WooCommerce Agency Growth and the Power of Subscriptions

Robbie: Hello and welcome to another episode of Do the Woo. I’m Robbie Adair with OSTraining, one of your co-hosts today. I’ve got two co-hosts with me today, Robert Jacobi and Ross Spadaro. Robert, welcome and how are you doing today?

Robert: Is half the year already gone by? Is it that crazy? Yeah, I’m so used to COVID time when nothing ever happens and all of a sudden six months fly by, and it feels like six years. Otherwise, just great, and fine, and dandy, and it’s great to be Woo agency-ing it up today. Wow, that’s a mouthful.

Robbie: Awesome. And I agree with you Robert, I can’t believe it’s been half a year or more. And Ross, this is your first time to co-host on Do the Woo, I do believe. And so tell us a little bit about yourself and you work at Woo, right?

Ross: Correct. Yeah, no, and thanks for having me on as a guest host today. Super excited to chat with you all. And yeah, Robert, to your point, this year has flown by, so I’ll digress from that. But I joined Woo about a year and a half ago. And there was this effort to relaunch the Woo expert or agency partner program at WooCommerce. And so as the foundation was being built throughout 2021 and 2022, I joined the team in June of 2022 as an agency partner manager, so working directly with our platinum tier Woo expert agency partners to help make sure they’re successful, have what they need and just drive growth through the program, through WooCommerce, and better together. So that’s my role in a nutshell, but happy to be here.

Robbie: Well, thank you. I’m glad you’re here. You’re going to help us grill, I mean question and talk to Kenn Kelly. I’m joking. Kenn is with Never Settle agency. And Ken, tell us a little bit about yourself, how long you had your agency, where you guys are located, specialties.

Kenn: Yeah, thanks for having us. I’m really excited about this. It’s been fun to see WooCommerce step into partnering with agencies more. It seems like there’s just been a huge opportunity for both of us, so seeing this happen in the last couple years has been really exciting on our side. But Never Settle’s a full digital marketing agency. So we do everything from starting at the beginning of that process with consulting, branding, design, UI/UX prototypes, full stack development, and then following it up with growth services like SEO, SEM, marketing, and then consulting again. So the services that we do, we do everything you would think of in a digital agency with the exception of social media management, we don’t do anyone’s social media. Doesn’t feel like it’s a high ROI for us to do it for someone else.

And then we are 11 years old this year and we have about 25 folks across, I think we’re nine countries, so over half of us are based in the US but we’re a remote workforce. And then the other half are spread out in a pretty diverse set of countries. We started out in Denver, Colorado and that’s where I’m located. And we still have a few folks here. But over the last 11 years we’ve grown and we’ve just had some really great referrals or just inbound leads that have come in, and we just couldn’t say no to great people. So we figured out how to do the remote work.

Robbie: Cool. Well, and congrats on 11 years having an agency. Anytime you go over that 10 year mark, I feel like you’re pretty set. You’re good. You’re going to last forever, now. As long as you want it to go, you’re going to make it. So I’m going to kick us off with the first question and I just want to see, one, how COVID, the pandemic, affected your agency and then how things are since COVID. And I say since COVID like COVID is over, we know it’s not, but since our shutdowns are over.

Kenn: Yeah, good clarification. We saw a lot of things change. The two biggest things that we saw right away were people restricting cash immediately, not knowing what was going to happen. So I felt like there was a lot of fear, and people just restricted budget, just saying, “I don’t know and I don’t want to spend.” And so we saw, we expected that to happen. It did happen. And I was immediately asking my team, like, “How can we diversify? What should we be doing?”

And so we ended up releasing a new service where it was like website as a service, allowing people to build. We’d built an entire website for them for $298, and it was just month to month, no long term contracts, provide two hours of service every month, free hosting, all their security, all that stuff, maintenance. And we provide those two hours of service however they want to use it, whether it was design, or dev, or SEO, whatever they may be. And really going after people that were saying, “Hey, we’re really cash conscious right now.” And so that was an example of the way we diversified.

