From Product Development to Community Growth in eCommerce

BobWP:
Hey everybody, welcome to do the Woo, episode 12. I’m Bob wp. I finally dragged Brad back from back his time in Disneyland a couple weeks ago. We weren’t on the air. I had some stuff going and he was spending his wee hours with Mickey and Goofy and all those. How was this

Brad:
Brad? Terrible. It was the worst. It was great Disneyland, man. It’s the most magical place on earth, right? So took my 3-year-old son, had a great time, got to meet Lightning McQueen at Mader from Cars World and Mickey and Minnie and all, even a couple of the evil witches, which were fun. It’s a cool place regardless of your age. I had a very, very good time. Nice to unplug too for a week and experienced life in real time.

BobWP:
Yeah, sounds like a deal to me. So our guest today, Patrick Rowland. Hey Patrick. Patrick’s just kind of a boo kind of guy. He’s been in this space for a little while doing stuff. How’s it going, Patrick?

Patrick:
It’s going very well. I haven’t been to Disney World, Disneyland, any of the Disneys, but what life’s pretty good.

BobWP:
Yeah, well cool. I’ve been to Disneyland once, I think I took Judy there for her 40th birthday and she said I could have done better. So I mean, it was one of those things, it was really hot time and it was not hot in the fact it was literally hot, too hot, the weather and yeah, we just didn’t quite, I dunno, I think having a kid with you makes more of the experience and we just kind of went around with my mom, we took my mom there and we all, so anyway. Yeah, it was not magical, huh, Bob? Yeah. Yeah, it wasn’t quite as magical as well. Patrick, you have been doing some stuff and I thought maybe we’d spend a good chunk of this show talking a little bit about it because it’s definitely, even though it isn’t, I mean I guess you could say commerce related in the sense, hey, it’s products and how many of us can say we’ve actually created a product. I know I can’t. So tell us a little bit about that. Just tell us what it is because maybe not everybody knows what you’re

Patrick:
Up. Yeah, so first of all, Bob, I love talking about stuff and I’ve done some stuff. Great place. Yeah, so I’ve been doing this for a while, been doing e-commerce stuff for a while. God, I think I joined Woo Teams back in 2013, so it’s been a while since I joined Woo Teams, and that’s when I really got into e-commerce. Wanted to understand what it’s like to be a store owner. I think if you’re in the WordPress world, a lot of you know what it’s like to run your own WordPress site. Even if you’re a development shop, you still have to build your own WordPress site to attract clients. But not many people who build e-commerce sites actually sell physical products. So last year I said I want to make a physical product. It took me a couple months, I decided I should build a board game because why not build a product?
I actually, so came up with lots of ideas, listened to all the podcasts, did all the stuff, took me a little bit over a year, and I released my own card game called Fry Thief on Kickstarter. So that’s just the start of the journey. I’ve got so many more decisions ahead of me, what platform I want to host on and how I want to structure the company and how many units I want to order. There’s a lot of stuff to do, but so far a year in, I made a product, I marketed it and I launched it on Kickstarter. So that part’s done. I’ll probably spend the next year sort of building the brand out a little bit more.

Brad:
That’s interesting. So is the Kickstarter, is it currently going on now or is it completed?

Patrick:
Nope, it’s all done. So I started it early February. My goal that last year was to have the Kickstarter ready to go by the end of the year, and I just waited, basically I had it ready to go. I waited through January because I just assumed people didn’t have money after Christmas. That’s just

Brad:
Smart thinking there.

Patrick:
I think that’s the right decision. And then I launched in early February. I think it was a 20 day campaign, so a relatively short campaign, and I raised 10 grand over that campaign. What’s cool is there, there’s a way in Kickstarter you can have a late pledge button and people can pledge your campaign late at a slightly higher cost and I’ve actually had a hundred bucks come in that way. So that’s just a fun unexpected thing that’s come in. But yeah, the campaign is done and now I’m talking with my manufacturer and doing all the stuff after that.

