Tailored WooCommerce Development for Unique Business Needs

Robbie: Hello and welcome to this episode of Do the Woo. I’m Robbie Adair, one of your hosts. I also have Robert Jacobi, my partner in crime here today to help me host this show. And we are very excited to be talking to Krissie VandeNoord today. And if any of you saw her recent talk at the recent, oh geez, what conference was it, Robert?

Robert: WooSesh.

Robbie: WooSesh. It was a fantastic talk though. So, we are very excited to have her here today. Krissie, welcome. And we’re going to start with letting you introduce yourself and give us some little background before you got into WordPress, what got you here?

Getting into WordPress

Krissie: Okay. I’m Krissie VandeNoord and I own NorthUX, which is just a small little digital agency. We do quite a bit of WordPress. And gee, as far as how I got into WordPress, it was very accidental. I’ve called myself actually an accidental developer because I’ve never been a big, here’s my life plan or the five-year plan thing. But I definitely never meant to become a developer. I was always a creative person and have a background in design. And then, back when blogs were a thing, maybe I’m dating myself a little bit, but it was really popular for everybody to have a blog. And of course, I was a designer, so I wanted my blog to have a certain look. And so, I just started hacking away at things to try to figure out how I control what it looked like and that my blog was on WordPress and that’s how I got started.

And a few years later, I was hired at a company to do a very small agency at that time to do some design and a little bit of web stuff. And it really just morphed into me a few years in saying, “Hey, WordPress could do this. WordPress could do that.” And ultimately convincing them to use WordPress for almost all of the sites we were building. And then shortly after that, they were like, “You know more than we do at this point. So, when you get stuck, we’re not going to be able to help you.” And it just snowballed from there. And then now, I’ve been doing my own business for six and a half years.

Robert: Oh, you’re not dating yourself until you say weblog instead of blog. Boy, I just really dated myself. Everyone else is looking at me like I’m crazy.

Robbie: Yeah, Robert’s like, “Yeah, remember when we had the webrings at the Flutter?” Do you remember the Flutter blog Webring thing? Oh, my goodness.

Robert: Hold on, let me search for that on Alta Vista. I’ll let you know.

Robbie: Exactly, exactly. Yeah, no need to date ourselves here. So, Krissie, so that’s an awesome story as to what got you here and it’s very interesting. Anytime we talk to people who are designers who also become a little bit of a developer, I call myself a quasi or just a fiddler. But it’s interesting, and I do think that what you describe there is what we hear a lot, which is designers with the frustration of seeing their designs come to life, want to learn how can they control it with the code, right? Because it’s always, you could design the most beautiful thing and then you turn it over to someone who’s going to take that in and put that into a template and you’re just like, “Well, that’s not exactly what I meant.” And so yeah, you go in and figure out how to fix it yourself.

Krissie: Yeah, absolutely. And I’ve always been a problem solver, so, I was the kid that liked to do the logic puzzles. And so, it was just a very natural like, “Oh, this is a problem to figure out. Let me figure out how to do that.” It’s just morphed into being a full stack developer somehow.

The WooCommerce path

Robbie: Well, that’s cool. And since then that has also obviously led you into WooCommerce and you were showing us some really cool things that you’re doing with WooCommerce. So, tell us what did get you into WooCommerce? What made you go down that path?

Krissie: Honestly, it may have been one of the very first clients that I had when I first started my business was a company called Team Covenant. And they do tabletop games and I was taking over for another developer. And so, they had already made some decisions about WooCommerce, but they needed to extend WooCommerce. The very first project that I took on was, things don’t work the way we need them to out of the box, because they had a subscription model that you could subscribe to these games and just anytime an expansion pack was released, you got it. But though they didn’t control the release schedule on those expansion packs.

