Enterprise Strategies & Insights with Open SaaS

Jonathan:
Welcome to another episode of Do the Woo. I’m your co-host, Jonathan Wold, and with me today is your other co-host, Tammie Lister. Tammie, how are you?

Tammie:
I’m good, thank you. How are you?

Jonathan:
I am excellent. Excited to be doing the Woo once again. We are joined today by Nate Stewart. He is the VP of Platform Strategy at BigCommerce. Nate, welcome.

Nate:
Hi. Happy to be here.

Jonathan:
And where in the world are you joining us from today?

Nate:
In Puerto Rico.

Jonathan:
How is the climate in Puerto Rico this time of year?

Nate:
It’s great. You know, we just had a hurricane pass through and push a little bit of the humidity out. Now it’s back to normal, everything’s fine here. Other than that, it’s nice and beautiful.

Jonathan:
Excellent. So Nate, you are not a stranger to the show. It’s just over four years ago, episode 64, you were a guest on Do the Woo. A lot has happened since. What are you working on at BigCommerce these days?

Nate:
I’m working on, believe it or not, some of the same things we talked about, just in more elevated forms. Like, I think a lot of what we talked about last time was more of an ambition to support openness and bring open into the core of BigCommerce. Around that time, we talked a lot about how we’re open SaaS, like we want to be the open SaaS commerce platform, the leader. And that was more of a future-focused vision of where we wanted to sit in the market, what we wanted to support. Now, a lot of that is reality. We’ve invested multiple years into making that true and that changes a lot, I think, in a good way, of how we work with the WordPress ecosystem, how we work with pretty much everybody’s way of working. We want to feel like you enjoy and love and cherish a lot of different platforms and technologies and ways of working. And we want to be the platform that makes you feel at home because we trust that you have good taste and you like what you like because it has value. So yeah, all that has kind of become true. I’m really just making sure we get the most value ourselves and everyone else with that strategy.

Jonathan:
I recall. It’s been great to watch over the years too, that you were talking about that then and there were some hints of it, but BigCommerce’s public position, because you’re of course a public company, that’s a whole other game to be talking publicly about this open SaaS strategy. It takes time to carry this out. So it’s interesting to see that it’s like we had that four years ago, you were talking about it. Now you have a lot more evidence that you can point to. Your investment in the WordPress ecosystem is how many, like, is it five plus years now that you’ve been in this space? Before we had you on the show, you’d already been at it for a while.

Nate:
Yeah, I think definitely in terms of when the first couple of WordCamps, big and small, we were doing research and meeting the community. That was like six, seven years ago. It took some time to build the plugin, but a lot of that was just coming from, at the time, we had hundreds and hundreds of merchants that already had WordPress running alongside their BigCommerce store. It was like, wait a minute, where does this data take us if we keep going? So that led us into the community. And then, I mean, myself, I kind of fell in love with just how it felt almost like what it felt like as I learned the web and grew into the person I am. I was like, oh, this feels true to who I am as well. And I think that’s just part of why I really fight to stick in any ecosystem where there’s that truth there and that it resonates with people. It’s not just a bunch of corporate marketing. There’s value beyond it. So yeah, that’s like six, seven years ago. It feels like a totally different world than six, seven years ago. But a lot of what stayed the same is kind of what I’m talking about, you know, at work and in the communities I’m focused on.

Jonathan:
This is a WooCommerce-focused podcast, right? And one of the things that I’ve liked about BigCommerce from the beginning is that you didn’t have this anti-WooCommerce stance, but perception and reality are two different things. And I think early on, a lot of folks, like you had a product, your first plugin, for instance, was focused on more of this small business use case where BigCommerce… Well, let’s start with this. How do you think about the WooCommerce ecosystem? Because you have competitors in the space. You compete with Shopify and other proprietary platforms, but with this open SaaS strategy, how is it that you think about WooCommerce?

