Insights and Tips from Long-Time WooCommerce Product Builder

Bob: Hey, Jonathan, who do we have as a special guest today?

Jonathan: Our special guest has not been on Do the Woo in a very long time, but she has been before. Her name is Beka Rice. Beka, welcome.

Beka: Thank you so much. I’m really pumped to see you guys again. It’s been so long.

Jonathan: You’ve got a slightly longer title these days. The senior director of product management at GoDaddy. How do you Do The Woo these days?

Beka: Bigger the company, the longer the title, I think, right?

Jonathan: Let’s use that.

Beka: Yeah. So these days I do a lot of what I had done historically at SkyVerge. So my teams are still very focused on working directly day in, day out with WooCommerce merchants. Understanding how we can help extend their experience, make it better. The cool thing about what we do now is we just get to have very different touch points with those customers, being part of a larger company and working with them at the hosting layer, as well as the software layer. So while my team also still builds WooCommerce software, as we have in the past, we also work really closely with the hosting teams and especially the Pagely team, now that they’ve joined. Kind of being able to have a better marriage between hosting and WooCommerce and optimizing performance, while also trying to provide a more seamless software experience. So I still do a lot, or do the Woo very similarly. I have for the past decade or so. But I get to do it on a different level now with GoDaddy and across multiple teams, which is a lot of fun.

When it all started

Jonathan: For those who don’t know your background, where did you first get started in WordPress? What was the genesis, your origin story?

Beka: Yeah. It’s been a long time with WordPress, for many of us. I was a user of WordPress first, and so out of college I taught high school for four years. I was a high school chemistry teacher. I was coaching varsity sports. And I found that the content management systems for teachers in classrooms were not great at that time. And so I decided to run my own website instead of using, I think we used Blackboard. And Blackboard’s pretty good now, but at that point it was definitely not very fun to use. So I used WordPress for my site. And I kind of credit that for getting me into software more heavily, because I think like many of us, you want to tinker with your site, you want to do something that’s not quite out of the box. For me, it was why can’t I insert a table into the page content?

So then you learn HTML and you learn CSS, then you learn PHP and JavaScript. So that was how I got into WordPress, which led me then directly to Woo, where I was working with Max and Justin in SkyVerge to do documentation. I knew how to use WordPress, install plugins. And so the rest is history, as they say. You get involved in that, and then you’re the one talking to customers, you start doing care and everything, and I’ve kind of now settled into the product management niche as a result. But, yeah.

Jonathan: And for you in your WordPress origin, where did WooCommerce first come onto the radar for you? Even as a user? Where did you first notice it?

Beka: So I have to credit Max, who’s my husband, for that. And so he was working with a small pharmaceutical company at the time and they were trying to establish their direct to consumer sales. And so in looking at all of the potential options online at that point, like Spree Commerce, Shopify was still relatively new, and JigoShop and WooCommerce. They got into Woo mostly because Max knew WordPress, and knew that he could at least bend it to his will if he couldn’t do what he needed it to do. And so then as a result I started working with them, not actually directly with Woo at first, but like, hey, we use these plugins, can you help us document them? And help users understand how they’d install it, and set it up and use it? And so I got into Woo doing that. Not actually directly running a store, but understanding their experience having run a store, and then starting to work directly with merchants who were running their own stores.

Bob: So it wasn’t suddenly you had an epiphany of, I want to get into ecommerce type thing?

Beka: No, no, not at all. And in fact, I didn’t really want two full-time jobs at that time. It’s one of those where it just takes up more and more and more time. I was doing grad school at the time too. So one of those things where you bite off a lot more than you can chew. But I think it was really cool because it led me to saying, hey, this is really fun. Helping these small business owners be able to do stuff that’s not possible. I think I’m really enjoying this. And so leaned into that direction, that being of service to small businesses I think is the unifying thread. That’s what was fun, and that’s what I enjoyed.

Jonathan: So what are the things? So you’ve seen a lot, both in WordPress and WooCommerce over the years. Being at SkyVerge, you’ve seen WooCommerce, focus on that, from just a lot of different perspectives. I’m curious, are there any, and I should know this, how many years now are we talking about with WooCommerce? Is it 11, 12 years?