So, it wasn’t like it was happening on a regular interval where you could just say every month or every three weeks or even every three months. It was very random. And so, they needed to be able to do subscriptions but then process them in batches on a whim. And so, we were figuring out how do we take WooCommerce and WooCommerce subscriptions and make it work for this? And they had a makeshift set up before, but we’re having so many problems with regular checkouts not connecting with the subscription thing. And then, I think they’d had a scenario where everybody got double charged and really bad customer service sort of situations.

And so, we just jumped right in and pretty quickly reached out to some people in the community who did more with WooCommerce at that time and was trying to figure things out with some advisors. And so, I just jumped right into the deep end of WooCommerce and that was six and a half years ago.

Robbie: Wow. So, with that particular problem that you guys did, did you do a custom plugin to fix this or did you just do custom code work inside of WooCommerce? Just curious.

Krissie: Yeah, no. We made our own plugin to extend the WooCommerce subscriptions for the most part. Because obviously we want to, as much as possible, allow for all the tools that we’re using to be updated and things like that without worrying about erasing whatever. We don’t want to get too hacky. So yeah, we did write our own plugin that just hooked into the right places and extended the things that we needed to do ourselves.

Robbie: Well that’s awesome. I mean, so many times, the very first time you do that you don’t realize you need a plugin and you do that little hacky thing and then it comes back to bite you.

Krissie: Oh yeah. No, thankfully, I had read enough. I mean, I had done plugins before, that wasn’t new to me. But I think I just have had been in the community enough that I’ve not ever made that mistake. I’d seen enough other people maybe make that mistake or talk about that mistake that I got to avoid that one myself.

Robert: It’s almost a cardinal rule with any open source project, don’t f with core.

Krissie: Right, right.

Robbie: No joke.

The growing pains with eCommerce

Robert: It’s nice, in giant finger quotes, to hear that you’ve probably gone through very similar eCommerce growing pains that pretty much everyone goes through. Have you come across something that’s totally insane in that regard?

Krissie: I mean, I’m sure that we’ve dealt with all of the standard eCommerce growing patents type things over time. I don’t feel there’s been anything that’s just really crazy out the box. I did, one time, have a situation where I’d actually already, I think done some work for this client, but then they were going to bite off a really large eCommerce project. And so, I think they just wanted to vet things. And somehow, I ended up flying to Denver and sitting in this room with this person that had built millions of dollars company and done one eCommerce site on that kind of a level and then was going to try to ask the right questions. So, it was a little bit ridiculous from the standpoint of like, “Okay, you’ve built one website for one business, but I’ve built a lot of websites for a lot of businesses. So, I do know what I’m doing.

Robert: Would you call that a rescue, almost?

Krissie: No, I don’t. I mean, I definitely feel like I’ve rescued clients for sure, but I don’t know that that situation was one. But I mean really honestly, even this first client that I was talking about, Team Covenant, that was very much a rescue situation.

The things that have helped make the job easier in core

Robert: And the lifetime of WooCommerce, what are the things that have actually helped make your job easier in core?

Krissie: I mean, honestly, just they use so many hooks and filters in the right places. We do so much of hooking in and adapting things that way. And even there was one time we actually de-registered one of the JavaScript files and registered our own version of their JavaScript file. We went that far to do that. But just the fact that you can do that without worrying about what’s going to happen when we run an update and are we going to lose anything or really mess something up. So, I think just the fact that they’ve made it so easy to extend with those things I think has been pretty key. I do so many find and file, search all files for this one little snippet to figure out where something is being hooked from. So, we use so many hooks and filters. Yeah, it’s awesome.

Robbie: Awesome. Well that’s good. You’re using the full power of Woo then. And so, tell me how are you guys getting prepared? One, are you excited or not about the custom tables coming to WooCommerce and what are your plans for migrating clients to that direction?

Krissie: Honestly, I haven’t even stayed up to date to know or make a plan for that. With a lot of new features, we tend to let them have some runway out in the world and see what happens before really convincing a client that they need to go that direction. Because I mean, ultimately it is something, we don’t have clients that are on a retainer that would be enough that we would just do that without explaining this is what’s happening, this is how much time is involved, this is why you should do that. When they move towards the whole big action scheduler thing to take over those kinds of contacts that were happening, that was a big deal.