Brad:
Yeah, I’m always fascinated by the campaign, the Kickstarter campaign. Bob, you back any campaigns like on Kickstarter or any other

BobWP:
Platform? I haven’t done that. Many of them. I think I’ve done, I backed one recently on a game that a guy I know did. Other than that, other than that, I don’t do a lot of them. I don’t know, it’s one of those, unless I know the person things I’m thinking, what if, maybe it’s just not my thing. How about you, Brad? Do you spend all your time backing stuff? No,

Brad:
Kind of similar, right? I don’t just browse Kickstarter and some of the other sites, but every once in a while something will kind of come across from a friend or on social media that I find is interesting. I think I love the idea, I love the platform. It’s really cool to see things like your game going to come to life and maybe it wouldn’t have otherwise, or at least it gets some great press out of it too. So it kind of builds that audience before you even necessarily have to have the product ready, I think. But there also have been a number of ’em, bigger ones that have not ended well, and I think it’s gave people a little bit of pause maybe on some of the bigger backing campaigns and stuff. But all in all, I think it’s a cool platform and a cool way to do things.

Patrick:
One of the things that you learned, so because I wanted to launch on Kickstarter, I backed probably like 26, 30 projects in the last year basically to be the customer, follow their journey, see what they did, see what they did wrong, and then learn from those lessons. But while backing those 30 campaigns, I learned a lot, just a lot of really common sense stuff like, oh, this person didn’t send out an update for a month, and I always didn’t know where, yeah, where’s my product? So you need to send regular updates. One other thing though, Brad is different industries do Kickstarter very differently. So video games fail all the time, and by fail, I mean they raise all the money, they take all the money, and they’re like, it’ll be done in a year. And then it’s like five years later some really bad version of a video game comes out. That’s because there’s technical complexity and all this stuff With board games specifically, what’s great is you’re basically printing cardboard and wooden or plastic tokens. The hard part is done before the Kickstarter, if that makes sense. So those tend to be much more safe. I’d say board games may come a couple years late, but they almost never fail.

Brad:
That’s good. Actually, one of the Kickstarters I recently backed, well I say recent, it’s been over a year now, is the new toe jam and Earl video game, and it just came out on the first four days ago, I think it was supposed to come out last year and kept getting pushed, but now it looks pretty successful and they rolled it out a bunch of platforms, but I can absolutely see how that would happen. You get this great idea, you’re ready to go, you get all this money, then it’s like, oh yeah, now we have to do it. Whoop. Totally. That’s interesting. But now you’re at the stage of the Kickstarter is over, you’ve received the kind of investment, you have your, I guess it’s a one pager upright your site.

Patrick:
Yeah, it’s just a very simple one page site right now.

Brad:
And I think you mentioned in the notes that you are glad you went this approach versus kind of going full fledged, full website build from the start. Maybe you could touch on that.

Patrick:
Totally. So, okay, so let take this one step back. I think that explains it better. So one of the things I assumed when I was an e-commerce developer is that when you come to me with a project, you have everything planned and done. You’ve done all the product research, you’ve made your brand and you, you’ve done all the steps in some sort of logical sequence. And one of the things I realized is that product development, branding, marketing, all of these are overlapping stages. And so it’s really helpful just to have an incredibly simple, I paid $10 a month for a landing page generator for while I was marketing this product, and that gave me so much flexibility. I everything was drag and drop. It wasn’t anything complicated. I just had a couple of forms where you enter email address, here’s a couple of testimonials, I had a little background there.
Here’s a couple of photos, add a background, add another form, add a video, whatever. I guess I think I didn’t realize how important it is to stay nimble in the beginning when you’re about to launch a brand new company or about to launch a brand new product. You just don’t know. I changed my product six months after its initial conception pretty drastically. And if I had already paid five or 10 grand in development costs, that would’ve been really, really hard to do when you’re only paying 10 bucks a month for some sort of simple landing page builder. That’s just such a good way to start. One of the things I’ve been thinking a lot about now is I think WooCommerce and actually WordPress sites in general, it’s amazing. It’s like building your own house. You can control every single thing, but you don’t build your house before you know want to live in the neighborhood. So I think when a new business comes my way, if they’re ever asking, should I build with WooCommerce? Yes, great option as long as you know you’re going to be here for a couple years doing this job. But if it’s just a brand new product concept, just start simple with a land

