Ecommerce Agency Growth, Challenges, Workflow and Team Building

Matt (00:00):
Hey, I’m Matt Nelson. I’m the owner of FastTracks Marketing. We’ve been, this is our 14th year in business. We’ve been primarily specializing in WooCommerce. We’ve been in the Woo Experts program for quite some time. Have grown our business alongside of the ongoing evolution of that software and extension that I’ve built up a team of about 12 on this end and are actively supporting quite a few e-commerce properties all over the United States and helping them grow their businesses and run marketing and campaigns and all that fun stuff that goes with it and tracking and analytics and want to hear more about what your guys’ setup is. We tend to be the solution provider. If we’re engaging with a client and we have worked with them before, there’s some kind of problem they want to solve because they’ve grown to a certain point or they want to increase their sales or their switching platforms or whatever, and that ends up being a good fit for us and they like the work that we do. There’s the very high probability that we end up creating some kind of service program for them post-launch to help push all of that after the fact, depending on what their goals are. And there’s a lot of key things about that process that we’ve developed over the years to try and help make that a more efficient process for them and give them a little bit more key visibility into what’s actually happening instead of getting a lot of gray, fluffy numbers that don’t accurately explain the investment that they’re putting into things.

Neil (01:37):
Yeah. Awesome. Yeah. We’re digital agency been around a few years longer than your company? I think we’re at 17, but really it’s not that much longer in the grand scheme of things. It started as a freelancing thing going back to the early two thousands, but then eventually got to the point where I was like, oh, I need a business partner. I need to hire, I need to grow. And e-commerce was always a big part of what I did. We’re talking like post.com era where it was still the wild west. I remember building applications from hand. I was like the quote full stack designer, developer working for companies in direct response marketing. It was crazy.

Matt (02:16):
That’s where I started too, the direct mail and brochures and all that fun stuff.

Neil (02:20):
For me, it was a lot of language learning products based on a company that was here in Philly that’s no longer around, but when we started Inverse, it was a lot of small business websites and start working with Joomla as the first content management system. We adopted Zen Cart or OSS Commerce as the first e-commerce platform that eventually there was a e-commerce add-on for Joomla we start working with and then we started moving over to WordPress after only maybe two years, really fell in love with it and started challenging what you can do with it. I think we were on version two at the time, version three maybe of WordPress and then there was a few different e-commerce plugins at the time, but WooCommerce was really the one that seemed to be the most enticing. So we start working with it for people and next thing we’re same as you. We’re a Woo expert. We’re partnered strongly with WordPress, VIP and WPEngine, and we do a lot of the same things you do where it’s like we got the medium businesses, but then we got direct to consumer brands that are internationally recognized. And then we got a lot of B2B folks too. That tends to be a really big segment of what we’re doing.

Matt (03:28):
Yeah, it’s funny you almost described our early years almost identical. We were jum in the beginning too, and it was just at the time a slightly more mature c fm ss, although a huge fan in the has to work with. And I think Virtue Mart was the other

Neil (03:45):
Virtue Mart was the add-on for Joomla. I couldn’t remember it.

Matt (03:48):
And then we did the same thing where we like it’s, it’s okay, but it’s not good enough that we want to really put our necks on the line for this more than stuff that’s smallish and it doesn’t have a lot of scale or pressure behind it. But same thing with WordPress too. We were in it prior to the advent of custom post types and it’s good, but it’s not quite there. And when that all happened, I’ll throw a trivia question at you. Do you know what the WooCommerce software was originally forked off of?

Neil (04:22):
No, you got me on that one. I don’t recall.

Matt (04:25):
It was called Jigo Shop. I

Neil (04:27):
Have heard of that. But yeah, I couldn’t connect the dots on that one. I just remember the little logo, the original logo was the little ninja guy for WooCommerce

Matt (04:35):
That was more of a carryover from Woo Themes and their whole, because we started working with Woo Themes initially way back and we really loved the simplicity and the code base and how efficient it was to work with it. We’re like, this is something we could definitely get behind and build around. And as soon as WooCommerce became a thing and we got our heads and hands wrapped around that, we’re like, this is something we definitely want to work with a lot more and same kind of deal just have been exploding ever since. It’s just, it’s interesting to hear you had a very similar timing and all of that, which is cool.

Neil (05:10):
Yeah, I think the point where we were like, alright, we need to really start diving into Woo though, and this is horrible for me to say, but I’m just going to put it out there. It was the minute Adobe acquired Magento, we also did a lot of Magento work and Magento too was a real struggle and pain to work with Magento one we crushed and that’s what we used for more larger scale and Woo was like smaller stores. But then when Adobe finally acquired Magento two, the writing was on the wall that, alright, Magento two, they keep pushing it upstream. Upstream, they just want it to be an enterprise product. Adobe acquired it and it was like, alright, they’re going to incorporate this into their cloud. And we started backing off and what was really cool is that’s right when automatic got their hands really into Woo and start working out some of kinks from the Woo themes era and then all of a sudden it was like, oh, you can scale woo a lot more and there’s more plugins coming out.

