From Freelancing to Agency to Store Owner

Brad:
And we are back with another episode of Do the Woo, episode number 28. I’m your host, Brad Williams, joined by my esteemed co-host, BobWP. Bob, what’s going on?

BobWP:
I was going to fake a dropout here again before the show. I kept having issues, and my internet quit and everything. I was just going to disappear and have you freak out for a moment, but then you’d just run with it. So, I’m doing good. Feel free to drop, Bob. We got this. We don’t need you. I know if I just fade out, nobody will even notice.

Brad:
We’ll keep chugging along one way or another. And the reason we’ll be able to do that is because we’ve got a really cool guest on today. Michael Tso is joining us. Welcome to the show, Michael.

Michael:
Thank you for having me.

Brad:
Excited to have you here. So why don’t you, for those not familiar, give everyone a little intro—who you are, what you do, and how that relates to WooCommerce.

Michael:
Yeah, so I’m Michael, and I live in Bologna, Italy. I’m from New Jersey, though I haven’t lived there in a long time. I’ve been remote working and living in different parts of the world. For the last couple of years, I’ve been in Italy. What I do…boy, what don’t I do these days? It seems like every other month I’m starting up another business or project. So I’m doing many things at once. But, Bob, the last time I spoke to you, I told you about my mate business.
And so, I’m still doing that, and it’s expanded. That’s my Woo store that started off as me playing around with Woo in a live environment, and it has turned into something much bigger—a very large warehouse. Outside of that, I also just started a new business called Reggio Design Studio. Basically, it’s a lot of what I’ve already been doing freelancing, but now I’m branding it under a name. A lot of client work with WooCommerce but also other services, as I’ll be hiring more help and have contractors, so some Shopify work, design work, and things a bit outside of e-commerce as well.

Brad:
Very cool. Yeah, let’s dig into that a little bit. First, I want to start with your store. I think we probably have to start with the pronunciation—you said it’s mate?

Michael:
Mate, yeah.

Brad:
It’s a drink.

Michael:
Yeah, so it’s a drink out of South America. It’s very commonly consumed in Argentina, Uruguay, Southern Brazil, Paraguay, and other places as well. It’s very, very popular, especially in Uruguay, where everyone knows about it. But it just hasn’t caught on with the rest of the world yet—particularly in the States. But I’m hoping to catch that wave, and maybe one day it’ll catch on.

Brad:
And this was born—you mentioned you were tinkering around with WooCommerce for fun, and it just evolved into an actual store that you decided to start selling?

Michael:
I’ve always wanted it to be a business, but when I started it, I didn’t have an idea of how big it could become or what’s involved in starting a store that sells physical goods. I wanted to be someone who actually had an e-commerce store rather than just building sites for people. I wanted to be on the other side and get the real experience. It taught me a lot, especially about things behind the scenes, like warehouse management, taxes, and other complex aspects that you don’t think about when you’re just building a store. It’s been an interesting learning experience.

Brad:
Kind of “dogfooding” in a sense—using the software yourself that you’d usually build for clients within your business.

Michael:
Yeah, and I’m learning a lot about many other fields that I previously had no experience with, like marketing with Facebook ads, AdWords, and selling on Amazon and eBay. It’s a whole other world that I’ve been digging into more and more. It’s been a costly business, but it’s like taking a course or something.

Brad:
And you were in the WordPress world, the WordPress space. I know you worked at Automattic for a period of time, so WordPress was familiar to you when you dove into this. So I’m assuming that influenced your decision to go with WooCommerce, or was it something else?

Michael:
Yeah, for sure. I already knew exactly what I needed to get things going. It felt like I was almost cheating because I knew all of the plugins I would want. The downside was that I wanted to install all the plugins because I knew what everything did. But I learned that added a lot to the complexity of the store, so I had to scale it back. I had to bring it down and ask, “What am I trying to sell?” before adding another plugin with 20 features that maybe didn’t add to the business.

