This week we interview Jakub Winkler (No relation to the Fonz) of Q-Solutions Studio. He has some very strong opinions on the MOSCA letter and why this has happened now.
We discuss the Magento Community and the impact that the Magento Open Source Community Alliance will have on it.
We discuss B2B marketing and why every business owner needs to break down what they are doing for marketing and measure, measure, measure! Jens’s best advice for an agency? “Listen to your clients”
We talk about the reasons why entrepreneurs need to hire a marketing agency some of the benefits and ROI they will get in return. This is a very informative episode for merchants and agencies. We also discuss how diversity helps us all be better business owners.
Transcript
Brent: We have the pleasure of having Jennifer Roth here, Jennifer, go ahead and introduce yourself. Tell us about what you do and one of your passions.
Jen: My name is Jen Roth, as Brent said, I run growth mode marketing along with my business partner and we are a Twin Cities based women-owned full-service agency.
And we are super passionate about helping companies grow and hence our name growth mode. We love to align strategies and programs and marketing investments directly with our client’s goals, measure that and help them deliver the results and the outcomes that they desire. Passion, I guess I have. A couple, but I love going to really awesome restaurants. I actually got to go to a three Michelin star restaurant and a couple of weeks ago in Washington, DC with my entrepreneur’s organization forum. And it was super, super awesome. And I love going with my girlfriends to Napa. So that’s probably two of my favorite guilty pleasures is when I’m not a mom and a marketer and a wife.
Brent: We are lucky to be in Minneapolis / St. Paul to have some fantastic restaurants to go to. But today we’re not going to talk about restaurants. Let’s talk a little bit about marketing. I know that you focus on growth, but also on B2B and probably growth in B2B. So let’s start with B2B Tell us a little bit about what you do for B2B and in marketing.
Jen: B2B marketing is different than consumer-based marketing. Primarily because in the B2B world it’s a considered purchase. Multi-step, complex buying process where you will often start your journey of driving awareness with not only the decision-maker but also the influencer or the champion. It’s really common in B2B to have a C-Suite person sign off on an actual purchase. The people who will be using the solutions that you’re selling are often different. They’re often managers, directors, VPs, et cetera. And so you see it’s just a different world because the evaluation process is considerable, brand loyalty is very important, but the way that people buy in the B2B world is just different. We focus on that and for those of you who don’t know, B2B is business to business. Any business that sells a product to another business falls in that B2B category, it’s super common for B2B companies to also have a B2C component where they might be selling things like benefits, healthcare benefits, for example, or software directly to consumers, as well as the benefit for something that they use.
Brent: Do you develop strategies, not only for new B2B, but you also do then develop strategies for an existing client? You want them then tell them about new products that you as a company are marketing and selling. I’m assuming that you come up with strategies for them as well.
Jen: We do. In fact most often when clients come to growth mode, we have a model, we have a model that includes three phases. We call it a growth marketing model and we implement it with almost every client that we serve. The first phase is really around setting your foundation. The second phase is really around building your presence. And the third phase is really around fielding predictable growth, which is where most people want to get to because that’s really where you start to see your marketing investment materialized in the form of conversions and leads, and sales.
But most often a client does come to us and they come to us for a variety of different reasons, but it’s often something like. We are growing really fast and we don’t have the marketing resources and capabilities in-house that we need. We need an extension of our team to help us strategize and think through the right way to bring our business and our products to market. And, or. We need to want a new product and we’ve never launched a product before. And or we don’t plan on hiring a bunch of people internally. We don’t want to hire a bunch of people internally. We just need an agency that can serve as our partner and our arms and our legs and provide the exact types of marketing expertise that we need when we need them, dialing them up when we need them and dialing them down when we don’t. So that’s often where people start is in coming to us and we’ll build-out. It might be a whole business marketing plan. It might be a roadmap, a marketing roadmap with more concrete, specific deliverables, or it might be a very targeted plan for a big event that you’re launching or a big product that you’re launching.
But that’s typically where we start. And then we actually do a series of different programs and activities based on what the client needs. And so most often we focus on that foundation. Not always because there are times when folks totally have their foundation set, but in twenty-some years of experience working in marketing, I can tell you that if you don’t know who you are, what you stand for, why you’re unique, and what your customers care about. All the marketing in the world is not going to work. So we spend a lot of time upfront working on helping people figure it out. What is unique to them, important to their customer, and provable. And we do that through stakeholder sessions. We do it through the voice of customer interviews. We do it through competitive audits. And then from that, what often comes out is personas buyer journeys messaging, brand identity works again, not always, but often we end up helping clients really evolve and think through that. And then that turns into a website where they’re able to showcase their story and their brand and who they are in the form of relevant messaging, compelling information, optimized sites with words, and buying experiences that we know their buyers have.
And then from there, you get into the next two phases, which is now that you know who you are and what you stand for and you’re inside matches your outside. You can start to build a presence. You can start to establish yourself as a leader in your space, or get people to the targeted people that you really want to know who you are.
Know what you stand for. And that really comes into play with social media and video and public relations and sometimes investor relations. Getting involved in trade media advertising, all that stuff, there, product launches. And then the last phase is really all about fielding predictable growth and that’s what we all know is demand generation. That’s all about it. Multi-component super smart, super-targeted email marketing, paid digital marketing, paid social marketing, organic digital really strong calls to action, and lead magnets that drive your buyers to the site. And get them to convert and experience and interact with you.
Really thinking through that in the metrics and how you actually start to drive a top of the funnel, middle of the funnel, bottom of funnel strategy to fill your pipeline so that as you move forward and you continue to grow, it’s predictable, it’s scalable and it’s systemic. A long answer, but that’s our model.
Brent: As a small business owner how would you tell them to start out in getting their marketing plan going?
Jen: I would still start, I follow the same three steps. I just do it in a scrappier way. I can tell you, even as growth mode, we’re about six years old or we’ll have our birthday here in September and we drank our own Kool-Aid if you will. We did the same exact exercise for ourselves so that we could figure out why we were important to our customers, unique to us and our differentiators were provable. And we did it by just simply talking to some of our customers and just asking questions.
I do recommend that if you have the resources to have a marketing expert, do it to start there, but if not, take your clients out to coffee and don’t just take the ones that love you. Take the ones that don’t like you and say, what are we doing? Why did you choose us? What can we do differently? Have you ever talked to anybody as a competitor? And what did they bring that you thought was interesting? What’s the last article you read online? Ask the questions because it’s amazing the information and the insights you can glean. About what makes you, and what is your authentic story?
So if I were a small business, that’s what I would do. And I am a small business so I understand, and I am an entrepreneur. And then from there once you have that in place, identify your target audience. Some companies make the mistake of trying to let the whole world know who they are when really they only went up 10 clients this year.
If you only want 10 clients, you probably know which 10 you want. Think long and hard about who you really want to add to your client base in the next year and focus your marketing energy there, instead of all over the place. That’s probably the biggest piece of advice that I can give to small businesses that are just starting, or that have been around for a while and are struggling with sales.
Brent: In the EO world, we have a concept called the shiny object. What would you say to an entrepreneur who would tell their team doesn’t say no to anybody? How do you get around the fact that sometimes saying no is the best thing you can do in the marketing world?
Jen: I have had the, I don’t know if luxury is the right word, but I have seen the consequences of following the shiny object in my own businesses, but also the clients.
And I can tell you irrefutably that if you have a targeted approach and you have a business model in mind, It will pay ten times over to stay focused on what it is that you do best. And here’s why, because let’s say I’ll just use my own agency and my own experiences. And example, if we try to service a business or a client who needs an in-depth public relations program.
And we love the client and they’re super nice and they fit in all of our other criteria and all they want is public relations. So we really just want to give it a try anyway, guess what? We’re not the best PR agency in the world. We partner with PR people. We do a lot of PR, but that’s not what we do best.
And then what happens is they don’t feel like they got what they wanted. They’re not a referenceable customer. We’re not happy with the services we delivered. And my employees aren’t happy because they got stuck doing something they weren’t competent in delivering and they couldn’t do their best work. So stay the course because, in the end, it will be worth it.
You’ll fill that slot with someone else. And the better you do at what you do best, the more referenceable customers you’ll have, and the more customers will refer you to the next set of.
Brent: Earlier you had mentioned something around building a website for somebody. I can recall a conversation that I had with a marketing person and I had brought up this topic of partnering with us because we’re Magento, we’re a Magento shop. And they said our clients don’t really sell things online. They only market things. And no, we’re not interested in partnering with you because we’re not doing e-commerce. And this was pre-pandemic.
What would you say to a small business owner that when they come to you and they say, yeah, we’d like to build up this marketing campaign, but no we’re not going to sell any?
Jen: Where do I start with? First of all, pre-pandemic was definitely different in the B2B world. And even in the consumer-based world for sure, but it was different because there was a belief that sales were primarily relationship-based and that feet on the street were the most effective mechanism for selling. But data will tell you, and you can go in and put this in your Google and look for it. And you’ll find all sorts of stats. Then 90 plus percent of B2B decision-makers are on your website prior to ever engaging a salesperson COVID happened and it became 100%. Because they had no other way to reach an organization to learn about solutions. And we saw over the course of 2020 and 2021 a huge uptick in people, investing in the overall infrastructure of their websites, adding e-commerce capabilities, and really thinking through those buyer journies, and who was actually going to their site, what they were experiencing and what type of information they wanted to provide. So it is probably true in some instances that very few instances that you may not sell something on your site, but it would never be true that somebody wouldn’t use your site as an important piece of information in the sales evaluation process and I believe that wholeheartedly.
Brent: I can comment on the fact that a lot of current business owners and salespeople are concerned that the buyer journey will disclude or we’ll cut out the salesperson. And I know that one way we’ve gotten over that is just giving the website as another tool to enable that salesperson to sell.
And then. I guess you have to say it selling the salespeople on this new tool and it’s not going to infringe on their ability to sell even more. And then I think it’s important to sell or to make it known to the owner or the entrepreneur of the organization, that this is a new tool. And don’t try to take the commissions away from the salespeople, because this is going to increase everybody’s business and having those tools online and the ability to purchase directly in the middle of the night on a Sunday or whatever time of the day is that buyer wants to purchase. It just enables them to do more with their products and to sell more.
Jen: I couldn’t agree more. And I’ve actually given presentations on the importance of the relationship between sales and marketing because I believe I say this often to people who know me, but I believe that marketing represents the voice of the customer, sales represent the voice of a customer and both are equally important. And so when you think about the marketing mix, the role of marketing is to enable sales. So sales can do their job and to understand what marketing needs and to provide the awareness and the ground cover that makes your buyer market, your industry, your marketplace, maybe potential employees aware of who you are and what you stand for and what makes you, you. The rest of your job in marketing is to help those sales folk shine and to be able to do what they do best, which is sales. And to be able to meet the needs of the voice of a customer. And so to your point, like the website is a critical role because it’s where people go first for that top of the funnel stuff, trying to find people and have them be aware of you. It also is where people stay to get to the middle of the funnel. So as they’re cranking through kind of their gear and their priorities and their initiatives, Eventually, there comes a time when they need your product. You want to be top of mind. That is marketing’s job.
When it gets in the middle of the funnel, sales and marketing need to hold hands and work through that together to get that person to convert from being aware of you to be interested in talking to you. And then at that point, Sales comes in and they lead the conversations. They lead the processes, they lead the actual sale in terms of taking your solutions and turning them into what is the most beneficial for the client’s needs and meeting them where they’re at. That’s my philosophy on the importance of making sure sales and marketing work together.
Brent: I want to just continue down this road of buyer journey and really having an entrepreneur dive into their buyer journey and find out places that are resistant and going back to the website and what you talked about, this is where the top level, this is where they’re going to get their information.
Their traditional buyer journey was they’d go to the website. They would look at that information. They would call the salesperson that salesperson would talk to them. Then they would put the order in salesperson would either put the order directly into their ERP system, or they would call some customer service person who then put it into an ERP system.
I guess one message that I had been always trying to tell. Business owners who are in this B2B space are, even if you don’t want your client to put in their orders directly, to think about the resistance that’s in that buyer’s journey and examine that buyer journey to enable more sales to happen without any resistance in that sales process.
Jen: I could not agree more. And that’s another thing we’ve actually seen a big uptick in, in terms of investments is really rethinking and re-understanding and recalibrating that buyer journey because you’re right it’s changing before our very eyes in the B2B world because of COVID and the number of things that happen online, both before and after a salesperson is engaged, it’s shifting and it’s becoming maybe not circular, but not linear. It’s maybe like an up and down or a wavy or a little bit of a loop, where people are in engaging in enacting interacting in both. The only other thing I would add to what you said is we have seen clients very interested in segmentation.
So a lot of industry, vertical kind of stuff. Maybe buyer types and ideal client and customer profiles. And even company profiles. You might be doing like a C-suite persona with a buyer journey map for C-level decision-makers or purchasing folks. But now you’re also seeing. C-level buyer in the manufacturing space.
What does that buyer journey look like? What does that persona look like? And so there could, they’re like almost there they’re there’s growing so much in importance to a business. And I remember when I kinda first started in marketing, I wasn’t so sure about whether or not buyer journeys were worth all the time they took and all the money they took, but I have become a believer as I’ve watched, it worked for companies where I’ve led marketing, but also with the clients that we work with. It’s crazy when you know who you’re serving, why you’re serving them, what matters most to them, how much more effective everything you do after that can be.
Brent: In the e-commerce world, we see a lot of inbound sales growth through marketing, and there isn’t a lot of KPIs needed on the sales side. It’s more on the marketing side. When there’s a B2B journey or a B2B marketing, there are some sales KPIs. And then there’s some marketing KPIs. Maybe you could talk a little bit about how to mix those and how to put those together. So the sales team is understanding what the marketing team is delivering to them, and even more important, the marketing team understands what the sales team needs and those KPIs that are maybe important to both.
Jen: Now you touched on one of my favorite topics because even though I’m not a numbers person, I love metrics because they tell you what’s working, what’s not working, and where people are going and it helps you fine-tune your marketing dollars and your investment. So that it’s going exactly where you want it to. That’s a super exciting question. Now, I will say it’s, it can be very difficult. So for our clients specifically, We tend to build out metrics, dashboards in Google data studio sometimes Tablo sometimes systems that they already own. Sometimes we just looked through HubSpot because they already own HubSpot and they have their CRM, their Salesforce, et cetera.
