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Talk-Commerce Chris Chasteen

Don’t Abandon Your Blog With Chris Chasteen

Imagine doom scrolling through Netflix, looking for the ideal show to binge-watch this weekend. Not the mind-numbing, watch while playing “Candy Crush” content, but the great shows that you really want to burn through 24 hours watching.

After reviewing thousands of low-budget horror movies and sitcoms, you finally stumble upon a hidden gem that you enjoy… but wouldn’t it be easier if these incredible shows appeared automatically? Or if the entirety of Netflix was customized for your exact specifications? That’s what Content Cucumber does (Well, they sort of do this)

Content Cucumber is a writing company. Their clients are metaphorical directors since everything they create keeps the individual wants and needs in mind. Their subscription-based service even lets business leaders update their blogs without lifting a finger, giving them more time to focus on their company (or watch Netflix).

We speak with Chris Chasteen, the co-founder of Content Cucumber.

Transcript

All right. Welcome to this super content-filled episode of talk commerce. Today, I have Chris chess Dean. He is the CEO of content cucumber, and I had the pleasure of first meeting Chris a long time ago, 2018, maybe at retail, X, or IRC at the time. Chris, go ahead and introduce yourself. Tell us what you’re doing.

Day-to-day and maybe one of your passions. 

Sure. Yeah. So just recently got the CEO title added on for the longest time it was just co-founder focused on growth, but I’ve actually now I’m working on all areas of our organization. So that means, running a contact, cucumber, running everything from finance to innovation, to growth the operations and making sure everything’s moving in the right direction.

And then as far as passion, I love music. I play music and I’m actually working on recording an album. 

Oh, nice. So you could come out with another service called title turnip, or something like that for your 

albums or? Yeah. I think that my indecision would get in the way of that one, but, 

So just for, so everybody gets some background content.

Cucumber is a service that, that, that writes content for people like us. So I’ve been using your service for a number of years. And you have a staff of writers that help entrepreneurs and business people and content people on e-commerce people, great content for their site. 

Yeah. Yeah. And I actually came from an e-commerce background.

The reason I started content cucumbers, cause I was helping grow an e-commerce store and I realized that we could reduce our ad spend and grow our revenue. If we just had focused a little bit on some organic. 

Yeah. And I can just speak from experience that developing that organic content has been the best decision that we made in the last, four years now.

The the SEO traffic that you generate just from that consistent blog post, or just consistent content that’s being generated is something that Google really likes. Maybe you could speak a little bit to how how that service has worked and maybe some of the benefits that some of your other clients have seen from it as well.

Yeah. So just the idea of posting consistently and like showing, proof of life to Google yeah, I’m still here. We’re still here. We’re still here. That definitely is rewarded. And Google looks at you as a thought leader. The more you’re talking about CapEx, where you’re diving deep on.

And really in any business, if you’re starting to get some traction, content is a really great way to shift the focus away from the short term gains, like advertising and sales, and really start to focus up on long-term because it’s very much a long-term thing. Like I always tell people if they’re like, if they’re really fresh getting started you don’t want to focus too much of your time on content in the beginning because you need to get the wheels moving.

But once things are moving, it’s. Putting fuel on the 

fire. Yeah, I would even argue that beginning phase, when you need to get the wheels moving is a great time to start building your content. It is also going to be the biggest time that you’re going to have a lot of ideas. And I know one thing we talked about in the green room is how you have.

Helped me or helped with Kento come up with some of those original ideas that then turned into content maybe speak to how merchants could use content to drive traffic to their products. 

Yeah. So at the beginning and content totally plays a role in the beginning with the product descriptions, right?

That’s like where you first need to really nail your web copy is if you’re talking about, selling. Hairbrushes or whatever you’re going to go and sell. Having really compelling content about the item outside of just like what its dimensions are like, how is it useful? What have people what are the experiences?

And that’s, before you’re getting tracked and you don’t have reviews, like the best thing you could do is try to talk about this, that whatever product it is at lake. So yeah, product descriptions, I think are probably your first content pathway to take as a numerous. For sure. 

What are you seeing then as a trend right now?

I know there’s some terms called compose, compose of composable commerce. There’s all kinds of now com commerce and headless. And w what are you seeing from adding content? Oh, on top of the regular content you’ve seen on a e-commerce store that content now has just become more important.

And I guess maybe speak to some of the things that you’re seeing in the industry around generation of content and the volume of that. You need to keep relevant. 

Yeah, to really establish a brand authority on top of having your product descriptions well, maintained, it’s also having a blog of some sort and having some talking points that really establish you as the authority of whatever it is that you’re going to sell.

So we see people like the people we see of our clients that are the most successful are very much like you were. We know what our niche is. We know who we’re talking to. We know what they’re interested in, and if you just continually listen to what it is that your audience is interested in, and you keep speaking to that, you’re going to be going down the pathway that you really want to be going.

So I’d say regardless of the trends, always go back to who your target profile audiences and make sure that you’re finding and meeting them with. 

Yeah. And I think to borrow a term from WordPress or some of the other content site, there’s always a pillar page that you’re trying to drive traffic to, or in the terms of a of a website that has a product or that product would be that pillar page.

And the goal is to generate content around that and then drive traffic to. 

Yes. Yeah. And there’s, there’s all sorts of different ways you can do that, whether it’s I’ve seen people do it from a case study pit standpoint, where it’s like this one product can be used in five different cases.

And then your landing page is like, How do I use so construction materials, a great example. So let’s say caulking, which is where I came from and Silicon sealants. You can use silicone sealants around windows. You can use them in the bathroom. You can use them on the sidewalk outside. And the people who are installing those different applications are very different people.

But having, a landing page from the audience saying writing out your content like this is how you use this product in this space, and then you can have another one about that space. So there’s a lot of different ways to approach that too. It’s not just like one category page or one pillar page for all the product types that person might be interested in, but it’s also creating different pages for one product that targets different audiences as well.

So there’s a lot of different ways to approach that content creation. 

So maybe talk a little bit about idiation as well. How you help or maybe talk about how merchants don’t have to have that full idea. You help them dig into it, come up with some more content and then follow on through even more content for.

Yeah, for sure. When you start working with any writer and a contact cucumber writer is a great example. If you have some rough ideas, share them with that writer, or even if you’re building a team make sure to share your ideas with your team. Cause like getting feedback on the ideas will help develop the idea.

And our, our service is a place where you can send us the roughest of sketches and we can help you hash that out, but always being on the lookout for bouncing your ideas off of other people I found is like infinitely helpful. Cause I see a lot of people they’ll be like, I have a thousand ideas, but then they just don’t.

Try to ask people like, is this a good idea? Cause they hold their ideas a little too close to the chest and ideas are free people aren’t going to steal them. And yeah, just 

let the flow, just talking about Combs. I was going to get a subscription to a comb. But my wife said it would be a waste of money, so I don’t know why, but so the I guess the, to go in on that, a lot of, content is so important, but content can be expensive in hiring a full-time staff writer.

Can be can be equally expensive. So how do you help? How do you see helping with your typical e-commerce agency by supplementing that content? Yeah, 

That’s pretty much the exact niche that I went to Phil because I, when I had silicone Depot trying to grow that business there wasn’t really a way to have a writer that was on my team.

But not like a freelancer, not like an intern, but someone who was a professional writer. And I could just borrow some of their time to dedicate to my project. And it was like Hey, let’s do that. And so that’s what contact cucumber is all about, is being able to access that professional writer for part of their time to basically help do that at a fraction of the 

cost.

And you don’t just do blog posts, you’re helping generate content for any type of media out there. 

Any type of written media and there’s some limitations to that. Like we can’t write your dissertation. We’re not going to write your homework. We actually, we actually did one of our first sample requests that we used to have a sample funnel where we’d let people make a free blog request.

Someone said, can you write a book report on where the Redfern group. And they’re like nice tribe, but no. So we’re not going to do your homework, but we definitely had some people, some pretty clever people that wasn’t the first one, because they came back the, I think the next day and put in another one, they’re like could you do a report on hurricanes and have it to me by midnight?

It’s oh, we’re not gonna do that. 

So it does give you an idea if you wanted to help get through school, though. You don’t just say, Hey, I’ve got to write this blog post on. The the geology of rocks. 