And then we tried to create a few products that were specific to restaurants, and gyms, and other things to get them to leverage WooCommerce to do bookings or whatever remotely, or to do their deliveries, and stuff like that. And those didn’t pick up and that’s just part of it. Sometimes you try things, and they work, and sometimes they don’t. So we tried to diversify our services. And then we also really encouraged our clients that were e-commerce clients to really double down. And I would say we had a handful of them that were all in. And we’re like, “This is an incredible opportunity, because this is the only way you’re going to be able to sell,” especially for our folks that had retail stores and all that.

And some of them trusted us and we presented data. It wasn’t just a random assumption. And their businesses grew like crazy. And then we had a lot of other clients that just said, “I can’t do it right now.” But their storefronts were closed, too, so they were shutting off the one thing that was providing flow to them and then they had no way to keep their other stores open. So that was one of the things we saw. And then we did see a turnover of people. We saw what sounded was a global thing of people just taking a pause and saying, “Is this what I want to do with my life?” And so we had a handful of people just say, “Hey, I want to go travel.” Someone was like, “I want to go see my grandma. She’s in another country, and I’m going to take this time off, and I don’t even know if I like coding.”

And so we had a handful of people that transitioned during that season. And it was awesome. We want the best of our folks. So we were excited about that. But that was something I didn’t expect that happened. And then post that, where we’re at, I think because of some of those moves that we made and really doubling down on e-commerce specifically with our clients, we’re doing really, really good. We’re in a really healthy spot. We worked really hard not to lose anybody other than voluntarily, the folks I mentioned. And that’s probably something I was the most proud of our team for is we had cash get crunched a lot when our clients backed down their budgets. And we looked at everyone that was on our team and we said, “What would it take to not lose one person?” And so the owner, myself and a couple other guys, we took no pay. And then we asked our team as a whole to take a 30% reduction so that we wouldn’t have to let anybody go instead of just letting go of the bottom 15% or whatever.

And our team, they weren’t stoked about it, but they all said yes. And then what was really, really fun was with my partners, is we tracked everything that we asked them to reduce, and we were able to end up pay that back within two years. And we didn’t lose anybody due to budgetary reasons. And then since then we’ve been growing pretty healthy about 30% a year.

Robert: Boy, there’s a million follow up questions. I have all of that you just said. Is the team fully remote?

Kenn: Yeah, we’re fully remote. We have an annual team meeting where we get together in Mexico or somewhere that is friendly to visas from all countries, and have a lot of fun, go over our mission and values as an agency, like, “We do tech technology, and business, and consulting.” But Never Settle, one of our aims is to see human trafficking ended. And so we look at how do we leverage technology to do that and other things. And so when we get together, we have a lot of fun. We talk about ideas and explore how can we press more into that? And then do lots of competitions, and some team building exercises, and stuff like that. But other than that, or me trying to fly around to see folks, everything else we do is remote.

Robert: You mentioned that you started developing product during COVID, and a lot of agencies have a hard time doing both. Is product just now a lead gen for your other WooCommerce projects and experience, or is it actually a revenue generator in and of itself?

Kenn: Yeah, it’s a revenue generator of itself. And every product that we’ve ever launched has always come out of a need that we’ve seen for ourselves or many clients, and then we’ve developed something, and then been able to sell it. So one of those products is MCF for WooCommerce and Amazon, which has basically a bridge to allow people to sell their products on WooCommerce and have Amazon white label fulfill it for them.

Robert: For everyone who’s listening who doesn’t have an idea what MCF means, is multi-channel fulfillment.

Kenn: Yes, thank you. So Amazon’s fulfillment and so allowing Amazon to white label their fulfillment for them, and that’s in the WooCommerce extension marketplace, but that’s an example. We actually had another business that we launched. We’ve launched a handful of businesses. And it was a products company. And we were selling our product on WooCommerce and fulfillment got too big for ourselves. And so we were looking at options. We saw Amazon and we were like, “What if we create an API that could do this?” And we did it for ourselves. And then eventually we had other clients doing stuff and we were consulting them on fulfillment. And then we were like, “We should launch this.” And we built it and then eventually we were able to get it in the WooCommerce extension marketplace.