Beka: Yeah. Woo as a platform was 2011. Yeah. I got started with it late 2012, early 2013.

I kind of had worked with it a little bit at that version. I think it was 1.4 to 2.0. Which for people in the ecosystem, that was a dark time. And then more so I remember writing just tons of documentation updates from like 2.0 to 2.1. So it’s been a very long time.

What stands out from the growth of the Woo space

Jonathan: Are there any, I’m just curious because we have this, there’s a lot of folks who are new to this space, which is great to see. Are there any themes as you think back overall, you’ve seen so much about WooCommerce’s growth, any themes, positive, negative? Just things that stand out to you as you reflect on how much change in growth that there’s been in this space. From your perspective working with small businesses in particular.

Beka: One of the things I think is not just true for WooCommerce, but WordPress overall, is that unifying theme of flexibility. And that anything I can dream up doing, I can do it. Even if I need to write custom code to make it happen. But the amount of times there’s a plugin that does exactly what you need and it might have 10 other users, but you’re one of those people. I think Woo has done a good job of respecting that core value of flexibility. Being one of the main reasons that people come to this platform, and this ecosystem. So I think that’s been a really cool unifying thread over the past 10 years. I think the changes though obviously have been huge. We started off just very focused on the commerce basics. How to do general retail, selling T-shirts, et cetera. And I think over time, what’s cool, it’s maybe a different thread, but a theme of change has been how Woo was expanded to these totally different and disparate industries and use cases. And I think very different than people who started the project probably even imagined.

Jonathan: Yeah. I think that’s a good example. It’s like, during my time in community at Woo, I was so surprised. And it was expecting, I was expecting a wide range of diversity, expecting a wide range of applications, and was just surprised fairly consistently. Oh wow, look at what someone’s doing over here with WooCommerce that I’d never even heard of before.

Beka: Oh my God. So many experiences. Especially people who do subscription selling or online memberships, and even some of the bookings use cases. There’s so much diversity of different things that people want to accomplish and I love, and what I think is really cool is that oftentimes it’s like they couldn’t do it with any other system. But then they were able to do it with WordPress and WooCommerce.

The trade offs of Woo’s flexibility

Jonathan: Now I’m curious because obviously I’m also personally a big fan of the flexibility, and just that idea in general. In your experience, that’s a leading question, are there trade offs of that flexibility?

Beka: Yeah, I think we all know them. Most folks don’t necessarily choose WordPress as their first online rodeo. And I think the project as a whole has been aware of that. And has been really working hard to try and address that. I think the thing in the industry that I found frustrating has been that we still put so much of the burden and onus on the user to manage the entire stack. And so I think that I try to do as many customer interviews as I can still, and my PMs go out and do them regularly. We try to do it at least a few of them a week. And day in, day out, it’s still something I hear 10 years later about, it’s hard to keep up with plugin updates, and theme updates, and manage all the software on my website. So I think people do have a trade off for it. Sometimes they’re aware of it, sometimes they’re not. And that’s one of the things that, as an industry, I hope we start to move differently on.

Jonathan: What is your take on why that’s the case? Like why is it, after all this time, I’d argue that WordPress is initial success. It’s always been more user centered. But we’re in this state now where it’s like, yeah, there’s all this complexity, especially in, e-commerce, what’s your take? Why is it not more user centered?

Beka: You know, we can all make up a lot of things here on this podcast for why. I think it’s just because it’s a really, really hard problem to solve. And I can’t remember the postulate that Google gave this name, or gave this phenomenon, but basically any interface you exposed to the user will be one that some of them come to rely on. Talking about even things that are hidden APIs, or things that you don’t expect. Some user’s going to find it, manipulate it and it’s going to become a critical part of their workflow.

And the thing with WordPress is the entire surface area is an interface that people expect to touch and use. And you just have these infinite possibilities as to how people use them, and that’s multiplied across the number of versions that you could have running in the software. So I think it’s just, it’s such a hard problem to solve. And there’s so many permutations that you can’t really do it reliably.

