A Story of Building a WooCommerce Business and Community

Abha: I’m Abha Thakor and I’m here with my co-presenter Anna Radu.

Anna: Hello.

Abha: And we have an amazing new podcast series for you. And for our very first guest, which is really important isn’t it Anna, that we chose somebody who we thought would be absolutely perfect. Who really symbolizes storytelling in words. Couldn’t really find somebody more perfect. Do you think we’re embarrassing this person yet? Because that’s where I’m going with this. I just want to make sure that I’ve got the right level of embarrassment.

Anna: I thought that we were inviting Robert because he was fun. Not because he was perfect, but go ahead. Hi, Robert, how are you?

Abha: Oh, okay. Oh, you’ve told everybody who he is. We better let the secret out now. So yes we have with us in the studio today, the very own, and the only one as there’s certainly not two of them. And you may know him by his hat, but you also just may know him from being Mr. Contributor. And it is Robert Windisch live here from Germany.

Robert: Hi there.

Anna: Hi, Robert.

Robert: And just for the record to be like, to embarrass me, talking to someone who walks with a straw head at conferences with like thousands of people, it’s very hard to make me feel embarrassed because, if you walk around and then you walk outside of these big venues and they still have the straw hat on, and the very like green glowing stuff, then you be seen by normal people and they look for you, like not really sure what you’re doing. So that’s why I’m okay with that.

The straw hat trademark

Abha: For those who haven’t seen Robert in a trademark straw hat, it’s covered with badges from wood camps, WordPress and WooCommerce. And it’s become a bit of a name in itself. And people always ask where this hat is. So they do check out the picture on the website, if you haven’t seen it already. And I don’t think the hat has its own WooCommerce store yet, but maybe there’s still time Robert for you to do that.

Robert: Yeah, the problem is they are very, very unique stuff on my hat that is very hard to come by. So, that’s why I try to get everything on my head to have it at least two times. Just in case something went very, very wrong and it get lost on the airport or something like that. So that’s why. Yeah, I would like to sell stuff about that or enable people to get these, but some of these pins are available in the WordPress merchandise store. So that’s why if you see something, maybe check out the available WordPress sites and maybe there are something for you if you want to get something about this.

Abha: But we do know it. We know Anna that he’ll definitely have a store on WooCommerce at some point.

Anna: Yeah. He must have that for whatever he wants, but for the hat particularly, I would just make an auction to see how we can put a price on something that is invaluable.

Abha: See, maybe we should run a side story on that. Robert, thank you for joining us today and with your hat, of course. Your company was Inpsyde, was founded in 2006, and is the biggest WordPress agency based in Germany. And you also have clients and staff all over the world. And as I understand it, you’re also one of the largest agencies dedicated to WordPress and WooCommerce in the world now. And with clients like PayPal, Mollie, CCV payment, Supply and Automattic, that’s quite a significant client list.

Abha: So we really are delighted to have you today talking about WooCommerce and also about your story as a builder and somebody in this space. So can you tell us a little bit about how Inpsyde was born?

The birth of his company, Inpysyde

Robert: Yeah, so we are kind of a community project. We started first, I myself started in the German WordPress forum before, like way, way before there was a German speaking forum on wordPress.org. So we needed to start our own forum because that goes way back to like 2004, 2005. So I joined WordPress in 2005, which is kind of late bloomer in terms of like WordPress age, because WordPress started in 2003. So I’m like, I was very late to the party for my own stuff. Yeah. I know. Like other people go like, “What, 2005?” Yeah. It’s long time ago. The version number was 1.52. So it is like ages ago for people who are currently working or with the blog did on all these things.

So, I joined a WordPress forum, the German speaking WordPress forum, and then worked up, up to the ranks of like a technical administrator there, because I had developer skills, I had admin skills and that’s the things that were needed in the forum. And also the German speaking site did also like the German translations before there was translations available to wordpress.org. So there’s like, all these things were needed. So we just did that, it includes like making a German speaking WordPress release at let’s say 11:00 PM in the evening when some American people decided, “Let’s do a release.”

