Differentiating Your Agency Through Stronger Client Relations

Nuno:
Hello. I’m Nuno Morgadinho. I’m the CEO at WigiLabs, and I’m here with Jesper and we we’re going to have this, this podcast today. and just before we start, a little bit about myself. So I’m the CEO at WigiLabs. I essentially a digital agency. We specialize in WordPress design, development websites, e-commerce and, and also platforms. And we’ve been in the market for 12 years now, more or less. So we started in 2011 and essentially our, our clients, we, we had a couple of digital newspapers here, here in Portugal, we’re based in Lisbon. and, and so those were, I would say, two of the most projects that have more, more visibility here. But as, as an agency, we end up working with sometimes bikini web shops, sometimes more business clients, et cetera. And so I’m, I’m going to hand it off to Jasper for, for his intro and then we’ll, we’ll continue with, with our chat.

Jesper (01:22):
Hi I’m Jesper Wallmander and I’m the CEO and founder of Wallmander based off of Gutenberg in Sweden. We are also a ecommerce agency. we’re almost do almost yes to e-commerce mainly on WooCommerce. So we’ve been, we started at 2007 and got into WordPress fairly early and focused on WordPress and then moved on to WooCommerce. And our clients is a range from the medical clients, B2B clients a lot of fashion brands. So we have clients all over the place as well.

Nuno (01:58):
Cool. And so already I see a couple of differences between our, our structures and our, our ways of going to, to the market. because I see you guys are not just doing WordPress, right? You’re also working with other platforms, is that correct?

Jesper (02:16):
Yes. we’ve been focusing on since we’ve been focusing just on e-commerce we got into some SaaS platforms as well. So brought one or two SaaS platforms in alongside WooCommerce. yes, they have the option for the clients and also the those or we work with BigCommerce as well. ’cause BigCommerce works very good with WordPress as a content as well, since we really like, like WordPress and have a long, long history with WordPress, that fits very nicely long WooCommerce for us as offer.

Nuno (02:52):
Yes. And so in terms of people structure, how do you normally organize things? Who tackles a, a client? Is it a, a pm is it an account manager?

Jesper (03:07):
WEe usually have a team usually led by a pm but it’s usually a team that tackles the client, both the technical lead and the design lead. so we’re a group of people looking at the solution. And of course, as everyone else, it looks different than depending on what stage the client is in. Usually it’s more of a business structure, business investigation in the beginning of our project, and then hands over more to daily work. And the PM sort of needs the, when the goals is set up and everyone sort of knows which way we heading, then the PM has a really structured or really key role of making that happen with the clients.

Nuno (03:48):
Yeah, so, so we, we’ve, we’ve kind of had an evolution, right? So we, we started mostly just us being developers and, and, and dealing with clients. And once we started having bigger clients and bigger projects, obviously we started feeling the cracks and, and feeling the need to, to have a, a pm and, and a more formal structure. but, but it was, it was also good when we were just developers, you know, just, just having just having fun and, and being able to, to interact directly with the clients. And one thing I always found interesting is that some clients, they, so sometimes we want projects because clients would say, we, we rather work with you because we know when, when we call in or when we send an email, it’s, it’s actually an engineer or a, a developer answering us, and it’s not, you know, the account or, or the support people or who are going to ask us to create a ticket or, or something like that, right? So it, it had, you had a similar experience where, where you know, sometimes you need to fence off clients. Sometimes you want to enrich the relationship with them, you know?

Jesper (05:18):
Yeah, I totally understand what you’re saying. I think we have, well, we talk about the PMs at our agency. our PMs are own developers, so that’s actually a problem scaling that we had bringing in product managers. ’cause our clients are very used as your clients were to talk with someone with a very high technical knowledge, especially when we do technical stuff like integrations and like advanced or performance reviews. They don’t want to talk with the pm, but just says, I’m gonna do a ticket. I don’t, oh, let me check with people. They want to talk with people that actually know what they’re talking about. and that tends to be the developers in this case, especially as it’s a dead heavy. So we definitely had that experience. And I think we are more like you guys that our PMs are actually people that are, they’re working with the platform.

(06:15):
They’re working with WooCommerce, they know WooCommerce and they have been developers themselves. So they, they can do a lot of that stuff. They just might get it over to have more, more client focused work and led less time actually coding. But they, they are developers. so we’re as you very damn heavy. so, which has been a problem bringing just PM people ’cause they, we, we spoil our clients with having people that are developers and can ask the developers questions, which sometimes is a problem. ’cause sometimes we need to get the team involved.

