If you have an online store, you will most likely have someone helping you customize it. We call those people “Developers,” and they help make merchants’ lives easier but creating solutions that increase your ROI on your website.
Stephen Hilliard is a Developer Advocate for BigCommerce and talks about all the great things that BigCommerce is doing for the community and for developers. He goes over some of the past events along with what they are planning for 2023.
The exciting news is the Twitter Spaces that is happening on Thursdays at 1 pm CST – You can join the space on Twitter starting Oct 20th, 2022.
Developer communities are a great way to drive the adoption of your products in the long term. They help you understand user behavior and build more valuable products with positive customer feedback.
BigCommerce is Open SaaS means building a great community around it. Heather and Brent talk about the growing BigCommerce community and how to get involved. @hnbarr_
Heather walks us through how to get involved and introduced to the BigCommerce community. There is a lot of firsts happening at BigCommerce, and the community is strong and growing.
Heather tells us why it is unique in the commerce space and especially in the SaaS space. So many things in the works, and this is the perfect time to get involved. Will there be a BigCommerce event in Austin? SaaS by SaaSWest?
5 Reasons Why You Need a Community Manager in Your Developer Community
Transcript
Brent: Welcome to Talk Commerce. Today I have Heather Barr. Heather is the community developer manager, or the developer, community manager with BigCommerce heather, go ahead, introduce yourself. Do a much better job than I did . Tell us your day to day role and maybe one of your passions in life.
Heather: Yeah, absolutely. So great to be here. Thank you so much, Brent. Like you mentioned, I am the developer community manager at BigCommerce so I basically just do the day to day admin type things with our developer community spaces. The most puppet is our Slack. In addition to that, I build out some programs and host events and things like that.
Heather: And now that we have a really awesome solid developer relations team I work. Very closely with them to do exactly that and just improve the developer experience or try our hardest to do that at the commerce. And one of my greatest passions is it actually is somewhat of a newer passion.
Heather: Maybe in the past, like year or two, I have built out a, like a van, like a camper van out of a old like Amazon truck. And so I really love traveling around in that and just doing some camping or glamping I guess you could call it. But.
Brent: All right, so now I’m super jealous and maybe after the interview we’ll have to talk about camper vans cuz I had the same idea out of an old, like a sprinter van or something.
Brent: Yeah, I love that concept and it gives you an opportunity to get out on the road and see things. So that’s super cool. Okay, so before we start the really fun interview, we’re gonna do the free joke project. And I did prep you on this, so it’s, I’m gonna just tell you the joke and then the goal is this a free joke or is this one we could charge?
Brent: So I have a very, I have a quick and simple one today. Ready? All right, I’m ready. To the guy who invented zero, thanks for nothing.
Heather: I like that one. That one is definitely charged worthy. It’s simple. It’s to the point. And it definitely
Brent: crack a smile. All right. Good. Do you wanna try one more or are we good?
Heather: I like that one, but if you have another, I can handle
Brent: another. All right. I got an easy one. Okay. What does scholars eat when they’re hungry? Academia nuts. .
Heather: Okay. ha ha, I really like that one. good. That one I would pay for .
Brent: Thanks for playing along. Yes. I need a little jingle for that, I oh, definitely. I’ll think about a jingle later on. All right, so let’s dive into the bigCommerce community. I’m excited about the BigCommerce community cuz I was just, I was at the partner summit and it has this sort of open source vibe that some of the other communities have. Tell us how, what you’re doing in the community and how you’re helping the community grow.
Brent: And tell us a little bit about the Slack channel and. Yeah, go for it.
Heather: So we have a Slack workspace and we are working on getting it to a point where we can just like fully blast it. But everyone listening to the podcast definitely reach out and get involved. I can have a link for bread that he can share, so you can join us there.
Heather: But yeah, that’s our most popping space right now. But we have other things going on in the community as well. The slack is just more of the I guess a real time peer-to-peer resource that we have available for developers and partners who are building solutions on the platform. And so in there we host some series events like AMAs.
Heather: We’re asking anything events with some of our product members. So basically if. People in the community have some interest in meeting with like someone from product or a team from product like mobile or headless or page builder or building widgets or whatever it is. Then basically we get those requests and then we just host like a small sort of intimate meeting in Slack and one of our like dedicated channels where you can just ask product anything about that topic.
Heather: So those are really cool. And we do those we do about two to three or four possibly every year. And we can increase that if we get a little bit more resources or help . But yes, so that’s one of the main things I guess going on in like in the Slack. We also have some other types of events depending on, like what you as a partner or developer are interested in.
Heather: Let’s say you want to I guess market or just promote your service to merchants and just have a space where you can talk openly about it and just have a real conversation about what you’re solving for and what are the, maybe the plans to come and so forth. We have an a series event like that as well.
Heather: We do it two to three times a year as well. And that is in our customer facing community. But to sign up, it’s through our developer community and then through My partnership with our developer relations team, Katie and Steven and Constance, which I know you already met with Katie. We are doing some bigger events, so those are really awesome.
Heather: So we did our first hackathon, which was really great. We planned to do many more and then, Also this past year we actually had our first community lead event too, which I know is huge, like in the space where you’re from. But it’s new here at BigCommerce and I really hope to see like more of these types of events and other types of content just like organically forming.
Heather: But that was with Space 48. So they held a, like a paneled type of, Virtual event where they basically were able to grab some partners from the community and just share tips and all types of stuff and just like things that they’ve learned like while developing on the platform. And it was completely community led and it just blew my mind.
Heather: It was so awesome. And yeah, I mean there’s just a lot of firsts going on right now and our developer community, and I think that is what’s really exciting is because, we’ve been building it for a couple years now, our. . Yeah, so we’ve been building it for a couple years now, and it’s just like we’re finally getting to a point where we’re able to.
Heather: see these types of opportunities and like actually really go forward with these types of opportunities ourselves, like internally. So I would say the big thing about getting involved in our developer community right now is that there’s a lot of firsts. So if you have any ideas or if you just wanna be a part of the beginning, like it definitely has.
Heather: That type of vibe where it’s like we’re, we’re getting that momentum and so we have a lot of stuff in the works and we have we just have a lot that we all wanna do as well. So it’s a really good time to participate.
Brent: Yeah. And I can say that we worked with Space 48 on that first event in for another community in Austin in 2016 with Shipper HQ and Karen Baker.
Brent: Nice. , that was organized and we ran that until 2019. So it was it’s a great place and I’m gonna propose that we, we do a big the big Dev X or whatever we call it. Yes. Event in, in Austin next year. Maybe we should call it BigCommerce by, we have to think of a name to mimic off of, So by Southwest, right?
Brent: Ooh, okay. Commerce by SAS or something like South SAS by sas. Yes. We’ll have to, oh
Heather: my gosh. Include you in the party planning committee. SAS by sas. Thinking of. So next year big developer things. And we’re starting to start conversations about those now and seeing who we need to talk to make these things happen.
Brent: Yeah. And there’s a great event space that we’ve always, we’ve done it in twice. It’s called Trinity Hall. It’s on Trinity, and I don’t know. Anyways. It’s in downtown Austin, but yeah. All right. So if I’m a new developer and I want to get involved in the developer community, and I, maybe I wanna build an app, is there a, is there like a place that, So I’ll join the Slack channel, and then is there a way for me to easily get started?
Brent: Walk me through pretending that I’m a developer and I really would like to participate in the BigCommerce c. .
Heather: Yeah, absolutely. We have a lot of different spaces where developers can try to, reach out or get involved with others. But I would say Slack is definitely the most popular, but it’s not the most visible.
Heather: So that is something that we are working on now as far as like how to get that to be a more visible place and whenever we are able to get it to be a more visible place, that’s the other side to it. So depending on where this app developer, came to us or found us, whether it’s Twitter or our help center forum or stack overflow or whatever it is we would be reaching out.
Heather: So that’s what my team does. We reach out. And then also Katie, she’s really great with our Twitter. . So yeah, we basically would get in contact to find out what you’re trying to do, and then if we feel that, you’re an app developer, so we would obviously send you the link to get involved with our Slack community, and then there you can connect with other developers, other partners that have been building apps forever.
Heather: And so you have those resources but also build that relationship with you and then really provide some resources that help you individually, but that’s like linking the correct docs to you or different. And right now actually our developer relations team is working on a like an app series or they will be starting soon.
Heather: Because that is a gap right now too. It’s partners and developers are just like people that are new to building solutions on the platform, having that hard time getting an app off the ground, I guess you could say. And so that is something that we are actively working on right now. But I would say, the best or like the vibe right now in the community on how we could help is just really getting to know you one on one and providing those resources to you one on one. So it is more of a, Hey, let’s connect, let’s help each other, like that type of vibe. As we continue to grow, we can scale and can provide more resources and pump out more resources ourselves.
Heather: That’s when, you know we can provide those links and you. That content.
Brent: Yeah. And there, there are regular public facing document doc, there’s a dev doc series that you have that’s public, so I could start there and then also get in contact with you to join the community and get going. How about I know that you mentioned having your.
Brent: First hackathon. , what are the plans around maybe having an in person
Heather: hackathon? There are plans to having an internal hackathon. Yeah, that was our first one and it was a blast. And it got a lot of people excited. So that was like external people as well as like BigCommerce employees as well.
Heather: Everyone was just so comforted about the hack up on. And with that comes more I guess you could say. So teams, approaching us saying, Ooh, like we wanna, what about our thing? What about our thing? And they also third party at companies as well, saying Ooh. And so there is a lot of interest, which is really good for us because we get to plan out in advance let’s do this hackathon, virtually this one hybrid, this one in person or whatever it is.
Heather: And we can plan all of those out. And maybe we can make all of them hybrid. Maybe we can try different locations. There are a lot of ideas. Basically just a lot of ideas on what we wanna do as far as getting one planned. We’re not sure which one we’re gonna do next. Actually we do have one next, but we can’t talk about it right now.
Heather: And it. , that one maybe virtually. But midyear or like maybe late in year, I think we’re gonna try to do something a lot bigger, and that would definitely be a hybrid or in person. And then potentially doing some like small, like little dev challenges virtually, or even like doing some small popups in person would be really cool.
Brent: Yeah, I think we usually cap hackathons at 80 or a hundred people just because of the amount of people that you could fit in a room and we always hit it after an event. And it was always really fun. How about including people other than developers like project managers and solution architects?
Brent: Do you see a space for them in the community? I definitely
Heather: do, and we have some of those Those types of roles are people with those roles in our developer community Slack right now. And so basically our developer community, Slack it’s like a umbrella acceptance. I guess you could say if you sit under the technical umbrella at all, if you work with.
