Adapting to Change in WooCommerce for Over a Decade

BobWP: Hey everybody, BobWP. I’m stoked for this interview, this chat with Mitch Callahan. Mitch Callahan is joining us all the way from Portugal, where WordCamp Europe is going to be happening. I’m already dreaming about that, but I’m not going to get distracted. Mitch, welcome to the show.

Mitch: Thank you, Bob. It’s great to be here. I know everyone says that when they hop on a show, but I’ve been to many word camps. I’ve seen you set up your microphone on the fly like a pro and interview so many people and so, for me, it’s awesome to actually be on the show.

BobWP: Yeah. Cool. Well, I may just be grabbing you at WordCamp Europe again. Who knows? Watch out.

Mitch: My pleasure, anytime. Use me as you need, man.

Building websites in elementary school

BobWP: Alrighty. Well, first let’s get a little bit into how you got into WordPress and WooCommerce space, but one of the things I do want to touch on, because we’ll have to make quite a jump from there, but I was looking at your LinkedIn site and it said you started building websites in elementary school. I think the first website was built 30 years or 25 years after I was in elementary school, so I obviously couldn’t be doing it. But why don’t you tell us first what you were doing there, in elementary school, and then do that giant leap to getting into WordPress and WooCommerce.

Mitch: Yeah, absolutely. I just remember getting the internet and there used to be these website builders, Angelfire was a popular one, GeoCities was another one, and I would have tons of little sites set up all over there. And I don’t remember what the heck I built at the time, and then it slowly evolved into learning HTML. And that was before CSS was really big and, honestly, the first site that I really remember building was a site for my band, at the time. We had this little three-piece band, and I put up the pictures of the band members, and I put some radio buttons below, and I wanted people to vote who was the best looking band member. And that was it.

BobWP: Oh. Yeah, and were you voted the best?

Mitch: I did win. And, of course, me being the creator of the website, people said it was rigged, but I swear to God, the votes were completely fair and it was truthful.

Along came WordPress and WooCommerce

BobWP: Oh, that’s hilarious. Okay, so where did WordPress and WooCommerce come into your life?

Mitch: Yeah, so fast forward, I had worked in many different industries and I was working in the finance world, at the time, and a friend of mine just brought up a website that he had built. He had mentioned that it was built on WordPress, and I was like, “Oh, this is really cool. I’ve never played with WordPress before.” And I remember just looking at the website, playing with it, and I was like, “This is cool.” I just had in the back of my mind, “I want to play with this in the future.”

Fast forward, I won’t get into it, but I started a company with my friend and we started off doing web design, and the first thing that came to my mind was, “Well, let’s try WordPress.” And so we set up our first site using WordPress and it was so easy. I was just like, “This thing is incredible,” and we fell in love instantly and we didn’t use anything but from there. And we just evolved and this is do the Woo, we work in eCommerce. It was just the next logical step. We’re like, “We got to sell some stuff. Let’s use WordPress and the rest is history.”

BobWP: Cool. Now that brings us to your agency. Why don’t you tell us more about your agency and what you’re doing there?

Mitch: Yeah, for sure. So the agency is Saucal and we work exclusively with WooCommerce. I like to say we really sip the Kool-Aid. I’m very much a strong proponent of open source software, and I love the WordPress community, and I love a free and open internet. And so that’s why we choose to do what we do, and so we help a lot of mid-market size stores. A lot of our companies are businesses that have grown up a fair bit on WooCommerce and they need technical help, so we help them with scaling, performance, building out new features. And we’ve really just become their backbone, their tech team, and handle it all in the back. Well, we’ll talk about it later in the chat, but it’s really just… We’re moving to a managed WooCommerce system where we really are the platform for them.

The goals of driving more Fortune 500s onto Woo

BobWP: So also, on your LinkedIn profile, you say you’re working to drive more Fortune 500s onto Woo, so how’s that plan going?

Mitch: Things tend to fall into place. WooCommerce started off really small and now we’ve definitely entered the mid-market, and I think it’s one of the most lucrative spots for WooCommerce, and I think it’s only a matter of time before we move into the really high-end enterprise market. And it’s already happening. We’ve been fortunate to work with some pretty big brands in the space like Salesforce, Amazon, which are Fortune 500 companies and to help them integrate into WooCommerce. So, yeah, the plan is unfolding.