Robert: I’m going to pick on Ross for a sec to tie off of that is how often does that happen that an agency is coming to you with a solution that can be redistributed throughout the entire WooCommerce ecosystem?

Ross: Yeah, no, that’s a great question. And I think that looking at the Woo expert program and the agencies that we’re working with, typically they have their higher technical aptitude. And I would say the majority have worked on plugins or done that kind of development before. A lot of the agencies that we vet and look at not only build websites and create these great experiences for merchants, but they’re also creating products that move the platform forward, help enable builders, help enable sellers, merchants to really get the most out of their store. And that’s one of the great things about open source. And so for a lot of the agencies I work with, some may sell in different marketplaces, but we have a third party developer team that manages and vets all the products that get added to our marketplace. And so it’s a pretty cohesive relationship here at Woo, where if an agency has a good product that meets a need, we’re able to make those introductions, and hopefully get it listed, and get it to more people.

Robert: Very cool. And that’s been your experience, Kenn?

Kenn: Yeah, I would say that was really accurate. And we work with a lot of other agencies, too. We cross paths and sometimes it’s events like Woo-Con, when that was going on, and speakers, whatever. But I would say it’s probably a pretty common model of you’ve already built something and then you’re like, “Hey, there’s revenue in this, can we sell it?” And some people have done really well on that and some haven’t, but it seems pretty common.

Robbie: And by the way, since we do have someone from Woo, and you just mentioned Woo-Con, every time we get a chance, we always say, “We would love to see that come back.” So Ross, you could just take that on up the chain. Thank you.

Ross: Yeah, well, when I heard it mentioned, I figured there might be some questions on it. So there’s nothing I can say officially, but it is something that we all know that people love, so hopefully more to come.

Robert: At least there’s WooSesh to fill in the gap.

Kenn: Yes.

Robbie: Yes, absolutely. Robert, do you want to ask your next question, do you want to go down the humanitarian path now?

Robert: I just don’t want to hog the whole thing. There’s all of us here, but yes, obviously it’s very important for Never Settle in the humanitarian space. Can you dive into that and what does that mean for you guys as a company? Does it even really mean something for WooCommerce or that’s just an enablement and a tool that makes your humanitarian efforts possible?

Kenn: Yeah, I think it means something for WooCommerce and for all of our clients in that I think we looked at what were we really passionate about, what were the problems we saw in the world? And that was the one that rose to the top for me personally, and then for some of my business partners. And initially it was like my life mantra, life mission to see. And then there was unity at the company level. And we said, “Wow, we could really leverage these business resources to make a difference.” But instead of just going and starting a nonprofit or doing something else, we just took inventory and said, “Who are we? Who are we created to be? What skills do we have? What resources do we have and how can we best use those?” And we felt like they were in technology and business.

And so we were just like, “Let’s build really incredible solutions for people.” And some of them are humanitarian people on themselves. We work with a lot of different nonprofits around the world that do incredible things. But all of them give us margin that we can then pour into this anti-trafficking effort, whether it’s technology that we’re building, whether it’s just money that we’re giving to other nonprofits in that space. But every single client that trusts us with their project, we’re taking a big piece of that margin and that revenue and we’re putting it in towards trafficking.

Robert: Yeah. Are there folks you really want to give a shout-out to, so that we can put this on the internet, so everyone else can know who they are, what they’re doing, and how to contribute, and be a part of?

Kenn: Yeah, there’s some really, really incredible people. I would say one that stands out right away is Operation Underground Railroad, and they actually just released a full feature length film called The Sound of Freedom. It’s in most theaters. And that’s a really good way to understand what’s going on and how near it is to us. The experts would say there’s trafficking in every city in America. This is not an overseas problem, it’s an international epidemic.