Brad:
That’s a really smart approach. It’s something we kind of preach to clients quite a bit because they walk in the door and they have this grand vision, which is great, this 12 plan of what they want to get to, but it’s like, what’s the MVP? What’s the version one that we can get out the door in a month or two versus 12 months and start getting some realtime users, realtime feedback? And almost every time that we do that, we learn stuff. The client learns stuff, how the users are interacting with their site or their features or whatever it is they’re doing, maybe how they’re purchasing product or what product is actually a hit versus not. And it changes. It absolutely changes the later phases. So that’s a really smart approach. Don’t dive in head first until you truly know what it is you want to do and what’s working versus not working. So kind of dipping your toe in with a landing page or an MVP absolutely is great

BobWP:
Advice.

Brad:
Yeah.

BobWP:
So what happened, I guess through this process, you said that obviously the site was not the biggest element. You had all these other variables, all these other components you had to juggle and you finally realized that. So what was the toughest thing to juggle? What was the thing that just kept GNA at you and up to the point where you are now?

Patrick:
Yeah, okay. So you guys have built sites for clients. You guys know how sometimes clients are unresponsive.

Brad:
No, stop.

Patrick:
So I realized why that happens. It’s because it’s sort of like a giant ball of yarn. There’s so many things that you have to do. I’m talking to my graphic designer to update these things. I’m talking to a professional reviewer who gave me some really good feedback and I want to implement it. I’m talking to my manufacturer about what happens if we change the cover of the box to a spot gloss instead of a flat mat. There’s a lot of conversations and threads going on, and the website is usually one of my last concerns. I’d say for me, Bob, I tried to manage review, so I worked with professional reviewers who gave me some good advice and I did make some final small tweaks. Working with manufacturers is very stressful. I found out they’re very bad at communication, generally speaking, and they have very weird work hours.
They’ve broken English. That was incredibly stressful. And even working with other professionals in the industry, I had to hire an illustrator and I sort of had the choice between hiring someone who’s going to charge me a hundred to $200 per individual piece of art, and that’s a lot. Or I found someone who works, it’s not their main job, but he charges like 30 or 40 bucks per illustration and they come with different communication expectations. The person who charges a hundred to 200 per illustration, I can probably email them any day. They’ll get back to me by the end of the day. The person who does this part-time, I kind of have to text him on the weekends to get work done, and that was a choice I made. So I just feel like I’ve been busy doing a thousand things and not paying much attention to the website. Does that answer the question?

Brad:
Yeah, yeah, it does. Until it’s time for the website that it’s like, we got to move, we need to launch next week.

Patrick:
Yes. Yeah,

Brad:
No, I get it. There’s a lot of moving parts. I can’t even imagine what goes into producing something like this. I got to say, actually I love the graphics just looking at, oh good. Your website and the Kickstarter and some of the graphics that you’re showing off there are really cool. Very clever.

Patrick:
Well, thank you. I appreciate that. Yeah, it has been a long, long process. I wish I could say I thought of this, all of this originally, but as I said before, it is a gradual process. As I’m building the website, I’m like, oh, wouldn’t it be cool if I did this to the cards? Then I go to that to the cards and a couple of months later update the website to reflect the new art style. It is a very iterative process.

Brad:
So are you currently circling back to the website? Are you currently working to build out the full blown e-commerce experience now? Is it still somewhat on the back burner? Is you focused on getting the product all figured out or where you’re at in that process?