I remember going to the client and saying, “Hey, here’s all the benefits if we switch and really take advantage of,” because this was the same client with the subscriptions. And so, there were some things that we could move some of this custom stuff over into this action scheduler and here’s all the benefits. And ultimately, they were like, “Yeah, that sounds perfect,” but that’s typically how we approach it.

Robbie: Got you. So, did you see a big benefit for them with that by moving them after you said, “Hey, I think this’ll be great.” And then you moved them because they agreed. Did they see the benefit then too?

Krissie: Oh yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Ultimately, it allowed us to really a lot of things that we had gone outside of WooCommerce and WooCommerce subscriptions to accomplish for them. We were actually able to then move into more standard WooCommerce processes because of the action scheduler. And so, in some regards, it simplified some things and kept things more inside of the core stuff than some of the customized things that we had done. And there’s a little bit of just security in that I think, or at least they felt like there was security in that. Not to say that our code wasn’t secure.

Robbie: But just I think maybe for the client too, there’s a little more transparency when they can see it in the backend. Clients don’t go digging through files.

Krissie: It definitely took it from being like this, I clicked a button and I’m getting a little bit of feedback that it’s processing so many at a time, but to actually see in a list here’s what processing and it was way more transparent.

Robbie: I was going to say, Krissie, like you, I kind feel clients that are already chugging along, if they’re fine, I will probably push that move out a little bit for them. There’s one client in particular though, we’re actually looking forward to having the custom tables capabilities because we would like to do that. But then, of course, going forward, any new ones will set them up with the custom tables to begin with after they release. I do to see how things work out. Don’t jump on the first day typically, but like I said for one of the clients, we’re really looking forward to the custom tables.

Krissie: Yeah, I agree. I think I’ve been in that kind of a scenario before as well where it was like, “Oh wow, this new thing really solves all these problems.” And so, as soon as it’s available we’re ready to move on it. But most of the time, I feel like we’re a, “Let’s wait and see and gather enough information so that we can convince people to that this is a worthwhile investment of resources to make this change.”

Keeping updated on your own corporate presence online

Robert: I was going to tease Robbie about this. But how often do you eat your own dog food in the case of making sure you’re upgraded just on your own corporate presence online?

Krissie: So, let’s just say this is the conversation I had with my project manager just yesterday. And she was like, “So, I noticed that both in our client portal and in our public site that we have some updates that need to be run. Do you want me to just go ahead and do that or have somebody do that?” And I was like, “No, I really like to do those myself because I’ve gotten a little bit hacky with the code on those sites.” Because when I need to do something for us, I just get in there and do it really fast and don’t always document things very well and do sometimes get a little bit hacky and at the same time I couldn’t successfully explain what we should double check before we actually push these updates live. So, if that answers your question.

Robert: And I can’t wait to hear Robbie’s answer on this one because I know you’ve done a bunch of changes in the last year.

Robbie: Oh my gosh, we have. And just like Krissie, it’s like, okay, so I called my own websites, my redheaded stepchildren because, of course, being a redhead, I can get away with that. But yeah, same thing as Krissie. You get in there, you get things done. If it were for a client site, you’re documenting that in the code, you’re documenting it in your project for the rest of the team to see. If you do it on your own site, you’re just do it and leave and then you’re like, “Probably, I should jot that down somewhere,” and you’re just hoping that you remember yourself when you go back in there to do it. I know it’s always the own sites that you are bad. You just get bad because you’re just, I get lax of myself. I don’t make myself follow the protocols I would if I were working on a client side as we…

Krissie: Oh yeah.

Robbie: We should though by the way, we should treat our own as we are the client, right? I mean, we should. This sounds like a good goal for 2023.

Letting your clients meddle around in the backend

Robert: This might be way too generic of a question, but how much do you actually want your customers to be meddling around? And yes, I use meddling purposefully in the backend.

