Enterprise‑Level Hosting and Educational Platforms

Robbie: Hello, this is Robbie Adair with Do the Woo. In this episode, my normal co-host is out gallivanting around at Yost Khan, and so I have a stand in today, which I’m very excited about. And that is Jay Walsh from Woo. Jay, tell us a little bit about yourself and your role there at Woo.

Jay: Oh, thanks. What a pleasure to be here. I just started about six or seven months ago with Woo and the communications and marketing team. So I’m kind of tasked with helping to tell the story and connect with lots of folks within the community and really just promote Woo, try to get more people talking about Woo within the industry, amongst our new customers, within the community. Absolutely. Yeah, and it’s been exciting. What a journey so far.

Robbie: Awesome. Well, it sounds like we’ll be seeing you at a lot of events coming up here soon then. And we’re going to help you with telling this story of Woo here today, because today we’re going to be talking to Krešimir Končić, and I probably have really murdered that name, but he is with Neuralab and it’s an agency, then they do WordPress, WooCommerce, all web-based applications, I believe. But Kresimir, tell us a little bit about Neuralab and yourself.

Krešimir: So yeah, we are a team that is producing open web apps for, I believe, 15 years now. So I’m the agency owner and founder, Kresimir Konchi. So you got the name right. Yeah. So we have been building various web applications for mostly enterprise grade clients. This is our niche. So we work with a larger system, larger clients with a lot of meetings, a lot of meeting notes, a lot of integrations and business talk and processes and stuff like that. But our first venture into the web was not with Woo or WordPress because Woo was not 15 years, I believe Woo is 10 years old or something like that. So when we started, we basically built everything from scratch. So we built databases from scratch, back and front and everything from scratch. There was no tooling and no DevOps. There was no technical stack that you currently have now.
It was basically nonexistent 15 years ago. So we basically did everything by ourselves, and then we started to play with various content management systems. We played with DotNetNuke, we played with Joomla, we played with Umbraco, and then this new kid on the block came, which is basically WordPress.

It was in the market when we opened our company, but it was not so popular as right now. So we started to play with WordPress around 2010, and we have seen all sorts of benefits and not reinventing the wheel. We saw that we can build custom plugins, custom teams, data modeling, everything. It has a large API and because we have engineering background, we kind of dig it. So we sold to ourselves, “Okay, WordPress is the future, the way of building web applications.” And what Met was talking about then and the whole community that was talking about, then we kind of clicked with this energy and with this philosophy of open web and it kind of clicked with our company. So we pursued building open web applications on top of WordPress and then came Vu later. So we kind of focused more on e-commerce projects because e-commerce is kind of big in enterprise sector, it always has been. So we kind of rode this wheel continuously. So yeah, I don’t want to go into the whole history of company, but this is in short bullets, this is basically it. So we have been driving for WordPress for over 12 years, I believe, 13 years, and we are sticking to it.

Robbie: Awesome. Well, so I think it’s very interesting having an agency myself that I tell people, a lot of times we build website applications and they’re like, “Well, what’s the difference between a website and a website application?” But I hear you calling it an application as well, and so I really appreciate that because if you were building a WordPress website with any kind of customization you’ve done there, plus you’ve got e-commerce, it truly is an application. It is a web application. Do you find though people question you about that or want to know what that means?

Krešimir: Yeah. So we have this meetings and talks about this all the time inside our company especially. So when we onboard juniors, we like to talk about wording and how to approach clients and educate clients and educate the market and educate the whole industry. So I would say that websites is a pretty old term. So I would say, so this would be my first sentence when we are explaining what is the difference between website and web app is that websites is, so has been term in 2006, 2007, 2008, to put it in technical and engineering term, everything that is happening in the browser is a web application. So that would be from the engineering perspective, the right technical term is to call everything that is inside the browser web application. And then inside of that you can have e-commerce web application, you can have a website, but website is basically, I would say a colloquial term for when I land on somebody else’s brand online, I’m landing on a website. It’s like visiting client’s site, visiting a client HQ. I would say that this terms comes from this kind of background, but when we talk inside company and with our clients, we always tell this is a web application. Application means it has data layer, business layer, interface layer. That’s basically it.

Jay: Kresimir, can I follow up on that question? I think the language around it is of course very interesting to me. And I’m curious though, for a lot of your clients and your customers, I know some of them are pretty large, but how often do they come in with, what level of knowledge about e-commerce? Because they probably say, “Well, we want to, maybe we want to do e-commerce. This is important to us.” What level of literacy do you usually see there and how do you go about leveling them up to understand the nuance of what’s a web app and what do they need to do?

