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.
The brands winning today are building a community that drives repeat purchases. Loyalty is gained in drips and lost in buckets because there are so many layers of competition. We interview Ryan Alford with The Radcast agency in South Carolina He has been radical about marketing advertising for 22 years.
Transcript
Brent: Welcome to this episode of talk commerce today. I have Ryan Alford, as opposed to all Chevy. Which we’ve made the joke in the back room. Ryan is a entrepreneur and a super popular podcast host for Radcast Ryan. Go ahead. Introduce yourself. Tell us a little bit about what you do on a day to day role and maybe one of your passions in life.
Ryan: Sure. Brent, it’s great to be here with you. Yeah, I mean I own, my main course of business is radical. You’ll notice the rad theme throughout a lot of things. And I’ll go ahead and give you the insider baseball secret. Ryan offered digital is where that started, but I just like the word radical better.
Ryan: Radcast the agency that I own in South Carolina, it’s a digital ad agency called radical and that’s the day to day and been in marketing advertising for 22 years. Working on some of the largest brands in the world before I started radical. And even with radical now working on large brands and I’m a father of four boys.
Ryan: So my passion seems to align with my children and my wife, Nicole God rest her soul. Who is she? Or bless her souls. She’d say not rest. She’s very much alive, but she’s a assistant principal in a middle school doing one of the hardest jobs in America. In today’s age. My passions revolve around family and when they’re happy, I’m happy.
Brent: that’s awesome. Yeah. We are also a family business here and my kids all worked in the company that my wife and I started. Everybody’s moving on, including myself and my wife, but yeah, I totally get it. Kids are at the cornerstone and I think one of the things we talked about in the green room is how are kids influencing what’s gonna happen into the future?
Brent: Maybe you could talk a little bit about that.
Ryan: My boys are. 1111 and 12. We’re a blended family. I don’t have twins but we’ve been together since our boys were two and four. So we’ve grown up together as the modern Brady bunch, but I will say this I’ve watched them daily. They’ve grown up in what I call digitally native.
Ryan: I’ve grew up and yourself, probably in what I call analog native. Even though I’ve worn both hats because I’ve grown up in the technology and agency industries, which are very tech heavy and owning a digital agency. I like to say I’m split down the middle, but our kids have grown up in a digitally native first world.
Ryan: What I mean by that is. Both video games, social media, smartphones the medium with which they are both consuming content and being marketed to has all been digital. It’s a world they know, and they place value on digital things that you and I and others probably in the gen X or boomers or whatever place value in physical things.
Ryan: My 12 year old son could really care less what he walks outta the house on, but if his avatar on Roblox doesn’t have the perfect pair of shorts, the perfect Nike digital shoes, and a spiky haircut. He’s not had a good day. And that blows my mind that he cares that much about it, but he’s grown up in that world where they place value very much in digital things.
Ryan: And being digital natives. So our children we’re watching them. We’re watching that value transition from physical to digital doesn’t ma mean that they have no value in physical things. We do experiences as families. We go on trips, but they don’t necessarily care about stuff in the physical world, the way that they do digital things.
Ryan: Especially in video games and social media and other things like tokens and different things. And you see this. And it’s really transitioning into that metaverse slash digital world where you’re gonna start to see a lot of marketing transpire and where marketing’s gonna need to take place.
Ryan: Because again, when things are happening digitally is we’ve moved digitally, the place with which to get eyeballs, to get reach, to get frequency. In the future and already now is in these digital worlds. And so marketing is being very much headed down that path pretty quickly. I’m not saying it’s here and now, and certainly for smaller businesses, they don’t need to be spending thousands and thousands of dollars on speculation.
Ryan: But again, you can see this happening in front of our eyes, in front of our children, with where they’re putting value. And so that’s how I summarize that Yeah.
Brent: So I think that kind of ties into NFTs and how popular they’ve become or are becoming, how do you see that in relations to how your younger children and kids are growing up and moving into marketing and being marketed too?
Ryan: Yeah. It’s interesting right now it’s a lot of hype and a lot of PR you’ve got digital artwork and things, and so I’m not as. I don’t high on the, the apes that are digital art that are, value that may go up or down. Mine is more in where the basis of the NFT, which is the smart contract that’s happening on the blockchain.
Ryan: And also the data transition for first party data that you’re gonna see happen on the blockchain. And all these things are interrelated. The NFT is the start of it because it’s that digital. A contract that I have a piece of art and I own it, and it’s creating that ledger. And what you’re gonna see is when we move into the future, again, a lot of this advertising and marketing is happening on the web and what’s happening is people are getting more concerned and closing in on that privacy.
Ryan: It’s gotten a lot harder to market on Facebook and other channels, because privacy concerns are there and what you’re gonna see with these smart contracts and your ID, you’re gonna have a wallet. ID on the blockchain, that’s gonna be more you giving permission for data usage. And so it’s gonna play really heavily in targeting in the future in marketing.
Ryan: And so the NFTs are scratching the surface of the technology used. And what you’re gonna see is that transition. And I do think we’re gonna move into a world the next 10 years. Think about. How ridiculously hard it is to get title work done on a house sale, if that was done on the blockchain and that digital ledger was there, you could immediately find that information there and it’s recorded there.
Ryan: And instead of now we’re fumbling around and back offices and paperwork from, 50 years ago on certain transactions, I think you’re gonna see all of this, all these things live within the same data and technology, and they’re all gonna be related to both marketing and just commerce in the future.
Brent: That’s that’s a really good point especially for title work for, so going back to kids what are some indicators that you see that kids are shaping the way marketing is
changing?
Ryan: Yeah. The biggest thing is if you start with the fastest growing social media platform in the world today is TikTok.
Ryan: and that started as the teenager platform, 13 to 23. And so they’ve advanced this platform, but now, and I just did a talk about this so they’ve set the standard and set the popularity and set the interest level for this channel of social media and content and really entertainment.
Ryan: And where our source of entertainment, our source of news, our source of knowledge. Our children are setting the standard for things that are taking off. But then I say that 50% of the growth on TikTok today is happening in 30 plus. They’re age 30 plus and 30 and 50% of that engagement is happening.
Ryan: So what started as the 13 to 21 year old platform TikTok 2, 3, 4 years ago is now becoming the mainstream. So you’re seeing the youth set the standard and the knowledge base for some of these platforms. And then it transitions. And it’s not that actually different from like Facebook, Facebook started as a younger platform, 15 years.
Ryan: Even 10 years ago. And now it’s the fastest growing platform for 45 to 65 year olds. Everybody thinks Facebook’s dead. Facebook’s not dead. It’s just older. It’s just graying. . Yeah,
Brent: definitely. Facebook seems like it’s the place for older people. Let’s just say. I think that I think you’re right.
Brent: Especially on the TikTok front I started using TikTok. I’ve been trying to use it more for business things, but I’ll be honest. My Jack Russell posts on TikTok are definitely the largest viewed items that I could possibly have. How do you think that compares to something like Snapchat? I see my kids still using Snapchat every day.
Brent: But the advertising angle for Snapchat, I think is much lower than it is for TikTok, but Snapchat remains super popular.
Ryan: Yeah. It’s super popular from a messaging platform specifically. I’m not that high on them as far as they’re long term proposition right now. They’ve gotten passed by as a mainstream content platform by TikTok, Instagram, with reels and different things.
Ryan: It’s certainly a player and it’s certainly used, but it’s primarily messaging from that younger audience. And I don’t wanna discount that value, but I just don’t think they’ve done as good a job. I feel like they’ve gotten on to very trendy like things like AR and certain things that are interesting, but the mainstream appeal of the platform has never really taken off.
Ryan: Where TikTok has grown is growing in a more mainstream fashion with content and engagement and the style of video that it progresses. I feel like Snapchat is faded behind by just remaining that messaging vehicle and not necessarily content
Ryan: consumption and video, I say, content is king, video rules and that’s the problem. Video is everything now. And I think that’s where Snapchat’s gotten left behind.
Brent: I know that you had you, you talk about some ageless truths in marketing and you started off with your son, I think, and his avatars.
Brent: I think one of those ageless truths, though, especially as kids get into their teens, are they going to point at you as the father and say, you cannot wear that today. Dad, you look so whatever 2010s or something, there, there are some ageless truths truths around marketing and the way our kids are
Brent: influencing us as parents. So maybe speak to some of those ageless truths and the diversity between that digital life and that real life. Yeah,
Ryan: I’ll go through, I have seven. What I call undeniable and ageless truths are creativity, reach, consistency, distinctiveness, attention, emotion, and motivation.
Ryan: Those are the seven. What I call undeniable truths. They’re all necessary even today, whether it’s digital, whether it’s promoting to children, promoting to adults, whatever it is. And I’ll say this no matter what you do, reach and attention are important. So back to the TikTok analogy right now, that’s where attention is growing there in an Instagram and other channels.
Ryan: YouTube. This is where the eyeballs are, linear TV is certainly not dead, but it’s faded for the number of attention and how much, how many eyeballs are there. And at the end of the day, reach is really a measure of media, which is the number of people that see your message. And no matter what, you’re, whether you’re selling t-shirts on e-commerce supplements, whatever it is, you have to have a baseline volume of reach the number of people that see your message.
Ryan: That’s an undeniable truth in anything that you do, unless you’re in accounts based marketing, and you only need to make four sales a year. You need extensive reach in order to meet your sales goals. Cause me media is divided by reach plus frequency. That’s where it gets into consistency. And the biggest thing I see and the biggest challenges I see today are people that veer off their core messages too quickly.
Ryan: And so people, there’s a, it’s interesting to me on social media, everybody thinks I’ve already posted that. How many times do you see the same commercial over and over again? Because that consistency is what drives. Awareness and consideration and intent, and I’m gonna getting into the purchase funnel here, but ultimately what drives a sale is that consistency of message.
Ryan: And the frequency that it happens. So I don’t know that I’m answering your question exactly, but I think there’s just certain things that even as the medians change, even whether it’s children, whether it’s adult, whether who you’re marketing to, there’s just some age old truths. And one of my other favorite ones is emotion.
Ryan: Even in today, people think with their head and they buy with their hearts. And so emotion can be humor. Emotion can be sadness, a lot of different things, but emotion drives purchase behavior.
Brent: So when we’re going to some of those ageless truths, I think you had mentioned there’s seven of them.
Brent: You had mentioned reach consistency, emotion. What are some of those other ones
Ryan: on that distinctiveness? That’s the differentiation. So Again, ageless here. If you want to sell more, you have to stand out. So distinctiveness, consistency, emotion, motivation. So again, this is if you go from the top of the funnel to the bottom, motivation are things like sales periods.
Ryan: What triggers your action that you want the consumer to have and take today. And so even you can have a brand promise and you can have a solution that you provide to someone’s problem, or just a great outfit that someone wants to buy. But what’s the motivational trigger that, that drives them to action today.
Ryan: Lastly, creativity, I don’t know if I mentioned that that will never die in marketing, at least on my watch.
Brent: So creativity, I think is, that’s always the big one out there that people look for. So the name of your firm is radical. What are you bringing to the table that’s radical that follows along with that creativity?
Ryan: Yeah, the biggest thing is we preach what I call B to H business to human. Whether we work with probably equal parts, B2B and B2C. But what we do is we create it. We drive creativity through the human lens because on the other side of the, whatever, the platform, whatever the medium is, a human that’s buying, whatever you’re selling.
Ryan: And so we use that as a premise for a lot of our creative thinking and what we’re trying to do again, back to those triggers. At the end of the day, what happens when you create an agency called radical. Is your people hold themselves to a different standard. Not only do we hire people that I consider creative, but we also challenge our clients to think out of the box and to know that we’re gonna bring solutions that may not always be obvious.
Ryan: and for example, today in social media, you need to educate or entertain. And so we challenge and we literally have a comedy troop that works for our agency that we’ll do comedic funny, irreverent skits for common sales pair. We had a flooring company that, we did a spoof off of Ron Burgendy.
Ryan: We did the Floor-a-thon, and, it was just irreverent and had a guy up there who was drinking while he was on set and selling flooring. And so again, we when people go left, we go, we just challenge ourselves to think differently and then push the envelope.
Ryan: And again, part of the, I don’t know, the craziness of calling yourself radical is it’s funny what it empowers both your clients and your people to push a little harder.
Brent: Yeah, that’s good stuff. Do you find it difficult to get B2B customers to think outside of what their norm is and I’m thinking there’s a lot of
Brent: boomers. I’m not a boomer. I’m not quite that old, but there’s a lot of boomers out there that, that were around before computers or before before the internet, let’s just say there was probably computers, but they, it’s harder for them to embrace some of these things in B2B cuz their thing is working.
Brent: How do you push them outside of their comfort zone and get them to do some of those things?
Ryan: The first thing is back to, when you hire an agency called radical, you’re gonna get what you paid for. So we set the table early, and at the same time, it is difficult. So Brent, so you’ve totally nailed what can be the challenge, but at the same time we do get that license to press them just when they hire us.
Ryan: We’re pretty upfront in the process. We’re gonna push you to consider things. And I also think what’s happened though, is you’ve had this convergence of B2B and B2C channels coming together a little bit, especially with the pandemic and stuff like that. A lot of people are at home on social channels, doing different things, embracing content through different ways.
Ryan: So you’ve had a little bit of a lightning and, or easing of, I call it maybe the executive level content, like everybody’s left their hair down a little bit. And realize that, Hey, I don’t have to wear a suit and tie every day and do stodgy boring content to be effective. So I think that the realities of today have helped lessen that expectation.
Ryan: And, again, B2B companies are seeing, and finally realizing that the age old stodgy Content and overly produced stuff doesn’t work. You’ve had a D social media, whether it’s TikTok, and I’m not saying that’s where B2B brands necessarily belong, but it does have influence. And LinkedIn has even grown as a content platform.
Ryan: People have gotten more comfortable and there’s been a decentralization of content being overly produced. and I think B2B is caught on in the companies that wanna work with us, that we push certainly have caught on. And again, preaching through that B to H business, to human language.
Ryan: They understand that. And that doesn’t mean that, your website can have any fewer legal standards or things like that. But I do think there’s an understanding and a place in this convergence of marketing and media that’s coming together.
Brent: Just sticking with B2B.
Brent: Do you help some of these companies who’ve come to you and they’ve maybe they have a baseline or they’ve tried something and it hasn’t worked, it’s gonna work cause you’ve seen it work for their companies. Do you create a baseline and then really help them understand how, whatever that audience is?
Brent: Let’s just say it’s YouTube as a simple one for B2B. To explain, Hey, let’s do this and let’s at least try it and then measure it and see how we’re doing. And then they have to also continue on with it for a certain amount of time to see some success.
Ryan: Yeah. That you’ve nailed it right there.
Ryan: That last part we just won’t, we choose not to work with people that wanna see definitive results in 30 days on anything marketing and the channels and the complexity are too great. It’s not because we won’t hold our soul to expectations. It’s because you have to trial and error, so many different things, and you have to be able to test a lot of different variables so that you see what works.
Ryan: So we like to run two or three tests at a time with different content and different mediums and then compare and cross over those things. And that’s the challenge, but that’s also the opportunity. And I think the brands that kind of buy into that see the success.
Brent: In our green room, we talked a little bit about that you spoke at a FedEx event.
Brent: I would like to talk about social selling and live social selling. Let’s dive into that. I’m interested in that and I think you’re right. That’s where it’s going right now, or at least a trend. Why don’t you explain what that is to our audience and help us to understand better how people can get into
Ryan: it.
Ryan: yeah, there’s two parts to it. Overall social selling is just exactly what it says. Leveraging Facebook, Instagram, TikTok Twitter, whatever the platform may be. These all have integrations into the eCommerce platforms. So social selling we press a lot of clients either towards Shopify or Magento when we’re working with clients on e-commerce.
Ryan: And all of them have these integrations built in where your product catalog pushes the social media so that the sale happens within the social platform. So that again, social selling you’re pushing or promoting whether it’s stories, whether it’s posts, whether it’s whatever that content channel might be.
Ryan: You’re but the actual technology that takes place in the transaction happens within the social channel. The biggest trend though, and that’s certainly growing and what’s happened is you’ve had two worlds come together that have allowed that number one, the demand for consumers within the channel, and then the technology’s gotten a lot better.