Nate:
Yeah, I think about it as a major part of the journey for decision merchants looking to easily make their vision a reality. You don’t start by coming onto a platform like BigCommerce and using every feature. You start many times with your marketing presence, with what you know. Some people are already blogging in WordPress and want to create a business, and it makes perfect sense to start there. So Woo is the first place that I feel most people should look because it’s so well supported. It’s just the default for that space. But then it’s a journey, right? So at which part of the journey does either WordPress or WooCommerce hit a little bit of a snag, where at that point you’re like, wait a minute, I need to get out of WordPress, get out of Woo. I don’t think that’s a positive decision. It shouldn’t be binary. It should be, hey, what part is it working and how do you retain everything you put into it and add on for the next level of your growth? That’s kind of the way I feel about Woo. I have a lot of respect for Woo. I feel a lot of really smart agencies and developers are creating really cool experiences in Woo. I like seeing that. I like seeing innovation in the space because it’s open source, you can do that.

Jonathan:
And I think the key for me lies in that open SaaS strategy because we’re no strangers to proprietary platforms that work within our space, like Jetpack and other products like it are proprietary and there’s the SaaS component, but they’re all in on the WordPress ecosystem. Whereas other platforms, like Shopify, it’s zero-sum, right? They want everything there. It’s like you’re choosing Shopify, you’re also doing the CMS and everything. And that’s what stood out to me the most about the approach you guys have taken, embracing the choice. You want to use WordPress, you want to use WooCommerce, that’s fantastic. We’re here to support you. What’s made it clearer, and you tell me Nate, is, as the years have gone on, your emphasis on the enterprise has made a lot more straightforward. Whereas early on, it was more of an overlay because you started out as a small business-focused platform. That enterprise shift has taken a number of years to get to this point.

Nate:
Yeah, I mean, I believe we’re on the 15th year of BigCommerce being the name of the company. The backstory is a couple of years before that it was actually like you got the code and you ran it yourself back in the day. And it evolved into a SaaS platform, right? That was because early days, e-comm, it was much harder to scale and support by, you know, much greater, like, let’s say 10X. I don’t know the exact thing, but it just, you wanted, people were reaching out, going, I love this, but I want it hosted for me. And now hosting and other tech has made it to where it’s less of a, it’s more fuzzy between open and SaaS. And I think it’s part of our journey. So we went from the code to SaaS. It was SMB only because in the beginning, e-comm days, we didn’t have all the advanced features we have now. You built a cart, you built a catalog, you built all those pieces. But over the years, you get to where the people that need the most help with their architecture and functionality, they need way more complex features. You naturally get into mid-market and then enterprise. So we’ve kind of been on that journey, and because we’ve invested in the open strategy a while ago, it bodes well for enterprise, really well. Typically, that’s what you see in any software platform landscape. The more enterprise, the more APIs they have, the more ecosystem. Whether you want to get locked into, I would almost say, closed suite versus open suite, you see a lot of those strategies in different ways play out. We are more of the open suite, you know, we want to make it easy to package. And that includes you want to use WordPress and you want to use WooCommerce in a different part of our product catalog, if you will, like our suite. We want to open up pathways to that for the enterprise, and even before that to where it’s not a binary decision. It’s what’s best for you as you are growing.

Jonathan:
And I think a good example of that to me, and we can touch on it more later, is you have products that people don’t know about, like Feedonomics, that have WooCommerce support built into it. It’s a product that’s focused on your product feeds out to various endpoints. And you could use WooCommerce in that. It’s a BigCommerce

product. The last question I have for you on this topic before we switch gears: WooCommerce has a mission to democratize commerce, which is connected to the WordPress mission to democratize publishing, right? I’d love to hear your thoughts on what role you see BigCommerce playing in supporting that mission. How do you think about that mission?

Nate:
Yeah, one that kind of echoes six, seven years ago when I was kind of indoctrinated in the community, the whole 51% I think is maybe the clearest way we help to get to 51% of the web, which much of that is commerce. When you actually look at the longstanding site, I think right now what happens, the trend I’ve seen is when you start in WordPress, you layer on WooCommerce, and then when you hit that decision point of, well, maybe it’s not as fast as I wanted, or it’s getting complex for the different plugins and the agencies I’m working with are quoting that I should migrate off to something else. It’s at that point where if we make it easier to just uplevel the pieces of your WordPress stack to keep you on WordPress as you evolve, then both WordPress and many times Woo benefit from that. That’s how you get to the 51% and more. You find those strategies in the WordPress community where there are partners like us that go, hey, let’s keep that stat. Let’s keep building it together. I want to see a world where WordPress goes beyond 51% and we are a part of that journey and celebrating together, knowing that we’re talking about a journey here, not a one-off decision you make when you have a new problem.