Krešimir: I mean, I have thought about this a lot when GPT came along because I think most of our clients tend to think that they know things about web industry and that they know stuff about e-commerce and web applications and how to build any sort of interactivity, and they’re pretty confident about it. So it’s like ChatGPT outputting some text. It’s pretty confident about it, but it basically doesn’t know what he’s talking about. So when we talk with our clients, we instantly go into education mode. So we always educate them about what they truly need, what they truly need to have to empower their business processes. So this is the biggest education point for us. So whenever we see an RFP from a client or whenever we see a brief from a client, whether it’s a very, very well written brief or RFP, we always dissect it and we always first internally cross out the words, cross out the buzzwords, we reformat the whole brief to suit what is what they truly need.

But we always educate the client. So a typical example would be we need WooCommerce with this and this plugins and with this and this integration and with this and this backend, and we want to design to be blah, blah, blah, blah, blah in this and this way. Okay, first, what are your business needs? What are your main functional needs? What is your strategy? What is your tactics? What is your operation? Then we go into meetings about a lot of their internal processes. So how do you handle shipping? How do you handle logistics? What are your products? What is your pricing? What is your marketing, 7P marketing, what’s the people, places, products, price, promotion? So we go into that and then after that we give them our way of thinking, our estimate, our project timeline, our way of thinking about their whole need. So I always say to my team, this is an uphill battle all the time because we always have clients that are coming along with all sorts of RFPs.

So one thing about Neuralab, I spoke to you earlier about that we are always working with enterprise grade clients. So in enterprise sector there are a lot of really smart people and really well resourced people with large teams and large knowledge bases. So they also think they know a lot about the industry. But to be honest, I believe, and I’ve seen it from my own eyes, that agencies are the best consultants because agencies work with a lot of verticals like with energy sector, finance sector, tech sector, fashion, beauty, everything. So we know a lot about verticals and other solutions that worked inside other verticals. And we also worked with a lot of horizontals. So we also know how to work with sales, how to work with marketing departments, how to work with tech departments, logistics, legal, everything. So agency would be wise to hear them out.

Robbie: Yeah. I think that we have the same issue, the educating customers. A lot of times whenever they come to us, then they think they know what they need and you are correct though, as the larger the client, usually the more well versed our contacts are there. And so normally we can all speak the same language, but even they will find benefit from working with agencies where an agency, like you said, you’ve worked in so many different industries and there are a lot of things that can be pulled over industry to industry to help them out that they might not have even considered if they tried to do that all internal and just use their own resources inside. So I think that a lot of customers benefit from working with agencies that way just about what you’re talking about there.

Krešimir:
Of course, and there is always this thing about pushing the clouds to their limits because we are constantly working with enterprise sector and they are quite slow. So everything is moving slowly. They have a lot of bottlenecks and we help them remove these bottlenecks.

Robbie: Awesome. So what do you find when you are working with these clients, whether they be your smaller clients or your larger clients, what are you finding with say the hosting aspect of these web applications that you’re building for them? Are they internally wanting to host? Are they wanting to use hosting companies or are they wanting to do kind of a cloud base but is their own accounts for that?

Krešimir: Yeah, so this is a great topic and it’s like ever present question in every meeting. So the thing is that hosting is really tied with the whole user experience that we are building. It impacts speed, SEO, the whole customer experience, the whole user experience. So it impacts everything. And inside Neuralab hosting is closely tied with our productized team. So we are offering hosting, we use mostly Kinsta for our own hosting purposes. We have also tried a lot of hosts. So we have worked with the WP engine, with Vertis VIP, with Kinsta, with Pantheon, Dream Host, Blue Host, whatnot. Kinsta is our main choice. It has been for over, I believe, eight years, so since they launched. The thing is that Kinsta is really tied with our DevOps process. So whenever developers push something to get when, so whenever they push something to Bodyworks for continuous integration or continuous development, it’s constantly pushed to Kinsta and this whole engineering process is really tied with how we work.

So whenever a client comes to us and they say, “We want to have our own hosting,” we have a large discussion with them about the benefits. And so the pros and cons of using Kinsta, Google Cloud and Azure AWS or their own hosting inside their own offices, we have seen also this kind of topics and our success rate of educating them is probably around 99%. They see that they can’t host something on site. It’s like old school approaches. Nobody’s using this anymore. So what we do have a question is who owns the account? So most of our clients tends to own the Kinsta account that we publish web application, this is fine by us, this is totally fine by us. It’s basically an accounting issue. Then, so they paid their own bills and that’s basically it. We have access to everything. But we are really tight with Kinsta Team. We have our own support agency partner program and everything. So we are really fast in working with them.

