Contrary to rumors Magento Open Source is indeed alive and here to stay for a long time to come. Willem Wigman talks about the two different support models of Magento Open Source and how this will benefit the community.
Long Term Support from Adobe will be called the Magento Open Source LTS version. This is a very common practice in Open Source software. The Short Term Support or STS version of Magento will be supported by the community. We also talk about the benefits of a cleaner more streamlined version of Magento Open Source LTS and how this will increase the ROI of merchants all over the world using any version of Magento.
What is the future of Adobe Commerce and Magento Open Source? Vinai Kopp and Brent talk about the recent Adobe Developers Live Commerce conference and discuss the keynote. We talk about Mage-OS and how the community has stepped up to help Magento Open Source move faster into the future. We debunk speculation in social media and talk about how long-term and short-term support will work around Magento. The excellent news: Magento Open Souce is alive and well and will be for a long time
TRANSCRIPT
Brent: Welcome to this episode. Thank you I have Vinai Kopp is here. I’m going to let you introduce yourself today. Vinai and I have known each other for quite a long time, but why don’t you go ahead and tell us what you do day to day and maybe one of your passions.
Vinai: Right on. Thanks for having me, I’m the technical director at Hyva themes. So I worked very closely with Willem and all of our customers about more specifically developing the developers to do the implementations and try to make their lives as easy and fun as possible. And one of my passions, oh boy. I guess sleeping.Dog working out doing the stuff with a dog is fun. man trailing and all kinds of just fun stuff. It’s great. Traveling with a family is lovely. I really enjoy writing code. That’s passion still is. Okay, good.
Brent: Yeah. I’ve had the opportunity to run with you and your dog and the mountains around Heidelberg, and it’s such a great experience.
Vinai: That was a very nice run
Brent: So today I think let’s talk a little bit about the Hyva of theme and I think more, more, let’s talk about. Some of the things that are happening with Magento open source and Mage-OS. I think that would be some really interesting topics that resonate. Let’s start with let’s start with Mage-OS and, talk a little about open source.
Brent: I know there was an Adobe developer live conference on Friday last Friday, and that would have been February 11th. What, was your takeaways from that?
Vinai: Yeah. Okay. For me, it was a very nice talk. I enjoyed it. Not just talks. I watched a couple of, and I didn’t watch everything. I just watched a couple of talks and presentations and this round table about Magento opensource and such.
Vinai: I liked it. The vibe within Adobe I’m enjoying is that it’s been a lot better than it used to be a couple of years ago, and they’re communicating a lot more which, helps me understand what’s happening. So that’s good. Even though you just asked me before we started recording, actually the keynote was a little misleading in part.
Vinai: A number of people reached out to me afterward and asked me about some of the statements that were made and at least from my understanding as part of the Magento open-source task force, where we talk extensively, not hours about these topics. Maybe the information given was a little incomplete, so I understand why people might’ve gotten the wrong impression there.
Vinai: One of the statements, for example, was that community open source handed over completely to the community. And that’s not true. What will happen at least according to the current plans as an expressed intent of Adobe is that Magento open-source as it is today will stay there as Magento open-source LTS.
Vinai: So long-term support, which has I have five years or whatever, support versions, very stable, absolute focus on security and stability because it’s the basis of their commercial offerings. And what they will be handing over to the community is a new distribution called STS Short Term Support. So this will not be officially supported on Adobe cloud.
Vinai: Probably it will be possible to install it and use. it Even though it just won’t be enough official distribution for, one. And that in fact will be owned by the community. It’s not quite clear who that will be. Will it be the Magento association or how that look like? But Adobe said they only will have a advisory role.
Vinai: No veto power or anything. So the community can in fact steer the way it should go, which is lovely. It’s pretty much exactly what we wanted to achieve with Mage-OS. And I’m very exciting. So I was very surprised when Adobe announced itself with a 180 turn. They’re so great. And a lot of things probably were being discussed internally before they announced this.
Vinai: So that’s one thing it’s not that open source is just handed over to the community and Adobe it’s okay, got rid of it. In fact, it’s going to be a whole new distribution. That’s in the hands of the community while the existing distributions will exist. And. Security features and new releases will flow back into STS and at the same time, any features that are developed and STS, and that are maybe then after a year or so are battle proven turn out to not cause big disruption and actually have tangible benefits for merchants.
Vinai: They can be cherry-picked back into LTS when there’s time for another release there. So there, these diversions are definitely not independent of each other, and there’s a vested interest on both sides to stay compatible to some degree I’d, even though I’m really looking forward to being able to innovate again, as part of the Magento Fork, and at least it’s hard not to speak about Magento STS.
Vinai: Because I’ve got pretty clear picture about Mage-OS, how that should be, you know what it’s for the value it will provide to merchants, to developers, to Adobe, to the ecosystem. It’s, maybe a bit premature. Trying to apply the same thoughts to the STS distribution, because that’s just not just Mage-OS. I’d But probably there’ll be some similarities.
Vinai: So I would be very excited to be able to help maybe steer some aspects of that into the direction that I personally find important, for example, make it more accessible for developers and the performance improvements, of course, et cetera. So many, things there to, do, to think about fun with. So that’s one part of it.
Vinai: The other part that you mentioned before we started recording again, was: Is Adobe going complete SaaS? Like Adobe Commerce going completely SaaS. I think what that was statement was intended to mean was that all new features that Adobe will be releasing for Adobe Commerce will be SaaS offerings, just like they have for the last couple of years.
Vinai: So everything around sensei. So Adobe analytics, product recommendation, search. I think those are the services they provide so far. They are SaaS offerings, but they only are usable with Adobe commerce because of the PHP stack, they built around it integrated into. Now in theory, they could be integrated into any commercial e-commerce offering, right?
Vinai: Not just Magento They’re SaaS offerings after all. But Adobe commerce will be built on the PHP stack. So it’s not like it’s completely SaaS now for the years to, for many years to come as the official statement. So nobody knows for how long pretty long as my expectation, right? It will speed pretty much what we’ve got right now.
Vinai: We have the stable PHP core and then SaaS offerings being built on top of this. And this is actually great because. Nobody likes breaking upgrades. It’s just doing work without getting any benefit out of it. So having a stable core is awesome for everybody developers have much more fun building new stuff, merchants don’t want to pay without getting something in return for development work and development hours.
Vinai: So this idea that we were proposing for Magento open source from the beginning for Mage-OS that is, and now also I think hopefully will be adopted for for the STS release, is that the same approach has followed. So any new features are developed as extensions, so to speak, right? It doesn’t have to be SaaS offerings, but they won’t be part of the core, so to speak.
Vinai: But that external extensions, which then can be added in, and the only difference is such a service or feature could be running inside of the same PHP process. So that would be the in-process customization. And as we develop as know and love. Or it could be a SaaS offering like Adobe offers it now, in case of Adobe, those could be customized through the thing called Adobe IO, formerly Firefly, et cetera, but there’s just for the SaaS offerings.
Vinai: So all the existing customizability of Magento still exists. And that’s great because we had the home module ecosystem and develop practice system around that. So maybe that clarifies things a bit.
Brent: I want to just break this down a little bit now. Cause we, when we went through a lot of things and I, did not have an opportunity to see the live broadcast.
Brent: But the The LTS and STS, I think obviously has confused a lot of people when, I read a few notes from, somebody that sent me here’s what’s happening, they said Magento’s going open source. Magento is going, SaaS was the first statement. And the Magento Association is going to take over the Magento open source.
Brent: These are some big statements. And I was like, wow where did this all come from? And I started doing some searching and I couldn’t find anything about it. So I think your clarification has made it much easier to understand. And then Willem did go through the LTS and STS with me.
Brent: And that also makes perfect sense. I do feel like maybe they did dump a whole lot in a keynote on the community. And I’m a little bit perturbed that it’s going to take three weeks for this recording to come back out. I feel like maybe there was some misinterpretations of this news and it hasn’t spread widely.
Brent: I just want to go back to open source and let’s talk directly about STS LTS. And so it’s clear right now, Magento is going to control the open source core of Magento. Adobe is going to control the open source core of Magento. It’s going to be called long LTS long-term support. And another entity at some point is going to get control over the fork, which is going to be this short-term support, which is going to be more of the innovative space that’s going to happen.
Brent: Would that be a good
Vinai: We’ll be able to adopt newer PHP versions much, much quicker. Include improvements that have a high priority for community better caching, better session handling. For Adobe, they didn’t have a high priority because of maybe focus on Adobe commerce, cloud or stability.
Vinai: There’s much more room to maneuver there for innovations.
Brent: Think some of the things you’ve talked about and one of the things they did they announce earlier was they’re going to decouple all the core features, all the third party modules like PayPal and Dotdigital.
Brent: All those are going to get removed from the core. And we’re going to end up with just Magento, which I think is a great idea in that part. Alright. Again, just to explain to the listeners LTS is going to be a a version of Magento that is a core version. That’s going to reside as an open source version for everybody to use.
Brent: It’s not going away. It is still going to be the core of Adobe Commerce. And Adobe commerce. Theoretically, what they’re saying is they’re not going to bundle a lot of new functions into the core of Magento, but rather depend on third parties and more likely from Adobe anyways, SaaS services to attach to it.
Brent: That a good, a easy way to say it. Okay. Absolutely. If we then talk just briefly about the SaaS, Because I heard a lot of people say Magento is going SaaS, right? I don’t know how that could have been misinterpreted. I guess I do know how it could have gotten misinterpreted.
Brent: It sounds like all the new features are going to be SaaS, but the core of Magento. As we know it, there’s no plans at the moment to make it go SaaS. And it would really have to be a brand new refactoring of Magento or Adobe commerce before it could possibly go completely SaaS
Vinai: so complete speculation here, but my guess is something like that will come at one point in time, maybe.
Vinai: But everybody within Adobe says many years to come, whatever that means, right until that we’ll be ready. So until then they will be reliant and dependent on the PHP version for many years to come. And also even after this new product finally has been realized this complete SaaS commerce offering. They have a lot of existing customers on Magento, as we currently know it and they will still need to be supported.
Vinai: So that will take another how it is, software never dies and we have still have Magento one and what’s called oh, it’s commerce hanging around. It’s still we’ll still have Magento two sides on PHP in 10 years. Officially supported by Adobe,
Brent: yeah. And I think the, realization to have this SaaS offering, it will be something that competes in the enterprise space when it’s ready.
Brent: And I’m guessing five years from now, it’ll be ready. Ideally it would be cool if they had three versions, they had a SaaS, they had a on-prem and they had an open source. With the open source, always underlying core that’s pushing forward. All the core features that are made Magento. And there’s no reason why a SaaS version couldn’t be PHP.
Brent: I think Akeneo has a SaaS version. That’s PHP Shopware has a SaaS version that’s PHP. Let’s, not speculate too much, but I think just to help people understand what was put out there on Friday The peripherals of Magento as we see them, or as Adobe commerce, sorry.
Brent: As we see them are going to be SaaS. And I guess the good news for that is that anybody has open source would now have options to bring in some of the enterprise SaaS features that Adobe commerce is offering
Vinai: theoretically will be decides to offer them to. Open source merchants running on source, sure.
Vinai: So there’s no technical reason not to only business reasons. Hey, we want to have it exclusive for commerce, which I don’t know, but they’re all, always other offerings too. Companies like Nasto offering product recommendations and other search streetwise, et cetera. So there are many options, competitors, so to speak of the Adobe offerings, which are of course, open to any open source merchant too.
Brent: And I think all of these, a lot of these extension companies Shipper HQ is a great example of who decided that they were going to go SaaS early on. They’ve had big success in doing that. And I don’t think because some of that the processing is done outside of Magento doesn’t necessarily mean
Brent: that it’s going to stop you from making some customizations that you want around that. If we think about how Magento works, there is an extension that usually talks to a SaaS provider.. And then the SaaS provider does its work and it comes back right. At a minimum, you can just connect with restful or you have some basic connections where it would do everything, but generally we’d have some extension.
Brent: You would install that extension would do the communications. If there’s any rules that we want to build, we could build into that extension. That’s outside of the SaaS. And I guess we would call that microservices, right? If we’re truly SaaS, you’d have to have all these different microservices that are residing outside and you’d have to manage all those things.
Vinai: I don’t know how micro to these servicesare, but services. And that’s exactly how the Adobe SaaS offerings integrate into Magento commerce to exactly. Just like you said. So no
Brent: difference. Yeah. And I think too I guess there are going to be Adobe extensions that you would install.
Brent: And I’m thinking specifically of the new Adobe payments, which is an extension you install, but the bulk of the work is done outside of Adobe commerce. And it is open to, it is open to open source clients. Interesting that a lot of the extension updates, because they said the extension is partially written in react.
Brent: The extension updates can be pushed to the extension from Adobe.
Vinai: Yeah. Then it has to be hosted somewhere like the JavaScript code needs to be pulled in from some server environment controlled by. Adobe in that case. So they just update the file server, which then gets loaded into the browser.
Vinai: That’s the only way to do that because they are unable to update the code running on a server, unless of course they own the server tooling with a cloud. So that would be another story. But Yeah, it’s everybody’s has the same tools at their disposal as a technological tool. It doesn’t matter whether it’s Adobe, whether it’s a third party SaaS provider, whether it’s an in-house team, Adobe obviously has a bit of.
Vinai: Power in terms of manpower, they can put behind some, things and unify a lot of offering. And there certainly is a benefit in that, but they still have to build stuff with the same technology everybody else see what’s
Brent: so I think some of the things I’m hearing is that you’re, excited or let’s call it bullish about this LTS/STS Model.
Brent: And it’s going to be a good path forward for the years to come, at least in the short-term at least five years in the long-term 10 years, right?
Vinai: Yeah, I am. Your guess about the timeframes as good as mine. That said I, my idea is probably something similar yet. I think probably not too far off, but again I, have no idea.
Vinai: I don’t know no additional information now because Adobe had big collaborations. They’ve got legal. They’ve got a ton of teams, a lot of different departments that have to be involved, product ownership, marketing, API’s, strategy, leadership, whatever that means. So, many people, so many aspects it’ll take some time.
Vinai: It won’t be here tomorrow. I have no clue how long it’ll take. It does seem like Adobe is interested in making that happen as quick as possible, as quickly as possible. So I can have no. Impression of anybody’s stalling, this and this is I’m talking here. Being part of this Magento open-source task force, right?
Vinai: So we meet every two weeks and get to talk with other members of the community who are interested in the future of open source and also five or six people from Adobe were there all the time. So we talk about different aspects of this and try to find the best path forward. And that’s what this is. So it’ll take some time.