Krissie: We have a really, really wide range of how we work. And ultimately, it really depends on the client’s skillset and understanding. And so, we have clients that they’re afraid to edit a typo on a page. And so, we’re doing just regular WordPress content management. But then, we have to the extent of, we also have clients that have an in-house developer and we have also helped, got clients to the point where they needed an in-house developer and help them hire an in-house developer and then continue to work with them. So, it’s about as far apart as you can get there on what they do.

Robbie: Yeah, I understand that, Krissie. To me, it is the same thing. You get a client and your like, “Oh goodness, they may never even log into the back end of their website.” Not because you’re keeping them from it, but because they’re like, “Oh no, I don’t want to log in there. Can I just have you do it?” And you’re like, “Yes, okay, send it to the sport ticket.” But then, you have other clients and quite honestly, I enjoy working with the clients that have highly technical people on their side too. Because you can talk in your own language. I mean, you can just talk to them and they understand and you can go first much faster, I feel like.

And so, I do enjoy having those clients that you’re not afraid to give them full admin access to everything. I mean, as a matter of fact, a lot of times I feel working with a client, you learn things too from some of these clients. Because of their particular needs, the way they’ve done it in other systems before, then you can go, “Oh yeah, that works here too. Let’s do it like that. Yeah.”

Krissie: Yeah. And always, with every project we consider our clients as users, so we always build things in. The only time that they’re going to have to come back to us is if they want to add a new feature or there’s some weird edge case bug that popped up that we didn’t foresee and really just they can fully manage everything themselves. And some clients totally run with that and we’ll hear from them once a year when they are like, “Oh, can we do this?” And other clients, like I said, really want the hand holding and the “Could you please just go edit this one thing,” and we do that.

But it is nice when clients are doing so much themselves. I feel like that does inform us on how other people interact with the dashboard and expect things to work. It’s always really enlightening because I can’t tell you about how many times we have a conversation where they’re like, “This isn’t working.” And then I’m like, “Why wouldn’t that be working?” And so usually it’s always like, okay, let’s screenshot or screen share. And you realize that they’re totally coming in from some weird other angle and you’re like, “Oh no wonder that isn’t working. I would’ve never thought to have tried to get to that spot from this.” And so, it’s always something of just learning how we can do it better or present things to them from a just usability of their own site.

Robert: Just blame the client. “No, it’s all your fault. You can’t use Internet Explorer anymore.”

Robbie: Oh, my word.

Thanks to our Pod Friends NitroPack and PeachPay

From a traditional Woo store to 3D and AI

Robbie: How do you wind up going from WordPress to a more traditional WooCommerce store to the amazing 3D AI voodoo projects that you do now?

Krissie: I think a lot of it has to do with I’m a problem solver and I’m a, I’m going to say this, but at the same time it’s very contextual. I’m a risk taker, but I’m not a risk taker like I want to go skydiving risk taker. And I had a little bit of a safety net. When I worked at my other agency, they would come to me and they’d be like, “Hey, we have a client that wants to do this. Is that possible?” And I would do enough research to feel 60% confident that it was possible and then I’d just figure out how to make it happen. And so, I’d kind of just operated with that mindset and I would say I have enough experience now that I would say it’s very rare that I come across a 60% confidence level with a request. But it certainly served me well in some earlier years when I was just trying to figure things out.

And I’m also a stick with it person. I have absolutely never, I don’t think ever bailed on a project. I’ve never been, I’ve learned a lot of hard lessons. I have absolutely spent way more time than I estimated and ate that time myself. But just having that tenacious I’m going to make this work attitude, I think, has gotten me pretty far. And I just also tend to say that now when people say, “Hey, can we do this?” The answer is always yes. It’s just a matter of how much is it going to cost and how long is it going to take? And if you are willing to do that for this.

