ACF, WC-Admin, WooCommerce Blocks and New Woo Mobile App

Brad: And we are back with another episode of the Do the Woo podcast, show number 11. I am one of your hosts, Brad Williams, and I’m joined by my good friend who really doesn’t need an introduction, but I’ll do it because it says I’m supposed to—Mr. Bob WP. Bob, how’s it going, man?

Bob: Good, good. We’re setting Brad off to doing the opening of the show sometimes. People are probably like, “Okay, I’ve heard enough of Bob. We need to hear a little bit more of Brad.” Did I do all right? Did I pass? I think I got in there.

Brad: Oh yeah. Yep. I’m already giving a five-star rating on iTunes for this particular episode, and with that, we’re done. Let’s just wrap it up before it gets worse. I’m very excited about this show. As you may have caught in our last show, we’re making some changes—bringing on guests to talk about WooCommerce, e-commerce, and different people in the field to share their thoughts, ideas, and opinions. Today we have a new guest, Mr. Jonathan Martin, who is the founder of Cool Blue Web. Thanks for joining us, Jonathan.

Jonathan: You got it, Brad. Thanks for having me on.

Brad: Yeah, very excited. We talked a little bit, and you’re actually out near Bob. You’re in the same state, so that counts, right?

Jonathan: Yeah, yeah. He’s in the prettier side of the state. I’m in the city side.

Brad: Well, I guess that’s all a matter of opinion, right? I think Seattle’s pretty beautiful—that whole area—so I definitely love the Northwest up there. I mentioned I go out a few times a year. It’s definitely a cool area, cool city, cool vibe, just good people out there—if you can get ’em to talk to you. Since I moved, it’s even gotten better. So, there’s Seattle cool people, and then there’s Bob over on the coast since Bob got ran out of town. No, I’m excited to have you. This is the first time we’ve actually met. I know Bob just from the local community there, so why don’t you tell everyone that isn’t familiar with you or what you do, who you are, and what you do?

Jonathan: Yeah. Awesome. So again, I’m Jonathan Martin, founder of Cool Blue Web. I started Cool Blue Web just about 10 years ago. I was actually a merchant—I ran several e-commerce stores myself, wanted to start some kind of an agency, was in love with SEO and paid search at the time, and really set out to build an SEO and paid search company. In the prospecting and initial building of that company, one of our customers found out that I also had these e-commerce stores and we were doing this e-commerce work, and they said, “Great, why don’t you work on my e-commerce store?” Then another customer said, “Hey, I need you to work on my e-commerce store.” And it wasn’t but about 18 months later that all we did was e-commerce. We didn’t even do SEO or digital marketing anymore. And we just started from there. Initially, we started on the Magento platform, then Woo came out. Our very first WooCommerce store was actually a baby diaper delivery service. So you’d order your nappies online, they’d schedule ’em out, come pick up the dirty diapers, and drop off clean ones. It was a really fun Woo project, actually, and it’s all the way grown up to today where almost all we do is WooCommerce development work. Our Magento side of the business is pretty small now.

Brad: Interestingly enough, once you have a kid, the diaper subscription service is like the most important delivery in your life because you certainly don’t want to run out of nappies.

Jonathan: My wife and I have had a couple of tense moments at 10:30 at night with a blowout. We have three kids where I’m driving to the local mini-mart to get a couple of extras.

Brad: Oh man, anyone that has a kid knows those fun stories. So yeah, that’s really cool. I love hearing the backstory of how it was kind of unintentional that you narrowed your focus into the e-commerce space. It really sounds like it just came from demand via your clients, one after the other. Next thing, I mean, how did that work? Did you just realize that’s what you’re really good at and your clients want it, so it just made sense? Or was it a little bit different than that?

Jonathan: It’s a combination of that. I loved building e-commerce stores. That was something that was a lot of fun. There are a lot of moving parts, a little bit of complexity, and problems to solve. I myself am not really design-oriented, so I’m more systems and process-oriented. There are a lot of processes and systems to set up to run an e-commerce store effectively. We also found that people who run e-commerce stores— their website is their livelihood. So it’s really important to them, and they’re looking to create strong relationships. Whereas with a dentist or an auto repair shop, while their website is important to them, once it’s built, they kind of want you to go away. They don’t want that long-term relationship. And we really wanted to build long-term relationships with our customers.