Tammie:
I’d really like to move us from that. You mentioned the toolkit, the suite, and we looked at how we have this kind of blue. I want to consider the space for commerce and builders. You mentioned this suite. What has been the most exciting thing to explore and experiment with product-wise lately? You mentioned layers and complexities, but what does that feel like building in, and how have you been exploring and building in that? What have you been exploring and building in that even? That’s a big question.

Nate:
Yeah. One of the things that I mentioned earlier, we had hundreds of merchants back in the day, which led us in the direction that were using WordPress on the side, meaning they had their site and then a shop dot. Now because of the plugin, but also because of things like headless and composability, it’s more nuanced than that. And now with the Gutenberg editor, it’s been this way for a while. You have blocks and whatnot. You can go, wait, if you already have your marketing site up there and you want to layer on commerce and you’re already closer to the mid-market enterprise, right? Because you maybe have a big B2B business and you’re going to B2C. So you’re already at scale with complexity. Well, I’ve been plugging with a team a little bit around how would we integrate Gutenberg and existing stuff that you have, you made a decision like your theme and your blocks, into our open-source storefront framework that we built called Catalyst. That way, you get to retain what you built on WordPress and via the Gutenberg kind of standard blocks. So to me, one of the interesting things here is how, and this is an area I’d like to work more with people to solve. Blocks are almost there. The API, it feels in any like the WP GraphQL and REST, you can get to the point where it feels like it should work 100%, but you run into issues in actual live implementations where, okay, there’s not really a standard where you can go from WordPress React into static or into now with like Next.js and the newest app router, React server components, how you transition from, I get this block, it’s a form plugin, I have this type of React running on my headless instance. How do I make it work to where on the front end of the editor it works and then WordPress? I want that to look and feel the same way. That actually gets very complex very quickly. And I think whoever works in solving that problem where we can get there together will radically improve how people are using Gutenberg, how we work through these migration strategies that don’t push you off of WordPress and off of Woo, but go, hey, this block works well for you here, this block is not performant, should we go headless? Should we just replace that block? Anyway, I’ve been plugging away with the team about that, working with several different agencies in this space to go, what’s your opinion? And yeah, there’s a lot there. I think Gutenberg is really cool, and personally, even on the weekend I’m hacking around occasionally, you might see me going like, what’s the new thing? But it’s funny how, I mean, it’s been years since it was released and some of those pain points are still there, right? We have to ask ourselves why. If they’re migrating out because we don’t know how to use blocks, that’s not even a core commerce thing. That’s just in general, I think that more could be done there.

Tammie:
I like how you’re kind of touching on it by what you are saying, which is you never, you don’t find those, I always call them stress cases, not edge cases because they cause you stress when you hit them rather than them being edge cases because they might only be for one person, but it could be really important that that one person hits them by the experimentation. So I think one of the answers, and it’s one of many, is people haven’t maybe explored some of these combinations. So that’s what really, for me personally, and I think a lot of people, is curious about these experiments that you’re doing. But I’d love, in what you’ve been creating in your own experiments, how have you discovered this to be uniquely different to building this space? Because it is a little bit uniquely different, these stacks, like you’ve shared about the complexities and the layers, but it kind of is shifting sands a little bit in places. What are some of the other differences that you’ve thought about as you are creating these spaces?