Weighing your clients comfort zones

Robert: Do you find yourself in the role that you’re able to actually suggest things that the customer wouldn’t have necessarily been in their comfort zone or on their landscape?

Krissie: Yeah, absolutely. And I hope that is where we’re offering the most value. I want for our clients to come to us with their problem without a solution. Because that’s usually where we can create the best solution. And sometimes, that takes a little bit of, especially with small businesses because they’re so used to having to do things themselves and so they’re used to having to figure things out and so they come to you and they’re like, “I need this.” But I think it’s really important to say, “Okay, why do you need this? What problem are we solving and is that really the right solution or is there a better solution?”

And absolutely, I have been, again, when I was working for another agency, I think it ultimately went well, but in a brand new where we just signed off and we’re doing this kickoff of a new web project and I totally went sideways and suggested this whole other piece of things that was not part of the original scope. And ultimately, the client was like, “That will save us a whole employee’s worth of time.” So yes. So, I essentially upsold and my boss was super happy with me, but I feel like that could have really gone wrong too.

Black Fridays and other sales spikes

Robbie: Yeah, that might have, but it was good it turned out. It’s November, so we know it’s Black Friday, Cyber Monday. Have you already talked to some of your clients or do you feel they’re prepped and ready to go? Especially you’ve got your, as Robert mentioned, your big cool snazzy 3D module. Can it handle Black Friday traffic Cyber Monday?

Krissie: It can handle Black Friday traffic. But I’m going to say something really crazy. My clients don’t tend to do Black Friday stuff.

Robbie: Oh really? Wow.

Krissie: I know. It’s insane. And I feel in some regards, maybe I’ve just gotten lucky that I’ve not had to have crazy be on call Black Friday kind of scenarios because they’re doing something new. Yeah, I think it’s just been the nature of their eCommerce businesses. They have either felt like there wasn’t enough benefit or they’ve done something kind of more small-scale Black Friday, here’s a little 20% discount. It’s nothing totally crazy. But the furniture companies that I’ve worked for that do the whole 3D stuff, I’m trying to think, I don’t even think they will open on, one of them won’t open on Black Friday, but they’ll be open on Saturday.

Even though they have the 3D stuff on their site now, they do a lot of their sales in person still. And then, the other one they sell through dealers. And so, it’s up to the dealer to decide if they’re going to do some sailor discount and they don’t necessarily have to do anything to support that.

Robert: So, you’re not generally worried about the scaling spikes and will the site go down kind of stuff.

Krissie: Not over Black Friday. We’ve definitely dealt with that stuff usually around stuff that we’ve done for clients that’s event based. And so, we did one thing where we built this whole tiered registration system so that they were having a conference and they were going to also stream this conference and so people could sign up to host satellites of the conference. And so, we had to allow people to register at different level of, we’re going to host this and it’s going to be less than 10 people, or we’re going to host this and it’s going to be a thousand people and charge them different levels and then let their attendees register for their thing. So, it was this tiered registration deal and we definitely had to manage traffic spikes around when the conference happened, but then also when they were starting to release certain blocks or levels or whatnot.

Robert: So, you’re almost expected to be not just a digital agency, but also a CIS admin, an IT shop at the same time?

Krissie: From time to time, yes. And I would say that’s the one thing that I usually, I’ve got a few go-to people that I rely on for that kind of a thing because I feel like I’ve learned a whole lot, but the whole AWS Elastic beanstalk and all that, I’m just kind of what I’m okay with not diving down that rabbit hole myself. So, I will have a couple of people and schedule them to be on call and they’ll walk me through enough that I could handle spinning up something else. But the configuration of that and stuff, I leave that to other people. But we do that for our clients sometimes when needed.

Robbie: I don’t like to go down rabbit hole in those things either. And not to give Robert a bigger head than he has, but in cloud ways, you have a lightning program and stuff, so actually his hat doesn’t fit anymore. Then, I can reach out to those kind of CIS admins that do know the deep dives on those things that I care nothing about learning. I have other things that I want to deep dive in. But yeah, network and traffic management of network, no. Not my cup of tea either of. Yes. Well, and I think most of the quality host out there now do have some support for people. And so, it means people like Krissie and I don’t have to be experts in those fields, thank goodness.

