The Transition of Working at WooCommerce to Launching a SaaS Product

BobWP:
Hey everybody, we are back with Do the Woo, episode 35. This is BobWP and one of our new co-hosts is joining us today. So you get a break from Brad. You don’t get a break from me, but you get a Brad break. So I have Jonathan Wold, one of my new co-hosts from Automattic slash WooCommerce, joining me. Jonathan, how’s it going?

Jonathan:
It’s going good, Bob. We got a lot of snow up here where I live. I’ve got about two feet outside right now, so it’s really, it’s a nice time of year.

BobWP:
Yeah, it’s coming down and we’re about to get 0.2 inch maybe if we’re lucky out there.

Jonathan:
For where you’re at, it’s surreal when you see snow on the beach. Ocean beach, it’s a little odd. So I live in a surreal world, but

Jonathan:
We also don’t have the same weather that you have. How cold is it in Australia right now?

Bryce:
Cold. Well, I’m not sure if you guys understand Celsius, but I don’t know what it is in Fahrenheit. It’s like 30 already, 30 degrees Celsius now, and it’s getting hotter. But Melbourne in general, we always joke that it has very unpredictable weather. We’ll go from 30 degrees in the morning to a thunderstorm in the afternoon.

Jonathan:
So for anyone in Fahrenheit, that’s about 86 Fahrenheit. So that’s the point there is it’s summertime in Australia right now. So for the first time this year or first time ever for us, my family and I, we went down to Mexico for Christmas and a number of different reasons. My wife’s doing school and a lot of crazy things. So we just skipped Christmas this year, went down there, woke up Christmas morning, went out and we ended up doing this excursion where we were riding camels on the beach. It was a very strange experience for me having always done pretty traditional cold weather Christmases to be, it’s sunny and warm and on a beach.

Bryce:
Yeah, I kind of liked it. Do you know how we feel? Yes.

Jonathan:
Yeah.

Bryce:
Bob’s got no idea. Bob’s like what?

BobWP:
Yeah, I know. I get used to it. It’s always been Northwest, and when we lived in Southern California for five years, it was weird to me because it was like, okay, here’s Christmas. I go out, see the palm trees, there’s no snow. It’s the same, feels like the same temperature it has been for the last eight months and nothing’s different and then it’d go into the next year. So, well, I grew up closer to you, Jonathan, over in Spokane, and those were the days of 5, 6, 7 foot snow drifts and those were then, that’s what I grew up in and that’s what I loved and I wouldn’t love it now because I have to drive in it, but back then I got to sled in it and do everything else and get pulled around on the back of car bumpers and anyway, all that fun stuff, crazy stuff. Bryce, you have been, like I said, in the WooCommerce space quite a long time. You’re doing something really cool now and you have been doing that for a while. Tell us or tell everybody a little bit about what you’re up to and a little bit of your background.

Bryce:
Yeah, I can start with the background. For me, I feel very fortunate to have had a really great background in the WordPress space, WooCommerce industry. So for me, I think a lot of people in life eventually when they find what they really love doing, they love it and everything else before was not as great and maybe they didn’t even want to think about it, but for me, I also used to love what I did, so it’s just the next step of that. But anyway, so yeah, a bit of my background before, well, I haven’t said what I’m doing now, but I started my kind of life in the WordPress world as a support technician for WooCommerce. So it was only 30 or 25, 25 odd people then, and they were looking for people to do support and I was like, I’ve seen WooCommerce before, I’ll try that.

So I didn’t really know what I was doing. I didn’t think I’d get the job. I was talking to someone yesterday and they’re like, was it easy to get a job there? And I’m like, well, I didn’t really think I’d get it. I just did an application. It went well. So did an interview and got the job and all of a sudden I was doing support for WooCommerce and very much learning on the job and then became interested more in the development side of things after a while of answering questions. And WooCommerce was really heavily used. This is back in 2000 and I think 14 or something like that. It was really quite popular then as well. This is five years ago, and we get a lot of questions and a lot of complicated ones and there weren’t that many of us doing support. So you’d have to get through a lot of questions and after a while you start to want to give more answers and there’s only so many answers you can give when you are technically limited by the response you can give. So in a desire to be better at my support job, I wanted to be a developer, but the catch 22 there is that as soon as you start doing more development work, that’s all you want to do.
And I think it’s not a surprise to companies like that. They see it a lot. So when I send a message to someone there and I’m like, I want to be a developer, I don’t think that was a surprise at all. They’re like, okay, we’re waiting for that message. But yeah, it took a little convincing and then eventually I moved into a developer position.

Jonathan:
One thing I’m curious about on the Woo team, had you worked remotely distributed before that?