Heather: Your developers. If you’re a CTO or a solutions architect or something like that, then you definitely are what we’re trying to have in this space. But for these events, I definitely see a benefit in having them. I think project management especially would be. Excellent to have because that’s what they do in their job and they really help the development lifecycle.
Heather: And so I think there’s a huge benefit of having like one project manager, like per team. I think that would be a really nice way to divide it up and then just really have a lot of success in the hackathons and from the submissions and on a team level.
Brent: Yeah I, There, there are some other events that happen in other communities that are longer, or maybe they’re a weekend event, maybe a Friday night through Sunday event.
Brent: And then you, where you come together, build your ideas that you want to do. Then you put a team together and then that team goes and tries to get as much done as they can. By Sunday night. , so that comps would include a project manager or some kind of a architect, maybe some, there’s a lot more room for roles there.
Brent: Yeah. And then some people that aren’t so technical wouldn’t feel left out and they can participate in the event and have a lot of fun.
Heather: Yeah. I think the more diverse the team can be the more successful it can be, honestly.
Brent: Where do you see the BigCommerce community going in the next year or two?
Heather: In the next year or two, I see us doing so many more events really honestly. I see that being our, I guess our biggest opportunity is doing hackathons, doing smaller like developer challenges and then also just Getting ideas from our community as well. If there’s something that they, like our members really want to push out or just wanna be involved or really want us to push out or, and just see as an opportunity, we are all ears for that.
Heather: Like I said earlier, like we’re just in a time of a lot of firsts and so we are so open to making this the, this community. The best it can be for our members. We really want to hear from our members. We really want to just give them what they want. And I definitely see events being a huge thing for us this upcoming year.
Heather: And that’s a whole different type of just a broad range of types of events that I see coming.
Brent: Are there any plans around, seeding other sort of community leaders to. build communities in other countries. In other areas.
Heather: Yeah. So that would be that would be incredible. I think so there’s a lot of like really mature communities and then also just some really engaged like younger communities that are doing this right now.
Heather: And that have been doing it for years. And that’s something that I would personally love to see. Like for the Hackathon, for example, we had people that were, it was a worldwide type of event and it was really cool to see because we only had two weeks to really announce it. But it was like split between many continents, so it was, it would be really nice to just have I guess like focus groups or just user groups or just super, just whatever we wanna call it, but just like based groups in different regions.
Heather: And I think , like Magento or a lot of other types of different communities where they have they host like their own meetups and stuff like that. And even if it’s super casual but then we can be involved like on our side of hey, like we can help organize it or whatever. But then yeah, like y’all totally own it, like y’all are there.
Heather: Let us know how we can help. Notion does this I really love that productivity tool and they. They have a really excellent community, but but yeah, I definitely see that. I’m not sure how realistic that is for like this coming year since we’re like, we’re just now being able to like host all these really cool events.
Heather: But hey, if it happens, like I am all for it and I, yes, I’m like for making it happen to you. So whatever I can do to help with that and if we have a lot of interest and a lot of engaged people in different regions, like I am definitely for helping getting that. ,
Brent: I know in the agency space it BigCommerce is growing so fast that it’s been difficult to sometimes find developers and so you have to train developers.
Brent: Is there a easy way for an agency head to say, get to, to hire somebody that’s been involved in another SAS platform and convert them or help them understand? Getting up and running on BigCommerce yeah. So we
Heather: have like big dev boot camps. That’s one of our excuse me, that’s one of our products or one of our services for getting started.
Heather: It’s like an onboarding type thing. So if you are a developer or if you have a developer that is like new to building on BigCommerce and you really wanna set ’em up for success Big Deb Bootcamp is a great option. Excuse me. Yeah, so you can get involved with Big Deb Bootcamp. I can actually get the link for you and I.
Heather: Include it so that you can try to like, push that out with your recaps and all that. But basically it covers developing on stencil on different types of getting started with like headless all of our APIs. Goodness. And just basic development, like getting started developing absent themes going over all of our resources basically.
Heather: So it’s a really nice program to get involved with if you’re new or if you’re just like trying to take advantage of what other resources are available to
Brent: you and do you see developers quickly being onboarded and getting up to speed. On BigCommerce
Heather: I guess you could say it really depends.
Heather: So with BigCommerce, we have developers that are, like third party developers as far as everyone, is a third party developer, but we have freelancers, we also have like developers that work for our partner agencies, and so it really depends on their relationship. I would say as far as what type of onboarding they get, which is something that we are working on as far as onboarding just developers in a better way in general, no matter you know, who or we know what they’re with.
Heather: I would say our. Are our partners. They have I would say more visibility to the big Deb Bootcamp. So I’d say that is something that kind of sets that like those developers aside because if you are a partner, you have more visibility. You just know about it more. If you’re a freelance developer, you probably have to discover it in a little bit of a different way, which is possible, but it’s not as visible to you.
Heather: So I would say. as far as like resources, like big dev bootcamp, it is a little bit more accessible if you are a partner. But then everything else as far as our documentation and our communities, like those are all very open for any sort of developer. So no matter if you are just doing freelance or you working for an agency or one of our partners, then you have access to the community.
Heather: And with that you have, the community team and then also Dev Rail to just walk you through whatever you would.
Brent: and I would imagine that the amount of BigCommerce developers is like an iceberg where there’s the ma vast majority that aren’t involved on the Slack channel.
Brent: And it would be great to get ’em all involved. Yes. . Yeah. So maybe a message out to all the agency. Heads to tell their developers that there’s this great place that you should join and absolutely get questions answered, right? I think that’s the main key about the Slack channel is that if you do have questions, there’s so many people in there that are so smart, then that can help you get those questions answered quickly.
Heather: I agree and if you are a partner listening to this podcast or this interview we are going to have our own spot on the partner newsletters, the agency and tech partner newsletters. So that’s new and keep a lookout for us. We’re hoping to keep coming monthly with new content and also always having that CTA where you can share with your development teams to have them join us in the developer community.
Heather: We would love to have all of you.
Brent: So a, as we finish things out today if you have one like little nugget that you could give a developer who’s starting right now besides joining the Slack channel Yeah. What would you tell them?
Heather: I would really tell them to take advantage of. Us. That would be me, that would be Katie, that would be Steven, our developer advocates.
Heather: And it’s not only through Slack. We are, you can meet us on Twitter, you can meet us at some events. You can meet us wherever LinkedIn, this podcast. If you are struggling and you’re maybe posting on Stack Overflow or in the help center, reach out to us like dms because we wanna get to know you and we wanna get to know like how we can.
Heather: Not only just you, but also just every other developer that might be going through like a similar experience as you. And we really want to talk and connect and we do. And so if you’re a developer and you’re not super into that, totally understand. I would say something that could help.
Heather: Ah, goodness. Reaching out really does the best, even if it’s like on a GitHub repo or something, just letting someone know. That’s really how we make our changes. Even product. If you comment on GitHub or if you submit an issue or anything like that, or reach out to us in some way, or even tweet at us or whatever it is reaching out does.
Heather: Really help us make it better. So if you can find a way to reach out to us in some way that is what I would
Brent: recommend. Yeah. And there’s also a BigCommerce Twitter community space now. Yes. As well. So that’s another good place for people to join. And there is more people in that space than another platforms I’ve noticed recently.
Brent: So that’s good. It’s being used. Yes. would add that as a developer and I’m going to admit that I started as a developer a long time ago. It is sometimes hard to ask questions and reach out and you really wanna solve it yourself. But once you’ve once you’ve paired up with, if you find somebody who can really help you, and I know when I got started I found somebody could help me.
Brent: And I think I was on MSN Messenger way back in the day and man did they help me, and there was so much more that I could get through with a little bit of guidance and mentorship. That, I think that the big com, I know that the BigCommerce channels can offer you even better than stack overflow or something like that.
Brent: That gets your question. You ask questions that’ll get answered quickly. So I can’t advocate more for using that and taking advantage of that as a developer. And it’ll really launch your career as a developer and help you accelerate your learning and getting things done. And then I would also say play around in a sandbox environment and make some stuff.
Brent: Yeah,
Heather: absolutely. I second everything that you say. I agree a hundred percent. I can’t agree more actually.
Brent: Great. As we close out, Heather, they I give everybody a chance to do a shameless plug. Okay. What would you like to plug today?
Heather: Goodness. I’ve been prepping for this question. I’m not sure I’m having a hard time threatening a shameless plug.
Heather: I’m not gonna lie, but I will say if you could invest in a. Reusable water bottle. You can take it to the airport, you can take it everywhere. If you could fill it up. I actually went to a place to eat not that long ago and I was like, Hey, can I just fill up my water bottle? And they’re like, Yeah, do it.
Heather: Of course. So definitely get yourself a reusable water bottle or a few. That’s my stainless plug, .
Brent: Cool. Thank you so much. Heather Barr, the community development developer manager for BigCommerce thank you for being here today. Yes, thank you
Open-Source and Software as a Service have traditionally not been aligned. The traditional SaaS model is closed code on a multitenant host. The Open-Source model is something you have complete control over, and you have to host it yourself.
Open SaaS brings the idea of open source to the SaaS Community. We talk to Katie Hoesley about the Big Commerce Hackathon and how developers can be active in a vibrant community.
Transcript
Brent: Welcome to Talk Commerce, the BigCommerce community channel today. I have Katie Hoesley. Did I get it right? Katie Hoesley. So Hoesley go ahead. Introduce yourself. Tell us what your day to day role is and one of your passions in life.
Katie: Okay. Yeah, I’m Katie. I am the senior developer advocate at BigCommerce.
Katie: And I think the things I’m really passionate about. Completely unrelated. I’m really passionate about education and I’m really passionate about being outside. I live in Colorado and I’m from Minnesota, like you Brent. I’m really passionate about the outdoors and education.
Brent: Good.
Brent: Today we’re gonna talk about some developer things at BigCommerce and how maybe developers could get more involved. Yep. In some of those activities that BigCommerce is doing. Tell us about what you’re doing in that role and some of the things that we can do together to encourage developers on the BigCommerce platform.
Katie: Yeah. So my position at BigCommerce, I describe it as to people as I swing on a pendulum between our product and engineering teams and then the developers in our developer community who actually use BigCommerce tools and who build on our platform. A big part of what we’re doing right now is just trying to get more people engaged in our community in general.
