female founders Archives

Outsource your Inbound Marketing with Dina Buchanan

April 14, 2023November 15, 2022 Brent W. Peterson

It’s getting more and more challenging to hire a great salesperson. Getting those leads, getting that person to make phone calls, getting inbound leads through anything, LinkedIn, social media, paid ads. It’s all a hard slog. We interview Dina Buchanan, who has a guaranteed formula for a fantastic return on investment.

In 14 words or less, Dina can help you gain hundreds of high-end leads and clients monthly from LinkedIn.

She allows you to focus on selling and scaling instead of failing at marketing. Dina will help you to eliminate the stress. Of wondering where your following clients are coming from. Dina shows us the positive side of outsourcing your inbound leads and getting more business.

No-Code Commerce with Kaus Manjita

April 14, 2023November 8, 2022 Brent W. Peterson

Businesses are going online daily worldwide, and it’s getting easier. But running their businesses requires constant two-way communication with users and customers across channels 24/7, year-round. @kmanjita

Today we interview Kaus Manjita with Mason. Kaus is a no-code evangelist, content nerd, and serial product builder. You’ll find her amid entrepreneurs, brand builders, developers, marketers, and designers over Zoom on Hangouts and on this podcast today.

Mason is Zapier made for commerce. It connects data designs and channels to run your product launches, sales documents, discounts, inventory updates, custom reviews in-app, help, funnels, and more, all on autopilot.

Wealth and Homeownership with Nicole Hamilton

November 27, 2024November 1, 2022 Brent W. Peterson

In interviews with homeowners, 25% say they bought their home first for an investment and second for a place to live. The other 75% say they bought a house simply as a place to live with little expectation for it to be a good investment. You grow wealth through homeownership.

Nicole Hamilton has made a career of helping others with home ownership. She explains REAFE in detail. A Real Estate Asset and Financing Evaluation is about maximizing the returns you get from your real estate.

Her tip for the episode is to think twice if you want to refinance. If you refinance with less than half the time on your mortgage, you start over with your interest payments!

Show Notes

Here are more links that might be of interest to listeners:

A product for people who want to plan for Homeownership: https://www.homeownering.com/the-formula-steps-to-becoming-a-homeowner/

And this is about the financial, real estate analysis I do: https://www.homeownering.com/reafe/

Here is a free equity report we have on our site: https://www.homeownering.com/free-home-equity-report/

Transcript

Brent: Welcome to this episode of Talk Commerce. Today I have Nicole Hamilton. She is the CEO of Homeowner. Nicole, go ahead, introduce yourself. Tell us your day-to-day role and one of your passions in

Nicole: life. Oh, okay. It’s great to be here, Brent. I’m an entrepreneur in the housing industry. I have a company called Homeowner.

Nicole: It’s very pro home ownership and treating your real estate with the same care that you do your other investments. I’ve had other companies in the sector. I’d say the common thread through all of my ventures is an obsession with real estate, finance mortgages, Home equity appreciation.

Nicole: Home is an investment home ownership and intergenerational wealth. My current company home owning. Is dedicated to getting people into home ownership and then getting them good financial outcomes. So it spans the the life cycle of home ownership from buying utilizing and improving your financial situation through home ownership.

Nicole: And then, selling. and my passion, I guess one of my passions right now is weightlifting, . I go really into it.

Brent: Wow. That’s great. Yeah. I definitely need to get more into Weightlift as I’m getting older, I realize that my upper body, I run every day, but my upper body is definitely neglected, especially over time and it, I think as we get into our fifties, which I am, you are it’s harder to gain.

Brent: On your upper bodies, you have to work twice as hard as if we were in our twenties. Anyways, we can, we’ll keep moving out along there, but that’s awesome. That’s good to know. I’ve heard more and more people talking about that, yeah. Alright, so before we jump into our content I have a thing called the free joke project, hashtag free joke.

Brent: And I’m just gonna tell you a joke and all you have to do is tell me if it should be free or if we could charge for it. Do I have to? You do not have to laugh. I would appreciate real real feedback on it. All right. But they’re all fantastic jokes. All right, Ready? Okay. My doctor just diagnosed me with a severe lack of awareness.

Brent: It came out of nowhere.

Nicole: Free .

Brent: Alright. Super

Brent: Thank

Nicole: you. I actually love, another patch of mine actually is standup comedy. Oh, wow. All right. I will listen to any standup comedy. Yeah, so I, I’m interested in the free joke project and I hope to follow that hashtag and learn more.

Brent: Yes. I’ve started publishing on Twitter art on On TikTok, Sorry.

Brent: Sometimes they’re on Twitter, but they’re all on TikTok on my Brent w Peterson TikTok channel Anyways. Free hashtag free joke project. Great. So Nicole homeowner I’m I’m also a homeowner and always interested in the subject. Tell us about how you got into it and what was your journey getting there?

Nicole: Yeah I guess the way I got there was Earlier in my career I was a science major and then I went into technology. And then I got very interested in how technology can make people’s lives better. I know sometimes it makes people’s lives worse, but I know that, for me it was, how can I apply this to really helping people?

Nicole: And then the recession in 2008, housing crisis hit, and I really wanted. Help solve a problem. The problem being that a lot of people got loans that they couldn’t necessarily understand were afford, and that caused a lot of foreclosures and immense pain for economic pain, for many millions of Americans.

Nicole: And so I started a company called Tactile Finance. Tactile Finance, Pronunciation. Pronunciation it. And that was a sort of visualization product for banks to use with their clients or non-profits to use with their clients. And it just provided transparency into the market. And that’s where I got super into the math and.

Nicole: And the consumer need and the consumer approach to housing finance. So it’s been about a 12, 12 year journey to where I am now. Which I would say, I wound that company down in 2015, 16, 2016. And it ran its course and I realized that I really wanted to focus on the consumer, not the inter, B2B business, but focusing on the consumer and the consumer needs.

Nicole: And so I think that journey just gave me a lot of insight. I understand, the, a more sophisticated picture. I understand the bank’s motivation. I understand the role of the non-profits, I understand the mortgage industry as a. . And then I guess one of my superpowers is to take really complicated information and make it digestible for people and an enzyme

Nicole: So that’s where my real passion for homeowner came, which is there’s all this sophisticated knowledge out there, but like people. Regular people like you and me can use it to better their situation and understand the complicated aspects of owning a home, selling a home equity, and things like that actually make an enormous impact on your, ultimate net worth.

Brent: Yeah, I think do. So going back, starting with people with on their first home, how do you help them past rent and getting into their first home? What, Do you have a formula or do Yeah, go ahead. Sorry.

Nicole: It’s an excellent question. Brent . So I actually have a product, it’s called the Formula, and it’s on our website and it’s like $20.

Nicole: It’s very inexpensive and it’s a system which basically gives you. The ability to see all the diff it’s all the different criteria to be a homeowner. So there’s a lot of different known loans and qualifications to get a loan, and it lets you see where you are in relation to those criteria now, and then plot your way to the quickest, most effective path to being a home.

Nicole: So I’ll just give you an example. If you’re refinancing a house or buying a house the lo what the loan officer is doing in the background is they’re trying to fit you in this formula. It’s called a dti, debt to income ratio. And that’s a blah, blah, blah, gobbly go, industry language, but ultimately they’re taking all the aspects of your financial picture.

Nicole: And they’re trying to fit it into a way in which the bank will say, Brent, you can get this mortgage. But all of that is very opaque to a home buyer. And what this does is it just gives you that information that you can see exactly what criteria they’re using, and there’s ways that you can adjust your goals.

Nicole: If your income is too low and your debt is too. Then the house that you can qualify for is gonna be lower, right? So it’s this formula that you massage and say, Okay, over 12 months, if I can reduce my debt by X and let’s say I pick a house price of, 350,000 then I can get to that goal.

Nicole: That’s a achievable goal for me. Whereas if you don’t have that information, you’re just like, Oh no, poor me. I can’t afford a home. So it’s just empowering people. A lot of people get left out of the housing, out of the home, out of home ownership because they lose faith and they don’t know how they’re gonna get from point A to point B.

Nicole: The real issue is that how, being a homeowner is is a known wealth builder, especially for the middle class. And letting more people get into home ownership is incredibly important. I A lot of, public policies are designed around that. So it’s just like a way to distill this information.

Nicole: Create a plan for yourself and be able to actually see how you can get to that goal. So that’s one of the things that kind of came out of, all this work that I’ve done in the last 12 years is how to make information that’s known in the industry, known by, other people. So it can empower.

Brent: Do you feel as though now what? Home ownership got more difficult after 2008 and are banks getting better at helping people to get into home ownership now compared to right after the crash, the home crash?

Nicole: I think what the crash did is it changed a lot of laws, like the dod Frank laws.

Nicole: It made lending. It made it, it made a lot of good things happen in the industry that prevent consumers from being taken advantage of. So that, I think, was a net positive for everyone, including the banks. In a lot of ways. It made lending safer. It also, we know that we’ve been through very, up until recently, a very, a period of historically low interest rates.

Nicole: We’re not in that right now, hopefully we will be again, sometime I. Yeah, so obviously that made it easier for people to purchase homes and it also drove home prices up too with, demand and everything like that.

Brent: I think my first home was in the nineties and it was, I think we got an arm.

Brent: Or if a five year fix with an arm after. Something like that. Yeah. And at the time it was like 9% interest or something like that, but with the arm it brought it down or something. I don’t know. How you, do you have a formula me, to help people through that? Because I know like my friends in England where every mortgage is an arm and now they’ve said their payments have doubled all of a sudden because of that adjustable rate.

Nicole: Yes. So arms are, I had an. It’s arms, A lot of mortgage people actually get arms, seven year arms and things like that because the interest rate is low in the beginning. But it’s contingent upon the idea that you’re gonna be able to refinance out of that into a better rate. So it’s a, it’s a. So there there’s some risk in that, that you just really need to know what it is. And I actually made a video it’s on my website, but it explains exactly what an arm is. It doesn’t have a lot of viewers cuz a lot of people don’t know, don’t necessarily wanna follow through the whole five minutes.

Nicole: But I do have a video about product, a product review of. Of a ShopVac that, that hits 35,000 views. But the arm video is not as popular as the ShopVac video. .

Brent: Yeah, I have some Jack Russell videos that are far more popular than any videos that I can post on YouTube. So I think it is funny what people tend to watch.

Brent: Alright, so back to finance. If so, one of the hard parts as an entrepreneur, Is getting a mortgage. One of the easy parts before 2008 as an entrepreneur was a stated income mortgage, which they don’t do anymore. How do you have do you have specific help for self-employed people as they’re trying to get a mortgage?

Brent: And maybe is there a certain amount of time that you have to either show a W2 or show your tax returns to a.

Nicole: Yeah, so there’s rules for, so there’s, yeah there’s rules for mortgages. Usually the rule is for W two s is you have to show two years of your income. And it’s two years is really a rule too for business income.

Nicole: So a lot of banks will have you submit. Whatever structure your business is. If you’re, if you’re an LLC or whatever, then you submit that income, to the mc if you’re not getting a paycheck, if you’re taking a draw from the company. So there’s different ways to do it but you touched on a really important thing, which is that, for entrepreneurs, it can be d.

Nicole: If you’re in any of these categories or let’s say an Uber driver, you’re getting income from all these different places and you don’t have a w2, there are formulas that banks use to assess what your income is. So it doesn’t mean that you can’t get a loan. But in business the one thing about business income is that they wanna see that it’s going.

Nicole: So , if you have a year that, you know, so that can be a factor, right? If you have a, if you have, 2021 was a good year and 2022 is a bad year, but 2023 is gonna be a better year. There’s some ease of, getting a loan if you’re showing that your business is improving.

Nicole: And there’s also. There’s always leeway too with in the, these areas where you have to interpret, whether something is improving or not improving. There’s always you can ask for, the manager above the loan officer to take a look at it and see if, if you can submit more documentation.

Nicole: Or provide more information about the industry that you’re in. I know that during the recess, sorry, the pandemic, restaurants, restaurant owners, weren’t a great bet, right? So there’s some industries that really suffer, from declined if you’re getting business income from that.

Nicole: But there’s ways that you can, the more you know about it, the more you can help yourself. Just like anything. .

Brent: Yeah. Especially I think as an entrepreneur, that’s the hardest part is maybe, and I think it’s even harder as a young entrepreneur. So if, let’s just say you’re in your twenties, you’ve started a business and you’re trying to navigate that process of your first purchase because you don’t have a w2 is it better to go to a big bank or a small bank?

Brent: as a new home buyer or as an entrepreneur? Does it

Nicole: matter? I think it’s great to really go to a lot of different types, so I always recommend that people also put a mortgage broker in the mix. , because they have a access to many different types of loans. If you go to a bank they’ll have their own products, but if you go to a broker, they’ll be able to search more broadly and find banks that are more suitable for your particular situation.

Nicole: So it’s just good like anything else to shop around.

Brent: Do you ever talk to people about maybe a sec or investment home or a second home, or somebody that’s buying a home just for Airbnb?

Nicole: So one of the things that home honoring does, which I got into lately, which I think is a really important aspect of investment finance, which is neglected by wealth managers for the most part is analyzing properties for their long term investment potential.

Nicole: in the case of, if you’re someone who’s not getting a mortgage just to get the lowest monthly rate, which is most of us, right? We don’t want to spend a penny more than we need to on our housing, cuz we have a lot of other expenses. But for a lot of people, they do have a little discretion in how they structure their financ.

Nicole: And you can structure it in a way that gives you, a better return based on your goals, on your investment goals. So one of the things that we offer is a, they call it the reef, which is a real estate analysis. It’s like a financial analysis. So in that case, you’re looking at your current houses, if you have more than one or just one, what the financing is, which your overall goals.

Nicole: And then coming up with different scenarios that could, maximize your, the goal that you’re looking for, whether it’s putting more money in play, whether it’s reducing all your expenses, whether it’s looking to buy a second home, whether it’s looking to buy a home for rental purposes, things like that.

Nicole: It’s a financial investment analysis. And I think, too few people go through those steps to understand their real estate as an investment. And if you consider how much we all spend on our housing, really do, and doing little tweaks, like taking a second look at that, helo that you have, is there a better way to structure it so that you’re spending less?

Nicole: What is the interest rate that you’re on? When does it a adjust, taking a more watchful eye to these major expenses that you have. And a lot of people don’t know that they have options, so that’s a really big focus of home owning right now.

Brent: Yeah. I think you, you brought up a really good point about your financial advisor and it’s been my experience that a lot of financial advisors don’t look.

Brent: A rental property as a valid investment, they think somewhat probab. Some do I’m not gonna, I shouldn’t generalize so much, but a lot of them would say you put your money in bonds or stocks or, and properties sometimes, or a property or maybe a real estate fund might be something they would recommend.

Brent: But buying a rental property and then trying to. Is sometimes out of their purview. Maybe it’s more common for entrepreneurs to buy doing something like that. But I Maybe just a quick comment on that. Do you feel as

Nicole: that’s, Yeah, I think that, wealth managers and investment managers, they know their domain very well.

Nicole: And if you think about. There’s a lot to consider already in their domain. They’re not really necessarily trained or equipped to do something, in the real estate realm because real estate investment is itself a large domain. There’s a lot of math and a lot of considerations, tax considerations all kinds of things.

Nicole: Liability considerations. With real estate investment that is, that, I don’t know that you could expect someone to also be an expert in, it’s a different kind of thing. I have a good friend Roger Brown who wrote a book called and I Wish I had it here. He’s a great guy. It’s called Real Estate in.

Nicole: Math or something like that.

Brent: Roger Brown. I’ll put it I’ll do some research and I’ll put it in the show notes.

Nicole: Yeah, no he’s an amazing mathematician and so I, I learned a lot from him. He did a lot of work with me over the years, validating the math that I was doing. , helping me make sure that it was solid.

Nicole: And so I learned a lot about real estate investment from him, and I just know that I’ve read his book. It’s very interesting, but it’s it’s something if you’re gonna get into that field, I just don’t think that an investment, a wealth manager is the right person to maybe help you with.

Brent: Yeah, and I guess I never thought about this. Probably there probably are wealth managers that are focused more on the real estate side rather than the just straight up investment side. That’s an interesting, I, that’s an interesting take on things. Yeah. How about what about recommending if somebody were to buy a, an apartment, just paying cash for it.

Brent: Is there ever a good time to do that

Nicole: right now? Yeah. , I think right now, if you’re a cash buyer, And, you can imagine if the Fed is trying to, slow the economy down and and we know that rates are going up and mortgage rates aren’t tied to that specifically, but they have definitely, the, a lot of relationship to the cost of money being lent, So you know right now you would expect real estate prices to decrease as it’s harder for people to buy homes in this high interest rate environment or high mortgage rate environment.

Nicole: If you’re a cash buyer, you’re, this is your time, Like this is this is in your sweet spot cuz you. If prices are declining and you’re competing against people who have to get a mortgage and you don’t need a mortgage, then you know it’s your

Brent: time. Yeah. Good. Nicole, we have a few minutes left.

Brent: And it always goes by so fast. If if you have one little piece of advice that you could give somebody, what would that be? To get into the housing market right now.

Nicole: I think that you should if you wanna be a homeowner and home ownership is for you, you should make it a goal. And don’t give up on it because it does have a lot of potential to improve your financial situation, but at the same time, obviously you wanna know what you’re getting into.

Brent: Yeah, I like that. I like that concept because if you never set a goal, you’ll never

Nicole: achieve. Exactly. It’s true for everything in life, isn’t it, Brent?

Brent: Yeah, that’s fairly, that’s a really good way to look at it. So Nicole, as we close out the podcast to give everybody a chance to do a shameless plug, what would you like to plug today?

Nicole: I have a newsletter. It has a lot of subscribers. You can go to my site, homeowner.com/newsletter. You can sign. And also, take a peek at the site. There is the formula, which is for people who want to be aspiring homeowners, and there is what we call the reef, which is financial analysis for getting better returns on your, on the money you spend on home ownership.

Nicole: That’s great. That was really three plugs, . That’s

Brent: perfectly fine. You had to sit through my joke, no, I

Nicole: love you could get it. I wanna hear more of your jokes. Okay.

Brent: You could get extra plugs because of the bad joke. ,

Nicole: the free joke.

Brent: Yes. Thank you so much for being here today. It’s been such a pleasure.

Brent: And just so many more things we could talk about on this subject.

Nicole: Yes, Thank you for having me. Wonderful to be here with you. Thank you.

Four Ways to Increase your Website ROI with Thien-Lan Weber

April 14, 2023October 31, 2022 Brent W. Peterson

Tune in today to learn about the four easy steps you can take BEFORE Black Friday to make your site faster. (You can even tune in after Black Friday). Thien-Lan Weber talks about the four easy steps you can take today to ensure your ROI is maximized on your website ROI.

OneStepCheckout is not a traditional Magento module provider with a lot of extensions. Our checkout module is our core business. We work exclusively with checkout and conversions to always bring you the best possible checkout product. We are all about reducing customer abandonment and increasing customer conversions.

Show notes

Page speed deck by John Hughes: tiny.cc/irx-page-speed
Forbes Finance Council Article: https://blog.onestepcheckout.com/2022/10/ecommerce-tips-holiday-recession-economic-downturn/
Optty (Buy Now Pay Later Aggregator): https://www.optty.com/
Hyva: https://blog.onestepcheckout.com/category/hyva/
Wyomind Shipping Extension: https://blog.onestepcheckout.com/2022/08/insights-why-click-collect-further-boosts-checkout-conversion-bopis-in-store-pickup/
OneStepCheckout Seamless Registration Feature: https://blog.onestepcheckout.com/2021/10/onestepcheckout-for-magento-2-registration-account-creation-modes/

Transcript

Brent: Welcome to this Spoony holiday edition of Talk Commerce. Today I have Thien-Lan Weber from One Step Checkout and she has done a much better job of her costume and background than I have Thien-Lan. Why don’t you go ahead, introduce yourself, tell us what your day to day role is and one of your passions in life.