Bryce:
No, no. My background before Woo is not Woo. I was living in Southeast Asia. I was running businesses there traveling. It was almost as far from remote as it could be because any work I was doing was very much in person, physical. We didn’t even have internet a lot of the time or good phone service and things like that.

Jonathan:
That’s something I’m always curious about is what that transition experience is. I personally resisted it. I’ve been doing fully distributed for eight plus years now. I was very resistant at first. What was it like for you first coming into Woo and then the transition to Automattic?

Bryce:
Maybe it was okay because I did such an overcorrection that it was so far from any, I’d never worked in an office doing a tech job. I’d never sat next to developers. So for me it was almost, and it’s probably what it’s going to be like for a lot of people starting their careers now and going forward that you don’t even experience a physical job. It’s just the only reality is working remotely, which makes the adjustment really easy. And that being said, when you work remote, as you know Jonathan, you do meetups, you see people in person a lot, and I’m sure you’ve left a couple meetups thinking like, oh, that was great. I wish I could do that every day with those people or even a little bit more frequently. You just would love to spend time physically with the people you work with. So it’s not all, I guess you miss it. I didn’t really miss anything. I hadn’t done that before, but I kind of loved working in person with.

Jonathan:
So in Metorik today, is the team distributed or how do you guys do that?

Bryce:
Yeah, so after Automattic, I ended up leaving back in 2016, and then it was really just that desire after just wanting to for a long time, build my own company but not being able to. And then there was a point where I worked on one day and felt like I’m able to do this now I’m ready financially, mentally, all that stuff. So I left and started this company Metorik back in 2016, and in short, we can talk about more later if you want, but it’s basically just analytics and email automation and I almost call it like a copilot for WooCommerce stores. So that’s a product. Now Metorik’s three people or four people, including me, my partner helps out a lot. And then we’ve got one other team member who, and I resisted hiring for a long time, so it wasn’t that Metorik was remote or had an office.

It was just me for such a long time, but after two and a half to three years I thought, okay, maybe it’s time, it would help. So I brought on someone back in May or so last year. And it’s funny you mentioned that kind of question wasn’t remote because the first person I hired was from Melbourne and someone I’d known my whole life. So yeah, I almost did an overcorrection again where I was like, I’ve worked remote for a few years, I’m going to do the opposite now. But it’s like we had an office or anything as a friend. Sometimes we’d work from his place, my place cafes, but also 80% of the time we’d work remotely. And I knew that going forward, if I ever hired a third person, fourth person, they would be someone not in Melbourne. So I almost wanted to train that first hire from the start, this is how we’re going to work.

And then the second person I hired in addition to my partner and myself is F Hutchinson, who, Bob, you probably know Fem, he used to work at WooCommerce and Automattic, and he’s not in Australia, so that’s a remote hire. And Fem was a bit of an unplanned hire in that wasn’t saying that

I’d been talking to him about for a long time. Just the opportunity came up and I think him and I both had really wanted to work with each other again after having that gap for a few years. So it’s just really good timing and that’s been really fun as well. But that’s been remote, so I guess it is a remote company. To answer your question,

BobWP:
So when you were at WooCommerce, and I don’t want to pinpoint down the exact moment, but obviously you found the need, you were looking at WooCommerce at some point, maybe it was in the tickling of the back of your head for sometimes saying where are all the metrics?

Bryce:
Yeah, no, it’s not something you come up with overnight, right? No. Well, the original idea for Metorik was it would’ve happened back in over a year and a half before I left when this is before Automattic. So I was just getting into a development role at WooCommerce when it’s just WooCommerce and I was like, guys, I’ve been building this beta for an idea I have for a metrics kind of app. And it was so far from what it is now. Literally all it did was pull in some data off the API and make a chart that used Chart.js and looked nicer. I did some design on the chart. It was really simple, but it was enough to say maybe this is an area to focus on. I had no credibility. I was just learning to be a developer and I was doing support most of the time.

I wasn’t really in the position I suppose to offer that to the company, but I had something in mind. So I showed them and it didn’t really work out. I never really went past that stage. So that was where the first idea came from, but I kind of just put it on the back burner. I think someone asked me at Automattic for the code when we were joining them, and I was like, I don’t have that anymore. It was an awful plugin and it didn’t really do much, but it was all right. It was enough to get the idea going in my head that this is an area that it would be fun to focus on one day. And then I think when it came around to it and I was like, I’m ready to do something on my own, it was just like, what ideas do I have?