A take on Woo being more likely to break than Shopify, Magento and Big Commerce

BobWP: Now, I’m going to throw in, I want to talk a little bit more around the agency, what you’re doing there, some of the stuff, how it’s worked, how it hasn’t worked. But I want to pull out this thing, because I came across an article that you had written that, I think a few months ago, it was called WooCommerce Versus Big Commerce Versus Shopify Versus Magento. Now I just came across another article that had the same kind of title and it was written on TechRadar. I don’t even really want to share because it was really one of those real standard ones. I mean, yours was far better, let me tell you.

But when they did their synopsis at the very end, and I just want to put a scenario out, if you were somewhere and somebody came up and said, “Oh, I read this and this is what it said,” what would be your reply? They said, “Last but not least, WooCommerce can empower small and mid-size businesses alike. It doesn’t require as much technical know-how as Magento. What’s more, if you already use WordPress, you’ll feel right at home with the simple to use UI WooCommerce had borrowed from it. On the downside, there’s a bigger chance something will go wrong with your WooCommerce store than with all other solutions that we mentioned, so we would deter less-adventurous users.” What would you say to that person?

Mitch: I’d say there’s a lot of contradictions in what he just said.

BobWP: I know.

Mitch: If there’s more things that will go wrong, you want the adventurous user to use it. But I mean, I understand, I think, the core, the nugget of what he’s talking about, I mean, I realize if you start adding on a lot of layers to your site, it’s bound something can go wrong. Whereas, when you’re in a closed environment, that’s probably less likely. I think maybe that’s what he’s getting to, but a lot of these things can avoided. But, yeah, that’s what I would say. Maybe clean it up a little bit.

BobWP: Yeah. I thought it was interesting how that was his closing out. It’s like a zinger at the end.

Mitch: The unfortunate truth with a lot of those articles is they’re in demand. People want to read them. It’s just that quality content takes time. And our piece that we wrote, I have wanted to publish that for years and thankfully, to some of the great people on my team, we have finally gotten it out the door. So I’m really happy that it’s out there and we’ve got the ebook for people to download for free.

BobWP: Yeah, and sometimes I feel if you look at who’s writing it, they’re a blogger, journalist, or whatever they’re called, very generalized. So they’re probably going around looking at a ton of articles that are already talking about this, just pulling bits and pieces from that and trying to pull together something that makes sense.

Mitch: On that note, though, I was just going to say, it’s like the blind leading the blind, right? They’re all just copying the same stuff.

BobWP: Yeah. It’s a vicious circle.

Mitch: Exactly.

The importance of case studies for agencies

BobWP: Okay, a couple things I want to talk about. I was looking at your site and, of course, there’s a ton of things we could talk about, but one thing I pulled out in particular, just because a lot of builders out there don’t do this at all, and that is case studies. And case studies, it’s an open book how in depth they can be, how you format them. For those out there that don’t do them, and I notice that you do them, you have actually quite a few on your site, what is the value you find as an agency using case studies?

Mitch: Oh my goodness. It’s funny you say that, because I think how severely lacking we are in our case studies, because a case study is so valuable. It speaks so much more than words, and especially if you have a case study in a specific vertical. If you have a new lead and they’re in a vertical that you’ve already worked in, you don’t need to say, “Hey, we know this space,” just send them the case study and it speaks for itself. Case studies, if you don’t have them, you need to make them right now, above any other sort of content. Because they’re valuable in so many parts of the process.

In the sales process, too, like when you’re following up with a lead, you don’t just say, “Hey, checking in.” You say, “Hey, look at this new case study we just published and here’s the results they got.” You don’t want to say, “We’re great.” You want other people to tell you that you’re great and you let the results speak for themselves. So yes, case studies are just essential. It’s nonnegotiable. You got to put in the reps and it’s an investment. You’re losing if you don’t have them.

Thanks to our Pod Friends OSTraining and Iconic

From sprints to managed WooCommerce

BobWP: You’ve iterated your business over the years. I mean, if anybody can relate to that, it’s me. I mean, we all do it or usually businesses that survive do it because they have that flexibility. I’d like to hear, because you’re moving into a space that is what a lot of businesses, vendors, whatever, are moving into. You made this change, was what you called sprints in your process. And how I want to take this is, when I first read it, I thought, “Oh, this is interesting,” and what those were and how they have now been part of the impetus to have you move to your new direction, maybe not the only one, but part of it.