Ryan: It used to be clunky as heck to try to integrate your product channels within like Facebook and Instagram, like two or three years ago, it’s gotten much easier. As well as the kind of transaction gateways is much easier. So you have demand and technology coming together around the same time. But then the biggest trend in all of this has been live social selling.
Ryan: So this is when you leverage the it’s really, when you think about it’s the QVC effect in 2022, but what we have now is the technology for anyone to broadcast you are your own media channel within these platforms. So whether you’re on Instagram, TikTok, or Facebook, You can go live and start promoting your products.
Ryan: And so we’ve seen a lot of success for brands that literally built studios, whether they’re a, furniture store or a merchandise t-shirt store, no matter really, whatever you’re selling set up studios within their own facilities that are just small facilities, where they have someone come on, they go live and they’re promoting product.
Ryan: It brings in that human element. So that you’re you put a face with the brand while also just giving someone that kind of channel with which to ask questions. Cause you’ve got messaging that can happen between there. And this kind of started in Asia, two or three years ago started really growing.
Ryan: And I think we’re at the right at the mass kind of adoption here the next year or two certainly a lot of brands have already using it, but I think you’re gonna see more mass adoption and it’s an incredible way to create another channel with which you can market and grow sales.
Brent: Yeah, I think Instagram certainly started some of that trends in Facebook, of course, in their in
Brent: buying directly from the app. But I think what you’re saying more is you go to the actual eCommerce store and they’re selling it to you live and maybe even doing a studio call where you can, where people are talking to you like on QVC, but you can also interact with those people directly through the channel
Brent: I think that makes it very exciting. And it makes for a broader audience via multiple social channels as well. Yeah,
Ryan: that’s right. And it’s another way to build community. The brands that are winning today are building not just selling, unless you have a truly differentiated product.
Ryan: The brands winning today are building some type of community which drives, repeat purchases and some amount of loyalty and brand. Loyalty’s very difficult to I say they it’s it’s gained in, in, in drips and lost in buckets because you. There’s so many layers of competition now. So it creates another layer for building community and building again, that dual communication channel on your product services or no matter really matter what you do.
Ryan: And yeah, I think it’s it’s a really big opportunity. And I think the channels the companies that are doing it are seeing a lot of.
Brent: I like that. You mentioned community and I was at ShopTalk a couple weeks ago and saw a great presentation. I can’t remember the brand right now, but it was a clothing brand and they’re, they built a lot of their brand around a brand building community and having, not just influencers, but the community of people purchasing that brand that are advocating for that brand consistently.
Brent: Do you think a lot of Let’s just say eCommerce only merchants are missing out on that opportunity to build community within that brand. Yeah. Within their own brand, I should say. Yeah.
Ryan: I, every brand is unique, so it’s hard to pass judgment per se, but I do think it’s a level that with the social channels now with influencers with different opportunity path, It’s a lost opportunity if you aren’t and it’s so hard to stand out and create, repeat purchases, unless you’re doing it again, unless your product is just so differentiated.
Ryan: But if you’re selling cosmetics or t-shirts or any kind of apparel, You better be building community because that’s, what’s gonna hold you up through the test of time is that community channel that it’s glorified word of mouth in a way, but it’s also creating and bringing together like-minded and it’s back to targeting, bringing the right target together and so that you’re building
Ryan: both the awareness channel, but the loyalty factor, because then they’re loyal to you for more than just the product itself.
Brent: Is there risks in e-commerce merchants or even any merchant embracing this I idea of community and then working on their social channels to promote their products?
Brent: What are, what risks do you see in this.
Ryan: There’s risk in anything, but I think there’s the upside is much greater. The risk could be you certainly don’t want to alienate especially if you have a broad mass appeal product, so you might risk, bringing together.
Ryan: Certain audiences that are maybe not reflective of your brand, that’s certainly a risk, but I think if you do it right, and you organize around your beliefs and principles and bring the right people along the upshot is much greater than the risk. Certainly with social media, in the live forum and in other things, the risk would be just imperfection.
Ryan: But what’s interesting is consumers sort of embrace that realness and that rawness, I can’t speak towards every legal liability. So you again, need to empower your people with the knowledge and the safeguards that they need. But I think the biggest risk might be.
Ryan: I think it’s more, the fear brands are fearful of imperfect situations or content. When in reality, that’s actually. .
Brent: Yeah. And I can speak to experience on some of the risks around the idea of trying to automate too much of your social media. I can remember. I’m a very ferocious tweeter when I’m at an event.
Brent: And I can remember setting up some bots that would auto tweet a hashtag if it was. Some combination of hashtags and somebody figured it out and was retweeting some inappropriate content based on the hashtags. And I quickly realized it was very early on, but I realized that was not a great idea to try to to try to promote some of those things
Brent: so I suppose some of the risks are around automating things and not monitoring that automation. And I think another risk too, that I see is is brands embracing social media, but never answering. Yeah, people sending you a message that says, Hey I want, this is, this has been a horrible experience.
Brent: What are you gonna do about it? I think Delta airlines has done a great job for me anyways, on responding to me on those type of things. But there’s other brands that I won’t mention that never get back to you.
Ryan: yes. If you don’t have support to do this, you’re better off not doing it. So you can’t do things that spark conversation and not have
Ryan: the hands on the other end to then answer it. That’s a total no-no and I think what you’ve also said, you brought up the automation factor, again, these channels are so ripe for customer engagement building community. And so you’ve got to commit the resources to them appropriately to take advantage of that opportunity.
Ryan: But if you don’t embrace it completely and you try to automate too much, that can drive a whole nother set of issues, some of which you’ve just described, but also there’s just an authenticness that consumers now expect from brands. And again, if you can’ embrace that fully and it doesn’t mean you have to be perfect, but it does mean you have to truly have engagement
Ryan: and someone assigned and ready to speak and act and be empowered on managing that.
Ryan: And the other challenge is on the automation side, lot of people get into that and I, there’s a big push in marketing to use more automated tools, but right now consumers really crave that authentic expression from brands and they don’t expect perfection.
Ryan: So if you weren’t set up to have the resources and human people. Responding to these things and empowered to do it. Automation just can’t complete the circle for what’s needed to use these channels appropriately and I’m and look, I love technology and software and automation. Like certainly it’s made a lot of our jobs easier and more manageable, but on social media, it’s social.
Ryan: That’s the name of the word? It’s not robots. It’s social. It’s, there’s a two way channel for engagement. You gotta be able to keep up with that.
Brent: Yeah. And I think I’m gonna key in on what you said earlier, you said spark a conversation. And if you put that in real terms, like you’re walking into a room and you’re gonna start talking to somebody.
Brent: If you start talking to somebody and then you simply never respond or worse, walk away as they’re trying to respond. It’s the analogy for social media is exactly the same. You’re basically calling somebody and leaving the phone off the hook. And never answering anything they’ve just said ,
Ryan: that’s exactly right.
Ryan: It’s a great analogy. I love that. It’s true. You can’t, spark the conversation and then not be there to answer it.
Brent: Yeah. And as, as bigger brands get, the more they should think about answering those things that are coming at them from social media. And if they’re not going to, they should explicitly say we don’t answer this channel.
Brent: Or I would just say don’t use that channel at all. If you’re not gonna
Ryan: answer. That’s right. I would definitely say that or use it in a way that it’s clear that you are pushing out, but not expecting something back in.
Brent: Yeah. But Ryan, we had a couple minutes left here. I wanna just, if you want to close out on a, something you said earlier about customers need to stick with a marketing initiative that you’re trying.
Brent: Even if it seems like it’s failing after a month or even two months if there’s a plan in place, is there a recommended amount of time that somebody should stick with it or is it pliable by the marketing campaign you’re doing? Yeah.
Ryan: That’s a hard, one. Marketing is so complex and so specific to individual companies.
Ryan: That’s a hard one to answer like universally, but I’m gonna give it my go here. Again, I believe in setting 12 month plans, but making them very mialable, like bendable moldable as needed, cuz you need to be able to read and react to the market. But what I do think you have to stick with is number one, you need to focus on a target and that target can’t change every 30 days.
Ryan: So you need to spend, because a lot of I do some master classes and things like that. And the first thing you have to do is nail your. Because otherwise even a good friend of mine, Andy Murphy says this analogy that even if you’re five millimeters off, if you plot that out over a hundred miles, think about how off course you actually end up
Ryan: And again, getting that target nailed in getting the message to that target dialed in and sticking with it long enough that you have true actionable data. Because 30 days really isn’t enough. So I like to see 90 day campaigns that are testing across one or two different variables that might be the media.
Ryan: It might be the message, but again, there’s a consistent target and there’s a consistent kind of brand promise and theme across all of that. And so I think campaigns in 90 days, I think years in planning, like as far as a year or 12 month plan. And I just think you have to nail that target and you have to at least nail the overarching solution or brand promise that you can provide.
Brent: I would add one more thing that maybe a lot of companies don’t listen to as well is that there has to be enough traffic to make that data actionable. If it’s a, let’s just say it’s B2B and they have very low traffic. It’s gonna take a little longer to prove whatever hypothesis that you’ve put out there.
Brent: I think it’s a mixture of traffic and time that all merchants have to embrace or at least trust that they have to be able to see it through.
Ryan: Yes. I think you nailed it. And the reality is we’ve done all this talk about social media. Organic social media, except on TikTok and a little bit on LinkedIn is pretty dead.
Ryan: you gotta pay to play to get the reach and the frequency that you need. To drive the traffic that you were just describing. So paid ads are a necessity unless you really have patience and know that organic traffic and growth is gonna take time, cuz SEO efforts on your website, take time. Organic posts get your about 7% of your followers.
Ryan: See them Facebook and Instagram. Twitter and others have figured this out. They’re just not gonna let you grow a business or a brand without paid approaches again, unless you’re leveraging influencers or other things, but those are paid as well. So again, if you want the volume that you need back to reach one of the undeniable truths and marketing it’s pay to play.
Brent: Yeah. And I think too that it’s not as easy for pay to play as it was 10 years ago, you really have to work on your campaigns and even look at more of those long tail searches in when you’re doing pay to play. It’s not just open up the spigot, but you’re gonna get a bunch of garbage nowadays, I think as well.
Brent: So as a merchant, you should pay attention to making sure that you’re looking at whatever’s happening and changing, like you said, the course to make sure you’re on target to hit that. Exactly. Ryan, this has been such a good conversation. I appreciate you being here. As we close out, I give every guest the opportunity to do a shameless plug about anything you’d like to plug.
Brent: What would you like to plug today?
Ryan: Yeah, obviously, hopefully this has been enlightening. My hat here, the Radcast. Love for anyone to go. Listen, if you look up the Radcast, we do own most of the SEO. You’ll find our show on all the channels. We’re a top 25 marketing and business show on Spotify, top 100 on apple.
Ryan: And then I am launching a master classes, a different in different things and a mastermind under the radical formula, the radical formula.com. So I’d love for you. If you’re an individual or small business, that’s a great place to work with me. And learn from, 22 plus years in the business.
Ryan: And then if you’re a larger brand radical company, radical.company online, Brent really appreciate it. This has been really enjoyable. And you’re a great host.
Brent: Yeah, I’ll make sure I’ll get all those show notes onto the onto the podcast. And again, thank you so much for being here.
Open-Source and Software as a Service have traditionally not been aligned. The traditional SaaS model is closed code on a multitenant host. The Open-Source model is something you have complete control over, and you have to host it yourself.
Open SaaS brings the idea of open source to the SaaS Community. We talk to Katie Hoesley about the Big Commerce Hackathon and how developers can be active in a vibrant community.
Transcript
Brent: Welcome to Talk Commerce, the BigCommerce community channel today. I have Katie Hoesley. Did I get it right? Katie Hoesley. So Hoesley go ahead. Introduce yourself. Tell us what your day to day role is and one of your passions in life.
Katie: Okay. Yeah, I’m Katie. I am the senior developer advocate at BigCommerce.
Katie: And I think the things I’m really passionate about. Completely unrelated. I’m really passionate about education and I’m really passionate about being outside. I live in Colorado and I’m from Minnesota, like you Brent. I’m really passionate about the outdoors and education.
Brent: Good.
Brent: Today we’re gonna talk about some developer things at BigCommerce and how maybe developers could get more involved. Yep. In some of those activities that BigCommerce is doing. Tell us about what you’re doing in that role and some of the things that we can do together to encourage developers on the BigCommerce platform.
Katie: Yeah. So my position at BigCommerce, I describe it as to people as I swing on a pendulum between our product and engineering teams and then the developers in our developer community who actually use BigCommerce tools and who build on our platform. A big part of what we’re doing right now is just trying to get more people engaged in our community in general.
Katie: And the thing we have actually running as we speak is the first ever developer hackathon at BigCommerce. So it’s a two week long hackathon. We have participants from all over the world and it’s been really fun. It’s the first time we’ve run anything like it. And of course, now that we’re running it, we have 2 million ideas of the things that we wanna do moving forward.
Katie: More hackathons, more community engagement, more open source, contribution competitions stuff like that. We really want anyone that builds on the platform to join either our slack community or follow us on Twitter. Because we have a huge number of people that build on this platform and we have such a small percentage of them in our engaged community.
Katie: And so if I could tell them all one thing it’s that I really think you get a lot out of engaging in the community. You engage with us on the dev team. You engage with the other folks that are building on the same platform. And you can eliminate a lot of multiple people doing the same work, we find out that people are building something that someone built five years ago, but they just don’t know it exists.
Katie: My day to day is really trying to get people into that community and then trying to create initiatives that really bring them a lot of value. And then. We have a perfect direct line into our users to bring feedback back to product and engineering, to tighten up those loops of iterations of products.
Katie: It’s a mutually beneficial relationship, like BigCommerce gets a ton out of us having an engaged community and the community itself. I think also gets a lot out of just being there and being with each other and with
Brent: us. I think that you had mentioned open source and that’s a little bit unique to the SaaS community.
Brent: Tell us about open SaaS and open source and how BigCommerce views open source and how open source then is is participated in from the broader community. Yeah.
Katie: Great question. So BigCommerce is moving in a direction. Like I feel like we’re partially there, but the larger initiative in general is moving towards being like an open SaaS platform.
Katie: Which means that we accept contributions from the community. You can go look at the code base of big design, for example, our like modular design library that has all these reusable components that you can use. Anyone can use them. They’re open source. And if you find a flaw or if you wanna improve it, like you can do that.
Katie: We can have all of this contribution from our community so that our community is not reliant on our developers fitting some bug fix or some feature request or whatever into a sprint, rather if you know how to fix it, or if you wanna add something, you can go ahead and do that. And I think anyone who uses a particular software consistently, or anyone that’s been a software developer knows that the community finds things that the developers on the back end don’t see, because they’re building the product.
Katie: They aren’t necessarily using it over and over and over. So the more contributions we get from our community in tandem with what our very skilled developers are building better for everybody. It’s a really cool concept. I don’t know if anyone else is doing or is as focused on it as BigCommerce.
Katie: And if I was a, if I was a developer out in the wild and I had to pick something, I feel like I would wanna pick an open SaaS platform over something that’s completely closed. And if I have any sort of issue or thing. I know I can just go fix real quick. I have to wait for it to fit onto a product roadmap where open SaaS or open source contributions in general are just a way for the community to directly affect the product that they use every day.
Brent: Maybe describe briefly how a developer gets. They find a bug, how do they get that fix into it? And how do they verify it’s been fixed? If it’s a SaaS platform. Yeah,
Katie: that’s a good question. You would have to find either in the documentation or by contacting someone where that repository is of whatever that open.
Katie: Thing, you’re looking at, say, it’s the big design. You could find the big design repository and you would submit a poll request for whatever change you’re making. And then someone on our end would either accept the poll request or they would reject it. You would find out, probably get like a GitHub notification.
Katie: I’m guessing if that’s how you’re doing it. And if there’s some major thing that you wanna change, they’re not gonna. Users create like humongous features, I don’t think at this point any platform would let users create something huge, but you would just submit a poll request and then you would know whether or not that got closed, like rejected or closed
Brent: accepted.