Nuno (06:51):
Yeah, definitely. And so, so how, how do you normally approach like bigger projects? Do you have like a discovery phase?

Jesper (07:02):
Yeah, we, we have a discovery that’s pretty, we usually bigger projects. We usually have discovery phase, and then we have, we sort of turn that into retainer. So a longer contract with monthly work. And so we try not to, our products are not, usually the big products are more ongoing retainer type of works than actually a big project.

Nuno (07:26):
Interesting.

Jesper (07:26):
Sometimes it’s we scope like a part of a project or a start of the project, but then we move it over to retainer work. And we feel that, that, that works better for, especially bigger clients. ’cause it’s very easy for them to calculate the budget job of that. But they, they have the budget for the year. It’s very easy. when that budget is set and we stay inside that budget, everyone is pretty much happy. We can focus on the result instead of trying to keep, keep the time inside the budget or inside the project. And when, when you do product scoping, it sort of tends to get more focused and actually doing the hours or managing the hours inside the product and actually focus on the results so you don’t get the products product creep. So we try to move that to retainer work with longer contracts with our clients.

Nuno (08:19):
Yeah, definitely. The retainer is, is, is a game changer, isn’t it? Because it changes your focus from you know, doing things as fast as possible because you cannot build many hours to, to okay, you, you have more flexibility, you have more, more time to do things properly and, and it’s more a long-term relationship. Right?

Jesper (08:43):
Yeah. And also, one thing, one thing that really has made a difference for us and different for our clients is when, when we have weekly meetings with the clients, and it has to be every week. It can’t be every other week. It has to be weekly meetings. We’ll have weekly meetings with the clients. Those clients are happy, and those, those projects go well. So that has been really sort of game changer across to really get those projects. And also you have to be on a certain level of retaining pay to work with them every week. But the clients that we have, that we work on every week, they are always happy.

Nuno (09:19):
Nice, nice. And I guess it ends up being more of a, a partnership rather than a, than you guys being a vendor for, for them, right?

Jesper (09:28):
Yeah, I mean, that’s, that’s what we wanna say, that we want to be a partner with the client. But that’s, it’s, it’s easy to say that, especially when they, the clients say that they want to partner, but then when we talk once every month, it’s not really a partnership . So we feel that, or I’ve noticed that to be able to really be a partner for client, we need to talk with them. We, we need to have a weekly meeting that that meeting can be on just for 15 minutes if everything is running smoothly. But it has to be every week.

Nuno (09:56):
And and of course we, we, we barely know each other, so we’re just, just for context here in this podcast, but before me, me and Jasper, we, we didn’t we, we ha didn’t connect earlier. we just had a previous very short chat before, before recording this. but from that short chat I, I, one idea I, i, I took is that you guys don’t act just, just as at the platform level, but you see yourselves more as can I say maybe as a strategy partner where, where you try to look at the different all, all the, all the tech stack that the client is using is, is that correct? How, how would you frame it? Yeah, we call it a sort of a tech stack agency. And we feel that our approach is that we have several partnerships. and to build a successful e-commerce site, it’s usually a mix up of three to four to five different platforms. They need to connect, they need to work, work with each other both inside grow loyalty programs email marketing or retention, marketing search filtering the, those different stuff. So we try to work really close with different, different vendors and different platforms that are just not the e-commerce platform and Build strong. So we have built ready-made solutions, we’ll try, which we tested those solution and we know how to use those solutions as well as the platform. so we have a sort of a tech stack approach to our science. so, ’cause usually they come and they have their own solution, but then they ask us to make that solution work and we know what partners that work, and we also know what part partners or for us that we have worked before.

(11:56):
So we know, or what, what platforms we are good at and where we have a good, good partnership with. I think good partnership is really key. ’cause then we can get our clients the help that they need. And we also know who to talk with when they need help. so I think that’s really, we sort of evolved to not just look at the platform, not just look at the platform as the only thing that makes the e-commerce solution good. It’s a, it’s a mix up of a lot of part, a lot of, yeah, a tech stack sort of. And we have our preferred tech stack solutions which we know and we’ve built before.

