Leveraging WooCommerce for Wyrmwood Gaming

Jay:
I’m Jay on the communications and marketing side. I’ve got Paul Maiorana, who’s the CEO of Woo. Hello Paul.

Paul:
Hello, Jay. Hello.

Jay:
And I’ve got Travis from the Woo customer success team. And Paul, you’re on the east coast of the us and Travis you are based in,

Travis:
Yeah, I’m based in Port Elizabeth, South Africa.

Jay:
Thats ight. Very nice. And I’m here in Northern California and on the call for our first kind of episode, we wanted to talk to an amazing Woo merchant that we’re going to dive right into. And we’ve got Douglas from Wyrmwood Gaming. There we go. Yeah. Makers of, I would argue some of the most coveted and beautiful furniture relating to tabletop gaming I’ve ever seen. I know people who will think I’m touching a celebrity here or contacting so many people. Love what you guys do. Douglas, you’re the founder and creator of Wyrmwood and one of the co-founders. We’re so excited to have you here and tell us where you’re based.

Douglas:
So I am based in the great state of Massachusetts, Taunton, Massachusetts, born and raised, and I never managed to get away as hard as I tried, and so I built a company

Jay:
Here. That is awesome. So we’re going to want to dig in and hear a little bit about the company and we’ll have a few questions because we have an interesting story about Wyrmwood Gaming, and it’s one of the most successful Kickstarter companies that’s been involved in Kickstarter for a long time. So we’d love to hear a little bit about that. But for the most part, I’m going to sort of sit back and let the three of all chat, but maybe Douglas could tell us a little bit, start us out, tell us a little bit about Wormwood Gaming, how it came about, just sort of the history story of how it became this force that it is today.

Douglas:
Yeah, so let’s see. About 10 years ago, wormwood gaming became a more serious venture. It actually started out as an Etsy shop, well actually, lemme actually back up slightly. Even before that, my brother and I had just failed to start a woodworking business. We went into custom furniture making, and that is an extremely difficult business to be in, mainly because it’s hard to find clients that are willing to sort of fork out the money to afford heirloom quality, custom, one of a kind furniture. And so really what we did is we decided, well, what we’re going to do is we’re going to take that skillset of being able to make heirloom grade furniture and we’re going to instead aim it towards the tabletop gaming market. So I’m talking about nerds, geeks, gamers of all kinds, and we’re going to make a small item that can ship anywhere in the world.

So we’re going to be able to actually, because actually transportation and furniture is a major, major headache. It’s a major thing you have to overcome. So anyway, we developed a small line of just tabletop accessories, so these would be little knickknacks to enhance your gaming experience. And we grabbed a smartphone, made a Kickstarter video, and we put out some of our products on Kickstarter. And it absolutely took off the first Kickstarter video. It was me and one of my co-founders, ed with a smartphone in my garage. And we sold a couple thousand units on Kickstarter and it was like a hundred thousand dollars. And at the time, that was crazy. Absolutely unexpected. And so then we struggled and we delivered those, and then we did another Kickstarter and then another and then another. And we slowly built a manufacturing company and now we have 150 employees in two states. And it was totally vertically integrated. So we designed the products, we manufacture the products, we manage our website, we do our own marketing. We’re actually pretty successful in that regard, which is maybe how some of the folks have heard about us with the talking about quasi celebrity stuff. That’s also us. And yeah, we do it all full stack from wood to selling it to shipping it.

Paul:
I have to assume you had sort of a background in tabletop gaming just as a player or hobbyist first, or did you see an opportunity to again kind of apply your woodworking skillset to something new?

Douglas:
No, so my brother had a much deeper, he’s one of the other co-founders, so it’s the three of us. It’s myself, a childhood friend who’s also sort of a gamer. I was a gamer and he was a gamer. And then my brother Ian, who’s also a co-founder, was more on the woodworking side. Although I did go into a woodworking apprenticeship with him for a while. I got fired very quickly from that. It didn’t actually last. It was sort of like, Hey, we have this heirloom skillset, can we apply it to a hobby that we really enjoy? And so it was sort of that the Venn diagram crossover of heirloom furniture had not hit the tabletop gaming scene. Sort of that intersection point and the ability we were able to ship worldwide because we had made something small was really the recipe for success. It was just the market was ready for that. That’s right. Yeah. The nerds were growing up, right?