Bob: Yeah. It’s so much flexibility that there’s too many scenarios. How do you cover all those scenarios in a matter of a few solutions? There’s always, well, I need this, I need this. So it’s, where do you draw that line?

Beka: That line is important. That you can’t do it for everything. So you have to say, well what size net can I cast? I think some of us in the industry are working in that direction now, but I think that’s the approach that we felt makes the most sense is like, okay, well what can I get? Can I get 80%? Can I get to 90%? We’ll never get to a hundred percent, especially when you look at the number of plugins and custom code and everything that could be happening on the site. But how close can you get? And I think it’s a fun challenge.

Jonathan: This is what I love about the hosting space in general is that you have this opportunity to really narrow in to the needs of whatever audience that you choose to go after and say like, “Hey, we love WordPress. We love the flexibility. You can do whatever you want. And we’re going to take some responsibility to understand your needs, to listen, to make investments, to optimize our offerings, to support those needs.” And you can do that because you’ve picked an audience. Whereas someone else could take same WordPress and they can be focused on a very specific other set of problems. And I think that’s where the flexibility can work really nicely, I think is especially in that hosting relationship.

The next project, what Beka is excited about

So speaking of which, what can you tell us about what you guys are working on? What are you excited about these days?

Beka: Yeah, I’d say this is good segue with that particular problem being one that we were keen to try and solve. So in joining up with the page lead team, we felt like that gave us a very good foundation. Because they’ve leaned into this concept and already managed software updates for enterprise clients who are notoriously against change.

Jonathan: Yep. They want stability. They want boring, they want it to just work.

Beka: Boring, making sure it works. And so we were very interested in that mindset because I think it showed they had that same ethos of like, well, how might we? If we want to go approach that, how might we do it? And so that’s one of the things that we’ve been working on is trying to bring that more specifically to Woo stores. Is can we manage more of the stack for you? Can we automatically update your software for you safely? Your PHP versions, WordPress versions, a lot of hosts do that, but also WooCommerce versions and plugin versions. Can we do that? And how wide of a net can we cast? And so I think that’s been one of the focal points for what we’ve been working on with that team, is trying to make the overall maintenance so much more seamless and more akin to what you might find in a hosted platform that doesn’t have all of those potential service areas and pitfalls around management.

The good points and the pain points

Jonathan: That’s a awesome. And as you’re talking to customers, are there any themes that are standing out to you in terms of, especially because I think a lot of, at least my interest, and I think a lot of ours is seeing WooCommerce win. Like, love the proprietary platforms. It’s great what they’re doing and they can serve specific needs, but ultimately it’s like, we want WordPress to be winning in this space. And so we have to be listening to what customers are saying. Are there any themes that stand out to you of what you’re hearing, from the folks you’re interviewing, where their pain is? Or even why they like WooCommerce, what stands out to you?

Beka: Yeah. There’s a couple that we’re incorporating in a product that we’re working on now that we have in beta. And so I’d say there’s a few themes. One specific to Woo is multi-service and multi-channel selling. And we focus a lot on trying to make that easier. And I don’t think that’s global to the Woo ecosystem. That is the benefit of being part of a hosting company is we don’t have to worry about 2.5 million people using the software. We can focus on a specific segment. And try to make things better for that segment. And so we see that folks who sell on their Woo store alone, easy peasy. You have everything you need at your fingertips in WP admin. But when you start to sell across various channels, like I want to sell in a retail location in person, and I want to sell online, and maybe I want to sell on Etsy or a marketplace or something else.

This challenge becomes exceedingly difficult for these merchants. And some other platforms have solved that with really seamless integrations, and you need that hub, that center, for how you can do that and how you can integrate with those services. So that’s a problem that we’ve been working on that I’m pretty pumped about, is seamlessly syncing your products, inventory, customers, orders, all of that data across those channels. One thing GoDaddy does is in person selling with smart terminals, card readers, payments. And so the ability to sell something in your store and decide yes, that should be deducted for my online inventory too. I’m pulling all these T-shirts out of the same box in my garage, so we want to make sure I have an accurate account. Trying to solve that problem has been one that we’ve been very excited about. And one of the things we focused on with our upcoming products.

