things that you can do with it, I think is hugely important for any platform. So I'm really glad to see a more formal structure around this than what we have seen in the past, where it was more just community-based. In the WordPress world we had the codex and it was like, "Well, it's kind of there, but I don't trust it." So it feels more mature, I guess, is the point I'm trying to make, which I think should give developers that aren't, or that are new to this space, or that are maybe thinking about jumping into WordPress and/or WooCommerce, more confidence to say, "Hey, there's actually a lot of support here for me as a developer, not just as a user, but as a developer. There's these tools. There's resources I need to learn and to grow, to be confident in this platform." What are you hearing? Are you getting some of the same feedback? Are you really seeing people take hold of the information that you're putting out there, or what's your take? Developer resource portal Allen: Yeah, absolutely. That's one thing I noticed as soon as I started. There is so much that's out there already. A lot of the feedback we were at least initially getting from developers was that there were good resources, but so much stuff was really hard because it was spread out. So one of the things we did initially was we created a developer portal that aggregated all of those resources in one place. Now if people go to developer.woocommerce.com, they can just see a list of everything from reference docs to guides, examples. There's links to all of the libraries that people might want to use. Bob: So as I understand, that you were not necessarily deep in WooCommerce or WordPress prior to coming to WooCommerce. I like to hear a little bit about the journey. What were you doing before you entered the zone of WooCommerce? Did Allen Do the Woo before coming to WooCommerce? Allen: You're right. Yeah, I'm not a PHP developer. I'm not a WordPress person. I was not a WooCommerce person prior to joining the company. So I was honestly a little surprised that I got the interview for the job. But before this, I had been working in pretty much just about every other language. I worked at GitHub for several years before this. I started there as a trainer, and we would go out to companies and we would teach people how to use Git and how to improve their development workflows, using Git and GitHub. Because of that, we had to learn a lot of different workflow patterns. We had to learn a lot of different programming languages and frameworks and all sorts of things. So for me, it very much set the stage in learning how to bridge the gaps between all of these different communities. After I started at WooCommerce, it was then that I learned that this was something that was very important to them and was finding a way to bridge the gaps between these divergent communities that they were going to have to bring together. Difference communities and languages So we have the react developers who know all about the front end stuff, the very modern way of doing these single page apps that have build systems and all sorts of things that WordPress and WooCommerce had never historically relied upon. Then you have these veteran PHP developers who know the framework, know the platform inside and out, and how to find a way to help these two groups help each other build really, really cool things for merchants. So my background prior to WooCommerce really came into play there because I had worked in all of these different communities and all of these different languages, and finding a way to help these groups communicate and find the commonalities between them, I think, is something that was very important to them. A fresh set of eyes (and ears) Brad: It sounds like bringing you in without having some of that direct experience in those areas that you mentioned, probably really set this up for success, this roll up for success, because you're coming in with somewhat with fresh eyes, right? Like you said, you weren't in those communities. You weren't diving in head first into PHP or even WooCommerce or React. So coming in with fresh eyes, I think, is probably a smarter approach versus somebody that's been at the start or even just more familiar with WooCommerce and where we're at, because you can really take a step back objectively. Like you just said, "Here's the bridge we have to gap. How do we do that?" versus saying, "Well, I've been doing this since it started seven or eight years ago. I know what we're going to do." You know what I mean? So I think having those fresh set eyes was really sets this role up for success in what you're doing as a developer advocacy in a positive way. Allen: I totally agree. I think that when you have diverse opinions, diverse viewpoints, trying to solve problems, it helps everybody see their blind spots. That's been my experience coming into the WooCommerce community, into the WordPress community, and then by extension, the PHP community as well, is they're just like a lot of these other communities, in that they have solved the same problems the same way for years and years and years. So when you start looking at the same problem in a different way, you can approach it in a novel way. So I'll give you an example. When I started, one of the questions I had for our development team was, "Okay, how do we go about setting up and managing a development environment for WooCommerce?" There's not a great definitive answer because there are tons of different ways that you can do it. Some people use this tool called Champ. Some people use VVV as a tool for managing these Vagrant installations. Then there's another tool called WPN, basically, it runs on Docker and things like that. So we got to explore all these different ways to create and manage these environments to find a way that works really well for people. Brad: Yeah. It's a good example, because again, lowering the barrier to entry for developers is ultimately going to make it a little less scary, less intimidating, and maybe even more inviting in a sense of saying, "Oh, I am familiar with a VVV approach or a Docker approach or whatever they might be familiar with and say, "Oh, they have guides to walk me through this or steps that I can get this set up." Next thing you know, you're running it and then you're starting to get excited. Like, "All right, well that works. Now let me start peeking out under the hood a little bit, using some of the docs." So maybe we can dive into that a little bit more and, and talk about some of the ways that you are approaching developer advocacy, some of the different tools that are available either online or maybe in other areas. But we can talk about those different resources that people can look for. The docs and resources for developers Allen: Yeah, totally. What we've had to do, because we noticed there's a lot of potential here because for better or for worse, some of the things that we have out there are a little bit out of date. Then there are a lot of things that just don't exist altogether. So what we had to do when I first started, was we went through and we did just an audit of all of the developer-related content that we had. We identified for some of those gaps were. Also reached out to the community to see what would be most valuable to them. Overwhelmingly, two things stood out from the developer community is that they want thorough documentation of the code itself. They want clear technical guidance in terms of how to go about various things on the platforms. How do I extend the shopping cart? How do I hook into the checkout flow, for instance. Things like that. They want very concise guidance around these things. So these are the pieces that we're focusing on right now. The developer portal that I mentioned a little while ago was very much about solving that discoverability problem that we had, which was that we have all these resources, but nobody really knows how to find them. It's pretty much a tribal knowledge thing. Now, this next phase where we're creating the new content is focusing on that technical guidance that we can provide, so that they're using the best practices for developing for the platform, be it adhering to certain linting guidelines and documentation standards, to make sure that they're developing against the platform in a way that is ... maybe we could call it future-proof, so that they're not going to have their extensions stomped out when the platform changes. Thirdly, to make sure that the work that developers are doing is constantly providing that first-class experience to merchants. So as you all know, as WordPress developers, because there are so many different ways to do things in WordPress, it's very easy to let that extensibility turn into hacked-around things that look like they're pieced together. That's an unfortunate side effect of that balance between extensibility versus standardization. So what we're trying to do is we're trying to respect that extensibility in a way that still provides that seamless customer experience and merchant experience. Brad: Yeah, that's actually a really good point because it reminds me of, in a more extreme example, page builders and site builders, where we are giving everybody tools, the average user tools to customize anything on the look and feel and layout is great, until it's not great. Then the entire net starts looking on like MySpace pages and years ago, right? It's just, "Cool, you can change everything, but should you give that power to every user on the site? Maybe just keep it so a couple of core users have that knowledge. But that's a more extreme example of what you're getting at, but at the end of the day, you're right, because if WooCommerce, the experience that someone puts together builds ... Whoever's using that platform from a store owner standpoint, that's their impression of WooCommerce. It's not hosted in the sense of Shopify, where these really tight guard rails that can prevent bad things from happening. But that's the give and take of extending the platform and having that flexibility just like WordPress. It's the same thing, right? If WordPress across the board looks terrible on every site that you visit that is WordPress, your assumption is going to be, "Oh, WordPress just looks ugly and it's terrible." It really has nothing to do with the platform. It's just the fact that everybody made it look bad or made it very shaky or clunky or whatever. So that's a fair point. I'm curious. Once you did an audit of everything, and there's a lot. Like you said, it was all over the place. Some of it was probably official. Some of it probably wasn't. It was just all over the internet. Now that you've gotten things back in a better spot ... and I love developer.woocommerce.com. It's just a nice layout and a great site because you can easily get to what you're looking for. Reference docs, libraries, guides, examples, tools. Just quick and easy. These are the things I'm looking for as a developer. Keeping the docs updated I'm curious what you do because being open source and the nature of open source and it moves quickly and WooCommerce moves very quickly. There's a lot of releases, more so than WordPress in terms of major releases. How do you keep this updated? How do you keep it current? How do we know when we're looking at some of this information, that it is the most current? It's not something that was written a couple of years ago and just hasn't been updated, because that's been a challenge for WordPress since the beginning. Allen: It's a huge challenge. To be quite honest, a lot of the stuff that's linked on there is probably outdated. So we have guides for putting together extensions and themes. I know that specifically, the themes guide, I think, was written in 2017. These are those pieces that we need to go in and update at this point, so that we make sure that they are current. So that's one challenge that we're facing. Some of the other things that we are doing right now is for instance, our reference docs have been recently updated. So if you go to the WooCommerce core, it's the core code reference basically. That entire site has been redesigned. What we do now is we generate that static site using the inline documentation that's alongside the code. So if code gets built, it generates those docs. So any changes to the code will be automatically reflected in the documentation. Brad: I love that. Yeah, it's awesome. Allen: This was a problem we had previously because we were using a deprecated library for generating those docs. What ended up happening, I think, is we stopped generating the documentation. So the platform kept getting developed upon, but the documentation lagged behind quite a bit. That, I think, is not an issue anymore. Brad: Yeah, that's great. I think any developer out there knows the struggle of documentation, working on WordPress or not. It's the thankless job. It's there for the developer. The end-user's never going to see it or care about it. But, man, as a developer, we care about it. Whether it's us reading our own code a couple of years later, or digging into somebody else's code, that stuff is hugely valuable. I think it uses the DocBlock standard, right? PHP DocBlock. I'm assuming it's the same as WordPress, which uses DocBlock. Allen: I don't know if we use DocBlock or not. I think it's PHP Doc 3, I think that is what they switched too. Brad: Those are so cool. So no matter what you're building, you can look at this standardized way of commenting and documenting your code, and then you can auto-generate docs for it. Like you said, at the very least, reference docs are exactly what's in the code. It just cleans it up in easier format to read on a website, which is awesome because it does take that away. That's the problem that the codex had for a long, long time before developer.wordpress.com started doing the same thing. A lot of good information, but it was just constantly out of date. Wouldn't tell you if something was deprecated until you went to use it. then you're like, "Oh, yeah, this is deprecated. I shouldn't be using this." So it's a challenge, but it looks like you're keeping up on it, which is great. Allen: It's really great, too. Maybe I'm just biased because I've working to get it out, but if you generate your docs, you can store them in your repository, alongside your code and GitHub will automatically build that as a doc site and host it on GitHub for you. So you have your code and your documentation living side-by-side. You don't even have to worry about deploying it, manage your docs in WordPress or something like that. You don't have to worry about that because GitHub can serve it for you where the developers are, which I think is really cool. Brad: That is cool. I write books, which are again, open source, the challenge is keeping things updated. So people ask, "Well, isn't this out of date really quickly?" By and large, the answer is no. It might mean newer things have come , but we discuss and write about everything in a way, like you said, that is backwards compatible. If you use the proper APIs, if you use a proper class of methods and everything, and you do things the WordPress way, it should always work. It's just a matter of if newer features are available or not, or something becomes deprecated. But what we like to teach and what I think is just people getting more comfortable going under the hood because at the end of the day, the code is your greatest tool. When you can really understand how to dig into the core of WooCommerce or WordPress or some other plugin you're looking to extend and understand what you're working with, that's the greatest tool in the world because all of your answers are right there. It's just understanding how to find them and how to read them and understanding of how the docket, the commenting system works and all that stuff. But once you get a decent grasp of that, then many times you can just go right into the code and get the answers that you need. You don't have to rely necessarily on, "Is this codex out of date or is this tutorial from a couple of years ago still accurate?" Check the code. The code will tell you if it's accurate or not. So again, it's that, making sure people understand that it's okay to look at code and the core. Just don't touch it, but you can look at it. Allen: That's been our experience, too, in talking to developers, especially in this community. People who are trying to solve specific problems, tend to follow a very determined journey, regardless of what they're doing. They'll start by looking for some high level guidance documentation. How do I extend X? If they can't find it there, then they start looking at the documentation that's been generated about the API itself. If they can't find it there, then they dive into the code and they figured out on their own. I think that this is really interesting in the WordPress community specifically because unlike other platforms, since the ecosystem of developers is much more interdependent than you would see on other platforms. So you have to understand how to navigate not only your code and the code for the core platform itself, but also the code of all of the maybe sibling plugins that you may encounter. So it's helpful to have those skills of navigating the code in some standardized way. Bob: Yeah. I can certainly relate. I've been taking a extended break. In fact, it's longterm when it comes to writing tutorials on WooCommerce extensions on my site and just keeping those up. So as a result, the doctor was able to take me off my meds, and life is much better now that I'm not writing those. But seriously it is. Documentation is a challenge. You had mentioned speaking with your developers, the communication you're having with them. Managing and creating those feedback channels I know, again, with documentation, you're getting the feedback and those channels in place, and that can be a challenge. Making them centralized, where they're not going off in all different directions. What has been your experience and what are you doing with that feedback channel? Allen: Yeah. So we're doing a couple of different things. In the past, what we have done is we had a monthly community chat that happens in Slack. My colleague, Jonathan, who's our community manager, he's done a great job of putting this together and managing it. Then I took over when I got more acclimated to my role. So we're doing that once a month. That's been a great tool for what you might say, bi-directional communication, mostly outward communication to developers, a little bit of feedback coming in. What we wanted to do is increase that multi-directional conversation between developers that may or may not involve us. We want to be involved in that, but we definitely want developers who are working with the platform to chat with each other as well. So we started setting up weekly office hours where developers can share their challenges and their expertise with each other. They can up-skill if they want to. This is not us teaching people how to do things. This is developers organically helping each other. If somebody has a problem, there's a developer over here who has 15 years of experience who has run into this problem in WordPress or WooCommerce before, and they can help. That helps people build each other up. That's one thing that we've been doing. Internally, what I've been doing is I've been working with three separate teams, specifically three separate engineering teams. We have our core WooCommerce team. We have a team who manages the WooCommerce admin extension. So all of that react framework stuff that we do. Also we have a team who is responsible for managing WooCommerce Gutenberg blocks. So I've been working directly with these teams once a month, to coordinate around issues that are affecting multiple extensions, things like that. I'm also working with our support team to identify specific issues that merchants themselves are running into, to make sure that those issues can get the attention from the engineering teams that they need in order to be resolved quickly and with the right priority. Brad: Yeah. I love the office hours, the developers getting together and just helping each other. I think just the nature of open source, that's in all of our DNA. I think it's one of the reasons we're drawn to open sources is that community, "Let's help each other learn and grow." I remember seeing that early on, in the old IRC days within WordPress, where many of us, back when I got started, it was just a bunch of us figuring things out together and just helping each other and to see it be more focused out where it's not just WordPress. It's like, "Okay, let's talk about one specific tool within WordPress. Would this be in WooCommerce?" But the idea that people want to help each other and share experiences because it's a good feeling. If I can answer a question that I went through at some point and figured it out and point you in the right direction, I'm going to feel good about that. Likewise, if I have a question and you help me, we're all going to feel good about helping each other out. So I love that idea because it's fun to share experiences, share challenges. We've all done a number of different things. Like you said, there's a million ways to skin a cat or whatever, just understand the nuances of challenges and problems. Just getting stuff out in the open can help you figure out a solution. So I think that's a really cool thing that you all are doing. Allen: Yeah, totally. I can't take any credit for it because really it's something that was already happening. This is one of the nice things about coming into a community that is already so thriving is that this is something that was happening 24/7 as it was. What we did is we just added a little bit of structure in when it happens, and the developers are taking care of the rest of it. Brad: Very cool. Obviously, WordPress is all about contributing. WooCommerce is all about contributing. How can people get involved and help with this and help you? Are there opportunities that people can contribute to different forms of documentation or discussions? We talk about the feedback and things like that, but are there other areas people could jump into to help? Jumping in to help the Woo community Allen: Yeah, absolutely. I think the easiest way for people to jump in and help right now is to attend one of these office hours sessions. Even if you can't make the office hour session itself, we tried to pick a time that would let as many overlapping time zones participate as possible. But right now there's just one session. So that unfortunately leaves basically half the globe in the dark literally, trying to participate in these. If you're not able to, I still encourage people to join our Slack community. You can do that by visiting the developer portal at developer.woocommerce.com. There's a link where you can get signed up to our Slack community, and you'll be added to all the channels where we discuss troubleshooting. We discuss development issues. I know that specifically in our developers channel, we have builders and we have extension developers who act with each other and share tips and tricks and all sorts of stories from building things and solutions. That has been really great. If people want to contribute to core projects, a lot of our projects are open source. We do maintain some things privately, but the majority of what we have out there is open source. We have a system of labels and a lot of our repositories for things that would be a good first issue if somebody wants to contribute in that way. So I'd encourage people to take a look at those issues in the WooCommerce repository specifically. Brad: Yeah. I always recommend if you're really wanting to up your game quickly and really just get familiar with WordPress, WooCommerce platforms that maybe you're not as familiar with, the best way is to jump into some of these things. Even just the conversations and start asking for help. I learned really how to build dynamic websites through forums 20 years ago and just asking a lot of questions. Over time, I went from asking questions to answering a lot of questions and that's the natural flow here, is you'll go from looking up questions, trying to get answers either through online or in Slack or wherever, to helping people answer questions that they're stuck on. You'll see that progression very quickly. So dive in and help out. There's so many opportunities to help, even if it's contributing to documentation, which again is such an important, critical component of any software development. But it's just one of those under the hood things that a lot of people don't think about, but we as developers know how important it is. So that's an easy way that you can get involved, even if you don't know all the ins and outs of WooCommerce across the board. You can help out with some of that as well. So a lot of great resources over at developer.woocommerce.com. Beta testers from all levels are invited Allen: I was going to say one other thing that people can do, especially if they're not developers or if they're not code savvy, we're always looking for beta testers for new versions of WooCommerce, new versions of packages that come out. So if you think of WooCommerce admin, or I think there was a new navigation package that we were beta testing a few months ago. We post those releases on our developer blog and people can get involved by helping us test out these new extensions before they land in core. That's one thing I can say is the feedback that we get from people who are beta testing these new features, that's a direct line into our engineering team because they read those comments and they make changes to those products before they come out, based on that feedback. Bob: Yeah. I think this is great because there's so many things on our side we'll be able to share. Hopefully, I don't descend too many people up on Allen's talents, and he'll say, "Where are all these people coming from?" Well, I've been sharing your Slack channel, your handle and stuff, but hopefully that won't overwhelm you. We might even have to have occasional special episodes. You know, the Allen Smith update. It's that time of the year. Brad: Allen Smith Hour. Come on in, if you've got a question. Bob: Well, this has been good stuff. Yeah, there's a lot packed in there. A lot of stuff they can take advantage of, get involved with. I know I'm looking forward to working with Allen more. We've already connected and, yeah, there's a lot of good intertwining between WooCommerce and our mission here. So if somebody's saying, "Hey, now I want to talk to Allen," where's the best place to connect with you? Find Allen on WooCommerce Slack Allen: The best place, I would say is reach out to me in Slack. If you join our Slack community, I'm pingable in there. You can ping me 24 hours a day. I don't always have my phone with me, but I try to get back to people within a reasonable timeframe, within a day or so. You can reach me in there. I'm just Allen Smith in Slack. The other thing is you can email at my email address is allen.smith@automatic.com. Those are probably the easiest ways to get in touch with me. Bob: Excellent. I just want to thank a href="https://woocommerce.com/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener" aria-label="WooCommerce.com (opens in a new tab)">WooCommerce.com again for their support. Also, if you are a builder, check out WooSesh next week, an online virtual conference, at Woosesh.com. Well, I think that is a wrap. Do check out DoTheWoo.io, lots of stuff Here. I hope the site speaks for itself. So dive into that and see all the different things we have going on. Again, Allen, I appreciate you taking the time to join us. Allen: Yeah. Thank y'all so much for inviting me on. This has been great. Bob: All right. Well, thanks, everyone. Until next week. We'll see you then. Scroll back to top Sign up to receive email updates Enter your name and email address below and I'll send you periodic updates about the podcast. powered by

Thanks to our community sponsor This is the last of the series where I ask my co-hosts to put on the guest hat. Today I chat with Jonathan Wold, who came on the show at the beginning of this year. As with my other co-hosts, Jonathan brings an amazing background to our show with his experiences in WordPress, WooCommerce and the bigger eCommerce ecosystem. A Chat with Jonathan In episode 74, I chat with Jonathan about: How he does the Woo (seriously)How his journey to both WordPress and WooCommerce were heavily influenced by the bigger eCommerce ecosystemCommerce and its natural flow into and within WordPressLearning from the guests the distinct differences between the WordPress and WooCommerce community even with overlapsThe users who are entering the WordPress space through WooCommerceHow publishing has a natural commerce component to itWhy shows with Matt Mullenweg, Nate Steward and Matt Gerri stood out for himHis professional and personal experience with habits, habit design and excecution. Connect with Jonathan On Twitter @sirjonathanJonathanWold.com Jonathan’s Top Episode Picks WooCommerce, Blocks, Open Source and Today’s World with Matt MullenwegDemocratizing Commerce and Woo Perspectives with Nate Stewart from BigCommerceBuying, Selling and Building WooCommerce Plugins with Matt Geri from Sftwr The Conversation Yes, this is the transcript. But not in the traditional sense, transcribed word for word. We do not speak as we write. Often the flow of transcribed content is hard to follow. So I have taken it a few steps further by seriously editing, at times, the conversation and even using my editorial freedom to clarify some points. So enjoy. Transcript Email Download New Tab Bob: Hey everybody, BobWP here, and we are back with, Do The Woo. You're probably getting tired of me because I've been the opening host for three shows in a row. The reason being is I've forced my co-hosts into being guests, so they don't get to open the show, they get to be hammered with questions that I have, and it's all good. I'm looking forward to that. Before we get into our third and final of that series, let me just quickly thank WooCommerce.com, our community sponsor. We'll be adding a new community sponsor come mid-October, and we hope we have many more join us and Woo in this journey. Just wanted to throw something out about WooCommerce. I don't know as a developer you've ever gone into the community chat, on their core channel in Slack. It's the last Thursday of every month at 1800 UTC. I've been actually just lurking there and watching it. It's fun because they talk about the updates coming in blocks and different stuff each month. You're able to go in there and ask some questions. That's why I think it's just not good to hear about it or think about it. And you sure can go in and read the conversation afterwards, but the fact that if you're there at that time, you get to be part of it. You get to ask some questions to some of the brains behind Woo, rather than just letting those questions muddle in your mind and get unanswered. If you want to check that out, again last Thursday of every month, 1800 UTC. Well, last but not least, or do you say, "You always save the best for last." There's several ways we can approach this one. Jonathan Wold, who you know as a co-host, is here today as a guest. Jonathan, welcome to the show, as a guest. Jonathan: Thank you, Bob. It's great to be here as a guest. How Jonathan really does the Woo Bob: Well, as you know we start every show with our famous question. I found this particular series of episodes has made this question very fun to ask. Obviously, each one of you Do The Woo in a different way, but you obviously Do The Woo, but I always say, how do you Do The Woo aside from Do The Woo? Jonathan: Well, I get the privilege of working in WooCommerce on a daily basis. I lead community initiatives for WooCommerce, and that touches a lot of different things where most of my time tends to be spent working with our meet-ups around the world, with our global community spaces, like our Facebook group, Reddit, Slack, et cetera, and then supporting initiatives that are happening throughout the community. I'm fairly involved in events, right now not so much, but looking to the future. Also involved in producing WooCommerce Live and anything that I can do to help support the community that's already there and then help it grow. Bob: Excellent. All the hosts ahead of you, all two of them I should say, had quite a history with the WordPress, and then how they got into WooCommerce, and I know you fall right into that slot as well. There has probably been a lot of twists and turns. Maybe you can kind of take us back in time and tell us a little bit how you got into WordPress, and then fast forward or slip through those years to the point of your first experience with WooCommerce. The history is a long and winding road Jonathan: I got into WordPress, I'm going to probably butcher the time, but I think around 15 years ago, something in that. I'd been interested in the web for a bit, I'd been building on the web in different ways and shapes like HTML and experimenting with a few things. WordPress forums mark the beginning of a great relationship Then, I had a client who wanted a blog. I'd heard about WordPress at that point, did some looking around, and found the forum actually on Wordpress.org. I decided to use it and implemented it. Had a really key experience, though, early on. I got stuck on something and I posted a question to the forum. It was my first one there, and since we keep the archives it's still attached to my username, you can go back and find it. I asked for help and Matt Mullenweg jumped in, quite a few other folks jumped in, and kind helped straighten me out, pointing me in the right direction. It really made a big impression on me like and this was back in WordPress 1.5, I think. These folks were willing to take time out and answer my questions. At the end of it, I just got this little spark of an idea that I should write about this and create a tutorial to document my experience. I did so, and I shared it afterwards and didn't think much about it. Around a year or so later, I started to have people reach out to me who had found the tutorials that I'd written and said like, "Hey, could we pay you to do this for us?" Which, I had never considered up to that point. Then it started, it just kept coming. That ended up kicking off my career in WordPress, which was driven more from demand than anything else. I started to have several people a week reach out, eventually got to a point where it was like several a day and say, "Hey, can you help us integrate WordPress into our existing site?" The rest is history on the WordPress side of things. I followed that lead all the way that it went. I worked on hundreds of projects as a freelancer, I got to touch a huge range. There's very few industries that I haven't touched in some way, shape or form through WordPress because they were all making that transition to the web and they wanted WordPress at the center of it. I got to learn a lot and then spent time in a big agency working on WordPress in the enterprise. Then, that eventually led to the privilege and the opportunity to work here at Automatic on Woo specifically. eCommerce leading to WooCommerce Let me back up though. That's where the WordPress journey started. The eCommerce journey, eCommerce and entrepreneurship have always been an interest of mine from a young age. I started out baking banana breads and selling them door to door with my younger brother and learned a lot about business and commerce and margins and shipping and fulfillment and all these little things just through some of our personal experiences. It started to get serious about 12 or so years ago when my brother and I joined two other young men and we co-founded a company that was an eCommerce startup, where we were building our own software, that was an eCommerce platform. We had our own drop shipping project that was doing fairly well. Then, we were creating eCommerce software to be used by others. At the same time, this was happening, we were using WordPress to pay the bills and doing software development work and that eCommerce startup ended up transitioning into something focused on paywalls in the media space. I learned a lot from that experience. It was around that same time, I think Woo was coming out. I remember that and had experience with a few other plugins, like WPeCommerce before, I think, was the one I used before Woo. My formal experience was within that startup context of building a platform, basically, proprietary that ended up becoming something that does quite well to this day. I'm no longer involved in it, but learned a lot from that experience. Then, just through that line of doing WordPress service projects, eCommerce would consistently come up in multiple shapes and forms. I would do a project that had a Gravity Forms based eCommerce application in it, or eventually started to do more with Woo, did projects on WPeCommerce, did some Shopify projects early on that integrated with WordPress. Through the service lens of my experience, I got to touch eCommerce in a lot of different ways and shapes and forms beyond the startup experience. I realized when I joined Woo that yeah, eCommerce has been a pretty consistent thread throughout the arc of my professional experience in multiple way shapes and forms. Bob:I find it maybe amazing having talked to all three co-hosts. I know myself I've caught bits and pieces of the backgrounds and things you've been involved with just through our discussions with other builders on the show. I'm always just amazed. I'm like "My God, I've got three veterans on this show." The vast experience that all three of you have is incredible. It ties into what I've told the other two co-hosts on the last two podcasts is I feel like I was extremely lucky getting the three of you as co-hosts because you each bring in a different perspective. You're each working in a different space right now. I mean, it's the WooCommerce space, but you're also bringing in such interesting history into that conversation. Sometimes, when I hear the background of all three of you, I think, "Oh, okay. I can see where during many conversations I've been involved with with you, where something comes from that you talk about." You have a lot of meat in that background that nobody knew about and you're bringing it to the table. It's been an honor for me just to have you three on, because it's, yeah. It's just, sometimes, and I've said this before and I'll say it again. Sometimes I love to just sit back and let one of you run away with the guests. There's just a clicking going on. There's something, maybe magical .. Jonathan: That's a great word. Bob: Yeah. It's magical. I just think, "Man, I don't even need to say anything here for a while because the co-host and whoever I have on are having a conversation and I can watch it grow and expand” The big arc of eCommerce experience Jonathan: What I found interesting too is this WordPress thread, like WordPress at its heart to me is about empowering creativity on the open web. I've had the privilege of seeing that in so many ways and shapes and forms over the years. As I look back on it, commerce is a pretty natural follow through. It's a natural aspect of if you're creating value on the web, at some point there's often an opportunity for a value exchange where you're providing something that someone can then buy. Yes, I've had the privilege of direct experience with Woo over the years, but the bigger arc of my experience in eCommerce is just that broader commerce experience with WordPress generally. Because a lot of what I've had the privilege of doing with WordPress over the years has either been for small business or large business or NGOs that have had some commerce component to it, whether it's subscriptions, whether it's donations, whether it's selling products, or oftentimes, through integrations with other systems like Shopify or native things like Woo or WPeCommerce. But that's something that I've realized more recently like, "Oh yeah. This is a pretty consistent thread over the years, apart from my direct startup experience in the space." That's something I really like about WordPress broadly is when you take this more general focus on empowering creativity that tends to lead, I don't know, there's a pretty close association with commerce in my experience. That's been really cool to see that sort of naturally happen over time. I think it was inevitable that you would see WordPress become this center for commerce. Woo happens to be the thing where most of that takes place these days. If it wasn't Woo, I think it would be something else. Bob: Right. In that huge span of history, it's been a shorter segment as far as it being a co-host on the podcast. You came on at the first of the year when the podcast went to weekly, I brought on both you and Mendel. Brad had been in place for a while. I've asked them both this same question. Is there some element or a piece of all these conversations you've had, or that you've been involved with up until now that really stands out and gives you a better reflection of who Woo builders are. Maybe something you've heard over and over and over again? WordPress and WooCommerce communities, overlapping but different Jonathan: First, I've really enjoyed all of the interviews that we've done and the ones I've listened to that I haven't been involved in. I love hearing different perspectives. I love hearing different people's stories and how they think about things. If I zoom all the way out, I think it's been a bit of an education for me. Over the arc of my past year, because I'm now coming up on a year of working in Woo and I know WordPress quite well at this point. I've been a part of the community for a long