And so I think movies like that really help. And that’s a great organization. One of the things that, as I’m going to say a couple names, it all comes into the banner of when you talk to people that are trying to see this end, everyone says, “The only way it’s going to end is if awareness is raised and then we prevent it from happening in the first place.” We have to rescue overcomers that are in that situation. We have to restore and invest into them, but the only way to stop the cycle is to catch it in the beginning. So it’s educating kids on what force coercion looks like, and it’s letting people know, like, “This is in your neighborhood and if you see something, how to recognize it, how to report it.” So Operational Underground Railroad’s, amazing.

UHAT is another organization that’s really amazing. iEmpathize is an local organization here in Colorado that’s done some incredible films, and documentaries, and other things to help raise awareness. And then the last one will be an organization called Even4One. And that’s probably one of the better ones to go to. And it’s even4one.org, and they are a directory for the US and Canada. And they’re all hand vetted organizations that you can go in and see, “I’m really interested. I want to find something that’s in my state, or I want to find something that’s in this industry,” or whatever. And you could find out how to connect with them. That’s half of what they do. The other half is they actually do live survivor help. So when people are trying to get out, they have live chat and resources to connect those people to safe houses or whatever that may be.

Robbie: Awesome. Well, thanks. I’m glad we got some of those out there so people can follow up with those if they want to.

Robbie: I know Ross brought a whole list of questions. And I have not let him ask you one question yet, Kenn. So I’m going to let Ross have the stage here and ask a question.

Ross: Awesome. That sounds great. And yeah, that’s all great stuff Kenn. And change gears a little bit, I think that something that some agencies might be interested about, and WooCommerce being open source and WordPress, it’s this platform that can do a lot of different things for businesses. And with Woo, we’re pushing to try to create a product platform that really serves those lower mid-market to mid-market customers and can really support enterprises. And I think with certain perceptions that might be out there about WordPress, some view it as not secure, or not performant, can’t scale, when agencies that are developing at a high rate are able to realize those things on the platform.

So one thing that might be interesting that I wanted to ask you was for agencies who maybe are struggling to break into that, working with merchants, or working with e-commerce businesses that are generating revenues, a million dollars plus, what was the key? Because I know you worked with a wide variety in a wide range of merchants and annual volumes. And so what’s been the key to your success in really breaking into that enterprise level merchant, convincing them, and talking why Woo is the best solution? And maybe how can other agencies get into that market space?

Kenn: Yeah, I’m hearing two core questions. One would be how to convince a enterprise level customer to trust WooCommerce when, if they think, “This is just an open source thing, a bunch of people are working on it.” And then another one, “As a agency, how do I get that kind of business?” Which is going to come partially with that convincing. But the biggest game changer for us that I wish someone would’ve told me a long time ago was, “We just put our work out there, and we started competing for awards.” A huge amount of our business was always referral based. And I really believe how you do the small things is how you do the big things. And so taking care of whatever customer we have today, knowing that long term, if we take care of them well, they will refer some business to us.

And I found a lot of times that might be five years, that was a long cycle, but now 11 years in, there’s a big pipeline of that. But I think the thing that accelerated growth outside of organic growth was really putting ourselves out there, and getting some awards, which then puts you in a directory or listing where people are going to find your services. So that was the biggest one. And then to win the business, being able to have really smart people that can articulate what WordPress and WooCommerce actually are, to get rid of the stereotype. And part of that, I like showing case studies. I like showing some of the bigger businesses that use it, some of the businesses that we’ve done. We have a client that has over a million SKUs, and they’re on WooCommerce, and they’re a retail store, they sell outdoor gear.

And so we get to walk people through that and then also explain to them, “What’s your other option? What are you looking for?” I think that’s the other thing. Something might sound arbitrary or not the best, but in comparison to what? So if we compare these other platforms, we start going through, like, “You actually own your data, you have access to your database, your source code.” And walk them through that versus, say, a leased platform, one one of the other e-commerce ones. Or, “Are you going to go 100% custom and do you have 10X the budget?” And so it starts clarifying, really, “Well when I start comparing, what are your options and what are you looking to do?”