Matt (06:03):
Yeah, a blessing and a curse all at the same time because we run into a fair amount of well just or where did these things come from? The next time we get into run a route of updates for someone, they’re like, oh, I just looked around and I saw this and they look cool and I’m like, you got to stop doing that. We’ve had, I don’t know if you’ve been feeling it as well lately, but I feel like the last couple months hacking and malware and stuff has just been, it’s been on the rise big time.

Neil (06:35):
I feel like I see an ebb and flow a lot over the years. I’ve had to deal with some crazy stuff, but I’ve seen a little bit more of it. Not terribly much more, but what’s been really good I think, and this is where I’ll say good hosting, plug and updates, core updates, maintenance plans to keep everything updated. You do the right things and you can avoid it. The one thing that’s always a monstrous pain in the butt is nonstop. Once a week I’m seeing a client with a carding attack where it’s just somebody just trying to hit cards in rapid succession, just trying to validate some list they got off the black market. That one is a thorn in my butt. That drives me nuts.

Matt (07:12):
Do you have a particular service that you like to use for the fraud prevention stuff?

Neil (07:19):
There are plugins, but it doesn’t really help that much. You need to actually look at the card data. Believe it or not, I’ve actually come to really Stripe as a payment provider because they’re baked in solutions pretty decent. I don’t want to take jabs at other payment solutions, but some of the other ones don’t have it. And then of course it’s always a hard sell to get a client to pick up what’s the other ones signified and the other one’s escaping me. That’s another big name one. But we have clients that have used them and have had moderate success.

Matt (07:48):
We’ve had some decent success with the Fraud labs pro. It’s like

Neil (07:53):
I haven’t heard of them.

Matt (07:53):
It’s a third party service that you can integrate with the platform and then it gives you a separated dashboard that it scrapes all the orders and you put in what your risk factor measures are. So it’ll evaluate the orders as they come in and then when they sit in your queue, it’ll give ’em a color coded grading of is this potentially, and we’ll block certain ones if they meet a certain level of that criteria. It is a nice extra added layer for some of our clients that sell more high ticket items like jewelry and things like that. They have to have it, the insurance for their shipping and stuff. If they send something out and it’s not legit and they just get screwed. So

Neil (08:37):
On jewelry you’re literally buying currency, it doesn’t depreciate. You got precious metals and diamonds. I have a client who’s a jeweler where that was a learning experience was just how much that thing was getting pinged for fraudulent orders because you’re literally getting something that can be exchanged for cash at that point.

Matt (08:55):
Yeah, we have a HVAC parts distributor client too. It’s same thing. People can just flip the components. They’re not legit or not, it’s definitely, it’s not getting any easier or less these days.

Neil (09:09):
You yourself, did you come from more like a design background dev background, marketing background? I always find that the owners of agency is always started by doing something in this line of work and then all of a sudden they’re like, oh, I could do a lot more, but then I needed to start bringing the talent for the stuff I can’t do.

Matt (09:25):
Yeah, I would say probably pretty typical. I started as a, actually started my college degree as fine arts and then I got two years into that and I was like, geez, I don’t think I’m going to be able to pay my rent by doing sculptures and paintings. So I changed to graphic design because that was a more applicable way. The to do was the artistic stuff that I enjoyed. But I also have been very interested in the technical side of things and that’s really, I’m going to age myself here, but back in the late nineties and early 2000 if you wanted to be in digital media and marketing communications, that was it. I actually had to go back after I graduated college to take my first web design course back in 2001. I worked, like I said, for direct mail education. They were a company that did educational training for teachers all over the United States and so they had seminars and sold books and things like that.

(10:25):
So we were designed all the materials and market the trainings and everything and that was a great way to directly apply that. And I got a really good crash course and how are you going to market and list building and trying to maximize response and what was good or not good and why and testing and all of that stuff, which is just such a part of our D N A now and everything that we do that’s digital. But I would say the key thing for me was during that time just out of school, I wanted to go back and get my master’s degree. And because they were a professional development company, they were very big on, well of course we’ll help you with that. And my director at the time for the marketing department, I was like, I’m going to go back and do design what I do.

(11:12):
And she was like, no, you shouldn’t do that. You should go and focus on marketing and strategic business planning and get your master’s in that. And so I went and did a cohort through Mercy College in New York, which was really interesting. I worked with 15 other people that were all over the world for two years and it was very early online learning in 2007. There was no video calls and couldn’t fake it if he didn’t do the reading. It was all basically written response. But that was a phenomenal experience to do that and it really helped shape me going forward from there and how I looked at the things I was doing and the purpose of what you were creating things for and understanding the need and what the result needed to be or what you were trying to achieve. It really does broaden your perspective in terms of you can design stuff just to make it look cool because you think it looks cool, but does it work?