Nate:
I think one that, again, this is more of a background thought the whole time. One decision we made early on was to do it 100% the WordPress way. And we, everything being in the community and the research and all the agencies and builders we talked to, they’re like, there’s the WordPress way, you build the template, it’s PHP, all of that. Gutenberg was happening as that. But no one really, it’s almost like people didn’t want it to succeed. It was a very weird feeling, but we got over that hump overall as a community. But during that early, you’re talking like six years ago plus, that WordPress way kind of limited us in terms of what Gutenberg was really trying to accomplish, which is being more modular, being more JavaScript-forward, React-forward. So now I have this, again, it’s a background thought of instead of, you know, the plugin being like the WordPress way templates, being more components by default, it’s really just React as the page loads reading out from an API. And yes, there’s a downside to, you know, you don’t have things in the table in the options table and other aspects. There’s maybe a loading artifact a little bit there where the page loads and then it reads the data. But the benefit is you are fully compatible with the static hosting trend that’s happening in the WordPress space and overall web development in general. It actually forces you to polish your API on your other end a lot better, making sure that caching and just performance in general is better at the API level. So I feel as a platform that is integrating that mode makes your product better for everyone by integrating that way. So I’ve had that thought come up a lot. The downside is there’s effort there to change, and there’s also feedback from the community where there are millions of people that love the WordPress way. And there’s the thought there, and what does the WordPress way even mean anymore? I’ve had this thought of it, isn’t it Gutenberg? Isn’t it blocks? So yeah, all that.

Tammie:
I think it’s fascinating that the WordPress way, maybe it should be adapting. Maybe the whole point about the WordPress way is that it isn’t a fixed way, and we maybe thought it was like chiseled, and it wasn’t chiseled. I think this is such a fascinating discussion. I want to skip back a couple of steps to something you were saying because you very clearly have an understanding of builders and you very clearly have an understanding both from your own tinkering, I love that word, and exploring. So that translates into what is being created. And I think that is incredibly important when you are creating these suites and trying to also create tools. Can you explain a little bit more how that translates into the products that you are offering as well? Because I think there’s something in there as well that we’ve been talking about and getting super excited about the API and the experiments. But how does that then translate into the products?

Nate:
So I think we’re really in this multi-product territory now. You can’t be truly open if the only way to get value is to combine everything the same way every time. That’s not open. That becomes closed in general, like entering the walled garden. And so I think what we’ve evolved over the years is formally, we’ve made acquisitions as a company. You mentioned Feedonomics, they’re doing very well outside of the BC ecosystem as well as in. They actively support all of our competitors, all our commerce competitors. When you go to feedonomics.com, it’s very hard to find any mention of BigCommerce. It’s very much its own product offering. Because we’re underneath the same umbrella, we work under the same constraints of, okay, when we need to ship a

feature and it’s using their technology, we build like a partner would, right? We don’t have internal things that are cheating. That helps everyone and helps us keep an honest open strategy. That’s why Woo fits into their strategy in a big way. They have many large WooCommerce customers and they have kept them on Woo and WordPress, and that’s okay because that product still grows their business. Let’s be honest, it’s easier to keep people happy if you don’t go into their house and say everything’s terrible. You can make comments, you know, they might not like the couch, but you don’t tell them to move. They like their community, right? Another example of this is Makeswift. They’re a recent acquisition, again, an independent company still like Feedonomics. They are a visual editor for Catalyst and our next-gen storefront. However, if you want to use Makeswift with WordPress, with WooCommerce, with any of our commerce competitors, they don’t become a competitor. If you like Makeswift, you’re not ready for BigCommerce, you’ve invested a lot in your current stack, that’s fine. There are interesting things with Makeswift because it is composable by nature. It is built from the ground up to support the latest in React and React server components, all that where Gutenberg is more of the default. It is React and the new way, but its APIs and all aren’t in the same ecosystem. You could technically use the Gutenberg API in the Makeswift visual editor and get the development flow you want while still retaining WordPress. It’s almost like WordPress as I know Jonathan you said in the past as the operating system. It has the API. There are all these interesting things that can happen when we’re multi-product. We’re not single platform where you buy it as a product. I think that’s one of the ways that we enable builders in a different way, and each of those separate products have different APIs and ways you can utilize them.

Jonathan:
One of the big switches over the past couple of years has been this increasing emphasis on enterprise, right? That’s the transition that you’ve been making. Multi-product is a good example of how you carry out that promise. You’re giving flexibility, especially in the enterprise, where that flexibility matters. They may have policies for using this or that, or they want just a piece of it. That’s a good example. Let’s talk about enterprise more and start with this: how do you define enterprise? What is that definition within the BigCommerce context?

