Articles & Podcast Episodes

Talk-Commerce Kristin Naragon

Akeneo Product Cloud is more than just a PIM with Kristin Naragon

We all want to keep our customers happy, so significant investments were made into CRM. Later, merchants found that the employee was being neglected and invested in that. The final piece to the puzzle was the product and the Product Information Management system.

Akeneo has now moved PIM to the next level with Product Cloud.

Kristen Naragon explains how Akeneo Product Cloud works and helps us understand PIM and how it enables you to get and maintain happy customers.

Akeneo also offers a full host of Akeneo Training classes to get a better understanding of how the system works.

https://www.akeneo.com/what-is-a-product-cloud/

What you will learn from this podcast

  1. Kristin Naragon is Global Marketing and Strategy for Akeneo, a mother of two and a Peloton enthusiast.
  2. Akeneo provides a PIM (Product Information Management) solution that helps turn browsers into buyers.
  3. 2023 is projected to be the year of the PIM, as businesses are now realizing the importance of investing in product experience.
  4. Akeneo offers both open-source and SaaS solutions and has been helping customers with product gathering, enriching, and getting to market faster for ten years.
  5. Akeneo is also well-suited to help with social commerce, providing consistency and speed to new channels.
  6. Social media and influencers are essential for creating a consistent brand image.
  7. Transparency is important to younger buyers.
  8. Akeneo PIM can help merchants get products to market quicker by providing checklists and automating manual processes.
  9. Akeneo Product Cloud allows for dynamic data to be combined into one product record, which can be activated in multiple channels.
  10. Experimentation is key to discovering new channels and reaching new audiences.
  11. Akeneo PIM can help businesses pivot quickly in times of crisis.

Transcript

Brent: Welcome to this episode of Talk Commerce. Today I have Kristin Naragon. Kristin is Global marketing and Strategy for Akeneo. Sorry, Kristin, why don’t you go ahead, introduce yourself. Tell us one of your day to day, what your day to day role is, and maybe one of your passions in life.

Kristin: Yeah. Thanks for having me, Brent. I’m really excited to be here. So I try to introduce myself, not by my work. And I try to remove myself from being defined by just the the work that I do. I am Kristen Naragon. I am a mother of two kids who are I think are just the most interesting humans on earth.

Kristin: And I love to travel with my family, my husband and my kids, we like to travel quite a bit. Maybe it’s quite a bit just from an American point of view, but we’ve taken the family to far flung places like Indonesia and Japan and Columbia and all across Europe. So we we have a good time and enjoy exploring new places and learning learning how other people around the world live.

Kristin: So that’s a little bit about me and a passion that I have. A Peloton enthusiast, and I will wake up at ungodly hours in order to fit in a ride or a workout with Peloton. So maybe that’s a plug for somebody else’s business. But I’m a little bit obsessed And in my day job.

Kristin: What I do to make sure I can afford my Peloton is I am the head of global marketing and strategy here at a Akeneo. And I have been with the company for two and a half years. It’ll be three years in February. Gosh, I joined right before the pandemic started, so two hot weeks in the office.

Kristin: And. Got to meet a few people and dispersed. We were. Building and changing a strategy all remotely in a new company was a bit of a trick. But we’ve we’ve done some great things. So that’s a little bit about me and what I’m up to. 

Brent: So for the listeners who don’t understand what a PIM is why don’t you give us the 10,000 foot view of a PIM and then let’s dive into PIMS more as we go.

Kristin: Yeah, so PIM it’s hard to explain if if you’ve got zero knowledge, but if we’re trying to talk to our grandparents and let them know what it is, it’s essentially those it’s a solution that helps turn browsers into buyers. And so if you think about what we do as consumers to go looking for researching products that we are interested in purchasing and read all of that information about the product.

Kristin: Find it in different locations, represented in different ways. The PIM serves that up in mo in the most delightful ways. So where the solution that helps those buyers feel more sure. About the products that bra and retailers are selling. 

Brent: I’ve heard it, I’ve heard it being said that 2023 is going to be the year of the PIM.

Brent: Why do you think that PIMs are trending so much, 

Kristin: Yeah. Oh man. I love this because the way that we see the world is that there are three key assets that any merchant, brand, manufacturer, any commerce business has. The first are customers, it’s pretty important to a business.

Kristin: The second are employee. And the third, of course are products. And so that first wave of investment was around that, the customer and obsession with the customer and the customer experience. And so centralizing the record for customers and then engaging with them in all the ways that a customer, they think wants to be engaged.

Kristin: And so huge industries have been developed around that customer engagement. The second wave has been around that second asset, which is employee. Maybe you might argue it’s going in the wrong order, but it is what it is. And so especially now since Covid, but it started well before this industry surrounding technology and consulting new innovations and supporting that employee experience, that life cycle of an employee from recruiting talent.

Kristin: Onboarding them, engaging them, health meters with employees. All of that is exploding right now. So the customer experience first and still going strong, employee experience wave is here. And if you’re watching it, it’s growing big and tall. That third pillar of a business is the product experience.

Kristin: And woefully neglected still a huge challenge for businesses, and it’s the thing that falls apart. If your customer experience is falling apart, it’s probably due to. A bad product experience. And so they’re waking up to understand, oh my gosh, the missing ingredient and this whole thing that I’ve been investing in is actually investing in that product experience.

Brent: Yeah, and I think one of the fun things or interesting things that I’ve always seen as the pin is that you can then put all of your product into one place and diversified into multiple channels. And as now we’re getting more into omnichannel, pin is even more important. To keep that continuity in product across all channels.

Brent: Yeah, for sure. Maybe talk a little bit about how Akeneo can effectively get over some of those hurdles when you’re talking about continuity of product. Yeah, there’s 

Kristin: so many hurdles that we we help our customers with and, you talk about the destination, so it’s always the last mile.

Kristin: I think that a lot of. A lot of people are interested in it, right? The last mile’s, always the heart smile, but actually in. This wave , what we’re seeing is that it’s actually starting way back before the last mile. You’ve got the whole marathon in front of you before you get there of product, gathering product information from wherever it comes from.

Kristin: So if you’re. A retailer, a distributor, it’s coming from maybe thousands of different brands trying to get that information. But even if you’re a brand manufacturer yourself, oh my goodness, you have agencies that you’re working with. You’ve got the creative people, you have the brand people, you’ve got the order management, you’ve got a lot of sources of information that you need, and to get together in one place that’s hard.

Kristin: Pin helps with that. And then certainly, Accelerating that speed of getting the information. So you gotta to crunch that hard work down into as much automation as possible so you get to market faster that last mile of getting to market faster. You gotta enrich the products, make that easy and fun to do, and then get that into all of those destinations.

Kristin: Now we talk about sales channels, which is absolutely one destination for product experiences to show up for your prospects and your customers. But it’s everywhere else too. So think of the end of your post purchase experience. If you’re calling up a particular brand and you want, you say, Hey, I bought this product on this particular site.

Kristin: I need to know X, Y, Z. You really want the person who’s picking up the phones to know exactly what it is and know more about the product than potentially was served to that person. So pin information actually gets served to support that full life cycle of customer information to things. The the customer support teams 

Brent: as well.

Brent: Yeah, I think so. Can you started back in the early teens, 2013, something like that? Tell us some of the beginnings of that and how that has impacted how PI have has grown and how it fits into the today’s puzzle or all the different pieces you need for a fully rounded e-commerce and store.

Brent: That’s 

Kristin: right. Yeah we we certainly support e-com, but it’s really commerce at its core in all the different destinations. But yeah, back to your question, it’s 10 years. We get to celebrate our 10 year anniversary at at our upcoming user conference in Paris in, in March. And Pretty excited about that.

Kristin: My goodness. Has, have things changed in that last 10 years? Can you have started with the founders who were working on the backend systems? E-commerce solutions like Magento. And they were, hands on keyboard trying to move products from one place into the e-com system and really just saw it loud and clear the problem that managing that product information and getting it into the direct to consumer channel.

Kristin: It was just a total nightmare. And so that’s where they began is trying to solve that problem. And they created an open source solution. And so anybody can go right now on GitHub or wherever you download your open source solutions. and find Akeneo who there, and it’s a powerful solution that’s just available to anybody.

Kristin: And I think that was the part of the vision was they knew this was such a vast problem that they wanted to provide a solution to anybody who needed it. And so we have 80,000 downloads of that solution. Across the world. So clearly it is any customer or any business with a product to sell has this problem and we’re helping them to solve it.

Kristin: And so that was that was the roots of the business. And since we’ve evolved into a full SaaS composable offering we fit into whatever stack a company might. And integrate neatly into whatever ecosystem is in the customer’s base. And so it’s been a quite, a, quite a journey, quite an evolution.

Kristin: And the value that we’re providing and the depth and the breadth, I think we. You hear it with our customers. Gosh, I’ve sold a lot of products before. I’ve been exposed to a lot of different solutions and I’ve talked to a lot of customers in my life. I have never talked to so many happy customers as I have here.

Kristin: It’s creepy, like not creepy, but it’s just, it’s almost unbelievable how delighted these customers are with the Kenya. And so it’s just a, it’s a wonderful, just a wonderful place to, to grow. . 

Brent: Going back to the beginnings and the reasoning around, so open source has been a big part of what helped software grow in the last 10 years.

Brent: Yeah. And the is certainly open source and has a community version that’s free for people to download and use. We do tell us some of the importance of that in how ge, how maybe getting users into PI and exposing them to pi, how does that help Akeneos brand to have that open source? 

Kristin: Yeah. It’s interesting, it was new to me of this open source model before coming to a Kenya, and what I realized is that especially in a market where as we discussed this it’s it’s been around for a while, the category, but.

Kristin: I think since the 10 years that we’ve been able to expose the, with the free open source model to so many different people, I think the education process, it really has accelerated the education process for what Apam is. Because I think it’s still one of those categories that people are learning about, right?

Kristin: Like learning exactly where it fits into their tech stack, Learning exactly how it solve the value that it bring. The problems that it solves. And so that open source nature that I think has really helped to sort of seed buyers with an educational tool. Now what we’ve got done recently, actually this year we released also a SaaS free trial.

Kristin: So it’s totally free, no credit cards, nothing. You just put your name in and you go, you get a 14 day free trial, it’s SaaS if you’re not a developer or some IT person who really understands how to install, an open source product, I am not one of those somebody like me can go in and just start the free trial on their on their computer and be done.

Kristin: So you’re, you can experience the Akeneo. Value over the course of 14 days. And I think that’s also part of, our heritage is getting the word out there, understanding the value that a solution like ours has to offer is really been helping us to expand the growth of the business, but also the solution at.

Brent: So on a tangent Akeneo has always been known for their purple three-headed. I think it’s a dragon, it’s a hydro, a hying. Is there a story behind that? 

Kristin: Yeah. Her pronouns are she and her name is Ziggy. Yeah, she’s evolved as well over time. And she’s taken on some iterations, but she was initially brought into the fold by a very creative person on the team who, took on the adoption of Ziggy and she was the three headed hydro for multi channel.

Kristin: And so at first she was the bad guy. She’s multi-channel, like hard to wrangle. She was evil. But she was tamed by Julia, who is our persona the PI power user. And now they’re best friends. So she and Julia Julia and Ziggy are now friends and Ziggy. Part of the, ah, man, to get your hands on a Ziggy people really like, So you can come to our booth or at any show or come to our user events.

Kristin: You might be able to find some limited addition gigs to adopt and take home with you. Our customers love them, . 

Brent: So one of the things that that is coming up in, in commerce now is social commerce. How does PI fit into social commerce and how can new merchants or merchants that are established and have a PIM or are looking at.

Brent: Utilize that for social commerce. 

Kristin: Yeah. Gosh. And social commerce is such a broad category too, and it keeps evolving by the minute and some platforms are even taking down the actual transactional piece of it. So I guess when I think of social commerce, that’s everything from the influence piece, the browse piece, the.

Kristin: Showcasing piece to the transactional components of it. And so if you think about it with those two buckets, I think PI is absolutely able to and should be serving that consistent. You talked about a consistent product experience no matter where you’re browsing. and it’s no question in my mind that unless you have a centralized product record, you have consistency in how you’re describing and showcasing your products.

Kristin: If you’re not doing that on social channels, you’re totally missing the whole point. And so driving consistency there is absolutely like table stakes critical these days. And I think the other so consistency is one, but also speed to those new. Random channels that seem to pop up as, as often as they do.

Kristin: I think without a pin, without preset. Centralized system, your speed to those new channels, your speed to market to those new channels is just a nightmare. Whereas with a proper pin, you’re able to open up a new channel, select the types of content, because every channel has different content requirements.

Kristin: But just modify the content that already exists and gets it, get it into the channel. So it’s not like recreating an entire process just to open up one social, new social channel. , it’s as simple as, clicking and reconfiguring. So I think it’s speed to those channels, being able to test out if those channels work for you, for whatever objectives you think that they should be achieving is just so much faster with with a setup pin.

Brent: And I think just going back to the traditional model of just doing eCommerce through one store, the reality of what’s coming is now we are gonna have maybe even when they talk about headless, maybe it’s not gonna, you’re not, you’re gonna be, everything’s gonna be done through all these channels.

Brent: And I know that in an earlier interview this year, we talked about even conversational commerce where. It’s done through chats and things like that. Yeah. So I think that retailers and merchants need to know that they need to stay at least somewhat ahead of the game or stay with it so you can continue to sell and see the channels that are out there.

Brent: What are the trends in in that social commerce head first type of thing that that Akeneo is jumping onto. . Yeah. 

Kristin: So if you think about a certain generation of buyer out there, of which I am not one of they are all over social and the influence that social people, influencers on social media channels have and the impact that it can have on your product.

Kristin: And for brand managers out there who want to control their image having the ability to have a central. Like I said before, just single source of truth for your product information and being able to get that into the hands of when possible influencers is absolutely one one thing that is part of, making sure that your brand image stays consistent even if it’s in the hands of somebody that you’re not paying.

Kristin: The second thing is that those younger consumers value transparency. . And so I think being able to provide in those social channels really truly transparent information about the product itself, but also layering in brand values inside of those social moments with your product. So not even discrete from.

Kristin: Side by side and integrated with your product story that is insanely important for buyers of a certain generation, . So transparency is critical and social is if you’re not there you’re just not existent. And those influencers have power. So if you’re not feeding those influencers with the.

Kristin: Information, they’re just going on their own. Those are the trends that we see, which, I think a pin like ours actually supports really nicely. 

Brent: And as your team gets bigger, I think that the importance of having different roles on your team to do different things and I think it applies especially in c let’s language One of the features that I particularly like about Akeneo is the ability to do the, to do checklists of things.

Brent: So you could you can see when your catalog is done in English and maybe your catalog isn’t completed in Spanish, and talk about how how that team aspect and even how that the aspect of having the ability to see when pieces are done and getting things launched quicker and not having to dig through mounds of data to figure out what isn’t and what is.

Brent: How that can help a merchant get things to market quicker. 

Kristin: Yeah. I’m glad you point that out because it’s one of the usability features of the solution that I think, doesn’t, is not like the sexiest thing to go talking about, but it’s once you get the product, you’re like, Oh my gosh, thank God.

Kristin: We recently did a total economic impact study with a few of our customers, and found out that retention was one of the outcomes. Employee retention and satisfaction was one of the outcomes of leveraging Akeneo PIM. And the reasons that were given were exactly what you talk about. So it’s the ability to see.

Kristin: Among a lot of products that you have to enrich. You have to get ready for getting to market, see what status they’re in, in, like you said, which language, but which market, which category, which family of products. So you can triage your day and not just waste time combing through and list lists of products.

Kristin: So it’s just a a quick way to understand where you are in your day to day job. And not be like, dragged down in the quagmire of lots of the Excel spreadsheets on lists of products. The other thing that we discovered was that since those employees were not, Drag down with some menial, matching and v lookup tasks that they were a even more satisfied because they were able to do the higher value work.

Kristin: The work that was actually more interesting of writing colorful descriptions, actually looking for what are the right brand images to put against these products. And so actually taking those extra steps to make their products showcase much more brilliantly on the places that they were going.

Kristin: So employee retention was a really wonderful outcome that we, we discovered with with the, those who are using the PIM. 

Brent: I think you can create and I’m gonna use all the wrong words, but like a workflow where you can have certain things that have to get done before the product’s ready to go.

Brent: Oh yeah. Which ensures that the product’s gonna be as great and beautiful as it should be when it goes live. Whereas your typical, if you are using some back end of any nondescript eCommerce system you’re not gonna have all. There’s not gonna be all those things in place to ensure that product is the way it should be across all areas. And even as a manager, then it makes it difficult if you didn’t have that tool in hand to make sure your product looks super great for your customer to see. 

Kristin: Yeah. No, it’s true. And the time to market is the, is so employee satisfaction and retention is absolutely one of them.

Kristin: But then time to market is the other benefit and the outcome of that because the speed with which you’re able to triage and understand which categories are ready to go. This is high and you, a lot of automation is happening behind the scenes so that you don’t have to do a lot of the manual work that probably you’re doing with spreadsheets and other old fashioned things to get this product information into one place.

Kristin: As an example, one of our customers who’s a seller of, Apple. Apple doesn’t give anybody any information prior to a launch of a new product, Of course. And so even, Staples. And so they would take them, I think, upwards of two weeks to, gather that information from the product launch and get it up onto their channels and into their markets to sell it.

Kristin: My gosh, that’s how much lost revenue over two weeks period. That’s that. That is an impact to the business, and now they turn it around in a matter of hours. Simply due to that process that they’ve nailed down, leveraging the interface of the PIM and all the automations and checkpoints and quality controls that we’ve got.