Jonathan: I remember going into, so I joined WooCommerce right before COVID kicked into high gear. And I remember I just started my local meetup. I just started my local meetup. And then later that week I had to write the post where we made the decision to close all the meetups. And that was my like, okay, and I’m here in the community role. Let’s do this. But what it did is it put me in this position, because we moved to virtual is what we did. We moved them all to virtual. And suddenly I’m hearing from all these people who were, it was very interesting because I’m sure this was universally across the case. They’re looking at different platforms. But people coming into WordPress and say, “Hey, I need to do something. I need to be able to have a thing online.”

I’m curious, we’re in kind of a weird place where COVID is still doing its thing. There’s this trying to get back to the semblance of normal, like what is normal anymore? From your perspective, have you noticed any shift? For me, it’s like there was initial desperation and this, I saw a lot of growth. And that also led to a lot of, I feel like stabilizing the features and functionality to support that. Is there still a lot to be done there? Do you feel like, are we serving people’s needs better in that physical transition? Like they’re going from physical to trying to get online, sometimes they still have a retail store. I’m hearing you guys are being focused more on that spot. And, yeah, what are you hearing from folks? Is it getting better?

Beka: I think in some ways it gets better, in some ways it’s still hard. So a lot of those folks who were retail in person, who then had to come online, a lot of them were able to do that. We’ve done a lot of work for those folks too. You can buy it online, it’ll sync to your smart terminal, you can pick it up in store. And those are really cool workflows. And I think it’s super neat to just be able to do that for small businesses. You can do what Target does, but yourself.

So there’s really great progress there. But I think the other side of that is that those businesses though, didn’t start online. They don’t have years of understanding how to be found, how to market online, how to leverage the amount of data and analytics that you get online. Like how do you understand customer acquisition and marketing to those customers or retargeting. So I think we’ve also seen a substantial learning curve for those folks who have done in person retail now coming online. And coming in, in such a huge wave, I think you just put it into a stronger focus. Like we knew that was hard for people in their first online venture, but so many of them who just had this huge influx of people where it’s their first online venture.

Jonathan: It puts you in a position to do a lot of teaching and guiding them, I imagine.

Beka: Yeah. Yeah. And we’ve definitely kicked up a lot of that in terms of content webinars and stuff. But you’ve got to build a lot of that in product and that takes time.

Jonathan: Is that something you guys are thinking about for, I know with GoDaddy pro I’ve had some context there where it’s like, I appreciate, I have a lot of investment on GoDaddy’s part to educate the people who are building for these folks. That’s great. Do you guys do similar things for the merchants? Is that stuff that you think about?

Beka: Yeah, we have been. I think it’s a newer muscle since we had done a lot in the pro space, but not as much for merchants specifically. That was one thing our team coming in was actually very excited about. So someone on our community team, Marcus, who actually came with us as part of SkyVerge, now also runs a lot of webinars for merchants and education for them. So I think education’s definitely part of it. Education in my mind is always a stop gap. You need to put those guard rails and touch points in the product wherever you can. Also something we’re trying to do is like, here’s what might be helpful is the next step in your journey.

Jonathan: Yep. I remember with meetups, that was a lot of the focus. So people are coming in like, where do I even start? It’s like, oh, well let’s talk through the process. And I noticed it was less about the technical oftentimes, and they’re just like, how do we think about this stuff? And yeah, that’s awesome.

Beka: Yeah. How do I think about marketing campaigns in online world? I’m not doing local ad buys.

Jonathan: And that can be very intimidating for folks. It can be explained quite simply, but it takes some, and it’s not only the ability to explain it, but to contextualize it for their specific needs. Like you could teach someone a whole lot about online, SEO, that really is not that useful for where they’re at right then.