Paul:
They have disposable income now. Right.

Douglas:
Exactly. That nerdy kid in your class that sort of was sitting, playing DD with his buddies at the lunch table, he’s a doctor now or he is a software.

Paul:
There’s millions of those people. Right, exactly.

Douglas:
And by the way, that was, I was that kid at that lunch table only. Instead of becoming a doctor, I learned how to do, my brother and I learned how to do high-end woodworking. So we just sort of naturally applied skillset. So it was very organic. There was no business plan. I’ve never written a business plan. I have no business being in business really, other than the will, I suppose. And yeah, that is how I ended up here.

Paul:
And can you remind me what you may have mentioned, what year did that all start when your first Kickstarter, I guess.

Douglas:
The first Kickstarter, Ooh, let me look that up. I actually am not totally sure. So by the way, when it comes to Kickstarter while I look this up, we we’re probably in the top 10 Kickstarter companies of all time, meaning we’ve raised many tens of millions of dollars through the Kickstarter platform, which that’s how we funded the growth of the manufacturing. So we don’t have, in software, it’s a lot about, oh, you get VC and funding and you go through all these rounds, do any of that. We just are funded directly by our customers. And so Kickstarter does two things a prove the product. So if you have a product people want, well, you’re going to know they want it because they’re buying it. So it not only proves the product, it then also gives you the funding so that you can produce the product.

So it’s solving two things. It, it’s proving a product fit and it’s also giving you funding. And by the way, manufacturing, it’s an expensive game to get into. It’s extremely capital intensive. So $4 million worth of machinery, maybe 5 million. And that’s in order to run a, what I still consider a small furniture manufacturing. Eventually. We did get into furniture, sorry to jump around a little bit. We did eventually get into furniture, and so now we do not just small accessories worldwide, we also do furniture. Although furniture, we haven’t cracked furniture worldwide yet, but the shipping and logistics is extremely challenging. We sell physical goods. We’re not like you guys.

Paul:
Actually, let’s talk about that. I’d love to learn a little bit more about you guys built this incredible custom furniture. Beautiful. Can you talk a little bit about what that process looks like when a customer hits purchase and what happens behind the scenes from there and how you get the product built, configured, and actually into your customer’s hands?

Douglas:
So by the way, so we launched the first Kickstarter in October of 2013, so late 2013,

Paul:
A little more than 10 years in. Wow, what a journey. Incredible. Congrats. Yeah. Actually, before we go to the shipping, I actually did want to ask a little bit about do you continue to leverage Kickstarter as a platform or is that something, now that you’ve built an audience, I imagine you could do sort of pre-orders and get to an effective similar position as you had leveraged Kickstarter?

Douglas:
Yeah, right now, so right now we are still on, we’re on the quest to profitability. So manufacturing is a volume game. So the last dollar produced in manufacturing is the sweetest. So every unit you’re pushing out, you’re losing money, losing money, losing money because it’s expensive to run a factory. Eventually when you have enough volume, then yes, then you start to kick profitability. So in terms of Kickstarter, we still do use Kickstarter. We are planning on continuing to use Kickstarter. It’s an excellent way for us to basically get new customers really, and we’re quite good at them at this point. Also, just to throw it out there, it’s still a superior funding model because you’re essentially getting interest-free loans from the clients. And so that can help when it comes to capital expenditure.

Paul:
Sure. Fund inventory, investments and manufacturing, all of that,

Douglas:
The whole nine yards. And so I have a love, love relationship with it. Some folks in the company have a love, some people have a love hate relationship with it. It really is a very, very compelling way to sell products. And what we may do is we may transition from used Kickstarter more for the smaller accessories and transition pretty much all the furniture to just the straight up furniture line. So anyway, the one downside of Kickstarter is when you launch a Kickstarter, you don’t know how well it’s going to do. So imagine having a company where every either three or six months, you’re just sort of rolling a D on the craps table and you want, it’s like sometimes we’ve had Kickstarters that have raised millions and millions and millions of dollars. We’ve had Kickstarters that go bust.