And we bet like, yeah, it’s so many issues still in the WordPress press in the issue track, they will probably do that tomorrow. And then they don’t. And they decided, “Let’s do a release.” That’s like 10:00 PM, morning their time. And we are like, okay, that was the evening, “Let’s do a WordPress release.” And that combined into having done the moderators and the administrators of those forum, like meet together at one place in Europe and then decided to, maybe we can start a company and helping companies like PayPal who were using WordPress by helping them understand WordPress and helping them develop stuff of WordPress.

Because we did at that time had known WordPress very well. So just to name drop here, we did a multisite before multisite was merchant in core. So this was like a force, so we are so deeply like connected to multisite that we just like did that ages ago. And so that’s why we had like a special kind of knowledge in WordPress. And that’s why we started our company. And it took off very well and we get clients and then started, worked from there up to the point where we are now.

Anna: What’s your role in the company at the moment?

Robert: My role in the company is the, I’m the chief information officer. That means my job is to make sure everyone can work, and to make sure that all people in the company have the information they need to do their job.

A favorite Woo story

Abha: You’re also a storyteller Robert and we people see that when you go to word camps, virtual and in-person. And as a storyteller in your own right, you’re very enthusiastic about open source. Do you have a favorite story about working with WooCommerce or working with a particular project?

Anna: I hope that includes me by the way.

Robert: I’m sorry.

Abha: No pressure.

Robert: We had fun stories together, but I have way, way, way, better story.

Anna: Way better story than something that we did on the meetup side for WooCommerce and WordPress org?

Robert: Yeah. I’m so sorry. It involves the meetup. It involves meetup, so.

Anna: Okay. Understood.

Robert: So I had or have a local WooCommerce meetup in my city. And when we started with like, we had a WordPress meetup and also offered like the WooCommerce meetup, because my knowledge in WooCommerce is enough to start a WooCommerce meetup to help people. And so we had someone join our meetup, who is like a self thought WooCommerce store owner. And this person simply started WooCommerce by like trying out stuff in the WooCommerce backend, looking at YouTube videos and talking teaching himself how to do all this crazy stuff that developers do all the time, but he’s like, he’s a non-developer, he’s a normal human being.

So that’s why he had some troubles getting into this. And the funny thing for me was like, seeing this person grow as someone who is like, really afraid of developer stuff, really afraid of tinkering, but he was forced to do that because he wanted to have a customized store. So that’s why he needed to do something like that. And the fun thing for me was that this person, after a while, after a few months of being in the meetup, I did not need to answer WooCommerce questions anymore, because this person, when he was like being pushed to like, “Hey, you can answer that.” Because someone was asking like, “Should I use WooCommerce or what’s the best things in WooCommerce?”

I was like, “You can do that.” And so he was then telling people how to use WooCommerce, how to change things, where to look for the right content into scaling up.

Abha: That’s brilliant.

Robert: That’s why it was so awesome to see this person in the meet up, like grow and the fun thing I can like, it’s not even stopping there. So I was looking him up for this podcast, what he’s doing right now, because we lost track of each other because everyone has their own stuff to do right now in this time. So, I was looking up and I kid you not, he had a Facebook live stream of inventory of his own store, where he had like people from the local community, like his clients and stuff, seeing it, looking at him like how he just scans stuff and then enters it, chats, talks to the people. So he has now, like, I would say, totally took off as a brand, establishing himself, having interaction with his potential clients or with his client.

And even like why he did the inventory, people were like, “Oh, I like this. I would like to buy this.” And I was seeing this inventory goes like, man, he just like the full circle of like marketing and brand building and store owning and all of this, and he did all of this with WooCommerce. That’s why it’s so empowering to see like the possibility of WooCommerce helping him democratizing commerce. So that’s why it was so awesome to see all of this combined in this one person.