Thanks to our Pod Friends TrustPilot and Captcha4WP

Warehousing and tight integration with Woo, yes or no

Bob: I’m going to take advantage of this because when you were talking about multi-channel, and I don’t often get to do this, I was thinking about a podcast we had before with somebody and they were talking about warehousing, which kind of that came to mind a little bit. And one of the key things that he said in that, because he had worked with that a lot is, and this might be something you can, I just like your thoughts on that, you know like yay, nay type thing. Yeah, totally makes sense. He said one of the keys to warehousing is to avoid tight integration with WooCommerce.

Beka: I think it honestly depends a lot on your strategy, and what’s going to be tapped into the warehouses. And I think it does tie into this multi-channel selling concept a lot. So if you want the warehouse to be hooked into Woo and other systems, then you can imagine that if Woo becomes what you’re tightly coupled to, then the warehouse has to go to Woo, everything else has to go to Woo. Now you’ve basically taken a piece of software and app that you’ve deployed, and you maintain yourself, and made it a data hub. And so now you’re not just scaling a website, you have to be accepting API requests from those external providers coming to you, being able to do that in a performing way. And so I think some folks have had bad experiences with that because it’s different hosting a web app, than it is a website.

So I think if you go that route, that’s probably why I’ve heard some folks with that perspective. I think we’ve also had experiences where a plugin or custom code on the site might break the rest API, or change his responses or something. Which also, if that’s your mode of communication between the site and everything else, you can’t have that not functioning. I think if you go down that route, my advice to people has always been like, look, you need a good developer partner. And one who understands the system because now you’re running a web app. And so you need to just pick the right web app for the job.

It might be your WooCommerce instance, it might not. I think that’s where we are trying to solve that problem just for a specific segment. Just like growing retailers, you’re kind of escaping that, is this a good idea? It’s a side hustle to, this is my business. So when we look at, okay, this is our target segment, here are some of the industries we could serve. We can at least try to make some of those decisions for them.

Where builders should put their time and energy

Jonathan: I like that. So for the folks who are listening that we have a lot of builders, folks who create products. There’s also the service providers, the freelancers, the agencies. And you know this space really well. You’ve been doing this for a good chunk of time. What are some of the opportunities that you’re noticing now? Where should folks who are wanting to serve these merchants be putting their time and energy?

Beka: Yeah. I think a lot of folks just have this fear of ecommerce, as a agency or profession, or WebDev. There’s a lot of context to learn and a lot of surface area to cover. When you launch WordPress sites, even if it’s different industries, it’s a lot of times content. But when you’re in ecommerce, now it’s web app. Right now there’s integrations with different services and a lot more to learn about what the merchant’s job to be done in the website is. So I’d say, I think I’ve given this advice to folks in the past too, but I think it’s worth repeating, that if you can pick a part of that merchant journey and become a very trusted partner in that part of the journey, I think you’ll develop great relationships with merchants who are going to rely on you for a number of things.

So things like helping them understand online marketing or analytics are two big areas where a lot of merchants, they don’t want to focus that much on, how do I learn about my customers and my site conversion rate. Now, how do I think about optimizing that and the browsing and shopping experience? Or how do I segment my customers and appropriately target them with personalized automated messaging? Those are areas that I think, that are not specifically web devs, setting up sites, et cetera. But even just services that are interesting to offer, especially if you do have basic proficiency in development. Because you can just understand what’s possible better and leverage that.

Jonathan: I like that a lot because when you’re talking to a merchant, that just the idea of understanding what’s possible, there’s so much flexibility. There’s so many things that are possible, which could be quite overwhelming. And oftentimes as a service provider, whether you’re doing the work for them, whether you’re creating the product, you’re in a great place to introduce the possible to them.

It’s interesting. I remember talking to agency folks and yeah, there was this general like, oh, we can’t do ecommerce. I said, well, yeah, there’s a lot of parts, but like you said, you can pick a part. You can be a trusted source for that particular thing.

Beka: Yeah. I think the difference is just if I set up a website for like a local law firm, I might have a maintenance retainer for them and I keep the site up, I update their content for them and I manage it. And my job in managing that with them, ongoing, is not more complex or different than my job in setting up the site.