Brent: One other benefit that you have is that you can have a third party vendor have limited access to start making that product ready. Not, maybe Apple wouldn’t do this, but if you have a vendor who is giving you a product and they’re, they know everything about it and they can, they have access to your system, they could be starting that pre-product input before your team even has to get a hold of it or a lot of that work would already be done to get it live as soon as.

Kristin: Yeah, totally. And so that’s the one solution for retailers and distributors is that onboarding solution to allow third parties to get in there and import their product information alongside other components. But there’s also inside the administrative rights of the core PIM itself, we have a bunch of customers who have seasonal release.

Kristin: And so they have a ton of products that they just have to get out the door in various season, and they find that it’s actually. Really valuable for them and their community actually, where this particular customer is to hire students, like working students as well as retired people to their offices.

Kristin: Give them, these are the three things that you’re working on. And that’s all the access that they have. So they have their list of products that they work on and the various fields and attributes that they’re allowed to enrich, and they find that their time to market. So much faster. Their flexibility with their workforce is pretty darn high, and they love being able to, to hire into the community people who might otherwise not have those types of opportunities.

Kristin: And it’s just this like win, win all around. 

Brent: Talking about new product launches and I know that Akeneo recently unlocked a new product, at the Unlocked Conference. Thank you. Tell us about Akeneo Product Cloud and how that’s gonna change things and enhance things. 

Kristin: Yeah, we’re super, super excited about this.

Kristin: This this for us is the way that the category evolves. One of the things that we clearly. Encountered in working with the customers that we have and, the benefits of having 80,000 installs of the product and open sources, having conversations with people to see what other pieces of information help to the browser, turn into a buyer.

Kristin: And if you step back and you think about all of those components of product experiences that help you and I discover to learn to make the purchase it’s more than what a traditional modern pin can consume or should consume. You go up on any product product page, you’ll see things like customer reviews, you’ll see things like and if it’s a dynamic pricing that’s not going inside of pin because it’s hot changing by the, this millisecond sometimes pricing.

Kristin: There are things that, let’s see what other components that we can think of that live outside. So there’s order information, right? So understanding if there’s availability of that product in a certain store that’s near you. Those are all components that naturally and should live outside of a traditional modern PIM like Akeneo.

Kristin: But that also serve that browsing to buying experience. And so the product cloud is that evolution of a composable offering that allows merchants and commerce leaders to get their products and showcase their product. Anywhere with any product information in one single pre in place. So it broadens the scope of product information to both warm and hot data.

Kristin: So non-static, non, once and done marketing data to that more dynamic data, puts it all in one place and allows those merchants to do analytics on performance. Of those products in all of the destinations to where it goes. So we’re pretty excited about this. It’s an evolution of building out the various components for us in this product cloud vision that we’re painting out there.

Kristin: But I think we’ve got the backbone of it with the pin with our app store, with our connected marketplace to. All the destinations that that we need to get them to, to the product information too. So we’re pretty excited about the product 

Brent: cloud. Is the, so you’re gonna tie in the ERP and any disparate systems that would be connected to the it’s you’re talking about having everything coming into one place and then spitting it out to the multiple channels again.

Kristin: Yeah, exactly. If you think of the PIM is now one component, one composable component of the entire product record. You’ve got a dam, you’ve got order management systems to serve, availability needs in the product record product life cycle systems that allow the searcher or the buyer or the consumer to understand where the inform the product was sourced from potentially since that’s now.

Kristin: A real transparency, like I said, is a real need for BA browsers and buyers to understand where the sourcing material has come from and how it was sourced some of that lives in a system like a plm. And to be able to combine all of those elements into one full product record in the single source.

Kristin: So now the full product record is elevated at a product data platform level and then shipped out and activated into the various channels that it needs to go. That’s what we now mean by a product record being activated into the various destinations where it needs to go. One of the other value propositions that I’m really excited about there is essentially.

Kristin: Now you’ve got the customer record. Oh, sitting in a CDP or a crm. You’ll have the product record completely. Sitting in a PDP product data platform, marrying those two and syncing those two data sources allows for analysis of your business that you’ve never had before. And so up leveling that centralized product record to that centralized customer record is just gonna.

Kristin: Further unlock so much growth for these businesses. 

Brent: That really helps the marketers, the top three things in marketing is measuring. And that will give a lot more insight to how well they’re performing. Absolutely. Kristen, if you had if you had a little juicy nugget that you could give a merchant as we’re going into fourth quarter, Black Friday this busier time.

Brent: What could you give a merchant? What would you what do you think the trend is now in, in this the end of 2022? 

Kristin: Oh, Juicy nugget. I love experimenting. I do that myself for my marketers in my in my team. If we’re not experimenting, then we’re not trying, we’re not failing.

Kristin: We’re not we’re not getting out there and making sure that we’re the best showcasing our offering in the best. . And so I think for merchants out there, it’s the same. It’s if you can’t quickly experiment in a new channel, if it’s a sales channel or marketing channel you’re missing out, you’re missing out on exposure to new audiences, or you’re missing out on, being able to showcase your products in ways.

Kristin: You couldn’t on a direct to consumer channel, potentially with with a, the YouTube influencer channel that’s coming out. So I think it’s it’s pretty imperative that, this season, if you wanna try something new, the quicker you can get there, measure it, understand it, pull it off.

Kristin: It’s, if it’s not working, but expand it if it is. I think that’s the real power in expanding your business. . 

Brent: Yeah. And just to help listeners understand how easy it would be as you have everything in your PIM and you have a new channel that’s now available, all those channels are gonna be connected within api.

Brent: And all you do is connect the two. And even if it’s such a new thing, there’s tons of middleware that can get you in connected if it’s not available. But generally those larger channels or the new channels that are out there, they’re gonna be available to connect to. And just as we wanna sell that particular thing to somebody, that channel wants that connection with you to sell through.

Brent: So I think that’s a great, That’s a great point that you’ve made about how. The time to market is so greatly reduced by having your product all in one place and ready to go. 

Kristin: . Yeah. Absolutely. Absolutely. And you know what, we know, we noticed this with And I think a lot of learnings came out of covid on so many different dimensions, but when we were trying to support our customers through Covid and the impact that it had on their businesses the ones in our ecosystem they were able to make these pretty significant pivots.

Kristin: We had a company that would sell to airlines. So they sold things like fuel to airlines. They sold things like everything in bulk to support the flight. And Covid hits, What do you do? So their big idea was to pivot to consumers. So they’re selling to, they’re selling to businesses.

Kristin: Clearly. They decided to take their wear. That actually suddenly were pretty useful for people because they had things like hand sanitizer in bulk. And so what they were able to do is do some repackaging but sell to consumers. So they spun up all that product information that they had in the kidney that they were using to sell to businesses, re, just tweak some of the descriptions to make it more consumer friendly.

Kristin: And they push direct to consumer within a matter of months. That’s a business pivot . But they accessed a whole new market through consumers because they have their product information sorted. Wait, that’s experiment, an experimentation at scale, and that’s business survival. And so now coming out of Covid and flights are all back, they have two consumer bases now buying bases now that they’re able to accelerate.

Kristin: The world’s your oyster in that case, right? Just in terms of new markets, new channels that you’re able to experiment with. 

Brent: I do wanna make a D2C, B2B point too, that the PIM is a channel to print as well. Yes. And if you’re a B2B and you have traditional, maybe one channel through some kind of website, but you also have a printed catalog PIM is a great place to put all of your products in, and then you can output to a printed catalog just like you do to any other channel.

Brent: You can think of it as electronic and digital, but that digital turns into pieces of paper at the end, and rather than having somebody comb through, pages and pages of InDesign documents or whatever you’re using you can start it in your PIM and then output to some product that, that actually is the printable version.

Brent: Yeah, 

Kristin: I was in my CEO’s office a few months ago and he proudly has displayed on his. This massive catalog. It’s like this thick and dense . He puts it on my lap and I’m like, Oh that’s, I could do some weight lifting with this, but it’s entirely powered by the kidney and the level of detail and the product information that’s in here.

Kristin: It, this is not a lost business of selling with a product catalog for many industries. And if you have to sort through all of that, all of those dense pages of product catalogs in product information manually, oh my Lord. And if you get something wrong, the expense of getting something wrong in a printed catalog that you’re doing thousands of, this is.

Kristin: Business impact. So yeah, getting the product information right and all of those checks and balances that you’d want for your digital, easy to pull down a misspelling on a, your direct to consumer channels. But if you’re have a misprint a spelling error in a catalog that has already been printed.

Kristin: you’ve got a problem. So all of the checks and balances that go into that are pretty important for those channels as 

Brent: well. Yeah, and I, so Kristen, I think you and I could talk about great solutions for PIM for the next three hours, but unfortunately we are out of time. Yeah. As I put, as I close out on a, each of our podcasts, I give a chance for the guests to do a shameless plug about anything you’d like.

Brent: What would you like to plug? 

Kristin: I, it’s the mission that we’ve got is to make sure that we provide a solution for anybody who needs it. So I’d say go to Akeneo.com and just start the free trial. And like I said there’s no, no credit card and nothing’s needed. You just put your your name in there and.

Kristin: There’s a live chat inside the food trial. You can explore the experience all on your own time and all on your own. Or if you need help, we’ve got that too. So I would just say check it out. If you’re curious about what exactly it looks like and under the hood is there for you to open up.

Kristin: So atkin.com is the shameless plug that I’ll put out. 

Brent: Yeah, and I’ll put all, I’ll put all the links on the show notes. Kristen Naragon, thank you so much. Kristen is the VP of Global Marketing and Strategy for Akeneo. Thank you for being here today. 

Kristin: It was my pleasure. Thanks so much, Brent.

Interested in a beginner’s guide to PIM? Check out this article.

Talk-Commerce matt beecher

Do you know the Six Key Areas of your Business with Matt Beecher

Entrepreneurs are aiming at a hundred different things at once. They’re scrambling to accomplish and grow their objectives, but they’re facing a lot of headwinds. And those headwinds come in the form of things like.

How do we prioritize what matters most?

How do we think about using data to manage our business, not just gut feel?

How do we think about the right people and the right seats and make sure that we have the right processes to get those people working effectively and that they’re an excellent match to our culture?

What is our culture?

How do we think about what our long-range vision is versus what we need to do this week, let alone this quarter?

And how do we think about financials versus strategic objectives?

All those things come together in the EOS model.

https://www.eosworldwide.com/matt-beecher

https://www.linkedin.com/in/8matt8/

5 Reasons Why You Need a Community Manager in Your Developer Community

5 Reasons Why You Need a Community Manager in Your Developer Community

Developer communities are a great way to drive the adoption of your products in the long term. They help you understand user behavior and build more valuable products with positive customer feedback.

Talk-Commerce Heather Barr

SaaS by SaasWest BigCommerce with Heather Barr

BigCommerce is Open SaaS means building a great community around it. Heather and Brent talk about the growing BigCommerce community and how to get involved. @hnbarr_

Heather walks us through how to get involved and introduced to the BigCommerce community. There is a lot of firsts happening at BigCommerce, and the community is strong and growing.

Heather tells us why it is unique in the commerce space and especially in the SaaS space. So many things in the works, and this is the perfect time to get involved. Will there be a BigCommerce event in Austin? SaaS by SaaSWest?

https://sites.google.com/bigcommerce.com/devx-at-bc/devx

Check out the post on why you need a community manager.

5 Reasons Why You Need a Community Manager in Your Developer Community
5 Reasons Why You Need a Community Manager in Your Developer Community

Transcript

Brent: Welcome to Talk Commerce. Today I have Heather Barr. Heather is the community developer manager, or the developer, community manager with BigCommerce heather, go ahead, introduce yourself. Do a much better job than I did . Tell us your day to day role and maybe one of your passions in life.

Heather: Yeah, absolutely. So great to be here. Thank you so much, Brent. Like you mentioned, I am the developer community manager at BigCommerce so I basically just do the day to day admin type things with our developer community spaces. The most puppet is our Slack. In addition to that, I build out some programs and host events and things like that.

Heather: And now that we have a really awesome solid developer relations team I work. Very closely with them to do exactly that and just improve the developer experience or try our hardest to do that at the commerce. And one of my greatest passions is it actually is somewhat of a newer passion.

Heather: Maybe in the past, like year or two, I have built out a, like a van, like a camper van out of a old like Amazon truck. And so I really love traveling around in that and just doing some camping or glamping I guess you could call it. But. 

Brent: All right, so now I’m super jealous and maybe after the interview we’ll have to talk about camper vans cuz I had the same idea out of an old, like a sprinter van or something.

Brent: Yeah, I love that concept and it gives you an opportunity to get out on the road and see things. So that’s super cool. Okay, so before we start the really fun interview, we’re gonna do the free joke project. And I did prep you on this, so it’s, I’m gonna just tell you the joke and then the goal is this a free joke or is this one we could charge?

Brent: So I have a very, I have a quick and simple one today. Ready? All right, I’m ready. To the guy who invented zero, thanks for nothing. 

Heather: I like that one. That one is definitely charged worthy. It’s simple. It’s to the point. And it definitely 

Brent: crack a smile. All right. Good. Do you wanna try one more or are we good?

Heather: I like that one, but if you have another, I can handle 

Brent: another. All right. I got an easy one. Okay. What does scholars eat when they’re hungry? Academia nuts. . 

Heather: Okay. ha ha, I really like that one. good. That one I would pay for . 

Brent: Thanks for playing along. Yes. I need a little jingle for that, I oh, definitely. I’ll think about a jingle later on. All right, so let’s dive into the bigCommerce community. I’m excited about the BigCommerce community cuz I was just, I was at the partner summit and it has this sort of open source vibe that some of the other communities have. Tell us how, what you’re doing in the community and how you’re helping the community grow.

Brent: And tell us a little bit about the Slack channel and. Yeah, go for it. 

Heather: So we have a Slack workspace and we are working on getting it to a point where we can just like fully blast it. But everyone listening to the podcast definitely reach out and get involved. I can have a link for bread that he can share, so you can join us there.

Heather: But yeah, that’s our most popping space right now. But we have other things going on in the community as well. The slack is just more of the I guess a real time peer-to-peer resource that we have available for developers and partners who are building solutions on the platform. And so in there we host some series events like AMAs.

Heather: We’re asking anything events with some of our product members. So basically if. People in the community have some interest in meeting with like someone from product or a team from product like mobile or headless or page builder or building widgets or whatever it is. Then basically we get those requests and then we just host like a small sort of intimate meeting in Slack and one of our like dedicated channels where you can just ask product anything about that topic.

Heather: So those are really cool. And we do those we do about two to three or four possibly every year. And we can increase that if we get a little bit more resources or help . But yes, so that’s one of the main things I guess going on in like in the Slack. We also have some other types of events depending on, like what you as a partner or developer are interested in.

Heather: Let’s say you want to I guess market or just promote your service to merchants and just have a space where you can talk openly about it and just have a real conversation about what you’re solving for and what are the, maybe the plans to come and so forth. We have an a series event like that as well.

Heather: We do it two to three times a year as well. And that is in our customer facing community. But to sign up, it’s through our developer community and then through My partnership with our developer relations team, Katie and Steven and Constance, which I know you already met with Katie. We are doing some bigger events, so those are really awesome.

Heather: So we did our first hackathon, which was really great. We planned to do many more and then, Also this past year we actually had our first community lead event too, which I know is huge, like in the space where you’re from. But it’s new here at BigCommerce and I really hope to see like more of these types of events and other types of content just like organically forming.

Heather: But that was with Space 48. So they held a, like a paneled type of, Virtual event where they basically were able to grab some partners from the community and just share tips and all types of stuff and just like things that they’ve learned like while developing on the platform. And it was completely community led and it just blew my mind.

Heather: It was so awesome. And yeah, I mean there’s just a lot of firsts going on right now and our developer community, and I think that is what’s really exciting is because, we’ve been building it for a couple years now, our. . Yeah, so we’ve been building it for a couple years now, and it’s just like we’re finally getting to a point where we’re able to.

Heather: see these types of opportunities and like actually really go forward with these types of opportunities ourselves, like internally. So I would say the big thing about getting involved in our developer community right now is that there’s a lot of firsts. So if you have any ideas or if you just wanna be a part of the beginning, like it definitely has.

Heather: That type of vibe where it’s like we’re, we’re getting that momentum and so we have a lot of stuff in the works and we have we just have a lot that we all wanna do as well. So it’s a really good time to participate. 

Brent: Yeah. And I can say that we worked with Space 48 on that first event in for another community in Austin in 2016 with Shipper HQ and Karen Baker.

Brent: Nice. , that was organized and we ran that until 2019. So it was it’s a great place and I’m gonna propose that we, we do a big the big Dev X or whatever we call it. Yes. Event in, in Austin next year. Maybe we should call it BigCommerce by, we have to think of a name to mimic off of, So by Southwest, right?

Brent: Ooh, okay. Commerce by SAS or something like South SAS by sas. Yes. We’ll have to, oh 

Heather: my gosh. Include you in the party planning committee. SAS by sas. Thinking of. So next year big developer things. And we’re starting to start conversations about those now and seeing who we need to talk to make these things happen.

Brent: Yeah. And there’s a great event space that we’ve always, we’ve done it in twice. It’s called Trinity Hall. It’s on Trinity, and I don’t know. Anyways. It’s in downtown Austin, but yeah. All right. So if I’m a new developer and I want to get involved in the developer community, and I, maybe I wanna build an app, is there a, is there like a place that, So I’ll join the Slack channel, and then is there a way for me to easily get started?