Brent: Are there, are you recognizing those people in a way, in any way?
Katie: That’s a good question. I don’t know. I don’t know if we have a system for like recognition of con contributions. I don’t know if we’re at a level where we’re getting enough contributions to think about it.
Katie: But we should, we definitely should. There should be an incentive. There’s an inherent incentive because it’s improving the product that you use, but there should be a greater incentive for people to continue contributing, cuz that’s the goal, right? Like people they start contributing and then they get the bug and they want to contribute more and everybody wins.
Katie: As of right now, I don’t know if there’s like a true incentive outside of the product being improved.
Brent: Have you looked at other open source communities that are doing the same thing that wouldn’t be SaaS? An on-prem open source software has a lot of these things that we’re talking about already
Brent: ingrained in ’em because people can run the whole system on their local machine and find those things directly. Have you looked to see what other communities are doing to see how BigCommerce can evolve in that as a SaaS company?
Katie: I don’t know if Magento qualifies for this, but when I first started in devel, I was like talking to everyone I could find online about dev and about their experiences, wherever they are.
Katie: And I kept hearing that Magento’s software is over 50%. Open source contributions. And that creates this awesome ecosystem where people want to contribute. They’re saying their contributions recognized developers love it because they don’t have to sit and fix all these things or add all these these little tweaks that they trust their community to do.
Katie: And I heard over and over these like rave reviews about just that. I think right away, I was sold on uping the open source. Just like upping people’s knowledge or awareness that like, you can do that here. And so our hackathon is our first big thing, but an open source contribution competition, or some way to get people to contribute to our open source content is definitely on the top of the list of things we wanna do next.
Katie: So yes and no, I think I don’t have a lot of direct things to look. There’s not I don’t know that there’s an exact parallel to what we’re doing for me to look at, but I heard over and over from people who had worked both in develop as a developer and in other roles at Magento that that was a huge thing.
Katie: That was a huge reason for their community growing so much and staying so big. And like I said, there’s so many devs using BigCommerce and there’s so few of them proportionally active in our community. Active in slack or active on Twitter or wherever it is our forums. And I’m hoping that more initiatives like that can get people in, people can see this is fun and it’s not that hard.
Katie: And you can solve your own problems, which I think for a lot of developers being able to solve your own problem. Is why you became a developer most of the time. You can do it yourself, you can build it yourself. So yeah, Magento is the big one that I kept hearing over and over.
Katie: Obviously you’re familiar with Magento. And so just hearing that alone, inspired me to really keep that on our developer relations roadmap of a really cool thing. We can get people. To be aware of and to
Brent: contribute to. Yeah. And I do know a little bit about Magento but I do also think it’s a good if you look back in history, it has a good roadmap of things that have worked and haven’t worked in a community.
Brent: And it’s a good way to collaborate with another community to find things that are working from one community, the other. And I think as a community leader the core of it shouldn’t be commercial. The core of why we’re in a community is to do great things together as a community.
Brent: And I applaud the hackathon. I think that’s very exciting. Is it the first eCommerce hackathon for a SaaS platform?
Katie: It might be? I’m guessing other companies have done one. I know Shopify did one years ago. I know it’s the first one at BigCommerce. We’ve never done an external hackathon before.
Katie: And when I looked around to try to find examples of other hackathons, so I could figure out how to run one and figure out what I needed to do in order for it to work. I really couldn’t find a whole lot of stuff. So I don’t know if this exact model of us running one, not in tandem with an event.
Katie: It is its own event on its own. I think that setup is fairly unusual. Normally a hackathon would be, the final two days of a week, long conference or something like that. So I didn’t have a lot of examples to look to. I just had my previous experience of being in hackathons. So we could stitch together what we thought we needed to do. I’m not sure if we’re the first oh, SaaS company to do one. I doubt it. I’m sure someone has but yeah, it’s our
Brent: first one. I think it’s super exciting. It’s the first one of a SaaS company I’ve heard of, but then, okay. I’ve been involved in another community for a long time that’s not SaaS, so I’m not the best expert in that.
Katie: We have, I think like a third of our participants are in Asia.
Katie: A third are in north America and a third are in Europe and 1159 central time is like 8:00 AM someplace, it’s all over the place.
Brent: Great. Is there, so is there plans to do an in person, like maybe in Austin, an in person hackathon it is
Katie: top of mind. I think running a virtual one has been awesome, but it just makes me that much more excited to run something in person.
Katie: I guess anyone on the internet knows it’s much more difficult to connect with people via discord or even via zoom. So we would love to have some sort of developer-centric event BigCommerce traditionally. I don’t think we have very large developer events. But as we dig a little bit more into like developer relation, as we invest more in our developer relations team and our community team I think it’s become clear that we have a ton of people in Austin.
Katie: We have a ton of people that would travel to Austin if we were doing some big, awesome things. There’s no date but it’s on our like mental roadmap of when can we do this? And we are excited. I really wanna do something
Brent: soon. Yeah. And I know John Woodall of space 48, and I know Tom Robertshaw who just did big DevX.
Brent: It was a virtual event too. Yeah. Our first event with him was in Austin. Okay. It was called ma Titans. And I think there’s probably a lot of opportunity. And I know Space 48 is fantastic in the collaboration space and especially in the developer space. And Tom is such a great person to lead that.
Brent: It seems that type of event would be a big hit in Austin. And I would be one of those people behind it that would be pushing for it. And it is fun. We have organized a number of the Meet Magento events, and typically after the event, we would do a full day hackathon in conjunction Adobe slash Magento always sent their community leaders there to help put those pull requests in at the end.
Brent: At the end we would have some scorecard items around how many bugs were squashed and how many pull requests were accepted. And it’s always a fun time. And then the developers, if their bug does get into the core. I think with the open source that you can download, you can actually see your name inside of the code base.
Brent: What is that? But it is it’s, I think from a recognition standpoint, it’s always fun to know that, Hey, I’ve contributed back to this software and it’s a good talking point for BigCommerce as well that you can participate and then give back to it.
Katie: Totally and like doing a hackathon like that too, a really short, like one or two days is a completely different energy than this two week one, this two week one, I think is gonna primarily be people working on or starting to work on apps that they do plan to bring to the marketplace, so I think we’ll have a lot of like MVPs that will get iterated on after. I’m sure Space 48 is gonna come out with some fully done app within two weeks. I don’t even know what those guys could do. Probably a fully completed app, but the energy of a two day one is really fun. Yeah, if we did some sort of open source competition or, whatever it is.
Katie: And also we have so many partners that are doing such interesting things. It’d be so fun to have speakers from somewhere like space 48, someone like you to come up and talk to the other developers in a real, in person forum. I’ve never even met my coworkers or seen our office, so it would also be cool for me.
Katie: But yeah, something in person is like definitely top of mind and being able to in incentivize and encourage open source contributions would be huge.
Brent: Let’s make sure we do a follow up after the hackathon and see how it goes. And definitely we have a few minutes left here and I have a new project that I’ve started personally it’s called the free joke project.
Brent: Okay. And I’m working on telling a joke during the podcast rather than. just Having a joke prior to my podcast, which I give away a free joke prior. I’m gonna tell you a joke right now.
Brent: And and then you can decide if it’s free or. Should I charge for it? That’s the question. Should it be an open source joke or is this one of those jokes that we want to really tie it down. We don’t want even anybody to modify the payment gateway on this joke.
Brent: That’s how closed it is. All right. So what do you call it? What do you call a detective who just solves cases accidentally? What do you
Katie: call detective who just solves cases
Brent: accidentally Sheer Luck Holmes.
Katie: I think you got charge for that one. Really? I think that’s gotta go behind the paywall. That’s a good one.
Brent: Behind the paywall joke. You’re the first one who has said that. Thank you so much. Katie, at the end of every podcast, I give the guests the opportunity to do a shameless plug. What would you like to plug today?
Katie: Okay I think what I’d like to plug is joining our developer slack space or following BigCommerce devs on Twitter.
Katie: That is me. I constantly retweet myself, so you’ll know right away it’s me, but that is I think the top of the funnel to joining our developer network and to really seeing what we offer and being able to engage with people just like yourself and people from my team. We’d love to have more people join the community and really see that it’s a great place to be.
Brent: Yeah. And I will just add that we’ve started a BigCommerce community channel on Twitter. Yes. That we’re trying to get more people. It does have more people than another platform that starts with an M that now starts with an a, but also has a large following. So I would encourage everybody to go to Twitter and join the BigCommerce, Twitter community channel.
Brent: Yeah. And we are trying to post something in there almost every day. Katie, thank you so much for being here today. Thank you for having me. It’s been a great conversation and I wish all the luck for your hackathon. And lots of bugs, squashed, and lots of new features seen.
We talk with Marta Molinska (@molme) about how she has helped hundreds of Ukrainian refugees as they crossed the border during the war. We talk a little about the Magento Association and how Marta is helping with events and the community. Ukraine can still use your help!
https://www.hospitallers.life/about-us
Marta runs a sky diving business in Poland and is passionate about the Magento Community.
Transcript
Brent: Welcome to this special episode of the Magento association. Talk Commerce collaboration to bring out more about the Magento association and what we’re doing to help the Magento community today. I have Marta Molinska Marta, please introduce yourself. Tell us what you do on a day to day basis.
Brent: And one of your passions in.
Marta: That’s a very nice way of introducing myself when it comes to passion because what I do on a daily basis is my passion. So I run a drop zone. So we are jumping out of planes and my personal role on the drop zone is to teach people how to And my side job is actually involved in Magento and Magento association as well.
Marta: I’ve been organizing Meet Magento Poland for 9 years straight and now I’m more involved in Magento association and in helping with communication with some consulting and I guess that I try to be a kind of maybe not community manager because it’s for me, the community is not something that you can manage.
Marta: It’s something that you can join and be part of it. And I guess that I want to be a part of it.
Brent: Thank you so much. And so today we’re gonna talk a little bit about Ukraine and how people can help Ukraine and maybe how both the Magento community and the Magento association can participate in helping Ukraine.
Brent: So sure. Give us a little bit of background on, on what you’ve been doing so far.
Marta: It’s it’s already a few months since the war broke. But the first weeks were obviously the most intense a couple of days after this shocking news when when Russia attacked Ukraine we in Poland, we were devastated.
Marta: And as I said, we were just in shock, but after a few days and when the migration crisis took place on the border we saw a horrible, horrible videos and pictures from from the border. We could see that the huge crisis is coming. And I guess that the whole nation was thinking just the same, but I need to step in.
Marta: I need to do something and people just open their houses, they open their their homes and they really welcomed total strangers. Of course, if someone that, needs help you’re open to share some of your personal space, but it I think that it never happened. At this scale, it was hundreds of, and thousands of people who welcomed Ukrainians in their homes.
Marta: But I saw that it’s not enough. And since I don’t have much space in my house but I do have a lot of spaces at the airfield as my drop zone, especially in the winter time when we are not operating. We decided quickly to share every inch of space that we had and we recreated every office and the room that we had to the refugee center.
Marta: And yes, as mentioned before the first week was we’re very busy and we had hundreds of people not at the same time though. We had a rotation. So families were coming in they stayed for a few days or weeks depending on what their next plan was. And then when they left new families were coming in.
Marta: Yeah, a rotation system. And then after each family left one by one we continued to help in their settling in process. Like with finding a job or doing some paperwork with school or providing some basic supplies for the new start you can just imagine people.
Marta: coming to to Poland with all their belongings, not in the suitcase, not in even, a backpack. It were just a plastic bags like from Walmart, and they were occurring at for 2000 kilometers. It’s I don’t know, 3000 miles. Yeah, that, that was something that was obviously the most intense time of my life.
Marta: That’s for sure. And the most rewarding as well. And from this point I also wanted to thank a lot some Magento community members that stepped up really quick and helped me to continue the work because on the very beginning, it was quite easy to gather funds for running the shelter.
Marta: But since it’s not my daily job to run this kind of places I had no competencies to do this. And also not much resources. First of all Karen Baker, she was the first to help me out with covering some basic costs that we had on the beginning. And also Hyva especially Vinai and Willem.
Marta: I was touch with them from the very start and 10% of their income for two months was dedicated to the shelter that I was running. And also a lot of other people coordinated to my PayPal account. It really helped. It was not in vain. It never occurred to me that I had so many friends who wanted to help.
Marta: I really appreciate it. And you can be really proud of yourself. You help? A lot of people, we had 426 people in total at the shelter and yeah, including 270 kids. So thank you very much.
Brent: Is the shelter still going or there was no need her things.
Brent: Okay. Yes. So things are start. I don’t wanna say normal, but
Marta: they’re, it is still far from normal. We didn’t have to keep the shelter up and running after end of May. So we had it for three months. But I have to admit that it felt like it was three years really. But yeah, after three months it was no longer needed because.
Marta: The waves of refugees started to fade out and people found their more permanent places to stay. So that was one reason. And second reason is, was that we needed to start our operations. So we needed the spaces for our usual business as well. But on the other hand, we we still have a couple of processes that are
Marta: open and they’re constant. Together with my dad I’m not, I don’t think that he’s ever going to listen to this, but still I’m really proud of him because he’s keeping up an amazing work for the past weeks. He was able to gather funds for four ambulances. And now he just got an amazing support again from Magento community from fi and Tomic KKA.
Marta: Many of you might know them from Devant company. They were really helpful and they were so kind to donate money for two ambulances, which are going to Ukraine in a couple of days
Brent: I saw some stories about ambulances that were coming into Ukraine and then volunteers that were going to the front line to help evacuate people, especially older.
Brent: I think a lot of elderly people that are stuck in that area are finding it very hard to leave or just even evacuate or at the time, especially, it was very difficult for them to move across that area. Yeah, that’s true. Yeah, I applaud you. And I thank you so much for all your hard work.
Brent: That is so great.
Marta: It’s something that we are neighbors. We can’t really, leave our brother nation. When they’re at war, we just need to step up.
Brent: That’s good. Switching gears into the Magento association. I think, I think that as you’ve helped with the Ukrainian crisis, you’ve also always helped with Magento and Meet Magento, and now Magento association.
Brent: Do you wanna talk a little bit about what you’re doing for the Magento association
Marta: now? Of course I’m happy. For we started our cooperation on the beginning of the year. It was just, it was short before the war started. So the beginning of the cooperation was a bit hectic.
Marta: I shifted my focus on on the shelter, but now we are obviously back on track and I’m pretty much involved in events. I guess this is my domain and I helped in organizing MA connect this year and also in previous year as well. We have two additions. And one addition in 2020 when the pandemic started and one in 2021 and 20 22 now.
Marta: So yeah, I was pretty much involved in, and I hope that we’ll be back in within next month with some good news about new events.
Brent: I saw that Adobe is going to have their summit in Las Vegas in March of 2023. So hopefully we can come up with a Magento association event that piggybacks on the Adobe summit and have a little bit more Magento representation at the event.
Brent: I would love. Yeah, as I remember too, there’s a down payment at somewhere in Las Vegas, still. , that they used. That’s true. There was a 2020 event that was planned. I’m sitting on the Magento. Membership committee and I am always looking for ways that we can entice people to join
Brent: the Magento association. I just interviewed Vijay Golani from India on some of his ideas on how we can get people to join. Do you have any thoughts on encouraging people to join the Magento association and the reasons why they
Marta: would obviously the first reason. To be more present in the community and to, for example, to be able to vote when you have the voting, you can say that you have the real influence on what’s going on within Magento association. But obviously there are also other ways You only want to get involved in in the Magento community you can reach out to Magento association and there are a lot of committees that work on a regular basis.
Marta: So it’s it’s very easy to to join or to suggest some ideas, but you are asking how we could encourage people to join. I am a fan of asking the community directly what they want, because we can think that we know, but maybe we don’t, maybe we just assume that something and if we start with wrong assumptions that we would go wrong direction.
Marta: So if we ask the community what the community really wants, then we can address the needs that really exist.
Brent: I think you’ve been involved in the Magento community for a long time. You’ve been involved in meet Magento, Poland in the past. What is it that drives you to want to be in a in the community and organize events? You’ve done so much for the community. What is it that lies within you that makes you want to do that?