Paul:
Yeah. I’d love to learn a little bit more about the process behind the scenes. You had talked a little bit in the Wyrm Life video about how you want your website to do things and it’s custom and you’re talking to your other production systems and all of this stuff, and super curious about all of that. Plus again, kind of the actual just logistics of getting your products into people’s hands.

Douglas:
So I am not, oh gosh, I’m not the person to talk to about half of this. It’s funny, I do have some observations concerning a lot of these things and specifically WooCommerce and that sort of thing. So first of all, I am, I guess ultimately the decision maker, and I have no clue how hardly any of this works. I’m a manufacturer, I know a bit about marketing, I know how to tell a good story. I don’t know anything about websites. What’s interesting to me in the company is people have these opinions. I don’t know this Shopify thing, which is, and that’s why we were talking why is it, this is what’s curious to me is why is it, and it was really the non-technical people. It’s like the marketing guys, the media guys, the non-technical guys are all like, oh, we’re having website issues. We need, let’s switch to Shopify.

Paul:
You characterize it well, is that if you’re just looking for something simple and easy to do, Shopify meets those needs very well. But if you have more complex buying experiences or again, connections to backend systems, that’s where Woo tends to shine.

Douglas:
Yeah. So it’s funny, the technical folks were actually kind of like, they’re like, yeah, I mean they had no issue with Woo. They’re like, Nope, actually all the tools are here. We can actually make this work with Woo. In fact, we’ve already done a bunch of work on the website would be a big pain in the dick to actually switch it over to Shopify. So it’s funny, within my company, that was the debate that was going on is you had the technical people that know what they’re doing wanted to stay the course and actually fix the website. There’s a story, we can actually go into it also, it’s like, how did we fuck up the website? We, it’s a good, that’s my question. My question is at the end of the day, and there is a story there, but anyway, just to round this out, it’s funny, the technical staff we’re kind of, Hey, stay the course, fix the current website. There’s nothing magical about Shopify. Meanwhile, the creatives and the graphic design side, those folks who don’t know anything about websites, as far as I can tell, they were like, yeah, just switch to Shopify. I guess I saw the ad and it looks really sweet, and I’ve just saying it was actually fascinating from my point of view where these people even got these opinions. And that’s by the way, your team, just to give some love to Travis, I don’t know, you guys, once you guys actually knew that it was wrong, you sent in ….

Paul:
Swat Team.

Douglas:
The SWAT team to come in and kick down the door, and you guys actually fixed it within a week or two. So actually thank you for that, Travis. I actually think you guys actually, once that happened, I was like, oh, I was like, let’s stick with this. I’m not interested in reinventing the wheel, right? I’m not in the website building business.

Paul:
It’s a tool to acquire customers, deliver your product. Exactly. You need to be focused on exactly those things, not the internals, how your website works.

Douglas:
And honestly, and feel free, I’m sorry I’m monologuing here, but I think it is interesting. I’m just giving you honest feedback. Really the core of it is I had a very inexperienced non-technical project manager manage a website relaunch and he fucked it up. That is the long and the short of it is how did we break our website? We broke our website because I did not pick the right person to lead that revamp process. And so now maybe that is a criticism. I mean, I think there is a double-edged sword where it’s like, hey, if you have this really capable software that can do a lot, and it’s very flexible and it’s very powerful, well, with that power and that flexibility comes the ability to literally shoot yourself in the foot. And we did that admirably. We did it admirably. We absolutely just wrecked our website

Paul:
Now, so funny that you, there’s a part in the Wyrm Life video. Again, we sort of covered some of this and I actually clipped that piece and shared it with our entire company because it’s so perfectly encapsulated. But the opportunities we have as a business and platform, but also the challenges, again, I’ve been, we talked a little bit before we started recording here. I’ve been in the WordPress community for 13 years and maybe a little bit longer, at least working at Automattic for 13 years now. And for much of that time, I have sort of relied on that Spider-Man quote, with great power comes great responsibility. But absolutely, that is our problem to solve as a WordPress community, WooCommerce to, we want to enable our merchants to have the great power that is WordPress and WooCommerce in terms of flexibility and be able to build exactly the experience that they want to build. But we do make it too easy for people to shoot themselves in the foot as well.

