Client Relationships, AI in Agencies and Open Source Benefits

Robbie:
Hello and welcome to Do the Woo. This is Agency Chat. I’m here with my co-host Robert Jacobi. Robert, how you doing?

Robert:
Hey, Robbie, nice to see you again. It’s been just a wee bit.

Robbie:
Just a wee bit. You’ve been around the world and back though, since we’ve seen each other. I swear. Every time I look at your social medias and stuff, I’m like, where is Robert today?

Robert:
It’s like the new Waldo. No, I actually did a full circumnavigation from Chicago to WordCamp Asia to CloudFest in Germany, and finally back home three weeks later.

Robbie:
Wow. I know. I keep looking at the calendar going like, oh my goodness gracious. We’re about to leave for Europe is what it feels like. But anyway, it’ll all be good. And I am Robbie Adair with OSTraining one of the co-hosts here on Do The Woo. And today on Agency Chat, we’ve got a couple of guys from Sleeping Giant Studios, and I’ve been waiting to say that I just love that name of that agency. It’s so cool. We have Rick McGarry and Jake Holman here today with us. Rick, how are you doing today?

Rick:
Great. I appreciate you having us on. Looking forward to the chat.

Robbie:
Cool. Yeah, we’re looking forward to learning more about Sleeping Giant Studio. See now I’m going to say it every time, and I know you guys use an acronym, but I’m going to say it the whole name every time. That’s all right. Jake, how are you doing today?

Jake:
I’m doing great, thanks. Yeah, it’s really exciting to be on here and just chat about the cool stuff in Woo.

Robbie:
Awesome. I know, and I’m real excited. Jake told me I have his blessing to go ahead and talk about ai. So we will be talking about AI today in here, but we’re going to get started and we just want to learn a little bit more about Sleeping Giant Studios. So Rick, why don’t you start us out and kind of give us the history of how you guys even started?

Rick:
Sure, sure. So John Hage who’s our current owner, and the founder of Sleeping Giant Studios started the company in 1996, and initially it was a video production side gig he had. John and I worked together at a Fortune 500 in it at the time, and we just kind of met and he was doing the video production thing, and then he saw how the web in the mid to late nineties was evolving, and he started doing that. I started joining him, kind of moonlighting on the side. And then long story short, he left that position to pursue Sleeping Giant Studios full time, and I joined him in 1999. So been doing this a really long time. We’ve seen a lot during that timeframe. Everything from the dotcom bubble bursting right around 2000 to the major recession in 2008 time period to now. And it’s been an exciting ride.

And so I can’t say we’ve seen everything, but it seems like we’ve seen everything in that time period. But you never know. I mean, look at ai, another disruptor. Disruptor coming out of nowhere, well, not out of nowhere, but relatively speaking really rapidly. It’s disrupting the industry, but, and my role is even though I went to college for development and information systems, I’m business development and consulting, so I really am not in the trenches, and that’s why we brought Jake along because he’s going to be able to speak to more of the technical stuff better than I can. I’ll get myself into trouble.

Robbie:
Wow. Quarter of a century in the industry. So yeah, you’ve seen some changes. You, I think all of us probably on this call have seen some changes over this time period. It’s really been very interesting and I find that it makes time pass very quickly, doesn’t it?

Jake:
That is so true. Yeah.

Robert:
That’s how you can blink and be in the industry for 25 years. Yep,

Robbie:
Exactly. So Jake, when did you come on with Sleeping Giant Studios?

Jake:
Yeah, so I joined in 2005 actually, I started just as an internship right out of college. And yeah, I had a three month span and John and I had a discussion, and yeah, I’ve been with the company ever since. So it’s, it’s been quite a journey starting trying to learn as much from the crew that we’ve had over the years. So I’ve moved up and now I’m the lead developer and work closely with Rick and clients to work on solutions for them, try to figure out tough problems that come up with unique ways of doing things based on the tools that we have at our time. So it’s been fun. I can’t believe it’s almost 20 years.