Marta: I wish I knew I don’t know. It’s I’m a very community person. And the same as in my skydiving community, we have we have a lot of connections and this is something that I really like about the Magento ecosystem. It’s not the only business, like there are a lot of different initiatives, different backgrounds, different companies.
Marta: Everyone has the same goal. Obviously we are in a business it’s it’s our way to make a living. But still it’s something more than that. Maybe that’s why I still stick with the Magento community because it’s still alive. It’s still there. I know it sounds like a cliche, but still it’s about the people.
Marta: And I like so much being around Magento folks that I can’t really describe this and maybe that’s why I stick to events, because where to meet Magento people just on the events. Yeah. That’s why we missed in person events so
Brent: much. . Yeah I agree. There’s some sort of magic there. I don’t know.
Brent: I haven’t been in, I’ve been involved in other communities, but it hasn’t been as magical as this and maybe there’s definitely a people aspect to it. I always enjoy, I enjoy going to meet Megento Poland, meet Megento Germany, nether. All those different places and traveling and meeting all those people.
Brent: And it isn’t the event so much, it is the people. And then when you start to get to know those people and enjoy their company and having some time with them, I think that’s the important part. Do you think there’s another community that can match the vibrance of the Magento community? Do you think it’s unique in any way or is there anything that’s this magic Elixer
Marta: I don’t know if there are any other communities which might be similar to Magento.
Marta: It has an orange vibe, and I guess this is a really unique group of people coming in and coming out also because it’s a living organism. It’s not like a solid rock, I guess That’s exactly why it is unique. It shapes our real from day one to now and to the future.
Brent: Yeah. I think part of the uniqueness too, it was born from the founders of Magento Roy and Yoav and then Bob Schwartz and even Mark Lavell really embraced the community. I saw that, when eBay did their, when they were there, there was a kind of a drop off and. when when Mark Lavell started again, he really embraced it.
Brent: And I think that’s part of it is that the, whatever the brand is that’s around the community. If there is a brand, there has to be buyin from all parties, I think is part of it. And now I think Magento’s finding its place in the world with Mage-OS and the Magento Association.
Brent: I think it’s starting to find its feet again.
Marta: I really hope that Magento association is is going to play a major role in shaping this Magento reality. And I know that it is not always been perceived as an important player, but now when the changes are being applied, the changes that are
Marta: really going to reshape the Magento association and with the more open attitude to, towards the community. I really think that we are going to make some difference.
Brent: Yeah. I can say that from the membership side, from the event side, there’s a lot of very exciting things happening and I’m seeing a lot more transparency, especially from the Magento association.
Brent: So we’re seeing more about what’s happening internally and we’re seeing more news from each of the community meetings and it’s an exciting time and I’m very excited for what you’re doing in events and I you’ve joined our membership committee as well. And and had some very good insight for us.
Brent: Thank you. Marta as we finish out, I give everybody an opportunity to do a shameless plug about anything you’d like to plug today. What would you like to plug.
Marta: I think we can, we started with with Ukraine and to be honest, I would like to end our episode also with a personal request for, to each of you.
Marta: If you can find a way to help Ukraine, everyone wanted to help on the very beginning and was eager. Either send money or supplies or to help in any other way, like offering jobs and so on. But after some weeks this general willingness to help faded a little bit and the war didn’t fight that much.
Marta: Didn’t fight at all, actually. So Ukraine still needs a lot of help. So each of us can really make a difference. I can say from my heart that every single act of kindness or any single act of help is changing someone s life. So I would really like to each of you to find a way to.
Marta: Ukraine in any way you can
Brent: thank you. Yeah it does. It starts with one person. I before this, I was talking to Dmitri from Swiss labs, Swiss up labs, and he also had a very good recommendation for a paramedic service. We will put any recommendations in our show notes today and make those links available to everyone.
Brent: Marta, what is your next event coming up? What is your next big thing you’re gonna be doing?
Marta: We’ll, I hope it’s going to be either ma connect. So our online event, or maybe a Magento association in person event, we’re still figuring out the details, but I really hope this is it.
Brent: Yeah, me too. Marta, it’s been so great talking to you. Thank you for the time. Thank you for a wonderful evening. Thank
Brent and Tom (@bobbyshaw) discuss ways to build community and how people can become more involved in the BigCommerce Community. We talk about different channels and how inclusive or exclusive those channels are. We talk about the BigCom DevX event that Space48 recently organized and the upcoming BigCommerce.
Hackathon happening August 15 – August 26, 2022, Starting at 10:00 am CDT
Brent: All right. Welcome to this BigCommerce. Big talk. Hey, that’s a good one. Big talk, BigCommerce, the addition of talk commerce on the BigCommerce community channel today. I have Tom Robertshaw who is a activist for the BigCommerce community. Can I call you an activist? Agitator? Okay. Agitator. Yeah. Yeah. So Tom, introduce yourself.
Brent: Tell us what you do day to day. One of your passions in life.
Tom: Brilliant, Innovation Director at Space48, and I head up our initiative to build a suite of apps that help the commerce merchants grow their store. Passion day to day two main passions. First, my children about two that three years old and three months old.
Tom: So that’s a lot of time and energy goes into that. And I love it. But my second passion. Probably supporting on Manchester United in the football slash soccer. Although that’s more difficult of late in their recent seasons.
Brent: Yeah. We have to stay away from controversy or as you would like to say controversy on our podcast.
Brent: Let’s dive right in. Let’s just talk about community. We’ve both been in another community of another platform for a long time. And in our green room talk, we were just going. Some of the reasons and we landed on the word. Why? Like, why are you involved in the BigCommerce
Tom: community?
Tom: Yeah. That’s a great question. And as you say, we’ve been involved in communities in the past and some, I think when you’re in a community, you think it’s special. And lots of communities are special. I think like for me, personally, whatever I’m doing, whatever I’m involved in, I want to give it my all.
Tom: I want to be involved fully. Get the joy out of it, but to make the most impact as well. Like it feels like if you’re gonna be working with a platform to be involved in the community, gives you so many benefits, whether or not that’s learning like from others in the community, rather than just being whoever you’re working with day to day.
Tom: If you can broaden that to some of the best minds in the community, just by being active, whether that be at in person events online events, forums slack groups and things like that. It’s a greater opportunity to learn from others. I also, particularly when moving to BigCommerce over the last couple of years, I’ve loved being involved in answering other people’s questions, because it was the best way for me to learn rather than just what challenges am I taking on day to day?
Tom: Like I’m building this app. Okay. I need to learn this API. And just the problems that I come into. Building that app, if I’m listening to and helping others I’m researching other APIs, finding out about their problems. And for me that for both Magento and commerce has been fantastic ways to learn myself.
Tom: And the old age old adage of teaching is a great way of learning because you really have to put thought into it. It’s not just oh, I know how that works. Once you tell someone else how it has to work, then that the inside out. So those are like a few ways why I really enjoy learning.
Tom: One of our values is we thrive and we learn. And so there’s so much about being involved, helping other people, getting help from other people that resonates with
Tom: me there.
Brent: yeah, I like that. So thrive when we learn. That’s a great, that’s a, that’s one of the core values of Space48 and that’s such a great, that’s such a great way to look at it.
Brent: And I think you had mentioned earlier, too, that like maybe 90% of the people that are involved in doing BigCommerce stuff. We’ll just say whatever they’re doing, they could be implementers or they could be a developer. They could be a salesperson project manager. They aren’t involved in the community.
Brent: And there’s not a lot of interest to be involved in the community, which means that we slice up the pie. We have a very small group of people that are involved and out of that pie, there’s people that would be the ones that are. Pushing that involvement or pushing that engagement.
Brent: And then there’s the people that are learning from the broader community itself. How do we get people to be more engaged and I’m just gonna also target maybe the introverts that aren’t, that don’t feel as though they want to be engaged, but sometimes feel left out when they aren’t engaged.
Tom: Yeah, it’s a great question. And a difficult one and I’m sure it’s, sure it’s one that the like developer advocates and community moderators at BIgCommerce are tackling on a week by week basis as well. I feel like inclusivity and making it a, an a, an open plate environment, whichever environment we’re talking about.
Tom: If it’s on the forums or if it’s on the BigCommerce dev slack, which is where I spend probably most of my day to day time engaging with the community. It’s just, I guess the best thing you can do is making it a welcoming environment. So it is answering people’s questions.
Tom: So people see that people aren’t like judged for their point of view or corrected and told that’s not how you do it. And providing and showing that everybody is welcome. And there’s so many different ways to to approach a problem. I think that’s the best that we can do to encourage I do the, there’s a couple of people within the community.
Tom: Andrew Barber in particular, in the BigCommerce Dev Slack like that, we’ll pose like questions each week, then there might be like slightly off topic questions or a bit more bringing any sort of personal lives into it, like music interests or what have you learned this week? What’s your favorite, like local cuisine.
Tom: And I think that’s a great way of building up a relationship with other people. And that’s what it’s all about at the end of the day, with everything that we’re doing it’s all about the people, relationships will live on. People will move to other industries, whatever other platforms.
Tom: But I feel being, being real in those communities as well is an important part of making people feel like they don’t have to perform or be particularly as you mentioned for introverts they’re more likely to be nervous about what they’re sharing or if they’re going to be corrected.
Brent: Yeah. And I’ll just say right this morning, anyways, it is gonna be Branston pickle on. Simply because I’m out of Branson pickle right now. Now I’m on a mission to find some more. So I know I can find an on Amazon, but it’s incredibly expensive. Anyways,
Tom: Beans on Toast for
Brent: lunch, say . Yeah, it’s also Marmite, which Tom you very nicely gave me a 500 gram jar of Marmite a number of years ago, but I’m sure that’s still going.
Brent: Yeah I ate the whole thing, so don’t worry. It’s been that long. I think one of the things in the community space and we talk about slack, like that is a closed channel. And if people don’t know about it, they’re never gonna know about it because it’s not public. , it’s public in the sense that anybody can join, but if you don’t know about it, you don’t know about, it’s like that speakeasy.
Brent: That’s a great little place to go to, but until you know about it, then you know about it. So maybe from a community standpoint, there has to be some more outward evangelism that helps people understand where the places to go in the community and help them find the places where they fit best, and I think the slack group is great.
Brent: There’s been some talk about a discord group. And because, I set up a Twitter community and again, that’s a closed group. Anybody can join, but if you don’t know, it’s there, you’re never gonna know it’s there. So how can we. Make it more, how can we get our voices heard better through the broader scope of say social media and then invite people to come to these communities.
Tom: Yeah, I think from my experience and so far in industry, it’s been, Twitter has been the place. I dunno if that’s changing, I know LinkedIn has its own sort of place for people to come to and share and build a network. But depending on which role you’re talking about, like from a developer perspective wouldn’t say necessarily like LinkedIn is the place.
Tom: But Twitter outside of groups, I think we are, all we can do is provide many different options for people for their personal preferences. Like you say is slack isn’t for everyone. I dunno if discord is what, like hip young people are using these days. But I was forced to sign up recently.
Tom: So I think to learn about that now. But yeah, and the Twitter community I think is a great. It’s actually new to me in this, in, in general. Like I’ve joined the eCommerce community group on Twitter as well as a PHP one. But I’m, they’re new to me, so I don’t know. How to make the most of them and what other people’s experiences are other than that, it, yeah.
Tom: Feels like for me personally I enjoy sharing on Twitter, as you say, that’s there’s, it’s public. You still need to be following your network. But that seems like the most practical way. The alternative that I mentioned earlier is the forums. That can be a bit more
Tom: transactional rather than conversational. So I have this problem or, critique my site. And so you, that’s another place if you know about it and if you’re in the becomes community, then I’m sure you do. But that would be another one to
Brent: mention, yeah. Forums is how I got started in the Magento community.
Brent: And just as you were describing earlier, I asked so many questions that I started thinking I can actually answer questions and the, I. Wanna be a teacher in any way, but I answered questions because I knew by finding the answers, it would help me understand the problem better. And I’ll be honest this is 13, 14 years ago I did a lot of Googling and it’s amazing how just some little investigative Googling would help you find answers for that.
Brent: And then getting into a network of people to help you find those answers. which what followed from joining those forums and forums are more of a public thing? I’ll be I’ll be transparent. I’m not part of the BigCommerce forums yet. have to be part of that. And I don’t do much of a technical role anymore, so maybe that’s shows where that pivot comes from more of a architectural thought leadership role,
Brent: you’re not so much in the forums, but I do feel like it’s an important place for people like myself to at least try to answer some of those questions. So tell us a little bit about the BigCommerce forums and why developers should go there.
Tom: Yeah, and I had a similar experience. I was a moderator on the Magento forums.
Tom: And now I didn’t initially get involved in the BigCommerce forums. I started out with the slack group and then have grown from there. I think one of the reasons I chose to get involved is like you say, it’s, it feels more open. it feels more open and accessible. So there’s a wider group of people that are in and on the forums as opposed to the slack group.
Tom: But also like slack, particularly in most communities, the messages are lost. So it’s again, it’s very transient of the logistic, the experience of being in a slack community, whereas with forums. while we’ve talked about relationships, there is, a commercial and brand building reputation, building aspect to being involved in the community as well.
Tom: Naturally. It’s a kind of a, it’s a strategic choice. And one of the be benefits of forums is the SEO of them. You answer a question a few times. If that question is popular or it’s linked to, then it’s more likely to show up in search results. And it’s there, forever, or as long as it becomes forums and this shape or forum are around.
Tom: So there’s a lot of it’s nice to know that the time that you’re investing is going to be useful to others in the future, not just the person that’s asking it, whereas slack, its, who asked the question and who maybe saw that question at the time after that it’s gone or forgotten.
Tom: And so I think that’s one of the great advantages over a forum. Even over Twitter for the same reason that if you search for a problem, your solution that you posted a year ago is much more likely to be found. And therefore the value that you’re creating is greater.
Brent: Yeah. It’s of like an encyclopedia, so you can go back and look up things where I definitely agree on slack is something that does get lost even after a day.
Brent: It depends how busy the channel is. And it’s hard to go back and find it. Maybe speak to a little bit about the developer community now and just let’s touch on big Devex and how you are helping to bring those developers together in a place that we can all talk together.
Tom: Yeah, sure.
Tom: We created and had our first BigCom DevX, which was a virtual event for developers to come together and listen to a few different talks from people within the community, sharing about their experiences, neat ways about solving problems that they’ve tackled or deep dives into things like stencil and handlebar and how to build
Tom: more advanced themes. And the reason we created that is we internally have a dev X every month where given that we’ve been across offices are now like multi, multiple locations for many years, we wanted a way for the development team to come together and just learn about what other projects have been working on?
Tom: What cool things have you been doing? What challenges have you faced that we other we might all want to avoid in the future. And so we were having a monthly kind of an hour to two hour call Talk set up in advance for some people might be five minutes just to share this one thing they learnt.
Tom: Some might be longer if it’s a deep dive on a particular tool of technology and I got a lot of value from it. I learned and met people in the other offices that wouldn’t have got to know otherwise, and after doing that for so long and particularly post pandemic and getting like really involved in the BigCommerce community, I was going through the the process of
Tom: getting to know other people manually reaching out to them, having a catch up call learning about like their backstory, which I’ve really enjoyed so far and wanted to provide something else. And it felt like an appropriate time to, yeah, let’s run this as an experiment.
Tom: Let’s create what we would normally do for a monthly dev and make it. Announce it three months in advance get people from the community to talk. And we’ve got really good feedback from it. So we had about 75 people attend it. It was a free event, as I say, for a couple of hours. And all the videos are now posted on the BigCom DevX YouTube channel for you to find later.
Tom: And we certainly hope to run it again, not sure on the frequency. Right now may, perhaps the next one will be in the new year.
Brent: There’ll be one in Manchester hopeful. That’s a big in conference developer conference. I think you, you had mentioned a little bit about answering questions helps your, I don’t know if you were used the word reputation, but it does help you create more awareness about yourself in the broader community.
Brent: I think it’s important to note that both of us don’t work for BigCommerce, but we work for places that are BigCommerce partners. But I don’t think your motivation ever should be self-promotion or trying to be commercial and answering a question, cuz you’d like to sell somebody, something I, as a developer a long time ago, always saw through that
Brent: when somebody was saying, you should use this extension because blah, blah, blah. And it that self-promotion in terms of trying to be commercial and selling something is different than I think the motivation to be in a community to help others, there’s two competing factors there.