Anna: That’s beautiful. I love it when this kind of things happen.

Abha: It’s very cool. And can you just imagine Anna, if I was watching a Facebook where someone was going through all the knitting stuff, you would be happy to stop me buying everything and so maybe he better not give me the link to that, but it is wonderful. I think being part of a meetup and both of you have done that and helped other WooCommerce users is that you get to see that full circle of WooCommerce, and how people can go from starting a business and to expanding, getting new ideas, going down and providing ideas that no one’s ever thought of and establishing it as a brand.

It really is amazing. And I think that makes WooCommerce really special because it’s got that community to it that you can be part of, and you can be part lot of changing and giving someone a life that’s completely different to what they have before. So Robert, thank you for sharing our story. And I know that one of your other favorite stories of course, must include Anna somewhere. Well, we won’t ask you to necessarily tell them all today, but I’m sure Anna will want to know that the stories include her somewhere.

Robert: Yeah. We had a good time also like with the mentor meetups.

Abha: And we’re going to talk about a bit more about those in a minute too. So you can maybe slip in a story or two. WooCommerce as we’ve talked about is an amazing platform. And because it obviously goes hand in glove of WordPress. It is an opportunity for store owners to tell those stories and to make their businesses, their offerings, just that little bit more special as well, and feed a little bit about themselves into that. It can help, you’ve talked about how it can bring products to life. It can make somebody who tells us that he’s not interested in knitting, which he definitely said, Anna, talk about his favorite story being a knitting shop, and probably will recommend that to other people.

So the reach that you can have with WooCommerce and through the meetups, it’s just absolutely amazing. You touched a little bit Robert on WooCommerce’s mission to democratize commerce, and why that is important in terms of helping people achieve their goals. But is this something that is accessible to anybody? Or do you have to have a particular site, do you think, to be able to you use WooCommerce in that way and to be able to tell the story and be actually in the space?

The accessibility to creating your own Woo story

Robert: Yeah, the benefit of like using the, like WooCommerce is so easy to adapt and so easy to use, because you just need a WordPress installation and you can have a WordPress installation almost on a toaster. I would guess there are toaster out there where WordPress and WooCommerce is running, or they will be after this podcast. So the possibility to simply like start off and simply try and simply take tinker around, like do something and have the possibility to express yourself and at the same time, own all your stuff. So you don’t go to a different site and put your stuff there. And just hope that there’s no one deciding that your kind of business idea does not work. And so they simply say, no, you’re not, we disable your ability to express yourself.

So that’s why it’s so interesting to have something from the air quotes, open web to simply have the ability to own everything and be able to customize, so that you look differently, your site, your expression that you have look differently than all the other stuff. So that’s why for me, that’s a possibility to simply also like, look for content for WooCommerce, let it be on YouTube, on somewhere else, documentation. There’s a huge Facebook support group. And so they’re almost like everywhere in the world, I would guess in almost every language, you have someone who can help you with WooCommerce because WooCommerce is the most used eCommerce system on the world. So that’s why there’s a higher chance to find someone who already did something in WooCommerce and can maybe help you along your way.

The WooCommerce support system and getting involved

Abha: Which is actually really cool. And both of you, in fact, have been involved with that WooCommerce support system and have contributed to that. Is that something that you would encourage other people to do, that you found that has really been valuable and that you’ve benefited from and has helped your own story?

Robert: I would say the possibility to learn from interacting with other people and to see, for example, what they are struggling. And I heard us all the time, like people coming in, like for example, this one person that I mentioned in the start, and he was saying like, “I have no idea of this. I cannot help.” And the thing is that what most people don’t get is like, when they’ve been down the road of seeing things in WooCommerce and understanding things in there, then they can help other people to reach their destination faster.