And I’m like, well, that works. I’ll try that. You’ve got to go with what, and I was like, I want to do something in the WooCommerce space because I just feel very at home here. The community’s amazing and I think especially when you are leaving an amazing job, one at Automattic to start something on your own, there’s a lot of trade-offs, you’re giving up a lot of really great stuff. So I kind of did this calculation in my head where I’m like, as long as I can cover my cost of living and maybe even replicate my old salary with this project, that’ll be okay, but that would also still be the equivalent of another job. So I wanted to be in an amazing community and work with my friends and stuff, so it almost kind of gave it more value rather than the money side. So if I’d gone and entered a whole new industry and maybe made a tech product, but very far from WooCommerce, I think it would’ve been, even if I’d replicated the financial needs, I don’t think it would’ve been as fulfilling as the work I was doing on a WooCommerce product. Yeah, it was part of my calculation, I suppose, in at what point does this project break even? It was a lower financial requirement because of the other value I got out of it.

Jonathan:
Exactly. One of the things that I’m really curious about, I spent a fair amount of time last year looking at the software as a service space and just kind of thinking about the opportunity in that as it relates to WordPress, and it’s interesting to hear you looking at multiple different pieces that factored into your decision to invest. And basically, from my point of view, it’s like a SaaS on Woo, right?

Bryce:
Yeah, yeah. It’s exactly like a SaaS.

Jonathan:
How much opportunity do you think there is from your point of view, as someone who’s kind of started and you’ve seen the ups and presumably the downs, the challenges, the opportunities, when you think about SaaS and WordPress and WooCommerce specifically broadly, how much opportunity do you feel there is in that space for people who are interested in what you’ve done?

Bryce:
Not just in WooCommerce, but WordPress in general? I wrote a blog post back in the early days when I was still working on the beta for Metorik. I was almost filled with a lot of just ideas and hope and was for the WordPress space because I was building and I was like, maybe I’m onto something where it might be something that other people can do and will have a lot of value. And I even wrote a blog post about the future of WordPress not being a zip file because plugins made a lot of sense for a long time, but now I don’t think that’s the case. It’s almost like the opposite, and I think we’ll see. It’s slowly shifting away and we already are where a lot of companies that have a plugin that maybe their whole business was providing a premium plugin, they’re shifting a lot of that functionality towards a SaaS.

The benefits are just infinite. I struggled to see many cons, but the advantages of doing a software as a service business rather than a plugin that people purchase and download in store, well, you can just offer so much more value as the business that’s providing that service because when you are offering people a plugin, it’s a little archaic in that just a very simple situation. There’s a bug, so what do you do? You fix it in the code, you put it into a zip file and then you upload it to your site as a new update and maybe it automatically lets them see the update in their admin or they get emailed and they have to download the update, install it. Just that whole concept that you need to firstly get alerted to the bug, you need to fix it, and then people need to actively make an action to benefit from you fixing that bug.
It’s crazy with a SaaS, if someone reports a bug right now, well, firstly, a lot of people don’t even need to report bugs because the amount of tracking you can do on a SaaS in terms of error tracking, I get an email the second there’s a new JavaScript error on the app, and I can look at that, fix it, put it live. No one even had to say to me, Bryce’s a bug, and then instantly every single user has the latest version with that bug fix. That already is enough for me to sell it. The other side of it, you can see I get pretty excited about it. The other side of it though is that from a business point of view, you are experiencing a much more predictable revenue stream where it also tends to be a little bit more affordable at the start for your customers because you can bill monthly.

Yeah, well, my lowest plan is $20 a month, which isn’t that cheap, but it is $20 to get started. While some plugins that would offer similar functionality might be 150 or 200 upfront. Now in the long run, I have no doubt Metorik will be more expensive. It’s probably one of the most expensive products for WordPress and WooCommerce out there, and it doesn’t bother me because the value it provides justifies the price and the number of customers we have speaks volumes to that. But for customers, they can get started without putting in a credit card, without buying anything because you’re offering a trial. And you can’t do that with a plugin because if you give someone the product, the plugin, the file, they have the product, there’s no after 30 days, Hey, you didn’t pay. Can you please send me back the zip file and promise to delete it?

You can’t really have that dialogue with the SaaS. Someone can come try the product, they can get every feature, and we don’t limit it at all. So they can go in, use the entire product as if they were paying, and it doesn’t matter. I have some people do trials that have half a million orders. They’re at a scale where if I said to them, you need to pay a thousand upfront, it wouldn’t be an issue for them. They make that much in 10 minutes. But everyone, whether they’re small or big, gets that same first experience with the product where you see everything you can be used. You don’t need to give me a credit card, use it for a month, and if you like it, then pay. And that’s really nice because I have some people that will never subscribe, but they just needed one thing I offered and they just wanted that one thing, and I don’t mind they can just try it, do that one thing they needed and then never use it again and it didn’t cost them anything. It doesn’t really bother me. And it’s just one of those unique things about running a SaaS that you get to have.