Brent: Maybe with the few minutes we have left here, we could talk a little bit about why we want to get people to join and some of the big things that they get out of the community, other than just commercial benefits.
Tom: Yeah, I think it, it comes back to some of the things I mentioned earlier.
Tom: Like I, I really wanna meet other people in the community. I enjoy kind getting to know people like, like myself getting to know you Brent and me visiting Minneapolis. What was it a decade ago now? So it’s amazing what can come out of getting involved and meeting other people, not least, the things you mentioned in terms of how it can be better for you
Tom: personally from a, the knowledge that you can apply at work or the projects that you might win because of it, those things are there, but they’re not the reasons that you go into it. Like you say. For me, it’s definitely been about the people. I think if I, my personally, if I can, if.
Tom: Be brutally honest. If I hadn’t got involved in the first conference that I’d been to, then I wouldn’t have gone on a tour of America and met my future wife. So there’s a good reason to do it.
Brent: yeah. Your kids have everything to do with the Magento community. We’ll give the Magento community full credit for both of your kids now.
Brent: I’m gonna edit that out. Definitely. it’s a joke, everybody. So you know, the other thing that, that has come up in our past community started with an M ended with an O had gento in it was inclusive versus exclusive. A lot of people saw Magento, some of the community members as being exclusive
Brent: and they felt it was hard to be involved with those other people. How do we stay away from that? How do we stay away from this sort of notion of being a clic or being some kind of in crowd? And if you remember, there was a hashtag called real Magento that was going around and people then started associating that with the in crowd.
Brent: And it wasn’t, it was I think it was meant to be a label of, Hey, this is where the Magentol community. not that there should be a fake Magento, but it also, we have to have a differentiator from the hashtag Magento, or BigCommerce, because that’s gonna be a commercial hashtag. How do we make it inclusive, but also say here’s how you find the content for this community.
Tom: certainly, and I’m probably the last person that should advise on how to be inclusive, but from going through that experience, and I recognize why those kind of hashtags were created, when there’s lots of Twitter, spam and things like that. And I think in some ways it regarded as a time back to your previous point about like being authentic and connecting those that are just there to be authentic.
Tom: So I think that’s some of it In terms of how to continue being inclusive. I think it’s about always being open to new members. I think it can be difficult, particularly if you’re an introvert. Like you’ve got people that, it can be like a little difficult when the new person walks up to the group, whether that be in, in real life or new person enters the slack chat, like I can appreciate like why we don’t really talk about it.
Tom: That is a strange experience that we, we have to deal with on a day to day basis in our modern lives. And I think it’s about recognizing that they probably just have a wealth of experience too. And even if they don’t, they can provide as just as much like value to the community.
Tom: And they’re just as important. I think I have certainly been lazy in the past of not necessarily considering myself in a clic, but trending towards like the same people that I already knew, because it was. And once you have found a group of people or people that you recognize, they are gonna be the people that you are drawn towards, you engage with because you know them, it’s safe, yeah. It’s gonna lead to a good time. And so it takes effort, doesn’t it, to be inclusive. And I think sometimes it’s hard to make that effort. And so I think we can all forgive each other for the times. And we, when we don’t but to continue to try to make that effort to stay as inclusive
Brent: as possible.
Brent: Yeah. And I think there is a challenge as well. You have to put effort to maintain relationships with the people that, there’s a certain amount of energy that has to go into putting the effort into maintaining a friendship like between you and I, if we both don’t put any effort in soon the relationship falls apart because there’s no effort put in either.
Brent: So the times that we did get to see each other in an event or something, we, you definitely wanna make time to spend time with your other community members and as it grows, and as there’s more people you wanna spend time as many as possible. So there I do see there’s a dichotomy in there between wanting to make sure everybody feels inclusive, but also wanting to maintain relationships within the community.
Brent: And I think. Like the relationship building and relationship maintaining. Like now we’re getting into more psychology and community, but the word is community, we’re trying to build community. And I don’t think it’s ever gonna be solved. I do feel as though the idea of diversity in our community can be solved.
Brent: Like we can invite more women, more people of color, and you and I are both not good examples of either of those. And how can we bring those people in? I feel like both of us could be open about making sure that we’re talking about the fact that we need more people of color and people that aren’t men and, that’s just a simple fact, right?
Brent: That, that has to be talked about. And it can’t be swept under the rug from a community standpoint and from an inclusion standpoint.
Tom: Yeah. And I think more, even more effort in that case, because, naturally, psychologically we are going to be drawn towards people that are like ourselves.
Tom: And if it takes effort to continue to Welcome by new people. It’s gonna take even more effort. If you don’t anything about the background or than what they’ve been through.
Brent: Yeah. I think that the perfect place for community building would be a community run together, which I’m a big proponent of changing your life through movement.
Brent: The Big Com Run. Huh? Are you getting it? feeling it now. I want to end, let’s end at a positive note. Tell us a little bit about what’s coming up for you in the BigCommerce world. And is there any, anything exciting that you’re working on right now?
Brent: And then I’ll make sure we put all these links and things like that in the show notes. .
Tom: Yeah, sure. Our most recent app just launched which we are about to more formally announce, which is a mega menu builder which I would be remiss not to mention on this particular episode we’ve worked.
Tom: with BigCommerce for a couple of years now, and we’re a bit frustrated what you can do out the box. And we know how important, like the store navigation is to draw people in help their product discovery and just simple lists of categories that it’s not gonna cut it.
Tom: And over the years we’ve created solutions with. Page builder, but again, that’s on a project by project basis. And so we’ve now built an app that allows you to manage your menu completely independently of your cater hierarchy, add images, choose your different sort of designs for the flyout menu.
Tom: And so it’s great for people just to install, configure and get working, but also for agencies to use as just to perhaps an admin interface and provide their own front end from menu. So that I’m really excited about.
Brent: Excellent. Yeah, and I’m all, I’m always excited about the concept of open SaaS, which BigCommerce likes to tout and the fact that BigCommerce, even though it’s a SaaS platform they offer a lot of ex extendability to their existing code and allow you to to work within that similar to open source.
Brent: You. Necessarily download it and run it, which would be actually cool if you could do little local instances of it, but I will, I’ll mention that to Brent Bellm. The next time I talk to him that we need local instances of BigCommerce run with warden. Anyways, I digress.
Tom: I’ll also quickly mention I’m excited for the BigCommerce hackathon.
Tom: That starts very soon as well. A two week event that BigCommerce are putting on to people to create whatever they would like, or whether that’s apps or scripts or demo stores, things that just create something with the APIs, following that open SaaS approach. And I’m excited to see that’s the first time that they’ve done anything like it.
Tom: First time I’ve been involved in that kind of thing with the BigCommerce platform. Looking forward to getting involved there. Yeah. And
Brent: hackathons are super fun and there’s roles for non-developers and hackathons either. They need creative thinkers. There’s always there’s roles for everybody in a hackathon.
Brent: And I would encourage even non-developers to join hackathons at least to see what’s happening and learn a little bit about that experience hackathons, I feel are most valued in person, but what we’ve learned in the pandemic and in the last couple years is that they are successful online and they build a lot of great relationships.
Brent: And I, I know that from the Magentol side they did some 24 hour hackathons that happened, starting in one time zone and just continually went for 24 hours straight around the world. And that was all done online collaborative. It’s a proven concept that works so great.
Brent: Definitely. Tom, thank you so much for being here today. I appreciate all the work you do putting in on the BigCommerce community. Thanks. I enjoyed it. When I finish off a podcast, I give everybody a chance to do a shameless plug. What would you like to plug today?
Tom: I will plug our apps. So if you search Space48 on the BigCommerce app store you’ll find a nice long list of apps that we’ve been able to put out now.
Tom: And we’re continuing to add to so check it out. All right.
Brent: Thank you, Tom Robertshaw. He is with Space48 in the UK. Have a great day.
We interview Sushma Vaya (@sushmavyas) with Ranosys from Singapore. #mm22sg Sushma has been organizing Meet Magento Singapore since its inception. We learn about Singapore’s vibrant and friendly city-state and the great event the team organizes. Listen to the entire episode and give me your feedback on the MA Pledge commercial I created at the end!
Meet Magento Singapore happens live on August 25th, 2022. Don’t miss it. https://meetmagento.sg
Transcript
Brent: Welcome to this special
Brent: Magento Association edition of
Brent: Talk Commerce
Brent: today. I have Sushma Vyas. She is in Singapore and she is with Meet Magento Singapore. We are going to talk about the event and how fun it was and how fun it’s going to be into the future. Sushma, go ahead,
Brent: introduce yourself. Tell us what you do on a day to day basis and maybe one of your passions in life.
Sushma: Thank you, Brent. Very happy, feeling really related to be part of this. My name is Sushma as you already shared with everyone in summary. If I would say one liner, my day to day job is to make sure people associated with us are happy.
Sushma: I act as the COO chief operating officer with Ranosys, I’m the organizer also for Meet Magento Singapore. I take care of end to end operations for the company, making sure all the departments meet their KPIs, people attached with us. I really mean it. Whether they are partners, our customers of all important people, team members, employees are happy.
Sushma: That’s the goal. And that’s what I do being in Singapore for past 18 plus years now. And yeah, I think that summarizes that’s.
Brent: So your real role as a chief happiness. I wish . I went to Meet Magento Singapore in 2019, and it’s such a great city, such a great community. And the event was so well put on, tell us a little bit about the history of Meet Magento Singapore, why you guys started it and a little bit about the event.
Sushma: Thanks. One of my favorite points to talk about we’ve been associated with Magento per se from I’d say it’s childhood days, because we used to do those little Magento meetups when we were very young as a company, Magento also was running community editions and all, and we did see. Real good potential traction people attached around 2016,17,18.
Sushma: We did attend a lot of Magento events globally and that got us excited that let’s have one Meet Magento Singapore itself. And the thought was really well taken by Adobe commerce aka/Magento. And we got this to own and organize Meet Magento Singapore. It was really, it has been an exciting journey.
Sushma: It was when the very first event, what I’d say was the most exciting for us was that Singapore hosts and is easy for people. It attracts people, businesses, retail, commerce, especially a lot more. Easier. Sorry. If I sound biased than a lot of other countries, it has that reputation and comfort as well.
Sushma: The venue has been amazing, I’d say. And we’ve enjoyed. And of course we all know since past three years, the journey we have seen how pretty and commerce has transformed. Likewise has the event itself opening it up for online presence mix of both. So in all, I’d say it’s been insightful.
Sushma: This is something that we ourselves learn from people around the globe when they come here and everyone builds that bond, that community. So exciting journey.
Brent: If you were to say to someone to attend the event what would be the some of the big draws to attend meet Magento Singapore.
Sushma: I’ll talk about Singapore, right. First is really the place, because as much as it is a little red dot, a small place, it brings, it offers everything. It attracts businesses. It adopts technology really fast and well. The place itself is an attraction
Sushma: we, I would say people to come and visit and see how this is so well organized, disciplined, yet open for innovation. And it implements that. Of course, because of all these things, there are huge brands companies who have their foundation here who have their offices here. So they can see and communicate, I mean, that community bonding and they can see how these big brands are facing the challenges, implementing it via technologies, solving it.
Sushma: For Meet Magento Singapore, I’ll say, come for our after parties as well. I know after parties are fun everywhere, but I, I really Bo that some of the best after parties we’ve had the venue is great Marina Basin and it’s real fun here. Meeting people from close to a hundred plus countries and connecting, talking.
Sushma: it’s a different mode that you see them in after parties and different insights that you get during the event and talks.
Brent: I think that we forgot about the importance of meeting people in person and everybody thought, oh, now that everybody’s doing zoom meetings and online that the live event is dead.
Brent: But I think what we’ve found is that, people desire to see people in person. And not only do you get to go to a great event, but you get to see a great city and then you get to see different cultures and all kinds of things that are wrapped around traveling to a different type of place. And I agree that Singapore is very easy to get to for us in the US.
Brent: It’s a long way. It’s halfway around the world, but yes, you know, it’s very easy. It’s very accessible. And I can say that even the customs. Everybody was so nice and it’s so easy to get through the cultures. There’s multiple cultures. We in 2019, we brought eight people from our office in Ahmedabad to Singapore.
Brent: And what did we do as soon as we landed, everybody wanted to find their Gujurati restaurant to eat at. So we all found the section of town that had a Gujurati restaurant and we ate there. So it, there, there is food for everybody. Something for everybody to offer. What would you say to a sponsor who would like to sponsor Meet Magento
Sushma: for sponsor?
Sushma: See, I think there’s a wonderful mix of audience because there’s a very good balance in terms of merchants, in terms of technology, partners, partners, and end users customers. So with this balance, they get to have their message reach the right people. It’s not lopsided.
Sushma: So there is one real advantageand we take of it. Otherwise, even the ecosystem is such that it attracts all these different pool of people. So that’s one of the biggest advantages for sponsors plus I shared, there’s this very easy ethos reputation of delivery that its Singapore has gained.
Sushma: Its its rapport in terms of making sure businesses are smoother run. The government would say, we’ll take care of the hassle for you. We’ll make sure things are things are not full of bumps for you, and you make sure that the business is flourishing. So that kind of something is a healthy sign for someone to sponsor in an ecosystem like this.
Sushma: So usually this is also something that we hear from our sponsors and, Yes, digital marketing and all there’s a good outreach. There’s a good reach that they get from. So, yeah, that’s what we would tell them,
Brent: From the event organizer side. So I know renos has been organizing, Meet Magentol Singapore.
Brent: If other organizers would like to organize an event in a different region, a different city, do you have some advice for them that to get started and some reasons why they would want to get started organizing a meat Magento in a different city?.
Sushma: Why they should or why they good for sure.
Sushma: Organizers do gain a lot of publicity for sure. And learning on top of that, because something that we, even our own customers, our partners, something that we see them when they are there on the stage speaking or discussing, it’s a very different learning and insight that we get, which otherwise in day to day
Sushma: communication or interactions we don’t get each other on that level of thinking or discussion. This is something we must do because meeting and meeting them in a different mindset is together new learning. And we build a bond, a community which is memorable to us, plus helping the overall ecosystem.
Sushma: if there are any tips or anything, that we follow, or we would prefer people to follow is maintain that local touch, what that place is known for, because people would come from far away from different places to also know more about that place as it there’s nothing beautiful or ugly.
Sushma: It’s the combination that makes that place really different and unique. So I’d say maintain that, make sure people also know more about the place, know the local touch, local flavor. So that event automatically becomes very special and unique. There are many things, but this is what I feel we must consider.
Brent: I like what you said about having a different mindset to learn. And I think that oftentimes as we are pushing our whole team to do work that we forget that our team has to also learn about what’s new. If we continue to work on what’s old, then all we’re gonna do is create old things, creating new things requires new knowledge.
Brent: And I agree that you get put into a different mindset and you’re not in front of a bunch of screens. You may be in front of your laptop while you’re watching the speaker speak, but you’re not in front of 10 screens with a dog barking and somebody asking you it’s time for dinner. It puts you in a place where you are in a learning mode.
Brent: Maybe speak to that learning mode a little bit.
Sushma: If I take myself as an example, I don’t come from a technical background. But when I’m there, I listen to those even technical talks or innovations, it makes me more excited to know more Magento as a platform. I would’ve never known otherwise. Except for that. Okay. Customers need this.
Sushma: We fulfill this, the depth of it. I would’ve never known or never have been inquisitive to know that. Okay. Alright. There is this feature. So because when during panel discussions or somebody shares, you can do this, just talking about that specific feature, which to me appears like magic. And then I feel, oh, okay.
Sushma: Then what else does it do? What else does it do? Where else can it be implemented? And it gives ideas. Okay. Not necessarily here. It can be used somewhere else. So I’m a student there. Actually, when I participate or I hear the talks, the speakers talking about it. Likewise, someone whose technical may find interesting business cases, which he, or she, would’ve not thought of while working on that piece of code or that piece of integration.