So that’s the thing, like everyone knows something more than other person. And if you help other persons along the way, then you can learn from them what they have benefited in life, or they have something that they know and you yourself learn from them, and they also get help along the way. So that’s always like a shared benefit for both of them. Like you can win-win situation for everyone involved, if you help and contribute to the grove of like what the open web and WooCommerce itself.

Anna: I would also add to that, that there’s the possibility that you also make friends. We’ve seen that happening across multiple projects and multiple initiatives, like the kind of people that you meet at word camps and at meetups and on the support Facebook group. And also, just by giving talks at various events. I think that that’s something that doesn’t happen in other places. People are really open to knowing other people and also to learning from them and teaching and supporting each other, because it’s a high chance that most probably whatever it is, the problem that you have right now with your WooCommerce story, someone else has already been through that, and solve it and they can advise you.

So I think that this is, one of the most beautiful things about this community, that the entry barrier is really low, and the people are really open. And by default, we believe that, we are part of a community without having to constantly ask for things, or set some other boundaries. We’re just like by default, nice people and we help each other a lot.

Abha: That’s so beautiful. It just makes you feel, that you want to be part of that space and you want to give it a go and say, if anyone’s listening to this and you think I would like to try having an eCommerce business, look at WooCommerce, there’s this wonderful community around it. And there’s lots of resources and we’ll be sharing some resources on the web page as well. So, half a go, get involved, find your local meet up. It’s a great way to open up a huge amount of possibilities.

And of course you have people like Anna and Robert who have been mentoring in this space for years and they wouldn’t do it unless it was fun. Unless it was something that, yeah. So, they’re really good advocates for that. And we talked about already, it’s that way of accessing commerce in a way that may not be possible if WooCommerce didn’t exist. And if WordPress didn’t exist.

Small companies, budgets and scaling

A question for you Robert, if anyone is looking at starting a WooCommerce store, do they need to worry about not owning their own stuff? Or about lots of extra charges or costs? Is it something that you could still get started with without having a big budget?

I know a lot of your clients are big clients or clients in the medium level of business who are looking to expand, but is it also something that you’ve seen companies that can go from being quite small and getting that scale by working with others?

Robert: So I would say it depends on what you want to achieve. So if you have a physical product, then you maybe need Add-ons for, like plugins for WooCommerce to track certain things. So for example, we have a store where we sell our plugins and we need a subscription, for example. Then there’s one plugin in the WooCommerce space where you can have like subscriptions, and this is like something where you need to pay money. So it really depends on what you want to achieve.

So if you have digital goods, let’s say you sell cool drawings. Let’s say that, then you do not need much things to like start off and run with a WooCommerce store, because you don’t need to have shipping. You don’t need to have a contract with a shipping company, they don’t only need like a payment provider, let it be like WooCommerce itself, or like other ways of doing payment there.

But possibilities are, it’s only limited by your invest in time by customizing that, or by limiting the scope. And the easy answer is like, done is better than perfect. Like, just try like a small iteration of this after you did your research, what’s your target audience on all of that? When you start the shop, like duty, like start slowly, have a limited range of like different plugins in there. And as a totally easy and very easy to skip thing on your public checklist, when you launch, just as a reminder from someone who did this very often, don’t do the payment test at the end.

Just for the record, if you want to launch in a few days, don’t do payments at the end, do it before. Just as someone who experienced, because you were triggering emotions in me, like thinking about launching a shop. And we had all the time, like people going in, like, “Yeah, I was doing the payment at the end and something does not work.” And so the answer is like, it’s very easy to start. Limit the amounts of things you want to add to the store at the beginning, and then just slowly iterate and get your store to the thing that you imagine at the end. But don’t start with this a different.