time. It's been interesting to see the ways that WooCommerce and its community is different than WordPress and its community. There's so much that's similar, but there's some differences. I think it's because of that sort of centeredness around commerce and the value exchange there. I had noticed myself being somewhat on guard when I first got started to talk about money and to talk about commerce topics with folks in the WooCommerce community. Because in WordPress it's open source, it's free, and sometimes there is a shyness about making money. In general, we struggle with commercialization in WordPress, like how do plug in authors, how do builders make money in this ecosystem? With Woo, I'm still trying to understand this, but there's a difference there. I think in general with merchants, for instance, there's a comfort with paying for things because they're making money. There's not this expectation that everything should be free, not that there is in WordPress, but there is a difference there. Over this past year of listening to guests and just hearing different stories and looking at things, it's been a great opportunity for me to see this eCommerce industry represented by Woo and WordPress as, they have a lot of overlap, but there are some differences between them. This year and the guests that we've brought on and listening to and just gaining perspective has helped me get a little bit more definition. Because I started out from this like WordPress centered, appropriately. The base of this kind of open source where everything gravitates towards free, whether it should or not. Whereas in commerce, merchants and builders don't have that same base expectation, at least in my overall experience. Entering the WordPress ecosystem through WooCommerce I'm still parsing that, but at the heart of it, there is a difference and this is evidenced well by people who come into Woo who don't know WordPress, which I think is awesome. It's one of the things that I get to see more of, people who are coming into the WooCommerce ecosystem. They come to love WordPress, but they're coming from a commerce first perspective. They care about different things like the work with merchants in this industry tends to be more focused on marketing and how to run an eCommerce business of which the technical is only a smaller piece. I like to approach life with a pretty open go with the flow and see where it leads perspective. That's something I wasn't expecting. I saw this more as a subsystem of WordPress where it really is like an adjacent system that just has a lot of overlap, but it's unique. Bob: That's interesting, because I haven't really thought it through in my head. That's something that has been apparent in my podcasts over the last 4 plus year. Yeah. How many people that are actually creating these WooCommerce sites for clients and the people that are building products for WooCommerce, how valuable that would be for them to recognize that. Not that they don't recognize it, because some of them essentially are creating products that are built to do exactly what those people want to do and that's sell. Some of them are probably coming from long WordPress paths as well, and to be able to not separate them out, but to understand, yeah, I'm dealing with a whole different audience here. There are some, sure there's some like-minded things between WordPress and WooCommerce obviously, but there's a lot of unique pieces as well. Publishing and commerce Jonathan: I think what I found helpful is to take the two missions, if you look at the missions for a moment. WordPress is about democratizing publishing, making creating on the web accessible for anyone. Woo is democratizing commerce, making commerce accessible. It's all about the money, WooCommerce, right? I mean, it doesn't have to be literal money exchange, but it is this commerce exchange of value. There's a clear similarity between the two because publishing can often have a commerce component to it. Anyway, yeah, it's very complimentary, but they are distinct missions and distinct ways of thinking about things. That's been great for me. I knew that intellectually going in to this because I started out with, all right, this is the mission and this is what we're going to do and everything I'm doing in community is in service of this mission. Over this year of getting to know guests and talking to more builders and doing research and interviews, et cetera, I've been able to move from intellectual to really taking it to heart, like, okay, wow, there are a lot of adjacency, a lot of compliments here, but some clear differences between the two ecosystems. Bob: It puts a bit of added pressure because when you think okay, I'm a WordPress developer, I'm creating static sites, professional service brochures sites, I'm creating a blog for somebody, maybe it's even a news site. Something that is really content based. Now, when it comes to the builders on the other side of things, the eCommerce side, they're building people's livelihoods. The other sites can also be a persons livelihood because it branches out a bit more. If you're an attorney, yeah, your livelihood is in the court and everywhere else and doing all this stuff and you can talk about it, but with commerce your livelihood is online, selling, people buying, making conversions. There's that added pressure, a bit, to the agencies, to the product builders, to make sure this works seamlessly and people have expectations and I've got to deliver those expectations on my end. Jonathan: Take a simple example like a forms plugin, right? There's a lot of great ones out there. Gravity Forms, Ninja Forms, et cetera. I personally know multiple operations running like multi-million dollar setups on Gravity Forms as a basis. Right? I doubt that that's what they saw when they first said, "Let's build a forms plugin." This is the same with Woo. There are some major operations running out of Woo that was probably quite far from mind. This is what can happen in open source. As a builder, you can build a simple plugin and then you get an email one day about how it's being used in this massive setup. They ask a basic question. You're like, "Oh, well I never intended it to be used at that scale." Yeah, it's very interesting. Bob: It is. Hey everyone, as we get closer to the launch of the next iteration of Do the Woo, I would like take take a moment to thank our sponsor WooCommerce.com. As a builder, did you know that are are dozens of WooCommerce meetups globally? These are the perfect opportunities to drop in occasionally and listen to store merchants and beginners share their stories and challenges. It also is a great resource for the clients that you have that are new to WooCommerce. All meetups can be found at WooCommerce.com/meetups/. And now back to the show. Now, you had said that overall, you just love hearing all the guests and the guests you've interviewed. I feel the same way. The other two co-hosts felt the same way. I did ask them to pull out maybe one or two particular episodes, and it could just be one as well that just something stuck out, you know? It wasn't that it was better than all the others, but there was something that hit you a little bit more in the old thought process or later on you contemplated on it a bit more. The guests and episodes that stood out and why Jonathan: First, they're all my favorite. There are a few that stand out. I really enjoyed the interview with Matt Mullenweg, and being able to just hear some of his perspective on things. It was also on my birthday, which was kind of awesome. Yeah. That was great. I enjoyed that for a number of reasons. I really enjoyed the interview we did with Nate Stewart from Big Commerce, just hearing a different perspective, such a great example. I think they've done some great work to think about making commerce more accessible over the years. They've transitioned to more of this like open SaaS thing and they've really embraced WordPress. Hearing his perspective, I really enjoyed. I think sometimes people are a little too myopic or they're like, they just think about one platform. It's like, well, what can we actually learn from what other people are doing and how they work together? Then I really enjoyed what we do with Matt Gerri He's a great example of a builder in my mind that has a lot of value to contribute that can easily go under the radar. Yeah, like I've known Matt for a long time and seen what he's done over the years. It's pretty remarkable to me. You can have these like small, easy to miss, little operations doing some really great things. Whether it's plugin work, whether it's service work, product work. I love discovering those when we get to bring people onto the show or hear about a builder that's doing some really interesting thing off in their little corner of the world that's providing a lot of value that you just wouldn't otherwise know about. Those are the ones that jump to mind. Bob: Yeah. Cool. Well, I cheated because now when I get asked that question or if I ever get asked, I can just say my favorite ones were with my co-hosts, because they talked about some of my favorite ones. I've got this all strategically planned to make my life easier. Okay, to round this out, and this has been a fun one because I think nobody can predict what the answers will be or what they'll come up with. I want you to tell something both personal, not too personal, but something personal and something professional that maybe the majority of people out there that are listening don't know about you. Jonathan: Man. There's a lot of things, Bob. Bob: I know there is. Jonathan: There's a lot of things. Bob: Well, you can meld a couple together. Both personally and professionally experimenting with habits, habit design and execution Jonathan: I think, if anyone knows me for a bit, they'll have some context, but a lot of people don't know to the extent to which I experiment with habits and habit design and execution. Today is day a thousand something in a row of doing pushups every day and taking a cold shower every day. I'm now tracking 39 different habits and I'm always experimenting with different things. I have a lot of different projects that I work on on the side and I've incorporated it, so it's like a mix of personal and professional, right? I, as an individual, am really good at jumping in and starting things, like putting a bunch of energy into something. And so you'll see me do this and I'll start this over here and I'll start this. Habits are the key to keeping the momentum going over a long period of time. As an individual, I have my strengths, I'm good at jumping in and improvising and just sort of getting something up and running. When I decide that something's important, then I'll design a habit around it to keep it going. I'm working on learning Spanish. I spend five minutes a day every day doing a little bit of Spanish. I'm a musician. I like writing music. I do illustration work as well. I'll do a little bit of that every day. Yeah. There's a wide range of things. I feel like at this stage, in my career and my life, it's a good feeling to feel like I'm just getting started. There are definitely the days where it's like, "Wow, okay, that's a lot, there's a lot going on there." But I'm careful to keep the scope small. Most of the things I'm doing are things that I can keep going with just five minutes a day. Then I'll have those moments where I'll have a burst and put a bunch of time into something and take it further along. Yeah, that's something I think a lot of people don't know to the extent to which I'm constantly experimenting and trying different things. What's great is that I do find things that stick and then I keep it up and then see that momentum over time. Bob: Yeah. From that, I can tell that from our conversations that even though I may not have known that about you, it makes sense. It's like, ding, ding, ding, ding. Okay. I get it now. Jonathan: I love things, like I keep a harmonica in my pocket almost all the time. I like to be writing music or working on music. I take long walks oftentimes when the weather's nice or even when it's not. I sometimes wonder what the neighbors think of this guy that walks around all the time and then I'll whip out the harmonica and play while I'm thinking about something. Always trying new things. I also like cooking and I enjoyed the cliche of making bread at home during lockdown. Bob: Yeah. Oh yeah. A lot of people took that up. We were trying to keep up on bread supplies. I mean, just because we having been making homemade bread long before the lockup, "Okay, well suddenly everybody's buying it. Oh no, we're out of flour. We can't get flour." Jonathan: Can't buy yeast anywhere. Bob: Yeah. Yeast was an interesting one. We bought this jar so we have it. I don't know how long it will last. We'll see how that goes. Jonathan: That's awesome. Bob: Well, this has been cool. Lets first have you share where people can connect with you. Connect with Jonathan Jonathan: You can go to Jonathanwold.com. That's my little WordPress on the web that I've been keeping up and running for over a decade now. Always to some degree of construction, but a lot of my writing is there. I'm respectably active on Twitter, @SirJonathan. If you're interested in some of my photography work, I've got an Instagram profile that I quite enjoy. I think that's the extent of it. Jonathanwold.com is my home on the web and where I keep everything else connected. Bob: Very cool. Well, I thought before we close out here, if listeners are not new and they've been listening for a while, they know that we're kicking out the next iteration of Do The Woo next week. Jonathan: Yeah. Bob: Official launch is October 6th. First of all, I just want to say that and let everybody know that Jonathan was very instrumental in this iteration as far as feedback and thoughts. This has been quite a new adventure for me and I'm hoping a lot of people are going to find this very useful. Just to throw out a couple of things, we will be adding a second podcast, actually, an extension of this podcast. It's going to be in the same feed, but twice a month on Tuesdays. We will be doing something called Woo Perspectives, which will be sort of a panel, but not formally. I'll be bringing in three individuals and we'll just be talking about some Woo things I bring up. I'm just going to let them run with it. It really is about conversation and letting people share their own perspectives and insights rather than just hearing always how something is built. We can hear what they think about something going on in the space or something with eCommerce. I think it's going to be fun because I'm simply going to be a moderator and the co-hosts, I'm sure, may just pop in every once in a while as well. We'll be starting out the first one, hopefully with all three of the co-hosts. We'll see how that goes by the time that happens later in October. Yeah, it's going to be fun and it's going to be kind of open to a lot of individuals that just have a lot of experience in the space, whether you know them or you don't know them, they're going to be instrumental in the WooCommerce growth. I think just hearing what they have to say is pretty cool. It's going to be fun. I am looking forward to that piece of it. There's a ton of other things. Anything that we've talked about that stands out that you want to share with anyone? Jonathan: I think the big thing for me that I think is worth calling out is that in my work in community at WooCommerce, we're really focused on the merchants and helping merchants get connected. I love the work that you're doing and Do The Woo has been, as a podcast and as a community, focused on that builder space. I think it's really important and there's a lot of opportunity to, like you're already saying, to share insight and perspective to help folks connect. You've been doing that in a lot of ways over the years. I'm excited to just see more of that happening. eCommerce is growing quickly. The WooCommerce ecosystem is growing and more and more people are wanting to get in to build things, to provide service and value to merchants and getting into it. You've been building a great resource for them to be able to do that. I'm just excited about it in general. It was great to see you switched to a weekly and just you've had consistent great content over this, it's almost been a year now. I'm excited for the next iteration. I love the little a change log you got going on. This is 5.0? Bob: Yeah. I'm going to have to update it real soon here. Jonathan: Yeah. I'm just generally excited about it. This is a great community. For me, as I'm working on helping serve and connect more of the merchants, I have a lot of confidence in knowing that the builder community is, is alive and well and growing and the work that you're doing and Brad and Mendel, it's fantastic. I'm excited to see what happens next. Bob: Cool. Excellent. Thank you. Just to let everybody know, I've been pushing out on Bobwp.com since Monday, this last Monday, or actually before that in the week before, a post every day that talks a little bit about different pieces of the new site and what you can expect to find. Check that out. It concludes on next Monday with a post called Community and Connections Without the Noise. I'll just give a little teaser to that. This resulted in a lot of the people I talked to about what I was doing with this site, one of the first things they would ask me is, "Oh, are you starting a forum? Are you doing a Facebook group? Are you doing a big Slack channel with all these channels in there for people to come and talk?" I'd say "No." And they'd say, "Okay, community connection. Tell me more." This was something that I've thought through how you can take a perspective of that and grow a community and connections more on a personal level rather than just a bunch of noise. That's not that that noise is not good. There's a lot of places for it. People need that and get in and talk with each other and be in those crowds sharing ideas and stuff. I'm just taking a different approach to it. Look for that next Monday. In fact, I've already been asked by one or two people that maybe that might make for a nice discussion in a webinar or something, just because it is taking a little bit of a different perspective on the whole idea of building community. I'm looking forward to that. Well, Jonathan, thank you so much. This has been fun having you as a guest instead of, well, I shouldn't say instead of. It's not been any more or any less fun than having you as a co-host, but it's just great to hear more of your story. I want to thank WooCommerce.com again, don't forget about that community chat I told you every last Thursday of the month on the Woo Slack core channel at 1800 UTC. Good stuff, get in there and you can learn some stuff and you can ask some questions. Jonathan, again, thank you. Jonathan: Thank you, Bob. Bob: Everybody have a good weekend. We will be back with the new Do The Woo next week. Take care. Scroll back to top Sign up to receive email updates Enter your name and email address below and I'll send you periodic updates about the podcast. powered by

Thanks to our community sponsor This is the second of three episodes where I ask my co-hosts to put on the guest hat. Today I chat with Mendel Kurland, who came on the show at the beginning of this year. It was the perfect opportunity to hear about the diverse background and talents that he brings to the Woo ecosystem. A Chat with Mendel In episode 73, I chat with Mendel about: His current work with WooCommerce, both as a developer advocate at Nexcess and his own personal projects.Mendel’s unique and diverse journey to WordPress and WooCommerce.What he has learned from talking with Woo builders on Do the Woo.How he has discovered a lot of grit and excitement from guests who come from all walks of life.Who he found most inspirational in the episodes he has co-hosted.Why is considers the strength of giving freely important and a steady message from the community of Woo builders.Mendel sharing the story of being a happy camper and a developer in the early days.What challenges people may not know about him when it comes to conversation. Connect with Mendel On Twitter @ifyouwillitIfyouwillit.comNexcess.net Mendel’s Top Episode Picks Bold Moves, Woo Reluctance and Membership Sites with Shannon Shaffer from Purple Finch StudiosLearning and Growing. WooCommerce Meetups with Sandi Batik The Conversation Yes, this is the transcript. But not in the traditional sense, transcribed word for word. We do not speak as we write. Often the flow of transcribed content is hard to follow. So I have taken it a few steps further by seriously editing, at times, the conversation and even using my editorial freedom to clarify some points. So enjoy. Transcript Email Download New Tab Bob: Hey everyone. BobWP, episode 73 of Do the Woo, this is number two in a series. This is really fun because I get to literally throw my co-hosts off the show during the regular episode and then ask them to come back on as a guest, so they have to put on a different hat.. I can actually see Mendel and he is wearing a different hat, I think, compared to the last time I saw him. Of course, I don't remember that, because that's been about a month, but anyway, we have a great show. I'm going to drop in our community sponsor, WooCommerce.com, before we get started. You know WooCommerce.com. If you're a developer or builder, you probably have gone to their developer resource portal. Don't forget that for your clients and your customers that are new to WooCommerce their blog has a lot of good Wooness on there at that beginner and merchant level. They can learn the basics of Woo and wrap their brains around that. So check out WooCommerce.com. The new Do the Woo launches October 6th I'm going to just make one quick announcement before I bring on my wonderful guest here. And that is that we have set a date for the official relaunch of Do the Woo, so watch for that, that day will be October 6th. (applause) And you can see we're recording at a live studio right now, and there is social distancing going on, so nah, not really, not at all, that was all Mendel's fans. Hey, Mendel. How you doing? Mendel: Hey Bob. I'm great. It's good to be here of course, I'm marking that date on my calendar. What date is that again, Bob? Bob: October 6th. Mendel: October 6th, the relaunch of Do the Woo. I'm pretty excited myself. Bob: Yeah. I'm excited to have you as a guest. This is going to be fun because you've been on my other podcast before in the past,. Here, we ask everybody else about WooCommerce, but it's nice to get the backstory and hear a little bit of what you're thinking. And just a side note,. I believe the first time Mendel and I talked was over a Bloody Mary bar at WooConf. Mendel: It was WooConf in San Francisco. I think we were in the basement of that cool space that they rented. And yeah, I walked up to you and I say, "Hey man, let's chat." And we had a Bloody Mary and I think it was like nine o'clock in the morning. So there's no reasonable reason we should have been having a Bloody Mary, but it was WooConf and it was fun and interesting. And there were wonderful speakers and awesome topics and great content and cool artwork, and having a conversation with you kind of just put the icing on the cake. Bob: Well, that's nice of you to say after all these years. Mendel: And just for the record, I am wearing a different hat than I do when I co-host. So yeah, you are seeing me with a different hat, Bob, even though the rest of you in the virtual world can't see me. Bob: Excellent. Yeah. That's good to know. So you are wearing a different hat literally. Well, this is what we always start with and I know that it gives people an idea of what you do, but I should ask you, Mendel, how do you Do the Woo aside from Do the Woo? How does Mendel Do the Woo? Mendel: Wow! Well, it's funny. One of the things that I've tried to do on this show is to not bring a whole lot of Liquid Web and Nexcess into it, because I want to focus on the people that we're interviewing. And so during this episode, I guess I'll talk a little bit about what I'm doing over at Liquid Web and Nexcess, and also how I Do the Woo in my personal life. I am a developer advocate for agencies at Nexcess for WooCommerce. So I help agencies onboard, I help them answer complex questions about WooCommerce and about building on WordPress and WooCommerce for their online stores. And generally, just try and be a helpful human over there at Nexcess, So that's how I Do the Woo in my professional life. Now I do some fun little side projects to kind of keep my mind sharp, so I spin up print on demand sites and personal rental sites and things like that for camping equipment. I try and keep myself sharp with some online stores and some eCommerce stuff. One of my favorite things to work on, this is super nerdy, is WooCommerce optimization. I've been fascinated with that for, I don't know, the past five years, and now I'm starting to get back into writing code and building a couple plugins that might be helpful for the WooCommerce world in the future. So I'm just all over Woo, and that's how I'm doing it these days. Bob: Wow! Couple of plugins. I'm impressed. Mendel: Yeah. Plugins are fun and what happens is, I'm doing work for somebody at Nexcess or I'm doing something on my own, and I'm playing around with WooCommerce. I realize there's something as simple as I can't see the inventory for all my products in list view, which is super frustrating to me. Why can't I see my product quantities? I want to know what's in stock, what's not in stock, but even more than that, I want to know what the product quantities are. Now, I haven't looked to see if that option is a column that's just hidden, I would assume it's not. And so in that case, I might go write a little piece of code and throw it into a plugin. And you get enough of those things together and all of a sudden you have a WooCommerce tweaks plugin, which is cool. So it's just stuff like that that I'm playing around with, trying to solve problems for the world. Bob: Yes, you're joining the ranks of a lot of the builders here who come up with the idea because they need to solve it either for themselves or for their clients. And then it's like, hey, might as well do a plugin and give it to the world. So cool. You are an official guest and an official builder and you are going to do a plugin, so this is just qualifies you like 100% as a guest. What is the backstory,?I don't think I ever heard this of how you got into WordPress and then where did WooCommerce come along ? The backstory of coming into WordPress and WooCommerce Mendel: Yeah. So it's a story that takes us back a little bit further than even my last job, which you, and a lot of people know about, and I'll touch on that in a second. So if you go back to around 2000, I built a social networking site in Iowa City, Iowa. This was before Facebook and all of those other, Twitter, all that stuff. I think it was around 2003, I built the site, it was pretty popular and what came out of that were a bunch of clients that I was doing advertising for, building simple websites for. I was trying to earn as much revenue as possible by helping small businesses build presences or actually just add business to their books. So I went through building sites by hand, and then I decided, well, as I got better at PHP, I thought, maybe I'll include headers and include footers and started to build what was half CMS and half not CMS, something where I was reusing a good amount of code. Eventually, I started working with Joomla and I played around with Joomla for quite a while. I ended up using it on client sites, and I went to go work for a music company. And I was working there and building sites for them, and at one point there were some issues with the Joomla content based sites. And at some point it was difficult to update the software and I ran into some problems that were not that great, I won't go into what those were, but they weren't that great. And I found my way to WordPress. And what I loved about WordPress is that WordPress was simple to update, right? As long as you didn't do tons of modifications, usually the updates didn't break things, if you did modifications in the right way. So that's not editing core files, that's creating future plugins, that's creating child themes, that's doing all of the things that you should be doing as a non cowboy or cowgirl coder and actually building things in the way that they're supposed to be built for WordPress. So as I got to know WordPress, I left that company, I went to go work for GoDaddy. And while I was at GoDaddy, I was working on other things, but in my spare time playing around with WordPress and playing around with WooCommerce eventually, when it became WooCommerce. At some point at GoDaddy, because of my knowledge with WordPress and software development and things like that, I helped to build out their developer evangelism program, which was cool for WordPress. And in particular, which is when you met me at that event in San Francisco at WooConf. I eventually left GoDaddy and I was working on my own thing, right? And my own thing was Geek Adventures, where I built eCommerce solutions that would sell tickets to events and would sell clothing , have them fill out their waiver online and would rent camping gear to them. This really put my eCommerce knowledge to the test. So by the time I got to WooCommerce, I had been working on asp.net systems that integrated with Microsoft ERP systems that integrated with the web, right? I did super enterprise complicated stuff like that. I had helped small businesses work on their eCommerce websites, do online ordering, do online ticket sales and things like that. And then started working on my own and building out my own eCommerce stores. And around the time I decided, hey, maybe I should dip back into this world of WordPress and WooCommerce, because I was kind of missing it. I talked to my buddy, Chris Lema, over at Liquid Web Nexcess because I loved what they were doing with managed WooCommerce as the first management WooCommerce host. And I said, "Hey, what are you doing over there? I want a piece, let's do this. And he said, "I've been waiting. I've been waiting two years for you to free to come here." So I went over to Liquid Web Nexcess and I've just had a blast playing around with the platform and all of the cool add on plugins and performance tuning and all the fun stuff that really we're doing at a different level than a lot of hosts out there. Bob: Yeah. Mendel: So that's the intense story, right? That spans like 15 years, something like that, 20 years, but yeah. What Mendel has learned as co-host of Do the Woo from the Woo builder community Bob: I have to say you're a very modest person because there's mellow Mendel, everybody always has fun, especially when they meet you in person. And just to know your experience now, your vast experience, everything you've touched on is pretty incredible. I got to say I'm impressed. When I was talking with Brad, our other co-host last week, I was saying that each of you bring in different personality, perspective and experience, and that's what makes this podcast fun. I can often let you as a co-host or one of the other two run with the show many times, because you connect with guests, especially at that level as a builder, a coder, somebody that's really into the guts of things. So good stuff. And I appreciate you sharing that with us. I want to move a little bit to the space, but also to the podcast. You've been on the podcast since the beginning of the year as a co-host. Has there been one big thing that has stood out that you've heard over and over from Woo builders or that you've even learned yourself? A lot of grit and excitement from guests Mendel: Yeah. I think the thing that stands out the most, especially with Do the Woo, is you do a great job of getting awesome guests. You do a great job of getting awesome guests on the show and they are all, not just builders, but they are people that have a lot of grit and a lot of excitement for what they do. They've clawed their way to where they're at, and in many ways come from a super diverse set of backgrounds and experiences with the web in general. Maybe not even the web, maybe in some cases more than just the web. The thing that stands out with Do the Woo is how willing the community is and how willing people that are, maybe on the outside of the community, looking in or maybe big shots in the greater web community, but how willing they are to come and talk and share their knowledge. All walks of builder lives And I credit you a lot, Bob, because you're such a well-known personality in the space. And I think a lot of people respect what you've done through podcasting, through disseminating information and teaching and helping and just being a friendly face. And I think you can really see that in the guests that have been on the show. There've been people that I know of course, Brad himself is a big shot, but then I had a co-host session with Chris Coyier right? He's internet famous. And then you bring in these people that should be internet famous, that maybe aren't as internet famous yet. So Shannon Shaffer from Purple Finch Studios, oh my God, I loved that particular episode. It was amazing. She's done like 17 things. And then she starts Purple Finch Studio after she masters photography, it's crazy the breadth and depth of not only the guests, but the conversations that you have on the show. And so what stands out to me is the same thing that I've loved since I've first stepped foot into the WooCommerce community and that's the willingness of people inside the community to help each other and share information. Bob: Well, first of all, I do like to just reach out to anybody. Some podcasts worry about how much listeners will certain guests bring in, I need to get somebody big name and sure. I've been fortunate enough to have some people drop in like that, but also we can bring in anybody, anybody in the Woo space, whether they're just trying to get into it now or they've been around, but they've been in the background for so long. And a lot of these people are, I know personally, they come to me, they maybe don't come to my co-host, but they'll come to me afterwards and say, "You and Mendel made this so much fun. I was nervous as heck." So I've been lucky to have picked three co-hosts that bring in that extra comfort level. Between the two of us or one of the other co-hosts, we've been able to make them feel relaxed. And some of them say, "Oh, I don't know if I'll have much to talk about." It's amazing just how much they do have to talk about once you get them in that space, you don't put any pressure on them and find out that thing that drives them. Then grow on that and get them excited about it and that's where the conversation just goes. Thanks to the continued support of our community sponsor, WooCommerce.com, here at Do the Woo our next iteration launches Oct. 6th. If you are a Woo builder of sites, products or services, you are going to want to make sure that Do the Woo is at the top of your list. It’s all about connecting the Woo builder community. I have a ton of great stuff in store for you so make sure and stay tuned in, follow me on Twitter @bobwp and get ready for some serious Wooness. And for those client sites, keep the WooCommerce marketplace bookmarked for access to a huge variety of extensions that will fit almost any clients needs. Or if you have a Woo plugin yourself, it might be time to consider the marketplace. Just go to WooCommerce.com. And now back to the show. The WooCommerce community, giving freely Mendel: When I think about community, when I think about how you pull people on the show that people might know and people might not know, I think one of the pieces of advice that I would give in a way that I try and live my life within the WordPress and WooCommerce world. Want to dub it like the BobWP way of interacting with the community, if you have information to give, give it freely. Give it freely up until a point if somebody needs 40 hours worth of time, then maybe this is something that they might want to consult with you on rather than give freely. But if people have questions, give freely. If you are not known or you don't feel known, you're probably more known than you think, but it doesn't matter anyway, because people want to answer questions because everybody else wants to seem smart. And if you are known, go out of your way to give back whenever asked and also give back when you're not asked to. And I think you've really embodied that, Bob, in the guests that you've brought on and in including us as co-hosts, I think that's a special way that you've led your WordPress and WooCommerce life, at least as long as I've known you. So I think it's awesome, I think the show has been really fun up until now, I just hope you don't screw it up in the next few months. Just kidding. Just kidding. What episodes have stood out to Mendel and why Bob: Well, I have the three of you to oversee me, because who knows what direction I'll go. But thank you for the kind words, that's very cool. You had talked a little bit about the show you loved, let's just revisit that a little bit as far as why you liked it. Now they're all great shows. I'm putting a lot on you. But which one or two do you really remember and what makes it stand out in your mind? Mendel: The two that I think about in recent history are Sandy Batik, that was episode number 60. We talked to her about WooCommerce meetups and the whole idea of lesson plans and learning within the meetups. And then, like I mentioned before, the one with Shannon Shaffer, that was episode 69. Incredible diversity, experience and expertise What stuck out to me about both of those is the incredibly diverse background of both people and all of the things that they did to get to the point at which they are and at which they're being successful. I think the cool example that they've set in how they've built their lives and their livelihoods around WordPress and WooCommerce, is that they took the experience and the expertise from other dimensions of their life, right? Other types of work that they've done, hobbies that they've had, ways that they've approached work in the past and they've continuously reinvented what they've been doing to get to the most successful place. It's like continuously optimizing for what it is that they care about, what they love, what they enjoy doing and just this continuous reinvention. I think those two people that I've spoken with on this show in particular, embody this idea of the iterative agile process of creating awesomeness within your livelihood. And so I love it. I find stories like theirs inspiring and the way that they've grown, inspiring. And I'm sure, if we were to have them on this show in a year or two years, they'd probably be working on something new or an upgraded version of whatever they're working on now. And I think that's super fun to watch. And it's a super fun thing to try and keep up with. Learn a bit more about Mendel both professionally and personally Bob: I totally agree. There has been guests over the years during my podcasting that I've had on more than once, a few of them actually been two or three times. And it's always interesting, no matter what time span it was, sometimes it was maybe even a couple of years or maybe it was a year or less, to see where they're at and what they're doing now. It's fun to watch them grow, just like you said. And speaking of how we grow and what we've done, what I want to do is move this towards having you tell us something that the people out there, our listeners, don't know about you both professionally and personally. Tell us the dark deep secrets of Mendel. Mendel, a developer and a happy camper Mendel: Yeah. So professionally, I'll tell you a story, very few people know this. There are a couple of people that know this, but for the Internet's debut, it was two or three summers before I went to go work for the music company. I still had clients, I decided to go to the Lake of the Ozarks to be a camp counselor and take some special needs kids or campers on some fun adventures, some in Colorado and some elsewhere. I had this Jeep at the time and one of the windows didn't roll up all the way. I purchased the Jeep from somebody and it got T-boned before I got it, and so I was rolling around with this real beat up Jeep. Anyway, during the day, I'd be helping these kids out, and at night, I would work on web development. I would update client websites and things like that, because I was hustling both at the same time. Well, when I got back from Colorado and the Lake of the Ozarks and I was back in Iowa City, I decided, it's summertime and I've been camping for the past month, why not keep camping? I packed up my apartment, I had a printer in the trunk of my Jeep, I actually had a cat at the time and I would take the cat camping with me. At some point, I decided that was not the best way for the cat to live, so I took the cat to a no-kill shelter, and that's one of the sad moments of that experience. But I remember when I wanted to prepare to go see a client, I would get a cheap motel. I would take a shower, get a good night's sleep and I would take that printer from the back of my Jeep and I would plug it in and I would print all of my collateral of my packages. In fact, I recently came across the actual packet with all the packages on it, which was pretty awesome. But anyway, I'd print it out and then I would go to my client's office and I would pitch them on a new idea or a new concept for their website. And that's how I lived for a few months until when It started to get cold, and I was still in this mentality, that I was just going to be scrappy and not get an apartment. At one point, one of my clients who was close to my age said to me, "Hey, Mendel, I just bought a townhouse." He said, "Do you want to rent a room in my townhouse?" And I said, "Yeah. Yeah. Sure." I was a little reluctant, because he's a client, and now he's an old friend, but I ended up renting a room from one of my clients, so I wasn't the roaming the earth web developer. It's a crazy story. It was a funny time. And yeah, not many people know that, but I guess I just put it out into the world. So there you go, world. Bob: Yeah. That gives it a whole new meaning to Mendel the web developer. Mendel: That's right. Yeah. We all have insecurities Bob: So how about something kind of on the personal side? Mendel: Yeah. I guess on the personal side, there's nothing I really like more than just having a deep conversation with other people. And sometimes, as many people can be with themselves, I'm very critical with myself, and sometimes I look at the conversations I have and realize that I shared more about myself than that person shared about themselves. And that makes me feel nervous and worried that I didn't get to give them as much of an opportunity to talk as I had. So I guess on a personal side, I have insecurities about conversations and meeting strangers and public speaking and being on podcasts and saying, um, too many times and all of those things. I think everybody that speaks publicly has those worries and insecurities. And I think it's important for the world to know that, while I am not the best public speaker and I am not the most famous person in the world. A lot of people see me doing things like giving talks and speaking and all that stuff, and while I love it and I love sharing knowledge and I love learning from people, there's always a voice at the back of my head that keeps asking me, did you do it right? Should you have said that? Should you not have said that? So I think, on a personal level, that's something that both drives me to be better and also creates anxiety for me. Bob: Yeah. I think a lot of people can relate to that. Myself, I can relate to it because there is always that questin, did that conversation work, did that talk go right? Did I go off on some tangent there? What were people thinking? I tell people that when I first started our previous business, and this was in the what? Early 90s, I was really involved with chamber of commerce because we were a local marketing business. And I remember going to networking breakfast where we'd sit around a table and there'd be like about 10 people at the table in a larger room. Then they would go around and you would have to stand up and give your elevator pitch. And I could not think of anything or listen to what anybody said, because my gut was just in a big knot, waiting for that moment that I had to stand up and speak for 60 seconds or something like that. And yeah, my face would get all red and I'd start feeling almost nauseous, it's like, oh, okay. And I'm just watching as a person next to me finally says something, I know it's my turn. And then I'd get up and most of the time I'd feel like, boy, I really blew that. I sounded horrible. And I just kept making myself do it. And you get to that external comfort level that people are looking at you like, okay, cool. And where you can maybe listen, but there's always that point where still you get that anxiety a bit about it being your turn next. Mendel: Yeah. Bob: Whether it's standing up in front of a crowd or whatever. 