Robbie: And by the way, that also being, I’m in the US and I’m in Texas and Texas is what we call a work for higher state. And so for us, it’s more beneficial for us to always push our clients to have their own accounts, even though typically we are the ones that guide them to where would best suit their needs, but we always like them to have their own accounts set up there too. But by the way, I will also say I’m also a big fan of Kinsta, especially with WooCommerce. It’s amazing.

Krešimir: They’re very great. Yeah, I mean this whole account owning is really tied to this philosophy that we have been promoting from early days of Neuralab is that open web and no vendor lock in. So whenever we talked with our clients when WordPress was not popular and when WordPress had a lot of myths flying around the whole ecosystem, it’s not secure, it’s slow. It’s only for blogs, like typical myths. One of the things that we always talked in our meetings with our clients that if you go with the customs TMS option or vanilla web option, you’ll have vendor lock in. So this kind of meeting note and meeting agenda is always present with us. We always explain to our clients what is a vendor lock in? And during these talks, we always say to this, “You can be the owner of your own hosting account because you’ll own the whole stack. So you’ll own the hosting account, you will loan the CMS, you’ll own the code and you’ll loan the data, which is especially important here in the EU because EU takes a lot more care about privacy and data than in the states. So this is also a topic for us also locally.

Jay: On that hosting question, it occurs to me that a lot of clients must already just be locked into whatever their platform might be. I mean, I totally get where you’re… You know the best place for them to end up is a place where they’re not as locked in and they have more liberty. But I mean for larger enterprise clients, I imagine there’s a lot of like, “Okay, we have this legacy space. Can you build within it? Can you build within this?” Is that a common experience or is it… I mean you always want tabula rasa, right? You want to start fresh, I suppose, but that’s pretty rare, I’m guessing. So you often have to build while the plane is in the air as it were.

Krešimir: So as I said earlier, hosting is always a topic in the early meetings, especially with enterprise clients that have their own IT team that is channeling their whole stack about ERP and warehouse management system and CRM and stuff like that. And the internal IT team is always at some, they’re looking over their shoulders about who will take their business and who will take their load. And they were hesitant about any cloud service basically because Kinsta is built on top of Google Cloud. They were hesitant, but in my terms, it’s always an opportunity to educate the client, so you should always place yourself in the role of the educator. And if you do that, I believe in most of the cases you’ll not have a problem. But yeah, on-premises and on-site servers that are underutilized are a big issue for clients because they pay thousands and thousands of dollars for the bare metal and they’re paying probably a lot of Microsoft licenses, so they want to utilize them.

So it’s like a harsh truth when we tell them it’s not a good idea, your web app will be slower, you will have down times. So whenever we say about SLA, like service level agreement, but who will own the hosting in most encompassing major term? Who will be responsible when the site is down? Then we have blank stares because they don’t want to get the responsibility about this, especially when the site is pretty large. We have one client, they are a creation agency for handling high school exit exams. So in Croatia you have exit exams. If you do it well, you’ll get a direct entry into the University. So it’s a big deal In Croatia, the site is visited around half a million of visitors daily and it’s handling and managing all sorts of private data and exam data, and a lot of really, really, really detailed stuff about pupils. So who will manage the load? So who will manage the uptime? So who will manage the responsibility of saying to half a million of users, “Your final exam is not ready because we have downtime.” So this is pretty serious stuff.

Robbie:
It sounds like to me though, you found that, you found the perfect way to work with internal IT departments though, because typically those internal IT departments, they’re swamped. They’ve got more than they could possibly get done in any week or day, and so they’re always looking for help, but they always ultimately will have accountability up for it. So it’s giving them, “You own it, but we will help you run it and we will help you if it’s down,” you’re answering all of their pain points that way.

Krešimir:
So when you go into a corporate meeting or enterprise meeting, so whenever you say, “We will take ownership as an agency and we will deliver by this date and we will remove your load and we will remove your bottle next,” you’ll always get a yes. So this is like because they know that they are slow, they know that they like internal hurdles and this is the best way to get into this. Of course you need to be aware that you can deliver in the end, but this is the reason why we are working only inside web. So we are only working web, and so we know what we are talking about.