Robert: Sorry, I got to jump in on this one, because I love the phrase that you just used, Kenn, a leased platform, which is also known as Shopify. Can I say the S word on here?

Robbie: You can.

Robert: But I’m putting leased platform into my lexicon. That’s a brilliant way of describing it. Do folks come to you saying, “We’re looking at a leased platform or custom?” And how do you navigate that conversation?

Kenn: Yeah, I would say they’re saying, “Hey, we’re looking at this out of the box solution.” And that it could be any, there’s a lot of providers that do that, or WooCommerce, or whatever. And we let people know. I think that’s part of gaining a customer’s trust, is we’ve been with WordPress from almost the beginning. Some of our developers have contributed to core, and huge fans. And to our own integrity, if it was a bad idea for someone, we would tell them not to do it. And so I think part of that’s like, “We don’t have a one size fits all, although we do a ton of WooCommerce.” But sometimes it really doesn’t make sense. So one, we just try to understand what are their needs and then walk them through what it is.

We have had quite a few people come to us once they get to a certain scale realizing they can’t do what they want. So it’s really nice to have, say, Shopify, or Squarespace, whatever, out of the box solutions that give you a lot for really cheap. And I’d say there’s a lot of plugins that do that in WooCommerce as well. But for us, one of my hot topics with WooCommerce and all of them is subscriptions. As businesses get in there, they get these quick fixes, but quickly they realize, “I actually want all this customization to my subscriptions, or to my checkout, or something.” And very quickly, those other platforms, you hit limitations, because you don’t have direct access to the database or the peer source code. You can use code to add to it, or you can use a widget, or something, but you can’t actually touch the source and you can’t own the database. So you have limitations. And so we walk people through that.

And then the other high risk I think for the people that it doesn’t make sense to be on a leased platform is just if you need 100% access to your source code, and your database, and 100% control. So we’ve had a couple people that came to us from the CBD and cannabis industry, and some of those platforms just made a sweep overnight. They didn’t tell them, they just said, “Legally, we can’t support this.” So they just shut down their site. And one of them was a dog food company, and they were doing nine million a month. So every day they were down, they were panicked. So that’s one of the things that I think we love the most about WordPress is just the ability to own your source code, own your database, and then you have to work it out with what you’re doing.

Robert: This’ll be great for other agencies in the space. How much of new business is actually migration from a leased platform?

Kenn: Yeah, 20% a fifth, maybe.

Robbie: Oh, okay. That’s lower than I thought. Yeah, but it’s lower than I thought it would be. I thought there’d be a lot more migration. I have a question along those lines, too, because you have your leased platforms, we’ll call SaaS, but the leased platforms because we just like that term, now. And then you’ve got WooCommerce, and then you’ve got custom eCom build, which do you guys ever do custom eCommerce builds?

Kenn: We do.

Robbie: Well, now I have a question for you because I find in my agency that there’s another little step in there between Woo and custom is a headless Woo, that starts mingling into custom, but you’re still using Woo as your basic framework. And have you guys also gone down that path?

Kenn: We have, yeah. And sometimes we’ve done headless WordPress with a total custom commerce engine, or headless WordPress WooCommerce and something. And then we’ve done just pure, 100% custom devs for their solution.

Robbie: Cool. So when you’re doing the headless, we’ll call it, what is the other technologies you’re typically mixing in?

Kenn: Yeah, React. But Quasar, if you guys are familiar with that. And my engineers are going to freak out if they hear this. I want to say it’s like a code engine that gives you a central repository to deploy it to iOS, Android, and a website, and potentially other solutions. So the most common reason that we don’t do WordPress, and WooCommerce, and go into 100% custom is a really unique business need, which is usually pretty massive. And I’d say one of the common denominators we always see in those are native apps. They have native iOS and Android apps that are commerce based, and they have their website, and typically they’ll be touching something else.
So one that we’re doing right now is it’s a franchise with stores all across the country, and that commerce engine has to integrate into their point of sale at the store level and at the franchise level. And so you start hitting these limitations where WooCommerce, they’ll either be as expensive, or not as scalable, or I don’t know if that’s the right way to say it. It feels like it’s in our client’s best interest to build exactly what they need. And you get so much with WooCommerce out of the box. And we’ve had a harder time integrating with apps.