Brad:
Yeah, it’s the blessing and curse of a very extensible system like WordPress. I’m sure we’ve all seen this: you log into someone’s site, and there are 50 plugins all running, and you have to ask yourself why. Bob, you and I have talked about this on previous episodes. We recommend sitting down before you install anything to map out your goals—what you want to accomplish for the first version to launch. Really map out those requirements so, rather than installing everything, you have a plan for what to install, configure, and what your goal is for that first version to get it live. Because version one is always the hardest version.

Michael:
Yeah, and it’s important, I think, to remind yourself of your goals and revisit them periodically to change anything that needs to be changed. But I find myself going back to adding features nobody wanted. So every now and then, I go through my features, plugins, and everything in the store, and if it hasn’t been helpful, perhaps I should remove it. Why did I add it in the first place if I didn’t even know if people were going to use it?

BobWP:
Yeah, one thing, and Michael, we talked about it when I had you on the other podcast, and what I think is interesting is the experience as a developer and then the experience as a store owner. We touched on that a bit—how probably your perspective changed a lot from developer to store owner, just because as a developer, you can try to have that empathy for the store owner, but until you’re in there actually battling the battles, it can be a whole different view.

Michael:
And I’ve been battling some things that are just… maybe because I have insider knowledge of how things should work, it frustrates me when things don’t work how I think they should. This tends to happen a lot with integrations—third-party integrations that haven’t been well-coded or reviewed. It has nothing to do with Woo, but it’s like somebody made an integration with Woo, and it was just badly coded. I’ve wasted so much time integrating with their platform, and it doesn’t even work well. So that’s just part of the struggle, I guess. Then I’m fixing their bugs and telling them what they need to fix.

Brad:
Submitting pull requests so you can get your site working. Yeah, that’s sad and funny, I guess. But I’d like to hear, if anything, maybe something you discovered or learned once you started building your own site—administering and running your own WooCommerce store—that gave you a different perspective, or something you didn’t realize before you were doing it for clients. Is there anything that stands out top of mind that was a bit of an eye-opener once you were the one digging in and working with it?

Michael:
I think that I should have been more open to changes in the beginning. One thing I did learn was that I should have been more open to making more drastic changes to the site. If I wasn’t going to get sales every day at the beginning, I should have been more comfortable making bigger decisions, changing the structure of the website, and just learning. Instead, I was being really careful about the smallest things and maybe spending a little too much time on things that didn’t even matter. I should have been a little more flexible at first.

Brad:
Yeah, that’s a good point. And I’m curious, how do you test things like that? There are a lot of ways to get feedback from users and test whether changes make a difference. What’s your general approach to testing, say, the text on a button or a new feature to see if your users actually want it? How do you identify those areas that you should focus on versus the areas that your customers don’t care about?

Michael:
I don’t have a solution to that yet because I’m still figuring it out, but I’ve been using Hotjar. That’s worked really well to see what people are navigating. It’s changed my understanding of what people find useful. Hotjar has been helpful, but it’s a lot of “let’s turn it on and see what happens.” Asking for feedback is difficult. I don’t have the scale where feedback is constant. If I get one piece of feedback after a thousand purchases, I’m listening, but I’m not sure if what they said really makes sense for the thousand-plus other purchases.

Brad:
Maybe they’re just the vocal minority, but it doesn’t mean that’s how everyone feels. That is a challenge, and I don

’t think there’s a silver bullet for any store, large or small. As you said, you’re iterating. It’s a process. Crazy Egg is another one we’ve used in the past. It’s really interesting when you watch a recording of somebody navigating your website. A conversion for us is someone contacting us for a website build, whereas for you, it’s someone buying a product. But just seeing what they do and click on can reveal confusion you didn’t know about. AB testing can also help. But it’s a process that’s never done—always iterating.

BobWP:
I’m curious about one of the things you’ve done lately. You’ve started selling on eBay. What made you decide to do that, and how would you compare selling on eBay versus selling on your own store?

