Building a Better Ecommerce Hosting Ecosystem

Jonathan: Welcome to another episode of Do the Woo. I’m your host, Jonathan Wold today. And with me is Beau Lebens. Beau, welcome to the show.

Beau: Thanks, Jonathan. Happy to be here.

What it means to be head of engineering at Woo

Jonathan: So you are the head of engineering at WooCommerce, at Automattic. Before we just jump into it, could you tell us just a little bit of what does that mean? What do you in your role there? What does that mean to be the head of engineering?

Beau: Sure. Yeah. So a lot of people don’t realize, but WooCommerce is actually a pretty complex business. Obviously for this audience, I think the biggest thing that people are familiar with is the core WooCommerce software itself. So the open source package, the plugin that you can download and install on WordPress. But we have a lot of other solutions that are part of that ecosystem. So I’m sitting across all of the engineering teams that are involved with all of those different things.

So there are a bunch of different extensions. WooCommerce Payments is one of the biggest ones. But then we have shipping solutions. We have partner integrations with folks like Google and Meta and TikTok. And then we have lots of point solutions for specific functionality that someone might need in running a store, whether that’s, I don’t know, taking deposits or different payment options, all sorts of things. So all of that rolls up within the WooCommerce business.

And my role as the head of engineering is really setting up all of the teams that work on all of that for success, making sure that we’ve got good processes in place, that we’re keeping on top of quality, that we have a constant stream of releases coming out across all of those different things. So there’s just a lot of logistics on that sort of thing. And then it’s working with those teams. We’re a engineering centric company, so it’s, developing those individuals, improving their own performance and their ability to get great work done. And then also coordinating outside of the company with the broader WooCommerce and WordPress community and ecosystem.

So we think of a community, when we say that, we tend to mean the direct folks who are contributing to, let’s say, WooCommerce or WordPress, whether that’s code or documentation or translations. And then ecosystem, we tend to use to refer more broadly to people who are building with those solutions. So maybe it’s someone who’s creating a WooCommerce store for someone else. So educating and communicating with that broader ecosystem as well.

When Woo first came on the radar for Beau

Jonathan: I’m glad you mentioned the ecosystem. It’s one of the things that I’ve noticed. When you think about WooCommerce, if you don’t know and you’re not paying attention, it’s like, “Oh, it’s just a plugin.” There’s a whole lot that goes behind the scenes to make that work. And then as soon as you touch on the ecosystem itself, you mentioned the partners, these integrations, which themselves can be even considered entire businesses, there’s just a whole lot more to it. And then you have of course, the community aspect of it and the relationship with third parties. There’s a lot to it. You’ve been at this for a bit. When did WooCommerce first come onto the radar for you?

Beau: Yeah, great question. So I won’t bore you all with my complete origin story. But needless to say, I’ve been involved with WordPress itself since the mid 2000s and started off just a personal interest with blogging and with this interesting open source project that was making that more accessible. And so got into WordPress. And then found myself doing consulting work at some point, attempted to create my own startup that was based on customizing WordPress. This was actually in the WordPress MU days.

Jonathan: Ah, yes.

Beau: So it was WordPress MU and bbPress all tied up together and heavily customized. So I found myself doing things that WordPress wasn’t fully capable of doing at the time. And then that set me down the path of working at some point with Automattic. So I joined Automattic in 2009. So actually coming up on 14 years in about a month, I think, it is. Yeah. So it’s been a while. And I’ve worked in all different parts of Automattic, including wordpress.com, I’ve worked on Gravatar, I’ve worked on a bunch of things, was on the team that made the first version of Jetpack. And then ended up actually leading all of the Jetpack efforts for a few years.

And right about four years ago now, switched over to WooCommerce. Basically, it was after Automattic had acquired WooCommerce, and we were ramping up the investment there and figuring out how we could really make this the solution for commerce on WordPress. And so within Automattic, we were moving some people from the rest of Automattic into WooCommerce, and I was one of those. And so I stepped into what ended up being the beginnings of this role that I’m in now about four years ago. And that was a really fun transition for me because I had been tangentially involved with WooCommerce right after we acquired it.