Vinai: And in the meanwhile, we, from the Magento opensource community Alliance, we’ll continue to build out the Mage-OS distributions and everything that we’re doing there, I believe will seed and directly into the STS version. Because we’re learning. Building this and all that knowledge will serve being able to have a community run Magento version, even with the guidance from Adobe, it doesn’t hurt learning.
Vinai: Things are never going to so we are not dependent on Adobe. And that’s the one thing I keep, repeating. And it’s one of my main motivations there. I think it’s pretty important to be independent, to be able to make our own decisions without having to wait for others. And so far everything that.
Vinai: Has greatly just only good things have come from it. Look at what we’re getting. We’re getting STS version. We have a lot more communication with Adobe. The whole vibe is shifting around Magento. We have a lot more clarity about where Magento’s headed, et cetera. So I believe if we could continue to do this.
Vinai: Good things will come.
Brent: All yeah. So I want to shift gears. Let’s I want to close out this Mage-OS thing. If you’re a listener and and you’re not technical, don’t worry Magento’s around.
Brent: I, want to just dive when it just one small technical talk, but really quick.
Brent: So I did see, I think he’s a Magento master and I should know his name, but he talked about integrating the UCT, the upgrade compatibility tool into the build of. Of every build of Magento. I think that’s exciting and I think more people should use this upgrade compatibility tool as well as just the multi, the testing framework.
Brent: I can’t express more that developers need to be using some of the tools that are out there. Have you used the upgrade compared to the UCT tool at
Vinai: all? Not an anger. I’ve just used it on. It’s a code base that I work on, but because I’m working with that product company, Hyva, it’s not like we have our own sites.
Vinai: Like I’m not a merchant in effect. I work for merchants, so it’s slightly different, but yeah, it’s good. This upgrade compatibility tool is helpful. I wouldn’t consider it a goal to be a hundred percent green because that severely limits what can be done, but it’s super useful. And that it shows where to pay extra attention during upgrades.
Vinai: Chances are depending on how the code is written, it will still work. But it’s, it just gives a indicational where, and get them started.
Brent: Good. All right, so let’s move on to the Magento association. So the you’re part of the open source task force, right? Is that what it’s called now? The open source task force.
Brent: I’m on the membership committee. So I can share my news from our meeting yesterday. And you can share your news how’s that you share your news first. What’s the news on the open source taskforce
Vinai: then use all the open source taskforce is that we’re trying to. Figure out how to make this STS version happen as good as possible.
Vinai: First Adobe has to figure some stuff out internally, but once it’s ripened a little bit we want everybody on this task force, once a joint efforts, they’re realizing that in fact, a lot of the work will be up to the community. And with as all things open source, the people who show up and do the work, they’re the one who counts.
Vinai: So it doesn’t matter about how’s things. How groups of people as are, should look, it’s just whoever’s there and does it. Yeah, I hope many more people will turn up, but the same with this open source task group at the beginning, we’re a lot more people. After sometimes some people just stopped going.
Vinai: Maybe they thought nothing would come out of it or don’t have time or last happened. I realize now we live in a world where things do happen that make Magento seem less important. So I understand, but we need the people who are willing to show up and do the work, and we want to encourage people to join.
Vinai: So that’s what we talked
Brent: about. One thing I’ve seen from this task force is the lack of representation from people outside Europe.
Vinai: Wait, so you’re talking about Mage-OS I think those are the task force is the committee of the Magento association. Yeah. Yes. So a Mage-OS. Yes, it absolutely you’re right.
Vinai: The U S was underrepresented and many other parts of the world. Okay. And the reason for that and you, guessed correctly. You’ve talked about that before. It’s just, we want it to move fast and moving faster, easier with a smaller group. Yeah. Now we’re at a point see we have, we almost have a release ready, and once that’s ready, we will open up the group and we’ll open up the GitHub repository and invite people to.
Vinai: It’s super important, what people have to participate, but then we have something, we’re not just people talking about stuff and we’ve got something. Yeah that’s super exciting and I’m looking forward to many people joining like us and other people, other parks, we need that.
Brent: Just to clarify and I started to add some confusion. Magento open-source taskforce is five people from Adobe and five community members that are working on how are they going to make this all work? The open source version, and what’s going to happen. The Mage-OS, the Mosca is a group of people that are actually working on making it work.
Brent: Is that a good way to describe it?
Vinai: Yeah. Started earlier. Thus whole STS version only happened because. Oh, what the open letter that this community lines, European centric group published and yeah, so that’s how it started, but it’s not going to stay that way. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. It’s confusing from the outside.
Vinai: I wouldn’t have a clue. What’s going on a Magento association. We have. We have Magento open source. Now we have Magento opens on LTS and STS, and then we have major multiple distributions and we have too much who can understand all that stuff. But I did it the company in real time. Yeah. So hopefully everything will just merge together over time.
Brent: Yeah. All right. So from the membership side, then the Magento association is going to have a paid model. And at first, what you’ll get from paying is you’ll have the right to vote for the board and the board voting is out now. I think it’s starting. And I think I think that there has been quite a shift in the community and, people are looking for new board members.
Brent: I think they’re looking for March 1st to start, it’s going to be on Patrion that they’re looking to to March 1st to start the member drive to get people to join the Magento association. And it’ll be I won’t say I won’t have any, I won’t say any prices yet because nothing has been confirmed, but th there should be some affordability in there as well.
Brent: It’ll be very similar to what Drupal’s doing. And the pricing will be the pricing to join will be lower than what Drupal has. And the first benefit is that you’ll be able to vote for the board of the board for Magento association. That’s my big thing. Yeah, I, yeah. And I think one of the things is that people have, complained from that the Adobe side it’s not been transparent and communicative and they had Magento association side has been slow in communicating.
Brent: So I think what we’re seeing is each of these committees is happening and I’m taking some responsibility on telling the world what’s happening in our current. I, wrote a blog post about our meeting in January. That should be out pretty soon. Now I’m going to write a media blog post about our meeting for February.
Brent: And honestly, to just the time to get that blog, post approved is quite quite a long stretch. It’s not like you just record it and get it live right away. There’s a lot of, there’s a lot of red tape and I’m learning that. Part of it is that the community has to be okay with some of this red tape.
Brent: And I think what you’ve said earlier about Mosca and how you wanted to make it happen faster, I think that’s a great decision to make that work, because if you do open it up to the whole community, now you have multiple, people who want to do different things and you, you can never get anything.
Vinai: Do you remember last September and meet Magento, Poland. The discussions that were happening there, the board paid membership and everything. So it was cool to see this come to fruition. Very nice. Also back then Matias from Typo3, he said, okay, if you start to open things up, what will happen is a lot of people will attend the first two meetings now be
Vinai: back to
Vinai: fraction and those are the important ones.
Vinai: So don’t spend too much time making everything too transparent and easy. Because too much effort there isn’t worth it. And back then, I it would be nice if we just had hundreds of people working overtime, getting everything done, we just yeah, I think that’s just not how it’s going to work.
Vinai: He has a lot of experience in that
Brent: areas. Yeah, I know I saw some of those. I saw some of his tweets or I think that there were tweets or LinkedIn, but I think there are tweets anyways. I just want to reassure people from the Magento association side and by the way, go to Magento association.org forward slash join and join today.
Brent: That things are happening there. Things are happening on the open source tasks. We’ll have some great news on the events committee. Things are happening on the events side. There’s going to be more meat Magento’s coming. There’s things happening from the membership side.
Brent: And I’m just going to continue to push that Magento association has a place on their website to tell us what each of these committees is doing. I do feel like it’s not like we’re working towards transparency, but it would be great to ha to even publish the meeting notes. As a transcript.
Brent: I don’t know why not right? This isn’t, there’s nothing happening in these meetings. That can’t be, we don’t sign an NDA and we don’t say, no, you can’t say this to anybody. So why can’t we talk at least talk about it. I think if we don’t do that, then we also end up with speculation. Like we did from last Friday’s conference where the keynote is saying Magento is going SaaS.
Brent: And everybody starts getting confused.
Vinai: Yeah. Would it be helpful to know. To be able to refer back to, okay. What’s actually going on if needed. Probably most people won’t watch that because we all busy and. No more meetings oh yes. I want to watch more
Brent: meetings. Yeah. I think he just said from a news standpoint, even from a transcript standpoint, if you Google, like I like right after I saw those notes, I’m like, I started Googling Magento, going open source and Adobe commerce open-source and Magento Adobe commerce, all SaaS and nothing’s out there.
Brent: There’s nothing, there’s no news about it. So then I’m like maybe there’s a misinterpretation of what the person said. Yeah. All right. We are going to have to do a second episode because we’re running out of time for your Hyva talk, but I think let’s, briefly dive into Hyva and I think that we should do a second episode specifically on the reason why people should, we should implore people to have faster websites.
Brent: I think that should be the topic. If you happen to be on Magento, Hyva is a great option. And we’ve just launched our first client on the Hyva theme it’s taken us a while, a live one. So we’re excited about it. And we’re seeing great things. And every, meeting I’m in this, shouldn’t be a Hyva commercial, but it’s going to be every meeting I’m in.
Brent: I pitch Hyva and say that there’s no better way to improve their ROI on a website than to increase the site. Speed. So tell us, maybe give us some updates. We have five, 10 minutes. Now give us some updates on Hyva and tell us what’s happening.
Vinai: So much it’s happening, all the things, all the good stuff’s happening in particular things that I’ve been working on a lot.
Vinai: Extension compatibility. We now have a number of extension vendors. Join Hyva. We are committed to supporting all their extensions, making them compatible. So they work out of the box on Hyva installs. We have some early adopters like red chants and Tuma with great extensions. So they all have their extension are compatible.
Vinai: And now we can seeing more larger major extension vendors join like mate, we just renounced a tech partnership with Magewerks and WebKuul coming. They have a lot of compatible extensions. So that’s great seeing that these extension vendors see the benefit in making the extension compatible.
Vinai: So we have more than a hundred compatible extensions. Some are listed in the Hyva compatibility tracker. Some are compatible out of the box, so no need to install additional extensions just provided by the vendor directly. And that’s been great. So I’ve been recording videos on how to make this compatibility model.
Vinai: I’ve been writing a lot of documentations. We’ve made the documentations public, which has been requested a lot, so people can inform themselves before actually starting out purchasing a license. So that’s done now at docs hyva.io, and that’s. What I’m trying to do, basically making the life of extension developers more pleasant and making life easier for merchants because all the extensions they want to work with, they just work.
Vinai: So that’s good. A lot of extension vendors have been following. Lead off Magento, creating better extensions in a way that they weren’t built for Luma. So building a ton of small JavaScript files, and that’s exactly the opposite of what we work, how we work in Hyva. But there’s a reason for right there.
Vinai: Any Google page metric, just. It just doesn’t pay having, this required JS based front end. So having small inland JavaScript is great. People love it. Customers love it. It’s super fast. Yeah, we have to adjust the way we ride these modules. And that’s what I try to add in. Developers.
Brent: That’s great.
Brent: Yeah. So I I’ve been again I’ve been pitching the fact that Hyva was going to improve your web vital scores. It would be great. And I’ll give you some idea that I had, it would be great. If on the Hyva site on your hyva.io site, you have some kind of. Check right.
Brent: With a with the theoretical. If you switched your theme, what your score could be. So like you punch in your URL. It does a quick calculation, which it’s an open, it’s an open API for the vitals. All you do is show that performance score. Like for example, I just did a test on on, yesterday on a client and it came back as a 17 on their performance score.
Brent: And I have a script on my computer that I run. So I just put in lighthouse URL, boom. It gives me a little report and I can share it right with the client. It would be cool to say, and that you would say here’s your score? 17. Theoretically, if you, it you’d know that it’s going to improve it just by removing all that JavaScript.
Brent: It’ll improve it by 50 or 70%, whatever it is. So it’d go to 65 or something and knowing that they still have still a lot more work to do, but you can give them some scores. I, can equate this to there’s some marathons that you can do that are downhill marathons, and they always say, if your marathon was a four hour marathon at Chicago, if you do this marathon, you’re going to do a 3:30.
Brent: Okay. You, can extrapolate the idea of performance gains from a benchmark that you would get in general. And of course you would say, this is not really going to happen. This is all theoretical, but you will see an improvement and improvement could be as much as this.
Brent: Absolutely. Yeah, it’d be a good selling tool.
Vinai: On average, if we take the customers where we have numbers, who went from Luma to Hyva, the medium amount they improved by is X. Then we could apply that there, maybe something like that. We, could, it would be tricky if people then would try to. Take that as a a promise, it didn’t work.
Vinai: You still are using this super expensive chat, live chat or whatever that ruins all the page metrics, no matter what page you set up with an excuse. It depends as always, but yeah, I like the idea of being able. Just immediately present some kind of
Brent: assaults there. Yeah. And then I think some, big some benchmarks some, key benchmarks and, having some success stories on, your site, you already have some success stories, but actually rolling them out with big, huge numbers and graphics.
Brent: Like some marketing directors like to see and CEOs like. They like to see a 56% improvement in load time or 120% improvement in a thousand percent. You know what I mean? Like those are the things that people like to see. I didn’t want to make this a marketing session, but
Vinai: thanks for this free consultation, I’m working on a new site and we were just missing a bit of the content.
Vinai: It looks great. I can’t wait till it’s finally live. So there’ll be more stuff. It’s coming. It’s almost there. I really would like to have somebody on board who focusing focuses on producing that kind of content it’s would be really helpful. Yeah. You got a job
Brent: good. So let’s, close out today.
Brent: I think that that there is some effort to get more content from Mage-OS. I think we had a meeting earlier and getting the community to be involved in helping to develop some of that content. So why don’t you just talk briefly about what you’re working on? Sure
Vinai: the background is Adobe removed the domain, Magento.com and redirect all traffic to their Adobe commerce, adobe.com landing page.
Vinai: And I was pretty disappointed about, and I think that’s a super bad idea. It’s bad for everybody who built their business around Magento and gender opensource named Magento. And it’s. Harsh. I dunno, it’s not good. So I think the decision was made, and that was also confirmed from speaking to people inside of Adobe, that people who don’t understand and to not have the full picture.
Vinai: And that just happens with a large company like Adobe. So hopefully, maybe something will change. I have no idea, but fact is at the moment, if somebody wants to get formed about Magento open source, If they don’t know that already, what do they do? There’s no magento.com. They just go to a page on Adobe side, selling them to Adobe commerce, which is it’s just explaining how that’s built on top of Open-Source.
