Team Dynamics and Culture Fueling WooCommerce Agency Growth

Ronald: Hello and welcome to another episode of Do the Woo. And we have a guest, his name is Marius. Marius, I’m so glad we connect again, we’ve seen each other a few months ago at WordCampUS and yeah, we saw each other spoke for quite a period at the WooCommerce Community Social, and you shared two business cards with me. I don’t know if you remember that, which is quite intriguing. So I’m going to let you do your intro of who you are and what you do and what’s your connection with WooCommerce.

Marius: Sure. Thanks Ronald, thanks Bob for having me. I’ve been working and playing around with WordPress and WooCommerce for quite a few years now. And the first business card that I created, it has the WPRiders logo, and that is the name of the brand that we are using to work with clients and to provide ongoing workplace development. This has been going for about eight years. We are now about 22 people across seven countries. It’s a distributed team and it has been an interesting journey.

And as we were walking this path sometime about two years ago, we realized there’s a recurring pattern in the demands that come from the shop owners that run subscription businesses. And that’s how subscriptionforce.com appeared. So that is my second business card. So the second one, it’s a plugin business, it’s a separate company and subscription force. It’s the only fully featured extension to the WooCommerce subscriptions plugin that increases the recurring revenue and keeps customers happy through self-service capabilities. So that’s the main purpose of it.

A subscription plugin and adds features to WooCommerce Subscriptions

Ronald: We’ll come back on the WPRider. So let’s go a little bit deeper in the subscription for, so it adds to the WooCommerce subscription. So you need WordPress WooCommerce subscription, and then you add subscription force to it. Explain it a bit in a bit more detail if you can.

Marius: Indeed. This is an extension to WooCommerce subscriptions. So in order to use or actually to benefit from this plugin and to understand its benefits, you need to be running a WooCommerce subscriptions powered business. So every time a shop owner starts delivering on a subscription like physical products, they eventually realize that customers need to amend their subscriptions by adding products, by removing products or changing quantities or just posing their subscriptions until a set date because they go on a vacation. All of this and many other features are not provided by the WooCommerce subscriptions plugin. So well, after we saw a recurring pattern in the demands of our agency, we thought there might be a place in the market or such plug.

Building a product, scratching an itch

Ronald: So this I guess is a result of working with clients under the WPRiders Agency. And you saw a demand was to a project, a custom project for a customer, and then you realized, hang on, there’s a bigger market here. Let’s also release as a plugin for the wider world.

Marius: Actually, we had about seven or eight projects like this one. Yeah, it ranged from, you name it, selling toothbrushes and toothpaste on a subscription to pet foods. Eventually we got into coffee subscriptions and so on.

Solving the challenges of development

Ronald: Amazing. Once you uncover the world of subscriptions and you match that with the stores offering. And then I think the more tricky part is the customer’s demand. I think you open up a can of worms because, oh, once you can do this, can you also do this? And can you do that? Talk me through a little bit through the process of developing and some of the challenges that you’ve had and then maybe add to that how the community and maybe the developers or developer advocacy helped you solve some of these problems.

Marius: So before going into this particular plugin, we actually analyzed about eight or nine other ideas. And we looked at a couple of, and there were like one column per criteria. We looked at existing vendors and we looked at, and very important, we looked at potential market size for the plugin. So we eventually estimated the number of newcomer subscriptions installs before we actually decided to go with this one. The other important criteria for us was doing personally know three people who have or had this particular problem, people that we can talk to. And then we looked at our capabilities, can we be different and better going to play into this field or to play that game? And after analyzing those eight or nine potential ideas, we decided to give it a go to this one. And then the next step was to compare the requirements that we saw in the market with the features and the capabilities of the existing plugins.

So essentially we were looking for gaps. Gaps of needs of uncovered needs. The other source of gaps, a pretty good one was, and still is, the WooCommerce forum. Formally it was a request, a new feature thing. You can see a lot of comments and in general on the support forums you can get these answers. The next step for us was to write a requirements document, which was a pretty detailed with screen the screens and the user stories and the user roles that we would like to cover. And our focus was on simplicity.

So for example, and it’s interesting that we have with one of our plugins, sub plugins, because eventually we developed two other more let’s say child plugins out of subscription.com and those are being sold over the WooCommerce marketplace. We are seeing some demand for one of our plugins. The interesting part is that this plugin is actually simple. It has less features than the competitor plugins, but probably it has a better interface and a probably smaller price. But the mix makes it an interesting plugin for the market. And then we went with coding and so on. But that was a process before we actually started to code the plug in.