Brent: Walk me through pretending that I’m a developer and I really would like to participate in the BigCommerce c. . 

Heather: Yeah, absolutely. We have a lot of different spaces where developers can try to, reach out or get involved with others. But I would say Slack is definitely the most popular, but it’s not the most visible.

Heather: So that is something that we are working on now as far as like how to get that to be a more visible place and whenever we are able to get it to be a more visible place, that’s the other side to it. So depending on where this app developer, came to us or found us, whether it’s Twitter or our help center forum or stack overflow or whatever it is we would be reaching out.

Heather: So that’s what my team does. We reach out. And then also Katie, she’s really great with our Twitter. . So yeah, we basically would get in contact to find out what you’re trying to do, and then if we feel that, you’re an app developer, so we would obviously send you the link to get involved with our Slack community, and then there you can connect with other developers, other partners that have been building apps forever.

Heather: And so you have those resources but also build that relationship with you and then really provide some resources that help you individually, but that’s like linking the correct docs to you or different. And right now actually our developer relations team is working on a like an app series or they will be starting soon.

Heather: Because that is a gap right now too. It’s partners and developers are just like people that are new to building solutions on the platform, having that hard time getting an app off the ground, I guess you could say. And so that is something that we are actively working on right now. But I would say, the best or like the vibe right now in the community on how we could help is just really getting to know you one on one and providing those resources to you one on one. So it is more of a, Hey, let’s connect, let’s help each other, like that type of vibe. As we continue to grow, we can scale and can provide more resources and pump out more resources ourselves.

Heather: That’s when, you know we can provide those links and you. That content. 

Brent: Yeah. And there, there are regular public facing document doc, there’s a dev doc series that you have that’s public, so I could start there and then also get in contact with you to join the community and get going. How about I know that you mentioned having your.

Brent: First hackathon. , what are the plans around maybe having an in person 

Heather: hackathon? There are plans to having an internal hackathon. Yeah, that was our first one and it was a blast. And it got a lot of people excited. So that was like external people as well as like BigCommerce employees as well.

Heather: Everyone was just so comforted about the hack up on. And with that comes more I guess you could say. So teams, approaching us saying, Ooh, like we wanna, what about our thing? What about our thing? And they also third party at companies as well, saying Ooh. And so there is a lot of interest, which is really good for us because we get to plan out in advance let’s do this hackathon, virtually this one hybrid, this one in person or whatever it is.

Heather: And we can plan all of those out. And maybe we can make all of them hybrid. Maybe we can try different locations. There are a lot of ideas. Basically just a lot of ideas on what we wanna do as far as getting one planned. We’re not sure which one we’re gonna do next. Actually we do have one next, but we can’t talk about it right now.

Heather: And it. , that one maybe virtually. But midyear or like maybe late in year, I think we’re gonna try to do something a lot bigger, and that would definitely be a hybrid or in person. And then potentially doing some like small, like little dev challenges virtually, or even like doing some small popups in person would be really cool.

Brent: Yeah, I think we usually cap hackathons at 80 or a hundred people just because of the amount of people that you could fit in a room and we always hit it after an event. And it was always really fun. How about including people other than developers like project managers and solution architects?

Brent: Do you see a space for them in the community? I definitely 

Heather: do, and we have some of those Those types of roles are people with those roles in our developer community Slack right now. And so basically our developer community, Slack it’s like a umbrella acceptance. I guess you could say if you sit under the technical umbrella at all, if you work with.

Heather: Your developers. If you’re a CTO or a solutions architect or something like that, then you definitely are what we’re trying to have in this space. But for these events, I definitely see a benefit in having them. I think project management especially would be. Excellent to have because that’s what they do in their job and they really help the development lifecycle.

Heather: And so I think there’s a huge benefit of having like one project manager, like per team. I think that would be a really nice way to divide it up and then just really have a lot of success in the hackathons and from the submissions and on a team level. 

Brent: Yeah I, There, there are some other events that happen in other communities that are longer, or maybe they’re a weekend event, maybe a Friday night through Sunday event.

Brent: And then you, where you come together, build your ideas that you want to do. Then you put a team together and then that team goes and tries to get as much done as they can. By Sunday night. , so that comps would include a project manager or some kind of a architect, maybe some, there’s a lot more room for roles there.

Brent: Yeah. And then some people that aren’t so technical wouldn’t feel left out and they can participate in the event and have a lot of fun. 

Heather: Yeah. I think the more diverse the team can be the more successful it can be, honestly. 

Brent: Where do you see the BigCommerce community going in the next year or two?

Heather: In the next year or two, I see us doing so many more events really honestly. I see that being our, I guess our biggest opportunity is doing hackathons, doing smaller like developer challenges and then also just Getting ideas from our community as well. If there’s something that they, like our members really want to push out or just wanna be involved or really want us to push out or, and just see as an opportunity, we are all ears for that.

Heather: Like I said earlier, like we’re just in a time of a lot of firsts and so we are so open to making this the, this community. The best it can be for our members. We really want to hear from our members. We really want to just give them what they want. And I definitely see events being a huge thing for us this upcoming year.

Heather: And that’s a whole different type of just a broad range of types of events that I see coming. 

Brent: Are there any plans around, seeding other sort of community leaders to. build communities in other countries. In other areas. 

Heather: Yeah. So that would be that would be incredible. I think so there’s a lot of like really mature communities and then also just some really engaged like younger communities that are doing this right now.

Heather: And that have been doing it for years. And that’s something that I would personally love to see. Like for the Hackathon, for example, we had people that were, it was a worldwide type of event and it was really cool to see because we only had two weeks to really announce it. But it was like split between many continents, so it was, it would be really nice to just have I guess like focus groups or just user groups or just super, just whatever we wanna call it, but just like based groups in different regions.

Heather: And I think , like Magento or a lot of other types of different communities where they have they host like their own meetups and stuff like that. And even if it’s super casual but then we can be involved like on our side of hey, like we can help organize it or whatever. But then yeah, like y’all totally own it, like y’all are there.

Heather: Let us know how we can help. Notion does this I really love that productivity tool and they. They have a really excellent community, but but yeah, I definitely see that. I’m not sure how realistic that is for like this coming year since we’re like, we’re just now being able to like host all these really cool events.

Heather: But hey, if it happens, like I am all for it and I, yes, I’m like for making it happen to you. So whatever I can do to help with that and if we have a lot of interest and a lot of engaged people in different regions, like I am definitely for helping getting that. , 

Brent: I know in the agency space it BigCommerce is growing so fast that it’s been difficult to sometimes find developers and so you have to train developers.

Brent: Is there a easy way for an agency head to say, get to, to hire somebody that’s been involved in another SAS platform and convert them or help them understand? Getting up and running on BigCommerce yeah. So we 

Heather: have like big dev boot camps. That’s one of our excuse me, that’s one of our products or one of our services for getting started.

Heather: It’s like an onboarding type thing. So if you are a developer or if you have a developer that is like new to building on BigCommerce and you really wanna set ’em up for success Big Deb Bootcamp is a great option. Excuse me. Yeah, so you can get involved with Big Deb Bootcamp. I can actually get the link for you and I.

Heather: Include it so that you can try to like, push that out with your recaps and all that. But basically it covers developing on stencil on different types of getting started with like headless all of our APIs. Goodness. And just basic development, like getting started developing absent themes going over all of our resources basically.

Heather: So it’s a really nice program to get involved with if you’re new or if you’re just like trying to take advantage of what other resources are available to 

Brent: you and do you see developers quickly being onboarded and getting up to speed. On BigCommerce 

Heather: I guess you could say it really depends.

Heather: So with BigCommerce, we have developers that are, like third party developers as far as everyone, is a third party developer, but we have freelancers, we also have like developers that work for our partner agencies, and so it really depends on their relationship. I would say as far as what type of onboarding they get, which is something that we are working on as far as onboarding just developers in a better way in general, no matter you know, who or we know what they’re with.

Heather: I would say our. Are our partners. They have I would say more visibility to the big Deb Bootcamp. So I’d say that is something that kind of sets that like those developers aside because if you are a partner, you have more visibility. You just know about it more. If you’re a freelance developer, you probably have to discover it in a little bit of a different way, which is possible, but it’s not as visible to you.

Heather: So I would say. as far as like resources, like big dev bootcamp, it is a little bit more accessible if you are a partner. But then everything else as far as our documentation and our communities, like those are all very open for any sort of developer. So no matter if you are just doing freelance or you working for an agency or one of our partners, then you have access to the community.

Heather: And with that you have, the community team and then also Dev Rail to just walk you through whatever you would. 

Brent: and I would imagine that the amount of BigCommerce developers is like an iceberg where there’s the ma vast majority that aren’t involved on the Slack channel.

Brent: And it would be great to get ’em all involved. Yes. . Yeah. So maybe a message out to all the agency. Heads to tell their developers that there’s this great place that you should join and absolutely get questions answered, right? I think that’s the main key about the Slack channel is that if you do have questions, there’s so many people in there that are so smart, then that can help you get those questions answered quickly.

Heather: I agree and if you are a partner listening to this podcast or this interview we are going to have our own spot on the partner newsletters, the agency and tech partner newsletters. So that’s new and keep a lookout for us. We’re hoping to keep coming monthly with new content and also always having that CTA where you can share with your development teams to have them join us in the developer community.

Heather: We would love to have all of you. 

Brent: So a, as we finish things out today if you have one like little nugget that you could give a developer who’s starting right now besides joining the Slack channel Yeah. What would you tell them? 

Heather: I would really tell them to take advantage of. Us. That would be me, that would be Katie, that would be Steven, our developer advocates.

Heather: And it’s not only through Slack. We are, you can meet us on Twitter, you can meet us at some events. You can meet us wherever LinkedIn, this podcast. If you are struggling and you’re maybe posting on Stack Overflow or in the help center, reach out to us like dms because we wanna get to know you and we wanna get to know like how we can.

Heather: Not only just you, but also just every other developer that might be going through like a similar experience as you. And we really want to talk and connect and we do. And so if you’re a developer and you’re not super into that, totally understand. I would say something that could help.

Heather: Ah, goodness. Reaching out really does the best, even if it’s like on a GitHub repo or something, just letting someone know. That’s really how we make our changes. Even product. If you comment on GitHub or if you submit an issue or anything like that, or reach out to us in some way, or even tweet at us or whatever it is reaching out does.

Heather: Really help us make it better. So if you can find a way to reach out to us in some way that is what I would 

Brent: recommend. Yeah. And there’s also a BigCommerce Twitter community space now. Yes. As well. So that’s another good place for people to join. And there is more people in that space than another platforms I’ve noticed recently.

Brent: So that’s good. It’s being used. Yes. would add that as a developer and I’m going to admit that I started as a developer a long time ago. It is sometimes hard to ask questions and reach out and you really wanna solve it yourself. But once you’ve once you’ve paired up with, if you find somebody who can really help you, and I know when I got started I found somebody could help me.

Brent: And I think I was on MSN Messenger way back in the day and man did they help me, and there was so much more that I could get through with a little bit of guidance and mentorship. That, I think that the big com, I know that the BigCommerce channels can offer you even better than stack overflow or something like that.

Brent: That gets your question. You ask questions that’ll get answered quickly. So I can’t advocate more for using that and taking advantage of that as a developer. And it’ll really launch your career as a developer and help you accelerate your learning and getting things done. And then I would also say play around in a sandbox environment and make some stuff.

Brent: Yeah, 

Heather: absolutely. I second everything that you say. I agree a hundred percent. I can’t agree more actually. 

Brent: Great. As we close out, Heather, they I give everybody a chance to do a shameless plug. Okay. What would you like to plug today? 

Heather: Goodness. I’ve been prepping for this question. I’m not sure I’m having a hard time threatening a shameless plug.

Heather: I’m not gonna lie, but I will say if you could invest in a. Reusable water bottle. You can take it to the airport, you can take it everywhere. If you could fill it up. I actually went to a place to eat not that long ago and I was like, Hey, can I just fill up my water bottle? And they’re like, Yeah, do it.

Heather: Of course. So definitely get yourself a reusable water bottle or a few. That’s my stainless plug, . 

Brent: Cool. Thank you so much. Heather Barr, the community development developer manager for BigCommerce thank you for being here today. Yes, thank you 

Heather: for having me.

Talk-Commerce Robert Rand Community

The Big Blue Wave with Robert Rand

What is a healthy ecosystem? Is it with a platform that only focuses on large enterprise clients like the fortune 500? Or is a healthy ecosystem around a broad base of commerce users that can mature and grow into a large company?

Robert Rand and Brent talk about the future of Magento Open source and what Adobe could do to help the community. We debate on the sliming of the core to add more features.

What do you think? We finish the episode talking about Shopware and the blue wave coming to the USA.

Let’s face it. It’s hard to build an ecosystem. We discuss what Shopware is doing to build its ecosystem and the resources they are putting into making this happen.

3 Reasons Why You Should Care About Email Segmentation

3 Reasons Why You Should Care About Email Segmentation

Email segmentation is not a new marketing technique. However, it has become an essential tool for businesses to target their customers with relevant and timely messages.

Talk-Commerce Jacob Anson

Segmentation is the key to your email success with Jacob Anson

If you want to grow your business and increase your profits, you need to learn how to segment your email lists effectively. In this Podcast, Jason Anson explains the best ways to segment your email lists and provides you with some of the best tools, tricks, and tactics for ensuring that every one of those subscribers is engaged.

Look for the Free Joke towards the end of the podcast. We learn that most people don’t understand Brent’s Jokes.

Check out my article on Segmentation in email marketing here

3 Reasons Why You Should Care About Email Segmentation
3 Reasons Why You Should Care About Email Segmentation

Transcript

Brent: Welcome to this episode of Talk Commerce. Today I have Jacob Anson, and Jacob is the co-founder of Agency JR. Jacob, go ahead and introduce yourself. Tell us what you’re doing day to day and maybe one of your passions in life. 

Jacob: Perfect. First of all, a pleasure to be here. So thank you for having me on. And yeah, quickly introduce myself.

Jacob: I’m the co-founder of Agency JR. We are an email marketing focused agency. I’m one of the two co-founders agency, and within my day to day, I’m mostly focused on the backend, like building out interest infrastructure, the systems, the processes, hiring, like all of the. Not so fun stuff as people say, but I love it.

Jacob: And in terms of some, what are things right now in this phase of my life, it’s mostly boric. I love it. It wouldn’t be that way. But outside of Boric, I guess there’s a bit of fitness and more of work. So fitness work. So that’s about all. 

Brent: Yeah, that’s, that sounds like my life. We won’t get into a lot of fitness right now.

Brent: We want to do it towards the end of the podcast. I could talk about running all day, but we won’t get, Let’s talk about email marketing and I know that that is something that you have a passion for. So tell us a little bit about some of the mistakes people make in email marketing.

Brent: Maybe we’ll start there. 

Jacob: Sure thing. Honestly, the biggest mistake is not doing email marketing. So let’s start there. But email marketing means it’s a broad term. There’s like a lot of verticals, a lot of niches that can use email marketing. But we see that a lot of them don’t use it or there’s not frequent use of it.

Jacob: For example, e-commerce even if you’re a small eCommerce store, you should be doing email marketing with email marketing is and can be very passive. Of course you can also, it can be very active, but you can do the bare minimum, set up some automations and it’s gonna be there and generate revenue while you sleep.

Jacob: And this also applies to any other kind of business out there, but it’s SaaS info product, whatever else that’s selling something. You need email marketing, even if they small scale. So that’s the mistake I see happening. But then to dive would be a bit more specific. So we, we ourselves are usually more eCommerce focused.

Jacob: We also have a couple of info or SaaS businesses as well, but than the eCommerce. Like the other mistake, which is a bit more specific would come down to campaigns. So campaigns, if you’re not too familiar with your marketing, are those one time email plus, for example, that in your Gmail. Those are like, for example, the Black Friday campaigns or like 4th of July sale campaigns and stuff like that.

Jacob: The mistake there usually comes down to the segmentation. So with your eCommerce shop, you have your customer list. Let’s say you have 10,000 customers, you have 10,000 emails. The mistake there is a lot of people think, Hey, I’m gonna get the best performance if we’re gonna take this whole list, these 10,000 people, and blast out an email to all of them.

Jacob: If you think about it in the first thought, it might seem logical because, hey, the more people see the email, the more people are gonna open email. The more sales I’m gonna get, maybe for the first email, yes. But if you continue doing that, they’re just gonna go into the negative spiral in your sales are eventually gonna go down to zero.

Jacob: Why? Because it all comes down to deliverability and list health. So first we’ll have to make sure that people you’re sending out. Actually wanna get your emails. If you’re onlay sending out everybody, a big chunk of the list usually is not engaged. You’re just ruining your del deliverability.

Jacob: And with deliverability, if you’re getting bad open rates, you’re gonna get even worse, open rates later down the road. So it’s important to segment your list. Target mostly to engage parts of the list, segment it and make sure you get, get good open rates as that’s gonna heap you open rates healthy. And then we’re gonna make sure your list stays healthy for a long time and you can extract more revenue and more profit out of it.

Brent: As you’re segmenting, is there specific engagements that you should look at? If a customer is highly engaged, Should you send them more or target it or I know that there’s a way of oversending, so if they’re over engaged, then eventually you’re going to Oversend and tell us some ideas around that.

Jacob: I’m gonna spill the beans of our agency strategy. Basically how we in inhouse do the segmentation. The first thing, it’s very simple. It’s very dumb down, so it’s easy to follow and easy to execute. So the first thing is the engaged customers.