Mitch: Yeah. Sprint, for us, was a nice change of pace because, generally when you start a web agency, it’s a very basic process of sending an estimate and you’re going to figure out some billing schedule like 10% upfront or 50% halfway and the rest at the end. And it’s not the best. In fact, I’d say it’s the worst process. I wouldn’t recommend anyone does that. And you end up having these projects that never finished and you’re chasing people for money. So on a business side, we knew right away that we didn’t want to ever be chasing people for money. We don’t want receivables. So we started doing things prepaid and then we had to figure out how do we do that in small enough chunks that the customer’s not going to feel like they’re going to get ripped off. We started doing weekly sprints and that was a great way to break down the tasks and the deliverables in smaller size chunks.

And it really worked for us for a good time because then the customers wouldn’t be hit with a big bill all up front. It was the smaller pieces that they can digest and then they could see the progress as they went. And honestly, it was a great transition. If you’re working in that older model I described, I think moving to a sprint model is probably the right thing to do. We eventually iterated on it, simply because describing your work as a sprint is a backend technical term. That’s what dev teams will describe them as. And that’s what we still describe them as behind the scenes. But for an end user, the customer, they don’t care.

We’ve kind of moved away from that. But nonetheless, the structure that we built on top, it still exists. So we can get into it, but we build in chunks of hours now, which is similar, but it’s more framed in a way that the customer understands and it’s all is continuous development, always ongoing. So then, part of your job is to continue building up the backlog and always adding value and keep going. But it was a big shift because, again, you were prepaid, you don’t have receivables and it was smaller. It broke everything down to smaller pieces.

BobWP: Yeah. Yeah. So this is your internal move into manage WooCommerce offering. Do you want to elaborate a bit more on that?

Mitch: Yeah, for sure. Because we love WooCommerce. We love open source. We really want WooCommerce to power the world of e-commerce. I mean, it already does power a lot, but we want to make sure it stays. And for us, I often consider, we would be the last line of defense. A lot of stores would eventually get to a point where they go, “Oh, should we leave WooCommerce because the grass is greener on the other side?” And I always knew, if you had the right care and you had the right team behind it, you would never want to leave because you can see what this is really capable of. And so that’s what we do and that’s what we focused on. So then we just started breaking that down into smaller pieces, like what does a successful WooCommerce store require to succeed?

And so there’s a lot of people moving to manage WooCommerce now. And a lot of them are like hosting companies. The difference is, with the hosting companies, they only really know how to host your site. They don’t know how to properly support your site or build out features of your site. So we’re coming from a very different angle. We’re coming from, we’re a services company first and a customer service company first. And then, we can help you pick your hosting and infrastructure in the back, but how do we really turn a service into a product that’s scalable and repeatable and solves that problem of giving people on WooCommerce an amazing experience? So we’ve broken it down to three tiers, very basic to get you started, and then a growth, and then a much bigger launch plan for stores that are continuously in development.

BobWP: Yeah. And that does make sense because, I mean, hosting, they’ll provide you with some maybe specific plugins that will help you for the basics that you may likely need. But that added holding hand of the client or anything, I guess, from customizations, to things breaking, to whatever, it’s like having a manager of your store, except the technical side of things, that’s just making sure everything goes right.

Mitch: Precisely and as great as WooCommerce is, and all the flexibility gives you, again, that’s not things that customers want to think about. So you take care of that for them. And then, they get all the benefits of WooCommerce where the flexibility and the ability to basically integrate with whatever they want. And they are very happy people.

BobWP: That makes sense.

WooCommerce challenges for the industry as a whole

One of the things I wanted to ask you, too, is where do you see the challenges in WooCommerce, whether it’s yourself, or your agency, or challenges you see to the industry, and maybe even what you think is a solution to those challenges?