Nate:
Yeah, for us, the way we define enterprise, it’s more like the size of their annual revenue, their employee count, it’s a blend, and they’re opting into being a part of our enterprise plan. It’s nuanced because typically you have a lot of platforms like products out there that are like, we’re enterprise or not. They come in and it’s like, okay, they have to be at a hundred million in annual revenue, they have to be XYZ. What we’ve found is you could have someone with a tremendous amount of revenue and they are very efficient because of the type of product they sell. There are DIYs and a lot of owner-operators, if you will. I believe there are a lot of those in the WordPress ecosystem. It’s known for that. People say, I’ll do it myself and I actually know how to code, design, and operate it. But that means why should they always pay the price for all the complexity of enterprise when they can handle a lot themselves? They might pay us a little bit less, where they’re not super enterprise, but they’re paying more in other ways that other people might not be able to pay, which means they’re putting in the blood, sweat, and tears to code and design themselves. But that persona, while they might appear more mid-market in terms of how they’re using it, they are an enterprise in revenue. We like to make it a real conversation with the brands we serve and everyone involved, where do you want the complexity to be? At the upper level, we handle a lot. Once you get to enterprise and you’re on an enterprise plan, we handhold a lot more, we’re a lot more with you building, helping you build, up to the point where you have dedicated people at certain levels of building your business. Some people might look at that and say, yeah, I know I’m generating a lot of revenue, but I don’t need that level. My personal opinion is everybody needs help and it’s going to make you sleep better at night when you have someone in your corner. But that openness goes into, well, let’s have a conversation. It’s a fuzzy line for mid-market and enterprise. High level, you’re talking like 50 million GMV, 25, around that territory, very clearly enterprise. It’s very rare for someone to opt out of that.

Jonathan:
This is where I get excited, looking at this through the WooCommerce lens. One of the risks we’ve seen over the past couple of years is people grow in WooCommerce, they like WooCommerce, they like WordPress, and then they start to hit the edges. There have been some great agencies, many of them coming onto the show, who’ve pushed the edges of WooCommerce and have innovated and figured out ways to make it scale further. And there’s also this feeling like it wasn’t designed for that. It’s an SMB-focused tool. While there’s a lot of room for growth, one of the things I’ve been intrigued about and been hoping to see more of is what it looks like to bring that enterprise capability from other players into the WooCommerce space. I think Feedonomics is a good example of that and would love to hear more about how you think about that. How can we, in the WooCommerce space, more successfully bring in enterprise capability? My hypothesis is that we can’t do it by just changing the core product because we have millions of store owners that count on that SMB approach that WooCommerce has taken. That’s the question. Right now, when people hit a certain point on WooCommerce and start to feel the edges, I think there’s a churn risk where people feel like they just have to leave entirely. My hypothesis is that doesn’t have to be the case. That’s where I see this opportunity with partners like BigCommerce being able to augment. How do you think about that? What would that look like practically?

Nate:
Practically, this is one case where being multi-product and having these independent companies that think about each ecosystem, they understand the APIs and aren’t filtering it through the BigCommerce lens. It means the Feedonomics team, the product knows how WooCommerce works, has a dedicated integration with them, and has been through this process day in and day out. Someone calls up going, hey, my sync, I have these plugins that are for my sales channels or advertising channels, and I’m getting to the point where it’s slowing down my site, or I don’t know how to support adding any more. I want to add five more channels. Keep in mind Feedonomics supports like 300 plus, maybe 400 plus, hundreds of sales channels. When things happen, like Target has a marketplace, you’ll hear our competitors make big announcements about it. But the reality is because Feedonomics is wholly dedicated to that, they’re working with Target and other marketplaces as the alpha of when they release functionality. There’s a huge benefit to going, all right, I don’t need to change WooCommerce at all. I’m already selling on sales channels. Let me get an easier-to-maintain site and way more sales channels. But again, you have to make that choice yourself, or an agency or developer working with a merchant. There is a cost, of course. It’s an open SaaS platform, but it is a SaaS platform. It’s a transition from a free plugin that I just have to pay someone to maintain or keep up with updates. It’s that cost transitioning to dollar cost, but you get the time back and peace of mind. It’s really that type of process. That’s why enterprise comes in. People coming in from, let’s say, they have half a million, a million in GMV, annual revenue, that’s probably not something that Feedonomics power is necessary for. You can just optimize Woo and the sales channels. But if you have questions like, I have 3 million in revenue, I’m growing faster than I can update, I have ideas and ambition to go into 10 more channels. Even if your site is working, if you can’t rapidly add 5, 10, 50 advertising, sales, and whatnot channels, and that’s your ambition, that’s when the right time is to talk. Again, it’s the journey. We talk a lot about the right journey and the merchant journey, having the right time, right place, rather than going, there’s one solution that fits everyone.