Vinai: Is beyond what most people want to know. So we need something there because it’s possible to create wildly successful websites on Magento. Open-source so many people are making doing great. And that’s why we decided are the Mage-OS group to put up content around Magento, open source. Targeted at merchants former.
Vinai: So they’re able to inform themselves so description what it is comparisons to Adobe commerce, for example case studies maybe insights into a specific features that are offered here. I don’t know, for example, page builder because that’s it’s feature that got rolled over from commerce to open.
Vinai: So things like that, that interest merchants who might consider it. So that should come out as fast as possible. And hopefully somebody else like the Magento association or Adobe will also do something, but experience has shown they move slower. So trying to get something done. And as soon as something else is there.
Vinai: The, if that’s better. I think everybody would be happy to contribute the content there too. So it’s just important to get the content out there because so many people’s livelihood is built around Magento and not Adobe
Brent: commerce. Yeah, I agree. So I just closing out today a couple of key points and I just want to key in, on Magento open source.
Brent: And I think that we have to continually talk to the leadership at Adobe and let them know how important those customers are and what a great funnel they. To getting to Adobe commerce. So everybody on Magento opensource is a great candidate for Adobe commerce, in opensource isn’t necessarily right for Adobe commerce.
Brent: Because it there’s certain things. Clients don’t need. But everybody could be right for Adobe or for Magento open source. And if leadership understands the more they invest in the open source side of it, the more potential clients they have that will move to Adobe commerce, the right type of clients Adobe wants.
Brent: And I know. That Adobe wants people that fit into their suite, right? They want people that would maybe get AEM that would get Adobe target to get Adobe analytics. They’d like to have people that fit into that Adobe, experience suite, which includes Adobe commerce. This is a great vehicle for Adobe to get clients upstream into where they would like to see them.
Brent: And I also would agree that decoupling some of these things that were. Some of the third party modules that were product core, we’ll make upgrades easier and make the experience that some Magento open-source users have had where upgrades have been a little bit more difficult and, they’re costly, right?
Brent: So slimming down the core and making it really, great and making the core. Easily upgradable is going to help the open source users to to have a larger ROI on their investment. Yeah, the key here though, is we just need to keep pounding in that Adobe can’t forget open source and it’s not a competition to Adobe commerce.
Brent: The way Adobe commerce is positioning themselves are for big business. There’s no, absolutely no focus on medium and small business. So why don’t they continue to focus on it by letting them use open source?
Brent: There’s some great folks inside of Adobe. Eric Erway, Nicole Khan Nelson Mineola.
Brent: Come on Chris, John Pasha talk HockeyApp I think it is not quite sure how to pronounce their names. Apologies, but they are great. They’re really working hard on increasing awareness and aside of adult. And we can see that it’s happening through the relaunch that we’re seeing now. So they’re also on the source task force.
Brent: So it’s not just us having to talk to it over leadership. We have to do that. You need to do that, but there also are good fonts inside of Adobe.
Brent: Yeah. Good. Vinai. We’re going to have to schedule another. Just performance interview and talk specifically about how you make your website faster and that will of course lead into
Brent: But thank you for today. It’s been a very enjoyable conversation. I’m going to get the transcript out on this one right away, so people can read it as well. And and let’s do another one where you can let’s do it. We should do an episode when we’re all ready to, display how easy it is to install Mage-OS I think that’s a fantastic idea.
Brent: Yeah.
Vinai: Yeah, let’s do that
Brent: one again. Alright. Thanks so
Vinai: much. Okay. Thank you to Brent. Yeah, take care. Thanks for having me. Bye bye.
Coaches are a dime-a-dozen, right? Maybe so. Maybe not. Perhaps you’ve never taken the plunge and experienced the transformation, Or you did and thought, meh. Been there. Was it YOU who went wrong? Maybe. Maybe not.
Henry Daas talks about his book FQ: Financial Intelligence as well as some of the highlights of the importance of having a business coach for entrepreneurs.
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Do you know the four ways to add B2B business to your B2C Shopify Store? Avi Kumar helps us to understand some of the complexities around doing B2B on Shopify. We discuss different business models and how you can be successful on your SaaS-based eCommerce store.
Avi is the owner and chief wizard of Invisible PPC, a white label PPC company that is helping agencies break into new markets.
Four ways to add B2B business to your B2C on Shopify:
Keep it simple, offer special Discount codes on the current B2C site for small-scale B2B sales, and/or just testing waters. For more robust solutions consider Third-party wholesale applications. Simplicity and single store to serve B2c and B2B Use Shopify’s wholesale channel if already paying for Shopify Plus. This provides a simple ordering channel to receive B2Bo orders. Finally, a fully separate Shopify online store gives B2B customers the most leeway both during and after the project, enabling, among other things, different catalogs and promotions in different stores.
Trying to go online from the Distributer model, consider these points:
1. Is your distributor willing to buy the product/service online? First test with them.
2. Set a higher price on the website Vs what distributor end retailers can offer? Will keep your distributors/retailers happy and trust us clients are willing to pay higher prices on the Brand site.
3. Offer exclusive products online
4. Exclude distributor Geo from online and go to new areas.
5. Offer a percentage for online sales in their territory, this will buy their goodwill and support for online.
InvisblePPC White Label Google/Bing ads service focused local businesses, a great choice for small agencies working in the local markets. Highly cost-effective and ROI positive to run Google ads for local business niches.
Before the pandemic, most CEOs thought a 100% remote workforce was unsustainable. The new reality is higher productivity by employees who have had to work at home. We interview Karthik Chidambaram with DCKAP about employee happiness as well as his adventures in selling products.
Do you know the four ways to add B2B business to your B2C Shopify Store? Avi Kumar helps us to understand some of the complexities around doing B2B on Shopify. We discuss different business models and how you can be successful on your SaaS-based eCommerce store. Avi is the owner and chief wizard of Invisible PPC, a white label PPC company that is helping agencies break into new markets. Four ways to add B2B business to your B2C on Shopify: Keep it simple, offer special Discount codes on the current B2C site for small-scale B2B sales, and/or just test the waters. For more robust solutions consider Third-party wholesale applications. Simplicity and single store to serve B2c and B2B Use Shopify’s wholesale channel if already paying for Shopify Plus. This provides a simple ordering channel to receive B2Bo orders. Finally, a fully separate Shopify online store gives B2B customers the most leeway both during and after the project, enabling, among other things, different catalogs and promotions in different stores. Trying to go online from the Distributer model, consider these points: 1. Is your distributor willing to buy the product/service online? First test with them. 2. Set a higher price on the website Vs what distributor end retailers can offer? Will keep your distributors/retailers happy and trust us clients are willing to pay higher prices on the Brand site. 3. Offer exclusive products online 4. Exclude distributor Geo from online and go in new areas. 5. Offer a percentage for online sales in their territory, this will buy their goodwill and support for online. InvisblePPC White Label Google/Bing ads service focused local businesses, a great choice for small agencies working in the local markets. Highly cost-effective and ROI positive to run Google ads for local business niches.
We speak with long-time Magento Community member Aron Stanić from Inchoo. We discuss all the changes in the community over the years as well as the state of Magento and its brand. We finish off with a discussion on the importance of expectations in the client/agency relationship.
Transcript:
All right. Welcome to this episode today. I have Aron Stanić. Aron is a long time a Magento community member. I think at least 25 years. You’ve been in the Magento community. Aron why don’t you go ahead, do an introduction. Tell us what you do on a day to day on your day-to-day life and then maybe one of your past.
Thanks, Brian, it’s great to be here. As you mentioned, my name is Aron Stanić. Currently Exploring what the future calls I was for 12 years employeed Inchoo Croatian based e-commerce agency in true ease, their famous word of famous company in the Magento world, at least.
And so I’ve spent my, my, the most of my 12 years there as one of the co-owners as well. I was mostly working around sales, marketing activities. And I worked a lot with merchants right. Directly with merchants. So one of my passions is you put it so other than e-commerce and you ex in particularly around e-commerce, one of my passions is running.
I can say him. As much of a passion as it is for you, because I cannot pull off those mileage is I think similar, especially in those temperatures that you do your rounds. But that has been a passion for my wife and myself. We started running actually in 2019 little did we know that habit will actually get us through COVID and pandemic with some degree of sanity.
Wow. Okay. That’s great. Yeah. And I think you’ve been to the big damn run I’m sure I’ve seen pictures of you at the big dam run. So was it the 2019 was your first big dam run or it must be since you started running in 2019. Yeah. Okay. I did run hearing nurse even before that. I used to play basketball actually back in high school and Rhodes college.
Big run was the one and only for me in front of the 19th. Yeah, it was the first time I was running in the desert and it felt great. It was a great drapes thing. But even before that, I used to have these 5k or three K runs that were in that. Organized that’s various other Magento meetings, right?
So we organized the developers paradise back in 2016 in Croatia. And then we organized to meet Magento’s in Azek, in our hometown hearing in Croatia. So each of those events also had its own small major on as a part of the agenda. Great. Yeah. So let’s talk today about Magento and the Magento association and where the community’s going.
What you’ve been involved in the association, or have you been involved at some level and what are you, what is your thought on what’s happening at that? Yeah. So I haven’t been formally involved with Magento association as such. I was involved in meat, Magento association, like back in the days, because we were organizing these events and we were constantly not just organizing, attending a lot of these events and we were also parts of some task forces back into the, but now since maybe since plenty, again, like 19.
Around the time. And before Adobe took over completely now, Magento association had its, I don’t think he ever had exact clarity right on, on what it should be after he took over from each Magento association because it was a very turbulent time and it still is around the ecosystem and especially in the community.
And now with the latest The fork side right there that you’ve heard with the Moscow, with the open source community Alliance being opened up. I think that this is very interesting times. I’ve noticed that with the initial Moscow initiative it opened up. And Magento association in a way to organize the task force that we live in big numbers is also then involved in but from the latest things with hero with, I believe on three there, I don’t think he’s that thrilled with how some of the conversations went around the whole magenta and keeping the brand or north keeping the brand within the Adobe ecosystem.
So we’ll see, I’m actually very curious and anxious to see what. Comes back with max, because I was just checking before the call there hasn’t been the official communication from the magenta open source community Alliance, since I believe in the vendor. Because then they were involved with Magento association as the members of task force that was supposed to.
Come up with a way of how to keep Magento community or Magento open source now, still alive, right? In one way or another. I for one would be very disappointed if it, if Adobe just simply don’t give up on on Magento community rights. And I can completely, I can totally relate to a lot of people, especially the contributors through the Magento open source who would feel in a way be betrayed.
Maybe it’s a harsh word, but they have to understand that point because when you’re contributing through an open source initiative, obviously there’s a notion then. Okay. If you’re contributing, if you’re putting your time and effort and it’s free, right. And you know that it’s free Should you expect anything in return?
And I think that anyone who was actually contributing did expect initially anything in return, but with the open source contributions, it’s inherent that there is not necessarily a quid pro quo, but th the sharing you’re sharing, not because he wants something. And not because you expect something back, but it’s understood that by this sharing, it will be better for everyone around you.
You know what I was thinking about it. But when you, obviously, you also have a you’re also our father and father of two kids. One is 10, one is seven. And for them the first things that we are learning, we are teaching them how to. We’re not talking to them about individual ownership and private property and its we’re teaching them.
Really good to hold on to something for the toy or to food or anything that you should share with someone else, not just because then they will share with you, but because it’s, these are the things to do. And I believe that open source is a great way of organizing efforts of individuals and agencies alike to, to add value to any ecosystem.
And over here we have. 12 13, 15 years, whatnot of people really heavily contributing. And now for it all to not necessarily fall apart, but for them to feel like it has not, again, been for nothing. Obviously a lot of people have made a very decent living and have brought their careers on a different path because of magenta and because of what Magento open-source was and still is.
But it’s he has got some other over a bit. They it leaves an author faced in your mouth. And the I’m very curious to see where this is going. I’m actually I can’t say that I’m ha I’m having a preference. Obviously it would be great if Adobe showed That there they understand the value and the strength of Magento can source and to not treat simply disregarded, but even if it happens now, if it’s business as such then I would.
Welcome an initiative that comes up with a fork because in the open-source world of e-commerce softwares, I don’t think that there’s anything still there that can meet that can match Magento’s community and Magento’s feature set. So there are contenders, definitely shopper is one of them, and there has been silliness and others, but no one has.
Really beer. Yes. And it would be a huge waste to just ditch it altogether. Yeah. It’s not only just the feature set. It’s also the ability to add all of your own features without having to have some external service as your feature. In a SAS platform, you’re going to have some external service that connects via APIs.
And the ability to do that inside of Magento is another uniqueness that it has. I have a theory on why Adobe does it, why it seems like Adobe is squashing, the Magento name, or doesn’t seem to care about open source. If you think about all the people now that have, that are making these decisions, nobody at Adobe that’s making these decisions is left from Magento.
All the senior management is Adobe, senior management and their goal is to create a suite around all the different Adobe enterprise products. And have a complete experience for the user. All their products are enterprise products. So it makes sense that Adobe commerce is a part of that suite. And why would they pay attention to anything that doesn’t, that isn’t part of it.
So if their goal is to get clients that can work in this. In this enterprise suite of products, so experience manager and target and all the other products that make up the Adobe. Their priority and their goals are not anything around, Hey, let’s get people onto a free version of it.
I think that experienced manager is a patchy sling. There’s a free version out there to use. There’s no talk about that. And there’s no community around that and I’m sure that actually there’s probably a small community around it, but there’s nothing that. Resembles, what is the Magento community, which incorporates hundreds of thousands of people.
So I think the mistake that Adobe is making is that they are forgetting where the software came from. And they’re forgetting about the path that smaller and medium-sized businesses will take to get to the point in which they now. And they now will be, could be part of that Adobe suite that would incorporate experience manager and all the other parts of that puzzle that Adobe would like to assemble, to make a complete experience solution for users.
I agree. I agree with that. Definitely been another thing is you mentioned that small and medium businesses might that the open source might be. Path words, they send the price level, but then, and I’m not sure that would necessarily be the case, at least for the majority of small and medium sized businesses that were usually that were original using magenta one to begin with even Magento.
When there were still no thoughts of squashing open or anything while he was still alive and kicking Magento two was still maybe a third too complex and overly robust. That’s pretty much made for the needs of those really small and medium sized businesses. And they make up the vast majority of implementations of Magento globally even now For them, even if Magento stays as such as Magento opensource or some within some other name complexity.
Losing its complexity is not yet getting it. The lecture of, in the field that Magento one used to have towards the, in the eyes of those small businesses, because they want something that’s fairly quickly set up that they can start selling tomorrow. And even in the pandemic during the pandemic, right there was when the lockdowns.