(12:13):
Does it generate what you want it to generate? Sometimes it’s not always the prettiest solution that creates the best response and I definitely didn’t have a very open mind to that idea prior to going through all of that. I always did freelance stuff on the side when I had my other jobs and that’s how I gained more experience in terms of development and how I got more opportunities. And that kind of grew to a point where I had to make a decision and I was like, well, I could probably just, if I have a few other people that I know that are thinking they want to get into that. And it just came together. There were four of us at the time, some of them were trying to buy another agency and they wanted an incredible amount of money for nothing. Basically they had no contracts and no set commitments other than we’ve worked with you for 10 years and that’s great.

Neil (13:00):
The customer list.

Matt (13:01):
Yeah, exactly. So we were just, screw that, we’re just going to go and do our own thing. And that’s how it started. And from that point on, I just basically took on anything digital, internet, online related. And so those early years you’re designing, you’re coding, you’re building the themes, end to end, troubleshooting, support, you name it. And I think it took probably two, two and a half years before we were like, okay, now we’ve got enough going on. If we’re going to do more, bigger, better, we got to start looking for the right people. And that predicated a move. We were out in Peterborough, New Hampshire, which is in the middle of nowhere. I’m like, nobody’s going to drive out here. How are we going to get people to the right people to work for any of the stuff that we need? So that was a whole bristly event. There were some people that I were originally partnered with that were very adamant and against the idea of making any major changes and ultimately that all of those original members are gone as of now, it took 14 years to do it, but playing the long game, so that’s good.

Neil (14:10):
It’s wild to me as I’m listening to your story, I’m sitting there going, yeah, check this pretty

Matt (14:15):
Much see nodding.

Neil (14:17):
It’s wild how aligned it is for me, I was a kid in high school that actually knew how to build websites, so I was like, oh, I could go out and do this for some people. And I was very fortunate. My high school had a great electronic arts program where by the time I was a senior they just let me sit in a lab and do whatever I want and my choice was lemme go find small local businesses to design and build websites for. So we’re talking Photoshop, slicing up, Photoshop, coding, things in tables, inline styles, Dreamweaver templates, this is where we talk real.

Matt (14:48):
How much did you love fireworks? Did you use fireworks?

Neil (14:50):
No, got into fireworks. I was a Photoshop guy, but I also did a lot of flash though. And it’s funny because I went to college, you went for graphic design. I went for a program that was called Digital Design at the time, and it was quite frankly horrible because at the time nobody understood that doing anything online, and this is at that point in time was this convergence of computer science and graphic design and how they work together and it was a horrible experience and I dropped out after a year and now the good thing I got out of it was I met my former business partner, she’s still one my dearest friend. She left the business a few years ago because kids, family, all that kind of good stuff, but horrible experience there. Then I tried another college who was like, yeah, well exempt, you have all these credits, you know what you’re doing, they yada.

(15:39):
And it was just like a lot of blowing smoke. So I dropped out of there and then I finally went into my bachelor’s degree entirely online, just purely out of convenience. By this time I was doing more work day in and day out and learning more and more on my own. So I was like, I need the convenience of taking the classes, getting the credits on my own schedule. And then when I graduate from there, because I was a little cocky and arrogant and used to push back on the online professors, you didn’t get to have this engagement like you were saying. So when they were teaching the wrong things, I was like, that’s not how you code that. There’s a lot easier way of designing that. I would give ’em a hard time. The program director gave me an earful, got on a call with me and was like, listen, I know you’re right, but this is the curriculum.

(16:23):
Can you cut this person a break? And then literally after I graduate, she was like, listen, you really know your stuff. You’re actually really good explaining it even though you’re going at the professor’s throat. If you go get your master’s degree, I’ll bring you in here to teach. And I was broke because I was starting to company, so I was like, all right, deferred loans I can maybe teach. That’s cool. So then I got an M B A with a focus in project management. I was starting the company, I was like, I need to know something about management. And then from there she held up to her end of the commitment, she hired me to start teaching online at the school I got my bachelor’s, it was a for-profit career type college, but it worked. And then a few years later I start teaching as an adjunct at a few local universities in the Philly area.

(17:06):
Next thing you know, I’m picked up by the university that I dropped out of, picked me up as an adjunct and then within a year I got hired to be the program director of the undergraduate program. And then within a few years I retooled actually the master’s program. And this I do take a bit of pride in. I’m the full-time professor. I’m a department head of the largest grad program in the school of design engineering where I work where we bring in students from all around the world looking to learn user experience design because since most of my career was in that direct response and it was all usability work and testing, that was before UX a phrase and it was like no, we were really studying how and why people respond and how to solve people’s problems and apply that to business. That was ux, we just didn’t call it that.