Jacob: You can send them out more emails. So for example, within a month, if we send out 12 campaigns, Around eight to 10 of those campaigns are gonna go out, that Engage list, and that’s completely fine. And the engaged part of the list, it can be built out. We usually have three buckets. Engage 30, Engage 60, engage 90, and Engage 30 basically means someone who has opened or clicked. One of your emails within the last 30 days. Then of course the last 60 days, last 90 days. Those are the engagement tiers. Depending on your rates, which just basically choose one of those the open rates should, ideally for the campaigns be around 30%.

Jacob: If they use Engage 90 and see if it’s around 20% of, we might jump one tier down, test out, Engage 60, and see where at which of those stages it comes out to roughly 30%. And then rest of the campaigns. So for example, we send out nine campaigns to engage segment. The rest of those three campaigns, we can test all different parts the list to try to get them into the engaged parts, the list. So we usually like to do one re-engagement campaign a month. , which is focused specifically on the unengaged part, the list. So we take, all the people don’t open their emails and we send out one email specifically to them once a month just to try and reengage them.

Jacob: And then few emails usually are like smaller segments, a bit more specific segmentation. Might it be like a specific product upsell email or maybe like an announcement or whatever. Something with also like more specific segmentation. So that’s what we usually. Works like a charm. Easy to follow. 

Brent: Yeah, those are some very ironclad rules that they actually make a lot of sense.

Brent: So I would I think if there isn’t any listeners who aren’t paying attention, that would be one part that I certainly would implore people to pay attention to. How about the over engagement? Is there a point in which you can over engage? 

Jacob: Over engaging. Yeah, so like over engaging, like at least how I understand is like burning out the list.

Jacob: So if you have like 10,000 customers, let’s say half of them are like engaged customers opening up your emails, obviously they don’t wanna be over spammed and they don’t wanna receive two emails a day from you. Like the cadence of your campaigns also. Usually to make sure you, you’re not over spamming and over accentuating your list.

Jacob: We usually don’t go over 15 emails a month on regular months. Obviously all of that gets thrown out of indoor during q4. Then you can do what you want in terms of email frequency. But for like regular months, summer spring and so on, I would not go over 15 emails a month and that’s just gonna ensure you’re not over engaging or burning out your list essentially. 

Brent: Yeah. So I know you mentioned q4, so you’re talk a little bit about specific strategies for Q4 compared to the rest of the year. 

Jacob: Yeah. Within the eCommerce, so obviously Q4 is the most important part of the year. Hands down, that’s where all of the revenue profit was made.

Jacob: So within US agency and basically I think every other eCommerce through our agency, they take it very seriously. Like some of the key differences between Q4 and regular months, always these email frequency. If for example, during July, June, we’re sending out maybe 12 to 15 emails a month.

Jacob: During November, December, we’re sending up to 30 emails a month. So it comes down average one email a day. So that’s first thing. And the second thing is how you build out your sales structure. So here maybe also you can spill the beans of our agency tactics and strategies. So for Q4, what we usually like to do, we build out a specific sales cycle, sales calendar, if I can name it that way, and essentially how it’s structured is that we go through certain phases. The first phase, which you usually start around October, started October, is a re-engagement phase which usually lasts about two weeks and that during these two weeks, it is basically try to re-engage as much of the unengaged customers as we can to build up the engaged part of the list, which is gonna get spammed too during the next couple of weeks. Then the next phase is the warmup phase. So once we have reengage as many customers as we can, we really wanna nurture the engaged part, the list, build it up, warm it up. And we usually do that through value campaigns. We do that through educational campaigns.

Jacob: We do that through a very specific warmup campaign. Which is essentially focused on getting the customers respond to the email. So it maybe could be an email, like a text based email, Hey, respond to this customer. But yes, if you wanna stay in the loop for Black Friday emails and what this does, which is really cool if Gmail sees that somebody replies to you, they automatically

Jacob: flag or white list your domain. So like your, all your future emails are gonna go in the primary tab. So it’s like a small tactic to ensure your deliverability is very good for those customers. And obviously also value campaigns. Obviously you don’t wanna always sell to your customers. Give them some values, some tips so they know not just selling them.

Jacob: Build a relationship with them. And once we have warmed up the customer at the start of November, we usually go into a buildup phase, a hype phase where we try to get some early bird list signs for like early Black Friday deals and stuff like that. Really hype up the audience for Black Friday.

Jacob: Let them maybe tease some deals, maybe let them know about the Black Friday timeline and stuff like that. Really get them hyped up for the upcoming sales. And then obviously once the Black Friday week starts, then we usually have two to three email sends a. Like a main email resend up the same email, three non openers, and like a different email depending on how the offers are structured for the client.

Brent: I want to jump back to what you’re saying about sending a text to get him to respond to the email. Are you saying you’d send him an SMS text to do that? Or How do you mean? Can you just explain that a little bit? 

Jacob: Yeah, sure. Maybe I explained, maybe use the wrong word.

Jacob: So it’s an email, so it’s a text based email. So basically, actually this is a good talking point. So text, like in this case I’ll explain maybe this specifically and i’s talk about text based emails. I think that’s interesting as well. So like for the email, hold the warmup email, it is a text based email, so like an email you would send to your brand.

Jacob: It doesn’t contain any graphics. None of that. Basically usually sent out from a brand representative. It mentions something like that. Hey John we see within our list, et cetera, et cetera. In the next couple of weeks, we’ll have our Black Friday sale and we’ll really think you’re gonna enjoy the discounts, the offers, whatever.

Jacob: If you wanna stay in the loop and make sure you receive your emails or show you how excited you are for the deals, respond to this email. But for example, yes. And that’s basically just make sure the customer respond to that email. It’s something, it doesn’t matter, but what they respond, the most important thing is that they respond with something as that is gonna white list the domain and it’s gonna ensure that the future emails for them.

Jacob: Much, much more likely to land in the primary folder, which then is obviously gonna boost up the open range. 

Brent: Okay. Yeah, that makes sense. does it help to do social as well, to drive people to, Is there a way to use social to p get people to respond to emails? , 

Jacob: of course. This of course depends like how used is like social media for the specific brand.

Jacob: Some brands, they’re not that heavy in social media. For those, obviously, it doesn’t make sense to push people there if they’re not gonna do anything with. Those extra follows. But if the brand has like a good social media strategy, then of course we can push people from emails to sign up on social media to stay in the loop with what’s happening there.

Jacob: And obviously if the social media, females that takes care of the Black Friday and everything is synergized, then they’re just gonna be much more likely to stay in the loop because we are gonna remind them through emails. The social media team’s gonna remind. Through social media. So they’re constantly informed about what’s gonna be happening for that specific brand.

Jacob: So if the brand has good social media, then yes, of course. Good. 

Brent: All right. So tell, talk a little bit about some trends that there is in retention for marketing, for email, things like that. 

Jacob: Yeah, sure. Trend, So biggest strength I would honestly still see is SMS marketing. I think maybe it seems maybe the SMS marketing has gone by.

Jacob: SMS marketing was really hot a couple of months ago, may be a year ago, but that, that still is one of the biggest trends I see and let a lot of brands have not properly adapted to. There’s still a lot of brands lacking proper SMS marketing or SMS marketing at all, which I think is a very huge thing.

Jacob: But with SMS marketing, it doesn’t really matter how big or small you are, you can still set up like some initial things that are there that. Drive you extra revenue, extra profit. You don’t really have to worry about it that much. And then at a certain point, you can build out a team, hire an agency to do all of the active work there as well.

Jacob: But some of the other trends we see within the marketing world from our perspective is some more integrated things within, for example, marketing and Facebook ads. Like for example, some funnel build outs and basically just more synergistic marketing strategy. overall because for the last couple of years, like there’s email marketing, there’s Facebook ads, there’s marketing, but there was not a lot of connection between all of those channels together.

Jacob: Maybe even maybe more for, so for huge brands. For bigger brands. But right now I see a lot like, also like medium science brands to really have more synergistic marking strategies. Everything works together much more oiled .

Brent: Is there a difference between open rates on devices? I’ve heard that post iOS 14, that sometimes you may not be able to measure open rates on emails and that might skew some of your KPIs. 

Jacob: , Yeah. So with this, like I have slight slightly the front take on this, like obviously the tracking it is slightly off.

Jacob: So like each new change and adaptation in terms of iOS or like platform is, it’s gonna skew the data a bit. So like it’s gonna skew what we see that the effect of gonna see marketing is still gonna stay the same. If you don’t see maybe like the 10% less people, the emails, that’s what they see on our end.

Jacob: But then in the end, like how many people open up the emails is still gonna be the same amount. But of course if it can skew the data, it can also play around with the conversion data conversion tracking. Because sometimes, for example, some of the email softwares, they also use the open metric as the as one of the, within the conversion windows.

Jacob: So for example, if the open is falsely tracked, it can either not count a certain conversion to. For the email also count an extra conversion for email, if that makes sense. But with this, we have not seen a huge issue, like we mainly use Kavio. I think Klavio has done a smart thing to battle this. Not too technical about this, but I think one thing that they did, which is really smart, is that they noticed how Apple works.

Jacob: So here, nobody quote me on this, but if I understood correctly, So basically how it works when you send out an email to an iOS device or an email with an iOS privacy email once to send out email, there’s gonna be an auto open like within one second. Once you send out the email and Kavio just disregards that and they usually look for the second open.

Jacob: And the second open usually comes for the from the real person, or it maybe comes after five seconds that the, not immediately after the emails sent. So there are things that the. Platforms are doing also to battle this. So I’m not too worried about this, but of course it can play around and with the date and skew a couple of things.

Brent: Yeah, it’s interesting. I think that merchants aren’t gonna worry. Some bigger merchants should worry about this, but. It’s, the whole privacy thing has been such an interesting journey in the last year especially. Just talking about privacy from the US compared to Europe. Europe is much more restrictive on sending emails.

Brent: US has the same rules, but maybe not as well followed. Talk about the best way to grow your list, that’s legal.

Jacob: Good question. That’s legal . Yeah. So obviously Europe, gdpr like in terms of like list growth, generally the same tactics strategies are gonna apply both US and Europe. Within Europe, if you’re gonna be completely legal.

Jacob: Is it? Gonna be a bit less effective. But the best growth strategy for list is actually, is gonna be just driving more sales to your store. Focus on your customer acquisitions you like, your paid ads, Facebook ads, Google ads, whatever. Because most of your list, it’s still gonna come through the purchasers.

Jacob: So people that go to the checkout, if they purchase or don’t purchase, The big, biggest bulk of your list and the highest quality bulk, your list is gonna come directly through that. So that should always be your main focus email. Just basically thanks those customers and turns them into repeat purchases.

Jacob: But if you wanna focus on growing your list specifically, or implement different kind of funnels, which are email first, conversion second obviously popups are. , so have popups on your side as well but popups to give you some tips, some value, a big mistake. I see a lot of agencies, a lot of brands, , Maybe it’s not a mistake.

Jacob: Sometimes it can also be valuable, but most of the case, it’s not really wanted. It’s having popups at very short triggers at very short delays. So if there’s a brand within three seconds, if you’re landing on a brand page, you see a popup, it’s not a good thing for a couple of reasons.

Jacob: First of all, nobody can really make a purchasing decision in three seconds. So if you are three seconds, then you see a popup for 10%. What it’s gonna do, first of all, is gonna scare the customer base, gonna have a negative effect on your conversion rate. And second of all, for the customers that do end up buying, you’re just gonna give away 10% of your margin.

Jacob: Because nobody can really decide in three seconds, Hey, I’m gonna buy this product or not gonna buy this product. So that’s not the good thing. So what we usually recommend is having popups at longer delay. and that’s just gonna mostly focus on driving X revenue. Usually go around like 30 to 55 seconds as that’s what usually sees the average time spent on site.

Jacob: And that is maybe gonna be more cater towards undecided buyer. So maybe they’re still thinking about the product and hey, boom, there’s a 10% off discount and that just gets them over the edge. So that’s a. Better strategy there. And then some other things you can just run direct lead gen campaigns. So for example, for q4, what we are gonna be doing is running leg gen campaigns to, for the early bird list, we’re gonna have a landing page.

Jacob: We’re gonna have our clients basically run, pay that so their warm audience, that planning page, generate a bigger lead list so we can hype it up and push. More revenue through the q4 sales. So good. 

Brent: Yeah. I have an episode that is called Learn to Love Your Popup. So I would encourage listeners to go back and I can’t remember the guest right now, but it is learn to love the popup.

Brent: And I have to admit on my own Talk Commerce website, I need to get a popup rolling on there. Jacob, I’m gonna try something new with you today. Before we close out the podcast. Generally if you, if anybody listens to this they know that before every podcast, I give you a free joke.

Brent: So I wanna a free joke. There’s no obligation. You don’t have to laugh. In fact, I have a laugh track behind. But today I would like to try reading you the free joke and just getting your opinion on it. And I guess the reasoning is, should I charge for it or not? So let’s try it really quick. Ready?

Brent: Three men are on a boat. They have four cigarettes, but nothing to light them. So they throw a cigarette overboard and the whole boat becomes a cigarette lighter.

Jacob: I don’t think I get it right, , so 

Brent: I’ll read it. I’ll read it one more time. It might not think about what we call a cigarette lighter in the US It’s called a cigarette lighter to light cigarettes. I’ll read it one more time. 

Brent: Three men are on a boat, okay? They have four cigarettes, but nothing to light them with, so they throw a cigarette overboard and the whole boat becomes a cigarette lighter.

Jacob: Oh, gotcha. Okay. ? Yeah now I got it. Yes. It’s a smart board play, like the English jokes. They’re sometimes a bit, It’s okay. 

Brent: I completely, I side swiped you with this, so I apologize, but the opinion is should I continue to offer them for free or do you think I should charge for that type of joke?

Jacob: For charge for that type of joke? Good question. I don’t know. For me, It was hard to get. So maybe I’m too dumb. I would not, definitely not wanna pay for that kind of joke. So for now, maybe leave them for free and then later on maybe you can start charging them for them as well 

Brent: and charging.

Brent: That’s the joke. And I apologize, I have to explain all my jokes. In fact I spend a lot of time in Latin America and nobody gets my humor. So you’re not new. It’s completely normal.

Jacob: Okay, so charging is also part of the joke. Okay. I then I’m definitly out. No. Perfectly. Okay. 

Brent: I’m out the league. This is just the way, this is the way for me. I apologize. I appreciate you being a good sport on the joke. No worries. It was fun. No worries. Jacob, as we close out, I give everybody an opportunity to do a a shameless plug about anything you’d like to.

Brent: and a plug in English is a promotion about something you’d like to promote. And so if you’d like to promote, if you like to promote that jokes, I’m all for it. But you are welcome to promote anything you like to. 

Jacob: All right. Thank you for the opportunity. So yeah, in terms of the shameless, once plug, I think I’ll go with the agency.

Jacob: If you need email mar help with email marketing, whether you’re an e-com SaaS info you can check out Agency JR. So it’s agency jacob rains.com. You can check out their case studies what we’ve done and talk with us to see if we can help. And also for agency owners we’re always open for new partnerships.

Jacob: So whether we have an e-com, SaaS or info focused agency you can also reach out through us, through Agency JR and see if a partnership makes sense and. Always have good, and I’ll make sure 

Brent: I get the links from the show notes and they’ll be able to get in touch with you through that as well.

Brent: So Jacob Anson, the co-founder of Agency JR. Thank you so much for being here today. 

Jacob: Thank you for having me. It’s been a blast. Thank you.

Talk-Commerce Jen McFarland

Entrepreneurial Empathy with Jen McFarland

Will your employee go a little further when times are tough? Jen McFarland ( @jensmcfarland )talks about entrepreneurship, marketing, and living in Kazakhstan. Listen for the size 45 clown shoes. Are they European sizes, US sizes, or clown sizes?

Mentorship, empathy, marketing, and NOT being a hater! If you are an employer, this episode is for you if you are an employee, this episode is for you.

If there is one theme to hear throughout this podcast, it is this quote from Jen:
“Smart Women in tech leave because of bad management.”

https://www.linkedin.com/in/jensmcfarland

https://www.linkedin.com/company/epiphanycourses

https://www.epiphanycourses.com

Transcript

Brent: Welcome to talk commerce today. I have Jen McFarland coming from Oregon. Did I get that right? Jen, Oregon? Yep. Yep. Jen, go ahead and introduce yourself. Tell us a little bit about your day to day role and maybe one of your passions in 

Jen: life. Oh, wow. Hi my name’s Jen McFarland. I am a marketing coach, even though I don’t like using the word coach.

Jen: It just seems to be what people call me. I also do a lot of hands on work. My favorite thing to do in my role as a marketing agency is I work with the city of Portland’s economic development division through their inclusive business resource network and we help people of color with their marketing so that they can build their businesses.

Jen: And that’s one of my favorite things to do. I’m also passionate about travel. hang out with my friends. It’s lovely here in Portland, because right now it’s summer and I am not originally from here. So when the rain comes, that’s not really my favorite time 

Brent: and it never rains on, in, in the west coast, right in Portland.

Brent: It’s always bright and sunny, just like San Diego. 

Jen: That’s what I a lot of people get it wrong. See, it only rains once in Portland, it starts in October and it ends in late may. 

Brent: Oh, that’s better than starting in October and ending in September. 

Jen: well, that’s true. We’ve had that happen before though. That was summer was on a Tuesday and it was pretty fun.

Brent: Yes. I was in Duluth this weekend and summer’s done already there, so no 

Jen: way. I can’t okay. Checking that off the list. Not moving to Duluth. 