Yeah. Yeah, we can do a whole nother business specifically for homework, like homework.

don’t know. What’s a vegetable homework hummus, maybe homework, calmness. There you go. Perfect. Yeah, we just helped you. We help you figure out how to get your homework done 

on time. And watch out for the dog. So it’s not going to eat it. So w specifically written, so helping with social media posts, just Twitter tweets.

Of course what was I just thinking of? Oh, email newsletters is a great example of something that’s needs to be done every month and is often overlooked. And I think that email right now, people are thinking is email really important, but Hey, I still get email every day and I answer it and I look at it 

right.

And merchants, like that’s some serious like money on the table. If you’re not, if you’re not utilizing email, you ought to because yeah, that, that’s a really good place to engage with your audience and get people to come back and buy from you again. Or, email is an ex. Excellent source of doing that.

And we, we write tons of newsletters every month and those are really successful and also like on that. It’s not something we do, but something to think about for merchants, if they’re thinking about building. Their content points and how to reach their audience more. Definitely getting into SMS a bit.

I’ve seen a lot of e-commerce companies adopting more SMS marketing, and that seems to be going much better than email even. So something to consider. 

Okay. So just adding on to, on, on what SMS is going to be shorter messages, but yeah, I can see how that was. That is going to help a merchant to.

To increase traffic and help get education around their products that they’re selling. Maybe we can just dive into the ways that merchants should measure some of this. Like how, what is your definition of success or do people come to you and say, how do I judge my success on my content?

Yeah. So there’s a lot of different ways to do that. Of course, in e-commerce conversion rate is king, right? That’s the thing. It’s straw, Kate’s driving traffic, but what percentage are actually converting into customers or it’s I’m sending out this email, but what percentage are actually converting into clicks and going to the website?

And for e-commerce I think conversion rate is probably the area where we focus on and we definitely see some blogs that if they get posted on the first page of that relevant result, they can see anywhere from, a two to 4% conversion rate, which for a blog post is pretty darn. 

Yeah, that’s great.

So maybe talk a little bit about non the more, the broader idea of just developing content and then from an SEO standpoint, how do you measure success? 

Yeah, starting from the topic gets, it definitely gets more and more vague, like the higher up the idea, the more vague it is.

And then the closer to the actual metrics, the, the more it’s relevant, but I would say a good like litmus. To try when you’re first developing your content strategy is look at what everyone else in your industry is talking about in is what you’re talking about. At least as interesting and Mo more ideal, more interesting than what everyone else is talking about.

And if it is then you’re on the right path. But if what you’re talking about, Everyone already knows that, some of that content is good, like reiterating terms. So Google knows that, you know what you mean? But don’t do a 2000 word blog on like how to drink water or something is like everyone already know.

There was like the benefits of drinking the quantity of water. And that’s why you should get our one gallon water thing, because you need to drink a gallon of water. Cause it shows that you’ll like sleep better and like you’ll not have to eat as much and your exercises will be more effective. It’s tell the benefits, not just the features.

And I think that stuff like that is really important when coming up with your 

context, yeah. And I think the underlying idea to that is you want to differentiate yourself from other people. And especially if you’re differentiating yourself from say, Amazon, if you have a specialty product, or if your product that’s crosses over into that marketplace world, where Amazon might sell it, the more you can do to distinguish yourself as a leader in that the better your content is going to perform.

And the more traffic you’re gonna. I suppose the, one of the minimum things that somebody could look at is that their traffic is increasing over time. And also making sure that you’re you’re indexing those pages onto Google, your blog posts. If this that’s where you’re going to do, you’re going to expose this content to and measure.

What is more popular than that? Is this one more popular than this other one? One thing that we’ve done is on some posts put specific call to actions on those posts. And even in the past, we tried doing some kind of little internal ad thing where we’d have some ads rotate through the blogs to see.

Are we getting a lot of clicks and if we’re getting a lot of clicks, that’s a great place that you should be trying to capture some of those reads, right? Because I think was logged. So if you have a blog and you mentioned 2000 words, somebody is going to spend a, five or 10 minutes reading that’s a great time to get somebody to stick with it and then go somewhere else on your own.

Yeah. Always have a call to action of some kind, for sure. That’s a must do for every post should have some sort of call to action for sure. I definitely agree with that. And yeah, I of course. Like traffic is an important metric to keep in mind. But the reason why I don’t go there first is because it can be a little demoralizing because it takes so long.

If you don’t have traction to get the traction that you’re like this isn’t working. And it’s if you’re writing things that are as interesting or more interesting than everyone else writing about the same thing, you will get traction. It’s just going to take time. So that’s a big piece there because I don’t want people to give up early cause this.

Six to 12 months before you’re seeing the results that you 

expect. Yeah. And I think ideally you’d like to do one per business day. So an average of 20 a month, I don’t know I’m being right. Or 

that really depends on the industry that you’re in. Of course the that’s I was just laughing cause that’s our, our pitch, our first offering, was, you can get up to a blog a business day, but really, it depends on the industry you’re in.

And if you’re in a say you’re in the. I don’t know, medicinal space, that’s going to require more like say you’re selling supplements or selling some herbal teas or something. That’s really going to take probably longer form of content because your competition is higher. And because you’re wanting to attract the type of buyer who wants to read a lot about that thing.

Whereas if you’re buying, if you’re selling something a little more surface level, some people will want to do a ton of research on tires, but the majority of your consumers just want to know is it going to work in snow? Is it going to work in rain? Is it going to work in the summer? And that’s really all they care about and it’s not going to go flat very easily.

And it’ll fit my vehicle. It’s okay, great. So those can be shorter. So it depends on your industry. I’d say four. Good average, those at least try to get, somewhere around 15 hundreds, a week, 1500 words a week out at minimum, in some capacity, whether it’s, a combination of 400 word or 800 word blogs or.

One 1400 word blog, but just some kind of mix of content that adds up to that number is probably a good place to be. This 

is Google looking specifically at the length of a blog post, and that was going to be my next question is 400, the best size, or is 800 zero. Is there a sort of a rule of thumb that makes sense for the length of your blog post?

Now you’re really diving into an area where you can. For SEO agency, people masterminds and they will argue that to the, yeah. So that, that one’s a contentious one. I think right now the hot topic is long form content. Like everyone’s more beating the drum of 1400 to 2000 words.

But again, it really depends on what you’re selling, because if you’re selling something that the consumer doesn’t really want to know everything there is to know about it, they just want. To know that it’s going to work for what they needed to work for. I would always urge you to meet your consumer where they’re at figure out who your customer is and always write to them.

If you think that they really want to nerd out about the laptop, then write 2000 words about the laptop. But if you think it’s no, I’m selling to someone who they just want to make sure that they can open Chrome and. You use the internet, they don’t care about gaming or anything. So just know who you’re talking to.

And Google will always reward you for staying on top of your audience. And that’s going to be a, there’s going to be SEO. People who disagree with that. They’re like no, 1500 to 2000 words. Like it really works. It’s yeah. Okay. It does work. But there does come to a point where Google’s goal in life is to figure out exactly what you want when you start.

And so sure right now, the long form content is performing well, but in the end, the Google’s AI is going to figure out every search and what you’re actually looking for. And so just work that out. If you’re going to go write a piece of code. What does the person who’s going to read this one? Do they want to sit down and read a 10 minute log or do they want a, three-minute answer to a very basic question, meet the people where they are, and actually with that advice.

And this is where I pushed back on the SEO. People’s I we’ve seen featured snippets because of that, where people write a short form, 400 word blog, and they’re the featured snippet, which that’s 

huge. Wow. 

We need 

to put that on our website, honestly. Yeah. You need a featured snippet too, on your. So I, what I guess what I’m hearing is, there should be a mixture of sizes of content.

And just, let’s just say you, you work for one larger, long, long form a week and some smaller ones to fill in, or at least get that one blog post a week up there to help the keep things moving. 

Yeah, exactly. Momentum is huge. 

And then I, I know one thing that we learned in just in, in sort of the way you can help to generate more of this content is that out of that blog post it’s officially a long form blog post, you certainly can find tweets that are relevant to that blog post, and it’ll lead people back to it.

So quotes and things like that. And then one thing that I’ve noticed recently there’s WordPress plugins that will help you write a blog post. A podcast about your blog post. And if you were to do a weekly blog post, you could, I would say, read it back. I wouldn’t have, I don’t know how they do that generation, but it would be really annoying if it’s some kind of audio generated from a robot reader, but that, that content would make, usually make a great.