Thien-Lan: Hello, I’m Thien-Lan Weber. I work for OneStepCheckOut. So I guess most people know me otherwise. One step checkout is the main Magento extension to reduce for Magento one and Magen two. My passion in life, it’s eCommerce and drumming. I also like dress. And appearing on podcasts.

Brent: Excellent, thank you.

Brent: And so today before we get into our regular content, I’m gonna tell you a joke and then you are going to tell me if that joke should be free or if we could charge for it. Ready? You ready, ? Okay. I found out my girlfriend is really a ghost. I had my suspicions the moment she walked through the door.

Thien-Lan: It’ll be free.

Brent: Good. All right, Telan. I know today is Halloween, so I dressed up in my doctor who Christmas sweater, which I have my holidays completely mixed. And you are very well appointed in a a scary outfit with a span stuck in your head and you even have a great background. I appreciate that.

Brent: But we, let’s talk about the scary state of the economy and things coming. And then I think, let’s put it into context of what merchants can be doing to make sure that they’re getting everything they can out of their website. . Exactly.

Thien-Lan: Yeah. So yeah, not very funny. The current state of the economy is pretty gloomy.

Thien-Lan: We actually, I noticed that in New York when I went for McLin to New York, it was not as vibrant as 2018 and 2019 when I went and even the locals like Eric, and. Laura was telling, wa was saying that, A bit more dangerous. Lots of homeless people in the street. And I guess here in Europe we hear all the news about inflation war in Ukraine and yeah.

Thien-Lan: Worldwide inflation is around 8.2%. For the last 12 months in the US it’s yeah, around 8%. In Europe it’s around 10%, but with big discrepancies between countries like France, where I live, which is like 6%, and countries where Anton I imagine to expert lives in Estonia where it’s like 25%.

Thien-Lan: So yeah pretty.

Brent: Yeah. And so I know that there are ways in which merchants can help. And one step checkout is at the end of the funnel, let’s say at the checkout process. And I, you mentioned that you had done a article with Forbes about some points in which merchants can look or work through the checkout process.

Brent: Why don’t you explain a little bit about what that was?

Thien-Lan: Yep. We partner up with nata, who is a for finance council member to talk about this context and what eCommerce merchants can do as quick wins to get more sales this holidays. So it’s all about getting. Market share because consumers will have less spending power.

Thien-Lan: So the competition will be really fierce among all the brands. And you need to offer an experience that really appeals from the moment that people like even before people learn on your website up to the end of your online sales funnel. So today, I’m happy to share with you those four. and and they should be a lot, most of them should be implementable before this holiday season.

Thien-Lan: So that’s the good news.

Brent: All right, so let’s just tell let’s tell us the four points and then let’s go into detail on each one of them. Yep.

Thien-Lan: So the first point is to have a fast. Sorry. A fast website good performing websites. Consumers who go to your website, if they, it’s loading in more than two seconds, they’re going to leave and go to another website.

Thien-Lan: So performance is key here and throughout the whole browsing experience, you need to make sure that it loads fast enough so that people don’t leave and find items that they want, gift ideas, and put them into. So that would be by using themes like Hova, for example, on two, that makes the whole experience much faster and even helps you score rank higher in the search results so as to capture more traffic.

Thien-Lan: So that’s number one.

Brent: Number two, Okay, so I, Yep, go ahead. No, go for it. Number two

Thien-Lan: is around shipping. So with C we saw that by online pickup, in store, or click and collect is very popular. And sales going through those channels are going faster than eCommerce itself. So given that most of most of the time those shipping methods are more cost efficient, it costs nothing for the retailer to just have people come and pick it up.

Thien-Lan: It’s going to be very useful for consumers who can’t afford those extra five, $10 for shipping. So that was number two offer. More flexible shipping methods, including cost effective ones. Third one is offering flexible payment methods. And for the last couple of years, by now, pay later has been very popular as well because they allow consumers to pay, let’s say, in sport installments every fortnight, but without paying any.

Thien-Lan: So that helps when the budget is very strained to break it down into a longer period so you get your paycheck and you don’t pay anything on top of that. So offering payment methods that consumers like need for the holiday seasons is a big factor for to drive. And last but not least, having a good checkout that removes all friction from the checkout experience and allows consumers to place their order without forcing them to create an account or look for two coupon code that you might not have, or filling a lot of fields that will allow you to convert all that traffic.

Thien-Lan: And your efforts along the online sales funnel into an actual order.

Brent: So three out of the four are at the end of the funnel, which is probably pretty common that once they get through, number one, if it’s fast enough, they’re gonna, they’re gonna wanna buy something. What if you start at the top of the funnel with.

Brent: The Google has changed its its algorithms to now put more weight on the speed of your site. And if, let’s just say so one step checkout supports more than just Magento, right? There, there are other platforms that you’re supporting.

Thien-Lan: So for Dar, we are looking at supporting Que, but the priority is to support Magento two and Which makes Magento two much faster.

Thien-Lan: And is adding the sexy back into Magento,

Brent: adding the sexy back in, is that what you said? Yep. That’s good. . Okay. So having that sub two second load time, which in the past first Magento especially, has been unheard of. So some of the tools I guess people could use to help with that would just be Google Lighthouse and Google Page speed insights.

Thien-Lan: Exactly. Another resource that I found very useful and entertaining was a deck of slides by John Hughes from ue it was a hundred slides, but very funny ones about page speed, why, what you can do, and all the tips. We can add the links to the notes of this podcast. But this is a fantastic

Brent: Perfect. Yeah, and I will add the, I will add that to all the show notes. Alright, so let’s move on to shipping. So I think in the US anyways, shipping free shipping is the thing and Amazon is really driving that. Do you recommend that merchants do free shipping?

Thien-Lan: So that’s a strategic decision based on your cost goods sold, your pricing, your competitors.

Thien-Lan: So I can’t. You have to offer free shipping or you have to include shipping in your item price. I think depending on categories and consumers there might be different strategies that was better for you. But yeah, consumers one of the key reasons for carbon environment is when consumers see extra cost at the end of checkouts, so that often happens.

Thien-Lan: when checkout is on two pages with the first page with the item price, and then the second page with tax shipping all additional costs. So that’s a big driver. Either you state up upfront how much your shipping is going to be, or you put a threshold of. When shipping becomes free, and that works quite well to get consumers to pile up their cart and reach that threshold.

Thien-Lan: That makes sense for you financially. But yeah the most important is to be very up upfront and not have any surprises. When shoppers go to the end of checkout and see the final cost they have to pay.

Brent: Yeah, and I can say from experience that I have dropped out of the cart many times when I get to the end and suddenly shipping is a quarter of the cost of the entire order.

Brent: And I automatically go to Amazon then because A, I know that the ship, there’s no shipping. And then b, I also know that it’s gonna come in two days. The other, I think the other good strategy in terms of shipping, and I do agree that showing shipping up front is such an important thing to do. If you were to have a threshold of, say if you spend 50 euros or $50 and then you get free shipping, I think that’s something that I, that appeals to me and it also gets me to spend a little bit more money.

Brent: So if you’re at $49, you search like crazy on what does that $2 item I could get to get my free shipping maybe talk

Thien-Lan: a little bit about, Does that I do the thing I haven’t looked for. The product that is the same as shipping. If shipping is $10, I’d be like, Oh, I get that $10 items. I can have it for free.

Brent: Yeah, absolutely. And if merchants are very clever, they would also do maybe a little scale that says Here’s how close you are to get to free shipping. And if you just add this one more thing. And if they’re very clever, they would add some extremely high high profit items. As incentives to get over that shipping amount.

Brent: So say you’re at $9 and they have something that they charge $9 for, but they pay a dollar for it. Hey, buy this item and you’ll get over your free shipping. There’s so many tactics that merchants could use if they start thinking about the behavior of consumers. And as a merchant too, I think you should be looking at what your competitors are doing and trying to make sure that you’re not missing out on something like that.

Brent: So for example, if your competitor is just offering free shipping, but their every item is a little bit more expensive there’s a reason for it. I think we’ve seen that on Amazon. Sometimes those really cheap things are more expensive cuz there’s free shipping and I you mentioned that earlier.

Brent: About the free shipping part of it. The other one the second one or the third one you mentioned was flexible payments, and you mentioned buy now, pay later. Talk a little bit about that.

Thien-Lan: Yes I’ve been following the Buy now pay later trend for two, three years now. And it all started in Australia and today there are more probably a dozen brands who offer Buy Now pay.

Thien-Lan: the most popular in the US would be a firm and in Europe might be clown. And the whole objective what I find very interesting is that it’s a win-win for consumers and for merchants. The merchants pay a little bit more with our in terms of fees, but consumers get to pay. To slice their payments over six weeks and sometimes more without pay, paying in any interest.

Thien-Lan: So it’s, great for them especially when they are they don’t have much budget and and it. Showed to drive a lot more conversion. And also a lot of those brands, they have their own app. They have their own consumer database, so they give exposure to their own merchants through their apps.

Thien-Lan: So let’s say on the Klan apps, you will say you will have or buy from ex brands, and then consumers will go directly from the cla up to that. Instead of going through Instagram ads or, Google search.

Brent: Yeah. And I think the other thing would be to make sure that they’re at least saving the token for the credit card to check out.

Brent: So second time around, you don’t have to enter all that information. Talk a little bit about that friction that happens in shipping and payment in your check.

Thien-Lan: Yeah so yeah, as I said, the number one reason for car abandonment is high shipping costs. So that’s why it makes sense to offer various options and buy, install to buy online pickup in store.

Thien-Lan: Is a interesting one. And yeah, we’ve partnered with French Magento extension provider called Why Your Mind That does very good quality extensions to allow that and add all these options. So the, this is The more payment and shipping options you offer, the less friction you get because consumers want certain options and if you don’t have them, they will go elsewhere.

Thien-Lan: So for shipping, that’s a great one. And for payments, either, they, one of the reason why they leave a website is also when they don’t trust the website. They have never heard of that band before, that the item is interesting and they don’t want to leave their credit card. So in that case, they would rather, for example, use paper.

Thien-Lan: And so it’s a good one to offer as well.

Brent: Just going back to the shipping I spoke with somebody earlier who said that they clicked on an Instagram ad and they were they needed something for a holiday. I don’t remember the holiday, but they needed it by a specific date and they said the shipping would be three to five days.

Brent: Their date was two weeks out, so there was plenty of time the two weeks came and went and there that nothing was ever shipped. Talk about the importance of maybe some reviews and having that knowledge that, hey, that item is actually gonna get there on time. Because I think sometimes people also wanna know that I’m gonna buy this and I need this, and if I don’t get it in this amount of time, I’m gonna go somewhere else.

Thien-Lan: Yep. So I guess there are two things here. One is setting expectations. So having the right information, the accurate information about when the item is going to arrive at your place is important. The other day I went to a local merchant and they have their own calculation and algorithm saying, Oh, for shipping it might be three, four.

Thien-Lan: But then they don’t re, it’s not accurate. It doesn’t really talk to the carrier. So it’s not, that trustworthy. So if you can, have the right timing and specify information about. When the order is going to be processed, when is going to be packed, when is it’s going to be shipped, and based on how far the consumer is, how long it’s going to take to be shipped, that would be the best.

Thien-Lan: But yeah, otherwise it is better to, overestimate the shipping time, then underestimate and then disappoint.

Brent: All right. So let’s get then to the, Oh we’ve talked a lot about frictions. Tell us about how, maybe, how one a checkout can help reduce that friction with the client at checkout.

Thien-Lan: Yep. After shipping cost being the number one reason for car and the number, the second one is forcing consumers to create an account. So how many times have you been to a website where, Click on cards I want to pay. And then you have that page that says, Log in, I’ll create an account. And you can’t do anything.

Thien-Lan: You can’t, pay, you can’t get your item. And 25% of consumers leave at that point. So we, OneStepCheckOut we’ve been addressing that. Thanks to feedback from a lot of our merchants and clients, and what we do is we allow to create an account by simply using all the information that anyone would answer when they fill out their shipping details.

Thien-Lan: So email, first name, last name, address, and the only thing you need to add it is a small tick box where consumers can enter their passwords twice and that creates an account. So we call it seamless account registration, and it replaces that, account creation wall that is making, 25% of people leave.

Brent: Do you find at that stage some people forget that they have an account and they fill out all that information. How do you get around the idea? , they go through that, they forgot that they created an account and then they click and then it comes back and says, You already have an account.

Brent: Please enter your password. And then they’ve forgotten their password and by the time they get around to finding it, they’ve left because they forgot they were even what they were ordering. Yeah,

Thien-Lan: that happens quite a lot. So yeah. I think we also allow people to check out as. And then have the account reconciliation later after.

Thien-Lan: I have to get back to you on that. But I think that would be the sensible thing to do because you absolutely don’t want people to be stopped at that point when they’re ready. To give you money and to pay for that item.

Brent: Talk a little bit about the idea of one step checkout. What, like the reason why it’s called One Step?

Brent: I think that’s obvious, but a lot of people don’t think through all the different steps that they have to go at checkout.

Thien-Lan: So it all started with Magento one, and back then checkout was six steps. So it made a massive difference to have all those steps into just one. Above the fold with one single button that says Order now.

Thien-Lan: So you can fill out all your fields and not click any next button, just one big button order now.

Brent: So it’s making sure that there’s almost nothing you have to do make sure you complete checkout. How about making sure that users The right address and things like that. I’m assuming, integrates with other plat or other services that help find the right address.

Brent: Yeah, go ahead.

Thien-Lan: The key advantage of our product is that we integrate with. 90% of the third party extensions that are out there. So address validation, that works really well. Tax calculation shipping estimates, any shipping extension hundreds of payment extensions. So whatever you need, you can integrate it with one step checkout.

Brent: All right. I wanna switch directions just slightly. Okay. Are you seeing the same amount of people on Magento two using your services, or do you feel like it’s declining right now?

Thien-Lan: So with Magento two, we could see that it’s on the other side of the product maturity curve. The number of install.

Thien-Lan: And the number of orders for Agen two has been slowing down. But as I said, with Hova, it’s been picking back up, so that’s why I’m saying it’s bringing sexy back. And so a lot of, I would say, yeah, big proportion of new orders from west of checkout, from gen two are driven by hiva things. .

Brent: So you would, you could say that HAFA is changing.

Brent: HOA is ch is saving Magento from the dorans, from the tomb.

Thien-Lan: Let’s say that .

Brent: Absolutely. So if you have something that we started off with spooky and scary. What would be the biggest thing you could tell a merchant that they should think about for. website and for their checkout process,

Thien-Lan: I would say yeah, performance is key.

Thien-Lan: So today people don’t want to wait. Most people would buy their holidays, gifts on mobile, so it has to be mobile friendly. Loading really fast, allowing them to browse and or even, guiding them into what would be the most interesting, the best selling products because people are also looking for inspiration and then removing friction all the way through to check out and let them place their order without asking them for too many questions or asking them to do too many things.

Thien-Lan: So a lot of a lot of that friction is also in the order. Subscribe to our newsletter, get $5 off. Remember this, do this, do that. And you’re like, Go away. Go away. I want my product. And then someone calls you, you do something else, and then you go to another website

Brent: to shop. Yeah, that’s, that’s a great point.

Brent: I do, I’ve had quite a few guests that say, Love you learn to love the popup, but make sure you don’t have the popup in checkout. Because it I agree. It’s so annoying when you’re typing in. All of a sudden you get the popup and says, that, says, Enter your email address and subscribe to our newsletter when you could have a checkbox in your checkout that says, I’m, I’d like to subscribe your newsletter , because you’re putting your email address anyways.

Brent: Exactly. Yeah, that’s a really great point. Popups popups, especially on mobile. I think the other thing is that merchants still are thinking desktop first, and we’ve talked about performance and we’ve talked about friction in the checkout. Friction in the checkout is even more when you’re on mobile because it’s so much smaller.

Brent: So having that easy to use navigation is so important. Do you have any words of advice for people to. Enter as little as possible for the checkout. For mobile, You mean for consumers? No. For a merchant. Is there anything that they can do to reduce the amount of things like you, You said that having options for shipping, but I think.

Brent: At some point, if you have so many options, that’s too many options to show on your mobile phone. Is it recommended that you have as little options or making sure that they don’t have a lot of opt or even that’s where the free shipping would come in, where they don’t even have to choose shipping because it’s free.

Brent: Anything that, and that helps merchants check out on mobile quicker.

Thien-Lan: Yeah, that’s that’s an interesting point and I’ve seen it with. A lamp company. So they are the biggest in Europe. They have lamp.de eliminations.co, uk, lamp.fr, and 13 lamp sites across Europe. And for all their websites they have, they almost removed the shipping method.

Thien-Lan: Section because they have one carrier, one shipping cost, and you don’t have to choose. So that makes the whole checkout form much shorter and it’s quicker. People don’t have to wonder, Oh, what do I want? It just tells you what you’re going to have and that’s it.

Brent: So you’d say they’re helping us shed new light on the checkout process?

Thien-Lan: Yep. They help. Yep. They help simplify the whole thing and I guess they’ve seen that consumers are happy with that. So why give the choice when you know it’s the best options for you as a merchant and consumers are happy?

Brent: Excellent. Telan we are running outta time. And as a bonus on the episode I do want to do another free.

Brent: Because it’s Halloween and I have a Halloween joke for you. And then we’re gonna go into our shameless plug. But before we get there, I do have a special Halloween segment joke for you today. So again, this one is free or paid. Are you ready? Ready. Why did the policeman ticket the ghost on Halloween?

Brent: It didn’t have a haunting license.

Thien-Lan: paid with

subscription .

Brent: Excellent. Good. All right. Yeah. Tn Lan, Thank you so much. As I close out every episode, I give our guests a chance to do a shameless plug about anything you’d like. What would you like to plug today?

Thien-Lan: The only thing I didn’t mention was that Natasha Sonoma from the Forbes.

Thien-Lan: Council is the CEO of Optt, O P W T Y, and that’s innovative platform that allows you to acquire and manage all your, by now, pay later brands all in one space. So that’s really cool because depending on your. Not all the favorite brands are the same. And if you operate in lots of different countries, you can acquire them all at once, and then in the panel you can see who is performing better and you can dial up that down based on your storefronts.

Thien-Lan: So that really helps consumers have the preferred payment methods. And in terms of integration, that helps all the hustle. talking to each of the brands, integrating them into your two checkout, and then seeing which one works for you. Yeah, excellent. For one, it’s not a plug for one step checkout, but for Opti, and that is compatible with one Step out as well.

Thien-Lan: So it’s like a Lego blog. You have one to click out, you plug Opti and from Opti you can have access to 60 by no pay later. .

Brent: Very cool. Thank you so much. And I will put all these in the show notes and I will try to get this episode live as soon as possible so we are not so far away. Ka TA’s Halloween and it won’t go live today, I’m afraid, but we should have done a live stream.

Brent: That would’ve been a good idea. Yeah. Anyways thank you so much for being here today. 10. Who also helps on the Magento Association. I appreciate all your work and she’s now showing us a nice sticker for one step checkout. I would encourage everybody to go there for their Magento two sites, and I would encourage everybody to use hfa.

Brent: Our newest HofA is our newest sponsor for Talk Calm. So you’re excited about

Thien-Lan: that as well. There you go. I wasn’t even paid to talk about them. ,

Brent: thank you so much. Have a great. .

Thien-Lan: Thank you. Bye.