Brad: Yeah, that’s smart. I mean, we look at websites and the way we describe them and just WordPress in general, it’s really, they say it’s free as in beer, and it’s like, well, my favorite description is free as in a puppy, right? Yeah. The puppy might be free, but it doesn’t mean once you get the puppy, you’re done, right? There’s always going to be costs, and whether that’s a dollar amount or just a time and resource thing, there’s always a cost to maintaining what you have and to growing it and making it more successful. And if you just launch a site and leave it, it’s not going to do that. You’ve essentially plateaued on launch day, which is not where you want to be. So I do think e-commerce is a very interesting space because just as somebody who runs a web development agency as well, there are a lot of very unique challenges, obstacles, and considerations just in e-commerce, outside of just the normal managing a website. There are a lot of considerations to make a successful store and a lot of things you can do to tweak and adjust to get those conversions. That’s why I always really like, and I find building e-commerce sites really interesting because of those new challenges, which as developers and people in the web space, I think that’s what we thrive on—challenges. But it sounds like it’s been going well. You’ve been purely e-commerce, you say, for a year and a half? Was that right? 18 months?

Jonathan: 18 months into the start of the company. So that was, what, eight years ago.

Brad: Oh, gotcha. So it’s been a while. So you guys are perfected.

Jonathan: There are 18 of us here today, and we’ve been a Woo partner since they started the partnership program, and we love it. In fact, talking about that relationship piece, one of the best things about e-commerce is we actually quit selling project work. Every engagement that we sell is kind of retainer partnership-based. We may do a spike to build something, but everything we sell is in that kind of, “We want to start thinking about year two on day one. How do we do that with you?” But yeah, we have 13 devs on staff, eight of which are on the Woo team.

Brad: How is that? Before we dive into topics, maybe another question or two, but I really find it interesting. You’re obviously focused on Magento and WooCommerce. You mentioned both are open-source platforms, both are vastly different if you’re familiar with Magento at all. There are obviously some similarities in terms of e-commerce, but Magento is a monster in terms of what it can do. You mentioned you have certain devs for Woo. Do they kind of teeter on both sides of the house, or do you have dedicated staff just for Magento versus Woo? I got to imagine the way you’re working with those sites and those clients has to be different.

Jonathan: So I used to make everybody do everything, and I lied to myself and said, well, I’m making them better developers, making them more well-rounded. But that really wasn’t the truth. I was just frustrating people and not letting them develop expertise. Today, we have a couple of people who sit on the fence and kind of go back and forth just because that’s the way their brains work, but most of the people on our Woo team just do WooCommerce development, and the people on our Magento team just do Magento work. The polite way to talk about Magento is that it’s a very sophisticated platform. That’s the nice way to say it’s really, really complicated and sometimes convoluted. In order to do something in Magento, sometimes it takes 10 steps when it would take you one step on Woo. In that trade-off, you get significantly more functionality out of the box. It scales really well, and there are a bunch of great things, but I mean, there’s a lot more technical debt that comes with Magento.

Brad: Yeah, Magento is one of those platforms that for larger stores that come in, and I mean big stores, that’s usually the platform I recommend for those kinds of larger-scale e-commerce with systems that are really integrated into your warehousing system, or maybe you have multiple warehouses—things like that. I just feel like, yes, WooCommerce

could do it, but the amount of extra customizations behind the scenes wouldn’t make it worth it necessarily when something like Magento has a lot of that stuff available. But you’re right, that’s a good comparison. Almost like a WordPress-Drupal comparison, maybe not quite as big of a gap, but Drupal has a little bit more of a learning curve and generally can take a few more steps to get where you need to go, but it’s obviously a very powerful platform as well. So, very cool. It wouldn’t make for a good podcast. It wouldn’t be, what do you say? Do the Magento? Do the Mag? I remember I interviewed the founder of Magento. I mean, this was when I first started getting into podcasting with SitePoint. I can’t remember the guy’s name now, but this was pre-acquisition from eBay. Well, multiple acquisitions now, but this was just when it seemed like it was really starting to gain some traction out there, and now it’s a freaking billion-dollar open-source project.

Jonathan: It’s going to be really interesting to see what Adobe does with them, right? I mean, it’s a very, very interesting thing.

Brad: Yeah, it is for sure. So cool. Well, thanks for sharing a little bit about you, your company, and your story. But we’ve got a few topics we want to dive into. Do you want to kick off the first one, Bob?