A great podcast or at least put it into some audio. And then what I’ve really seen, a lot of people doing now is turning it into a little bit of a vlog where you get on and you just either read the highlights or talk about the highlights from your post. Then let people go through and read that long post for 

sure.

Yeah. And I think. Again, to dive into some examples of what you’re talking about. Sometimes video content makes a good appearance with like makeup tutorials. We see people who are doing that kind of thing, but then where you’re talking about the more like higher level overview about certain products, I dunno.

What do you think? What are some products? Do you think that audio pairs really nicely with a blog? What kind of products do you imagine? 

Just audio or audio and. 

Let’s just take the audio example where you’re going to, we’re going to write a blog and then you turn it into a podcast. What do you think?

What kind of industries do you think that works really well 

for? Yeah. I think audio only would work, I think, excuse me, obviously, for audio devices, if you’re selling something, excuse me, selling something in the audio world that’s a great example, but yeah. Anything where you can describe it, anything where you don’t have to have a visual of what you’re doing.

So you mean you gave the makeup. That’s a great example, where you have to see somebody doing it, anything where you don’t have to see it, and you can capture somebody while they’re driving or they’re running or whatever they’re doing. And it’s a, it’s something that can be described. And I guess if we look at what’s out there from a blog or from a podcasting standpoint, everything in a podcast is normally.

Descriptive. If you’re talking about strategy of any sort or thought leadership and then if you can boil that thought leadership into what is it, what is Ted talk say 18 minutes or something? That is your, yeah. That’s your ideal things. Yeah. I don’t know how many, eight, how many words? 18 minutes is it must be 2,500 words or something like that.

But if you can concentrate on that and then I would even say you don’t have to do the whole thing. Like people like to hear shorter bits, like two or three minutes of it, and then it gives them a chance to read the whole post. 

Yeah, no, that’s interesting. And something I’ve seen a lot on.

Newscasters doing these days, like you see it on the Washington post and things of that nature where they’ll have an audio format that just literally reads the article out loud for you. And I find that kind of interesting too. It’s if you’re researching a pro like anything and it’s just listen to this in audio form, then you can just click play and.

Open your emails and listen to it in the background. And yeah, that’s a cool idea. I like that. I think that’ll probably start encouraging our clients to think more 

like that. Yeah. I think that’s where this idea that WordPress has that you could turn this this blog post into a, they’re saying a podcast, but I think the idea of just has a sort of a screen reader of some sorts that would read it to you would be a little bit better.

Then having a weekly. Podcasts based on a robot, reading your content. 

And anytime you can try to give your viewers or your users more ways to interact with your content usually you’re going to see performance upgrade, but the one thing I would caution everyone, if you try the, these ideas. Don’t stop iterating.

So it’s if you notice by adding audio, it re reduce the amount of times people click on your call to action, then try it without it, and then try it with it or try it with the call to action in the audio. Always iterate. I think something I see happening with Al with our clients sometimes is they’ll get stuck into their pattern and I’m doing the same thing every week and it’s not doing anything.

I’m like let’s try some new stuff and see what happens. So I think that coming up with new ideas, this is super 

important. Yeah. Testing and measuring is the most important thing anybody could do to ma to see how successful their content is. And I just had a conversation with an email person who said there is a Sending an email for a product is it’s great.

But at some point people get sick of getting your emails and you don’t, you’re not, you don’t have a success as you did before on that newsletter or that email list that you’re sending to because there’s a fatigue in getting way too much. I think from a content standpoint, though as long as it’s relevant content, you can’t, you.

You couldn’t have too much content unless you’re duplicating something across your own site or just plagiarizing somebody else’s 

right. I do agree. I think that what I was the point I was driving home. More that try to change how your blog posts look and feel and mess with your call to actions and that kind of just the scientific testing and try different things out.

Like definitely keep posting content, like you’re right. Like anytime you get deep into a topic, especially if you want to be the authority on that topic, you’ll never run out of stuff to talk about, but just try different stuff on the blog and just see what works. Yeah, 

we 

found that effective sometimes get lucky.

Like I think we got we are, we ranked pretty high on layout shifts, the new web, one of the scores and web vitals from Google. And it was only because we wrote an early article about it and posted it. And then we’ve been following up on eat more of those web viatical, web vital web, what vital web core vitals, sorry, core vitals that Google has.

I don’t get it. I’ll get this right today. Don’t worry. But if you can beat your early on some of those topics, there’s not a lot of penalty you’re going to get from writing about a topic when it first comes out, you have a lot of upside. The only penalty you have is the time it takes to write that article, right?

Yup. If it’s something new, like the core website, That Google has now that’s the score in your website. And there’s some specific things that are, that Google is keying in on. And if you’re early to those specific articles, you’re going to get some early wins and then making sure that you are writing relevant content moving forward, that still has something.

That still connects to that original article. Cause that’s going to continue to show Google that you have some thought leadership on that. 

Yeah, for sure. I think having those like anchor pieces that can eventually link to a bunch of other articles that go into depth as a really great or really great concept.

And we’ve seen that workout successfully for a lot of. 

Just diving a little bit into your into your career now, or your entrepreneur journey, entrepreneurial journey, you started content cucumber when you were still in college. Are you still in college now? No, 

No. I I dropped out of college and then starting to of take it over.

So yeah, I actually met my co-founder and my wife at university went one semester. Met both of them and then, thought Hey, I, I got a home run, so 

yeah, just I can, I had the, I had a similar journey. I, but I went to school for eight years before I dropped out. Okay. So you got your master’s degree?

No, I don’t have any degrees, but I did go to school full time for eight. Oh, okay. Yeah. Full-time student and then decided that I wanted to go into business and here I am, it’s been quite a fuel hit quite a few years later. So how do you, so what does it look like now to content you cover? How you keeping things fun and exciting?

Yeah. Fun and exciting. I think one of the things we’re doing right now, which is really fun is we have this competition going on called the real rumble. And it’s this competition where everyone submits a reel in our slack channel. And may the best real win and the best real winner will get like a custom made real winner of content, cucumber t-shirt.

And we just try to do little things like that to have fun. And me and the video guy who is hosting and judging the competition, did a a sketch to inspire everyone where I played a lawyer basically saying that this real needs to be thrown out. And he played the other lawyer, the defense attorney and the judge.

Like it was really funny, a little bit where we were just going back and forth on whether or not we, this a real. Allowed to be submitted or not. 

Nice. Cool. I know one of the things that I remember that you did at at one of those early IRC or retail X or whatever, the name they’ve changed to this year you had ice cream.

It seems like that. It seems like that doesn’t it, whatever it is this year, they’re 

like, we’re not getting enough 

traffic rebrand again, yearly rebrand again. Yes. Yeah, I still call. I like calling it IRCE, but reaching to that feels very oh, G right? Yeah. Retail X also seems okay now, but the, whatever the new one is I think it’s content retail, something like that, or 

I can’t believe they’ve rebranded again.

I don’t know why they think that’s going to be the solution, but sorry, if you’re listening to this and you organize that conference. I’m sorry. 

I think one of the things that you did earlier. So you had ice cream that you rolled around on a cart, which was, it was a great idea. You had a jazz concert this last 

time.

Yes. Yeah. We had a jazz trio. That was really fun. We always try to do something super creative and out there to show everyone that like we’re creative people. We try to live that spirit because we see a lot of content writing companies. You show. And look like all the other super corporate companies.

And I’m like, what are you doing? We’re literally creatives, get creative. So yeah, we try to have fun with it. Actually the ice cream, there was like blog flavored and newsletter flavored and Facebook posts flavor. And so we made them like all the flavors and then, oh yeah. And then black raspberry.

That was the one that we didn’t give it. One of those silly titles. So we could riff off all the titles and then say, and black raspberry and that all. Usually got a laugh cause they’re like why is black raspberry on its own? I don’t know. He just thought it was fine. 

In case you get a, in case you spam and get.

That’s king blacklist, 

blacklist, respirator. There you go. That would have been hilarious. I have an idea so at and I don’t want you to tell us what your booth is going to be like this year at whatever the new conference is going to be called in Chicago, IRCE slash retail X slash.

Content content retail. But if you were at a corner of your booth, that just says the, my iPad’s that said here’s the AI content creation, people go talk to them and then they have to just talk to an iPad. It’s in the little corner of your booth. And then you have your real people that are talking.