I remembered that the BigCommerce had a huge in the UK big commerce had a huge marketing efforts saying you’ll get the line with us in 24 hours. I think you could not do that essentially with my gender, even with some other open source platforms you could, if you had a really good theme and they had all the time in the world just for you, but SaaS platforms suffer a service platform such as Shopify and BigCommerce.
Took advantage of this type of, not just the pandemic, but also of where Magento 2 went and with all the issues that Magento 2 had in the previous versions and a lot of those small and medium size businesses rolled over. And you can see if you’re looking at BuiltWith or some other platforms, you can see where businesses who used to be on Magento, are now.
I know where did they go? So unless they stayed in that open source, and in that case, they might be still in Magento 2 even still on Magento 1, or maybe have considered Shopware or WooCommerce. If they are really simple businesses, then you have the other ones, the other huge batch that have actually moved away to towards the SaaS Platforms.
Yeah, and I think you’re exactly right. The messaging from Shopify for the longest time has been, their platform is easy and Magento is super complicated. I know that Derek Harlick and myself way back in to. 15 or 2016 did a presentation on getting Magento up and running in 90 minutes and selling something to the audience right there.
And it can be done, but you’re exactly right. The complexities that are there and the way that the admin is presented gives you everything you need and more. And sometimes just on a SaaS platform, there’s guard rails around it. You can only do so much. You can’t do everything you can do in Magento.
And if you were to say, or even hide some of those things, maybe Magento would be more popular. I know that we had, for a long time, we had the client of universal music and they the problem was that they’re the people that were deciding what they would like in their store knew they could do anything they want.
And when you can do anything you want, and then you run up to the saying, okay, you can do anything you want, but you have to also spend that much time and money to get anything you want. So with a SaaS base, you suddenly say you can get almost anything you want. Here’s what you can have choose from this.
And that. A lot of times it helps people to determine what they need. On the other hand, they promise you other things. So maybe you are limited in terms of the feature set and features and the innovations that you may have, but they promise you your time and they promise you the stability of the platform and they tell you it’s for your own.
And I can see that, but for example, I think there’s something also here involved.. If you take a look you’re graphically, right? Where SaaS has higher market share.. That’s US. That’s Canada. That’s Australia. That those are your, let’s say single markets countries, primarily while in Europe, where there are a lot of different small countries.
But if you disregard Germany and UK and all of this huge ones, then if you’re a business you’re usually operating regionally, not just now. And you have to take care of various facts you have to take care of multi languages. Multicurrency is, are local regulations. And this is where actually open source gives you the ability and the flexibility that you need even out of the box, Magento supports multilanguage multicurrency.
So in your. And if you think of that then, and connect it with who is leading the now Magento open-source community Alliance. If you take a look at the people, they’re mostly 90% European. Right there, not that many Americans actually, who are involved in that because again, they have either lean towards the view, Adobe commerce and the professional enterprise level side, or they’re in the SaaS business because SaaS makes sense, makes much more sense.
Then it’s much easier to adopt. In a single market, such as you know US. So in that sense, I believe that open source can meet the needs of European businesses still with much on a much higher level than. SaaS can, obviously you can, even the Shopify BigCommerce, you can add plugins that allow you to have, or go with Shopify plus then it opens up and you have the ability of multilanguage multicurrency and all of these things. But in its nature open source is much more flexible and it can respond to. Ever-changing regulations, of the European union in a much better way than then it is the case with SaaS it’s easier at the end of the day it’s much easier.
And it, a lot of Surveys have shown that in one or different researchers that, that ease of doing business in US as compared to you is much higher. So there, there are very little regulations, very little friction. You have an idea or a product you want to start selling online. Do it over here, you have to jump through several hoops and especially then you have to fire an accountant who can explain to you a lot of the details and intricacies about how much can you sell to a specific country and how much then you can you have the tax when you reach a certain threshold and these Northern states can not be done probably as easily as they can with opensource.
I just want to back up to some what you said about Mosca and and there’s two points like the con the most people they decided they’re going to do this fork. And then I do want to talk about the speed of change and the amount of people in those decision-making processes and how long it takes.
So I do disagree a little bit about the fact that the most was, I feel like the most good decision was made in a bubble in Europe. And I wasn’t exactly consulted or I wasn’t on the, I wasn’t in the inner circle in that I didn’t know what was happening until after it happened. And I also realized that there wasn’t an effort to bring it to a broader community because they would like to make this quick, they would like to make this a little bit quicker than if you have more people there’s going to be more disagreements.
So I don’t disagree that the most initiative is. Is I think it’s a good thing. I think it’s a good thing to keep things rolling. I don’t a hundred percent agree with the fork. However, I do feel like if Adobe’s not going to listen, if Adobe is going to sit, continue to sit on the bench and not recognize that there’s a strong community, that the fork is a great option.
But I do feel like because Willem and the team there recognize that if they don’t do something. And if they try to incorporate too many people that’s speed in which it takes to get agreement on what they would like to do is going to, it’s going to stall and you’re never going to agree on anything, you’re going to be stagnated. So I going back to that, I do want to talk about, I know that Karen Baker has continually talked about the fact that we need to be an inclusive community and she has a lot of very strong opinions. There are also going to be very strong opinions in the opposite.
And that then turns into stagnation. So how do we make, how do we keep this moving forward without this just being a European centric organization? What’s wrong with it being centered in Europe and just getting a. I do agree with that. We, the notion that the speed is here also very important.
I had a feeling that Adobe is letting the time clock play off, just letting it play out, then we’ll see what happens if it comes to that then we might need three act or not. And I think that you hit the nail on the head when you mentioned that some of those decisions and everything.
From the fact that there are no more regional Magento people left at Magento. So starting with Roy and Yoav and moving towards through generations and generations of these people. Yeah. You are completely correct. So then you have a feeling that The care for this product and for the community is in the hands of the community itself.
You don’t have strong organization or old, either sheep. That’s that has been throughout these years, running this product. And that’s definitely a challenge, but if you don’t know who is exactly calling the shots and how are these people decided, or who decides that they’re calling the shots.
Then you may get into a point where there’s just too much noise and too many distractions for them to be able to create anything. So inevitably in the way I see it, there’s going to be, have to be if the fork is. Really going forward, there’s going to have to be some type of an entity behind it. Leading it, calling the shots and it’s not getting, you can’t have 100% democracy and these things because we didn’t have it. Even when it was still open source within Adobe, within Magento, you still had contributions and pull requests and everything. And someone had to prioritize.
Yeah, I think what we’re thinking. Yeah. People were thinking the Magento association was going to take over the charge or a. The care for the product, for the open source product. But that was not even the initial idea. I don’t think that was why Magento association at the beginning started.
It was organized through to, again, they grow from Meet Magento association, but to be more a facilitator of networking and then knowledge exchange and those kinds of things. So we are not. Somewhere on defense or in the, in between. And whether someone will step up and say, okay, we’re doing it this way.
I know if they get their livid and then we’ll take it or we’ll give it, if not, I think if this gets dragged on for too long, then the other thing that, that, that works for him. Yeah. And take it or leave it as a good way to put it and sometimes take it or leave it as decided on 51%. So there’s going to be a, there’s going to be a very small minority that doesn’t agree with what you’re doing, but again, these decisions have to be made.
And I guess the only way to do it is just to wait in the court of public opinion in terms of how the Magento community is viewing it. I do want to circle back again to the European centric because the reality is the reality is that, that there’s a lot of people in America that.
That don’t have any stake in this. They don’t really care. I can probably count on my two hands, the amount of people in the U S maybe it’s more than that, but the people that are that have some, still have some passion about it the passion for Magento is definitely still rooted in Europe.
The bulk work of Magento is being done in India. Let’s face it There’s a ton of people. There’s tens of thousands of Magento developers in India, but they don’t they’re, their voices is heard in a different way. If anything, maybe there has to be a strong voice coming out of south Asia as well to help push this.
But I think from a commercial standpoint and we always have to go back to Adobe, has a commercial vision for their product and. This open source product fit into their commercial vision. If it doesn’t, we have to help them understand how it can if it and if they’re not going to listen then the fork is an inevitable, but I will say that as soon as that letter came out, I think the next.
Adobe had a post that said, no we’re committed to this product and here’s why, blah, blah, blah. Now the ironic part of that is that, that I can’t remember the person’s name at the moment. But he’s gone. He’s not part of the, he’s not even part of this effort anymore. So again, there’s been turnover and there’s new people that have no vision or they have no history of what Magento has been.
And so they, they have no idea why this should be at all important. And yeah, one more point about the board that the other part of a Magento association is a lot of the people that were involved in that these first two years of. Board level membership are gone. I think Ben marks was on the original board as an adviser.
He’s gone. Guido was on the board and I believe he’s gone as well now. So some of those people that have a strong opinion about where it should go are gone. Yeah. You are completely right there. So what’s the funny thing is that you mentioned India as one of the very important, the areas or regions where a lot of bulk of Magental work and implementations, and even globally is being done, not just in, but from and I noticed on the Magento association page that the next event.
The only one in between a little, two or three events that are left in the Meet Magento ecosystem is the one in India. It should be true to happen in early February. And then it’s followed up by, by Mexico land and I’m not sure what it’s called. We have a Baltics events scheduled for me, so we’ll see what happens there.
There, there’s still some of those efforts and organizations being, you did mention a really good point. About us agencies, not really getting, not necessarily invested, but involved in all these areas, they don’t see their own benefit. So you with what gentle and. A handful of other agency that I’ve known from these 12 years like Shiro and Creatuity who are based in the US are still there.
But a lot of others were either acquired maybe by some other agents, but Accentures and whatnot, by those larger agencies, or they have also switched right towards other solutions. So yeah that that’s why you see that European centerism and around around so interesting times definatly they have had some, we’ll be we’ll see where this all goes..
Yeah, I think gone are the days of the single Magento agency who only does Magento. Unless you are a a Viamo of the world that has that clout and enough business to sustain that at that high level, it is difficult to operate in there. Just, I think one last point on this, on the American side as these agencies solidify and get bigger..
The management also has a commercial vision of the product and the people who remembered what Magento was and where it came from are also gone. And so from a leadership standpoint, that agencies. If those agencies have no have no recollection of why should happen and their team, isn’t part of that community.
Then there’s also going to be a disparity in how that agency reacts to events. And. Things like that. And I think we’ve seen it. Mainly at the sponsorship level it’s been difficult to organize events in the U S there are assuming it’s a hundred percent going to be a developer event, which it traditionally has been, but like Mage Titans was a good example of how it worked well in Europe, but did not work well in the U S.
Yeah, I know. Yeah, because it was always, let’s put it this way, business oriented rather than community oriented. So one thing that I saw with Adobe’s acquisition, obviously Adobe’s and other companies similar to Adobe, they’re acquiring a lot of different businesses and it’s usual, it’s normal for them to then absorb that product that they have acquired or an agency or.
Within their own system renamed it, rebranded, whatever. I think that Magento is maybe the first one that, that, where Adobe in their own acquisitions felt the pushback, such a pushback from the community. And when you’re talking about in the scale and the real business numbers, five client numbers, This is small.
This is a small piece of apply, but it creates much greater noise. Then it’s probably the worst thing in their mind. I get just think of that someone at the top level saying, okay, what are these guys even talking about? What kind of community open source?
What are we talking about? It’s like, how can we get. Yeah. And why should we care about us as a brand? So I think that the ensemble handle some of these conversations that are also taking place. Yeah. I’m just writing that down. You said, how should we get rid of. And unfortunately it’s partially true.
They would like it to all go away and their vision of where it should be, I think. Okay. So let’s, we’ll, let’s just close out this topic on the Magento stuff, but I think that if we’ve identified the main problem with the Magento association, Adobe has been communication and Mosca really highlighted the fact that, Hey, if we make a lot of noise and somebody’s going to answer, so Magento association has answered and Adobe has answered. But I think the vision of where Adobe would like to see. The magenta opensource is so muddled that if they were to just come out with a clear statement that would be such a a boost for the community. And honestly it wouldn’t hurt their enterprise side of things.
There’s no downside to committing to something on the open source, even saying even having a public or having some public statements about open source. And saying how important it is to the community. There’s absolutely no. Cause they could change their mind in a year and again, we would be back in the same spot and they would, there would be nothing lost to them because the reality too, is that the enterprise level clients out there who aren’t using community, they don’t care about community either or right.
It’s it’s developers and at the merchants who are using it and have. Who believe in it that those are the ones that really have something in it. Yeah. He needs. And those third party providers, service providers who lean on to merchants wherever they are. And if they see that there are hundreds of thousands of businesses on a particular platform, that they will create an integration for that particular platform.
We’re talking about the ERPs or search engines or. Yeah. You mentioned it wouldn’t hurt, but I think that anything that they would come now from Adobe without it feeling. That, that it’s really honest and that they’re substantial. Let’s just follow the process, but that there’s real substance behind me with just know backfire.
So from my point, you mentioned that the vision is muddled. I haven’t seen that there’s any vision at all. To be very frank,, I assume that the vision exists for them for the open source. And it’s very difficult for someone probably to just come out and say that. Yeah, I think the same thing from the Magento association, I think what we’ve seen is a announcement in, in, around Magento Connect, which I think happened in September, October.
And and they said that that there’s a commit there. There’s going to be things happening from their side. And that there’s a podcast coming out. That’s gonna help support the Magento community. Actually, they didn’t say what the podcast is a commercial podcast and it’s just advertising Magento as a platform.
And I don’t know if you’ve listened to it my, my complaint and I’m on the membership community. For the Magento association. Our goal on the membership community is to grow membership, right? And I would think the best thing to do in a podcast is to make a short commercial for the Magento association to join.
And right now it’s completely free. So here’s my commercial right now is go to Magento association.org forward slash join and join it’s free. And eventually it’s going to be, there’s going to be a paid membership, but right now it’s free. And there’ll probably be some incentives if you’re already a member.
That you’ll be a founding member. Blah-blah-blah so that’s my little, that’s my little pitch on why you should join the I think that there, there is a lack of cohesive vision from the Magento association. There is a vision, but I don’t think. It’s communicated. That’s my thought on that.
Yeah. It’s all comes down to communication and it’s probably something that we’ll talk about in the next part of the conversation as well. How important communication you think. Not just between the members of the ecosystem, but in between the relationships between the agencies and merchants.
So yeah, definitely. We know the task force that was established right around the gentle can source. I think that the community likes some, again, some clarity and communication on where the task force is, what they’re talking about. The only thing I believe that we heard that. Those couple of speeds from Wheeler a week ago or something like that.