There are lots of different tools that you can use. What we do. And what I recommend anybody does is when you write your marketing plan, identify your KPIs for each of the things that you’re doing when it comes to marketing and sales specifically one strategy that we’ve seen work really well in B2B.
I don’t think would apply to B2C, but is that you would have something called a marketing qualified lead. So you’d have an opportunity which is any kind of inquiry or contact that comes into your fold. And they either meet the criteria as a prospect, or they don’t, if they don’t meet the criteria, you need to boot them out of the system and say, thanks, you can listen to us, but we know we know you’re not a client or a prospective client.
If they are a prospective client and they meet your criteria, doesn’t even have to be banned. It doesn’t have to be their writing right now. It can just be that they’re, they fit the right profile. Then what you want to do is you want to work them through lead scoring. And so what lead scoring will do is it will help you think it’ll help based on the behaviors that each of these prospects and users are taking, how interested they really are.
So they might start by visiting your website, but if they go to the careers page, then maybe get negative five points. If they go to the product page and they watch a demo, they might get 25 points and you work your way through these points. And then when it gets to a point where most often we have one, two and three marketing qualified leads and a one, two, and three-phase when it reaches three.
It reaches a certain point threshold where a salesperson will get an email or an alert within their CRM that says, Hey, This person’s done enough marketing activity that it’s probably worth reaching out. And I always liken it to the MQL three is are the kids in the classroom that are going pick me?
The MQL twos are the ones that are in the back of the room that is super curious but don’t want to raise their hand. And the MQL ones are the kids that didn’t even want to come to class in the first place. So don’t send the kids that didn’t want to come to the class, the sales team they’re busy.
They don’t need those guys. And they don’t want to talk to you. So wait until they’re raising their hand or they won’t raise their hand and then get those sales folks and their skillsets involved.
Brent: That’s a great analogy. And I love that picture. You’ve painted. Putting on putting on my entrepreneur hat. You had mentioned earlier that you are an extension of somebody’s marketing team. What would you tell an entrepreneur who believes that they should just hire everybody in-house? And they don’t, they want to have internal resources and don’t depend on anything from a marketing agency.
Jen: That’s a great question. So I have a couple of things there and I’m actually going to answer this. I also was a VP and a senior VP of marketing in the B2B world. So I know what it’s like to sit on. Both sides. Granted, they were bigger companies. One was really big. The other one was midsize, but, the advice that I would give entrepreneurs is if you are not an expert in marketing, you really need to think about hiring somebody who is just like you hire an accountant, just like you hire a lawyer.
If you’re not if it’s not your expertise and your core competence, Then be okay with investing in that and building that as part of kind of your growth infrastructure. Most often when we end up with retainer type of clients, which we have a lot of it’s because they need the world of marketing has so many areas of expertise you have a strategy from a marketing perspective, do you have a strategy from a content perspective? You have graphic design, you have video, you have web development, you have social media, you have there is our paid digital, you’ve got organic. You’ve got the number of skills that are needed to truly run marketing from the top to the bottom and everything in between is just, there’s a lot to it.
And so the clients that we work with love being able to bring in an agency that can literally dial-up and down like today we’re doing a rebrand. So I need a lot of heavy lifting around how we tell our story and what we look like to the market. Okay. I’m done with that. Now, what I really want is digital.
So then those people go away and you spent, you bring in your digital experts. If you hire all those people, you better have a lot of marketing to do because you’re going to spend a fortune, trying to get all the right skillsets. And every once in a while, you’ll find a unicorn that can do a lot of things, but it’s pretty much impossible to find a unicorn that can do everything.
And it’s very common, especially for business owners to come to me and say, I hired a marketing coordinator and him, or she’s really good at writing strategies, but I don’t see any tactics. Or vice versa, really good at doing what I ask, but there’s no strategic thinking. It’s very difficult to find somebody that can do it all. I don’t even know if you can. And so that’s, to me if I were running a small business, it wasn’t marketing, we obviously do our own. I would take the time and I would invest in it because it’s a serious lever of growth and you don’t want to spend all that money on all those people. You’d rather just use people that already know what they’re doing.
The one other benefit that I see a lot. And I always tell my friends that are still on the client-side, one thing I’ve learned has been on both sides of the fences is that when you work with an agency, they get the opportunity to see how lots of people work, versus just themselves. And I never realized that until I was on the agency side. And so if you’re trying to think about something differently, engage in the agency, because you’ll get the benefit of all of these ideas that they get to share with other clients that you will never see.
Brent: So two points of that last your last statement there.
The first one is that agencies need to be always talking to their clients and sharing those stories with your other clients that are the value that you get out as a client. And that’s the value you give as an agency. The next part is about hiring. And the unicorn, especially we’re a development house.
And I can say that we have a few unicorns, a lot some people that can do everything, but the part that’s the hardest is managing a team. And I have repeatedly said to some of our unicorns. That’s great, but now let’s talk about times 12 times, 15 times 20, how. How are you going to get that done? If a certain task or a certain project takes three months?
Hey, that’s great. That means four projects a year, but we actually wouldn’t get done 20 projects a year. So how are we going to make this work as a team? So you as a business owner, you as an entrepreneur need to pick that same. And think. Okay. Yes, having internal resources is great. And our job climate in the, especially in the Adobe space you’re going to look at six figures on a developer salary.
And that developer salary needs to be specialized in our space in the Adobe space, but you really need to have a front-end developer needed a brand person. You need to have, you need to design, or then you need a UX person. Okay. Suddenly now you say your six-figure budget is turning into nearly a seven-figure budget that you need for your small, not small brand medium-sized brand, even that will bring in Maybe six figures in revenue.
So you have to, as an entrepreneur, you have to make that hard decision and look at that. And really, I think, one good point you made about is really let’s look at the numbers, analyze the numbers and come up with some ROI.
Jen: To your point, like you might say I don’t want to pay an agency a hundred thousand dollars to develop my website because I’ll probably only make a hundred thousand dollars in sales or attribute a hundred thousand dollars of sales in the first year.
I can hire somebody for a hundred thousand dollars. One person, you can hire one person for that, and you’re going to need about eight. So it’s not that you’re spending a hundred thousand dollars with an agency versus a hundred thousand dollars internally. You’re spending $800,000 internally versus a hundred thousand dollars internally.
And I think people who don’t understand the marketing discipline and the complexity of building a website that actually works, don’t always see that, that piece of it.
Brent: The small part about being an entrepreneur as well as it’s a lot easier to fire an agency than it is to fire a group of eight people.
Jen: Oh, true. And the other part too is, and I’ll be completely honest and I love this and it makes me sad at the same time, but because we’re specialized in growth marketing, we get to work with all these great clients who start small and get big. And then they do hire internal teams because they’ve gotten significantly bigger and it’s very sad for us cause we miss them, but we’re very happy because our kids are grown and gone.
And it’s okay. Because oftentimes like bring us in for project-based things, but things change. But yeah you’re right. Like it’s a lot easier in, in COVID, especially this happened a lot where you could contract. And increase as you need to do versus having that payroll sitting there all the time needing to be used.
Brent: I think the message to an agency because we do get that too, where people get bigger and then they started hiring an internal development team and suddenly we’re not doing so much work, but having that quarterly strategy session with that client, just to see what they’re doing it’s easy when you’re focused on your team and you’re in a silo. It’s easy to stay in your silo and always just go in that same direction. But I think that what we’ve seen and especially in this world with so many new platforms coming out, there are so many different routes you can take and there’s places and things you should test, not only for development but especially in marketing, you need to test those things and make sure that you’re doing or trying them at least.
I know that one, I heard a comment I think was Gary V or something like that. That social media is like your advertising. You don’t advertise on a show, a hit TV show thinking, is this show going to be around for a year? No, it’s here now and it’s popular. So try that platform. See how it works.
And if it’s around in a year, great. If it’s not move on to the next one, but at least test them to see how well they’re working.
Jen: That’s the very premise of growth marketing. It is hypothesizing. Create build or develop implement test refine, and just keep doing it iterative improvements.
And it’s really cool too because marketers have more numbers than they ever have before and we’re metrics to work with. So for example, you can test lead magnets, but a high value. Assets that you put on your home page sales, a demo for a software company, or a free trial for a gym or whatever.
And you pick and you play with those and you do AB tests. And it is amazing how, as you continue to refine it, one always comes to the top, so I think that is a really good perspective and good insight.
Brent: At the beginning of our conversation, you had mentioned a couple of inbound things that people could be doing. You had mentioned paid media. Paid social. Maybe we could just take a little bit of time towards the end of our conversation here to talk about a few of those things merchants should be looking at, or even not merchants to anybody’s trying to market something. And I just want to keep saying, if you’re marketing something, you’re not doing it for free, you’re doing it because you’d like to sell it.
So I’d like to dispel this idea that. Commerce isn’t part of marketing is to sell something that’s the basis. And so anyways you’re doing social media, you’re doing paid ads, you’re doing organic ads. What if we were to take the top five things or top seven or eight things, but what will be those things you would, we would recommend?
Jen: Yeah, so I, what I always recommend is starting with what your desired outcome is, and then doing some kind of. Back of the napkin math to determine if you need a million dollars in sales and each product is worth X amount, how many opportunities do you need? You close half of them.
And then what do you need from my elite perspective. So I always recommend starting with that. You know what you actually need, but in terms of the types of programs, it truly does depend on who you are. Who you’re targeting what you’re positioning. So for example, if you’re selling to a CIO or it decision-maker or an engineer, they are very driven and guided by peer review.
By NPS, by Reddit they have they’re, they’re super smart people who rely on him, meaningful credible information to help them make decisions, and colleagues who recommend. So the strategy you would use if that’s your audience is going to be different, that said. From a digital perspective, you would absolutely still want to invest in organic social media for LinkedIn and for Twitter in any B2B audience.
If you’re interested in the talent side of things, make sure you’re on Facebook. And make sure and start to think about an Instagram strategy. If you haven’t peopled think I’m crazy, but I’m not because take just five minutes. If you’ve got teenagers anywhere near you or young adults anywhere near you in the workforce, 25, 30 years old, they’re on Instagram. They’re on Snapchat. They’re on TikTok. They are absorbing information differently than we are and meaning us old people like me and they are making they’re going. There are future decisions. There are future decision-makers. So start thinking about how you’re going to build awareness and influence within those channels and those worlds as those people start to make decisions.
I’m not doing a super good job of answering your question in a pointed way, but I think. Any foundational demand generation program with, or without commerce or e-commerce needs to have a strong social media footprint in your basic channels, it needs to have strong and consistent organic content.
It needs to have high-value information. That helps the folks that you are selling to understand your product better, do their jobs better. Having an emotional appeal, whatever the situation is, but high-value content, rock-solid content, marketing strategy, organic social, and then paid digital through SEO.
Pay-per-click and display are probably where I would start. I will say that in certain areas, email marketing is definitely not dead. There are a lot of places where email marketing works really well. The only thing I’ll say about that is it absolutely depends on a database that is in good shape.
And so it’s not uncommon for us to work with clients where they want to do email marketing, but they don’t have the database. And so if you’re in that situation, Know that you’re going to have to invest in your database before any of that email marketing stuff will work, which means you should turn to social and paid digital because that does not require you to spend money on a database.
The other thing that’s really interesting is intent data. So if you haven’t, I don’t know if you’ve used intent data yet, Brent, but. It’s actually fascinating. And it’s the thing that makes people so mad, right? When they say Alexa is listening, because there are, there’s the ability to actually be able to detect patterns around buying behaviors and influences and place advertising in front of folks who are actually interested in actually fit your profile.
And while you might say that’s spooky because they’re listening to me, on the flip side, It’s relevant. Wouldn’t you rather have relevant content and relevant ads than things that you don’t care about at all? So there’s, I always think there’s two, two sides to that point.
Brent: I think intent data is an easy one to see too, is if you click on something and suddenly you start seeing ads for that, something everywhere you’re browsing, that’s just targeted ads.
Jen: That’s targeted ads using intent data. So they took your cookie and they said, this guy likes golf clubs and then you see golf clubs everywhere, and then you might see golf apparel, and then you may see golf vacations, and that’s intent data.
Brent: Intent data is best seen on Facebook. When all I get in my feed are bike apparel stuff, and I don’t even bike that much. All right. So we have a little bit of time left. Just, I want to change a little bit directions here. We’ve been talking a lot about diversity in our community.
You had mentioned earlier that you’re a women-owned, woman-founded company, maybe from an entrepreneur’s standpoint. How maybe some advice for women who want to start or. From a diverse background. What would you how, maybe you could comment a little bit about that?
Jen: Yeah, that’s interesting. I don’t get asked that often. If you, for women people of color any ma I actually also have a greatest, so I actually have a disability. And my advice to people is. Who might feel like they can’t do it or feel like maybe they’re in a minority situation is if you want to do it and you believe you can, you will.
And reach out if you have a good idea, put it on paper, talk to people about it. Draw inspiration from those who you trust and respect use your friends and your networks. To make you stronger and better and pay it forward, make other people stronger and better. And honestly, this is a shameless plug for EO, but join organizations like EO, because I find that my forum is like my own little advisory board and I can draw on all of these super-smart folks who can give me advice where maybe I don’t have the strengths yet, or the skillset or the know-how. And there’s a lot of grants and resources, especially for women-owned businesses that to get to get you started. So you can look for, I believe it’s WBENC I could be wrong, but if you search for women-owned businesses are women own business resources. You’d be amazed at what you can find in a way of grants and just resources to help write a business plan, to help fill the budget.
They offer a lot of help and I always tell people who call me, who say, I’m thinking about leaving corporate America and starting my own business. What advice would you give me? I always say. Make sure you have a great CPA, make sure that you have a lawyer because you’re gonna wanna make sure you have all your articles of incorporation and all that stuff set up.
And make sure that you have a really solid network because the best way to get started is to rely on the people around you who know a lot who know best and who can help you.