Bob: Yeah. Let’s see, what is it? The very first one I found—I actually got it from WP Tavern—WooCommerce Blocks is now a feature plugin, introduces six new blocks. I played around with it. In fact, I’m playing around with—actually, I updated my site to 5.0.3 Sunday, but that’s another story. But everything went fine. I’ll just say that it all went very smooth.

The new blocks, originally, you could display as a grid and filter by category. Now you can use bestselling products, top-rated products, new products, on-sale products, and now it’s also a featured plugin. They say it’s more polished and tested. Yeah, it is nothing like major, but I think as I get into it more with the different blocks, especially with a lot of the plugins I’m doing, I’m finding that, I don’t know, it’s just a different workflow. And the fact that now you can more easily put in these WooCommerce products or one product, or however many you choose to, into pages and posts for any reason that you might want to—just, I don’t know. I’m just finding it pretty slick and I’m liking it. What can I say? I’m just that way. But I think this plugin is going to be interesting to see what else they do with this, what the future holds for it.

Brad: Yeah, I mean, it is definitely a cool plugin. I actually like the fact that it’s a plugin versus being directly in core, at least for now, just because it’s in the early stages. Gutenberg just came out last month, which is a requirement for this, whether you use the plugin or you’re running Core Gutenberg, WordPress 5.0 or above. But the fact that it’s a plugin means they can really iterate quickly, get versions out every week or couple of weeks, whatever, so they could really move on the development versus if it’s in core, that immediately is going to slow it down. You’re only going to get a new version every time a new version of WooCommerce ships. So honestly, with featured plugins, great, which means it’ll get more attention, more eyeballs, and probably more work on it. But I don’t necessarily think everything needs to get shoved into core because it can just develop faster as a plugin.

But this definitely makes a ton of sense. Automattic is all in, obviously, with Gutenberg, so it makes sense that anything they own is also all in. So I fully expected this for WooCommerce to see blocks continue to be pushed into all their core products—WooCommerce being probably the biggest. It’s nice to see. I mean, the one thing I would say is they need to get their ratings up. The reviews are pretty bad for this plugin. They have one five-star review and it says—I don’t think it was meant to be a five-star because the only five-star review says “very weak.” No, I’m sorry, it says “very, very weak.” So I feel like they didn’t mean to click five stars on that.

Bob: Yeah, maybe they’re dyslexic or something. I don’t know.

Brad: I think the problem is everyone’s saying, well, they turn it on, and it broke everything. I don’t think they totally understand what it means by just introducing blocks into a site that isn’t ready for it. You know what I mean? Things may not just magically work. And I think that is an educational thing around blocks and Gutenberg across the board. It’s not always just going to work with what you have. You have to make sure it’s compliant and works well with Gutenberg and the block editor and test it. You can’t just turn things on and expect it to be perfect. So cool plugin though.

Bob: Yeah. Speaking of—and this is kind of interesting because this segues into something. We just recently had a local WooCommerce meetup, and surprisingly, Jonathan was at it and he talked for a little bit about some Woo stuff. Then he brought in one of his team members, Nina, and she was talking about the ACF for blocks on WooCommerce. Myself, I found it fascinating until she started talking about code and then, of course, I zoned out. But the rest of it was—I got the concept of it. And I know, Brad, you have some thoughts on that, and I don’t know if Jonathan might be able to chime in, but kind of that versus using Gutenberg for the blocks or using ACF for blocks. I mean, anyone that is either building and maintaining sites or an agency or company that builds and maintains sites, there are a lot of internal discussions that I’m sure everybody’s already having—or should be if they’re not. And that is kind of how we are building sites in a Gutenberg world, I guess. And this is beyond just WooCommerce. This is a WordPress question. How should you build sites? Should you use Core Gutenberg and customize and build blocks customized for your clients or customize for your site?

Should you use another tool like ACF or anything else? There are other ones, I’m sure, or at least there will be, that will kind of build these for you. They’ll still be Gutenberg blocks, but you’re using another tool to do it. If so, do you trust the tool? Is it a part of your arsenal? You have to have these larger conversations to decide if you even want to use Gutenberg blocks. There’s no reason you have to. We’re still building sites that are pure ACF with no Gutenberg. So we’ve been talking about this internally for over a year leading up to when it releases—what’s our plan and our stance? While it’s always going to be evolving, as it should with technology, our current stance is to really evaluate the needs of the client and make the decision based on that. We’re not just 100% all in with Gutenberg just for the sake of using Gutenberg. That may not be the best experience for our client. It might very well be the best experience, but it may not be. So just like anything else, we evaluate the goals that the client is looking to hit for the project, for the website, and we work backward. What’s the best way to get to those goals, to accomplish those goals? And that includes not just hitting the goals, but also how they manage their site to get to those goals. And a lot of people, I think, overlook that aspect of development. And Jonathan, you can probably speak to that, but the admin and administration are just as important—sometimes maybe even more important—than what’s public. Because if they can’t actually put out there what they want to put out there in a way that makes sense to them, then they’re not going to do it, right? They’re just not going to put it out there.