Katie: And the thing we have actually running as we speak is the first ever developer hackathon at BigCommerce. So it’s a two week long hackathon. We have participants from all over the world and it’s been really fun. It’s the first time we’ve run anything like it. And of course, now that we’re running it, we have 2 million ideas of the things that we wanna do moving forward.
Katie: More hackathons, more community engagement, more open source, contribution competitions stuff like that. We really want anyone that builds on the platform to join either our slack community or follow us on Twitter. Because we have a huge number of people that build on this platform and we have such a small percentage of them in our engaged community.
Katie: And so if I could tell them all one thing it’s that I really think you get a lot out of engaging in the community. You engage with us on the dev team. You engage with the other folks that are building on the same platform. And you can eliminate a lot of multiple people doing the same work, we find out that people are building something that someone built five years ago, but they just don’t know it exists.
Katie: My day to day is really trying to get people into that community and then trying to create initiatives that really bring them a lot of value. And then. We have a perfect direct line into our users to bring feedback back to product and engineering, to tighten up those loops of iterations of products.
Katie: It’s a mutually beneficial relationship, like BigCommerce gets a ton out of us having an engaged community and the community itself. I think also gets a lot out of just being there and being with each other and with
Brent: us. I think that you had mentioned open source and that’s a little bit unique to the SaaS community.
Brent: Tell us about open SaaS and open source and how BigCommerce views open source and how open source then is is participated in from the broader community. Yeah.
Katie: Great question. So BigCommerce is moving in a direction. Like I feel like we’re partially there, but the larger initiative in general is moving towards being like an open SaaS platform.
Katie: Which means that we accept contributions from the community. You can go look at the code base of big design, for example, our like modular design library that has all these reusable components that you can use. Anyone can use them. They’re open source. And if you find a flaw or if you wanna improve it, like you can do that.
Katie: We can have all of this contribution from our community so that our community is not reliant on our developers fitting some bug fix or some feature request or whatever into a sprint, rather if you know how to fix it, or if you wanna add something, you can go ahead and do that. And I think anyone who uses a particular software consistently, or anyone that’s been a software developer knows that the community finds things that the developers on the back end don’t see, because they’re building the product.
Katie: They aren’t necessarily using it over and over and over. So the more contributions we get from our community in tandem with what our very skilled developers are building better for everybody. It’s a really cool concept. I don’t know if anyone else is doing or is as focused on it as BigCommerce.
Katie: And if I was a, if I was a developer out in the wild and I had to pick something, I feel like I would wanna pick an open SaaS platform over something that’s completely closed. And if I have any sort of issue or thing. I know I can just go fix real quick. I have to wait for it to fit onto a product roadmap where open SaaS or open source contributions in general are just a way for the community to directly affect the product that they use every day.
Brent: Maybe describe briefly how a developer gets. They find a bug, how do they get that fix into it? And how do they verify it’s been fixed? If it’s a SaaS platform. Yeah,
Katie: that’s a good question. You would have to find either in the documentation or by contacting someone where that repository is of whatever that open.
Katie: Thing, you’re looking at, say, it’s the big design. You could find the big design repository and you would submit a poll request for whatever change you’re making. And then someone on our end would either accept the poll request or they would reject it. You would find out, probably get like a GitHub notification.
Katie: I’m guessing if that’s how you’re doing it. And if there’s some major thing that you wanna change, they’re not gonna. Users create like humongous features, I don’t think at this point any platform would let users create something huge, but you would just submit a poll request and then you would know whether or not that got closed, like rejected or closed
Brent: accepted.
Brent: Are there, are you recognizing those people in a way, in any way?
Katie: That’s a good question. I don’t know. I don’t know if we have a system for like recognition of con contributions. I don’t know if we’re at a level where we’re getting enough contributions to think about it.
Katie: But we should, we definitely should. There should be an incentive. There’s an inherent incentive because it’s improving the product that you use, but there should be a greater incentive for people to continue contributing, cuz that’s the goal, right? Like people they start contributing and then they get the bug and they want to contribute more and everybody wins.
Katie: As of right now, I don’t know if there’s like a true incentive outside of the product being improved.
Brent: Have you looked at other open source communities that are doing the same thing that wouldn’t be SaaS? An on-prem open source software has a lot of these things that we’re talking about already
Brent: ingrained in ’em because people can run the whole system on their local machine and find those things directly. Have you looked to see what other communities are doing to see how BigCommerce can evolve in that as a SaaS company?
Katie: I don’t know if Magento qualifies for this, but when I first started in devel, I was like talking to everyone I could find online about dev and about their experiences, wherever they are.
Katie: And I kept hearing that Magento’s software is over 50%. Open source contributions. And that creates this awesome ecosystem where people want to contribute. They’re saying their contributions recognized developers love it because they don’t have to sit and fix all these things or add all these these little tweaks that they trust their community to do.
Katie: And I heard over and over these like rave reviews about just that. I think right away, I was sold on uping the open source. Just like upping people’s knowledge or awareness that like, you can do that here. And so our hackathon is our first big thing, but an open source contribution competition, or some way to get people to contribute to our open source content is definitely on the top of the list of things we wanna do next.
Katie: So yes and no, I think I don’t have a lot of direct things to look. There’s not I don’t know that there’s an exact parallel to what we’re doing for me to look at, but I heard over and over from people who had worked both in develop as a developer and in other roles at Magento that that was a huge thing.
Katie: That was a huge reason for their community growing so much and staying so big. And like I said, there’s so many devs using BigCommerce and there’s so few of them proportionally active in our community. Active in slack or active on Twitter or wherever it is our forums. And I’m hoping that more initiatives like that can get people in, people can see this is fun and it’s not that hard.
Katie: And you can solve your own problems, which I think for a lot of developers being able to solve your own problem. Is why you became a developer most of the time. You can do it yourself, you can build it yourself. So yeah, Magento is the big one that I kept hearing over and over.
Katie: Obviously you’re familiar with Magento. And so just hearing that alone, inspired me to really keep that on our developer relations roadmap of a really cool thing. We can get people. To be aware of and to
Brent: contribute to. Yeah. And I do know a little bit about Magento but I do also think it’s a good if you look back in history, it has a good roadmap of things that have worked and haven’t worked in a community.
Brent: And it’s a good way to collaborate with another community to find things that are working from one community, the other. And I think as a community leader the core of it shouldn’t be commercial. The core of why we’re in a community is to do great things together as a community.
Brent: And I applaud the hackathon. I think that’s very exciting. Is it the first eCommerce hackathon for a SaaS platform?
Katie: It might be? I’m guessing other companies have done one. I know Shopify did one years ago. I know it’s the first one at BigCommerce. We’ve never done an external hackathon before.
Katie: And when I looked around to try to find examples of other hackathons, so I could figure out how to run one and figure out what I needed to do in order for it to work. I really couldn’t find a whole lot of stuff. So I don’t know if this exact model of us running one, not in tandem with an event.
Katie: It is its own event on its own. I think that setup is fairly unusual. Normally a hackathon would be, the final two days of a week, long conference or something like that. So I didn’t have a lot of examples to look to. I just had my previous experience of being in hackathons. So we could stitch together what we thought we needed to do. I’m not sure if we’re the first oh, SaaS company to do one. I doubt it. I’m sure someone has but yeah, it’s our
Brent: first one. I think it’s super exciting. It’s the first one of a SaaS company I’ve heard of, but then, okay. I’ve been involved in another community for a long time that’s not SaaS, so I’m not the best expert in that.
Katie: We have, I think like a third of our participants are in Asia.
Katie: A third are in north America and a third are in Europe and 1159 central time is like 8:00 AM someplace, it’s all over the place.
Brent: Great. Is there, so is there plans to do an in person, like maybe in Austin, an in person hackathon it is
Katie: top of mind. I think running a virtual one has been awesome, but it just makes me that much more excited to run something in person.
Katie: I guess anyone on the internet knows it’s much more difficult to connect with people via discord or even via zoom. So we would love to have some sort of developer-centric event BigCommerce traditionally. I don’t think we have very large developer events. But as we dig a little bit more into like developer relation, as we invest more in our developer relations team and our community team I think it’s become clear that we have a ton of people in Austin.
Katie: We have a ton of people that would travel to Austin if we were doing some big, awesome things. There’s no date but it’s on our like mental roadmap of when can we do this? And we are excited. I really wanna do something
Brent: soon. Yeah. And I know John Woodall of space 48, and I know Tom Robertshaw who just did big DevX.
Brent: It was a virtual event too. Yeah. Our first event with him was in Austin. Okay. It was called ma Titans. And I think there’s probably a lot of opportunity. And I know Space 48 is fantastic in the collaboration space and especially in the developer space. And Tom is such a great person to lead that.
Brent: It seems that type of event would be a big hit in Austin. And I would be one of those people behind it that would be pushing for it. And it is fun. We have organized a number of the Meet Magento events, and typically after the event, we would do a full day hackathon in conjunction Adobe slash Magento always sent their community leaders there to help put those pull requests in at the end.
Brent: At the end we would have some scorecard items around how many bugs were squashed and how many pull requests were accepted. And it’s always a fun time. And then the developers, if their bug does get into the core. I think with the open source that you can download, you can actually see your name inside of the code base.
Brent: What is that? But it is it’s, I think from a recognition standpoint, it’s always fun to know that, Hey, I’ve contributed back to this software and it’s a good talking point for BigCommerce as well that you can participate and then give back to it.
Katie: Totally and like doing a hackathon like that too, a really short, like one or two days is a completely different energy than this two week one, this two week one, I think is gonna primarily be people working on or starting to work on apps that they do plan to bring to the marketplace, so I think we’ll have a lot of like MVPs that will get iterated on after. I’m sure Space 48 is gonna come out with some fully done app within two weeks. I don’t even know what those guys could do. Probably a fully completed app, but the energy of a two day one is really fun. Yeah, if we did some sort of open source competition or, whatever it is.
Katie: And also we have so many partners that are doing such interesting things. It’d be so fun to have speakers from somewhere like space 48, someone like you to come up and talk to the other developers in a real, in person forum. I’ve never even met my coworkers or seen our office, so it would also be cool for me.
Katie: But yeah, something in person is like definitely top of mind and being able to in incentivize and encourage open source contributions would be huge.
Brent: Let’s make sure we do a follow up after the hackathon and see how it goes. And definitely we have a few minutes left here and I have a new project that I’ve started personally it’s called the free joke project.
Brent: Okay. And I’m working on telling a joke during the podcast rather than. just Having a joke prior to my podcast, which I give away a free joke prior. I’m gonna tell you a joke right now.