So yeah, that never seemed. Yeah. So let’s move to agency discussions and communications. A great is a great thing to talk about. What’s your approach from the agency side to make sure your clients are. You know what we did throughout these years, we’ll be okay. We created, we made a lot of mistakes.
We did some good things as well, but th the one thing that I. Strike it as the most important thing in any agency, client relationship any business relationship whatsoever is actually managing expectations now, because if a client comes, if a merchant comes to an agency or looks for an agency, they have.
Be very clear first and foremost in front of themselves, what did these, did they expect from an agency? Do they expect them to be a partner through partner and then they will rely on their advice and then maybe hire them, not just for the technical and for the development part, but also for some of the e-commerce marketing activities or are they just looking for someone to.
The solution. And that’s one of the most important things to have as, as initial conversations. Then you, as an agency could also decide whether you want to establish this kind of relationship. If there’s someone who’s just looking for you to create the technically sound solution, then they will then take over and manage and run them their own.
Okay. Perfectly fine. If we can meet halfway, if the expectations are. Ben’s a great place to start. On the other hand, if you, as an agency are looking for partners or for merchants who we can partner with, who you can grow with and help them grow, then you probably would not be that willing to take such clients.
We, you see early on. They don’t see you again as equals or someone who can contribute to the growth, the bottom line, but just expect you to deliver the code that is floats. So those are the initial conversations. So what are the expectations? What do you expect from this relationship? And then. Even beyond that, obviously you have to talk about the budget expectations and the overall total cost of ownership and within the e-commerce and within, especially with the open source, there’s a lot of education that has to happen from both ends.
You have to understand the client’s business, but you have to also. The client or the merchant understand options and weighing these options. And then teach them that it’s not a good idea to, to. To overall to over the blow the the installation with 1500 extensions, hoping that because each of them is doing their own part, everything will magically happen.
We’re not in the microservices yet. So if you know that there’s, there has been a lot of a ton of conversations around these kinds of things because they’re that. It’s it comes down to communication. Sometimes someone from the Magento side has communicated that it’s open source, it’s free.
Then you have thousands of extensions on the marketplace that you can simply plug and play. And help your business, help your installation be more complex. And then you have to manage again, the expectations not tell them that it was completely wrong, but explain why it’s not exactly like that.
And then when you were in that position and did, this is what has happened to me a lot of times, a lot of the times is when you are, have a good understanding of the product, which you should have, if you’re talking to a potential customer or the potential line, You are not avoiding some of the difficult conversations.
Sometimes you are even opening them. If you know that they are crucial to managing expectations properly. And then that puts you in a, why was he positioned? Because someone else is just pitching the solution, right? Someone else is just pitching the product, just the bank. Again, it depends who you have on the other side, if you have personal on the other side, who recognizes that and for understands, and who’s not looking for yes.
People on the other hand, on the other side of the table, then you opened up the doors to do some proper relationships down the road. But for me over the years speeds being a hassle sometimes managing no. Let’s say, and I’m not not saying anything against Magento, but understanding why their marketing and where they buy their sales theme does not know the product really well.
It’s because the knowledge of the product and potential issues and the downsides and the comparisons between others will inevitably Put them in the in the worst position it will not help themselves. If you’re talking primarily about benefits and what the product gives you, and then hand it off to an agency who needs to implement everything that you have promised, and that it’s easier.
The hard work comes down, comes back to you. So the experiences have been you have to prepare, you’re very open, very honest, because at the end of the day, if you over. Someone will end up hurting it will be either your product your project development team, or are you going to approach your manager for them will be in a pickle or inevitably there is going to be issues on the client side as well, because the new solution that you put out will not be what they thought it would be or where they, what they hoped it would be.
This is where I doing open source in general has to have these conversations with SaaS platforms. Let’s say that the conversations are faster. It’s you have that? It works in that way. Can I tweak it? No. K right then. Yeah, I can. So that means I have to adopt my business model to the platform. Thank you.
They’re leaving again. It’s faster. It’s clear. We don’t know source. You can do everything, but that doesn’t mean you should, right? Because he then jeopardizes the stability of the system. It jeopardizes the business. Model as a whole, if you start doing all too many customization, so managing these kinds of expectations has been in my book crucial for establishing good, solid, honest long-term clients relationships.
I gave a talk at Magento, imagine 2015, and the title of my talk was what to expect when you’re not expecting. And it was the, you hit on many of the same topics. So education uncom uncomfortable conversations has been one of the main parts of my talks at these events. My original talk was in meat, Magento or Magento live journal.
And my, my thought was I want to educate merchants on what to expect from an agency and how to maybe navigate some of those communication points. And the funny part about that was all the people that raised their hands were developers. You have developers, agencies and murders.
And the ones that are struggling the most are the developers who are on their own, who don’t, who, oh, maybe you’re not, they’re not communication savvy. And I think the makeup of a developer, isn’t exactly how well they communicate with people. Their makeup, a really good developer is a good developer because.
They’re engrossed in their technology. They’re not necessarily engrossed in how well they communicate with the client. So I think you’ve hit them all exactly right on the point. I think that the best thing Adobe could do is have an engineer on a call with a client to help the client understand what they can and can’t do.
But the thing is that happens, especially on magenta. The client will find out they can do it and then they’ll find out that’s going to be 500 hours and they’re like no, it shouldn’t be that much. I want to do it in 200 hours. And then there’s somebody at the agency, a sales person, normally, who would.
Yeah, we’ll figure it out. Let’s get this signed and that’s starting from the sales cycle and you hit it on the head as well from the how Magento used to sell a Magento enterprise for the salespeople start that. And it ends up having to be cleaned up by the project management team.
Yeah. And there’s even that’s, all of these things are coming from us being immersed in Magento as a product for these 10 or 12 years. So you cannot even blame. Some of these people who are actually, they’re also doing their own job, because a lot of those people, especially in the sales and marketing.
Thought or in a different way, or haven’t been directed, is there a job description and then understand completely from that standpoint, that we touched on previous from the business standpoint, it’s about the numbers, right? It’s about the new logos. How did they put it right then your sales, and then someone else has to clean up the mess. And then when you have invested several thousand hours, maybe in. That it’s not that easy to take on that Suncoast motion, and forget about it. Let’s move away and start something in you. Then you’re stuck and. Again, from the magentas standpoint, from the open source perspective of e-commerce softwares, there’s nothing yet there that’s matching Magento.
So anyone who has a fairly complex website especially if they want to create a lot of these things, even if they’re on, even with the notion that they’re on e-commerce or sorry, on open source, they sometimes feel stuck. I you because they might want to move away from agenda, but they understand that it’s very difficult to them.
Replicate that. Yeah. And sometimes impossible. Yeah. So I just we only have five minutes left, so let’s we have to close out. Unfortunately we have to close out this conversation just to recap what you said earlier the expectations of the client should be should be, you should learn those that the agency needs to learn the expectations of the client at the start of the project.
I’m an advocate of bringing the sales person in, because oftentimes to this, the client will say I was promised this and what the client hears sometimes is different than what the sales person says. That’s all just meeting expectations and then education, I think is what you said next. So listening to the client, helping them understand the way things are going to go.
And then also helping them to understand. So the client has to do some education and we have to do some education as an agency. And then I think that just to key in on that, what you said about having those difficult conversations and making sure you talk about that. As soon as you can, because the longer you wait, the longer there is for that time to pass.
And the client say you should’ve told me this a month ago. We could have dealt with it. Then none of the waiting around is going to help anybody. Is it did I summarize what you said earlier? Pretty well. Perfectly. All right. So Aron, what is, so you just briefly, what what is your future look like?
What are you planning on? I got, as I mentioned, I’m on my way out I’ve been having some conversations over these past several weeks with again, with some of the members of the community I’m taking some time off even though with restrictions now in Croatia, both colleagues, some online classes with the kids.
It’s not a sabbatical, it’s not really a relaxing time. But still it gives me some times to Re-evaluate what I have done over these 12 years see some of the things that I love doing see some of the things that I might not want to do again. And then I know the easiest way for me east of stay around e-commerce ecosystem, because I know like that in terms of weather, whether it’s going to be.
Similarly agency experience or something completely different fairly open to new experiences in that regard. Great. And as I close out I was give everybody an opportunity to do a shameless plug to promote anything you’d like, what would you like to promote today? Okay. I haven’t actually through things.
For one 12 years is 12 years. Hey, so each crew.net, I N C H O o.net for anyone who is looking for a solid or grave Magento. That’s you don’t have to look elsewhere. They’re still a great team who can handle any kind of Magento project. Other than that I’m based in Croatia, leading creation.
So great shot, especially is no fraud, especially in the U S for Fritzy and for the nice beaches. But one thing that, that has really been a good thing or. Past year or so throughout the pandemic is that the Croatia has opened up for these are the non digital nomads, right? So you have you, right?
So that’s the freedom of movements or anyone can work, travel anywhere, bar the COVID restrictions. Other than that Gratiot has starting in 2021 and starting to get digital nomads. It’s a perfect for any Nani resident, primarily for us people to stay, to live in Croatia for up to 12. No, no questions asked.
So it’s a permit for a long-term state. And this is being done. And this is being taken advantage of by a lot of us actually residents who are traveling, who have found, and it’s fairly affordable to live in Croatia. And there are a lot of different homes who are offering that type of long-term state options.
So if. In Kingsville for remote work and you’re looking for a country where you can actually live on a in a much more affordable way with your celery and learning from the states, from anywhere else in the world, and still have a great view. They take a, I dunno, take a swim in March if you want to.
So there they’re really great options for Nani residents or anyone who’s listening. You should visit DNA Croatia dot. So DNA, crayfish.com. That’s these are the no men’s association of, for creation over there. You can learn a lot about what it takes to travel, to come live in Croatia and work for your current employer or for yourself, if you are a freelancer.
So this is a great place to be. And if you do decide to come no, feel free to give me a call. Maybe we can meet for a coffee or. All right. That’s fantastic. And we cannot swim here in our lakes and March. In fact, yesterday I was out around the lakes and there was a whole group of people doing kite surfing which was really cool.
And it’s not surfing as you would think. It’s on a big frozen lake and they’re going across this lake probably 60 miles an hour with there’s both a wind surfing on the ice and there’s kite surfing. For if there’s no snow, if it’s just straight up ice, you can go more than 160 kilometers an hour on the ice.
It’s crazy fast and no more than a hundred miles an hour. Anyway, You don’t care if it’s fluid or solid, you just pull up. Yeah. Right now it’s all solid. It’s going to be solid until March our lake. We can run, we can walk on our lakes from December, until March anyways. Not a plug for Minnesota. If you like that winter outdoor lifestyle, that is a great place to be.
So anyways, Aron, I really appreciate you being here. It sounds like we’ll have to do a co we should do a follow up conversation with the, with your next chapter in life. And we can continue to talk about how we can improve Magento association and the communications around it so much for being here.
The Indian Ecommerce market is progressing rapidly and merchants and agencies need to recognize its importance. Swapnil Ghone talks about his experience in the Indian market and we discuss some of the companies that are already succeeding. Swapnil has nearly 20 years of experience in Sales/ Business Development/ Account Management, Project Management, Operations, Training, and Customer Services in the Indian Ecommerce space.
Ecommerce in India has exploded in India since the pandemic. The merchants who had already understood the importance of technology have done really well. They have mostly scaled up well and grew their businesses in a very short period of time. An example is a delivery platform called Dunzo, which delivers groceries and essentials from local stores. They had already been using technology and grew overnight based on demand when India shut down. Dunzo supports small local stores and kept a lot of small shops going. About 40% of merchants have really embraced Ecommerce but that means about 60% of merchants still have not caught up. Some of the challenge is simply getting a small merchant to be forward thinking enough to understand how technology is changing commerce and educating them on how they can enhance their business.
Our guest today is Kate Bradley, CEO of Lately.Ai, a social media marketing tool.
Lately uses artificial intelligence to help companies manage their social media accounts. In this episode, she talked about how to use artificial intelligence to manage your social media accounts and create content that resonates with your audience.
Plus, there are a lot more useful insights to learn from her so stay tuned!
Artificial intelligence is amazing and is progressing leaps and bounds week after week. We interview Kate Bradley, Co-Founder, and CEO of Lately.ai, and learn how the Artificial Intelligence tools help social media managers produce and distribute social media efficiently while saving hundreds of hours.
Brent Peterson and Kate Bradley discuss the importance of social media marketing tools in the industry, especially Lately.Ai.
As Lately’s CEO, Bradley shared how wonderful this tool is and how it can help social media managers in their work. Enjoy this episode and gain insights into social media marketing straight from the pro!
Lately’s A.I. learns which words will get you the most engagement and turns video, audio, and text into dozens of social posts. Unlock which words will get you the most engagement with artificial intelligence that studies what your audience wants to read, hear or watch. Lately’s A.I. content-generator will then atomize any interview, webinar, conference panel, podcast, blog, PDF, word document, or newsletter into lead-generating social posts that get next-level results. Because that’s the power of artificial intelligence.
In addition to her success with the Artificial Intelligence tools from Lately.ai, Kate’s appeared as a guest speaker on hundreds of sales, marketing, and entrepreneurial podcasts and has led presentations for Walmart, National Disability Institute, IRS, United Way Worldwide, SaaStr, SXSW, Content Marketing Institute, Harvard University, Columbia University, NYU, and others.
Stay tuned and enjoy this Talk Commerce episode.
A notable quote from this podcast:
“What rules certainly shouldn’t be broken? Because so we can evolve and do better. But like, how can you find enough sanity in that one confined space so that the chaos, which is mostly good chaos can continue to reign? And that you don’t lose your mind at the same time?”
Key Takeaways
[1:49] – Guest Introduction
[8:57] – What do entrepreneurs think about AI?
[15:56] – The AI Power of Lately
[18:26] – Your Brand Voice Despite AI
[24:42] – Finding the Right Channel
[32:12] – Leveraging Engagement
[33:51] – The Role of AI in Sales Conversion
[44:38] – AI Does Not Equate to Cheating
[54:04] – The Role of Google
Ideas/Quotes by Kate Bradley
I’ve raised $3.4 million, but I haven’t actually raised over seven years, so I have actually raised a full-price round where all that money comes in at once. It’s been a trickle, trickle of income, which means it’s really hard to really do anything meaningful, because you’re constantly cash-constrained, right. And this is part of the plight of any entrepreneur and certainly, female founders, we’ve harder time than men raising, which is BS, but it is what it is. So we had, you know, kind of come to Jesus with ourselves.