Jonathan: Software needs to support business. Business doesn’t need to support software. I mean, that’s something that—if you hire a dev that doesn’t really understand what you need as a business owner, you can get a mismatch. And you can have a great piece of software that you can’t use, that doesn’t do what you need it to do, or makes it hard. So we use ACF here to build most of our sites in Woo and WordPress, and we use this thing called Section Builder that we’ve developed here where it uses ACF, and it builds out different kinds of sections, and then you can make those sections allowable. And our team developed something here internally called Guten Bridge, which allows those sections to be pulled into a Gutenberg block. And so it’s still ACF, but the ACF is being used in a block, so it can be used—it’s kind of a hybrid between the two. Rather than just sticking on the ACF side, you can still call the blocks out with Gutenberg.

Brad: I like that approach. I like hybrid approaches like that because ACF is a tried and true, tested tool—one that a lot of people trust, including, I think, all of us on this show. So someone building out blocks using ACF is fine if that’s the way they need to work and it gets the client what they need. I don’t see anything wrong with that. But yeah, I think a hybrid approach is a smart move. I think over time it probably will lean more

toward doing everything kind of directly in Gutenberg and Core Gutenberg development, but I feel like it’s a transitional period. And when that time comes, I don’t know, I think it’s still a ways out. I think it’s just evolutionary in that you don’t want tools in there just to have tools in there that you’re comfortable with. You want the right tools in there. And right now, I think the right tool is still to look at ACF as a really strong contender and still use it. I don’t think you have to go all in with Gutenberg just because it’s the new hotness, you know what I mean?

Jonathan: And for all the sites that are already existing, there isn’t really a rush. You don’t have to worry about moving in that direction and changing everything that’s already built. The sites that are going to be built using Gutenberg-only blocks should be new sites—the new sites that are rolling out. Let that kind of prove out the model and develop that technology. There’s no reason to have to reinvest just to change the way you edit your site.

Brad: Completely. And it can be selective too. One thing we’ve noticed as well, Gutenberg is great for that kind of long-form content on a blog. It doesn’t mean they necessarily need it in other sections of the site or other content types of the site. So you could also isolate it by the type of content. So for WooCommerce, it could make a lot of sense using Gutenberg for the product pages. You could build these really beautiful product pages with all your content, but maybe you don’t need it for pages because you literally just do static, “Here’s our privacy policy, here’s our contact page,” and it’s overkill. So it could be a little selective that way. But it’s definitely an interesting topic because we’re all talking about it internally. Some people are doing it more publicly, some aren’t. But it’s an important question to ask yourself and ask your team—is what we’re doing today what we should continue to do, or do we need to adjust based on some of this new technology that’s coming out?

Jonathan: I had that conversation with a Woo lead at Woo, and it was kind of interesting. My question to him—so I’m not a developer. I used to be a hack of a developer, but it’s been so long that, I don’t know, I can’t code my way out of a paper bag. But that was my worry—was what we’re doing today going to be obsolete in three or four years? And his answer was no. He didn’t think so—that sure, there’s going to be new technologies and there is going to be a new way to create fields within Gutenberg and within the blocks, but that isn’t available really yet. And so ACF still—it just saves the dev so much time to be able to use that within the blocks.

Brad: My advice with anything technology-related is always to look out into the horizon. You need to be able to see what’s coming, but then you also need to take that and realize—is this what we should be using or not? Because a lot of technology that comes down, and I’m not trying to say it’s not good, but it gets all this buzz because it’s new and that gets people excited. But that doesn’t mean just because we’re using React on some things that we need to become a 100% React shop and not touch anything else. We should know React, and we should understand how to use it and where it makes sense. But I feel like some people kind of rush to it just because of the buzz wordiness of some of this stuff. And React may not be the best example, but it’s the most relevant to a lot of the stuff we’re talking about.

So yeah, do what’s best for you, do what’s best for your clients. Obviously, you don’t want to lock them into anything that can’t be adjusted down the road, but there are a lot of options out there, and just like anything in technology, there’s no one right answer. There are a lot of different ways to get to where you’re trying to go.