(12:35):
Well, what we’re saying is that when, when clients come to us and they say they want to build a web shop, that’s not actually what they want. What they want is to sell online, right? And so to sell online, you need more than the platform, right? You need the marketing, you need the authority, you need the audience, you need so many things. Right? And but, but at the core, you’re not a digital marketing agency, right? You see yourself as as a development agency or, yeah,

Jesper (13:06):
We we’re, we’re, we’re still, we’re still, we’re still definitely the web development or development agency. We’re very dev heavy. just that I mean, integrations is a really big thing that we do. We integrate to a lot of systems, a lot of EPIM systems, a lot of ERP systems. So integration is really a and that’s, that’s a really core thing that we do. and I would say that’s really a hardcore development sort of . but yeah that way might, there’s a lot of integrations when I look at different, different tech stack or different partnerships and different systems to work to works with each other. there’s a lot of stuff that, yeah, a lot of stuff that needs to work. And that tends to be developers that, that have sort of,

Nuno (13:54):
So, so in terms of tools, what, what kind of tools are, are you working with? When you say you have those, those, those tax stack solutions, how does a typical tech stack look, looks like?

Jesper (14:07):
well, usually, I mean, for us, search is really big part. Search and filtering and merchandising is on a quote part. And yeah, search on WooCommerce can be better. So we usually look outside to third party to do search. And there we have a couple of different platforms depending on the client’s budgets. so we use Clark, for example, which is this Danish platform. there’s a couple other, other ones that are really good as well, but that’s, they have good connection and good solution for WordPress or WooCommerce Klavio of course on email marketing and customer retention. Klavio is a really a strong partner for us. something we’re really integrated, almost every client that we have, it’s a really good way of actually getting into the business of making them money. and that also ties into segmentation of the clients and really how, how they work with the clients and making sure they don’t lose or make more money. it’s a great tool for that. YoPo is another great science that we do. review.io reviews on site. And also have a loyalty program, which is really great platform that we use a lot. so there’s several different platforms that we both enjoy working with. ’cause we know that that makes the client’s website better, basically.

Nuno (15:32):
So, so let me, let me challenge you on that, which is, you mentioned several, several tools, but at, at the end of the day, I’m guessing other agencies also use those tools, or more or less the same tools. So how, so how, how do you differentiate yourself? How do you see yourself doing things different from, from the other agencies who also use those tools?

Jesper (15:59):
almost almost I don’t see ourselves has to do better than other agencies. I think if we use the same tools that other agencies, it’s just a, it’s just a testament that we use in the right tools. I think for us, I mean, the same thing with WooCommerce. there’s another of great agencies out there that do WooCommerce great. we try to be one of them. and I think for all the tools you need to know how to, how those tools work and what they work for and what they not work for. I mean, we, we don’t have exclusivity to do WooCommerce and I don’t have it. You don’t have there’s, but there’s so many ways to mess up the platform and do wrong with the platform, and we just try to stick with platforms that we know that we actually can be good at.

(16:48):
I think that was, that was the one of the things that we really decided really early on with WordPress that we just gonna focus on WordPress. We are gonna work with one platform. ’cause we wanna be really good at platform. And I can’t, I’ve been there, been in the industry long enough to, we have, we have developed our own e-commerce platform. We’ve built our own custom solutions. we, since we’ve been developers, we’ve been working, if client can came to us in the beginning and said we have a deal or whatever, we like, oh, we can work with that. ’cause we know the programming skills. So it’s just not about development. I think it’s knowing the tool, knowing how to perform in that tool, and also knowing how to set it up and actually do good for the, or best practice in the tools. So I think it’s just for us, we don’t have to be better. We just have to be good. if we can do be good than all those tools I think we’re gonna help our clients a lot. And I think there’s a lot of clients that need good help out there.

Nuno (17:53):
Yeah, definitely. Definitely.

Jesper (17:55):
So, so for us, it’s just be knowing the tools that we suggest for the clients, even though there’s a great email marketing tools, we know Klaviyo, so it’s, we can help them with Klaviyo. we don’t know any other tools. So it’s, we can say, this works, this doesn’t work, but these flows, we’ve done that for 20 times, this gonna work.