Douglas:
I don’t know how you square that circle. I mean, it seems almost axiomatic at a certain point, if you empower people, you empower people to fuck up. I’m in a very fast growing manufacturing company and we fuck up a lot, and it’s because we’re fast growing and because I have to empower people and I hate committees and I hate decision by committee and I like empowerment. So anyway, I wasn’t actually that when things went wrong with the website. Personally, I felt as if, yes, if Shopify, if I could have hacked a quick solution that could have been as capable, I would’ve, and I was ready to pull that trigger. If Travis and his team hadn’t come in and actually made it right, I probably would’ve pulled that trigger. I don’t believe in weight loss pills. I don’t believe in magic bullets. I don’t believe that if we did go to, and this is the problem, when you’re in a problem like that, when you’re in this situation where his websites are complex and expensive and all this, if it was as simple as just going to Shopify and I could flip a switch and be like, oh, it’s all better, then yeah, maybe.
But that’s not how life works in my experience. And luckily I have technical people on staff that were like, Hey, Doug, there’s no magic bullet out there. Some of this shit is hard and it takes time and effort to fix things and make things better. So stay the course. And so we’re staying the course and go for it.

Paul:
And I’m glad we were able to help do that. Maybe Travis, not to get too in the weeds, but maybe you can share a little bit of color around some of the challenges that we found and the kind of recourse we took to get the site back to running smoothly and highly performant and all those things.

Travis:
So a couple of weeks ago, myself and a few of our solution architect, we met with Dom and Mike. Dom is, if I’m remembering correctly, Doug, he’s the sort of newly appointed developer on the site who’s helping you get everything squared away and sorted out. But essentially we helped Dom identify and also confirm some of his assumptions that the foundation of the site had that we could improve upon. A lot of things were optimization related as well as just adding in a PM that would allow us to know exactly what’s going on with the site, diagnose the problem, and then either remove those little tidbits or add whatever else to improve it. So some scripts were running that didn’t have to be running, we got rid of those. And it sounds as if Dom found a lot of value in just having technical minded folks to bounce ideas with and just confirm, I want to go this way. I need to get from point A to point B. This is my thinking of how we’d like to get there. What do you think? Is that the best way? And then we can just confirm things. But Douglas, it was really interesting. We’ve got a lot of Wormwood gaming fans, and that’s actually how we stumbled across Wyrm Life.

Douglas:
I was wondering how that happened. Yes. I just want you to know, tell that story too. Yeah. Well, when I made that first video, so we have a vlog, and this is just part of being in the modern direct to consumer economy is consumer anyway, we don’t, that’d be another whole separate conversation. And we think one thing that’s really engaging and is really great content is showing problems. People love to see problems and then people like to see how these problems resolve and the conflicts and the people having different opinions about how these problems are resolved. So what we did is we turned our entire company into part of the marketing of our company where the idea is, Hey, we’re going to manufacturing’s hard. We’re going to tell our story. That’s the advantage. What is one advantage of domestic US manufacturing is we have a big shop full of problems.
We’re not outsourcing our problems. We’ve got all our problems. And so, hey, let’s make some lemonade out of these lemons. People love to see problems. We’ve got a lot of problems. Sounds like a great reality TV show. And so we released these vlogs and one of them was about our website issues and I don’t know, there must’ve been some fans within your organization or something. The response was immediate, you guys swooped right in. And it was like, wow. Sure, sure. I guess they saw it. We didn’t tag you or anything. It wasn’t a takedown. We weren’t trying to create drama between anybody. And how

Paul:
Did that happen, Travis, somebody, are there folks on our team who subscribed to the

Travis:
Channel? So there’s a couple of folks who obviously follow Wormwood Gaming and they purchased some products from you, Douglas. And what happened was, I think it was November of last year, there was an initial video that came up on my radar that I think your thumbnail was, our website sucks. Someone reached out to my team and said, Hey, I’m a Wyrmling if I’m not mistaken.