Bridging the Digital Retail Gap with Leigh Sevin

April 14, 2023October 18, 2022 Brent W. Peterson

Remember when shopping, marketing, and brand building were all going digital? Leigh Sevin and Jinesh Shah noticed how little the retail industry had changed its approach to sales. @endearhq

While the rise of online shopping pushed many brands into the next frontier of marketing and customer service, retail salespeople were still confined to the in-store experience. Associates’ limited access to resources and inability to earn credit for online sales highlighted a massive gap in the retail sales model.

We interview Leigh Sevin, the co-founder of Endear. She gives us insight into this ever-changing market and how Endear works to bridge the retail gap.

Endear is the first and only clienteling app certified for Shopify Plus merchants. Its CRM and messaging platform is made especially for retail sales teams and tracks how messages convert into sales in-store and online. Endear empowers retail teams to engage customers over remote channels like email and text. At the same time, the app measures how outreach is performing, including data points like average order value, location of last purchase, and time to convert.

https://endearhq.com

Transcript

Brent: Welcome to Talk Commerce. Today I have Leigh seven. She is the co-founder of Endear and Leigh, go ahead and introduce yourself. Tell us your day to day role and maybe one of your passions in life.

Leigh: Sure. So as you said, I’m the co-founder of Endear. Endear is a CRM designed specifically for consumer brands.

Leigh: So we help brands consolidate all of their data and then empower their sales people to use that data to develop really high quality. Relationships with their customers, primarily over email, texts, and of course face to face.

Leigh: In the free time, I do have, I also enjoy exercise and baking.

Brent: Oh, wow. Baking. Good. Are you watching the new series of the great British bakeoff?

Leigh: I didn’t even know it launched. Has it got, is it alive? Is it, Can I launch?

Brent: Yeah, I think there’s, there is two episodes out.

Leigh: This is very big news as I go into fall, so thank you for this.

Brent: Yes, it’ll, it, it’ll be very addictive. Good. And I apologize for cutting you off there. No, not at all. Good. Alright let’s talk about CRMs and if you wanted to just do a brief overview for people who may not know what a CRM is.

Leigh: Yeah, absolutely.

Leigh: CRM is customer relationship management. So really what that means is, when I’m speaking to maybe someone a little bit older or not as familiar with technology, I really describe it as a really high powered grex. So that’s one way to think about it. It’s about taking everything you know about a customer and putting it into one consolidated place.

Leigh: What Endear does in terms of taking it a step beyond that is Basically we try to give you the insight that data is revealing in the aggregate. For example, specific to consumer brands, those things might be what does a customer’s lifetime spend? What’s their average order value? How often are they shopping with you?

Leigh: And these are the things that one of our users would probably try to do on their own, just from the raw data that they might have. And we just wanna take that work off their plate and give it to them in real time.

Brent: Users who are familiar with a CRM would ask then, as a retailer, why would I need a CRM?

Leigh: So CRMs are incredibly popular for the B2B world, right? There is no technical or technology sales person that would spend a day not logging into a CRM. And I think what’s changed about retail, especially for the sales people, is that they used to be able to readily depend on organic foot traffic and therefore not need to do a lot of outbound sales.

Leigh: What came their way was enough to reach their goals and really succeed as a salesperson in a store, atmosphere. But I think what’s changed, especially with eCommerce and obviously with the pandemic and just generally with how much is available to consumers these days, you do need to stand out.

Leigh: You do need to take matters into your own hands, and that’s really what CRMs are there help a salesperson do. It’s about understanding who can I be reaching out to proactively in order to generate a sale, generate a relationship, understand what their needs are, share updates with them, and that all comes from being able to combine the actual data that we’ve consolidated for you with scalable outreach and tracking.

Leigh: So understanding. If I do reach out to this person, how are they responding to that outreach? Are they opening my message? Are they clicking on the products I’m recommending? And I think the insights aspect of endear is what really keeps people motivated to know that, Hey, my, my text message actually converted into a sale.

Leigh: Maybe that customer didn’t come into the store to do that, but that shouldn’t matter. What matters is my efforts led to revenue for the company.

Brent: From a differentiation standpoint do you think Endear makes itself from other platforms that are strictly e-commerce?

Leigh: I would say, when we think about CRM, Omnichannel versus e-com, most of the time CRM is genuinely lacking on the e-commerce side as well.

Leigh: But for the most part, e-com brands tend to compensate by relying on individual departments stand in for CRM. So for marketing teams, a lot of the time that’s their email marketing platform or their SMS marketing platform for support teams. That might be their live chat, right? It’s everyone that’s ever asked them a question over live chat.

Leigh: Maybe there’s a customer profile, maybe there’s not. And to be honest, for us, CRM is just so much of a low hanging fruit in the sales world, and also the department that is right now least saturated with technology, they have really nothing but the terminal. So we wanted to go where the pain was most heavily felt, and that to us was sales.

Leigh: But I would say CRM in general tends to be more oriented towards B2B salespeople, and that’s really where Endear differentiates itself. We are more about the integrations that a consumer brand would need, the KPIs that a consumer brand would need, and the amount of data storage that a consumer brand would need over what a B2B brand or company would need.

Brent: When I, as a user come into a retail store and endear is being used there, is there a way that the user would target me or help understand more about me?

Leigh: It’s a, That’s a checkout. Yeah, I get that question. Did you say after checkout?

Brent: No. During checkout or

Leigh: before or whatever. So I get, if you already know the person time and the funniest part is that question assumes something that you’ve already decided to walk into a store. And actually for retail stores, the hardest part is getting you to do that. Stores for better or worse, actually have an incredibly high conversion rate.

Leigh: The convert, about 30% of the people that walk. The return rate is also dramatically lower than it is on econ, right? Econ faces at this point, probably near 40% return rate, whereas stores probably having the single digits. So you know the, What we have to think about is where is the challenge? Is the challenge, knowing who a customer is once they walk in.

Leigh: Not really. The store does great. So to us, the real pain point is how do I get you to walk in the first place? And that’s why Endear is so much more about what to do with your downtime, what to do to generate foot traffic or generate converting traffic on your website. And that to us comes from really understanding who your customer is, cultivating that relationship, and then extending that relationship beyond face to remote channels like email and text.

Brent: Do you leverage social media and allow the users to leverage some of that social media as well to promote that drive to get people into the.

Leigh: I would say that’s something that we’ve considered and have on our roadmap for later down the line. I think there are incredible conversations going on over Instagram right now, where we see Endear coming in most often for social media is we have this really cool feature called stories.

Leigh: And they’re basically, depending on your platform, they’re completely shop. So it basically allows for salespeople to create a custom or completely, special story just for one customer or a group of customers, and send it only to them. And that’s something that they can share via a simple URL that endear then tracks for you.

Leigh: So we do allow some flexibility over how you’re using some of the assets you’re creating within endear across platforms. But really what we’re after is that really high touch, one to one conversations.

Brent: And you’re looking for customers to repeat at the store and increase that traffic from their existing base, right?

Leigh: Yes. We are only using a, the data that a brand already owns, but we’re making them do more with it. So the, KPIs that we focus on helping a brand improve is how do I extend lifetime value? How do I increase aov, how do I increase loyalty? What most of these brands are dealing with right now is incredibly high customer cost of acquisition.

Leigh: And so the only way to compensate beyond just simply trying to reduce that, which I would say you can do by opening a store in the first place, is by then increasing the lifetime value. And that’s really what Endear is

Brent: all about. Do you see, so you mentioned lifetime value. Do you think that the stores that leverage an online.

Brent: can mix and matched both to get people online and then offline to purchase things as well. Do you see that as part of the puzzle and gaining traffic for the retailer?

Leigh: Yeah, absolutely. There’s a very famous stat sort of floating in the ether that opening a store basically increases your eCommerce traffic by about 37.

Leigh: What a lot of people miss is that they’re talking about traffic. So that’s an easy number to gauge. I think what our customers want to know is what about actual conversions? And that is really where your sales people are such a great resource for not just, working, as I said, face to face, but then motivating customers when they go to buy online, to feel more confident about their purchase, to buy more frequently, and also probably decrease the return rate.

Leigh: They really do know what size they are. They know maybe they’ve actually tried it in store and then only got really convinced to buy it after the fact. But those purchases tend to be a lot stickier than the ones of a customer just shopping on their own. And we’ve actually seen that in our own data that customers who shop with the help of a salesperson, even online actually in one case study, had a 50% higher AOV than the customers who were going at it alone.

Brent: Have you seen a difference pre pandemic to post pandemic on challenges that retailers are facing and getting people into the store? Obviously during pandemic it was impossible to get ’em into the store, but you see a switch in how behavior is now, whereas we’re going into full opening .

Leigh: I think, this sort of ebbs and flows because I think what also happened was Every retailer that was a little resistant to change.

Leigh: Maybe they started brick and mortar, really had to open eCommerce and had to embrace that as a channel during the pandemic. So if anything, eCommerce has gotten way more competitive because anyone who was resistant before now needed to figure it out. And obviously their first move is to do all the most obvious channels.

Leigh: That used to be the reason why e-commerce was so great, you could acquire customers for, not much money compared to the cost of opening a store. And I think those two levers have now completely switched. It’s become actually dramatically more affordable to open a store these days because landlords had to learn 10 year leases are not gonna work, no one’s gonna sign a 10 year lease.

Leigh: And we saw that a little bit with the popup craze. And I think that has found its middle ground of saying, what does a two year lease look like? Is that better for me? How can I make it more appealing for tenants to come into my physical space? So those costs have dramatically dropped while the cost of doing business online has actually skyrocketed because everyone’s using the same tools, everyone’s using the same, acquisition strategies.

Leigh: So it’s really hard to stand out right now online.

Brent: Do you see Paid and organic traffic coming to a store, be it online or in person. Do you see any way that somebody could jump start coming into the store rather than if you just didn’t wanna do paid ads? Is there an advantage somebody has to do organic?

Leigh: I think endear is that organic opportunity. We always joke that a marketing team at a omnichannel brand has so much work on their plate, and they are primarily worried about traffic to the site, conversion on the site, and it’s just not, if you have 12 stores right? That means that they can’t be focused on making sure every single store is optimized or maximizing their opportunity with traffic.

Leigh: So really what you get is you have this huge database of customers and the people who are. Focus on making sure those customers know about the store is the store team themselves. So giving them the power within Deere to actually do their own local marketing, their own local outreach. They are going to be the most motivated to get those customers in the door.

Leigh: And I think that’s really, that’s free. You have to pay for a sales force, whether you like it or not, if you’re gonna open a store. So you might as well maximize their resources to get that ROI on that physical retail.

Brent: Yesterday my podcast was about segmentation and and the person that I had on had mentioned Klaviyo. I know that there, there’s a lot of overlaps from CRM to automated marketing. How do you work with other partners to ensure that you’re maximizing? If somebody has attentive or something, how do you work in Totally making sure that. both are being used effectively.

Leigh: That gets to the whole purpose of CRM. We did an analysis at one point, and I think about 75% of our customers use Klaviyo, and I think another like 40% also use Attentive. And so what that tells us is, A) there’s this thing that we call called the Commerce Stack, and just to even be a proper eCommerce brand, you need about seven different apps cuz you need your email marketing and or SMS marketing.

Leigh: You need your loyalty, you need your support, you need your onsite popups and engagement. And then you also actually need the os, the backbone of the whole thing, which is typically Shopify. So With all these different platforms running, they’re all really good at what they do individually.

Leigh: The question. How do you bring them together from a data perspective? And that’s really what a CRM is out to solve. It’s how do you understand, okay, who is my marketing team touching with Klaviyo and who is my sales team reaching out to via Endear?

Leigh: And Endear works to actually consolidate those two things so that you understand, who’s responding more to one channel or another. And across all these channels, what kind of picture can I get of this customer? What kind of marketing does she respond to? What kind of email does she respond to or text?

Leigh: Does she respond to? Has she used her loyalty points? How do we get her to use those loyalty points? So all of it is about actually using these apps in tandem. And then of course, I think right now people are very concerned with, their overall spend on technology. And so the next question has to be,

Leigh: how can I consolidate how many of these apps actually have overlapping functionality? And I think that’s gonna be the really big challenge that comes next For these e eCom brands or for these omnichannel brands, how do I really make sure that I’m being most efficient with the tech stack that I’ve created?

Brent: Do you see a future in SMS verses email or both? Or? I see SMS happening a lot more, but I also see a lot of now, spam and SMS. Do you see SMS moving forward in what where it’s at? Or do you see it plateauing soon and people are gonna ignore messages in the future?

Leigh: It’s gonna take, it’s not there yet, but it’s gonna take the same toll as email, which is, would I ever not answer an email from a friend just because of how much email marketing I get?

Leigh: No. It doesn’t stop me from finding the ones that are important and of. All of our personal email clients or our phones will help us do some of that filtering automatically. So I think what really it comes down to is what is a brand’s email marketing or SMS marketing strategy. And I think the challenge there is that is also why empowering a sales force of some sort can be truly needle moving.

Leigh: They will break through the numbness that comes with marketing at some point. If I truly know somebody and they’re texting me, I want to respond because they likely, the content of that message is personalized. It’s specific to me, It’s content that I care about.

Leigh: And so it’s just about, everyone will say it, but it really is about personalization. And I think what’s cool about focusing on sales rather than marketing. , it lets you not worry so much about scale. The whole point is it doesn’t have to be all that scalable because you have a huge labor force, you have a huge sales force, so let them just do it properly one to one, and it will convert really high.

Leigh: And if you have 20 to 50 people doing that, you’re gonna see incredible results. And as I said, those people work for you anyway, so why not let them cut through the noise?

Brent: Do you think that the big brands out there that are running retail stores, The challenge is getting people into the stores again, or what do you see as the biggest challenge facing retail today?

Leigh: I think from a growth perspective, it is probably that, you still need to figure out how to drive traffic to your stores if you’ve made that investment. I think the other challenge is still for a lot of brands, especially the big ones, omnichannel, How do I understand? How my online and offline channels are working together.

Leigh: How do I make them work better together? How do I help them be resources and allies talk to each other? Because a lot of the time when we at least launched Endear, there was incredible sort of antagonism between what was happening e-commerce and what was happening in store, and they were considered almost rivals.

Leigh: And I think that is one of the biggest mistakes that a brand can make. It’s more about how can these two channels support each other. I think there are really great examples. , brands that have done that really well. With online, with in-store pickup for online purchases, making sure you can return, something you bought online in a store because A, that drives traffic and b, that’s just logical.

Leigh: Not doing that is gonna really annoy your customers. And so for me it’s looking at the strategies that actually unify those things. One of my favorite sites actually does this very cool thing where you can actually search their website by what’s available local to you. So you can basically browse the store from their e-commerce site and then just go buy it or go reserve it, which, talk about same day delivery.

Leigh: You don’t even need that. You can just walk over and go get it.

Brent: Looking at somebody like Best Buy, certainly they’ve now embraced that. It took ’em a a little bit of time to get there. But you can obviously that features a great way to make sure that people see everything, but then go to the right place to get it.

Brent: The future of. I think it was interesting that Amazon is still opening physical stores today, so it’s like online to physical. Do you still see that happening? Do you think there’s gonna be some strictly e eCommerce brands that are going to do little popup stores to see to see how it works?

Leigh: I think there are different, physical presence formats that are right for different kinds of products. And I think what we’ve really seen over the past couple of years is innovation around what does it mean to have a physical presence, right? It used to be a question of do I do wholesale or do I do retail, like dedicated retail?

Leigh: And even that’s a relatively new concept. So what I love is looking at all these different models for how brands can test what it means to. available in a store, whether it’s their own store or, these new sort of neighborhood goods is a great example, right? It’s not necessarily a wholesale deal, it’s more like I’m leasing or renting shelf space rather than an entire, store.

Leigh: And so all these different models allow different kinds of companies to really test what makes the most sense for them. And I think, the same time that Amazon is opening. Warby Parker is still opening tons of stores and actually doubling down on their retail footprint. So I think if anything, it’s a sign that, physical can work for all different kinds of companies and it’s more about understanding and really testing what makes sense for you, and how do you collaborate with other brands so that you are maybe doing a joint effort and you’re not, taking on the entire cost of leads for yourself if you happen to be at a one type of product or one product business that’s not really gonna make sense to just populate an entire store with one product?

Brent: Yeah. I think if anything, the pandemic reminded us that we do like to go outside every once in a while and visit a store and touch a product and shop around and visit, just get out of the house.

Brent: Do you do you think that a lot of retailers now are moving towards Having something like Endear to help them leverage more of their in store versus versus web traffic to promote specific items. You talked about the one item thing, but is there more of an in, in if you have Overstock or under stock, is there a way, is there more of a push to get a lot of that stuff?

Brent: I know there’s a lot of Target has a ton of extra inventory. So they’re pushing, this inventory online, offline. Is there more of that now coming through on retail?

Leigh: Yes, and I think inventory, especially if your omni channel is one of the hardest nets to crack, and it can get very cumbersome and it’s very detail oriented, very logistics heavy.

Leigh: And that to me is another reason why stores really do benefit when they have something like Endear because they have those products literally right in front of them. And with Endear, they can know exactly who. By the store and who would be interested in this product. So being able to again, be your own best advocate and move product that may even be sold out online.

Leigh: Being able to tell an entire neighborhood, Hey, that thing that’s sold out online is actually available in store in your size, come by and hopefully be the first to get editor. I can reserve it for you, is an incredibly, a huge value prop to your community, but also a really easy optimization considering all the challenges that brands face with inventory so it’s basically taking advantage again of your human capital to solve a very big logistical challenge. And I think, best sellers are always gonna move, and that’s great, but especially if you have those lingering products, being able to target them also without even broadcasting necessarily a huge promotion via a marketing email, Potentially sending it to only a handful of VIP customers or a handful of customers who have bought something similar in the past and just extending a promotion to them.

Leigh: Also helps, this long history of the vicious cycle of, if I discount then everyone’s gonna wait for the discount that if I don’t discount, it’s never gonna move. So avoiding that major sale and just giving a handful of people maybe part again, like you have a loyalty program for a reason.

Leigh: You know, Show your gratitude to those people and give them first access, or give them last access to some of these lingering products is a very easy way to really make the most of the inventory you do have.

Brent: I wanna change gears a little bit and talk about entrepreneurship. What motivated you in your young years to start a new CRM?

Brent: It’s a very competitive space. Tell us your journey on Endear and starting that.

Leigh: Yeah. My co-founder, Jenesh and I really got into this space pretty circuitously, it was not a very linear path towards success, but what we landed on was quickly learning that within the physical space in retail technology was lacking.

Leigh: There was a huge doth in just any sort of innovation whatsoever. And of course what we saw was this boom in econ technology and it made sense, right? It’s already cloud based. It’s already driven by fast movers. People who were excited about the future in retail to a lot of people sounded like this very laggard, slow industry that would never adopt anything new.

Leigh: And I think that was one of the biggest misconceptions because if there’s huge success in econ, obviously retail stores are eventually gonna have to. And so what we saw was this huge white space, especially among the newer, more modern brands who were leaning on physical retail as a new growth channel.

Leigh: And they were so data oriented already, and there were no solutions in the market that sort of looked at what the store was doing as a CRM. I think it. Maybe our exposure as solving this problem for our customers, but also ourselves needing a CRM and having a sales team that we realized they were really one and the same.

Leigh: They were all facing the same problems. And I think it’s our orientation towards data specifically that really sets us apart in the market because we’re just giving our users much more information and ammo to work with. Compared to just letting them, maybe you just have a messaging platform. That messaging platform is only as good as the content that the users are sharing on it.

Leigh: And so I just think that relying only on something that lets you do SMS is never gonna get you the scale or the quality of conversion. That’s something like Endear would. That was the biggest lesson, was getting to talk to users and understanding how much of their business was already driven by cultivating these relationships.

Leigh: Understanding that this behavior already existed. It’s just that no one had really, hypercharged it, No one had really given it the proper attention from a tech perspective that it deserved.

Brent: When you started what was your biggest challenge at getting up off the ground?