Nevermind. It looked better in my head than it did. It’s 

kind of funny. It’s like comparing the experience, like your here’s the robot. I was actually imagining, like we have like a. Like a little more dramatic. Like that idea makes me think you’d make a robot, how you do with like boxes and silver paint and then just put an iPad on its face.

And you’re like, yeah, try to interact with this and see if you can create something. And 

it’s frustrating. I did try one of those services. I’ve tried a couple of the AI services that write articles for you. And I have had such a horrible experience. I even went for 2.0 of some service. I’m not going to, I’m not going to give their name, but they came out with this 2.0 version and you pay a little bits for every part of the article and it generated this article.

It give you like five different points and it put it. I put a bunch of content in there and it was like, every single point was completely wrong. It was so wrong. And it’s okay, I want to get credit for this. This is like the most useless piece of information that anybody has ever written for me.

Oh no I think I tried it for talk commerce. I think I wanted to just, Hey, let’s break this down. The one of my episodes and write a show summary. And so I had, like I said, it, all this information and then it came back and it said, It gave me all this crap. And I’m like, oh man, this is like the worst.

I can’t use any of this. I can, I could maybe use the outline, which I think I eventually did. And I had to write my own little thing. But I think what that maybe just speak to having a real person write an article for you. So you actually get real content that, does that make sense to people? 

Yeah, for sure.

Yeah. A real person, they understand. What people like, they understand that people want things to be accurate and they understand creative writing is very much a a discipline. And so all of, pretty much all of our writers have some sort of creative writing or journalism degree.

So they’ve gone through the pathway of figuring out what it is that people will actually read. Whereas I think the AI is trying to drum up the right thing. Not necessarily focused on what people want to read, but. That it is readable itself. And it’s it’s it actually what AI content generators are good for, I think is coming up with title ideas, honestly, you can, have I wanna make a new title or I want to make some like a paragraph of copy.

It can help you with that. But once you get into long form content, it gets so out there. Cause it’s pulling from every corner of the internet. So it’s it’s also gonna pull from the parts of the internet. I really don’t know what they’re talking about. 

Yeah. And then you need to go and do all the research on where did it find this?

Because I now I’m recalling that. I had a specific guest that I put in and it came back with a bunch of facts about this guest, which it happened to be nothing to do with the guest at all. It was something that was not even true, or I don’t know where it came up with the content, but it took me longer to figure out or to find where did it come from?

Then it did just the right again, just to write it myself. And 

went down that rabbit hole, 

trying to determine yeah, it was like, okay, you have a guest. And if I was, if I were to do something for you and I put it, I put Chris jets chestain and into Into the AI writer and it wants to write a short bio of everything that we’ve just talked about.

And all of a sudden it says, you were born in 1947 and you wrote three successful novels before you founded content cucumber in 2023, okay which part of this is real and what isn’t right now? Logically I know that. That you’re no older than 55, but that would also make you not born in 1947 and I’m now I’m joking.

Cause I can clearly see that you’re 18, but like at some point AI writers are going to make more work than it could be. Somebody just wrote it. 

Yeah. Brent Peterson, the esteemed dolphin trainer from Sweden. It’s what? Wait. Where did you get that? 

Yeah. Yeah, that was my job before.

Yeah. Swedish dolphins. They’re really common. Absolutely. Everybody knows about Swedish dolphins on. Now we have our headline of the show by the way. Sweet dolphins. Definitely. We’ve just gone through AI title generation 

and it will give you stuff like that. And you’re like, okay. That’s good.

Not because it’s good, but good, because it’s not good and I’m going to use it because it’s not good and people are going to click on it. Cause it’s 

funny. Yeah. Maybe we’ve got a few minutes left. Maybe tell us a little bit about what merchants should look at. Let’s just say I’m selling something to do with bathrooms.

What type of content would be the first step that they would take to get started? 

Yeah, so bathrooms and let’s just assume it’s products like showers and toilets and sinks and plumbing and accessories and tile and everything bathroom. You’re going to help build bathrooms. And actually, it’s funny that you say that because we have a company that does something very similar to that.

But yeah, so essentially where you would start is you’d say, okay, who is it? That’s redoing their bathroom. Okay. It’s probably a homeless. Or an investor, or it could even be a renter, that it’s either going to be someone who’s living there or someone who wants to get value out of that because, so you have these two different audiences, so you can talk about how investing in bathrooms can raise property value.

And then you could also talk about how bathrooms are. A really vital place to have looking really nice and also just a better quality of life to have a better bathroom. So I would say like finding out who your audience is. And then figuring out what things are important to them. Also there’s the whole, like my toilet broke crap.

What do I do now? And it’s even if you don’t solve that problem, talking about it and saying, Hey, don’t panic, turn your water off. Call plumber. You’ll be fine. This is what you searched for. If you couldn’t find a plumber. So just providing resources for the people who you think, cause they, maybe they come to you to buy the toilet.

But. Just providing useful resources to the people who you want to come to your site. So you just work out okay, who’s all the people that I want to come to my site. And that’s where that’s your content strategy. And it’s really figuring out who those people are, where they’re hanging out and then writing to that and making sure they can find you.

Yeah. And then also making that little warning bubble that says don’t take a crap in it. 

Yes. Yeah, of course. If it’s. If, yeah, if it’s not flushing, probably don’t try to put anything in it. 

Yeah. I can see that this is, this whole conversation is going down the toilet right now. As we close out the episode, I give everybody a chance to do a shameless plug it.

What would you like to plug today? 

Normally I’d plug contact cucumber, and. We’ve talked about contact cucumber so much. So I guess I’ll stick with that though, but yeah, consequent comer is a really easy way to get all the content that you need generation. It’s a month service.

You can get up to 2000 words a month. We have plans that you can tell us what to write. We write it. Or you could also do a hands-off plan where we do everything for you. We do the SEO strategy. We make the content calendar. We post it to your website, so you can have as much or as little involvement as you want.

And our whole thing is writing. And I guess lastly, to just steal one more shameless plug, check out Chris tasks. Dot com for updates on music stuff, which 

will come later this year. All right. Yeah. And so just now I have to ask what type of music are you doing 

so for this album, it’s going to very much be inspired by like seventies prog rock and eighties, piano 

rock.

Wow. 

So think Elton John Emerson, Lincoln Palmer stuff like that, but I’ll be posting updates and. Yeah. I also have a Instagram that I do all that stuff too. As Chris, Jesse musics. 

What instruments do you play or instruments? 

So piano is that I always say I’m a professional pianist because people have actually paid me to play piano.

But I also play guitar and drums and other instruments too, but people don’t pay me to play those. 

Just a short story to end it off. My, my daughter went and got a degree in or went for a degree in vocals. And so she ended up meeting a lot of music, people, and she had a person over at our house one day who was just getting ready to do his his recital.

He had a piece getting a piano degree. And so he just you want me to play a few things and we have a grand piano in our living room. Granted, it hasn’t been tuned in like 10 or 15 years. It’s been forever. And I, it’s, there’s an electric piano sitting next to it too. Anyways, he plays it and he does about 20 minutes just out of his head.

It’s amazing. And then I’m like, would you ever what if like they asked you to play this? When you, if you went in for recital, he said I would refuse. It was so it was, sounded so bad. It was his recital sounded great, but our piano is definitely out of tune desperately needs help. So if you do come over, there is a, an electric piano.

You can also play in our house. 

Cool. Yeah, that sounds awesome. Are you going to have someone come fix 

up your piano? I was thinking about it. I think the soundboard is cracked. I think that’s the only thing. It’s like a 1940s, a grand piano. That looks really cool. So right now it is, it’s a big, huge piece of furniture that needs to be tuned.

Yeah. A lot of times old pianos just turned into old pianos or Swedish dolphin. And our sweetest dolphins. That’s true. I’ve seen that. 

All right, Chris, Jess, Dane, we are going to see you in may. I’m excited. I hope you’re going to be retail X or whatever. They’re calling it this year. Maybe it later.

If I were to be really clever, I could come up. I’ll look up what it’s actually called and I’ll do a little boy silver and it’ll say.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah. You got to make it really robotic 

too. This is my AI driven content that I’m going to inject into that into the audio part. And then I could like, if it’s, if we do put the, I’ll put a little thing over the top of our mouse, so people can’t mistake it for some kind of a mouth over anyway.