Nuno (18:19):
Yeah. And I, if, if you asked me the same question, I would say, yeah, we more or less we use the same tools as other agencies, you know especially internal tools as well, right? So everyone’s essentially using Slack these days and, and ClickUp or Monday for, for task management and other similar tools. But, there’s a lot of similar tools between agencies from, from, from what I can see at least. And I feel what kind of differentials differentiates ourself with clients is more sometimes the kind of handholding we do with them, the kind of support we do with them the advising them as well. Sometimes almost seeing the, the, the client as, you know, it almost as if it were our own business. You know, if I were in your shoes, what, what I would do. Right? And and, and I guess for, for you guys is the same at the end of the day. So and of course for us, something that clients also when they come to us, sometimes it’s because of other clients we’ve worked with and other brands and other projects that they’ve come across as well. Right. That interesting.

Jesper (19:46):
I I think it’s more about the experience than the tools. I mean the tools like pens , you can do amazing drawings, you can do bad drawings with it. I think learning those tools that we have, and I mean, we always thought that the expert role is more, it’s more fun to be expert at something ’cause people come to you ’cause you’re good at something and it’s very easy when you’ve done it 20 times to do it, do it good the 21st time than doing something new the first time. So, so I guess the experience, you just been doing it for a long time. I don’t know if you get a lot of I would say badly done WooCommerce cases come to you , and you, you see people that are messed up in different ways.

Nuno (20:26):
Exactly. So yeah, we, we also do a lot of, you know, speed improvement projects and taking on sometimes legacy projects from other parties as well, from other agencies as well sometimes. And with WooCommerce, it’s, it’s like you say, it’s, it’s easy to, to mess up, right? and, and it’s also my experience is that sometimes also if, if you have success, which is great but you are on maybe an older WooCommerce or maybe you are, you’re still on a shared hosting or, or something like that the, the site starts, you know, becoming slow and, and, and almost crawling to, to a halt sometimes. and, and when clients come to us with that sort of, of issue, it’s, it’s making the platform look, look bad as well, right? So, so we see sometimes people are on the edge of changing platforms when they come to that.

Jesper (21:38):
Yeah, I think that’s something I know, but for us it’s been, when they worked with WooCommerce store, it’s very easy to see what they need to do to make it sort of great again or make it like really fast and improve, improve it is pretty easy, easy fixes usually but there’s a lot of people doing it in the wrong way or not optimized way. so I think it’s really, yeah, for us it’s really, you see stuff and you, you’ve seen it a lot of, lot of times. So it’s really easy to see yeah. Then again, to be specialist that something is really easy to see what improve. And you seen, seen most of the stuff before

Nuno (22:20):
Really because for me, I feel s it, it can be a lot of different things, right? Sometimes it can be the database, sometimes it can be a plugin, sometimes it can be the hosting, sometimes it could be, you know, something else or all of them, right? So I, I feel performance in WooCommerce is still, and, and I, I hope now with, with, you know, the cost of order tables, et cetera, I, I feel that that will obviously improve a lot. But up, up to this point, improvement has been the bottleneck of, of WooCommerce, would you agree?

Jesper (23:01):
Yeah, I think the speed improvements that we’re seeing I think that’s getting a lot of us excited. so I think that’s, and it’s also, I think I think one of the problems out there for just speed our WooCommerce WordPress is that it’s a bit different on building speed on WooCommerce than it just on WordPress. Plus you can use, use a caching plugin on WordPress and then you’re fine. WooCommerce requires a bit more work to actually perform and making sure you use the right plugins and Right, right, the correct hosting providers. so I definitely, definitely agree with you. speed is definitely, there’s a lot of talk speed about speed out there. And I mean, we just have Black Friday or Black Week or so there’s a lot of focus on performance and speed, speed and stability. I’m ha really happy with the performance and what’s happening going forward. It’s but I think we all wanted to go faster or as our clients wanted you, we want to be done yesterday.

Nuno (24:05):
So, yeah. And I mean, we, we talked about hosting a database, sometimes multilingual plugins is also the culprit. So when, when you tie together WooCommerce with, with multilingual, is, is that a horror story for you guys? Or, or is it just business as usual?

Jesper (24:29):
No, since we have great people in Germany that does a really great plugin for multilingual, so it makes it a bit easier. I mean, multilingual it’s easy to get wrong in the agency to make that performance wise really bad. I would say multilingual press is the, the best one for performers out there. I think the toughest part for real science is just managing multi-sites. I don’t think we have found is that people, they don’t expect it to be, be as much work as it is to maintaining a multi-site or main, or not maintaining a multi-site, maintaining several different languages and markets. I think a lot of people want to go some everywhere and want all languages, and then they, they don’t understand how much work it is to send to different ingredients and sell to different languages.