Mitch: Hmm. That’s a good question. I will say you have to find ways because WooCommerce is so nuanced, there’s so many different ways it could be done. So you have to find ways to standardize it wherever possible. And so the first tier of our managed WooCommerce hosting is just maintenance, but we’ve found ways to automate a lot of the testing. It takes some customization upfront, but at least now the process for each site is more or less the same. You’re using the same software to test, and then we can essentially scale. It requires a lot less man hours. So for example, that’s one thing that has allowed us to smooth it out. And if we can get them all on, our second tier includes enterprise tier hosting at a significant discount. And if we can get them all on similar types of platforms, we still want to maintain flexibility. But again, that’s a way how we can kind of make that rough process smoother.

Bitcoin and WooCommerce

BobWP: Right. Now, one of the things that I also saw in your LinkedIn, so I kind of buried in, I’m going to bring this, up and some people moan and grown in the space about this. But I just like your perspective on it is, I think you said on LinkedIn, something around that you are fascinated with Bitcoin or you’re just intrigued. So you’re probably into it at some level. Where do you see this playing out with WooCommerce, or do you see it at all? Is there anything that excites you about it, that you’re thinking how it all evolves in the end? Or is it just fascination you have with it in general, that is maybe even WooCommerce specific?

Mitch: Yeah, there’s a lot of amazing open source software in the world. And as much as I would love all of them to play nice, a lot of them are just their own fragmented ecosystems. So I do see them playing a part together though, just as much as WooCommerce is an open e-commerce platform. Bitcoin is your open payments, because if you think about your store setup, aside from maybe you have a third party fulfillment provider or something, but payments is really the one thing that you’re not in control of. And Bitcoin gives you that freedom. So Bitcoin, specifically the lightning network, is a really cool way I would like to see more stores integrating payments into their sites. Again, I love Bitcoin for the same reason I love WooCommerce. It gives you freedom. It puts you and control and, ultimately, you can decide the direction of your digital destiny, whatever it looks like.

BobWP: Well, I like that answer because it’s concise, it’s direct and it’s not down a rabbit hole, which sometimes when we bring up Bitcoin, that is exactly where it takes us depending on who we have on. So it makes it very interesting.

I want to be Saucal when I grow up, a piece of advice

What advice, and I’m not talking about startup agencies, I’m talking about agencies, smaller agencies. And again, this is maybe very generalized, but somebody comes up and says, “Hey, I want to be like Saucal when I grow up,” type of thing. I mean, “This is my dream. I look at this.” And that’s a loaded question. It’s easier said than done, but what is your biggest piece of advice for that growth for an agency to get to the level where you’re at?

Mitch: If their dream is to do this, I mean, I say all the power to you. I think the more in control you are of your future, the better. To get here, I… Honestly, dude, we’re on a WooCommerce podcast. I think you need to really niche down. You have to have your focus. And I think, in the future, the WooCommerce agencies are going to niche down even more, but you have to find a way to stand out and add value. And I get it, when you start out, you offer everything under the sun, because you don’t know what’s going to stick. You don’t really know what your skillset is, but once you actually land some jobs and you realize, “Hey, I don’t know anything about branding or I’m not very good at graphic design,” you start shedding those pretty quick and you realize what you’re really good at and you just double, triple, quadruple down. That’s what I would tell them. And take care of your people. I mean, at the end of the day, people are what get this done so you got to treat them really well.

BobWP: Right. And that is a good point. Somewhere along the line, it was, “Oh, my niche is WooCommerce.” Well, that’s like saying, “My niche is retail stores.” I mean, it’s like, “Okay, let’s talk about this. Are you talking about a 10 level retail store in downtown Manhattan? Are you talking about a little retail store out in the rural area?” Do you see that in the space? Do you see more WooCommerce agencies, WooCommerce developers? Is there anything going more for the niche focus. Because how do you choose that? Is it like an industry based, is it size based? It seems like there’s so many variables. It will take some thinking through to actually get to that point.

Mitch: Yeah. And it’s almost going to mirror the WordPress system, because there’s people who are just good assemblers of WordPress sites and all the power to them, because they’re great for small business. But then, there’s people who are really good at the back end and the deep coding, and they’re the ones who can really help you scale a large media site, and they are not the same thing. And one serves a different purpose. So with WooCommerce, do I see a lot more people offering it? Absolutely. It’s almost like a checkbox. The unfortunate truth is a lot of them don’t really know it that well. And we end up having to be the guys who have to clean up their dirty work. Again, it’s about niching down. They’re chalking it up. But if you’re going to be in WooCommerce, be a small store builder or really learn it and contribute to it and make it better.