Patrick:
Awesome question. So for probably one or two more months, I can sort of keep that late pledge button on my Kickstarter page and I’m just going to keep that. That’s the simplest solution right now.
But after one or two months, I do want to have my own website selling this product. Since it’s my only product, I’m probably going to have basically a single pager. I don’t need more than that right now, but I do want to have a full website. And then one of the things I realized very quickly, looking at these numbers, a lot of my revenue comes from people getting add-ons or multiple copies of the game. So now that I’ve gone through this launch process, now I know people really want to have multiple copies of the game. You can get these little add-ons so it plays with more people. I’m definitely including those on the website and definitely making those on upsell. And then there’s sorts of fun stuff you can do with free shipping where you only get free shipping when you order two copies of the game, stuff like that. I’ve learned a lot of those things, but for one or two more months, I just wrapped up the campaign two weeks ago, I think for one or two more months, I’m going to keep the button here and then I hope to build the website in the meantime.

Brad:
Nice. And you’re obviously, you’re a little biased towards WooCommerce with your background at Woo themes and working pretty closely with the platform, did you look at other platforms? Was it already a predetermined decision that you’re going WooCommerce? Was there any comparison there?

Patrick:
I’ve been in WooCommerce so long and I’ve wanted my own WooCommerce store for so long that I’m probably just going to build it WooCommerce. But I go to Shopify Unite every year for the last three or four years. They do a great job. They have an amazing product. If someone else, so I mean, I have background as WooCommerce developer. If someone else was doing this, I’d probably recommend for their first product. That’s very simple. Shopify’s pretty good, but I like knowing that I can customize anything down the road. So right now I don’t need customizations, but down the road, if I build my site this way, I’m free to customize it any way I want.

Brad:
Yeah, you said the S word, Bob, did you?

BobWP:
Yeah, I know. I know. We’re going to beep that out. I got good editing skills. So

Brad:
No, it’s funny because, and I’ll admit it, I am similar. I have a lot of friends and family that obviously if you’re in the web space or tech space, everyone just assumes you can do everything, which is funny, but when you’re in the web space, they’re like, oh yeah, you can build websites. Can you help me launch an e-commerce store? And I’m like, you should start with Shopify. Prove your concept because it’s not as simple as just clicking a couple buttons and away you go. And it’s really all e-commerce platforms and open source. There’s just a lot of configuration and questions you have to ask yourself and workflow, checkout process, workflow and all that stuff you have to really map out. And if you’re just trying to prove, can I sell these things I make on the side for fun, will it work? Go with an Etsy, go with the Shopify, go with something that’s hosted and quick and cheap and you could just kind of prove your concept. And then when you say, oh, this is working now, you take the leap to something that’s bigger, more flexible. Like you said, you have the background so you know what you’re doing. Most people that are looking to run a store.

Patrick:
Absolutely.

Brad:
So it is a good recommendation.

Patrick:
And just a little bit of data there, just in the board game world specifically, a third of Kickstarters fail, meaning people who are in my exact same spot, they’ve been preparing for this for six months or a year, still one third of those people still don’t even have enough money to raise their initial capital investments. So if all those people build websites, that would all be wasted money. So it is really helpful to have some validation either through Kickstarter or just have a simple Shopify site or just a couple orders on Etsy is some validation. Then go build your custom whatever you want.

Brad:
And when you say they fail, you mean they don’t hit their target goal,

Patrick:
Correct, correct, yeah. In that time, I specifically meant one third of board game Kickstarters do not hit their target goal,

Brad:
Hit their target goal. So two thirds do, which is actually higher than I probably would’ve assumed. I probably would’ve guessed it was more like 50 50 or something to be honest. But

Patrick:
Yeah, I think I look at this a little bit nostalgically where five years ago anything on Kickstarter got like 5,000, 10,000, a hundred thousand dollars, and now there’s some competition. Now you do have to understand some positioning, but yeah, it is pretty high when you think about it that way.

Brad:
Yeah, and that’s true when it was new and the new hotness and everyone loved it. And now we kind of mentioned earlier on with a few high profile projects kind of going down in flames, maybe people are a little more hesitant to just throw money at everything that looks nice.

Patrick:
Oh, absolutely.