The WooCommerce marketplace

Ronald: I must say, I have to compliment you on the research part because it’s something you potentially dive in too fast to build the stuff because you think, oh, I’m just going to see if something works and let me try this before you do your research and exactly what your end result or your goal should be. So going through all those different steps, the way you describe this, so it seems a very wise plan. Do you have the extension on the marketplace, WooCommerce marketplace?

Marius: Yes, we do. And the strategy that we went with was to have all the features that we are providing under the subscription force.com plugin. Well, it’s the plug name is subscription forces being sold on our own website. However, on the WooCommerce marketplace for brand protection reasons, we decided, and maybe for marketing reasons, we decided to repackage the features and to focus them on specific jobs to be done. And maybe some of the listeners are not familiar with the term. I would encourage you to search for a seven to 10 minutes video on YouTube with Clayton Christensen about the jobs to be done. Essentially, it’s maybe it’s a worldview, this thing, it’s a way to look at the reality and it’s about thinking and imagining that when you use a certain plugin or object, you are actually employing, you’re hiring, that thing that it’ll do some job for you.

And when you think of that particular tool as if you are hiring it, then you realize there’s a context when you are hiring that tool. It’s particular context which is dictated by a couple of factors, like the timing, with whom are you, what did you do before, time of the day, and so on. For example, the research about the jobs to be done has been extensively advertised and it has been popularized and it has been made on McDonald’s milkshakes. So somehow McDonald’s realize that the actual customers of their milkshakes who actually employ those milkshakes are different to those who they imagine. A long story short, they realize people use their milkshake instead of bagels in the morning while commuting, once they realized when people do hire the milkshakes and that people are actually driving while sipping that milkshake, they made the milkshake thicker so that it can last longer.

So this decision, this consequences and let’s say aha moments can be obtained once you look through the lens of the jobs to be done. So coming back to our approach, we went with two jobs to be done. And the jobs to be done are actually in the plugin names. One of them is buy once or subscribe. And essentially it’s exactly what it does once you install this plugin. And by the way, this feature, it’s also in the subscription force plugin. So the buy one subscribe thing will allow you to subscribe to a simple product. You don’t need to create two SKUs as a shop owner in cases when you are selling some product as a one time product, and you are also selling it on a subscription.

So this is the job to be done, people would employ this plugin when they have this need. And the second sub plugin, it’s called self-service dashboard for newcomer subscriptions. Again, when does this job to be done arise? It is when me as a customer, I’m going on a vacation and I just need to pause that subscription until that specific date, or I just need to switch a product to a different variation. I need a different coffee size pack or maybe t-shirt color, or maybe I need to add the product or change quantity.

Ronald: Naming those plugins to quite literally what it says on the 10 is what it does. Was that a conscious decision? So it’s easier for merchants to find it in the marketplace.

Marius: Actually it’s the wording that customers used when talking to us. This is the verbiage, the precise verbiage,

Ronald: Yeah. And that’s in your view, has been a successful formula to stand out and sell in the marketplace?

Marius: Yeah, so far so good.

Tips for adding a plugin to the Woo marketplace

Ronald: Fantastic. Do you have any other tips you’ve learned along the way When you add a plugin into the marketplace?

Marius: It takes a lot. So we need to brace for that.

Ronald: Do you mean it takes a lot of time or a lot of effort and energy?

Marius: The timeline to get it through for us. The first time, it was about three months since we said, okay, we want it published. And until we had it, because the first time you have to create account, it has to get approved and then you have to submit your product and it has to be compliant with certain requirements. Unfortunately, the checks, that the automated checks on the source code that are being performed, they aren’t according to documentation. So you start getting some strange PHP called for errors that are kind of different from what is being said that you should respect, which also its up time.

Then add up one or two small bugs in the submission interface and spice it up with time. You have to wait until somebody will actually answer the ticket. So it usually takes about two, three months the first time after that, the approval process because after that you only submit a new product. You don’t have to create a vendor account after that. It probably takes couple of weeks up to a month.

Ronald: Yeah. And once it’s listed, what do you do to get more views on your product? Or is that also part of the research that you find something that is a niche and therefore you can stand out faster?