Nuno (25:22):
Admin work they, they will have, right?

Jesper (25:24):
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Admin work in itself, it’s just that it’s a, it’s not the technical solution for us that’s that complicated. It’s actually getting the client to understand how much work it’s for them to maintain five different languages.

Nuno (25:47):
Let’s say once you come off and, and let’s say conclude those, those speed improvements, what, what are the metrics you’re, you’re looking at and what do you think are the most important metrics? Because obviously Google with core web vitals is, is having a big, a big play in this but maybe there’s some other metrics you guys look for as well.

Jesper (26:15):
Sales? Yeah. no, I mean, if you learn from technical metrics on the site, or we work a lot with the clients on how they should send more, which can be in so many different ways. but I think it’s, I would say a Google Page feed maybe gets sometimes too much. people tend to be, tend to think that’s more important may than maybe this sometimes there’s a lot of other stuff we can do that would be much more important for the client than actually that can actually bring sales than to be too much focused on page feed. and there’s several different way of page feed as well. I mean, you can have a bad page feed on Google, on Google but have a really fast sight just ’cause it isn’t optimized in the correct way for Google, but it’s still gonna be fast for the clients and it’s still gonna sound like crazy.

(27:11):
So sometimes we try to look at a lot of the numbers and what, what we should do for the clients to be able for them to sell more. It could be did they go into Facebook, Facebook advertising, or how do they perform in SEO? what are, or how does the email marketing actually work? and sometimes it’s bringing one of the partners that we have that are really good at SE to improve their SEO scope because ’cause that’s gonna bring, if they have good conversion, then they just bring in more people, pretty much. So I don’t know, what do you get, what do you guys focus on? Do you have a metric that you focus on or,

Nuno (27:51):
Well tend to use to give more attention to, to Google core web vitals these days, right? So that has been a an evolution as well. We, and, and of course, performance and like you said, it, you can look at it from, from different angles, but one, one particular metric, or two metrics I particular look for is, well, one of them is the time on site. So how, how, how much time the person is actually going through the products, going through exploring the shop rather than coming into the shop and, and immediately closing it, right? So because if people are interacting with, with the, the brand and the products, et cetera, somehow they’re enjoying the experience, right? And they’re not immediately going, going off. and the other one is just time to, to checkout, right?

(28:56):
So since you arrive and land on the homepage until you can finish a purchase, how long is that process? How many clicks do you have to go through, right? And I feel sometimes people, e-commerce founders, let’s say, tend to, to, to overlook that, and they’re focused on having great images, which is obviously very important and, and focused on a number of other aspects. But at, at the end of the day, we need something to, we need to, the owner needs to decide which metrics are important, and we need to measure those and, and, and improve those, right? And so there’s, there’s also not right and, and wrong metrics that they’re just metrics you, you, you want to measure, right? But, but I feel, I feel that that’s a key difference between WooCommerce and, you know, other SaaS platforms where, where people performance is, is not top, top of mind at all. Right?

Jesper (30:04):
Yeah. I think, I mean, I think really correct. I think it’s one of the most important thing is just the choose metric and just focus on improvement, right? So like, just get getting yourself the baseline and say, okay, this, how can we improve this? How can we or improve this? I think that’s the most important part. continuous improvement is it’s gonna get you there sooner or later, as I think that’s really good. And I think yeah, we have the luxury of be able to do a lot of stuff and improve a lot of stuff with WooCommerce since we can do anything with WooCommerce pretty much, which you can’t do on the, on other SaaS platforms. So it’s both pro pros and cons that comes with open source and, and the WooCommerce, but if you do it right, it’s amazing platform and you can do amazing stuff.

Nuno (30:53):
So how, how are you seeing the latest developments in, in WordPress and, and Woo I’m talking about, for example, full, full site editing on WordPress and also in terms of Woo, for example the high performance order storage and, and other things that are happening. are you excited for the future of WordPress and Woo, or what’s your take?