Brad:
Yeah. Yeah, that’s cool. I mean, it’s fun to hear that. I’ve never done run a Kickstarter myself. I’ve even invested in one where it was a local art project and our town here, and they were looking to raise some funds to do this mural under a bridge, and I was like, that’s cool. Not only am I backing something that I care about, but it’s in my local community. It’s not just a game or a tech thing or a gadget. It’s like I’m improving my community through a Kickstarter campaign, which was really neat.

Patrick:
That’s very cool.

Brad:
And they had the different levels. One of ’em was like, get your name on a plaque. So we did that level and I put my son’s name there, so every time I drive by and he’s three, he doesn’t know what I’m talking about, but I’m like, your name’s under that bridge, so someday we’ll go there when you can actually see it and understand what it means. But it’s pretty neat, a little bit of legacy in the town for a cool mural. Oh, totally. It is a good platform for it.

BobWP:
Totally. I’m thinking before we move on, I got to hear this story behind the shipping mistake you had. I am just looking at some notes here, and I always like the word mistake always stands out.

Brad:
Bob loves a good mistake.

BobWP:
Yeah, yeah. There’s nothing like a good solid mistake and one is you wanted to use a bigger sturdier box. What was the mistake there? You use a flimsy crap.

Patrick:
So I want this game to be able to sell in stores. So I sort of designed it to eventually make it stand out on a shelf, and so I made the box. Now we’re on video right now, so it was like an inch and a half and then I increased it to two inches and it just gave it a little bit more presence and it’s a very sturdy box. What I didn’t realize is that moves you from the small flat rate box in USPS to the medium flat rate box, which goes from just under $6 to just under $11, something like that. And I made this and it looks great, and I actually got feedback from play testers who were like, Patrick, the box looks amazing. And people were saying, you can probably charge more because of how this box looks. I’m like, wow, that’s great.
People are literally saying, I could probably charge more just based on how it looks on the shelf. But then I went to ship it to reviewers. This was probably end of November, end of December, something like that. And when I took it and then I ordered some boxes and I realized they didn’t fit. So I had to pay five bucks extra for 20 review copies, which was, or whatever it was. So it cost me, I think it was a lot more for the international, I think international is 40 bucks to ship it. And I was like, oh God, this hurts.

Brad:
It kind of reminds me of just in software development in general, how one change can have an effect somewhere completely well, in your mind, I guess somewhat unrelated when they are related. So it’s really thinking through the whole thought of this little change. While it might look amazing, what else could it possibly affect in some adverse way? And that’s a really kind of tangible way of describing that. That’s interesting.

BobWP:
I was just going to say, I had on my other podcast, I had a guy that was actually, he’s in a professional packaging design and he did the Star Wars little toys and stuff for the Star Wars. He worked for Mattel and stuff. Anyway, you should listen to that podcast. It was really interesting to hear that whole far as product placement in stores and how that works. And I’m sure you’ve already dove into a lot, obviously from what you’ve talked about, but that’s another whole different world there.

Patrick:
It’s another thing. So this again reminds me that all of the timelines are overlapping. I was basically, I thought I was done designing the product and then as I was shipping out to reviewers, I realized I made a mistake and I had to email all the reviewers, Hey, the box is too big, just so you know, it’ll be a little bit smaller. And then I had to make all the updates on my websites and I had to get updated shipping. It’s this very complicated web. I honestly believed when I got started web developments that websites are like perfect waterfall project management systems where it’s like design and it’s 100% done. Then you move on to development, 100% done. You move on to testing and then you launch and it’s perfect. And this process reminded me of how interconnected everything is. Like testing says, just change this one thing. It was confusing. And then you have to redesign it, redevelop it, and just go through all the steps again.