Leigh: I would say our biggest challenge was really accepting. Being willing to focus on who it was that needed our product most. I think for a while, and I think it’s normal to go through this, we would take any customer that would have us and we would, do whatever they asked of us. But slowly we realized that, there needed to be a very concrete market that we were going after and we needed to use the customer experiences we already had to pinpoint.

Leigh: Exactly who that customer should be. And I think in almost every conversation with a new founder, every conversation, every interview I give, I talk so much about product market fit because I think it is the hardest part of starting a company is finding the product that satisfies a market doesn’t, worry about how big or how small it is, maybe later.

Leigh: But just building something that an entire audience loves is incredibly gratifying and motivating. And being willing to settle on one audience was something that is really hard for founders.

Brent: Do you think that it’s hard to say no to some customers sometime or even say to that customer, you’re really not a good fit and maybe you’re not gonna be successful with us, so why don’t you use X platform?

Brent: We have problem

Leigh: now. We. Can’t help ourselves from time to time. It’s very tempting when someone wants to use your product and you have to be honest about what it can do for their business or what you’re willing to do to meet them halfway. And I think there’s a saying basically that most startups die of congestion, not starvation.

Leigh: And I think that’s a really good way to think about it, especially at where we are in the seed stage. You have to be able to focus and you have to know why you’re focused. And I think it’s always good to put opportunities on your own radar for investigation and research. But we’re always remembering, your bread and butter customer and why they love you so much because they are the ones that will keep feeding you.

Brent: I’m gonna make a small CRM joke, so I apologize, but when you were looking at how you were gonna design Endear, did you look at SalesForce CRM and think , this 1980s interface is the last thing I’m ever gonna want to do, and we’re gonna make all this great data presentable for people who can actually use it.

Brent: and if anybody’s used Salesforce CRM, they know exactly what I’m talking about.

Leigh: I have to be completely honest, I’ve never seen the Salesforce CRM. I don’t know what it looks like. All right. But you’re very lucky. I’ve heard that, I’ve heard that from so many people. There’s like a I literally think there’s a quote on our website that is basically we have plenty of users who have tried Salesforce and to even think about putting.

Leigh: A retail worker who’s constantly on her feet on Salesforce to use as if she were at a computer all day is absolutely insane. And so we’re very honest about, the way that we’ve built the product, specifically for someone who works in a retail environment, someone who is able to, they have to be able to look up from their phone no matter what they were doing, and work with a customer and then look back at their phone and know exactly where they are in their workflow and pick it up instantly.

Leigh: It’s not no secret that turnover is also incredibly high in retail. And so what we think about in terms of how we build the product is okay, and there needs to be something that the second you hire a salesperson, they can pick it up in 30 minutes. They do not have six months to train on something like Salesforce because they’ll probably be gone in six months.

Leigh: So how do we build something that, A, they can get up and running in 30 minutes and B actually might get them to stay longer because they love the tech. They love that they can track their own progress. They love they get credit for sales online. So how do we make it a reason for someone to actually stick with your brand because of how great, the motivation is through Endear.

Brent: Do you find it harder to. design, something that’s easy for a millennial to use as compared to somebody who’s retired but now has gone back to work and is suddenly in retail. Do you think there’s a challenge in both in that sort of learning phase?

Leigh: So one of our first customers, they actually were a beta customer and they were still with us today, like three years later, they got a version of Endear that we would never want anyone to have to be on.

Leigh: The entire sales course were in like the boomer generation, and I trained every single one of them. Maybe sometimes it took an hour and a half. But what I knew was their willingness to work with me and to get trained and then their ability to use the platform was probably the biggest validation that we were doing something worthwhile because every single one of them got on and said, I absolutely hate technology.

Leigh: I don’t know why we have to use this, and yet somehow three years later here, they are still using it and getting even better at it, and they are incredibly productive. So to be honest, millennials are great at tech and it’s great that they use Endear and they, I think they love it. I think what’s more encouraging is that we have users across all generations and they all seem incredible value.

Leigh: And getting up to speed and actually, finding it pretty easy to use at the end of the day.

Brent: And I can say that I’m old enough to remember when I was working as a waiter that you had to look through a big book to see if this credit card was stolen or not. So it has come a long ways.

Brent: Another good parallel would. Somebody who’s a runner and they log all their miles in a physical book and then they move to a spreadsheet, and now they’ve moved to logging all their miles in Garmin or Strava or something like that. Strava. So that same sort of pathway for the CRM could be seen through how we’re making our lives easier.

Brent: And you don’t have to at checkout or at at the pos or even as somebody walks in there is an opportunity or getting people to walk in, I should say. There’s an opportunity to somewhat know the customer and then to leverage that knowledge to help them understand that there’s something.

Leigh: Totally. I tell every founder, if you ever hear of an industry still relying on Google Sheets, that is the billion dollar idea to go after. It’s always a sign that there’s a problem to be solved. And I know a lot of companies that, they are the Google Sheets alternative. They are, as you’re saying, the Strava to just logging it in a Google sheet or same for us, our users went from little black books to, if they were relatively sophisticated, A, a pretty, color coded Google file and then they found us.

Brent: The the typical customer that you would see or the typical user for Endear, would there be a certain size that would be a right fit? 10 stores, 20 stores?

Leigh: We, when we started, a lot of our customers were smaller. I think more of a mindset. Certainly from a, traditional icp.

Leigh: What are your qualifiers? What do you look for? We look for brands that have, north of three stores. That’s something that we do take into consideration mostly because it shows a level of bullishness on physical retail and eagerness to. We look at their tech stack. Do they use platforms that we already integrate with that we, so that we can deliver that really 360 degree view of the customer?

Leigh: But I think what we’re really excited about that we’re seeing now is, if you did start with Endear when you were relatively small, there is no interest in moving to Salesforce because it’s just, it doesn’t matter how big you are, that product is still not designed for the retail store enviroment.

Leigh: And so we’ve seen customers that, started in the single digits that are now, double and nearing triple digits store fleets. And they are not giving us any signs that they’re interested in leaving because we’re growing with them and we are watching their needs change and become more sophisticated at the same time that the product becomes more sophisticated.

Leigh: We obviously hope that trend sticks around, but that’s what we’ve seen so far.

Brent: I’m doing a terrible job of staying on track here, but if we jump back to entrepreneurship have you found it harder scaling your tech stack or your people stack?

Leigh: That’s a really good question for my co-founder Jinesh and our CTO JP, but I will answer it as best as I can.

Leigh: I would say people stack on some level proves to be more slippery in the sense that I think you know what you’re getting with tech and if you don’t know, you’ll figure it out pretty quickly and you are even aware of the quote unquote like tech debt that you might be taking on at any given moment.

Leigh: And it’s also probably pretty clear to you how to fix it. I think the team growth side is you have all these things that you want to, that you wanna do or that you wanna think about, and finding that balance between hard skills and culture and also, equity and making sure that you’re finding that diversity in the applicant pool that you’re looking at.

Leigh: And then you have to think about we are a distributed team. Do we always wanna be distributed? I think so. What are the drawbacks and what are the advantages of that? And what if there are drawbacks, how do we compensate for those? So I think there are just a lot more unknowns when you’re dealing with humans in general, which is why, tech products are really fun to build.

Leigh: because you can rely on them, but then you realize like there’s a user at the other end of that and you have to think about, how are they going to receive this product? What are they gonna want to see from it? So I’ve just basically bundled your questions still back into endear and the problems that we have on that front.

Leigh: But I would, I hope I answered it at some level.

Brent: When Leigh wakes up in the morning, what drives her to get up and do something better? Stronger. Bolder as the Endear co-founder.

Leigh: Anecdotally and broadly, I would say it’s the customers that we work with.

Leigh: So I absolutely adore this space. I love the customers that I work with. I geek out when I see a brand that I recently shopped at or know or just follow on Instagram, and I see them wanting to use in Endear. And I feel the same way when one of those customers just has an amazing experience or one of their sales people has an amazing experience.

Leigh: And knowing that, as I said, it goes back to product market fit, you get incredible motivation knowing that, hey, even if something is broken, even if you know an employee wants to leave, all of that stuff is totally solvable if your customers love your product and it’s totally worth solving if your customers love your product.

Leigh: I wouldn’t feel the same way if customers didn’t. It’s like, why are you even bothering? Like you have a bigger existential problem if your customers are not huge fans of what you do every day.

Brent: Do you ever buy something from a store that’s using Endear and you wanna say, That’s my product you’re using?

Brent: Yes, all the time. The person that’s selling it , by the way, that’s my product. Yeah.

Leigh: I’ve done it. I’ve done it a few times. I also have a very. Supportive husband who won’t walk into a store that doesn’t use Endear without trying to pitch them on endear, which I also appreciate, but I have also stopped doing.

Leigh: It’s very cool to walk around a lot of neighborhoods in New York and see the brands that we work with. I’ve walked in and it’s just a weird interaction. You’re like, Oh, that’s cool, thanks. But it’s not quite anything, I think it would be pretty weird.

Leigh: A HubSpot person came up to me and was like, I work no, actually I’d appreciate it. I’d be like, That’s cool. We use HubSpot. So I try to keep my cool when that happened. But I would say the other thing that gets me up in the morning is when I have friends who say, I just got a text from a store using you and I, I saw you in the url, or I could tell it was you guys.

Leigh: And I think that is also incredibly inspiring that, we are. Penetrating all these different circles of people that are receiving her product and most of the time not even knowing it.

Brent: I started in the Magento world, which is like Shopify, but it. It’s better. And it’s, No, I’m just, I’m not gonna talk about that. But I can also relate to that. Nobody actually cared at all that I was using Magento to sell stuff or developing on Magento. Anyways, we’ll move on. We have a few minutes left.

Brent: And I promised a free joke. I was gonna do it in the beginning, but then I forgot. And now we’re, because I’m a d today, I don’t know why. So I’m gonna tell you a joke. And this is a joke that could be free or we could pay for, . All I want you to do is just react and tell me what you think.

Brent: Here we go.

Brent: Two fish swim into a concrete wall. One turns the other and says, Dam!,

Leigh: Okay,

Brent: I’m, make it, I’m, That’s clearly a free joke. I’m gonna say a free

Leigh: joke. I was actually ready for it to be. A different punchline from a different joke, and I was like, Maybe this is a different version. So you actually caught,

Brent: Tell me yours.

Brent: Tell me yours. You know

Leigh: The one where it’s like there are two muffins baking in an oven, and one muffin says, Damn, it’s hot in here. And the other one says, Oh my god, A talking muffin. So I thought that was gonna be the joke, but with two fish ,

Brent: Yeah. How do fish talk underwater? That’s my question. It’s Aquaman, right? They must use some kind of radar thing.

Leigh: Yes. And there’s that very famous David Foster Wallace speech or short story about what is water? And it’s basically like people’s awareness. If you haven’t, that’s also what’s on my mind now, which is, it’s a much more existential philosophical question.

Leigh: So now I’m just in 10 different places like you, so there you go.

Brent: All right. I gotta do one more since I clearly bombed the first joke.

Brent: What is the opposite of a croissant? A happy uncle.

Brent: Okay. Cross an, Yeah. Anyway. I get it. I will stop torching you on the jokes, . I

Leigh: appreciate them.

Leigh: I get it. I’m with you.

Brent: If you were to say to a retailer the thing that they should be paying attention to as we go into Black Friday, Cyber Monday. What would be that something they should be really looking at now, going to quarter four and even into quarter one?

Leigh: That’s a great question. I would say, what are you gonna do differently from last year? And ask yourself, what did I do last year? and what have I done every year that, am I seeing any difference in results? And I think the question becomes, if everyone else is just gonna do the same thing anyway, what is the harm in taking a year to try something that I’ve never done before?

Leigh: And at the end of the day, I’m not a retailer. I only have so many creative ideas that I’ve seen from the brands that use us, but I think. A like getting ahead of the most obvious things. Like you’re gonna send a promotional email the week before and then three days before and then the day of your sale.

Leigh: What doesn’t look like that? Just anything. But that is my advice at this point, because you can always do that. But is there something more creative you can do either on top of that or instead of that, because you know everyone’s gonna do that and we do have that. Have test.

Leigh: We do have an entire webinar from a bunch of other brands speaking about this that I would highly recommend. This doesn’t count as my shameless plug. I wanna clarify that. I would recommend people go listen to if they’re looking for inspiration.

Brent: All right. And we’ll put that in the show notes. So we’ll make sure you get that on the show notes of the podcast.

Brent: So Leigh, as we close out, I give everybody a chance to do a shameless plug. What would you like to plug today?

Leigh: I would like to plug Endear as an app, is that allowed? Can I just plug the company? Absolutely. Okay, great. Yes, one of the great things about Endear sales process is we offer everyone, both we can get a demo on the app and then we also include a free training as part of your trial.

Leigh: So I would encourage everyone to a go check out the website and Endearhq.com and book a demo because there are no strings attached. And you’ll even get a free training if you sign up for a 14 day free trial. So that is my shameless plug.

Brent: Perfect. Leigh Sevin co-founder of Endear. Thank you so much for being here today.

Brent: Thanks so much. Had a

great

Leigh: time.

Akeneo Product Cloud is more than just a PIM with Kristin Naragon

April 14, 2023October 11, 2022 Brent W. Peterson

We all want to keep our customers happy, so significant investments were made into CRM. Later, merchants found that the employee was being neglected and invested in that. The final piece to the puzzle was the product and the Product Information Management system.

Akeneo has now moved PIM to the next level with Product Cloud.

Kristen Naragon explains how Akeneo Product Cloud works and helps us understand PIM and how it enables you to get and maintain happy customers.

Akeneo also offers a full host of Akeneo Training classes to get a better understanding of how the system works.

https://www.akeneo.com/what-is-a-product-cloud/

What you will learn from this podcast

Kristin Naragon is Global Marketing and Strategy for Akeneo, a mother of two and a Peloton enthusiast.
Akeneo provides a PIM (Product Information Management) solution that helps turn browsers into buyers.
2023 is projected to be the year of the PIM, as businesses are now realizing the importance of investing in product experience.
Akeneo offers both open-source and SaaS solutions and has been helping customers with product gathering, enriching, and getting to market faster for ten years.
Akeneo is also well-suited to help with social commerce, providing consistency and speed to new channels.
Social media and influencers are essential for creating a consistent brand image.
Transparency is important to younger buyers.
Akeneo PIM can help merchants get products to market quicker by providing checklists and automating manual processes.
Akeneo Product Cloud allows for dynamic data to be combined into one product record, which can be activated in multiple channels.
Experimentation is key to discovering new channels and reaching new audiences.
Akeneo PIM can help businesses pivot quickly in times of crisis.

Transcript

Brent: Welcome to this episode of Talk Commerce. Today I have Kristin Naragon. Kristin is Global marketing and Strategy for Akeneo. Sorry, Kristin, why don’t you go ahead, introduce yourself. Tell us one of your day to day, what your day to day role is, and maybe one of your passions in life.

Kristin: Yeah. Thanks for having me, Brent. I’m really excited to be here. So I try to introduce myself, not by my work. And I try to remove myself from being defined by just the the work that I do. I am Kristen Naragon. I am a mother of two kids who are I think are just the most interesting humans on earth.

Kristin: And I love to travel with my family, my husband and my kids, we like to travel quite a bit. Maybe it’s quite a bit just from an American point of view, but we’ve taken the family to far flung places like Indonesia and Japan and Columbia and all across Europe. So we we have a good time and enjoy exploring new places and learning learning how other people around the world live.

Kristin: So that’s a little bit about me and a passion that I have. A Peloton enthusiast, and I will wake up at ungodly hours in order to fit in a ride or a workout with Peloton. So maybe that’s a plug for somebody else’s business. But I’m a little bit obsessed And in my day job.

Kristin: What I do to make sure I can afford my Peloton is I am the head of global marketing and strategy here at a Akeneo. And I have been with the company for two and a half years. It’ll be three years in February. Gosh, I joined right before the pandemic started, so two hot weeks in the office.

Kristin: And. Got to meet a few people and dispersed. We were. Building and changing a strategy all remotely in a new company was a bit of a trick. But we’ve we’ve done some great things. So that’s a little bit about me and what I’m up to.

Brent: So for the listeners who don’t understand what a PIM is why don’t you give us the 10,000 foot view of a PIM and then let’s dive into PIMS more as we go.

Kristin: Yeah, so PIM it’s hard to explain if if you’ve got zero knowledge, but if we’re trying to talk to our grandparents and let them know what it is, it’s essentially those it’s a solution that helps turn browsers into buyers. And so if you think about what we do as consumers to go looking for researching products that we are interested in purchasing and read all of that information about the product.

Kristin: Find it in different locations, represented in different ways. The PIM serves that up in mo in the most delightful ways. So where the solution that helps those buyers feel more sure. About the products that bra and retailers are selling.

Brent: I’ve heard it, I’ve heard it being said that 2023 is going to be the year of the PIM.

Brent: Why do you think that PIMs are trending so much,

Kristin: Yeah. Oh man. I love this because the way that we see the world is that there are three key assets that any merchant, brand, manufacturer, any commerce business has. The first are customers, it’s pretty important to a business.

Kristin: The second are employee. And the third, of course are products. And so that first wave of investment was around that, the customer and obsession with the customer and the customer experience. And so centralizing the record for customers and then engaging with them in all the ways that a customer, they think wants to be engaged.

Kristin: And so huge industries have been developed around that customer engagement. The second wave has been around that second asset, which is employee. Maybe you might argue it’s going in the wrong order, but it is what it is. And so especially now since Covid, but it started well before this industry surrounding technology and consulting new innovations and supporting that employee experience, that life cycle of an employee from recruiting talent.

Kristin: Onboarding them, engaging them, health meters with employees. All of that is exploding right now. So the customer experience first and still going strong, employee experience wave is here. And if you’re watching it, it’s growing big and tall. That third pillar of a business is the product experience.

Kristin: And woefully neglected still a huge challenge for businesses, and it’s the thing that falls apart. If your customer experience is falling apart, it’s probably due to. A bad product experience. And so they’re waking up to understand, oh my gosh, the missing ingredient and this whole thing that I’ve been investing in is actually investing in that product experience.

Brent: Yeah, and I think one of the fun things or interesting things that I’ve always seen as the pin is that you can then put all of your product into one place and diversified into multiple channels. And as now we’re getting more into omnichannel, pin is even more important. To keep that continuity in product across all channels.

Brent: Yeah, for sure. Maybe talk a little bit about how Akeneo can effectively get over some of those hurdles when you’re talking about continuity of product. Yeah, there’s

Kristin: so many hurdles that we we help our customers with and, you talk about the destination, so it’s always the last mile.

Kristin: I think that a lot of. A lot of people are interested in it, right? The last mile’s, always the heart smile, but actually in. This wave , what we’re seeing is that it’s actually starting way back before the last mile. You’ve got the whole marathon in front of you before you get there of product, gathering product information from wherever it comes from.

Kristin: So if you’re. A retailer, a distributor, it’s coming from maybe thousands of different brands trying to get that information. But even if you’re a brand manufacturer yourself, oh my goodness, you have agencies that you’re working with. You’ve got the creative people, you have the brand people, you’ve got the order management, you’ve got a lot of sources of information that you need, and to get together in one place that’s hard.

Kristin: Pin helps with that. And then certainly, Accelerating that speed of getting the information. So you gotta to crunch that hard work down into as much automation as possible so you get to market faster that last mile of getting to market faster. You gotta enrich the products, make that easy and fun to do, and then get that into all of those destinations.

Kristin: Now we talk about sales channels, which is absolutely one destination for product experiences to show up for your prospects and your customers. But it’s everywhere else too. So think of the end of your post purchase experience. If you’re calling up a particular brand and you want, you say, Hey, I bought this product on this particular site.