Jay:
Can I ask maybe a follow-up to that, the education, the exam one sounds like a wickedly complex kind of experience, but whether maybe within the context of Woo and WordPress, I know the answer to this is going to be no, but do you ever reach a point where you’re like, “That’s too complex, we can’t do that, or you need to move to someone else,” or do you rise to the most difficult challenge? Do you have an example of a challenge that was really, really heavy lift in terms of complexity and maybe traffic or whatever have made it hard?

Krešimir: At Neuralab, we really love complex and big projects, we never have enough of them. Complex projects are complex topic. So whenever we see a complex RFP and project brief, we tend to know how to build this, we tend to know how to design the whole customer experience and user experience and backend and frontend and everything. But the problem is the budget because we want to do it in a right way and we want to do it in a scalable way, and this costs a lot of money. So mostly what happens is when clients see our quote, they say, “Oh, we can’t afford this.” So they have two options. They will either go with some other agencies that will probably sell them snake oil or if they’re wise, they will cut on some functions and remove the complexity of the project and then they will remove the excessive budget and excessive timeline.

So this is kind of talks that we have, but I have never seen a project when we have enough budget both time and money that we don’t want to do it because it’s overly complex. So the most complex web applications, in my opinion, are platforms, when you are connecting two types of customers. So for instance, eBay. So eBay is connecting sellers and the buyers. We had a case, interesting case of it’s called TDA Top Digital Agency. They’re a platform that is connecting agencies and clients, but mostly about old school marketing stuff and print. So we have built a platform on top of Vu that utilizes in memberships, subscriptions, commerce, of course, the whole VP stack. And we can built the whole platform for connecting these types of users on top of this stack. So we have of course used, this is a custom theme, custom plugins, custom integrations, everything is built custom on top of WordPress tech, but it’s a highly complex project.
So I believe it was around 5,000 hours, something like that.

The second case was for Dream Act charter, like a global company for renting yachts. So they have offices all around the world, thousands of people working for this client. So they have of course commerce and woo, but they have all sorts of products like renting a yacht to booking a yacht, booking a simple product, booking a virtual product, booking of variable product, groups products, product bundles, all sorts of products that are basically their yachts or merch or stuff like that. All sorts of templates. They have five or six different content types, menu here, menu there, flying around everything. So it was also around four or 5,000 hours of work. And this was also work between, I believe eight agencies. So we were working on the whole web application, but they also have a separate agency for building the digital brand, separate agency for doing the SEO, separate agency for content building, separate agency for I believe, analysis of the whole marketing. So it was kind of a lot. So we don’t shy away from complex projects, but they are heavy on the load.

Robbie: On that first case, you said you guys did subscriptions. Did you use Woo subscription with WooCommerce?

Krešimir: Yeah, of course, of course.

Robbie: Awesome.

Jay: Can I ask a about, so I’m excited to hear that you’re using Woo and I mean I work with a team that’s always very invested in questions around Woo but is there something when you’re using it that you’re like, what would be a dream feature or something that you find periodically that you feel is missing from Woo that you, what’s on your top list of features you’d love to see from it?

Robbie: Ooh Kresimir you’ve got a line right into Woo right now through Jay.

Jay: You always do, you always have, we want to hear it.

Krešimir: So I’m not developing anymore. I have been developing for over 20 years, so I needed to handle the business. So I don’t know the technical nitty-gritty about WooCommerce. I know that developers are complaining about how jQuery is use, how JavaScript is used, how the template thing is done. But I believe every kind of mature system that has its pros and cons have some sorts of inner workings that are not optimal, to put it mildly. I am happy about the whole WooComerce team going into this high performance order storage roadmap. I believe this is a way to go. I believe that WooCommerce should be more geared towards larger projects, larger clients, not to be competitor to Shopify that you are currently also now pursuing with Woo. It’s WooExpress, right? Yeah. I don’t think this is wise because this type of market has a lot of players around catering to this small, really, really, really small businesses is a great option. But catering to this, like, micro businesses, I don’t think this is wise. I think WooCommerce has bigger opportunity handling the larger enterprises because of its nature of building open web applications, REST API, modularity, plugins, custom teams, custom code, large ecosystem of both hosters, developers, DevOps.

I believe it’s pretty geared towards larger projects. So I’m happy that this thing about scalability and improving WooCommerce to handle thousands of orders and thousands of head to cart per minute is basically what we are eager about. So we were in Austin, I believe it was WooCommerce conference in 2012 or something like that. So Chris Lema was speaking about the largest possible scale scope that you can have with WooCommerce. And I believe his team with WP Engine pushed WooCommerce to be like 2000 at the cart every minute. So they had 2000 head to cart events every minute. So this is a pretty large scale. So whenever somebody talks to me about what is the possible scale of Woo? I always talk to them about this example, and I always say to them, “So when you get to this kind of scale, this will be pretty good words to have, how to scale even further.”