Robbie: Interesting, Quasar. Now I’m going to have to look this up. I love it. I’m glad that you brought that up, because it’s interesting just to hear other things.

Robert: I love being able to real time Google while we’re talking, because I’m like looking it up. It’s a Vue JS framework, so it’s JavaScript, JavaScript, JavaScript everywhere. So whether it’s React or Vue, it’s a front end JavaScript framework, right?

Kenn: Yeah. From what I understand. I coded a long time ago and I keep drifting further and further away.

Ross: But this does lead me to another question for you, Ken, if I’m cool to ask another one, here. So with all of the changes happening in the e-commerce industry, the different platforms, headless becoming a thing now, this is maybe a broad question, but where do you envision the future of e-commerce going? And how does Woo fit into that? Whether that’s a year from now or in the next five years, I think post COVID, the landscape has started to change bit, and I’d be curious on your thoughts.

Kenn: Two things that stand out to me are subscription based businesses, which we’ve been seeing happen for a long time. Amazon pressed that quite a few years ago. And a lot of people started realizing, it was like, “My toilet paper’s going to be on delivery.” And now everyone’s like, “Oh, this makes a lot of sense.” And people also see, “Oh, it’s a recurring revenue stream.” And I think when it’s forced it doesn’t work. But I absolutely think that that segment of e-commerce is going to continue to really expand. And WooCommerce can do that out of the box, really powerful engine, there.

One of the things that we see where we get called into bigger projects are people wanting some sort of advanced subscriptions. So a client that we’re launching right now, Bixbi Pet, which is not the one that I mentioned before, the other CBD pet food thing, they have all these incredible dog foods, and all organic, and all this stuff, and they’re most PetSmarts across the country, and pretty large business. But their customers are on subscriptions for their dog food, and their dog treats, and cat food, and cat treats.

But they wanted a really cool checkout engine for people to build their subscription. So we had a lot of customization in that, but where we found the most customization, where I think it’d be fun to see us as a community invest more into WooCommerce is my account experience. That’s the thing that I feel like has the most potential, not just in design and user interface, but as an example, for these guys, they want their customers to come in and be able to just swap out what flavors they’re in. So they’re going to order three bags a month and they want to be able to go in and change those without changing the subscription. And that’s highly custom. That’s not something that you can do out of the box, or to set up an auto-rotation where they’re just surprised. They can just say, “Hey, of these six flavors, just rotate them for me.”

And so we built that for them and that’s an example. And I think not only are you going to see subscription businesses increase, but you’re going to see people really pressing into the customer experience of the subscription business. That’s the ones that we’ve seen really grow, is they really nurture those people. They see them as the goal behind their business and so they invest a lot into that experience.

And then I think just the future from what I can see is going to be just more and more personalization. It’s going to be leveraging AI, it’s going to be leveraging market automation tools, but less blanket offerings. They have something that’s written that says, “Hey, this person’s ordered 10 bags of cherry dog food,” which isn’t a real flavor, “and we’re releasing cherry treats. so we’re automatically going to present this offer to them to try it free for one month or something.” So I think personalization is one of the big things.

Robert: As a dog owner, I could not tell you how right you are on this path. That’s brilliant. Also, I would love for you guys to figure out when, actually, I need to get that dog food. Because a lot of them are like, “Okay, 30 days.” But maybe I didn’t do the math and it’s actually 20 days or 40 days. I’m just not paying attention and all of a sudden I have four bags of dog food in the garage.

Kenn: Yeah. Actually, one of the big things we did was actually a food calculator, and it’s like, “What dog is it? How much do they actually weigh?” And it’s all these things. Then it spits out a calculation and helps people do that.

Robert: That’s really cool. I’m 100% with you. The more personalization, it just makes you feel like you’re actually connected to a company that’s a million miles away in some e-commerce internet. So that I think that’s great.