BobWP:
Yeah, interesting. Wow. Well, let’s see here. How are we doing on time? I think we have a little bit of time here. Just a couple small, two or three small things. One, I was just going to mention a podcast I’d done with Matt Malig, and for those of you that don’t know who Matt is, the guy that founded that WordPress thing that we talk about so much. And also Todd Wilkins, who is head of e-commerce at Automatic and had quite a long conversation around WooCommerce, Jetpack, Gutenberg, all the fun topics without the drama actually is what I call it, the podcast without the drama. And I don’t know if there, I’ll put a link in if there was anything that really stood out. One of the things I thought was interesting when I talked more about blocks and WooCommerce, even though they’re going to be, I’m sure adding some more, Todd mentioned that he also sees it more leaning towards the extensions.
That’s where the real power, and that’s where I think they’re the most excited about is what everybody’s going to be doing with the extensions, all the different WooCommerce extensions. And I think that’s where the opportunity is for them as far as actually taking advantage of blocks in Gutenberg. I didn’t know if you guys had a chance to look at if there’s any or look at the transcript or listen to it. If there’s anything that stood out or you made faces at and don’t tell me, I should have asked them this because I heard that on Twitter about five or six times. Oh, you should have asked them this. You should have asked them this. Sorry. It’s

Brad:
The backseat interviewer, right? Yeah, yeah. Or Monday morning, interviewer. I liked it. I listened to it actually earlier today. And honestly one of the lines that stood out to me, which I guess it makes complete sense, and this has probably been mentioned before, but never, this is the first time I heard it from Matt was when they brought WooCommerce, when they purchased it, acquired it, whatever, under the automatic umbrella, that was their kind of core value change from democratizing publishing to democratizing publishing and commerce, which is kind of like an obvious one, but I’d never actually heard ’em say that.
Not something I’d listen to. So just an e-commerce platform, it’s an open source e-commerce platform, which kind of has all those values and ideals that we hold WordPress. The same with WooCommerce. And that’s I think one of the reasons why it is so popular and why so many of us like to use it because of that, it still is the core of what we’re trying to do here with open source. So I liked hearing that. I liked reading that and I highlighted it. I thought it was really cool and it’s right at the beginning of the interview, but it was nice to hear that.

Patrick:
So I’m looking forward to all the different blocks. Todd just talked about a couple different blocks that they’re working on. I just want to see more stuff that lets you customize the product page and how it looks. I want there to be some sort of default product page. So in e-commerce, long form product pages convert really well. So when you add some videos beneath this, then you add some customer submitted photos beneath that, then you add some quotes, then you add those pages work really, really well. And I really want to see WooCommerce lets you do that somehow. So I look forward to that. But Brad, to your point, I think this is something I struggle with is when you are, so if you’re just a regular store owner, you just pick whatever you’re solving a problem. It’s like how do I get from point A to point B? But there is a philosophical reason to use open source, which I’m so in favor of. I control my data, I control the foundation of my business. And it’s good to be reminded of that because if youre looking at a feature comparison, no one ever mentions you own everything. No one can ever take it away from you is a feature of WordPress.

Brad:
Yeah, you’re right. I think it’s easy to forget that some days, and we’re always quickly reminded when some service shuts down and takes all of our data with it, and we know it because we live it and we love it and we’re passionate about it, but the majority of the internet users out there do not, they don’t even understand open source and why it’s such a benefit and what owning your data means and how do you accomplish that. So they’re worthy out there really pushing it. The ambassadors of open source and the movement, and I’m not just talking about us three, but the whole community. And so it is good to hear that and be reminded of these are the reasons we are passionate about these type of tools and have podcasts talking about these type of tools.

Patrick:
Yeah, I dunno if you guys normally do follow-ups, but I have a follow-up for you, Brad. Here’s the way I’ve been thinking about this. I feel like hosted platforms are like Netflix, you just click, everything works, it’s downloaded, it works. Happy days. Owning your own data is kind of like going to a websites, downloading the DVD, burning it to your own physical DVD and then putting in your own physical

Brad:
Libraries in your own media, your Plex server or whatever.

Patrick:
Yeah, it is entirely yours. You control it. No one can take it away from you, but compared to Netflix, so how do you convince someone to go from Netflix to their own plus server?