Kristin: I need to know X, Y, Z. You really want the person who’s picking up the phones to know exactly what it is and know more about the product than potentially was served to that person. So pin information actually gets served to support that full life cycle of customer information to things. The the customer support teams

Brent: as well.

Brent: Yeah, I think so. Can you started back in the early teens, 2013, something like that? Tell us some of the beginnings of that and how that has impacted how PI have has grown and how it fits into the today’s puzzle or all the different pieces you need for a fully rounded e-commerce and store.

Brent: That’s

Kristin: right. Yeah we we certainly support e-com, but it’s really commerce at its core in all the different destinations. But yeah, back to your question, it’s 10 years. We get to celebrate our 10 year anniversary at at our upcoming user conference in Paris in, in March. And Pretty excited about that.

Kristin: My goodness. Has, have things changed in that last 10 years? Can you have started with the founders who were working on the backend systems? E-commerce solutions like Magento. And they were, hands on keyboard trying to move products from one place into the e-com system and really just saw it loud and clear the problem that managing that product information and getting it into the direct to consumer channel.

Kristin: It was just a total nightmare. And so that’s where they began is trying to solve that problem. And they created an open source solution. And so anybody can go right now on GitHub or wherever you download your open source solutions. and find Akeneo who there, and it’s a powerful solution that’s just available to anybody.

Kristin: And I think that was the part of the vision was they knew this was such a vast problem that they wanted to provide a solution to anybody who needed it. And so we have 80,000 downloads of that solution. Across the world. So clearly it is any customer or any business with a product to sell has this problem and we’re helping them to solve it.

Kristin: And so that was that was the roots of the business. And since we’ve evolved into a full SaaS composable offering we fit into whatever stack a company might. And integrate neatly into whatever ecosystem is in the customer’s base. And so it’s been a quite, a, quite a journey, quite an evolution.

Kristin: And the value that we’re providing and the depth and the breadth, I think we. You hear it with our customers. Gosh, I’ve sold a lot of products before. I’ve been exposed to a lot of different solutions and I’ve talked to a lot of customers in my life. I have never talked to so many happy customers as I have here.

Kristin: It’s creepy, like not creepy, but it’s just, it’s almost unbelievable how delighted these customers are with the Kenya. And so it’s just a, it’s a wonderful, just a wonderful place to, to grow. .

Brent: Going back to the beginnings and the reasoning around, so open source has been a big part of what helped software grow in the last 10 years.

Brent: Yeah. And the is certainly open source and has a community version that’s free for people to download and use. We do tell us some of the importance of that in how ge, how maybe getting users into PI and exposing them to pi, how does that help Akeneos brand to have that open source?

Kristin: Yeah. It’s interesting, it was new to me of this open source model before coming to a Kenya, and what I realized is that especially in a market where as we discussed this it’s it’s been around for a while, the category, but.

Kristin: I think since the 10 years that we’ve been able to expose the, with the free open source model to so many different people, I think the education process, it really has accelerated the education process for what Apam is. Because I think it’s still one of those categories that people are learning about, right?

Kristin: Like learning exactly where it fits into their tech stack, Learning exactly how it solve the value that it bring. The problems that it solves. And so that open source nature that I think has really helped to sort of seed buyers with an educational tool. Now what we’ve got done recently, actually this year we released also a SaaS free trial.

Kristin: So it’s totally free, no credit cards, nothing. You just put your name in and you go, you get a 14 day free trial, it’s SaaS if you’re not a developer or some IT person who really understands how to install, an open source product, I am not one of those somebody like me can go in and just start the free trial on their on their computer and be done.

Kristin: So you’re, you can experience the Akeneo. Value over the course of 14 days. And I think that’s also part of, our heritage is getting the word out there, understanding the value that a solution like ours has to offer is really been helping us to expand the growth of the business, but also the solution at.

Brent: So on a tangent Akeneo has always been known for their purple three-headed. I think it’s a dragon, it’s a hydro, a hying. Is there a story behind that?

Kristin: Yeah. Her pronouns are she and her name is Ziggy. Yeah, she’s evolved as well over time. And she’s taken on some iterations, but she was initially brought into the fold by a very creative person on the team who, took on the adoption of Ziggy and she was the three headed hydro for multi channel.

Kristin: And so at first she was the bad guy. She’s multi-channel, like hard to wrangle. She was evil. But she was tamed by Julia, who is our persona the PI power user. And now they’re best friends. So she and Julia Julia and Ziggy are now friends and Ziggy. Part of the, ah, man, to get your hands on a Ziggy people really like, So you can come to our booth or at any show or come to our user events.

Kristin: You might be able to find some limited addition gigs to adopt and take home with you. Our customers love them, .

Brent: So one of the things that that is coming up in, in commerce now is social commerce. How does PI fit into social commerce and how can new merchants or merchants that are established and have a PIM or are looking at.

Brent: Utilize that for social commerce.

Kristin: Yeah. Gosh. And social commerce is such a broad category too, and it keeps evolving by the minute and some platforms are even taking down the actual transactional piece of it. So I guess when I think of social commerce, that’s everything from the influence piece, the browse piece, the.

Kristin: Showcasing piece to the transactional components of it. And so if you think about it with those two buckets, I think PI is absolutely able to and should be serving that consistent. You talked about a consistent product experience no matter where you’re browsing. and it’s no question in my mind that unless you have a centralized product record, you have consistency in how you’re describing and showcasing your products.

Kristin: If you’re not doing that on social channels, you’re totally missing the whole point. And so driving consistency there is absolutely like table stakes critical these days. And I think the other so consistency is one, but also speed to those new. Random channels that seem to pop up as, as often as they do.

Kristin: I think without a pin, without preset. Centralized system, your speed to those new channels, your speed to market to those new channels is just a nightmare. Whereas with a proper pin, you’re able to open up a new channel, select the types of content, because every channel has different content requirements.

Kristin: But just modify the content that already exists and gets it, get it into the channel. So it’s not like recreating an entire process just to open up one social, new social channel. , it’s as simple as, clicking and reconfiguring. So I think it’s speed to those channels, being able to test out if those channels work for you, for whatever objectives you think that they should be achieving is just so much faster with with a setup pin.

Brent: And I think just going back to the traditional model of just doing eCommerce through one store, the reality of what’s coming is now we are gonna have maybe even when they talk about headless, maybe it’s not gonna, you’re not, you’re gonna be, everything’s gonna be done through all these channels.

Brent: And I know that in an earlier interview this year, we talked about even conversational commerce where. It’s done through chats and things like that. Yeah. So I think that retailers and merchants need to know that they need to stay at least somewhat ahead of the game or stay with it so you can continue to sell and see the channels that are out there.

Brent: What are the trends in in that social commerce head first type of thing that that Akeneo is jumping onto. . Yeah.

Kristin: So if you think about a certain generation of buyer out there, of which I am not one of they are all over social and the influence that social people, influencers on social media channels have and the impact that it can have on your product.

Kristin: And for brand managers out there who want to control their image having the ability to have a central. Like I said before, just single source of truth for your product information and being able to get that into the hands of when possible influencers is absolutely one one thing that is part of, making sure that your brand image stays consistent even if it’s in the hands of somebody that you’re not paying.

Kristin: The second thing is that those younger consumers value transparency. . And so I think being able to provide in those social channels really truly transparent information about the product itself, but also layering in brand values inside of those social moments with your product. So not even discrete from.

Kristin: Side by side and integrated with your product story that is insanely important for buyers of a certain generation, . So transparency is critical and social is if you’re not there you’re just not existent. And those influencers have power. So if you’re not feeding those influencers with the.

Kristin: Information, they’re just going on their own. Those are the trends that we see, which, I think a pin like ours actually supports really nicely.

Brent: And as your team gets bigger, I think that the importance of having different roles on your team to do different things and I think it applies especially in c let’s language One of the features that I particularly like about Akeneo is the ability to do the, to do checklists of things.

Brent: So you could you can see when your catalog is done in English and maybe your catalog isn’t completed in Spanish, and talk about how how that team aspect and even how that the aspect of having the ability to see when pieces are done and getting things launched quicker and not having to dig through mounds of data to figure out what isn’t and what is.

Brent: How that can help a merchant get things to market quicker.

Kristin: Yeah. I’m glad you point that out because it’s one of the usability features of the solution that I think, doesn’t, is not like the sexiest thing to go talking about, but it’s once you get the product, you’re like, Oh my gosh, thank God.

Kristin: We recently did a total economic impact study with a few of our customers, and found out that retention was one of the outcomes. Employee retention and satisfaction was one of the outcomes of leveraging Akeneo PIM. And the reasons that were given were exactly what you talk about. So it’s the ability to see.

Kristin: Among a lot of products that you have to enrich. You have to get ready for getting to market, see what status they’re in, in, like you said, which language, but which market, which category, which family of products. So you can triage your day and not just waste time combing through and list lists of products.

Kristin: So it’s just a a quick way to understand where you are in your day to day job. And not be like, dragged down in the quagmire of lots of the Excel spreadsheets on lists of products. The other thing that we discovered was that since those employees were not, Drag down with some menial, matching and v lookup tasks that they were a even more satisfied because they were able to do the higher value work.

Kristin: The work that was actually more interesting of writing colorful descriptions, actually looking for what are the right brand images to put against these products. And so actually taking those extra steps to make their products showcase much more brilliantly on the places that they were going.

Kristin: So employee retention was a really wonderful outcome that we, we discovered with with the, those who are using the PIM.

Brent: I think you can create and I’m gonna use all the wrong words, but like a workflow where you can have certain things that have to get done before the product’s ready to go.

Brent: Oh yeah. Which ensures that the product’s gonna be as great and beautiful as it should be when it goes live. Whereas your typical, if you are using some back end of any nondescript eCommerce system you’re not gonna have all. There’s not gonna be all those things in place to ensure that product is the way it should be across all areas. And even as a manager, then it makes it difficult if you didn’t have that tool in hand to make sure your product looks super great for your customer to see.

Kristin: Yeah. No, it’s true. And the time to market is the, is so employee satisfaction and retention is absolutely one of them.

Kristin: But then time to market is the other benefit and the outcome of that because the speed with which you’re able to triage and understand which categories are ready to go. This is high and you, a lot of automation is happening behind the scenes so that you don’t have to do a lot of the manual work that probably you’re doing with spreadsheets and other old fashioned things to get this product information into one place.

Kristin: As an example, one of our customers who’s a seller of, Apple. Apple doesn’t give anybody any information prior to a launch of a new product, Of course. And so even, Staples. And so they would take them, I think, upwards of two weeks to, gather that information from the product launch and get it up onto their channels and into their markets to sell it.

Kristin: My gosh, that’s how much lost revenue over two weeks period. That’s that. That is an impact to the business, and now they turn it around in a matter of hours. Simply due to that process that they’ve nailed down, leveraging the interface of the PIM and all the automations and checkpoints and quality controls that we’ve got.

Brent: One other benefit that you have is that you can have a third party vendor have limited access to start making that product ready. Not, maybe Apple wouldn’t do this, but if you have a vendor who is giving you a product and they’re, they know everything about it and they can, they have access to your system, they could be starting that pre-product input before your team even has to get a hold of it or a lot of that work would already be done to get it live as soon as.

Kristin: Yeah, totally. And so that’s the one solution for retailers and distributors is that onboarding solution to allow third parties to get in there and import their product information alongside other components. But there’s also inside the administrative rights of the core PIM itself, we have a bunch of customers who have seasonal release.

Kristin: And so they have a ton of products that they just have to get out the door in various season, and they find that it’s actually. Really valuable for them and their community actually, where this particular customer is to hire students, like working students as well as retired people to their offices.

Kristin: Give them, these are the three things that you’re working on. And that’s all the access that they have. So they have their list of products that they work on and the various fields and attributes that they’re allowed to enrich, and they find that their time to market. So much faster. Their flexibility with their workforce is pretty darn high, and they love being able to, to hire into the community people who might otherwise not have those types of opportunities.

Kristin: And it’s just this like win, win all around.

Brent: Talking about new product launches and I know that Akeneo recently unlocked a new product, at the Unlocked Conference. Thank you. Tell us about Akeneo Product Cloud and how that’s gonna change things and enhance things.

Kristin: Yeah, we’re super, super excited about this.

Kristin: This this for us is the way that the category evolves. One of the things that we clearly. Encountered in working with the customers that we have and, the benefits of having 80,000 installs of the product and open sources, having conversations with people to see what other pieces of information help to the browser, turn into a buyer.

Kristin: And if you step back and you think about all of those components of product experiences that help you and I discover to learn to make the purchase it’s more than what a traditional modern pin can consume or should consume. You go up on any product product page, you’ll see things like customer reviews, you’ll see things like and if it’s a dynamic pricing that’s not going inside of pin because it’s hot changing by the, this millisecond sometimes pricing.

Kristin: There are things that, let’s see what other components that we can think of that live outside. So there’s order information, right? So understanding if there’s availability of that product in a certain store that’s near you. Those are all components that naturally and should live outside of a traditional modern PIM like Akeneo.

Kristin: But that also serve that browsing to buying experience. And so the product cloud is that evolution of a composable offering that allows merchants and commerce leaders to get their products and showcase their product. Anywhere with any product information in one single pre in place. So it broadens the scope of product information to both warm and hot data.

Kristin: So non-static, non, once and done marketing data to that more dynamic data, puts it all in one place and allows those merchants to do analytics on performance. Of those products in all of the destinations to where it goes. So we’re pretty excited about this. It’s an evolution of building out the various components for us in this product cloud vision that we’re painting out there.

Kristin: But I think we’ve got the backbone of it with the pin with our app store, with our connected marketplace to. All the destinations that that we need to get them to, to the product information too. So we’re pretty excited about the product

Brent: cloud. Is the, so you’re gonna tie in the ERP and any disparate systems that would be connected to the it’s you’re talking about having everything coming into one place and then spitting it out to the multiple channels again.

Kristin: Yeah, exactly. If you think of the PIM is now one component, one composable component of the entire product record. You’ve got a dam, you’ve got order management systems to serve, availability needs in the product record product life cycle systems that allow the searcher or the buyer or the consumer to understand where the inform the product was sourced from potentially since that’s now.

Kristin: A real transparency, like I said, is a real need for BA browsers and buyers to understand where the sourcing material has come from and how it was sourced some of that lives in a system like a plm. And to be able to combine all of those elements into one full product record in the single source.

Kristin: So now the full product record is elevated at a product data platform level and then shipped out and activated into the various channels that it needs to go. That’s what we now mean by a product record being activated into the various destinations where it needs to go. One of the other value propositions that I’m really excited about there is essentially.

Kristin: Now you’ve got the customer record. Oh, sitting in a CDP or a crm. You’ll have the product record completely. Sitting in a PDP product data platform, marrying those two and syncing those two data sources allows for analysis of your business that you’ve never had before. And so up leveling that centralized product record to that centralized customer record is just gonna.

Kristin: Further unlock so much growth for these businesses.

Brent: That really helps the marketers, the top three things in marketing is measuring. And that will give a lot more insight to how well they’re performing. Absolutely. Kristen, if you had if you had a little juicy nugget that you could give a merchant as we’re going into fourth quarter, Black Friday this busier time.

Brent: What could you give a merchant? What would you what do you think the trend is now in, in this the end of 2022?

Kristin: Oh, Juicy nugget. I love experimenting. I do that myself for my marketers in my in my team. If we’re not experimenting, then we’re not trying, we’re not failing.

Kristin: We’re not we’re not getting out there and making sure that we’re the best showcasing our offering in the best. . And so I think for merchants out there, it’s the same. It’s if you can’t quickly experiment in a new channel, if it’s a sales channel or marketing channel you’re missing out, you’re missing out on exposure to new audiences, or you’re missing out on, being able to showcase your products in ways.

Kristin: You couldn’t on a direct to consumer channel, potentially with with a, the YouTube influencer channel that’s coming out. So I think it’s it’s pretty imperative that, this season, if you wanna try something new, the quicker you can get there, measure it, understand it, pull it off.

Kristin: It’s, if it’s not working, but expand it if it is. I think that’s the real power in expanding your business. .

Brent: Yeah. And just to help listeners understand how easy it would be as you have everything in your PIM and you have a new channel that’s now available, all those channels are gonna be connected within api.

Brent: And all you do is connect the two. And even if it’s such a new thing, there’s tons of middleware that can get you in connected if it’s not available. But generally those larger channels or the new channels that are out there, they’re gonna be available to connect to. And just as we wanna sell that particular thing to somebody, that channel wants that connection with you to sell through.

Brent: So I think that’s a great, That’s a great point that you’ve made about how. The time to market is so greatly reduced by having your product all in one place and ready to go.

Kristin: . Yeah. Absolutely. Absolutely. And you know what, we know, we noticed this with And I think a lot of learnings came out of covid on so many different dimensions, but when we were trying to support our customers through Covid and the impact that it had on their businesses the ones in our ecosystem they were able to make these pretty significant pivots.

Kristin: We had a company that would sell to airlines. So they sold things like fuel to airlines. They sold things like everything in bulk to support the flight. And Covid hits, What do you do? So their big idea was to pivot to consumers. So they’re selling to, they’re selling to businesses.

Kristin: Clearly. They decided to take their wear. That actually suddenly were pretty useful for people because they had things like hand sanitizer in bulk. And so what they were able to do is do some repackaging but sell to consumers. So they spun up all that product information that they had in the kidney that they were using to sell to businesses, re, just tweak some of the descriptions to make it more consumer friendly.

Kristin: And they push direct to consumer within a matter of months. That’s a business pivot . But they accessed a whole new market through consumers because they have their product information sorted. Wait, that’s experiment, an experimentation at scale, and that’s business survival. And so now coming out of Covid and flights are all back, they have two consumer bases now buying bases now that they’re able to accelerate.

Kristin: The world’s your oyster in that case, right? Just in terms of new markets, new channels that you’re able to experiment with.

Brent: I do wanna make a D2C, B2B point too, that the PIM is a channel to print as well. Yes. And if you’re a B2B and you have traditional, maybe one channel through some kind of website, but you also have a printed catalog PIM is a great place to put all of your products in, and then you can output to a printed catalog just like you do to any other channel.

Brent: You can think of it as electronic and digital, but that digital turns into pieces of paper at the end, and rather than having somebody comb through, pages and pages of InDesign documents or whatever you’re using you can start it in your PIM and then output to some product that, that actually is the printable version.

Brent: Yeah,

Kristin: I was in my CEO’s office a few months ago and he proudly has displayed on his. This massive catalog. It’s like this thick and dense . He puts it on my lap and I’m like, Oh that’s, I could do some weight lifting with this, but it’s entirely powered by the kidney and the level of detail and the product information that’s in here.

Kristin: It, this is not a lost business of selling with a product catalog for many industries. And if you have to sort through all of that, all of those dense pages of product catalogs in product information manually, oh my Lord. And if you get something wrong, the expense of getting something wrong in a printed catalog that you’re doing thousands of, this is.

Kristin: Business impact. So yeah, getting the product information right and all of those checks and balances that you’d want for your digital, easy to pull down a misspelling on a, your direct to consumer channels. But if you’re have a misprint a spelling error in a catalog that has already been printed.

Kristin: you’ve got a problem. So all of the checks and balances that go into that are pretty important for those channels as

Brent: well. Yeah, and I, so Kristen, I think you and I could talk about great solutions for PIM for the next three hours, but unfortunately we are out of time. Yeah. As I put, as I close out on a, each of our podcasts, I give a chance for the guests to do a shameless plug about anything you’d like.

Brent: What would you like to plug?

Kristin: I, it’s the mission that we’ve got is to make sure that we provide a solution for anybody who needs it. So I’d say go to Akeneo.com and just start the free trial. And like I said there’s no, no credit card and nothing’s needed. You just put your your name in there and.