Robbie: Well, I’ve got a couple of questions for you, Kenn, and one is related to what we were just talking about there, the future. And you briefly mentioned it, and that is AI. And what I’m curious about is if you guys have started thinking about, because you said you do SEO, we know SEO landscape is about to take some dramatic changes because people are starting to go into AI bots to find out information versus going and Googling for that information. So it is changing a SEO landscape. What do you guys think about that? And what are you thinking you’re going to do in the future? Just curious.

Kenn: There’s a lot of really smart people talking about this right now. And I think right now it’s the Wild West. And there’s just a lot of things to capitalize on by leveraging AI. The future of AI scares me a bit. And I think for SEO, my best guess from what I can see is that people will use AI instead of Google, asking questions. When AI starts getting connected to the live internet, in certain places, it is already, they’re just going to do that, and they’re going to let it curate the information for them. And then the question is, every business wants to rank number one, so how do you get the AI to say you’re the solution? I think there’s so much that’s unknown. One of the things is on the other side, AI now has the ability to produce mass amounts of content.

So you say the best content, and volume, and consistency. If everyone can do that with one click, it’s going to be a different game. And so I like a lot of Google’s long term rules that they’ve used for SEO or guidelines that I’ve seen, which is really just following true user behavior. So they move really into like, “Does this query answer the user’s question?” And so I think as a business or an agency that’s helping a business, just getting them not to get starstruck and worrying, trying to say, “Oh, we can use this tool and we’re going to generate all this stuff.” Just focusing on are you solving your user’s need? I think that’s going to be the best combative approach towards what AI can do for Google.

And I think that even how people are using products is just changing a lot. So as long as you make sure you take care of the people in front of you today, they’re going to tell their friends. And that’s one of the reasons influencer marketing right now is so powerful, which is going to be outside of AI. Because someone says, “Hey, I know this influencer, I know what they eat, I know what they do, I trust them. So if they say, ‘Go get this kind of dog food or whatever, I know they’ve vetted it out, and it’s a full suite pass.’” And I think people are moving more and more towards that, especially as fake media. I don’t know what you want to call it, there’s just spam, so much stuff on the internet that’s not actually true. I think people are starting to see that. And so they’re going to move more into just trusting people around them, which could be a good combative approach towards AI.

Robbie: Yeah, it is a big topic. I know asking a question like that is a hard to answer because it’s just a large topic and we don’t even know everything about it yet. Even down to mean Google does have Bard, they’re working on, but by being getting ChatGPT integrated, and stuff like that, we’re actually finally seeing Bing make a little bit of a wave. They were always, we just didn’t care, we were all geared towards Google. But I do see that this is starting to level out a little bit more out there. So it’ll be very interesting.

Okay, so my other question I have for you, and then I promise I’ll let Ross and Robert have one more question. My other question is, you mentioned that because you’re in Colorado, and cannabis is legal there, but I know that there are a lot of rules and regulations around how they can take money. So when you’re working with WooCommerce, how are you helping those cannabis industries with, how can they take money online in WooCommerce?

Kenn: It all comes down to, I think it’s where the liability sits, which is typically the bank that you’re choosing. So WooCommerce, it’s the engine to process the transaction, but it’s not actually processing the transaction, if that makes sense. There’s the gateway and then really the bank is the one. And they’re the underwriting ones that are saying, “We’re willing to take this risk.” So there are certain banks or certain payment processors that are willing to do that. And so those are the people that we connect them to.

And a lot of that’s for us has just been CBD, but even that, it’s still regulated. And there’s certain banks that are saying, “We don’t want anything to do with this because it’s not clear federally.” And there’s other banks that are just, that’s their marketing stance, like, “This is what we do.” So a lot of times the extension already exists in the Woo Marketplace, and so we just connect it through that extension that already exists, that one of the developers created, or we create the API and just connect WooCommerce to that payment processor.

Robbie: So you are finding that there are payment processors out there that are willing to work in the cannabis arena?

Kenn: For sure.