Otherwise, I think there’s cool places. I see LMS integrations into WooCommerce, that’s its own space in its own. Or if you just want to specialize, you can add layers on top of it that aren’t just the code itself, like, “Okay, we specialize in WooCommerce subscriptions, but now we’re also going to help you optimize your free trials and all this stuff.” There’s so much value you can add on top of it in, and that’s the way I would be looking at it personally. It’s just, for me, when we started in WooCommerce, there was almost nobody and we’ve just became very technically adept to it. So we work on really high performance sites and anyone who needs serious, heavy lifting. And then, that’s kind of where we fit.

BobWP: Okay. Great. Good advice.

What won’t Mitch buy online

Last question. And this is something I used to ask in my old podcast, and I like to just bring it up every once in a while because I find it kind of an interesting question to ask. What won’t Mitch buy online?

Mitch: That’s really funny, man. I know what I want to say, but I’m not going to say it, but you know what? Okay. If I think about it, I do buy most things online, but the one that I still haven’t… I think it’s things that are tactile and things you need to feel like clothes. I will buy clothes from a company that I’ve tried on before, but whenever I’m trying something new, I much prefer going into the store and having someone make recommendations for me. That’s just the one thing that personally hasn’t stuck that much.

BobWP: Yeah.

Mitch: Almost everything else is online.

BobWP: Yeah. I’ve gotten a little bit more, I don’t want to say, looser buying clothes online. But if I have to buy something that is not a pair of sweats or something like that, something a little bit more. And we just bought some new furniture a few months ago and there’s no way I would’ve bought that online, because I actually needed to sit in it and see what it visibly looked like, just size wise and everything. So yeah, I mean, I’ve had some people that say, “There’s absolutely nothing I wouldn’t buy online.” I’m just like, “Wow. That’s great if you’ve got that kind of confidence,” but there’s still some things that just bug me a little bit.

Mitch: Dude, you nailed it, because like I bought a couch. The first time I bought a couch online, I totally regret it. And my friends were like, “How the heck could you buy a couch without sitting in it?” And I’m like, I get it. The ultimate trifecta, you need an amazing mattress, you need a great couch, and you need a good office chair. And I just bought a new office chair and there was no way I was buying it without trying it in person. So I went to a store and sat and I was like, “Okay. Okay, this is legit.” And then I can buy it online.

BobWP: Really get that. And I think, when I used to ask that quite a bit, that was a lot of the things was, there’s certain things you just need to experience and feel in touch. Technology, fortunately, most of that stuff can be bought online.Sometimes, I’ll buy something, though, and even technology-wise and I’ll think, “Man, it looked so much bigger online. This thing is really, really tiny compared to what I was expecting.”

Mitch: Yeah, the spatial hasn’t really been figured it out yet. And they do like the AR and stuff, but it’s not that good. You really got to pull out the tape measure and measure three, four times to be sure.

BobWP: Yeah. Well, this has been excellent. I’m glad I was able to finally get you on here. I know we’ve been working at it for a while trying to balance both of our schedules.

Mitch: Yeah. You’re a busy guy.

BobWP: Yeah. Well, you are too. So when two busy guys try to get together, it takes a while. But we are patient and we got it done. Where can people connect with you online if they want to reach out to you for any reason?

Mitch: I’d say LinkedIn is probably the best approach. Just search up Mitchell Callahan on LinkedIn. I do have a Twitter account, but honestly I never use it.So LinkedIn is a good spotter. Just hit up our website, saucal.com.

BobWP: Yeah. Do check out his website and thank you, Mitch. This was an excellent conversation. Really enjoyed having it with you, and I so much appreciate you taking the time to join us.

Mitch: Hey Bob. My pleasure, man. And I got to admit, you are a real pro. I think you’re even… It’s funny, whenever we talk about your podcast, someone always says something about your voice, because you really just got this voice that’s so relaxing. And the second we hopped on here, I was like, I felt like my chill factor went up a notch and I was like, “Okay, this feels good, man.” So again, thank you for having me. And I wish you the best when you come to Word Camp Europe, and especially with your big anniversary coming up. It’s a great place to do it.

BobWP: It is. It’s going to be fun. Thanks a lot, Mitch.

Mitch: My pleasure, man.