That was really the first contact I’d had with it myself. And so my view at the time was external but internal, if you like. So I was looking at WooCommerce from the perspective of the rest of Automattic and thinking like, “Oh, how can we leverage the things that we’ve learned or the things that we are good at within Automattic to help accelerate the growth of this WooCommerce thing?”

A perspective on Woo from a deeper context

Jonathan: I like that a lot. It’s interesting, because you knew WordPress well at that point. You had a lot of that deep context. And of course, having been in Automattic already for quite some time, you had seen a lot of the ways Automattic does things you, you’d experienced a lot of the scale, challenges and opportunities. So Woo was newer to you at the time, but you had that deeper WordPress context. Do you recall any of your initial observations? At that point, Woo already was fairly large as an ecosystem. There was lots of around it. So it already had, at least from my perspective, some fairly unique characteristics. Do you recall any of your initial impressions or observations of looking at that ecosystem from that perspective?

Beau: Yeah, definitely. I think probably two of the things that stand out in my memory would be, one that when I looked at WooCommerce, I saw immediately this is like WordPress, another whole layer of WordPress. It’s like a fractal expansion if you like. It’s like another whole platform built on top of this platform. It’s got its own ecosystem of what we call extensions, which are really just WordPress plugins that specifically extend WooCommerce. It’s got developers who really focus just on WooCommerce, they’re not really that focused on WordPress itself.

So it was really this very fractal version of the entire WordPress ecosystem. And that was really interesting. Also kind of daunting, to be honest, because WordPress is huge. It’s thousands and thousands of contributors. There’s a lot that goes into making WordPress a big successful community. And there was another whole version of that for WooCommerce. So that was probably the first one. And then more from the Automattic perspective, something that I saw was that some of the things we do within Automattic is build services. So rather than specific pieces of code that you deploy on a WordPress site, we are looking at like, well, how can we host that and how can we provide functionality that you can’t really deliver in a single plugin, but you can deliver if you’ve got this huge network of computers?

And so we can do things like Akismet for example, or Jetpacks’ backup services, things that you need from the cloud. And that there wasn’t a lot of that in the WooCommerce space other than payments. Payments, by definition, happen on another server somewhere, whether that’s off on Stripe or PayPal or Square. So that was definitely there, but there wasn’t a very coordinated approach to that in the WooCommerce space. So most things were just pieces of code deployed as extensions that existed within the context of a single WooCommerce store. And sometimes, that contributes to the complexity of running a large scale WooCommerce store because now you are responsible for all of that complexity. So that seemed like an interesting opportunity to maybe move some of that over time.

The complexity of the ecosystem

Jonathan: It’s interesting to notice that there are quite a few people, at least anecdotally, and I suspect the data would back it up, that come into WooCommerce and don’t even really know that much about WordPress, to anchor that point of like it’s clearly within WordPress, it’s just also very much its own thing. And that brings interesting challenges. To me, at least observationally, there is this degree to which it wasn’t planned that way from the beginning. WooCommerce, starting out with Woo themes, and it was almost incidental like, “Oh, we should build a little bit of this.” And then right place, right time and growing. And then you just look at, okay, there’s an entire ecosystem.

And in your opening, talking about the head of what your role is, the scope of your responsibilities, there’s just a lot to it. Well, you could just make big quick moves. In general though, as we find with the WordPress project, it’s, in generally, just not in the best interest of the ecosystem as a whole to move very quickly. You have to be very deliberate. And people can be frustrated where it’s like, “Hey, why can’t WooCommerce just get something done quickly?” And there are things that you can move fast on. But I think that complexity of this ecosystem as a whole and that there’s so many moving parts means that if you’re going to do a good job, that you have to consider a lot and you need to be deliberate. And I can see that that brings a curious realm of challenges into the mix.

Beau: Yeah. I think something that immediately comes to mind when you say that is the whole effort that we’ve had to deliver HPOS, High-Performance Order Storage. We got a lot of feedback over the years of like, why haven’t you done this yet? Obviously this is a thing, people want it. There was even a liquid web extension out there for many years that did a version of this. And so a lot of developers just didn’t seem to understand why we wouldn’t just ship that and be done with it. And what it came down to really was this ecosystem question, was, the technical solution, certainly not simple, but it’s very attainable. To technically solve this problem is very doable.