'm sure there's some people that handle it a lot better, but I don't think it's human to not have a little bit of anxiety and the heart rate go up a little bit because, hey, you're putting yourself out there no matter what. And whether it's a conversation one-on-one with somebody you may be asking yourself, was I talking too much? I've done it. I've stopped. Mentally, I'm thinking, I better shut up. I need to let this person tell me a little bit about themselves. So I can totally relate. Mendel: Something my wife reminds me of a lot after I'll walk away from a conversation. I'll say, "Oh my God, I just stuck my foot in my mouth." Or, "I said the wrong thing." Or, "I hope they didn't take that the wrong way." Or something like that. And she says, "Listen, most people are so focused on themselves that they don't even hear it. They're not thinking about it." Which is always a reassuring thing to think about. So these days I try and think, you know what? Yeah, yeah. I said something a little silly. The people that know me will realize that that's just one of my quirks, and the people that don't know me hopefully, are paying too much attention to themselves to notice. So yeah. Bob: That's a good golden rule to live by there. Alrighty. Well, this has been fun. Glad I was able to get you in the guest seat. And also, for me, it also gives me a chance to publicly thank you for coming on at the first of the year. We've known each other for several years and you were a perfect choice in the lineup and it's been a blast and I hope you hang around or I don't scare you off in the near future or anything. And even with your insecurities, you do a great job, people enjoy it, people love coming on and talking. Like I said, guests love all three co-hosts, and I think I've found three jewels. Where to connect with Mendel So with that said, how can people connect with you? Mendel: You can touch base with me personally, @ifyouwillit, on Twitter. Ifyouwillit.com, on the internet. If you need anything, need some advice, need some help optimizing your site, whatever it is, just give me a shout, I'm here for you and I'm available. And part of that is because Liquid Web and Nexcess pays me a salary to not only help Liquid Web and Nexcess customers, but also to help people in the community that need help with eCommerce and with WordPress and things like that. So I would be remiss if I didn't mention that Nexcess.net, the website for the company that pays the bills while I talk and tell you crazy deep secrets about my life. Bob: Cool. Mendel: Sorry for that unpaid advertisement, Bob. Bob: That's perfect. Actually, it's good because I want to thank them too, because I know that they have granted you permission to come on here and be a co-host once a month. So I reach out to them and of course, I will mention, they are my host, the host for both my sites. So I have a special place in my heart for that company as well. Well, everyone we are launching as I said before, on October 6th, I want to thank WooCommerce.com one final time for their support. They've been an ongoing support since the beginning of the year and they're going to be continuing their support and we'll be having a lot of cool people come on. In fact, the week of the launch, that we will be having Allen, who is a developer advocate at WooCommerce, come on. So we'll be able to pick his brain and see what he's up to and some good stuff, and even more Woos. So appreciate everyone joining us. We'll be back next week with Jonathan, our third co-host, and hear a bit about what Jonathan's doing, and we'll be announcing more about what you can expect with the new Do the Woo. So until next time, take care. Scroll back to top Sign up to receive email updates Enter your name and email address below and I'll send you periodic updates about the podcast. powered by

Thanks to our community sponsor This is the first of three episodes where I ask my co-hosts to put on the guest hat. Today I chat with Brad Williams, who was my first co-host and has been on the show since May 2018. It’s a good time to learn more about how Brad does the Woo, as well as some insights into WooCommerce and what he has learned from the builder community via the podcast. A Chat with Brad In episode 72, I chat with Brad about: Working on a podcast two years + with BobWPThe advantages of having a co-host on your podcastHow Brad does the Woo (aside from Do the Woo)Brad’s evolution with WordPress, WooCommerce and eCommerceWhat Brad considers the largest challenge when deciding whether a client should use WooCommerce What Brad has learned from all the shows he has done with Woo buildersThe top two Do the Woo episodes that stand out in his mind and whyWhy he decided to have his company create a handful of pluginsHow his personal story with axe throwing may be something listeners missedThe one thing you don’t know about Brad professionally and how it has become his top advice Connect with Brad WebDevStudios.comBrad on Twitter @williamsba The Conversation Yes, this is the transcript. But not in the traditional sense, transcribed word for word. We do not speak as we write. Often the flow of transcribed content is hard to follow. So I have taken it a few steps further by seriously editing, at times, the conversation and even using my editorial freedom to clarify some points. So enjoy. Transcript Email Download New Tab Bob: Hey everyone. BobWP here, episode 72 of Do the Woo. This is where I normally welcome my wonderful cohost, but I thought for the next three episodes we'd take a different approach to this. Because you get to hear these co-hosts always asking and talking to the guests. And they share a bit here and there, but I thought, "Hmm, maybe it's time to figure out who these three co-hosts are." You may know them well. You may not know them enough. You may wonder if you still want to know them after hearing everything we talk about. But in any case, this week, we're going to start with Brad. You know him as a wonderful co-host, and now he is sitting in the hot seat, the guest hot seat. Brad, how you doing? Brad: Man, you're really setting us up here, Bob. I'm good. I'm a little nervous now after that intro, but I'm okay. How are you doing? Bob: I'm doing good. I came up with this idea because yeah, it's like everybody hear's the three of you all the time. And of course you share stuff, the conversation is very natural, but I thought, "Man, maybe it's time to find out a bit more Woo-ness about our cohosts." So first, before we even get into that, I wanted to let everyone know we're close to the relaunch of this site. Currently WooCommerce.com is our only sponsor at this point in time. We have some new community sponsors coming on here shortly, but we always like to give a shout out to WooCommerce.com. Last week, 4.5 came out, this week there's a new version of the blocks. A lot of stuff going on over there, so do check out WooCommerce.com because they've been a great supporter and they're going to continue to be a great supporter as we move into the next phase. I'm going to give a little backstory here. In 2016 I actually started Do the Woo podcast and I changed it to another podcast after about nine months. Then in January 2018 I decided to bring it back. It was time to bring the Do the Woo back. I missed it. And Brad was actually the very first guest, episode number one. I looked for a sucker, or a good guest I should say. Okay, there's Brad. Brad will do it. Brad on Do the Woo for 2 years plus And later on, about March, I started thinking, "Well, it'd be nice if I had a cohost, because I think people get bored just hearing me always talk to the guests. They'd like to get another perspective in there." And I looked back and thought, "Well, if anybody had the guts enough to come on my first show, they might have the guts enough to become a co-host." I reached out to Brad and I said, "Hey, this is a thought I have right now. What do you think?" And surprisingly, he said, “Yes." Brad: What was I thinking, Bob? And here we are, two years later, is it? Bob: Yeah, so probably everybody wants to know, "How have you handled BobWP for two years?" That'd probably be the biggest question. I don't know if you even have an answer for that. Brad: Well, you got a nice zen attitude, a very calming presence, a lot of deep breathing. Bob, you're a professional. I like hopping on your show and talking to people and interviewing people and definitely in the format that we do it, where it's more conversational and less scripted, is my favorite. It's my favorite to be a part of and my favorite to listen to. I don't like scripted podcasts or scripted shows. There's certainly podcasts that need to be that way, but I've just never been interested in that. I like just open conversations that flow and the topic kind of goes wherever it goes. Even though you have some general guidelines or talking points, it just kind of goes organically through the conversation. And so all in all, it's been a lot of fun. You've made it very easy. You're quite the professional, Bob. Bob: Well, thank you. Thank you. Very few people say that. Brad: I could go off and run my mouth a little bit. And it works, I guess. Having a podcast co-host is the right way to go Bob: Well actually, back then when I was looking at trying to decide who to ask as a co-host, very few people came to mind. And I don't know if I've just been lucky or if I always have this gut feeling, but it went so natural after you came on. I was like, "Wow, this works..." And I knew from you having been on DradCast and different things and also just knowing you for quite a while. Brad: Yeah. Podcasting is difficult. It's hard. If you've never done it, just trust me. It's hard. The podcasts or shows that you listen to that feel effortless when the hosts that are very good at what they do, because it should come off very natural. It should come off like you've been planning for hours and tens of hours and all this prep work and it just naturally flows. And there's just a lot of great podcast hosts out there and interviewers. And that's, again, why it's popular and why people like listening to podcasts and consuming that type of media. But the fact that it's hard, imagine doing it by yourself, like you were, Bob. I mean, you were doing it by yourself. But for the listeners, imagine not only having to run a show, but coordinate everything about it and then be the sole interviewer to guide the discussion, to come up with the questions. It's just you're juggling a lot, and especially as it's live or as the interview's live. It can be tough to kind of think of, "Oh, I've got to get my sponsor plug. I want to make sure I ask this question." Or while the person you're interviewing is answering your question, you're already thinking about the next question, because you need to. Or where you want to take the conversation. But sometimes you can lose focus of, "Well, what did they actually just say?" A team. Having at least two people can help alleviate some of that pressure. Can help make it flow better. We can jump in and support each other. If one topic kind of dwindles off the other one can jump in and kind of start a new topic. A lot like running a business. There's some great companies in our space run by a single person, and that seems absolutely terrifying to me. I would never want to run WebDevStudios by myself. And that's why I have a great partner in Lisa Sabin-Wilson, just like you and I on the show, and along with the other co-hosts, so. Bob: Right. And I'm fortunate because it has gone so well. And each co-host brings in a different perspective, different background. And just to let you know, and let everybody know, this is one of the things that I've enjoyed the most about it, is I don't know how many guests have come back to me. And no matter which hosts I have had on, many times they come back and say, "Wow, thank you. I was really nervous. You made it fun. You made it comfortable." So I think that's important. For every cohost I have, it's important that the guest feels comfortable. And fortunately, like I said, I pulled in three personalities that blend well. It does make it a fun show and people do have a good time. Brad: Yeah. Certainly if you have not done a lot of podcasts it can be an uncomfortable spot for someone to come on. They want to come on and promote their product or their service and talk about their experiences, absolutely. But it can be intimidating just knowing that you're opening yourself up. So yeah, I think the more we can do to make this a more comfortable space, have some fun, goof around, get into some fun topics. Very quickly, it just starts to flow naturally and our guests start to open up. And we've pumped out some great episodes in interviews because of it. Yeah, for sure. Well, I'm going to start this with basically the two questions we usually start out with, except I have to modify this first one. So I'm going to ask you, Brad, how do you do the Woo aside from Do the Woo? How does Brad do the Woo aside from Do the Woo Brad: Aside from this podcast? This is all I do. So I've been around WordPress; really 2006 was my first taste of WordPress. I started my own personal blog and picked WordPress. Ended up starting a company and focused on WordPress. The rest is history. But early on, as we were building WordPress sites at WebDevStudios, we'd get requests for eCommerce functionality. And you have to think back to the 2008, 2009 timeframe, you didn't have things like Shopify. Those turnkey, very simple online stores. Etsy, I don't think existed back then. If it did, it certainly wasn't the national or global site that it is today. So there wasn't a lot of third party, super easy for small business, medium businesses to spin up a store. Starting with eCommerce way back There were options. They weren't necessarily easy and as intuitive as they are today. And the same was true within WordPress itself. So we've talked about this on previous shows, but really I think the original eCommerce plugin was WPeCommerce. When I first got into WordPress, that was the only one I knew of, the only one I'd heard of, and the only one that seemed to have any kind of traction or community around it. I'm sure there were others out there, but that one was definitely clearly at the top. And it was also clearly known that it was very difficult to work with. So yes, it worked, but it was tough. You could get it working, but when you really needed to get into some customizations or to make some adjustments for the type of store you're trying to set up, that's where you'd quickly run into problems. It butted heads with a lot of other plugins. And we have to remember, again, the plugin ecosystem wasn't what it is today. The standards aren't what they are today. Even the ability to manipulate WordPress wasn't what it is today. So you just have to remember the time and place that we're talking about here. But that was the biggest. So we used it. We rolled out some sites with it. We definitely had some headaches and frustrations. And then the next plugin that took off and became a real direct competitor was the Shopp plugin. And the big difference to me seemed to be that Shopp built the solution from the ground up, but they really seemed to wrap a whole business model around it. Where WPeCommerce was free and I don't even know if they had paid add ons. I think it was just free at the time. Where Shopp, I believe it was paid. Do you remember? I believe the core of Shopp was paid. Bob: Yeah, I'm trying to remember. I never used it myself, but I remember seeing it a lot. Brad: Yeah, but basically he had a revenue stream attached to this, with the add-ons and things like that. So he was able to have more dedicated developers. And Jonathan Davis was the primary there who started Shopp. And so that quickly rose up and we did some sites with that. And then another year or so later WooCommerce showed up. I wasn't familiar with Jigoshop until WooCommerce, but Jigoshop was out there and WooCommerce was a fork of Jigoshop. And then WooThemes, at the time they were known for the themes. They rolled out WooCommerce and they really put some serious muscle into it. And that's when it became clear that WooCommerce was starting to take over as the preferred option. It had a good community, had a lot of really good extensions. Was very flexible to customize your stores. It went above and beyond what everything prior to it had really done. And I think just because of the size of WooThemes at the time, they could put a whole team of people on it to really grow out that side of the house there. So it wasn't just one or two people; it was a lot of people. And that's when it became clear it was the front runner. And really the rest from there is history, because it just kept growing. Then once Automattic acquired it and it just exploded, because now Automattic has some massive funding and an extremely large team around it, you know? So it really became the default from there. Evolving with WooCommerce and eCommerce We've since built and launched a number of sites, including sites that do millions and millions of dollars of sales every year through WooCommerce. So definitely on the enterprise scale side with WooCommerce as well, too. So that's the evolution from the early days of what we were doing and what a lot of people in WordPress were using, to where we all just kind of gathered around WooCommerce, because it really was the best solution. And really it still is the best solution in terms of a WordPress-powered eCommerce plugin and platform. Not knowing how much of your projects are eCommerce sites, has there been an obvious growth because of the popularity of more people wanting to sell online? Was there any particular times you felt like it bumped up significantly? Or have you just kind of gone with the flow and have it there as an availability, but don't really necessarily always push it over everything else? I look at when our company is building a website or doing a project. We don't like to make decisions on what's going to be used until we really sit down and understand the goals of the project. I think going into a project and saying, "Okay, it's, eCommerce. We're just going to use WooCommerce," isn't doing necessarily justice for your client, right? Maybe it should be WooCommerce and there's probably a strong chance we will recommend WooCommerce, but we want to understand the goals. Like what are they trying to accomplish? What is the uniqueness to their business or their products or their sales cycle that we need to factor in that the system needs to support? All of these questions that come up. And there's a lot when you get into eCommerce, as you can imagine, that you need to ask and talk about to determine if that is actually the best option. It's very similar, like React. Like what kind of JavaScript framework? Should everything be powered by Gutenberg Blocks or not. These are all great. These are tools available. It's like a bat belt, right? Like Batman. These are all tools in my belt that we could use if it's the right tool to use. Right? So we start with goals and we work back from there. In terms of WordPress, if we're leaning towards a WordPress-centric solution, then WooCommerce is our go-to. Wait, I take that back. We've done some Easy Digital Downloads as well, which we also really like. Again, it's got a very specific area that it excels at. But by and large, WooCommerce when you're selling products and things like that is our go-to. But we'll also look at external systems too, things like Shopify, BigCommerce. We used to look at Magento. We don't really look at that as much anymore. Again, we just want to make sure we're putting the right system in place for the client based on what they're looking to accomplish. Not just saying, "You're going to be WooCommerce. Now what do you want us to build?" Like that may not be the best option. But by and large, usually it is, so. The top thing that Brad considers when deciding whether to use WooCommerce Hey everyone, just wanted to give you a heads up that the new Do the Woo will be launching in early October. Because of this, we currently have WooCommerce.com as our single sponsor. I would like to thank them personally for their continued support and encourage you as a builder to check out their new developer resource portal. It’s chock-full of incredible documentation. You can find it at developer.woocommerce.com. And now back to the show. Bob: I'm going to just throw in one thing I hadn't thought of previously. Is there anything you find when you're making your decisions and you're looking at a WordPress site and WooCommerce fits the mold just fine. But from your perspective in the enterprise world, anything missing with WooCommerce? Brad: Yeah. Good question. Prior to me starting WebDevStudios I was a developer and at a large eCommerce store. And I worked my way up to director of IT at that company. So my background prior to WordPress and open source was eCommerce, and it was eCommerce running a physical warehouse of products and shipping out products. We sold batteries, batteries.com. Like the most boring product you could probably sell. Bob: Everyone needed one. Brad: Yeah. And of course this was like 15 years ago. So everything had a battery that could be replaced. Now it's a much different world, right? Like most batteries you don't replace. You just replace your device, which is kind of weird. But it's just the evolution of technology, right? So that's my background. I understand a lot of the challenges that come with that. Like having a warehouse and having an eCommerce platform. Taking the order is great, but what happens after the order has been placed, right? And that's where you really get into some complexities. Those order details need to go into the warehouse. They need to go into whatever system they're using to pick the order. Then the warehouse, when they pick the order and it generates a shipping label and spits out that it's shipped, it needs to go back and update the eCommerce site to tell the customer that. Like, "Hey, your order shipped. Here's a tracking number. It's on time. Blah, blah, blah." So that whole relationship between eCommerce system and warehouse is one of those things that I always flag if it comes up of that is a serious complexity that we need to dig into a little bit more. So WooCommerce could definitely support warehouses, but it's all about what system they're using. Because WooCommerce is not going to be their warehousing system; WooCommerce is just going to interact with it, right? And then there's even more complexity. What if you have multiple warehouses, right? What if you have more than one warehouse? Forget Amazon, because that's too big to even wrap our heads around. But if you're just a store that has maybe a west coast and east coast warehouse, are the products the same in both warehouses? Probably not. Maybe they are, maybe they're not. Maybe there's some overlap. It has to figure out what warehouse things need to go to, what things are shipping and how you're syncing inventory across multiple warehouses. And so when you start getting into complex setups like that, that's where I start the question of if WooCommerce is the best solution. Is it doable? Yes. I mean, you can do anything with open source. But is the cost and time going to justify the outcome? Do you want to spend six figures on us building a custom solution to do exactly what you want, or would you rather use something like BigCommerce. Or even maybe a Magento that has some of this stuff built in? So the warehousing one is one that stands out. Obviously SMB, its not usually a consideration. If they have a warehouse it's probably in their garage and they're shipping out of their garage. Or you're started getting to midsize and certainly at an enterprise level, that's a doozy. Another one's just inventory. You know, we set up, I mentioned, that multimillion dollar system. It was for a grocery chain and you can imagine we had to track all the inventory of a grocery store. And grocery stores, just envision your local grocery store, and most people, we probably go to a decent sized grocery store. There were tens of thousands of individual products and SKU's at that store. So tens of thousands of products at a single location and the inventory is updating daily sometimes. Right? So now you're talking about how do we keep inventory in sync at that scale on a nightly basis? Then you're opening up another can of worms. We did it in WordPress, but we really had to evaluate if that was going to be the best solution or not. In this case it was and we made it work and it worked well. But you know, certainly on the enterprise side, when you start getting intoit, there's going to be some complexities. And a lot of it's at scale, right? It's like, okay, this will work if you have a thousand products, but you have 100,000 products. That might introduce some problems. So those are the things we kind of dig into and considerations where maybe WooCommerce isn't the best solution. Bob: Yeah. Interesting stuff. What Brad has learned by interviewing Woo builders I'm wanting to do a little reflection on the podcast and some of the shows we've done here. Mostly because I think it's great to have the opportunity to ask each cohost something about what you learned from each of them. Because you've interviewed different people and you may have listened to other shows or whatever. But there's things that you're going to pick up that maybe another cohost or even myself don't pick up. What do you think is one of the biggest things you've learned about the Woo builder community overall in regards to the different guests we've had on? Brad: Yeah, that's a good question. One. They're all crazy. No, I'm just kidding. I know a lot of developers and talk to a lot of developers, like you've mentioned I did the DradCast podcast. We talked to a lot of people and I just know people in the space. So I know a lot of very successful plugin developers, site builders, that aren't WooCommerce-specific. And I know a lot within WooCommerce, especially from talking on this show. So I think the one thing about any kind of eCommerce, it's just there's more complexities, right? So I feel like anyone that we've had on this show that has a product or service, or specifically around WooCommerce. Those types of people like to solve, in my mind, more complex problems. And I don't know if that's why they're drawn to it necessarily, if that's just the nature of what it is. But there are more complex problems when you're working with eCommerce. There's just more opportunities with eCommerce, because anytime you're selling a product that can help someone generate money you can charge more. There's a higher cost to that. If I can buy a plugin for 50 bucks and literally make that 50 bucks back by using whatever that feature is across a couple of sales. Like abandoned carts. We talk about abandoned cart all the time. If I can use a service or a plugin that contacts anyone that left a full cart but didn't pay, it gives them a 20% off coupon and they come back and convert. That's huge. That's huge. And it completely justifies the cost of that product or service and I'd never have a reason to cancel. So there's a lot of really big opportunities and there's a lot of really big challenges. And I think a lot of the people we've talked too, by and large, they like to take on those challenges, regardless of how big or complex they may be or how convoluted or frustrating it may be. They'd like to take them on. It's just one thing that stood out is it seems like the people that we talk to, the people in the WooCommerce space are very, very much into solving complex challenges for their clients and for their customers, which I think is really, really cool. Podcasting means learning new stuff all the time Bob: That's interesting. Yeah. When I think back on that you're exactly right. One of the reasons I've done podcasts for as long as I have, especially when I'm with guests, is I'm always learning something new. And of course, with this podcast and a lot of them, I know for sure that I'm learning something new because I'm not a developer, I'm not a product builder. And I'm guessing that there has been plenty of a-ha moments for you. That sometimes somebody will say something and you're like, "Wow. I never thought about that." Not that I'm asking you to recollect any of those, because I know I can't. I don't know if that's one of the things that you've also found talking to all these people, is no matter how much you do this stuff there's always going to be somebody bringing up something that you just go, "Wow. I never thought of it that way." Brad: Oh yeah. For sure. It's technology in general, right? Like the technology moves extremely fast. And so if you're in the technology space, no matter what you're doing, you also have to do your best to keep up, right? Or you're going to get passed and you're going to fall behind and it's going to affect you and your company and your business? So I think there's always opportunities to learn and to grow, especially from people that are in the trenches, that are doing this day-to-day. They're going to have seen stuff or come across stuff that I haven't, or even our company hasn't. I'm sure you hear stuff on occasion from time to time that's new to you. And you have to be always open to learning if you're going to be in the tech field, because if you're not you're in the wrong field. I mean, like the stuff we're talking about, the stuff we're doing, some of it didn't exist even a couple of years ago. I remember when... this has been a little while now, but when responsive design first was all the rage. And this is like 2009, 10 when it was new and people were just starting to do it. And every WordCamp was starting to have someone talk about it. I was like, "That's amazing." It's like a game changer in terms of how we work with mobile and different screen sizes. And back then there weren't as many screen sizes necessarily to worry about. But now it's like, you can't even fathom how many different sizes of screens that are out there that need to work well. And now, it's just what we do. Like everything's responsive. It's not even like, ""Oh yeah, we're going to make it responsive. Of course we're going to make it responsive. That's just what you do. One example that always stands out is just that. Now everything's like JavaScript, It has been a big focus for the past few years and JavaScript's been around forever. I was working on it 20 years ago, but now with the number of frameworks that are out there and obviously the push with Gutenberg and React within WordPress core it's a big component of what everyone is working with. So if you don't know it, you need to know it or ultimately, WordPress is going to pass you by. So I'm always trying to learn whatever I can, because I know I don't. I definitely know I don't know everything. Never will. What episode or episodes have stood out for Brad and why Bob: For sure. Hey everyone, BobWP here and as I have been dropping hints here and there, my next iteration of Do the Woo is coming out soon. If you are a WooCommerce builder, you will want to be one of the first to know about this… I can reassure you that you are going to love it. To get notified pre-launch, simply go to bobwp.com/V5 and sign up. Let’s head back to our chat. Now, all of our guests have been incredible. I mean, that's what I like about it. And we've had people that are very popular in certain ecosystems, whether it's WooCommerce or something else. And then other people that are just hardworking, plugin developers getting good product out there. Are there any one episodes that might stand out to you and why did it? In-person chats about blocks Brad: Yeah. You did prep me for this question, so I actually did some digging and I wanted to kind of go back and look at the different episodes I've been involved with. And a couple definitely stand out. One, even though it didn't necessarily air the way we wanted it to air, the one with Darren stood out. He was at WordCampUS and Bob and I were there in person. And we spoke with Darren Eithier who is a software engineer at WooCommerce. So we're able to interview him in person. But we had to re-record because of some issues with the audio. Just the fact that we were able to be there in person, even if it it had to be redone. It still it was a great episode. And it was interesting because that's when we first started talking about how WooCommerce team was looking to make the shopping cart and checkout process more block-based, using Gutenberg Blocks, which is one of the bigger initiatives to you use Gutenberg outside the editor that I've come across. And outside of the traditional editor, which I thought was super cool. So that one stands out. The content marketing side of eCommerce Another one that stands out as well, was all the marketing talk we had with Tavleen Kaur from WooFunnels. We talk about complexities with eCommerce, but the majority of eCommerce stores and stores running WooCommerce aren't that complex, right? Like you have product. you're going to ship it using some type of USPS or FedEx or whatever. You set up a payment gateway and, ta-da, you have a store. People can buy stuff, right? So the real challenge comes, once you have a store how do you get people to come and buy stuff? And a lot of times we're talking about the store and different plugins that you can integrate, do this. But I think that was a really valuable conversation because we really focused on, "Okay, you have a store. Great. Now let's talk about marketing. Let's talk about sales funnels. Let's talk about abandoned cart." Let's talk about all these different things that you can do to get people to come to your site, to see your product and, once they're there, to actually help convert them. Because that is the hardest part of an eCommerce store. Great. I have a product now, how do I get people to buy it? And that is the million dollar question that will never be answered, but there's a lot of little things you could do that gets you closer to answering that question. And we cover a lot of really valuable nuggets of info just in the short 30, 45 minute interview that we did. That one stands out too. Because I don't think you hear a lot about that on shows like ours. They're talking about eCommerce. People just think about the store. Great. Get the store working is obviously important, but once it's working how do you get people to buy your product? And I have friends ask me this all the time. Like, "Here's my eCommerce store. What can I do to get more sales?" And I'm like, "That's the million dollar question. If I could answer that and say, 'Do this, and you'll make a million dollars,' I'd be charging you a lot of money for that answer." So it's a good one. If anyone has not listened to it, it was episode 55. Bob: Okay, cool. Yeah, that was a really good episode. The decision to roll your own plugins One question that occurred to me, or we talked to a lot of people that have built plugins and we've seen a constant theme in that usually, because a lot of them have agencies, and a need grew out of that. Now, your team has built some plugins as well. What made you decide to build the plugins? Brad: Yeah. I mean, early on that's exactly how we released our first. I think I released maybe a couple of plugins early on, just messing around and trying to understand the process. But yeah, early on we definitely built some plugins for clients with the intention of releasing them. And with the client's full buy-in on that. So basically got funded to build the plugin for the client for a specific need. Since we thought the plugins would also be valuable to other people, we released them to the public for free. And then the win for the client is if we're going to have a plugin out there with our name on it we're going to make sure it continues to work. Right. I don't want to plug it out there with my company's name on it that blows up your site. So that's the big benefit to them and they get credit and stuff for funding it and stuff like that. So that's how we got a number of plugins out there early on. Most of them have done okay. Our real big plugin is Custom Post Type UI. That's the behemoth. That's, I don't know, the last time I checked like 800,000 active users, 800,000 plus. So whatever that means. But somewhere between a hundred and 900,000 active users. Five, six million downloads, you know? So that's been fun too, because obviously having that big of a user base definitely opens up some more challenges. You got to be even more careful when you release an update that it doesn't break hundreds of thousands of websites. But it's been cool to see that one grow over the years. Bob: Yeah. Cool. Well, I want to close this out with you sharing something, it can be personal or professional, that you don't think most of our listeners know about you. Brad: I got one of each. I got one personal and one professional. Something about Brad personally that you don’t know So on the personal side, probably nobody knows this, but I actually won an ax throw in championship when I was like 17. Can you believe that? And this is before they had these ax throwing venues. This is before all that. This is in the '90s. And my dad goes to these historical reenactments, they're called rendezvous. It's like pre-1840 fur trapper, Indians. There's teepees and people basically live like they did back then for a week or two. And they have muzzle loader competitions. You shoot the old muzzleloader, the black powder in a musket. And then they have what they call hawks, but it's an ax throwing competitions. I tried for years from when I was probably 12 or 13. Every year I was in this competition. Every year I'd get fourth, third, maybe a second place finish. And then when I was 17, the cutoff because once I turned 18 I had to go to the adult bracket and forget it. Those guys were really, really good. So it was my last opportunity and I won the gold. Bob: Oh, wow. Brad: And it's literally they would put a playing card in the middle of a cutoff tree stomp or something that they put sideways. You'd throw the ax into it. And it looked like a stoplight. It had three dots. And based on that, if you cut the paper it was like a point, but if you cut like one dot, it was two. But if you cut all three, I want to say it was four. Then if you cut it literally in half, it was like five points. And I did it. I cut a couple in half. I did really good and I won. And then I retired, because I wasn't going to go to the adult bracket. So that was it. That was the last time I competed throwing axes. Bob: I was going to say, how did that skill workout for you in life? Did you use a later? Brad: I mean, if there's some kind of apocalypse and I have to run around with a hatchet, maybe it'll come back to me like riding a bike. But I haven't really done it seriously in a long, long time. A professional experience and secret revealed On the professional side, well, this is a little advice I give people. I don't know if I've told this story or not and I'll keep it short. But essentially back when I was in the Marine Corps and I was just trying to get some experience building websites on the side, there was a morning radio show. I was in North Carolina and they were based in the Carolinas and they had a coming soon website for months. Like this was a brand new show that just started. So one morning I got up early, at like six in the morning, and I called them. And I finally got through and they picked up and said, "Hey, what do you want to talk about?" And I was like, "I want to build your website. Do you have a website? Because you've had this coming soon page up for how long? I will build your website for free." And they were all about it. I ended up building the website and launching it for them and did it completely free. And they just kept plugging me on the radio every morning. And I think I had a link back to our WebDevStudios at the time, which wasn't even an officially formed company. It was just a domain that I own. And that started bringing in some work very early on. And the point of the story I like to tell people is sometimes you just have to go for it and you just have to ask. And the worst thing they can say is no, or we already have a website, or whatever. I did it just to get some publicity around the company and what we were doing. Did it for free and got a portfolio piece. And that was very early on, like 2000, 2001 timeframe. So before WebDev was really official. I think it's a good story because people can realize that there might be some opportunities in their life if they're really trying to get into this where they can just say, "Hey, let me launch a site for you. You need a site or your site's terrible. Let me redo it for free." Just to get some experience. Get a portfolio piece. Maybe get a referral that they can help you out, because you helped build their site and that get sthe ball rolling. Bob: Yeah. Cool story. Alrighty. Well, this has been fun putting you in the hot seat. I like it. It's something that I could get very used to, but we won't get too used to it. Brad: Well, we may turn the ties on you one of these days, Bob. Bob: Oh, God. Gang up on me, huh? Well, that'll be fun. Something to look forward to. Anyway. Most people know where to connect with you, but for those few that haven't connected with you where can they find you? Where to find Brad Brad: So the company's WebDevStudios. You can always reach out if you have a project or something you'd like to talk about. I'm pretty active on Twitter, @willaimsba. So hit me up on Twitter. Y. I mean, I really geek out on this stuff. I enjoy it. I'm always happy to help people. I think that's the open source mentality of this community, we're all in this together. And you know, a lot of people helped me get to where I'm at and I've always tried to give back however I can. So if I can help you out, reach out. Let's chat. Bob: Very cool. Well, first I want to thank you. I've been fortunate, very fortunate, to have you as a co-host and looking forward to this next phase of Do the Woo and continuing it. Brad: Yeah, likewise. Bob: I want to thank you for, as I said, taking the hot seat. This has been fun. Brad: This has been great. Thanks for having me, Bob. Bob: All right, everyone. Well, make sure you visit WooCommerce.com, our community sponsor. They're always doing something over there. And again, we so appreciate their support. Looking forward to this next phase with them as well. Until next time, we'll see you next week where we will be speaking with co-host Mendel Kurland. So take care, everyone. Scroll back to top Sign up to receive email updates Enter your name and email address below and I'll send you periodic updates about the podcast. powered by