Jesper (31:22):
Yes, I’m really excited for I would say almost , especially WordPress blocks and think it looks or are really amazing. I think when we, we’ve been dabbing into the headless space a bit and looking at what other head headless CMS tools. I think when it comes to content, WordPress is macing CMS tool sometimes a bit underrated, I think from, especially from the SaaS point of view. but I think WordPress is one of the best, if not, if I can have my own opinion, it’s the best CMS tool out there and most flexible one. And Emory, it’s al always the easiest, I would say the easiest one to use, but I’ve been using for a long time, so it’s, it’s easy one, you know, how to, but I’m really exciting. It feels like WordPress is really taking a big jump forward to modernize. And of course WooCommerce is gonna tag along to that. And if you combine the new performance enhancement with Word WooCommerce and then full start editing on WordPress, it’s a really, really interesting and I would say exciting platform in the future. And I dunno, what do you think about the future or how do you look at the future?

Nuno (32:37):
So, so before going the future, let me just talk about that as well, which is short story. The, the, a couple of of months ago I was looking at this new client and, and talking with, with, with the colleague about it and about the client, and it’s a high profile client that, that, that came to us. And, and we were kind of having this chat where, okay this, this client is, is high profile. They’re, they’re also obviously looking for, they’re enterprise level, they’re looking for an enterprise CMS solution in, in, in a way. And, and we need to deliver, you know, something, something at that level, right? And and I, I remember my friend going into chat GPT and, and asking chat GPT to, you know, make a comparison of different CMS solutions out there and compare them with, with car brands, you know, so for example, if WordPress was a a a car, what, what brand would would that be? You know, just to make it easier to also to, to present to the client the different options. And, and she, GPT came with Toyota for WordPress. So it’s very flexible, very, very open. And then you had other, other car brands there as well. I, I, is that, is that how you see WordPress, the, the Toyota of CMSs, or would you assign a a different brand to it?

Jesper (34:22):
and maybe the Lexus part of Toyota. There’s so many variants of WordPress. if we look at the full, full site editing, I think that’s really innovative and it’s, that’s really beating a lot of the CMS tools out there, especially a lot of the headless CMS tools out there. If you look at the only standard version of WordPress yeah, it’s not gonna be as exciting car maybe but the, the future with the Autoscale, like, I really enjoy the future and really like where it’s heading. And I think the, I guess the car, it’s all depending on what what other CMS tools you’re comparing it to, I guess.

Nuno (35:06):
True, true.

Jesper (35:07):
So how are you gonna reference it,?

Nuno (35:09):
Yeah. and going into more the, the enterprise space, I know you guys do all or most of your work is with enterprises, right?

Jesper (35:20):
Yep.

Nuno (35:20):
Do you see also a, a, a big opportunity for, for enterprises with workplace?

Jesper (35:26):
I would say so. I mean, we’ve been doing WordPress for both enterprise and stock NASDAQ stock listing companies for more than 10 years. we, I think we launched our first WordPress site for a NASDAQ listed company in 2012. and at that time people didn’t use WordPress to do websites because WordPress was a blog platform, but I think we had done several high profile NASDAQ listed companies here in Sweden, then, both from a WordPress point of view, just the editing point. And I would say it works great, and if you make it secure and good hosting and everything that’s a tool that I definitely feel comfortable recommending people to do enterprise stuff with. Then I think it’s a, it’s a choice for people. Some, some prefer the SaaS sort of approach sometimes it’s a, it’s more a flavor of, of the, of the client if they want own everything themself with the pros of having a open source platform out there with when the control they get with that. And some, some people doesn’t want to have control, just give control to someone else and pay for it. but I’m definitely feel very secure and I think definitely WordPress has the enterprise level space out there. how do you look at it since you, you work work with Word magazines a lot, you said?

Nuno (36:52):
Yeah, news media especially. and for us it’s, it’s a question of how, how can we make what we’re going to make into this, you know, delightful user experience at the end. And, and WordPress obviously doesn’t, doesn’t limit you in that regard. And, but sometimes clients still think WordPress will limit li limit them in, in some way, right? So we, we also have to do a, a little bit of educating in, in that, in that regard. Yeah. I, I feel there’s, there’s, there’s, there’s many opportunities and we see WordPress also evolving and changing along these years, right? So, like I said, we’ve been in the market for, for 11 years and, and so much has, has changed, right? And up almost to the point where are we going to be making custom themes for next year? Or are, are we going completely into full site editing and, and not doing so many custom to themes? how, how do you guys see that? Do, do you, do you do a lot of custom, custom themes as well? Or how, how do you approach design and all those aspects?