Brent: And and then you can decide if it’s free or. Should I charge for it? That’s the question. Should it be an open source joke or is this one of those jokes that we want to really tie it down. We don’t want even anybody to modify the payment gateway on this joke.
Brent: That’s how closed it is. All right. So what do you call it? What do you call a detective who just solves cases accidentally? What do you
Katie: call detective who just solves cases
Brent: accidentally Sheer Luck Holmes.
Katie: I think you got charge for that one. Really? I think that’s gotta go behind the paywall. That’s a good one.
Brent: Behind the paywall joke. You’re the first one who has said that. Thank you so much. Katie, at the end of every podcast, I give the guests the opportunity to do a shameless plug. What would you like to plug today?
Katie: Okay I think what I’d like to plug is joining our developer slack space or following BigCommerce devs on Twitter.
Katie: That is me. I constantly retweet myself, so you’ll know right away it’s me, but that is I think the top of the funnel to joining our developer network and to really seeing what we offer and being able to engage with people just like yourself and people from my team. We’d love to have more people join the community and really see that it’s a great place to be.
Brent: Yeah. And I will just add that we’ve started a BigCommerce community channel on Twitter. Yes. That we’re trying to get more people. It does have more people than another platform that starts with an M that now starts with an a, but also has a large following. So I would encourage everybody to go to Twitter and join the BigCommerce, Twitter community channel.
Brent: Yeah. And we are trying to post something in there almost every day. Katie, thank you so much for being here today. Thank you for having me. It’s been a great conversation and I wish all the luck for your hackathon. And lots of bugs, squashed, and lots of new features seen.
Brent and Tom (@bobbyshaw) discuss ways to build community and how people can become more involved in the BigCommerce Community. We talk about different channels and how inclusive or exclusive those channels are. We talk about the BigCom DevX event that Space48 recently organized and the upcoming BigCommerce.
Hackathon happening August 15 – August 26, 2022, Starting at 10:00 am CDT
Brent: All right. Welcome to this BigCommerce. Big talk. Hey, that’s a good one. Big talk, BigCommerce, the addition of talk commerce on the BigCommerce community channel today. I have Tom Robertshaw who is a activist for the BigCommerce community. Can I call you an activist? Agitator? Okay. Agitator. Yeah. Yeah. So Tom, introduce yourself.
Brent: Tell us what you do day to day. One of your passions in life.
Tom: Brilliant, Innovation Director at Space48, and I head up our initiative to build a suite of apps that help the commerce merchants grow their store. Passion day to day two main passions. First, my children about two that three years old and three months old.
Tom: So that’s a lot of time and energy goes into that. And I love it. But my second passion. Probably supporting on Manchester United in the football slash soccer. Although that’s more difficult of late in their recent seasons.
Brent: Yeah. We have to stay away from controversy or as you would like to say controversy on our podcast.
Brent: Let’s dive right in. Let’s just talk about community. We’ve both been in another community of another platform for a long time. And in our green room talk, we were just going. Some of the reasons and we landed on the word. Why? Like, why are you involved in the BigCommerce
Tom: community?
Tom: Yeah. That’s a great question. And as you say, we’ve been involved in communities in the past and some, I think when you’re in a community, you think it’s special. And lots of communities are special. I think like for me, personally, whatever I’m doing, whatever I’m involved in, I want to give it my all.
Tom: I want to be involved fully. Get the joy out of it, but to make the most impact as well. Like it feels like if you’re gonna be working with a platform to be involved in the community, gives you so many benefits, whether or not that’s learning like from others in the community, rather than just being whoever you’re working with day to day.
Tom: If you can broaden that to some of the best minds in the community, just by being active, whether that be at in person events online events, forums slack groups and things like that. It’s a greater opportunity to learn from others. I also, particularly when moving to BigCommerce over the last couple of years, I’ve loved being involved in answering other people’s questions, because it was the best way for me to learn rather than just what challenges am I taking on day to day?
Tom: Like I’m building this app. Okay. I need to learn this API. And just the problems that I come into. Building that app, if I’m listening to and helping others I’m researching other APIs, finding out about their problems. And for me that for both Magento and commerce has been fantastic ways to learn myself.
Tom: And the old age old adage of teaching is a great way of learning because you really have to put thought into it. It’s not just oh, I know how that works. Once you tell someone else how it has to work, then that the inside out. So those are like a few ways why I really enjoy learning.
Tom: One of our values is we thrive and we learn. And so there’s so much about being involved, helping other people, getting help from other people that resonates with
Tom: me there.
Brent: yeah, I like that. So thrive when we learn. That’s a great, that’s a, that’s one of the core values of Space48 and that’s such a great, that’s such a great way to look at it.
Brent: And I think you had mentioned earlier, too, that like maybe 90% of the people that are involved in doing BigCommerce stuff. We’ll just say whatever they’re doing, they could be implementers or they could be a developer. They could be a salesperson project manager. They aren’t involved in the community.
Brent: And there’s not a lot of interest to be involved in the community, which means that we slice up the pie. We have a very small group of people that are involved and out of that pie, there’s people that would be the ones that are. Pushing that involvement or pushing that engagement.
Brent: And then there’s the people that are learning from the broader community itself. How do we get people to be more engaged and I’m just gonna also target maybe the introverts that aren’t, that don’t feel as though they want to be engaged, but sometimes feel left out when they aren’t engaged.
Tom: Yeah, it’s a great question. And a difficult one and I’m sure it’s, sure it’s one that the like developer advocates and community moderators at BIgCommerce are tackling on a week by week basis as well. I feel like inclusivity and making it a, an a, an open plate environment, whichever environment we’re talking about.
Tom: If it’s on the forums or if it’s on the BigCommerce dev slack, which is where I spend probably most of my day to day time engaging with the community. It’s just, I guess the best thing you can do is making it a welcoming environment. So it is answering people’s questions.
Tom: So people see that people aren’t like judged for their point of view or corrected and told that’s not how you do it. And providing and showing that everybody is welcome. And there’s so many different ways to to approach a problem. I think that’s the best that we can do to encourage I do the, there’s a couple of people within the community.
Tom: Andrew Barber in particular, in the BigCommerce Dev Slack like that, we’ll pose like questions each week, then there might be like slightly off topic questions or a bit more bringing any sort of personal lives into it, like music interests or what have you learned this week? What’s your favorite, like local cuisine.
Tom: And I think that’s a great way of building up a relationship with other people. And that’s what it’s all about at the end of the day, with everything that we’re doing it’s all about the people, relationships will live on. People will move to other industries, whatever other platforms.
Tom: But I feel being, being real in those communities as well is an important part of making people feel like they don’t have to perform or be particularly as you mentioned for introverts they’re more likely to be nervous about what they’re sharing or if they’re going to be corrected.
Brent: Yeah. And I’ll just say right this morning, anyways, it is gonna be Branston pickle on. Simply because I’m out of Branson pickle right now. Now I’m on a mission to find some more. So I know I can find an on Amazon, but it’s incredibly expensive. Anyways,
Tom: Beans on Toast for
Brent: lunch, say . Yeah, it’s also Marmite, which Tom you very nicely gave me a 500 gram jar of Marmite a number of years ago, but I’m sure that’s still going.
Brent: Yeah I ate the whole thing, so don’t worry. It’s been that long. I think one of the things in the community space and we talk about slack, like that is a closed channel. And if people don’t know about it, they’re never gonna know about it because it’s not public. , it’s public in the sense that anybody can join, but if you don’t know about it, you don’t know about, it’s like that speakeasy.
Brent: That’s a great little place to go to, but until you know about it, then you know about it. So maybe from a community standpoint, there has to be some more outward evangelism that helps people understand where the places to go in the community and help them find the places where they fit best, and I think the slack group is great.
Brent: There’s been some talk about a discord group. And because, I set up a Twitter community and again, that’s a closed group. Anybody can join, but if you don’t know, it’s there, you’re never gonna know it’s there. So how can we. Make it more, how can we get our voices heard better through the broader scope of say social media and then invite people to come to these communities.
Tom: Yeah, I think from my experience and so far in industry, it’s been, Twitter has been the place. I dunno if that’s changing, I know LinkedIn has its own sort of place for people to come to and share and build a network. But depending on which role you’re talking about, like from a developer perspective wouldn’t say necessarily like LinkedIn is the place.
Tom: But Twitter outside of groups, I think we are, all we can do is provide many different options for people for their personal preferences. Like you say is slack isn’t for everyone. I dunno if discord is what, like hip young people are using these days. But I was forced to sign up recently.
Tom: So I think to learn about that now. But yeah, and the Twitter community I think is a great. It’s actually new to me in this, in, in general. Like I’ve joined the eCommerce community group on Twitter as well as a PHP one. But I’m, they’re new to me, so I don’t know. How to make the most of them and what other people’s experiences are other than that, it, yeah.
Tom: Feels like for me personally I enjoy sharing on Twitter, as you say, that’s there’s, it’s public. You still need to be following your network. But that seems like the most practical way. The alternative that I mentioned earlier is the forums. That can be a bit more
Tom: transactional rather than conversational. So I have this problem or, critique my site. And so you, that’s another place if you know about it and if you’re in the becomes community, then I’m sure you do. But that would be another one to
Brent: mention, yeah. Forums is how I got started in the Magento community.
Brent: And just as you were describing earlier, I asked so many questions that I started thinking I can actually answer questions and the, I. Wanna be a teacher in any way, but I answered questions because I knew by finding the answers, it would help me understand the problem better. And I’ll be honest this is 13, 14 years ago I did a lot of Googling and it’s amazing how just some little investigative Googling would help you find answers for that.
Brent: And then getting into a network of people to help you find those answers. which what followed from joining those forums and forums are more of a public thing? I’ll be I’ll be transparent. I’m not part of the BigCommerce forums yet. have to be part of that. And I don’t do much of a technical role anymore, so maybe that’s shows where that pivot comes from more of a architectural thought leadership role,
Brent: you’re not so much in the forums, but I do feel like it’s an important place for people like myself to at least try to answer some of those questions. So tell us a little bit about the BigCommerce forums and why developers should go there.
Tom: Yeah, and I had a similar experience. I was a moderator on the Magento forums.
Tom: And now I didn’t initially get involved in the BigCommerce forums. I started out with the slack group and then have grown from there. I think one of the reasons I chose to get involved is like you say, it’s, it feels more open. it feels more open and accessible. So there’s a wider group of people that are in and on the forums as opposed to the slack group.