Thanks to our sponsors When you chat with two Woo builders who have been in the space for sometime, the journey is filled with twists and turn. Throw in 2020, virtual events and you get a conversation that delves even more into the opportunities, as builders, sellers and event coordinators, that are thrown your way. A Chat with Brian and Patrick In episode 71, Jonathan and I chat with Brian and Patrick about: How Brian started with WordPress: building a Photoshop tutorial site and then moving into WooCommerceHow Patrick’s love of coding and PHP led him to WordPress and on to WooCommerceWhy meetups were a pivotal moment in Patrick’s introduction to WordPressWhat challenges 2020 has brought to both of them, as well as opportunities in WordPress and eCommerceBrian’s experience with virtual events and how that has played out in today’s worldThe challenges of virtual events, specifically around networking and sponsorshipsWhy topical events are key to the strategy of virtual eventsWhat you can expect from the virtual online conference WooSesh this year Register for WooSesh for Free WooSesh.com Connect with Brian and Patrick Brian on Twitter @rezenPatrick on Twitter @BFTrickWPSessions.comSpeakingbytes.comLaidBack.games Deals From Our Sponsors Get 10% off CheckoutWC with the code BOBWP The Conversation Yes, this is the transcript. But not in the traditional sense, transcribed word for word. We do not speak as we write. Often the flow of transcribed content is hard to follow. So I have taken it a few steps further by seriously editing, at times, the conversation and even using my editorial freedom to clarify some points. So enjoy. Transcript Email Download New Tab Bob: Hey everybody, BobWP here, and we are back with Do the Woo episode 71. Jonathan: Whoa. Bob: Yeah. Hey, Jonathan. Jonathan: Hey Bob. Bob: How you doing? Jonathan: I'm doing much better now, I appreciate the accommodating a reschedule. I had a fun Labor Day weekend but pulled my back a little bit. And got to go to a chiropractor yesterday, feeling much better. And it was worth it. Bob: So if Jonathan says anything weird, we know he's on meds. Jonathan: I'm not. Maybe I should be. Bob: All righty. Well, we have a couple great guests, they're pros in their space and they've been around for a while, but before we dive into that, quick shout out to our sponsor, WooCommerce.com. 4.5 just came out earlier this week and hope you're on that. Minor update, a bit of a change with the onboarding that you will notice. CheckoutWC.com, great way to redo your checkout. Streamlines the account process also by allowing customers to create an account without additional information. And GoWP.com for that maintenance. You need somebody in there taking care of your client sites. They have a great white label service and their support staff, everybody at GoWP, is awesome. So do check them out. Well, we have Brian Richards and Patrick Rauland with us today. They've both been on my shows before. they've been around forever, it seems like I've known these two forever. How are you both doing? Hey, Brian. How you doing? Brian: I'm doing swell. Thanks for inviting me today. I'm excited to be here. Bob: Cool, and Patrick? Patrick: I'm doing pretty good. So Jonathan, you had a good Labor Day. We had sun it was beautiful, it was 90 degrees. And now it's snowing. Jonathan: What? Bob: Oh, no. Patrick: 2020 is just the year that keeps giving. So I was at the pool on Monday and it snowed last night. So, I'm doing great. Brian: That's ridiculous. Patrick: It is. Jonathan: Where are you, Patrick? Patrick: I'm in Denver. Jonathan: Wow, snow. Patrick: Yeah. Bob: I heard that was coming so I was wondering if you were going to mention that. I was kind of hoping you would. Wow. Jonathan: Wow. We had a crazy windstorm pick up, when we went river rafting. Sunday we were river rafting, but the wind was already starting to get fairly strong that the waves were going upstream, so it was a fairly unproductive river rafting, but then Monday, it just picked into a proper wind storm. No snow, though. That takes the cake. Seems a little early for snow. Brian: But 90 degrees to snowing. That's a 60 degree swing, man. Patrick: It is. It is. Jonathan: That's a little extreme. Patrick: I mean, 2020's just so crazy, and so anytime I can just do a regular, nice podcast with Bob, it's nice. It's calming. Jonathan: Well, it's not over yet. Bob: Yeah, really. Hopefully we can bring relief into your life. Well, how I start this out, always, and with both of you, there's no loss for words to this question I'll start with Brian. Hey, Brian. How do you Do the Woo? How Brian does the Woo Brian: A few different ways. For my own site, WPSessions.com, I have subscription-based membership. I'm running my own store there with both subscriptions and memberships turned on and a bunch of custom stuff happening for what I need. I also have historically helped lots of different clients get their sites up and running. That was always a joy to say, "Oh, yeah. By the way, you could have an eCommerce store. You're selling this stuff? Let's take that online." And to see all of the ideas expand from their mind from there has been a joy. Then one of the things that I do together with Patrick is run WooSesh to teach all kinds of store builders all around the world how they can do more incredible things with WooCommerce. Bob: Excellent, and I know that, Patrick, for a long time you have seriously Done the Woo. So how do you Do the Woo these days? How Patrick does the Woo Patrick: So, I've done lots of stuff in the past, worked for WooCommerce. I've built lots of client sites. I have two new things this year, Bob. I run my own store. So if you go to LaidBack.games, I sell a cute little game called Fry Thief. It's just a personal project that I ran for a couple years, and it's fun to sell stuff on your own site, and also, Bob, I talk about WooCommerce all the time and it's really good to have learned experience. So I'm enjoying that, and I also work at Nexus now. We're a hosting company. We do awesome hosting, including a managed WooCommerce product. So I'm looking at it more on the speed side now, Bob. I get to learn how to optimize WooCommerce, which is something I just didn't focus on a lot before. So, it's fun to get into the optimization side of it. Bob: Yeah. So we got some serious Woo-ness here today. This is overflowing, majorly. You both have the journey. We don't want to take the whole show talking about that, but I'd love to hear, in a nutshell, how you got into WordPress and then where did Woo come in along the way? Why don't we start with Brian. Brians journey to WordPress and WooCommerce Brian: Yes. So I first started using WordPress when I was in college. I had a roommate who loved WordPress. He was a blogger, and I was looking for something to use for a project. He's like, "Well, you should use WordPress for this." I'm like, "Yeah, but this isn't a blog. I'm building a site with a bunch of content that's categorized and grouped." At that same time, I started to realize that all of these sites that I was frequenting were all WordPress under the hood, courtesy of them saying "Powered by WordPress" in their footer. I'm like, "Oh. Hang on. So it's not just for straight-up blogs. Let me take a more serious look at this.” WordPress 2.3 and a Photoshop tutorial site So, I would say, it must've been 2007 was my first year. WordPress 2.3 had just dropped, and so tags had been merged into Core out of a plug-in, and it was an exciting time to figure things out. I used it for myself for a couple of projects. One of my first sites was a Photoshop tutorial site called PhotoshopKid.com. It was very short-lived, but it was a lot of fun. I designed a custom theme, and the layout looked exactly like Photoshop, and the layers pallet in Photoshop was the site menu in this WordPress theme that I designed. It was a lot of fun. So you'd basically click on the layer in the panel and that was whatever page you wanted to see, and the visibility icon would travel so you could see which page was active, and then I took it a step further. There was this fantastic JavaScript library called Scriptaculous that let you do lots of very fancy animations for writing zero custom code. I made it so that you could rearrange the layout just like you would drag the different panels in Photoshop around, and you could have your own unique experience while you're browsing the site. It was a lot of fun. Then I used it for a bunch of clients, and now, I teach people how to do incredible things with it on WPSessions. I bring other people in to teach that, and that was born from my agency life and recognizing that i had all these blind spots from being a self-directed learner in web development, and that triggered the realization that everybody has blind spots because we're all self-directed because the web is so new and changing all the time, but none of us have the same blind spots. WooCommerce extensibility For the last seven years, I've been learning about learning and helping other people learn the things that I know and other experts know in WordPress, and I picked up WooCommerce right at the beginning, right before V1 even dropped. This is going to be really amazing because it was an extensions-based design, so you have this tight core that's like, "All right. Here's how eCommerce happens. Oh, you need to sell with these payment gateways? No problem. Add those extensions. Oh, you're doing subscriptions? No problem. We've got an extension for that." I love the extensibility because it was just like WordPress in that regard, and so I picked it up for myself, but also for clients, like I said, and it's just been a lot of fun and experimentation the entire way. Patrick started his journey with custom PHP Bob: Patrick, how about yourself? Patrick: I don't want to give you the whole story because we're going to be here a while, but I'll give you the starting point because I think that's the most important part. I used to do custom PHP development of websites. We had a lot of custom jobs. It was my first job out of college, and it was great. It was fun. It was good, but I got tired of building login pages. There's just certain functionality that doesn't need to be custom. Logging in to your website, you don't need to reinvent the wheel every time. I'm copying and pasting code from previous projects, and that's how I got into WordPress.I don't want to build login pages anymore, and then we had more and more clients who just had regular pages, and they wanted a blog, and you're like, "Oh! This is way easier.” WooCommerce came along So I started from the custom PHP side, and then I got into WordPress, and then I found a WordPress meetup group, and I think that meetup group was pivotal for me because it turned me from a person who's using WordPress and just cramming it in. And then I'm learning about Backup Buddy, and then I learned about eCommerce and WooCommerce, and I learned about all these things. I learned about Backup Buddy about a month before my first site was ever hacked. The benefit of this WordPress meetup group was just good timing, and then they recommended WooCommerce for eCommerce. It was my first eCommerce experience. No, that's not true. It was my first eCommerce project from scratch. I had maintained other people's eCommerce projects, but I hadn't built one myself from the ground up, and I loved it. I loved it so much. Brian, you already said it, but just like the extensions model is a great way to do it where you have the core package and you add on all the features you want. Beautiful. Brian: Yeah. I forgot to mention, as you just said, the not having to do the same thing over and over again was huge to be able to just say, "All right. Well, here's WordPress core and the six or seven plug-ins that basically I need for every site that I'm building for my clients." The other catalyst was I wanted to give my clients some the ability to update their own site, or at the very least, make it easier for me to update their site versus just static HTML and CSS like I had been writing for all of the years prior to that. A meetup group for WordPress was pivotal for Patrick Jonathan: Patrick, your experience feels a little atypical. For some developers, it's counter-intuitive where it's like, "Well, that's where you get paid to reinvent the wheel over and over again." Right? Or do something entirely custom. It's cool to hear. And the meetup group, what was it about it? Was it just the people themselves? Is there anything that stood out to you in those initial experiences that helped you buy in? Patrick: Sure. I'll answer this in two parts. The first thing is, I love building custom functionality. That's how I got started, just writing PHP and MySQL code to do whatever crazy stuff a client wants. I love that, and if I can spend less time building a login page, I can spend more time doing the cool custom coding stuff. So I think that's the way I looked at it. This client can afford 30 hours of my time. I'll spend two hours setting up WordPress and making that beautiful and 28 hours doing custom coding stuff. So I think that was the angle, that was the frame I used. The meetup group was--I think the best way to phrase it is, there's an expression here I'm not remembering, but it was an opportunity that was just sitting there. Someone had started a meetup group in a town just south of where I lived, and there was like a hundred members in it, but they had never had their first meeting. It was like a hundred people want to meet about this, and I convinced my boss to say, "Hey, I will learn more from this meetup group than by doing an hour of Googling." I will just learn by osmosis by hanging out with people. So that meetup group was great. I became the defacto leader. Someone started it, a hundred people had joined, no one had set up the first meeting/ I set the first meeting at a coffee shop. Also, this is cheating. I'm a morning person. It was definitely a morning meetup, having coffee. I was having biscuits and things, whatever, and it was great. I don't know. Does that answer the question? Jonathan: Yeah. Well, it's interesting. So had you done meetups before that? Patrick: No. There was a local web meetup. That was everything. So there's like a Drupal person, WordPress people, Magenta people. That was everything. So it was really nice to have a WordPress specific meetup group. Jonathan: Nice. Nice. That's very cool. Thanks to our sponsor:This episode is brought to you by GoWP, your partner to help you sell maintenance programs to clients while growing your business. Your expertise in development or design should not be weighed down with shop maintenance. The best solution is to hand off the low-value work that can often eat up your days. And making sure you client's sites are healthy and up-to-date is critical. Their white label service gives you access to their engineers and developers an extension to your team. And that even extends to their knowledge base filled with pricing page templates, lead magnets and maintenance plan documentation that you can edit and use yourself. Topping that off is their content edit request service. Any Woo shop success is based on fresh and up-to-date content. Let GoWP cover that for you clients and agency. Personally, I know you will not regret extending your services through GoWP and leaving your clients in safe and comfortable hands. Just head on over to GoWP.com and sign up for their free partner account. Now lets head back to the show. So, you mentioned 2020. 2020 is on all of our minds in different ways, shapes and forms, and for some we would rather it not be on our minds right now. As I've looked at it, it feels like it's just really been an accelerator of existing trends. We've seen this really strong in the world of eCommerce. I'm curious for the two of you, like you have a unique vantage point where you've been in this ecosystem for a long time with WordPress and Woo, and you're both in this. Brian, you have the events focus. Patrick, you work and you're doing day in and day out. I'm curious of the challenges and opportunities that are standing out most to you within this world of eCommerce. Patrick, I'll start with you. Challenges and opportunities for eCommerce in 2020 Patrick: Oh, that's a good question. Let me start with the lockdown, quarantine, mid-March--we saw a ton of people sign up. So it's kind of cool that people face this adversity and say, "Hey, you're stuck inside at home. You can't go to work unless you have a work from home job," And actually we had a ton of people sign up and want to create either a WordPress or WooCommerce site. That gives me a little bit of hope that people are doing cool things when they're locked down, and I want to help those people so much. We worked on a better onboarding email sequence just to make sure they have all the links they need. I think this is a reminder that you want to have some control over finances and nurture your own little side business. I had someone message me on Facebook yesterday, and they said--I also make courses for LinkedIn Learning--and they said, "Patrick, I found your course on LinkedIn Learning. This pandemic has made me realize how important it is to have some sort of financial independence, and I want to thank you so much." And then there was other stuff we chatted about after that, but I love WooCommerce as a vehicle for people to take agency over their life and their finances and have it be a little side hustle in addition to your main job, or have it be your full time thing if it grows that big. That's what I really like about it and I hope more people can do. I hope more people are creative and sell tutoring, like selling guitar lessons. There's so many things you can do remotely. The last thing I want to say, this is unrelated to WooCommerce, but I've been playing some board games online, and normally I love playing them in person, but don't normally play them online, and there have been these online leagues that have just been forming because of the quarantine. I think there's space for people to make online communities now like there hasn't been before. These board games that I've been playing online, there are giant discord servers where people are just getting on together and playing games, and I think there's still opportunity for you to create your own community and maybe monetize it some way, sell a product or help people out that are playing games or doing whatever they're doing online. Jonathan: Just want to touch on that for a moment, and then go to you, Brian. I started my Woo meetup here locally in March of this year, and then a few days later sent out the announcement that all the meetups are now switched to virtual. It was an interesting time because the first meeting was physical, and then thereafter, it's been a weekly, and it's been happening virtually. It's been really interesting. The one thing, on the positive side, I've been blown away. The Woo meetups are overall doing really well. They're growing and people have, I think, primed by, like you said, this sense of, "Okay. We need to take some more agency. We need to do things." There's a lot of interest. One of the unique opportunities that's come about with everything being virtual is people visiting lots of different meetups, and jumping in here, jumping in there. They're traveling to London, they're traveling to India, all from the convenience of their homes. That's been great. I think it's interesting to also think about, as much as I don't like to, some of the challenges and downsides because all of this can be--and I'll bring that back to the opportunity. I love that you brought up the board games. We, as humans, need connection, and the internet can provide us these opportunities. It's not the same. It doesn't have to be, and it's not necessarily better or worse, depending on how you go about it. I agree entirely. There's a lot of opportunity right now in the community building space where people can connect who wouldn't otherwise. I think and want to believe that once we're back to being able to meet, those who have made those connections now are going to be that much stronger for it on the other side. Patrick: Yeah. I love all that, and you just reminded me of something about the pandemic. This is a time where people are changing habits, and I'm including myself here where I felt stuck inside. I live in a downtown apartment, so I don't have a big backyard or anything, and so at the end of my workday, now, I take an hour, sometimes and hour and 15 minute walk, and it's just like my, "The work day is done. I'm going on a walk." I listen to podcasts. I walk the dog, and I've been doing it now for like four months. Jonathan: That's amazing. Patrick: Probably when this pandemic is done, that habit is still probably going to stay. So I wonder what other habits people are forming where if you can get people to use your product in their habits, you're going to be good to go. That'll be a good business opportunity. Jonathan: Brian, so you're in the event space. What's the impact? What are the challenges and opportunities that you've seen with this switch to so much happening online? A veteran virtual event coordinator in 2020 Brian: It's been wild. Quickly, in my local community, it's been wonderful to see all of the local businesses embrace eCommerce, particularly restaurants where it has been historically difficult for them to say, "Oh, yeah. We're going to offer delivery." To now say, "Wow. We can get food from any of the restaurants nearby to our house." It's been really nice. For events, it's been a wild roller coaster. I was originally going to run four virtual conferences this year, just mine. WordSesh split into three regional events for WordPress developers, and then WooSesh, which is still coming in October for store builders, like I mentioned early on. That was going to be it, and then the world started to shut down in February, was shut down in March, and all of the physical events were now done, and I had so many people reach out like, "Brian, you've done this before. How could we do this? Could you run our event? Could you teach how to run an event?" I didn't realize until that point that I had been spending the past seven years preparing for this moment, and so I have already run 11 conferences this year, and I still have two more in front of me. It's been intense. Virtual events are not a facsimile for real life conferences I really feel for everyone who is used to running physical events because virtual events are not an accurate facsimile of what it's like to have a physical conference. They are completely different things, and this is very easily illustrated in just the single point of the hallway track that most conferences have where you serendipitously run into someone whom you might not have otherwise seen and you have, perhaps, I life altering conversation. I've had many of those at different conferences where a few chance conversations completely altered the course of my business for a given year, and had a tremendous improvement. You can't really do those in a virtual event, and to try and do them is very difficult because they're just built in to physical events. One, at a physical event, someone comes at the beginning of the day. They're probably going to stay for the entire day, regardless of what's happening in the programming, regardless of what kind of emails they get because, "Well, no. I'm here." And at a digital event, that's not the case. They might show up for a session in the morning and then split, or they'll come in the afternoon, and they'll tune in and out. You're not necessarily going to have their entire attention, and that's okay. I've thought about that as I've been designing my events as I need to design them so that it's easier for people to come and go as they need to throughout the day. We've made talks shorter. We've made the entire programming shorter. For WooSesh, we decided we're aiming for a five hour long day, which still seems like a lot to sit in Zoom, but that's also inclusive of a 15 minute break every hour, so you can completely disengage, and it's basically two talks that you can watch in an hour. I don't know how we'll be able to do this with the actual programming when we're done, but we sort of put similar topics together. So if you're only interested in one topic, you can watch those two in bouts, but you can't still get the real community feel of a physical event because there are so many different opportunities for these individual conversations to happen. Like I mentioned, in the hallways, you're moving from one session to another, at a meal, afterwards, beforehand, and it's very easy as a participant to walk into a conversation, see what it's about and be like, "Uh, actually, this one's not for me," and then walk to the next one, see what that's about and be like, "Aha! This is it." That's really hard to do virtually outside of having an actual, virtual 3D meeting space where people are moving around, which has been experimented with at lots of conferences, and I thought about that for a little while. That's a layer that I don't really want to add to my events for this year. It's been bananas seeing practically every event go online or just get canceled. Topical based conversations, the solution for virtual events Jonathan: Brian, with how much you've learned about how much works and how much doesn't, where do you see the opportunities in that event space? We in the WordPress ecosystem are dramatically effected by this. Meetups is a big part of this. What's some of the opportunity that you see that maybe isn't being capitalized on yet? Brian: My current leaning is that topical-based conversations are going to work much better than, like what I've been doing with WordSesh, which has always been most easily related to a digital WordCamp where it's like come and learn about a variety of things for WordPress development, instead, perhaps, focusing on something specific. One of the events I helped with early this year was Block Talk for talking about the Block Editor in WordPress. So every talk was related to that. That was very interesting. I think narrowing the focus more and having events that are, say, a couple hours long, that's not a huge burden on someone's calendar. They could say, "Well, I could make it to, say, a 90-minute event and really dig in and learn on this thing." It's probably going to be both better for the organizers because it's much easier to organize an experience around, say, a 90-minute schedule and better for the attendees because they could say, "All right. This is exactly what I'm here for. This is what I need. I'm for sure going to make time to come to this thing." The other thing that I've been thinking about in terms of conferences, and this is broader and even applies to physical events is catering the talks either towards a micro-tutorial, like here's one thing that I'm going to teach you how to do and you're going to do it really well, or a case study where it's like, here is a problem I encountered, these are the reasons that it was a problem, these are the solutions that I considered, this is what I tried and why it didn't work. Here's what we ultimately did and why I think it was a success because conferences aren't well suited for a deep dive into a topic, but a case study is really well suited for helping people see even if they've not encountered problems themselves, it'll help them to mitigate those, either, ideally, to prevent them from encountering or when they do experience a problem, be like, "Aha! I remember this person talked about this exact thing. They tried these things that didn't work. This solution that they did isn't exactly going to work for me, but at least I have now the right direction to head." Bob: I've been in some of those networking online attempts. Yeah. It's hard to replicate those. It really is. Brian: Yeah. Thanks to our sponsor:This episode is brought to you by CheckoutWC, a premium plugin that replaces your WooCommerce checkout page with a beautiful, responsive and conversion optimized design. I’ve heard it myself working with shop owners over the last several years. The frustration of limited options they have for the checkout page design. They’re eager to implement best practices and good design to maximize conversions. CheckoutWC steps in with the solution that will help you reduced abandoned cars and help you increase sales. The best part is that it works with any WordPress theme and you won’t need to struggle with configuring page builders, or even messing with code. In a nutshell, it’s easy to get the checkout page you want. Head on over to CheckoutWC.com and you can give it a 7-day free trial. And to top that off, drop in the promo code BOBWP and you will get 10% off. That’s CheckoutWC.com And now, back to our conversation. The challenges and opportunities for sponsors in the virtual event space Bob: Do you see, with as many as you're doing, and I'm not sure how many are actually sponsored, these events. These sponsors that go to these events, both small and large, have thrived on that same thing that almost the hallways track runs on, that interaction, that conversation just comes out of the blue. Of course, taking it online, then, it really does throw a wrench in things. From your experience, is it the same for the sponsors? Okay, you got to realize this is an online event. This is just kind of how it rolls, and we can't get really, really, really too creative with that part of it, or are there opportunities? Brian: I think there are opportunities. You're right. For people who aren't sponsors, the dilemma here is that sponsors have all of this budget that was set aside to sponsor and be present at events that are no longer happening, that may be happening virtually, and their return on that is way different. Sponsoring an event is always a gamble because it's really hard to attribute your ROI from being even at a physical event. Let's say, we'll take WordCampUS., for example, where there's around 1500 people who attend. We'll say, maybe, 60% of those people will come by your booth. Maybe half of those will actually stop at your booth. Maybe half of those will actually have a conversation with you. Half of those, again, will actually give you their email address for some follow up stuff, and suddenly this 1500 person gives you 50-60 quality people to talk to about your product or service. Really hard, but theoretically, those people become really good fans for you, or at least some of them do, but being there, having people see your name as one touch point of many is a really great opportunity because next time they come to think of they know that is what your business does, "Ah! I remember seeing them at this event. Yeah, they seemed pretty neat. I'm going to check them out." You can't track that as a sponsor. You can't say, "Oh, they signed up here because seven months ago they recognized our banner at an event." It's even harder to do at a virtual even where you might have tracking links and things like that where we're going to see if we can get a better feel for the ROI here because people won't remember or use the tracking link. They might just type in your name like, "Oh, I'm just going to Google WooCommerce.com." So finding opportunities to interact with the attendees is difficult. As an organizer, I've made space for my sponsors during the main event. Each sponsor gets an opportunity to have their own session in the event, and I try to guide them to say, "don't just use this as a pitch. You can if you want. It's your 15 minutes, or whatever it is, to use how you see fit, but you are going to make many more fans by teaching them something and showing, perhaps demonstrating, our product is actually perfect for solving this kind of problem." Besides that, even that's not really enough. I don't exactly know of the solution because having a Zoom Room, for example, having a virtual booth isn't going to get you the same kind of traffic at a virtual event. There needs to be some kind of component that is interesting and engaging to the attendee, like "Join us for a 15 minute consultation on how to speed up your website." For example. Each person signs up for their own slot. You get some personalized one-on-one time with each of them. They get something valuable out of it, like, "Oh, you should consider optimizing images like this. Try these other six strategies," and now they are theoretically, going to be a fan for life, and they're going to be talking about that, but it's really hard to do. It takes a lot of time to plan and such. Patrick: Brian, you just sparked some ideas. At Nexcess, we've been trying to do something with events. We love sponsoring WordCamps, and now that they're all going online, that exploded our event strategy. So we tried a lot of stuff. We tried, I think, stump the eCommerce expert where they just ask me eCommerce questions, and they can get a $25 Amazon gift card if they win, and we got like two people. Then we tried other presentations. We tried a bunch of stuff, and the thing that worked the most for us is Nexcess Nachos. We just cook food and chit chat. That's it. We just turned it into a cooking show, and we got like ten times as many people to our not-a-cooking-show-cooking-show, and they just wanted to hang out and chat. I think maybe we need to realize that the role of sponsors has changed. I've helped people run WordCamps for many years, and people always come up and they're jazzed, and they're excited, and then they want product features. I think now our social energy is so low, you will get more people to your booth by having a social thing and casually mentioning your product once or twice. Jonathan: I love that. Patrick: Yeah! Jonathan: It's interesting. There's so many interesting things here where this pandemic is also providing the opportunity to rethink things. Brian, you're talking about some of the challenges, the fuzziness of sponsorship at in-person events, right? On the one hand, there is just a difference there, but it's also shining a bit of a light on a symptom of that fuzziness. You could take this idea of a cooking show, for instance, and have done that in person, in theory. Right? Done some thing that's different, but there's something there about the service of the audience. We were at WordCamp Europe, and I had to think through what are we going to do with Woo for this? It became apparent to me pretty quickly. Okay, this needs to be different. We can't just have a bunch of people showing up, and we had some advantages. There were a lot of inherent interest because of eCommerce. What we did was interesting, but what I heard from others is it was fairly common for sponsors to be like, if there's six, seven people in a Zoom Room, and then one person pops in, and it's like, whoa, okay. People would just bounce. They come into the room and just see six people in company t-shirts and it's quickly overwhelming. Whereas, what you could do in person is sort of casually walk up and you weren't the main focus. I love the opportunity, here, to rethink and try creative things because what happens with this idea of the cooking show, is that you've sort of lowered the stakes, and it's kind of interesting. There's this relaxation element to it, and people are curious about it. There's a lot of opportunity, I think, to just try more things like that. My experiment with WooCommerce Live over the past few months is like, this has got to be short, but people are like, "You got to make it longer." Like, "No, no. This has got to be short. It's got to be good. It's got to be tight." We need to think. I'd love to see us draw more from the world of sports and live streaming video games. Think of it more of how do you create community around these shared experiences? When you go to a sporting event, you're there all day, and the game, at least in my experience, is a sub point. It's like the time you're having with friends. It's the food. It's the long waits. It's all these things around it. When you're at home, you arguably have a better viewing experience than if you were in person. I think we need to take some of those same ideas and say the thing that you get in person needs to be really good. It probably needs to be a lot shorter, which you guys are already starting to recognize, and then we need to think about creative ways to bring community around that where you can have shared experiences of watching the game together. That's great. I'm glad to hear that you guys are experimenting, and I hope to see a lot more people experimenting. Don't try to transfer this same thing. It won't work. We already see that. What can you creatively to provide value and put yourself top of mind for the folks you're trying to serve? Bob: Yeah. I'm thinking if you transfer that back into the real life thing. You walk into a vendor space, "Wow, I smell nachos," type of thing. I'm just thinking through beyond whatever, but interesting stuff. Well, why don't we hear a little about WooSesh, what you have planned going for that because I know that we're moving up on the time here and wanted to get a little bit more into that and what people can expect. I'll let either one of your start. What to expect in WooSesh 2020 Patrick: Let me talk a little bit about what as you, an attendee, are going to see here and there. If you've been to a previous WooSesh, it's similar to previous years. It's going to be a two-day event. Day one is for everyone. If you use WooCommerce, you