Douglas:
Yeah, yeah, that’s right.

Travis:
Okay, cool. So this was John Coy. He said, I’m a Wyrmling, I’ve been following Wyrmwood for a long time. It looks like they are running WordPress and Woo, but they’re running into some issues. And that was the start of a bit of a email back and forth. I believe Ed figured out the problem in that specific case, but then when it resurfaced again, and that particular video I believe was called Doug is pissed, our website is something like that. So that’s when we realized, okay, this we are on strike two year that we need to sort out and try make a connection. So that was shared within our water cooler Slack channels. And that’s how we knew, okay, we have to make a move here. We were almost on the verge of rocking up at your manufacturing warehouse, knocking on the door and being like, Hey Douglas, we are WooCommerce. How can we help?

Douglas:
Can I tell you a real issue? This is actually, this is something you should be aware of. I receive endless emails from all these sorts of folks. Hey, you want to get a new website? Blah, blah. I’m always getting pitch pitch, pitch, pitch, pitch pitch. I think you probably reached out to me, maybe you got through red. I have seen your emails coming in, Travis, and I was just like, oh, it’s another pitch I actually had, there’s actually a little bit of a loose connection there where there as a decision maker, I have a hard time understanding like, Hey, these are internal people at Woo, and this is different than the endless pitches I get because literally I get, especially because a little bit well known on social media, it’s actually kind of hard to differentiate these things. And so I don’t know if you guys in turn.
Anyway, that’s a challenge you guys should look into. I actually think that was part of why things got so bad. Actually, I’m going to one more very, very brief monologue. So brief, so brief. I just want to actually thank you guys. Lemme take you in the way back machine. I don’t know if this may be a rather typical journey for a customer. It’s like we grew up with your software. We grew up, it was literally myself and Ed Maranville, absolutely zero technical background, zero, just completely amateurs were able to get a website. I think we might’ve contracted a little bit with someone on five. It was like for super short money, super short money. We got a website, we got an e-commerce site running, and we did hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars of business. And we had invested up until that point, probably $2,000 on the website. The thing was, it’s actually kind of amazing because remember, I’m coming from a furniture world. I mean, back in the day they used to have these things called stores and to have a furniture store

Paul:
Be spending a lot more than a couple thousand dollars.

Douglas:
So it’s actually amazing. It really is. Yes. And then I think this is part of what got us into trouble is we had underinvested for such a long period of time. Then I’m like, Hey, let’s make things better. And then I appointed the wrong person to lead that effort and that’s actually when things went sideways. So anyway, and by the way, we were asking the website over those years to do more and more and more. There was sort of a feature creep on the website and that coupled with poor project management during a relaunch is how we got torpedoed. That might be helpful for you guys to just have that input.

Paul:
It’s super helpful. We’ve definitely seen similar stories. I think it kind of comes back to that sort of following best practices and being a responsible sort of website owner. But I think that WordPress and WooCommerce can scale to really meet any needs, but we often do see folks, yeah, it’s building. You may start with a solid foundation but keep adding more and more additions that eventually the house starts to kind of close in on itself a little bit. And again, that’s not necessarily because WooCommerce or WordPress can’t handle that scale or volume of traffic or whatever or your custom needs, but sometimes it could be helpful after a decade of making additions to come back and say, all right, if we were building this from scratch today, how would we approach it knowing what we know now, what the company’s goals are today, not what they were 10 years ago. And I think unfortunately, this was a great news in this case, in that we were able to actually make contact with you all and help get things corrected. But we often see people kind of throw the baby out with the bathwater unfortunately and say, oh, this, it’s a WordPress problem. And not realize that again, their WordPress or WooCommerce can absolutely meet your needs, but may have just gone about it in not the best way to do that. The thing

Douglas:
About tech is back in the day, it used to be people that were into tech were technical. And what we’ve seen is, I think, and I’m guilty of this, when I was back in college, I was sort of into computers and I built my own computer and I was this big nerd, still am a nerd in many regards, but at a certain point when it comes to the apps and the smartphone, everything’s simple. Everything is simple. And so I think one of the challenges is that I think that viewpoint or that ethic, you almost think, Hey, it’s a website. This should be simple. Why is a website complicated and difficult? This should actually be simple. And then it turns out it’s not simple and I don’t have a lot of experience. I’m talking a little bit out of place. But if it’s simple, is it capable?