Brent: I know that there has always been a developer track or a technical track, and there has been a business track. And that just means that there’s something for both audiences. There’s something for merchants to learn about what are the new things that I can do on Magento or Adobe commerce.
Brent: And I know, especially for the developers, they can learn about the newest technology things that may put a merchant to sleep. Having that ability to see those different pieces of the puzzle and spark some interest. And I’m just gonna say that those new things create innovation because a merchant may say, oh, I saw this at this event.
Brent: I’d like to do it on my site, but I’d like to do it in this way. The pushing the boundaries. I sit on the membership committee and Meet Magento Association is trying to get more members as part of the Magento Association. What would you say to people who not are not sure or don’t know why they should join.
Brent: Do you have any good advice for them?
Sushma: I’d say definitely join because. I’ll make it a little more philosophical if you hope you don’t mind, because at the end of the day, all of us want to contribute. All of us want to give back. In that effort, what we gain is enormous. When we join our intention was really not, oh, we give back, we do this.
Sushma: You know, okay, it’s a community we want to learn. I’m very attached to this by the way association, because we’ve gained a lot, whatever we’ve gained, I’d say from our years still now it’s because of that and because of the community it creates. So the fulfillment part is huge. In addition to what we gain in terms of repeat learning resources to knowing problems before you face it and solutions, how these get resolved.
Sushma: All this is. I always are like, I’d say golden assets of having being part of a community in which Magento association gives you so readily easily. I would not ask anyone to think twice about it because this is one of the strongest, one of the biggest, and I wish all the best because that shouldn’t die.
Brent: And even at the lowest level, it’s $1 a month, so $12 a year. And I think that allows anybody, the facility to join and they’re coming. We are coming out with some other models where companies can sponsor their employees to join as well. So there’s gonna be continued innovations from the Magento Association to help membership grow.
Brent: Sushma as we close out our podcast every week, I give the guests an opportunity to do a shameless plug about anything promotion about anything you’d like to promote. What would you like to promote today?
Sushma: Hadn’t really thought about it so much what I’d like to promote, but, since I’m part of Ranosys, I’m part of this whole company that’s one, one thing that I can promote is that explore, recommend, refer, explore services.
Sushma: I think that’s about it. I wasn’t really that prepared about it. What, in my mind. So that’s what I can think is the first thing that’s. That’s
Brent: Thank you, Sushma. So thanks for staying up so late for me. I really appreciate it. Oh,
Sushma: it’s a
Brent: pleasure. Pleasure talking to you. I wish you all the, yeah, go ahead.
Sushma: I was saying you have some really interesting questions there.
Brent: Good. Yeah. And I, I wish you all the best in your event coming up. I wish I could be
Sushma: there this year thank you. Thank you so much.
Brent: I will miss you 2023. Yeah, hopefully,
Sushma: definitely. Yes. Thank you. All right. Thanks Brent. Have a lovely day. Bye-bye.
Here are some topics that were discussed at the event.
Magento machine learning – How Adobe and Magento are dealing with AI and Machine learning. Magento university – It is now called Adobe Digital Learning Management. Artificial intelligence – As from above – Machine learning and AI are a big part of what is happening in commerce. Magento commerce merchants now enjoy fantastic Adobe commerce support. Dedicated cloud service – Adobe Commerce Cloud is being integrated into other Adobe services. Magento commerce is now called Adobe Commerce. AI-powered inventory management and AI search are the new trend for 2023 Adobe Sensi is driving relevant products across the Adobe Commerce Platform.
Kalen Jordan introduces the concept of a new podcast called “That was a Joke,” sponsored by Cricket Protein Bars.
So far, we do not have the sponsor or the podcast, but this is our first attempt at accomplishing this task. You will learn about surfing in Costa Rica, swimming in Minnesota, and electric skateboards. As a bonus, I have left in our conversation on Employee Happiness.
Kalen tells us about his week-long surfing lesson in Costa Rica from Witches Rock
Cricket Protein
Kalen: How are you doing? I’m hanging in there, man. You’re look-in fit is a fiddle. Thanks, dude. suns out guns out. Do you know what I’m saying?
Brent: Wow. I could tell those are some good size guns. You got the, and you’re in Texas. Those are the rules.
Brent: I don’t make the rules. You move from California to Texas because of your arms. So you could be legal in Minnesota. We don’t have li it. Yeah.
Kalen: Yeah. Those are street legal. Those are street-legal in Minnesota, but yeah, I might run into some run into some snags. How are you doing, man?
Kalen: What’s heck where are you? Hawaii. Min, Minnesota. I’m in
Brent: Minneapolis.
Kalen: Minneapolis.
Brent: Okay. Yeah, as they say, as the credit board, a plane somewhere.
Kalen: I don’t get, I
Brent: don’t get, I don’t never mind. It’s a joke. Just ignore me for a while,
Kalen: dude. If we ever do our own podcast, never mind. It’s a joke.
Kalen: That’s the whole podcast. Oh yeah, there you go. How good is
Brent: that? Yes. Sponsored by. Somebody funny,
Kalen: we’ll figure it out. Cricket, protein bars. I, there you go. My whole goal in life is to have a podcast with a cricket protein bar as a
Kalen: sponsor.
Brent: Yeah. And those are, I don’t know why. And those are actual crickets, right?
Brent: That use the protein from actually grinding up the cricket powder. Yeah. Yeah. That’s good. It’s gluten free
Kalen: is it? Yeah, that makes sense.
Brent: There’s no gluten in crickets, right? Unless they’ve just eaten some fresh grain.
Kalen: True. I’m actually, by the way, I’m using a gluten-free microphone right now. I don’t know.
Kalen: I can tell looks
Brent: great. Yeah, no it’s yeah. Mine is a paleo microphone. Okay.
Kalen: It’s non GMO
Brent: as well. It is non GMO. My microphone was built or was grown in fields in North Dakota that had GMO products next to it. They blew the extra mic. Bits of microphone blew into the field and contaminated it.
Brent: And that’s why I have my stand, which is blue and my microphone, which is I believe a zoom. Is that
Kalen: a GMO adjacent microphone? Because I can’t do this. I know. Sorry about that. I can’t have you on this esteemed podcast with that kind of a setup. That’s absurd.
Brent: It is. And I agree with you a hundred percent.
Brent: It’s can we talk about disgusting?
Kalen: Let’s talk about the elephant in the room, which is the gigantic BigCommerce partner award behind you.
Brent: It’s okay. It’s actually not an award. It’s just that we’re a partner with BigCommerce now because I’m on all kinds of BigCommerce calls and they got sick of seeing the Magento stuff in background did that’s in fact, sums out.
Brent: We did get an award in in. 21 for, from BigCommerce, but it was during the pandemic and they never shipped him out. Oh, I’m gonna call him out right now on this podcast that never got our award. That’s rough, the old that they did send me that in place.
Kalen: That’s the old partner award trick.
Kalen: Oo, that’s the oldest trick in the partner book.
Brent: We’re gonna go heavily branding here.
Kalen: I like, what is that? What is that hat that you got on there? I should have one of those here. It’s
Brent: called Hoooooooofa
Kalen: dang it. If I would’ve had that in
Brent: your video I gotta take off. Cause I click a little kid with a hat on.
Kalen: Yeah. That’s the problem with hats. They can tend to do that,
Brent: unfortunately. All right. What we’re talking about, some fun stuff today, man. You had some really topics, all
Kalen: sorts of topics, all sorts of fun stuff. We’re gonna go all over the map.
Brent: What is the end of your podcast this week? Or is it a video
Kalen: series?
Kalen: We’re figuring it out as we go. We’re figuring it out as we go. And it will be reveal at the proper time,
Brent: but I’m gonna, we are in the, we were, we are gonna remix and it is also gonna be a bonus episode on talk commerce. Perfect. Fantastic. Fantastic. So we’re, we’ll see, it’ll be competing and we should release it together.
Brent: Same week, same apple podcast stream.
Kalen: You’re gonna compete with my own podcast. All I can
Brent: do is try to keep, I can try to keep up with
Kalen: that non GMO microphone.
Brent: Yes. But I do feel like on my stream, I’m gonna put a bunch of beeps in. Just to cover up your swearing. Oh, okay.
Kalen: Son of a bur yep.
Kalen: Burp. Yeah I do swear a lot these days. just not on podcasts. You’re
Brent: You’re in Texas. You have to,
Kalen: it’s a lot, it’s a lot to swear about including. Employee culture and happiness, which is one of my favorite topics. Really. Okay. It really is. I’m big on call employee culture and happiness.
Kalen: I’m surprised that you’re surprised you sounded like you were surprised by that, which I don’t I’m particularly
Brent: appreciate. I, because I’m not surprised.
Kalen: That’s my whole, that’s my whole life.
Brent: That’s your whole shtick.
Kalen: I have a handbook. Have you read my handbook on employee culture and happiness?
Brent: No. No, we should read it right now.
Brent: yeah, no, I don’t have a, it could be like an audio book.
Kalen: yeah, one of these days it’ll be an audio book. No, but that was something you wanted to talk about was employee culture and happiness.
Brent: So yeah, I think in today’s age, when while we’re here in Minnesota, the unemployment rate is 2% or something like that.
Brent: Oh, crazy. Like crazy low. Yeah. As an employer, you have to go the extra mile to retain your employees.
Kalen: you have no choice. So is this just a pragmatic, is this just a pragmatic thing? Listen, if the if the unemployment rate were higher, we wouldn’t care about this at all, but because it’s so low.
Kalen: We gotta bite the bullet and be nice to people.
Brent: yeah. That is a great, that is a great way to look at it. I will answer that in full transparency that that you should not take an employment rate into account. And the reason is what does it cost to rehire the next person?
Brent: The 2% is a hard. Wall for an employer to get over. Because there’s simply not anybody you can hire, right? Yeah. Let’s just say it’s 10%. You get really sloppy and you’re hiring. You’re like, oh, we’ll hire people and blah, blah, blah. And if they leave, who cares? Just because we can hire more people.
Brent: Yeah. But does that mean because you’ve hired somebody new that person is gonna just hit the ground running. like even in the programming world, developers could be the only, one of the, they developers theoretically could be the fastest onboarding person you could have because hopefully your projects is detailed well, and they can come in and they just look at the requirements they’re already qualified.
Brent: They could start working right away. There’s still gonna be a week or two of rampup
Kalen: Point them at some tasks and have ’em like jump right in, in theory.
Brent: Yeah. Theoretically, they’re gonna have to learn a little bit, but let’s just say have two weeks or a month to get them up and running. Okay.
Brent: Let’s just say in the US developers make whatever we’ll use a round number, a hundred grand a year. What does that then cost you that one that’s $8,000 that you have to pay that one month of trying to get everybody up and running, onboarding all those other things.
Brent: Yeah, so it’s a lot of money. I think that, that 2% unemployment rate is a wake up call to employers who haven’t been big on employee culture and should be working on that.
Kalen: Yeah. Yeah. Totally. No, and yeah, I was just kidding. It’s easy for me to beat, to joke about these things.
Kalen: Cause I don’t have any employees and. And then I give you a heart. You actually have responsibilities over there. So I’m busting your chops. but
Brent: it is a I appreciate that question and I believe that is a completely fair question to ask any employer. I
Brent: think it’s a factor for sure.
Kalen: It doesn’t change, like what’s the right thing to do, but it is a factor. But what are, so you’ve been in the. Working world for a long time. Since the Dawn, but so what are some things that are top of mind for you as far as like employee culture,
Brent: keep people happy.
Brent: think that Time off is certainly a big one. Having well planned and thought out like for a developer, right? want a developer wants to have a project manager that is going to help them be better developers they’re they don’t want help technically, but they need help org or
Kalen: they things to be organized.
Kalen: They just want like requirements not to change things to be straight forward, tell me what I need to do. I can do it. It’s not gonna change 16 times and then I can get it
Brent: done. Yeah. They want them to run interference.
Brent: They don’t want the client talking to them directly. Yeah. They, hopefully the project manager can handle all that. So yeah, from a, from an employee stand happiness standpoint, we want to encourage that and support that. Yeah. All those pieces as you come down the whole pipeline of getting work done.
Kalen: That’s really good, actually, because there’s so many different, you could talk about benefits and perks and but I really think the core of what a developer cares about is exactly that make the work itself. Clean to whatever extent, in the real world, things are gonna change.
Kalen: Things are gonna be requirements are gonna be fuzzy and stuff like that, but as much as possible make, the process of getting work, done the project management structure, like straightforward, I think also probably you wanna work on challenging stuff. Interesting stuff too. That’s also obviously gonna be a big component.
Kalen: But like the work itself, make the work, improve the work itself, as opposed to all the things around it that are important. Are. Nice to haves, but they’re not really the core of what your job is about.
Brent: Yeah. This actually, this whole discussion would be better for a panel.
Brent: If we had say four or five employers, that’d like to just talk about what is it that they, or even employees like are just a regular. Developers. No developers are regular, they’re all extraordinary. Find four extraordinary developers, which are every developer and ask them what makes them happy.
Brent: You’re probably gonna get four different answers, right? Some of them want to get paid. Some of them would like lots of time off. Some of them like flexibility in their schedule, as a edge agile, is all kinds of things. It’s, it is gonna be varied. It’s a complicated, it is a complicated task.
Brent: But that culture that any company embodies would have people that have been there for a long amount of time and they would be the ones driving this culture, the ones that like the culture. So maybe it is about time off or flexibility. Those are the ones that are gonna stick around.
Brent: And if somebody doesn’t care about some of those other things, then all they wanna do is make the biggest money. Then that’s where you see developers jumping from jumping around the agency. And again, I don’t wanna make it sound too general. Like not it just because somebody goes from one agency to the other because they make more money.
Brent: Doesn’t mean they’re jumping because of the money. There’s all kinds reasons. I don’t want to generalize it, but it’s just an example of the different parts of that. That encompass that whole idea of employee happiness.
Kalen: I think of the dev teams that seem felt to me, the strongest are where there’s this combination of you enjoy working with your peers, you respect them. They help you and also challenge you. So if you have a problem, you can get feedback, get help, get support. The work is interesting. You have a high level of autonomy or ownership of what you’re doing.
Kalen: There’s not a lot of red tape and, nonsense. And and then you get paid well, that’s that never
Brent: all those
Kalen: things, right? Yeah. But you’re an employee, right? Are you technically an employee? Yes, I am. Are you ha are you happy? Are you,
Brent: That’s good. Yeah. I think part of that is autonomy.
Brent: You want to give people a degree of autonomy to to be able, you wanna give them space to make some of their own decisions. Yeah. So that’s huge. Yeah. I think one thing that’s always important is knowing what is that space? And then what is, how does creativity go into that space?
Brent: As an employer, you want to recognize that people need some of that space, right? They, and they, and if you’re demanding so much time out of it what is an acceptable, modest time to for either create creative growth or personal growth or educational growth?
Kalen: Yeah, because like I I remember this one dev team I was on and we were working on a new project. It was interesting. It was fun. It was exciting. And then certain people were building certain components of it. And. When you talk about like creativity and stuff, like they were taking some very creative approaches to the architecture of how to build this thing.
Kalen: And we would talk about it and be like, oh yeah, it’s gonna, it’s gonna work like this. And it’s gonna be super extensible. And it’ll, the code’s gonna be so clean. It’s gonna be. You could tell they were super excited about it from like a creativity standpoint and it sounded cool.
Kalen: It sounded great. But then, a day turns into a week, turns into two weeks and it’s like the thing isn’t getting done, and it’s oh yeah. And they show, show you all the stuff. And then they have a good explanation for why it’s not done.
Kalen: It’s oh I gotta do this. And then I got da, and I gotta refactor it. And they’re all good reasons. And then sometimes people just get caught in like a loop of things can be complicated. And so that’s the flip side of it, is if you’re too creative, like you gotta get stuff done.
Kalen: Like you gotta get, things out the door.
Brent: Yeah, there’s a in the development world, there’s always a push and pull be between the developer who is a perfectionist. And the developer, who’s just a get stuff done. Developer. In a past life I liked, I did development work.
Brent: I would never say I was a developer, a very good one anyways, and I was a get stuff, done, person because especially if you’re a. Single contractor, or, you are the only person accountable to that customer. And so you’re just trying to get as much steps down as you possibly can.