Chris J chesting content cucumber is the company. You deliver content and you deliver it every day. It is such a great service. I’m happy to be I’m happy to be a customer of yours. I’m excited to see you in Chicago at and I’m excited to see what your booth is this year. 

Yeah. Awesome.

Yeah. W it’ll be good to see you. And I don’t know if you do live updates or anything, but it could be fun to do a live update. Yeah. 

I think last year I saw one person doing a little podcast and I was thinking about, maybe I would just do some little short interviews at the show this year 

and yeah, it is.

It’s a cool way to get to talk to your customers, to get some merchants in there and be like, so what’s been working for you 

lately, yeah, exactly. Last year was like a cricket fan. Hopefully there’s more people this year. 

Yeah. All right. Yep. I think so. All right. Thanks for having me.

Bye. All right.

NRF Big Show Wrap-Up: 2022 the Year That was(n’t)?

This year, the NRF Big Show focused on five themes: digital transformation, peak retail, e-commerce in omnichannel, shopping and the millennial consumer, and the Future of Retail. Digital transformation is all about meeting the customer where they are. Retailers are transforming their stores into increasingly digital spaces with digital displays, …

Read more

Building a Customer Centric Culture

Store owners want to get from out of their e-commerce business. Real conversations happen when building a customer-centric culture is a prime focus. Whether you are a merchant or warehouse distributor, or a manufacturer looking for digital commerce. You should look at your tech partner, either agency or the solution integrator, and make sure they understand the business aspects and the workflow of your industry.

Vatsal Shah offers transformation and growth to organizations and individuals by creating an inner drive. He helps them elevate their brand image, increase revenue and profitability. He founded Pragmatic Consultancy in 2008 to unlock their potential. As a business coach, he championed transformations of 69 IT, Digital Agencies, E-Commerce, and Retail organizations, trained more than 12K people and 184 CEOs. His clients spread across India, China, UK, Africa, Ireland, and the USA

Vatsal and I also discuss Vatsal’s involvement in Meet Magento Events


Transcript:

All right. Welcome to this episode. Today I have Vatsal Shaw. He is a coach, a CEO coach. E-commerce evangelists speaker. I’ve seen him speak in person. He’s a pragmatic at pragmatic consultancy. Sorry. Let’s all. Please introduce yourself. Do it much better than I just did. And maybe tell us one of your passions in life.

Yep. Thank you for having me here at the same time. Yeah. So in a nutshell, if I tell about myself, what I do is I help it companies, digital marketing companies and agencies grow from small to big, say from few million dollars to multi-million dollars or multinational companies. What I work closely with them in terms of strategy, planning, execution, creating organization structures, they’re liberal politicians pricing and.

And as a result, a lot of adult Shopify, big commerce agencies have grown. I also work with various mobile and app development companies available in development companies. So almost all types of ID, sector companies. And I’m fully focused on that. And my passion is when people grow and then they touch more lives and all prosperity at that time, I feel good.

So I’m a teacher at heart and businessmen as. I have a weird combination about education. I studied it masters, then marketing majors, then psychology and communication. So I try to keep on accumulating new knowledge and keep on sharing on different platforms. And yeah, my mission is wherever I am, I should be able to transform lives, whether it is individuals or.

And my individual passion and singing and drawing, bending, and singing as well. So are you going to sing a song for us today? No, because I may be singing in Hindi, but you’re a leg Indian language. Your target audience may not understand that. So we’ll do a follow-up episode with you singing. Oh, we’ll do the intro.

I will sing a song for you and meet with India, because then the audience is. Alright. Perfect. So today I’d like to split up the topics between the store owner and maybe the agency and see maybe there’s I know there’s different perspectives from both all was there’s different perspective there, the third perspective from the developer as well, but maybe you could go into what customer.

The store owners want to get from out of their e-commerce business. Yeah. So it has been my favorite topics since long. We have been reading on internet or maybe listening the dogs from specimens. And I started with the purpose. We might have read a book called Scott McCain, which is what customer really want.

And then a lot of popular conversation happens where customer centric culture is a prime focus. So what I always look at is when any e-commerce. Oh, no. Or you can say merchant or warehouse, distributor, or a manufacturer looking for digital commerce. The space, what they look at is their tech partner, either agency or the essay they understand the business aspects and the workflow of that industry.

They bring subject matter expertise on the table. They help them digitize their workflow instead of. Fixing them around a platform or a tool or technology, which is preferred by them. It is an interesting no six, seven points. I can recall from the court Mac in that customers are looking for a compelling experience and where the it companies or agencies.

Giving the customer service or development service or e-commerce maintenance service. And so on customer look at personalization and personal focus that how I can help their business, how can increase their revenue. How can I increase their order ROS and so on. But most of the agencies focus on tech part, or they are focusing on digital part or UX part all together.

Is there a very rare combination. Most of the essays don’t focus end-to-end servicing of the customers customers want reciprocal loyalty means they want me as a solution architect or business practitioner to suggest what not to do. Instead, I have seen a business analyst or e-commerce solution specialist keep on prospecting.

What next can be sold to the customer. And a customer wants differentiation. If. Same Gordon’s book purple cow. What they want is there as to what has to be remarkable or different. If you look at all different chains of retail store on store, we’ll have component. Similar, but the orchestration of the retail sales is different.

And the same thing happens when you talk about digital commerce. So I understand that functionalities can be same platform can be the same, but the way it has been delivered has to be different. Whereas I have seen that agencies are busy making excellent at their packages and selling the same thing again and again.

So these are some of the gaps which I keep one finding in the market and I’ve seen the biggest. Exactly do opposite side. And then the Grove as billion dollar company and the rest skip one, struggling and finding new customers, licensed valley, switching the platforms and so on. And and as a result, Merchants struggle in finding the right partner.

So it is not the problem in Asia. It is a problem. I have found everyday because I talked to agency partners in us, UK Australia, Singapore, and India. So I have seen this trouble going on everywhere. And I would say merchants are right now pretty savvy, but still they get confused.

What is right for them. Yeah I I agree with that. So what do you think agencies could do to interpret what the client wants? In my previous stock which I recently delivered at magenta association connect we recently delivered that Magento association connect actual problem statement.

Somebody is trying to solve. And then based on that research is done, right things. So it’s interesting thing I used to teach when there was a curriculum going on in India that help us start digital commerce. And I was affected in there. So I used to teach to the merchants and the business owners as well considered that you are going to the new city.

And if you don’t have enough money on you’re trying on, so you won’t buy a house or an apartment, what you will do as you go on. So that can be Shopify. If you grew up at big and if you are established, then you want a bigger system because you have bigger house like bigger family and you want to scale it bigger.

So then you can look at hosted SAS cloud platform, or you can switch to window. And if further you grow, then you can have only general solution, which is enterprise grid, which can be Adobe commerce or any other no. Solutions, which we see in the Gardner store. So with the need of the client size and scale, if it’s just them, things, it works in a different fashion and it will reduce the cost of ownership. What I’m seeing is merchants struggling in their profit and margin for each thing. And that’s where the number of site opens you find equal ratio. Number of sites gets school. Yeah, I think that’s been an ongoing thing for a long time.

 Is the is the sites that go back and forth between either agencies or platforms that’s happened quite a bit. So in the beginning you mentioned some breakdowns that agencies should pay attention about. Maybe we could go over those again. You mentioned UX UI, what are some of those high level things?

If we were to take buckets, the merchant or the agency is offering and they are, and I think the other thing you said is they don’t offer. They don’t often offer all of the different things. They’re just offering one small segment of those broader orphaning offerings. What what are the things that that you mentioned earlier?

Okay. Interestingly, most of the agencies, they do requirement gathering. Then they do solution specification, but they don’t do like the product development companies do. So when you look at the product development companies or digital product development companies, what they run is a design sprint, or discovery sprint.

They go on MVP model. I have not seen e-commerce stores getting developed in. It just design, like you tell us what you want. We will package it, deliver. And then at the end we will support. I believe that business evolved over a period of time. What worked in 2018 may not work in 2020 and will not work in 22.

So it can be in a weaving model. Then we can keep on increasing the scope. Digital commerce where the technology and marketing can work. And then I’m doing Moscow analysis is very interesting stuff. And when I deal with merchants, I knew that mustache would have, could have, and won’t have eaters and I would rather recommend them what not to do then.