Is it actually powerful? Is it actually able to do complex tasks? And I think that’s probably where Shopify would fall down. Now again, I don’t know that it just, that’s sort of logically made sense. And when the most technical members of the team that had the most real knowledge advised me, in fact, I think the reason we got fucked up was that we weren’t listening to the technical leads. We were sort of letting, we were making website, and I think this is totally most likely common. Where the project manager went wrong is he was listening to the artists, the designers. It was sort of like an aesthetic first viewpoint. And I think that is where we went sideways. And then when I took over this project, and by the way, unfortunately this project manager did not survive his career, did not survive the flub up. So then when I got installed into this, I said, look, we’re going to have a tech first viewpoint on web. This is a tool. The tool has to work. I don’t care what it looks like. Yes, when the website relaunch happened, the site did look better, but it was non-functional. Well, that doesn’t help anybody. So anyway, sorry. Yeah, this is a little bit more background on that.

Jay:
I find, and I think maybe our merchants in particular might find this interesting or widely within our community that Douglas, the way that you’ve approached both Kickstarter and social media, you talked a little bit about looking at your business as a a reality show, creating a real phenomenon in that sense, which I know many people would be like, how do I do that? I want that. I’m curious if you have any thoughts about the inherent challenge. I mean, you’re obviously a very distinct personality, but any thoughts or recommendations for folks who are like, how do I light that fire?

Douglas:
I have in certain very rare circumstances, reviewed marketing material before it goes out. So I believe, for instance, we run a vlog. I do not watch those vlogs. I watch it when everyone else watches it. The media folks, our media team or different organizations probably call them different things, but there’s content creators. Those content creators want to take the risk. They want to do the thing they want, push the envelope if they’re good. That’s what you want. You want ’em to be hungry. You want ’em to be daring. You want ’em to make a splash, right? We’re trying to make a splash. So I let ’em play in the water. They go nuts. I do not preview, say, if you look at our vlog, I don’t preview it. And there’s stuff I really wish, I wish I’d reigned that in a little because it’s high risk.

And so I think one of the things that makes it so organizations are unsuccessful in media and marketing is you get too much top level brass involvement. There’s too much concern about brand alignment and all these things, and it’s kind of bullshit. Nobody cares except for you guys in the boardroom, but that’s not what people want to watch. And so you’ve really got to have a reckless level of empowerment in order to be successful. I mean, that’s why solo creators, it’s like why is it that social media creators, they’ll just be some kid with a smartphone and he’s outperforming your multi-billion dollar company and it’s because that kid has no inhibitions. He does not give a fuck. He doesn’t, right? And so if you want to try to ride that wave, you got to get on the surfboard. Just a true creative force.

You got to risk a wipe out. You’ve got to be willing and giving up that control is difficult for a lot of c-suite folks. I think. So for instance, our vlog, so just to rattle over, just for people that aren’t familiar, our Instagram probably has around 600,000 followers, something like that. Our YouTube channel has over a hundred thousand. We get millions of impressions or it’s very popular. It’s very popular. And it’s because the team has been empowered to the point of what I think a lot of people would consider almost recklessness, just what it calls for right now, manufacture. That’s not how we treat safety on the floor. We’re dealing with big machines. People can really get hurt. You can actually, and by the way, a bad date to me, and I think this is just because we come from different worlds. A bad date for me, oh, our vlog got us into trouble or look at these mean things. These people are saying online. A bad date to me is like, yes, somebody lost a piece of their body. I’m being real. I am in manufacturing. And manufacturing is actually, it’s the world of atoms. It’s the world of people.