Michael:
Selling on eBay was a completely random decision. I had no idea it would work—I didn’t know it was still so popular. I haven’t shopped on eBay in ages. It’s been primarily Amazon for me. But eBay’s entry barrier is easy. There’s a limit to how much you can sell at first, but that’s just to get your feet wet. It was mostly just testing. Amazon is not as easy to get into. They require more documentation. I’m still not on Amazon because it’s taken a long time. But with eBay, it was as simple as signing up and getting my listing up on the same day.
Over time, eBay sales grew, and my listing allowance increased. I called eBay, and they increased my limit further. So I put my entire inventory there, and it’s entirely synced with WooCommerce. The process is all managed in WooCommerce, including order fulfillment through EasyPost. My entire inventory is counted in Woo, and from there, I can push it to eBay. So I hardly ever log into eBay itself. Everything happens in Woo, and it syncs up elsewhere. It’s been really easy. I learned that eBay is a good starting point for marketplaces because if you want to sell on Walmart or other platforms, they sometimes ask for your eBay listings as a reference.

BobWP:
Was that integration pretty seamless?

Michael:
I’ve been through several integrations, and the one that’s worked best for me is a plugin called WP-Lister. It’s a premium plugin, and they also have an Amazon integration that’s been great. For example, eBay charges a fee, and they also prefer free shipping, so I can set an extra percentage to cover those costs. Everything syncs over from Woo to eBay seamlessly. I don’t have to think about it. It’s all automatic.

Brad:
Did you set up the integration before testing eBay directly, or was your first approach through WP-Lister?

Michael:
I tried other platforms first, but I realized I needed a way to manage all products centrally. My inventory was limited, and I didn’t want them out of sync. So I focused on a solution where Woo could act as the hub, which WP-Lister allowed.

BobWP:
Okay, let’s shift over. I want to learn more about Reggio Digital Studio. You worked at WooCommerce for a while, then left and freelanced, then started this store, and now you’ve launched a digital studio. Are you aiming to build an agency rather than freelancing? What prompted that shift?

Michael:
As I mentioned earlier, it’s about branding the work I was already doing. I’ve been freelancing for a while, but I wanted a brand to tie everything together. I’ve also had so many projects that I wanted to make it bigger. I’m learning a lot from building Mate, my store, and I’d love to share that experience with clients. I wanted to do something larger than freelance work and build a team that could take on projects beyond what I could do alone.

Brad:
Cool. Yeah, I love the animation on the homepage of your site. Definitely check it out if for no other reason than to play with the animation.

BobWP:
Oh, I’m doing that now. We’re going to take a break while we play on Michael’s site a bit here.

Brad:
Yeah, I think it’s great that you have real experience running your own WooCommerce store. You can bring those experiences to clients and suggest ideas that worked for you. That experience is valuable, and it’s something not everyone can say.

Michael:
Yeah, I hope so. It’s made me realize that if you’re shopping on Amazon, you often don’t know who you’re buying from, but on eBay, it’s clearer. Of course, I make the most if you shop directly, so my callout to everyone listening is that if you trust the website, try to shop directly from e-commerce stores. It supports them much more than going through other platforms.

BobWP:
Cool. And I want everyone to know that I’m actually drinking some of Michael’s tea right now. He sent me some mate. I’m not a huge tea drinker, but it’s actually pretty good.

Michael:
Thanks!

BobWP:
Just giving you a live reaction here. Fortunately, it was a positive one.

Michael:
It hasn’t been easy to partner with some of these companies out of South America. There are so few contacts out there. So when I do find a really good mate company, I reach out and really try hard to get them on board, like, “Hey, people actually love this stuff in the States too.” And I’ve been trying to educate people and get them to try it, like yourself. And of course, there are a lot of people from South America who moved to the States or Canada or elsewhere and want access to it and can’t find it at their grocery stores. So it’s fun trying to partner with companies that are out in the middle of nowhere in Argentina, and trying to get a huge crate of mate over to the States and dealing with customs and all of that—that’s fun. Just trying to get all that stuff over here. “What is this that you’re sending?” I just say it’s tea, technically not tea, but just label it as tea, and that’ll get it through customs.