Brent: One last question then, what would you say to it? How would you say, what would you say to a bald white male who typifies the non-diverse aspect and we’re in Minnesota. The bald white male is the person in the entrepreneur community that’s most represented. Unfortunately, maybe sometimes they have hair, but who knows? Sometimes they don’t. What advice would you give them to help enable people of color, people of diverse backgrounds, women who whomever it is that would like to get into the entrepreneur community. How could you give them some advice and enable them to be advocates for them?
Jen: If I were a white male, what advice would I give me? Is that what you’re asking?
Brent: What would you, and I asked this question a lot and I think making noise around it is the first thing, but a lot of bald white males don’t feel like they should be on any committees or be part of a diversity program because I’m not diverse. So what do I have to offer?
Jen: What you, that is a first of all, really insightful and great that you’re asking it, but Your skills and your knowledge and your connections. Everybody who starts at the very beginning needs to some they need strength. They need grit. They need intelligence, but they also need a running start and a lucky break.
So I think helping people, connecting people to resources and potential clients and information is what you can do most and to just remove the barrier I’ll get, I don’t know if this is even a fair example. Your right, EO is definitely comprised primarily of white men. But there is a conscientious effort to increase the diversity within the group.
And I have seen that happen and I do learn from all of the folks, whether they’re white men or they’re other women or they’re people who have come here from other countries. So I think just the more you open yourself up to a conversation with somebody who is a minority and you let them in and you share what that barrier starts to just go away. You don’t even, you don’t even see it anymore. Does that make sense?
Brent: I think I’ll add on just that you should be aware of the fact that maybe you’re in a privileged person and I’ll just say that to myself, that be aware that, and then invite people to that and start the conversations.
And I think the most important thing is don’t be afraid to have that difficult conversation and it may feel uncomfortable and. You know me as a mid-west Lutheran we would tend to look at our own shoelaces before we’d look at the person. So maybe looking up and seeing that there’s somebody different and that, Hey, they have something to offer and it makes this community even better when there’s more diverse.
Jen: Yep. I agree. And I think sometimes the answers can be found in our children. I think about my kids that are teenagers and young adults now, but when they were little, they didn’t think twice about where a person came from or how much money they had or what color their skin was, or what gender they were, because they just didn’t know to.
And if all humans could be like that, we live in a wonderful.
Brent: We absolutely would be great. This we’ve really chewed up this hour and so just as we’re closing out what kind of nugget could you give a person that wants to sell something? They don’t have to sell it online, but they’d have something to sell.
What would be something good that you could tell them to do?
Jen: Yeah, I would say make sure you know who you want to sell it. Make sure. You know why they want to buy it and meet them where they’re at in their buying process. If you do those things, you will succeed.
Brent: Great. Thank you. So as we close out the show, I like to give everybody a chance to do a shameless plug about anything you’d like to plug and go ahead and give us a shameless.
Jen: My daughter is selling now I’m getting pizzas, burgers, her theme. I’m kidding. I guess I’m really proud of a growth mode and the agency that we have built for me and my business partner. And I guess what I’m most proud of is that we were named to inks were about six years old.
I think I mentioned that earlier, and we were named. Fastest growing companies. We’re actually in the top 25% and we are a certified WBENC company. And I attribute that to certainly setting the right stage and. Building the right kind of culture and the right vision for how marketing should be done with the businesses that we have the privilege to serve.
But I also attribute it to having an amazing team that makes every day fun and makes every client happier and makes the world a better place. And we, our secret sauce are absolutely the team that has allowed us to grow the way that we’ve grown. So I guess my plug is really around just growth mode as an agency, but also the great team and clients, honestly, that we get to work with.
Brent: That’s great. Thank you. I’ll I will give one small plug, both and being fully transparent. Jennifer is the marketing chair this year for EO, Minnesota. I am the membership chair for EO, Minnesota. If you are in the twin cities area, I would encourage you to reach out to us if you’re an entrepreneur. And learn about
Entrepreneurs Organization Minnesota.
It is a global chapter. There are 15,000 members. It’s a great organization. And as Jen mentioned earlier EO gives you a chance to talk to other entrepreneurs that you would never get the chance to do. You can’t tell your best friend who is working in a company in a corporate world about, Hey, I can’t make payroll this week or I can make payroll. And by the way, I just made an extra million dollars this year. Those are conversations you can have with your entrepreneur’s group that you can’t always have with your typical friends and family. So it is a great thing to join. At least learn about, and Minnesota is. For news organization in Minnesota is a great chapter.
And we are looking for members. So that’s my shameless plug. That’s awesome. All right. Jennifer Roth is the president and co-founder of growth mode marketing in the twin cities and all of our links and show notes will be available for you to get those Jennifer. Thank you.
This episode was hosted by Kalen Jordan. The interview happened on the behest of Kalen to talk more about the Mage Open Source Community Alliance and the recent letter published.
The “Cone of Silence”
Transcript
00:02:36,173 –> 00:02:39,533 kalen: See here’s the great thing about the car in the garage. is that?
59 00:02:40,733 –> 00:02:46,573 kalen: Um, you get what I got Wifi. I got great Wi fi. So that’s not an issue. I’ve got good
60 00:02:46,733 –> 00:02:49,293 kalen: connectivity. Great sound proroofing
61 00:02:49,773 –> 00:02:51,533 kalen: right, because when you have kids,
63 00:02:52,653 –> 00:02:53,693 kalen: that’s the key. It’s
64 00:02:53,340 –> 00:02:54,340 65 00:02:53,853 –> 00:02:59,293 kalen: all about soundproofing, so cars are probably, Uh. Your car is your probably single
66 00:02:59,533 –> 00:03:04,333 kalen: most sound proooofd object that you own, believe it or not, So
67 00:03:05,120 –> 00:03:06,240 brent_peterson: except for the Um. The
68 00:03:05,993 –> 00:03:06,993 69 00:03:06,400 –> 00:03:09,760 brent_peterson: Cone of silence from the original gets smart, and now you’re going to have
70 00:03:09,760 –> 00:03:11,680 brent_peterson: to google that because it’s quite hilarious.
71 00:03:12,500 –> 00:03:13,500 brent_peterson: Look up. the
72 00:03:13,033 –> 00:03:14,033 73 00:03:13,360 –> 00:03:16,800 brent_peterson: Cone of silence in the original gets smart from the nineteen sixties.
74 00:03:16,813 –> 00:03:21,133 kalen: You’re going to have an entire to do list of things to Google by the time you’re
75 00:03:21,293 –> 00:03:23,213 kalen: done with this podcast, Which is
77 00:03:24,973 –> 00:03:26,413 kalen: it? Just as it should be
78 00:03:25,200 –> 00:03:29,520 brent_peterson: Um, for so for soundproofing, I’m building a little home studio in my
79 00:03:29,600 –> 00:03:31,120 brent_peterson: basement, Um, not like
80 00:03:30,673 –> 00:03:31,673 81 00:03:31,440 –> 00:03:36,320 brent_peterson: t. â–j gamble. I’m not going to gamble hundreds of thousands of dollars on my
83 00:03:37,553 –> 00:03:38,553 kalen: First of all, No,
84 00:03:39,060 –> 00:03:40,060 brent_peterson: no, nobody.
85 00:03:39,133 –> 00:03:42,893 kalen: nobody does anything quite like T. â–j gamble, so that
86 00:03:41,120 –> 00:03:43,760 brent_peterson: Yeah, nobody can compete against that. I’m going to
87 00:03:43,473 –> 00:03:44,473 88 00:03:43,920 –> 00:03:48,480 brent_peterson: spend two percent of my budget. Uh, like that. as compared to his hundred
89 00:03:48,720 –> 00:03:54,560 brent_peterson: percent, he’s going to be the United States military infrastructure, and I’m
90 00:03:54,540 –> 00:03:55,540 brent_peterson: going to be like
91 00:03:56,140 –> 00:03:57,140 92 00:03:57,820 –> 00:03:58,820 brent_peterson: Um for
93 00:03:58,273 –> 00:03:59,273 94 00:03:58,740 –> 00:03:59,740 brent_peterson: for budgeting towards
95 00:04:00,880 –> 00:04:04,720 brent_peterson: my my studio. But this morning I was recording and I got everything all set
96 00:04:04,880 –> 00:04:06,480 brent_peterson: up very nicely, made the
97 00:04:06,273 –> 00:04:07,273 98 00:04:06,480 –> 00:04:10,240 brent_peterson: mistake of leaving the door upstairs open and we have a new Jack
99 00:04:09,873 –> 00:04:10,873 100 00:04:10,400 –> 00:04:12,960 brent_peterson: Russell. so the next thing I know is Susan’s
101 00:04:13,033 –> 00:04:14,033 kalen: That’ll do it.
102 00:04:13,120 –> 00:04:17,120 brent_peterson: running down the stairs. Turns the corner and all I hear is No,
103 00:04:18,480 –> 00:04:22,880 brent_peterson: And the this little puppies’s found the basement. and and we have carpeting
104 00:04:23,040 –> 00:04:26,400 brent_peterson: and has discovered that. Hey, this carpet is just like grass.
105 00:04:27,680 –> 00:04:28,800 brent_peterson: So if you listen
106 00:04:28,833 –> 00:04:29,833 kalen: just like grass.
107 00:04:29,120 –> 00:04:34,560 brent_peterson: to my, if you listen to my podcast today with Ysa Ritzma, there will be a
108 00:04:34,720 –> 00:04:37,680 brent_peterson: person yelling in the background that only comes in
109 00:04:37,313 –> 00:04:38,313 110 00:04:37,840 –> 00:04:42,480 brent_peterson: for a second, and I will give a Starbucks gift card if you can pick out that
111 00:04:42,720 –> 00:04:44,160 brent_peterson: exact time five dollar
113 00:04:44,320 –> 00:04:47,920 brent_peterson: Gar, Starbucks gift card If you could pick out the. If you give me the time
114 00:04:48,060 –> 00:04:49,060 brent_peterson: signature on that
115 00:04:50,513 –> 00:04:51,513 kalen: very cool.
116 00:04:51,500 –> 00:04:52,500 brent_peterson: Yeah, big spender.
117 00:04:51,613 –> 00:04:57,453 kalen: Well, if the link is up, if the link is up, I will. I literally will stop our podcast
118 00:04:57,613 –> 00:05:00,253 kalen: right now and just go find that. because
119 00:04:59,040 –> 00:05:03,360 brent_peterson: Hey, th. I. I. I recorded that early this morning and I published it
120 00:05:03,100 –> 00:05:04,100 121 00:05:03,453 –> 00:05:07,773 kalen: Okay and it’s up. Okay be cause. I, I mean, honestly, I’d rather just get the gift
122 00:05:08,093 –> 00:05:09,533 kalen: certificate. I mean, you know,
123 00:05:09,140 –> 00:05:10,140 124 00:05:09,693 –> 00:05:13,533 kalen: as much as I enjoy chatting, I I could really use.
125 00:05:11,760 –> 00:05:13,760 brent_peterson: for for you, I would send it anyways,
126 00:05:14,973 –> 00:05:21,293 kalen: Okay. Well, I, I, I’m in. I’m go to hold you to that. Uh, cause I, you know, I really
127 00:05:21,533 –> 00:05:26,493 kalen: need the Co. These are tough times and I could use a gift card right about now for
128 00:05:25,520 –> 00:05:29,840 brent_peterson: as you sit in your Um, modelles Tesle models that you probably
129 00:05:26,353 –> 00:05:27,353 kalen: some coffee.
130 00:05:29,553 –> 00:05:30,553 131 00:05:30,240 –> 00:05:33,680 brent_peterson: got hand delivered from from Yn musk.
132 00:05:34,573 –> 00:05:36,973 kalen: well, we. You know, we do hang out from time to time.
133 00:05:36,740 –> 00:05:37,740 134 00:05:38,333 –> 00:05:42,813 kalen: He’s a good guy. Are you pro Elon Mosqu or anti Yon mosque? This is my new. Okay.
135 00:05:40,880 –> 00:05:44,720 brent_peterson: I’m pro. Do you not read? You know, do you not look at your social media
136 00:05:44,733 –> 00:05:49,373 kalen: I read. No, I. no, I read. I read. I mean, I. I read a lot of stuff. Um,
137 00:05:44,960 –> 00:05:46,960 brent_peterson: when you? okay, Yeah,
138 00:05:50,653 –> 00:05:53,613 kalen: I read the New York Times Covered to cover every morning.
152 00:06:21,540 –> 00:06:22,540 153 00:06:22,573 –> 00:06:28,573 kalen: Uh, So what? what? Uh? What did you talk to Yssie about today? Man, y, I saw his post
154 00:06:29,053 –> 00:06:31,613 kalen: on the open source situation. I,
155 00:06:33,213 –> 00:06:36,653 kalen: I, um. I agreed with a lot of it. I was happy that he said a lot of stuff he said.
156 00:06:37,300 –> 00:06:38,300 157 00:06:37,933 –> 00:06:39,453 kalen: But what did you guys rant about?
158 00:06:38,080 –> 00:06:43,840 brent_peterson: so I think W. we. We tried to dig into what is the issue here? Um, and it’s
159 00:06:44,000 –> 00:06:47,920 brent_peterson: really not. It’s not about forking or not forking right, and I didn’t make
160 00:06:48,000 –> 00:06:52,320 brent_peterson: the joke about Uh, my my neighbor, as I was growing up. Uh, I grew up in
161 00:06:52,400 –> 00:06:57,520 brent_peterson: Golden valley, Minnesota, and my neighbor had a uh, at a had like a thirty
162 00:06:57,760 –> 00:07:03,120 brent_peterson: two Cadillac, this giant car, and he got personalized license plates on the
163 00:07:03,200 –> 00:07:05,040 brent_peterson: car that said four â–q two.
164 00:07:05,953 –> 00:07:06,953 165 00:07:06,800 –> 00:07:13,200 brent_peterson: Um, and I’m sure it had nothing to do with Uh, forking a Github repository
166 00:07:13,360 –> 00:07:16,240 brent_peterson: or any sort of repository. Uh, because it was like
167 00:07:16,073 –> 00:07:17,073 kalen: You never know.