And what’s amazing to me, Brent, is how, how many different kinds of patterns can appear like you think you see one, but then you just tilt your head a little bit, and there’s a whole new slice there. And that’s the thing that’s so important is like, once you know that trick to constantly as well, like a kaleidoscope spinning your head around. So you’re making sure you see all the different ways that those patterns can be evolving or appearing. Because that’s, I mean, that’s the puzzle, right? Because it always will change like you think you solve one problem. It’s the, they say welcome all, which is cliche, but it’s so true.
When if it’s creative writing or something like that, you know, you’re suddenly making yourself less creative because you don’t have the space. And maybe, I don’t know, maybe some people are more creative in that aspect.
Right, right. And we create a writing model based on the words and key phrases and sentence structures in those posts that have the most engagement. And then, so this is part one. And this is really important because AI can’t work by itself. It has to learn from something so in part one, it learns from you. And then you feed it long-form content, like this video, or any audio or a blog text or something like that. Again, it has a second learning arena. And this is so important because it’s a child. So it pulls from that content. And it’s looking with the writing model as its basis to try to find the same quotes, right to assemble and pull into social posts and clipping up the video that goes with the quotes and all those kinds of things
Brent: Welcome to the show today. I have Kate Bradley. She is the CEO and founder of Lately. And that doesn’t mean just Lately. She is the founder of Lately. Not Lately. Kate, go ahead and introduce yourself. Tell us what you do. Day-to-day and maybe one of your passions in life.
Kate: Hey there, brent, kudos to you for like totally not outing me on not knowing which state that was, but my idea I’m just
Brent: such a silly, I think you said New Jersey.
Brent: I said, no, it’s Delaware.
Kate: I’ve got a, like 40 states before. I didn’t even get there, but you’re so kind and patient with me. So yes, it’s true. I’m the CEO of Lately, which, my team does call me Kately, Brent. I don’t know if you’ve heard them do that before. It’s pretty funny. I’ve got investors who are like, yeah, just call me Peter Lee.
Brent: My, one of my nicknames was Brentley and I do have brent.li think I’m also a, I’m a domain name junkie
Kate: oh, really? My uncle Chris was the first domain king. He was the first guy to buy up a whole bunch of domains and make his money that way, which is, that’s some foresight right there.
Kate: don’t know if that trickled down to me, but so before Lately I used to be a rock and roll DJ broadcasting to 20 million listeners a day for XM satellite radio. And somewhere in between there, I also owned a little marketing agency and our first client was Walmart. You guys know them.
Kate: And I got Walmart 130% ROI year over year for three years. Amazingly what I learned from both of those experiences. And we’ll dive into this later, I’m sure. Help fuel the bedrock for how Lately is artificial intelligence works, which surprises me, right? I’m 47, Brent. So I’ve lived enough life where the S the zigzags are now making a straight line to at least in my mind, which you hope will be the case.
Kate: You want all the dots to connect
Brent: minor circles even better. Yeah. And they don’t connect. That’s the odd part.
Kate: More like a spring,
Brent: a spiral. Yeah. Yeah. It’s weird.
Kate: Ladies and gentlemen, Brent Peterson. So good.
Brent: What, tell us what do you like what are you doing right now day to day and what is something you’re super passionate about?
Kate: Honestly, Christmas at the moment, it’s in the way, I’m trying to just do what a lot of people are doing, which is licking stamps and getting things out the door. And I’m always too late about it and planning a menu and just all that kind of stuff. But, With Lately, we just launched three new products.
Kate: And when people say that you’re always like, oh, that sounds nice. Or whatever. I don’t know what people really think, but for us, we’re doing something crazy. Brent, we’re actually turning, I shouldn’t tell you this maybe, but we’re turning the company inside out. Because we’ve been learning and listening and learning to you and so many others what you like, what you don’t like, and what’s in our capacity to change, right?
Kate: We’re a small company, I’ve raised $3.4 million over seven years. But I haven’t actually raised a full price round where all that money comes in at once. So it’s been a trickle of income, which means it’s really hard to really do anything meaningful because you’re constantly cash constrained.
Kate: And this is part of the plight of the, any entrepreneur and certainly female founders. We’ve had a harder time than men raising which is BS, but it is what it is. So we had a come to Jesus with ourselves. This summer, a confluence of like really crummy events happened and I’ll just touch on what that means for people.
Kate: Like number one, I discovered a $240,000 accounting error, which, Eight months ago. I wouldn’t be embarrassed to say that, but I’ve met so many founders. Who’ve had worst things happen to them since that, like now I know it’s just par for the course. Those kinds of hurdles, I can’t even say, I can call it a hurdle now it’s obviously cataclysmic.
Kate: That gets you to look closer. And see what’s really wrong. And so we did, we zoomed in, and some of the things that we thought were wrong were, but they were bigger than we thought. And so we banged our heads against the wall and I certainly cried a bunch.
Kate: And then, had the wherewithal to put myself in, into a couple of situations that I knew would change the channel, right? How do we get out of growth? How do we get into growth mindset and move from scrape mindset? And so that’s what we’re doing now is taking all this information, just totally flipping things on its head and changing the channel.
Kate: And so that’s, what’s on my mind, like I’m constantly thinking, am I doing the right thing? Is this gonna work? Oh God, Jesus, please let it work. Do I have the right team to do that? Pretty sure I do. My team is amazing. Do I have enough runway? There’s three months right now for a couple of us, don’t take a paycheck.
Kate: But that’s always the case. And then I think to myself, are you crazy? Oh, good. You still are. Okay. Then keep on. Yeah,
Brent: I think we all, as entrepreneurs, you have to have a little bit of craziness in it. I guess there is the accountant entrepreneur, who just goes.
Brent: It goes by the numbers and does it, because the numbers say they can do it. But then there’s the other, the flip side of, and I’m, I guess I would be at the flip side where you just run headlong into it and hope that it’s a wall, but it’s going to be a soft wall and you’re going to crash through it.
Brent: And it’s not going to be a hardened steel wall that you’re going to bounce off of. And then there’s the middle ground and probably you enter the middle ground after you’ve been at it a little bit. You decide, oh, I probably should start tracking some of these things and I should measure some of these things and I should define success.
Brent: And especially if you have investors that you’ll have to define some success and some objectivity in that.
Kate: It’s true. Yeah. As you’re speaking, you reminded me something, one of the best pieces of advice that I’ve ever gotten and, people give you lots of free advice and there’s a reason it’s free because most of it ain’t very good.
Kate: But one good one was to look at all the data you have and always searched for the patterns in the data. And then, what to double down on or obviously double down off. And what’s amazing to me, Brent is how. How many different kinds of patterns can appear. Like you think you see one, but then you just tilt your head a little bit and there’s a whole new slice there.
Kate: And that’s the thing that’s so important is once that trick to constantly as like a kaleidoscope spin your head around. So you’re making sure you see all the different ways that those patterns can be evolving or appearing. Cause that’s, that’s the puzzle, right? Cause it always will change.
Kate: Like you think you solve one problem. It’s the, they say whack-a-mole, which is cliche, but it’s so true, and then like on a personal note, just to answer that question a little more I’m really thinking about I’m not old, but I’m older and I’m thinking about my sanity and like, how do I maintain this level of stamina?
Kate: It’s already waning. To be honest with you, like the equation of self care to like work has definitely, there’s more self care needed every day, to keep going. And I don’t know about you or, your listeners, but for me, that can come in so many ways, like massages and acupuncture and working out and all that kind of stuff.
Kate: And then, meditation, or even just diet and vacations as we were touching on earlier. And then I also think about who am I surrounding myself with? Do I have people around me, either my team or my friends or my family who (a) make you smile? Cause you can’t do any of this
Kate: if you’re not laughing at yourself, cause it’s painful, you gotta be able to crack some jokes along the way. But then are they people who will force me to tilt my head and get that other perspective?
Brent: Yeah, no, that’s a great point. And I I agree that you have to be constantly reevaluating, but I think you also have to have a point in which you can move forward and have some space to be able to move forward in and feel comfortable in that space without constraints or without it feeling like it’s the end of the world, or this is the biggest disaster that has ever happened.
Brent: And let’s go into firefighting mode. I’ve found those to be not very productive, especially when you can’t do some strategizing and be creative. I think you lose a lot of that creativity when you put that pressure on and you have to either deliver something or solve something it’s ironic that we often wait till the end of our term to deliver a term paper.
Brent: When, if it’s creative writing or something like that, you’re suddenly making yourself less creative because you don’t have the space. And maybe, I don’t know, maybe some people are more creative in that aspect. Yeah.
Kate: I agree with you. You just reminded me when so I was taking some poetry courses.
Kate: Don’t roll your eyes people. Cause I was a fiction writing major and so I love words and the sound of words, but what I actually did a shoot like poopoo poetry for a long time until I realized. What was interesting to me is there’s rules, very set rules and a lot of poetry and that they too can be broken.
Kate: And so I was interested in breaking them. And I remember one professor actually assigning me the task of cause I was really going so lawless out there and he was like, okay, you’re going too far. So I want to sign, you, make up your own rules, make it be more rules but keep within your own rules, if you don’t want to conform to the rules or set preset rules, and it was a great task because it gave me the understanding of how much work one would take just to actually stay within the confines of those rules.
Kate: And so I had a lot more respect for poetry as a genre than I had before. I think about that with. Certainly Lately, or even I’m onboarding a new CRO right now and poor Nick, like he’s coming into our, you call it a I call it a fire hose, but like he’s coming in. We’re just waterboarding that poor guy, like all day long.
Kate: You know how it is, right? There’s so many things wrong, of course, that this is part of startup life. There’s a million things wrong, but you have to decide I’m going to drag out the fire metaphor and spin it around a little bit. So there’s 50 houses on fire, which one gets water. And even the one you decide that gets water, you’re not going to put it out.
Kate: You’re just going hit, hit the first floor a little bit. And I’m watching him struggle and I feel all the guilt of being a terrible onboarder. But then it’s the way it has to be because he’s going to have to figure out kinda what rules are rules, what rules are meant to be broken, what rules certainly should be broken cause so we can evolve and do better, but like, how can you find enough sanity in that one confined space so that the chaos, which is mostly good chaos can continue to reign and that you don’t lose your mind at the same time.
Kate: Yeah, no,
that’s
Brent: a metaphor. Is there? Yeah, no, it’s good. Yeah. Which leads us into our next discussion about AI. How do you keep all that together? I, full transparency. We we were an early adopter of Lately. We were early as opposed to late. He’s killing me.
Brent: Sorry about that. Yeah, it was called early when we first started. And I’m a believer in it. But I’ve also, I’ve continued to embrace this whole idea of AI and I’ve recently. Also signed up for a writing tool that helps you write. I won’t tell you which one I did,
Kate: but I want to know so that you can compare notes and tell me,
Brent: is this one of your new products?
Kate: We have the AI, our AI actually does write for you. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So
Brent: You’ve heard of Jarvis, right? It’s not Jarvis, but it’s similar to Jarvis. And it, what I’m finding is that if you have a very factual based article that you would like to write, do not depend on any AI right now, because it’ll give you a whole bunch of, oh, you know what?
Brent: I’m excited about this. Cause I’m going to put in a bleep, it’ll give you a whole bunch of bullshit. I’m going to bleep this out later, but it’s so it gives you, breaks down into sections and then writes it for you. And I had one that was. Five sections of this article and none of it was right.
Brent: It was like, it was so wrong and it sounded so real. It, went on to say, Mike was an early founder or co-founder of this new product and blah-blah-blah, and it was nothing to do with it. So AI can be completely wrong and it can lead you down the wrong path. And in that case, it actually didn’t help at all.
Brent: It made it worse because suddenly you have this thing in your head that, oh, this is the way I should go. And you got to pivot and go somewhere else.
Kate: Yeah you’re right. On the scale of AI, would I like to think of it is, if AI was a human, we’re looking at a three-month old, it’s a baby a wee sweet baby, and it needs a lots of guidance and it needs to be fed and it can’t even walk yet or hold up its head really. And no, I’m not surprised if that’s the case like with, and I can define Lately, not as a commercial, but just so that people understand.
Kate: So Lately uses artificial intelligence to first learn your brand voice. It studies all your social content and it’s looking at what gets you the highest engagement. And we create a writing model based on the words and key phrases and sentence structures in those posts that have the most engagement.
Kate: So this is part one, and this is really important. AI can’t work by itself. It has to learn from something. So part one, it learned from you and then you feed it long form content like this video or any audio or a blog text or something like that. And again, it has a second learning arena and this is so important because it’s a child.
Kate: So it pulls from that content. And it’s looking with the writing model as a basis to try to find the same quotes, to assemble and pull into social posts and clipping up the video that go with the quotes and all those kinds of things. So the reason I wanted to say all that is in our world, we made a really important stance to insist that AI and humans must co-exist right.
Kate: Cause we could see that the AI would run off the rails and it’s only a robot, and humans are slow, right? So let’s put the two together and make them work out. So one of the things that’s been interesting to learn is like how little humans care, so we insist that you come in and tell the AI what’s wrong or right.
Kate: Cause this is how it learns, but a lot of people don’t even want to do that. And so then it’s often its own. We can see, like I select the T’s Alex is one of our customers. Like I can see Alex just pushing the button and letting the AI go. And I’ll be like, Alex, you gotta like step in here. But what’s been interesting.
Kate: Brent is to learn. So here’s the secret, which is we have a second level of AI, which we’ll introduce in about two weeks that can read any content and summarize it on its own and use your isms in the summary. So it’s not just quoting anymore is writing and it’s pretty incredible. Like it needs a lot.
Kate: It has to have at least 10,000 pieces of content to learn from. So that’s a lot. Cause it’s really trying to get it right. And instead of swearing I do swear like a sailor in real life, but I try not to. And so I come up with other ways, so I might say jumping Jehosaphat or holy hot pickled jalapeno pepper, stuff like that.
Kate: And so the test of the AI on my voice does that, for example. And it gets some stuff wrong. Like I can see it hashtag weird things in the middle. Cause it’s trying to guess what you would like, that’s the thing that we have to all remember is that A, the human has to be involved for the AI to get it right.
Kate: But B even no matter how far we take the AI. It doesn’t matter, whether it’s his driving cars or writing copy, is that humans just like you and I are do here. Like humans provide that vision to say qua Brent, that AI can never replicate. And it shouldn’t like, so even if we managed to get it, as far as it can, like right around 99%, I say would be the dream.