Bob: Yeah. Well, good job. You two took it and ran, and my AirPods died during that conversation. I had to switch to my headphones, so everything is moving right along here.

Brad: Professionals, Bob?

Bob: Yeah. Oh yeah. I was going to turn off the video, but then you thought probably maybe I just croaked or something.

Brad: Bob just left. He’s left. He does not agree with what we just said.

Bob: Yeah, I’ve lost it, buddy. I don’t know. I lost you guys. Anyway, okay, so I’m just going to mention this next thing. We have a few more things we want to talk about, but the WC Admin version 0.5.0.0 was released. None of us are using it, but I just thought it would be good to mention it in case somebody is into it or interested enough to go see the new highlights of that. You can check that out on the Develop WooCommerce site. I’m going to kind of move right to the next one because this actually just came out the day we’re recording this, and I know you put that up, Brad. What’s going on with the mobile app?

Brad: Breaking news! There’s a new WooCommerce mobile app, which is apparently—by all accounts, it seems like it’s brand new. They’ve replaced the old one. It’s a little bit hard to get that information out of the different posts, but that’s the impression I get from what I’ve seen.

But basically, there’s a new WooCommerce app. It’s available on Android and iPhones—on iOS on the App Store today. So you can do a search, it’s called WooCommerce Mobile App. Some of the key features—this is for store admins, people managing the store—you track your store, obviously see the products. It’s really got a focus on reporting, is what I’m getting out of it. You can definitely manage orders, which I think is cool. And honestly, the big one for me—real-time order alerts with a little “cha-ching.” So every time an order comes in, “cha-ching!” When I ran a store—or I used to run stores, not anymore—but that’s all I wanted to hear all day long. That’s the one notification I would never mute, is that “cha-ching,” like an order just came in. So to be able to be out and about on your phone and get real-time, “money’s coming in,” is pretty cool.

So they’ve got a post on WooCommerce.com about it with some of the details, but it definitely looks like a complete refresh. So like you said, it’s breaking. It just came out today, so I have not had a chance to play with this either, but we’ll definitely be checking it out. What do you guys think? You think they nailed it this time?

Bob: Yeah, I think it’s cool. I think, like you said, it’s interesting because I remember years ago when I was actually doing sites, I was working with somebody and they weren’t using WooCommerce, but they were using Square on their site. I was meeting with him, and during the entire time—he sold hummingbird feeders at the Pike Place Market in Seattle at a booth there, which is a very popular place—and he would be notified every time there was a sale there from one of his people who were manning the booth. He seemed to get a little distracted when we were talking about his site. He’d look over and he’d go, “Man, so-and-so is doing really good today.” And you could hear this little “bing, bing, bing” and stuff. So yeah, those notices are nice. That was kind of a long answer to that, but I think—of course, I don’t run a WooCommerce store either—but I think anything you can get on mobile is—any information you can get as far as tracking your store and stuff. What do you think, Jonathan?

Jonathan: I think for small business owners, for what they call Soho—self-employed home operators—the app is a great opportunity for them to stay in touch with their store while they’re out and about throughout their day. I think that those types of apps begin to lose their effectiveness once the store grows to any significant size. If you’re getting 100 or 200 orders a day, that little ding is going to be more annoying and not really opening anything else. But still, I think for—my wife sells products on Amazon, and she gets anywhere from 15 to 25 sales a day, and that’s exciting for her to see that kind of stuff come through. So I think that for the large majority of WooCommerce merchants out there are in that kind of zone, and I think that having an app is great for that.

Brad: It’s definitely cool at a high level too, how you can see your stats in terms of visitors, orders, revenue per day, week, month—at a glance. Also, I think the manage order piece, on the surface it looks kind of vanilla, and obviously, this seems to be the first version of it. But I think this is a pretty powerful tool because I can imagine—again, a smaller store, but if you’re filling boxes in someone’s garage, I could see where the people who are actually doing the work have a tablet or a phone on them versus a laptop, just because it’s more mobile—they can walk around the garage or the warehouse or whatever. You can add tracking information, you can fulfill the order, you can add notes. I’m assuming they’ll expand on that, so you could probably have a full pick

-and-pack kind of mini-system right there on your phone, which would be great for the small business. I think, obviously, the larger companies, they’re going to have a whole warehousing system and specific software for picking and shipping orders. But on a small scale, this might actually be a really good option for people to actually manage orders.