BobWP:
Yeah, I find that interesting because I look at it as, and this is from the other side of it, somebody that spends the money and does this is that I love the trial, but I also love any SaaS that provides that monthly option because sometimes I need more than the trial and I’m thinking, okay, let’s take your product. For example, I could do the trial and then say, okay, I’m going to go ahead and spend 20 bucks and play with it a bit longer. And after that maybe I decide not to, and then I can go the option of depending on the place, whether I want to go yearly or go monthly. But it gives, and I’m sure there’s a lot of people that don’t agree with me or don’t think that way because thinking, oh,

that’s 20 bucks more. I don’t want to have to spend, well, there isn’t many opportunities to spend a lower amount of money and really work on something for a while. And until you started talking about it, I didn’t really think of it that way, but that’s how I approach a lot of this stuff. I don’t know how many services I bought for just two or three months and just thought, okay, this is great, but I can really use it.

Bryce:
But I was able to get out of it what I wanted to make that decision. Yeah, that’s something really nice about giving people that freedom again in how they use software, but it’s not all amazing for consumers. Of course it is going to be more expensive. Some people say to me, why do I have to pay more if I’m growing? Because if they start using Metorik when they have $80 a month, they’re paying that $20 a month. But if they grow and then suddenly they’re doing $2,000 a month, they’re paying, I think it’s a hundred a month for that plan, five times the price, they say, why am I paying you more? It’s the same product, but because of the SaaS, you have different economics and stuff where the costs on our end end up increasing as they grow. So the price reflects that, but you still are able to offer a very high quality product and service to everyone. And that’s for me enough to justify it.
And the beautiful thing about running a business or selling any product is that no one has to buy it. It’s a choice. It’s a choice where someone can look at it and say, this is worth the money to me. And someone can say, this is not worth it. And everyone has that choice over how they use it. The really nice thing and why I always advocate for WordPress developers, WooCommerce developers to consider SaaS as an option is that because of how the numbers work and that if you can provide something with a lot of value to a bigger customer who will happily pay you four or $5,000 a month, I’m sorry, four or $5,000 a year, you only need 10 or 20 of them to replicate a salary at another company, but you’re doing what you love, they’re happy. And so it doesn’t bother me if I won’t have 10,000 customers.

We have 1100 or so now that’s more than I could have ever hoped for. I would’ve been happy with a hundred customers or 200 customers. So your requirements as a business reduce a lot, and you could compare it to someone who has a premium plugin that costs $50 a year. Let’s say it’s $50 a year even, and for them to do a hundred K in revenue, they need to sell. I should be better at math for someone who runs an analytics company, but they need to sell 2000 licenses a year, 2000 licenses. That’s like seven a day. That’s crazy. That’s a lot. Seven new customers a day. We don’t have that many new customers a day. And I’ve been doing this for three and a half years. Maybe some days there’ll be like six or seven, but most days there’ll be one or two. But when you have a SaaS, all of a sudden the requirement to have a steady influx of new customers every day disappears.
You just need to maintain what you have the customer base you have and slowly add to it while not losing as much as you’re adding. The beautiful thing about a SaaS business is that as long as you add more revenue each month than you’ve lost, you retain more or you retain, no, sorry, not you retain, but you get more new customers than you’re losing, you’ll just keep growing. While with any other business, you have to just keep selling. And if you want to grow 10%, you’ve got to sell everything you sold in that last period, but 10% more. It’s just I don’t envy it. People doing that, it’s so difficult.

Jonathan:
So given all the pluses and the experience that you’ve had, and I love by the way, just looking at your blog, you talk about growth with purpose and a bigger picture, but given all the pluses, what are some of the challenges this? Well, if it’s too good to be true, it probably is, right?

Bryce:
Yeah, no, I love that saying as well, and I always say it, if it is too good to be true, there are negatives, not that many, and I think it’s enough that having done this now for a little while from experience, I can say this is a better option, but the negatives that stick out straight away, you have to provide pretty much 24/7, well, you have to 24/7 uptime. So that’s on me as a service to provide. I’ll get a phone call in the middle of the night if something goes down. If you had a plugin, that’s not really an option. It’s not really a concern if the product doesn’t just stop working in the middle of the night on X many thousand stores as a plugin. So as a service, there is a single point of failure being the service. So if that fails, everything fails and you’ve got to fix it. That’s by far the biggest negative. I’m trying to think of others, and there aren’t too many coming to mind. That’s really the biggest one.

Jonathan:
What was your experience like finding the product market fit? Because going from idea to actually, I know people who put a lot of time into something and they don’t seem to get traction. How did you navigate that?