What was much more complex was how do we set it up so that we can safely deliver this to an ecosystem where people expect to just click and update button on WordPress and update their WooCommerce so we can’t just change the database out from under them. Plus they have all these different extensions. I don’t know what the latest number is, but I know at some point, we saw the average was that most WooCommerce stores had at least 17 different plug-ins anywhere up to hundreds. We’ve literally seen sites running hundreds of plug-ins. And we don’t have control over those. So we need to give a migration path for people to get to HPOS without breaking their store along the way.

And that’s the complex bit. It was actually the migration, the rollout, ecosystem adoption. And we’re still working on all of that, even though the technical solution is there. So on a single site where you control every piece of code that’s running there, it’s relatively simple to just switch to HPOS. But doing it out into an ecosystem is much more complicated. And we take that really seriously. We align very closely with the ethos of the WordPress community. So things like backwards compatibility are really important to us, being very user-centric. And even though we are very much a developer tool and developers use WooCommerce to build complex commerce solutions, at the end of the day, we do try to make sure that that merchant experience is excellent and that merchants can run their own store on a day-to-day basis.

And so we need to do things in a way that’s understandable for them. Like I said, that’s safe. They can click that update button and not have problems. And all of that’s really difficult. It’s not like running it in a SaaS environment where we just control the stack and we can just roll out an update and roll it back if there’s a problem. So yeah, there’s a lot to it.

Jonathan: I imagine that your services background and some of the SaaS experience has probably helped you. Because at the end of the day… And this is perhaps some of the tension that your typical WordPress or WooCommerce developer wouldn’t appreciate. When you take more of a services background and context, the end users have that expectation of not being disrupted, right?

Beau: Right.

Jonathan: Like it’s got to continue working. So you’re in this little bit of a hybrid. I mean, it’s not even just a little bit. It’s like there’s a lot of non-control that you have over what end users are going to do with it, yet also this expectation that when they click update, it’s going to just work. And if nothing else, that’s going to just add more time to figuring out how you navigate all that.

Beau: Yeah, it really does. And I’ll say my experience working on Jetpack in particular was really useful with that because it is such a hybrid of, obviously there is code that goes out and they deliver every month, which is actually what we’ve shifted to with WooCommerce over time. So there is a certain amount of code that is delivered every month that needs to be stable, it needs to be reliable, you need to be able to click that update button. And then we also have all of the services. And so you have that, well, this, we can deploy at any time, but then it depends on what version of the client is interacting with the server. So there’s all sorts of complexity there. And there’s interesting trade-offs of how you deliver things in each place as well. So it’s been interesting.

What Beau enjoys most working with Woo

Jonathan: So my last on the personal line. So you’ve had almost 14 years now at Automattic. You’ve experienced a wide range of things. You’re now all in on Woo, you’ve been so for quite a few years now. What do you enjoy most in the work that you do?

Beau: I think the biggest thing with WooCommerce in particular is the direct tie to people’s livelihoods. That’s really… I don’t know. That’s very exciting. It obviously comes with a high degree of trust, whether they know it or not, and a high degree of responsibility. But I really enjoy that. It’s much more visible and visceral how WooCommerce impacts people’s livelihoods. With WordPress, there was always an element of that. But often, it’s a little more disconnected. When you can put dollar signs very directly on your involvement and your impact on someone else, that’s very, very direct and very real. And so it’s also just a really fun to transact on something and then realize that it’s WooCommerce.

So my favorite recent example is, there’s a really cool custom bike shop here in Denver called Rodeo Adventure Labs. So they make custom bikes and I bought a bike bag from them and realized that it was WooCommerce. And so I reached out to them and was like, “Hey, that’s cool. You use WooCommerce. I work on that.” And I ended up actually going and spending a couple of hours sitting down with the founder and talking through their WooCommerce store and getting feedback from them and stuff. And so that connection is just really cool and really keeps me going.

What is Woo Express?

Jonathan: That’s cool. So Woo is always working on a bunch of different things, but one particular project that you have going on is this thing called Woo Express. For people who have no context yet, what is Woo Express?