BobWP:
Oh, well, let’s flip over a little bit. I just have a couple of things I wanted to add at the end of this show. One of the things, and I don’t know, I thought maybe there’d be a bit more activity on it—there was a tweet the other day, or actually it was a while ago, from Mario Peshev, and I believe he has been on the show. He’s at No Fear Inc. on Twitter, and he said, “I’ll be presenting at an eCommerce Summit next week regarding the future of WooCommerce, given the recent $300 million investment from Salesforce in Automattic. What’s your take on the future of eCommerce?” And a few people chimed in, and I know this has been talked about a lot, so I don’t want to rehash it, but there was some feedback. Most people said it’s a good thing; some people said, “Oh, it really is not going to make any difference to WooCommerce.” Just wondering if either one of you have any thoughts on that, or are you pretty much status quo?

Michael:
I am not sure that it’s going to make a huge difference, but if it does, it may make a difference several years later. You can look through the history of WooCommerce.com and its marketplace. Things seem to move a bit slowly, at least on the public side, and you don’t see a ton of changes on the front end. Most of what we see is on GitHub for WooCommerce, and whenever a new extension comes out. So it’s really hard to know what’s going on behind the scenes. Having been at Automattic, I know things can just take time. So it’s hard to know how they’re going to distribute all that, but I’m confident they’ll distribute it quite well and make good use of that money. But we won’t be able to tie it to one specific thing, like, “Oh, this money was utilized for this one thing.” That’s my guess, anyway.

Brad:
Yeah, I mean, you’re right. Obviously, Automattic now has so many different kinds of arms and revenue streams and areas that this investment is going to trickle into. WooCommerce is one of those, and Salesforce has its own commerce platform. I’m not really familiar with it, but I believe it’s aimed more at larger-scale commerce, whereas Woo is accessible to any size online store, small or large. So I think it’ll be interesting. Obviously, Salesforce is the number one CRM out there; it’s massive. They have a ton of users, and we work with it a lot with many of our mid- and enterprise-level clients. I think being an investor in WordPress itself makes a ton of sense because it’s the biggest platform on the web. Anything they can do to have tighter integration between the services will be a win for both sides.
How that directly impacts WooCommerce… yeah, that’s kind of TBD. And honestly, Bob, I didn’t even reply to that tweet because I thought, “I don’t know how to sum this up in a tweet or two.” And usually, if I can’t sum it up in a tweet or two, I just don’t tweet. So yeah, I don’t know. That’s a really good question: how does it impact WooCommerce? How does it impact WordPress as a whole? There’ll certainly be an impact, but it might be hard to point to exactly, “This is the one thing that capital created.” I think ultimately, things might speed up because there’ll be more resources, more people, a larger company, more capital to fund it, so they can play around with some more interesting things. But I don’t know. It’s hard to say right now. But either way, I hope it’s good for WordPress. I think it will be. But I think that’s what we’re all thinking right now—it’s open-source, and we’re all in on WordPress, and we want it to remain open. I don’t see any reason why it wouldn’t based on the message that we’re hearing from Matt and Salesforce.

Michael:
One acquisition that, outside of Tumblr, kind of flew under the radar is that Prospress was acquired. That’s an exciting one, I think, because that team is so talented. I’m not sure if you’ve talked about this already, but it’s exciting to see Subscriptions as part of the Automattic family. Now they’ll have a ton of resources for that as well. It’s such a successful plugin, and there’s so much talent on that team. I think that’s going to go really, really far at Automattic.

Brad:
And I think we’ve been trying to get Brent on this show for the whole year. But yeah, I think so. We’re still working on it; it’s hard to coordinate times with Australia, but we’ll get him on at some point. But yeah, you’re right. They’re an awesome team, very talented, good people over there. And they make Subscriptions, among other things, but that’s certainly their top billing. To your point about developers and doing things the right way, they certainly know how to do it the right way.

Michael:
Yeah, for sure.

BobWP:
Well, I promised Mario that you guys would at least weigh in because he wanted some forecast from me, which…

Brad:
So our answer is, “We don’t know, Mario. We don’t know, man. You’ve got to figure it out.”

BobWP:
Yeah, I told him. He said, “Oh, I was expecting one from you,” and I just said, “I’m weak. I listen to the crowd. I’m more of a listener than a joiner in the conversation.” So anyway, that was interesting. And I’ll put a link in the show notes to that tweet.
The other thing is just that there’s an update coming on the WooCommerce admin. Just curious—more than about what’s actually around the bend—have you been diving into that, Michael?