Brent: Yeah. Duluth is very lovely in the summer. So July some parts of August depends which way the wind is blowing. Off the lake or not. How all right. The only thing I know about Portland is Portlandia.

Brent: And so I know that you probably go to one of your local restaurants and get the name of the chicken that when you’re gonna sit down to eat, is that right?

Jen: They don’t always tell us the name of the chicken, but it’s, it’s 50 50, if you get the full lineage of the chicken. So yeah. Portland idea, totally accurate.

Jen: A hundred percent. 

Brent: all right. So Jen I know some of the topics we talked about in the green room were around certainly entrepreneurship, but how you went through the peace Corps and then got into entrepreneurship or how the peace Corps helped you get into it. Tell us a little bit about that.

Jen: Yeah. So I love travel. I am a unique person in that I did peace Corps with my husband. He also likes travel. So we went as more mid-career entrepreneurs. So we were both in our thirties and we, so when you go as a couple, you can’t go to as many places as a single person, they have to have a place for two people to live and all kinds of things.

Jen: So we went to Kazakhstan. It is it’s not like Borat he’s, supposedly from Kazakhstan. Kazakhstan is a country south of Russia. It’s the largest land locked country in the world. And people there are insanely nice. So nice to the point where. It would be considered kidnapping in this country.

Jen: So I was walking, we were teachers and I had a long walk back to the host family. This is when we were training and my husband was ahead of me and somebody saw, it was like, oh, the American is alone. I want my niece to talk to the American. So basically they’re like, come on in. And I’m like I have to get home.

Jen: It’s dinnertime. They bring me in and this, I was so inexperienced that I didn’t know how long this process would be and they start cooking and I’m like, oh no, I’m in deep trouble. I don’t have the phone number to get ahold of my husband, the person I’m supposed to talk to. Isn’t in the house. I don’t know any of these people, what is happening.

Jen: I think I was there for about two hours and about halfway in this woman, young woman comes in and sits down and I can understand enough Russian at that point to understand that this is the person I’m supposed to talk to you. And she speaks English. And that is how I met my best friend in Kazakhstan so we talked, it was awesome.

Jen: We left that training place and then we ended up moving back there and living there for a year and Rahan saw me and was just like, oh my gosh, it’s you? This is so great. And that’s how we met each other. But like in America, these are things that never happened. You’re not walking along the street and somebody’s Hey, come on in.

Jen: Talk to my niece. Like you would never stop. You would never do it. And so that’s how I learned that sometimes you can take these risks that just seem insane and crazy, and it turns out really good. So this was somebody who I was really close to for that time. I miss her all the time, even though I’ve been back for a long time.

Jen: And I think business is a lot like that. Sometimes you have to take that chance. You have to be like, is this for real? I don’t know if this is for real or not. And then you. Yeah, it’s cool. And you take that risk. You take the plunge and it works that way. It just works out. And that’s really what happened.

Jen: I would say then when you fast forward and I’m an executive at the city of Portland and I decide to leave, but I don’t really have a parachute really set for myself. I knew I wanted to have a business, but I hadn’t really set it up. And I was like it’s gonna work out. And it has, it’s just crazy sometimes how.

Jen: works that way. You have to have a certain degree of trust in order for it to really work out and Peace Corp was we loved peace Corp. It was super great. 

Brent: Yeah, that’s good. So the peace cor in Kazakhstan. Wow. I have I’ve and you lived there for a year. Tell when was this? When did you do this? 

Jen: We lived there for two years.

Jen: Two years. Okay. It was in the early two thousands and it’s cold. it’s really cold there. I would say that the weather is probably similar to Milwaukee Wisconsin, except there’s no central heating. I remember sitting next to, we had, I don’t know what you would call it. It was technically supposed to be a heater, but it was like these bare wires that would just heat up I don’t know.

Jen: It was so cold that I sat so close to it, that I set my pants on fire and I didn’t notice it for a minute and I. I was like, do you smell smoke? It was breakfast. And I was talking to my husband. He’s like something smells funny. And I looked and, but I was like, I also felt warm, so I wasn’t complaining and then I looked down and I.

Jen: oh, I just burned a hole in my pants. I like you just no, it it’s a different experience there because it’s very cold and very snowy and like the vitreous fluid in your eyes freezes, and so you’re blinking a lot and it, it’s just an interesting experience.

Jen: And then it’s like insanely hot in the summer. And I think Milwaukee’s kind of that where, Minneapolis is like that too. Except you have a lot of mosquitoes there compared to Kazakhstan. So it’s a lovely, wonderful place that nobody’s ever heard of. And it was just a wonderful experience and it was very hard and also awesome.

Jen: We only had running water, I think about. we would leave the tap opened, cuz we weren’t sure when the water was gonna come on and we would fill the bathtub and then use the water. We had a water distiller, so it would be clean and everything. So it was an interesting time, an interesting experience.

Jen: And I think that’s why, my husband and I have weathered COVID really well. I weather uncertainty a lot better. I think that’s. I think that’s why people call me a coach, even though I’m really a consultant. And I do a lot of hands on marketing for people. It’s because I have this really grounded oh, it’s gonna be okay.

Jen: And I think after you have some of these experiences, like I’ve had experiences at the enterprise level where like we melted down entire. Servers and everything came to a grinding halt, and we had to match data among like hundreds of thousands of people. And we’ve, and I’ve lived in countries where I didn’t have running water.

Jen: Like it just, everything always works out. And I think that grounded feeling I have about things is really because I’ve lived in places without any creature comforts, I’ve had all kinds of experiences and at the end of it, it’s great. Everything works out. Everything works out in the end. 

Brent: So two comments, number one, I’m sad to hear that you associate Minnesota with mosquitoes, which we have a state bird. It’s not the mosquito number two. I did spend a lot of time in the eighties watching the show, Laverski and Shirliova. It’s a Kazakhstan program about two ladies in a beer bottling plant that in nevermind.

Brent: It’s a, that’s a tie back to Milwaukee Laver, Shirley and Milwaukee. Yes. I know I’ll stop. So do you please, do you think there’s a special risk factor or no, maybe not risk, but there has to be something in you or. Something you can’t quite quantify to be able to leave your job as a public employee or a city employee, and just jump off and go for it.

Brent: Do you think there’s something that most people can’t quite identify with? 

Jen: I don’t know. I certainly had the golden handcuffs on if that’s what you mean, had every, I was paid I had. still have my retirement from there. Certainly if you know all of the security in the world, I don’t think I was actually gonna lose my job.

Jen: But it, I wasn’t happy. So I think that when you look at your life and you’re like, this isn’t really what I want. I, I don’t know. Some people will decide to. and be miserable. And I just, that, wasn’t what I wanted for myself. And I wanted something different. I also have the experience that when my dad was around 50, he was being worked to get to death at the state of Idaho and had a bad situation.

Jen: And he ended up having a heart attack. And I was like, I don’t wanna be like that. He didn’t want that. And so I think that as I, got into my forties, I was like, yeah, I Don. This is not the road. I know where this road can lead because I had seen it with my dad. And I was like, I don’t want that road.

Jen: And I have been so much happier since taking the risks since doing something. But certainly I would say a lot of people don’t do it because maybe they don’t have the same sense of adventure. They don’t have these experiences where they’re like, Yeah, I’m just gonna go move to Kazakhstan now, ha that’s crazy.

Jen: Most people that’s crazy. So I do think that there’s a part of me that is really adventurous and willing to take these chances and take chances on myself. And I would say certainly I’m the person who gets the LinkedIn email, the little messages and I’m like, is this real or not? And I’ll actually research things that don’t.

Jen: real. And then that’s how I ended up I had a film crew at my house earlier this year because they read one of my blog posts and they’re filming a documentary and they wanted me to be in it. And it was just a random request that came into LinkedIn, but I’m willing to take the risk that that could work out.

Jen: And it did, it was fun. It. Unique. Doesn’t happen every day that I have a film crew at my house. So I do think that we have these opportunities as entrepreneurs where we can either be like, oh God, I get so many LinkedIn requests all the time. I’m just gonna ignore all of them. I don’t even know these people.

Jen: And I’m that. Odd person. Who’s oh, is this looks neat. If this is real, then I’m gonna pursue it. And I think that we have these opportunities all the time in our lives, and we have that choice. We have the power to make the choice about how we’re going to navigate and proceed. Do 

Brent: you think it gets more difficult as you get older to make that decision?

Brent: And I’ll just back that up with, I started as an entrepreneur in college, I went to college for eight years and decided. I wanna do something different. So I dropped outta college sure. After eight years and I started a business. But I really didn’t know what I was doing or getting into at a younger age.

Brent: Sometimes you can jump into those things and it just happened, whatever that I got some traction and it worked, but some people as they get a little bit older might think I’ve got a career and I don’t know if I want to, chance on not having a paycheck. Do you think it’s more difficult as you get older?

Jen: I do. And I would say that, at the time I was leaving my executive role, that all played into it as okay how much runway do I have? The truth is I had more runway because I had more savings. had more experience it. It was a different runway than if I had decided to do it right outta college.

Jen: Like you, that would’ve been a disaster for me. I know who I was and where I was at that stage that would not have worked for me. It was also not on my roadmap. Peace Corps was a hundred percent on my roadmap coming outta college, having my own business. That was something that kind of simmered later on.

Jen: And I think that you have to have that entrepreneurial mindset, that entrepreneurial spirit, and I guess I had it all along. I just didn’t identify it as that ability. Be adventurous and take the plunge. I don’t think that’s for everybody. I don’t think that everybody feels that way about life.

Jen: about what they want for themselves. Everybody’s different. So I do think that those decisions become a lot harder because we have families, we have more complicated lives than we do out of college or when we’re younger, there’s just not as much complexity. Maybe we don’t have a house. I had all of these things I had to worry about.

Jen: We have a house, we have, I have a marriage. I can’t just run off and join the circus. I could, but there’s not really a lot of circuses anymore. Size 45 clown shoes in case anyone’s curious, but I can’t do that without talking to somebody. I can’t just run. And do whatever I want anymore. So I think sometimes we get lost in that complexity and we decide it’s just not worth it because there’s too many elements to work out.

Jen: So I think that can be a hard stop for people when there might be gold there. If you did take that plunge, if you did go out there and do something new. 

Brent: Yeah. I can think of so many, like be your own boss. Do your own business. There’s so many people like that are pushing franchises or something like that.

Brent: And I think there’s a distinction between taking somebody else’s dream and going with it and doing your own dream. Maybe it’s harder to do your own dream because especially as you said, as you go along, you have more entrenched things that you want to stick with. And part of it being an entrepreneur is being able to let some of those things go and embracing change.

Brent: Oh yeah. You had mentioned earlier about being an accidental entrepreneur. How do you, how would you relate to that?

Jen: I said earlier that I wasn’t gonna lose my job, but my job was very uncertain. It was a year to year deal where I had to wait for the budget to go through, there was a lot of uncertainty around that and I was really unhappy. I really, at one point thought that I would bounce around at different roles at the city.

Jen: And it became clear that this role I was in was that was where I was gonna be. And I. Like it. I created the job. I created the entire department. I had been doing a lot of projects. That’s really what I would do that was my role at the city was I would create new programs and places and policies, and I would move around a lot.

Jen: And I became clear that this is, this was it. This was the landing spot. And I was like, oh no, this is not interesting to me. as I was making this entire. role and crafting this program. I was like, wow, I wonder who’s gonna have to do this all the time. And then it turned out to be me and I was not happy. So what happened then is in life outside of my work, I had a friend who had their own business and I began to see how I could help other people in smaller roles in smaller businesses.

Jen: Where it wasn’t an enterprise large business situation. And I started to realize that some of the things that I took for granted and thought everybody knew they didn’t, about marketing, about technology, about how to get all the pieces to fit together. And so I started helping people as side hustle, is what people call it now.

Jen: And. from that experience. I was like, I could really do this. It wasn’t the intention. It was all by accident, helping somebody in need. And then it became another person and another person in the meantime, during the day, I’m in a role that I’m really unhappy with it’s budget season. Again, do I want to go through another.

Jen: Will I, or won’t I have a job, even though I think I will. The program, it’s been years now and it’s still running, so yes, I would’ve had a role. So it all happened. Like the kismet, like all of the things started happening and I was like yeah, it’s time to go. I need to go.

Jen: I wasn’t happy. There were a lot of reasons. so I took the plunge, but it wasn’t some grand master plan. I think a lot of times when people go into, should I have my own business or not, they’re looking for some sort of bright light that they run to, or all kinds of certainty and knowledge about how it’s all gonna turn out.

Jen: it’s not like that. it just doesn’t happen. I don’t think for a lot of people, maybe some people do have funding set up ahead of time, or they have banked a ton of clients. That’s certainly not what I was in when I decided this is what I’m gonna do. This is what I enjoy more. And there’s just a lot of factors that go into it.

Jen: So it was accidental. And it took a little bit of time to decide that this was what I was going to do. 

Brent: If you were to think between say the employer role and the employee role you talk a lot about how you’ve helped others as an employer, do you want to encourage your employees who you recognize could be good entrepreneurs to chase their dream?

Brent: So basically you’d lose them, but they would have their dream. Is that something you think as a good entrepreneur, you should be doing? 

Jen: Absolutely. My role in companies, when I go work there is to work myself out of a job. I’m not real big on the whole, have a retainer for life kind of deal. Like I like people to move on, get out of my nest and move on.

Jen: And I feel the same way about the people who work with me, who work for me. Part of what we’re doing is we’re fostering the growth of others. And in that we have to allow them to blossom and grow. And one of the reasons I feel that way is because that wasn’t something that was an option to me at several different points in my career.

Jen: So I don’t want to inhibit the growth of somebody else because I know what that feels like. 

Brent: I can remember people that have helped me and people that have hindered me in the past. And certainly maybe the ones that have helped me the most are the ones that are more confident in the abilities for them to succeed in their own roles, knowing that they’ve now fostered somebody to go out and chase their own dream. Is there any advice you could give an entrepreneur to help them, maybe it’s insecurity where somebody feels as though that they wanna retain this person for the rest of their lives.

Brent: And I’m not saying that it’s bad to have an employee who’s gonna be there for the rest of their lives, because there are people that simply want to be an employee that are not interested in being an entrepreneur. Not everybody is cut out for that. No, but I do feel as though. Some employers could be a hindrance to somebody’s upward career if they were to, I don’t know, a stranglehold or something 

Jen: well, I will say that I haven’t had as many mentors as other people have.

Jen: And I think that sometimes what happens is, and by mentor in this specific case, I know that you can have mentors that. Anywhere. But a work mentor, like somebody who was above me in an organization, mentor me and helped, find another role somewhere else. I work really hard. It’s one of the things that I do.

Jen: So I didn’t tend to attract mentors who wanted me to leave. So they wanted me to stay there because they knew. Whatever they needed, it was gonna get done because Jen would do it. And I can tell you, by the time I left the city, there were like four people doing what I was doing. Like I was taking on so much and I would just get it done.

Jen: That’s what I’m good at. I’m an implementer, get stuff done. I can say that just because somebody is working really hard. And I think that we’re seeing it now with the quiet quitting is what they’re calling it, where it’s basically people who have really good boundaries. And they’re saying, I’m gonna come in.

Jen: I’m gonna do exactly what you want me to do. I’m gonna leave on time. I’m gonna turn my phone off. I’m not gonna answer your. And people are really upset about it. And I’m like, why they’re finding that you’re gonna pay them the same, regardless of what they do. If they work extra or not, and they’re not interested and you’re not helping them grow because they wouldn’t be doing, if you’re doing it, if you were actually fostering a better relationship, For entrepreneurs.

Jen: Yes. It’s hard to have somebody leave. I get it. You don’t wanna have to train a new person. It means that you have to take on more for a while you find a new person, train them and get them to that next place. I will say though, that in the long run, you have to think about all of these things in the long game.

Jen: If you foster somebody and send them on their way, and you have a really good relationship with them, meaning they don’t quiet, quit. There’s not a big argument. And they leave . That is a partner that you have in the future. That you can be working with. This is somebody that you can join forces with maybe at a later date, but you are building a community of people who are going to sing your praises, their potential contractors later on down the road.

Jen: You don’t know where that’s gonna lead, but you do know where it’s gonna lead. If you burn somebody out and don’t help them grow, that never ends well. Never. 

Brent: It leads to resentment and things that aren’t happy. So on the on the flip side of that is the employee relationship.

Brent: We talked about the entrepreneur, the employee how as an employee, do you see ways that you can encourage your employer, maybe to have this fostering role rather than working you to death. And I do agree that now today’s new world that they want to have that time to themselves.

Brent: And the motivation to just work for the sake of work is not there anymore. 

Jen: That’s true. I think a lot of it is that the new younger generations. Relate to work differently. And I think that they get just as much done as anybody else. , it’s just how they do it looks differently. I have, I’m still seeking a mentor from, generation Z.

Jen: I wanna know exactly how people feel and very curious, because it’s not my generation, but I will tell you. . If you come into an organization, you have to understand that you are interviewing them as much as they are interviewing you. So that’s the first thing, right? You don’t go. You ask questions, you go in and you ask a lot of questions.

Jen: So you can be really clear about the role. You can be really clear about what the environment is like. You talk to other people who work there. That’s the starting point. If they pass over. Hurdle then the next hurdle is then you make it clear about your future goals. Like where is it that you see yourself going and you need to start having like conversations with the person you work for to help build those skills so that you can make it to the next place.