Beau: Yeah. So Woo Express is a simpler streamlined version of getting up and running with WooCommerce and with some of the solutions that we see as being really key or really important to many merchants. So you can think of it as, it’s almost like a version of WordPress.com is to open source WordPress, where hosting is taken care of for you, there’s a bunch of additional functionality that’s included, and we try to make it just much easier to get onboarded, up and running. It’s a bit more opinionated about here are these solutions that you should use, and walks you through the process a bit more.

Jonathan: Excellent. What was the original motivation for it? What problem did you set out to solve in WordPress?

Beau: The versions of this have I think been attempted by different web hosts over the years. And it’s something that we’ve heard over and over and over is that when merchants try to set up their own store as opposed to working with a developer who sets it up for them, they tend to just be overwhelmed by the range of options, and quite honestly, the complexity of setting up a full commerce experience. So they don’t know which extensions to pick, they don’t know how to configure things, they maybe don’t even understand hosting. Especially these days, folks are expecting more and more that things just work on the internet, that you can just fill out a form and it’ll just work.

And so over the years, we’ve had a lot of feedback that just getting up and running with WooCommerce is too complicated for people. And so this is our swing at solving that problem. So enabling merchants who want to set up their own store to get up and running and get moving a little faster than they could otherwise.

Measuring the success

Jonathan: How are you currently thinking about how you’d measure the success of an initiative? So you’re taking the swing, it makes sense, there’s a lot of effort that’s gone into it. If this goes well, how do you see this impacting the ecosystem?

Beau: Yeah, that’s an interesting one. So I think the biggest thing that we are going for here is, through Woo Express, we should be able to get more active merchants. So people who have a store, it’s set up, they’re functioning in some way, and really just increase the size of the pie for everyone if you like. Because what we are seeing at the moment is a ton of people come, for example, to WooCommerce.com, to your point earlier of not everyone comes to this through the WordPress community. So people come directly to WooCommerce.com and they’re expecting to get up and running with this thing called WooCommerce.

And we see a lot of them don’t successfully get up and running. They come to the door, maybe they start dabbling, and it just feels too complex. And so they move on to something else. And so this is a chance for us to try and help more of those people successfully get up and running. And then once their business starts growing, that’s when they get into customization or unique new functionality or whatever it is.

Jonathan: Now there’s an interesting tension here, because if you take the builder community as a whole, subconsciously or not, there’s some degree to which freelancers, the agencies that rely on the fact that Woo can be complicated to configure as a way that they can, “Okay, we’ll take care of this for you.” So there is some degree here to which, if you’re successful, you’re eliminating work for some of these freelancers. I think it’s easy to talk about… Where I go immediately is the meta view, to your point about the importance of increasing the pie as a whole.

But there’s a real tension there. And I’m curious, how do you think about that, just navigating the needs of the builder community who somewhat relies on the complexity with the needs of the merchants who we don’t want to see churn out of the Woo ecosystem?

Beau: Yeah. And that’s, I think, what you just said at the end of that bit is a bit more like the way we look at it, is, if we rely on WooCommerce being complicated and hard to use, people are just not going to choose it in the long run. And so if the area that people are making their money in as developers or builders or freelancers, if it’s purely in that get it set up and know how to navigate this complex thing, that’s probably not very sustainable for anyone. And so what we hear from most freelancers is that’s not what they enjoy doing either. They actually enjoy more of the custom solution or really tailoring something to specific workflows or helping people set up and run their business in more unique ways.

And all of that’s still possible on Woo Express. So we actually think Woo Express… And it’s powered by WordPress.com at the moment. So the way that it’s built is, it’s actually leveraging the WP Cloud infrastructure that powers the more advanced sites on WordPress.com. And a lot of cool things come with that, that really speak to the needs of developers. There’s some that I can’t talk about just yet, but there’s some things like GitHub and SSH access, and you can install any other plugin or extension or theme on there.

So you have all of that power available to you. But what you get is some of the more monotonous bits and pieces taken care of. So there’s definitely nothing stopping developers from using Woo Express as a, quite honestly, much cheaper and much better put together starting point to create sites for their customers and then tailoring them from there.