168 00:07:16,400 –> 00:07:18,960 brent_peterson: this is a. This is in the late seventies, anyways,
169 00:07:19,373 –> 00:07:25,213 kalen: I mean, maybe William is seventy four years old and he just is, is aged very well,
170 00:07:23,920 –> 00:07:29,440 brent_peterson: y. He, he carries it very well anyway, so I don’t think that this is a. The.
171 00:07:29,600 –> 00:07:34,000 brent_peterson: The issue here is not about forking or not forking. The issue is about
172 00:07:34,320 –> 00:07:36,880 brent_peterson: transparency and communication from Adobe.
173 00:07:38,033 –> 00:07:39,033 174 00:07:38,560 –> 00:07:44,320 brent_peterson: And the second issue then is about the Magento Association and how much can
175 00:07:44,260 –> 00:07:45,260 brent_peterson: they share?
176 00:07:46,320 –> 00:07:50,160 brent_peterson: How much control do they have? And what do people think they can do
177 00:07:50,753 –> 00:07:51,753 178 00:07:52,973 –> 00:07:57,453 kalen: Yeah, I think it’s all. Yeah, there is kind of. It’s all kind of bundled together and
179 00:07:57,533 –> 00:08:03,213 kalen: it’ weird. I feel like even talking right. You’re in a doobe partner, right, I
180 00:08:03,373 –> 00:08:07,773 kalen: assume, unless you’ve gotten pulled from the partner program for making tons of
181 00:08:07,853 –> 00:08:11,133 kalen: horrible dad jokes, which I assume could happen at any point.
198 00:08:54,960 –> 00:08:58,720 brent_peterson: Yeah. but what is the issue here? I think the issue is pretty clear that and
199 00:08:58,800 –> 00:08:59,840 brent_peterson: they stated it right.
200 00:09:01,440 –> 00:09:08,160 brent_peterson: They, this so again. This makes for a lot of unknown variables. There is no
201 00:09:08,320 –> 00:09:11,360 brent_peterson: public road map from a gentle open source and this has
202 00:09:11,153 –> 00:09:12,153 203 00:09:11,600 –> 00:09:12,640 brent_peterson: left a lot of the community
204 00:09:13,760 –> 00:09:18,320 brent_peterson: who believe in the monolith who believe in the model is a valid approach to
205 00:09:18,400 –> 00:09:21,840 brent_peterson: many cases feeling uneasy about the future in Ma Geno,
206 00:09:22,433 –> 00:09:23,433 207 00:09:23,420 –> 00:09:24,420 brent_peterson: So I think
208 00:09:24,033 –> 00:09:25,033 209 00:09:25,040 –> 00:09:28,880 brent_peterson: it, and I don’t think it’s about forking or not forking. It’s not really
210 00:09:29,200 –> 00:09:35,520 brent_peterson: about about monolith or splitting up into micro services. It really is about
211 00:09:36,240 –> 00:09:40,480 brent_peterson: helping people understand where the open sources where the open source of
212 00:09:40,420 –> 00:09:41,420 brent_peterson: magenta is going.
213 00:09:42,733 –> 00:09:47,053 kalen: right, right and a, and I just feel like, Um,
214 00:09:49,533 –> 00:09:54,013 kalen: you know I, you know I’m I’m a little bit further from the details these days. As far
215 00:09:54,173 –> 00:09:59,853 kalen: as what exactly they’re introducing with the micros, and how that’s differing from
216 00:10:00,093 –> 00:10:05,293 kalen: the the traditional kind of moth. I bundle together lots of different things under
217 00:10:05,533 –> 00:10:11,373 kalen: this category of like community unrest, like the the, The people that have been
218 00:10:11,693 –> 00:10:16,733 kalen: complaining about con, contributing the people that have posted an issue to Gith hub
219 00:10:16,973 –> 00:10:22,333 kalen: and they get no response And then ninety days later the issue gets auto closed,
220 00:10:22,653 –> 00:10:27,293 kalen: right, Or you know, Uh, Jacob Winkler has posted a lot about stuff he’s contributed
221 00:10:27,453 –> 00:10:31,453 kalen: and it just gets. it. just sits there. I talked to Damie and Retzinger about that
222 00:10:31,533 –> 00:10:37,773 kalen: yesterday, Lukash, uh, uh. What’s his face? that? Um, uh, he’s going to get mad of me
223 00:10:37,853 –> 00:10:43,053 kalen: for that that had similar issues. It’s just like there’s all this stuff where there’s
224 00:10:43,133 –> 00:10:47,053 kalen: all this energy of the com. Like when I said something to me, said like there’s this
225 00:10:47,133 –> 00:10:52,573 kalen: energy and if it’s not sort of harnessed it gets frustrated And that’s what I see
226 00:10:52,813 –> 00:10:56,733 kalen: from. Like The Twenty thousand foot view is like there’s people waiting around on P.
227 00:10:56,893 –> 00:11:02,893 kalen: Rs. there’s people waiting around for architectural direction. There’s just all this
228 00:11:03,133 –> 00:11:08,733 kalen: and it’s just like Hey, let’s start a dialogue with a dooby. What does that even mean
229 00:11:09,133 –> 00:11:14,413 kalen: start a dialogue like I want. like I want to see people just do stuff you know, Like
230 00:11:14,893 –> 00:11:19,293 kalen: William came out with Hooa, and everybody loves it. He reinvented the front end.
231 00:11:19,853 –> 00:11:25,053 kalen: Everybody loves it right. it’s it’s he’s doing stuff. He’s actually making stuff
232 00:11:25,293 –> 00:11:30,253 kalen: happen independently. I feel like that’s kind of the spir. I’m on a rant here. I’m on
233 00:11:30,333 –> 00:11:31,773 kalen: a full on rent. Um,
234 00:11:32,813 –> 00:11:37,293 kalen: anyways, I feel like that’s kind of the spirit of Magento is that we just go out and
235 00:11:37,373 –> 00:11:42,093 kalen: we do stuff, whether that’s in the form of a a module that we create and contribute
236 00:11:42,333 –> 00:11:48,573 kalen: or whatever. we just do stuff. And we don’t sit around waiting for approval from
237 00:11:48,733 –> 00:11:54,093 kalen: anybody, and I feel like we’ve just been sitting around waiting for approvals. You
238 00:11:54,173 –> 00:11:58,653 kalen: know now, I, that’s just my. I could be completely wrong about that ’cause I’m not
239 00:11:58,813 –> 00:12:01,213 kalen: very on the ground connected all this stuff
240 00:12:02,720 –> 00:12:06,640 brent_peterson: Yeah, I think they’re I. you’re. You’re very correct in saying that people
241 00:12:06,880 –> 00:12:08,560 brent_peterson: are sitting around waiting for
242 00:12:09,600 –> 00:12:13,200 brent_peterson: fixes to get put in and I think that uh
243 00:12:14,320 –> 00:12:19,680 brent_peterson: that Adobe has definitely missed the boat in terms of making sure that from
244 00:12:19,760 –> 00:12:23,680 brent_peterson: the community side they’re keeping up with what’s happening on those on
245 00:12:23,760 –> 00:12:26,480 brent_peterson: those poll requests and and those fixes, because they are
247 00:12:26,640 –> 00:12:32,240 brent_peterson: missing out on a huge amount of potential bugs that are in the code already
248 00:12:32,480 –> 00:12:34,240 brent_peterson: and that are getting fixed And it’s a.
249 00:12:34,033 –> 00:12:35,033 250 00:12:34,480 –> 00:12:38,240 brent_peterson: It’s a Mi. You know thousands of coders that are out there helping that. Um.
251 00:12:38,033 –> 00:12:39,033 252 00:12:39,440 –> 00:12:42,960 brent_peterson: So that’s one issue. The other issue that you brought up is what is the road
253 00:12:43,120 –> 00:12:47,200 brent_peterson: map of Magento? Um. I think there’s sort of a road map for the commerce
254 00:12:47,360 –> 00:12:51,200 brent_peterson: version of it, but it’s not. It hasn’t been published since Say twenty
255 00:12:51,520 –> 00:12:56,240 brent_peterson: nineteen, Uh, Since the last time we had a live conference. Um, I don’t know
256 00:12:56,400 –> 00:13:00,640 brent_peterson: if they’ve actually put out at any like Meet Me Genento, India, or any like
257 00:13:00,640 –> 00:13:04,720 brent_peterson: this. Meet me Gentle Poland, Did anybody from a doobe show up for the
258 00:13:04,720 –> 00:13:07,360 brent_peterson: virtual part of it? I haven’t seen the whole conference yet,
259 00:13:08,260 –> 00:13:09,260 brent_peterson: but did
260 00:13:08,653 –> 00:13:12,893 kalen: yeah, I know, I just I just know they said that they had a travel restriction so as
261 00:13:12,973 –> 00:13:16,333 kalen: far as actually going, nobody actually went there in person.
262 00:13:17,040 –> 00:13:21,680 brent_peterson: yeah. So, um, you know that’s that be? I think, just helping us to
263 00:13:21,700 –> 00:13:22,700 264 00:13:23,440 –> 00:13:28,240 brent_peterson: where we’re going the last time I saw Anton Cririll, before he left Magento.
265 00:13:28,880 –> 00:13:35,280 brent_peterson: he gave a speech at Meet Magento Germany about Magenta moving to isolated
266 00:13:35,220 –> 00:13:36,220 267 00:13:36,593 –> 00:13:37,593 268 00:13:37,360 –> 00:13:41,840 brent_peterson: And I’m okay with that. And the reason is is you can still put those
269 00:13:42,000 –> 00:13:47,760 brent_peterson: isolated services together as a monoliphs, and and deploy it now. Yes and I
270 00:13:48,000 –> 00:13:52,800 brent_peterson: had the conversation this morning about. Does that mean? Uh, you’re going to
271 00:13:52,880 –> 00:13:57,040 brent_peterson: have to use something like G, P, r, S, or some. He. He had a technical term
272 00:13:57,200 –> 00:14:01,120 brent_peterson: that have already forgotten. Um. they’re They’re like a graphq, â–, type of
273 00:14:01,200 –> 00:14:05,120 brent_peterson: interface that’s internal that binds those services together And is that
274 00:14:05,360 –> 00:14:08,560 brent_peterson: going to be slower than not binding them together? I don’t know who. I don’t
275 00:14:08,720 –> 00:14:13,600 brent_peterson: care. because if it isn’t that, doobe’s probably going to fix it. So is it
277 00:14:13,553 –> 00:14:14,553 278 00:14:14,000 –> 00:14:17,840 brent_peterson: monolither really an issue or not? I don’t know. I think what the issue is
279 00:14:18,160 –> 00:14:23,920 brent_peterson: is like what they’ve done with Uh, with search. they’ve deprecated uh, a Mi
280 00:14:24,160 –> 00:14:29,360 brent_peterson: sequel search in favor of elastic search. without giving the option of
281 00:14:29,520 –> 00:14:33,680 brent_peterson: having just a regular. Uh, my sequel search, and
282 00:14:33,313 –> 00:14:34,313 283 00:14:33,920 –> 00:14:37,360 brent_peterson: jeeze, I know that everybody loves my sequel search. They love the fact
284 00:14:37,073 –> 00:14:38,073 285 00:14:37,520 –> 00:14:41,120 brent_peterson: that as you search for anything, you bring everything up on the database.
286 00:14:41,393 –> 00:14:42,393 287 00:14:42,580 –> 00:14:43,580 brent_peterson: What could be better
288 00:14:42,993 –> 00:14:43,993 289 00:14:43,680 –> 00:14:47,040 brent_peterson: than if you had a thousand things? And no matter what you search for, you
290 00:14:47,200 –> 00:14:49,840 brent_peterson: always get a thousand results. See, I’m
291 00:14:49,553 –> 00:14:50,553 292 00:14:50,000 –> 00:14:52,000 brent_peterson: being sarcastic. Now you’re not even laughing,
293 00:14:52,573 –> 00:14:56,013 kalen: I. I didn’t even catch that because all I was thinking about was going into my next
294 00:14:55,833 –> 00:14:56,833 295 00:14:57,840 –> 00:15:02,160 brent_peterson: So what you’re saying is what I hear you saying. Now is you’re not actually
296 00:15:02,400 –> 00:15:03,760 brent_peterson: listening to me? You’re
297 00:15:03,773 –> 00:15:05,213 kalen: I. I let me,
298 00:15:03,920 –> 00:15:05,920 brent_peterson: just thinking about what you’re going to say next.
299 00:15:06,653 –> 00:15:10,733 kalen: you know I did make that mistake, but let me take a step back. Let me take a step
300 00:15:10,893 –> 00:15:16,733 kalen: back. And what you said was there is a thousand things in the database and every se
301 00:15:16,973 –> 00:15:20,973 kalen: â–query returns you without. So you’re saying My sequel is horrendous for research. Is
302 00:15:20,953 –> 00:15:21,953 kalen: what you trying to say?
303 00:15:21,360 –> 00:15:25,360 brent_peterson: It sucks. but at least it works at the some degree, and it gives somebody
304 00:15:25,600 –> 00:15:28,320 brent_peterson: that basic option if they want to. You know that the issue
345 00:18:09,053 –> 00:18:13,293 kalen: proof will be in the pudding. That’s another thing. the I said on the on the panel
346 00:18:13,693 –> 00:18:16,413 kalen: which I really enjoyed. It was very, very interesting.
347 00:18:18,673 –> 00:18:19,673 348 00:18:19,200 –> 00:18:23,200 brent_peterson: No, I think that, Uh that. I mean, I think that William Willm has started
349 00:18:23,440 –> 00:18:27,520 brent_peterson: something that that has been that has been lacking in our community. Um, if
350 00:18:27,680 –> 00:18:32,400 brent_peterson: we look back at what happened when Ebay bought Magento, it took about three
351 00:18:32,420 –> 00:18:33,420 brent_peterson: years for
352 00:18:34,320 –> 00:18:40,880 brent_peterson: for them to realize that there is a strong underpinning of public sentiment
353 00:18:41,713 –> 00:18:42,713 354 00:18:42,560 –> 00:18:48,240 brent_peterson: that that evolved around Magento and Um. There was a number of people that
355 00:18:48,400 –> 00:18:53,360 brent_peterson: got invited to the imagined conference, and uh, Um and Um, you know they.