Jesper (38:16):
We almost just do custom themes. we have a, a, a custom team that we work out of that are already integrated to our tech, the tech stack partners. So we have an easy way to integrate the different features. So we, a lot of the stuff that we start off with the boilerplate or our base theme has those partners like the search, the search and features from those partners all in the business. We sort of, we sort of start off with the tech, tech stack plate, sort of a tech stack more than just a theme. It’s, it’s already integrated with our tech stack, so we get sort of a headstart with those, with the tech stack approach. so we try to do that to, so we can spend less shorter time on building our websites, basically. so we try not to do everything from scratch, but having a, a startup theme that we can start off work from to save, save we’ll save time and money for our clients, and also have a best practice approach if we have done it before, we know what’s working and we know we don’t have to build the same integration 10 times.

(39:27):
that’s, that’s, we don’t think it’s fun and people don’t think it’s fun to pay for it. So true. We try to reuse stuff. So I would say, yeah, the custom themes and I think especially when you look at, it’s, yeah, the full side I think is both the good and bad. if you know what you’re doing, it’s great. If you don’t letting the client have too much control on, on how stuff looks as well, it can be dangerous ’cause it’s not gonna be consequent house font sizes, colors and everything. sometimes you need to regulate the bits to make it look good.

Nuno (40:05):
So going into community you guys obviously have been a part of the WordPress community for, for years now. how, how do you see the community also evolving? Let’s say we’ve, we’ve had many, many meetups, many word camps in the past couple of years. Do, do you think those formats will hold in the fu in the future? Or do we need new formats, new ways of people connecting?

Jesper (40:38):
I, I think the word camps has been a lot developer focused. for me personally I found that camps, or camps or get togethers with other platforms outside has been more beneficial for me as a agency owner as a developer and WordPress worker. Work camps are great, but for me as a, regardless of getting business and getting leads and meeting merchandising and expanding my network could also be that, you know, another people in the WordPress. So coming to WordCamp is more meeting old friends than getting to know more new people. so for me, it’s been more beneficial to getting to know new people outside and getting a closer connection with other tech stack agency or tech stack partnership that we have.

Nuno (41:30):
What do you see those, those events doing well that, that we could kind of model in, in world camps?

Jesper (41:39):
I think those events, they tend to have a lot of merchants there. They have a lot of merchants looking for their solution. maybe not always a lot of agencies there, which as, of course, this agency is very interesting to be where the clients are, not the other agencies. It’s always no nice to meet all the other agencies, but it’s from a, from a business point of view, it’s better to meet merchants than other agencies even though it’s and have a beer and discuss different topics. so I, I think if we can get more clients to get to the WordCamp, not just sort of people from the industry, it’s going to be more interesting for us.

Nuno (42:26):
So that, that’s an interesting point you, because you’re obviously talking about, in a way, client acquisition, right? And so obviously for, for client acquisition, we would go to other conferences and other events, but I feel agencies like, like, like ours and, and yours, we also need to look at world camps as almost as if our bigger team is coming together and what can we do as, as a bigger team in driving WooCommerce to other places, you know? So we, we, we, we still see or, or I still see many agencies just looking at themselves and thinking, okay, we’re, we’re this agency and we’re doing good work and et cetera, but they’re not essentially, they’re not driving WooCommerce, they’re, they’re just using it, you know? and we suffer from that as well. So obviously we could contribute much more to, to WooCommerce and, and, and WordPress. But do you, do you feel a need to do, do you see that vision as well where almost as we’re not just a small agencies, we’re actually a, a, a bigger bubble where a lot of small agencies is what makes w WordPress and Woo what what they are?