A uniformity of Woo hosting in the ecosystem

Jonathan: I’m glad you mentioned WP Cloud. I think it’s a good example. Automattic is a big organization. There’s a lot going on. There’s a lot of complexity, there’s a lot of history, a lot of different initiatives and things that have been tried. I really like the positioning of WP Cloud. It’s going to be interesting to see how it plays out over time. One of the natural tensions here, you’ve mentioned some of the other hosting companies that have tried to do some of their own. And so we’re trying to solve this problem in different ways.

There’s a much larger ecosystem than even what WooCommerce.com touches directly and what WordPress.com touches. And so you’re in this interesting role as a business of being a custodian for the broader ecosystem, and having to make some decisions that maybe not everyone’s going to like, yet you have to. To do your jobs effectively, you have to think about the bigger picture in the long term. And what I like about the positioning of projects like WP Cloud and being involved in something like this is that, at the end of the day, it’s a project anchored on growing the ecosystem as a whole. And more and more hosting companies are looking at becoming partners with WP Cloud.

And I can see future states where what you’re building now with Woo Express can end up becoming the basis that other hosts could use in their offerings, and you’re building towards more uniformity towards it.

Beau: Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. One of the things that we’re already learning, quite honestly, with building Woo Express is, what works for merchants. We’re in a interesting spot where, I think historically, we’ve taken a bit more of a put things out into the ecosystem and let them figure it out sort of an approach. And what this gives us is an opportunity to really focus on a more complete merchant experience and deeply understand what works and what doesn’t for merchants, whether that’s in the core WooCommerce software itself or in any of the extensions and other solutions that we bundle in there.

And so we’re very much using this as a way to drive improvements on the merchant experience in WooCommerce Core. So that’ll be available to everyone, including all other hosts. But it also means that, as a package, we can start to say, because we do partner with other hosts, we work with them very directly, and we can say, “Hey, look, this stuff works better.” If you bundle all of this together, if you offer this with a free trial, if you keep your pricing in this range, whatever it is, the learnings that we have from doing this ourselves, absolutely we intend to share this with hosts and work with other hosts to implement this for the whole ecosystem.

At the end of the day, quite honestly, we Automattic are a relatively small part of the whole WordPress and WooCommerce ecosystem. Obviously, we play a certain role, but there are way more hosts out there, there are people doing their own things, building their own solutions, and we know we’re just a part of that.

Jonathan: One of the things that stood out to me from my time at Woo was talking to hosts in other countries where I became aware, and who are competing directly with Shopify and winning and other proprietary platforms. And a big part of it… And what they loved about WordPress and WooCommerce was their ability to create solutions that were even more tailored to the needs of their local ecosystem.

And that’s one of the things where it’s like… And it struck me then and it stuck with me since, that’s one of the strengths of… There’s a lot of challenges in a decentralized ecosystem. It’s one of the core strengths is that you can have a bunch of different players who are working together, more coordination needed, more work on your part and thinking about releases and how we manage all this, but it’s ultimately a much more resilient setup that is able to actually compete and win against projects like Shopify that, somewhat by design, a much more homogenous in nature. And they’re having to think globally and miss the opportunities to really fine tune and cater something.

And especially in the e-commerce realm, because a lot of it comes down to the partnerships, the payment gateways, the logistics sides of things. Like there’s all the stuff that has to come together. Yeah. So it’s very challenging. And I think it’s easy to miss for folks and they can complain. It’s like, well, if you take a broader view though, this is a global ecosystem with unique local needs. And it was interesting for me to see WooCommerce being able to win very effectively in some of those markets. And I love that, at least from my perspective, it feels like Woo, as a business, is embracing that and saying, “Okay, we need to make moves, we need to move the ecosystem forward, we need to model things, and we’re also recognizing that it’s a lot more than just us.”

Beau: Yeah, absolutely.

Jonathan: Yeah. That’s cool.

Beau: Yeah. I think you mentioned payments and logistics. I think those are two perfect examples, especially in the commerce space. We could theoretically, as a business, try to go to every single local market and cover every payment option and delivery or carrier option, and we would never be able to… we would need so many people writing so much code to try and produce all of those solutions. And we don’t really have any desire to do that. Like you said, we can model what a good solution looks like and we can say, “Here’s our personal best in class version that is available in certain markets, covers certain needs,” but we’re always going to leave things open to the ecosystem to say, oh, there’s… I don’t know.