Kate: Except for this one little factor. And the factor is the thing that, I really want to have a beer with you or a cup of coffee. You’re cracking me up over here. You’re and I can see I’m detecting the looks in your face. I can see the smirk on your slow, dry sense of humor. Like all that is reaching through the screen on me.
Kate: And a robot can’t replicate that.
Brent: Yeah, hopefully
Kate: no way.
Brent: When we first started with Lately about three years ago, the main tool we still use is we it’ll pick apart our blog posts and put it in a nice social media snippets, which is a fantastic tool.
Brent: And more recently you’ve come out with it’ll actually Go through a podcast and come up with a snippets and as well as video. So I think those are two really valuable things that people can use. And so I think that this whole idea of writing something, I what I haven’t seen is from the content AI, tools is that idea of when it does give you a wrong answer to infatically, just say, Hey, don’t ever give me this again. This is so wrong. I think what you’re, it sounds and I haven’t used your new or your newer tools yet. But one thing that I haven’t seen anyone do so far is that learning model where even if it doesn’t know your voice, if it just writes something to write it for the sake of writing a blog post, let’s say, and it comes up with 800 words that are completely wrong.
Brent: Like it doesn’t do anybody any good. And if you don’t have as the user, the ability to go back and say, here’s what I’ve meant. Okay, if you breaks it down into your three main headings, of a blog post in the intro and a conclusion you want your three main headings, right?
Brent: And then if it gets all three of those wrong, great to go back and say, Hey, here’s what you got wrong. Here’s what I meant. Like then the human takes some time to say, here’s what I was going to give you. Please look and learn about this. Yeah. That’s
Kate: I think that’s probably the hardest part it is. And it’s the part nobody wants to do.
Kate: We’re all lazy, which is so interesting. But you think about it, like with Spotify or Pandora, like you thumbs down the channel, when, if it’s playing your song, you I’m like, so there’s this idea of the human, interfering in a good way. I like to make the couple of metaphors, like one is, it’s like an electric toothbrush Brent, right?
Kate: It’s still going to hold the damn thing up to my teeth. But perhaps more interestingly is there’s a great Betty crocker story where, you know, Betty crocker made cake mix. And at the time it was all powder. Even the eggs were powdered eggs and the Housewives, which who was buying marketing to at the time they didn’t feel as though they had made a cake because so much was already in there.
Kate: So they took the powdered eggs out and they made it so that you, the human had to add eggs. And that was the thing that worked. So now they actually felt that there was a human roll here. See?
Brent: Interesting. Yeah. Oh, that’s good. Yeah. I’ve never thought of it that way.
Kate: Yeah. And that’s the thing.
Brent: Oh, sorry. Yeah no I think you’re, you’re exactly right there. The idea that I think right now, AI is still in its early stages and people think it should do everything.
Kate: Yeah. It’s amazing what we expect. I remember demoing somebody a long time ago and they’re really like, oh, that’s all.
Kate: And I was like, do you know how hard this is? It’s amazing. I think I went to, I was in radio for a long time. When in small town radio. And then when I was at XM, suddenly I could get tickets to much larger shows. Like I’d never been to see ACDC or the rolling stones or anything like that.
Kate: And I managed to get tickets to the rolling stones and which is another great story for us to have over coffee. And I took my husband and the show was amazing. And then right afterwards, he’s can we get Paul McCartney tickets? And I was like, Jesus, we just
Kate: give you a second, man. Don’t tell him I told you that. But yeah, the other thing I wanted to touch on here too is get to getting back to that. The, je ne sais quoi part, the magical, human part which I want to further emphasize, because this translates to sales, marketing, entrepreneurship, like all the things, right?
Kate: So that special indescribable component that only you bring to the table, right? Whatever you’re working on. So one of the things I learned in radio Brent was how the neuroscience of music works when you’re processing music in your brain when you’re listening to it.
Kate: So when you hear a new song, Brent, every other song you’ve ever heard instantly gets pulled forward by the memory of your brain. And it’s trying to index this new song in the library of the memory of songs in your brain. And it’s looking for familiar touch points. So it knows where to put that song, right?
Kate: And so by pulling that library forth, it triggers emotion and memory. And the stallion, this is why music is so powerful right now, those three characters all must exist for trust to happen. And trust is why we buy anything. It has to be there. And when your voice acts similarly, right?
Kate: So when you write text, whether it’s, you’re texting your wife to pick up cash at the bank, or if you’re slacking your employee to fill out the form, or you’re emailing a sales target, People read that text and they hear your voice in their heads. This is the theater of the mind a little bit here. Right?
Kate: And when they hear your voice is like a musical note. There’s a frequency to it. It’s a note, write it. It does happy frequency. So that same idea happens. It’s your job as the author to help guide the reader and fill in those blanks with the nostalgia and emotion and memory, like putting those familiar touch points.
Kate: So a trust is triggered, right? Same idea here. You do it by putting the shape of your state behind you. I’m doing it with some Pac-Man here. We’ve did it right away. And we were connecting and laughing about how we met each other. And I forgot. And we were touching on all of these familiar touch points now because the listener
Kate: it’s multifaceted. And I’m trying to give them many avenues. You’re trying to guide me into doing the same thing here, right? Because we want people to not only listen, this is the thing I really want to emphasize with people. It’s not just listening here. You want people to evangelize. I’m assuming you do.
Kate: I do. Because listeners who become fans are infinitely more powerful than just a listener, same way a customer is an evangelist, and the only way to do that is by optimizing the humanness of the thing, right? This mystery character, this third party, the theater of the mind,
Kate: all that.
Brent: Yeah. I want to just dig into that humanist of the thing, because I can say from my experience so I’m I’m on Twitter and I like to I like to send out different, jokes and stuff. And I found that people know, I guess you can see on Twitter where it’s, where it generated from.
Brent: I used to, pre-load like a quarter’s worth of a joke a day or something like that or whatever it is. And then it would just go out. And I think, honestly, Lately is a great thing for this, but there is a, there’s a bit of humanist and I and I think this is where you ha you can’t a hundred percent rely on AI.
Brent: Like the engagement part of it, people know. When it’s a BOT and when it’s not, and even early on, I think it was x.ai or something like that was like a tool that came out five years ago. That was just automated scheduler and you could register Amy. Oh yeah. Amy and Alex or something like that.
Brent: Amy in Ingram and Alex
Brent: idioms of the bots. Yeah.
Brent: And it’s one of my clients figured it out. Like I sent this out and I probably made 50 appointments and 49 successfully. And one of my clients like was just screwing around a pain, it’s just like back and forth
Kate: the poor robot. Nah,
Brent: I feel bad.
Brent: Yeah. So I think what, w what I’m learning as an AI human wait, am I artificial intelligence
Kate: now? We’re second guessing.
Brent: I think a lot of people would say that, you can, I guess you are artificial, if you’re depending on a tool to send your tweets and never engaging in real life, right?
Brent: Yeah. Symbiotic. The point is that you can’t a hundred percent depend on AI, and like you said, 99%, if it’s effective, but what you still need is that real, like we’re here to, for a reason, and we’re marketing for a reason. And at the end of the day you end up talking to a bot on your chat and it’s just give me a representative for you.
Brent: Like you’re on the phone. What you like? Yeah. Zero, zero. No. Like calling the cable company. Oh my gosh. I didn’t hear you. Did you say you want to disconnect your cable? No. You would like to go to the, oh, you’ve been upgraded the 10 gigabit. Your new bill is $12,000 a month.
Brent: Thank you very much. But that, that interaction and then that humanist is such an important factor. And maybe you could talk about how you’re doing, how are you doing that with Lately? Like with your own. Business and making it better. How are you constantly improving that?
Brent: And do you have the thought in the back of your mind when you’re adding features and developing your own platform?
Kate: Yeah, we do. I’m so glad you asked this question because I think it’s a fun one to answer. So first just to put some proof in the pudding for anybody questioning it.
Kate: So we only use Lately to market Lately. We don’t do any cold calls and no cold emails and no paid ads. So only organic and only with the AI. And we have a 98% sales conversion. And I’ll just say that again, 98% sales conversion. So in case anybody wonders, if it works or not, this works. Now there’s a little more into that process.
Kate: And so you asked about that and I’ll tell you here’s the secret? So first, because I wrote hundreds of commercials, thousands of commercials, and I was a fiction writing major. I’m good at writing. And so I write all the social posts from my own channels are by me by hand. They’re not Lately, it’s all me.
Kate: I write them when I think of them daily. And then Lately studies me first as a best practice. And from my social posts, I created about two dozen writing rules that I passed on to my team. So we’ll auto-generate content from Lately. The AI will give us a bunch of social posts. My team takes the rules that I gave them that are based on how I write and applies the rules to augment what the AI gave them and help it learn, help it get better and better.
Kate: And then we publish all of that on our brand channels and also on our employee channels, right? So the more the merrier and then the AI learns from there, it’s studying our brand channels and employee channels for best practices as a second layer. And then the next layer is, of course what you bring to the table and in your custom voice, it creates from you now, then collectively, it’s got all of our employees, our customers, and it’s looking at that data as a whole best practice as a whole.
Kate: So there’s four different layers there for it to, get smart on. And the goal is for us to be able to assemble this data. And then for you Brent, to be like, okay, Lately new Lately V two V3, whatever it is, I want to have a sense of humor. And I want to be able to use all the keywords that are going to appeal most to mortgage industry companies smaller than 100 in Minnesota, for example,
Brent: yeah, that
Kate: sounds fun. I think it’s pretty fun. It’s a little wacky. But it’s interesting because the problem we’re talking about is people writing is hard it’s not only knowing what to say, but knowing what to say, that’ll get a reaction, but the reaction is what we want.
Kate: What we all want. You want someone to do something for you? Every communication has this as its baseline, right? And there’s no shame in that. It’s very clear. Take out the garbage, water the plant, sell the damn thing, whatever it is, right? Exchange my robe that I don’t like customer service. So when you know, that’s the case, then you can really work backwards and thinking about, okay, and this is what the writing rules are about.
Kate: Like very practically speaking. I hate it when people are. Be more engaging and you’re like, duh how is the thing? And so what I thought a lot about is what’s the psychology that goes into how to get people to react with what you write, right?
Brent: Yeah. Yeah, exactly.
Brent: I know that Grammarly is another tool that is used to at least, check your spelling get rid of the red squiggles. And Grammarly does break it down into the type of voice you’re using. Are you going that far as to and I just saw a report. That’s what it reminded me of.
Brent: It says, you have an optimistic conversation or you’re confident. Mine always says feeble. That means? Do you incorporate that many, that, that part of it to try to match that style and then, for me, and I’m sure I’m not unique, but like do you have Spotify?
Brent: I do. Yeah. Spotify gives you the end of the year, most listened to songs for the year. You know what, my number one song was for last year, it was it was Neil diamond and it was sweet Caroline. And it’s come on, are you kidding me? Yeah. And there’s a reason why, but it wasn’t because I love the song.
Brent: It’s just because it was like a number one their thing. If you do it, it just plays the same star
Kate: algorithm.
Brent: And then number two was Cake. I love it. The band Cake right there. Aren’t even related. I think if Lila Down, she’s a Mexican singer.
Brent: Like these are my three top artists. That’s fascinating. So then how do you fix, how do you fit that in? Yeah. Like how do you call it? How do you say. How do you have a voice? I definitely have a different voice when I wake up and I’m going to have some coffee.
Brent: Like when I was in Hawaii for the last six weeks I started work at 5:00 AM and I literally rolled out of bed. I had the coffee maker going, so I could get into meetings right away. And I, try to be awake. You have a different aspect of life then as you do later in the day when I’m half asleep.
Brent: That’s true.
Kate: So yeah so it’s called tone of voice is the term that we hear and use. And Watson has API for that. And I don’t know if that’s what we’ve tapped into. I can’t remember. Cause we do integrate with IBM Watson and a bunch of other things, but in the new product, there is a tone of voice.
Kate: I just saw it actually yesterday. I forgot that they were doing that by they, I mean my tech team and I was like, oh yeah. Cause other people ask about that center sentiment, is the other thing. So we’re just dabbling with that right now. And, with the music thing, what’s interesting to me is, so the format that I was in Brent is called AAA or adult album alternative, which is a rare format.
Kate: It’s all the bands you described by the way. So new music and old music, and usually deeper cuts stuff, that’s in your actual album collection. And it runs the gamut from folk to rock, to blues, to, to world and everything in between. And like the music you might hear on, I hate to say this on NPR, if I’m, I don’t want to alienate anybody.
Kate: And in cooler, like he’d be Dave Grohl or Weezer, that kind of stuff, too. But what I love about that format is that it thinks about humans in a way that’s not one dimensional, whereas most of radio, so here’s the here’s, boom, we pull back the black curtain for people. So radio operates on, let’s play the same song over and over and over and over and over again.
Kate: And it relies now on charts for research, as opposed to asking people what they like. So Lee Abrams, who invented XM, he in the seventies, he used to stand outside. This is his idea. I’m going to stand outside the concert and ask them what their favorite song was. So human did this, right? So we would know what song to play off the record.
Kate: Now everybody reads charts and the DJs don’t even actually listen to the songs themselves. So there’s no tastemaking involved. They’re just like, oh, they’re telling me to play in a play this, which is asinine. But in. Format. We were on live. We were actually on the radio live. Oh my God, this never happens anymore.
Kate: So the human could make the judgment and a human could take you on a journey. Cause this is part of what you do every day right here as you hold the mic, Brent. But if you’re doing your job, you’re making the listener feel as though they’ve got a voice with you, right? This is that je ne sais quoi thing we’re talking about here.
Kate: And so with adult album alternative, because it’s looking for multiple ways to turn you on. It’s actually creating the evangelist. We talk about this is that long tail. This is why I believe in long tail. I’m going to give you guys just another example here. So the marketing forever used to say consistency, and that’s not wrong, but it has evolved.
Kate: So you can’t really say have a Coke and a smile to everyone anymore, because it’s not, what’s going to turn them on our friend, David Alison is proving this. He’s a consultant to the United nations to prove him. Whereas a series of statistics that they’ve referred to now as value graphics versus demographics.
Kate: And the idea is that Brent and I can be in different countries. We could have a different ages, different colors or races. We could have all kinds of different backgrounds, but we care about the same things. And so if you market to people based on what they care about versus how old they are, what color hair they have, the likelihood of you having an understanding of their predictive behaviors and turning them into evangelists goes up exponentially, right?