Anna: I have a story to share that with support what you just said. So Jonathan Wold says, hello, he’s also waiting to connect with you. We’re doing another show on Do the Woo snd maybe we can touch on that some at a later stage. So we were having a call one day and his younger daughter came into the room, and I wanted to say hello to her as well. And she is a year old and she’s very creative. And I was wondering, “Hey, hi, what are you working on? What are you doing? What’s your thing?” And she was like, “I am currently working on a concept for my new tote bag for my WooCommerce store.” She’s eight, if I’m not wrong, I think I’m right, actually.

And she was having a homework for her WooCommerce website that by the way, accepts payments, and you can place orders and you can get creative stuff made by kids. So if a kid can do it, I think that anyone can do it. Of course, it takes a really creative and dedicated, small being, but you can definitely do it. So I think that’s really beautiful.

Abha: It is wonderful. And I think maybe we tell a show where we talk about these things and their stories too, which would be absolutely for fantastic.

Thanks to our Pod Friends Jetpack & WooFunnels

Abha: I know we’ve probably all seen it. I know working with clients and my colleagues working with clients, one of the things is that you can get people so enthusiastic about having a WordPress and WooCommerce store that they have as many plugins, as many customizations as the world will allow them to have. And doesn’t necessarily help. It can have an effect that’s quite costly. It can be negative in search terms and in performance too.

Customizations to a Woo site and what you should be thinking about

And one of the things that we always say to them is think about what is the story that you want your store to tell? What is it that you want about in your life, in your own story? What is it that you want to achieve with this? Because if it isn’t to have distribution in a million places, if it isn’t to have all these mailing lists and things, then let’s not have the plugins and the customization that does that. I know Robert, that’s something that’s also very close to your heart about actually having the customization that actually you need, and that is going to support you.

So we’ve talked before about, websites that just want to sell PDF documents, I wonder if you could just share some of those insights into what people need to think about when they’re customizing a site.

Robert: Yeah. It’s really like, just sit down and think about what exactly is your target audience and how excited do you reach them and what they exactly need. So that’s really like the steps that you need to do to determine what exactly are extensions, what exactly of tools you need on your store. And then look around and see where you can get these. And maybe you find like several plugins that do several things. And it’s better to have like smaller plugins that only do one thing, but this thing really good and not to get like a big honk of different plugins that do different things and install them and just use a tiny fraction of the features that they have.

So that’s why, because you have all these extra burdens on every plugin, on every change you do that will impact the store. And you need to test that, that you do. So that’s why it’s really, to start slowly with that and to iterate. It’s the best way. Otherwise, if you have someone who is deep into this field, then this person can help you with the whole product. But if you start on your own and you are not that experienced, then it’s the best way to really start easy and iterate easily with backups and like testing systems to really get where you want to go without getting in front of yourself and just hurling yourself over things that you cannot control anymore.

Abha: And I guess, it is that idea of, maybe it’s brilliant to be part of, what is the biggest open source commerce solution, I think on the planet. And it gives you all these opportunities and inspiration ideas, but you don’t have to do them all. You can just do the ones that fit with your values, that fit with what you want to achieve and fit with a story for your life and what you want to happen next.

Helping you clients to expand their business

So just adding onto to what you’ve said, Robert, you’ve mentioned that I’m going to repeat that for Robert, if they don’t need shipping, then not to have those kind of products ready in their WooCommerce store.

But they can expand can’t they? And I think that’s some of the things that you’ve done with clients in your world as well, that you’ve taken clients from being with medium size in the WooCommerce space to being a bigger entity that they can then use more of. So can you share any tips that you might have about how you can do that kind of expansion from your own experience?

Robert: Yeah, the biggest hurdle or the biggest obstacle in a WooCommerce store is the checkout. So that’s everyone is telling you that it depends on how many orders per second you want to do so. And if you reach that level, you are not talking anymore about a normal hosting. So you have a dedicated hosting with dedicated, like tweaks on some parts, be it a database engine, or be it database, or be it like something on like the performance level on PHP. So that’s the thing where you can clearly change things without getting too deep into WooCommerce. It depends on then, also the customization that you do.