And that’s totally turned on its head with ecommerce. That the easier thing is getting the site up and running and getting the content in there. And then the ongoing tasks are just so diverse and complex, and depends so much on the merchant’s business and how they want to fulfill orders, manage customers. And I think that intimidates people. And I hope that, that fear doesn’t stop you from picking, to your point, picking a piece of it.

Jonathan: Well, and by its nature, the more successful they are, the more complex things can become. Because now they have more integrations, they have more needs. They might ask a question about warehousing at some point. And what do we do about this?

Beka: Develop partnerships with other agencies. Bring your friends.

Jonathan: Yeah. And that’s the thing. If you can be in that position and you stay open, and you’re curious about things, so it’s a big world. WordPress itself, but then it’s like WooCommerce just opens it up all that much more. But you don’t have to figure it all out. You can find others.

Beka: Absolutely. For you to figure it all out, you’d have to be like 150 person agency. And even then there’s still going to be things you don’t know. It’s just, it’s such a different beast, but I think that’s also what’s really fun and cool about it, is that there’s these areas of competency that you can zero in on. And especially catering to your skills in terms of whether that’s design or development, or maybe you’re just really good at figuring out how different tools work. I can’t tell you how many merchants would just love someone to manage Google Analytics for them.

Bob: Yeah. And I was going to say, and Jonathan you could probably, because this is what you talked about at WordCamp Europe. Is it almost seems like some of these agencies, and some of these smaller that are reluctant need to be also educated on how to use and create, and make use of good partnerships. And not just think of partnerships as you do this and this, you make referrals to me, and I make referrals to you. And I think that’s where, as much as you would think it would be natural for people to understand that, I know from my experience when people come to me and want to start a partnership, what that typically means, and that value there of having that expertise, and having all these other resources out there that you can help each other. If you get that right, and get that nailed down, then yeah, you’ve got a smooth running machine there. Versus frantically saying, oh, I can’t do that. Or, maybe I should try to do that.

Beka: Yeah. I think it’s something too that GoDaddy has been learning from even the hosting space as well. That we need to develop more of these partnerships with folks who do specific pieces of commerce so that we can say like, oh hey, merchants need these things. They come to us as the first touch point. How do we connect them to the right partners to help with the job? And so I think that connectedness of the merchant journey is something where there’s a lot of partnerships to be had. And you don’t have to try to do everything yourself where you don’t have to be in that frenemies position of like, oh, this job is too big for me or too small for me. It’s not about the size of the job, it’s about the vertical it’s in. And developing those partnerships that are parallel and unaligned to the verticals that you do.

Tips on creating products for WooCommerce

Jonathan: You know the product space quite well. Your SkyVerge background gave you at least a little bit of experience in WooCommerce products.

For folks who are looking at the size of this ecosystem and saying like, hey, we want to solve some more problems. What guidance would you have to offer for folks who are wanting to get into creating products in WooCommerce today?

Beka: Yeah. I think no matter what size you are, there’s great recipes and great guidelines to follow. And so even a company as big as GoDaddy, we’re doing these exact things right now, trying to look at a specific niche, or target audience and problem. I think with Woo and WordPress there’s this temptation to try to go as big as you can because it’s a big ecosystem, and you can build things flexibly, abstract, serving multiple use cases at once. And I’d say avoid that temptation. You can still develop things from a good abstract mindset. But to focus a product on a specific audience or niche when you start, and to solve something very specific. What we’ve learned over time is that deciding on a niche, or a narrower slice of the market than you otherwise might, you’re going to learn a lot more.

You’re going to be able to have happier customers who are going to promote you to other people. And then in turn, you’ll open up adjacencies for yourself in terms of other jobs to be done, or other things that your product could do that you may not have anticipated as use cases. But it’ll get you to market faster. It will get you testing and in the hands of customers. And I do truly feel like there is no substitute for that. You can run all the tests in the world, you can do all the research. You can give people prototypes. But start small, get it in front of customers, and iterate has, I think, proven time and time again that it’s the best way to bring a product into market, and improve it and enhance it over time. No plan survives contact with the enemy. So get out there, get in front of them, and let them tell you what they need.