Robbie: They just can’t be FDIC, correct?

Kenn: I don’t know. I would assume not. Yeah. I’d assume that if the cash is stored in that bank, it’s not protected by the FDIC.

Robert: Correct. That’s exactly how it works.

Robbie: Awesome. Well, Ross, I’m going to let you throw another question in, here.

Ross: Maybe I’ll bring it program side. And you talked about the different awards you’ve gotten through different technology partners, and platforms, and things like that. But maybe in the ecosystem, and working with merchants, what has the Woo expert badge meant to you and your business? How has it impacted acquiring new business or networking in the community? Yeah, just what’s the overall impact that you’ve seen from the badge?

Kenn: For sure. It’s been super positive and I thought you guys would assume that when I said 20% of migrations was a low number, I said, “One-fifth,” or whatever, when you said, “How many am I migrating from these other platforms?” Part of that is because we do so much WooCommerce business. So I think that’s the thing to think about is that’s where we’re known. And it’s from a couple things. All of our WooCommerce clients, when they’re sharing referrals to us, they’re telling people what we built them. So people are already coming in with an expectation of WooCommerce. And then being in as an agency partner, getting leads or just getting recognized. We’ve had partner leads where we work together with Ross and his team to take care of something that a customer has that they know we’re uniquely skilled in. But then there’s also people just finding us in that directory. That would be another example of a directory or an award where people find us.

And it’s really tied to influencer marketing, which is why I was saying, because they’re saying, “Hey, we trust that if WooCommerce has vetted Never Settle as an agency, and they’re at their platinum level, their highest level, we trust them.” So those leads come with a lot of trust. And sometimes just people find us, and then they fill out our own contact form, and we ask them, “Hey, where’d you find us?” Like, “Oh, we saw you in the WooCommerce directory.” And that’s why I’m really excited for this. This is something we wanted for a long time. I’ve talked to a lot of the senior leadership about this for a long time. It’s like, “Hey, let’s do this together. This will be really good for both of us.” And seeing it finally take off was really, really fun. But I would say, yeah, because of a being recognized as a Woo expert and a lot of the work that we do is WooCommerce, that I think that influences that first number I gave you on the 20% that we’re migrating from other platforms into WooCommerce.

Robbie: Well, Ken, I really appreciate you coming on the show today. It’s been a very interesting conversation. And I’m going to start with you, with if you’ll just tell the audience how they can get in touch with you and find you after this, if they would like to reach out?

Kenn: Yeah, the best place would just be neversettle.it.

Robbie: Awesome. Are you also on any of the social media?

Kenn: I am. I’m trying to think. I’m not a big social media guy. But I’m on LinkedIn and I am on Instagram. I think I’m on Instagram as Kenn, K-E-N-N_K-E-L-L-Y. But not going to find a lot of volume there on those.

Robbie: Well, you’re busy. You’re busy building WooCommerce sites.

Kenn: That’s right.

Robbie: Ross, how can people find and reach out to you?

Ross: So if you are an agency that’s interested in joining the program, you can go to the WooCommerce dot com website and click Become an Expert to see what it’s about. And if you are a merchant or a business owner that’s looking for an agency partner, you can go to partners.woocommerce.com, and I believe it’s /english/marketplace. You can also find it through the WooCommerce.com website, never fear. And you can find our great agency partners there. So if you need work done, they’re going to be the best help you achieve those goals. And then I am also on LinkedIn, if you want to reach out to me directly or you can always email me, ross.spadaro@automatictt.com.

Robbie: And Robert?

Robert: robertjacobi.com, @robertjacobi on Twitter. That’s the easiest.

Robbie: And yes, you can find me @ostraining.com or I’m on any of the social medias as Robbie Adair. There’s me and a soccer player in Canada. I am not the athletic one. That’s how you can find me. But yes, thank you for joining us today and watch out for the next episode of Do the Woo.

Robert: Thanks, Kenn. Thanks, Ross. Thanks, Robbie.

Kenn: Thanks for having us.

Ross: Thank you.