Rick:
Yeah, we’re problem solvers.

Robert:
And I’m going to go with the SGS, so Robbie can stick with saying Sleeping Giant Studios. So along with that history and technical expertise, the one thing that struck me is that you are a platinum certified Woo expert, which is one of those things that I have not really seen out there. From your experiences, what did it take to get to be that and what’s the upside of being labeled as such?

Rick:
Sure. So when Automattic purchased Woo in, I want to say it was 2014 or 2015, I can’t remember the exact year, but we had already been using WooCommerce by that time. We started using Woo when it first emerged in 2011. Jake, I don’t know if that’s right, but around then.

Because we had been customizing and building our own e-commerce plugins, and when Woo came around and it was like, okay, this is doing 90% of what we needed to do, let’s use it. We still had to extend it quite a bit for a lot of our projects, but we were using it. And when Automattic purchased, they were looking for ambassadors for lack of a better term. And so they reached out to a number of different agencies that they saw had done some larger implementations using WooCommerce, and we had a number of successful e-commerce implementations at that time. We had to go through a vetting process where we actually had interviews with some of the Automattic team. They were vetting our code, how we implemented things, different projects that we’d been on, the migrations, integrations, that kind of stuff, and went through that process. It was a much more thorough process than it is today, I think.

And so we were brought on as a platinum level agency because of that level of work that we had done. That initially was really helpful in getting us additional clients throughout North America that would go to the Woo or me, the WooCommerce website and see, because there was only a handful of Woo expert agencies at that time, and very few of them were platinum level. And so we were able to create a number of great relationships because of that, and that was very much a boon for us and the other Woo expert agencies that were platinum. And so the program has changed quite a bit over the years and evolved and expanded and improved too. And so there’s a much larger number of Woo expert agencies out there, and automatic, to their credit, have really done a lot of work to try to improve and create additional value added services for those agencies. And we do appreciate that.

Robbie:
Awesome. So guys, here we are, I cannot believe this, but we are already in second quarter of this year time’s just flying, like I said. So as an agency, especially a small agency like yourself, where are you focusing now that we’re already in second quarter? What is your goals that you have for the rest of the year? Do you plot it out quarterly, you just going, flying by the seat of your pants? What’s your plan?

Rick:
Well, a lot of it is dictated by our model, which is really about creating relationships, really solid relationships with our client base. And whereas I think a lot of the larger agencies, they have different operations and processes internally. Because we are a smaller agency, we rely very, very heavily on these great relationships that we build. A lot of our clients have been with us for 10 plus years, which is really rare in our industry. And just providing them great work, very efficient work when we can. And we’re also very, very cautious about bringing on new customers. We’ve made the mistake in the past, just like every other agency of bringing on too much too quickly and trying to drink through the fire hose. And I see you guys nodding your heads. You know what that’s like,

Robert:
No one else can see it. But yes, Robbie and I are shaking our heads as former and current agency owners about the fire hose.

Rick:
So we’ve made that mistake. But so our models really based upon those relationships and really finding clients that are a good fit for our culture and for their culture, and that’s worked really well for us. And so I don’t want to say we necessarily plot out and say, Hey, we want to make sure we’re doing this and this and this. It’s really simpler than that. It’s just, Hey, let’s make sure our existing clients are really well taken care of, and then when we bring on new clients, let’s make sure we’re vetting them out, that they’re a good fit for us and they feel the same way about us. So that’s the way we look at that.

Robbie:
Since you have long-term clients like that, I’m sure that you are seeing waves in the quarters based on their industries then. Correct. You’re kind of following their industries a little more than just web industry per se.