Brad:
You got to make it easy, right? That’s really, yeah, the idea of downloading a movie, setting up a plex server, understanding what that even means, running it on a smart TV or Roku or some device. I do that. That’s exactly what I do. But I wouldn’t expect my dad to be able to do that and I wouldn’t want to have to walk him through how to do that. So I think honestly, I think the short answer is it has to be easy and intuitive. And honestly, when I’m talking WordPress to people that don’t maybe know a little bit about it, but not sure that much, that’s one of the things I explain is that one of the reasons in my opinion, WordPress has gotten so popular this past decade or so is because it is extremely intuitive.
You can sit someone that’s never used it down on the dashboard and say, try to make a post and was, I used to say this a lot before Gutenberg, I hope it still holds true. And usually they could fumble their way through making a post. They may not do everything, they may not select a category, but they’ll probably be able to understand you have to make a title, add some content and hit the big blue publish button. And I think that’s one of the reasons it’s gotten so big. And I think that is the thing we need to keep in mind. E-commerce will always have some complexities, but how can they scale that back so the end user that maybe is just testing a concept can get up and running with a couple clicks just like you would on Shopify. And we’re certainly not there yet, but I think we will get there, whether it’s through commerce itself doing it or somebody building something that kind of layers on top of it, or maybe it’s another e-commerce platform for WordPress. I’m not sure. But I mean, that’s why I push people to Shopify. If they’re just trying something out, you give them 20 or 30 bucks a month, test your concept, it’s super easy, point and click and you have a site done. You don’t have to worry about hosting or plugins and updates and whatever, but you give up some of those freedoms, right? Totally. Like you just mentioned with proprietary, so

BobWP:
Well, I’ll leave a link for everybody to that podcast. You can dive into it more themselves and go from there.

Brad:
Bob, it’s a good length too, like the interview, I’m sure people, you mentioned, people wanted to ask more questions, but I see a good 30, 35 minute podcast and I’m in, but if I see an hour, I’m like, I dunno, that’s a commitment. It’s like that two hour marking movies as soon as it says two hours or one minute, I’m like, oh man, I don’t know.

BobWP:
That’s a long one. Yeah, yeah, it definitely, it went really smooth and

Brad:
Yeah, it’s a good interview

BobWP:
Having them both on there too, which was really nice. And Pat, Matt actually was the one that suggested having Todd on as well, so I got kind of a nice balance between the two. So yeah, it was great. Let’s see. We have some things to wrap up here, kind of what’s coming up before, what’s coming up? You said there’s a thing going on with Reddit, you put something in here. I’m not a Reddit person, so

Brad:
I don’t know how many people are on Reddit. I’ve been a Reddit user for 10 plus years. I enjoy it and I like finding, I think the whole global, just going to reddit.com and seeing the most popular is interesting, but I think the real power of Reddit is these very kind of niche focused subreddits. And there’s one for WooCommerce, so I thought it might be fun to mention. I was kind of going through it. It’s pretty active, very much focused on help and support. If you have a question, how do you do this? How do you do that? Something’s not working. It seems to be that kind of focus, which is fine. And there’s just a lot of interesting threads. At the very least if you are already a little more advanced with WooCommerce. I think seeing some of this stuff can give you a good perspective of what normal users are struggling with, whether it be someone developing or even a shop owner, like you mentioned Patrick, a lot of people maybe build sites, but they’re not running an actual store. So I feel like you can see some of the concerns, frustrations that we might take for granted and say, oh, of course it’s this, but the end users maybe are struggling with. So it’s pretty fascinating. Thought I’d throw it out there. Give it a little plug. So it’s just reddit.com/r/woocommerce. Lemme check that out.

BobWP:
Cool. And also on the horizon, I know there’s a conference coming up a bunch of, I mean it really relates because it’s going to be a lot of product creators, content, I mean a lot of people in the business WordPress space. You want to tell us about that?