356 00:18:53,520 –> 00:18:57,920 brent_peterson: re. They sort of reinvigorated the community and then I think the next year
357 00:18:58,080 –> 00:19:00,320 brent_peterson: they sold they sold it. Um,
359 00:19:03,200 –> 00:19:06,800 brent_peterson: when uh? you know, I think when Uh, Marco of Veltic took over, then there
360 00:19:06,880 –> 00:19:11,440 brent_peterson: was this recom commitment to the Mu to the community. I’m interested in
361 00:19:11,600 –> 00:19:17,600 brent_peterson: learning Uh, from people that that were involved in say, uh, a M, a patache
362 00:19:17,760 –> 00:19:21,840 brent_peterson: sling or one of the other open source platforms that they have. Uh, what
363 00:19:22,080 –> 00:19:24,800 brent_peterson: what that community looks like? And I know it’s a different
364 00:19:24,433 –> 00:19:25,433 365 00:19:24,960 –> 00:19:30,000 brent_peterson: type of community. I think a M’s on Java. Um, and it’s a little bit more
366 00:19:30,080 –> 00:19:31,200 brent_peterson: mature maybe than
367 00:19:30,833 –> 00:19:31,833 368 00:19:31,360 –> 00:19:35,280 brent_peterson: Magento, But it’d be interesting to see what what’s happened to those people
369 00:19:36,080 –> 00:19:39,360 brent_peterson: and do. does. Uh. does a doobe still listen to them?
370 00:19:40,973 –> 00:19:46,573 kalen: Yeah, that’s a good question. I think I want to say, Cordova, or Phone Gap, or one of
371 00:19:46,653 –> 00:19:51,533 kalen: those was also one of the bigger open source projects that had been acquired, and I
372 00:19:51,613 –> 00:19:56,733 kalen: was always curious about the same thing. You know how, how how have things gone with
373 00:19:56,813 –> 00:19:59,293 kalen: some of these other open source communities?
374 00:19:59,873 –> 00:20:00,873 375 00:20:01,613 –> 00:20:06,973 kalen: but I don’t know. I think. probably the fact that we don’t already know like they’re
376 00:20:07,133 –> 00:20:11,293 kalen: not there. There isn’t like a druple community out there. There isn’t a typo three
377 00:20:11,153 –> 00:20:12,153 378 00:20:11,920 –> 00:20:13,280 brent_peterson: Well, there is a Dple community.
379 00:20:12,173 –> 00:20:16,493 kalen: out there. There’s a no. no, No, No, but I’m saying Under Adobe
380 00:20:16,720 –> 00:20:18,080 brent_peterson: Oh, right. okay, got it.
381 00:20:16,973 –> 00:20:22,733 kalen: Like there there, you know there isn’t there. Aren’t one of these kind of bigger open
382 00:20:23,053 –> 00:20:25,293 kalen: source communities that you think of immediately,
383 00:20:26,733 –> 00:20:31,213 kalen: So yes, I mean, I, I don’t really know. And then, of course you know more and more
384 00:20:31,373 –> 00:20:35,933 kalen: people are leaving every day, right like Matt. A C was there for a while and he was
385 00:20:36,093 –> 00:20:44,493 kalen: rara open source. Then he was gone and bed bargs, of course is, uh, is uh now at uh,
386 00:20:45,693 –> 00:20:47,453 kalen: not sp, uh, shopware, right,
387 00:20:47,620 –> 00:20:48,620 brent_peterson: not at Spriker.
388 00:20:48,573 –> 00:20:54,333 kalen: um, I was going to say spriker, um, um, uh, Geto moved to Spriker, right,
389 00:20:54,260 –> 00:20:55,260 390 00:20:54,833 –> 00:20:55,833 391 00:20:56,573 –> 00:21:02,653 kalen: So you know, um, Yeah, there’s just this like, Uh, You know a lot of people like
392 00:21:02,973 –> 00:21:09,453 kalen: Anton’s at Word Press at W, P engine, right, Pyoter is at. Is it Uh, w P,
393 00:21:09,600 –> 00:21:11,440 brent_peterson: I thought he’ at Big commerce. Yeah,
394 00:21:09,693 –> 00:21:13,213 kalen: engine, big Haer, for Yeah, first it was W P, and then big
395 00:21:13,140 –> 00:21:14,140 396 00:21:13,293 –> 00:21:14,413 kalen: commerce. Right, So it’s like
397 00:21:15,180 –> 00:21:16,180 brent_peterson: Yeah, I think
399 00:21:16,000 –> 00:21:19,120 brent_peterson: that you know, and when they get so large that those people are going to
400 00:21:19,120 –> 00:21:24,400 brent_peterson: come and go, And that’s just that’s the reality of what it is. And uh, you
401 00:21:24,480 –> 00:21:29,520 brent_peterson: know. The. The. I think the the key point there is that the community can’t
402 00:21:29,760 –> 00:21:36,560 brent_peterson: be made up of any one person or group of people at Adobe Slash Magento, And
403 00:21:36,720 –> 00:21:40,960 brent_peterson: the community never was made up of core people at Magento. The community
404 00:21:40,753 –> 00:21:41,753 405 00:21:41,360 –> 00:21:43,680 brent_peterson: was made up of our community, and if you
406 00:21:43,233 –> 00:21:44,233 407 00:21:43,760 –> 00:21:48,880 brent_peterson: look all the way back to that first imagin conference, Um, it was. you know,
408 00:21:48,960 –> 00:21:51,920 brent_peterson: a whole bunch of people from all over the world that made up that community,
409 00:21:52,593 –> 00:21:53,593 410 00:21:53,680 –> 00:21:56,080 brent_peterson: Germans and French people, and a few Americans.
411 00:21:56,673 –> 00:21:57,673 412 00:21:57,280 –> 00:22:02,400 brent_peterson: Um. That kind of that that start started there. or at least we the some of
413 00:22:02,480 –> 00:22:07,200 brent_peterson: the core people in that community, then, Um. and that that’s just continue
414 00:22:07,680 –> 00:22:09,840 brent_peterson: to change and and grow and
415 00:22:11,040 –> 00:22:12,800 brent_peterson: ebb and flow. Um, and
416 00:22:12,433 –> 00:22:13,433 417 00:22:12,960 –> 00:22:16,560 brent_peterson: people come and go and and join and leave and are interested and not
418 00:22:16,460 –> 00:22:17,460 419 00:22:18,160 –> 00:22:22,320 brent_peterson: But I think that’s that’s the key part of it and that’s where I think that’s
420 00:22:22,400 –> 00:22:29,600 brent_peterson: where Willm and Vn and and the team at Um at Whofa have have tapped into.
421 00:22:30,720 –> 00:22:33,840 brent_peterson: and now this open letter now has spurred something
422 00:22:34,880 –> 00:22:40,000 brent_peterson: that is, is causing people to at least raise their eyebrows. Wake up, you
425 00:22:41,520 –> 00:22:43,920 brent_peterson: and and take some notice. and something iss happening.
426 00:22:45,613 –> 00:22:50,173 kalen: Yeah, yeah, I mean, I’m even feeling re energized, you know, and and I, you know,
427 00:22:50,493 –> 00:22:54,653 kalen: I’ve got other stuff I’m starting to focus on. I always feel guilty that I, I don’t
428 00:22:55,293 –> 00:23:01,453 kalen: do. you know, Uh, do more for the association and different things like that. And um,
429 00:23:02,253 –> 00:23:07,213 kalen: you know I, I, I’ve drift. My interests have drifted, you know, as like a lot of
430 00:23:07,293 –> 00:23:13,693 kalen: people do. Um, but yeah, this whole thing has kind of got me all excited and
431 00:23:13,853 –> 00:23:15,053 kalen: bothered, you know,
432 00:23:16,093 –> 00:23:21,453 kalen: and got me you know, thinking about things and kind of thinking back to like. What is
433 00:23:21,613 –> 00:23:27,213 kalen: that original Magento community spirit that’s somehow being expressed? Um. here,
434 00:23:28,333 –> 00:23:30,813 kalen: Um, you know, a little bit of a rebellious
435 00:23:32,253 –> 00:23:36,493 kalen: spirit. It, or at least it kind of an independent. You know, there’s a real
436 00:23:36,573 –> 00:23:40,493 kalen: independent streak in the Magento community you know, and I think.
437 00:23:39,680 –> 00:23:44,400 brent_peterson: Yeah, and I think, Uh, you know Yov and and and Roy and Bob were all
438 00:23:45,520 –> 00:23:50,000 brent_peterson: very independent minded people who promoted that culture in our community.
439 00:23:50,380 –> 00:23:51,380 brent_peterson: And really
440 00:23:51,033 –> 00:23:52,033 441 00:23:51,680 –> 00:23:56,240 brent_peterson: the the key was that they promoted innovation that happened in it. And I
442 00:23:56,320 –> 00:24:00,400 brent_peterson: think the one thing that we are, we are sorely missing in Gentle
443 00:24:00,640 –> 00:24:06,000 brent_peterson: specifically is that drive from leadership and else, just say, leadership is
444 00:24:06,000 –> 00:24:10,080 brent_peterson: at the Adobe level here that drive to innovate and have the community
445 00:24:10,560 –> 00:24:14,880 brent_peterson: innovate, and the frustrations that you mentioned earlier around, maybe and
447 00:24:17,300 –> 00:24:18,300 448 00:24:19,040 –> 00:24:24,880 brent_peterson: If you can’t get a poll request done and looked at for a error, how what is
449 00:24:24,960 –> 00:24:28,720 brent_peterson: your chances of getting a poll request for something that is contributing
450 00:24:28,960 –> 00:24:33,200 brent_peterson: that is actually innovative to Magento rather than just fixing something?
452 00:24:36,173 –> 00:24:40,333 kalen: Yeah, totally. And and I don’t know, I don’t know what the realities are on the
453 00:24:40,333 –> 00:24:44,493 kalen: ground. I’m sure that they’ve got a a tough work load Is probably hard to manage all
454 00:24:44,653 –> 00:24:49,053 kalen: these issues and things that are coming in. There’s probably a lot of noise coming
455 00:24:48,753 –> 00:24:49,753 456 00:24:50,653 –> 00:24:56,893 kalen: so it’s probably a hard tricky thing to solve. But I don’t know. I just feel like if
457 00:24:57,053 –> 00:25:03,213 kalen: the community sort of just did their own fork, I kind of just feel like it would. It
458 00:25:03,293 –> 00:25:07,773 kalen: would just I want to believe that it would work better. And and maybe that’s naive?
459 00:25:08,013 –> 00:25:13,053 kalen: you know, maybe at this scale that’s completely naive. I don’t know. but I, I’m like,
460 00:25:13,773 –> 00:25:18,973 kalen: let’s do it. Let’s you know, let’s let’s see what this thing would be. You know.
461 00:25:20,000 –> 00:25:24,880 brent_peterson: Yeah, I’m not. I’m not uh. convinced on forking yet, Um. I, um. I, I would
462 00:25:25,120 –> 00:25:29,040 brent_peterson: like to have. I would like to have Adobe energized a little bit more
463 00:25:29,280 –> 00:25:35,440 brent_peterson: internally to kind of see some value in what the community can do, Um, and I
464 00:25:35,520 –> 00:25:38,320 brent_peterson: know that there’s an answer for whatever is out there,
465 00:25:39,360 –> 00:25:43,440 brent_peterson: Um to fix. And I think you know the reality too. Is that? what? what? I
466 00:25:43,520 –> 00:25:48,720 brent_peterson: don’t remember? What year they started publishing Um. G, the code on Github.
467 00:25:49,600 –> 00:25:53,840 brent_peterson: It wasn’t that long ago that we couldn’t even contribute to bug fixes. That
468 00:25:53,920 –> 00:25:56,160 brent_peterson: you had to email somebody and email your patch.
469 00:25:55,753 –> 00:25:56,753 470 00:25:56,400 –> 00:25:57,840 brent_peterson: and hopefully it got looked at.
471 00:25:58,353 –> 00:25:59,353 472 00:25:58,880 –> 00:26:03,440 brent_peterson: You know that that we where it’s been it’s It’s relatively new that we could
473 00:26:03,600 –> 00:26:09,360 brent_peterson: actually co. We could, we could do a Poquest and we could uh offer that as a
474 00:26:09,020 –> 00:26:10,020 475 00:26:10,713 –> 00:26:11,713 476 00:26:11,520 –> 00:26:15,840 brent_peterson: I think that they just need to make pay some attention to it, and you know
477 00:26:16,160 –> 00:26:19,840 brent_peterson: just really what it comes back down to, though is just communication and
478 00:26:20,000 –> 00:26:23,120 brent_peterson: transparency. If they were to come out and say hey, we don’t have enough
479 00:26:23,280 –> 00:26:26,400 brent_peterson: people to do this. We don’t have enough people to actually look at all these
480 00:26:26,560 –> 00:26:27,680 brent_peterson: bugs that you’re putting in.
481 00:26:28,573 –> 00:26:33,933 kalen: right, right. like people have asked. like, okay, Wh, What exactly these associations
482 00:26:34,093 –> 00:26:38,973 kalen: roll with open source? Is the association doing events only? are they going to be
483 00:26:39,293 –> 00:26:43,853 kalen: somehow, you know, in charge of open source. And then, like I think, it was said in
484 00:26:43,933 –> 00:26:48,253 kalen: the panel yesterday that like a dialogue was started with a doobe on the topic,
485 00:26:48,653 –> 00:26:52,973 kalen: right, What exactly does that mean that a dialogue was started like you’re saying
486 00:26:53,213 –> 00:26:58,973 kalen: Transparency. like. Okay, Who’s the person that is in charge of this when? like?