Rick:
Yeah, that’s a great point, Robbie, because what we see is depending on the, I mean some of our B2B or B2C clients that have brands where they’re going to get hot around the holiday season, and so we see demand for that spike during that, where some of our B2Bs, especially in manufacturing, they’ll have a completely different business cycle and demand cycle. They may be have a hot season in the spring, or because they’re related to the construction industry, for example, maybe they’re really, really peaking in spring and the summer, but then disappear in the winter months. But what we see then is during their low time or their low periods, that’s when they look at investing in new technologies or new features or new functionalities or extending different things that we can do to help improve efficiency drive down costs. Whereas during their peak seasons, typically more, let’s make sure everything’s okay, handling surge demand, for example, we’ve had situations where a customer is launching a new product and they announced the new product and they’ve got a marketing campaign around the new product. And at midnight on November 13th, the site is getting absolutely pounded by literally thousands of people simultaneously hitting it. And so we’re all hands on deck for that kind of thing. And that can be a challenge as trying to manage that kind of surge demand. And we’ve gone through a lot of learning processes over the years on how to partner with different providers that can help us because we don’t want to be in the hosting business. So we have hosting partners that can manage that surge and that kind of thing too.

Robert:
I wanted to jump back slightly to your statement about culture fit and your company’s culture, your customers and partners culture. Let’s start off with what makes the SGS culture unique, special, and even simply, what is it?

Rick:
That’s a good question too. I mean, a lot of people tell us, and we don’t sense this, that we have the whole, you ever hear of Midwest nice, that whole thing? And I don’t know what that means really, but people say we’re pleasant and they just like that. We’re not like, go, go, go, go, go. And we are go, go, go, go, go. But it’s people I guess like us, and I think that’s a cultural thing, and we’re very straightforward about what we’re doing. We try to work with our customers and understand their businesses as we bring on new customers. I often find myself taking on the role of almost a business analyst.

A lot of times from a consulting perspective, our sweet spot for most of our clients is anywhere between on the low end, 500k, maybe to 10 million in terms of online transactions. Even though we have clients that are much bigger than that, those tend to be our B2B clients where we’re doing a lot of the work behind the scenes integrating with ERP systems, CRM systems, accounting systems. We’ve done some implementations with some major brands that they’re not as sexy. It’s lawn watering equipment, for example, that you can buy at Home Depot and Menards. Building out that e-commerce site isn’t the most, Ooh, that’s really awesome stuff.

Robert:
If you need to water your lawn, I’ll tell you that. You mentioned this Midwest Nice, which I’d like to say is very different than Minnesota NICE PS is. SGS is based out of La Crosse, Wisconsin, a three state area actually knows where it is. How does that affect your ability to compete with, which I will lovely call the secondary coasts. We have the best coast.

Rick:
So initially it was a big challenge, quite honestly, when we started in the late nineties, early two thousands, people didn’t associate lacrosse Wisconsin, which is actually closer to the twin cities than it is to Milwaukee. And we’re right on the border of Minnesota and Wisconsin on the west side of the state. They didn’t associate lacrosse with tech. And that was a perception challenge we had, and we just grounded out in those early years and just did good work, landed a few really significant projects that we were able to establish ourselves and kind of build our reputation. And one of them was a national brand that people in a specific industry were very familiar with. And that was kind of a springboard for us.

And then once we established that notoriety or that kind of both internal confidence as well as perceived expertise, then things started happening. Today it’s very different. I mean, as you know, in the WordPress and the WooCommerce world, having remote workforce is very typical and especially after Covid. I mean, we don’t travel hardly at all anymore. Whereas customers would request face-to-face prior to covid. Now they’re completely okay with doing remote or teleconferencing like we are today. It’s really a non-issue now. Years ago it was,

Robbie:
I could see that. And by the way, you have Midwest nice. We have southern congeniality down here. But I will say sometimes that is what makes a difference with say a California client. They’re just like, Hey, you know what? We’ve dealt with agencies here and we want to try something different. So sometimes I feel like that my agency is not in a New York or LA kind of setting that sometimes that actually makes a difference to the client that they want something different.

Rick:
No, we’ve found that that’s very true. And again, that’s just the feedback that we got and we go with it. And I’m not saying we promote it because for some people they may be like, what does that even mean?

Robert:
I know Robbie’s champing at the bit to start hitting Jake with the AI questions.

Robbie:
You know I am.