Jonathan: It’s curious that the fear that often can show up as maybe early stages of product creators of like, oh, if we do this we’re limiting ourselves. And I’m curious your thoughts on this. It seems, at least in my experience, you can always do more afterwards. You can always expand the scope of what you do. You can always create another product. But oftentimes it seems that people just, they start with too big of a scope. They’re like, oh, I don’t want to limit myself to too small of an audience, or too specific of a problem. But what I’m hearing you say, it’s like, no, do that, you can build on that.

Beka: You can land and expand. I think the difference there is often, and it depends on what part of your journey you’re in. A company like SkyVerge, where we were 37 people when we were acquired, an opportunity may not seem big enough for us to invest in. And I think sometimes, for some folks, they feel that way. Like okay, well, if I’m going to invest in this, I need to make X dollars for it to be reasonable. And I think it’s fine to think about a product in those terms. Sometimes that’s the right decision, sometimes it’s not. I think though it can be a short term view. So looking at the long term potential of what you’re building, you don’t have to necessarily say like, well, I need to capture a hundred percent of this market at once, right?

Identify what you feel like is the best segment. Because if you try to capture all of it at once, you will never get there. The customer feedback you’re going to get is going to be too diffuse. You’re not going to be able to parse it effectively. You’re not going to have promoters who love your product, and are willing to tell other people about it. In order, you have to go slow to go fast. And so I think even if you might feel like you’re limiting yourself, take a longer term view of what the overall market is. If you do think you could get there, then recognize that it’s just going to be a long term strategy to get there.

Entering the Woo ecosystem to invest and create products

Jonathan: I like that, in the long term thinking. Last thing I’m curious about for the moment is on the community side of things. As you think about the builders, you’ve had a lot of experience, you’ve watched the WooCommerce community grow. How do you, it seems like it’s one of the more unique things I think about open source and WooCommerce is how strong. If someone’s coming into the space, and they see the opportunity and they’re wanting to invest and create products, or add WooCommerce services to their agency, what guidance would you have to offer, if any? How should they think about the community? How should they relate to it? What would you say about that?

Beka: Yeah. I agree with how much of a role the community plays, I think can intimidate folks sometimes. So I’d say the first piece of advice wouldn’t even be what to do or what not to do. It would be, recognize this is a good support infrastructure for people overall, and you should be a part of it and embrace that. I think what I’ve found to be really impactful is to come in and understand, can I be of service to this community in some way? A lot of times folks come in and they might listen, or they might hang out on the fringes or they might ask for things in the community. And sometimes people are going to be willing to help you. But I think if you want to develop a brand in the space to develop an agency, or to build up that karma, you need to be able to give something back to it.

And that giving something back to it is going to help you springboard your efforts. And then in turn you’ll find that people are more willing to give you feedback. To beta test products, to help you with problems. You may not think you need that now, but you will, at some point. We’ve contributed a lot to WooCommerce core over time. There are still times where we have questions about it. And even having touched a lot of different parts of the code based of functionality over time, there’s still things that you don’t know about it. And the community’s an excellent way for you to learn that, but you need to invest in it to get something out of it.

Jonathan: It’s one of the things I love about contributor days at Word Camps. And I’ll encourage folks because people could find it pretty daunting if they’d never been. Like, oh, I couldn’t do that. It’s like, no, that’s not the point. This is about learning and connecting with folks. And just showing up and expressing that openness and willingness to like, Hey. Because everyone has something that they can bring, and that’s at least, yeah. There’s something about community in this sense of, the way that I like to think of it is like shared ownership, like with an open source.

When you show up it’s like, if I help you with your WooCommerce, that also benefits me in a way, because more people are having success and we’re using this thing together. And I think that’s surprising for people, I think, if they’re not used to an open source ecosystem. So yeah, it’s something that until you really go into to a meetup, go into an event, talking to folks, attending, I think you just have to experience it for yourself. It’s at least what I’ve found. If you’re not used to this open source ecosystem.