Bryce:
No, the unique situation I was in, I suppose, to other founders doing SaaS products is that well, Automattic has a very strict and publicly known conflict of interest policy where you can’t do anything, and Jonathan, you work there, you can’t write a bit of code or anything. So it put me in a very unique situation in that I had to really, really be confident in my idea that it would work because there wasn’t a little middle ground where I could just slowly test it and see, to be honest, I even thought about, I’m like, should I get another job that doesn’t have that and then slowly work on it? But I was like, that’s not fair to the next employer and all that stuff. So I just had to really hope for the best and I had a bit of a game plan and I was like, I’ll quit.
I’ll try build it. It’ll take me at least a few months to build it. I’ll do a beta, maybe it’s another month, two months of that, then hopefully people will pay. But because I was in a situation where I had less requirements to other people, I don’t have kids, didn’t have a mortgage at the time or anything like that, I was able to have a pretty good idea of what I needed financially. So I just had a timeline where I’m like, it was almost like I was starting a company and had investment and I was like, this is my runway. I know my cost of living is two, $3,000 a month. I have let’s say 30 grand. I have a runway of 10 months, and if I don’t get to a certain point,

Jonathan:
So you calculated it and you said, all right, I can work on it this long and I got to make it work within that.

Bryce:
But I didn’t know if it would work if that’s the question. But at the same time, I think I did because I worked in WooCommerce enough to know that there was a need for this and if it wasn’t going to work with my solution, someone else was going to do it after me and that’d get it to work. So it was just a matter of time. Again, I kept telling myself, all I need is 500 customers enough just to pay the bills. And because it was a SaaS, my volume needs were a lot lower than if I was building a plugin. I would’ve been like, I need a hundred new customers a month for the next year. That’s really challenging, but just getting 50 or a hundred people isn’t as bad as difficult.

Jonathan:
I’d love to hear about your first customer. What was that like?

Bryce:
Of course everyone, I remember that very fondly. Well, it’s hilarious because when I launched it, it was in beta and no one was paying for that. And then I was like, you know what? I’m ready. I’ll just turn it on. And by that I meant the marketing site was up. Anyone could start a trial. There wasn’t a beta code or anything like that. So there was this one day where I felt ready and I just flipped the switch and I didn’t think much would happen. My partner and I, we went over to go visit my brother that day at his office and we were just like hang out. It was a very relaxing day. And then I’m driving back home and I get an email on my phone, okay, you have your first, it’s that email from Stripe. You’ve received your first payment. A lot of people have gotten that, and it’s a nice feeling you get that and you’re like, okay, cool, this is happening.
And I got that, but my first thought wasn’t, oh my god, that’s awesome. My first thought was this makes no sense because anyone who would’ve tried it today would’ve just started a trial and they’ve got 30 days, they don’t have to pay. So my first thought was, this is fraud. I’d had some bad experiences running business in the past with chargebacks. I’m like, oh, this is definitely fraud. They’re just testing out a credit card. I’m going to get a chargeback. I’m sweating and I’m not enjoying that moment at all. But then I look at the customer and investigate and it’s like someone in Melbourne who started a trial that day. They connected a real store to the service. They must

‘ve just liked it and then subscribed that day and it was hilarious because they were only 10 minutes away from me, a 10 minute drive of all the people in the world. It’s someone that’s within 10 minutes of you. It’s just crazy.

Jonathan:
I really appreciated you sharing all this from my point of view and having spent the last year looking at the world of SaaS at a high macro level, there seems like there’s so much opportunity here and it’s really cool to hear your story and perspective, and I hope for folks listening that, and it sounds like one of the keys that I’m hearing from your story is you focused on solving a problem that you knew existed. That’s a key.

Bryce:
That’s it. If you want people to give you money, you just need to give them more value than what they’ve given you. It just needs to be a profitable transaction for them. No one’s going to complain if you told me if I gave you a hundred dollars, you’ll give me back $110. I’ll do that in a second, even if it’s a dollar, as long as there’s a profit to the consumer, that transaction makes a lot of sense. I do really hope that more WordPress WooCommerce businesses try the SaaS route, and I’ve been advocating for years for it because there is a con, which I said, but if you can find your way around that and work with the constraints of that, there are so many pros and a lot of the cons that you do have with plugins, and I can probably think of a lot more than just that one I thought of for SaaS, they all disappear and suddenly you just get to do what you love, which is solving a problem for people, but the numbers make a lot more sense, so you can do it in a much more sustainable way and you can potentially even offer much more value than you ever could in a plugin.