Marius: It seems like the reviews and the sales will count. And we learned that along the way because one day, one of our, the buy ones for subscribe extension was featured on the WooCommerce featured plugins and we were very surprised because they didn’t tell us anything. They just created a nice graphic and some nice copy and featured it there. And we very proudly took screenshots and started promoting that. And through social media it was an achievement for us, as small as it may seem, but it was a nice one, a confirmation. And then they told us, yeah, you got picked up to be featured because you have sales and you have reviews. So probably there’s something along the lines of the number of sales plus the reviews that you get in a time span.

Building a diverse agency team

Ronald: Yeah, I can imagine. It’s a two way relationship/ if you invest in it and users are happy and it gets picked up and it’s a win-win win situation. It’s a great story. Let’s go back to the WPRiders. How many on the team and from how many countries.

Marius: Oh, it’s about twenty ish people and now we are six or seven countries.

Ronald: Six or seven countries.

Marius: That wasn’t the plan at all. That wasn’t the plan at all. No, no.

Ronald: So the six, seven countries that just came along, is that because your team members moved away or you’ve started to attract team members from other countries?

Marius: Actually very few people moved away.

Ronald: Oh, so they’ve not all gone and sat on the beach with laptops.

Marius: Not at all. No. Usually people moved from some country to some highly advertised capital of some country, first of all country and so on. But most of the people, we just found talent across the globe and it wasn’t meant to be like that. Actually, we had an office probably the first four years and somehow before the pandemic, I think six or nine months before COVID came in, we decided to go fully remote. So the office stayed empty for about three months. At that time we already had some people working remotely and our colleagues coming to the office eventually said, how about saving one hour and a half on commuting every day? So yeah, wasn’t the plan. We just found nice people in tune with our culture. Culture is very important to us as a company.

Finding someone to fit the companies culture

Ronald: How do you find out if somebody is the right fit into your culture? Is that something that you are very conscious on when you’re recruiting somebody?

Marius: Absolutely. Yeah. Between 2003 and 2013, I had another company, another software company, and there we failed with five different products and there we made all the mistakes and bad things that you can do. That was a product company. So that’s why this time when we are approaching the new product, we do some research, we look at positioning and we look at the market and the needs and things that customers value and so on.

Now coming back to the recruitment, we start by trying to attract the right people. And we do this by, well first and foremost WPRiders was day zero when it was founded as a company. I just sat and wrote down the values that I would ideally have and run our company by. So after I had the values written down, and not only just some words but actual let’s say explanation of values, what was my understanding of those values at that time, and how do I know, or how does somebody objectively know if a person lives up to the values or not?

So next, when we started hiring people, I would just add those values into the job ad because that would telegraph to certain people that, hey, these guys are like this and like that. And throughout the years we had people telling us, probably had maybe half a dozen people telling us, I have created the resume just to apply to your job because you require a resume. I have never had to apply to a job, but something clicked and I wanted to just meet you guys. So this is the effect that you are getting when you are consciously telegraphing and sending messages maybe, I don’t know, subliminal messages probably on a certain wavelength. And then during the interview there are questions designed to discuss examples to discuss this or that value, for example, integrity, honesty. And every six months we do evaluate ourselves like a performance appraisal and we do look at the values again and then we make sure we allocate some resources and budget in order to support and to foster those values to develop them.

Ronald: Is that something you do yourself, these reviews with your team members? Or do you have somebody independent or an HR person who will do that for you with you or for you?

Marius: Throughout the years we’ve designed a process for this. Actually, that’s one way that helped me convert myself from a freelancer, one-man show into a team. Every time I would do a repetitive task, I would just write down a checklist, like a guideline, a process like procedure. And then I would just run it based on that checklist just to make sure I’m not missing on anything. And later on when new colleagues came in, they would just pick up on those checklists and they would develop them further. So yeah, we are doing these reviews internally based on these processes that we’ve developed. And we have our director of operations who’s evaluating most of the people because most of the people are in the operational department and I am still doing the performance appraisals for the other areas like sales and recruitment.

Thanks to our Pod Friends FooSales and Captcha4WP

Keeping team members happy

Ronald: And how do you make sure that your team members are happy? What’s your secret sauce?

Marius: Write a lot about this. It’s even in our job ads. Yeah, there’s a saying and it’s a metaphorical thing, but it’s somehow remotely related to your question. We say here in this part of the world that money can’t buy happiness but it can support it. So once you have the reasons to be happy, money will eventually increase that happiness and support it, but it can’t buy happiness. So similarly with your question, if somebody’s unhappy, I’m not sure if you can just switch button and turn them to happy. But we do have a set of conscious activities for that. Well, first of all we do one on ones and then we do anonymous reviews every 12 months so that if somebody has something to say, they can submit that form anonymously and it’s truly anonymous. And that’s what we do in order to get the pulse.