Jonathan: If it has that order fulfillment side, that would be a very beneficial feature to have.

Brad: Yeah, I’m just looking at screenshots. There’s definitely a fulfill order button, there’s a way to add tracking. It looks basic, but it looks like probably the start to something that could be a lot more robust, which is pretty cool. So yeah, check it out. It’s WooCommerce.com/mobile, or you can just go to the Google Play or App Store, download it. And the other tip I like to give people—open-source is great. I think a lot of people don’t even think about it, but these apps, these mobile apps, they’re all open-source. So if you’ve ever wanted to kind of dip your toe into iOS or Android development, this is an app where literally all the source code is available online. So sometimes deconstructing something that already works is one of the best ways or quickest ways to kind of wrap your head around how to do app development or any development.

So yeah, you can go check it out on GitHub, pull down the source code, and just start hacking away at it. So it’s a great way to learn those different platforms.

Bob: Yeah, very cool. All right, well, we usually round it out by talking about some of our favorite tools—Woo stuff. I’m going to have Jonathan actually start because I know he has a couple of things, but we kind of saved his “what’s new with Jonathan” to the end too because he has something kind of cool that’s in beta. So why don’t you start and tell us a couple of tools you like or actually are a part of that you want to share?

Jonathan: Yeah. Okay, awesome. Thanks, Brad. Yeah, so we actually have a product right now that we’re launching here called Verify WP. And so just a little story about what it is—it’s a WordPress developer candidate testing system. I’ve run a WordPress agency for almost 10 years. I’ve hired 60-plus WordPress developers over those years, and I’m about 50% successful at hiring a developer. I’m supposed to be good at it, and about half the time, I’m not. Half the time, 3, 4, 6 weeks into that relationship, they’re either not experienced enough or they don’t have the right work ethic to actually make it within our company. So we developed a candidate assessment platform to try to improve that success rate. One of the biggest challenges that we have is Nina, right? You met Nina at the meetup earlier this week, or I guess that was last week. As an agency owner, I would post a job posting, and I’d get about 80 resumes, but I don’t have time to call 80 people. And so what I would do is I would pick a day and call 10 of those people, but how do you get 80 resumes down to 10? You filter out the people that clearly aren’t qualified. You filter out the people who you don’t like the format of their resume. You filter out people—you make up rules in your mind on who’s going to be a good fit for your company, and who’s not. One of my rules was I wasn’t going to hire someone who was relocating because I would feel responsible if I had to let them go two weeks later. I wasn’t going to hire someone who wasn’t a US citizen because I didn’t know what the legal ramifications were about that, and I wanted a simple life as a business owner and didn’t want to have to worry about that.

Nina meets both those requirements. She relocated and she is a Canadian citizen, not a US citizen. So she actually—I would’ve filtered her out. And so I think that normally when I get these 80 resumes and I filter down to 10, I’ve often left the best candidate on the table and not even called them—not even given them an opportunity to come in for an interview. And so we took our team of WordPress developers and built out this testing platform with three different types of tests because the WordPress community is very diverse, and lots of people call themselves a developer and they mean very different things. And so we created a test for what we call WP Builder, and that would be someone that’s great at building sites using a Visual Composer or Divi or kind of a drag-and-drop interface. And there are lots of people that are making beautiful, functioning sites using platforms like that. We created a test called WP Themer, which is for someone that’s building themes—they’re solid HTML, CSS, JavaScript. They’re really good at taking PSDs and turning them into themes or whatever it needs to be. And then a test called WP Developer, which is really more focused on plugin development, integrations—that style of development. And the concept is that a hiring manager would buy into the system, they’d get access for 60 days, they’d get 100 invitations, and they’d invite all 80 people that applied for that job. Then whoever was serious about that job would then take the test, and then they would actually look at the results of the test and call the top 10—which 10 got the best scores on the test. Now the test can’t tell whether or not your developer uses deodorant or if they’re going to show up to work on time or any of those kind of soft skills that are very important in this world, but at least they have the opportunity to only talk to the most qualified candidates. It’s in beta right now. We’re doing usability testing. We’re hoping to be fully live in the middle of February with it.

Brad: I love it. Definitely a challenge I’ve experienced firsthand. Hiring, you’re right, is difficult. Hiring is extremely time-consuming, and you don’t want to leave the best candidates on the table. And you’re right, sometimes the only way to figure that out is to get on a phone or a video or meet with them for a proper interview. So I actually looked this up. It’s the first I heard of it when Bob mentioned you were coming on the show, and I think it’s a great idea. I haven’t seen anything like this before. Yeah, this is interesting.