Jesper (43:53):
Yeah, I mean I I definitely, if you mean the part of the community so yes I share a lot with other WooCommerce agencies that I getting know year, during years. some, some people more than others, but it’s, I have the other agency owners that I speak with on a fairly regular, regular basis and discuss on different things. And so I think, I think the network, it’s, yeah, there’s a, maybe not answering the correct question, but it’s yeah, the network you get from the community, that’s great. I think it’s twofold. I think a network for me as agents owner, and there’s a network as a, as a WooCommerce business and then being a part of the community and sharing among the community what’s good practice and best practice, and how we can make WooCommerce better

Nuno (44:47):
For Shopify. For example, if, if we, if we partner with Shopify and, and we are you know, doing stuff for, for Shopify, there’s no expectation of us, you know, giving back to Shopify in a way or contribute or, or driving you know, the next release of Shopify or whatever. But, but with wool, we, we can do that, right? We can we can suggest things and contribute back and, and, and make the end platform better for all. Is that something that appeals to you guys or obviously we have a business to run at the end of the day and we need, we need to, we need to take care of it, right? Yeah,

Jesper (45:33):
I think that was something that I found very, for me, the first time I got into a long time when I get into word-based business, I felt getting into the open source community where it’s very nice ’cause of the sharing mentality. and a lot of people has that sharing mentality, even though, even though they don’t contribute to the exact WooCommerce features or community, they, they feel like they’re, it’s not a problem to help a competitor ’cause a lot of people share. and there’s so many ways you can contribute as well with just like releasing plugins on features that we have done and just work outside that platform, sort of working inside the ecosystem. so I enjoy being a part of the ecosystem. We haven’t been very good at contributing and like commercializing our stuff that we have done. We tried a few times, but we also feel like if we have released a plugin or release a feature or a service, there’s, we not product people, then you have to take care of that as well. and it’s your responsibility to take care and maintain the support that feature plugin. so we’re, we’re a more of a by bystander looking at the community than contributing.

Nuno (46:53):
Cool. And in, in terms of I think we’re probably it cross crossing the time limit here, but in, in terms of obviously with all the AI revolution that that’s going on do you see AI playing a big part in, in in the Woo ecosystem and in are, are clients already asking you to do some, some things with AI? Or, or not yet? How are you seeing it?

Jesper (47:27):
it’s an interesting, we’re getting into I think we’re gonna see a lot of the AI tunes out there. for me personally, it’s both yeah, it’s, it’s both interesting and frightening at the same time. I think a lot of people, I think we’re gonna have a, a lot of people gonna try AI and do a lot of stuff with ai. We always see several features like writing product text and everything. And, and it’s amazing how fast this has come about. But we also see that, I mean, you lose control and if you try to build a brand, if you don’t have control of your communication, it’s never going to be your brand. It’s gonna be a generic AI brand, which a lot of brands that are successful, successful have done, done stuff that are sometimes different from others. So I don’t know if AI is going to have that, like creating those innovations or breakthroughs or sometime breaking the rules and making stuff look like an anything they haven’t seen before. so I think we are gonna have, I think a lot of people are gonna try AI and we, I think we’re gonna have a backlash on people understanding AI can’t fix anything for me. I think you still have to do some work, work yourself, especially if you want to sell. ’cause if you do something that everyone else is doing and you’re not gonna be more successful than anyone else. See that

Nuno (48:59):
There’s also a side of AI that I think is not being talked enough or it, it’s not known yet, which is, especially for e-commerce brands, how will those brands be able to do, let’s say, product placement inside this, those large language models, you know, so, so that when people ask, okay, but what’s the best laptop for me as, as a WordPress developer, which brands are, are going to appear on that answer, right? because essentially those, those tools can also drive e-commerce, right? But, but then we don’t know how, how that will, will work in the future. Right?

Jesper (49:45):
It’s a both interesting and frightening future.

Nuno (49:48):
True, true. Okay. I think we’re, we’re going to wrap it up here and just perhaps leave here some, some ways for people to, to connect with us. And I’m on Twitter. Morgadinho iis my name and on LinkedIn as well, on Slack WordPress dot org, slack. So if anyone wants to, to reach out and, and you Jesper?

Jesper (50:21):
Yeah, the easiest way to find me is on LinkedIn, I would say. that’s where you find me. So Jesper will on LinkedIn

Nuno (50:27):
Or the next WordCamp. Yeah. Okay. Do, do you have a, a next WordCamp planned already or no. we haven’t we’ll probably go to on European one next year, but it’s, it’s a long time to, to get there, , before we get there.

(50:44):
Okay. So there’s a WordCamp in Portugal happening early next year, so you’re invited. Yep. And, and everyone’s listening. Please check that out as well. Okay. I think that’s it. Thanks.

Jesper (51:01):
Thank you.

Nuno (51:01):
Thank you.