487 00:26:59,453 –> 00:27:05,213 kalen: like? When was the issue raised? How much time has passed? When when are we going to
488 00:27:05,293 –> 00:27:09,933 kalen: get an answer? You know, so I guess you’re I think you’re right From that perspective
489 00:27:10,093 –> 00:27:16,333 kalen: Is Is is like. If we could get transparency, Um, that would, that would be great and
490 00:27:16,413 –> 00:27:21,773 kalen: I don’t. I don’t think anybody there is like a bad guy like. I just think I don’t
491 00:27:21,853 –> 00:27:25,613 kalen: know. They probably have their own internal meetings and internal policies and
492 00:27:25,773 –> 00:27:31,133 kalen: they’re just doing their job. You know, But something is amiss
493 00:27:32,973 –> 00:27:40,333 kalen: so as something’s not aligned, so like, how can we? I don’t know how. I don’t know.
507 00:28:22,880 –> 00:28:26,400 brent_peterson: that that’s just not going to happen. So you know, I don’t know if that’s
508 00:28:26,560 –> 00:28:30,320 brent_peterson: goingnna get any better, and I don’t know why it would be any better in the
509 00:28:30,400 –> 00:28:34,000 brent_peterson: in A. in this Mag, major open source community alliance.
510 00:28:35,040 –> 00:28:39,200 brent_peterson: They were able to make that letter happen quickly because they only involved
511 00:28:39,360 –> 00:28:43,760 brent_peterson: the people that were there right. So, if we were to say and I, you know,
512 00:28:43,840 –> 00:28:46,880 brent_peterson: like I didn’t know. Apparently that letter was floating around for a week.
513 00:28:48,080 –> 00:28:54,000 brent_peterson: Um, so it was it was seen by a few people, which I can understand. But if
514 00:28:54,160 –> 00:28:58,080 brent_peterson: you were now to say okay, I want to have everybody see it. Okay. Well now
515 00:28:58,240 –> 00:28:59,840 brent_peterson: everybody’s going to have a different opinion,
516 00:29:00,193 –> 00:29:01,193 517 00:29:00,880 –> 00:29:05,440 brent_peterson: And and uh, suddenly you get mired down in in, Um,
518 00:29:06,480 –> 00:29:10,000 brent_peterson: in a whole bunch of you know what, not so good
519 00:29:09,533 –> 00:29:10,813 kalen: a whole bunch of moarchy.
520 00:29:11,120 –> 00:29:13,920 brent_peterson: molchy. That’s a great word. Thank you for that, Um,
521 00:29:15,440 –> 00:29:20,640 brent_peterson: and that moarchy. Then just keeps us, keeps our feet stuck and we can’t move
522 00:29:20,880 –> 00:29:24,160 brent_peterson: because we’re waiting to get out of this moarchy, where
523 00:29:24,113 –> 00:29:25,113 kalen: Yeah, yeah, I mean
524 00:29:24,480 –> 00:29:28,000 brent_peterson: if if you’ more, if you’re smaller and more agile, you can make those
525 00:29:28,240 –> 00:29:30,880 brent_peterson: decisions quickly and go forward. It’s kinda like
526 00:29:30,633 –> 00:29:31,633 527 00:29:31,360 –> 00:29:36,160 brent_peterson: it’s kinda like you know as a leader you need to make those decision. You
528 00:29:36,240 –> 00:29:40,400 brent_peterson: have to do it sometimes unilaterally, Uh, because you need to make ‘
529 00:29:40,220 –> 00:29:41,220 530 00:29:42,000 –> 00:29:47,040 brent_peterson: and as you know as somebody that is an entrepreneur, then that is part of
531 00:29:47,200 –> 00:29:50,320 brent_peterson: the culture. But if you’re looking at something where it’s a bigger
532 00:29:50,560 –> 00:29:54,720 brent_peterson: organization like Adobe or like Smith Buckland, and you have to follow a
533 00:29:54,800 –> 00:29:59,600 brent_peterson: whole set of rules, and uh, you have to go through every single step and
534 00:29:59,680 –> 00:30:01,920 brent_peterson: whoop, and there is no room
535 00:30:03,200 –> 00:30:05,520 brent_peterson: for for pushing the envelope, Because
536 00:30:06,340 –> 00:30:07,340 537 00:30:06,433 –> 00:30:07,433 538 00:30:07,040 –> 00:30:10,320 brent_peterson: will we do? Well, I guess you know what we really need here is Elon Musk,
539 00:30:12,173 –> 00:30:13,773 kalen: that’s what it comes back to.
540 00:30:12,960 –> 00:30:16,160 brent_peterson: He would say he would save Ma Gentta, open source.
541 00:30:16,973 –> 00:30:25,293 kalen: I mean, I think Willm is the Elon musk. You know, Um, which um, you know. I think you
542 00:30:25,193 –> 00:30:26,193 kalen: know that you need
543 00:30:27,133 –> 00:30:31,453 kalen: Um. I, I’m a big believer in what individuals can do right like you, you do through
544 00:30:31,613 –> 00:30:37,133 kalen: out the analogy of of Um, socialism, or kind of collectivism, which is kind of
545 00:30:37,373 –> 00:30:39,053 kalen: contrasted against kind of
546 00:30:40,093 –> 00:30:44,333 kalen: individual. What? what an individual or a small group of individuals can do right? I
547 00:30:44,413 –> 00:30:49,133 kalen: mean, I think of Laravelle, started by Taus, one guy, Taylor Otwell, you know, And
548 00:30:49,053 –> 00:30:55,053 kalen: and it’s it’s this huge ecosystem that’s grown, but he’s continued as the kind of B D
549 00:30:55,133 –> 00:31:00,893 kalen: F. â–l, You know the sort of benev benevolent dictator for life. And and it’s it’s
551 00:31:05,293 –> 00:31:07,373 kalen: whereas Magento is kind of Um,
552 00:31:08,413 –> 00:31:10,253 kalen: stagnated in in some ways,
553 00:31:11,693 –> 00:31:16,653 kalen: and anyway, I, you know, I just think that and I and I know he probably hates it
554 00:31:16,733 –> 00:31:22,093 kalen: every time I. I sort of make a big deal out of him individually. Um, because he’s
555 00:31:22,253 –> 00:31:27,293 kalen: trying to build a uh team and kind of, I think catalyze kind of a broader movement
556 00:31:27,613 –> 00:31:29,453 kalen: you know, but um,
557 00:31:30,493 –> 00:31:35,293 kalen: yeah, man, I mean, you know I, I think one person can can build something you know.
558 00:31:35,533 –> 00:31:39,773 kalen: Incredible. It’s like it’s like the mythical Man month. you know, I’m sure Doobe’s
559 00:31:39,853 –> 00:31:45,373 kalen: throwing tons of resources at various things. I’m sure if you looked at their burn
560 00:31:45,613 –> 00:31:51,293 kalen: charts and their budgets, they would be significant. But that doesn’t always mean
561 00:31:51,533 –> 00:31:56,813 kalen: that you know things are getting done And and I know that people on the association
562 00:31:56,973 –> 00:32:03,133 kalen: have put in a ton of effort a ton of time, a ton of blood tears. I just you know,
563 00:32:03,533 –> 00:32:09,053 kalen: that doesn’t always guarantee like results right. Sometimes one person or a small
564 00:32:09,293 –> 00:32:15,773 kalen: group of people can get stuff done super fast, right on on a on a shoes string
565 00:32:15,673 –> 00:32:16,673 566 00:32:18,733 –> 00:32:23,613 kalen: whereas the bigger incumbent right can spend a lot of money. Really a lot of time and
567 00:32:23,853 –> 00:32:26,733 kalen: not really go as fast. You
568 00:32:27,680 –> 00:32:30,720 brent_peterson: Yeah, no, I think you, you hit it there and there’ two sides of that whole
569 00:32:30,960 –> 00:32:36,160 brent_peterson: thing about about collective collectivism. There is a broad community that
570 00:32:36,320 –> 00:32:41,920 brent_peterson: can support a A. a. a, Um, a dream of somebody. and that that broad
571 00:32:42,160 –> 00:32:46,160 brent_peterson: community it kind come together in the terms of Magento and fix a whole
572 00:32:46,240 –> 00:32:51,360 brent_peterson: bunch of bugs. Right, uh, but if that, but what that broad community can’t
573 00:32:51,520 –> 00:32:52,800 brent_peterson: do as a community
574 00:32:53,700 –> 00:32:54,700 575 00:32:55,360 –> 00:33:00,560 brent_peterson: C is is always agree on what is the next best thing that we. What is the
576 00:33:00,640 –> 00:33:06,400 brent_peterson: next big thing that we should do for our community to move us forward. Um,
577 00:33:06,640 –> 00:33:09,040 brent_peterson: because you are always going to have somebody that is more
578 00:33:10,400 –> 00:33:14,400 brent_peterson: all, used a word conservative and liberal. Uh, not in the political sense,
579 00:33:14,640 –> 00:33:17,520 brent_peterson: but just if you think about it, the people would like. Some people in our
580 00:33:17,600 –> 00:33:20,560 brent_peterson: community would like it to stay the way it has been, and some people would
581 00:33:20,720 –> 00:33:23,680 brent_peterson: like to grow into new things. And there’s new people coming to the community
582 00:33:24,080 –> 00:33:27,680 brent_peterson: that know. Don’t care about what happened in Magenta One. they, they’re
583 00:33:27,760 –> 00:33:30,560 brent_peterson: they’re in. They’re involved in a genento, too. Uh,
585 00:33:30,720 –> 00:33:34,080 brent_peterson: and they would like to see that. So there’s all kinds of opposing views that
586 00:33:34,160 –> 00:33:38,880 brent_peterson: are happening. So the two sides are are the broad community, Help support it
587 00:33:39,200 –> 00:33:44,080 brent_peterson: and maintain it, and and make sure that we’re we’re growing. In a flat
588 00:33:44,400 –> 00:33:47,520 brent_peterson: sense. You know we’re growing. but it’s it’s really just maintaining
589 00:33:47,760 –> 00:33:51,840 brent_peterson: something. Then there’s the little people that are poking things at it that
590 00:33:51,920 –> 00:33:54,720 brent_peterson: are lighting fighters here and there, like the Hofa theme,
591 00:33:55,153 –> 00:33:56,153 592 00:33:55,680 –> 00:33:59,600 brent_peterson: And those people are the ones that are sticking out that are making things
610 00:34:57,200 –> 00:35:00,720 brent_peterson: Maybe there’s some people that want that and I, you know, I think that the
611 00:35:00,880 –> 00:35:03,680 brent_peterson: idea that that between p w a and hufah,
612 00:35:04,720 –> 00:35:11,120 brent_peterson: uh, a bolted on theme versus a a p w A’s theme. Um, you know that’s just the
613 00:35:11,200 –> 00:35:13,200 brent_peterson: beginning of making it more complicated
614 00:35:14,240 –> 00:35:20,160 brent_peterson: and does, does it? Um. Does it make it so much more complicated that people
615 00:35:20,180 –> 00:35:21,180 brent_peterson: aren’t going to use it?
616 00:35:22,973 –> 00:35:25,613 kalen: Yeah, I mean, that’s kind of the million dollar question like
617 00:35:27,773 –> 00:35:32,253 kalen: I don’t know, you know, I mean I. I. I did some stuff with like Laraville, which uh
618 00:35:32,413 –> 00:35:37,133 kalen: bundles all sorts of uh, modern jaasript stuff that I wasn’t familiar with Web,
619 00:35:38,413 –> 00:35:43,133 kalen: all sorts of stuff that I just was not at all familiar with and it mostly just worked
620 00:35:43,533 –> 00:35:47,373 kalen: right out of the box because they had it configured and packaged in a way that it was
621 00:35:47,453 –> 00:35:53,933 kalen: easy to get up and running and kind of on boarded me into this tool set. And um, my
622 00:35:54,093 –> 00:35:58,573 kalen: sense is that it’s sort of the exact opposite case with a lot of Theo stuff where
623 00:35:58,733 –> 00:36:02,973 kalen: it’s you. Things just take a long time to get to get going,
624 00:36:04,093 –> 00:36:08,253 kalen: and the complexity is slowing every you know everybody down.
625 00:36:09,233 –> 00:36:10,233 626 00:36:11,293 –> 00:36:14,413 kalen: I. I. I don’t know. I mean you, you would know better than I would you know what the
627 00:36:14,493 –> 00:36:19,853 kalen: pros and cons are to the isolated services. Um it it. It just seems like there’s this
628 00:36:20,013 –> 00:36:25,693 kalen: contingent that is saying. Let’s keep it simple. Um, Which makes sense to me. keep it
629 00:36:25,773 –> 00:36:30,973 kalen: simple. Stupid, Um, and I, I don’t know. It seems like the Enterprise Commerce
630 00:36:31,133 –> 00:36:34,093 kalen: edition. Whatever the heck is being called These days. They still call it Enterprise.
631 00:36:34,813 –> 00:36:37,853 kalen: Um, Is kind of Adobe Commerce.
632 00:36:38,893 –> 00:36:43,293 kalen: Enterprise Edition Is is. Can it be like a different thing? It just feels like it’s
633 00:36:43,373 –> 00:36:45,853 kalen: going to be an entirely different thing from
634 00:36:46,433 –> 00:36:47,433 635 00:36:48,013 –> 00:36:53,133 kalen: Magento is Now. I mean, why not just have it become an entirely different thing
636 00:36:53,293 –> 00:36:58,013 kalen: written in Jaa Micro serviceerists. I, I mean, I’m hearing that it’s going to be
637 00:36:58,093 –> 00:37:01,053 kalen: getting rewritten a Java or something like that. I don’t know where I heard that
638 00:37:01,133 –> 00:37:02,333 kalen: from, but um,
639 00:37:02,400 –> 00:37:04,240 brent_peterson: Well, you’re in Austin. So you should know?
640 00:37:04,893 –> 00:37:08,093 kalen: I should know these things. you know, I hear things I hear a little.
641 00:37:07,440 –> 00:37:10,480 brent_peterson: what Do you? You should be hanging out at the coffee shops? Although a Doobe
642 00:37:10,800 –> 00:37:14,080 brent_peterson: employees hang out and you should be overly overhearing their conversations.
643 00:37:14,813 –> 00:37:18,013 kalen: Well, maybe that’s what I do. Maybe that’s where this is coming from.