Kristin: There’s a live chat inside the food trial. You can explore the experience all on your own time and all on your own. Or if you need help, we’ve got that too. So I would just say check it out. If you’re curious about what exactly it looks like and under the hood is there for you to open up.

Kristin: So atkin.com is the shameless plug that I’ll put out.

Brent: Yeah, and I’ll put all, I’ll put all the links on the show notes. Kristen Naragon, thank you so much. Kristen is the VP of Global Marketing and Strategy for Akeneo. Thank you for being here today.

Kristin: It was my pleasure. Thanks so much, Brent.

Interested in a beginner’s guide to PIM? Check out this article.

SaaS by SaasWest BigCommerce with Heather Barr

April 14, 2023October 4, 2022 Brent W. Peterson

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?

https://sites.google.com/bigcommerce.com/devx-at-bc/devx

Check out the post on why you need a community manager.

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

Heather: for having me.

Entrepreneurial Empathy with Jen McFarland

April 14, 2023September 20, 2022 Brent W. Peterson

Will your employee go a little further when times are tough? Jen McFarland ( @jensmcfarland )talks about entrepreneurship, marketing, and living in Kazakhstan. Listen for the size 45 clown shoes. Are they European sizes, US sizes, or clown sizes?

Mentorship, empathy, marketing, and NOT being a hater! If you are an employer, this episode is for you if you are an employee, this episode is for you.

If there is one theme to hear throughout this podcast, it is this quote from Jen:
“Smart Women in tech leave because of bad management.”

https://www.linkedin.com/in/jensmcfarland

https://www.linkedin.com/company/epiphanycourses

https://www.epiphanycourses.com

Transcript

Brent: Welcome to talk commerce today. I have Jen McFarland coming from Oregon. Did I get that right? Jen, Oregon? Yep. Yep. Jen, go ahead and introduce yourself. Tell us a little bit about your day to day role and maybe one of your passions in

Jen: life. Oh, wow. Hi my name’s Jen McFarland. I am a marketing coach, even though I don’t like using the word coach.

Jen: It just seems to be what people call me. I also do a lot of hands on work. My favorite thing to do in my role as a marketing agency is I work with the city of Portland’s economic development division through their inclusive business resource network and we help people of color with their marketing so that they can build their businesses.

Jen: And that’s one of my favorite things to do. I’m also passionate about travel. hang out with my friends. It’s lovely here in Portland, because right now it’s summer and I am not originally from here. So when the rain comes, that’s not really my favorite time

Brent: and it never rains on, in, in the west coast, right in Portland.

Brent: It’s always bright and sunny, just like San Diego.

Jen: That’s what I a lot of people get it wrong. See, it only rains once in Portland, it starts in October and it ends in late may.

Brent: Oh, that’s better than starting in October and ending in September.

Jen: well, that’s true. We’ve had that happen before though. That was summer was on a Tuesday and it was pretty fun.

Brent: Yes. I was in Duluth this weekend and summer’s done already there, so no

Jen: way. I can’t okay. Checking that off the list. Not moving to Duluth.

Brent: Yeah. Duluth is very lovely in the summer. So July some parts of August depends which way the wind is blowing. Off the lake or not. How all right. The only thing I know about Portland is Portlandia.

Brent: And so I know that you probably go to one of your local restaurants and get the name of the chicken that when you’re gonna sit down to eat, is that right?

Jen: They don’t always tell us the name of the chicken, but it’s, it’s 50 50, if you get the full lineage of the chicken. So yeah. Portland idea, totally accurate.

Jen: A hundred percent.

Brent: all right. So Jen I know some of the topics we talked about in the green room were around certainly entrepreneurship, but how you went through the peace Corps and then got into entrepreneurship or how the peace Corps helped you get into it. Tell us a little bit about that.

Jen: Yeah. So I love travel. I am a unique person in that I did peace Corps with my husband. He also likes travel. So we went as more mid-career entrepreneurs. So we were both in our thirties and we, so when you go as a couple, you can’t go to as many places as a single person, they have to have a place for two people to live and all kinds of things.

Jen: So we went to Kazakhstan. It is it’s not like Borat he’s, supposedly from Kazakhstan. Kazakhstan is a country south of Russia. It’s the largest land locked country in the world. And people there are insanely nice. So nice to the point where. It would be considered kidnapping in this country.

Jen: So I was walking, we were teachers and I had a long walk back to the host family. This is when we were training and my husband was ahead of me and somebody saw, it was like, oh, the American is alone. I want my niece to talk to the American. So basically they’re like, come on in. And I’m like I have to get home.

Jen: It’s dinnertime. They bring me in and this, I was so inexperienced that I didn’t know how long this process would be and they start cooking and I’m like, oh no, I’m in deep trouble. I don’t have the phone number to get ahold of my husband, the person I’m supposed to talk to. Isn’t in the house. I don’t know any of these people, what is happening.

Jen: I think I was there for about two hours and about halfway in this woman, young woman comes in and sits down and I can understand enough Russian at that point to understand that this is the person I’m supposed to talk to you. And she speaks English. And that is how I met my best friend in Kazakhstan so we talked, it was awesome.

Jen: We left that training place and then we ended up moving back there and living there for a year and Rahan saw me and was just like, oh my gosh, it’s you? This is so great. And that’s how we met each other. But like in America, these are things that never happened. You’re not walking along the street and somebody’s Hey, come on in.

Jen: Talk to my niece. Like you would never stop. You would never do it. And so that’s how I learned that sometimes you can take these risks that just seem insane and crazy, and it turns out really good. So this was somebody who I was really close to for that time. I miss her all the time, even though I’ve been back for a long time.

Jen: And I think business is a lot like that. Sometimes you have to take that chance. You have to be like, is this for real? I don’t know if this is for real or not. And then you. Yeah, it’s cool. And you take that risk. You take the plunge and it works that way. It just works out. And that’s really what happened.

Jen: I would say then when you fast forward and I’m an executive at the city of Portland and I decide to leave, but I don’t really have a parachute really set for myself. I knew I wanted to have a business, but I hadn’t really set it up. And I was like it’s gonna work out. And it has, it’s just crazy sometimes how.

Jen: works that way. You have to have a certain degree of trust in order for it to really work out and Peace Corp was we loved peace Corp. It was super great.

Brent: Yeah, that’s good. So the peace cor in Kazakhstan. Wow. I have I’ve and you lived there for a year. Tell when was this? When did you do this?

Jen: We lived there for two years.

Jen: Two years. Okay. It was in the early two thousands and it’s cold. it’s really cold there. I would say that the weather is probably similar to Milwaukee Wisconsin, except there’s no central heating. I remember sitting next to, we had, I don’t know what you would call it. It was technically supposed to be a heater, but it was like these bare wires that would just heat up I don’t know.

Jen: It was so cold that I sat so close to it, that I set my pants on fire and I didn’t notice it for a minute and I. I was like, do you smell smoke? It was breakfast. And I was talking to my husband. He’s like something smells funny. And I looked and, but I was like, I also felt warm, so I wasn’t complaining and then I looked down and I.

Jen: oh, I just burned a hole in my pants. I like you just no, it it’s a different experience there because it’s very cold and very snowy and like the vitreous fluid in your eyes freezes, and so you’re blinking a lot and it, it’s just an interesting experience.

Jen: And then it’s like insanely hot in the summer. And I think Milwaukee’s kind of that where, Minneapolis is like that too. Except you have a lot of mosquitoes there compared to Kazakhstan. So it’s a lovely, wonderful place that nobody’s ever heard of. And it was just a wonderful experience and it was very hard and also awesome.

Jen: We only had running water, I think about. we would leave the tap opened, cuz we weren’t sure when the water was gonna come on and we would fill the bathtub and then use the water. We had a water distiller, so it would be clean and everything. So it was an interesting time, an interesting experience.

Jen: And I think that’s why, my husband and I have weathered COVID really well. I weather uncertainty a lot better. I think that’s. I think that’s why people call me a coach, even though I’m really a consultant. And I do a lot of hands on marketing for people. It’s because I have this really grounded oh, it’s gonna be okay.

Jen: And I think after you have some of these experiences, like I’ve had experiences at the enterprise level where like we melted down entire. Servers and everything came to a grinding halt, and we had to match data among like hundreds of thousands of people. And we’ve, and I’ve lived in countries where I didn’t have running water.

Jen: Like it just, everything always works out. And I think that grounded feeling I have about things is really because I’ve lived in places without any creature comforts, I’ve had all kinds of experiences and at the end of it, it’s great. Everything works out. Everything works out in the end.

Brent: So two comments, number one, I’m sad to hear that you associate Minnesota with mosquitoes, which we have a state bird. It’s not the mosquito number two. I did spend a lot of time in the eighties watching the show, Laverski and Shirliova. It’s a Kazakhstan program about two ladies in a beer bottling plant that in nevermind.

Brent: It’s a, that’s a tie back to Milwaukee Laver, Shirley and Milwaukee. Yes. I know I’ll stop. So do you please, do you think there’s a special risk factor or no, maybe not risk, but there has to be something in you or. Something you can’t quite quantify to be able to leave your job as a public employee or a city employee, and just jump off and go for it.

Brent: Do you think there’s something that most people can’t quite identify with?

Jen: I don’t know. I certainly had the golden handcuffs on if that’s what you mean, had every, I was paid I had. still have my retirement from there. Certainly if you know all of the security in the world, I don’t think I was actually gonna lose my job.

Jen: But it, I wasn’t happy. So I think that when you look at your life and you’re like, this isn’t really what I want. I, I don’t know. Some people will decide to. and be miserable. And I just, that, wasn’t what I wanted for myself. And I wanted something different. I also have the experience that when my dad was around 50, he was being worked to get to death at the state of Idaho and had a bad situation.

Jen: And he ended up having a heart attack. And I was like, I don’t wanna be like that. He didn’t want that. And so I think that as I, got into my forties, I was like, yeah, I Don. This is not the road. I know where this road can lead because I had seen it with my dad. And I was like, I don’t want that road.

Jen: And I have been so much happier since taking the risks since doing something. But certainly I would say a lot of people don’t do it because maybe they don’t have the same sense of adventure. They don’t have these experiences where they’re like, Yeah, I’m just gonna go move to Kazakhstan now, ha that’s crazy.

Jen: Most people that’s crazy. So I do think that there’s a part of me that is really adventurous and willing to take these chances and take chances on myself. And I would say certainly I’m the person who gets the LinkedIn email, the little messages and I’m like, is this real or not? And I’ll actually research things that don’t.

Jen: real. And then that’s how I ended up I had a film crew at my house earlier this year because they read one of my blog posts and they’re filming a documentary and they wanted me to be in it. And it was just a random request that came into LinkedIn, but I’m willing to take the risk that that could work out.

Jen: And it did, it was fun. It. Unique. Doesn’t happen every day that I have a film crew at my house. So I do think that we have these opportunities as entrepreneurs where we can either be like, oh God, I get so many LinkedIn requests all the time. I’m just gonna ignore all of them. I don’t even know these people.

Jen: And I’m that. Odd person. Who’s oh, is this looks neat. If this is real, then I’m gonna pursue it. And I think that we have these opportunities all the time in our lives, and we have that choice. We have the power to make the choice about how we’re going to navigate and proceed. Do

Brent: you think it gets more difficult as you get older to make that decision?

Brent: And I’ll just back that up with, I started as an entrepreneur in college, I went to college for eight years and decided. I wanna do something different. So I dropped outta college sure. After eight years and I started a business. But I really didn’t know what I was doing or getting into at a younger age.

Brent: Sometimes you can jump into those things and it just happened, whatever that I got some traction and it worked, but some people as they get a little bit older might think I’ve got a career and I don’t know if I want to, chance on not having a paycheck. Do you think it’s more difficult as you get older?

Jen: I do. And I would say that, at the time I was leaving my executive role, that all played into it as okay how much runway do I have? The truth is I had more runway because I had more savings. had more experience it. It was a different runway than if I had decided to do it right outta college.

Jen: Like you, that would’ve been a disaster for me. I know who I was and where I was at that stage that would not have worked for me. It was also not on my roadmap. Peace Corps was a hundred percent on my roadmap coming outta college, having my own business. That was something that kind of simmered later on.

Jen: And I think that you have to have that entrepreneurial mindset, that entrepreneurial spirit, and I guess I had it all along. I just didn’t identify it as that ability. Be adventurous and take the plunge. I don’t think that’s for everybody. I don’t think that everybody feels that way about life.

Jen: about what they want for themselves. Everybody’s different. So I do think that those decisions become a lot harder because we have families, we have more complicated lives than we do out of college or when we’re younger, there’s just not as much complexity. Maybe we don’t have a house. I had all of these things I had to worry about.

Jen: We have a house, we have, I have a marriage. I can’t just run off and join the circus. I could, but there’s not really a lot of circuses anymore. Size 45 clown shoes in case anyone’s curious, but I can’t do that without talking to somebody. I can’t just run. And do whatever I want anymore. So I think sometimes we get lost in that complexity and we decide it’s just not worth it because there’s too many elements to work out.

Jen: So I think that can be a hard stop for people when there might be gold there. If you did take that plunge, if you did go out there and do something new.

Brent: Yeah. I can think of so many, like be your own boss. Do your own business. There’s so many people like that are pushing franchises or something like that.

Brent: And I think there’s a distinction between taking somebody else’s dream and going with it and doing your own dream. Maybe it’s harder to do your own dream because especially as you said, as you go along, you have more entrenched things that you want to stick with. And part of it being an entrepreneur is being able to let some of those things go and embracing change.

Brent: Oh yeah. You had mentioned earlier about being an accidental entrepreneur. How do you, how would you relate to that?

Jen: I said earlier that I wasn’t gonna lose my job, but my job was very uncertain. It was a year to year deal where I had to wait for the budget to go through, there was a lot of uncertainty around that and I was really unhappy. I really, at one point thought that I would bounce around at different roles at the city.

Jen: And it became clear that this role I was in was that was where I was gonna be. And I. Like it. I created the job. I created the entire department. I had been doing a lot of projects. That’s really what I would do that was my role at the city was I would create new programs and places and policies, and I would move around a lot.

Jen: And I became clear that this is, this was it. This was the landing spot. And I was like, oh no, this is not interesting to me. as I was making this entire. role and crafting this program. I was like, wow, I wonder who’s gonna have to do this all the time. And then it turned out to be me and I was not happy. So what happened then is in life outside of my work, I had a friend who had their own business and I began to see how I could help other people in smaller roles in smaller businesses.

Jen: Where it wasn’t an enterprise large business situation. And I started to realize that some of the things that I took for granted and thought everybody knew they didn’t, about marketing, about technology, about how to get all the pieces to fit together. And so I started helping people as side hustle, is what people call it now.

Jen: And. from that experience. I was like, I could really do this. It wasn’t the intention. It was all by accident, helping somebody in need. And then it became another person and another person in the meantime, during the day, I’m in a role that I’m really unhappy with it’s budget season. Again, do I want to go through another.

Jen: Will I, or won’t I have a job, even though I think I will. The program, it’s been years now and it’s still running, so yes, I would’ve had a role. So it all happened. Like the kismet, like all of the things started happening and I was like yeah, it’s time to go. I need to go.

Jen: I wasn’t happy. There were a lot of reasons. so I took the plunge, but it wasn’t some grand master plan. I think a lot of times when people go into, should I have my own business or not, they’re looking for some sort of bright light that they run to, or all kinds of certainty and knowledge about how it’s all gonna turn out.

Jen: it’s not like that. it just doesn’t happen. I don’t think for a lot of people, maybe some people do have funding set up ahead of time, or they have banked a ton of clients. That’s certainly not what I was in when I decided this is what I’m gonna do. This is what I enjoy more. And there’s just a lot of factors that go into it.

Jen: So it was accidental. And it took a little bit of time to decide that this was what I was going to do.

Brent: If you were to think between say the employer role and the employee role you talk a lot about how you’ve helped others as an employer, do you want to encourage your employees who you recognize could be good entrepreneurs to chase their dream?

Brent: So basically you’d lose them, but they would have their dream. Is that something you think as a good entrepreneur, you should be doing?

Jen: Absolutely. My role in companies, when I go work there is to work myself out of a job. I’m not real big on the whole, have a retainer for life kind of deal. Like I like people to move on, get out of my nest and move on.

Jen: And I feel the same way about the people who work with me, who work for me. Part of what we’re doing is we’re fostering the growth of others. And in that we have to allow them to blossom and grow. And one of the reasons I feel that way is because that wasn’t something that was an option to me at several different points in my career.

Jen: So I don’t want to inhibit the growth of somebody else because I know what that feels like.

Brent: I can remember people that have helped me and people that have hindered me in the past. And certainly maybe the ones that have helped me the most are the ones that are more confident in the abilities for them to succeed in their own roles, knowing that they’ve now fostered somebody to go out and chase their own dream. Is there any advice you could give an entrepreneur to help them, maybe it’s insecurity where somebody feels as though that they wanna retain this person for the rest of their lives.

Brent: And I’m not saying that it’s bad to have an employee who’s gonna be there for the rest of their lives, because there are people that simply want to be an employee that are not interested in being an entrepreneur. Not everybody is cut out for that. No, but I do feel as though. Some employers could be a hindrance to somebody’s upward career if they were to, I don’t know, a stranglehold or something

Jen: well, I will say that I haven’t had as many mentors as other people have.

Jen: And I think that sometimes what happens is, and by mentor in this specific case, I know that you can have mentors that. Anywhere. But a work mentor, like somebody who was above me in an organization, mentor me and helped, find another role somewhere else. I work really hard. It’s one of the things that I do.

Jen: So I didn’t tend to attract mentors who wanted me to leave. So they wanted me to stay there because they knew. Whatever they needed, it was gonna get done because Jen would do it. And I can tell you, by the time I left the city, there were like four people doing what I was doing. Like I was taking on so much and I would just get it done.

Jen: That’s what I’m good at. I’m an implementer, get stuff done. I can say that just because somebody is working really hard. And I think that we’re seeing it now with the quiet quitting is what they’re calling it, where it’s basically people who have really good boundaries. And they’re saying, I’m gonna come in.

Jen: I’m gonna do exactly what you want me to do. I’m gonna leave on time. I’m gonna turn my phone off. I’m not gonna answer your. And people are really upset about it. And I’m like, why they’re finding that you’re gonna pay them the same, regardless of what they do. If they work extra or not, and they’re not interested and you’re not helping them grow because they wouldn’t be doing, if you’re doing it, if you were actually fostering a better relationship, For entrepreneurs.

Jen: Yes. It’s hard to have somebody leave. I get it. You don’t wanna have to train a new person. It means that you have to take on more for a while you find a new person, train them and get them to that next place. I will say though, that in the long run, you have to think about all of these things in the long game.

Jen: If you foster somebody and send them on their way, and you have a really good relationship with them, meaning they don’t quiet, quit. There’s not a big argument. And they leave . That is a partner that you have in the future. That you can be working with. This is somebody that you can join forces with maybe at a later date, but you are building a community of people who are going to sing your praises, their potential contractors later on down the road.

Jen: You don’t know where that’s gonna lead, but you do know where it’s gonna lead. If you burn somebody out and don’t help them grow, that never ends well. Never.

Brent: It leads to resentment and things that aren’t happy. So on the on the flip side of that is the employee relationship.

Brent: We talked about the entrepreneur, the employee how as an employee, do you see ways that you can encourage your employer, maybe to have this fostering role rather than working you to death. And I do agree that now today’s new world that they want to have that time to themselves.

Brent: And the motivation to just work for the sake of work is not there anymore.

Jen: That’s true. I think a lot of it is that the new younger generations. Relate to work differently. And I think that they get just as much done as anybody else. , it’s just how they do it looks differently. I have, I’m still seeking a mentor from, generation Z.

Jen: I wanna know exactly how people feel and very curious, because it’s not my generation, but I will tell you. . If you come into an organization, you have to understand that you are interviewing them as much as they are interviewing you. So that’s the first thing, right? You don’t go. You ask questions, you go in and you ask a lot of questions.