So we had a client that has several like several orders per second on their site. And we needed to help them grow, to be able to accept more than 10 or more like they wanted to up to like 10 to 20 orders per second. And the problem was that they simply had their own written code for WooCommerce. Like they did some stuff and we just simply helped them to understand better where they need to do what with WooCommerce. So our experience in WooCommerce helped this client to do the right tweaks in WooCommerce or like with their database queries, to really be able to accept all the orders at the same time.

So that’s why it’s really understanding every line of code that is customized there because you have the normal WooCommerce and then you have like all the plugins that people bring into a project and the performance there simply do go in and to understand every written line of code and to help clients determine which plugin can be replaced, which plugin needs to be replaced, and which other tweaks they need to do on their stores.

Abha: And it’s great to have that support I’m sure. And I think Anna probably you’ve seen that out with the support that you’ve given to companies as well and how they’ve used it in future.

Anna: Yeah. I was actually part of a larger group of volunteers that were providing support for Woo builders. And the beautiful thing about this was that all of these people were pretty open to any kind of ideas that they might test to see what best serves the problem that they have, or the things that they need to achieve. And what I truly loved about that was that, it would generate a conversation around that topic that would be really strongly educational. And also it would tie the relationships between the community builders.

Because you could tell that there were some people who were more open to providing help and they had more experience, but they were also open to new ideas they haven’t considered yet. Or they were builders who just started with their WooCommerce sites, or they were people who had more experience, they could also have a team behind them, but they could still not nail some technical or even not technical thing that they experienced. So I think that, this is the magical part about it, that support can have many forums. And so sometimes it’s just a word of encouragement.

Like for example, we had once a week for a while, we were asking about community spotlights, like what’s one win that you had with your WooCommerce site that you would like to share with the world? And there were so many beautiful examples, like people who learned how to, I don’t know, either build something technical or they had their first sale or their first, I don’t know, customer, or they tried an additional product or a plugin. So yeah, I think that that’s pretty awesome to be witnessing and to be part of.

Abha: It is. It’s just such an amazing and magical place in that sense. And it is a nice to hear how people help each other, and often people help each other by sharing the stories of what they’ve done, what’s made it work for them and their own support stories like Robert, just saying that about payment, checking your payment gateway. And also checking that the payment gateway you want to use is actually going to work in the countries that you want to be operating in, because that’s a common thing that goes wrong, especially if it’s left at the last minute.

So I think all those things are great ways to learn. So if you haven’t already joined your local WooCommerce meetup, or if there isn’t one, as I understand Anna, you can actually offer to start running a local one too?

Anna: Yeah.

Abha: And they can find out all about that on the WooCommerce website as well. And it’s a lovely page dedicated to community, and you can find your local meet up. And of course being online, you can just go to one of them. It doesn’t have to be in your area. So I have a plug for the WooCommerce one in London, and that happens on a Wednesday, and they have people from all over the world. And there’s many, many others too. But it’s a great way to get involved.

The personal learning from being a contributor to WooCommerce and WordPress

And that neatly brings me onto the contributing question, Robert.

Can you share a little bit about your own personal learning from being a contributor, not just to WordPress, but also to WooCommerce as a mentor, as a supporter, doing things like this, all your support to Do the Woo. And just generally being enthusiastic.

Robert: Yeah. So my support with WooCommerce goes back, just for the record, as a company, we doing WooCommerce since 2012. So we helped also like get WooCommerce off the ground in Germany by enabling legal stuff for WooCommerce. So when you see contributing as making the ecosystem grow, then I am also more involved in that, like doing the decision to let’s do, let’s do like this plugin for WooCommerce to enable everybody in Germany to be able to use WooCommerce legally.

And there was no other plugin before. So, that, and also being in seeing like the community chats there, the court chats, and getting to know how WooCommerce is evolving, and to see that, being part of the mentor team that we had with Anna and Jonathan to help the local, let’s say, the local mentors that do local meet up and help their like regional mentors to see the benefits from, to have a place where they can chat with each other and to see how they can grow.