Jen: And I think that you will find people who are very open to that. You will also find a lot of people who are very, not open to that. And I think that. It really is about having those conversations early. It’s about meeting with your boss and talking through problems and solutions and what that career ladder can look like for you.

Jen: It does mean being brave and a little bit bold and. These things don’t happen overnight. and I know that we all want it. I remember when I was younger, I thought I knew everything. I thought that I should have this, and I should have that. Sometimes these things take time, not as long as your boss wants it to your the entrepreneur wants you around as long as possible.

Jen: So it. There is a little tension in that conversation, but I think it’s worthwhile for both parties to start really having these mentor mentee conversations, help building skills, because they’ll be a better employee up until they leave. Anyway, if you just open the doors and sometimes people will go, oh, there’s a lot.

Jen: I don’t know. And you might end up having them longer. The more, you open the curtain so they can see the mess of everybody’s business. Cause none of our businesses are perfect. You might actually find somebody who can help you in ways that you don’t know. If you start to give somebody more responsibility and teach them as much as possible.

Jen: And then as the employee you’ll wanna stay longer because you’ll see more and you’ll learn more than if you go elsewhere or if you go and embark on having your own business. 

Brent: I think. What you said earlier about burning bridges that applies even greater for the employee, because if you can leave on good terms yes.

Brent: And you can provide value to your previous boss. Now that boss becomes a conduit for you for your next job or your next role or whatever you’d like to do. What advice would you give to a a younger employee who’s trying to navigate learning how their boss is gonna react to, Hey my timeframe is 24 months and I’m gonna be leaving.

Brent: Right. some bosses are gonna say they’re gonna say to themselves, that’s great. I’m gonna look for a new person already, cuz I know in 24 months they’re gonna be gone or the boss may just come out and say, that’s not gonna work for me. There’s a certain amount of rapport that has to be there in the beginning.

Brent: But then there has to be. almost there has to be some not psychology, but there has to be some way to learn and feel out where each person lies without necessarily giving out your entire hand. 

Jen: Absolutely. This is about relationship building and a lot of what I believe in is honesty and transparency.

Jen: building those relationships over time. Now, as you begin to get to know your employer, , you might realize that they’re not interested in what it is that you want, and you may not be able to be all the way to look, I have a 24 month window here. Like you might not be able to share that part that might be too much for that person to handle.

Jen: So you need to. Feel it out. This takes time. You don’t know the person as well, as you think, particularly in the beginning when everybody’s on their best behavior, like things change and evolve over time. So certainly you have to be careful and strategic about it, but being honest, it, it really does pay off.

Jen: So you’re not just shocking somebody because that can be part of burning the bridge too, is if you’re just like, whoa, piece out and it’s over, you have to give, you have to have open communication. And that’s part of it is if Y and part of it can be covered in the interview process. If you’re getting a sense of, they don’t, they’re not really interested in having any sort of.

Jen: Mentorship type of relationship with you. If you are not getting the sense that this is a growth opportunity, that’s gonna be very telling and you have to be strategic about how you ask about those things as well. But it is something that I think you can feel out early on, and hopefully you can talk to other people who work there.

Jen: You can also look at things like Glassdoor and stuff to see what former employees say. It depends on how big an organization is. All of which to say, it’s not an overnight thing, no matter what, no matter how open somebody is, but you also have to take care of yourself. You can’t just stay somewhere because somebody needs you.

Brent: Do you think it’s a red flag as an employee that, if your boss clearly doesn’t care at all about you or your personal life, is that a red flag for you? You as an that’s a rhetorical question, isn’t it? I don’t even know why I asked it. I can say that as an employer, I’ve gotten much more aware of the fact that I need to know about my employees and there is a world outside of their job.

Brent: And simply asking some of those questions and being interested in what they’re doing helps you as an employer to build a better relationship with your employee. And it just does go vice versa. Is there anything that you can say to extract some of these things out of an employer as an employee?

Brent: I don’t think you can ever teach anybody to. I think somebody has to make that revelation themselves, as an entrepreneur, as an employer, if you’re narcissistic and you only see anything other than the end of your fingers, then you’re never gonna move past that point.

Brent: But there has to be some growth on both sides and as an employee, It is a delicate art to try to coax that out of people.

Jen: Absolutely. And I’m laughing because I worked for somebody who absolutely didn’t think anybody should be friends with people from work. And I will tell you that it wears on you after a while they’re talking about themselves and they have no care about what’s going on in your life.

Jen: I’ve worked for people like that. And I can. . I said, I worked hard and I do work hard, but after a while, you don’t wanna run into the fire with that person. If they don’t care about you, you will not run into the fire for that person. As the employee, you will go to a certain point and then you’ll be like, I’m done.

Jen: I’m out. This is hard. And because when it gets hard, you want to have somebody that is with you. and if you don’t care about anybody but yourself, and everybody’s just there to support you, but you don’t care if they like to go hiking or if they have a boyfriend or not like that’s, it’s gonna be game over sooner rather than later, because we all have lives.

Jen: We all have things outside of the business, outside of whatever it is that you’re expecting somebody else to do for you. 

Brent: Yeah, that’s a really good perspective. I make a point of in my day job, I make a point of interviewing or at least talking to everybody every quarter.

Brent: And I think it’s about 65 people that I do my best to talk to every quarter. Yeah. And I’ve gotten to the point of saying, are you happy? At least, I’m trying to build a relationship and I’m trying to learn more about. But I think that’s a good question. Do you think that I would go with you into the fire to take something out?

Brent: That’s a hard question to ask cuz they may not answer it truthfully and you don’t wanna say, would you come with me? Cuz of course they’re gonna, yeah, of course they’ll come with you. But that’s not the real answer either. You wanna somehow build that? As the employer, you wanna support your employee. You don’t wanna force their support on you. You would like them to support you because they enjoy their job. And they would like to continue on and build this momentum that you have as a relationship. And as an employee, employer, you don’t wanna say you have to run in there with this, into the fire regardless.

Brent: You would like it to be voluntary. . 

Jen: Yeah, okay. So this is an eCommerce podcast. We haven’t talked about that this is marketing people don’t buy from you unless there’s no and trust they’re buying in to what it is that you are selling. So as a leader, why isn’t it the same thing?

Jen: Why is it that we expect people to just do it? Because I’m paying you, they’ll go with you because you’re paying them. I’m talking about will they go a little bit further when times are tough? When things go sideways, are you nice mistakes happen? It, there are all of these opportunities that you have to really build that relationship so that your employees know can trust you.

Jen: And when things go bad, cuz they always go bad. Nothing’s perfect that they will say, yep, I’m here for you. I’ll stay late. I’ll do what it takes. Let’s make this happen. Let’s make the magic, let’s turn this around. And that’s really what it comes down to. It. It is that you have to build those relationships in the same way that you would with a customer who’s paying you.

Jen: It’s a two way street. And I think oftentimes as employers, it can be forgotten because we have so many things to do, but it’s really important to surround yourself with the people who are. going to support you, who are gonna help you and who are going to help you bring the people in that you need to keep the thing going.

Jen: And you have to look at that holistically. And if you can’t do that and people are leaving, sometimes that’s a you problem. It’s not always that everybody there’s that nobody wants to work. It’s that’s not always the answer. It’s that? You’re not providing a safe community for people to work in. 

Brent: I’m just gonna write that down safe community to work in.

Brent: That’s a good one. You, I would like to talk about let’s I would like to talk about your podcast. So women conquer business. Yeah, can we, and we were gonna talk about marketing too, but now we’re already at, we’re already at 38 minutes. I know. Do you want to take a little bit of time and talk 

Jen: about that?

Jen: Sure. So yesterday we recorded our hundred and 50th episode. I’ve been a podcaster since 2018. I will say that I’ve had probably four or five shows in that time. I used to do. interviews don’t do interviews anymore. I used to talk about all different types of things. Now we just talk about marketing it’s I think that over four years you change a lot as an entrepreneur.

Jen: What you talk about changes. and certainly the show is a reflection of that. So now what we’re doing are marketing howtos. So I help people understand concepts that can be somewhat challenging and drill into the essentials. I think yesterday we talked about course platforms and how to find a good course platform if you’re just getting started with online courses.

Jen: So a lot of my bread and butter. would be, if a CMO was, somebody came and said, we wanna do this thing. And you’re like, I don’t really know what that is. I can talk people through what something is and help them. And that’s really what the podcast is about is if you wanna do X here’s, how you get started or, and it can be at different levels of complexity.

Jen: So that’s really the bread and butter, and that is. And one of the opportunities. So when I was talking about opportunities, one of the opportunities I had really early with my podcast, I was approached by an organization I’d never heard of. And they said, we really like what you’re doing. Can we repurpose your show and pay you?

Jen: I was like okay, is this for real? I don’t even never even heard of you. So a lot of early solo shows have been repurposed and sold on another platform. I retained the rights and. that is how my new business epiphany courses was born. Like I have a lot, even though I don’t work at enterprise all the time, a lot of my content that I create and share is sold to enterprise companies as part of an eLearning platform.

Jen: And that is the baseline for epiphany courses because we know that all of that information and that content has been vetted. And is very popular among you. Fortune 500 fortune, 100 companies that are consuming it on this other learning platform. So we’ve started making a learning platform for small business owners where they can also learn in this container and get that information and then supply a community for people to talk through it.

Jen: So that’s really the essence of what I do around the podcast. They’re really these lessons. That then get repurposed elsewhere that then we turn around and make courses around. It’s an interesting concept. I never thought that what I do would evolve in this way. I think that when I started my business, if somebody had said you’re really gonna be into creating content.

Jen: I would’ve been like, I don’t even know what that. I didn’t, it was never on my radar, but as you can tell, I like to talk. So it seems to be working out for me. 

Brent: Yeah. I think that’s such a great way to look at marketing as well is repurposing content. And I now, there’s this content driven eCommerce and everything is around.

Brent: eCommerce and even no UX eCommerce, where it is all about a conversation. You’re gonna talk to somebody in WhatsApp and they’re gonna place the order for you or whatever. I think that you’ve taken the opportunity. You’ve taken that risk and that challenge and. Stepped up on it.

Brent: So one of the things that I’m on the entrepreneurs organization board here in Minneapolis, and I’m on the DEI diversity committee. Yeah. And we in Minneapolis, we’re not incredibly diverse. And in, even in the entrepreneur C. I think we’re 15% women and 85% men.

Brent: So if the math is right, is there a particular struggle that women, this is a rhetorical, I’m sorry, I don’t know how to phrase this, but , I know that there’s struggle in, in people that aren’t white, bald males to break into the entrepreneurial community.

Brent: Through all kinds of factors. . Do you talk about that, those struggles in your podcast? 

Jen: I did. I talked about that a lot early on as a woman in tech at a large organization, meaning the city of Portland. I experienced a lot. I had a lot of days where I felt like I should just walk in with a helmet on, I had people.

Jen: Call me, Jenny, like as a way, a very pejorative way of little girl I’m gonna pat you on the head and stuff. So it was . I dealt with a lot, and I have a bank of content that really talks through some of those struggles and how to get through it. And all of that.

Jen: I think that a lot. what I have learned is, if you go to my website, I there’s nowhere on here where I’m saying I’m gonna empower you because empowerment comes from within. If you even look at like the definition of it. So the truth is we can talk about it a lot, and I’m glad to talk to people about the struggles of women in entrepreneurship.

Jen: Certainly, I would invite that and also. we just have to put on our helmet and go in and do it. Anyway. I was at a networking event once they brought me in to speak. It was a small group. I was my friend who invited me and I were the only women. There was a man sitting next to me. I handed out my business card and I saw him playing with it the whole time.

Jen: He, I hate to say it, he was a bald white guy. So no offense to bald white guys. I. Including you, Brent. He was playing with it and all kinds of stuff, and we got to the end and he was like, I just, I gotta tell you, I’m never gonna send anybody to you because of your business name, women conquer business.

Jen: And I was like, okay. And I was really taken aback. And in the moment, I didn’t know what to say. I was like, really, I had just spoken. as you can tell, I’m fairly friendly. There’s not a lot here to really be angry about, I didn’t think. And I got home and I was like, you know what?

Jen: That’s really good marketing, cuz I didn’t really like that guy either. So if he doesn’t wanna work with me, like that’s an example of good marketing. And I think that women have to find those corners where we fit and people are willing to help us because there certainly are corners where people.

Jen: Aren’t. And I think though, that’s also the case with men. I think that’s the case in the transgender community. I think that this is fairly universal. It’s just that for women, there are a lot more corners where we don’t fit. And I think that really stunts the growth a lot is that, and so when we talk about, we’ve talked a lot about mentorship.

Jen: I do think that sometimes as women, we. men to be our mentors. They need to come and they need to say look this, Jen’s really cool. Like she knows what she’s talking about. Let’s how can we support you? I think that’s part of it. I think also as women, we need to say, you know what, a lot of people don’t like us, they’re gonna hurt her feelings.

Jen: Oh when we just have to keep going. So I think that it’s really hard and it’s difficult and. Over time. I have really strengthened my own helmet, to where I just don’t care as much. about, I don’t focus on the people who don’t like me anymore, because I have a hater every time I put something on YouTube, there’s one person that dislikes it.

Jen: I’m like. What it’s just, and I think it’s the same thing. Like they just, maybe I said something one time and I’m like, I could focus on that one person, but then I’m ignoring all the people who I could be helping. And I’m ignoring all the people who like me, if I just focus on the one hater.

Jen: And I think that as women, it’s a lot easier sometimes for us to absorb that criticism and focus on that when the truth is we have to focus on. all of the other people who are helped by us who want to help us. And I think there’s a lot more of that than the other. 

Brent: Yeah. I think a good lesson for every, a male, whether they have hair or not is empathy.

Brent: Because if as an example, that person that made that judgment based specifically on a name that maybe they lack some empathy, but if you have empathy and you put your, if you could put yourself in somebody else’s shoes and I run for a team called mile in my shoes where you’re running with people in homeless and people coming out of prison, that if you could put yourself in their shoes for a mile.

Brent: You can empathize with them. And I think there’s a tieback as being a good employer to have empathy for your employees because they’re going through their own struggles and you can’t thrust upon them your own. Like I can’t thrust upon. Anybody my own things without having some buy in from the other side.

Brent: So I’m trying to navigate the whole subject. And I believe that talking about it is better than not talking about it. I agree. 

Jen: And I think that there has to be some realities out there and, may speak to the male listeners for just a minute.

Jen: It’s easy to say we’ve made so much progress. That’s not really a problem anymore. The gendered issues, the differences in pay, so many things that are going on. And yet I can tell you that I’ll go out on Quora. And there are like executives from Google who are like women don’t like tech, so they don’t need to have jobs in tech cuz they don’t like it.

Jen: The truth is we leave smart women in tech leave because of bad management. because we’re smart. we don’t wanna put up with it. So we are interested. We’re interested in everything. We are smart. We’re capable. We can do all of those things. We’re not there yet. We still need. empathy and we need compassion.

Jen: And just like you do, I think men need it too. I think that those are the things that we need to realize is yes, we’ve made so much incredible progress and things are looking so much better for women and people of color. And we don’t have equity yet. We’re not there yet. So we just need to have that compassion for each other and build those relationships and we’ll go a long.

Brent: Yeah. So I, we are running up against the clock and I feel like we need to have a follow up conversation about marketing specifically. We’ve talked about a lot of great topics and I thank you. I know we talked earlier about my free joke project and I don’t want to, I this is a terrible segue, but let’s just talk about the fact that. My free jokes land very poorly. And you had a much better joke with the size 47 or 45 clown shoes. cuz I said 17 and I was just thinking American sizes, but you said 45? Yeah. And you weren’t thinking European, you were thinking clown sizes. That’s even better.

Brent: I appreciate that. And you caught me off guard so I’m gonna tell you a joke. And the goal from the joke is just to know if I can charge for it or if it should remain free. okay. All right. 

Brent: What did the tectonic plate say when it bumped into another, sorry. My fault.

Jen: I do like that. 

Brent: I have one more. 

Brent: My doctor says I’ve developed a German sausage phobia. I fear the wurst. Oh. I know that was just a, that was a free one. That’s a free one. The first one, I think the first one should it be chargeable or not? Yes, it should be. Wow.

Brent: All right. Yeah, I’ll 

Jen: give that an a plus. They’re both great, but I love dad jokes, 

Brent: all right, good. Jen at the end of every podcast, I give my guests an opportunity to do a shameless plug about anything you’d like, what would you like to plug. 

Jen: I would like to talk about epiphany courses. This is our new project.

Jen: It’s at epiphany courses.com. It’s a course platform and a community where we talk about marketing and we’re focusing on service based businesses in particular people who are coaches, consultants, all types. I have acupuncturists, I have intuitive coaches in there. all different types of people who are building all types of service based businesses.

Jen: And we talk. marketing and how to build your marketing platform. How to we answer questions. We have some mini courses, our bread and butter are courses that are under an hour. Hence epiphany. We wanna give people in as brief amount of time as possible, all the information that they need so they can make a decision about whether or not it’s even a viable marketing tactic for their business.

Jen: And that’s all at epiphany courses. 

Brent: All right. And I will put those I’ll put the links in the show notes and and what’s the best way to get in touch 

with 

Jen: you. Oh, I’m all over social media, but yeah, you can find me at LinkedIn on LinkedIn, Jen McFarland on LinkedIn. And then also through my 

Brent: websites.

Brent: All right. Thank you, Jen. Thanks so much. And I’ve enjoyed this conversation. 

Jen: Thank you.