Beka: I think people can just have a tendency to under index on relationships. And I think I probably was one of those people 10 years ago. Like why do you need to network? It’s like, well, if you have a great product, people are going to love it. It doesn’t matter. But I think if I’ve learned anything it’s that those relationships are key to helping you build a great product. Like building those relationships with your customers and with people who would be interested in using the product, helping you promote the product. So if I were going to try to give advice to maybe my past self anyway, it would be to recognize the inherent value in that and make sure that you cultivate it.

Bob: Yeah. I think it’s coming out of that shell or whatever. And because most people I’ve talked to that haven’t experienced WordCamp, and then somehow they decide to do it and you talk to them afterwards, there’s very few times you find regrets. You know, nobody says, wow, that just really sucked. And, I’ll never do that again. It’s like, whoa, I did not know this would happen as it played out and stuff. And I think I even talked to a few people at Word Camp Europe that this was their first WordCamp. And they were just like, they were in awe of everything, and the people they talked to and stuff. We had Adam. Adam, good old Adam from GoDaddy. I gave him the mic of the podcast and told him, just find somebody and talk to them.

So he did. He just grabbed the first person that went by. Of course that’s Adam, that’s pure Adam.

Beka: Not surprised.

Bob: But yeah, it was like a three, four minute quick talk. And it was her first experience. And again, I did that with Carl and his name is Boogie. And it was Boogie’s first time at a Word Camp. And it was just interesting. It was almost like hearing these little personal conversations that they met each other. And I think we don’t often know what really happens there, and how many people are, I almost say, enlightened, but they are. They realize the value of it. And hopefully that carries on for them.

Beka: Yep. I’d say too, it ties back to Jonathan’s earlier question. Just to close a loop on it of, how are you going to build a great product? You have to build that exact relationship that you might value in the community with your customers. You need to be able to talk to them. You need to be able to ask them what they think. You need to be able to put something in front of them and see how they react. And so I think just understanding that a part of your time is going to be fostering and investing in relationships is an important part of what you do.

Jonathan: What is your next WordCamp?

Beka: WordCampUS. Yes. So it’s been a long time for me. I was trying to think of the last one I went to, and I think it was WordCamp US in St. Louis.

Jonathan: You got one of the few tickets then.

Beka: I did. I did. I have a speaking ticket.

Jonathan: That’s a good one to get. What are you going to be talking about?

Beka: About multi-channel selling. So I’m actually really excited. Since, as I mentioned, we have this product and beta. We’re really focusing a lot on helping multi-channel sellers. And so I think we’ll have some really great data and insights that we can even bring in post launch to share with people about what we’ve seen be successful, and which channels have done well for which industries. So I’m really looking forward to sharing our experience, at least with the segment of the Woo market that we’ve tried to sort of double down on, and make their jobs easier.

Jonathan: That’s awesome. Looking forward to that. And for those who are interested in learning more about what you’re working on, where can they find you?

Beka: Yeah, I am in the Woo community Slack, which I think is a great place to start. Love to chat. We have a lot of our team there as well. I think anyone who’s using Woo, who’s interested in talking about your experience, I’d love to chat with you or have someone from my team chat with you. You know, like I said, we try to spend a not insignificant amount of our time doing that, and trying to acutely understand the pain points that folks have running WooCommerce stores, or a Woo focused agency helping merchants. So I would love to chat if you want to link up there. You can always stay in touch with the GoDaddy Garage blog too. So we also post a lot about our product updates there, and we’ll have a lot of really exciting Woo focused news over the second half of the year. It’ll be a pretty fun time. And you can connect with me personally on Twitter too. It’s B-E-K-A underscore R-I-C-E.

Bob: Excellent. All right. Very, very good. And we won’t let over 200 episodes pass before we have you on again. So we got to make sure that doesn’t happen again.

Beka: Well, I had a good excuse, Bob. So having a, having a baby and raising a toddler in the interim was a good reason, but nice to be back and getting some more sleep again.

Bob: Yeah. Very cool. Well, thank you very much, Beka. It was always and is pleasure.

Beka: Yes, likewise. It was good to see you guys.