Matt (18:00):
That is wild. Again, check. It’s the same thing. I didn’t pursue it beyond the semester that I talked. It was just too much. But same thing, I have my master’s and my alma mater reached out and they’re like, oh, you’re part of this local business and we see that you do this. Would you be interested in coming in and being an adjunct professor to teach website design and intermediate and advanced? This was like 2011. I was like, yeah, that would be cool. And I would say just to anybody, I’ve said this a million times, if you have any sort of public speaking block of any kind and you want to crush it forever, go teach a college course to 15 kids with a three hour lab because that’ll squash it forever. It was a wild experience simply because what you were saying, I went in there and they’re like, oh yeah, sure. So here’s the stuff that they’ve been doing and here’s the curriculum. And I was looking over, I was like, none of this is relevant. I wouldn’t hire anybody who came to me and was like, here’s some sites I built and it’s all nested tables and nothing’s quit. And I was like, what is this? So I ended up, that’s probably why soured me on is I ended up writing all of my curriculum scratch. It’s

Neil (19:20):
A lot of work

Matt (19:21):
And I get it why that gets stale and the rapidness of how things are changing in our industry, a huge challenge for, we have the ways we go about things, but that is constantly evolving if we’re not challenging ourselves and always asking the question of is there a better way that we need to be doing this because it’s more core or it’s efficient, the experience is better on the front end or backend for the clients customers and the end users who are maintaining it. I had a lot of pissed off students like this isn’t how we’re supposed to do this. I’m like, yes it is. This is the right way to do this. And like I said, I totally get it to keep changing that over and over again. That’s a lot. Every semester

Neil (20:10):
I realize we’re getting a little off topic from the

Matt (20:13):
New

Neil (20:13):
Convers thing, but what I’ve learned is that if you write the course correctly and you structure it correctly, you can leave yourself leeway in between and if you treat it just like your agency, the evolution doesn’t have to be so jarring where it’s like, oh my God, I need to rewrite the whole course. You can just let it naturally progress from term to term and I think you’ll appreciate this. So I have grad students that come in from all around the world and it’s a two year master’s program. The very first course in the program is called Essentials of Interaction Design. We bring in students from architecture, industrial design, graphic design, web and multimedia, all of these various design disciplines. And what we did was our very first course is comparable to bootcamp that’s out there. We entirely built the course around the subject of e-commerce because it’s so relatable.

(21:03):
It’s the one thing that every single one of these students have done. They’ve gone through purchase journeys on lots of different websites. They’ve experienced the marketing, whether you’re talking about acquisition or retention. So in order to get ’em to really understand how to design well, we use e-commerce as the topic to establish that baseline before getting into more novel innovation. As a user experience designer, and I don’t know if you’re familiar with it, one of the things we have them do is actually heuristics using bamer. Have you ever used bamer at all to study some of the websites that you’re working with?

Matt (21:36):
No.

Neil (21:37):
Great tool. Great platform. Basically it allows you to quantify the quality of design for different industry verticals in e-commerce. They’re like the UX subject matter experts on all things e-com in the world. Phenomenal tool set.

Matt (21:53):
What’s it called?

Neil (21:54):
Baer, the Baer Institute.

Matt (21:56):
The ba.

Neil (21:57):
They write some annual reports and then they actually have this assessment tool where you can take any website and go through and it takes six to eight hours to do an assessment if not longer, but you can actually show a client by redesigning a site or redesign components, you can actually show them how you move the needle and better align them to their industry vertical and they’ve studied thousands of websites. It’s really a fantastic tool if you haven’t used it.

Matt (22:27):
Yeah, so is that B A Y M E R D or

Neil (22:31):
M A r d?

Matt (22:32):
M A R D,

Neil (22:34):
Yeah. Okay.

Matt (22:35):
All right. I’m going to check that out. And just to the educational stuff that we’ve been talking about, it definitely makes me wonder, I have a 14 year old son who’s just gotten into high school for him and just the perspective of looking at what are you going to do after high school? That options are so much different to today than they were 15, 10, 15 years ago because there’s so many things that you can learn in different ways like online or virtually or whatever not. I would say that the college experience is definitely beneficial and I wouldn’t not recommend people do that, but it’s just there are, so you have to be very open-minded these days about, I’m a big, big Gary v follower and just thinking about how much time you really have and not feeling like you have to know everything or everything figured out. But it does make me wonder sometimes when we talk about our experiences and the past trajectory and how all this happened, but makes me wonder if we’ll start to see less and less of that because it’s a big push. Do people have the patience to struggle for two or three years to get to that tipping point where now we need to grow and now I’m going to bring in people and now I’m going to build more of a structure and a system around it. I just wonder sometimes if that’s something we’ll start to see because it’s not as an instant gratification or I can’t just spin it up fast and get rich quick.

Neil (24:08):
And it’s not only that, but you hear about all your influencers and how just overnight they’re making a million dollars and it’s yet yeah, they hit the lotto essentially. That’s not going to be everybody. My son who’s going to be 14 every once in a while brings this type of stuff up and I’m like, buddy, hard work. That’s the thing that you need to focus on hard work. And at the same time, I have this sort of duality in it because you got all these people that can be self-made, have instant success, which is super inspirational. Even Gary V, he’s a hustler, but he figured out some of the formula to getting people to really dial in with him. But then on the other side, I’m sitting there going, you’re seeing kids making these crazy incomes and then you’re also asking a child who’s going into maybe what their junior year when they got to do SATs, Hey, you’re 16, 17 years old, you’re going to be working until you’re 65. What do you want to do for the rest of your life? And I go, there’s a little bit of insanity in that premise alone that doesn’t really apply to the modern era.