Talk-Commerce Danielle Asah

Becoming Your Dream Self with Danielle Asah

Sometimes young people need a boost to overcome certain challenges that might be stopping them from achieving their dreams. We interview Danielle Asah, the CEO and founder of Day Dreams, a digital marketing agency that helps visionary entrepreneurs and professionals amplify their messages and build their brands.

Danielle coaches aspiring writers to publish non-fiction books and has a book entitled Becoming your Dream Self, Seven Keys to Own and Control your Life as a Millennial.

She is part of an NGO in the United Kingdom whose goal is to motivate people to follow their hearts and make a positive difference in the world via their own unique actions.

Transcript

Brent: Welcome to this episode of Talk Commerce coming from Cameroon west Africa. Today, I have Danielle Asah. Danielle, go ahead. Introduce yourself. Tell us what you do on a day to day basis and maybe one of your passions in life.

Danielle: Thank you so much, Brent, for having me on it’s actually an honor to be here today. yeah I’m an author, I’m a marketer and I’m the CEO one founder of Day Dreams, a digital marketing agency that helps, visionary entrepreneurs and professionals amplify their messages, build their brands and drive mores to social media.

Danielle: And for over six years now, I’ve lazed a unique path, which is that of digital marketing. And my pursuit of new and challenging opportunities led me to become a developmental editor where I have aspiring artists to write and publish their books like nonfiction book in less than six months. And in addition, I’m a member and associate director of World Game Changers.

Danielle: This is an NGO in the United Kingdom whose goal is to motivate people, to follow their heart and make a positive difference in the world via their own unique actions. I am passionate about two things. First of all, I’m passionate about helping being visionary entrepreneurs and professionals.

Danielle: And secondly, I’m passionate about helping being young millennial to overcome certain challenges that might be stopping them from becoming their dream self or achieving their dreams, which is also the reason why I wrote a book entitled becoming your dream self seven keys to own and control your life as a millennial. 

Danielle: Thank you so much. 

Brent: One of the things that you do is branding, but it sounds like you do a whole lot more of that. Can we talk about the world game changer? That you’re part of a little bit it sounds like a fantastic program and you’re helping young people and a young entrepreneurs break in into entrepreneurship.

Brent: Tell us a little bit about that. 

Danielle: Yeah, the world game changer is is an organization in the United Kingdom, as I said, and we are just a group of people all over the world in all the continents in the world where we generally come together and talk about certain issues about how to improve maybe the product of living, how to make people follow their own path and their dreams and the little change we could.

Danielle: To actually impact our own people in the community where we live. So talking about the young millennials it’s actually a passion because I grew up, I remember 10 years ago, that was in 2012. I almost dropped out of school, like of college because my parents did not have money to send me to the univers.

Danielle: But I had this passion. I wanted to be an entrepreneur. So at that very level, I was forced to become an entrepreneur, and I also went after graduating from college, I went to the university, while some of my friends were taking some vacation. I was actually working to save money to consequently to achieve to go to the university to be able to pay for my school fees.

Danielle: and definitely, this also led me to working in different companies like doing some certain activities like those door sales working as the marketing agent in the building and construction company. And later on I actually learned about entrepreneurship when I a very young age and growing up and starting my own business.

Danielle: And also this also taught me something great. And I just had this passion of hurting other young people around me because I know, especially in Africa where I we have a lot of young people who are still confused even after their graduation from college are still very confused about what to do. They don’t actually know about what their passion is.

Danielle: So I’m actually that person, I’m that person that would like to help them to find their purpose, to embark on that particular journey and help them to achieve their. Through some of the training program I used to give online, like I train these millennials on spec, specifically digital marketing skills, which I’m more specialized in.

Danielle: It’s been amazing so far. Like I’ve heard so many people and even the people that I work with in the team, they are all millennials. Cause I just find passion helping working with them so that we can mutually help us serve and grow together. 

Brent: Do you think there’s a disconnect between the way older people think like myself and millennials would think in terms of how are they gonna get into the job market?

Brent: And even as an entrepreneur how you want to portray yourself to let people know what you’re doing and how you’re gonna break into the job market?

Danielle: I think, yeah, I think there’s actually that difference when it comes to young people, because, and I would say that it depends on the, like the community where we grew up, like the situation in my country and in the Western world is quite different. I remember one year ago I met someone on LinkedIn, a guy, I think he’s 18 years old. He was in the US. And he has found out his company since ever since he was 18 years. So I was like, wow, this is great. But it’s actually a big challenge in Africa and in my country Cameroon because we have most of us are just focused on going to school.

Danielle: They just wanna acquire a certificate, but actually they don’t think about a career after education, which is some of the things when I have an opportunity to empower young people and to teach them that you have to not only focus on going to school, but definitely you have to think about in life after education.

Danielle: So I think there is that difference. Cause young people, they feel like, okay they still have time. I remember high spoke with a father, like he’s about 70 years in mine and he told me that There’s one thing that young people have, which old people don’t have, which is time. And I really agree with him when you are young, you feel like you have all of the time on earth to do whatsoever, but when you are much older, you don’t have time.

Danielle: I’m sure like you, you have a very busy schedule. You need to schedule time for everything so it’s the same. We have time, the young people, they have time. So it’s important. As they have the time to develop their skills. But when you come much older, you have many responsibilities and we needed time. 

Brent: Yeah. I think there’s one more thing that older people don’t have that young people have and that’s hair. That’s a small joke about my haircut, but let’s keep moving. So I think that you’re helping young people build their personal brand. Tell us some of what you’re doing to help them on branding and personal branding, I should say.

Brent: And why that’s so important right now.

Danielle: Yeah, that bread. That’s a very interesting question because I can try to share my journey about how I got into building my brand. Even getting in contact with you, getting noticed by you, like with getting noticed by a top leader, like you.

Danielle: It all started in 2018 upon my graduation from university, I had my master’s degree and I was still confused. I didn’t even know what to do, but I knew that I had a passion in digital marketing. So I started taking some online courses, taking some certification program and also getting an internship.

Danielle: Or a job in a digital marketing company. So after this I was looking for a job in a company by then. I was less experienced. I didn’t I didn’t have any visibility. No one knew about me. And at that time I remember I was in 2019. I applied for a job after I have optimized my Linkedin profile.

Danielle: I applied for a. In a company like a digital marketing company in Germany. So it was an online job. And I remember the guy told me that he rejected my application from, because he said I was less experienced. And I couldn’t learn the job. So I tried to convince the guy like I’m ex I, even though I don’t have the experience I’m willing and I’m really zealous about learning this thing.

Danielle: And he was like, no you’re not the right fit for this job. And I said, okay. So can you just imagine that after one year of consistently building my brand later on, I got contacted by this same person and this same company. And he never wanted me because the first time he wanted me to be an intern is in, in his company.

Danielle: So the second time he wanted me to be the co-founder of his same organization. For me, that was a that was a big win. I like, I began to feel like, okay, this I have, I’ve been able to build my brand. So that is just to show the importance of building a brand. First of all, I want to say what personal branding I want to give a brief definition of what a personal branding is because people get confused about it. And I would say it’s about like developing a clear and an authentic image of in the mind of your targeted audience or targeted clients in order to achieve a specific goal. And the first thing is you have certainly heard about this code does says marketing is about yeah, marketing is about asking someone out on a date and branding is a reason for them to say yes

Danielle: Yeah. So definitely it, personal branding is a process of is a process of positioning yourself as an authority in your. As an influenza as it means it’s actually standing out from the crowd because there are 100,000 people just like you out there. So what makes a difference between you and that person is actually the brand.

Danielle: What makes you to be visible, to learn, be recognized as a top leader is the personal branding. And when it comes to personal branding, it’s about highlighting your strengths, your beliefs, your competency, and establishing that reputation and trust and communicating your unique value.

Brent: One question I have about the personal branding for anybody, but I think it’s more for younger people that they want to have this persona that is for their friends, that they’re going out and partying and they’re having a great time.

Brent: And then they want to have a business persona that they would like to give people as well. How do you advise people or younger people, especially to make sure. maybe on LinkedIn, they’re gonna have all business persona and then some other social media platform. They’re gonna have a, more of a fun personal persona, but sometimes in the past, people have gotten into trouble because they’ve posted too many things, maybe on Facebook or YouTube, that there are some mixing with your different personas on different social platforms.

Brent: And do you advise younger people? When they’re doing that branding that they don’t put too much out there on social, or they have one persona that’s one thing. And the other persona is another thing, but be careful how you portray them. 

Danielle: One thing I would say is that I think that’s a great question because definitely when it comes to young people only knows we have, they actually don’t overthink about what they post online.

Danielle: So they just go on and share. But definitely what you share is visible to everyone. I remember there was last year, I was invited to a show where I had about 50 people and I asked them who have ever Googled his name. And I remember out of the way, young people and out of. 50. I had just one person that said he has ever Googled his name.

Danielle: And there is one thing we ought also know, like when you Google your name, what pop up is exactly what the other people see. And I can imagine that for young people, their goals can maybe starting their business, as you said, and, or maybe learning a job in a serious or big corporation or company.

Danielle: Whatever you post online, whatever you share, you have to know that it’s all visible to everyone. And those exact same thing is what your target audience or recruiters. They will see what they Google your name. So personal branding here is about controlling or managing the narrative or the messages that are about you.

Danielle: And it has to do with what you post. And the first thing that you need to act yourself is what do I want to be known for? What do I people to know me for and start creating message that is in mind with that message that you want to communicate or what you want to communicate out there. It’s very important because whatever you put out there, other people are seeing it and it can either, it, that would determine whether someone should trust you, whether that someone should collaborate with you or whether someone should do business with you or not. And there is this great said Gordon. He once said, when people love you, they will listen to you. But when they trust you, they will do business with you.

Danielle: So it’s all about building that credibility and trust. because you want to collaborate and do business with people and you have to be serious about the messages that you are putting out there because it has a lot to play in there. 

Brent: And when somebody does post something, it is out there forever.

Brent: Some even sometimes if you delete it, somebody may have captured it. And so that posting is there indefinitely. So it is a good advice to say make sure what you’re posting and think about it. And and don’t post things that are going to well, it’s hard for a younger person to know what’s gonna be a problem for them in the future, but think about what you’re doing.

Brent: I myself post and think about how do I wanna be perceived? And I try to stay away from some of the controversial things. Also in the controversial things, it does raise questions and it helps to push boundaries and it helps to talk about some of those important topics.

Brent: There is important things around that. Exactly. Is personal branding for everybody. Do you think that everybody should have some thought about 

Danielle: this? We have all been sold on the idea that personal branding is just. influencers, it’s just for big corporations or top topnotch leaders, or I don’t know celebrities, but it’s, actually’s very wrong because I’m personal branding is for everyone.

Danielle: Everyone that wanted to stand out is for everyone. Now we need to, there is alight daily. She said we often think that branding is just for, it’s just done for large corporation, but it’s actually, has everyone has a personal brand, and brand, we need to keep in mind that you can actually begin developing your personal brand.

Danielle: The point in your career, regardless of whether you are successful, whether you are wealthy or whether you are well established as a business or not. So whatever you stage in life, you can definitely start building your brand. And I would tell you’ve been successful or having the skills does not automatically make you to stand out.

Danielle: because, like I said, there are 1000 people just like you, there are thousand people like like person thousand, like thousand personal brands, specialists, or professional out there. Now what makes a difference between you and the other one is personal branding, is building your brand consistently.

Danielle: And I would say no one else is the same match like you or combination or no one has the same exact combination of your skills and expertise like you. Personal brand is about demonstrating, trying to put out your personality or your professional and personal abilities, your skills, your experiences.

Danielle: And you have to know that we have the social media platform. I will not say it’s the only way to actually build your brand, but it’s one of the major things you can use in order to view your brand online. And so just to conclude, I’ll say neither fame no worlds will actually make you to pan out as an authority or to be noticed in your niche, but just try to stand out, just try to stand out by building your brand.

Brent: What advice do you give people to help them stand out? 

Danielle: Yeah. When it comes to standing out our, first of all, say there is only one view and building, building a personnel brand is like creating a unique you. And in addition to that, building a person that brand requires just more than just creating.

Danielle: Some quality content, building relationship with colleagues and friends. It requires more than that. So when it comes to personal branding, I would say the first thing to do is first of all, craft a brand vision which is similar to a statement generally the like classic way or the classic example here is I have eight Z Y.

Danielle: like me, I would say I help entrepreneurs and professional build their brands with growth marketing strategies. So leadership begins because of all communicating your why, when it comes to you have to start cause all by communicating your why we, you know, of this popular author Simon Sinek, he said start always start with your why

Danielle: and he say, people don’t buy because people don’t buy what you sell, but people buy people buy why you do it. that’s quite amazing. So once you craft your brand vision, you can decide what you want to be known for, which I already explain. And the next thing developing a consistent message, which you’ll be sharing and communicating on your different social media.

Danielle: Your logos, your brand colors, everything has to be in sync, right? They have to know you for your brand colors. For the message you share and maintaining that consistency and also be genuine and authentic, it’s really easy to identify who is fake. You need to be true to yourself, true to other people.

Danielle: And be honest, don’t try to be like anyone else. When it comes to brand building, be yourself. Try to be unique. Try to be genuine. Then we can also do like building or social media presence, build your social media presence. It can be establishing a LinkedIn setting up your different social media profile.

Danielle: and account like on LinkedIn setting up and optimizing your LinkedIn profile. Cause this starts from there. One thing I do with my client most of the time is making your LinkedIn profile look like a landing page. Like when I went to your LinkedIn profile, I was able to find out about you because LinkedIn is the biggest platform for professional.

Danielle: And it’s both the personal and professional representation of who you are. So definitely you want someone to get into your LinkedIn profile and be able to find exactly what you do and how you can help them. And and also I want to insist on being consistent, like when you are sharing content online, you need to stay consistent because that’s what will make people to actually remember about you.

Danielle: Because there are 100,000 people just like you, you wanna break through that noise. So stay consistent and people will admire you for that. When you want to build a brand, those are some of the steps by step process you can actually take in order to build a powerful brand online

Brent: Being consistent and then being engaging as well. I think for your social media, especially if you’re just posting and never responding. Then people just think that you’re a bot or you’re just not listening to them. Yeah. Because part of that is the message you’re putting out. But part of that too, is knowing and listening to what people are saying to you.

Brent: And if they have a specific question, knowing that you should respond to them. And I think on LinkedIn, if you’re frequently posting, but never responding, then people stop listening to you because they know you’re just posting and not listening 

Danielle: back. Exactly. So people generally want to make sure that you care about them.

Danielle: And if they ask the question, you have to be capable of responding and also engaging like you, you care about them engaging on other people’s profiles, who are the people you want to reach out to. And when I think when I talk about posting on them, it’s about adding value. It’s not about selling. Most of the times you hardly see me selling, like on my profile, I don’t sell because people are there.

Danielle: When someone can actually see that he can help him solve a particular problem, he’ll reach out to you for help. So what I do generally is normally they say we need to apply the 80 20 rules when it comes to content posting content online. 80% of your post should be about adding value.

Danielle: And the other 20% should be about promotional content. But generally I would say 5%, only 5% of your content should be promotional content, right? People hate when you are always selling to them. So why not creating values, like sharing content, sharing stuff that can help people and you. Stand out as an authority because you cannot call yourself an expert.

Danielle: If you are not adding value in people’s life, if you are not constantly trying to help people, if you’re not sharing valuable content. So you have to not only engage with your audience, but also see how you can constantly be sharing contents to add value in their life and try to be like getting interested in what they are doing.

Danielle: By you can also do networking. So apart from content, there’s also networking, trying to reach out to people, ensuring that you care about them finding about who they are, what they do and what are their challenges on the daily basis? Yeah. And how you can help in very interest. 

Brent: I think that’s one of the hardest things to realize when you’re building your personal brand.

Brent: And it’s part of it is about yourself, but when you start to add value to others, that’s when the branding really takes off, because there’s something that others see that they get in value from you. Other than just a really fancy looking page. Having that value added is one of the biggest thing that you could impart on a younger person to help them understand why any, even an older person like me, anybody like that, they can understand.

Brent: Then if it’s only about yourself and you’re never adding value to somebody else, then there’s really no point in somebody wanting to look at your brand or think about why would this person add anything if they don’t add any value. Exactly. You had mentioned asking why, so I do wanna ask about your book.

Brent: Why did you write your book and tell us a little bit about your book. Yeah. 

Danielle: I wrote my book, which is sightful becoming your dream soul seven kids to own and control your life as a millennial, Because of my experience in life, having almost dropped out of school when I graduated from college because my parents did not have money to send me to school and later on becoming an entrepreneur, doing all types of job, because I wanted to save to go to the university.

Danielle: And also starting my business as a millennial, I wanted to help other people like empower other young millennials and tell them it’s possible to become whoever you want to be. If only you can take the necessary steps, which I explain in the book. So in the book, I just highlight the seven steps I took in order to become my dream self, because this has always been what I wanted to do to have my own business working with young people.

Danielle: In this book, I just try to align as with the mission of helping young people out there. And that is my why. Everything I do. My objective is to help young people. And also these visionary entrepreneurs. I know the struggle that entrepreneurs are going through, like setting up a business and it’s not working most of the time.

Danielle: It’s because they don’t have the know how to actually run a business. So if I can be like that person to get up with my team, helping them to support their. Businesses build helping them build their brands and grow, but that is not part of the book. So the book is more focused on the millennials by helping them, empowering them, giving them some great tips that they can use changing their mindsets, setting goals, long term and short term goals.