655 00:38:05,120 –> 00:38:08,320 brent_peterson: That’s all. I mean that what youve just said would solve everybody’s
656 00:38:08,400 –> 00:38:11,840 brent_peterson: problem, because if they did that, then sure be that people would fork it,
657 00:38:12,000 –> 00:38:17,040 brent_peterson: and we’d be off to the races with to open Source and the Ma,
658 00:38:18,080 –> 00:38:21,280 brent_peterson: or a Doobe commerce. then would its own little beast
659 00:38:22,320 –> 00:38:25,520 brent_peterson: that would live on on on through the Adobe world.
660 00:38:26,033 –> 00:38:27,033 661 00:38:26,960 –> 00:38:31,520 brent_peterson: I don’t know if Adobe would want to do that because I think they’ also left.
662 00:38:32,400 –> 00:38:37,040 brent_peterson: Uh, you know a patchy sling there, which is the undering experience manager
663 00:38:36,900 –> 00:38:37,900 664 00:38:37,393 –> 00:38:38,393 665 00:38:39,853 –> 00:38:44,573 kalen: you know I. I. I actually had a conversation with Dame and Retsgrey yesterday. Um, I
666 00:38:44,573 –> 00:38:50,013 kalen: don’t know if you know him, but he’s a. He’s a. He’s a cool guy and uh, he, um, it’s
667 00:38:50,093 –> 00:38:55,213 kalen: not live yet, but um, he was saying something really interesting, which is that a uh.
668 00:38:55,293 –> 00:39:01,133 kalen: Magento is kind of like open source, but not exactly in the sense that a lot of these
669 00:39:01,293 –> 00:39:04,973 kalen: architectural decisions right, like I heard from. I think one or two different
670 00:39:05,213 –> 00:39:09,373 kalen: people. The thing about Java. Okay, not going to say who, Because again, that’s kind
671 00:39:09,453 –> 00:39:13,693 kalen: of the nature of this beast is that it’s like you know a guy and you have a
672 00:39:13,773 –> 00:39:17,773 kalen: conversation with some person. But it’s off the record because they’re not supposed
673 00:39:17,853 –> 00:39:23,293 kalen: to be what right. And this is sort of exactly how open source is not supposed to
674 00:39:23,373 –> 00:39:27,773 kalen: work. Everything should be discussed out in the open. It should all be discussed on
675 00:39:27,853 –> 00:39:32,573 kalen: Github. Whoever was talking about rewriting it in Java, if in K. If they were in
676 00:39:32,733 –> 00:39:38,333 kalen: fact, that should just be discussed openly right look, but there’s all these backroom
677 00:39:38,653 –> 00:39:43,693 kalen: conversations right. there’s the partner ecosystem. There’s always these backroom
678 00:39:43,933 –> 00:39:48,493 kalen: conversations and part of that is, Uh, you know, there’s a closer relationship
679 00:39:48,813 –> 00:39:52,333 kalen: between partners and that’s that can be a good thing. That can be a feature, not a
680 00:39:52,413 –> 00:39:57,373 kalen: bug. but it’s it’s also just kind of. you know. it’s kind of wacky. The whole thing.
681 00:39:57,953 –> 00:39:58,953 682 00:39:59,700 –> 00:40:00,700 683 00:40:00,353 –> 00:40:01,353 kalen: you know, it’s kind of
684 00:40:00,400 –> 00:40:02,640 brent_peterson: that’s back to somebody’s got to make a decision.
685 00:40:03,713 –> 00:40:04,713 686 00:40:04,720 –> 00:40:08,880 brent_peterson: At some point, the decisions the the moving forward decisions have to be
687 00:40:08,960 –> 00:40:13,840 brent_peterson: made, and they shouldn’t involve every single person in the whole world. You
688 00:40:13,380 –> 00:40:14,380 689 00:40:14,173 –> 00:40:15,373 kalen: Well, okay, I mean
690 00:40:14,400 –> 00:40:17,120 brent_peterson: there, there’s going to have to be a group of leaders that that do that, and
691 00:40:17,200 –> 00:40:20,320 brent_peterson: they’re going to have to make that decision and then live with the live with
692 00:40:20,100 –> 00:40:21,100 brent_peterson: that decision.
693 00:40:23,193 –> 00:40:24,193 kalen: you could be R. I
694 00:40:24,253 –> 00:40:28,333 kalen: mean, yeah, I mean, you know that’s where leadership is. That’s where leadership is
695 00:40:24,320 –> 00:40:25,520 brent_peterson: That’s what leadership is.
696 00:40:28,493 –> 00:40:32,973 kalen: and in business, that’s that’s how sort of business works. Um, you know, you’ve been
697 00:40:33,053 –> 00:40:36,893 kalen: a business owner for many years and you’ve had to make those types of decisions and
718 00:41:27,373 –> 00:41:31,693 kalen: Oh, there’s no nucleus or there’s no center of gravity right,
719 00:41:30,880 –> 00:41:34,720 brent_peterson: Right, he had that big speech and Karen Baker did the same thing about how
720 00:41:34,880 –> 00:41:37,920 brent_peterson: our community’s falling apart And uh, you know, I
721 00:41:37,553 –> 00:41:38,553 722 00:41:38,000 –> 00:41:42,080 brent_peterson: think those are the times where Um where maybe it is splintering and and
723 00:41:42,240 –> 00:41:47,200 brent_peterson: having those people stand up and talk about it brings us together again.
724 00:41:49,100 –> 00:41:50,100 brent_peterson: So but is it
725 00:41:49,713 –> 00:41:50,713 726 00:41:50,160 –> 00:41:53,520 brent_peterson: splintering is? Yes, of course, it’s always splintering. People are going
727 00:41:53,680 –> 00:41:55,680 brent_peterson: off in their own directions and so
741 00:42:33,760 –> 00:42:38,080 brent_peterson: everybody’. not going to have the exact same opinion about everything. So
742 00:42:37,713 –> 00:42:38,713 743 00:42:38,240 –> 00:42:40,320 brent_peterson: what does splintering the mean?
744 00:42:43,053 –> 00:42:44,333 kalen: Yeah, I think
745 00:42:45,773 –> 00:42:49,933 kalen: I go back to Larriville, because I’m Ca. I, That’s the other the closest analogue I
746 00:42:50,013 –> 00:42:56,173 kalen: have. You’ve got one leader, Taylor Otwell, who is incredible. He, every year he
747 00:42:56,333 –> 00:43:02,733 kalen: reads the entire code base line by line. That’s how committed this dut is. Everybody
748 00:43:03,213 –> 00:43:07,133 kalen: respects them as the like. A Lot of open source projects need to have a leader, right
749 00:43:07,293 –> 00:43:13,533 kalen: a B d f, â–l and Um. Lius Torvalts. Right. You think of these people and
750 00:43:14,893 –> 00:43:19,693 kalen: Um, or or companies need a founder. You know, you know you have a founder that’s led
751 00:43:19,853 –> 00:43:27,373 kalen: the company from day one and I, I feel like that is is kind of an important thing. We
752 00:43:27,453 –> 00:43:32,173 kalen: don’t have that right now. Um, although I think maybe that’s Willm, That’s my
753 00:43:32,253 –> 00:43:34,653 kalen: campaign, William for B. D f. â–l, but
754 00:43:37,313 –> 00:43:38,313 kalen: I don’t know. I mean
755 00:43:39,293 –> 00:43:44,253 kalen: yeah, I mean yes, Th. this would. This could splinter things. I guess
756 00:43:45,693 –> 00:43:47,693 kalen: um, I, I think organically.
757 00:43:48,813 –> 00:43:54,573 kalen: if if it was successful, it would start to pick up steam. And then maybe people that
758 00:43:54,733 –> 00:43:59,133 kalen: were not as interested in it would start to find a use case for it right.
759 00:44:01,133 –> 00:44:06,093 kalen: I mean, what about commerce and open source? Is that a splintering? is that A? Is
760 00:44:06,173 –> 00:44:07,533 kalen: that a splintering of the community?
761 00:44:08,653 –> 00:44:09,773 kalen: You know. I mean you. re.
762 00:44:09,600 –> 00:44:12,640 brent_peterson: I mean a commerce and open source is just a name. and that’s been around
763 00:44:12,500 –> 00:44:13,500 764 00:44:15,280 –> 00:44:16,880 brent_peterson: Enterprise came out in twenty ten
765 00:44:17,633 –> 00:44:18,633 766 00:44:18,560 –> 00:44:24,080 brent_peterson: and know the reality is thato has to make money so they have to pay. They
767 00:44:24,140 –> 00:44:25,140 brent_peterson: have to pay the bills,
768 00:44:25,933 –> 00:44:29,053 kalen: Yeah, money is good. Money’s money is important.
769 00:44:31,073 –> 00:44:32,073 770 00:44:32,513 –> 00:44:33,513 771 00:44:34,173 –> 00:44:39,133 kalen: I guess I. I think the point you raise is is interesting to me. Is like everybody’s
772 00:44:39,293 –> 00:44:41,693 kalen: always saying that everything is splintering the the community
773 00:44:43,053 –> 00:44:48,333 kalen: and the argument the association is making is listen, guys. We have been working for
774 00:44:48,413 –> 00:44:53,293 kalen: three years now to create this association to put some structure in place to foster
775 00:44:53,533 –> 00:44:59,213 kalen: dialogues and you guys are trying to blow it all up and you guys are saying Oh, we’re
776 00:44:59,293 –> 00:45:04,413 kalen: just going to do our own thing, And they’re saying we want you to work with us right
777 00:45:04,733 –> 00:45:10,013 kalen: as the association to communicate these things in a in a clear way to Adobe.
778 00:45:11,453 –> 00:45:18,173 kalen: And and I feel, and like I get that. But the same time it’s like
779 00:45:19,293 –> 00:45:22,013 kalen: there’s so much pent up frustration
780 00:45:23,453 –> 00:45:27,613 kalen: and ankt in the community And it’s just like
781 00:45:28,973 –> 00:45:35,133 kalen: it’s sort of spontaneously combusting. I feel like. In some ways you know
782 00:45:34,720 –> 00:45:35,840 brent_peterson: But doesn’t it feel like
783 00:45:36,940 –> 00:45:37,940 brent_peterson: that’s what happening
784 00:45:38,960 –> 00:45:40,160 brent_peterson: every time this happens.
785 00:45:42,173 –> 00:45:44,333 kalen: what do you mean? What do you
786 00:45:43,280 –> 00:45:46,880 brent_peterson: I mean it feels like the things are falling apart when this
787 00:45:46,513 –> 00:45:47,513 788 00:45:46,740 –> 00:45:47,740 789 00:45:48,400 –> 00:45:52,080 brent_peterson: When it felt like when Um Ebay bought Mago,
790 00:45:53,760 –> 00:45:59,760 brent_peterson: they had that â–x Commerce conference and then the next year it wasn’t I to a
791 00:45:59,840 –> 00:46:04,800 brent_peterson: man conference. It was just imagine. like Magento came out of it completely
792 00:46:05,180 –> 00:46:06,180 brent_peterson: right. Like
799 00:46:22,720 –> 00:46:28,000 brent_peterson: like it was getting sucked into some beheemth like Ebay, and and we’re never
800 00:46:27,940 –> 00:46:28,940 brent_peterson: going to get it back.
801 00:46:30,413 –> 00:46:36,973 kalen: I think that the corporate overlords, they keep trying to sort of absorb Mago. and
802 00:46:37,053 –> 00:46:39,613 kalen: then it just doesn’t just can’t happen.
803 00:46:41,133 –> 00:46:47,133 kalen: Like, like I said man, the community is rebellious. We’d like to do our own thing. We
804 00:46:47,213 –> 00:46:54,013 kalen: have our own hive mind. You know we’re going to keep fighting. You know, we’re go to
805 00:46:54,173 –> 00:46:58,333 kalen: keep. We’re going to keep forking. You know, it’s going to keep aing
806 00:46:59,120 –> 00:47:01,040 brent_peterson: Yep, uh, you know. think about um.
807 00:47:02,160 –> 00:47:06,240 brent_peterson: think about you. Think about these business leaders that are making these
808 00:47:06,480 –> 00:47:11,600 brent_peterson: decisions that don’t give uh, rats. Whatever about Magento. They bought
809 00:47:11,760 –> 00:47:14,960 brent_peterson: Magento in in the sense that they needed, and they wanted a commerce
810 00:47:15,200 –> 00:47:20,000 brent_peterson: platform to to go into the Um, broader Uh portfolio for a doobe,
811 00:47:20,433 –> 00:47:21,433 812 00:47:20,960 –> 00:47:24,640 brent_peterson: Uh, and what? they could have chose some other platform. That’s a Sass
813 00:47:24,800 –> 00:47:28,000 brent_peterson: platform. They could have chose something like Big commerce or whatever is
814 00:47:28,160 –> 00:47:33,680 brent_peterson: out there. They chose a Ma genento and it’s a Ph P platform. I don’t. I’m
815 00:47:33,840 –> 00:47:38,400 brent_peterson: just, I’m just putting out my guesses here. I’m guessing they didn’t think
816 00:47:38,640 –> 00:47:42,800 brent_peterson: about. Hey, this is Ph P. and none of the other products on a doob or Ph. H.
817 00:47:42,500 –> 00:47:43,500 818 00:47:44,080 –> 00:47:47,520 brent_peterson: Right they? they didn’t think of any that. I’m sure they looked at a bunch
819 00:47:47,460 –> 00:47:48,460 brent_peterson: of factors
820 00:47:48,673 –> 00:47:49,673 821 00:47:49,120 –> 00:47:53,840 brent_peterson: that made it F. from a business standpoint Make made it make sense.
822 00:47:55,840 –> 00:47:59,360 brent_peterson: And then the next thing after that you have a whole bunch of managers that
823 00:47:59,440 –> 00:48:01,360 brent_peterson: make decision. Ions that again,
824 00:48:02,480 –> 00:48:05,840 brent_peterson: don’t necessarily a line with where Magento was.