Besides that, what we are trying to do are certain activities and we tried quite a few things. Some of them work, some of them don’t work. For example, we ran a book club, we just bought a book in 10 or 15 pieces, send them over to the people so they can have their own sample and read it and underline. And then we met a couple of weeks and discussed one chapter. So that would be in tune with our third value to develop our ourselves and to grow together. That’s how we define to grow together. The other things that we are doing, it’s a weekly sharing, the scary meeting or sharing the scary meeting it depends. Why is it sometimes scary? Because we share the things that we tried and they worked or maybe they didn’t work.

Ronald: That’s a really good one. Yeah,

Marius: Yeah. Yeah. We might share technical things, business things, HR things, client talk things or just some movie or dish that we cooked and it went well or it failed and so on.

Ronald: Do you get to meet also in real life where you have, I know it’s probably been difficult?

Marius: It’s a bit more challenging. We try to get as many people to work camps as possible at work in Europe in portal we were I think 12 people from a bunch of countries and this fall, so we had team building here in the mountains in Romania and then those who live in Romania, in Bucharest, in the capital we try to meet maybe every other month or so just to play a board game.

Recruiting clients

Ronald: So you’ve created a culture that you obviously like yourself and by having been a freelancer, you’ve learned how you want to be working, operating, you embrace this with your own new team and the team is growing and that obviously attracts a lot of other team members because it’s something that you spread and that comes back. How do you do this in terms of recruiting clients and building up the business in financial security?

Marius: Yeah. That’s a very important one. And the answer to this question changed across the years. Nowadays, we rely on partners and inbound to get inbound leads, which is working fairly well enough to sustain the business. We have certain other outbound initiatives that we’re working on. Let’s see which one works out. And before that, maybe three or four years ago, until three or four years ago, I have been investing a lot of time. And then actually this is how I started on investing a lot of time on Codeable and Codeable probably the number one actually it’s the number one WordPress freelancers marketplace where people can go to in order to have their WordPress tasks fixed or done. So I started out there and then I scaled up as an agency by working on Codeable and then we transition to having our own marketing.

Ronald: And clients that come through these marketplaces. Are they a one hit, please solve a problem or do you find them coming back and you turn them into long-term clients?

Marius: Most of the clients come back. So if they like working with you, they will stick.

Ronald: Yeah, that was obviously a trick question because that tells me that your customer service is excellent of course if they all come back.

Marius: Yeah.

Keeping the customers coming back

Ronald: What’s then in that way is your key advice if freelancer developers use these platforms, how can you make sure that right from the beginning all the way to them coming back, you noted that relationship and you give good customer service to make sure they come back.

Marius: I would say number one is picking your clients. Understanding who do you want to work for?

Ronald: But here’s a bit of a repeat again, isn’t it? Because you do that with your team members. You also do that well with your research and the plugin. So you also do that with your customers. You find the right fit, the right culture in them.

Marius: Eventually we realize that we are working best with non-technical founders who are running a WordPress business and with marketing managers who have been hired by this non-technical founders. Ones they scale up and there’s a list of clients that we probably have a hard time working with. For example, if there’s another agency, we tried working without agencies, but it’s just too difficult to adapt the processes from both agencies in order to make it a long term fruitful collaboration. And I think that’s fine to understand where do you want to play and where do you have a chance to actually deliver superior value.

Ronald: Yeah, very interesting. I guess there’s some fit for thoughtful for the listener as well that if you believe in something, if you believe in the right fit and culture, you both thrive and you create something of good quality relationship wise as well as product.

Marius: And if I may mention, in terms of customers and choosing with whom they want to work with. And eventually if you’re launching products, I’ve learned quite a few practical things from two books. One of them, it’s called Buyer Persona and it has been written by Adele Ravella. So this one it’s obviously about how to understand who your customer is. The other one where I learned about the jobs to be done framework, it’s called Competing Against Luck by Clayton Christensen. This one is very good for launching products. And lastly I would say a book I would mention a book called Obviously Awesome. And this one it’s about positioning.