want to come to day one. We're going to have some awesome WooCommerce people, and then a bunch of people from Woo as well as a whole bunch of people who use WooCommerce talking, and you don't need any credentials. You don't need to be a developer, or a coder or anything for day one. Day two is where we... Speaking of events, I like to make sure the event is deep enough for people who want to be experts. So day two is for people who have the ability to code. We're going to go a little bit deeper into some things. As an example, we have someone who's optimized 20 WooCommerce sites, Luke Cavanaugh. He's going tell us, what did he learn by optimizing 20 WooCommerce sites. Right? He's going to tell us, "Here's these things. Here's these things. Here's these things." And probably about half to three-quarters you could do without any code, but then just 10-25% of those things, you need to have a little bit of coding knowledge to understand to get the full advantage out of it. That's the content. We have about, Brian, I think it's about five main talks every day, and we have a couple talks from some sponsors that f fill in some of the gaps, but we have basically five main talks. You're not going to be overwhelmed, we're hoping because we all got lots of stuff going on. Day one is for everyone. Day two is for coders. That's that very short and sweet version. I want to see what Brian builds on top of it. Brian: I'm going to build all kinds of extensions from that because that's the way I operate. Yeah, that's exactly right. If you're building stores in any capacity, you're going to find something of value on day one. You may also find something on day two. Like Patrick said, we're not exclusively talking about code everyday. As I mentioned earlier, one of the realizations we've had over the years is general, broad coding talks don't work well at a conference, but specific tutorials and case studies work extremely well. We've angled ourselves towards those for this event, help people solve as many different problems as they can based on the content that we have. We are very mindful of, as I said, having breaks every hour so that you're not just plugged in for five straight hours, and we've been talking about, but haven't landed on any specific things to help people get excited at the start of the event and at the end of the event each day so that it's more than just, "Hey. Come and learn these things." We want to have some community engagement. This is something we talked about earlier in the podcast, but of course, virtual engagement is a very different thing. So it's not going to be as easy as, "Hey. Come early, grab a cup of coffee, find some people who are talking about some things that are interesting to you." We're thinking through a digital analog of that, and I don't think I have anything else to add about the programming. You did a pretty tight job of describing that, Patrick. I should mention, the website is WooSesh.com. The event is specifically happening on October 13 and 14 here in 2020, and it is completely free. You can sign up and attend, and it costs you nothing but time. Hopefully, you'll see a tremendous return on that investment of time, and if you cannot make it for the live event, it is being recorded, and it will be available on WPSessions. We'll share some of the recordings that will go up on the WooCommerce blog. We did that last year. So if you go to the WooCommerce blog now and search for WooSesh, you'll find a few of our learnings and recordings from past events. There's some pretty interesting stuff in those articles. Bob: Excellent. All righty. Well, I'm glad you were able to throw in that website because that does help a lot as far as... Brian: One tiny detail, where is this thing? When is it? Jonathan: I presume it's built on WordPress, right? Brian: You would presume correctly. In fact the entire registration experience is WooCommerce, but you wouldn't know that if you go to WooSesh.com/register. It just looks like a registration form, but that's actually the checkout page for WooCommerce. Automatically add a product to your cart, has a bunch of custom fields that are related to the event that we're running, and then the order confirmation page and order confirmation email are entirely custom, too. It doesn't look like WooCommerce at all, but it is! Bob: Whoa. All righty. That's good to know. Now everybody can run there and just look at it. Hopefully, they'll remember to register while they're there, too. They won't get lost in looking at the actual build of the page. Brian: Right. Too distracted by the uniqueness of it. Bob: Yeah, really. Okay. Well, anyway. Great stuff. Would've loved to talk even more, especially around events. A lot of stuff going on, but we can do this again in the near future. Got a lot of stuff going on here on the Do the Woo. One quick shout out to the sponsor before we head out, WooCommerce.com. Again 4.5 came out. Check it out. Minor update, but hey, there's some stuff in there. CheckoutWC. Speaking of their checkout page, that's what you can do with this is you can create a custom check out page. Brian: It's a slick tool. Bob: Yep. Do something a bit different with it. And GoWP. Why spend all your time with your clients doing to the maintenance work. Do what you do best. Hire their team to take care of that part for your client's needs. Well, I think that does it, and I think, Jonathan, I think I'll go ahead and have you close out here. Jonathan: Awesome. So, connection's more important now than it's ever been. What are ways that people can connect with each of you personally to learn more about what you're doing, what you're working on? Patrick, let's start with you. Patrick: So, let me answer this with... Man, I have so many things I want to promote. If you want to see where I'm just blogging, SpeakinginBytes.com is where I hang out, B-Y-T-E-S, like computer bytes. I also have LaidBack.games if you want to see my WooCommerce store. Yeah, those are the two I want to promote. That's what I've got going on. Jonathan: I'll have to check out your Fry Thief game. That sounds awesome. Patrick: Check it out. It's fun. It's delightful. It's not too hard to learn. Yeah. Thanks. Jonathan: That's awesome. Brian: Delightful is the perfect description of Fry Thief. Jonathan: That's a good takeaway. That's what gaming should be. There's some that are a bit of a slog, but you also want delightful experiences. Brian, how about you? What are the ways people can connect with you personally? Brian: Probably the easiest way is to find me on Twitter. My handle is Rzen, but it's spelled R-Z-E-N because I'm kind of illiterate, and from there you can find everything else. WPSessions.com is where all of the recordings go for all of the events that I host, and there's tons of exclusive sessions and courses there with really top notch presenters. Then, WooSesh, of course, what we were talking about here. WooSesh.com, W-O-O-S-E-S-H.com. That's coming up on October 13 and 14, free, fun, amazing. Jonathan: Delightful, even. Brian: Delightful, even, yes. You may be surprised and delighted if you come to WooSesh and you've never been there before. Jonathan: Awesome. So that's a wrap. Bob, you have a lot of great things coming up. If you guys aren't already, go to BobWP.com and subscribe, scroll down and find the form to sign up. Bob's got a lot of great things coming up with the Do the Woo community, a lot of fun things to look forward to. Thank you both for joining us, and that's a wrap. Scroll back to top Sign up to receive email updates Enter your name and email address below and I'll send you periodic updates about the podcast. powered by

Thanks to our sponsors Greg built his first WooCommerce shop in high school, and it was wildly successful. From there, he went on to build more stores as well as help friends and family, in these current times, take their brick-and-mortar shop online. It led to his role at HubSpot as the Global Manager of WordPress partnerships which includes a deep integration into WooCommerce. A Chat with Greg In episode 70, Brad and I chat with Greg about: How Greg does and has done the WooHow the journey in Woo started with an idea and a productHis successful Woo shop selling handmade pens while in high school to customized boat shoes in collegeWorking with Woo leading up to his current position at HubSpotWhen and how the WooCommerce / HubSpot integration came to lightThe importance of partnerships and collaboration vs. competitionWorking with Woo agencies and plugin developers for enhanced HubSpot integrationWhat is coming around the corner for the plugin Connect with Greg Greg on LinkedIn Learn more about the HubSpot integration HubSpot for WooCommerceHubSpot extension Deals From Our Sponsors Get 10% off CheckoutWC with the code BOBWP The Conversation Yes, this is the transcript. But not in the traditional sense, transcribed word for word. We do not speak as we write. Often the flow of transcribed content is hard to follow. So I have taken it a few steps further by seriously editing, at times, the conversation and even using my editorial freedom to clarify some points. So enjoy. Transcript Email Download New Tab Bob: Hey, everyone, BobWP. It is time for Do the Woo episode 7-0, the big 70. Hey, Brad. You know Brad, the mainstay of Do the Woo. How are you doing, Brad? Brad: I'm good, Bob. How are you doing? Bob: I'm doing good. Are you mourning the end of summer, or have you been summer-ized? Brad: No, I'm ready. I already had a pumpkin spice latte. I've had pumpkin chili. Pumpkin cookies. Pumpkin beer. I get into a little bit earlier than most people, so I went to my first Halloween store yesterday, last day of August. Yeah, I'm ready for fall. I'm done with summer. Let's bring on the cool weather, the sweatshirts, Halloween, all that fun stuff. Bob: Halloween. Yeah, I was waiting for that one. Brad: What about you? Are you clinging onto summer? Bob: Oh, no. I'm ready. We always have a mellow summer here, so we have pretty moderate weather. This weekend, we're having a heat wave where we'll be in the 70s, so it's like, "Woo." Weird stuff. But I'm good with that. We've had fog most of the day coming off the ocean. I'm always in a fog anyway, so it suits me well. All righty, let's get it on with the show here. First I want to start out by thanking our sponsors. WooCommerce.com. I might just mention that they have a new developer resource portal that was just launched this weekend. It's pretty sweet. You'll have to go check it out. A lot more information there. I think every time they add new content there, they'll be putting it on their developer blog so you'll be aware of new guides that are put in there, so it's pretty sweet looking. And you can just go over to their site and look on their blog and they have an article about that. CheckoutWC.com. Away to take that old default WooCommerce checkout page and really buff it up. One of the interesting things I like about is they auto-populate the city and state fields when you put in the postal code. Talked to him on this podcast and he said that he was going to shift the zip code up above the state and city because if you fill in the zip code, and when you move on down, it's autofilled. So it's kind of a different user experience, but I think it's pretty sweet. And GoWP.com, whether it's WordPress maintenance or a team for your content edits or page builds, their white label for agencies helps you so you don't have to worry about this stuff. You can focus on what you do the best. Well, let's move on. Got a great guest today, Greg Karelitz from HubSpot. How are you doing today, Greg? Greg: I'm doing great. Sitting up here on the outskirts of the greater Boston area, and I think we have a streak of about 75 degree sunny days coming up, so fingers crossed that we can get outside a good amount and really enjoy it. How Greg Does the Woo Bob: Excellent. Well, Greg, how do you do the Woo? Greg: Oh, man. Well, I've been doing the Woo for a long time now, both as a builder but also a partner. My day job and something that I'm really passionate about is I work at HubSpot. I am the global manager of WordPress partnerships, so I work with all different WordPress partnerships from themes to plugins to hosting companies. And one of my favorite partners is WooCommerce, so not only do I have the pleasure of working with the talented and really smart people who are at WooCommerce and get to chat with them on a weekly basis, but we also have a pretty in-depth integration now for free between HubSpot and WooCommerce that helps online stores grow their business better and know more about the businesses and people that are coming to their stores to help them really get the deep insights. So I have a personal side of loving to build online stores and websites, that's the nerd in me, and then the professional side, which is also a little bit nerdy where I get to build partnerships and product with WooCommerce as part of it. And it can go a lot deeper than that, but I get to do the Woo on a daily basis, which is pretty fun. Brad: Anyone that gets to do the Woo on a daily basis is living a good life, that's for sure. Greg: I'll tell you. Hubspot, an all-in-one growth platform Brad: Just for anyone, and there probably aren't many listening, if any, that aren't familiar with HubSpot, but for anyone listening that may not be familiar with HubSpot, in a nutshell, kind of encapsulate what the company is and what you do at Hubspot. Greg: So HubSpot is an all-in-one growth platform,. Basically in today's landscape, I think there's like seven-thousand-plus marketing tech softwares and about three- or four-thousand-plus sales tech softwares. What HubSpot does is instead of having all of your tools disconnected, we've built a full, all-in-one platform that ties together HubSpot CRM with HubSpot Marketing, HubSpot Sales and HubSpot Services and puts all these tools under one platform and also integrates with over 500 other tools so that all of your sales, marketing, customer service software is all bundled into one interface,. It also gives you extreme depth and knowledge on your customers and what they're doing across your business. From a marketing, sales, and service perspective you can help them and ultimately achieve more growth of your own business. A journey with WooCommerce that started in high school Bob: I want to dive into that more. But I saw a little bit of your journey to WooCommerce and I think it's fascinating, and yours goes to quite a young age, which is pretty impressive. I mean, I can't tell you what I was doing at that age, but it certainly wasn't building websites or... well, WooCommerce obviously wasn't around, so that would have been impossible. So go back in time and tell us how you got into WooCommerce yourself personally. Greg: So back in high school, one of my best friends from high school and I, we did woodworking as our elective all four years. And for senior year, when we had the opportunity to do a senior project, which actually got rid of one of our classes so we could focus on something that we really cared to dive deeply in, we're like, "We got to do something around woodworking." And in the wood shop, we had a lathe, which is a machine that you can use that does what's called turning different products. Selling handmade pens So the thing we decided to make were what we thought were super beautiful, handmade wooden and acrylic pens where we buy these kits, get exotic wood, whittle them down on the lathe, polish them up, make them look super pretty, and we would package them and sell them to individuals, local stores, and then we decided to take this into our full summer business. So we said, "We're building these pens for our classmates for graduation, which is our senior project. Why don't we just go and get a lathe, put it in my basement, and why don't we just build as many pens both acrylic and wooden that we can make and see who wants to buy them and see what we can make off them." And we loved it. We got a lathe, put it in my parent's basement. My buddy Steve would come over and we'd stay up till like two or three in the morning making as many handmade wooden pens as possible, getting different packages to make them look super presentable, and we started selling them around local stores. And we said, "Why stop at local stores? What if people somewhere else wanted them?" We then dipped our toes into building a website, and this was my real first endeavor building a website for business, all my research led me to WordPress. Then ultimately into WooCommerce where then we had all of our handmade pens with their own products for people to buy wherever they were throughout the United States, because we only shipped domestically. And it started to really work, which was cool. And then once we went off to college, it got a little bit difficult to zip over to my parent's basement to make these pens, so we decided to slow that business down. Moving to Boat Shoe sales and more success And then college, the next iteration, a group of friends and I decided to make custom boat shoes, so we actually manufactured our own boat shoe and went through the whole process of manufacturing them. It was pretty crazy. I think there were like 10 iterations to get to the final product. And then I was looked at as the Chief Technology Officer because I was the computer science nerd, they said, "Let's figure out a way to build an online store." So again, did the same process and ended up building a WordPress website, having WooCommerce in it. And we had four different colors with 30 different variations, so if you add up all those different types of products, there were well over hundreds of SKUs. So WooCommerce was our first really experience into building a full-fledged eCommerce store for our boat shoe business. And our model actually led to hundreds of thousands of dollars in sales in the first five months because we had this network of college ambassadors that were helping drive people to the site. We were able to track their sales with coupons, and it got pretty involved. But that was the early stages with WooCommerce and my journey into it, and now I have some passion projects that I build my sites and host my stores on. And most recently with coronavirus, some of my best family friends have had their businesses turned upside down being more brick-and-mortar, and so I've helped them actually turn their businesses and change their models into online stores where they can then sell their products, services, and goods, and they've done pretty well through it. So it's a true passion of mine, and it started a long time ago, and I just stepped in it and got lucky with the right products and was studying and researching it most nights and really loved getting sucked into the journey of it. Bob: So I'm wondering what the heck boat shoes are? Brad: From the guy that lives next to the ocean. Greg: So if you've ever seen Sperry Top-Siders or something like that, they are similar to these shoes. I guess a lot of people when I was in college were wearing these around their campuses. And what we thought they're kind of cool. Everybody wears them out, and there was basically just one company that was the dominant player, Sperry, and they didn't ever do customization. So my friend that went to University of Miami was in a fraternity, and all these guys were wearing boat shoes, and he came up with the idea of what if we could put a fraternity and sorority logo on a boat shoe where people that are already buying all this accessories for their fraternities... I wasn't in one, so I didn't really understand it, but he's like, "There's a huge market here." So the boat shoe is simply a shoe that people wear that are actually built for boats. The outsoles have a special grip, so if water gets under them, it still stays grippy. But they're kind of a everyday or going out kind of shoe that you can muck up or spill on and there's no worries. And so we said, "Let's do some research into this," and we built a cool product and then had to find a way to get it onto the feet of people, which was then my job. Staring with an idea and a product Brad: Yeah, I really like the stories you shared because a lot of the guests we have on the show start on the technology side. They start by building websites generally for other people or maybe for themselves, but to hear that you started with an idea and a product that you were like, "This could work. Let's start selling this beyond just the local area online. How do we do that?" And then landing on WooCommerce is pretty cool. And not only landing on WooCommerce, but liking it so much and having such success that you thought about that on your next venture with the shoes. And essentially, it sounds like doing kind of the same thing of getting it online, getting out there, and having some success with that, which I think is a really cool story just around WooCommerce. I think back to when I was in high school, which it's been a little while, but it was in the mid to late '90s, and obviously there was nothing like it. You couldn't just spin up a quick site to sell something. Even in the 2000s there was some options, but everything was kind of clunky and it wasn't great. And now, it's not only can you launch a store very easily with minimal effort, but you can do it on your own for a pretty minimal, potentially none to really low cost. Certainly a minimal cost in terms of really just hosting if you don't need to go buy premium extensions or anything like that. So I think it just speaks to the power and flexibility around WooCommerce to hear a high schooler like yourself back then was able to launch a successful product and do really well. I think that's awesome. Greg: And I think it worked out nicely because we already had a built-in customer base with some stores around the area. And then what we decide to do was in the packaging that people were buying in the physical stores, we put our website which doesn't exist anymore, but it was ikpens.com, and people would then buy them as gifts for friends and family for different occasion. Actually, what was pretty cool is one of our customers order. We used woods like mahogany, really beautiful, and all the way to one called wenge, which if you look it up, it's an exotic wood. But the customer wanted 100 pens all the same that were laser-engraved with his company's logo on it. Greg: And we had no idea how to do a laser engraving. And for us, to sell 100 pens in one fell swoop was a great order, and our margins on them were fantastic because we were making them all ourself, and we actually got the wood recycled so we didn't have to pay for it. So we brought it to a local engraving shop, had them all engraved. They looked amazing, and we shipped them to him and I think they were for holiday gifts for his employees, and he said that they were the coolest thing that he had ever given out. Whether he was just saying that to build us up or not I think the story of a couple high school kids building a little pen business that could also be customized was something that people found exciting. I don't think I could do that again because I'm no longer in high school and don't have that ability to say, "Oh, I'm a high school guy building these things." But it was a pretty cool moment and really my first step into business without really knowing what I was doing at all. Brad: Just seeing where you're at now working with HubSpot and partnerships and specifically around WordPress and WooCommerce, it makes it kind of... I don't want to say it ties a bow on the story, but clearly it shows that trajectory of little did you know back then selling pens that that was putting you on the path to where you have ended up now, just because of the software you were using. Who would even think that's possible? You just happened to use WordPress and WooCommerce, and you did it again and now you're experienced with it and you do it a lot and you've done it for friends and families, and now your job is related and involved with WordPress. Greg: I'm one of the luckiest people I know because I get to work with cool businesses and help other businesses try to achieve what I have tried to achieve is something that I do genuinely get excited about, and it leads me down the path of learning about more products and more themes and more plugins. Which is just kind of the never-ending cycle which is that developer journey. There's always a different way and better way to do it, and the community around WordPress and also WooCommerce specifically is now mature enough where you can build a pretty powerful, beautiful store in a matter of hours if you know what you're doing, and I feel like that's a secret power that people can start to hold today. Brad: Very true. Thanks to our sponsor:This episode is brought to you by CheckoutWC, a premium plugin that replaces your WooCommerce checkout page with a beautiful, responsive and conversion optimized design. I’ve heard it myself working with shop owners over the last several years. The frustration of limited options they have for the checkout page design. They’re eager to implement best practices and good design to maximize conversions. CheckoutWC steps in with the solution that will help you reduced abandoned cars and help you increase sales. The best part is that it works with any WordPress theme and you won’t need to struggle with configuring page builders, or even messing with code. In a nutshell, it’s easy to get the checkout page you want. Head on over to CheckoutWC.com and you can give it a 7-day free trial. And to top that off, drop in the promo code BOBWP and you will get 10% off. That’s CheckoutWC.com And now, back to our conversation. The evolution of the HubSpot/WooCommerce integration Bob: As far as the integration and HubSpot with WooCommerce, was this something that while you were working at HubSpot that you decided to go ahead and did you come up with the idea that we need to make this integration tighter, we need to make it more seamless. How did that all come to be? Greg: It's something that in my role today, one of the things that I think helps a lot is that I am the customer. And so I use HubSpot on a daily basis. I use WooCommerce on a daily basis most times. And the two didn't really work together very well, and I was like, "We're not serving the need of the people that are the ones that should be benefiting the most from this." And so I got to give a few shout outs here, but I'll tell about the journey on how we connected the dots. One of HubSpot's premier partners, it's a company in India called MakeWebBetter, and they have a sister company called CedCommerce, and they're actually one of the large eCommerce solution partners out there. But MakeWebBetter had built an integration between HubSpot and WooCommerce that was good. It was a paid plugin, and it basically brought over your customer and order information from WooCommerce into HubSpot as contacts and deals. And it was a good integration, but I think part of the beauty of having everything work well together is that you can have a premium integration using two free softwares and integrate them for free together. And I think if those don't all add up, you get some users and some customers, but you're not serving the market the way that the market, I think, has the pent up demand for. So when diving into that and chatting with MakeWebBetter, their founder Himanshu and a couple people on the team, we were like, "You know what? We want to bring this product and this integration to the market and make it so that businesses that choose to use WooCommerce as their store and can choose to use HubSpot's free plan or paid plans for free with WooCommerce." So we set on this mission to redesign how the integration worked and make it easier to onboard, make it easier to use, make it free for everybody. And they did it, and it took about four to six months to fully revamp it. And now since we relaunched it in April, May, there are over 4,000, 5,000 stores now using the integration. Brad: Wow. That's great. Greg: And it's still just scratching the surface and there's a couple new exciting things coming out in probably the next couple weeks or so that are just going to make the integration even stronger where we're bringing more of HubSpot inside of WooCommerce so businesses have one-click buttons that lead them to know everything about what their customers have done across the business. So it's about to be really exciting, which it already is, but now we're going to make it even easier for WooCommerce store owners to know more about their customers, more about their behaviors, and more about the things that actually drive results so that they can continue to make more money and grow their business better, which is our mission. So it's exciting and I think about to get more exciting. Brad: Got to sell more pens, right? Greg: Hey, I might have to spin this business back up. Brad: I know you got the tools. Greg: That's right. Brad is a fan of HubSpot Brad: I love seeing that. We actually use HubSpot at my company, WebDevStudios. We switched over at the beginning of the year fully to the CRM. I'm a big fan. I was a fan before, but now I'm an even bigger fan because we use it every single day. It's a great platform. And the free offering around the CRM and stuff is it's actually insane that it's free, to be honest. But what I love about this is anyone that has a store, like even back when you were selling the pens, selling some products initially, you can get some products out there and do stuff, and at some point you're going to hit a bit of a wall in terms of growth, and that's where tools like HubSpot comes in. Just looking at the data, analyzing it, looking at more powerful marketing tools, and integrations and what you can do to market to your existing customers, what you do to convert more customers or new customers, and bring in more traffic. I mean, clearly you could spend as much as you want on this type of stuff, but like you said, you're basically pairing up two free tools that are giving you some massively powerful information and features at your service that will have a direct and immediate impact on your sales. So it's kind of a no-brainer, especially if you're not doing any kind of market automation or anything like this to at the very least look at some of the free stuff that HubSpot's offering, hook up that integration component, start pulling that data in and start seeing what you can do with it because the data is key. You can learn so much, but it's just knowing what to look at, how to look at it, just like Google Analytics, right? There's so much data, but trying to understand how to decipher it is really the challenge. I know tools like HubSpot really, really help with that. I also love seeing companies like HubSpot releasing their own products because I think... you mention there's the other company, which is awesome you guys partner with them. That's really cool versus competing with each other. But the idea that the premium space, I got to buy this, I'm working with a company I don't really know is almost like a middle man to make sure WooCommerce and HubSpot play nice together. That's not going to sit well with a lot of people, and especially larger stores, it's probably not going to sit right at all. Versus, "Hey, this is the official HubSpot plugin. This is the official integration." Immediately, you have trust in that. I'm going to trust that it's HubSpot's name on it, it's going to be good. And I think you're already seeing it. You got four or five thousand users just in a matter of months on a new plugin... or a revamp plugin. That's pretty amazing, so congrats. That's a great job. Greg: And I think to your point on that, too, it's to have that MakeWebBetter team who are premier plugin developers in the WordPress and WooCommerce space be committed to making this product even better and free. Honestly I think the credit goes to them on making this all work. And then we have WooCommerce in the mix now, and we're jointly promoting, but people always ask, "Oh, what's the catch?" There really is no catch. I think the beauty of the way that HubSpot's business model was built and what our founders and a lot of the people that make a lot of the decisions feel is we want to add to your experience, Brad. Unmatched value at a free level and not have any strings attached, and then when you need more, you can upgrade to more plans and different paths that unlock more value so you can continue to grow better. And I just think when you put the customer first and really think about how the integration fixes their business problems is when you start to really earn the trust and respect that leads to steady downloads and steady users and happy customers that hopefully tell a lot of other people about it too. Brad: I mean, if the store is successful, then everyone involved is successful, including the products and services that they're using. So I think it's a really smart business approach to it because honestly, that's one of the things that sold us. I'm like, "We can use their CRM for free. What's the..." I literally said the same thing. "What's the catch?" And then I realized, "Oh, there's obviously some additional value and services we can tap into when the timing's right and when we're ready," so that makes sense. But definitely cool to see this. And again, I think it's like you said, the credit to the team over there and it could just have easily went the route where you launch your own product and you're competing and then its market confusion or whatever it might be. But the fact that you partnered up with each other and really revamped it, built it up, released it for free is super cool, especially for the community and all the open source users of the product. Thanks to our sponsor:This episode is brought to you by GoWP, your partner to help you sell maintenance programs to clients while growing your business. Your expertise in development or design should not be weighed down with shop maintenance. The best solution is to hand off the low-value work that can often eat up your days. And making sure you client's sites are healthy and up-to-date is critical. Their white label service gives you access to their engineers and developers an extension to your team. And that even extends to their knowledge base filled with pricing page templates, lead magnets and maintenance plan documentation that you can edit and use yourself. Topping that off is their content edit request service. Any Woo shop success is based on fresh and up-to-date content. Let GoWP cover that for you clients and agency. Personally, I know you will not regret extending your services through GoWP and leaving your clients in safe and comfortable hands. Just head on over to GoWP.com and sign up for their free partner account. Now lets head back to the show. The connection with agencies and plugin developers Bob: Are you finding any reception from agencies? I think Brad for example, agencies that may already be using it themselves, and as this integration grows tighter it's opening their eyes, "Yeah, this is something I might want to start recommending to my customers," where before, maybe it was the disconnect or... yeah, literally the disconnect was there. I'm not sure if you're talking to those agencies or who's talking to them, but if that is a bit more enticing because they've got the experience behind them already and they've got the trust in you. And now with this, it seems like it's an easier step to convince their clients into using it if it's the right fit for them. Greg: So I think that there's two demographics that are starting to really benefit and add more value to it. The first one that you call out is the agency. I think a lot of times, agencies are looking for easier ways to connect tools together that add more value to their customers. This is a great one. I wish I were closer to more agencies to understand more of what they're doing and trying to accomplish. That is probably something that I'm going to try to jump into a little bit more deeply over the next couple months, but of the agencies that I have spoken with and work with on "How do we build this correctly? What do we do here?" The reception has been very positive. It's just been an easy way for them to pull the data right into HubSpot and be able to help their customers manage their business better. So 100% on that. The second demographic that I think is going to be really interesting is other plugins that work really well with WooCommerce that can also work really well with HubSpot. There are a few I can't mention, but we're having conversations with a couple where they add a lot of value to the WooCommerce space today with their plugins, and they see their plugins as a natural segue to add more data inside of HubSpot to allow business and sales and growth leaders have more information on the shoppers and the prospects and the customers that are about to make or making purchases. So there's a couple layers here that I think we're kind of just peeling back and starting to discover that's the initial integration between WooCommerce and HubSpot in phase one. Phase two is how do we help all the other plugin developers and all the other users of those plugins, get even more value by having those tools also integrate with HubSpot, so all the data continues to flow between the three, WooCommerce, that plugin, and HubSpot, or add another plugin into that triangle there. And then it starts to create a network effect between products, which I think is where you start to see amazing value because people use a lot of plugins with WooCommerce, so we want all of them to work really well with WooCommerce and HubSpot. And the value people will get from that will be even greater that they get today, which is, I think, where I start to get really excited and say, "How do we best do this in a way that's also systematic?" so that developers can do it without working with people or talking to people, and that customers just know that it works and those agencies can say, "Oh, it works with X, Y, Z and A, B, and C. This is a no-brainer." And that's really the penultimate goal is how do we get to that level, and that's a pretty long journey. Brad: That's smart you're thinking about that because I think a lot of companies don't. They're laser-focused... I guess for good reason. They're laser-focused on their product, but like you said, I don't know if I've ever seen a WordPress site or a WooCommerce site that has one plugin running. It's usually at least 10, sometimes like 50 or even more. And to make sure they're all playing nicely. I love plugins that, like you said, interact well with each other, and a lot of the big ones do that because it's worth the investment for them to integrate with all these different plugins. Like Yoast SEO or something, how can we integrate with that or whatever it might be? So I think it's super cool when plugins start seeing each other and say, "Hey, I notice you're running HubSpot. We can interact with that. Would you like to set up that configuration?" "Yeah, I would. Oh, I didn't even know that existed. Let me look at a video that shows me what we can do." And there's a ton of potential there because there's just so many great plugins that people use and they need on these stores. And just WordPress in general, not even WooCommerce specific, but WordPress specific. There's a lot, so it's great to hear you're thinking about that and having those conversations and heading in that direction. Greg: That's the ultimate mission, and that's actually why when asked to take over this role inside of HubSpot, I was like, "Yes." Because as the customer... and I actually think that this is the future of WordPress is, there are 50-some-odd thousand plugins, and 50,000-some-odd themes, and the more tightly all of those work together in some way, shape, or form, the less the customer has to do and the more value it adds to the customer. And I think the more businesses that we can actually bring into that mind space with us, the better the experience is going to be all around. I don't necessarily look at it as competition. I look at it as cooperation, and I think that's what's going to move the needle even further for businesses like HubSpot to be successful in this space. Brad: I mean, at the end of the day, every plugin, every extension, every theme is an extension of WordPress and is for better or worse, representing WordPress. I'm sure we've all come across this where someone's having trouble and you get in there and there's just plugins that weren't built correctly or they don't work well with anything, and it's just a terrible experience for the user trying to set it up. And at the end of the day, where are they going to blame? They're going to blame WordPress. They're going to blame the overall CMS that they're using. They may not realize it's one particular plugin or it's a combination of plugins that don't work well together. So ultimately, WordPress gets a black eye and they move on to something else. So anything we can all do to make just the process better, easier, more intuitive. I mean, Bob, we talk about Woo and how there are some challenges there just from a configuration standpoint. If you're not somewhat technical, it can be extremely overwhelming when you get into the configuration pages and the settings pages and, "Oh my god. I have 10 pages of stuff I've got to make decisions on." That can be overwhelming for people, and I know that's something that WooCommerce team is working towards simplifying. So it's more of a... I hate to say, but more of a Shopify experience of "What type of store do you have?" and a couple clicks, and boom, everything's configured for you. But it just speaks to that. It's the right thing to do, and no matter what we're doing, if we're releasing code and products for WordPress is to make sure at the very least they play nice with other