Krissie: Yeah, I’m a big fan of managed WordPress hosting for most of my clients. I really try to push them that direction so that we don’t have to navigate that totally on our own and unsupported. And so, just being able to say to some of these hosts that we’ve used, “Hey, by the way, we’re expecting this traffic spike, so what do we need to do?” And I’ve had hosts say like, “Hey, we’ll just out of a courtesy bump you up a level for this timeframe.”

Robert: For the spike for Black Friday or whatever that might be.

Krissie: Yeah, yeah. It was essentially that one in particular was for the Kansas City Ballet and they have a huge spike around Nutcracker time. And so, it was basically covering that of all the hubbub around Nutcracker and so they bumped them up for a month or so and then took them back down.

Robert: So, that’s going to start up in probably what, two weeks?

Krissie: Yeah.

Robbie: I will say I think that, and something like that, it’s not like it’s a day or two days that hits for Nutcrackers. So yeah, you do need a month. And I think that’s more the trend we’re seeing with Black Friday nowadays too, is, I mean people are already starting their Black Friday sales already and they’re running them basically almost the month of November. And that does help pace out the traffic for not just them but everyone else and it’s great for consumers because that means they don’t have to all be on standby on one day to try and get specials.

Speaking of Woo, there’s those Taylor Swift tickets

Krissie: Yes, yes. There’s not that stress of like, “Oh my goodness, I have to do this.” I can say this here because my daughter won’t listen to this podcast. She’s only 10, but we’re going to try to get her Taylor Swift tickets and take her to her first concert. And so, my husband’s like, “Do you have an alarm set? Have you done the thing?” And it’s very much like that. “Get in the queue.”

Robert: You know you’re talking to one of the biggest Taylor Swift fans.

Robbie: I’m trying to get tickets too.

Robert: And now, Do the Woo has become the Taylor Swift chat.

Robbie: That’s right. We’re all Swifties here.

Robert: Oh, my goodness.

Robbie: I know I’m a big nerd, but oh yeah, I know. I’m excited about this.

Robert: I’m not a Swiftie, my daughter is.

Robbie: I know.

Krissie: No, I mean, I’m not going to lie, I can enjoy some Taylor Swift. And also, my husband teaches high school English, so his students are just, he got a lot of Swiftie students. He was the one that knew that she was even going to be doing this and kept being, “I think she’s going to announce it a thing soon.” And it’s just because the students have told him, it’s not like he follows anything that he would’ve known that.

Robert: That’s funny.

Robbie: I might have known it was coming too.

Robert: I’m going to say in 1989, maybe one of the greatest pop albums ever made. I’m done with that.

Robbie: Well, I’m going to say she just hit the top 10 of the Top 100. That’s amazing.

Krissie: That’s pretty impressive.

Robbie: It’s very impressive. It’s very impressive for anyone. Speaking of, now, I’ve got to go look and see if Taylor Swift’s eCommerce store is WooCommerce. I’ll be looking at that just here in a minute. Yeah.

Krissie: I don’t know if anybody else does. I’m sure they do. But a dream client of mine would be to do some kind of musician site, a musician that I really enjoy and maybe I wouldn’t like it actually when I did it, but something about that I just think would be really fun.

Robert: Well, it’s just so consumer facing and it just, everyone would see it.

Krissie: It’s so consumer facing, but it’s also, there’s so much ability to push the status quo or do something a little bit outside of the box where you could still deliver really great UX, but it doesn’t have to be this exact experience that everybody is assuming is going to happen on a shoe website or whatever.

Robert: But you could integrate all that fun 3D stuff so we could have Taylor Swift Bobbleheads. I know that’s right.

Krissie: Anybody got a hookup with Taylor Swift?