Jay: Thank you for sharing that.

Robbie: And by the way, I agree with you that WooCommerce to me is always for our clients, especially, it’s the fit when we need larger e-commerce, custom e-commerce, we can put somebody in in Equit or Shopify, I think they have their place, but then typically the clients will mature and need to move on to something that’s more robust, more complex. We just actually moved a client that had been for years in 3D cart, which became Shift for Shop, but anyway, and moved them in because they had outgrown it, they needed more custom stuff as well as we had set them up with an LMS, which also had to be a SaaS platform then. So now we’re able to take all of those different SaaS platforms, pull it into one WordPress with Woo and Learn Dash and Woo Subs and stuff like that, and you can create the custom environment that they have now grown into and need. So I agree with you that I treat Woo as my heavy stick as it were for e-commerce.

Krešimir: I mean, especially if you are venturing into this headless web apps or stuff like that where you are only talking with rest API, I mean, WooCommerce is perfect for that.

Robbie: Have you guys done any mobile apps to tie to your WordPress Woo apps?

Krešimir: We are intentionally not working on native mobile apps. So we are not working on top of Android and iPhone ecosystem. We are only building web applications, but inside that, we have worked a lot with REST API. So for instance, we have built, it’s basically a B2B internet, it is only available for internal customers. And this internet is basically a web application. It’s like mobile first progressive web app like PWA that is talking with the WooCommerce server REST API, it’s fetching orders, it’s fetching customer data, and it’s pulling back to the database. And we are also using REST API to talk with various ERPs. In this case, it’s the NetSuite.

Robbie: Nice. Well, and Jay, since you were asking, we’ll also throw out, I would love to see the Woo conferences come back that he mentioned he went to in Austin. Would love to see that come back. So just see what you can work on there, Jay.

Jay: It’s on the chalkboard. Everybody likes a party. Everybody likes a celebration. It’s got Woo in its name. No, I feel like it’s, yeah, there’s a bit of a gap in this space too, and I’m glad that so many other spaces exist for this, but I feel like there are so many Woo specialists and folks who work in that world that there’s a great conversation to have.

Robbie: It’s just a great place to network.

Krešimir: I mean, WooCommerce is basically now the biggest market share player in the world. It should have its own central conference. It’s a big shame that we don’t have that.

Robbie: Well I think we’ll have Jay work on it. That’s right. Jay, work on it.

Jay: Like to throw a party.

Robbie: Well Jay, thanks for coming on and co-hosting with me today. I appreciate it, and Kresimir I really enjoy you coming on and sharing with us insights about your agency. Sounds like you guys are doing some awesome projects over there, and so we’ll probably have to have you come back on sometime and talk about some of your projects that you’ve got going on. And will we see you at, We’re Camp Europe?

Krešimir: Yeah, of course. So we are coming, I believe six of us are coming and we’ll be in Athens for around five days. So we’ll hang out for sure.

Robbie: Yes, we will. We’ll hang out.

Jay: Look for the WooCommerce booth. There’ll be some exquisite stuff on display there and our folks will be around. So it’s a slice of it, but it’s there and we’ll have a lot of fun. Look forward to seeing you both.

Krešimir: We’ll be there. Not a problem.

Robbie: Well, right before we hop off there, tell us how can people find you on the web?

Krešimir: So you can search for Neuralab. We are present at Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, GitHub, B Hans. We are also VU experts. So you can also find us on the VU expert roaster. It’ll be best that you Google Neuralab. We have offices in New York and in Zagreb. So you can also find us on these locations. If you’re in Zagreb, especially because we have large HQ here with a lot of barbecue culture. So yeah, we are also doing a lot of meetups in Zagreb. So I will invite everybody to keep an eye on our meetups page. We are doing meetups every quarter, and it’s both physical and live-streamed on YouTube, so you be able to watch that. We have folks coming from Automattic and Kinsta and WPEngine.

Robbie: Great. Jay, how could people find you?

Jay: Well, I’m on Twitter at JAnsonW, but if I’m doing my job right, you’re just sort of seeing coverage and people are talking about Woo. So we’re always checking our email and checking our conversations, but that’s the place to go.

Robbie: All right. Well thank you guys both.

Jay: Thanks Robbie, I appreciate the invite. Thanks, Kresimir.

Krešimir: Thank you guys. Thank you guys for your time. It was a pleasure.