So yeah, it is not pro business when it talk about closing the deal. But what I have found is by doing this, I end up winning more. Sure. Yeah. So where then the agency comes in, if the client is asking for something that isn’t measurable or is measurable. So what I mean by that is a lot I think what you’ve said earlier was agencies will just do exactly what the client said.

And then they don’t often go back and measure the success of whatever they’ve been they’ve delivered. Maybe you could talk about some things that would be measurable that an AI would help an agent. Sure. In previous question also, I missed telling it so one is consolidation part second, I’ve seen that agency don’t focus on marketing automation, and it goes in the way of the customer.

So recently I have seen that some of the agency have picked up a conversation where they say client, that we work on value pricing or the amount of orders. Or the increase of the revenue have we will have a share out of it. It is called performance marketing. So that is lighting. New thing. Agencies should look at UI.

UX is already people have been doing, but I would say interaction design can be the next thing where they can look at ideal customer profile, which is ICP of merchants clients. And then based on that, they can create custom customer flows and personalization. These are the costly things. So all merchants can not afford.

I understand that, but the people were in terms of the enterprise who can go for it, they should look at it. And it didn’t say you should start looking at it for similar concept, but it does smaller scale. They can give to all the plans. Yeah. Yeah. And I think you would agree that a agency should offer it and let the client say no, rather than never say anything about.

Certainly. Yes. So w when you offer something, at least you are leaving a customer empower and they have rights to choose. So when customer feel empowered they love it. And instead of dictating, this is not right, this is possible. This is not possible. If we give choices to the customer where you made a differentiation between types of agencies.

So maybe you could explain or tell us the difference between an e-commerce agency and an it company. I think a lot of times those two things get blurred. Yeah. I have seen this overlapping conversations out there. I have seen the. Agencies have different type burners. Their primary focuses on UX design and they outsource the development.

Second IRC in a digital marketing and branding agency, but they have small development arm and then outsource development. Third is tech focused company, which is working on as a platform essay or implementation partner. And they don’t have to do marketing house. So this all three of them claim themselves.

And it was just very confusing to the market. And there are pure-play ID players in this. Menu also, you will find e-commerce development is one of the option. So I can see this four distinct types and then all claim that they can build an e-commerce store. So what they mean, maybe The right components.

They may degrade the jacket and put it live. But th that is where not the business begins. It is, I would say 20% of the nearest 80 is missing. Which is around the business and the workflows and marketing and so on. It’s a different way of looking at it. I have seen ID companies, how they build up in a different way.

What they look at is we will make one thing and sell multiple things. So there is a product approach. There are agencies which work like a B2C B2B approach. What I mean by that is there so end clients or they sell dedicated resources. And I think companies are more focused on selling resources, staff, augmentation, teams, selling, they are offering manpower to the other it companies, agencies, or to the end customers.

And so that is one of the VR selling. Services and gaining money, which is most commonly found in it. Companies or product development companies, unlike agencies. And then what agencies look at is how we can create a masterpiece, how we can win a project or a brand or a kitchen where we do value pricing.

And we may do less number of projects, but we will have be more. So these are the two different tracks that I’ve seen. People get confused between to try and both the things together and switching between two and so on. So don’t you think though, that in that to be in it, to be an e-commerce agency, you have to be an it company and not necessarily I asked an e-commerce or digital commerce agency.

Not an ID company, but they know how to do orchestration of all these components available. They do have programmers and developers, but Derek, their center is not technology or product. Their center is commerce. So now you look at the big four consulting firms. They do amazingly big implementations, but their core focus is commerce or retail tech, or digital transformation of retail chains, not a particular platform or technology.

They use technology to deliver. Oh, that would be the with, okay. So are you making the differentiating around platform rather than technology or rather than the skill set of the particular developer? Because it sounds like an e-commerce agency. If they’re only on Adobe commerce then they’re focusing on that and they can’t offer something.

 I’m not saying they can not offer something else. I, you can see that most of the Adobe partners have started offering multiple platforms now, except couple of still they’re still low Adobe only, but rest of the people that have. No suggesting different platforms. What I’m seeing is their core concentration, even while department gathering and suggesting to the customer is revolving around the product platform or the technology.

It’s not that our own commerce. When you put commerce into the center where you start reading. What is the customer’s product? What is their differentiation? How we can create a story around pans products, and then you start building no canvasing their customer’s journey, and then fit commerce technology in that.

So it can be then in store catalog can be variable. It gets, so it brings the only channel solution. So what. So it’s what is the first priority technology first or commerce first? Yeah. Okay. I get it. So I think that a lot of the, a lot of the agencies that have been Magento only are focusing on making sure the client fits into Magento.

And what you’re saying is figure out what the customer needs first and then find the best solution for them. Okay. And then wherever the right components are fitting. Components and technology in the clients need. So it can be Magento. It can shop if it can be front end with Hiva or it can be used to a friend or it can be anything else.

It backend can be anything. It can be, anything can be anything. So it’s not necessarily that it only one product can be fitted. Yeah. You can have one product as a base and then you can revolve components around it, but the focus should be commerce, not the product we are. Got it. Oh as we move through this, then how can agencies become more agile when they’re making these decisions for on the behalf of clients?

Oh, it is a interesting phase. We are passing through. Now since last couple of years, we can see that there are different layers of solutions on the label. So the VA said different platforms available that our platform, which is economical, that our platform, which is for the mid range.

And there are platforms, which is expensive. Now, when you. I consider that if I’m an agency owner, what I have to do is I have to be agile in strategic decision making to sustain and grow. What I need to look at is my imbalance, what analysis I’m supposed to do. But at the same time, nowadays is a question on installed capacity.

 So we build a one listing, can Google G nine metrics. It says capacity building of the company. Now all the agencies are supposed to be. Check a skill they have, they’re supposed to build new capacities. Earlier they were doing one of the tech work. Now they’re talking about composable commerce.

They need to learn or unlearn rather different ways of doing and calling and practicing e-commerce development. People who are front end developers, maybe. Be in need or maybe a different kind of rented would be in a need. So a lot of new things are coming up. So if I will be an agency on I would have forecast there’s interns on 1819, that what would be the next instead of being like, I would have been a late adopter of different front end platform.

 Maybe she’ll get in Contentful, goes to a friend, a lot of many other things. And then we’ll look at how different vacuums forms can help me deliver what client. Second. What I have seen is agencies who have been settled records all or two and a half decades old, 15 decade, Allie, 1.5, which has been a seasoned player who have been gold platinum partners, adapting new change and embracing Jane needs.

Lot of evaluation with them, which leads a redesign of the process, recharging in no motivating people inside to learn new things and learn what they’re already good at or the best. And reshape the organizing structure. Earlier you had only one type of people. Now you have multiple type of people, a leader who used to be a king, maybe now he’s one of the manager.

So a lot of structure restructure happens. And then so this leads to a jail management. And if you go to any businesses, They teach different ways of managing business, but they I would say new terminology should be taught nowadays. It’s just got a general management because businesses are specifically it businesses becoming now a giant, it started project management.

Now it is business management. It also getting a day because everything new coming in new conversations are, I know their social commerce is going to play a big role because three platforms will be more now different ways of payment methods are. A lot of things have changed. So I would say the people who used to be great may not be a fit into the market sooner.

 It would be survival of the test. I would say that, yeah. That’s a really good way to put it this, since things are moving, they’re moving exponentially quicker. It seems like you have to be agile when you, when it comes to your management process, just like you have to be agile when it comes to your delivery process of your technology.

 You mentioned a composable commerce. I know that composable commerce and content and commerce are a big thing right now. Maybe you could explain what your thought is around composable commerce and how it fits into today’s. I think you are the better person than me do. Explain where this composable of commerce here with masters.

 And I claim to remaster in commerce space, but I would say composable gives a lot of freedom of expression to the developer, or maybe an agency also to the customer where I have Liberty to choose what all I want and I can. No set up things together, which works in the favor of my business.

So earlier I would say it was made to order. Now it is assembled to order. So if I say in a simpler word, what is composable? Commerce is assembled to order depending on the client need, we assemble right components and deliver to this plant. And it, it breaks the boundary of one particular platform’s dominance.

 It becomes open to everyone. We shared the pie and the pie is bigger than this word, compostable commerce is heading towards. And how do you feel content in commerce fits in with that? Last year in the UK happened to talk about content driven commerce. I always believe that we don’t buy products.