Robert: We just need to convince her to get off of Shopify.

Krissie: Okay. I have to say, I don’t hate Shopify.

Choosing what runs the clients store engines

Robbie: Woo is accepting of all. It is fine. I always say all the eCommerce can learn from one another and some eCommerce platforms do certain things better than others. And so, you can always take from it. We do know, as you’ve already stated here, Woo is very extendable. Whereas, when you go to a SAS platform, you don’t have the extendability, but you may have some cool features that you don’t have somewhere else or they’re just built in, baked in. So yeah.

Krissie: Yeah, exactly. And I think the extendability is huge. And so, I try to really make sure that, “Hey, this may meet all of your needs right now, but where do you want to be in five years? And are you going to have to totally change to another platform to get where you want to go at that point? Because that’s an important consideration to make.” And some people are like, “You know what? I know I’m never going to want to do something. I know I want this to be just the really standard, typical eCommerce scenario kind of a thing. And so, sometimes, it depends, but sometimes other platforms are fine.

Robbie: Correct. Sometimes it’s a stepping stone for people and you need that for them, like you said, because maybe they’re brand new and starting out and they don’t have much budget, but they do need to get into eCommerce. And so, there may be this, we’ve actually even stepped clients through one SAS platform that was a lower end, less bells and whistles on up to a Shopify then on up to, “Oh you need your own WooCommerce because you’re doing all these cool things now and they’re tying into this and that and I can’t do that on that SAS platform.” So yeah, I mean that’s what I’m saying.

All the eCommerce, I think they have a place in the ecosphere and it’s up to us to determine for our clients, which is the right choice for them at this particular time in space. And you do have to think future you’re talking about. I mean, is this something that’s only going to be good for them for six months if they take off then maybe this isn’t the right answer. Or is this something that’s going to last them for three years before they need to make that next step? So yeah, definitely.

Krissie: I’ve done a webinar on this. I need to flush it out a little bit more, but I have this course that I’ve got half written about a Website 101 or Technology 101 for either the DIYer or I’m responsible for a website. And so, how do I understand just what a database is and open source versus closed source. And just understanding all of those nuts and bolts that ultimately when someone says to you a cash, what do they mean? And just enough of that knowledge to be able to feel empowered to make some of these decisions instead of just feeling, because I think a lot of people just get paralyzed in that decision of, “Well, which platform am I supposed to pick? I don’t even know.”

And they can read a bazillion articles, but they don’t understand the technology differences behind them. And so, they’re really ultimately just kind of hiding their eyes and randomly picking one because they’re just not equipped with the right kind of knowledge to understand the nuance between some of them.

Robert: And they don’t care.

Krissie: Yeah. But they should care. Some of them don’t care, but they should care. They’re going to care later when they realize that they’ve painted themselves into a corner.

Robert: Sure. But I mean their core business is not technology, so how are they, so my core business is not cars. I drive wherever my wife tells me to drive we’re supposed to drive and then because it gets me from point A to point B. Right?

Krissie: Sure.

Robert: So Krissie, we just need you to write a choose your own adventure book where you wind up going through all the paths and you can start the book every time and see where each path leads you.

Krissie: Yeah, no, that’s a great idea. I mean I could make a forum that does that basically.

Robert: No. It’s got to be a cool book with stick figures and pictures and…

Robbie: Dragon slayer of the game.

Robert: That’s right.

What is on the the horizon for Krissie

Robbie: Yeah. All right. Well, so Krissie, what do you have coming up on the horizon? I mean, you so showed us that really cool 3D plugin that you did on WooCommerce. Are you doing this for more clients? Are you looking at some other cool technologies that we should know they’re on the horizon from you?

Krissie: I hope that we get to do this with more clients, for sure. I would love to and I’ve definitely had conversations with some other clients about using this particular tool. So, hopefully, one of them will bite off a new project soon and some kind of fun use cases that are outside of the furniture realm that are a little bit more space planning or things that would be fun. Right now, our big project is creating, and I can’t say too much about it, but creating a really customized learning management system. And I wish I could say more right now because I’m so excited about it. I’m so excited about it.