Tom: But also like slack, particularly in most communities, the messages are lost. So it’s again, it’s very transient of the logistic, the experience of being in a slack community, whereas with forums. while we’ve talked about relationships, there is, a commercial and brand building reputation, building aspect to being involved in the community as well.
Tom: Naturally. It’s a kind of a, it’s a strategic choice. And one of the be benefits of forums is the SEO of them. You answer a question a few times. If that question is popular or it’s linked to, then it’s more likely to show up in search results. And it’s there, forever, or as long as it becomes forums and this shape or forum are around.
Tom: So there’s a lot of it’s nice to know that the time that you’re investing is going to be useful to others in the future, not just the person that’s asking it, whereas slack, its, who asked the question and who maybe saw that question at the time after that it’s gone or forgotten.
Tom: And so I think that’s one of the great advantages over a forum. Even over Twitter for the same reason that if you search for a problem, your solution that you posted a year ago is much more likely to be found. And therefore the value that you’re creating is greater.
Brent: Yeah. It’s of like an encyclopedia, so you can go back and look up things where I definitely agree on slack is something that does get lost even after a day.
Brent: It depends how busy the channel is. And it’s hard to go back and find it. Maybe speak to a little bit about the developer community now and just let’s touch on big Devex and how you are helping to bring those developers together in a place that we can all talk together.
Tom: Yeah, sure.
Tom: We created and had our first BigCom DevX, which was a virtual event for developers to come together and listen to a few different talks from people within the community, sharing about their experiences, neat ways about solving problems that they’ve tackled or deep dives into things like stencil and handlebar and how to build
Tom: more advanced themes. And the reason we created that is we internally have a dev X every month where given that we’ve been across offices are now like multi, multiple locations for many years, we wanted a way for the development team to come together and just learn about what other projects have been working on?
Tom: What cool things have you been doing? What challenges have you faced that we other we might all want to avoid in the future. And so we were having a monthly kind of an hour to two hour call Talk set up in advance for some people might be five minutes just to share this one thing they learnt.
Tom: Some might be longer if it’s a deep dive on a particular tool of technology and I got a lot of value from it. I learned and met people in the other offices that wouldn’t have got to know otherwise, and after doing that for so long and particularly post pandemic and getting like really involved in the BigCommerce community, I was going through the the process of
Tom: getting to know other people manually reaching out to them, having a catch up call learning about like their backstory, which I’ve really enjoyed so far and wanted to provide something else. And it felt like an appropriate time to, yeah, let’s run this as an experiment.
Tom: Let’s create what we would normally do for a monthly dev and make it. Announce it three months in advance get people from the community to talk. And we’ve got really good feedback from it. So we had about 75 people attend it. It was a free event, as I say, for a couple of hours. And all the videos are now posted on the BigCom DevX YouTube channel for you to find later.
Tom: And we certainly hope to run it again, not sure on the frequency. Right now may, perhaps the next one will be in the new year.
Brent: There’ll be one in Manchester hopeful. That’s a big in conference developer conference. I think you, you had mentioned a little bit about answering questions helps your, I don’t know if you were used the word reputation, but it does help you create more awareness about yourself in the broader community.
Brent: I think it’s important to note that both of us don’t work for BigCommerce, but we work for places that are BigCommerce partners. But I don’t think your motivation ever should be self-promotion or trying to be commercial and answering a question, cuz you’d like to sell somebody, something I, as a developer a long time ago, always saw through that
Brent: when somebody was saying, you should use this extension because blah, blah, blah. And it that self-promotion in terms of trying to be commercial and selling something is different than I think the motivation to be in a community to help others, there’s two competing factors there.
Brent: Maybe with the few minutes we have left here, we could talk a little bit about why we want to get people to join and some of the big things that they get out of the community, other than just commercial benefits.
Tom: Yeah, I think it, it comes back to some of the things I mentioned earlier.
Tom: Like I, I really wanna meet other people in the community. I enjoy kind getting to know people like, like myself getting to know you Brent and me visiting Minneapolis. What was it a decade ago now? So it’s amazing what can come out of getting involved and meeting other people, not least, the things you mentioned in terms of how it can be better for you
Tom: personally from a, the knowledge that you can apply at work or the projects that you might win because of it, those things are there, but they’re not the reasons that you go into it. Like you say. For me, it’s definitely been about the people. I think if I, my personally, if I can, if.
Tom: Be brutally honest. If I hadn’t got involved in the first conference that I’d been to, then I wouldn’t have gone on a tour of America and met my future wife. So there’s a good reason to do it.
Brent: yeah. Your kids have everything to do with the Magento community. We’ll give the Magento community full credit for both of your kids now.
Brent: I’m gonna edit that out. Definitely. it’s a joke, everybody. So you know, the other thing that, that has come up in our past community started with an M ended with an O had gento in it was inclusive versus exclusive. A lot of people saw Magento, some of the community members as being exclusive
Brent: and they felt it was hard to be involved with those other people. How do we stay away from that? How do we stay away from this sort of notion of being a clic or being some kind of in crowd? And if you remember, there was a hashtag called real Magento that was going around and people then started associating that with the in crowd.
Brent: And it wasn’t, it was I think it was meant to be a label of, Hey, this is where the Magentol community. not that there should be a fake Magento, but it also, we have to have a differentiator from the hashtag Magento, or BigCommerce, because that’s gonna be a commercial hashtag. How do we make it inclusive, but also say here’s how you find the content for this community.
Tom: certainly, and I’m probably the last person that should advise on how to be inclusive, but from going through that experience, and I recognize why those kind of hashtags were created, when there’s lots of Twitter, spam and things like that. And I think in some ways it regarded as a time back to your previous point about like being authentic and connecting those that are just there to be authentic.
Tom: So I think that’s some of it In terms of how to continue being inclusive. I think it’s about always being open to new members. I think it can be difficult, particularly if you’re an introvert. Like you’ve got people that, it can be like a little difficult when the new person walks up to the group, whether that be in, in real life or new person enters the slack chat, like I can appreciate like why we don’t really talk about it.
Tom: That is a strange experience that we, we have to deal with on a day to day basis in our modern lives. And I think it’s about recognizing that they probably just have a wealth of experience too. And even if they don’t, they can provide as just as much like value to the community.
Tom: And they’re just as important. I think I have certainly been lazy in the past of not necessarily considering myself in a clic, but trending towards like the same people that I already knew, because it was. And once you have found a group of people or people that you recognize, they are gonna be the people that you are drawn towards, you engage with because you know them, it’s safe, yeah. It’s gonna lead to a good time. And so it takes effort, doesn’t it, to be inclusive. And I think sometimes it’s hard to make that effort. And so I think we can all forgive each other for the times. And we, when we don’t but to continue to try to make that effort to stay as inclusive
Brent: as possible.
Brent: Yeah. And I think there is a challenge as well. You have to put effort to maintain relationships with the people that, there’s a certain amount of energy that has to go into putting the effort into maintaining a friendship like between you and I, if we both don’t put any effort in soon the relationship falls apart because there’s no effort put in either.
Brent: So the times that we did get to see each other in an event or something, we, you definitely wanna make time to spend time with your other community members and as it grows, and as there’s more people you wanna spend time as many as possible. So there I do see there’s a dichotomy in there between wanting to make sure everybody feels inclusive, but also wanting to maintain relationships within the community.
Brent: And I think. Like the relationship building and relationship maintaining. Like now we’re getting into more psychology and community, but the word is community, we’re trying to build community. And I don’t think it’s ever gonna be solved. I do feel as though the idea of diversity in our community can be solved.
Brent: Like we can invite more women, more people of color, and you and I are both not good examples of either of those. And how can we bring those people in? I feel like both of us could be open about making sure that we’re talking about the fact that we need more people of color and people that aren’t men and, that’s just a simple fact, right?
Brent: That, that has to be talked about. And it can’t be swept under the rug from a community standpoint and from an inclusion standpoint.
Tom: Yeah. And I think more, even more effort in that case, because, naturally, psychologically we are going to be drawn towards people that are like ourselves.
Tom: And if it takes effort to continue to Welcome by new people. It’s gonna take even more effort. If you don’t anything about the background or than what they’ve been through.
Brent: Yeah. I think that the perfect place for community building would be a community run together, which I’m a big proponent of changing your life through movement.
Brent: The Big Com Run. Huh? Are you getting it? feeling it now. I want to end, let’s end at a positive note. Tell us a little bit about what’s coming up for you in the BigCommerce world. And is there any, anything exciting that you’re working on right now?
Brent: And then I’ll make sure we put all these links and things like that in the show notes. .
Tom: Yeah, sure. Our most recent app just launched which we are about to more formally announce, which is a mega menu builder which I would be remiss not to mention on this particular episode we’ve worked.
Tom: with BigCommerce for a couple of years now, and we’re a bit frustrated what you can do out the box. And we know how important, like the store navigation is to draw people in help their product discovery and just simple lists of categories that it’s not gonna cut it.
Tom: And over the years we’ve created solutions with. Page builder, but again, that’s on a project by project basis. And so we’ve now built an app that allows you to manage your menu completely independently of your cater hierarchy, add images, choose your different sort of designs for the flyout menu.
Tom: And so it’s great for people just to install, configure and get working, but also for agencies to use as just to perhaps an admin interface and provide their own front end from menu. So that I’m really excited about.
Brent: Excellent. Yeah, and I’m all, I’m always excited about the concept of open SaaS, which BigCommerce likes to tout and the fact that BigCommerce, even though it’s a SaaS platform they offer a lot of ex extendability to their existing code and allow you to to work within that similar to open source.
Brent: You. Necessarily download it and run it, which would be actually cool if you could do little local instances of it, but I will, I’ll mention that to Brent Bellm. The next time I talk to him that we need local instances of BigCommerce run with warden. Anyways, I digress.
Tom: I’ll also quickly mention I’m excited for the BigCommerce hackathon.
Tom: That starts very soon as well. A two week event that BigCommerce are putting on to people to create whatever they would like, or whether that’s apps or scripts or demo stores, things that just create something with the APIs, following that open SaaS approach. And I’m excited to see that’s the first time that they’ve done anything like it.
Tom: First time I’ve been involved in that kind of thing with the BigCommerce platform. Looking forward to getting involved there. Yeah. And
Brent: hackathons are super fun and there’s roles for non-developers and hackathons either. They need creative thinkers. There’s always there’s roles for everybody in a hackathon.
Brent: And I would encourage even non-developers to join hackathons at least to see what’s happening and learn a little bit about that experience hackathons, I feel are most valued in person, but what we’ve learned in the pandemic and in the last couple years is that they are successful online and they build a lot of great relationships.