plugins and themes, and hopefully they integrate with them and actually can help support each other and grow, so it's a good point. Bob: Good stuff. And yeah, I'm going to have to keep on top of this and hear all this stuff you're doing and what's going on with this integration. And I think definitely we have to have you back. I don't know when, but to talk about this plugin piece and how you're approaching those builders and getting them to integrate HubSpot into that. And yeah, it's fascinating stuff, so we're going to definitely put you on the radar to talk more about that down the road. Yep, for sure. Well, let's go ahead and move into announcements and then I'll Brad wrap this up for us. I know that you mentioned that some cool stuff is coming on down the pike as far as the integration, so tell us a little bit about that. What's happening? What’s new with the integration Greg: So today, the way that you would configure HubSpot and WooCommerce together, the plugin's pretty simple to use. But now that we have a pretty critical mass using it and a lot more people will be using it, one of the things that we want to do is look to see what other of the best plugins do to enhance other parts of WooCommerce. So specifically, if you think of the orders page, when you use a print slip plugin, there's usually actions right next to in the line items of your order is a click-to-print print slip. So what we're doing and the MakeWebBetter team has done is they're now bringing buttons into the order screen so that as you're looking at all your orders, there will be two buttons. One will have a little human icon, so you can click that and it brings you right into your HubSpot account on that contact profile that allows you to see all the pages anybody's ever viewed, any buttons they've ever clicked, any email they opened or haven't opened or clicked inside. Basically a beautiful tidy timeline of all the behaviors and activities they've ever done. So that'll be brought into the order page. Right next to that button will be a handshake icon that's going to be a button that leads you out to the deal, so the order syncs with the deal inside of HubSpot so that you can see more metadata in a really easy-to-view manner. Where this deal originated, what source, did it find you from Google, did it find you from social media, how much was the deal, how many orders has this person done, all in a beautiful deal organization card, so that will make the user experience better. Additionally, inside the plugin itself, there'll be a brand new dashboard page so you can see all of the contacts, orders, and products that have synced and if you have any outstanding syncs that need to happen. And then the team's also enhancing what is a paid feature of HubSpot which is called Workflows. It's our automation. So that now with a click of a button, you can have a full automated workflow created that will allow you to do first-order nurturing or second-order nurturing or abandoned cart nurturing without ever doing anything, which is going to be super powerful. So we're basically making the user experience and what we know are the things that people want to do more easy to actually do, and that'll be coming out over the next couple of weeks to make sure that that product's enhanced for everybody using it and all the people that want to use it. Brad: That's awesome. I love the history tracking. We use that at WebDev. When someone fills out a contact form, we can see every page they visited and how they landed on our contact form, which you can imagine is insanely valuable information to understand, like what content's working, what content's not, and it's the same with products. How did they land on this product and buy it? Maybe they looked at five other ones, and they keep going to this same one. That tells you something. It's just such valuable information that you can learn from. It's so cool to see. Bob: Wow. A lot of cool stuff there. Brad, anything going on with you? Brad: Anything going on with me? No, but I'll plug my book, so Professional WordPress Plugin Development Second Edition. If you're like HubSpot and you're looking to build a plugin and you don't know where to start, you could just hire me, or you could read my book and learn how to do it yourself. Check it out. It's on Amazon. It's probably in the bookstores, but I haven't been to a bookstore in a while. So it might be there if you want to brave going into a bookstore right now, but you can definitely get it on Amazon. The price dropped, too, so it's a pretty good value. Just search Professional WordPress or WordPress Plugins, you'll find it. Bob: Excellent. Well, yeah, next Wednesday the 8th, Do the Woo, I'm calling it version 5.0 because I'm thinking of all my different versions ... Brad: At least five. Bob: Yeah. I skipped those. There was a few minor things in some. And then Brad coming on, of course, was one of the big versions. But yeah, it's incredible stuff coming. We're going to be diving into the builder community big time, have great sponsors, bringing on all sorts of cool people, great discussions to be heard, even more so than ever. Yeah, big stuff happening. Keep your eyes on that. We'll be talking more about that. And Brad, why don't you go ahead and wrap this up for us. Brad: So I definitely want to thank our sponsors. WooCommerce. Go check out that new developer resource portal that's available if you're into development. CheckoutWC. As Bob mentioned, it's an optimized checkout page for WooCommerce, really focused on conversions, works with every theme. I also love the auto-populating city, state, and I love the autofill stuff, especially on mobile. And that'll get me every time when I hit some new Facebook ad and it makes it really easy to punch in my address. That's how I spend money when I probably shouldn't on my mobile phone,. Make it easier for people to give you money and they will. And then last but not least, GoWP. Great company. White label services for agencies. They can help handle your maintenance, 24/7 support team, content edits, page builds. It's a nice extension of your team so you can focus on the larger project work and they'll handle some of the smaller stuff, so check them out at gowp.com. And I guess that's it. What did I miss, Bob? Bob: What did you miss? Any other news you might have, Greg? Greg: In exciting news, I'm about to get married, so that's the personal. Brad: Congrats. Greg: Thank you. And other than that, I think just wishing everybody be safe and well and hopefully with any time that they can find that would otherwise be spent negatively, they could hopefully dive into a passion project and choose to spend it positively and enhance themselves and maybe build something cool using WooCommerce and other plugins that we've talked about today or that have also been mentioned throughout the show in other episodes. So I think that's the message that I'd like to share is we got some time, we got time to spend, and we get to choose how we use it, and I think all of us can probably find some substantial ways to enhance ourselves and help other people out in the time being, too. So that's the only update that I have that's noteworthy to share. Brad: That's great. And if people want to reach out and connect, where could they find you online? Greg: I think LinkedIn's usually a really good one. I say Twitter, but I'm not the best at Twitter. I'm trying to work on it a bit. But LinkedIn's a great one, and then feel free to message me on that and we can either find a time to connect or share some stories over a meeting or just chit chat, a non-LinkedIn chat. Brad: Awesome. Well, thanks so much for being on the show, Gregory. This is a great conversation. A lot of value. Definitely check out HubSpot if you're not familiar, or even if you are. Go check out the new plugin they got. I'm definitely going to give it a look, kick the tires a little bit, let you know what I think, but it sounds amazing and they got a lot of good information and even some short videos, which I love that kind of overview of the product which are always nice way to digest quickly what all it can do. So definitely appreciate it. You can find me on Twitter, @williamsba. I'm on LinkedIn. I probably will... maybe we'll connect. We'll see. I check it, I don't know, once a month I guess you're supposed to. But yeah, Twitter's the best way. Bob, you just tell people to google BobWP and they'll find you, right? Bob: Right. Right. That's about it. Brad: All right, for Bob and everyone else, we will wrap it up. We'll see you on the next Do the Woo. Scroll back to top Sign up to receive email updates Enter your name and email address below and I'll send you periodic updates about the podcast. powered by

Thanks to our sponsors Greg built his first WooCommerce shop in high school, and it was wildly successful. From there, he went on to build more stores as well as help friends and family, in these current times, take their brick-and-mortar shop online. It led to his role at HubSpot as the Global Manager of WordPress partnerships which includes a deep integration into WooCommerce. A Chat with Greg In episode 70, Brad and I chat with Greg about: How Greg does and has done the WooHow the journey in Woo started with an idea and a productHis successful Woo shop selling handmade pens while in high school to customized boat shoes in collegeWorking with Woo leading up to his current position at HubSpotWhen and how the WooCommerce / HubSpot integration came to lightThe importance of partnerships and collaboration vs. competitionWorking with Woo agencies and plugin developers for enhanced HubSpot integrationWhat is coming around the corner for the plugin Connect with Greg Greg on LinkedIn Learn more about the HubSpot integration HubSpot for WooCommerceHubSpot extension Deals From Our Sponsors Get 10% off CheckoutWC with the code BOBWP The Conversation Yes, this is the transcript. But not in the traditional sense, transcribed word for word. We do not speak as we write. Often the flow of transcribed content is hard to follow. So I have taken it a few steps further by seriously editing, at times, the conversation and even using my editorial freedom to clarify some points. So enjoy. Transcript Email Download New Tab Bob: Hey, everyone, BobWP. It is time for Do the Woo episode 7-0, the big 70. Hey, Brad. You know Brad, the mainstay of Do the Woo. How are you doing, Brad? Brad: I'm good, Bob. How are you doing? Bob: I'm doing good. Are you mourning the end of summer, or have you been summer-ized? Brad: No, I'm ready. I already had a pumpkin spice latte. I've had pumpkin chili. Pumpkin cookies. Pumpkin beer. I get into a little bit earlier than most people, so I went to my first Halloween store yesterday, last day of August. Yeah, I'm ready for fall. I'm done with summer. Let's bring on the cool weather, the sweatshirts, Halloween, all that fun stuff. Bob: Halloween. Yeah, I was waiting for that one. Brad: What about you? Are you clinging onto summer? Bob: Oh, no. I'm ready. We always have a mellow summer here, so we have pretty moderate weather. This weekend, we're having a heat wave where we'll be in the 70s, so it's like, "Woo." Weird stuff. But I'm good with that. We've had fog most of the day coming off the ocean. I'm always in a fog anyway, so it suits me well. All righty, let's get it on with the show here. First I want to start out by thanking our sponsors. WooCommerce.com. I might just mention that they have a new developer resource portal that was just launched this weekend. It's pretty sweet. You'll have to go check it out. A lot more information there. I think every time they add new content there, they'll be putting it on their developer blog so you'll be aware of new guides that are put in there, so it's pretty sweet looking. And you can just go over to their site and look on their blog and they have an article about that. CheckoutWC.com. Away to take that old default WooCommerce checkout page and really buff it up. One of the interesting things I like about is they auto-populate the city and state fields when you put in the postal code. Talked to him on this podcast and he said that he was going to shift the zip code up above the state and city because if you fill in the zip code, and when you move on down, it's autofilled. So it's kind of a different user experience, but I think it's pretty sweet. And GoWP.com, whether it's WordPress maintenance or a team for your content edits or page builds, their white label for agencies helps you so you don't have to worry about this stuff. You can focus on what you do the best. Well, let's move on. Got a great guest today, Greg Karelitz from HubSpot. How are you doing today, Greg? Greg: I'm doing great. Sitting up here on the outskirts of the greater Boston area, and I think we have a streak of about 75 degree sunny days coming up, so fingers crossed that we can get outside a good amount and really enjoy it. How Greg Does the Woo Bob: Excellent. Well, Greg, how do you do the Woo? Greg: Oh, man. Well, I've been doing the Woo for a long time now, both as a builder but also a partner. My day job and something that I'm really passionate about is I work at HubSpot. I am the global manager of WordPress partnerships, so I work with all different WordPress partnerships from themes to plugins to hosting companies. And one of my favorite partners is WooCommerce, so not only do I have the pleasure of working with the talented and really smart people who are at WooCommerce and get to chat with them on a weekly basis, but we also have a pretty in-depth integration now for free between HubSpot and WooCommerce that helps online stores grow their business better and know more about the businesses and people that are coming to their stores to help them really get the deep insights. So I have a personal side of loving to build online stores and websites, that's the nerd in me, and then the professional side, which is also a little bit nerdy where I get to build partnerships and product with WooCommerce as part of it. And it can go a lot deeper than that, but I get to do the Woo on a daily basis, which is pretty fun. Brad: Anyone that gets to do the Woo on a daily basis is living a good life, that's for sure. Greg: I'll tell you. Hubspot, an all-in-one growth platform Brad: Just for anyone, and there probably aren't many listening, if any, that aren't familiar with HubSpot, but for anyone listening that may not be familiar with HubSpot, in a nutshell, kind of encapsulate what the company is and what you do at Hubspot. Greg: So HubSpot is an all-in-one growth platform,. Basically in today's landscape, I think there's like seven-thousand-plus marketing tech softwares and about three- or four-thousand-plus sales tech softwares. What HubSpot does is instead of having all of your tools disconnected, we've built a full, all-in-one platform that ties together HubSpot CRM with HubSpot Marketing, HubSpot Sales and HubSpot Services and puts all these tools under one platform and also integrates with over 500 other tools so that all of your sales, marketing, customer service software is all bundled into one interface,. It also gives you extreme depth and knowledge on your customers and what they're doing across your business. From a marketing, sales, and service perspective you can help them and ultimately achieve more growth of your own business. A journey with WooCommerce that started in high school Bob: I want to dive into that more. But I saw a little bit of your journey to WooCommerce and I think it's fascinating, and yours goes to quite a young age, which is pretty impressive. I mean, I can't tell you what I was doing at that age, but it certainly wasn't building websites or... well, WooCommerce obviously wasn't around, so that would have been impossible. So go back in time and tell us how you got into WooCommerce yourself personally. Greg: So back in high school, one of my best friends from high school and I, we did woodworking as our elective all four years. And for senior year, when we had the opportunity to do a senior project, which actually got rid of one of our classes so we could focus on something that we really cared to dive deeply in, we're like, "We got to do something around woodworking." And in the wood shop, we had a lathe, which is a machine that you can use that does what's called turning different products. Selling handmade pens So the thing we decided to make were what we thought were super beautiful, handmade wooden and acrylic pens where we buy these kits, get exotic wood, whittle them down on the lathe, polish them up, make them look super pretty, and we would package them and sell them to individuals, local stores, and then we decided to take this into our full summer business. So we said, "We're building these pens for our classmates for graduation, which is our senior project. Why don't we just go and get a lathe, put it in my basement, and why don't we just build as many pens both acrylic and wooden that we can make and see who wants to buy them and see what we can make off them." And we loved it. We got a lathe, put it in my parent's basement. My buddy Steve would come over and we'd stay up till like two or three in the morning making as many handmade wooden pens as possible, getting different packages to make them look super presentable, and we started selling them around local stores. And we said, "Why stop at local stores? What if people somewhere else wanted them?" We then dipped our toes into building a website, and this was my real first endeavor building a website for business, all my research led me to WordPress. Then ultimately into WooCommerce where then we had all of our handmade pens with their own products for people to buy wherever they were throughout the United States, because we only shipped domestically. And it started to really work, which was cool. And then once we went off to college, it got a little bit difficult to zip over to my parent's basement to make these pens, so we decided to slow that business down. Moving to Boat Shoe sales and more success And then college, the next iteration, a group of friends and I decided to make custom boat shoes, so we actually manufactured our own boat shoe and went through the whole process of manufacturing them. It was pretty crazy. I think there were like 10 iterations to get to the final product. And then I was looked at as the Chief Technology Officer because I was the computer science nerd, they said, "Let's figure out a way to build an online store." So again, did the same process and ended up building a WordPress website, having WooCommerce in it. And we had four different colors with 30 different variations, so if you add up all those different types of products, there were well over hundreds of SKUs. So WooCommerce was our first really experience into building a full-fledged eCommerce store for our boat shoe business. And our model actually led to hundreds of thousands of dollars in sales in the first five months because we had this network of college ambassadors that were helping drive people to the site. We were able to track their sales with coupons, and it got pretty involved. But that was the early stages with WooCommerce and my journey into it, and now I have some passion projects that I build my sites and host my stores on. And most recently with coronavirus, some of my best family friends have had their businesses turned upside down being more brick-and-mortar, and so I've helped them actually turn their businesses and change their models into online stores where they can then sell their products, services, and goods, and they've done pretty well through it. So it's a true passion of mine, and it started a long time ago, and I just stepped in it and got lucky with the right products and was studying and researching it most nights and really loved getting sucked into the journey of it. Bob: So I'm wondering what the heck boat shoes are? Brad: From the guy that lives next to the ocean. Greg: So if you've ever seen Sperry Top-Siders or something like that, they are similar to these shoes. I guess a lot of people when I was in college were wearing these around their campuses. And what we thought they're kind of cool. Everybody wears them out, and there was basically just one company that was the dominant player, Sperry, and they didn't ever do customization. So my friend that went to University of Miami was in a fraternity, and all these guys were wearing boat shoes, and he came up with the idea of what if we could put a fraternity and sorority logo on a boat shoe where people that are already buying all this accessories for their fraternities... I wasn't in one, so I didn't really understand it, but he's like, "There's a huge market here." So the boat shoe is simply a shoe that people wear that are actually built for boats. The outsoles have a special grip, so if water gets under them, it still stays grippy. But they're kind of a everyday or going out kind of shoe that you can muck up or spill on and there's no worries. And so we said, "Let's do some research into this," and we built a cool product and then had to find a way to get it onto the feet of people, which was then my job. Staring with an idea and a product Brad: Yeah, I really like the stories you shared because a lot of the guests we have on the show start on the technology side. They start by building websites generally for other people or maybe for themselves, but to hear that you started with an idea and a product that you were like, "This could work. Let's start selling this beyond just the local area online. How do we do that?" And then landing on WooCommerce is pretty cool. And not only landing on WooCommerce, but liking it so much and having such success that you thought about that on your next venture with the shoes. And essentially, it sounds like doing kind of the same thing of getting it online, getting out there, and having some success with that, which I think is a really cool story just around WooCommerce. I think back to when I was in high school, which it's been a little while, but it was in the mid to late '90s, and obviously there was nothing like it. You couldn't just spin up a quick site to sell something. Even in the 2000s there was some options, but everything was kind of clunky and it wasn't great. And now, it's not only can you launch a store very easily with minimal effort, but you can do it on your own for a pretty minimal, potentially none to really low cost. Certainly a minimal cost in terms of really just hosting if you don't need to go buy premium extensions or anything like that. So I think it just speaks to the power and flexibility around WooCommerce to hear a high schooler like yourself back then was able to launch a successful product and do really well. I think that's awesome. Greg: And I think it worked out nicely because we already had a built-in customer base with some stores around the area. And then what we decide to do was in the packaging that people were buying in the physical stores, we put our website which doesn't exist anymore, but it was ikpens.com, and people would then buy them as gifts for friends and family for different occasion. Actually, what was pretty cool is one of our customers order. We used woods like mahogany, really beautiful, and all the way to one called wenge, which if you look it up, it's an exotic wood. But the customer wanted 100 pens all the same that were laser-engraved with his company's logo on it. Greg: And we had no idea how to do a laser engraving. And for us, to sell 100 pens in one fell swoop was a great order, and our margins on them were fantastic because we were making them all ourself, and we actually got the wood recycled so we didn't have to pay for it. So we brought it to a local engraving shop, had them all engraved. They looked amazing, and we shipped them to him and I think they were for holiday gifts for his employees, and he said that they were the coolest thing that he had ever given out. Whether he was just saying that to build us up or not I think the story of a couple high school kids building a little pen business that could also be customized was something that people found exciting. I don't think I could do that again because I'm no longer in high school and don't have that ability to say, "Oh, I'm a high school guy building these things." But it was a pretty cool moment and really my first step into business without really knowing what I was doing at all. Brad: Just seeing where you're at now working with HubSpot and partnerships and specifically around WordPress and WooCommerce, it makes it kind of... I don't want to say it ties a bow on the story, but clearly it shows that trajectory of little did you know back then selling pens that that was putting you on the path to where you have ended up now, just because of the software you were using. Who would even think that's possible? You just happened to use WordPress and WooCommerce, and you did it again and now you're experienced with it and you do it a lot and you've done it for friends and families, and now your job is related and involved with WordPress. Greg: I'm one of the luckiest people I know because I get to work with cool businesses and help other businesses try to achieve what I have tried to achieve is something that I do genuinely get excited about, and it leads me down the path of learning about more products and more themes and more plugins. Which is just kind of the never-ending cycle which is that developer journey. There's always a different way and better way to do it, and the community around WordPress and also WooCommerce specifically is now mature enough where you can build a pretty powerful, beautiful store in a matter of hours if you know what you're doing, and I feel like that's a secret power that people can start to hold today. Brad: Very true. Thanks to our sponsor:This episode is brought to you by CheckoutWC, a premium plugin that replaces your WooCommerce checkout page with a beautiful, responsive and conversion optimized design. I’ve heard it myself working with shop owners over the last several years. The frustration of limited options they have for the checkout page design. They’re eager to implement best practices and good design to maximize conversions. CheckoutWC steps in with the solution that will help you reduced abandoned cars and help you increase sales. The best part is that it works with any WordPress theme and you won’t need to struggle with configuring page builders, or even messing with code. In a nutshell, it’s easy to get the checkout page you want. Head on over to CheckoutWC.com and you can give it a 7-day free trial. And to top that off, drop in the promo code BOBWP and you will get 10% off. That’s CheckoutWC.com And now, back to our conversation. The evolution of the HubSpot/WooCommerce integration Bob: As far as the integration and HubSpot with WooCommerce, was this something that while you were working at HubSpot that you decided to go ahead and did you come up with the idea that we need to make this integration tighter, we need to make it more seamless. How did that all come to be? Greg: It's something that in my role today, one of the things that I think helps a lot is that I am the customer. And so I use HubSpot on a daily basis. I use WooCommerce on a daily basis most times. And the two didn't really work together very well, and I was like, "We're not serving the need of the people that are the ones that should be benefiting the most from this." And so I got to give a few shout outs here, but I'll tell about the journey on how we connected the dots. One of HubSpot's premier partners, it's a company in India called MakeWebBetter, and they have a sister company called CedCommerce, and they're actually one of the large eCommerce solution partners out there. But MakeWebBetter had built an integration between HubSpot and WooCommerce that was good. It was a paid plugin, and it basically brought over your customer and order information from WooCommerce into HubSpot as contacts and deals. And it was a good integration, but I think part of the beauty of having everything work well together is that you can have a premium integration using two free softwares and integrate them for free together. And I think if those don't all add up, you get some users and some customers, but you're not serving the market the way that the market, I think, has the pent up demand for. So when diving into that and chatting with MakeWebBetter, their founder Himanshu and a couple people on the team, we were like, "You know what? We want to bring this product and this integration to the market and make it so that businesses that choose to use WooCommerce as their store and can choose to use HubSpot's free plan or paid plans for free with WooCommerce." So we set on this mission to redesign how the integration worked and make it easier to onboard, make it easier to use, make it free for everybody. And they did it, and it took about four to six months to fully revamp it. And now since we relaunched it in April, May, there are over 4,000, 5,000 stores now using the integration. Brad: Wow. That's great. Greg: And it's still just scratching the surface and there's a couple new exciting things coming out in probably the next couple weeks or so that are just going to make the integration even stronger where we're bringing more of HubSpot inside of WooCommerce so businesses have one-click buttons that lead them to know everything about what their customers have done across the business. So it's about to be really exciting, which it already is, but now we're going to make it even easier for WooCommerce store owners to know more about their customers, more about their behaviors, and more about the things that actually drive results so that they can continue to make more money and grow their business better, which is our mission. So it's exciting and I think about to get more exciting. Brad: Got to sell more pens, right? Greg: Hey, I might have to spin this business back up. Brad: I know you got the tools. Greg: That's right. Brad is a fan of HubSpot Brad: I love seeing that. We actually use HubSpot at my company, WebDevStudios. We switched over at the beginning of the year fully to the CRM. I'm a big fan. I was a fan before, but now I'm an even bigger fan because we use it every single day. It's a great platform. And the free offering around the CRM and stuff is it's actually insane that it's free, to be honest. But what I love about this is anyone that has a store, like even back when you were selling the pens, selling some products initially, you can get some products out there and do stuff, and at some point you're going to hit a bit of a wall in terms of growth, and that's where tools like HubSpot comes in. Just looking at the data, analyzing it, looking at more powerful marketing tools, and integrations and what you can do to market to your existing customers, what you do to convert more customers or new customers, and bring in more traffic. I mean, clearly you could spend as much as you want on this type of stuff, but like you said, you're basically pairing up two free tools that are giving you some massively powerful information and features at your service that will have a direct and immediate impact on your sales. So it's kind of a no-brainer, especially if you're not doing any kind of market automation or anything like this to at the very least look at some of the free stuff that HubSpot's offering, hook up that integration component, start pulling that data in and start seeing what you can do with it because the data is key. You can learn so much, but it's just knowing what to look at, how to look at it, just like Google Analytics, right? There's so much data, but trying to understand how to decipher it is really the challenge. I know tools like HubSpot really, really help with that. I also love seeing companies like HubSpot releasing their own products because I think... you mention there's the other company, which is awesome you guys partner with them. That's really cool versus competing with each other. But the idea that the premium space, I got to buy this, I'm working with a company I don't really know is almost like a middle man to make sure WooCommerce and HubSpot play nice together. That's not going to sit well with a lot of people, and especially larger stores, it's probably not going to sit right at all. Versus, "Hey, this is the official HubSpot plugin. This is the official integration." Immediately, you have trust in that. I'm going to trust that it's HubSpot's name on it, it's going to be good. And I think you're already seeing it. You got four or five thousand users just in a matter of months on a new plugin... or a revamp plugin. That's pretty amazing, so congrats. That's a great job. Greg: And I think to your point on that, too, it's to have that MakeWebBetter team who are premier plugin developers in the WordPress and WooCommerce space be committed to making this product even better and free. Honestly I think the credit goes to them on making this all work. And then we have WooCommerce in the mix now, and we're jointly promoting, but people always ask, "Oh, what's the catch?" There really is no catch. I think the beauty of the way that HubSpot's business model was built and what our founders and a lot of the people that make a lot of the decisions feel is we want to add to your experience, Brad. Unmatched value at a free level and not have any strings attached, and then when you need more, you can upgrade to more plans and different paths that unlock more value so you can continue to grow better. And I just think when you put the customer first and really think about how the integration fixes their business problems is when you start to really earn the trust and respect that leads to steady downloads and steady users and happy customers that hopefully tell a lot of other people about it too. Brad: I mean, if the store is successful, then everyone involved is successful, including the products and services that they're using. So I think it's a really smart business approach to it because honestly, that's one of the things that sold us. I'm like, "We can use their CRM for free. What's the..." I literally said the same thing. "What's the catch?" And then I realized, "Oh, there's obviously some additional value and services we can tap into when the timing's right and when we're ready," so that makes sense. But definitely cool to see this. And again, I think it's like you said, the credit to the team over there and it could just have easily went the route where you launch your own product and you're competing and then its market confusion or whatever it might be. But the fact that you partnered up with each other and really revamped it, built it up, released it for free is super cool, especially for the community and all the open source users of the product. Thanks to our sponsor:This episode is brought to you by GoWP, your partner to help you sell maintenance programs to clients while growing your business. Your expertise in development or design should not be weighed down with shop maintenance. The best solution is to hand off the low-value work that can often eat up your days. And making sure you client's sites are healthy and up-to-date is critical. Their white label service gives you access to their engineers and developers an extension to your team. And that even extends to their knowledge base filled with pricing page templates, lead magnets and maintenance plan documentation that you can edit and use yourself. Topping that off is their content edit request service. Any Woo shop success is based on fresh and up-to-date content. Let GoWP cover that for you clients and agency. Personally, I know you will not regret extending your services through GoWP and leaving your clients in safe and comfortable hands. Just head on over to GoWP.com and sign up for their free partner account. Now lets head back to the show. The connection with agencies and plugin developers Bob: Are you finding any reception from agencies? I think Brad for example, agencies that may already be using it themselves, and as this integration grows tighter it's opening their eyes, "Yeah, this is something I might want to start recommending to my customers," where before, maybe it was the disconnect or... yeah, literally the disconnect was there. I'm not sure if you're talking to those agencies or who's talking to them, but if that is a bit more enticing because they've got the experience behind them already and they've got the trust in you. And now with this, it seems like it's an easier step to convince their clients into using it if it's the right fit for them. Greg: So I think that there's two demographics that are starting to really benefit and add more value to it. The first one that you call out is the agency. I think a lot of times, agencies are looking for easier ways to connect tools together that add more value to their customers. This is a great one. I wish I were closer to more agencies to understand more of what they're doing and trying to accomplish. That is probably something that I'm going to try to jump into a little bit more deeply over the next couple months, but of the agencies that I have spoken with and work with on "How do we build this correctly? What do we do here?" The reception has been very positive. It's just been an easy way for them to pull the data right into HubSpot and be able to help their customers manage their business better. So 100% on that. The second demographic that I think is going to be really interesting is other plugins that work really well with WooCommerce that can also work really well with HubSpot. There are a few I can't mention, but we're having conversations with a couple where they add a lot of value to the WooCommerce space today with their plugins, and they see their plugins as a natural segue to add more data inside of HubSpot to allow business and sales and growth leaders have more information on the shoppers and the prospects and the customers that are about to make or making purchases. So there's a couple layers here that I think we're kind of just peeling back and starting to discover that's the initial integration between WooCommerce and HubSpot in phase one. Phase two is how do we help all the other plugin developers and all the other users of those plugins, get even more value by having those tools also integrate with HubSpot, so all the data continues to flow between the three, WooCommerce, that plugin, and HubSpot, or add another plugin into that triangle there. And then it starts to create a network effect between products, which I think is where you start to see amazing value because people use a lot of plugins with WooCommerce, so we want all of them to work really well with WooCommerce and HubSpot. And the value people will get from that will be even greater that they get today, which is, I think, where I start to get really excited and say, "How do we best do this in a way that's also systematic?" so that developers can do it without working with people or talking to people, and that customers just know that it works and those agencies can say, "Oh, it works with X, Y, Z and A, B, and C. This is a no-brainer." And that's really the penultimate goal is how do we get to that level, and that's a pretty long journey. Brad: That's smart you're thinking about that because I think a lot of companies don't. They're laser-focused... I guess for good reason. They're laser-focused on their product, but like you said, I don't know if I've ever seen a WordPress site or a WooCommerce site that has one plugin running. It's usually at least 10, sometimes like 50 or even more. And to make sure they're all playing nicely. I love plugins that, like you said, interact well with each other, and a lot of the big ones do that because it's worth the investment for them to integrate with all these different plugins. Like Yoast SEO or something, how can we integrate with that or whatever it might be? So I think it's super cool when plugins start seeing each other and say, "Hey, I notice you're running HubSpot. We can interact with that. Would you like to set up that configuration?" "Yeah, I would. Oh, I didn't even know that existed. Let me look at a video that shows me what we can do." And there's a ton of potential there because there's just so many great plugins that people use and they need on these stores. And just WordPress in general, not even WooCommerce specific, but WordPress specific. There's a lot, so it's great to hear you're thinking about that and having those conversations and heading in that direction. Greg: That's the ultimate mission, and that's actually why when asked to take over this role inside of HubSpot, I was like, "Yes." Because as the customer... and I actually think that this is the future of WordPress is, there are 50-some-odd thousand plugins, and 50,000-some-odd themes, and the more tightly all of those work together in some way, shape, or form, the less the customer has to do and the more value it adds to the customer. And I think the more businesses that we can actually bring into that mind space with us, the better the experience is going to be all around. I don't necessarily look at it as competition. I look at it as cooperation, and I think that's what's going to move the needle even further for businesses like HubSpot to be successful in this space. Brad: I mean, at the end of the day, every plugin, every extension, every theme is an extension of WordPress and is for better or worse, representing WordPress. I'm sure we've all come across this where someone's having trouble and you get in there and there's just plugins that weren't built correctly or they don't work well with anything, and it's just a terrible experience for the user trying to set it up. And at the end of the day, where are they going to blame? They're going to blame WordPress. They're going to blame the overall CMS that