Jen: So you can be really clear about the role. You can be really clear about what the environment is like. You talk to other people who work there. That’s the starting point. If they pass over. Hurdle then the next hurdle is then you make it clear about your future goals. Like where is it that you see yourself going and you need to start having like conversations with the person you work for to help build those skills so that you can make it to the next place.

Jen: And I think that you will find people who are very open to that. You will also find a lot of people who are very, not open to that. And I think that. It really is about having those conversations early. It’s about meeting with your boss and talking through problems and solutions and what that career ladder can look like for you.

Jen: It does mean being brave and a little bit bold and. These things don’t happen overnight. and I know that we all want it. I remember when I was younger, I thought I knew everything. I thought that I should have this, and I should have that. Sometimes these things take time, not as long as your boss wants it to your the entrepreneur wants you around as long as possible.

Jen: So it. There is a little tension in that conversation, but I think it’s worthwhile for both parties to start really having these mentor mentee conversations, help building skills, because they’ll be a better employee up until they leave. Anyway, if you just open the doors and sometimes people will go, oh, there’s a lot.

Jen: I don’t know. And you might end up having them longer. The more, you open the curtain so they can see the mess of everybody’s business. Cause none of our businesses are perfect. You might actually find somebody who can help you in ways that you don’t know. If you start to give somebody more responsibility and teach them as much as possible.

Jen: And then as the employee you’ll wanna stay longer because you’ll see more and you’ll learn more than if you go elsewhere or if you go and embark on having your own business.

Brent: I think. What you said earlier about burning bridges that applies even greater for the employee, because if you can leave on good terms yes.

Brent: And you can provide value to your previous boss. Now that boss becomes a conduit for you for your next job or your next role or whatever you’d like to do. What advice would you give to a a younger employee who’s trying to navigate learning how their boss is gonna react to, Hey my timeframe is 24 months and I’m gonna be leaving.

Brent: Right. some bosses are gonna say they’re gonna say to themselves, that’s great. I’m gonna look for a new person already, cuz I know in 24 months they’re gonna be gone or the boss may just come out and say, that’s not gonna work for me. There’s a certain amount of rapport that has to be there in the beginning.

Brent: But then there has to be. almost there has to be some not psychology, but there has to be some way to learn and feel out where each person lies without necessarily giving out your entire hand.

Jen: Absolutely. This is about relationship building and a lot of what I believe in is honesty and transparency.

Jen: building those relationships over time. Now, as you begin to get to know your employer, , you might realize that they’re not interested in what it is that you want, and you may not be able to be all the way to look, I have a 24 month window here. Like you might not be able to share that part that might be too much for that person to handle.

Jen: So you need to. Feel it out. This takes time. You don’t know the person as well, as you think, particularly in the beginning when everybody’s on their best behavior, like things change and evolve over time. So certainly you have to be careful and strategic about it, but being honest, it, it really does pay off.

Jen: So you’re not just shocking somebody because that can be part of burning the bridge too, is if you’re just like, whoa, piece out and it’s over, you have to give, you have to have open communication. And that’s part of it is if Y and part of it can be covered in the interview process. If you’re getting a sense of, they don’t, they’re not really interested in having any sort of.

Jen: Mentorship type of relationship with you. If you are not getting the sense that this is a growth opportunity, that’s gonna be very telling and you have to be strategic about how you ask about those things as well. But it is something that I think you can feel out early on, and hopefully you can talk to other people who work there.

Jen: You can also look at things like Glassdoor and stuff to see what former employees say. It depends on how big an organization is. All of which to say, it’s not an overnight thing, no matter what, no matter how open somebody is, but you also have to take care of yourself. You can’t just stay somewhere because somebody needs you.

Brent: Do you think it’s a red flag as an employee that, if your boss clearly doesn’t care at all about you or your personal life, is that a red flag for you? You as an that’s a rhetorical question, isn’t it? I don’t even know why I asked it. I can say that as an employer, I’ve gotten much more aware of the fact that I need to know about my employees and there is a world outside of their job.

Brent: And simply asking some of those questions and being interested in what they’re doing helps you as an employer to build a better relationship with your employee. And it just does go vice versa. Is there anything that you can say to extract some of these things out of an employer as an employee?

Brent: I don’t think you can ever teach anybody to. I think somebody has to make that revelation themselves, as an entrepreneur, as an employer, if you’re narcissistic and you only see anything other than the end of your fingers, then you’re never gonna move past that point.

Brent: But there has to be some growth on both sides and as an employee, It is a delicate art to try to coax that out of people.

Jen: Absolutely. And I’m laughing because I worked for somebody who absolutely didn’t think anybody should be friends with people from work. And I will tell you that it wears on you after a while they’re talking about themselves and they have no care about what’s going on in your life.

Jen: I’ve worked for people like that. And I can. . I said, I worked hard and I do work hard, but after a while, you don’t wanna run into the fire with that person. If they don’t care about you, you will not run into the fire for that person. As the employee, you will go to a certain point and then you’ll be like, I’m done.

Jen: I’m out. This is hard. And because when it gets hard, you want to have somebody that is with you. and if you don’t care about anybody but yourself, and everybody’s just there to support you, but you don’t care if they like to go hiking or if they have a boyfriend or not like that’s, it’s gonna be game over sooner rather than later, because we all have lives.

Jen: We all have things outside of the business, outside of whatever it is that you’re expecting somebody else to do for you.

Brent: Yeah, that’s a really good perspective. I make a point of in my day job, I make a point of interviewing or at least talking to everybody every quarter.

Brent: And I think it’s about 65 people that I do my best to talk to every quarter. Yeah. And I’ve gotten to the point of saying, are you happy? At least, I’m trying to build a relationship and I’m trying to learn more about. But I think that’s a good question. Do you think that I would go with you into the fire to take something out?

Brent: That’s a hard question to ask cuz they may not answer it truthfully and you don’t wanna say, would you come with me? Cuz of course they’re gonna, yeah, of course they’ll come with you. But that’s not the real answer either. You wanna somehow build that? As the employer, you wanna support your employee. You don’t wanna force their support on you. You would like them to support you because they enjoy their job. And they would like to continue on and build this momentum that you have as a relationship. And as an employee, employer, you don’t wanna say you have to run in there with this, into the fire regardless.

Brent: You would like it to be voluntary. .

Jen: Yeah, okay. So this is an eCommerce podcast. We haven’t talked about that this is marketing people don’t buy from you unless there’s no and trust they’re buying in to what it is that you are selling. So as a leader, why isn’t it the same thing?

Jen: Why is it that we expect people to just do it? Because I’m paying you, they’ll go with you because you’re paying them. I’m talking about will they go a little bit further when times are tough? When things go sideways, are you nice mistakes happen? It, there are all of these opportunities that you have to really build that relationship so that your employees know can trust you.

Jen: And when things go bad, cuz they always go bad. Nothing’s perfect that they will say, yep, I’m here for you. I’ll stay late. I’ll do what it takes. Let’s make this happen. Let’s make the magic, let’s turn this around. And that’s really what it comes down to. It. It is that you have to build those relationships in the same way that you would with a customer who’s paying you.

Jen: It’s a two way street. And I think oftentimes as employers, it can be forgotten because we have so many things to do, but it’s really important to surround yourself with the people who are. going to support you, who are gonna help you and who are going to help you bring the people in that you need to keep the thing going.

Jen: And you have to look at that holistically. And if you can’t do that and people are leaving, sometimes that’s a you problem. It’s not always that everybody there’s that nobody wants to work. It’s that’s not always the answer. It’s that? You’re not providing a safe community for people to work in.

Brent: I’m just gonna write that down safe community to work in.

Brent: That’s a good one. You, I would like to talk about let’s I would like to talk about your podcast. So women conquer business. Yeah, can we, and we were gonna talk about marketing too, but now we’re already at, we’re already at 38 minutes. I know. Do you want to take a little bit of time and talk

Jen: about that?

Jen: Sure. So yesterday we recorded our hundred and 50th episode. I’ve been a podcaster since 2018. I will say that I’ve had probably four or five shows in that time. I used to do. interviews don’t do interviews anymore. I used to talk about all different types of things. Now we just talk about marketing it’s I think that over four years you change a lot as an entrepreneur.

Jen: What you talk about changes. and certainly the show is a reflection of that. So now what we’re doing are marketing howtos. So I help people understand concepts that can be somewhat challenging and drill into the essentials. I think yesterday we talked about course platforms and how to find a good course platform if you’re just getting started with online courses.

Jen: So a lot of my bread and butter. would be, if a CMO was, somebody came and said, we wanna do this thing. And you’re like, I don’t really know what that is. I can talk people through what something is and help them. And that’s really what the podcast is about is if you wanna do X here’s, how you get started or, and it can be at different levels of complexity.

Jen: So that’s really the bread and butter, and that is. And one of the opportunities. So when I was talking about opportunities, one of the opportunities I had really early with my podcast, I was approached by an organization I’d never heard of. And they said, we really like what you’re doing. Can we repurpose your show and pay you?

Jen: I was like okay, is this for real? I don’t even never even heard of you. So a lot of early solo shows have been repurposed and sold on another platform. I retained the rights and. that is how my new business epiphany courses was born. Like I have a lot, even though I don’t work at enterprise all the time, a lot of my content that I create and share is sold to enterprise companies as part of an eLearning platform.

Jen: And that is the baseline for epiphany courses because we know that all of that information and that content has been vetted. And is very popular among you. Fortune 500 fortune, 100 companies that are consuming it on this other learning platform. So we’ve started making a learning platform for small business owners where they can also learn in this container and get that information and then supply a community for people to talk through it.

Jen: So that’s really the essence of what I do around the podcast. They’re really these lessons. That then get repurposed elsewhere that then we turn around and make courses around. It’s an interesting concept. I never thought that what I do would evolve in this way. I think that when I started my business, if somebody had said you’re really gonna be into creating content.

Jen: I would’ve been like, I don’t even know what that. I didn’t, it was never on my radar, but as you can tell, I like to talk. So it seems to be working out for me.

Brent: Yeah. I think that’s such a great way to look at marketing as well is repurposing content. And I now, there’s this content driven eCommerce and everything is around.

Brent: eCommerce and even no UX eCommerce, where it is all about a conversation. You’re gonna talk to somebody in WhatsApp and they’re gonna place the order for you or whatever. I think that you’ve taken the opportunity. You’ve taken that risk and that challenge and. Stepped up on it.

Brent: So one of the things that I’m on the entrepreneurs organization board here in Minneapolis, and I’m on the DEI diversity committee. Yeah. And we in Minneapolis, we’re not incredibly diverse. And in, even in the entrepreneur C. I think we’re 15% women and 85% men.

Brent: So if the math is right, is there a particular struggle that women, this is a rhetorical, I’m sorry, I don’t know how to phrase this, but , I know that there’s struggle in, in people that aren’t white, bald males to break into the entrepreneurial community.

Brent: Through all kinds of factors. . Do you talk about that, those struggles in your podcast?

Jen: I did. I talked about that a lot early on as a woman in tech at a large organization, meaning the city of Portland. I experienced a lot. I had a lot of days where I felt like I should just walk in with a helmet on, I had people.

Jen: Call me, Jenny, like as a way, a very pejorative way of little girl I’m gonna pat you on the head and stuff. So it was . I dealt with a lot, and I have a bank of content that really talks through some of those struggles and how to get through it. And all of that.

Jen: I think that a lot. what I have learned is, if you go to my website, I there’s nowhere on here where I’m saying I’m gonna empower you because empowerment comes from within. If you even look at like the definition of it. So the truth is we can talk about it a lot, and I’m glad to talk to people about the struggles of women in entrepreneurship.

Jen: Certainly, I would invite that and also. we just have to put on our helmet and go in and do it. Anyway. I was at a networking event once they brought me in to speak. It was a small group. I was my friend who invited me and I were the only women. There was a man sitting next to me. I handed out my business card and I saw him playing with it the whole time.

Jen: He, I hate to say it, he was a bald white guy. So no offense to bald white guys. I. Including you, Brent. He was playing with it and all kinds of stuff, and we got to the end and he was like, I just, I gotta tell you, I’m never gonna send anybody to you because of your business name, women conquer business.

Jen: And I was like, okay. And I was really taken aback. And in the moment, I didn’t know what to say. I was like, really, I had just spoken. as you can tell, I’m fairly friendly. There’s not a lot here to really be angry about, I didn’t think. And I got home and I was like, you know what?

Jen: That’s really good marketing, cuz I didn’t really like that guy either. So if he doesn’t wanna work with me, like that’s an example of good marketing. And I think that women have to find those corners where we fit and people are willing to help us because there certainly are corners where people.

Jen: Aren’t. And I think though, that’s also the case with men. I think that’s the case in the transgender community. I think that this is fairly universal. It’s just that for women, there are a lot more corners where we don’t fit. And I think that really stunts the growth a lot is that, and so when we talk about, we’ve talked a lot about mentorship.

Jen: I do think that sometimes as women, we. men to be our mentors. They need to come and they need to say look this, Jen’s really cool. Like she knows what she’s talking about. Let’s how can we support you? I think that’s part of it. I think also as women, we need to say, you know what, a lot of people don’t like us, they’re gonna hurt her feelings.

Jen: Oh when we just have to keep going. So I think that it’s really hard and it’s difficult and. Over time. I have really strengthened my own helmet, to where I just don’t care as much. about, I don’t focus on the people who don’t like me anymore, because I have a hater every time I put something on YouTube, there’s one person that dislikes it.

Jen: I’m like. What it’s just, and I think it’s the same thing. Like they just, maybe I said something one time and I’m like, I could focus on that one person, but then I’m ignoring all the people who I could be helping. And I’m ignoring all the people who like me, if I just focus on the one hater.

Jen: And I think that as women, it’s a lot easier sometimes for us to absorb that criticism and focus on that when the truth is we have to focus on. all of the other people who are helped by us who want to help us. And I think there’s a lot more of that than the other.

Brent: Yeah. I think a good lesson for every, a male, whether they have hair or not is empathy.

Brent: Because if as an example, that person that made that judgment based specifically on a name that maybe they lack some empathy, but if you have empathy and you put your, if you could put yourself in somebody else’s shoes and I run for a team called mile in my shoes where you’re running with people in homeless and people coming out of prison, that if you could put yourself in their shoes for a mile.

Brent: You can empathize with them. And I think there’s a tieback as being a good employer to have empathy for your employees because they’re going through their own struggles and you can’t thrust upon them your own. Like I can’t thrust upon. Anybody my own things without having some buy in from the other side.

Brent: So I’m trying to navigate the whole subject. And I believe that talking about it is better than not talking about it. I agree.

Jen: And I think that there has to be some realities out there and, may speak to the male listeners for just a minute.

Jen: It’s easy to say we’ve made so much progress. That’s not really a problem anymore. The gendered issues, the differences in pay, so many things that are going on. And yet I can tell you that I’ll go out on Quora. And there are like executives from Google who are like women don’t like tech, so they don’t need to have jobs in tech cuz they don’t like it.

Jen: The truth is we leave smart women in tech leave because of bad management. because we’re smart. we don’t wanna put up with it. So we are interested. We’re interested in everything. We are smart. We’re capable. We can do all of those things. We’re not there yet. We still need. empathy and we need compassion.

Jen: And just like you do, I think men need it too. I think that those are the things that we need to realize is yes, we’ve made so much incredible progress and things are looking so much better for women and people of color. And we don’t have equity yet. We’re not there yet. So we just need to have that compassion for each other and build those relationships and we’ll go a long.

Brent: Yeah. So I, we are running up against the clock and I feel like we need to have a follow up conversation about marketing specifically. We’ve talked about a lot of great topics and I thank you. I know we talked earlier about my free joke project and I don’t want to, I this is a terrible segue, but let’s just talk about the fact that. My free jokes land very poorly. And you had a much better joke with the size 47 or 45 clown shoes. cuz I said 17 and I was just thinking American sizes, but you said 45? Yeah. And you weren’t thinking European, you were thinking clown sizes. That’s even better.

Brent: I appreciate that. And you caught me off guard so I’m gonna tell you a joke. And the goal from the joke is just to know if I can charge for it or if it should remain free. okay. All right.

Brent: What did the tectonic plate say when it bumped into another, sorry. My fault.

Jen: I do like that.

Brent: I have one more.

Brent: My doctor says I’ve developed a German sausage phobia. I fear the wurst. Oh. I know that was just a, that was a free one. That’s a free one. The first one, I think the first one should it be chargeable or not? Yes, it should be. Wow.

Brent: All right. Yeah, I’ll

Jen: give that an a plus. They’re both great, but I love dad jokes,

Brent: all right, good. Jen at the end of every podcast, I give my guests an opportunity to do a shameless plug about anything you’d like, what would you like to plug.

Jen: I would like to talk about epiphany courses. This is our new project.

Jen: It’s at epiphany courses.com. It’s a course platform and a community where we talk about marketing and we’re focusing on service based businesses in particular people who are coaches, consultants, all types. I have acupuncturists, I have intuitive coaches in there. all different types of people who are building all types of service based businesses.

Jen: And we talk. marketing and how to build your marketing platform. How to we answer questions. We have some mini courses, our bread and butter are courses that are under an hour. Hence epiphany. We wanna give people in as brief amount of time as possible, all the information that they need so they can make a decision about whether or not it’s even a viable marketing tactic for their business.

Jen: And that’s all at epiphany courses.

Brent: All right. And I will put those I’ll put the links in the show notes and and what’s the best way to get in touch

with

Jen: you. Oh, I’m all over social media, but yeah, you can find me at LinkedIn on LinkedIn, Jen McFarland on LinkedIn. And then also through my

Brent: websites.

Brent: All right. Thank you, Jen. Thanks so much. And I’ve enjoyed this conversation.

Jen: Thank you.

Becoming Your Dream Self with Danielle Asah

April 14, 2023September 13, 2022 Brent W. Peterson

Sometimes young people need a boost to overcome certain challenges that might be stopping them from achieving their dreams. We interview Danielle Asah, the CEO and founder of Day Dreams, a digital marketing agency that helps visionary entrepreneurs and professionals amplify their messages and build their brands.

Danielle coaches aspiring writers to publish non-fiction books and has a book entitled Becoming your Dream Self, Seven Keys to Own and Control your Life as a Millennial.

She is part of an NGO in the United Kingdom whose goal is to motivate people to follow their hearts and make a positive difference in the world via their own unique actions.

Transcript

Brent: Welcome to this episode of Talk Commerce coming from Cameroon west Africa. Today, I have Danielle Asah. Danielle, go ahead. Introduce yourself. Tell us what you do on a day to day basis and maybe one of your passions in life.

Danielle: Thank you so much, Brent, for having me on it’s actually an honor to be here today. yeah I’m an author, I’m a marketer and I’m the CEO one founder of Day Dreams, a digital marketing agency that helps, visionary entrepreneurs and professionals amplify their messages, build their brands and drive mores to social media.

Danielle: And for over six years now, I’ve lazed a unique path, which is that of digital marketing. And my pursuit of new and challenging opportunities led me to become a developmental editor where I have aspiring artists to write and publish their books like nonfiction book in less than six months. And in addition, I’m a member and associate director of World Game Changers.

Danielle: This is an NGO in the United Kingdom whose goal is to motivate people, to follow their heart and make a positive difference in the world via their own unique actions. I am passionate about two things. First of all, I’m passionate about helping being visionary entrepreneurs and professionals.

Danielle: And secondly, I’m passionate about helping being young millennial to overcome certain challenges that might be stopping them from becoming their dream self or achieving their dreams, which is also the reason why I wrote a book entitled becoming your dream self seven keys to own and control your life as a millennial.

Danielle: Thank you so much.