So that was a really interesting time to be directly involved, and otherwise being around in helping somewhere. And my local WooCommerce meet up helping on the plugin side we had as a company also like pull request for the WooCommerce plugin itself, done and accepted because we needed something for our legal black and for other things. So that’s why we and I were really deeply connected because again, for me, as a person, I’m totally behind publishing and democratizing commerce. So that’s why the goals of WooCommerce and WordPress totally aligned with myself. And that’s why, I’m here to stay and I’m here to help the communities of both systems to grow.

Abha: And they’re very grateful for your support. I’m sure Robert, and you’ve inspired many, many people along the way. But how does it also affect you? And in terms of, you as a person, what has changed in your world as a result of being, not just involved with WordPress and WooCommerce as a contributor, but also using those packages and helping firms?

Robert: Yeah, for me, the possibility is to like connect to people all over the world and see their walk a mile in their shoes and understanding where they’re coming from, where they’re heading, and what they do to make the world better place. Because like what Anna said, like all the people we meet along the way, it’s really like when you meet people in this ecosystem, you know that they are like being at the same frequency as you. So they are like also like, to empower others, make sure the world gets a little bit better. So that’s why it’s really, for me, is to be able to see the world through their eyes, like experiencing all the things that we did.

And for me, the benefit of being like a kind of a dinosaur in around this topics is to that, I know where we come from. So that’s the benefit for me. Like, I know where we come from. I know how WooCommerce started, where it was in the first iterations, how WordPress evolved as a community, as ecosystem. And the same thing goes with WooCommerce me to see like, where we are heading and seeing like how much we grow as an ecosystem and as a community. So that’s the benefit of really like, to see all these people that make up the community and make up the ecosystem, and to know their stories and to know their culture, know little bit about them. And then to see where they are, where they are heading and how that also helps me see the world through different eyes.

The experiences that stand out from watching others

Abha: I have to ask, ask a question for both of you, what is most fun thing really that you’ve learned by seeing other people? It doesn’t have to be like about WooCommerce. It could just be about life. What’s the thing that makes you laugh the most, or you’ve enjoyed the most. That’s obviously safe to be podcast.

Anna: Yes. I could give an example that’s both fun and frustrating at the same time. It was interesting to me to see that when we started working on the support group, we were this mix from very different nations and cultures. And my first realization was that even though we all speak English, our English has a very different look and feel. And the things we say can mean very different things across, from one culture to another. So it was really interesting to see how we can get closer to working better together, in the sense that, some things might seem funny, some things might seem offensive or a sense of humor can be different from one culture to another.

But it was always okay because in the end we wanted to help one another. So it is fun if you remove the context out of it. But I think that’s one of the key things I learned that it was always fun for me to watch how colorful the same language can be because of the fact that it’s being used by another culture, it can look really different. I don’t know. I don’t think I have a specific and really fun story.

Abha: That means that there’s lots of ones to make. So we’ll have to think of some of those. So I’m sure Robert you’re going to have some, and it may even involve wildlife.

Robert: Yeah. When you bring this topic up, then it’s Christopher. Because like, what I said before was like to see the world out of like, see the different eyes on different worlds, like how they experience the world. And there are some people who live like in the outskirts somewhere like on a farm and tell you all about like how some things of like wild animals can really be a bummer and really force you into running out of your house with an axe, just to make sure that something goes away.

Abha: I’ll just make that clear, I was talking about wildlife, not people.