Tammie:
I’m going to pivot towards the end and imagine we’re kind of dreaming a little bit. We spoke about the past four years, but it’s panning away from products. There’s so much going on in this space, so many emerging trends, technologies. Let’s think initially for commerce builders, what should you be keeping an eye on if you’re building in this space now and in the next year? Then we can kind of get a bit dreamy after that.

Nate:
I’ve actually seen a lot of different podcasts and articles about this topic in this space recently. Static, and again, I talked about how does Gutenberg in the WordPress ecosystem play with that. Not static as just the end goal because why not? It’s fast and we should do it more. I think that will improve WordPress as a platform and other platforms integrating with it. If you think about the right separation of concerns and how the technology enables both approaches cleanly. As a builder, going, I’m building in a way that works for WordPress and its out-of-the-box state and WooCommerce’s out-of-the-box state. What happens next? Someone wants to go static, they want to use

Next.js, what do you do? Is what you built cleanly able to support that? As we think about our architecture and design of APIs, supporting both is better for everyone. It’ll create more opportunity for you as a builder, better for the end user. They’re more likely to stay in the WordPress ecosystem with what they built before because it can be translated into what’s next. A lot of what I’m talking about, we think deeply about composability and it’s almost a part of everything strategically that we’ve worked on recently and will work on in the future because of that reason.

Tammie:
I definitely align to that. All too often, before it was generally just like commerce, what does the front look like, and how do the transactions happen there? But now it’s kind of flipped in that sense. I’m going to flip that question though as well, segue. What buzzwords or tech should commerce creators avoid? Because I think there’s so much, as you were saying, there’s like podcasts and it can be really easy to be distracted or pile your feature set too high so that you then get problems. What makes your eye roll when you hear about someone adding and you’re like, you don’t need to add that, it’s not going to work, it’s not going to help someone?

Nate:
Yeah, I definitely think my eye rolls a bit when it’s AI without purpose. I think that’s kind of a softball question because a lot of people might say that. But what I mean with AI without purpose is if you’re chasing a perceptual win where it’s like, hey, I can have a chat interface here or look, you could ask it to do a theme and it does it. I feel like that’s removing research and analysis and understanding of the user from it. That’s just trying to achieve an end goal. Almost like what I said about static, don’t do static just because you hear a podcast about static. Do it because you understand the value of being able to transfer from one type of architecture to another. That changes how you build your thing. AI that has a purpose, like, okay, we’ve researched exactly how people are using our themes or integrating different APIs and we have a focused use of AI that’s tailor-made to accomplish that task or series of tasks faster. That’s awesome. I see a lot of people just layering it on. Especially in business, a merchant layering on random AI chat stuff, is it better than ChatGPT? Are you just trying to get a brand for yourself as a builder? I’m not discounting, some people that’s great early in your career, write up something and create and be like, hey, look at me. I know how to hit APIs for AI. But the reality is, does it make someone’s life better? And if it’s just a cool toy but it doesn’t make it better. That’s the difference. I’m not saying I know the answer perfectly. I had to look in the mirror and eye roll myself if I’m heading down. But if we just layered AI on top of that, we’re all capable of running into that peril of all I need to do is layer x feature or tech and it will solve my entire business.