Matt (25:11):
No, Jesus, I had to make a whole boatload of poor decisions and mistakes, and that may even not be what we do on a day-to-day basis. It comes with its series of unique stresses and issues, but at the end of the day, you feel good about what you’re providing and you’re helping people accomplish their goals and you can have a lifestyle that you’re happy with and you’re able to do the things that you like to do. That’s really what it’s all about for me.

Neil (25:44):
No, I’m right there with you. So I’ll use it as a segue to bring us back to Woo. What’s the biggest mistake you usually see people making with their WooCommerce stores not to get off of kids? I make plenty of mistakes with my kid.

Matt (25:58):
I can only choose one. Geez. I would say the most common ones that we run into is there’s a few pretty common scenarios. It’s a smaller e-commerce iteration or operation and they have worked with somebody else and they’ve thrown a whole bunch of plugins at it and it’s slow and it doesn’t work quite right or things break all the time and why is this happening? And the typical response from our end is we will do, we call it a technical opportunities analysis because nobody likes the word audit, but that’s really what it is to get a full picture and understanding of what’s happened and what’s there and what are you using and why. And a lot of times those sites are built by people who don’t actually know how to build websites. So they’ve got these big bloated, crazy page builders and the site’s only a couple of pages and mostly a catalog and why do you have all this extra stuff?

(26:54):
What are you doing with this site that you need to have all this extra complexity baked in that you’re causing all this additional load for no reason? And they’re like, I don’t know, this is just what they put us on and I’m not here to throw any page builders or anything under the bus, but we’re not particularly fond of them if we can avoid them at all costs because they’re generally unnecessary and they just add a lot of extra weight. So that’s a pretty common situation and usually they don’t like to hear that because we’re like, well, if you really want this to be awesome, you’re going to get rid of all this. And they’re like, we can’t. It’s usually a budget constraint. We don’t do a ton of that, but if we can fit some in here and there, we’ll help people out if it works for our schedule.

(27:32):
The other one is more on the opposite end where it’s like a scale situation. We have a very unique scenario. We’re dealing with one of our retail clients that they’re going to do somewhere in the neighborhood of three and a half million this year, but they have their collectible dolls basically, and the issue is that they are releasing limited run pieces, so they’ll have a hundred of them and we’ll tease it and let the community know. And so what happens is that they all stack up right before it’s going to go live, and so they sit on the server and they just refresh, refresh and so they’re just stacking up SQL queries and overloading the database so that they can be the first one in there to get the low numbers piece and it sells out in two minutes, which is awesome. We create all this demand and we’re making this cool and people want it, but now that it’s getting so big, we just recently had to move their server because the way it was set up on the previous one, they were just throwing more and more resources at it and not really getting into the nitty gritty of here’s how elastic we need to make this for when these events happen so that the site won’t go down.

(28:48):
But unfortunately that was drawn out over a process of eight or nine months to get to the point where we’re like, this doesn’t work. We just crashed your biggest server. What else do we do? And they’re like, well, there’s nothing else we can do. And I’m like, all right, so it’s the scaling end of it. It’s that combination of how many orders and customers and skews are you dealing with. And the current cart events, we’ve had a lot of experience in that arena too. So the solution is vastly different depending on what that core need and hurdle is that you have to get across or it’s a volume thing. We’ve had stores that are dealing in 500,000 SKUs and that’s like a whole other different animal than I’ve got a hundred products on my site. We are very much on a very wide spectrum of challenges that we deal with our clients, but I would say on the common, you’d have that smallish side where it’s just the build quality and how people are implementing it just overblown with too much stuff for no reason versus really getting into the technical nitty gritty, outgrown the current implementation to a point where it just can’t handle the amount because again, for a similar reason it’s just not built or implemented properly for what the need is.

Neil (30:06):
Yeah, so it’s funny, your shop definitely sees a little bit more of end-to-end than we do. We tend to be a little bit more focused really in the tech and we thrive because we have a lot of marketing and other tech partners that bring us in, which is how we’ve grown. So it’s interesting because I can usually boil it down to one simple thing, which is proactive communication. Usually there’s a marketing guy or a decision maker somewhere where they know that there’s a need, whether it’s a new feature that needs to be released at a certain point in time because of a promotion or there’s going to be some big social media campaign that’s going to just flood the site with a lot of traffic and some of these things are duds when it’s social media. You can’t a hundred percent expect everything to fly, but if you’re good at what you do, they know to be prepared.