BobWP:
One of the things I’m curious about, and maybe we’ll kind of close this out with you on this one, and this is a bizarre thing because I always think weirdly, these ideas, and maybe that’s why I have a co-host to try to keep me under control and stuff. So I’m looking at, and I don’t know if there are metrics that you can track this or any way you know it, but when you are selling something based on, okay, you pay this X amount of money and you can do X amount of orders with that monthly orders, is there a sweet spot where people say, okay, I see the value. Let’s say I’m getting 50 orders. Oh man, is this worth the money or the person that’s getting 75 orders, yeah, this is worth it, or is it more the value that you bring than what they’re looking at as compared to this is how many orders I’m getting and I’m paying this much?

Bryce:
I thought there was a sweet spot at some point and people used to say to me, I’m having 10 orders a month, should I use the product? And I’d say to them, probably not. If you’ve got to pay that much per order, I’d say maybe come back and use it when you have 50 or 60 orders a month. But then I see people subscribe that have five orders a month or some people that haven’t even launched yet. They just want to have it all set up. So I thought there was a sweet spot and I was wrong. I think there isn’t, and it’s completely up to that user. I have some customers that have $2,000 a month and they think it’s not worth it. They’ve done the trial and they get faced with that option. They’re like, this isn’t worth it. But at the same time, someone with 1% of the orders that they have a month will pay 50% of the price that they would’ve had to pay.

So it’s definitely up to the individual. I did find though that when I first launched a product, it was just reports, very kind of simple, some fancier reports and insights like that, but that was all then slowly added more features and more features. And it got to the point where I added this email automation kind of whole add-on product to it. I found that after I added that and the abandoned cart tracking and abandoned cart emails, a lot of smaller stores started to use it because it was a lot easier for them to get their value out of it. And even if you’ve only got 10 or 15 orders a month and it’s cost you $30 a month, if your average order is like a hundred and you set up an abandoned cart sequence of Metorik and it gets you that one sale every month, you’ve still paid for the product.

Why they choose Metorik over a plugin or another service, I don’t know. That’s up to the consumer. I just try to offer the best product we can. I don’t even look at competitors or anything like that. Maybe that’s a bad business decision. I just don’t really care. I just enjoy what we do and I just want to do the best I can do it that, and as I was kind of saying before, because of how it works financially, it just doesn’t matter as much about we don’t have growth targets. As you were reading on the blog, Jonathan, growth with purpose is very real for us. A lot of people say to me, I can help you grow double. And I’m like, that’s the opposite of what I want. I’ll grow on my schedule or I’ll grow when my team feels like we want that or when it makes sense, but you don’t demand that growth. You can kind of have tunnel vision.

Jonathan:
One of the advantages I think the Woo ecosystem has, Shopify as a publicly traded company, their earnings call, they’re inherently focused on growth. You can hear the venture capital saying, how are we going to get our return? And in the broader Woo ecosystem that’s not there. And I love hearing that you can focus on what actually matters and providing value to your customers more than just pleasing investors.

Bryce:
Exactly. It’s a really nice situation to be in because you just have so much freedom that all these other big companies that have much bigger numbers, revenue and customer size and everything, they don’t have those freedoms. So you’re like, would I rather live with a million dollars and have no freedom or with a few hundred thousand and have all the freedom in the world and everyone’s going to have a different answer. It’s just about what works for you. And I’ve found this works for me. And I think a lot of people in the Woo space that have decided to create businesses and products in the space have had that kind of thought and they’ve decided this is the path for them.

BobWP:
Cool. Alright, well, I scoured the web to see if I could find any other new things in the Woo space going on, and it’s amazing what you come across. And I found an article titled “My Size Announces Availability of My Size ID in WooCommerce, a leading E-commerce platform.” So I went and looked at it, and I’m not sure if either one of you have ever seen anything like this before. I watched the video and thought this is interesting. Basically what it does is let me just find that where I had that, and I seem to have lost it already, but you can scan your measurements and build personal sizes and how that’s going to play into things. I don’t know. I’m already hoping you don’t have a video on the same time you’re scanning and you’re putting something on Instagram of you scanning a certain part of your body or I don’t know. There’s probably a lot of weird implications. I’m thinking they’re like, aren’t even possible, but have either one of you ever seen anything like this before?