Robert:
Am What no one can see is the a hundred question list she has right in front of me.

Robbie:
Exactly, yes. If you think about it, especially for us that have been here in the industry for a while, we’ve seen disruptors. We went from the flash and action scripting, seeing that getting killed. We saw social media show up and become such an integral part of businesses, which we would’ve thought when that first started. But now AI and I mean, AI has been around a long time. I speak at a lot of conferences about it. It has been around a long time. It’s nothing to be afraid of. We do have the generative AI though now that has happened that it made it just more visible to people. And so now everybody’s like, oh my God, this is brand new. It’s like, no, it’s not really. But the new tools that are coming out and that the speed that they’re coming out is amazing. So Jake, I know Jake earlier was like, I’m not going to have a job. I’m like, yes, you’re going to have a job, but Jake, tell us how is it helping you AI tools in your job?

Jake:
Sure. Yeah. I also have been following AI and machine learning for quite some time before the big gender surge. But we were playing around with the LMS that came, I mean, just playing around with ChatGPT couple years ago or whatever it was, and just typing a query into it and having some response that sounded like it was actually curated, but it was instant. And then we all saw that being like, this is going to change things. And then obviously all of the stable diffusion stuff that was out there, but when copilot was added, I installed it right away. And just the idea of intelligence just at another level, that’s what it really felt like for me. I use that in my day-to-day coding, but also, I mean just if I want sample data, I’ll just fire up an instance of ChatGPT or some LLM that I’m running on my personal computer just to get a random copy.

That’s not your just boilerplate stuff that we’ve looked at forever. It’s just, in my opinion, it’s not only changing the potential of the future, but it’s just fun. A lot of times it’s just fun to play around with it. And even when you’re writing code, you can now have it analyze your code and say, yeah, maybe you could do this a little bit better, or here’s a thought. It’s just really, it’s an interesting tool. And for us being a smaller agency, some of the efficiencies that we get with it, it’s so helpful. And I jokingly say it’s going to take my job because I think there’ll always be a need for the development community to recognize how powerful these tools are and how to use them to make the web a better place or to make everything better.

Robbie:
Absolutely. And people are using them the tools like you’re talking about. So at the Dev, oh my gosh, what an amazing tool to have any of the PHP storms AI tool in it. I mean, the tools that are there are amazing. And then as far as, I’m sure Rick, you’re starting to see some ways to use it in your business development with, I mean, there’s so many things it can do for you with your scheduling and automations and things like that. What about with e-commerce, though? So when I was in, I think it was WordCamp Europe last summer, I was talking to someone and I talked to so many people, I can’t remember who it was I was talking to, but they were starting to use AI to analyze huge, huge records of e-commerce products to help it rewrite the descriptions, to search against keywords for those descriptions and things like that. Are you guys looking at some tools to actually help on the e-commerce side of things for your clients in Woo.

Rick:
What I can tell you is that Woo has really made a lot of updates and is making strides towards implementing a lot more business use cases for end users. And so to your point, creating unique descriptions, for example, of products that it’s coming up with, analyzing actually the analyzation of search results and making recommendations based upon previous searches within the user base. That’s been around for a while, but they’re improving on that kind of thing. There’s a lot of SEO tools that are out there now. That’s a double-edged sword because we’ve seen what’s happening in the SEO world with AI right now, and it’s kind of a mess, might be a little bit of a kind word, but there are, I think genuine great use cases for writing descriptions or identifying products that should be promoted or highlighted more effectively or in real time based upon things like geolocation based upon search history based upon user history data that we have access to that’s legitimate. So there are definitely e-commerce use cases from a technical standpoint. I’d have to defer to Jake on that one.

Jake:
Yeah, I mean, I think the thing is that it’s all kind of, to your point, things are changing so quickly and it sometimes feels like, oh, I haven’t read up on what happened this week. I feel out of date. So that’s just a lot of times, even when I’m over lunch, I’ll just pop on a podcast or somebody that I follow that’s in the AI world and just see what disruptions they followed and then thinking about, oh, maybe we can use that at SGS to make our day-to-day better. So

Rick:
It’s a hot topic in the WOO expert community right now. I can tell you that.