(30:55):
And usually when we don’t get the feedback loop back to say, Hey, here’s the thing that’s likely to happen, that’s usually where we got to be putting out fires and that’s like on that bigger extreme issue when we work with more of those smaller businesses for lack better way, PUD it, we do have our hands a little more involved in some of the marketing stuff or we’re working with some local internet marketing partners where we’re friends with them and usually it’s the exact same thing. Somebody went plugin happy, somebody went page builder happy, and I could rattle off the names of page builders and I’d say, has this caused you a problem blink once for no, twice for yes and you’d just be blinking the entire time and listen, they’re great If you’ve got a really tiny website, I’m not going to lie, we have a small division practice in what we do where it’s literally for the mom and pop businesses in a local area where we’re using Beaver Builder, but even my team recently was the way that Gutenberg has evolved, let’s just stop doing it. And I was like, that’s fine. Your call stop using Beaver Bill. I’m totally okay with that. Four years ago when we started that division, Gutenberg was still at its infancy and it was like, alright, we need something with a little more flexibility. I’m talking coffee shop down the street type of website where I’m not throwing a developer at it, I’m not throwing a designer at it. One of my sort of front end people can design and develop the entire thing end to end and I can make that person happy.

Matt (32:18):
Same thing. We definitely are the most recent sort of evolutions with Gutenberg has definitely been some exciting opportunities looking ahead at furthering the way we typically do our framework implementations and it’s been a lot of advanced fields and page sections and things like that so that we can design and then literally implement exactly what the mechanism is to build those parts and still make them interchangeable and easy to combine in different ways, but it just removes all of that settings work when you’re dealing with more of the, and the Gutenberg, I forget what they call it, block patterns, so that’s a big game changer because now you’re going to be able to have more visual representation of, oh, I just need to add this part or I need to add this part, and now I’m just going to fill in the options, which is really sort of that next, a couple of years ago we’re like, ah, this is great and it’s rock solid and it’s almost impossible for them to break, which is great. It’s just fill in the blanks and away you go and everything looks perfect all the time because you’re not dealing with any toggles or options or styles or colors or anything. It’s just very consistent, but it’s still very abstract and that’s the bridge that’s going to allow us to cross very soon, which is super exciting.

Neil (33:35):
Well, and for me, the exciting part is how that plays nicely with WooCommerce and also not just WooCommerce but other large plugins that are out there that really impact the front end experience because that’s one of the biggest arguments I have for not using say Shopify or BigCommerce. Don’t get me wrong, they’re good for some things. We do a little bit of Shopify work, but at the end of the day I’m like what they’re best at is giving a retail experience where here’s a catalog, here’s a cart, and they’re doing some stuff to expand that and make it more flexible. But at the end of the day, so many people are depending on page builders there. Shogun is a big one. So I’m like, alright, cool, but WordPress just does all this. So if you have a brand where you need to do more storytelling and you need to build more landing pages and things that are more marketing centric, to me it’s actually going to be easier and more successful building that out of Woo with WordPress than it would be to try to jam a square peg into a round hole using a SaaS platform.

Matt (34:33):
Same thing. I say it a lot if you’re just starting up your e-commerce retail for the first time and you only have a couple of products like Shopify is amazing at that, sign up for an account, follow the steps as long as your products are pretty straightforward, it’s very straightforward to deal with that. When it gets a little, it’s beyond that, right? You’re saying you have story to tell or I’ve got something else, or I’m adding a membership with a subscription or I want to book something or we want to sell tickets immediately. That starts to get very messy and difficult and potentially very expensive where we have a very solidified series of tools that we use to do those things and we can customize it pretty much any way you could possibly imagine and that allows for the range of types of businesses and services that we’ve been able to adapt solutions for that it’s really not a question of can or just does it make sense and does the time and effort justify the cost?

Neil (35:38):
Yeah, it’s funny you’re hitting the nail on the head because I think that’s the one side of open source that’s always hard for people to understand. I’ll never say no to a client, I’ll never say that you can’t do a thing, but the question is, should you

Matt (35:51):
Is the important piece there

Neil (35:54):
And getting into the nitty gritty of that, it’s like time cost, the R o i on the effort to build a thing that’s unfortunately where you get into a little bit of a rabbit hole and plugins are great, but again, sometimes you’re getting a plugin for one out of 10 features that plugin delivers and you’re like, it’s actually better not to just buy this $50 thing and slap it on because here’s all the adverse effects that thing’s going to have. Pay us for the five development hours just to build the little function you need and call it a day.

Matt (36:21):
That’s another loveless thing to update and it’s easy if something potentially goes awry and to troubleshoot that, it’s just so much faster. Yeah, we’re definitely on the level there for sure. One interesting thing for us, especially this year, we ended up doing something common that has come up a lot that we’ve heard is gift cards. So physical swipeable cards in a retail environment, but also being able to use that in their e-comm experiences. So we actually ended up doing a plugin development for Givex is a gift card provider that’s been around for 25 years, never heard

Neil (36:57):
Them.