I’m from Western Australia originally. Maybe there’s something that is blowing up in Western Australia and people are using a very specific payment method and there’s some local bicycle or drone courier or whatever it is, and someone there can build solutions for WooCommerce for that and probably corner the market in Western Australia. And that’s awesome. We love that. And some of our bigger competitors, that’s going to be the very, very, very long tail that they will maybe get to someday, but probably not. And so yeah, probably not is the answer. And so if WooCommerce can be the solution for those people, that’s what we’re all about. That goes to the core of the idea of democratizing commerce for me.

Specific challenges putting it together

Jonathan: My guess is that you’ve been working towards this Woo Express concept for a while. What are some of the challenges that… And we’ve touched on some of them at a high level, but are there any particular challenges that have stood out to you in putting this together?

Beau: I don’t know if it was an unexpected challenge, but I’ll say that what was the most confronting challenge was the reality of what happens when you take a bunch of WooCommerce solutions and put them together. It’s not always the best experience. And that’s where we have done a lot of work and we’ve got a lot more work to do. It’s just the reality of taking… The architecture of WordPress and thus WooCommerce is that you have these core packages and then you have all of these extra plugins, and they don’t always play as nicely together as you would like.

Jonathan: That’s generous.

Beau: Whether that could be on the UI level and it could just be what do they look like. Does it feel like a single product? It could be functionality. If you install… We have a saying internally that I love, which one of our engineering leaders refers to like, one plus one shouldn’t equal two, it should equal 11. And if you install, what’s a good example? Let’s say a gift card plugin with a subscriptions plugin, you might expect that you could pay for a subscription with a gift card, but can you?

Not sure. Or can you buy a gift card on subscription? So there’s all of these sorts of things where sometimes one plus one just equals two. And they’re both there separately, you can use gift card functionality, you can use subscriptions functionality, but what would it mean if one plus one equaled 11? So that sort of interaction is another whole layer of complexity and interesting.

Navigating tensions with finite resources

Jonathan: It brings the tension as well of what do you put in Core versus what do you leave to extensions, what do you manage directly at WooCommerce as you guys have acquired quite a few of these extensions versus what do you focus on third parties to do? And I suspect, and this is part of it, is that there aren’t easy answers to a lot of this, where it’s like there’s benefits and trade-offs to each approach. If you take things in-house, that can be great in terms of being able to solve compatibility issues, but it also can come down to, well, then you might not have all the resources. Now you have to manage less resources across a bunch and then an extension can end up being neglected. So there’s these benefits and trade-offs. How do you navigate making those decisions when you have finite resources to work with?

Beau: Yeah, it’s really hard. As you said, there’s often not good answers. And it’s more a matter of just picking the one that’s the least bad at the moment, or that you can live with for now, and that we think provides as much value as possible without being impossible to sustain. But yeah, I think the ones that you just touched on, like what do we put in Core? We try to keep Core very similar to WordPress. We follow a similar mentality. We try to keep Core relatively lean. And what we’re doing is trying to just keep it flexible and keep it capable.

So we talk a lot internally about capabilities. So what is Core capable of supporting? Doesn’t mean it has to do it, but it should allow a developer to build a solution in to then do a thing. So we do try and keep Core relatively lean. One thing that you’ve probably seen if you’ve sat up a new Woo store recently is that, in the onboarding experience, we’re trying to surface more of these optional things and then install them on demand. So we don’t have to deliver them in the Core package. You don’t have to use them if you don’t want to. But if you want those solutions, then they’re very accessible.

Jonathan: This feels like a part of the key opportunity you have with a project like Woo Express, is to have, you continue to have the Core. And at least from an outside perspective, it makes a lot of sense that you do it this way. You don’t take a thing like Woo Express and focus on baking it into core. You have it as a supplement or a compliment that is being driven towards through host, through WordPress.com, et cetera, that gives that opinionated, curated, like this is what we think is the best way to use Woo without taking away choice.