Michael:
Yeah, I did. I did remove it, though, because I was consolidating my plugins—not because it’s not awesome. It is awesome. I love the way it looks, but I was just consolidating some plugins, and that was just one of them. But I do really like the way it looks. The one part that kind of confused me at first is that you have to get used to when you click on WooCommerce now, it takes you directly to the order screen, I think it is. But with the admin menu, if you click on it, it takes you to a dashboard, so more of the reports. I did have to change the way I use it, I guess. You get so used to where the links are; you don’t even think about where the menu items are anymore. It could be in another language, and you just know where everything is. So I got used to where a menu item was, but it changes in that plugin.

BobWP:
Anything on the list for the next release that catches your eye, Brad? Most of it is beyond what I use or comprehend, except maybe the CSV download.

Brad:
Yeah, I mean, it seems like a lot of just tightening up, bug fixes, a few changes. I need to give it another run. Honestly, I haven’t used it with the last few releases. I think it was earlier in the year the last time I gave it a shot, and there have been a number of releases since. So I need to get back in there, maybe for our next show, and give it another run to see what’s changed. It looks like there are definitely some visual changes as well. Okay, I see the next release is actually going to be in a week and a half. I’ll make it a point before the next show to give it a run-through and see the differences and changes. But I love the way they’re building it as a feature plugin, essentially. It’s definitely the right way—you can install it, play with it, check it out, and then remove it if you’re not ready for it. Just like Michael did, clean up those plugins.

BobWP:
I’ll revisit it myself. It’s been a while. Well, I think that pretty much wraps it up, and it’s great having you, Michael. Brad, we should probably have Michael tell us what’s exciting going on and where people can find him.

Michael:
There’s always something exciting on my Twitter, my full name, Michael Tso. And from there, you can find links to Reggio Digital Studio and to my store. Well, I’m going to pronounce it kind of like the Argentin

ian way, yerba-matero.com, or perhaps in a more American accent, yerba-mate.com. I’m sure you’ll put this in the show notes, where it makes more sense.

Brad:
Very cool. What’s going on with you, Bob? I have some WordCamps coming up. This weekend is WordCamp Philly, so I’m excited about that. I’ll be there on Saturday, and in about a month’s time is the big one—WordCamp US. So I know, Bob, you’re going to be there. I’ll be there the second day, on Saturday. It got in the way of Halloween a little bit, so I’m going to miss Friday. I don’t want to rush out from Halloween and miss plans with my son. He’s in prime trick-or-treat age, so…

Speaker 4:
It’s…

Brad:
A big deal. But I’ll be out there Saturday, so if you’re at WordCamp US, definitely track me and Bob down. I think we might even be doing some Do the Woo action live.

BobWP:
Yeah, we plan on it. We won’t hold you to it, but I’m pretty sure we’ll swing it this time. I’ll be there as well, and I’ll also be over at WordCamp Seattle the week after, doing some stuff. I’ll be doing a session on podcasting and branding through your podcast. And, yeah, we’ll be doing some podcasting there. We have a little podcast area we’re setting up, so that’s going to be fun. Yeah, Michael, it’s always a pleasure having you on.

Michael:
Thank you.

BobWP:
Thank you, across the pond. Exciting to hear. I definitely want all those tea lovers to give this a whirl. I’ll be disappointed if they don’t. And, Brad, always a pleasure meeting up with you again. We do that occasionally.

Brad:
Thanks so much, Michael.

Michael:
Brad, do you drink tea? I’ll send you some next time as well.

Brad:
I do, yeah. I have to check it out. I’ve never had that type before. I’ve never heard of it, I don’t think.

Michael:
Excellent.

Brad:
Bob gives it the stamp of approval; it must be good.

BobWP:
Geez, pressure’s on. Alright, thanks, everyone, and join us again in a couple of weeks for Do the Woo. Well, that’s a wrap for today. And if you enjoyed the show today, a review or share is always appreciated. You can follow us on Twitter at Do the Woo Podcast or subscribe on any of your favorite podcast platforms. Thanks for listening, and make sure to join us again for some Do the Woo.