Back with some more conversations that I picked up over this last week.
Tumblr showing some Woo
Now I have known that Woo was part of Tumblr, but I didn’t know this much. Tom Wilmot from HumanMade shared a post from Artur Piszek who works at Tumblr and WordPress.com.
“Wow, had no idea Tumblr subscriptions (and more) is built on WooCommerce, sounds super cool & hardcore.”
The initial tweet that led into the thread was this response to Elon Musk talking about monetizing Twitter:
Are we are talking about helping creators earn a living without sacrificing creating freedom?
Oh boy, that is something I know quite a lot about!Let me share how we built this infrastructure on Tumblr and how we run a marketplace on top of App Store👇 https://t.co/wQGd1xRiWR
— Artur is running Stable Confusion (@artpi) November 9, 2022
Along the way he talked about how Tumblr allows you to subscribe to your creators in exchange for subscriber-only content and also being able to tip creators.
But what I didn’t know was how WooCommerce played into this so deeply. Although I would suggest you read the full thread, he also shared a post titled, Running Tumblr on WooCommerce.
Back to the thread, he dropped a few things such as…
“We built all of this on top of WooCommerce. Each creator gets one (!) under the hood, so that we have: – WooCommerce Checkout on Web – Unified order history – WooCommerce Payments on Web”
and….
“How do we pay out? Your web purchases are already in WooCommerce Payments (Stripe Connect). We charge our own bank account (where Apple puts the money) via ACH and deposit it into creators’ Stripe Accounts. From there, Stripe pays them to their bank accounts.”
When Tom Wilmot had retweeted this, he was as surprised as me. Artur’s response:
“What’s more, we spin up a new WooCommerce for each creator that enables the feature! As I said, craziest thing I ever built.”
Now you know if you didn’t before. Anyway, all a very interesting read.
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More cohesive stories of enterprise with WordPress
Now jumping over to another conversation. And yes, Tom started this one as well. He was replying to a post on Post Status written by Magne Ilsaas from Dekode titled The WordPress Enterprise Paradox. As taken from the post:
Magne wants to start an overdue conversation about three big risks – and opportunities – for WordPress agencies:
1) A lack of spaces for professional conversations and knowledge-sharing, including professional events, meetups, and mastermind groups catering to enterprise WordPress.
2) Successful agencies that use WordPress extensively with little or no community involvement whose work would benefit from enterprise WordPress peer networks.
3) An over-emphasis in WordPress agencies on short-term engineering solutions to the exclusion of long-term business solutions. What’s often left out is design, user experience, and most of all the capacity to play a strategic advisory role in partnership with clients.
It goes on to dive into these deeper and worth reading. And as I mentioned, Tom also added his thoughts as well.
Good post on @post_status from our friends at @dekodeno on what we need to do differently as Enterprise WordPress agencies if we want to continue to grow and flourish. 🧵👇 https://t.co/SB6lu11O4X
— Tom Willmot (@tomwillmot) November 8, 2022
His thread continues, which I would also highly recommend reading, but there was one line that said it all.
I agree with all 3 of Magne’s core points but I think the biggest opportunity comes if we can create a clearer definition of “Enterprise WordPress” as a space and brand.
In the past I have made some attempts to raise the voices in the enterprise space of both WordPress and WooCommerce. For example, we talked with Jake at 10up and touched on it. But those efforts of mine have never gone much further for one reason or another. So let’s just say that I’m exploring this more and seeing how Do the Woo can help.
WooCommerce Developer Office Hours returns
Whether you have had a chance in the past to attend these in the WooCommerce Community slack channel, you will again be able to take advantage of it again. Starting on Nov. 23, you will have the opportunity as Woo devs to ask questions. In other words, an hour dedicated for developers to virtually congregate. You can learn more about this on the Woo developer blog.