Brad:
Yeah, so Pressonomics, it’ll be the sixth one, I think they skipped last year if I remember right, but this will be the sixth showing. But basically it’s a WordPress focused event around the kind of focus on the economics. So essentially companies making money with WordPress. And it’s primarily, I would say products. There’s definitely an agency presence, there’s definitely a hosting presence, but a good majority of it is people selling products for WordPress, whether it’s plugins or themes or maybe even services around WordPress. But it’s very much focused on that commerce side of the WordPress community and what we’re doing here. So always a pretty big WooCommerce presence. So I wanted to throw it out there because they just opened up tickets. I think it was last week. The event’s going to be Wednesday, September 11th through Friday, September 13th out in Arizona, Tucson, Arizona. So take a look. It’s a little very different from a word camp, so I don’t want you to assume it’s just a word camp focused on this. It’s very much way more kind of, I would say, aligned with kind of a traditional business event versus a word camp. So I’ve been to three of them, I believe, and a lot of value, a lot of great conversations, a lot of value, a lot of networking, a lot of good presentations. So definitely worthwhile event to check out.

Patrick:
So I’ll just give my own 2 cents there. I’ve only gone to one press. Nos really liked it. What’s amazing is I met someone who lives just north of Denver in Fort Collins here, Colorado, and I sort of helped him get into the WordPress WordCamp community here in Denver, and he was the lead organizer the last two years. So I met him there, got him into the community. He helped lead WordCamp dinner for the last two years, and we’re really good friends now. So it’s just funny how you meet people. He’s like an hour north of me, and I didn’t know he existed, but I met him at Press Nomics and he’s an awesome WordPress, and that’s a great story, people.

Brad:
Yeah, for sure. It’s a very opening group too, if you’ve never been, it’s very welcoming, very open source minded. That’s what it is. So it’s a good one. Press nomics.com has all the details.

BobWP:
All right, excellent. Patrick, besides building this site for your new game, what else is on the horizon?

Patrick:
Yeah, so WSEs went really well last year, and Brian and I have started sort of talking about what we want to do this year. I really, really enjoyed running it last year. Again, we’re just starting to plan it, so if you have any ideas for esh, just ping me or Brian on Twitter or email us or reach out to us through our websites. But we really enjoyed it and we’re just excited to do it better next year. We don’t even know how we’re going to do it better yet, but it’s fun to start talking about that

Brad:
24 hours. Yeah,

Patrick:
20 hours. That is one way.

Brad:
The original couple where SES Scott and I ran was, it was 24 hours straight, which was a marathon to get through, but maybe we don’t do that. It’s a little bit tough from a organizer standpoint.

BobWP:
Yeah,

Brad:
It’s

BobWP:
Tricky. Yeah, and I have, let’s see, what do I have coming up? I, I’m going be creating a second site, a little, going to be offering some coaching services. Again, little minimal coaching services around content, see what else? Oh, my other podcasts I’m going to be announcing soon, that’s going to be changing the format. It’s going to be the same kind of, I mean it’s going to be the same podcast but different. And then WooCommerce related in April 1st, I’m doing my 48 hour marathon content marathon again. So I’ll be doing, pushing out 48 pieces of content every hour on the hour for 48 hours. And they’re all going to be commerce related content. So I’m busy working on that and all that stuff will be more formally announced soon, but that’s kind of what’s in the works. Just a few things here and there for me. So that’s it. Cool. Appreciate it, Patrick, love having you on. I know I’ve had you on the other podcast several times and time to get you on this one. Great to hear about everything that’s going on. I want to remind everybody that yes, they can get two months half price, 50% off at Liquid Web on their WooCommerce managed hosting. Just use the code, Bob wp woo, and you’ll get 50% off your first two months. So again, thanks Patrick for joining us.

Brad:
Thank you, Patrick. This was great. Thanks for sharing our story and I think it’d be a lot of fun if we could have you back on once the site’s up, and I’m sure you’re going to learn some things once the site goes live and how users interact and kind of wrap up the story, if you will, of your board game. So best of luck to you. Looks cool.

Patrick:
Well, first of all, I love talking about stuff, so thank you for having me on here to talk about stuff. But yeah, I would love to be back on at some point,

BobWP:
For sure. Alright, well thank you everybody. You can go ahead and subscribe, do all that good stuff to our podcast and until a couple of weeks from today, we’ll talk to you later. See you around. See you. Bye-bye.