Brent: One of the things that you do is branding, but it sounds like you do a whole lot more of that. Can we talk about the world game changer? That you’re part of a little bit it sounds like a fantastic program and you’re helping young people and a young entrepreneurs break in into entrepreneurship.

Brent: Tell us a little bit about that.

Danielle: Yeah, the world game changer is is an organization in the United Kingdom, as I said, and we are just a group of people all over the world in all the continents in the world where we generally come together and talk about certain issues about how to improve maybe the product of living, how to make people follow their own path and their dreams and the little change we could.

Danielle: To actually impact our own people in the community where we live. So talking about the young millennials it’s actually a passion because I grew up, I remember 10 years ago, that was in 2012. I almost dropped out of school, like of college because my parents did not have money to send me to the univers.

Danielle: But I had this passion. I wanted to be an entrepreneur. So at that very level, I was forced to become an entrepreneur, and I also went after graduating from college, I went to the university, while some of my friends were taking some vacation. I was actually working to save money to consequently to achieve to go to the university to be able to pay for my school fees.

Danielle: and definitely, this also led me to working in different companies like doing some certain activities like those door sales working as the marketing agent in the building and construction company. And later on I actually learned about entrepreneurship when I a very young age and growing up and starting my own business.

Danielle: And also this also taught me something great. And I just had this passion of hurting other young people around me because I know, especially in Africa where I we have a lot of young people who are still confused even after their graduation from college are still very confused about what to do. They don’t actually know about what their passion is.

Danielle: So I’m actually that person, I’m that person that would like to help them to find their purpose, to embark on that particular journey and help them to achieve their. Through some of the training program I used to give online, like I train these millennials on spec, specifically digital marketing skills, which I’m more specialized in.

Danielle: It’s been amazing so far. Like I’ve heard so many people and even the people that I work with in the team, they are all millennials. Cause I just find passion helping working with them so that we can mutually help us serve and grow together.

Brent: Do you think there’s a disconnect between the way older people think like myself and millennials would think in terms of how are they gonna get into the job market?

Brent: And even as an entrepreneur how you want to portray yourself to let people know what you’re doing and how you’re gonna break into the job market?

Danielle: I think, yeah, I think there’s actually that difference when it comes to young people, because, and I would say that it depends on the, like the community where we grew up, like the situation in my country and in the Western world is quite different. I remember one year ago I met someone on LinkedIn, a guy, I think he’s 18 years old. He was in the US. And he has found out his company since ever since he was 18 years. So I was like, wow, this is great. But it’s actually a big challenge in Africa and in my country Cameroon because we have most of us are just focused on going to school.

Danielle: They just wanna acquire a certificate, but actually they don’t think about a career after education, which is some of the things when I have an opportunity to empower young people and to teach them that you have to not only focus on going to school, but definitely you have to think about in life after education.

Danielle: So I think there is that difference. Cause young people, they feel like, okay they still have time. I remember high spoke with a father, like he’s about 70 years in mine and he told me that There’s one thing that young people have, which old people don’t have, which is time. And I really agree with him when you are young, you feel like you have all of the time on earth to do whatsoever, but when you are much older, you don’t have time.

Danielle: I’m sure like you, you have a very busy schedule. You need to schedule time for everything so it’s the same. We have time, the young people, they have time. So it’s important. As they have the time to develop their skills. But when you come much older, you have many responsibilities and we needed time.

Brent: Yeah. I think there’s one more thing that older people don’t have that young people have and that’s hair. That’s a small joke about my haircut, but let’s keep moving. So I think that you’re helping young people build their personal brand. Tell us some of what you’re doing to help them on branding and personal branding, I should say.

Brent: And why that’s so important right now.

Danielle: Yeah, that bread. That’s a very interesting question because I can try to share my journey about how I got into building my brand. Even getting in contact with you, getting noticed by you, like with getting noticed by a top leader, like you.

Danielle: It all started in 2018 upon my graduation from university, I had my master’s degree and I was still confused. I didn’t even know what to do, but I knew that I had a passion in digital marketing. So I started taking some online courses, taking some certification program and also getting an internship.

Danielle: Or a job in a digital marketing company. So after this I was looking for a job in a company by then. I was less experienced. I didn’t I didn’t have any visibility. No one knew about me. And at that time I remember I was in 2019. I applied for a job after I have optimized my Linkedin profile.

Danielle: I applied for a. In a company like a digital marketing company in Germany. So it was an online job. And I remember the guy told me that he rejected my application from, because he said I was less experienced. And I couldn’t learn the job. So I tried to convince the guy like I’m ex I, even though I don’t have the experience I’m willing and I’m really zealous about learning this thing.

Danielle: And he was like, no you’re not the right fit for this job. And I said, okay. So can you just imagine that after one year of consistently building my brand later on, I got contacted by this same person and this same company. And he never wanted me because the first time he wanted me to be an intern is in, in his company.

Danielle: So the second time he wanted me to be the co-founder of his same organization. For me, that was a that was a big win. I like, I began to feel like, okay, this I have, I’ve been able to build my brand. So that is just to show the importance of building a brand. First of all, I want to say what personal branding I want to give a brief definition of what a personal branding is because people get confused about it. And I would say it’s about like developing a clear and an authentic image of in the mind of your targeted audience or targeted clients in order to achieve a specific goal. And the first thing is you have certainly heard about this code does says marketing is about yeah, marketing is about asking someone out on a date and branding is a reason for them to say yes

Danielle: Yeah. So definitely it, personal branding is a process of is a process of positioning yourself as an authority in your. As an influenza as it means it’s actually standing out from the crowd because there are 100,000 people just like you out there. So what makes a difference between you and that person is actually the brand.

Danielle: What makes you to be visible, to learn, be recognized as a top leader is the personal branding. And when it comes to personal branding, it’s about highlighting your strengths, your beliefs, your competency, and establishing that reputation and trust and communicating your unique value.

Brent: One question I have about the personal branding for anybody, but I think it’s more for younger people that they want to have this persona that is for their friends, that they’re going out and partying and they’re having a great time.

Brent: And then they want to have a business persona that they would like to give people as well. How do you advise people or younger people, especially to make sure. maybe on LinkedIn, they’re gonna have all business persona and then some other social media platform. They’re gonna have a, more of a fun personal persona, but sometimes in the past, people have gotten into trouble because they’ve posted too many things, maybe on Facebook or YouTube, that there are some mixing with your different personas on different social platforms.

Brent: And do you advise younger people? When they’re doing that branding that they don’t put too much out there on social, or they have one persona that’s one thing. And the other persona is another thing, but be careful how you portray them.

Danielle: One thing I would say is that I think that’s a great question because definitely when it comes to young people only knows we have, they actually don’t overthink about what they post online.

Danielle: So they just go on and share. But definitely what you share is visible to everyone. I remember there was last year, I was invited to a show where I had about 50 people and I asked them who have ever Googled his name. And I remember out of the way, young people and out of. 50. I had just one person that said he has ever Googled his name.

Danielle: And there is one thing we ought also know, like when you Google your name, what pop up is exactly what the other people see. And I can imagine that for young people, their goals can maybe starting their business, as you said, and, or maybe learning a job in a serious or big corporation or company.

Danielle: Whatever you post online, whatever you share, you have to know that it’s all visible to everyone. And those exact same thing is what your target audience or recruiters. They will see what they Google your name. So personal branding here is about controlling or managing the narrative or the messages that are about you.

Danielle: And it has to do with what you post. And the first thing that you need to act yourself is what do I want to be known for? What do I people to know me for and start creating message that is in mind with that message that you want to communicate or what you want to communicate out there. It’s very important because whatever you put out there, other people are seeing it and it can either, it, that would determine whether someone should trust you, whether that someone should collaborate with you or whether someone should do business with you or not. And there is this great said Gordon. He once said, when people love you, they will listen to you. But when they trust you, they will do business with you.

Danielle: So it’s all about building that credibility and trust. because you want to collaborate and do business with people and you have to be serious about the messages that you are putting out there because it has a lot to play in there.

Brent: And when somebody does post something, it is out there forever.

Brent: Some even sometimes if you delete it, somebody may have captured it. And so that posting is there indefinitely. So it is a good advice to say make sure what you’re posting and think about it. And and don’t post things that are going to well, it’s hard for a younger person to know what’s gonna be a problem for them in the future, but think about what you’re doing.

Brent: I myself post and think about how do I wanna be perceived? And I try to stay away from some of the controversial things. Also in the controversial things, it does raise questions and it helps to push boundaries and it helps to talk about some of those important topics.

Brent: There is important things around that. Exactly. Is personal branding for everybody. Do you think that everybody should have some thought about

Danielle: this? We have all been sold on the idea that personal branding is just. influencers, it’s just for big corporations or top topnotch leaders, or I don’t know celebrities, but it’s, actually’s very wrong because I’m personal branding is for everyone.

Danielle: Everyone that wanted to stand out is for everyone. Now we need to, there is alight daily. She said we often think that branding is just for, it’s just done for large corporation, but it’s actually, has everyone has a personal brand, and brand, we need to keep in mind that you can actually begin developing your personal brand.

Danielle: The point in your career, regardless of whether you are successful, whether you are wealthy or whether you are well established as a business or not. So whatever you stage in life, you can definitely start building your brand. And I would tell you’ve been successful or having the skills does not automatically make you to stand out.

Danielle: because, like I said, there are 1000 people just like you, there are thousand people like like person thousand, like thousand personal brands, specialists, or professional out there. Now what makes a difference between you and the other one is personal branding, is building your brand consistently.

Danielle: And I would say no one else is the same match like you or combination or no one has the same exact combination of your skills and expertise like you. Personal brand is about demonstrating, trying to put out your personality or your professional and personal abilities, your skills, your experiences.

Danielle: And you have to know that we have the social media platform. I will not say it’s the only way to actually build your brand, but it’s one of the major things you can use in order to view your brand online. And so just to conclude, I’ll say neither fame no worlds will actually make you to pan out as an authority or to be noticed in your niche, but just try to stand out, just try to stand out by building your brand.

Brent: What advice do you give people to help them stand out?

Danielle: Yeah. When it comes to standing out our, first of all, say there is only one view and building, building a personnel brand is like creating a unique you. And in addition to that, building a person that brand requires just more than just creating.

Danielle: Some quality content, building relationship with colleagues and friends. It requires more than that. So when it comes to personal branding, I would say the first thing to do is first of all, craft a brand vision which is similar to a statement generally the like classic way or the classic example here is I have eight Z Y.

Danielle: like me, I would say I help entrepreneurs and professional build their brands with growth marketing strategies. So leadership begins because of all communicating your why, when it comes to you have to start cause all by communicating your why we, you know, of this popular author Simon Sinek, he said start always start with your why

Danielle: and he say, people don’t buy because people don’t buy what you sell, but people buy people buy why you do it. that’s quite amazing. So once you craft your brand vision, you can decide what you want to be known for, which I already explain. And the next thing developing a consistent message, which you’ll be sharing and communicating on your different social media.

Danielle: Your logos, your brand colors, everything has to be in sync, right? They have to know you for your brand colors. For the message you share and maintaining that consistency and also be genuine and authentic, it’s really easy to identify who is fake. You need to be true to yourself, true to other people.

Danielle: And be honest, don’t try to be like anyone else. When it comes to brand building, be yourself. Try to be unique. Try to be genuine. Then we can also do like building or social media presence, build your social media presence. It can be establishing a LinkedIn setting up your different social media profile.

Danielle: and account like on LinkedIn setting up and optimizing your LinkedIn profile. Cause this starts from there. One thing I do with my client most of the time is making your LinkedIn profile look like a landing page. Like when I went to your LinkedIn profile, I was able to find out about you because LinkedIn is the biggest platform for professional.

Danielle: And it’s both the personal and professional representation of who you are. So definitely you want someone to get into your LinkedIn profile and be able to find exactly what you do and how you can help them. And and also I want to insist on being consistent, like when you are sharing content online, you need to stay consistent because that’s what will make people to actually remember about you.

Danielle: Because there are 100,000 people just like you, you wanna break through that noise. So stay consistent and people will admire you for that. When you want to build a brand, those are some of the steps by step process you can actually take in order to build a powerful brand online

Brent: Being consistent and then being engaging as well. I think for your social media, especially if you’re just posting and never responding. Then people just think that you’re a bot or you’re just not listening to them. Yeah. Because part of that is the message you’re putting out. But part of that too, is knowing and listening to what people are saying to you.

Brent: And if they have a specific question, knowing that you should respond to them. And I think on LinkedIn, if you’re frequently posting, but never responding, then people stop listening to you because they know you’re just posting and not listening

Danielle: back. Exactly. So people generally want to make sure that you care about them.

Danielle: And if they ask the question, you have to be capable of responding and also engaging like you, you care about them engaging on other people’s profiles, who are the people you want to reach out to. And when I think when I talk about posting on them, it’s about adding value. It’s not about selling. Most of the times you hardly see me selling, like on my profile, I don’t sell because people are there.

Danielle: When someone can actually see that he can help him solve a particular problem, he’ll reach out to you for help. So what I do generally is normally they say we need to apply the 80 20 rules when it comes to content posting content online. 80% of your post should be about adding value.

Danielle: And the other 20% should be about promotional content. But generally I would say 5%, only 5% of your content should be promotional content, right? People hate when you are always selling to them. So why not creating values, like sharing content, sharing stuff that can help people and you. Stand out as an authority because you cannot call yourself an expert.

Danielle: If you are not adding value in people’s life, if you are not constantly trying to help people, if you’re not sharing valuable content. So you have to not only engage with your audience, but also see how you can constantly be sharing contents to add value in their life and try to be like getting interested in what they are doing.

Danielle: By you can also do networking. So apart from content, there’s also networking, trying to reach out to people, ensuring that you care about them finding about who they are, what they do and what are their challenges on the daily basis? Yeah. And how you can help in very interest.

Brent: I think that’s one of the hardest things to realize when you’re building your personal brand.

Brent: And it’s part of it is about yourself, but when you start to add value to others, that’s when the branding really takes off, because there’s something that others see that they get in value from you. Other than just a really fancy looking page. Having that value added is one of the biggest thing that you could impart on a younger person to help them understand why any, even an older person like me, anybody like that, they can understand.

Brent: Then if it’s only about yourself and you’re never adding value to somebody else, then there’s really no point in somebody wanting to look at your brand or think about why would this person add anything if they don’t add any value. Exactly. You had mentioned asking why, so I do wanna ask about your book.

Brent: Why did you write your book and tell us a little bit about your book. Yeah.

Danielle: I wrote my book, which is sightful becoming your dream soul seven kids to own and control your life as a millennial, Because of my experience in life, having almost dropped out of school when I graduated from college because my parents did not have money to send me to school and later on becoming an entrepreneur, doing all types of job, because I wanted to save to go to the university.

Danielle: And also starting my business as a millennial, I wanted to help other people like empower other young millennials and tell them it’s possible to become whoever you want to be. If only you can take the necessary steps, which I explain in the book. So in the book, I just highlight the seven steps I took in order to become my dream self, because this has always been what I wanted to do to have my own business working with young people.

Danielle: In this book, I just try to align as with the mission of helping young people out there. And that is my why. Everything I do. My objective is to help young people. And also these visionary entrepreneurs. I know the struggle that entrepreneurs are going through, like setting up a business and it’s not working most of the time.

Danielle: It’s because they don’t have the know how to actually run a business. So if I can be like that person to get up with my team, helping them to support their. Businesses build helping them build their brands and grow, but that is not part of the book. So the book is more focused on the millennials by helping them, empowering them, giving them some great tips that they can use changing their mindsets, setting goals, long term and short term goals.

Danielle: What do they want to accomplish networking with people? And lemme tell you something. LinkedIn has been a game changer for me. What I’m doing today because of the relationship, the network I’ve dealt online, the people I connect with on a daily basis and I exchange with, and, it’s the book is actually there, anybody that is struggling, that it be a young that is struggling and doesn’t even know what his

Danielle: purpose is because I found myself at this stage. I didn’t even know why I was created in the first place. What is my mission? What is my purpose on it? Why am I created? So I just came to the realization that I was created to use my, give my skills. Am I talent to serve other people?

Danielle: And ever since then, I’ve been helping people all over the world, like in the US and UK and in Canada. To build your brand together with a team, with team of young people. And it’s been super amazing. And whenever I have the opportunity to help young people I really want to do it because young people they struggle a lot cause I’ve been there and at times they just need someone that can tell them what to. They just need someone that can encourage them, mentor them and tell them, okay, this is what you can do, because this is exactly what I went through. And this is how I overcame this. And so my book is on Amazon and I read during the pandemic.

Brent: Yeah. And I’ll make sure I put the links and the show notes for your social media and your book. Danielle, we have a few minutes left. I do want to just you had mentioned that you help people to write nonfiction as well, is that correct?

Brent: Yes. Let’s just briefly talk about how would you help somebody like me write a non-fiction book and how would you come up with a topic? And do you have a exercise

Danielle: that you’d go through? Yeah, definitely. I work with an an expat and also being someone that have written a book and have also ghost written or helped other, like for now I’ve heard five people write their.

Danielle: I know that for older people, they don’t have time when it come to it. They don’t have that time to write a book, but they have the know how, which can definitely help other people out there. So what we do is that we try to listen to your story and see which one is the message that you want to communicate out there, which is definitely from the experience you’ve been through your personal experience.

Danielle: And then we craft a message around there, like a title around there. And then we work on the title of the different topics, the different chapters, and they start writing the process. So literally what I do is that I do sessions meeting sessions, where we meet, and then I ask you some questions and you answer them.

Danielle: And then I sit down with the recording and I try to develop a story chapter by chapter, but I make sure that everything that is written in the book is from you. Because one thing I say is that the best person that can teach you something it’s someone that have been through a particular situation. Yeah. So that is a process of writing the book but why I say non-fiction book and focus more on transformational book, like books serve her books, where you can just read and then gain one or two things that can definitely transform your life.

Brent: We have a few minutes left now. I give our guests a chance to do a shameless plug, which is promoting whatever you’d like, what would you like to plug today?

Danielle: I would like to share about my experience working with the entrepreneurs and young people and how they can build their brands online. Talking about personal branding, I would say it is very important and for everyone that wants to make a difference out there, whether you are a professional, whether you are seeking for a job, whether you want to start your own business, I would tell you it’s very important to start building your brand because when you build your brand, you start attracting the right people with the same goals and vision.

Danielle: And this is a game changer in your career. It can help you to get opportunities that you would’ve never, ever imagined in your life. if you don’t know how to grow about it, I can help you. Together with my team to start building your brand online. And also I’ve been able to help about 50 professionals who wanted to land a job, like setting up their LinkedIn profile and start building a brand for them.

Danielle: So if you are a professional, that is, that needs a job. So we can help you to build your brand, set your social, your LinkedIn profile. And if you are business owners and you have been struggling with your business and you don’t even know how to go about it. I urge you to just reach out to me at Danielle Asah

Danielle: and I will definitely see how we can help you to, but if you can also follow my content, because I share content on the daily basis on how to build your brand. If you want to do it yourself, or if you wanna reach out to me just for a strategy session, I can give you one or two tips. You must necessarily not work with me.

Danielle: I can give you some. And also share with you how I was able to build my brand. And in less than two years, I was able to stand out as an authority in my field. Thank you so much.

Brent: That’s probably exactly how I found you. I think I found you through LinkedIn and I think I found you through the world game changer.

Brent: Danielle, thank you so much for being here today Danielle Asah, I will put your LinkedIn profile in the show notes so people can contact you that way. It’s been a pleasure talking to you today, and I wish you all the best. Thank you.

The Simple Formula for Success in Open-SaaS and the BigCommerce Hackathon with Katie Hoesley

April 14, 2023August 30, 2022 Brent W. Peterson

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.

Katie: Yes, exactly. Thank you so much.

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