Jonathan: Developer testing platforms are out there. There are a bunch of other larger ones, but they’re for big software engineering teams where you have your lead engineer go in and craft the test. An agency just doesn’t have the time for that. My devs, they live and die by the billable hour. I need them working. I don’t need them developing tests and figuring that stuff out.

Brad: Yeah, I’m excited. Maybe I’ll get a beta invite when it’s ready—kick the tires a little bit for you. But like I said, I think it’s really cool. And you’re right, there are other platforms out there for testing, but I’ve never seen anyone specific to WordPress like this. Yeah, honestly, if you can save some time, then it’s huge. And you’re right, find that right person—it’s critical.

Jonathan: A bad hire costs thousands and thousands of dollars. I mean, if someone stays in your company for five weeks, you paid them for five weeks, now you got to pay someone else to fix their work. It gets very expensive.

Brad: And just overall company morale, right? You got to have the right people because definitely that can affect the people that are doing the right things if you start to bring in the people that shouldn’t be there. So yeah, there’s a lot of—hiring touches a lot of aspects—really all aspects of a company. So it’s that important that you get the right people in. So anything to make that process easier and more accurate is definitely going to be a really good idea. All right. And what else? You had a mastermind that’s going on too, Jonathan?

Jonathan: Yeah. We’re a WooCommerce partner—or expert, I think, is what they call ’em. And Woo didn’t do a WooConf this year. So I approached Todd over at Automattic and said, “Hey, what about we put on kind of a mastermind group and invite the WooCommerce experts, the ones that want to come?” I said, “Hey, let’s maybe do it in Vegas.” And he said, “Well, hey, how about Atlanta so we can get some of our European friends to come over?” And so we did. So on February 11th, 12th, and 13th, we’re going to hold—it’s a small mastermind, 20-30 agencies—to come and really share best practices. We have some speakers coming in, so we’ll have Todd Wilkins from Automattic, the head of WooCommerce, we’ll have Jason Swenk, who’s another podcaster in the agency space, and a TED speaker called David Rendall, who does a great talk called “Pink Goldfish” and “Freak Factor.”

But the real value is actually going to be sitting in a room with other agency owners, and we have these sessions where each agency that is in attendance needs to bring a 15- or 20-minute presentation on the best practice that has helped their business grow over the last year. And so if you are an agency owner, I mean, imagine sitting in a room with other people and hearing their best tip. And for some people, it’s how they run their retainer system. For some people, it’s how they do

their hiring. For some people, it’s what their proposals look like. For some people, it’s what their project management style is. And I’m a member of another one of these masterminds—it’s called the Digital Mastermind Group—and it’s mainly marketing agencies and HubSpot agencies. And one guy got up there and he shared how he lost his business one year and he went bankrupt. And it was really interesting to hear, and he had the courage to come and show up and share his story about how he made a couple of bad decisions in sequence. And it ended up turning out to him losing his whole company. And it was really awesome to hear him share that and bring that kind of knowledge to the table. I mean, when I came back from that event, we changed some practices within our agency because I’m like, “What can we do to make sure that never happens to us?” So that’s our goal and plan. There are still a few tickets left—I think we have five more spots available. But yeah, I’m really excited to put it on. It’s going to be a three-day conference. It’s going to be a lot of fun.

Brad: Cool. All right. Yeah, that sounds great. I really like these kind of focused, smaller events like this—these masterminds or whatever you want to call them. I’ve heard of a number of them over the years—some big, some small. I generally think the small ones are probably something that I would be more interested in—just more intimate. You probably get more out of it versus a 100, 200-person conference—too big. How many people is the cap for this one?

Jonathan: Yeah, so the cap is at 30 people.

Brad: Nice.

Jonathan: So it’s small, right? The goal is to build relationships. You’re going to be hanging out together from eight to five all day long in presentations and that kind of stuff, and we’re going to go out to dinner together afterward. Any bigger than that, it’s difficult to really get to know people. The goal is to—almost never—we’re a WooCommerce partner. There are like 30 WooCommerce experts. I almost never go up head-to-head against another WooCommerce expert. It’s not really like we’re competitors. So it’s a rising tide raises all ships. So if we can all kind of help each other to be better, the focus is that we can get more logos—raise WooCommerce to more of an enterprise-level acceptance.