they're using. They may not realize it's one particular plugin or it's a combination of plugins that don't work well together. So ultimately, WordPress gets a black eye and they move on to something else. So anything we can all do to make just the process better, easier, more intuitive. I mean, Bob, we talk about Woo and how there are some challenges there just from a configuration standpoint. If you're not somewhat technical, it can be extremely overwhelming when you get into the configuration pages and the settings pages and, "Oh my god. I have 10 pages of stuff I've got to make decisions on." That can be overwhelming for people, and I know that's something that WooCommerce team is working towards simplifying. So it's more of a... I hate to say, but more of a Shopify experience of "What type of store do you have?" and a couple clicks, and boom, everything's configured for you. But it just speaks to that. It's the right thing to do, and no matter what we're doing, if we're releasing code and products for WordPress is to make sure at the very least they play nice with other plugins and themes, and hopefully they integrate with them and actually can help support each other and grow, so it's a good point. Bob: Good stuff. And yeah, I'm going to have to keep on top of this and hear all this stuff you're doing and what's going on with this integration. And I think definitely we have to have you back. I don't know when, but to talk about this plugin piece and how you're approaching those builders and getting them to integrate HubSpot into that. And yeah, it's fascinating stuff, so we're going to definitely put you on the radar to talk more about that down the road. Yep, for sure. Well, let's go ahead and move into announcements and then I'll Brad wrap this up for us. I know that you mentioned that some cool stuff is coming on down the pike as far as the integration, so tell us a little bit about that. What's happening? What’s new with the integration Greg: So today, the way that you would configure HubSpot and WooCommerce together, the plugin's pretty simple to use. But now that we have a pretty critical mass using it and a lot more people will be using it, one of the things that we want to do is look to see what other of the best plugins do to enhance other parts of WooCommerce. So specifically, if you think of the orders page, when you use a print slip plugin, there's usually actions right next to in the line items of your order is a click-to-print print slip. So what we're doing and the MakeWebBetter team has done is they're now bringing buttons into the order screen so that as you're looking at all your orders, there will be two buttons. One will have a little human icon, so you can click that and it brings you right into your HubSpot account on that contact profile that allows you to see all the pages anybody's ever viewed, any buttons they've ever clicked, any email they opened or haven't opened or clicked inside. Basically a beautiful tidy timeline of all the behaviors and activities they've ever done. So that'll be brought into the order page. Right next to that button will be a handshake icon that's going to be a button that leads you out to the deal, so the order syncs with the deal inside of HubSpot so that you can see more metadata in a really easy-to-view manner. Where this deal originated, what source, did it find you from Google, did it find you from social media, how much was the deal, how many orders has this person done, all in a beautiful deal organization card, so that will make the user experience better. Additionally, inside the plugin itself, there'll be a brand new dashboard page so you can see all of the contacts, orders, and products that have synced and if you have any outstanding syncs that need to happen. And then the team's also enhancing what is a paid feature of HubSpot which is called Workflows. It's our automation. So that now with a click of a button, you can have a full automated workflow created that will allow you to do first-order nurturing or second-order nurturing or abandoned cart nurturing without ever doing anything, which is going to be super powerful. So we're basically making the user experience and what we know are the things that people want to do more easy to actually do, and that'll be coming out over the next couple of weeks to make sure that that product's enhanced for everybody using it and all the people that want to use it. Brad: That's awesome. I love the history tracking. We use that at WebDev. When someone fills out a contact form, we can see every page they visited and how they landed on our contact form, which you can imagine is insanely valuable information to understand, like what content's working, what content's not, and it's the same with products. How did they land on this product and buy it? Maybe they looked at five other ones, and they keep going to this same one. That tells you something. It's just such valuable information that you can learn from. It's so cool to see. Bob: Wow. A lot of cool stuff there. Brad, anything going on with you? Brad: Anything going on with me? No, but I'll plug my book, so Professional WordPress Plugin Development Second Edition. If you're like HubSpot and you're looking to build a plugin and you don't know where to start, you could just hire me, or you could read my book and learn how to do it yourself. Check it out. It's on Amazon. It's probably in the bookstores, but I haven't been to a bookstore in a while. So it might be there if you want to brave going into a bookstore right now, but you can definitely get it on Amazon. The price dropped, too, so it's a pretty good value. Just search Professional WordPress or WordPress Plugins, you'll find it. Bob: Excellent. Well, yeah, next Wednesday the 8th, Do the Woo, I'm calling it version 5.0 because I'm thinking of all my different versions ... Brad: At least five. Bob: Yeah. I skipped those. There was a few minor things in some. And then Brad coming on, of course, was one of the big versions. But yeah, it's incredible stuff coming. We're going to be diving into the builder community big time, have great sponsors, bringing on all sorts of cool people, great discussions to be heard, even more so than ever. Yeah, big stuff happening. Keep your eyes on that. We'll be talking more about that. And Brad, why don't you go ahead and wrap this up for us. Brad: So I definitely want to thank our sponsors. WooCommerce. Go check out that new developer resource portal that's available if you're into development. CheckoutWC. As Bob mentioned, it's an optimized checkout page for WooCommerce, really focused on conversions, works with every theme. I also love the auto-populating city, state, and I love the autofill stuff, especially on mobile. And that'll get me every time when I hit some new Facebook ad and it makes it really easy to punch in my address. That's how I spend money when I probably shouldn't on my mobile phone,. Make it easier for people to give you money and they will. And then last but not least, GoWP. Great company. White label services for agencies. They can help handle your maintenance, 24/7 support team, content edits, page builds. It's a nice extension of your team so you can focus on the larger project work and they'll handle some of the smaller stuff, so check them out at gowp.com. And I guess that's it. What did I miss, Bob? Bob: What did you miss? Any other news you might have, Greg? Greg: In exciting news, I'm about to get married, so that's the personal. Brad: Congrats. Greg: Thank you. And other than that, I think just wishing everybody be safe and well and hopefully with any time that they can find that would otherwise be spent negatively, they could hopefully dive into a passion project and choose to spend it positively and enhance themselves and maybe build something cool using WooCommerce and other plugins that we've talked about today or that have also been mentioned throughout the show in other episodes. So I think that's the message that I'd like to share is we got some time, we got time to spend, and we get to choose how we use it, and I think all of us can probably find some substantial ways to enhance ourselves and help other people out in the time being, too. So that's the only update that I have that's noteworthy to share. Brad: That's great. And if people want to reach out and connect, where could they find you online? Greg: I think LinkedIn's usually a really good one. I say Twitter, but I'm not the best at Twitter. I'm trying to work on it a bit. But LinkedIn's a great one, and then feel free to message me on that and we can either find a time to connect or share some stories over a meeting or just chit chat, a non-LinkedIn chat. Brad: Awesome. Well, thanks so much for being on the show, Gregory. This is a great conversation. A lot of value. Definitely check out HubSpot if you're not familiar, or even if you are. Go check out the new plugin they got. I'm definitely going to give it a look, kick the tires a little bit, let you know what I think, but it sounds amazing and they got a lot of good information and even some short videos, which I love that kind of overview of the product which are always nice way to digest quickly what all it can do. So definitely appreciate it. You can find me on Twitter, @williamsba. I'm on LinkedIn. I probably will... maybe we'll connect. We'll see. I check it, I don't know, once a month I guess you're supposed to. But yeah, Twitter's the best way. Bob, you just tell people to google BobWP and they'll find you, right? Bob: Right. Right. That's about it. Brad: All right, for Bob and everyone else, we will wrap it up. We'll see you on the next Do the Woo. Scroll back to top Sign up to receive email updates Enter your name and email address below and I'll send you periodic updates about the podcast. powered by

From the corporate world to a money blogger, Shannon runs a ten-person agency specializing in membership sites using WooCommerce. Her success story in the WP space is fascinating, and her three-year look at WooCommerce as the monster, certainly, overall, has a wonderful ending (with scattered Hallmark moments). A Chat with Shannon In episode 69, Mendel and I chat with Shannon about: How Shannon does the Woo and her start in WordPress as a money bloggerThe story behind naming her agency Purple Finch StudiosWhat it takes to scale from a single entrepreneur to a ten-person agency.How hiring employees before they are needed has worked for herWhy she considered WooCommerce a monster for three years and what changed her mindWhat she finds appealing about WooCommerce over other optionsWhat her clients’ needs are and how she meets them using WooCommerceHow she vets WordPress plugins for her company’s projectsWhat is a WordPress celebrityBuilding relationships and the power of connections in the communityHow she has dealt with the diverse platforms and ways of doing business, and what that has looked like Connect with Shannon PurpleFinchStudios.comOn Twitter @shannontshaffer Deals From Our Sponsors Get 10% off CheckoutWC with the code BOBWP The Conversation Yes, this is the transcript. But not in the traditional sense, transcribed word for word. We do not speak as we write. Often the flow of transcribed content is hard to follow. So I have taken it a few steps further by seriously editing, at times, the conversation and even using my editorial freedom to clarify some points. So enjoy. Transcript Email Download New Tab Bob: Hey everyone. BobWP here. Episode 69, and we are doing the Woo with my illustrious cohost. Mendel, Kurland how you doing? Mendel: Illustrious. Wow. You're hamming it up this week. I like it, Bob. I'm doing great. It's real hot here, but I'm doing the AC. So, how are you? Bob: Good, good. It's nice, mellow temperatures here. I was going to ask you, are you looking forward to the summer winding down, but I imagine you'll have some heat for a while there. Mendel: I am looking forward to it winding down because I tried to grow a garden, and nothing's growing in this heat. So, I'm excited to get some things in the ground for the fall. I know it's super exciting. Everybody tune in just to listen to Mendel gardening. Bob: I think we'll revisit that in a couple months, and see how that's going. Anyway. Well, we have a great guest as usual. But before I dive into that, let me just give a quick shout out to our sponsors. WooCommerce.com. Don't know if you've looked at their Woo payments. It's an option through Stripe, but it's another gateway option that you can use on your WooCommerce shop. CheckoutWC.com. Replaces your WooCommerce checkout, and surprisingly it works with all WordPress themes. So, that's always an issue, or something you've got to think about. And at GoWP.com. What's cool about them is they have these maintenance plans that include what's called a visual validator plugin updater. Mendel: That sounds really fancy. Bob: It keeps you on top of things that go sideways with your plugins when you do those updates, which is always good to know. Well, the thing I like about Twitter, and all the people I met through Twitter, and through Word Camps is I never know somebody that I know that does a Woo. I kind of dig in and I find out, "Oh yeah. We do quite a bit with WooCommerce actually," and I was not aware of that. And that is why I'm bringing on our guest today, Shannon Shaffer. Shannon, welcome to the show. Shannon: Hi guys. Thanks for having me. How Shannon does the Woo Bob: Shannon, we always start with how do you do the Woo? Shannon: So, I actually own a agency, a small agency, outside of Philadelphia in Pennsylvania, and we do the Woo with membership sites. We specialize in creating membership sites for mid-size companies and professional associations, like lawyers, doctors, that kind of thing. My journey there is long and crazy, but we actually have been doing membership sites for about five years, and just started using Woo a little over a year ago. Switched all of our tech to Woo, and we are really loving it. So, it was a good change. The WordPress story Bob: How did you get into WordPress? Shannon: That's the crazy story. I started in 2006. I was an OJ mom blogger. I had a job that I didn't love, and I just started writing. One day I was like, "Oh, I'm just going to start this online thing," and started writing online, and then realized, "Hey, I can make money doing this." I spent seven years having multiple blogs with millions of views, and learned all the things. Totally self-taught. Because that's what WordPress does to you. And at the end of seven years, I was like, "I don't know that I want to continue to do this." Ended up selling to a media company my blog network. And then, decided that I was going to help other entrepreneurs who face some of the challenges when they were getting online. And that's how Purple Finch Studios started back in 2014 as a way to help other entrepreneurs. If you look at our website, we're 100% geared towards people who originally started out doing all their website stuff themselves, and then they kind of grew, and they still think their website is their baby. They want to be in the back end of WordPress because they don't trust developers. And that's where I come in. I'm not a developer. I can do stuff, but it's really bad. You don't want me to. But I know enough that I'm able to developer speak, and also talk to the customer in a way that they trust us. So, that's the evolution of, in one minute, of a 14 year history of my background. So, 14 years. Gosh, that sounds like a long time. Mendel: I always have to laugh when people say, "Well, I just run a small agency." Because there's nothing small about running your own business, right? It's all-consuming for you, and especially if you have partners and stuff like that. Shannon: Yeah. But when you have 10 employees, you're a small business. So, that's what I mean. That we're small in the world of businesses. The story of the name Purple Finch Mendel: Totally. So I've been curious, I often wonder what's in a name. But in this case, I'm really curious. Why the Purple Finch? Shannon: Basically, I also shoot photography, and I had a mentor who sent me out on this journey to become a really good photographer who could shoot anything. And in that journey, one of the things that she taught me is that, "If you have the patience to shoot something small and fast," and not with a gun, but with the camera, "If you can shoot something small and fast, and get it in focus, you can shoot anything." So, I picked a Purple Finch. It was a really long journey. Eventually I could shoot a Purple Finch. I don't know if you know what they are, but they're really tiny birds, and they're really fast, and they're skittish. And so, Purple Finch actually represents a journey of learning how to do something, and taking the time. And doing it well, and not being about just doing it halfway. Because that's something that we really pride ourselves on is that we're just not going to slap up a website. We think about the entire process from the user journey all the way to what we're using in the backend. And I will tell you that every single person who I have a meeting with asked me that question, and it is a wonderful icebreaker. So, there you go. It's usually in my office here, but we're moving. So, normally I have a picture of the first Purple Finch that I actually captured on a canvas behind me. Mendel: And I appreciate the story even more because it truly embodies what it seems like your journey has been to this point, right? And I can't say the same about everybody's choice in names, right? Sometimes people are just like, "Ah, I don't know. It sounded cool." So yeah, so you just did it. Bob: Or they say, "I'm just going to put WP at the end of my first name." Mendel: That's right, that's right. Who would do that? Bob: And I won't actually waste time telling the story, but our previous business we were called Cat's Eye Marketing, and there is a story behind that name. And as Shannon said, it's a great icebreaker because we had people asking all the time, "What's this got to do with anything?" Shannon: And I've had a few people tell me that, I had one guy tell me that my name was really elementary, and probably that I wouldn't be able to be successful. And I just said, "Oh, if I have to stay being a seven figure company, I'm cool with that." Okay. So, I've had people make those kind of comments, and it's like that's fine. It's not for everybody, and I understand that. I can relate to that because we used to be told that, "That doesn't tell me anything about your business." Well, you just asked about it though. Mendel: Listen, there's a mattress company called Purple, right? And if they can become a gargantuan company with a word that has probably zero meaning, you with three words that has a super deep meaning, forget that person who said you couldn't do it because I think you're doing it. Shannon: Yep. You don't have to like it, but it means something to me. And it's just a reminder that nothing happens overnight. You know? So, that's really what it comes down to, and we don't have to do things ... Everything's a journey. And whether it's your business, whether it's your personal life, there's a journey behind everything. So, there you go. Mendel: Bob, I have one more question for Shannon right now, and then I'll get off the mic and let you ask her. But I'm super curious about this. You've done a bunch of things, a bunch of creative things in your life, and I'm curious how. You grew a blog network. That is notable. Well, you became a photographer. That is notable. And I'm sure there's a million other things in-between. Scaling from a singe start-up to 10 employees And then, you started this agency, and I would guess that you probably started it with either just yourself, or yourself and one or two other people. So, how did you start, and then how did you scale from one to 10? Because there are a lot of people in this space that have no clue how to get past, "Hey, I'm just making money for myself, and I don't know how to actually build something bigger than a sole proprietorship or a partnership." Shannon: In my first career, before this, I worked in the corporate world, and did a lot of that stuff. So, I was fortunate coming into it when I started the blog network, I hired early and often, right? In fact, I lie. I waited too long in the blog network. In this company, when I first started, I learned lots of lessons about waiting too long. In this company with PFS, I hired early. So, it was just me, but before I even had work for a developer to do, I hired a developer. He was part-time with me, and then about four months in I think we had two gigs. I met a developer, we immediately clicked, and I'm like, "Hey, I don't have enough work for you, but do you want to come work for me?" And I just figured out how to make it work. So, I just constantly tried to stay ahead of things. I'm a really numbers driven person, so if the numbers tell me that we need the next person, even if my gut, and my heart, and my emotions are like, "I want to spend money," the numbers will always tell me when it's time to hire somebody else. And I think that's the lesson that I learned is that you have to hire early and often to be successful. And now, we're at point where I don't wish to grow anymore, so it's a little bit different. But I think that's what it was. By the first summer after we started, I had three employees and I couldn't afford a single one. If I would have mentally said, "Oh, I need to be making money right now for myself.” Hiring employees before you need them Mendel: Well, explain that. Because you're doing demand gen at the same time that you're hiring essentially dead weight, right? Shannon: Yes. Mendel: And most people would say, "Oh. Well, do the demand gen, get the business, and then you hire the person really quickly to fill the demand." You seem to be doing it backward, so how'd that work? Shannon: Well, I think the key of it is if you can do the work yourself, yeah, do it. Right? If you're able to. So, if I got a job that I would not be able to fulfill with my own skillset, that would be bad. If you're looking at somebody who's running an agency, and they're not a developer, an engineer, and you are more on the creative side of things, I think that not having a pipeline of people that can do the work is scary. So, I've seen that happen, and I've seen people say, "Yeah, yeah. I got this. We can do this." And then, they don't have somebody. Or they hire somebody unknown to them, and then they are delivering an inferior product. I'm a little bit crazy about making sure that what I'm delivering is not just meeting the goals, but over-delivering on every project. So, I was fortunate that I sold a company prior to starting this one, so I was able to use some of that cash to be able to put it into this one. It's a unique scenario. But I don't feel like I was in a position to sell a job, and then figure out how I was going to get it done. For me, that's a recipe for disaster. The funny story is how I ended up using WooCommerce is is that I had a job come in from a very large company, and it was something that I didn't think that we could do because of the plugins that we were previously using for our membership sites. And it was actually Chris Lema, who, sitting at Jennifer Bourne's kitchen, he's like, "You can do this." He goes, "Why are you not doing this?" So, I went out and hired a developer who knew WooCommerce, right? And she's a rockstar at it. And so, once I had her on my team, we in one year went from doing just an occasional to almost everything that we're putting out. And not just small, little bills. So, I don't know, I don't have a good answer how to help anybody else, but that was what worked for me is making sure that I knew how I was going to be able to deliver. Bob: It follows this trend of being prepared, and also making that pivot. And not sitting there and going, "Oh, WooCommerce is so cool. How can I get into it?" It's like I see the demand right now. I'm moving ahead. I'm getting a developer in here, and going for it. For three years WooCommerce was the monster Shannon: Well, I tweeted last year that I thought WooCommerce was the boogeyman for so long because of not understanding how it worked. And as soon as we started moving forward with this, I was like, "Shannon, you've been wasting time." Because we were building these membership sites with these plugins that were really designed for learning, or didn't do what our clients needed. And who knew that WooCommerce was the solution that was sitting in front of my face the whole time, but I was just too afraid to look at it. So, somebody else had to tell me that, "Hey, not only is this the solution, you're more than capable of doing it." Sometimes fear I think just we make a little, tiny thing into this big monster. And for me, literally for three years WooCommerce was this monster. Mendel: Where does that come from? Because you seem bold. Bolder than a lot of people I know that are trying to do their own thing. Like you said, you've been in corporate America, you've built things, you've sold things. What do you think generates that, "Oh my God. Can I do this? Can I not do that?" Because it's something that a lot of people have. Shannon: I think just it's human nature, right? To question your ability. Sometimes we have this. For a long time, getting really personal, because I am not a developer, and I'm also a woman, spending time in this space, I'd be at WordCamps and things like that, and really feel imposter syndrome. Like I shouldn't be here. But then, I think you get to a point where you have all these things that you think that you can't do that it just starts to hold you back. And I think imposter syndrome is a big problem. I started learning, as I was digging deeper and really talking with people, that a lot of these people just are taking risks just like me, right? They try something, it doesn't work. They try something else. And WooCommerce specifically, I think I listened to a lot of other people's opinions about it who knew nothing about it. They were like, "Oh, you don't want to do that. Do Shopify, or do ..." I won't knock any other plugins or anything. So, "Do this plugin or that plugin." And except with the plugin, we were taking a plugin and essentially totally modifying it. It was silly. We were doing so much stuff to make it work, and I'm like, "Why are we doing this?" And so, we've simplified our processes. That fear held me back from moving forward with that. Getting over it? For me, it's just come with age. I just think honestly. I was telling Bob that I just sent my son off to college. And when I left him, I was like, "Try everything once. Just try it." Almost everything. Try everything once, because otherwise you have regrets, right? So, I think that's where I'm at in my life is that I'm going to try everything. And we never built a membership site in WooCommerce before this. If I told you the brand, you'd recognize it. It's that big. And like I said, Chris was like, "You can do this." And once we got started, we never looked back. Thanks to our sponsor:This episode is brought to you by GoWP, your partner to help you sell maintenance programs to clients while growing your business. Your expertise in development or design should not be weighed down with shop maintenance. The best solution is to hand off the low-value work that can often eat up your days. And making sure you client's sites are healthy and up-to-date is critical. Their white label service gives you access to their engineers and developers an extension to your team. And that even extends to their knowledge base filled with pricing page templates, lead magnets and maintenance plan documentation that you can edit and use yourself. Topping that off is their content edit request service. Any Woo shop success is based on fresh and up-to-date content. Let GoWP cover that for you clients and agency. Personally, I know you will not regret extending your services through GoWP and leaving your clients in safe and comfortable hands. Just head on over to GoWP.com and sign up for their free partner account. Now lets head back to the show. The appeal for using WooCommerce Bob: On that same line of thought, what was the appeal of WooCommerce? Once you got over that barrier, Chris pushed you into it, what was the one thing that stood out that you thought, "Okay. I'm not locked in necessarily, but this is worth going down this track." Shannon: I think it's the flexibility. If I look at the applications that we've used it for over the last 12 months on the various sites, they're all very different. But how we do it is the same. It's just not locked into how somebody else uses it. I'm pretty unique in how I like things to work because I'm constantly thinking about the user. And when you use a plugin that's developed by somebody else, you are basically having to follow their user journey, their user flow, what they think is important to the user. Well, I like to put what I think is important to the user into the site. We just did Environmental Medicine Doctors. So, there's an association of doctors, and how they think is very different than the group of school teachers that we help build a platform for. Because what they need and what they want to see are totally different. But when I'm using a plugin that's out of the box, they both have to be the same, right? So, I just like the flexibility. There's a couple plugins that we have fell in love with that make it really easy to do everything that we want to do. But again, WooCommerce has allowed us just to do anything. So, I was afraid to move away from somebody else's product that I knew worked really well, and do something totally custom. Now we're just doing it. What Shannon’s clients are looking for in a membership site Bob: So, now that you're doing memberships with WooCommerce, and before that you were of course doing membership sites using WordPress, do you find that most of your clients, and it sounds like that from what you shared with as far as the industries you work with, that most of your clients are not existing WooCommerce store shop owners coming to you for a membership site, and that people are coming directly to you for a membership site. Shannon: Right. And what we're able to do is, so for example, the particular client that I mentioned, they had a membership site that was on some platform. And then they were selling webinars as a digital product on another platform. And then, they had like their goods on another platform. Three things to manage. So, we now have their membership sites, their webinars, and they can sell their little chachki stuff for their members all in the same place. So, that works. And a lot of them are doing that. We have a fitness client who sells fitness gear, but she also has a membership site where she does videos and trainings. So again, the membership site was on one platform, and then she was using Shopify to sell her goods, and we can just bring it all into the same spot. So, no sense in having your members go out to another site to buy your five products that you offer. It's very common. Vetting plugins Mendel: Yeah. So I'm curious, as a part of the building process, how you vet plugins, or how you vet new plugins. Because this is, man, if I had a dollar for every time I see posted in a Facebook group, or a forum, or something like that, "What's the best plugin for this?" Or, "What's the best plugin for that?" How do you figure that out? Do you use a standard process or something like that? Shannon: Honestly, this is going to be an odd answer, but most of the plugins are from people that I've met, and talked to, and have relationships with. Beka Rice, she introduced me to SkyVerge and their plugins, and lots of conversations prior to that. We were strictly MemberPress with Blair. So, just communicating and talking to them. We don't really use a lot of plugins, but we were really tied to our membership plugin for a long time. And not that it's bad. It's good, it's just it's limited to allow a client to be able to have three of their different types of offerings on the same website, in the same platform. And a lot of our clients, like I said, going back to what I said earlier, they still want to be in their websites. They want to be able to go in and add their webinars, and all the things. So, it's really good for them, too, because it brings it all into one central location. Mendel: Yeah. So going deeper into that then, so I totally get that you are a celebrity, and you know all of these plugin developers. But ... Shannon: A celebrity. Not quite. Mendel: But when you're talking with them, what's going through your mind? What are some of the questions? Maybe the boxes that you're checking? You might not have a super simple process, maybe it's you appreciating them and their commitment to the plugin or whatever. But what are you thinking about when you're talking to them? It’s more than just a decent plugin Shannon: Okay. First of all, I'm not an easy sell. I don't know if you could tell this about me, but I'm pretty feisty and opinionated. So, I'm not an easy sell. And it usually takes multiple times. I'll tell you, I've met people, we've tried their product, and we don't like it. So as I'm talking to them, I like to give them my use cases specifically. Not just, "Here's a sales page for my plugin. Look at it. This is what it does." I like to specifically dig into my use cases, and how we would do something. Also, obviously longevity, and documentation, and can we do some of the things that we need to do? I ask a lot of questions. That's why it took me so long to move to WooCommerce is because I am such a skeptic. I think another thing is that I do have such a great team that we are able to objectively look at everything. So, I used to be a partner with a plugin company, so I partially owned a plugin company. I don't want to say what, but it was a really bad plug in. It was bad, right? But I didn't realize that at the time. But it opened my eyes to realize that while I think every plugin developer probably goes into it with good intentions, that there are good and not we'll use the word bad, but there are great plugins, and then there's some that are just mediocre and not that good. So, I guess my mind is does it meet the needs? And do I feel like the person who is responsible for it actually understands the needs of not only the client, but also understands how it's going to affect my entire environment. Right? I take on clients who have some themes with plugins in it that ... In fact, we just had one with the latest WordPress update, a nice jQuery issue. They called me and they're like,"Okay, relax. We'll get it fixed." In fact, I'm having a meeting with them after to tell them that we have no choice but to stop using some of their plugins. They got to go away. We could come up with a temporary fix, but long term there's going to be issues. Thanks to our sponsor:This episode is brought to you by CheckoutWC, a premium plugin that replaces your WooCommerce checkout page with a beautiful, responsive and conversion optimized design. I’ve heard it myself working with shop owners over the last several years. The frustration of limited options they have for the checkout page design. They’re eager to implement best practices and good design to maximize conversions. CheckoutWC steps in with the solution that will help you reduced abandoned cars and help you increase sales. The best part is that it works with any WordPress theme and you won’t need to struggle with configuring page builders, or even messing with code. In a nutshell, it’s easy to get the checkout page you want. Head on over to CheckoutWC.com and you can give it a 7-day free trial. And to top that off, drop in the promo code BOBWP and you will get 10% off. That’s CheckoutWC.com And now, back to our conversation. I don't think you have to be a rock star celebrity, as somebody might've said. I think that that is a benefit of attending WordCamp, and spending some time talking with people. And I think anybody can do that, and really just networking and communicating. Also, you have those people that you trust in your circle that say, "Hey." There's times they'll ask if we're doing something. "What would you recommend if I needed a calendar, what do you recommend?" So yeah, you have that trusted circle of people who aren't going to steer you in the wrong direction, too. WordPress celebrities Mendel: Yeah. I often have to laugh. Kind of laugh, but also help people get into the right mindset when they think of people in the WordPress world as WordPress celebrities. Because the only thing that separates somebody that is a celebrity like BobWP from the rest of the world is that he's been talking longer. Right? And he has more experience building things, and he's willing to give that experience freely. When you pair experience with real knowledge, and some sort of way to disseminate the information, then I think you're a celebrity in your own right. People can do the same thing by writing every day. Maybe you know something about that, Shannon. But yeah, you can really become an expert in an industry by just having that rigor, and building content, and learning, and growing, and meeting people, and connecting yourselves. I think that's really all that stands between celebrity-dom and just the average folks going to WordCamps. In fact, there are a million things when talking to people that are fairly unknown in the WordPress world that teach things to everybody every day. In some ways, maybe they do more at their local meetups and things like that to help each other out. So, I think it's super important to punctuate that fact that when you're at a WordCamp meeting these people, that you're right, that doesn't make you a celebrity. It just makes you somebody that is going out there, and looking for resources and help, and finding it. Shannon: Yeah. I think one of the biggest things, if I could, is that I think a lot of people go into these situations guarded. Believing that we're competition. Why am I going to go to my local meetup, and give away all my secrets to the agency that's right down the street? And I can tell you that the one thing that I think has helped me the most is being an open book, and sharing openly with others. And you know what happens? They're like, "Oh, okay. This chick's willing to tell me anything. We can have conversation." And then all of a sudden, they become an open book. One of my closest friends I met at a WordPress event, and she and I, the first night that we were there. We sat and basically we do the exact same thing, we gave away to each other over what, we call it tears and tequila because that's really what it was. We both cried and had tequila. I don't know if we really had tequila, but we were drinking. And we just let down our guard, and really shared all the struggles that we both were having in our businesses. And all of a sudden, we've in the last three years, we are each other's business support network. There's not a thing that I don't know about her business and vice versa. So, I think that is part of the key, too, is when you go to these events, you can't just take. You have to be willing to give. And if you're willing to give, you would be surprised how many people are willing to give back to you. Even the celebrities, the real celebrities of the WordPress space. They are willing to. And that's how I feel. I feel like how did I get so lucky that I have people who I call my friends that have all this knowledge and all these skills? I feel extremely blessed that I did have Chris to push me off the ledge. And you both know that he's the epitome of what happens when you let somebody in, and they're willing to give everything. So, I think it has to be you have to be willing to share. And I feel like I have a lot to offer. Especially for me, the rest of the world can't see me, but you guys can. I feel like I have a lot to offer, and I try to talk with young black women because that's really important to me. And being able to be open, and if they need anything to help pull them up. So, I love that I have made all these friends in this community who have all helped to shape my business. I just made a Hallmark. That was a Hallmark trailer for you. Mendel: That's amazing. Bob: Yeah. We need more Hallmark moments on this podcast. Shannon: Yeah. And I'm not going to cry. But I could cry. But seriously, yeah. Diverse platforms and transitions Mendel: That's awesome. I love the diversity of your journey. You've built muscles in different places, and I think that that's super inspiring, too. Because a lot of people, they're looking to get into web development, or they're looking to change industries in their own career. Going from tech to non-tech, or going from property management to computer engineer, and people not understanding how to make those shifts. And so, my last question is how did you come across these different, diverse platforms, or diverse ways of doing business, and how'd you make those transitions? Shannon: When I was 30, I decided that I didn't want to be in the corporate marketing and finance world anymore. And I just felt like I wanted to do something different. And when I started with WordPress and writing, I wrote about what I knew, right? So even though I got online, and it was the wild, wild West of the internet at that time, basically you just did what you could do, I just thought, hey, there has to be something that I can do in this space. It's so new. And I still think, when I look at the opportunities that are in the online world, we're in our infancy of what is going to be able to be done. And I think you just have to be willing to, again, take that risk. Blend your skillsets with WordPress So for me, I just stayed with something that I was comfortable with. I started writing about money online. And in that process, I needed to learn WordPress. And then, I started learning more, and more, and more. And I was like, "Oh, you know what? I really like this whole taking my marketing skills and bringing them online." And I was forced to learn how to use WordPress. If I define myself, I'm a WordPress super user. Right? That's how I would always define myself. And so, that skillset just became, "Oh, how can I use my skills?" Yes, I'm in this space, I own an agency, but I don't think you have to think about who owns agencies? Who creates websites? It's developers, designers, right? People with that background. I think you have to think outside the box of, "Hey, how could I do this?" And incorporate something that you love. And that's where it went back to hiring often and early is that I was able to bring in the people who were able to make my visions the reality. Right? I think being willing to be uncomfortable taking those risks. But you can do it while you're maybe doing something that you still need to do. So, let's just say you're an accountant, and you want to switch into WordPress in some way, shape, or form. Why not start writing online about the accounting world? Just to get started, learn WordPress. Or maybe you go to work for an agency as an accountant to get your foot in, and as you're learning WordPress to understand it. Or if you're totally wanting to switch careers, my mom graduated from college when she was 40, which is a huge feat in itself. So, you can always go and just do it. Just get an education elsewhere. So, I was just always willing to pivot because I'm constantly feeling like I'm growing as a person. And if you can put that fear aside and just jump in, I think it's doable for anybody. Bob: Yeah. I think that is a perfect way to round this out. Instead of do the Woo, just do it. Shannon: Do! Yeah. I didn't mean for this to be a motivational. Mendel: I think a lot of people can benefit from motivation. Especially right now where they're trying to switch industries, or they're trying to make moves. And so, I think it's super inspiring to hear how you've done that. And maybe people will reach out to you. But before I get that information from you, I do want to take a second to thank our sponsors one more time. Because WooCommerce, where would we be without you? There would be no Do the Woo podcast because there would be no WooCommerce. So, thank you, WooCommerce, for being a community sponsor. And by the way, if you haven't checked out Woo Payments, I hear it's a super simple way to connect your store to a payment gateway. So, check that out. CheckoutWC, I love CheckoutWC. I've been using it. It's fun. It's cool to use. And yeah, it looks beautiful, and it helps optimize your checkout flow. So, check that thing out. Do the CheckoutWC I guess. And then, GoWP. Check out their maintenance plans. Because they have the the Visual Validator Plugin Updater. It keeps you on top of anything that may go sideways with a plugin update. So, make sure and check out GoWP.com. I feel super lucky to have been able to talk internet, WordPress, WooCommerce, mommy blogging, and photography with celebrity, Shannon Shaffer. And Shannon, how can people get ahold of you if they want to get in touch? Connect with Shannon Shannon: Okay. Well, you can find me at PurpleFinchStudios.com, on Twitter at Shannon T Shaffer, and it's S-H-A-F-F-E-R. Or you could always shoot me an email, Shannon@PurpleFinchStudios.com. Love to hear from you. Mendel: Awesome. Sweet. Well, thank you so much for joining us. And make sure to stay tuned to BobWP's Do the Woo podcast. Because there's some big things happening here at Do the Woo. So until next time, Bob, thanks for letting me join your show today. Bob: It's a joy having you as a co-host. And Shannon, thank you for being on. Shannon: Thank you for having me guys. It was a pleasure. Scroll back to top Sign up to receive email updates Enter your name and email address below and I'll send you periodic updates about the podcast. powered by