Danielle: What do they want to accomplish networking with people? And lemme tell you something. LinkedIn has been a game changer for me. What I’m doing today because of the relationship, the network I’ve dealt online, the people I connect with on a daily basis and I exchange with, and, it’s the book is actually there, anybody that is struggling, that it be a young that is struggling and doesn’t even know what his

Danielle: purpose is because I found myself at this stage. I didn’t even know why I was created in the first place. What is my mission? What is my purpose on it? Why am I created? So I just came to the realization that I was created to use my, give my skills. Am I talent to serve other people?

Danielle: And ever since then, I’ve been helping people all over the world, like in the US and UK and in Canada. To build your brand together with a team, with team of young people. And it’s been super amazing. And whenever I have the opportunity to help young people I really want to do it because young people they struggle a lot cause I’ve been there and at times they just need someone that can tell them what to. They just need someone that can encourage them, mentor them and tell them, okay, this is what you can do, because this is exactly what I went through. And this is how I overcame this. And so my book is on Amazon and I read during the pandemic.

Brent: Yeah. And I’ll make sure I put the links and the show notes for your social media and your book. Danielle, we have a few minutes left. I do want to just you had mentioned that you help people to write nonfiction as well, is that correct?

Brent: Yes. Let’s just briefly talk about how would you help somebody like me write a non-fiction book and how would you come up with a topic? And do you have a exercise 

Danielle: that you’d go through? Yeah, definitely. I work with an an expat and also being someone that have written a book and have also ghost written or helped other, like for now I’ve heard five people write their.

Danielle: I know that for older people, they don’t have time when it come to it. They don’t have that time to write a book, but they have the know how, which can definitely help other people out there. So what we do is that we try to listen to your story and see which one is the message that you want to communicate out there, which is definitely from the experience you’ve been through your personal experience.

Danielle: And then we craft a message around there, like a title around there. And then we work on the title of the different topics, the different chapters, and they start writing the process. So literally what I do is that I do sessions meeting sessions, where we meet, and then I ask you some questions and you answer them.

Danielle: And then I sit down with the recording and I try to develop a story chapter by chapter, but I make sure that everything that is written in the book is from you. Because one thing I say is that the best person that can teach you something it’s someone that have been through a particular situation. Yeah. So that is a process of writing the book but why I say non-fiction book and focus more on transformational book, like books serve her books, where you can just read and then gain one or two things that can definitely transform your life. 

Brent: We have a few minutes left now. I give our guests a chance to do a shameless plug, which is promoting whatever you’d like, what would you like to plug today? 

Danielle: I would like to share about my experience working with the entrepreneurs and young people and how they can build their brands online. Talking about personal branding, I would say it is very important and for everyone that wants to make a difference out there, whether you are a professional, whether you are seeking for a job, whether you want to start your own business, I would tell you it’s very important to start building your brand because when you build your brand, you start attracting the right people with the same goals and vision.

Danielle: And this is a game changer in your career. It can help you to get opportunities that you would’ve never, ever imagined in your life. if you don’t know how to grow about it, I can help you. Together with my team to start building your brand online. And also I’ve been able to help about 50 professionals who wanted to land a job, like setting up their LinkedIn profile and start building a brand for them.

Danielle: So if you are a professional, that is, that needs a job. So we can help you to build your brand, set your social, your LinkedIn profile. And if you are business owners and you have been struggling with your business and you don’t even know how to go about it. I urge you to just reach out to me at Danielle Asah

Danielle: and I will definitely see how we can help you to, but if you can also follow my content, because I share content on the daily basis on how to build your brand. If you want to do it yourself, or if you wanna reach out to me just for a strategy session, I can give you one or two tips. You must necessarily not work with me.

Danielle: I can give you some. And also share with you how I was able to build my brand. And in less than two years, I was able to stand out as an authority in my field. Thank you so much. 

Brent: That’s probably exactly how I found you. I think I found you through LinkedIn and I think I found you through the world game changer.

Brent: Danielle, thank you so much for being here today Danielle Asah, I will put your LinkedIn profile in the show notes so people can contact you that way. It’s been a pleasure talking to you today, and I wish you all the best. Thank you.

Talk-Commerce Dymitr Diejew

Making a Breeze out of Magento with Dimitry Diejew

Welcome to the new Breeze theme. Consider it the new base instead of Luma to build your next theme. SwissUpLabs created their new open-source template to improve customer engagement and make your site the search engine’s top priority.

With the Breeze theme, it becomes easier to provide an excellent user experience and higher sales conversion. The Breeze Blank theme is designed for all devices and by multilingual clients. The minimalist design is great for any type of website, and the Blank options maximize your customization opportunities. The theme maximizes Your Google Light House Score.

Transcript

Brent: Welcome to Talk Commerce today I have Dimitry Diejew. Go ahead and introduce yourself pronounce your name much better than I did. Tell us what you do on a day to day basis and maybe one of your passions in life. 

Dimitry: Brent. Thank you very much for your invitation to your podcast. My name is Dimitry and I’m from SwissUpLabs company.

Dimitry: I’m a co-founder and product manager. Recently our company is focused on Breeze Front End. And I think we can talk about this a bit later on. And if you are interested in my interest, I think that the most beautiful part of our life is simply traveling with people. You love hiking cooking taste food, and eating it together.

Dimitry: Something like. 

Brent: Thank you for that. So today we’re gonna talk about speed and why speed is important. And specifically around Magento two maybe talk a little bit about your experience around Magento two and some of the issues that we’ve seen after it’s been seven, eight years.

Brent: We’ve seen the Magento Luma theme. Tell us a little bit about why you decided to start this initiative and what you’re doing? 

Dimitry: Yes. Frankly speaking. Yes. Magento two with us from 2015 and it’s now for seven years and Luma theme frankly speaking, I think there were no updates to it for this seven years and world really changes for last seven years.

Dimitry: We a lot of bad chance simply face it new requirements from Google. It’s like it happened three or four, four years ago that Google announces that it’ll rank search results, according to page speed of each page. So slow pages, slow sites will be shown as a bottom part of the page and the faster sites we’ll have some positive results, and for the last two years, people are starting to ask how I can my make my Magento site faster and get better run in Google. And I think everyone in Magento two ecosystem faces the same problem that making Luma fast is not easy. And here we, that is why we decided to create breeze.

Dimitry: And share 

Brent: it with 

Dimitry: the community. 

Brent: Yeah. I think that if we look at the broad scope of how many Magento websites are out there, it has to be 90 some percent that are incredibly slow. So was it the speed issue that prompted you to create breeze or was there other underlying things that made you want to start it and then maybe speak a little bit about the fact that it’s it’s open source.

Dimitry: Ah it’s better toward the extent why we created Breeze you will look at the history, how we created it. First of all, at SwissUpLabs we’re offering extension and templates and our customers, usually when they install our products, they’re checking. Okay. What will be page speed of our sites after using that product.

Dimitry: And they constantly were asking why it’s slow, how we can make it faster. So first we came with page speed extension, and I think that every extension vendor on the market ha have extension like this that is. Offering like image optimization, Java script bundling like critical CSS and many other like small tricks to make

Dimitry: lumas seem faster. But after several years we simply stack into the wall and said, okay, we can’t make it faster because there is a lot of CSS and default luma theme and you can’t remove it or throw away. There is a lot of Java script. Knockout JS is like simply killing the page score. Even without any extension, it was critical as flow.

Dimitry: So more than one year ago we decided to play and like experiment and we created extension that was killed was named bridges. So we simply thrown away all, almost all Javascript tag that came with Luma. And we code it and used several libraries that allow it to make JavaScript part of Luma much smaller.

Dimitry: But in the end, we had the same Luma styles, the same templates, but Java script was controlled by. And initially it was not free. It was like provided only for our customers and. Later we saw that it’ll bring a lot of profit for community if we will make it free. So we decided to make it free.

Dimitry: And people started using it was still slow because it was not complete solution. It was just replacement of Java script. And then we said, okay, we need to make it in the right way. So we decided to create the. That will show the full power and remove and all other issues from Luma frontend.

Dimitry: And that is how we created Breeze frontend. And now we are also offering Breeze evolution Theme that is also free and our main idea because of that stands behind of Breeze is that Magento is open source. And we think that frontend that used by many people also should be open source that anyone can contribute it, that you can fork it, you can offer your features.

Dimitry: And that is how open source community simply works. 

Brent: I just want to be clear, is it is a re it’s a replacement of Luma, or are you basing this off the Luma? 

Dimitry: It’s complete replacement right now. We are only using Luma out because it’s like, it’s a really complex part of front end and we are still not sure what to do with it because like every payment extension shipping extension, it’s based on KnockoutJS and it’ll be like, Which this will be very careful with checkout, but as far as we know, Google simply doesn’t measure the speed of checkout page.

Dimitry: So for now we replace all pages and it’s not based on Luma zero inheritance from Luma. 

Brent: So later on then is there gonna be a lot of work for developers to get extensions working with Breeze or is it essentially a breeze to get it working together. That was a small 

Dimitry: joke. Okay. Is okay. Yeah. We really wanted to make it breathe, but anyway, you still have JavaScript code that is based on the KnockoutJS and all other libraries that came came with Luma.

Dimitry: You need to rewrite your JavaScript code and that is most time consuming part of migration. Then you have to update your less style a bit, and that it after that your extension will work frankly speaking key, you will simply install an extension at the Breeze evolution team or Breeze blank scene.

Dimitry: You will see all main blocks, simply functionality, Java script will not work. So that is how it. 

Brent: Can you talk a little bit about the difference on this theme and what Adobe is pushing under PWA and why would somebody still want to use breeze over going with PWA?

Dimitry: Yeah. Okay. Yeah, it’s a good question. PWA is really great technology. And I think that a lot of big companies will benefit from it, but it’s as far as, remember, it’s already two years on the market, like with PWA studio and we don’t see like a huge List of stores that are using it.

Dimitry: If you will check the number of store that are using Magento two, it is like it’s hundred of thousand, something like that. Probably less, a little bit more. But with when you are looking for a list of stories that are using PWA studio it’s not as big as number of Magento two stores.

Dimitry: So it’s really looks that a lot of Magento two store owners simply afraid or simply don’t have enough money to migrate to headless solution that is why I think that it’s like, it was quite a clear with message from community that was sent one year ago. His open letters that We still need monoliths front end.

Dimitry: And that is why we came into this direction. And we think that from, for small store owners and even medium size businesses, it’s still okay to use monolith front end because it’s easier to develop. It’s easier to maintain 

Brent: You’ve made a really good point about the ease of use.

Brent: And that PWA requires you to have two different separate stacks and maintain both of those. And also having a separate place or could be the same place. But hosting would also be a little bit more complicated with PWA. Do you think that Adobe is missing something here by only pushing PWA?

Dimitry: I can say for sure, but I think that Adobe has its own role. It’s serve its own clients’ interest. And for people that are using Adobe commerce it’s much easier to use PWA and it’s within a reach of their budget, but I think it’s if you will see at the numbers, like 90% of all Magento users is open source and not everyone will be able to use PWA.

Dimitry: So there is really need for good and fast and easy to use monilith front end, frankly, speaking, working with Magento from day one when it was variant studio as far remember. And when it’s just it was published, it like, it was a lot of people and everybody was happy. Cause it was to edit everything because he was able to like story owner with low technical skill was able to create store around it and modify it according to their needs with Magento two.

Dimitry: And Luma frontend, it became a bit more complex. And our old clients that us, for 10 years, they say, okay, we are missing times from Magento one when we were able to simply edit template files. And it was easy for us. We were able to do that without expensive developers, I don’t understand Adobe positions that they are pushing the PWA technology, but I think that the risk space and the risk requirements for different types of front ends, 

Brent: I’m gonna ask a question about the Magento association or the Magento community in general.

Brent: Do you feel as though. Either Mage-OS or the Magento association should take over the responsibility of the open source product. So things like breeze will continue to grow and and go out into the marketplace. Or do you think that what we’re doing already and how open source is positioned with Adobe that there’s enough behind it for them?

Dimitry: I think that mag association should simply create a place where different companies developers can offer their solution for real needs of store owners. So there be diversity, if you want to choose this solution, you can go visit probably you will like breathe or probably you’re still okay with Luma.

Dimitry: Because it’s like cheaper because every extension or themes that you can buy because I was reading a lot about current state of Magento to community. And I see that there is a lot of talks about how things should be from position of agencies and like quite big companies that are using Magento two.

Dimitry: But I still see that almost no one is speaking in the behalf of small story owners, there is still a lot of I think it’s thousands and thousands of store owners that creates their stores by them own like it all day. So Magento one and they are doing updates. They installing extension Magento two I think it’s simply one of the best eCommerce platforms on the market, simply because of that, it simply gives you a lot of power right out of the box.

Dimitry: No other platform will give you that for free. And that is why I think it’s simply a great chance for any small merchant that has right set of skills to create and run successful store with a low budget. If you know what you’re doing, you can do that. It’s just I think so.

Brent: Yeah. So as you grow or as breeze grows what are the things that are coming out? What are the features and what are the new things you’re gonna be releasing under the breeze logo or breeze brand? 

Dimitry: Okay. As I said right now we are still not covering issue with checkout because. Check out at Magento two is also, it’s not fast.

Dimitry: If you will check discussion at Reddit or Linkedin, and many people complains that there is a lot of request the page can load for several seconds and you need to optimize it. So we think that we will take care of that issue. But my issue here is that we made Breeze. Mostly because we need a really good feedback from community because developers.

Dimitry: And store owners really understand what’s their problems. And as soon as they will start implementing Breeze start using it they will come to us and 

Dimitry: then they will tell, here is the problem let, cause is Luma, because it was published at seven years ago, and for that time there was no update of front end, and for this time, there were a lot of changes on the market.

Dimitry: For now, we have a front end that simply outdated. And with brief, I think we want to go with the way of evolutions that we will have requests from community. We will add it. Probably somebody will push some ideas, push some commits, and we’ll also include it in terms of Breeze.

Dimitry: So community will decide what to do with Breeze in one or another. 

Brent: Yeah, that’s great. From a I want to just go back a little bit about the the Adobe PWA. I think Adobe is arguing or would say that it’s easier to integrate experience manager with a PWA. What would be your reaction when somebody says something like that and how hard is it to integrate a, another CMS platform into Magento as a monolith?

Dimitry: I think that I’m wrong person to answer that question, but I think every technology or stack has its strong and weak sides. As I said, we working with small store owners and they simply don’t have such need cause if you want to implement other platform, okay.

Dimitry: I have a good example. We really like implementation of integration of WordPress with Magento two that was done by Fishpig company. I think we are using it in almost every second project. So if it’s can be done with WordPress. So I think it can be done with any other type of CSM, but as. Our goal is to serve small small business and medium sized business.

Dimitry: And percent Magento open source. 

Brent: Yeah. And I think that you’ve identified a really, a large portion of users of Magento two that I think Adobe has forgotten about and that is the small business user who’s simply using Magento two for their store, and they don’t want to invest all the money in all the other Adobe products that maybe Adobe’s trying to do.

Dimitry: Tell us Adobe will be really surprised to see how many offsite stores in 

Brent: the world. Yeah, it is a incredibly popular platform still. So tell us how do they find you? How do they find the, your company and get in touch with you?.

Dimitry: Simply word of the mouth. They found us in the Google. It’s find sync, if you will check Magento or Adobe marketplace. I think there are just five or seven template on the marketplace and just like six of this seven template are from our company. So they’re simply going to marketplace.

Dimitry: There the main vendors that sell in here templates, then they go into our site, checking our products, reading our reviews, and now I really hope that more and more people will start using Breeze frankly, speaking via publish it evolution and Breeze blank on marketplace and receive that popularity.

Dimitry: It’s keeping growing. And we see like quite many installation every 

Brent: day. Yeah. That’s great. And just your the website for the theme is breeze front.com, right? Breeze B R E Z E front.com. 

Dimitry: Yeah. We, yeah. And yeah, that is correct. We created, 

Brent: Separate side. Great. And the, your company is Swiss up labs.com.

Brent: Yeah. Great. So Dimitri, as we close out on every podcast, I give a guest an opportunity to give a shameless plug about anything. What would you like to plug today?

Dimitry: Okay. I don’t want to talk about our company or Breeze because discuss that. I just probably want to ask everyone if we will listen to simply help Ukraine our companies through from Ukraine, developers, from Ukraine, and now really like in very difficult situation. And we really appreciate any help business support from countries all around the world.

Dimitry: And. We will appreciate any 

Brent: kind of help. Yes. And are you in Ukraine right now? 

Dimitry: No. No, I’m not in Ukraine. I’m in Poland for the last seven years, but many our developers are still living in Ukraine. Good. 

Brent: And how are they doing now? Are they, are you still be able to function and get most of their work done?

Dimitry: Yeah. Yeah, it’s quite strange, but that people are still going to work. They’re still having their life here and It’s difficult. It’s tough, but people are standing. 

Brent: That’s great. And I know that there’s lots of places that you can help out and contribute to the Ukrainian cause.

Brent: Dimitri, thank you so much for being here today. I appreciate your time. And again, I encourage people to go to breeze front.com and see it. I’ve seen some of the lighthouse scores. Your theme is scoring. Fantastic. And I’m so excited that there’s more and more people that are building and growing their Magento two practices and that you’ve offered this fantastic front end as a replacement for that very slow back end.

Brent: And I just wanna add it’s probably more than seven years. The ver very first version of Magento two was supposed to be out in 2012. I don’t know if anybody remembers, but. It has been 10 years since the launch date was announced. Yeah. So the theme is probably older than seven years, but it is very, what you’re doing is very well needed.

Brent: Thank you so 

Dimitry: much community about our product. I think that it’ll really help a lot of people out there.