Robert: You can totally say more. We won’t, Robbie and I will not tell a soul.

Robbie: Not a soul.

Krissie: But it definitely is in the actual educational and special needs space. And I think that there is a huge need for this in that intersection. And so, I’m just super excited to see where that goes. But it also is ridiculously complex from just even a data structure standpoint because there’s 200 some lessons that are going to be loaded into this, but then there’s what we’re calling concepts. But just learning things that need to be learned that are going to appear in various orders and lessons and things like that. And so, there’s just this weird mishmash of how data is going to interact with other pieces of data at different times and relate to and be used and reused and tracked and all that stuff.

Robert: And then you need to make it squirm compliant and then testing and all that fun stuff or I’m just guessing until you tell us who it is or what it is.

Krissie: Another thing that I love about this is the client is essentially going to do a beta launch with limit of 100 people to go through and it is coming in with a very phased approach. So, I feel we’ll be able to go through with this group of 100 and gain so much information before we start a phase two of making it more robust. And that to me is really fun, to get real user information and then be able to have the ability to just immediately react and adjust and redesign and design the future around that.

Robert: Do you find that you’ve gone through these kind of closed beta projects before?

Krissie: Not quite so explicitly. But certainly, I definitely have had clients that have taken a real staged approach to releasing something new and done a lot of, let’s give them one little piece and then get feedback and use that feedback to decide what we’re going to do about the next piece. But not in such a limited group kind of a way, more they just put one piece out to everybody and then took information before deciding piece number two.

Robbie: And are you going to have an eCommerce piece in this?

Krissie: Yes, it is definitely, there’s be a subscription model to this. Long-term plan, there will be licensing of group accounts and then way long-term plan is we’re even wanting to maybe license some of pieces of this via a REST API to make available to other platforms that might want to use it.

Robert: When do we get to hear about the actual launch? I’ll put it that way.

Krissie: So, this first initial launch is supposed to happen January 1, and I could probably share more than…

Robert: Perfect. I guess, Robbie will have to have Krissie back on so she can share more.

Robbie: That’s exactly what I was just thinking.

Krissie: I’d love that because I’m super excited about this project.

Robbie: Awesome. Well yes, well we would love to hear more about it. So, we better wrap this up though now because otherwise we could talk all day here, I feel like.

Robert: I got to get my Taylor Swift tickets. What are you talking about?

Robbie: I know, I was just thinking I need to go and get, find out what time I need to set my alarm. For now, I feel behind the ball after Krissie was like, “Yeah, I got my alarm set. I’m like, “Oh no.”

Krissie: No. Oh, I have my alarm set because my husband’s like, “Do you have your alarm set?” Because again, he’s a teacher. So, he can’t be available at 10:00 AM in the morning to be online and hovering for them to go on sale. So, I have to do that.

Robbie: Awesome. Well I’m going to go and set my alarm right after this. So, thank you so much Krissie for coming on and sharing the information about your projects, your business. We’ve enjoyed talking to you and we definitely want to have you come back on and talk about this next big project that you can only tell us little snippets of right now.

Krissie: Well, I would love that. Thank you so much for having me. This has been fun.

Robert: Lest I forget, how can folks find you online or in 3D?

Krissie: Oh yeah, absolutely. Our website is northuxdesign.com and you can follow me on Twitter, if anybody’s still using Twitter right now.

Robert: I just got verified yesterday, so I’m in.

Robbie: Whoa.

Robert: I spent that 2 cups of coffee to check it out.

Krissie: So, it’s I’m @krissierae, I believe is my handle. K-R-I-S-S-I-E-R-A-E. And then, I believe that our business is @northuxdesign is our handle there.

Robert: Awesome. Thank you so much.

Robbie: Thank you.

Krissie: Yeah. Thank you.