Paul:
Stakes are high.

Douglas:
I try to just keep things in perspective that everything online is all fun and games and fuddy duddy and it’s not a contact sport. And so I think, I don’t know, having a little perspective understanding, it’s not the end of the world if people think the wrong thing about you one way or another at this time or that time. I think that’s what hamstrings, a lot of caring too much at a certain point, becomes a liability when it comes to this sort of thing. And by the way, also, just to throw it out there, I’m a direct to consumer company. I am direct to consumer, and so I am trying to impact those consumers online by getting my stuff in front of them and telling the story and engaging them. I think different businesses are different. I mean, if the business is not direct to consumer, then it’s a different, you guys are b2b, so I don’t know how applicable this is in your world.
I think the B2B world is very different than the B2C world. And so you don’t want to take a successful lesson in one realm and then transpose it into another realm. So actually I’m curious. Those would be questions I have for you guys is how do you play the B2B game? That’s actually interesting to me is how are you mean? Yeah, I mean, it’s just such an interesting challenge. I mean, I have all sorts of questions just because I’m a curious guy in terms of the distribution of, you guys probably have a bunch of, there’s probably large accounts or whales and then a lot of minnows. And strategically is the goal to bring in more minnows or to go catch more whales? There’s a lot of interesting questions here that are totally not necessarily part of this conversation.

Paul:
You asked him. It’s interesting, yeah, you talked about how you’ve sort of grown up with WordPress as a business, and we definitely see that sort of trajectory where folks start small, even just as a hobbyist with a blog and find a bit of a niche and scale that business. And we’ve seen folks, maybe a good example is Tiny Wood Stove who was a WooCommerce store. They started literally just a blog with WordPress, basically a couple who had recently quit their corporate jobs and went on the sort of nomad life and started a blog about it. Long story short, their blog about their nomad life and how to heat their camper has turned into a manufacturing business, and they now sell these tiny wood stoves, and I forget now how big of a company they are, but they scale beyond just the original founders. And so I think to answer the question more directly, WordPress is such a huge part of that kind of customer acquisition channel for WooCommerce as people enter WordPress, even just with sort of a creative idea, again, even maybe just a blog because of the flexibility of WordPress, that idea can very quickly turn into, or blog very quickly, turn into an e-commerce platform or much more than that.

And so that sort of community building is still an important part of what we do here. Even in the kind of the B2B space, it’s really engaging the agencies, web hosts, everybody in our ecosystem are all towards the same goal of growing WordPress and commerce adoption. And so probably it’d be interesting to kind of envision what a worm life could look like for Woo. I think there’s similar, again, it’s B2B, but we’re all still humans at the end of the day. And figuring out the best way to engage those folks is, yeah.

Douglas:
One challenging question. I’m going to throw a challenging question at you. I’m just curious really more than anything is, one thing that I’ve noticed is there’s now a lot of e-commerce going through apps. This seems to be a thing that’s occurring. So for instance, on Instagram, Instagram, you can now shop through Instagram. This is relatively new now. We have not been pushing into this heavily, although we’re starting to dip our toe in, but shopping through Instagram, shopping through TikTok, shopping through YouTube, I don’t know. Just talk about that. I’m interested in where you think that’s going. And I mean selfishly because interested in where that’s going and I don’t know, it’s just an interesting development.

Paul:
Absolutely. Yeah. Just the kind of embracing a multi-channel or omnichannel experience is certainly something that we hear a lot from our customers and that we very much want to support. We have great integrations with TikTok and Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, enabling our customers to leverage WooCommerce, but to still reach their own customers wherever they are. So I think that’s still really important. Part of, for most folks, selling online should be an important part of the strategy for you guys. Whether it makes sense to try and sell your more custom bespoke furniture through an Instagram may not make sense, but your more sort of simple, less complex products would make a lot of sense, I think, to reach that audience. And so I think that’s very much I, it’s maybe even antiquated to say that that’s the future. It’s here now, but I think certainly we anticipate that kind multi-channel experience really proliferating over the coming years, but also believe that it’s really important to own your brand and experience and while you’re leveraging these separate channels to obviously sell through them, but also leverage them as a way to bring customers back to your own website where you own the data, own the experience, and can deliver exactly the kind of customer experience you want to.