825 00:48:07,200 –> 00:48:10,400 brent_peterson: They just are looking at where they would like it to be,
826 00:48:11,520 –> 00:48:17,200 brent_peterson: not necessarily thinking about how it got there and how it’s going to get
827 00:48:17,440 –> 00:48:22,240 brent_peterson: maintained. in terms of hey, you know we have three hundred thousand people
828 00:48:22,400 –> 00:48:27,600 brent_peterson: that care about it. Um, are we going to upset them if we start doing this or
829 00:48:27,680 –> 00:48:30,800 brent_peterson: are we going? Are they going to feel shut out when we stop talking
830 00:48:30,740 –> 00:48:31,740 831 00:48:32,433 –> 00:48:33,433 832 00:48:34,273 –> 00:48:35,273 833 00:48:34,500 –> 00:48:35,500 834 00:48:34,893 –> 00:48:37,053 kalen: do you mean when we stoped talking altogether,
835 00:48:37,440 –> 00:48:41,360 brent_peterson: well, you know, if if we look at this as being a communications problem and
836 00:48:41,440 –> 00:48:44,640 brent_peterson: the communication is just there, not telling us what’s going to be happening
837 00:48:44,800 –> 00:48:49,840 brent_peterson: in the future with Magento, they are there really in. in a sense, not really
838 00:48:49,820 –> 00:48:50,820 brent_peterson: telling us
839 00:48:51,680 –> 00:48:56,400 brent_peterson: where they where where it’s going right. We don’t know necessarily where
842 00:48:57,940 –> 00:48:58,940 843 00:49:00,320 –> 00:49:04,960 brent_peterson: and that is, uh, a concern that the community has, because they would like
844 00:49:05,200 –> 00:49:07,440 brent_peterson: people would like to know where it’s going,
845 00:49:07,953 –> 00:49:08,953 846 00:49:08,480 –> 00:49:13,520 brent_peterson: and even more than I, I think few people want to be included in that they
847 00:49:13,600 –> 00:49:16,400 brent_peterson: want to feel that. if it’s a community you want to feel like you’re included
848 00:49:16,220 –> 00:49:17,220 brent_peterson: in the community
849 00:49:18,560 –> 00:49:22,640 brent_peterson: And if you don’t know what’s happening and the decisions are being made and
860 00:49:44,880 –> 00:49:46,480 brent_peterson: next episode on shopware.
861 00:49:47,233 –> 00:49:48,233 862 00:49:48,813 –> 00:49:52,973 kalen: I don’t know the first thing about shopper, other than I think it’s the next Magento,
950 00:53:33,120 –> 00:53:37,360 brent_peterson: um, I heard that Laravell was named after a guy named Larry Vll.
951 00:53:39,380 –> 00:53:40,380 brent_peterson: Did you hear that
952 00:53:43,533 –> 00:53:45,293 kalen: I, I did not.
953 00:53:46,240 –> 00:53:48,720 brent_peterson: Uh v e I, â–l,
954 00:53:50,300 –> 00:53:51,300 brent_peterson: and Um,
955 00:53:52,160 –> 00:53:56,800 brent_peterson: if it would, it would have been Larry Vile, like Vale, Colorado, otherwise,
956 00:53:56,500 –> 00:53:57,500 957 00:53:56,673 –> 00:53:57,673 958 00:53:57,120 –> 00:53:59,200 brent_peterson: now it’s Larry Vlle, and they just shortened it.
959 00:54:01,120 –> 00:54:02,480 brent_peterson: Did you hear that same rumor
960 00:54:04,080 –> 00:54:06,560 brent_peterson: like his neighbor’s name was Larry Vlle.
961 00:54:08,413 –> 00:54:10,653 kalen: please tell serious. Are you serious?
962 00:54:11,060 –> 00:54:12,060 963 00:54:14,013 –> 00:54:19,853 kalen: How did you get me? I was like the very last minute I was like, Oh my God, he’s
964 00:54:19,633 –> 00:54:20,633 965 00:54:20,960 –> 00:54:23,920 brent_peterson: Yeah, we made through this whole episode without any jokes.
971 00:54:31,453 –> 00:54:34,013 kalen: dad joker on the planet.
972 00:54:34,500 –> 00:54:35,500 brent_peterson: I’ve been told that,
973 00:54:37,293 –> 00:54:40,973 kalen: Just when I think I have you figured out, you throw me for a loop. you know,
974 00:54:40,820 –> 00:54:41,820 975 00:54:42,640 –> 00:54:47,280 brent_peterson: uh, speaking of, Uh, of well, so coup a couple of things as we close out.
976 00:54:47,600 –> 00:54:52,960 brent_peterson: Um, If if Willilm is our eelon musk, it is going to be infinitely less
977 00:54:53,200 –> 00:54:58,960 brent_peterson: expensive for him to shoot the Hofa theme into space than it was for Elo to
978 00:54:59,040 –> 00:55:01,440 brent_peterson: shoot his first tessin to space, right,
1006 00:56:05,693 –> 00:56:07,773 kalen: Oh God, thank you. Did you
1007 00:56:07,420 –> 00:56:08,420 1008 00:56:07,853 –> 00:56:09,613 kalen: do that as you come up with that one yourself.
1009 00:56:09,760 –> 00:56:12,640 brent_peterson: I don’t come up with any of my jokes myself. No,
1010 00:56:11,213 –> 00:56:14,973 kalen: You don’t come up with any of them, but you deliver them like an absolute champion.
1011 00:56:15,280 –> 00:56:18,400 brent_peterson: yeah, that’s the only that I don’t even know if that’s my talent.
1012 00:56:18,913 –> 00:56:19,913 1013 00:56:19,460 –> 00:56:20,460 brent_peterson: I don’t think it is.
1014 00:56:20,653 –> 00:56:23,053 kalen: I, no, I wouldn’t â–quit your day job.
1015 00:56:22,160 –> 00:56:26,880 brent_peterson: I do come up with spontaneous jokes. Uh, and I do have to explain them. I
1016 00:56:26,960 –> 00:56:28,160 brent_peterson: think that’s the best part of it,
1017 00:56:30,893 –> 00:56:33,453 kalen: It is the best part, ladies and ja.
1018 00:56:32,240 –> 00:56:34,560 brent_peterson: my, my best joke, my best joke.
1019 00:56:34,113 –> 00:56:35,113 1020 00:56:34,800 –> 00:56:37,440 brent_peterson: When I’m running, I know we’re over now, but uh, I
1021 00:56:37,453 –> 00:56:39,053 kalen: no, no, no, we have all the time in the world
1022 00:56:37,520 –> 00:56:42,960 brent_peterson: do. I do my long runs. Um, and oftenims we outut with, I’m with the new Sam
1023 00:56:43,120 –> 00:56:45,920 brent_peterson: Muth, a new group of people and we’re doing twenty miles or something like
1024 00:56:45,540 –> 00:56:46,540 1025 00:56:46,193 –> 00:56:47,193 1026 00:56:47,520 –> 00:56:54,880 brent_peterson: I wait until Mile eighteen and I, My advice is always running is always
1027 00:56:55,600 –> 00:56:59,440 brent_peterson: running. Is is is, uh, ninety percent mental
1028 00:57:00,033 –> 00:57:01,033 1029 00:57:00,480 –> 00:57:05,120 brent_peterson: and the last fifteen percent is in your head, and I leave it at that and we
1030 00:57:05,280 –> 00:57:07,360 brent_peterson: just keep going. And then if they’re
1031 00:57:07,273 –> 00:57:08,273 kalen: I love it
1032 00:57:07,440 –> 00:57:12,480 brent_peterson: paying attention at all what I say, they will question my math, but a lot of
1033 00:57:07,440 –> 00:57:12,480 brent_peterson: paying attention at all what I say, they will question my math, but a lot of
1034 00:57:12,560 –> 00:57:15,520 brent_peterson: times they’re not, They’re not at the point where they could think straight,
1035 00:57:12,560 –> 00:57:15,520 brent_peterson: times they’re not, They’re not at the point where they could think straight,
1036 00:57:15,380 –> 00:57:16,380 1037 00:57:15,380 –> 00:57:16,380 1038 00:57:15,693 –> 00:57:17,933 kalen: they don’t. They don’t catch it, kind of like I didn’t
1039 00:57:17,580 –> 00:57:18,580 1040 00:57:18,093 –> 00:57:21,773 kalen: catch your my sequel joke. They just kind of go like, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah,
1044 00:57:23,860 –> 00:57:24,860 1045 00:57:25,053 –> 00:57:29,453 kalen: I love it. I love it, ladies and gentlemen, Brant Peterson, All done here, were
1046 00:57:29,613 –> 00:57:30,973 kalen: wrapping it up over and out.
Today I have Jisse Reitsma from Yireo. Jisse and I have an open conversation around Mage Open Source Community Alliance and some reactions to the letter. We talk about the reaction from the Magento Association and talk a little about what could make it better. If you are interested in talking about this subject, please reach out to brent@brentwpeterson
The discussion on this week’s podcast focuses on the current issues developers are facing with Adobe and Magento. Two main issues discussed were the transparency of Adobe and the monolith and modularity dichotomy.
The Mage Open Source Community Alliance (MOSCA) open letter to the community sought to show that developers care about the Adobe products and believe that the open-source code that drives their products is neglected. Developers are accustomed to accessing a roadmap of the software shared with the broader community, which shows transparency, and some don’t believe that they are receiving that transparency with Magento.
It is believed that open source development lies in the hands of developers, and instead of just talking about the changes that they want to see, they can make it happen. That is one point that the open letter drove home. However, at this point, the change seems to be happening without actually any organization.
An important question in all this discussion is if there is indeed a split, who would own the trademark? Who is going to be the owner of the source codes? Who will be responsible for fixing the bugs as they arise?
If Adobe is not becoming more transparent in their decision-making, if there’s not a roadmap being published upon opensource, assuming that there is one, then actually the community will not see which way the whole Magento opensource thing is growing. Then, in the end, that’s going to mean that many people are just so unsure about a fundamental something that they’re either going to leave or create a fork or are going to stick with even Magento one. And that’s the direction we don’t want to go to. Something needs to change.
While some developers believe there is no need for a monolith, others believe it is functional. The proposed decomposition of the monolith by Magento does not leave developers with a choice. It is suggested that developers be given an option to decide whether or not they want to go the route of the monolith or modularity. It boils down to deprecating or not deprecating.
There are a lot of Magento merchants that use the software, and a lot of those merchants feel uneasy about where their version of Magento is going. A question that they have is if Magento gets more complicated, does that mean that it would get more expensive for them to run their store?
Some proposed solutions to having Adobe communicate and be more transparent with the community are having a monthly bulletin, utilizing social media, and employing a social media and marketing committee to keep the community informed. This way, developers could openly share their ideas and grow on them like trading at a bazaar. What is currently happening is that the discussion is taking place in a cathedral manner. There’s a lot of conversing and what comes out is a filtered down smooth message that doesn’t have teeth and is unopinionated. The beauty is that the community is in charge of the innovation, and the Magento association should bring it out.
What it comes down to is just more communication and transparency from Adobe would solve these problems.
The letter is creating quite the buzz in the community and already has more than 1300 signatures (As of Sept 17th). We talk about where Magento Open Source is headed and what this means, especially to merchants.
We go into OneStepCheckout and some real numbers that help merchants decrease cart abandonment. (If you don’t measure you don’t know) We also talk about the reason why One Step Checkout has adopted Shopware as its 2nd platform.
Show notes:
Hyva + OneStepCheckout live store: haardenexpert.nl
This week we interview Anna Völkl. Anna is the lead Magento developer and release manager at Economics the leading Magento agency in Austria. We dive into a great discussion about Magento security and tools merchants should use to help secure their Magento store. We talk about a day in the life of a Magento developer and Anna shares some of her passion around the Red Cross. We discuss the Magento community and the re-opening of Magento events someday. We all miss them!
This week we interview Howard Tiersky, the CEO of From – The Digital Transformation Agency. Howard helps executives win in today’s digital world. He is Wall Street Journal’s best-selling author of “Winning Digital Customers, The Antidote to Irrelevance”. Howard has been named one of the Top 10 Digital Transformation Influencers to follow today by IDG. As an entrepreneur, he has launched two successful companies that help large brands transform to thrive in the digital age.
We have a great conversation around the digital experience, how customers navigate it and what a business owner should do to stay relevant in today’s world. https://wdc.ht/order
This week we interview Danny Verkade with Cream. Danny is the CTO of Cream, a leading Magento agency in the Netherlands. He is also on the Magento Association Board.
We discuss his experience with the new Hyva theme and how it fits into the Magento ecosystem. We go over some of the tools that merchants can use to constantly evaluate the performance of their website. We talk about how someone can easily get into Hyva and why they should!
We finish up with some conversation about the Magento Association and the future of events, big and small. Hyva website delivered: https://vollebregtaanhangwagens.nl Reading: https://techcrunch.com
This week we interview Yoav Kutner. The co-founder of Varien, Magento, Akeneo, MageCore, and Oro Commerce. (What didn’t he found!)
He is a member of the Forbes Technology Council. We talk about the early history of Magento and go into the Oro Business Application Program. The BAP that Yoav developed is the foundation for many solutions on the market today. These include Oro CRM and Akeneo.
We talk about Oro Commerce and why it makes sense for a B2B company to use this platform. Yoav gives us some insight into his thinking on self-serve platforms and how to reduce any resistance to the B2B buyer journey. We discuss how different the journey is for B2B. Yoav gives us the three driving factors that ORO delivers.
This is a great episode and must be shared with all your friends and family. Even your grandparents will love this show.
This week we interview Neil Twa. Neil is an executive mentor to business owners responsible for over $100M in Collective FBA Sales. He has helped to launch, grow, and scale 7 and 8 figure, high ROI Brands. He is the CEO of Voltage Holdings which launches, operates, scales, and acquires ecommerce brands with a focus on Amazon FBA. He owns multiple ventures including Voltage Portfolios. His partners include Kevin Harrington, the original shark on the hit TV series Shark Tank and the inventor of the infomercial. He has sold 1000’s of products leading to over $5 Billion in sales. He focuses’ on buying ecommerce brands to take them direct-to-consumer across multiple channels. We discuss how you can get started on a new business selling on Amazon, with little to no experience, and how you can take your existing business to Amazon FBA and automate the delivery of your products. This is a great conversation around why a business needs to embrace all channels and even why a business needs to sell some branded products!