Robbie:
It’s a hot topic in every community right now, Rick. It really is. Every community.

Rick:
Yeah, I mean there’s a lot of discussions going on behind the scenes with, I don’t know what I can and cannot say with regards to that, but there’s a lot going on, let’s just put it that way. And WooCommerce is making some significant changes and updates with regards to it.

Robert:
Well, and I’m happy to hear you spill the beans on any of this super, super talk. I mean, what do the Woo’s all about is letting other agencies and folks know what’s coming down the pipe.

Robbie:
This is a safe space, Rick, you can share.

Robert:
It’s a safe space. It’s completely public and everyone will hear it, but it’s a safe one. Exactly.

Rick:
Well, it’s one of the advantages of being in the Woo expert program is that I’m actually missing a meeting right now that’s regarding one of the new services that they’re rolling out. And it’s tailored for initially the WOO expert agencies or other agencies that are using WooCommerce. And so it’s pretty neat to be able to have access to that kind of information, not only directly from the Woo team themselves at Automattic, but the community of developers and agencies themselves that there’ll be times where we may have a challenge or something that we haven’t seen before or we just can’t figure something out. So we have a dedicated Slack channel for the experts that will post something out there and say, Hey, you guys ever see something like this? And boom, we get back a response or somebody from Automattic or the Woo team might lend and assist and facilitate something with one of their solutions architects. We recently were in the midst actually, of working through a massive token migration from a different payment platform to Woo payments.

And that’s not just something simple. There’s no easy button on that. And so when you’re talking about thousands of subscriptions and migrating all of that payment information, credit card information over to a new payment processor and doing it securely, doing it in the correct fashion, we reached out through our expert channels and boom, we were able to get some help and some direction on that, and away we go.

Robbie:
Yeah, I’ve done this migrations. You just gave me a little heartburn there, Rick. I’m going to have to excuse myself and have some to, no, I’m joking. I’m joking. That’s difficult.

Jake:
He does have a way of doing that. Sometimes he’ll bring up a topic and it’s like, oh, okay, I remember the hurts or the struggle to get through that one. But yeah, we always seem to find a way just to piggyback off of his point, sounds so

Robert:
Easy sometimes just hit the migrate go button and it’s all good. I know we’re crunch for time, but I’m going to geek out on this, especially for the rest of our audience. What is the best way to migrate tokens like that? I mean, that is a huge one. I don’t think we’ve ever really tackled, I mean, we could do multiple shows on that, but is there a magic button or is it just grief and tears and AI and whatever else can be involved?

Rick:
Well, that’s not, like I said before, we had to reach out for help because that’s not something that we had done before, nor were we comfortable doing. We’ve done lots of migrations and integrations, but never with sensitive data like that. So ultimately, there’s a process that has to go through. You have to request the token data from one payment processor to initiate that export, and it gets exported through VGS very good security, which is basically an intermediary. Think of it as almost like the middle person holding onto that data in a secure fashion using a standard that’s known in the technology community,

Robbie:
Almost like an escrow.

Rick:
Yeah, it’s similar to escrow. And again, I, I’m speaking at a high level because it’s the solutions architects that are helping us with this. They then can take that data and Woo, payments uses Stripe as a backend, and so we then import that or they import that data and then once that import occurs, then we script it to correlate with the new subscriber data that we pulled over having to migrate all the subscribers, all of the products which are subscriptions in this case and all of their past history, the orders, we have to make sure they’re all together. As you guys know, that is not a simple process. And we’ve done our fair share a lot of these types of projects, and there’s always going to be something that maybe goes a little bit off, but we’ve gotten to a point where we’ve gotten pretty good with it, and that’s where a lot of our demand comes from. But yeah, there is no easy button. There’s a lot of moving parts that you really have to plan out and of course, and then minimizing that maintenance window and making sure that you’re not losing any of that data, that’s all part of the picture.