Making your niche sustainable

Ronald: I suggest you share the links with Bob and we’ll list them in the podcast notes. Marius, if I may move. So we’ve done the pass and we’ve looked at product and marketplace and your agencies is looking at the future. And I guess there’s also a a two, three part question. Partly as looking at a sustainability of your agency and the people that work for you, making sure they can build a future on that, how you work on that. And I think you can lead that into where you then also see the world of eCommerce, the world of web development and how you find your niche to make sure that that bubble remains sustainable.

Marius: This bubble has appeared and it has been growing on the back of the open source community. So that’s why it’s our value number four. We only have four values, it’s contribution and we do invest back into the community. And we have been doing this through various projects. One of them is running a local workplace meetup. I’ve been running it for five years as a host and volunteer. It has more than one thousand to a hundred members. I actually stopped doing it up to five years and just passed on the Olympic flame to some other people. But the most recent project that we finished, and I’m actually very excited about it, we called it WPRiders Academy.

So we took eight people and we taught them with coding for free for three months, biweekly meetings, biweekly sessions of about one hour and a half with one of our developers who taught them. So we use the mix of video courses and there’s sessions where they would just get some assignments and they would work on them. So that’s how we look at the sustainability of the whole ecosystem and this is how we see our place it. And in terms of people, we have people working with us for five, six, and seven years. So the agency is eight years old and our number one and number two employees are, they’re still with us.

Ronald: As you said that about your team members who are still with you over the last six years. It occurs to me that they also grow in that development that you’ve taken them on and it’s a big responsibility and of course they help you invest in them and that whole ecosystem that from within your own business that grows and then to, as you described, it’s your fourth value where you extend that by taking on apprentices and even the meet up where you have a thousand plus members that you help support, you teach them, you guide them. If only you can of visualize the impact you have on that ecosystem. You alone where team members but also others earn a living from WordPress from WooCommerce. That’s certainly that three dimensional view of that grows and grows And that’s something very powerful I think within WordPress and also WooCommerce and open source.

And I’m really quite tumbled by how you describe that and how important that is to you. So I take my hat off. That’s great. Love it. We all go through, well a lot of the countries, they go through some difficult economic times, increases of cost and so on. And I guess for agencies, you also agency owners, you also feel that pinch a little bit here and there. Do you have some advice when it comes to riding out a storm more in general terms? Definitely don’t go to specific world events, but where you say, well we grow in a sustainable way, maybe don’t take risks so much. Do you have some advice on that?

Marius: There’s one or two things that we’ve done in the beginning and the third one that we keep doing as we speak. So the first two were some, let’s say approaches that allowed a simple freelancer to be able to get two full-time people and then to grow from there. So I was using a tool similar to a calendar, it’s called Forecast, Harvest Forecast. And I would just book my time there whenever a client would pay for the project in advance. And they eventually ended up having about six to eight weeks of projects booked, pre-booked in advance and prepaid. So that was a good buffer for making the leap. The other thing which I was fortunate at the time to benefit from, we accessed some European Union funds, but you can replace European Union with any funds that you may want. And it wasn’t a big sum, it was about $22,000 but it was enough to have cash in the bank to cover the salaries for these people for a couple of months in advance.

So we got both the projects which were secured in the codeable escrow, this buffer of money. And I kept that money and it kept growing the amount that we hold in the bank in order to cover at least three months of full salaries and taxes in case something happens. And this is a public information in our team, sharing this with everyone so that they know it’s a secure place and that money would allow us to live for at least three months given or assuming we would just make $0 during a month. But obviously that is highly unlikely. So we probably can live for at least six months plus, which is good enough time span in order to probably hopefully get over any problem.

And the other thing that we’ve done is this year we switched to subscriptions. So most of the clients we work with, and it’s again about deciding what the customers that you can serve best and we realized that those who need a technical partner by their side, who need development, but also advisory, those are ideal clients that we can deliver value to. So we work with them on subscriptions and they pay us a recurring amount every month and they buy time out of our team’s time. So this is how it works and that gives a certain predictability to the whole business.

Ronald: That’s great. Marius, I could talk to you for a lot longer because you have some very interesting, insightful nuggets, good experience on so many levels. I’m quite sure that whoever listens to it will have the same impression that actually it’s good to be calculated and do your research in order to be successful. Because that’s what I found speaking to you. So well done for being where you are. It’s an incredible journey. It’s really one to admire. Thank you also very much for your time. Really appreciate it and I hope I’ll get to speak to you again soon or at least see you at another WordCamp.

Marius: Thanks as well for the opportunity for your time, gentlemen. Yeah, I’m looking forward to the next working.