Brad: All right, very cool. Yeah, no, my tool isn’t as exciting as that. In fact, now it sounds very lame. But I guess I shouldn’t say that because it’s a great little plugin. That was really the wrong term to use.

Bob: It’s only a little lame.

Brad: Yeah, it’s just not quite as, I don’t know, robust as what Jonathan has going on between his two—the mastermind and the new website. But it’s a plugin I used a lot in the past, and I’ve written about—the WooCommerce Customizer plugin. It’s a free plugin by my friends over at SkyVerge. I know a lot of people go, “Oh, a lot of this stuff can be done in the code,” but some of us don’t want to deal with that crap. So you can do things like change the cart button text easily. You can change the number of products displayed on per page, customize tab titles, customize the button text on the product page, change the login message, change the coupon text—a whole bunch of free stuff that is easy to do. And like I said, some of us just need that. We need easy, and I’m always into easy. So it’s a sweet little plugin. I’ll put a link in there, but it’s called the WooCommerce Customizer plugin that you can get over on the repository on WordPress.org.

Bob: Nice.

Brad: I have one last-minute one. You didn’t think I had one, did you, Bob?

Bob: No, I didn’t. Okay, I see it there now.

Brad: I didn’t until about 10 minutes ago. So I’m going to give a shout-out to Joe Casabona because I stole this off one of his posts. Joe runs some great courses over at CreatorCourses.com. And I actually had to look up how to pronounce this, and thankfully on their about page, it has it, so it’s called Metorik—M-E-T-O-R-I-K.

Jonathan: Is that Metorik?

Brad: Metorik? That’s what I thought. And then on their about page, it’s like “meh-tor-ik,” but it says they’re open to interpretation. I was thinking it was meteoric too. But anyways, it’s a really, really powerful kind of add-on for WooCommerce stores. It basically pulls in all of your data and does some really crazy advanced reporting across all aspects of your site. It also does cart abandonment emails and reports around that, some customer service stuff, but it’s really specific, granular, detailed reporting that you can pull. They have a great example on their segmenting piece. Imagine you want to find all your customers that have registered in the past year, so relatively recent. They’ve spent over $100 but made just one order and their last order was over six months ago. And boom, you got a CSV of all those customers. So you can imagine just with that bit of granularity, the type of stuff you can get out of the system. Use that in your marketing efforts, use that in just understanding your data and your customers and what’s working and not working with your products and your sales. It does way more than that. I’m definitely giving you a high-level overview, but it definitely looks like a powerful tool if you’re running a pretty serious WooCommerce store and you want to start digging more into the data. I love data. A lot of times it’s trying to understand how to use the data that is—well, most of the time, that’s the challenge, right? All this great data—what do I do with it? Tools like this, I think, make it a little bit more digestible to get the data even more specific, which hopefully can help you make the right decisions to grow your business. So definitely check it out—Metorik.

Jonathan: One of the awesome reports that you can run actually with Metorik—although I always called it meteoric—but so let’s say you have product A. You can determine what the most common other product that is purchased alongside of product A is. So let’s just say product B, and then you figure out what that product B is. Then for everybody that bought product A that didn’t buy product B, you send them an email and offer them that, right? Because your data has shown you that that’s the most common second purchase or whatever. We’ve seen some stores increase their average order value because of that.

Brad: Yeah, that’s super interesting. I mean, that’s basically on Amazon—”Other customers who bought this also bought that,” right? That’s there for a reason—or bundle them together, save some money, or whatever. But yeah, that’s super cool. So definitely a really powerful tool. It is a paid tool.

Bob: So what do you say we wrap this up, huh, Brad?

Brad: Yeah, I think—we had a little—but we just had so much stuff to talk about.

Bob: Yeah, that’s great. We always worry we don’t have enough, and then we’re like, oh wow, it’s almost an hour.

Brad: That’s how it goes. Yeah, definitely appreciate you joining the show, Jonathan. It was great to hear about your company, your story a little bit, get some of your thoughts, and hopefully, we’ll see each other in person someday.

Jonathan: Yeah, it’s been a lot of fun. Yeah, it’s good to meet you, Brad, and see your face again, Bob—twice in a month.

Brad: Yeah. Oh God. You might need a little Bob break.

Jonathan: Yeah, really. Time for one.

Brad: Alright, everybody. Well, you can always find us on my site at BobWP.com or your favorite podcasting platform. Till next time, see you all around.

Jonathan: See you.

Brad: See you.