Matt (36:58):
I had not ever heard of them either before this year, but we hear about them all the time now because we built a plugin bridge that provides the functionality for you to sell gift card through WooCommerce, but then directly connects to their central a P I so that you can then issue something digitally immediately with a unique id so then the end user can get the receipt with all the information, then bring that into the store, and then they could actually use that and their p o s and it all connects back to the same thing. And conversely, if you wanted to buy a physical gift card, the end entity could then generate that gift card on site and then mail it to whoever and then they could go back and use that on the website or come back and swipe it in the store. That’s been a big new thing that we’ve been working on this year and it’s been incredible how many businesses are coming around and finding us and being like, oh my God, we’ve been looking for this forever. And it’s just been a very interesting angle to start those conversations with people because it’s been a very frequent pain point that we’ve run into

Neil (38:05):
Now I’m curious about that one because we’ve been dabbling with the idea of doing some plugins ourselves. We have some stuff we’ve built over the years for clients, or not necessarily for clients because paying for the work, but more like we built it ourselves as a utility to deliver functionality where we’ve evolved it, but we don’t really have it out in a repo. We’re not really promoting it. We know that we have to polish it up to make it a product, but we’ve also been contracted now by a few companies to build plugins, which has been awesome, so we’re getting even more experience there. I’ve been on the fence with should we develop our own products and start doing plugin development as a part of our business model? Is that how you’re taking that on or was it an accident? Was it for a client?

Matt (38:49):
It was originally for a client and then it, it’s been evolving into a product I think that we’re just about, we have sold that to a couple different companies now. We’ve implemented it half a dozen times and that’s continuing to gain some steam. I think what’s going to be interesting about that is we’re just putting some work and finishing touches on our infrastructure here of once that is executed, monitoring license keys and things like that, and we’re going to plan to use WooCommerce subscriptions for the licensing for that stuff annually, which I think only makes sense given what we specialize in, but I think that’s just going to be a very interesting component to this and the question will be because what we don’t know is just if that all of a sudden starts to really blow up, which wouldn’t be the worst thing, it’s the staffing behind it and the support system and then there’s has to be dedicated much more dedicated care and attention to furthering and maintaining and patching and all those things that are going to go into that.

(39:56):
That’s all on the immediate horizon for us in the next couple of months, but it’s been an interesting evolution this year to see that evolve and grow into something that you can see now, oh, this solves a very specific problem for potentially a lot of people and that’s something that I don’t think we can afford to not have as part of our makeup, and I’m sure you feel the same way. I say we work every day. All we do is we solve people’s problems all day long and come up with solutions and find better ways to do things. And I definitely feel like we shouldn’t turn a blind eye towards is there something in what we’re doing that is easy to compartmentalize and then make more widely available, and how does that improve other people’s experiences or opportunities?

Neil (40:50):
I’ve been on that fence where it’s like, do I pull the trigger? Do I take a few of these, take a dev from my team, say polish these up, get ’em out there. But through our experiences with developing plugins for a few other companies where essentially where they’re back office support, they’re just paying us to take care of their plugin, the thing that I’ve learned is the support angle to it is really tough to navigate because a lot of times it’s not your plugin that’s the problem, it’s the implementation of WordPress. It goes back to that plugin happy culture where you stick a plugin out there, now you’re just one of another a hundred plugins on somebody’s woo site and then it’s why does yours not work? You’ve got three others that are conflicting with it, and that starts turning into is it our job to support that or should I be selling an agency service? And that’s the part where I’m like, do I want to deal with that headache? I don’t know if I’m there where I want to deal with that.

Matt (41:40):
I totally hear you. I know we’ve been debating the same thing. I think part of what we’re being considerate of for ourselves and the things that we’re going to choose to put out there is that they’re going to be very specific solutions for unique problems like this physical gift card thing. So if you use this physical software implementation and you’ve got, because the scenario is like, oh, I’ve been using this thing for 20 years and I’ve got all this data in there and I don’t want to move it, but we want to update the e-comm engine and that’s going to look so much nicer and how do we get these things to work together? I find you’ll have more potential for things to conflict with each other if it’s more of a generalized tool or add-on, like something that works with everything else instead of it’s just this one thing and it’s communicating with a specific account that you own that it provides this information access. And the only other sort of connective integration there is, it’s through your account page. It doesn’t, or the process of buying the card, the

Neil (42:47):
More

Matt (42:48):
Sort of specialized. I think we can keep those things. My hope is that the support, I’m sure we’ll run into this stuff I’m not living, but you’re

Neil (42:55):
Narrowing the

Matt (42:56):
Potential. I’m

Neil (42:57):
Very narrow. Yeah, no, and that totally is valid. Makes a lot of sense. I just know that I’ve seen some of those sites where it’s like a hundred plugins plus. I love it when you see 10 themes that aren’t even being used anymore. And then I’ve seen the sites with the multiple page builders and you sit there and you go, the reason why that thing doesn’t work is because of this and we have to clean all this stuff up. And that’s where I tell everybody, I’m like, that is both the wonderful thing about WordPress and also the Achilles heel. You have this entire D I Y audience, which are building things on their own that do stuff like this and they can make it work, which is cool, but it’s not necessarily performant. I tell people. Then there’s also the pro developers and the pro developers generally have a good sense of things.

(43:41):
They have good best practices. They know not to overkill the plugins, but then there’s the next tier up where it’s like the enterprise development, which is where you’re thinking about how does the platform work with the infrastructure, how does it scale, how do you keep things as minimalist as possible? You become just an absolute lunatic about get commits, things like that. And not to again, change topics, but even in hiring, that’s the hardest thing for it. For me, I want the enterprise developer. I don’t even want the pro or the D I Y, but a lot of times you’ve got the D I Y that can’t distinguish those tiers.