Brent: And I, I know that from the Magentol side they did some 24 hour hackathons that happened, starting in one time zone and just continually went for 24 hours straight around the world. And that was all done online collaborative. It’s a proven concept that works so great.
Brent: Definitely. Tom, thank you so much for being here today. I appreciate all the work you do putting in on the BigCommerce community. Thanks. I enjoyed it. When I finish off a podcast, I give everybody a chance to do a shameless plug. What would you like to plug today?
Tom: I will plug our apps. So if you search Space48 on the BigCommerce app store you’ll find a nice long list of apps that we’ve been able to put out now.
Tom: And we’re continuing to add to so check it out. All right.
Brent: Thank you, Tom Robertshaw. He is with Space48 in the UK. Have a great day.
Have you ever felt like a kid in the candy store? Imagine if that was your day job! This week we interview Ken Shenkman, who has been running his family business since 1992 and is on BigCommerce.
Nestled in sunny South Florida, The Bulk Candy Store sees its staff as family and its customers as close friends. Bulk Candy Store has been helping celebrate memorable events with sweets and snacks since 1992. Every day is a celebration, and sharing those moments with the people we cherish is priceless. Whether you are ringing in the New Year or just gathering to make merry, the Bulk Candy Store has all of the sweet treats you need to make the special occasions of your life exceptional.
Part 2: Multi Store Disruption with Brent Bellm, CEO at BigCommerce
Transcript
Brent Peterson: Just going back to multi-storefront, if we put all these pieces together, you have a solution now that will work across borders, across currencies, across languages maybe help us understand how big you’ve already helped us understand how big of a hurdle it was, but some of the solutions now that people can go to market with and the speed in which they could do it.
Brent Bellm: Yeah. So one example I love to use. I think it might’ve been the first or second multi-store customer to go live with us in beta.
Brent Bellm: This was months ago. This was last year. It’s a company called The Bullet Group that has Motorola rugged phones. So these are phones that are dust-proof, waterproof, drop-proof, rugged phones, and another brand called cat phones, like Caterpillar phones that they sell all across Europe.
Brent Bellm: They launched. I think they’re up to I don’t know, 20 plus stores for each of those two brands that are selling different currencies, different languages, all around the world. And they did this in a headless way. Meaning they’ve got, I think a WordPress front-end is the design. And then the backend is BigCommerce multi-store and it’s a multi geo scenario.
Brent Bellm: Ted Baker is doing the same thing. Ted Baker just launched this great apparel brand. They have something like a dozen different stores, different languages, different currencies. Again, that’s the multi-geo use case. But you could also instead do a multi-segment use case. Like maybe your initial store sells to consumers, but then you wanted a B2 B store to sell to your wholesalers and your retailers.
Brent Bellm: You can do that with multi-store. You could also come up with different brands. Sub-brands promotional launches, a store that you spin-up and then spin-down. And the power of this is that when you spin one of these stores up, you can use the same integrations that were on your main store, all the investment you put into building that initial big store, integrating into your ERP or accounting system, your email marketing, whatever your payment solution is.
Brent Bellm: You don’t have to replicate all that work. You can leverage it. That’s really the power and the speed of multi-store, but I think it’s illustrative that those first couple of examples I gave you they have a dozen or more stores and they did it out of the gate.
Brent Peterson: And I think the difference right now in the landscape of SaaS at least is the other, your competitors are all having to have a storefront and a different backend. And then they have to figure out how to manage all those multiple backends.
Brent Bellm: That is correct.
Brent Peterson: You’re letting the client effectively manage one place, one place to do everything and then distribute out those SKUs and even multiple currencies with different checkouts in different countries.
Brent Bellm: My understanding is that with Shopify, you can clone a store and it’s pretty easy to clone a store. You push a button. You’ve got another store. That’s like your initial store, same theme, same integration, same currency of that. You can’t do multi-store, which is one account. And then start changing all of that changing the theme and the currencies and the that have like same integration, same backend one account, one store, lots of storefronts.
Brent Bellm: You have multiple stores and we’ve always been able to do that too. This is much more powerful. This is. Very appropriate for many of the world’s mid-market and large enterprise businesses who do have multiple brands, segments, and, or geographies, but so many small businesses want to do the same thing.
Brent Bellm: And that’s one of the neatest things that we’ll be doing next. The announcement today is live launched for our enterprise stores, but we’ll be bringing this to our small business stores, our $30 a month for $80 per month. With our $300 a month plan, you’ll be able to click a button at a store, and boom, there you go. Storefront, I should say.
Brent Peterson: So you did mention that these new things coming up for the smaller merchants. What else is coming up with multi-storefront? What are the things we have to look forward to?
Brent Bellm: So in addition to bringing it to a small business and click of a button store addition, another major area of investment for us is in international capabilities within our native Stencil framework.
Brent Bellm: So having multi-language we already have multi-currency, but especially multilanguage and some other geographic capabilities built into individual stores. multi-storefront will benefit from this. If you’re using. Our native design framework and theming engine called stencil. If you don’t want those limitations today, then you can go headless with us and do your front end and WordPress or ContentStack or ContentFull or pick any other front-end framework.
Brent Bellm: We’re a leader in headless but we’re bringing some of that native in as well. And then a final release, which should happen next month. It’s March should happen next month in April is multi location inventory. So this is also going to be helpful because for businesses who have multiple warehouses and, or the addition of retail point of sale, we’ll have the full inventory API capabilities for you to use logic within BigCommerce to track.
Brent Bellm: Where is the inventory for each SKU, and then present that either to the customer. If the customer wants to make a choice, buy online pickup in store or within your shipping optimization to say customers located here closest warehouse is there shipped from that warehouse. So a multi-location inventory APIs are coming out soon and that’s quite complimentary to multi-storefront.
Brent Peterson: The multi-location inventory is going to help in the omnichannel world. If somebody is trying to connect some of their outbound POS systems into BigCommerce, that’ll allow the, that inventory to be available to the storefront.
Brent Bellm: Yes. And today you can manage that logic outside of BigCommerce, but bringing it in is nice and scalable.
Brent Bellm: It’s the sort of thing that would let us, for example, we’re integrated in and partnered with point of sale platforms like Teamwork Commerce, and Square and Clover. Another differentiator from Shopify who has its own proprietary. One size fits all point of sale. We partner with the market leaders and EPASS now in Europe ISEL these partners can then integrate the knowledge of inventory counts that they have in individual stores into the API.
Brent Bellm: And then the merchant who may have remote ship warehouses that are outside the point of sale can integrate those as well. And so that complexity can all be orchestrated within BigCommerce relieving you from having to have an outside order management system or ERP that’s handling all of that.
Brent Peterson: A lot of your enterprise clients are going to have an ERP there’s this enhances that allowing actually to connect multiple ERP is each store or each you can grab the inventory from each of those ERP systems with the with multiple inventory locations. So you’d have to have that. So that’s right. I think that, that gives another advantage to that. We did mention a little bit about headless and I’m always interested in headless.
Brent Peterson: Where do you think headless is going in the next five to ten years? Do you think the the idea of having a monolith where we have an easy added front end that’s part of the system. Or do you think a lot of stores are going this headless route?
Brent Bellm: I think headless will only grow. For example, when people talk about the metaverse, if you start creating storefronts in the metaverse that won’t be based on pre-packaged themes coming out of BigCommerce or Shopify, you’ll be designing that outside of our framework and then integrating a BigCommerce in as a backend, more broadly.
Brent Bellm: There is a very rich set of frameworks and content management systems and digital experience platforms that companies can use for their front ends. I gave the Ted Baker example, they’re using BloomReach, which is a really nice design and experience platform. I gave the example of The Bullet Group using WordPress more than 25% of the world’s.
Brent Bellm: E-commerce. Our WordPress stores, right? And WordPress is by definition going to be headless because WordPress is a content management system without its own e-commerce backend. You need to use BigCommerce or WooCommerce or another headless backend in order to commerce enable a WordPress site. But you think about the the popularity of all these additional frameworks, NextJS and content management systems like ContentFull and ContentStack, the high end, Adobe Experience Manager, Drupal and Acquia ones.
Brent Bellm: We don’t work with like SiteCore. There are a lot of these and what they do is they free up the designers to do things that are more innovative, less constricted than, the templating engine coming out of the e-commerce platform. We’ve got great themes, and you can do a lot with your design and Stencil.
Brent Bellm: The vast majority of our stores are in fact designing within BigCommerce because those teams are great, but increasingly brands want to be unconstrained and they want to really innovate in their user experience. And this is the advantage you get with headless. This advantage is that you then now have to integrate your front end and your backend BigCommerce is the platform that makes that easy.
Brent Bellm: Our biggest competitor is commercetools, a German company that’s like at the extreme end of difficulty. Because it’s just this giant, API switching network and you need a point solution to everything that integrates you need your payments, integrated your email marketing, integrated your your catalog management, integrated your backend ERP integrated.
Brent Bellm: It is a nightmare. Whereas BigCommerce has all this functionality built in and you get to pick and choose which functionality in which of the thousand plus apps that are already integrated. You want to leverage. And so there’s so much less work to do headless and many of the front ends are so well integrated that we’ll soon be putting them into our channel manager.
Brent Bellm: You can just go in and click a button and say I want a new storefront. And for this storefront, you can choose differently with each one for this storefront. And I want to use WordPress or the storefront. I want to use ContentFull and Vercel for hosting. You can, that will all be configurable straight out of the BigCommerce control panel.
Brent Peterson: Do you see BigCommerce now as being the leader in that sector and people
Brent Bellm: chasing you? It’s not just that. I see us as a leader. So does IDC when. And this is two years ago, but they had their enterprise report on headless platforms and they showed us as a leader. If I remember right, we might’ve been the only platform in the leader quadrant, which is a true platform rather than a microservices platform.
Brent Bellm: Like the other one commercetools. Is there maybe Elastic Path. These are all purpose built for headless commerce platform and they’re very expensive and hard to pull together. Whereas, BigCommerce was a full featured platform that starting six years ago said we want to serve the use case of companies who don’t use our templating engine.
Brent Bellm: The first two companies to go live with BigCommerce where giants Harvard business publishing, which is still headless with us today. General Electric. Those were custom front ends. And over time we’ve really built out our APIs, our connectors, our GraphQL capabilities. And so there’s no doubt that we’re fully invested in headless and.
Brent Bellm: It’s every bit our goal to continue to be the best platform in the world to do for most businesses to do headless commerce.