Tammie:
I would plus one that so much. I think it is so easy to AI, is it a workflow or is it AI as well as also that thing? Does it get a hurdle? Okay, the last question I’m going to ask here though is kind of, it kind of segues the end of this. Four years from now, you come back on the podcast, what do you hope you have seen? It feels an inevitable one if we’re talking about the future to give my last question. If we’re talking about the future, I would say there are a million viewers or listeners of this podcast and you invite me back for some tropical villa special edition thing. I know that has nothing to do with technology. I’m just trying to put out some optimism and let the universe make it happen.

Jonathan:
I think Bob’s been talking about that, starting to take the hosts and putting us up. I think we’re going to get there.

Tammie:
Thank you, Bob. If you do it a year, Bob, I’d like some puppies if we’re doing that, that’s fine.

Nate:
I am trying to think about four. I feel kind of echo back on being able to celebrate together, getting WordPress. I don’t want to say modernize WordPress because I think WordPress is, people don’t give enough credit for modernizing as it goes. I actually think a lot of people have learned from Gutenberg without admitting it in other ecosystems. Modernize is the wrong word. It’s more perceptual. I think switching what people feel in the community and an internal perception of, hey, we have modernized, we’ve been through the pain of bleeding edge, trying to learn this stuff and into the rest of the planet by default going, okay, WordPress is in your stack, that’s great for these areas. Having a real conversation around it. Leveling the playing field with headless CMS where a lot of people had for years been using WordPress as a headless CMS. We’re not talking about the full journey, it’s like, which way are you using it with other parts of technology to get the most out of WordPress, out of WooCommerce at that stage. If in four years we’re having real conversations around that and we’ve done the technology work, everyone is better. That’s how you get to over 51% and beyond. It almost becomes like we’re, it’s not like WordPress, it could be, and again, I’m ripping off Jonathan, the WordPress as an OS. You think about Windows, Mac, iOS, all those different things. It’s close there now, but these things have to be solved to know how you interoperate and have all the standards where it doesn’t have to be like every use case is in WordPress. WordPress has to win at every stage of the journey. It has to be where you can hook in and out and get the most out of WordPress. It almost becomes a utility like an operating system long term. In four years, that’s happening. There will be so many more people using WordPress actively that we probably will be on a tropical villa for that episode because there will be so many new ideas and innovation there. I hope to be a little bit part of that journey.

Jonathan:
It’s interesting because we’ve been on this trajectory for a long time. Gutenberg, it is interesting to look back now. At the time, there was a lot of, I would argue that the work that Tammie and many others have done on that transition was in fact the WordPress way. What we see today with themes, we added all this complexity to themes in the WordPress space and now we’re getting back to how it was originally and things are getting simpler again. It takes a long time though. This vision of WordPress as an operating system for creating on the open web, I think we’re seeing it play out more and more. E-commerce is a great example of people building and saying, hey, I can create on the web, I want to add business into this context. I really appreciate the work that you guys have been doing at BigCommerce to recognize and be a part of that. That open SaaS strategy fits really well into that. What we see in the future is WordPress just being a ubiquitous part of a stack and a foundation that people can feel like, hey, I own this. It takes a long time though to catch up and bring that parity, features, and ways of doing things that builders need to be able to create confidently on it. Right now, it’s the people who really believe that are making it happen. That includes folks like yourselves investing into the space. Thank you for that. I look forward to seeing what the next four years bring. Nate, if anyone wants to connect with you further or learn more about what you guys are working on, what’s the best way to get in touch?

Nate:
On LinkedIn, Nate Stewart, search for that. Also Nate.stewart@bigcommerce.com. Feel free to email me. I’m not really on Instagram randomly taking pictures. I missed that whole thing. Definitely missed TikTok. I have an account on now X but I probably won’t actively respond. So LinkedIn and email. We also have our developer community. If you are a builder and you go in there and ping me, it’s a private community that anybody’s free to join. You go to developer.bigcommerce.com and go to the community section. We actually have a WordPress channel there that you could join in. I would love to see more people talking about how they’re using WordPress in our community. Or you could just reach out personally. Like I said, we’re working with a couple of agencies and leaders in the space just to think about what the future is here. The more voices we have that are stress testing that, the better it is.

Jonathan:
Excellent. We’ll also look forward to seeing you at future WordCamps as well. Nate, thanks for coming on and talk to you soon.

Tammie:
Thank you.

Nate:
Thank you.