So it’s an interesting tension. But I can see that working well over time where it’s like… Because there’s quite a few end users who don’t know that they might someday care about the flexibility in Woo, they just want to get something, they just want results. They’re trying to build a business. And if you just drop them in WooCommerce and like, “Here’s all the extensions you could want,” that’s probably not helping them win.

Beau: Yeah. Not at all. Yeah. And like you said, that flexibility over time, often you don’t know upfront what flexibility you do or don’t need. You just want to get a thing started. And you probably just want to sell a couple of products. And if we look at what we’ve got, often those are physical products. You might be dealing with purely local delivery, might be a relatively simple scenario. But hopefully you’re successful. And then you want to, I don’t know, ship to a different state or to a different country and you want to accept different payment methods, and maybe you start doing more custom products or you have different business workflows or whatever it is. And that’s when that flexibility is really important.

So we do still very much want to keep that available. That is the point of WooCommerce in a lot of ways. So that’s really important to protect for us. Like we talked about earlier, we as Automattic or as WooCommerce, we are never going to have all of those solutions ourselves. If we restrict things in a way that we have to be the ones to provide those solutions, that doesn’t end up being good for anyone.

How freelancers, agencies and product builders should think about Woo Express

Jonathan: No. So for builders who are listening… So we have your freelancers, your agencies, you also have a whole bunch of people who are building products for WooCommerce. How do you want them to think about Woo Express?

Beau: Yeah, good question. So I mentioned earlier, there’s nothing stopping developers from using Woo Express as a starting point for building solutions for people. So I think that is the first thing that I would say is, if you are out there trying to figure out hosting and trying to figure out how to get the first set of out of the box functionality up and running for WooCommerce stores, Woo Express is going to be a great place to start with that.

Like I said, it’s based on WordPress.com, so all of the hosting benefits that come with that, come with Woo express, including really honestly pretty incredible performance and very, very generous traffic allowances and all of that sort of thing. We’ve been hosting WordPress powered sites for a long time at this point and we’re pretty good at it. So as a hosting foundation, I think WordPress.com is, we couldn’t ask for a better place to start with this.

How the broader hosting ecosystem should think about Woo Express

Jonathan: Cool. Now, when you think about the broader hosting ecosystem for which Woo is increasingly a big part of it, how do you want them to think about Woo Express?

Beau: I’m hoping that they look at it as somewhat inspirational and like, oh, this is what a really good Woo experience can look like. One of the things, quite honestly, that we’ve seen when we look around is that getting up and running on a host, if you go to a host and you specifically want to run a WooCommerce store, it can be pretty difficult to get through the whole experience of creating all of your accounts, registering a domain, whatever it is, and then picking all of the solutions, et cetera, et cetera.

So we’re hoping to really set a best in class example and then work with those hosts to say, “Okay, how can you do similarly?” And how can we make it mutually beneficial for the host and us, for our shared merchants? Because eventually, those merchants probably end up interacting with something else in the Woo ecosystem. And so we all want to make sure that we’re enabling that in every direction.

Jonathan: There’s a curious tension there, because in order for you to set the best in class example, there is this like, okay, we’re going to take a lead here, we’re going to be opinionated and drive towards this. And at the same time, as we alluded to earlier, there’s opportunities for hosts to say, “Hey, we’re going to take that.” Because this is what I like again about the WP Cloud positioning. “We’re going to take that and we’re going to do an even better thing for our local market, for the audience, for the folks that we’re serving.” So it’s like, they can take what you’ve done, and that’s where the partnership concept comes into it, where it’s like, there’s some risk involved into it.

If you just let the ecosystem do whatever, that’s fine, then it’s going to be whatever it’s going to be. For you to do this best in class example gives a chance for you to set a higher bar like, “Hey, based on everything that we’re seeing, this is what we think is the best.” And then if you get the positioning right, which I see you guys move in that direction, it’s an invitation for builders, for the hosting ecosystem to say, “Okay, we see that. That makes sense.” And you’re like, “Yeah, we’d love for you to use this. Use this as a starting point. Do even more for the market that you serve and let’s work together on this.”