Eric started with HTML and CSS websites in 2002, but found his way to WordPress and WooCommerce when they evolved from the web. But his true passion is talking about being an introvert and how he has learned to enjoy meetups and WordCamps. Also, because Eric is a firm believer in contributing to WordPress, the conversation easily moved into that arena. A Chat with Eric In episode 68, Brad and I chat with Eric about: How he does the Woo and, having started with CSS and HTML, when WordPress and WooCommerce came into his life.His journey as an introvert and the challenges he has met.Where he found that sweet spot for introverts via Meetups, as well as a great discussion among the three of us around the being an introvert.Contributing to WordPress and WooCommerce.How contributing can go beyond just coding.His experience of transcribing on WordPress.tvStepping out of one’s contribution comfort zone Connect with Eric Eric on LinkedInIvyCat.com Deals From Our Sponsors Get 10% off CheckoutWC with the code BOBWP The Conversation Yes, this is the transcript. But not in the traditional sense, transcribed word for word. We do not speak as we write. Often the flow of transcribed content is hard to follow. So I have taken it a few steps further by seriously editing, at times, the conversation and even using my editorial freedom to clarify some points. So enjoy. Transcript Email Download New Tab Brad: And we are back with another extra exciting episode of Do the Woo, episode, number 68. Bob we're chugging away aren't we? Bob: We are chugging away. I almost forgot to unmute my mic. Sorry everybody, there's a lawnmower that's deciding that I was going to do my one recording for the week and he waited out in this truck for the perfect time. Brad: We're chugging so fast, Bob can't even unmute fast enough. That's how quick we're going. We're on episode number 68. We've got a great show ahead of us, but first we definitely want to thank the sponsors that help make the magic happen. First off is WooCommerce. Maybe you've heard of them. I hope so. That's what we talk about on the show. Head on over to WooCommerce.com. They're our community sponsor. And we want to give a quick note that at Wednesdays at 1400 UTC in the WooCommerce commerce community Slack developers channel and get your questions answered, share challenges, questions, and maybe even go help people if you're able to. So check that out. If you search WooCommerce community Slack, you can sign up for it. It's free. And it's a great way to get some support from fellow WooCommerce developers and shop owners and all that great stuff. Just want to thank CheckoutWC.com, which actually replaces your WooCommerce checkout with a nice, beautiful, responsive, and conversion optimized design. So if you're struggling with conversions, you are trying to increase those conversions, check out their services and see if it's an offering that might be able to help. And also last but not least, GoWP.com, white label maintenance plans and content edit requests to help you hand off all that low value work that really eats up your day. An great group of people over there. And they're ran by a gentleman by the name of Brad. So I fully support any company that has a Brad involved, which I do. So go check out, GoWP.com. How'd I do Bob? Bob: You did great, not too bad. I told you you'd eventually get it down pat. Brad: Oh, we're at episode 68. So hopefully by a hundred, we'll be rock solid. We've got a great show today. I'm excited to talk to this gentlemen we met a few years ago back at WordCampUS at a nice dinner with some friends. Eric Amundson. Welcome to the show Eric. Eric: Thank you. Brad: Did I pronounce your last name right? I usually remember to ask pre-show and I forgot. So I hope I got it right. Eric: No that's all right. I answer to all sorts of things. Technically it's Amundson. Brad: Technically, that's what we're going with. Eric Amundson. Welcome to the show, Eric. Eric: Well, thank you. How Does Eric Do the Woo Brad: Why don't you just tell our listeners how you Do the Woo. Eric: How do I Do the Woo? Well, I have a little agency called IvyCat and we build custom WordPress websites. And a lot of those are WooCommerce websites or event management websites. And yeah, that's how I Do the Woo, is really working with customers to make either new WooCommerce websites or to supercharge their existing WooCommerce websites, so they're higher performing. From Early HTML and CSS, to WordPress and WooCommerce Brad: How did you first come across WooCommerce. It's always fun to hear how people landed on the platform that they prefer, in this case. I'm curious if you've been using it for years, if you used other platforms and gave it a shot and really liked it. How'd you end up on WooCommerce? Eric: Sure. So I think my company actually sort of standardized on doing WordPress sites in 2010. But I started back in 2002, just doing HTML, CSS stuff. There were not a lot of great real eCommerce platforms back then. The one that we really used a lot at the time was called Shopp, S H O P P. And we implemented that on a bunch of sites and then actually built a plugin for it to deal with Washington State sales tax. And then of course, Automattic bought WooCommerce. and that gave WooCommerce a big shot in the arm. There was the whole Jiggershop thing. And so WooCommerce just became the platform to be, that was huge. And just like WordPress itself, so extensible that it had a really active community of extension developers. And so it became for us, easier to work with. And the market became bigger a lot quicker. Brad: I remember Shopp, I believe the gentleman that ran it, his name was Jonathan Davis. Eric: Yeah. You're exactly right. Yeah. I met him at a WordCamp San Francisco years and years ago. Super nice guy. And I think he moved on and somebody else took over. I'm not sure. Brad: Yeah. I believe it was acquired or sold. Prior to Shopp, it was really the only real player in the WordPress space. If I remember correctly it was WPeCommerce, which was clunky at best. Shopp was really the first eCommerce kind of plugin that I had seen or used that was more polished. And actually had a business model around it to help fund it and grow it. And it was a good platform for the time that it was. We're talking, like you said 2010, pretty early on as WordPress adoption goes. But I remember Shopp, it was a good plugin back in its day. Eric: Did WP eCommerce a few times too. And like you said, it was a little more painful at the time. Brad: Yeah. To put it nicely. But it worked. As the platform matured, the options needed to mature and really WooCommerce took off. Like you said, once Automattic bought it. It really was kind of the de facto eCommerce platform with the company, like Automattic behind it is, it's going to be hard to compete with. But there's other options, but we certainly lean towards Do the Woo and that's why we love this podcast. So definitely appreciate you sharing. The Challenges of Being an Introvert Bob: Now I've known Eric for a while because he formerly lived in the Seattle area where we had the meetup and WordCamps. So I've known him through several meetups and WordCamps. This takes it a little bit away from WooCommerce. But you are an advocate of introverts and developers. And I mean, we're talking WooCommerce, of course, there's going to be plenty of those. I know we can always get back into kind of the more WooCommerce centric talk here. But I remember you did a session on it as well at a WordCamp. You have gone to a lot of these so how have you conquered that challenge? Eric: Oh, that's a great question. I think it's so interesting that probably within the last three, four years, maybe even five years, there's been a lot more conversation around mental health and introversion and imposter syndrome and that sort of thing in the WordPress community. Which I think is really neat because I don't think it's the exception. I think developers in general tend toward introversion just by nature of what they do. Not that everybody is. But I do think when you say people are either an introvert or they're not, I do think there's a little bit of a spectrum there. And some of it is learned behavior. So when I was a wallflower in high school, but as time went on, I started to learn and develop tactics to be able to deal with extroverted situations. A friend of mine in Gig Harbor used to tell me that his wife was an extrovert and they would go to a social situation and she would walk out just jazzed and ready to go and pumped. And he would walk out as an introvert feeling like, "All right, I got to take the rest of the night off, man. I've had enough of people." And so anyway, to answer your question, I think my default mode is to try and blend into the background and not make waves. And some of that is just the way I was raised and not wanting to look stupid or stuff. So you and I met, I was trying to think about it. It was really early on when the WordPress Seattle meetup started. Back when we met in the basement of this place called Tech Stars, do you remember that? Bob: Yep. A Comfort Level at Meetups Eric: It was like this dark brick area with little overhead lighting. And sometimes it was standing room only in there. One of the cool things about that meetup was that there was usually a main speaker that would talk about some topic and there were great speakers, because there was a lot of great talent in the area. And then it would break off into these little groups. And there was, if I remember how they were divided, users and bloggers in one group. Then I think they call them devsigners in another group. Folks who are like developers, designers, but not full on hardcore developers. And then there was the full on hardcore developer group. And I knew that's where I needed to be because that's where I had the most questions. So I would go sit in there and it was super funny because there'd be like 10 men and women sitting around looking at their phones, staring at the ground, not talking to each other. And I realized that someone had to break the ice. So I would raise my hand and say, "Hey, I'm not too proud to ask a stupid question. What do you guys do about X?" And that was usually all that it took and then everybody would open up. "Oh, I was wondering that same thing." And then someone would throw something out and then the conversation was just great. So my journey as an introvert ended up trying to be an icebreaker when I can. And I try to recognize that for a lot of introverts, it's debilitating almost to go into these situations or it's really, really scary. And I think I said even in that talk that I gave, Bob. Being an Introvert. A Missed Opportunity I told the story about, I lived in Gig Harbor and I would drive to Seattle 40 miles away, something like that to go to the WordPress Seattle meetup. And I think there was more than one time where I had made that drive and then sat in the parking lot, just really scared about going inside. Like, I don't know I'm going to walk in, everyone's going to look at me. I don't have anything to say. I shouldn't really be here. And I turned around and drove home and that was just a terrible, missed opportunity. I would make excuses like, I love audio books, so it's time on the road. Woo. But truly it was me not reaching out. And what I've learned over the years is that there's a lot of people that feel that way. And sometimes all it takes is smiling, shaking hands. And now it would be like bumping elbows or waving your mask. But anyway, just breaking the ice. Thanks to our sponsor:This episode is brought to you by CheckoutWC, a premium plugin that replaces your WooCommerce checkout page with a beautiful, responsive and conversion optimized design. I’ve heard it myself working with shop owners over the last several years. The frustration of limited options they have for the checkout page design. They’re eager to implement best practices and good design to maximize conversions. CheckoutWC steps in with the solution that will help you reduced abandoned cars and help you increase sales. The best part is that it works with any WordPress theme and you won’t need to struggle with configuring page builders, or even messing with code. In a nutshell, it’s easy to get the checkout page you want. Head on over to CheckoutWC.com and you can give it a 7-day free trial. And to top that off, drop in the promo code BOBWP and you will get 10% off. That’s CheckoutWC.com And now, back to our conversation. Is Brad an Introvert? Bob: Yeah. Brad, were you ever introvert? Brad: Yeah. I kind of classify myself as an extroverted introvert, which is kind of weird. But for me, it's purely based on the situation I'm in and which way I lean. Obviously in a more comfortable space with people I know, I'm much more extroverted. But if I walked into a room and there's 50 people and I don't know anybody, I am much more likely to kind of sit in the back and observe and just kind of take it in. And I don't have a problem, I'm okay with that. I like to kind of soak in what's going on. Soak in my environment, listen before I speak a lot of times, it's just kind of my nature. But in the WordPress space now that I know a lot of people. When I go to these events, I see a lot of people I know. And it's just immediate comfort for me, but it definitely was not like that initially. Because I was in a very similar situation to you Eric, where I would go to an event, I wouldn't know anybody. And I would just kind of sit there and I wouldn't really interact. I would get some stuff out of it, but not nearly as much as I could have if I actually just opened up a bit. So I also am the type of person that if I'm uncomfortable with something, I will usually try to force myself to go in head first. And that's actually how I started speaking at a lot of events because I wanted to get more comfortable at these events. And I thought, what's the most terrifying thing I can do, I'll get on stage. Which is terrifying, especially the first number of times that you do it and you still get butterflies even after you've done it a lot of times and you feel very comfortable with it. You still get nervous. But I think that also helped me overcome it a bit. It's an interesting topic and I agree, I think more people lean towards introvert in the web and development, design than not. It's one of the greatest things about WordPress community. It's so open and welcoming. As you start to meet people and learn that, you realize that really you can talk to anybody in this community and they want to talk to you. Nobody's going to tell you to go away because your question's silly or they don't have time to talk to you. I think just once you really understand how opening and welcoming this community is, it can really help break down some of those barriers that you might've put up on your own that aren't actually there. Eric: Right. I think sometimes the only barriers to engaging are just the ones that we put up. I heard this years ago, and I think Andrew Nacin referred to the WordPress community as a duocracy. If you were interested in doing something, you were part of the community. And one of the ways that I felt like I can break the ice a little bit was through contributing in ways. Whether that was just going to meetups or WordCamps, or actually trying to write documentation or do support or things like that. It was a way for me to get in and meet a few people at a time and become part of the community, which gives you confidence and you start feeling like, "Oh yeah, Brad's right. This is an opening, an accepting community. And I can belong here.” No One Believes Bob is an Introvert at Heart Bob: Yeah. I find it interesting because I've told people that know that I'm an introvert at heart. That's where I came from and they go, yeah right, Bob. They don't believe me. But it does take time. I go back as far as the early nineties when we started our business and I started joining chambers of commerce and probably some of the people who are listening don't even know what they are. But you'd have networking events and you'd sit around a table, breakfast network events, and everybody would have to stand up and introduce themselves. Give your elevator speech. And I hated it. It was like I was sweating. And all I could think about is when my time came, I couldn't even listen to what anybody else said. I'd just sit there and watch them as they got closer one by one and then I'd have to do it. And I just started doing it more and more. I started speaking early in, I don't know, 2008 or 2009 or something. And yeah it was something that you just have to do over and over. And I still have to push myself on it sometimes. I'll step back and revert to introversion or whatever you want to say. And I not only tried to cure myself of it, but I started making an effort to help others. In the sense that I would see people at events that were obviously very, very introverted and shy. And I thought either they want to meet somebody or they don't. So I go up and just approach them and talk to them a little bit. And you can always get a feel like if they are looking at you like, go away. I don't want to talk to you. So I would. But other times I knew they were incredibly shy and nervous about meeting people. So I talked to them a little bit and then I'd go around and start introducing them. Just a short story,. There used to be this local, well-known conference each year by Chris Pirillo. If you like to go and hang out with a nerdy, geeky crowd, it was for you. I went to it and I wasn't particularly that nerdy or geeky, and I went to an after party and it was in this bar in Seattle, down in a very dark basement. And there was this young, I call him a kid because he looked like he was 12 years old, but I know he wasn't that young. Because he was in the bar. And he was standing over against the wall and he just kind of looking frantic. So I thought, well I'll go up and just start chatting with him. And I did. And we had a great conversation for about 20 minutes. But the funny thing is, at one point he looked at me, he said, "This is kind of freaking me out, this whole place. Because everybody's so old." I looked around at everybody else and thought, "My God, what's he think I am?" I think I said something to him like, "Oh, don't worry, we don't bite." A lot of these people are cool. But it's a very interesting thing to grow yourself out of. And it does take time and practice and takes having to force yourself to do it in some situations that aren't particularly comfortable. Biting Off Bits of the Introvert Using Meetups Brad: Yeah. You can kind of bite off small pieces too. Local meetups are a great way to dip your toes in because it's less intimidating, there's generally less people. And nowadays, I mean, you could even dip your toe in virtually with all the meetups being held virtually and even at WordCamps, to an extent. So the idea of a few hundred people event is terrifying, then try something a little bit smaller and get comfortable with that, especially your local community. Because you automatically have a connection, your local. You're in the same general vicinity, you probably eat at the same places. And most of them are the same people even. So there's definitely ways you can kind of ease into it and grow a bit as you get more comfortable. Eric: Absolutely. I think that's one of the nice things about doing local meetups. I organize a few, one is the South Sound WordPress meetup and another one, which is the Redwing WordPress meetup in Redwing, Minnesota. And reframing them in my head from being these terrifying things where I'm going to meet strangers to these occasions where I get the opportunity to help people or to see if I can assist. And I think I did that early on with contributing, just at one point I was on the docs team and writing documentation. It just felt like I was helping out, I was contributing in some way. And so that helped me over the terror of meeting new people. Contributing to WordPress and WooCommerce Bob: Speaking of contributing and I know we've been talking about being introverted, which it's not WooCommerce specific, but you can be introverted and still Do the Woo, I think. There is that correlation. But as far as contributing to WordPress and WooCommerce, I know you've had some experience with that. I know Brad has as well. Do both of you want to touch a little bit about what people should look at. If they want to contribute to WooCommerce, not that you necessarily have all the answers, but just guiding people towards that a little bit. Contributing is So Much More Than Writing Code Brad: Yeah. I'd love to hear your thoughts on that Eric. I definitely have some, but I think it's an interesting idea. Because a lot of people assume to contribute is writing code. And that is obviously a part of it, but that is certainly not all of it. Eric: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think when we talk about the WordPress ecosystem as a whole, there's all sorts of ways that you can contribute. In fact, I cut on it today. I think a jumping off place for the contributing teams on WordPress.org is Make.WordPress.org. And I think there are 18 teams now, 18 separate contributor teams that contribute in some way. From documentation, to support, to training and TV and all sorts of things. And years ago, a gentleman named Andrew Woods and I started the docs meetup in Seattle. And we'd do it one Saturday a month where we get together and write documentation for WordPress.org. And it was interesting because it was a great way to get into the community. People would show up and think, Oh, I don't have anything to contribute. But honestly, if you've been using WordPress at all, you have something to contribute. Whether that's just giving feedback or helping somebody else. Brad: We at WebDevStudios, we do the Five for the Future initiative that Matt proposed years ago and kind of resurfaced it recently.. But we've been doing that ever since. And it's our official way as a company to give back to the project. We're very fortunate. We get to do some amazing things on a platform at WordPress, that people spent an untold number of hours building over the years. So the least we can do is give back 5% of our company time. So one day a month, our entire company contributes to WordPress core. And of course, our entire company is not all developers. We have project managers, we have account managers, we have a number of people that don't write code. And the ways they contribute are things like support forums, answering questions, or maybe helping to organize a local meetup or a WordCamp. Or like you said, documentation, the thankless job of actually writing documentation. Eric: I know, it's the worst. Brad: Yeah. Or a lot of what I've seen lately is they are helping transcribe videos on WordPress.tv. Which is a tedious process, but it's watching a presentation and transcribing it. So you have to start it, stop it, type, rewind, start, stop, just go through the whole presentation transcribing it. Again, it's giving back to WordPress, it's giving back to the project. So there are just so many different, interesting ways you contribute beyond just writing code. I think it's a really cool topic because I think just by default, people think, well if I'm not a developer, how can I really help? But there's a lot of ways. Like you said, if you use WordPress, you have some knowledge somebody doesn't have and you can help them. Thanks to our sponsor:This episode is brought to you by GoWP, your partner to help you sell maintenance programs to clients while growing your business. Your expertise in development or design should not be weighed down with shop maintenance. The best solution is to hand off the low-value work that can often eat up your days. And making sure you client's sites are healthy and up-to-date is critical. Their white label service gives you access to their engineers and developers an extension to your team. And that even extends to their knowledge base filled with pricing page templates, lead magnets and maintenance plan documentation that you can edit and use yourself. Topping that off is their content edit request service. Any Woo shop success is based on fresh and up-to-date content. Let GoWP cover that for you clients and agency. Personally, I know you will not regret extending your services through GoWP and leaving your clients in safe and comfortable hands. Just head on over to GoWP.com and sign up for their free partner account. Now lets head back to the show. Transcribing on WordPress.tv Eric: Yeah. You mentioned that TV. And that is like, when people ask me, "What are the easiest ways for me to start contributing?" I think one is support. Because like you just said, if you've got some experience, you've got more than somebody else. So getting on the support forums, there's usually something that you can answer. And my early victories on the support forum were someone would say, "I just can't make this thing in my sidebar look right." And I would drop in and give them two lines of CSS and they would think I was a hero because I made it look right. So that fed me and I knew I was doing something good. So I think support is a good one, but TV is another one that you pointed out. And one of the things I love about contributing to the TV team is that if you're new to WordPress and you're trying to learn about a subject. WordPress.tv has literally thousands of videos from people from all over the world about all sorts of WordPress related subjects. So you can find something you're interested in, like search engine optimization, content marketing, developing. I know Brad's going to do a talk in a couple of days on developing your first WordPress plugin. I don't know if that'll be on WordPress.tv. But any way you can go watch these presentations, and transcribe them. Which is super helpful to people,. You are basically providing subtitles or even translating into different languages. I'll tell you my little story about WordPress.tv and the first time I transcribed. I guess the first one I transcribed was a presentation from a gentlemen at SiteGround. I think it was Daniel Kanchev, who gave this presentation on moving WordPress sites. It's like 45 minutes. And it was really detailed, transcription takes a while. So don't start with a 45 minute video. And then the next one I did was I transcribed a presentation that I had given at WordCamp. And that was super humbling because having to watch yourself and then listen to yourself over and over again, I'd have to stop and type and then correct. And it was so humbling because I got to hear all of my own verbal ticks and my stops and starts. And eight sentences together joined by the word so. But it was a way I could contribute. So TV is a great way to get started. Even if you think you don't know anything, because there's all sorts of great topics out there that you can help make more accessible to the community by subtitling or translating. Brad: We're contributing right now. Right. Bob? Just the knowledge that is being talked about and shared on this show is contributing to the overall project. We're sharing valuable information with people that would like to listen to the show. So I think you just got to keep that in mind. It's not about just the code or the how things work. It's contributing to sharing knowledge is how I look at it. Sharing knowledge that you have around WordPress and the project with the community, with the public. That to me is contributing to WordPress. Eric: Yeah, absolutely. I'm kind of fond of saying, you contribute just by showing up. Just showing up at these events, WordCamps, meetups and trying to help somebody else, telling your story, that's contributing. Bob: Yeah. That's kind of how I felt the last decade or more with my content, even on my blog, even though it isn't actually documentation. Going Outside Your Contribution Comfort Zone One of the questions, and I don't know if either one of you have thoughts on this. But when somebody, let's say a developer, looks at it and says, "Oh, I can get in, contribute code, this is cool." I think it would be cool, but it probably would be also a challenge to get them to try to expand a bit and contribute in other areas like documentation or anything to get a feel of other parts of WordPress. It's like you get stuck in this bubble and code is great and that's your comfort level. But it seems like there would be other opportunities for them to say, "Well maybe I'm going to stretch that comfort level a little bit and get a taste of the other side." whatever that other side is. And I guess I'm just wondering if you ever see, or if you've known people personally, any contributors that do a little bit of bouncing around to get a flavor of different things versus just saying, this is what I'm really good at and I'm sticking to it. Eric: Yeah. That's an interesting question. The first person who came to mind, I don't know if you remember Kim Parsell. She was a wonderful contributor to the WordPress project. And she and I were on the documentation team at the same time. And that was back when there was a push for... I don't know if it was just a continued push, but it was for having documentation in core. She worked a lot with the core team to try and document things in line within the core code. She bridged that gap from a user to a developer. And she had to talk to developers and put them in a different way of thinking so that they could really document this in a way that it made sense to the end-user or to other developers. She was a really special lady. Bob: Yeah. She was special for sure. Brad, do you have any thoughts on that, as far as your own experience? Brad: I think it's always the point of developers versus users. There is definitely a value to a dev interacting with users more often. Because it's easy to get siloed into just writing code and pushing features, but not really understanding how people are using those features. And many times, and this is true with client work as well as just WordPress users. But many times, if you talk with users, if you listen to their frustrations or areas that just don't make sense to them, it's very eye-opening because you'll learn things that maybe you didn't see. It's very easy to get tunnel vision as a developer. It's just like when we build a website, when we go into our QA process, we bring in developers that were not on the project, actually QA the site. Because it's easy to overlook something really obvious if you've been staring at the same website for three or four months while you build it. Fresh set of eyes are going to catch it immediately. We've all been there. Like somebody calls out some mistake we made, maybe a blog post we wrote, or a piece of code or a presentation. And we're like, "Wow, I have the word "the" in there twice, like I've looked at this presentation a million times before I gave it. And I literally have the word "the" in there twice. Why didn't I catch that?" It's because you were staring at it for so long. Just a different perspective and that's probably true just in life in general. But having a different perspective and hearing feedback. I think is always a good thing. Eric: Yeah. And empathy, being able to put yourself in that user's shoes. Bob: Yeah, exactly. This was fun because we've been off in a couple of different topics, different areas. We never know where we're going to go with this. Right, Brad? Brad: You know what, I just buckle up and see where Bob's driving us. So away we go. Eric: Beep beep. Bob: Yeah. We often chat about WooCommerce in-depth, but also there's a lot of fringe stuff going on too. And I know any developer can relate to the being introverted or not. Or if they're in that middle of the road. And contribution's huge, which I'm sure we will probably talk about more in other shows as well. But yeah, I think this was a great conversation. Let’s go ahead and close out with what's going on with people or if they have anything exciting to share. I'm going to let Eric go first if anything's going on or just something on his radar that he wants to share with us. Eric: Well first, thanks for having me on the podcast. I've enjoyed talking to you guys. And I'd like to thank you both for your contributions to WordPress. Because Brad, I've read your book many times. I bought it for developers and they used it as a reference. And I've listened to you talk at WordCamps and that's been a big help to me. And Bob, your constant participation and facilitation of conversation in the community is very commendable. And for being an introvert at heart, I just give you lots of props for doing this. As for announcement, WordCamp Minneapolis is this Friday. I'm just South of Minneapolis, but you can attend from anywhere. Tickets are still free. Just have to go to Minneapolis.wordcamp.org/2020. So that's Friday the 21st and I think that's got some good sessions. So if you don't have anything shaking, come to Minneapolis virtually. Brad: Good opportunity to meet some folks virtually. And then when the in person events start up again, you'll be familiar with some people, you'll have some friends you can meet up with. So especially if you're on the introverted side, it's a good opportunity to see what it's all about. Bob: Brad, let's revisit that talk about that live coding a plugin Brad: Yeah. So thank you Eric, for the reminder. Because yes, in two days I'm doing a live coding session, no pressure. Over on Post Status. So basically it's about an hour long, free webinar, join up and I'm going to be live coding a plugin, your first plugin. So it's going to be fun. It's going to be informative if you've ever been interested in building a plugin or have dabbled in it, but looking to take it a little bit further. I'm going to be there with the coauthors of our latest book, Professional WordPress Plugin Development, second edition. So John James Jacoby and Justin Tadlock will be with me. Along with Corey Miller, facilitating the conversation as I'm writing code. And they're probably critiquing everything I write down. But should it be a fun time, we'll see how it goes. I don't think I've ever live coded in front of an audience, virtual or in person. So if nothing else, that should be entertaining. But you can check that out. I've got some tweets on it on my Twitter @WilliamsBA or over at Post Status. I think it's post_status on Twitter. They have some links to it too. But this Thursday, the 20th at 2:00 PM Eastern time. So it'll be the day the show comes but a little bit later in the day. So hope to see you over there. Bob: Very cool. And I just might drop that, Woo 4.4 came out, minor update. The interesting thing I was just going to bring up about it is the centralized coupon management area, which is now under the marketing space. And what they've done, if you do go in there and you haven't been playing around with beta is that your coupons are available. The link in the side, under WooCommerce as they always were. But they're also going to be duplicated under marketing. So you'll be able to go in, I believe in the advanced settings and toggle it off once you're new to or I guess familiar and used to the new location. So you can keep it in the old spot and have it both places. Or you can toggle that off. A few other odds and ends with that one and then blocks. Block 3.2 came out with dark color support, more control over payment methods and enabling order notes, on both the cart and the checkout block. So a couple of things that came out today, which is Tuesday, a couple of days before the show comes out. And yeah, just moving along with the releases on the WooCommerce end. So I think that about does it. Just want to thank the sponsors once again, GoWP.com. You might want to check out their Facebook, GoWP Niche Agency Owners group. They have some cool stuff going on there, they have a Friday happiness hour. You can get on there and talk to people and bring in your challenges. Check that out. WooCommerce.com of course, always good stuff going on over there. And CheckoutWC.com. That checkout page which is a critical point, make it user friendly and conversion friendly. Connect with Eric So Eric, where can people connect with you on the web? Eric: Good question. I'm on LinkedIn. Just Eric Amundsen. If you look me up, my email is just eric@ivycat.com. So if you have any questions or need anything, ping me. Bob: Cool. Excellent. Well, I appreciate you taking the time to be on the show. I know as an introvert facing Bob and Brad is like a challenge. Right, Brad? Eric: No, it was a pleasure. Brad: Introvert or not. It's probably a challenge facing us. Eric: No, no, thank you guys so much. I appreciate it. Brad: Yeah, thanks Eric. This was great. Scroll back to top Sign up to receive email updates Enter your name and email address below and I'll send you periodic updates about the podcast. powered by

Matt has been in the WordPress space since 2005 and has run the gamut in his experiences in working on the web. And his history with eCommerce goes back just as far. Add his involvement in developing and buying plugins, several of which are for WooCommerce, and Matt brings some interesting perspectives to the table. A Chat with Matt In episode 67, Jonathan and I chat with Matt about: How he does the Woo and how it figures in the mix of his varied experiences on the web.His thoughts on whether we are just scratching the surface in plugin development.If a potential plugin buyer should have experience with plugin development.Defining the kind of plugin you want to buy and what you should consider.How a developer can make their plugin attractive for acquisition.What he looks for when purchasing a freemium plugin.Whether the average time of turnover from free to premium purchase matters in the buying decision.How to determine the valuation of a plugin.Opportunities for new plugins in the WooCommerce ecosystem.Making the decision o