Brent: I think another good role for a project manager is to be that person who can say this task actually takes this long and to do it right. It’s gonna take that long. And the only way to get around doing it right, is doing it wrong.
Kalen: Say the only way
Brent: to get a, if you, the only way that’s not do it right.
Brent: Is to not do it. You can say it in so many words, but if you want it done faster, you’re gonna have to take some shortcuts and chances are, it’s not gonna be right. Like you’re not gonna write your unit tests or you’re not gonna do QA on it, or you’re gonna skip over a bunch of functions that, or whatever it is, there’s just things you can do to cut corners.
Kalen: Yeah. Yeah. And yeah. And that’s. Yeah. And then that’s the problem. Like I’m a get stuff. I’m a get stuff done developer and I can move pretty quickly, but I’m not like the perfectionist. And then the downside to that of course, is that, down the road, you realize there’s technical debt.
Kalen: There’s. There’s limitations to what you built that really can start to compound over time. And I really should. , I really should have taken a little extra time and done it, done it. The fir, but there’s really no such thing as doing it. You want to do it as.
Kalen: As best as you can and then improve on that. And that, and this is why somebody that’s been coding for 10 years is so much more efficient. Somebody’s been doing it for a year because they’ve gone through enough of those cycles that they can see, the problems ahead of them and then fix them, from the get go.
Kalen: Yeah
Brent: yeah. What, so you had some other topics you wanted to go? I did have some topics I had let’s jump into ’em. Let’s
Kalen: talk about exercise, man. Cuz you’re a big exercise guy. And what have you been doing to. Exercise. What’s your what’s. What do you do, man? You do a lot of stuff. You do cross country skiing.
Kalen: You do all sorts of stuff. What’s. what’s your latest deal?
Brent: My goal is not to do cross country scheme cuz I’m very tired of the cold weather. Although I do enjoy it when I do it. Yeah. And it is super fun. Yeah. But it’s also cold enough to. Walk on a lake yeah.
Brent: And in order for the ice to be thick enough for you to walk on, it has to be cold for a sustained amount of time. Wait, just the opposite of being a hundred degrees for 13 days in Austin is the opposite of that is to be below freezing for right a month. So the lake is a foot thick anyways.
Brent: Yeah. Yeah. So I, right now I’m running and I’m biking and I’m swimming. , I’m doing a little yoga. oh, nice. When did you start the yoga? I had a pretty significant injury back in February that sidelined me. Oh no. Am I running? And, I think stretching is one of those things that I just have to do.
Brent: And so yoga has been a good thing. I was doing it every day, but I’ve cut it down a couple times a day. Just flexibility as a runner. Yeah. You’re you become very inflexible. Yeah. Oh, do you in the same from running thing all the time. So your hips are super tight and oh,
Kalen: interesting. Yeah. How did you injure yourself?
Brent: Running on the ice. If you can think about and I’m writing an article about it right now I wanted to detail my injury. There’s Icelandic horse that, that has very tiny little steps, lots of tiny steps, right? Lots of cadence you call it. When we run in Minnesota, because we’re running on snow and ice.
Brent: you change the way you run and that then changes like smaller steps a thing. Yep. Yeah. Yeah. So it’s not a bad thing, but if you go from, running in a warm place, , I’m not embarrassed to say that I spent most of my November and December in Hawaii, which was warm. Nice.
Brent: And I came back at Christmas and went immediately to Fargo. And it was like going from 80 degrees to minus 10 and go running. And I was in a running streak. So I had to run every day and I hate running on a treadmill.
Kalen: Why didn’t you stay out there longer? Why didn’t you stay on Hawaii, longer
Brent: Christmas?
Brent: We have family, like we celebrate some of these holidays and the family that liked whatever reason they like to have us around. I don’t know. Yeah, so just repeated
Kalen: stress, just a repeated stress thing of running in a little bit of a funny.
Brent: Yeah. And then, I think my body reacts better to cold weather, like the cardiovascular part.
Brent: So I feel like I can run a lot harder and I do. It just makes it worse because your muscles are super tight because of the cold weather. Anyways, I ended up with a very bad glued injury. I had a running streak going, I had 683 days of running straight before I stopped. What? Wow. And so you really, why did keep that streak going?
Brent: I really wanted to, and I was on a treadmill and I was holding myself up with my arms. Oh, just trying to let my legs dangle. Oh. Until that one mile I thing clicked around and I’m like, this is so stupid. I’m not really running a mile. I’m barely touching the treadmill. I might as well just call it quits and oh no, I got, so I, I had to heal.
Brent: Yeah. So took a while. I did a lot of stretching, lot of trips to the PT. Oh wow. And yeah, it felt, I started feeling better and then immediately, because of all the different pieces, I’ve had IT Band problems and, tight tightness and my IT Band and I’m about 99% now. Oh, that’s
Kalen: great.
Kalen: How how long did you have to stop running.
Brent: I stopped for about six weeks. Oh, okay.
Kalen: Oh, wow. Yeah. That’s frustrating when you’re doing something and then you have to stop cuz that becomes your whole routine and you start to depend on it and stuff and and then if you have to stop, it just sucks.
Brent: Yeah. So now I’ve started doing open water swimming and believe it or not. Our open water swim club starts. June 14th. okay. Cause that’s June 14th. That’s when the, what lakes are, that’s pretty much warm enough to swim in. The water was still 69 degrees on June 14th, right? Yeah.
Brent: That’s chilling by August. They’re gonna be 80 because it’s so hot here in the summer. Do you ever do
Kalen: ice baths
Brent: or cold? I’ve done his best. Yeah.
Kalen: Yeah. Okay. I’ve been wanting to get, I keep hearing about the benefits of I do sauna and stuff, but I keep hearing about the benefits of ice baths. So I wanna do that, but I gotta buy a bag of ice or something like that and just put it in a bathtub tub
Brent: or something.
Brent: I think Philip does ice baths does into a very, really long run.
Kalen: Oh, okay. Yeah, a lot of the people I follow on social media related to Jim and workout stuff. Talk about ’em and I gotta get that going. Yeah. I, what were you gonna say?
Brent: Yeah, I was gonna tell you my last thing that you asked me what I’m doing.
Brent: I have one more thing that I’m doing. Yeah, what I’m biking. Okay. So I swim, I bike and I run. That’s what I pretty much do on yoga. Nice and yoga. I did my first triathlon last weekend and no,
Kalen: way’s it. Your first tri your first tri. Cause before it was, you were just more pure running and then now you for this year.
Brent: Okay. I did lunch last year too. Anyways, that’s it first. Oh, what are you doing? Tell me what you’re doing. No. For this year. Cause it’s so cold here.
Kalen: Okay. You don’t your first triathlon this year, but you’ve done triathlons in the past. right? Yes. Okay. You’ve done a ton of
Brent: them. No, I wouldn’t say a ton, but I’ve done.
Brent: You’ve done a handful. I’ve done solid. Yep. And I’m a terrible swimmer. yeah. You look
Kalen: like a terrible swimmer.
Brent: Yes. That’s what everybody says too.
Kalen: do here’s do you when it comes to exercise, do you do the things because they’re beneficial for you or do you just do the stuff be like, have you gotten to the point where you just do it because you enjoy doing it?
Kalen: Like you do the running cuz you enjoy running. You don’t do it because. It helps you to be healthier or is it a mix of the two?
Brent: Yeah, I think I am doing it because I absolutely enjoy it. I am trying to enjoy swimming more. , that
Kalen: swimming is so boring. I’ve tried to do the swimming thing, but I can’t do it.
Kalen: I just lose my mind. I get too
Brent: bored doing it. They have headphones you can wear while you’re swimming. But oh, I do mainly open water swimming. So the, in Minnesota here it’s supported. So there’s buoys and they have peak lifeguards on paddleboards.
Brent: Oh, that’s cool. I swim with the swim buoy. So I feel pretty safe. And you have a goal, you go. 400 yards come back, four yards. That’s pretty cool. Too big circle or
Kalen: whatever it is. That’s kinda of an epic dude when I’m in Costa Rica like surfing. you’ll first of all, like just being on a surfboard and paddling is so tiring and you’ll just like, just going from A to B you’ll be exhausted.
Kalen: But then of course you just lay on the surfboard, and chill out and you’ll see dudes open water swimming in the ocean. And. You will just see a guy just go out like as far as you can see, like he’s practically out past the horizon. Just swimming. No, support. nothing. Not even sometimes they don’t even have a boo or anything like that.
Kalen: I don’t know what these people are thinking. It’s insane.
Brent: But yeah, there’s people that swim miles and mile. I was talking to a guy last night who is in a swim club and he met a lady that is, he, she, there’s a swim you can do across the English channel, which is like 26 or 30 miles or whatever.
Brent: You get out, you stamp your passport and you swim back. That’s funny. So it’s like a 50 mile or 60 mile swim. That’s funny. That’s not gonna be me. I’m not gonna
Kalen: do that. You’re not gonna do all that. Let me grab another water real quick. Hold I’ll be right back.
Brent: This episode of Kalen talks is sponsored by. Protein cricket bars, protein, cricket bars, bring you crickets and protein in a nice condensed package. Dude,
Kalen: let’s start a protein cricket bar brand. How cool would that be?
Brent: There’s probably one that exist. We could be the
Kalen: spokesperson. That’s true, by the way. I need to install an AC in the garage but which is on my to-do list.
Kalen: So if you wonder why I’m sweating like a madman that’s the reason why I’m just,
Brent: and we don’t have our AC right on our ACS, not on right now, but it was on last week and it was like, 90, it was 96 here. and it was 64 degrees in my basement, cuz all the, oh, that’s not bad. All the AC drops, that’s not bad.
Kalen: Yeah. But yeah, I like, I feel like on a, like I, I recently got an electric skateboard because I just, I think it’s a lot of fun and I feel like I’ve been on a path of doing, like doing exercise, cuz you, you have to, you wanna get in better shape, you wanna get healthier and then gradually you start to find the things you really love to do.
Kalen: And then eventually you just do the stuff cuz you like, that’s ultimately where you want to get to where you just do the stuff that you love to do. And it’s not, you would do it even if it didn’t make it’s not about the getting healthier is like the byproduct.
Brent: You know what I mean? Yeah. I is that I totally get a high from running. There’s nothing more fun than getting up, as the sun is rising and having. Whatever amount of miles in front of you and just having this little adventure of running around. And seeing things like when I travel, I always try to do some kind of extended long run or I’d stay on a Saturday to do my long run.
Brent: I think we were gonna get together last spring. I was gonna come to Austin for some event and I had planned on staying an extra day and that’s when I got injured. So I had to cut that one short, but I had a 20 mile run planned in Austin and I have a route planned out and I was super excited to kinda, ah, that’s a bummer.
Brent: Go see the it’s fun to see that I’ve done the The murals, there’s all kinds of paintings and there’s a walking tour. I did eight miles of just running around, looking at all the great paintings on the side of buildings in it’s a great way to see a city. Yeah.
Brent: I think it’s EXPECIALLY fun. Did I say that, right? It, especially cuz I said, some
Kalen: people say, EXPECIALLY,
Brent: I feel like that’s a, and that is pronunciation That the one thing I love to say to my wife is I love to say, Hey, would you like to get an EXPRESSO? Yeah. If she said, do you mean Espresso And I said, oh, she
Kalen: Expresso She corrects you. No, that’s not cool. Yeah. EXPRESSO that’s valid. Yeah. Hundred percent. valid No. I’m jealous of people that are into running, cuz it seems like a really cool way to, like you said, see a city and I’ve tried to get into it, but I’ve just never, and like my joints drive me crazy, but I’ve tried.
Kalen: But that’s how I feel about the skateboard now is I want is it’s a fun way to like I’ve been exploring different parts of the city where I live in that I hadn’t seen before. And it’s a neat way to get around. Yeah, it’s funny how, when you’re just driving you, you just go through the same route that wherever you’re going and you never really stop to smell the roses,
Brent: or and did you get a one, one wheel, one of those one wheel skateboards or no.
Brent: So
Kalen: I got a it’s called an evolve. It’s like an actual skateboard with four wheels. Huh? I did try the one wheel and I rented it and I have a buddy here nearby. Who’s super into ’em, but I couldn’t quite get it. Have you ridden a one wheel before?
Brent: No, but I have a friend who has one.
Brent: Okay.
Kalen: They seem really cool, but the problem is that you can also, you can fall on them a lot. And they do this nose dive thing.
Brent: Where that’s exactly what he just broke his collarbone. Are you for real? Yep. He was going 20 miles an hour and it just there’s something with the battery happened.
Brent: The
Kalen: battery dies it’s oh my gosh,
Brent: you’re supposed to get a warning. Yeah. He put little wheels on the front, on the back now. So if it does a nose dive, it can but I still think if you’re gonna nose dive and you’re gonna dig in, you’re just gonna, it’s gonna, yeah. You’re not gonna recover
Kalen: from it.
Kalen: Yeah. It’s scary. I watched a ton of videos on that and I was really nervous about it and stuff like that. Apparently you learn how to feel when that’s happening and then you can avoid it. And those things that you, the wheels are called fangs, the wheels that you put on the front, and then they make it so that if it does nose dive it, doesn’t like hard dive.
Kalen: It gives you a little bit more space or whatever, but yeah, I was just like, nah, and just riding it. It was just weird. I just more comfortable on the skateboard, but I’m still, I’m super nervous about falling just off the skateboard. Because they go, 15, 20 miles an hour and stuff like that.
Kalen: And,
Brent: And do you have a remote that you hold because I’ve seen those electric skateboards and I’ve seen people holding it remote and they’re just yeah. Cruising.
Kalen: Yeah. It’s nuts. Yeah. Okay. There. There’s a little remote and actually right after this, I’m gonna go to this meetup and we’re gonna, I’m gonna cruise around with some people
Brent: electric skateboard meetup.
Brent: Yeah.
Kalen: Actually it’s a one little bikers too or not, oh, it’s a, I think any electronic per a transportation device, whatever they’re called, but but yeah, it’s a one wheel group and then there’s some people with skateboards too, but I’m gonna be like the one I’m gonna be like the weird one, cause everybody else is gonna have a one wheel.
Brent: Susan and I went out and joined a new bike group on on Wednesday night and nice. There was an, a and B in biking. And so we, and there’s a 40 mile and a 25 mile. So we joined the slow 25 mile group. And I haven’t actually ridden that far this year. And it was an, a group for us anyways, but I was so tired.
Brent: that’s a long
Kalen: ride. Yeah. That’s a 25 miles. That’s a ride for me at least. If I ride 10 miles, I’m tired.
Brent: Yeah but you’re going like 10 miles an hour. So that’s pretty fast.
Kalen: I get
Brent: I know you don’t even know how
Kalen: fast you’re going. I don’t know how fast away hours making fun of me, but I don’t exactly know why. So
Brent: did you take, let’s go. I wanna come back to surfing cuz I took surfing lessons last year. Did you take lessons in Costa Rica?
Kalen: Yeah, I went to a surf camp for a week.
Kalen: Took lessons, whoa. A week. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. And then shout out to witches rock and then and then I stayed it by myself for the rest of that month. And then we’ve gone back. This is gonna be like our fourth time going there. We were there for three and a half months last year, total. And part yeah, so we loved it.
Kalen: But that’s kind of thing with the skateboard is that I loved surfing so much and I was like, we need to move here. I was talking to my wife about it. Didn’t you know, then you realize it’s a little more complicated than that when you have three kids and stuff, even though we homeschool. kids have dance, they have music, they have their friends.
Kalen: You can’t you gotta stay put, so
Brent: yeah. I’m just gonna put out a little shout out for Hawaii because the one thing that a lot of people don’t realize about Hawaii is that it is a US state and getting a house there is far easier and than like Mexico or Costa Rica. And getting the other thing is what?
Brent: Go ahead.
Kalen: Getting a house there is easier. Is that what you said? Yeah. Cuz
Brent: it’s a US state. You can get a mortgage. I know you wouldn’t need a mortgage, but people that would need one,
Kalen: I would need a mortgage but it’s expensive there. It’s crazy.