Brent Peterson: So just a little bit about performance. You mentioned GraphQL and for the non-technical people GraphQL is a newer, let’s just call it one step above restful APIs where it’s much more performant.
Brent Peterson: The coverage on GraphQL is very large on BigCommerce and most things are available via of GraphQL, which gives you a better performance on your store, out of the box.
Brent Bellm: That’s right, but there’s still some gaps. There are some, there are still some components of our product that don’t have GraphQL APIs.
Brent Bellm: We don’t have the full admin API infrastructure for just quickly provisioning a full store using GraphQL APIs. That’s all being worked on, it’s coming.
Brent Peterson: Yeah. And then, going back to the admin and separating admin out, a lot of times the complexity that brings and you could still build it out with restful APIs, that’s right. So I guess as we close out today what are you most bullish about for BigCommerce in the next year,
Brent Bellm: in the next year? Gosh, it’s so hard to limit. To one thing, you’re asking this question after the launch of multi-storefront. So I would have probably named that if you would ask me that question two days ago, but we’re on the other side of that announcement.
Brent Bellm: One of the things I’m most bullish about is international expansion. We were international from day one. The company was originally founded in Sydney, Australia, and only relocated its headquarters to the U S. Two years in when most of the customers were there. So they, they moved to the customers now are headquartered in Austin, Texas, but we’ve shown that we’re really good at hiring great talent and because of our open and partner centric approach, going into new geographies and immediately being able to successfully serve the local.
Brent Bellm: Customer and partner ecosystem. We did that spectacularly well, starting in the UK in 2018. I think it was that business. Absolutely booming. Since we expanded into Italy, France and the Netherlands last year and beginning of this year, Germany, Spain, and Mexico. Now each of those is off to a nice start.
Brent Bellm: So one of my aspirations is to get to a point where we’re competing and serving businesses in every country just about in the world of all sizes. I have a real passion for that. I was an international relations major in college and, ran PayPal Europe for four years. So this is an area where I really get jazzed.
Brent Bellm: We’re also a giant believer if I’m going to limit myself to two things. The other thing I’m most excited about is omni-channel selling. We bought a company last year called feedonomics, which is the leading feed management solution. In the world feed management is how an ecommerce company gets its catalog of products for sale from out of its e-comm platform or PIM or ERP and into the leading advertising channels, social networks and marketplaces that it wants to generate demand from and sales.
Brent Bellm: feedonomics is good, so good because they have, they serve something like 28% of the top thousand US online retailers. They not only connect you into Google shopping and Facebook, Instagram, and WISH, and Walmart and eBay and Amazon and Mercado Libre and all these other great channels, but they transform and optimize the data in each one.
Brent Bellm: So that your catalog looks exactly the way it needs to look to perform best on Google and then separately for Facebook and separately for eBay and each of these has different schema for text length, description, length, picture, pixelation, and feedonomics enables you to optimize for every one.
Brent Bellm: And what it does is it makes it really easy for a business to advertise and generate demand and sell in so many more places where your possible consumers might be spending their time and that drives growth. So between multi-store, which is creating more of your own storefronts to sell to customers and omni-channel, which is getting your catalog distributed to all the other places where consumers may browse the internet or shop, omni-channel plus multi-storefront, I think really is a one-two punch to help businesses succeed better on BigCommerce than they would elsewhere.
Brent Peterson: Yeah. And just as we close out here, I just wanted to make a comment on the challenges of going into new markets and how the open SaaS concept really helps to hurdle or get over those hurdles. It’s possible for somebody in Bolivia or Uruguay to build a BigCommerce store and then to have a custom
Brent Peterson: checkout made with a custom payment system. That’s a Bolivian bank and whomever is going to ship in Bolivia. Yeah. This is possible with BigCommerce where the majority of SaaS platforms, it is impossible.
Brent Bellm: That is correct. Although we also want to compliment that with having pre integration into, one or more of the leading payment solutions in Bolivia.
Brent Bellm: So the merchant doesn’t have to go through that trouble if they don’t, if they don’t want to. Yeah.
Brent Bellm: I was just making an illustration
Brent Bellm: on that’s right. We have that openness and flexibility as part of open SaaS.
Brent Peterson: That’s great. Brent, as we close out the podcast, I give everybody an opportunity to do a shameless plug about anything you’d like to promote today.
Brent Peterson: You’ve spent a lot of time promoting multi-storefront. Is there anything else that you’d like to promote that’s even non BigCommerce?
Brent Bellm: Yeah, the only other thing I think I would promote that’s related to BigCommerce that I haven’t touched on yet is our B2B capabilities. B2B e-commerce is roughly as big as B2C and we’re full featured. We serve B2B really well. We have a B2B edition with a whole bunch of core B2B functionality that comes out of the box.
Brent Bellm: And so if you’re a B2B seller entirely or partially, we’re a great platform for that.
Brent Peterson: Yeah, full transparency. We are a BigCommerce partner and we’re using the B2B edition and it’s fantastic. It works very well. Brent, thank you so much for being here today. It’s been such an enjoyable conversation and I wish all the best for multi-storefront.
Brent Peterson: It is a game-changer in the SaaS business. And I say that from a background of another platform that is multi-storefront. And I’m so excited to have this new feature inside of BigCommerce.
Brent Bellm: Thanks for having me, Brent and congrats to your parents who named you very well.
Brent Peterson introduces Brent Bellm, the CEO of BigCommerce.
Brent Bellm: BigCommerce is a software as a service e-commerce platform where brands and retailers use the software to create successful fast-growing e-commerce stores. They power brands of all sizes from startups who get going for $30 a month up to some of the world’s largest companies. BigCommerce recently launched Ted Baker, a leading men’s apparel and lifestyle brand.
Brent Bellm says multi-store is one of the biggest product releases of any e-commerce platform in history. We discuss how BigCommerce lets any account or customer launch additional stores from a single account. allowing scalability to companies to expand how and where they sell. The platform was originally designed for one account, one store and to expand to build multiple stores, every component had to become multi-store aware.
Brent Bellm says when Magento went from Magento 1 to Magento 2, it was a rewrite. Brent Bellm notes that with multitenant software, everybody’s running on a single platform. They’re immensely proud of making their platform a complete platform for even the world’s largest enterprises.
Brent Bellm notes that if you go start a store for $30 a month, you’re running on the exact same platform that Proctor & Gamble is. BigCommerce versus on-premise software can be 50% lower to 80% lower, depending on the nature of the customer. Brent Bellm notes that they joined Escalate, one of the first saas e-commerce platforms, in the nineties.
Brent Bellm says in 1999, 2000 companies were spending five to $10 million to cobble together the software and infrastructure for their stores. Brent Bellm mentions that in 2015, it’s fundamentally broken if on-premise software. Brent Bellm talks about how in 2010, they saw Magento take off, but it burdened companies with having to license, maintain, and secure their software. Brent Bellm says it’s high time that a saas platform was the solution for complex businesses.
Brent Bellm notes that they’re going to create what they call open saas, and they’re going to take a saas platform and open up every component. Brent Bellm says they’re going to try to make saas as open and comparable to open source as possible. Brent Bellm mentions that it’s been seven years bringing enterprise-level openness and functionality to a saas platform.
Brent Bellm notes that if you’re a small business, you can use their proprietary solution or if you want to use someone else, they surcharge you an extra 2% of all your sales. Brent Bellm says they were doing internet payment gateways in the nineties. Brent Bellm talks about how there is no such thing as one size fits all in payments. Brent Bellm says there’s a differentiation between a Braintree between CyberSource and authorize.net.
Brent Bellm says they go to each of these phenomenal payments players and talk about, let’s get you the single best integration into BigCommerce. Brent Bellm says they don’t surcharge customers if they don’t use their own proprietary product. Brent Bellm talks about how you will see that you save a lot of money at every tier using their players because their payments players compete against each other.
Brent Bellm says that third-party checkouts are disallowed because they have to control the checkout. Brent Bellm notes that they believe in their concept of open commerce and that they make the best built-in checkout they can. Brent Bellm mentions that you can modify the source code and use a third-party checkout. Brent Bellm says they support checkouts that are different from other countries.
Transcript
Brent Peterson: Welcome to this BigCommerce episode of Talk Commerce. And I have Brent Bellm here, the CEO of BigCommerce. Brent, why don’t you introduce yourself? Tell us your day-to-day role and maybe one of your passions in life.
Brent Bellm: So I’m CEO of BigCommerce. I took over for the founders about seven years ago.
Brent Bellm: BigCommerce is a software as a service e-commerce platform where basically the software that brands and retailers use to create beautiful, successful fast-growing e-commerce stores. We serve them all around the world. We’re big, of course, in north America, but also Australia, New Zealand across EMEA, and very proudly have recently launched in Mexico with further expansion plans in South America.
Brent Bellm: We power brands of all sizes from brand new companies and startups who get going for $30 a month, all the way up to some of the world’s very largest companies, for example, Proctor and Gamble runs a vast majority of its brands on sites all over the world on BigCommerce, SC Johnson, Unilever other customers of ours, just to pick one category.
Brent Bellm: We recently launched Ted Baker, a leading men’s apparel and lifestyle brand. And we’re one of the biggest software as a service platforms in the world. We IPO’d two years ago and now trade as a public company on the NASDAQ.
Brent Peterson: So we’re at ShopTalk today. And you had a big announcement yesterday. Multi-storefront. Why don’t you tell us a little bit about a multi-storefront for BigCommerce and what that looks like?
Brent Bellm: Yes, multi-storefront is the biggest and most complex product release in our history and arguably one of the most complex and biggest product releases of any e-commerce platform in history.
Brent Bellm: What multi-store does is it lets any account or customer of ours, launch additional stores for additional brands, additional customer segments and or additional geographies. All from a single account. These stores can have the same or different themes and designs, catalogs, checkout experiences, integrations.
Brent Bellm: The value of it though, is it’s a scalable way for companies to expand how and where they sell, leveraging all the efficiencies of a single account. What is so powerful about this is that traditionally one could only get multi-store functionality from the most expensive large enterprise platforms, Magento enterprise, Salesforce, SAP, and what made it really complex to launch is our platform was originally designed for one account, one store.
Brent Bellm: You could have multiple stores, but they each had to have their own account, their own infrastructure. You’re basically duplicating all your effort. To build multiple-store, every component of our platform had to become, multi-store aware. Catalog had to know which store it’s referencing, checkout, which store it’s referencing tax.