 There was a popular tweet because of my session with Guidewire. I said that people don’t buy a product, people buy stories. So you don’t buy apple phone or for 100 back, you buy a story which is around math. Similarly, you don’t buy anything like the, I think you are using. Right now.

Yeah. Yeah. So you’re it because somebody might have you on a great story about it, and then you happen to buy that. So people don’t buy products, people buy stories around it. Look at the community into inclusive Magento community. It is a spirit and the story which holds us together. So it’s always that it’s, they want a product.

 And then when you talk about expiration of. Nowadays generation Zed is coming in. The next set of buyers are doing this enzyme. They are patient, they are digital, they’re tech savvy. They read about brands and then the juice products, which connects to their values, which is a girlfriend which builds loyalty and trust.

There are some of the key points we can find in McKinsey article, how their behavior prints, and then looking at that continuum and commerce will be the key. When you talk about DTC brands that are more towards advanced story and content, their philosophy, why they read it and so on. So it is going to be a interesting part.

I know that you mentioned earlier around growing your e-commerce business, what do you think it takes to sustain and continually grow an agency in this e-commerce world? Recently. Oh CNS not only e-commerce development, but marketing of store using marketing technologies arrow, maybe automation.

And then there can be a huge gap when. Need of skilled manpower of which we need as a merchant automat, no manufacturer to run my e-commerce store. If agencies start focusing on giving that service, which is called e-commerce process, outsourcing EPO which is called manage e-commerce stores.

So some of the people I have seen some companies have started this. Since one and a half year are doing there, get catching wildfire. What it does is this allow merchants or manufacture to focus on the core business and rest of the grunt work, which they need to manage the store also done by the agency.

 Maybe a subcontracted partner agencies have, but that can be new addition to grow it and see business second, I would say no, client is small, maybe a new birding literacy brands can be a unicorn and coming two, three years. So it is a scale look at how they can start small and then grow along with the.

And working on performance marketing alone or the client or e-commerce tool can be an amazing thing. And the way I recommended we should look at Jeannine metrics, which is called installed capacity. So what kind of team competition? I have skilled metrics I have inside the company, how to keep on checking and updating it to stay into the market.

Yeah, I think you you mentioned something interesting there about about no client is too small and oftentimes you do get a big client that has a small idea that wants to grow it. So that’s a great way to look at it. Hey they, this is a really big client, but they want to do something that’s as a test.

 And there’s all kinds of tools out there too, to test their ideas. And you as an agency or as an agency has to be willing to take up that test and move forward with that with that client. And it could be a small client and the agency believes is them or could be a big client that has a small idea that the agency believes in.

I think both are very valid. You mentioned Meet Magento a few times and I’d like to go into Meet Magento’s now. You attended all the Meet Magento India. I had been doing most Saul. Yeah, I turned it all and I have taken a role play in four, not one, not in one because I worked my top was not selected by you.

I would say that this kidding, but yeah, in the in the first episode of Magento, I here I was. Then in the third one, I was a anchor and speaker and hopefully contributing this year as well. And then not only in making much of the India, I have been contributing to split, went into Singapore, Indonesia, UK, wherever I get an opportunity.

Recently I contributed to Magento association connect. Yeah, I know Magento community because I started my gender with Magento when the first meter release was there. I still didn’t call it Dave and I was, I used to do a job and my CEO gave me a big printout of what into architecture and then the data structure and.

What the hell how this can be possible. I’m talking to them eight, nine. And since then I have been, then I left my ID job. And then at that time I used to be e-commerce product manager. And then later on, I started my consulting career and help a lot of e-commerce agency grown using Magento. So the idea has been fantastic journey.

And personally, I love orange. And now I’m forced to love many more colors, like green, blue, and so on. So let’s just say, we’ve been talking a lot about agencies as an agency. Why would an agency want to attend any Meet Magento? Yeah. There are a lot of things. One. People don’t generally spend time on reading or entrepreneurs are busy managing things, which is coming up in their daily routine.

So consider that if I want to have a quick review of what’s new into the mix. Good a bit Magento, you will find world’s finest speakers talking about the new trends. What is coming next? And then know you can quickly learn and whatever you feel interesting. You can go back and explore. Second you meet like-minded people.

And have a drink with them. Third it’s fun to be with the community. It’s a different you have talk to like-minded people. You talk about your case studies and you learn from each other’s experience and exposure. That’s the reason you should read and go into Meet Magentos. Personally, I have been to imagine as well, four times.

So it’s altogether different vibes when you meet in person nowadays it’s drier because. We are on zoom and then delivering session on hoopin. But yeah, but all who below, but when it goes back normal, I think it’s. Interesting conversation happens when we meet. Yeah. And I think some of those conversations happen in person and different conversations happen in person.

And you feel more enabled or more empowered, I think on both sides to have more conversations and things come up that wouldn’t normally come up. It would never come up if you didn’t attend. And I think it’s harder on zoom too, to have those open conversations. What about why would a developer Juan and with tandem Meet Magento event?

Okay. So I would say they have numbers. Life is pretty boring sorry, developers. I love you, but yeah, that’s how it is. You love computer and poor more than the people around many may not agree to it, but yeah, I have seen that you’re focused on. What is to be delivered as a tech park. So if you want to revive your human feeling go and meet your friends at windows.

And then actually in the way you’ve learned from each other, feel jealous that somebody knows more than me. And then you go back and put up more hustle and learn what it does also have certification coupons going on. So you’ll go and attempt your exam. They get a day off, maybe paid from your boss and then go and attend video.

 I’ve seen that developers can learn a lot of things. They’re focused towards that, but there, they can also attend business tracks, or you can say margin tracks to see how commerce at the play. I always seen that funny part, that developers and then the lead in tech technical. I don’t know why that I’m not interested in business tracks.

Actually what they are making is actually empowering the business. So they should look at that also as a perspective consider that if they want to become a freelancer agency owner, they should attend business track to understand how this business. Yeah. I you bring up a great point about developers on how the developers should have a bigger, a broader view of the solution that they’re doing when they’re doing their coding.

A lot of developers fall into that trap of, Hey, I’ve been given this task, I’m going to do this task without asking any questions, attending those business tracks, lets you have a chance to learn the bigger picture of what you’re trying to accomplish. I want to key on one point you said, why would a boss let their employee attend?

And so my question is why should a boss give their employee time to attend a Meet Magento event? If I would be a boss, I would let my all employees go and sponsor tickets and then I will see them go and see the world, how it goes. Why? Because when they go there, they see the tracks, they look at different parts of where people coming from.

Different part of world, some from America, some from Germany, Europe, maybe Singapore, Austria. In the place where you are, and then they learn how to, how they communicate, how they behave body language, they learn soft skills. They also explore presentation skills. I will not, some of the team members, I would push them to talk as well.

I would push my developers to deliver a talk as well. There is a different exposure to develop a person’s personality. And then yeah. It is always good that there is a trend as well, that other, we know many business agency owners come there for shopping, you know what I’m talking about so that they take away into those developers that is part of life and part of business.

But at the same time if I’m having a great culture, if I’m paying well, I should not worry about my developers going here and there. But then I would put them as a brand ambassadors as a. And from what my brand have a snowball effect, bring many more people like you into our company and let’s throw together that can also be a talk I can deliver as a boss too much.

Yeah. I think you brought up a great point about that, that it is a two way street that your people are out there to recruit other people. And it is a, it is an open forum and giving them the opportunity to learn more about what’s out there in real life and talking to other other people in their same industry.

You learn a lot from that. And I know in the past I’ve learned a lot just from attending, talking to other agency owners you learn their experiences. Certainly there’s going to be some filtering around that, but you do learn about how they’re experiencing their customers now. And we did, we earlier, we talked about how maybe clients jump between platforms.

 Clients definitely jumped between agencies. As you start to be great, big talk to bigger agencies, you’ll learn this big clients been with this agency and this agency, and they they seem to change their mind every two years or every year sometimes. I wanna, I want to key on one more point that you made too about about speaking at events like this and how these smaller events and actually Meet Magento is not a small event.

It’s been quite large. But it’s not as it’s not as, I don’t know how to come. It wouldn’t be compared to say Adobe summit there. There’s not the same budget. Let’s just say that the why would, what is the PR what would, let me try to phrase this question correctly? Why would a person want to speak at an event like that?