Kate: So it’s the same idea here with I’m talking like a crazy person, but back to Lately. So the reason Lately doesn’t give you one message instead gives you dozens is because we know this, we know that your customers are going to engage with multiple different kinds of messages and the likelihood of them
Kate: sharing, which is you want to click or share. But sharing is a little bit more powerful because sharing goes farther and people take credit for what you wrote. It’s all about the ego. They want to look cool and be the person who’s the taste-maker and just like music. And so that’s how you get that proof, social proof and the trust.
Kate: See how this all, so again, I wouldn’t say this against the people can hear this. The hard way is the way this is what we do. And we have a 98% sales conversion because of it, right?
Brent: I think too, that, like you had said earlier that you write all your own content, which I applaud you for that and getting into that habit is.
Brent: For me is a, it’s very difficult to do that, especially if I think, Hey, I’m going to be creative for an hour in the morning, and I want to try to use that creativity for the rest of the week. And then I’ll schedule those out. I suppose it’s a little bit still writing your own content, isn’t it?
Brent: But then scheduling it is, I don’t know if that’s cheating or not.
Kate: I don’t know. I don’t think it’s cheating. I think it’s being resourceful. The only reason that I it’s funny when I was a marketing consultant, I would do that for other people. Exactly what you said scheduled spend an hour, schedule it out from a week and be done with it.
Kate: But because I’m flying by the seat of my pants, like I’m just trying to think. I don’t think I’ve brushed my teeth yet today. It’s 2:52 PM here and it’s not because they’re not fuzzy.
Brent: I didn’t want to say anything now that you brought it up. I can barely get it together to put my yoga pants on here.
Brent: I’ve got the, I’ve got the smello-o-mic and he’s coming through breathing through the mic on you.
Kate: Yeah. And, the other thing I want to say here is as we’re talking, like I’m thinking of all, this is my nature. I’m thinking all the things I could be doing better. I’m thinking of what quotes can I give the AI to you right now? What am I one-liners I’m thinking of all the crutches I have.
Kate: How many times if I said right to end a sentence with you?
Brent: Yeah. Yeah. I use another tool called Descript and I know lightly does this too, but I use it to do my, I use it to just, to give me my transcripts. And I just like I did, I just said we’ll pull those out for you, which is really nice.
Brent: And often I listen. I watch some news shows and I’m very intentful and listening to the announcers and they are very good at not ever saying But if they have guests on or, I think if they have other people on it, doesn’t, there’s not a, it’s not a set pattern, but it seems like the, and I suppose they’re reading off a teleprompter and that’s really where they’re winning, right?
Brent: The ones that are doing it off the cuff, or putting in some of those ums and soes and right. And and it’s like this and blah-blah-blah, and
Kate: it’s more powerful. So I listened, I just did it again. I’ve been listening to Smartlist. I love that podcast and I love that the advertisers are giving Sean and Jason and Will Arnett, Bateman, and Hayes the.
Kate: Pat, they’re empowering them to read to ad-lib for the commercials. This is a novel idea. And the result is I, listen, I stay through the commercials, I’m dying to know how they’re going to do it. It’s hysterical. And I, in like McDonald’s is having the wherewithal to do this, that whoever is running that show way to embrace, technology and evolving with a new mindset.
Kate: That’s
Brent: pretty incredible. Maybe I should do some live commercials for Lately on this show. I would love that. We’ll see how it goes. In a past life. I had a computer retail store and I had a radio host sponsor and his name was Jesse Ventura. Oh. And then Jesse had to quit because he ran for governor, we paid for one minute spots and he would go on and on about, he would bill for number one, he’d come down to the store and he’d interview talk to people and he would learn about us.
Brent: And then he would do these spots and he would go on about these guys with a Coke bottle class. I’d come fix my computer. He’d gone for five minutes and we had more business from his one minute spots than I can imagine any prerecorded spot. It was fantastic. He did such a great job.
Kate: Yeah. I’m going to use that because people still don’t believe that a sprint. They, you conveyed to them. Use your vernacular be casual try to loosen the stiffness, loosen the tie or whatever it is. Take off the clip-on earrings here, people and be yourselves and the people are still so nervous about they’re still so afraid.
Kate: And they think how can I do that if I own a bank or, and I’m like, listen your customers are still just people just like you, they still just want you to talk to them. Yeah.
Brent: A couple of a powder milk biscuit. And there you go. Are people going to just put my, I just put myself into a demographics just going
Kate: to say, like right here, did we just,
Kate: it’s amazing. So yeah, the good news is not everyone will have caught onto that. And so then we’ll continue to shine because. That’s what stands out. So it’s I want to teach the world to sing, but I don’t at all because
Brent: I think we can still teach them to sing okay, maybe not in key, but at least they’ll sign. And if you get enough people singing, it doesn’t matter if they’re in or out of key. That’s true from my experience because I’m a Lutheran and where we have a choir. So you know how that works anyways. Now
Brent: we’re at way off target here. So coming back to AI I’m excited about that. The tools that you’re developing and we’re using where do you think it’s going? Like where do you think content creation is going? And I see often now I publish a blog post and there’s a tool that says, make this blog post into a podcast.
Brent: And I think myself, are they seriously going to have some robot read through this podcast or read through a a blog transcript and make it into a podcast. For me, it’s the other way around is so much easier. But do you think that’s where we’re going? Do you think there’s going to be some, Happy voice.
Brent: And I guess, I just switched to the Irish version of Siri and it’s, it works, it only goes until 10 and then it’s the pub,
Brent: even if you knew that one was coming to kill it. But, and actually see obviously Siri does a pretty good job at that. There’s still those weird things. If you’re in Germany or you’re in like in Hawaii and there’s all these funny, long names it’s going to get most of them wrong.
Brent: And then that’s where people really figure out that it’s a robot reading it instead of a real person. And yeah. Coming full circle into what you said. You have to have a real person there to moderate it, or at least to help it along to make it real. Yeah.
Kate: The w what is the phrase go to air is to be human, right? And that’s the magic. It’s always going to be the magic. I think your question of where it’s going is interesting, because there always be like the sharper image of AI tools, right? So the stuff that seems like, the electronic juicer that first, you have to tip a domino for, it’s going to go hit the squirt gun and then dump the can of oil onto the squirrel.
Kate: Who’s going to jump over and crack a nut. And then, whatever, I call this crazy stuff. Because people, self included were lazy. People are lazy, and they’re always looking to avoid the work. And writing is so hard. It really is a hard thing. And so many stages, right? But you know where the mindset is what’s shifting to is to understand that if you don’t have AI in your toolkit, you’re going to be a dinosaur pretty quickly.
Kate: It’s evolved now, at least in marketing, from analytics and automation to this content piece, because we saw this early on, but it doesn’t matter how good your social media management platforms are or your analytics. If what you’re putting out there, you can’t put lipstick on a pig, as they say you have to have some, something of quality to measure and analyze.
Kate: My goal is to move from getting people 75% of the way there. That’s where we’ve been to now 90%. And I thought it was going to take about five years to do that. And it looks like we’ll be doing it while we’re doing it right now. It w it went live to nobody on Friday. And we’re going to work the kinks out and people will start seeing it live.
Kate: I think December 28th is our goal. And again, it’ll take us a little while to, to learn and not have people go. Huh. I’m really curious about how we are going to get better and getting the human to be involved. That’s gonna be. The next hurdle for me. And that’s the solve?
Kate: That’s the end all solve. All right. It’s like, how do I get you to be willing to do something that’s hard to do and get excited about it, to feel rewarded about it? This is the thing. Going back to the first question you asked me, this is what keeps me up at night, Brent, because I don’t have that answer.
Kate: And I’m experimenting.
Brent: Yeah. And I, we don’t have much time left, but I think, and we’re going to have to do another session because we have so much more to
Kate: talk about. I’d love to, and I have to laugh more.
Brent: Google sees content as king and the more, I hate to say it, but the more content you can have, the more possibilities that people are going to see you and see your site.
Brent: And I think so I think one mistake people make from the AI tool is like I thought earlier, a I’m just used as tool to write articles. And if I’m writing an article and I’m letting the tool to everything, and you’ve writing a bunch of bogus content, you are hurting yourself more than you’re helping.
Brent: So that’s the bad side, but the curated side, I think where you’re going or where your, what we’ve been talking about is we’re using it to help supplement some of that grunt work or some of that harder work or, in my case, I think it’s really helpful to have some of those stimulus in terms of what should the headers of my three main parts of my posts be, what are some good topic headers within my main title?
Brent: And if your AI tool can get you that far, maybe that’s a good step. The point is that all of this content we’re creating helps users and especially marketers, because you can create more of it. The key is making good content instead of just create crappy content.
Kate: Yeah. Unfortunately there will always be noise out there, because people just think more is better and it’s not the case. That’s why I always tell people. You do have to be everywhere all the time you do, but it’s impossible. So just pick one thing, just pick one thing and be really good at it, and then figure out the next thing.
Kate: That’s such a good, that’s like my life, my husband will be exploding about all the dues we have to do for getting ready to do on a trip or something that, and I’m like, dude, your only job is just to get out the door I’ll pack the bags, man. Okay.
Brent: Yeah. That’s such a great point.
Brent: And I think, in the entrepreneurial world, there’s this concept of the shiny object, whereas an entrepreneur you think oh, I’ve been wildly successful as a marketing person. I am going to go open up a restaurant and I’m going to sell bagels. And I don’t know the first thing about it, but I saw somebody doing it on TV and I can be great at it and suddenly
Brent: you’re doing two things and maybe not so great at either one of them.
Kate: Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Not everyone’s a drummer. They can do it. All right.
Brent: Yeah. The other one that I just recently heard is in the term of triathletes, if you’re a triathlete at all, why not do three things, mediocre when you can, instead of doing one thing really well, that’s the flip side, do it right.
Brent: If you can swim and run and bike, just okay. Yeah. Yeah. I don’t know where I was going with that anyways. Was that
Kate: 10,000 hours guy. So every, I dunno if that’s totally true, but now that what you’re getting to, I think a little bit is that we like to science things to death, all of us do.
Kate: And when you do that you remove the human element to it, by the way. So not everything is going to check all the boxes and not maybe it shouldn’t, but end it shouldn’t right. We have to allow the room again. We’re seeing the same thing over and over again, but the room for the human to get in there and either make the mistakes or, the best advice I ever got in from my radio mentors was to make mistakes, to leave silence, like silence on the air.
Kate: You think deadly, but guess what? Brent.
Kate: People turn it up,
Brent: who is going to blink first? Yeah, no, I agree. Yeah, trying to fill in, I’ll put in one more comment, but then we have to try to close up here. We, we do these meetings called level 10 meetings, and there’s a certain format where you have a finished in an hour and blah, blah, blah, have all these different things to do in the meeting.
Brent: And it they’re really, they’re very effective from a business standpoint, but one of our, I was in a developer meeting and one of the guys said because everybody’s not engaging. And he said some people talk and other people are not going to be other people don’t feel comfortable and they need to be asked and then they’ll give you some of that, that they don’t feel like if somebody is dominating the conversation, they don’t feel like they’re going to jump in and do that.
Brent: So I think part of that is, is very important to know the types of things we have and the types of people and this all goes back to AI and how it’s going to learn. And I don’t even know where I’m going anymore. So we should
Kate: probably I’m with you. All right. I think where you’re going is everybody needs permission.
Kate: And when you give people permission to be a part of the conversation in any way, like w one way is when you wield the mic, as we said before, and you make people feel as though they have a voice, even though they’re just listening, like that is permission to participate, and to lean forward, giving their participant permission to lean forward or permission to DoubleClick or permission to reshare.
Kate: And that’s what call to actions are all about, right? So the best call to actions actually do that. They’re not learn more. Check out. Those are vapid call to action. So don’t make me feel anything. And so by laying that groundwork, and it all comes back to trust, making evangelists do you want customers who buy you and throw you away?
Kate: Or do you want customers who work with you for free? I want that second kind.
Brent: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. The ones that are going to talk about it and talk about you and that’s, I think that’s where influencers come in and there’s so many other places we can go down the road here. All so we have a negative five minutes left.
Brent: What parting advice can you give our listeners today? Or what did, what are you excited about? What what do you think is new?
Kate: I think what’s new is what’s always old, which is to You know this sentence, so boring, but stick to the basics. And so my basic is air checks.
Kate: I’m always telling my team and myself to listen to what you’ve done, go back and listen to it. It’s always there. You can always learn from yourself, especially if you’re being embarrassed by rewatching a demo or listening to a podcast, you were just a host of, and I’m interested in the sound of words, you know this right?
Kate: So one of the easiest things to do in addition to going back and listening is just to read what you’re writing out loud. Get getting to that oral space. When you do that, Brent, it’s the immediate autometer of bad and good, because if you’re tripping over it, if you feel in any way awkward coming out of your mouth, it’s awkward for your listener and when it’s awkward for them or your reader, the tank’s trust.
Kate: So just try it like, this is why, like I have resting bitch face in writing. I like to say, so I have to use lots of emojis and smileys and italics and bold and different ways to really make sure that what I’m saying is clearly communicated as people read it. And that’s when you make that extra effort, the hard way is the way, right?
Kate: Just that extra effort gets people to do what I want them to do.
Brent: Excellent. Really good. Yeah. And we need that sarcasm tool as well. Yes. Sometimes people don’t understand the sarcasm bit. All so as we close out, I give everybody an opportunity to do a shameless plug.
Brent: Is there anything you’d like to plug today?
Kate: Of course, come on and visit us at Lately. DubDubDub that Lately.ai. And ask for Lauren, she’s the best as you probably know, Brent we are humans and we like to talk to you and meet you. And we love to hear, where you heard about us.
Kate: And so I guess that’s the most shameless thing, but I’ll say one more, which is there’s a little band I love. And they’re called the dam Wells dam and w E L S. My husband is a guitar player and they were our favorite record at XM, which is how I met him. Job hazard, Damwells.com.
Brent: Nice. Excellent. And I will give my small shameless plug. We are doing a conference, an unconference in Florida on January 21st. It is a unscripted UnConference, no speakers. So if you do email and ask me about what kind of topic can I speak about and are you taking call for papers? No, it’s an unconference anyways.
Brent: Kately from Lately, I appreciate the time today. It’s been fun and we’re going to have a second conversation as a follow-up to do the rest of our thoughts. And yeah, I think I would like to plug Lately because it’s been such a great tool for us.
Brent: And it is such a great tool to organize there’s and I’m glad we didn’t do a sales presentation because people get turned off by that, but, analytics, and it does that all for you. It’s a great tool and I highly recommend it Lately that AI Kately from Lately Kate Bradley, the CEO and founder of Lately.
Brent: Thank you so much for being here today. I love ya.