Robbie:
That’s awesome. Yeah, you guys, as you mentioned earlier, you kind of went from broader based services down to your niche here. And lemme tell you, that’s getting pretty nichey there to be doing those type of migrations. And you guys do work with other agencies, which I think is important for other agencies to hear out there. If they hit these projects and they’re going to have those types of technical problems and migrations and things that reaching out to an agency like Sleeping Giant Studios, I’m going to get it one more time, would be a good fit then, correct?

Rick:
Yeah, and we work with agencies on different levels. For example, since we don’t offer marketing, we will partner with other full service agencies that do offer marketing if one of our clients needs that kind of assist. Likewise, we have other full service marketing agencies that reach out to us when they get on over their heads with a project like this, like an integration or migration. And we will collaborate on projects with other technical agencies, whether it be other expert agencies or there’s been times where we simply didn’t have the bandwidth for something and a client has come to us and said, Hey, we’d like to do this. And we just say, yeah, we just can’t do that right now, but hey, here’s this other agency. They’re also expert agency and we’ll refer them to them. So there’s different ways We work with other agencies, both in the marketing markets as well as the technical agency environment,

Robert:
Say, I love the fact that because it’s open source, because it’s Woo that you folks have a community to engage with for very specific, whether it’s technical or business related, integration, whatnot, issues. And I think that makes a special project compared to others.

Rick:
I think that’s worth mentioning is the open source nature of both WordPress and WooCommerce. And I was in a meeting with a Woo expert meeting, I don’t know, six months ago, maybe a little longer, where somebody made a great, no, it was an automatic conference. And somebody at Automatic made a great point and made an awesome analogy, which is open source is kind of owning your home, whereas being in a closed network has its advantages, but it’s like renting. You’re at the mercy of the landlord, whereas with WordPress and Woo, you own everything. You own your data, and if you want to make a change with your payment processor, for example, you can do that. If you want to use a different technology for managing subscriptions, you can do that. Whereas there’s a lot less of that flexibility, and you are at the mercy of those closed systems with non open source solutions. Again, they have their place, and I’m not saying that’s bad, but I thought that was a really great way to, especially in today’s climate where privacy and ownership of your own data is a decision making factor for a lot of people.

Robert:
I couldn’t have scripted this conversation any better because I’m just going to plug the new open talk on Open source podcast at Do the Woo as well, because we’ll be talking about that a lot in the next couple months. So I’ll take the second of the last word, Robbie, it’s all yours.

Robbie:
Awesome. Awesome. Well guys, thank you so much for coming on the show today and chatting with us and letting us learn a little bit more about your studio and what all you guys do. How can people find you if they would like to connect with you? Jake, we’ll start with you.

Jake:
So you can just look us up at sleepinggiantstudios.com and we’re on the socials and this and that. But really just check out at the website. You can reach out there and hopefully folks enjoyed our conversation and we’re always up for talking with anybody about this. The WooCommerce community has just been absolutely amazing and it’s a pleasure to be on here with you guys.

Robbie:
Cool. Thank you. And Rick, how can people reach you?

Rick:
Yeah, best place is through our websites, SleepingGiantStudios.com. We’re not terribly active on socials, quite honestly. And it’s kind of the situation of the cobbler whose have no shoes. We are unique in the sense that we have never marketed ourselves very heavily because we haven’t had to. And the work that we’ve gotten has a lot of, it’s been word of mouth or people see that we’re doing certain things in a certain vertical market, and so that’s kind of why that is. So we do have a Facebook page. We do have a Twitter handle, but I’ll be honest, we’re not real active on those and I think that part of that comes with our boutique agency kind of status.

Robbie:
Cool. Awesome. All right, well thank you guys again. And Robert, thanks for joining us today as well and helping me quiz these fellas. I think it was a great show and we really enjoyed learning more about your studio and everyone else out there. Don’t forget. Listen to the next episode of Do the Woo.

Rick:
Thanks guys.