Brent: It’s crazy expensive. It is expensive, if you go there as a tourist and go out to eat every day, but if you’re making your own food and.
Brent: you live in a local, it’s not as bad, much more expensive. They have a Costco. So that’s all you
Kalen: need the houses. The houses are expensive.
Brent: The houses are expensive, but they’re smaller. You pay the same amount for a house, but it’s not gonna be like, it’s not gonna be, what do you have?
Brent: Like 12 or 15,000 square feet in Austin. It’s you’re gonna, you’re probably gonna have to. For the size of the house you have, you’re gonna have to, yeah. If you settle for 2,500 square
Kalen: feet. Yeah, no. Yeah. If it’s just the two of you and you’re getting a small house, it’s probably super doable.
Brent: A big house in Kona is 1500 square feet oh, okay.
Brent: Yeah. And a big house for millions is gonna be anything over three or 4,000.
Kalen: So did you do some, so you did some surfing out, you did some surfing out there. In Hawaii.
Brent: Yeah. I only did one day of surf lessons. Which now have hearing that you said a week, that’s probably a really good idea.
Brent: The mistake I made and I went with my son was he said paddle back as soon as you can. And so we would go out, do our little run and then we were just both Gavin and I are just whipping it to get back to the start. And it’s man, you guys have never had anybody get back as fast as you guys get back.
Brent: But what happened I wasn’t used to that motion and I ended up bruising, one of my ribs between the waves bouncing and me paddling so hard. It’s bruised a rib. Dude
Kalen: it’s. Yeah. And it’s so painful.
Brent: I don’t know if you’ve heard of persuasive kids. I have a very, I have a very persuasive son.
Brent: He’s dad, we’ve gotta go by. Let’s just go to Costco right now. I know they had surfboards he’s like he, he talked me into going to Costco. We bought two surfboards. So you bought, and then every single day, he’s we gotta get out there. We gotta get, which only makes your ribs hurt more.
Kalen: So you kept going out.
Kalen: I
Brent: did.
Kalen: Yep. Okay. So how how many times did you go out total? Did you get the hang of it?
Brent: My son definitely got the hang of it. I would say because I was in such pain that I never got, I was never relaxed enough that time that we were just back in May and susan. And I went out and just paddled around and it was so much easier once you’re comfortable and not in pain.
Kalen: To, yeah, totally. I feel like that first week for me was like, the there’s just balancing on the board was super hard, like laying down balancing and paddling for me was like, I was just like, I was a wreck. I was like all over the place. And then the rib pain and stuff like that. And then your arms are so sore.
Kalen: It’s yeah, after that week I feel like I started to get the hang of it, but
Brent: the first, so I’m not the only one that gets rib pain. That’s good to know. Oh, I’m glad that I’m glad that you had all kinds of rib pain.
Kalen: Yeah, I had so much. And then it’s weird how the pain just starts to go away. Like I think you’re you’re at your, whatever your ribs get conditioned to it.
Kalen: And then, I don’t know, you probably figure out your technique a little better too, whatever, but.
Brent: It’s fine. You’re from California originally. So was that part of your culture? Did you, were you a surf kid?
Kalen: No. I didn’t grow up near the beach at all, but I was always into skating and rollerblading and stuff like that.
Kalen: And then snowboarding. So I picked it up relatively quickly, but yeah, it was a new, that was a new thing, but it’s pretty fun. Pretty fun, man. Are we with our time here? We’re almost at our time,
Kalen: there was a couple other things on the list, but I don’t know. I feel like we had a solid sesh, solid yeah. Podcast sesh.
Brent: So can I’ve got a good I’ve got a one of my favorite poets. Yes. It’s called love poems for married people. Oh, wow. This is great. Can I read a poem? Oh my gosh.
Brent: As we close it out, please. All right. Yeah. And I got this book for Susan. So this is gonna be a joke you’re setting. No, they’re real. It’s love poems by it’s John
Kalen: Kenny world in which you’re gonna read a real poem right
Brent: now. Poems
Kalen: look at it says poem, you found a poem. That’s gonna somehow be an, a joke one way or another, but we’ll see..
Brent: We’ll find out after I read it right. We’ll find out real soon. Okay. Title the Mo title. Ready? Here we go. Are you in the mood? I am. Let’s put the kids down, let’s have a light dinner shower, maybe not drink too much and do that thing I would rather do with you than anyone else lie in bed together and look at our iPhones.
Brent: that’s so dumb. It’s a real. It’s a real poem.
Kalen: Yep. Yeah. That’s
Brent: wow. I find all of his poems completely hilarious. And are they all,
Kalen: they’re all funny.
Brent: Are they all if you think that’s funny. I think it’s hilarious.
Kalen: but they’re not like sincere love poems. So it
Brent: was a sincere love poems.
Brent: I’m this guy has to be Irish because the humor that comes out of it is very Irish. Yeah.
Kalen: I like it. I like it. I’m gonna flip. I’ve been thinking about actually trying to read some more poetry. I’ve been trying to read fiction. I can’t read fiction though. It’s so hard for me to it just goes in one ear and out the other.
Kalen: versus mostly I’ve just read like non-fiction books and
Brent: all I’m reading a fiction book. It’s by comb McDonald, and it’s the dead man sins. And we’ll have to put it in the show notes. It’s completely hilarious. He’s got all these anyways. Nice. I am reading a fiction book.
Kalen: Sorry. You cut out just a tiny bit. What was the, what was that book?
Brent: It is it’s called dead man sins. It’s by Cole. It’s C a I M H I know it’s Irish. And I should know how to say it cuz they often say it, but Cole McDonald. Okay. On Amazon C a I M
Kalen: H. And
Brent: what’s it about? It’s a sort of a it’s a detective novel, let’s say, but nice.
Brent: Quite a bit of Irish humor in it.
Kalen: Nice. I’m reading the Hobbit with my daughter. Oh, that’s a good one, which is fun. Yeah. It’s yeah, it’s pretty. It’s pretty cool. She reads it to me and she understands it much better than I do. Good. She’ll actually test me. She’ll be like, she’ll test my comprehension. She’ll be like, did you understand that part dad.
Kalen: And I’ll be like she’ll have to explain this to
Brent: me. That’s good that you have to read the line, the witch in the wardrobe. Yeah,
Kalen: I think they’ve read that one. Yeah. Yeah. They were
Brent: contemporaries. CS Lewis and JRR Tolkin.
Kalen: Yeah. I think there’s some science fiction from CS Lewis.
Kalen: I’ve read a bunch of when I was in college, I read a bunch of CS Lewis’s books on Christianity and stuff like
Brent: that. Yeah. My favorite book is called the Great Divorce. Yeah.
Kalen: I think I read that
Brent: one. Yeah. It’s a good one. It’s not about divorce. Yeah.
Kalen: But anyways, he has some interesting science fiction too.
Kalen: Yeah, absolutely. Brent Peterson, thanks so much. This has been a lot of fun. Where can people find all your content and links and web links?
Brent: If we’re gonna put this up, mine will be on talk hyphen commerce.com. Fantastic. And I don’t know, we’re gonna name this episode. We’ll
Kalen: figure something out for that’s for darn.
Kalen: Sure. All right. Thanks everybody for tuning in. See you next time.
This is a broader series of interviews to focus on the Magento Association. The goal of these interviews is to increase awareness and increase membership for the Magento Association.
The event happens on August 3rd, 2022 in Jakarta Indonesia
Transcript
Brent: Welcome to this episode of Magento association or something. We don’t know what to call it yet, but this is promoting the Magento association today. I have Muliadi Jio from Indonesia, and he’s the organizer of Meet Magento. Indonesia
Muliadi: hey, Brent. Hey everybody. Good to see you all. And talk to you again, Brent
Brent: let’s dive right in. Tell us a little bit about your event, and how long you’ve had it running for.
Muliadi: This is if I count it this is supposed to be the, instead the six or the seven-year we run in Indonesia. So it’s always been offline, of course. And then the last two years, unfortunately, during the pandemic, we have to switch to online for a couple of years and this year.
Muliadi: So we are so excited. Finally, we were able to do it again as an in person meeting. And so far the respond, at least from the advertising for the sponsor side. They’re so excited. It’s been a while there’s no event and everybody just jump in and join. So we’re very excited.
Brent: And traditionally, you get a lot of people at this event.
Brent: Tell us about your attendance
Muliadi: and things like that. I remember when we started seven years ago I think that’s close to about a hundred people which is where we see, oh, that’s a good audience to start at that time. And then as we go year after year, I think the last. In person event on what’s that right before pandemic 2019 that one is actually around 600 people show up on the event.
Muliadi: And we can always unique us. So we have Three different track traditionally, so one track really for business and one track really for a solution. So where the sum of the sponsor can talk in the solution because they’re bringing their solution to it. And then the last track’s really more technical discussion.
Muliadi: And yeah, we have about 50/50 about like merchant versus a engineering dev flow burst kind of audience. .
Brent: And how about your venue and the location? Tell us a little bit about Indonesia. Why would, why should we all come to Indonesia?
Muliadi: Why would we want to come? I think most you have to, if you’ve never been to Indonesia, I think a lot of people very funny when we talk to a lot of people, especially from American or from the Europe, obviously a lot of people know Bali more than the Indonesia itself.
Muliadi: So when we talk about, do you know Bali. Indonesia, maybe not but obviously Bali sits in Indonesia and where we are is in Jakarta, which is the kind of the central the biggest city in Indonesia. We are close to two hours away from Bali. By flight.
Muliadi: Yeah. And then we’ve been doing this in Jakarta because like it’s all the business and all the enterprises all have the headquarter in Jakarta. It’s fun. You can fly to Jakarta and then you can, obviously once you’re in Indonesia, you should just explore to any, like to Bali and all the rest of the, a exotic islands on the east part of Indonesia.
Brent: And of course there’s so many exciting and beautiful places to visit in Indonesia. Obviously going to a Meet Magento event is such a great opportunity to travel and meet people. And from the sponsor standpoint maybe tell us a little bit about some of the merchants you have there and why somebody would want a sponsor.
Brent: A Meet Magento event.
Muliadi: Yeah, we traditionally very very localized as far as like our event. A lot of the sponsor, we get a lot of local sponsor, but obvious some we open up for a lot of international. Businesses that want to get their business exposed to Indonesia market, which is well known for the big population and the opportunity here.
Muliadi: So that’s always the kind of the attractive point to be able to get your business exposure to here in Southeast Asia especially in Indonesia itself. Yeah at our event is always free. That’s the unique part. Compared to any other event around crossroad on the other meet change event I think we are the only one that is free and fully funded by the sponsors.
Muliadi: Luckily and then, yeah it’s exciting.
Brent: And you have, you said you have three tracks that you’re running in conjunction with the event?
Muliadi: And they yes, there’s a three tracks. It’s a whole day event.
Brent: So you have a business track, a developer track. And what was the other.
Muliadi: It’s what we call it.
Muliadi: The solution track it’s really for people can present their product and basic more like showing kind of solutions. And typically we use that for the sponsor to be able more engaged and able to demo the product and stuff like that. But digital this year seems like we are going to
Muliadi: blend it together. We have a lot of different kind of speakers this year. Not only just a group sponsor, but as well, like a lot of the business practitioner. So we mix around all inside the three track that we have. We still have gonna have three tracks, but not like really divided that way anymore.
Muliadi: For this year.
Brent: So part of this is the Magento association now helps to promote these events. And Magento association has paid memberships now. So I’m on the membership committee. And our goal is to increase membership.
Brent: What would you say to people
Brent: who that, what would you say to people who encourage them to join the Magento Association?
Muliadi: I think let’s go back with the heart of this Magento is the community and this Magento has been really successful because all those community support. So I think the Magento association is becoming the form of that. And naturally we want to be part and this association and participate as much as we want
Muliadi: and that’s and in the form of the paying membership, I think that’s at least a little bit that you can do as far as participation, and that’s a lot more to participate. I believe you are also involved with much more than just a paying member. You are also involved in the comittee and a lot of the different stuff.
Muliadi: And I, I think that’s what we are looking forward with the Magento association. So we can recreate this vibrant community back where everybody can participate and basically yeah, I think in our maybe like blessing each other, something like that.
Brent: Go back to the beginning. And why you decided to put on a Meet Magento event, had you attended events in Europe?
Muliadi: So it’s by accident actually, I went back to Indonesia way back on 2010. So it’s almost 12 years now. Initially I just going back here because family reason and I was already have a good relationship with Magento. I was in the states for 16 years and right before I went back to Indonesia, I worked with a company called Guidance, which is.
Muliadi: Partner of Magento. We are among one of the first partner working with Magento directly, still in the Culver City office. Naturally when I went back to Indonesia at that time I’m building the first set of developers for Guidance and really focusing on Magento and it started with only a couple of us.
Muliadi: And then the team grew to five. And 10 and all of a sudden become a full team of I think at that time we still have about 15 people concentrating, really delivering the gentle project for our US clients, a lot of, but then Indonesia eCommerce picking up around 2012 to early 2013.
Muliadi: So then we get a lot more exposure with a big comp, a big company that interested to know more about Magento. And obviously at that time I still go back and forth, always attending the Imagine. We miss the Magento Imagine events. That’s been really great. And I met a lot of people there.
Muliadi: Some of them were was the founder of the Meet Magento association at that time still . And so we have a talk and then we would think, okay, maybe we can build a community in Indonesia. Why don’t we try? And then I talked to a couple folks on the Magento and they also interested to
Muliadi: build exposure in Indonesia. So we just launched our first event out of the blue working with Magento, working with several I’m trying to remember. It’s been so long and yeah, but that’s, it’s turned out really good. The event we get a lot of support from the local company, as well as audience that coming in and show really interest on the platform and interest in the building the community.
Muliadi: So just that’s becoming now every year after that, we just continue to have the events until now, basically. Guido is one of the first person actually flying to Indonesia on our yeah. Guido. Yeah. Guido Jensen. Yeah, he put
Brent: on the, I think they put the very first event in the Netherlands and I think Meet Magento, Netherlands by far is one of the best ones that’s out there still.
Brent: It’s such a fun event. Yeah.
Muliadi: Yep. And then the following year or year after two years after that, Thomas also fly to Indonesia. So yeah, it’s been really a good run. All right. Followed them, saying that I need to
Brent: come one of these years. I’ll come
Muliadi: next year. You need to, I’m gonna keep saying until you come here, please do so
Brent: tell us, how do they find an event?
Brent: is it
Muliadi: your address? It’s re really from information? Yes. So the official website is called very easy to remember is the M A G E dot ID. So it’s a mage.id as. So you can go to the website, you can see the agenda, you can see the speakers that are already set for this event. It’s gonna be on August 3rd.
Muliadi: So not too far, it’s less than two weeks. Their venue will be the venue address will be on the website and you can register there right away too. And like I said, it’s free.
Brent: So just outta curiosity when you do a free event, do you find a lot of people don’t show up?
Muliadi: Obviously with the free event typically the, from the registration and the show up is probably it’s a industry stranded around 60% show up or so 40% most likely not show up.
Muliadi: Yeah. But it’s still it’s still good number. We we’ve like we, with all the registration that we have it’s a good turnout
Brent: for us. Yeah. That’s a really good number. I know that so we organize meet Megento India. and did, have you been to meet Magento India yet?
Muliadi: Did you come?
Muliadi: No. No, you have to come we’re planning. I only went one time to Bangalore. Oh, that was
Brent: Magento live. Yeah. Anyways we get we pay, we have people pay, but we do get an incredible attendance. It’s in the 90%, the people that buy tickets come to the event. Yeah. I think all the meet Magento events and I’ve been to meet Magento Singapore as.
Brent: So that whole south Asia , meet Megento events you do such a great job putting those on I tended last year, virtually which was a very good event. , I stayed up late to to be a speaker in my evening. Thank you, morning. It, it was very good. I actually spoke the night and followed watched a lot of the speakers.
Brent: Yeah. Thank you so much for being on. I will put mage.id on the show notes and I wish you all the best in your event.
Muliadi: Thank you. Thank you, Brent. Really great talking to you as always. Thank you. And good night.
What are you doing to retain your employees? Are you thinking of happiness, or is your business model churn and burn. Brent and Kalen talk about this subject in this short episode.