Bryce:
It’s hilarious because when you showed me this, I was just looking at it. I’m like, well, it’s so familiar. And there, well, there is this Japanese company called Zozotown, and they’re I think the biggest e-commerce or fashion retailer in Japan. I think Yahoo just bought them actually, Yahoo Japan. But they had something similar. I saw it once where people are wearing this full body suit where it had dots all over it. And I was like, what is that? And I looked into it and I was like, I realize this is a suit that they sell for like $5 or $10. They don’t make money off it, I assume, but they send you the suit and then they can use a photo or a video of you in that suit to figure out your measurements. So I’m not sure if this company’s doing something similar, but

BobWP:
Yeah, actually I’ll put the link in there. But if people go and look at the video on, I’ll put it to actually the website of this. This shows this young lady looking ready to shop and she’s just scanning with her iPhone across certain parts of her body, which I’m hoping most people will do this. I mean, she’s clothed and everything, but I imagine people now sitting in restaurants and deciding, oh, I got to buy something. Oh, I got to get sized. And you’re looking, overseeing this person with their phone doing various things and it could be really interesting. But yeah, it’s basically, yeah, you just kind of move the phone, your phone around and measure certain parts of your body. They probably tell you where to do that or how to do it, and you build a personal sizing. So I think it’s

Bryce:
Problematic

Jonathan:
For me. So it’s interesting as an application, but what it gets exciting to me is within Woo, broadly, the mission is democratize commerce. And when you think about things like this, to me fit into that category, there’s someone out there who would love to be able to do sell garments online, and they don’t know how to deal with the sizing problem, whether this is the solution or someone else. It’s bringing tools like this and making them accessible. Someone who wants to make clothes doesn’t have the capability likely

to go and create tooling to doubt go and make, yes. But if you can provide it to them, make it accessible, then suddenly new categories of businesses can come online that couldn’t practically before. Where they can create these curated experiences is. And so whether this is the thing or not, I always get excited to see things like this in that vein of empowering merchants to do things that they couldn’t do before and provide solve problems they couldn’t solve before.

Bryce:
Yeah, no, you’re a hundred percent right. That’s the beauty of software and just the direction of e-commerce with fulfillment centers, and you don’t know what the next thing is that’s going to necessarily work. That’s why I think you’re right that it might be this, it might not be this, but maybe people thought the same when fulfillment centers started working with smaller e-commerce companies. Like, oh, I don’t know if this will work, but it enables people to do something they couldn’t do otherwise. And that’s always really awesome to see.

BobWP:
And the other thing I came across was make Web better releases, a new plugin to manage WooCommerce coupons on Zendesk came across a press release they sent out, and I’ve never obviously used Zendesk. I don’t need to. I’m just trying to see the application there as far as support and being able to streamline your coupons in support.

Bryce:
It does make sense because we do have an integration with Zendesk and people have asked us for exactly this, so I think they’re definitely on the right path.

BobWP:
Cool.

Bryce:
Straight

BobWP:
From the horse’s mouth there,

Bryce:
Somebody, it makes sense when people start to move. A lot of the work you do within an e-commerce store isn’t always in the e-commerce system. If it’s customer support, you’re going to do that wherever you do customer support. So the next logical step is to bring the tools to the users wherever they need them.

Jonathan:
For anyone thinking about creating SaaS, one of the things I just want to encourage is just ask lots of questions. I’ve been surprised. It’s very easy to just not realize how many, first off, how many WooCommerce installations there are out there, just how many there are. But there are, even if it’s only thousands or even hundreds of people with particular problems, that can be more than enough as you were alluding to earlier, to build something on. So you might not think to go look at Zendesk as an example and the integration between Zendesk and Woo as an area. But when people are using Woo and WordPress as the operating system for their business, there are parts and pieces that there are problems that they’re having that you can solve for them. And I was surprised to see project management and resource and HR plugins for WordPress that are all solving very specific, different, trying to solve very specific different issues, and then to all the reasons you talked about SaaS, there’s so much more opportunity to solve those things.

Bryce:
The WooCommerce space is so big, and I think people, as you were saying, they just don’t realize it’s crazy because it’s almost like treated as if it’s a bit of some new software that’s not worthy of attention. It is such an insane thing to witness. People talk and think like that when as a business, I’m seeing the complete opposite. We have literally over a thousand people pay us a minimum of $20 a month for a product for their WooCommerce store, and the majority are paying a hundred dollars plus a month, and we we’re not even really scratching the surface of it. So I imagine there are other businesses in the Woo or WordPress space that will have 10 times as many customers maybe not paying as much, but there are so many potential customers in the WooCommerce space, and I think a lot of people look at the numbers like, oh, there are hundreds of thousands of Woo stores. And in their mind they’re thinking, but 90% of them aren’t making any money. That’s just not the case. A lot of them are tens and tens of thousands of these stores are really huge businesses that employ multiple people and might turn a profit, but are doing hundreds of thousands, millions in revenue. There are tens of thousands of these using WooCommerce, and they’re underserved as a market

Jonathan:
Very much. It’s exciting to see what you’ve built and your ways of thinking about it and looking forward to seeing how you continue to grow with purpose. Thank you. Yeah. I’m personally just excited and looking forward to seeing a lot more people start to recognize this.