Okay. So it’s an interesting question. Many people ask me you are not going there to sell your service or promote your CEO coaching course. You are not an agency. You are not a developer. You are not part of Magento. You’re not running a Magento farm, or you are not running WordPress from why you keep on talking there.

So I say there are a lot of tech, people are there and a lot of agency owners have. If I have some idea and if I can get a platform to share, it’s amazing to get. And then I would say a lot of. URI or I would say followers, or you can say fans, I have earned in my life of who appreciate what I talk is thanks to Meet Magento.

A lot of people in those, I have spoken even in word games and also in university forums, but meet Melinda has given me helped me a lot of respect in the country where I’m living. And it has actually made me a better personally. And that’s the reason I should go and talk there. It actually, when I’m supposed to prepare for a talk, I’m supposed to do background work, study research.

It also helped me improve my intellect as well. So it’s amazing to. Yeah. Yeah. So I would just key in on to couple of those points, that number one, it gives you an opportunity to learn how it is in front of other people. And it helps you to collect your thoughts and put them into a format that helps you to communicate to others.

And you will get direct feedback from others and how your presentation went good or bad. I know that we’ve been talking about giving some coaching. If there’s younger people that would like to present we could help them give them some coaching on how and I’m sure that you would also be good at giving some coaching to younger people or maybe people that are not so experienced in public speaking.

I would also say that since this is virtual, it is a lot easier to do a presentation to people because you don’t, maybe you don’t see them out there in person. And there’s not that extra pressure. There’s some pressure still, but you don’t see them there in person. So there’s a lot of opportunities and I think the biggest one is just that.

In preparing you end up learning so much about what you’re presenting that in that presentation all that time, it takes to put it together. You end up learning 10 times more than you could possibly have known before you started that presentation. I would add one point there considered that what all knowledge I hear.

If I can summarize that knowledge in 20 minutes. Think about how well I will be making my pitches to the customer. So it helps me create framework that how I can compress my conversations still, it can be crisp and effective, so it helps in business development as well. So where’s the train. All right. I promise I have one last question about meat Magento.

 Why would the merchant want to attend a Meet Magento? Oh, it’s interesting. At one particular place, merchant can see what all kinds of technology he or she needs is available. All the boots are there at the same time. He or she can validate different vendors standing there. Third, they can validate whether that vendor is good or bad, because you will always find people who can give feedback about them for they can learn new things fifth, they can also meet a product company, employees, like they meet one another.

You will always find people from Adobe. You’ll always find people from.digital. So we’re actually a platform or a product. So you can go and talk. You can get. It started on the live meeting. People were from payment gateway or processor like PayPal. People is always there. So you’ll find there’s a merchant.

I can find quick solutions so I can have quite answers to my questions, which I have been thinking in my office. I can just go for a few hours and get those answers. All right. So you brought up one more question. I apologize for not, I’m going to have another question. One. The last question about me, Magento prompts.

 Why would one of these eight, what would one of these tech companies sponsor? I Meet Magento event. So there are multiple reasons. One, you get promoted locally, so you be attractive to the new employees. That is one of the biggest advantage tech or is get when they promoted me Magento.

Second, if the merchant’s footfalls are there, you catch that merchant as well, and a third, any type of brand promotion happening, you should have an opportunity to do it. Why? Because unless you are visible on earth, how people will notice you and how you get Get more leads or the mileage. So I would say attending events and sponsoring events is one of the channels of generating leads or getting visibility.

So people should spend money there. Yeah. Excellent. All right, so let’s just switch to the Magento association for a little bit, as we close things out. That’s not, yeah, we won’t get into anything contentious, but I know that. Suddenly because of because of some people they’ve made some noise in our community and it started with the hoof a theme, and now it’s culminated in this may major open source community Alliance that has put some of us would look at it.

Some people would look at it as some division and others would look at it as it’s coming together. So I feel as though that it’s helped us to come together better because really this open letter that. Has prompted Adobe to wake up the Magento association to wake up and suddenly we’re all talking. What is your view on that?

So when people are sleeping here to make noise, to wake them up, there’s the first answer sake. Sorry. You can say that openly, but yeah, that’s there. And second, I am also part of modern day association committee ISO a committee called diversity and. And you might have a red a blog coming out from from the chosen ones who is going to take a head Magento open source.

So DNI committee actually played a good role in choosing who can be the next stars betters. I would say it was intended, it was spending, but this noise helped them do it faster. So sometimes I believe people perform better and faster in pressure and that actually have happened and I go the same then does help us merge together instead of splitting into two.

So I think now it can be a better roadmap we can see, and I hopefully See that open source survive grew and try because a, I would say whatever market share Magento has, the majority of it is open source. The Adobe commerce. So if it thinks then there will be a vacuum in the middle layer of open source e-commerce systems.

Yeah. And I think all these things are coming together now to show the importance of where the community fits in. And Adobe’s also acknowledging that the open source product has a great hold on. What the commercial product does and that they can’t simply ignore it and continue on with plans without talking to anybody.

I wouldn’t say Adobe cannot do it. The reason is open source clients. Are there potential prospects to convert into the pain? Licensed claims anybody who’s on opensource would likely to if they grow likely to buy at a promise. Actually for them, it was a lead generation platform. Instead of putting it on back burner, they should look at how they can tell.

Yeah, no, I agree that this has been the, this has been the question since 2010, since the enterprise platform came out, is how do you, is it a competitor or is it a lead generation or a One league below, like in, in cricket you have a premier league, right? You have a a great big league and then you have the leagues that are at, and everybody promotes the top.

So clients, the clients should, their aspiration of a client should be driving to the top and having this premier platform that you’re going to be on a Gobi needs to look at that open source as the, as. Driving place that helps people to move to the top. And I think in the past there’s been hundreds of thousands of users on the open source platform and they need to make sure that they’re.

Attending to those users because of bad experience and open source, and essentially means that they’re not going to go to that commerce platform because why would they even had a good experience. So from the Magento association point of view, then w I think there’s only 2000 members and I think there’s a hundreds and hundreds of thousands of developers that are in the Magento community.

How can we get more people to join Magento associates? They have created a committee which is commit a community building, or you can say it, it adds more registration to the Muslim association, but I believe that it’s not marketed, but if it is communicated it will work. Just for example, if you go on LinkedIn and you search Magento.

And you just select Southeast Asia countries like India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, and Singapore. LinkedIn search ends at 50 to get results. And then it’s dot.dot. You will find more than 50 to give people if you just stand that those many. Now you think about all different continents, Africa, USA.

 Russia, Australia, New Zealand and so on. So this can be, this has to be, I would say 20 X or 30 X community and registered on Magento association platforms. I think it. It needs marketing. It needs a declared hash. And then we’ll look here looking at people registering here. And I think it’s not promoted by.

Yeah. And I am on the I am on the membership committee. We don’t have any control over marketing. I think it has been suggested a few times that we do marketing as well. But what I believe is when solutions are not working, then the fork works, so sometimes you need to make new. No.

Then it starts working ultimately the benefit of Melinda community association unless you get more membership, how we can monetize or how we can grow big or how we can pass on more benefits. So it’s needed it as it has to be marketed, but then you always find great influencers in particular country.

They are not even leveraging those influencers to gain more membership. Yeah. And I think one thing that I just thought of that it seems like a no brainer is when we do a Meet Magento event, we should ask if those people would also like to join the Magento association, there has to be some way of opting people into the Magento association.

If they sign up for Meet Magento event, I think those two pieces are disconnected at the time. Yep. So if those data was pulled into the Magento association membership, it will create a magic. So I would say by default opt-in can be a choice that if you registered to Meet Magento, you are attempting for free the part of Magento’s position as well.

Excellent. We’ve solved everything. Thank you so much. We have used up our time and I, we had talked about going for 30 minutes and we’re coming up to an hour. So I think I I think we have to we have to wrap things up now, but I appreciate your time. I know that earlier I asked you if you could give me a shameless plug, so why don’t you go ahead and give me a shameless plug about anything.

 Perfect. Lots of Shaw. The CEO is this right. CEO of pragmatic consultant. So when they get all right, yo coach. Perfect. Okay. It was great speaking to you today. I appreciate your time. A lot of first time we dogged in this land. The log of first time we talked about this lent the log of first time we talked, taught this length, the law of first time we talked with this lent.

Thank you very much.

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