Robert: Wildlife. Yeah. And this person can tell you stories of wildlife and has even the videos or pictures to prove. So that’s the fun, to simply have these stories. So this person can really tell you, this person like lives on the farm and has stories to tell you. And the other thing is, to really see people who have a different sleeping pattern than you. And at the same time are like, so they can be at an event at like 2:00 AM their time, totally fresh where you look yourself, like going like, “Oh, no, I’m not being up dead late.” But so you see different people who are at conferences, at online conferences, be around from everywhere in the world and just show up and to have a good time, and then you look at your time and go like, “It’s late for me. It must be very, very late for them.”

So, this is the fun, because it’s the connection on a personal base to you know where they’re coming from, as being like a person who is really long in the ecosystem. I know like, “Oh, I saw this person first time at this, around this time.” And you see all these people grow as a human being, grow as like how they present themselves, how they’re being perceived and how they… you see them like take up different parts of work in the community and help the ecosystem grow. So that’s really like, for me, it’s very soothing to see all these people coming in, taking up some work somewhere and making the world and the ecosystem better. So that’s why it’s so pleasure to see all these people active in the community.

Anna: It almost sounds as if WooCommerce and WordPress, the open web, made you a better person.

Robert: Yeah, totally did. Like the thing is like doing that since 2005, I cannot imagine a different world, because that’s the thing that’s my daily job to be open source loving person that knows that the world will get better because people are interested in having the world be a better place.

Anna: Awesome. I think we need more people like Robert. Yes, please.

Abha: Definitely. And if you think that you have a story to share just like that, of your own journey and that can inspire other people, then get in touch with Anna and myself and will be really keen to speak with you. And the other thing, I think also for Robert, and probably just for Anna too, is that, doing the Woo has so many ways that you can learn about WooCommerce. You don’t just have to think you’re on your own.

If you think that there isn’t this community out there, go to Do the Woo, have a look at the podcast, there’s lots and lots and lots of amazingly interesting people from all over the world, doing fantastic things. And what brings them together is they’re actually using the same software. And that is pretty awesome in itself. And I know Anna’s going to want to know about a few more things from you, Robert. So I’m going to hand it to her.

Anna: It’s really easy. We need your contact information. Where can people learn more about your work? About what you do? Or even reach out to you for advice?

Robert: Yeah. So the easiest way to reach out to me is on Slack. So if you are already in the WordPress or in the WooCommerce community, then my nickname is nullbyte. It’s a programmer humor. Like some programmers just chuckled by hearing on this podcast. Yes, it’s a very, very stupid, easy thing that I decided some years ago. And I sticked with that. So the other way is on Twitter, on Twitter, it’s username nullbyte, because the other name was already gone because there also other programmers on the internet that came before me on Twitter. So, that was the easy way. And my company site is inpsyde.com.

But just like we have interesting post there’s also a fun post about me, for example, the song I would like hear and repeat until end of time.

Anna: Oh, wow. Okay.

Robert: It’s also on there on my blog post. So, that’s the easiest way to reach out to me.

Abha: And I’m sure people will rub it and if they can be inspired, I’m sure we are and we continue to be by your story. Then hopefully people will come. And in the future, we’ll be interviewing people who started WooCommerce stores because of hearing from people like yourself. And will get you meeting I’m sure. And finding stores too. Just as we come to a close on our very first, Woo Build Stories podcast, I know Robert’s something that you’ve often say is that people in the world are very different, but still very much the same.

People in the world are very different, but still very much the same.

Robert: Yeah. Because as I said, it’s the communities and the same frequency that people do, that people have. Because so many people that I know in the WordPress and WooCommerce ecosystem, they have the same goal. They want to have the same outcome. They want to use the same tools to do that. And they also have from their place in life, they know where they’re heading. So that’s why it’s a very good way to just like step on the shoulders of giants and help other people, like empower other people and embrace the ecosystem and the community. And I cannot encourage people enough.

It’s very, very empowering to connect to people that are having the same path that you have, and that already know something that you are not aware of. So it’s really like from a learning perspective and from a growing perspective, it’s the best way to join like the WooCommerce, the WordPress community, because I can attest to you, these people are all awesome.