Bryce:
Yeah, I’d just love to see more of it. Exactly. That’s my feeling. One thing that I’ve noticed is that as more and more businesses dip their feet into SaaS, it encourages consumers to see the benefits in it as well, and they become more comfortable with it. And that’s just another personal anecdote from when I started having those conversations with people at WordCamps and those demo calls, and they’re like, all right, so how does the price work? And I’m like, well, you’ll pay me every month. There was a little bit of like, oh, well, the other plugins I use, I don’t do it like that. And it just takes a couple attempts for people to use products like this to see the benefits, and then suddenly they’re like, well, yeah, I am paying you more, but I get a really consistent product every month that never stops working and keeps getting updated. And then more and more of us offered these kind of services and products as the customers will become a lot more comfortable with it, and they’ll actually prefer it if they had the choice. That’s at least my suspicion.

Jonathan:
We see that with Shopify. I think there’s so much of the money made is in that sort of SaaS ecosystem and today in WordPress. Yeah, there’s just a ton.

Bryce:
I’m just thinking as well, if I was a Shopify merchant and I needed a product, maybe it was something to run competitions or whatever it is, so I’m looking for a product for it. If I found one and they’re like, we’re different to all the other Shopify products in that we’re a one-time fee of $200, I’d almost completely ignore it and avoid it straight away. I’m just thinking, well, how do they offer a quality product that gets updated over the next five years for $200? Or will they offer me support in six months or what if I scale to this size? I start to have all these questions. I’m like, well, they can’t, so they won’t. It’s not a good choice anymore. If it’s super good,

BobWP:
I’ll leave those links in the show notes. And yeah, I guess this is, I’ll keep scouring the web and finding these little gems out there. And just as both of you pointed out, all those little pieces are being filled. Everybody has their needs for the WooCommerce store. So Jonathan, how about we close this out?

Jonathan:
Let’s close it out. First episode where I’ve had the chance to be a co-host and looking forward to the rest of this year, Bryce, there’s a little bit happening in Australia right now. Do you want to tell us about, for those who aren’t aware, there’s been a bit of a

Bryce:
Yeah, the reality is people can deny it or however they like, but the reality is climate change is real, and this is kind of now where we’re seeing the impact of it, where they’re just basically devastating, uncontrollable bushfires happening in Australia. And the size of them is quite hard to fathom because it is just so big. And I try to imagine, and I can’t, but we’re talking like fires the size of countries in European countries. I think Belgium, there was a few different countries that was compared to it. It’s the entire country, like that size. It’s crazy. And it’s just not new. Australia does have bush fires like any California, and a lot of places around the world with a lot of forests, there are fires, but not at this scale and not this uncontrollable and unpredictable and just the devastation. Exactly. Yeah. So many people are losing their homes.
There are billions of animals that have died. People are saying certain species are going to go extinct. It’s just that bad. Yeah. What can we do? There isn’t much, but financially, there are some options. There is one organization, which metric we decide to donate some money to and push people towards, which is called Wires. W-I-R-E-S. They’re working to help all the wildlife devastation, helping animals that are sick and trying to save their lives. But there are some other organizations as well. I guess we’ll link to it in the show notes that are really doing great stuff. And the amazing thing is that, and I guess this is me just thanking the international community. The support has been amazing. I’ve gotten messages from customers even just saying, are you okay? I’ve donated to this charity and this charity, and I’m like, that’s amazing. Because the reality is it might be a problem for Australia, but realistically and long-term, this is a problem for the whole world. And it’s really nice to see that when push comes to shove, we are all in on it together and working together to try to solve it. So yeah, I can just say I appreciate that. I’m sure every other Australian does as well.

BobWP:
Awesome.

Bryce:
Thank you.

BobWP:
Yeah. Well, that’s it. Yeah, we’ll leave it at that. I think we got our priorities right here to closing it out, and I’ll make sure and get, Bryce will send me all the links. We’ll put ’em in the show notes and yeah, let’s do it. So Bryce, where can people find you on the web?

Bryce:
I’m just on Twitter at Bryce Adams, B-R-Y-C-E-A-D-A-M-S. I don’t tweet much, but when I do tweet, it’s normally not that

interesting either. But no, I try to want to be more active there and it can be hard sometimes to share publicly like that, but that’s where I am. So if I do share, it’ll be there.

BobWP:
Yeah, exactly. Alright, well I appreciate you taking the time and yeah, thanks. We’re looking forward to seeing what the year brings in for you, Jonathan. Always a pleasure to have my co-host on and have you for the first time.

Bryce:
Well done to Jonathan for the first

BobWP:
Time, right? We are good to go. So everyone, yeah, check out those links. Do something. Do something that matters. So till the next time, Do the Woo.