Matt (44:14):
Yeah, no, absolutely. It’s a very specialized skillset for sure. And you, we live with our more enterprise level clients. We spend a lot of time in New Relic when we’re launching things or committing stuff or just to see what’s actually happening, because that’s the level that you need to be at to truly understand what the core issue is that you have to address, not turn this off and turn this back on. I need to understand exactly what’s happening in the system. Yeah, maybe we’ll have to do this again in four or five months and we’ll come back and then maybe you could have a gigantic, I told you, cause I’ll have a ton more gray hair and be like, oh man, that was not the right one.

Neil (44:54):
No, are you kidding me? I’m sitting here excited, like I’m just going to throw you in the deep end and then call you up and be like, how’d that worked out? Yeah, how’d that go? And then if you’re like, it’s good, I’m just going to hit publish on that draft page, all the plugins. Yeah,

Matt (45:07):
Fair enough. Fair enough. This has been good though. I think it looks like we’re probably running up against time here,

Neil (45:13):
So I’ll ask the question. If you could give any other agency owner a tip, especially a developing agency, what would be the biggest thing you would tell them?

Matt (45:23):
The earlier you can? Again, this is just me talking from more of the leadership head of IT standpoint. The sooner you can settle on the way you want to really manage your workflow and how you’re going to keep track of everything that’s going on, regardless of how small you think you are, you need something to help you manage your project’s time and all of that stuff has to connect and talk to each other. So spending time upfront, probably way earlier than you think you should, is going to save you a lot of headaches down the road. In our early days, we had a system, nobody used it the way that it was intended, which made a switch probably year four. We still use that platform today and it’s not perfect, but it works for us and it’s continued to evolve over the entirety of the time that we’ve used it, and it’s just, I don’t know how we would work without it. There’s a lot of options out there. I’ve evaluated a litany of them, but it’s just important to have those systems in place because we tried to do it without it for a while and it was not fun.

Neil (46:36):
Oh, I know that feeling too. We bounced through quite a few systems, but recently in the last year and a half, landed on click up and that’s been pretty good. That’s been pretty good.

Matt (46:47):
I almost switched to that last year. We use Mavenlink as our, it’s called Tata now, but they made a humongous upgrade with the acquisition mavenlink turned into the Tata, and that actually enhanced a lot about how we can schedule and forecast and in addition to tracking actual tasks and time and budgets and things like that. And it integrates nicely with our QuickBooks stuff. And again, it’s not without its shortcomings. It has a few quirky things here and there. I did really a lot about click up. We actually work in click up with another one of our partners, and there are a lot of awesome things about that platform.

Neil (47:24):
Yeah, yeah. No, but I’m right there with you. I mean, if I were to give a similar final thing, honestly, I tell everybody, I’m like, have those right hand people, either

Matt (47:34):
Partner

Neil (47:35):
Or those rock stars that you promote because that they’re fiercely loyal. They’ll take care of your clients, they’ll take care of your internal team because you can’t do everything yourself. And that’s always been like my challenge is I want to try to be all things to all people. So there’s times where I crack open the code, there’s times I crack open a Figma file. There’s times where I see some stuff going back and forth that’s just driving me nuts because two devs are debating it or a client devs debating something that I’m like, all right, I’m going to stick my nose into this and figure it out for everybody. And even though I enjoy those moments, being able to choose those moments as an owner is nice because I know that everybody appreciates the extra support, whereas not having to do that day in and day out, because I have a few people who I can a hundred percent depend on, I can even confide in. They understand the business issues, they understand the client challenges. Even some of the challenges that might be going on with certain people on the team worth their weight in gold. And I tell everybody, I’m like, don’t look at people as like a commodity. If you got those rock stars, promote ’em. Make them feel loved and cared about because they’re the ones that are going to make the difference in how your company grows.

Matt (48:45):
Yeah, I definitely operate on the level of that. I work for them, not the other way around.

Neil (48:52):
Totally. Totally. Yeah, and if you’re asking them to do ot, you better be doing it too, just so they can see that you’re in the thick of it.

Matt (48:59):
Absolutely. Absolutely. That’s cool. This has been a lot of fun. It has been interesting. I always feel like that I don’t get out enough to just network and went down to,

Neil (49:10):
I feel you

Matt (49:11):
WordCamp us and we’re at the Blue Experts reception. It had been a long time since we’ve gone out and just rub shoulders with our peers and talk shop and brainstorm and shared some ideas and thoughts and stuff. It was just very refreshing. I’m looking forward to hopefully doing more of that in the near future.

Neil (49:33):
Yeah, for sure. For sure. I think now that we’ve been out Covid for a bit, but it seems every few months people are going out more. You’re seeing the conferences rebuild. Hopefully we’ll meet in person soon.

Matt (49:43):
Yeah, that would be great. Absolutely.