Brent Bellm: Every single component themes URLs had to be rewritten to understand which store am I talking about storefront for a given owner. And that rewrite took us three years. We did it all while on a multi-tenant SaaS platform, meaning without disrupting the 60,000 roughly stores that are running every day, their stores keep running.
Brent Bellm: And then at the end of this path, they suddenly have the ability to add more stores without anything breaking on the stores that they had historically. That’s really hard to do. Remember when Magento went from Magento one to Magento two, it was a rewrite. And a component of that was trying to significantly improve their multi-storefront capabilities.
Brent Bellm: They had the benefit of being on-premise software. They could just throw away Magento one, rewrite it as Magento two and say, Hey customers, if you want this set of improved capabilities, you have to migrate. It’s a total migration. You throw away your Magental one. And now you start over on Magento two.
Brent Bellm: You can’t do that with multitenant. Software as a service multi-tenant means everybody’s running on a single platform. And when you make changes, they have to not break the stores of everybody running. You can’t tell them to version or upgrade or migrate. You have to fix it all while the train is running.
Brent Bellm: And that is what we have done. So we’re immensely proud of it. It truly makes us a full featured complete platform for even the world’s largest enterprises. And it’s a very big differentiator, for example, from Shopify who cannot do this.
Brent Peterson: I want to back up just a little bit and just talk a little bit of a more more about SaaS as well and how much savings clients can realize in their SaaS offering versus the on-prem.
Brent Peterson: You did mention that the having to upgrade and some of those breaking things. The upgrade path in a on-prem version, you do have to shut down and start up and spend money on doing that. Where are the savings then met from BigCommerce for the client when they’re on just the SaaS platform,
Brent Bellm: When you’re on SaaS a large portion of your software hosting and everything is included in one price.
Brent Bellm: You don’t have to pay separately for hosting. You don’t have to have an army of software engineers to maintain your code. You don’t have to worry about security and bug fixing. It’s all included. That starts for as little as $30 a month, and believe it or not on BigCommerce, if you go start a store for $30 a month, you’re running on the exact same platform that Proctor and Gamble is and all of our largest and some of the biggest companies in the world they’re running on the exact same platform.
Brent Bellm: We’re maintaining hosting, constantly improving performance, speed each and every day. Our agency partners who are familiar with on-premise software in particular Magento often tell us that total cost of ownership of BigCommerce versus on-premise software can be anywhere from a 50% lower to 80% lower, depending on the nature of the customer.
Brent Bellm: And the complexity of their site. So it’s a dramatic saving. I’ve always believed that this was the best solution for most companies who are, if you’re a retailer or a brand, you’re usually not a technology company and don’t have world-class software engineers and IT professionals. I believe in this for 22 years.
Brent Bellm: In fact, in the nineties, I was a retail consultant first, starting with retail stores, physical stores, and then going to. Internet stores. And when I cut the cord on consulting and said, I’m going to now bet my career on a single concept. What is the concept? I most believe in the world of e-commerce at the end of 99, I joined a company called Escalate, which was one of the first SaaS e-commerce platforms back in the day.
Brent Bellm: I remember there being three or so others, I could name Yahoo stores. Volusion, Blue Martini. We were number four. There might’ve been a few others around the world. They didn’t even call it SaaS back then they called it ASP. But at the time, this is like 1999, 2000 companies were spending five to $10 million to cobble together the software and the infrastructure and the hosting for their stores.
Brent Bellm: And Escalate came along and said, we’ll do that for you, but only charge you 6% of your sales. But that scales and you don’t have all the upfront costs. Incredible idea before it’s time. That company didn’t end up surviving and succeeding Yahoo stores and Volusion did, but they never really were able to modernize their tech stack as technology moved faster than they did.
Brent Bellm: But today I came back into BigCommerce and into this industry in 2015 with a total conviction that in the year 2015, it’s fundamentally broken if on-premise software, no matter how good. And I knew how good Magento was because I partnered with them when I was at PayPal. My boss ended up buying them into eBay.
Brent Bellm: I was part of that evaluation in 2010. So I saw Magento taking off. I had all the respect in the world for what a great platform it was, but it was on-premise software. It burdened companies with having to license their software, then customize it, maintain it, secure it, host it. And most companies can’t do that well.
Brent Bellm: They certainly don’t like the versioning and the upgrading. And I said it is high time that a SaaS platform was really the solution for the world’s complex businesses. We’d already grown to number two in the world for serving small business. Shopify was number one, they had a five-year headstart on us.
Brent Bellm: And in 2015, I said we’re not going to catch them. We can’t overcome their five-year headstart. They’ve already IPO. We have not yet. So we’re going to do something they’re not doing and nobody else is doing something that’s new to the world. We’re going to create what we call open SaaS. We’re going to take a SaaS platform and open up every component and turn it into little microservices, catalog and checkout tax service, everything with our own API layer and SDK, so that the world’s complex businesses.
Brent Bellm: Can customize can modify can extend when they don’t like our native functionality use partner functionality. We’re going to try to make SaaS as open and comparable to open source and on-premise as possible. And so that is our mission. It’s been that for seven years bringing enterprise level openness and enterprise level functionality to a SaaS platform.
Brent Bellm: So that the world’s businesses can really optimize for whatever complexity or uniqueness they have, that’s our vision for what BigCommerce is doing differently than any other company. It’s religion for me. I think it’s what a big portion of the world’s companies need when they embark on the best path of e-commerce.
Brent Peterson: I liked the concept open SaaS, maybe talk about some differentiators, especially around the checkout and the payment section, BigCommerce does offer a lot of savings as well in that area. And maybe against some of the competitors, what are they doing in checkout and what can’t you do?
Brent Peterson: Yeah. On some of the other platforms,
Brent Bellm: When I came into BigCommerce Shopify was already offering Shopify payments and more or less shoving it down the throats of their merchants. If you’re a small business, you can either use Shopify payments, their proprietary solution. Or if you want to use someone else, you better hope they’re integrated because that’s up to Shopify.
Brent Bellm: And if you do, they surcharge you an extra 2% of all your sales. Now I come from a payments background too. I was doing internet payment gateways in the nineties. I was eight years at PayPal. I helped create express checkout and build their whole merchant services business I ran PayPal Europe. For four years, I ran global product at PayPal.
Brent Bellm: I know payments. And one of the things I know best is that there is no such thing as one size fits all in payments. The needs of a business in Mexico , I was there last week, are completely different when it comes to payments and the needs of one in the United States or Canada and a solution built by Shopify a white labeled solution for north America.
Brent Bellm: Sorry. United States and Canada is not going to work in Mexico. Let alone pick any other country around the world. It’s not going to work in B2B, but even for Plain Jane credit card processing, there’s real differentiation between a Stripe between a Braintree between CyberSource and Authorize.net.
Brent Bellm: Chase GoTo Europe, Adyen, Checkout.com. All of these companies do something different and special. It’s not one size fits all. And so rather than in the pursuit of trying to take as much money from our customers as we can, which, what happened if we had a proprietary payment solution, our strategy is the opposite.
Brent Bellm: We go to each of these phenomenal payments players, and we say, let’s partner, let’s get you the single best integration into BigCommerce that you have with any platform in the world. So that if ever a business goes to you and says, Hey, we like your payments. Which platform can we best take advantage of it on, we want that to be BigCommerce.
Brent Bellm: I believe that statement is true for PayPal and Braintree for Stripe, for Chase, for Adyen, you go on down the list. We give customers choice and we don’t surcharge them if they don’t use our own proprietary product, because we don’t have a proprietary product. We believe the specialists in payments are far better.
Brent Bellm: And especially with their diversity of solutions then we would be, and that Shopify is by the way, if you want to know how you benefit from this, it’s very straightforward. Just go to pricing on Shopify and compare that to pricing on BigCommerce. And you will see that you save a lot of money at all at the exact same size of merchant at every tier, you’re saving a substantial amount of money using our payments players because our payments players compete against each other.
Brent Bellm: Whereas Shopify says use us, or, and we’ll charge you more at every level. And if you don’t like it, we’ll surcharge you 2% to use somebody else. Now let’s go to checkout. So if Shopify is making let’s call it 2.9% off a small business. When they process the payments if they don’t use Shopify, they want to charge them the 2% surcharge.
Brent Bellm: That means they have to control the checkout to know how much GMV, how much in sales of businesses getting so they can charge them that 2%. That is a core piece of the rationale around why at Shopify third-party checkouts are disallowed. You have to use Shopify checkout. They used to have third-party checkouts built by Bold, built by Bolt, different companies, D versus T fast.
Brent Bellm: Or merchant specific ones and they said, no, we don’t allow those any longer because we need to know every single piece of data, every single sale. Cause we’re going to charge you 2% if you’re not processing the payments through us. Okay. That’s how they make money. And they’re really good at making money.
Brent Bellm: We, on the other hand, believe in our concept of open, which is that we do our best to make the best built-in checkout that we can. But if you need to modify that checkout, you can do that. You can download the actual source code. I don’t think this is possible. Any other SaaS platform you can download the source code that powers every single pixel in the BigCommerce checkout, modify it, re upload it.
Brent Bellm: Now you’ve got a custom checkout running on BigCommerce that you’ve modified that this still maintains PCI compliance. That’s pretty cool. You can also use a third-party checkout. We support proudly Bold and Bolt. And Fast and anybody else who creates a custom checkout, we support checkouts that are different other countries around the world.
Brent Bellm: You can have your own proprietary checkout. You can have a checkout modified for B2B and all the various B2B payment methods. We support that type of openness because businesses are complex businesses need to optimize for their geography and their customer and their use cases. And what we specialize in is instead of a one size fits all playbook, open SaaS, flexibility, the power to let a complex business optimize for its complexity. And win that way.
The Indian Ecommerce market is progressing rapidly and merchants and agencies need to recognize its importance. Swapnil Ghone talks about his experience in the Indian market and we discuss some of the companies that are already succeeding. Swapnil has nearly 20 years of experience in Sales/ Business Development/ Account Management, Project Management, Operations, Training, and Customer Services in the Indian Ecommerce space.
Ecommerce in India has exploded in India since the pandemic. The merchants who had already understood the importance of technology have done really well. They have mostly scaled up well and grew their businesses in a very short period of time. An example is a delivery platform called Dunzo, which delivers groceries and essentials from local stores. They had already been using technology and grew overnight based on demand when India shut down. Dunzo supports small local stores and kept a lot of small shops going. About 40% of merchants have really embraced Ecommerce but that means about 60% of merchants still have not caught up. Some of the challenge is simply getting a small merchant to be forward thinking enough to understand how technology is changing commerce and educating them on how they can enhance their business.