Douglas:
One of the things is people, well, it’s all so interesting. It’s like the needs of a company and a brand seem to be so different than some sort of influencer sort of vibe. If I’m an influencer, what’s interesting is my company sort of straddles these worlds because we are so online and on that side of things, but an influencer, I feel like they, I don’t know if they care as much about that. I’m not sure. I don’t know. I certainly do. My company does. And by the way, when it comes to a custom table, you’re right, I don’t see how these apps currently would ever support that sort of thing. I am selling a customizable product that’s very expensive. Our average transaction for our medium level gaming tables, it’s about $4,000 per transaction. So this is a $4,000 decision someone’s making. They’re going to want to go somewhere that’s not like, oh, I’m on TikTok. Swipe to the right. Yeah,

Paul:
Scroll across that video in TikTok and be like, yeah, I’m going to make that buy.

Douglas:
Right, right.

Jay:
But at the same time, it’s like, I see that while I’m in TikTok or Instagram or that’s this ignition, this moment when it’s like, that’s beautiful. How do I find my way back to your space to start thinking about the decision?

Douglas:
Right? By the way, how I’m thinking about that right now is I think it used to be, Hey, I’m going to bring the people to the website in order to sell the product. My philosophy right now is when they are on TikTok or they’re on Instagram or they’re on YouTube and they see, the goal of our marketing team right now is to get across the core functionality of that product, which ideally makes someone go, Ooh, I want that. And then when they get to the website add to cart, I’m not actually right now looking for the website to tell the story so much. I think that story is going to be told on social media. I think when they’re watching the TikTok or the Instagram, whatever the heck this is, right, they’re going to have some sort of, they’re either going to like it or not like it, and if they like it, you’ve sold them. When they go to the website, I actually want add two cart. I just want to decrease the friction. For me, the way I’m thinking about it right now is the website is not so much about telling the story of the product. They know the story from the media channels that they’re on. That’s where they learned the story. That’s where the decision, my goal now is when they get to the website, low friction add to cart. I’m just throwing, I’m not saying that’s good advice. I’m saying that’s how I’m currently thinking about this

Paul:
Problem. I think that’s exactly right. Obviously it depends on the types store you’re operating, who your customers are, but I think for you all that strategy makes a lot of sense.

Douglas:
No, and again, it’s different. Businesses are going to have different needs.

Jay:
Learning about what’s successful in any business can lead to learning about what’s successful in your business. I think that’s interesting about seeing it there when you start seeing those loops. I hate to wrap. This has been tremendously interesting. I really appreciate Douglas, your time to talk to us about Wyrmwood Gaming today. Anything else as a final before we wrap up, Paul or Travis, anything that you would want to add to?

Paul:
I’ll just reiterate your thanks. I really appreciate the time, Douglas. It’s been really lovely to get to know you and the Wyrmwood team over the last few weeks and just learn a little bit more about the business. So thank you.

Douglas:
Yeah, no, and think, like I said, my company really is a little slice of an American dream. We’re manufacturing in America selling domestically, and the only way we’ve been able to do that is by my company could not exist without the internet. Lemme put it that way. My company could not exist without the internet. Between Kickstarter and then also you guys and our ability to actually make sales on a website, it actually is pretty nutty. It’s actually pretty miraculous, and I think sometimes it’s good to just sort of take stock of that reality. It’s like, I don’t know, there’s 150 employees in Massachusetts and Pennsylvania that are their paychecks come through your company, essentially. You’re the middleman for that. And so I don’t know. So thanks to you guys and especially Travis and his team to help us dig out of the problem that we were having.

Paul:
We love hearing these stories so much. Our mission is very much to democratize commerce and this, you all are such a fantastic example of that. Cool.

Douglas:
Alright, well hey, thanks for the time guys. It was fun. Yeah, so cool.