Beau: Yeah. Absolutely. And those markets, just to be explicit about it, they’re not necessarily just geographical markets. It might be, some host is going to target people setting up very specific types of stores, whether it’s, I don’t know, like time booking based stores, or they might be real estate stores or I don’t know, whatever it is, they might have some specific niche, some specific market that they’re really interested in serving. And so they might learn from what we’ve done and say, “Okay, we are targeting a certain space with what we’re doing with Woo Express.” And that might not be at all what they’re targeting, but they can take pieces of what they can learn from us and then say, “That, but with this other customization to suit this space.” And that’s totally fine. Great by us.

Jonathan: Yeah. And a ton of opportunity. And I love that you have the MU background. Because I think that’s one of things I’m most excited about too is, there’s so much opportunity for entrepreneurs to come in and say, “Okay, we’re going to serve these smaller markets.” It could even just be a couple of thousand customers in a particular market. And like you said, it doesn’t have to be anything to do with geography, that you can build some pretty incredible solutions on WooCommerce, on WordPress that they don’t even have to know what are those things. There’s increasingly SaaS like opportunities that just makes sense to build within this WordPress and Woo ecosystem. I like that a lot.

Beau: Yeah. And there were versions of that much earlier on in the WordPress space too. Right? People had pre-packaged targeted solutions, like I mentioned, real estate, because that’s an example in my head that, I forget the company’s name, but years ago, I remember interacting with a group that they just churned out real estate sites based on WordPress and they had a specific set of plugins and configuration that they used. I think they had a custom theme. And they could just make real estate sites all day long. And they serve that market very, very specifically and quite successfully. And that’s the thing that I think, over time, we see that, or we will see that more with commerce solutions as well, where it’s just a version of that and it’s, what are their specific financial needs or business needs or whatever it is.

Jonathan: Now, one of the challenges… One of the curious things, I’ll put it this way, about WooCommerce the business. So you do a lot of work on the platform. You take responsibility for, there’s a lot of engineering, there’s a lot of resources that go into this. You also still have an entire community of people that can contribute, that get involved in different ways and shapes. But in some senses, I think there’s at least definitely a feel of WordPress, or of WooCommerce being a lot more commercially driven than, say, the WordPress project. And there is a reality, right?

At the same time, you know like the community’s involvement is a big part of what makes this all work. So I understand that there’s a contribution day coming up. Can you tell us a bit about that, your just thoughts on that?

Beau: Yeah, definitely. I’ll say, to your point, absolutely there is a bit of a difference in that WordPress itself is fundamentally… it has the WordPress Foundation, so it is driven by a community driven group. Whereas WooCommerce also is open source, but is fundamentally owned and driven by Automattic as a commercial entity. But to your point, our fundamental belief is that the only way that that is successful is if it’s got a thriving ecosystem. And the only way to get that is a thriving community. And that’s the best way for this product to exist, but also for this space to be served.

And so you mentioned a contributor day. We internally have acknowledged actually that we need to engage more with our community and we need to empower them more, we need to give them more direction because we’ve actually got people asking how can they help, how can they contribute? And sometimes, we are not able to tell them, which is not the best. So coming up on the 19th, we’ve got a contributor day. And because we’re both a global company and a global community, we’re running it for 24 hours. So we’ll have a few check-ins throughout that time. We will have a ton of people internally who are just online, and their workday that day is, you are there to help the community, you’re there to help them try and get stuff merged, to answer questions, to point them in the right direction, to help them get their development environment set up, whatever it is.

I haven’t counted internally, but I know we’ve got at least about six teams worth of people. So it’s probably 50-ish folks, maybe a little more, who basically that entire workday, that will be what they’re doing.

And then we are trying to get as much of that merged as possible, obviously assuming it’s all well written and passes tests and everything else, to get as much of that work merged so that those folks can see their work delivered in WooCommerce ready for the next release after that.

Jonathan: Awesome.

Beau: Yeah, it’s going to be fun. We’re really looking forward to it. I know we’ll add a link in the show notes, but developer.woocommerce.com is where you can find out more about that. And there’ll be a least a couple more posts. We’ll coordinate that in our community Slack channel. And like I said, it’ll be for 24 hours. To be honest, it’ll probably go longer than that. But formally organized for 24 hours. So we’re really looking forward to it.

Jonathan: I love it. Well, thanks for all that you’ve been doing and your involvement in the space and your care for the future of it all. If folks are interested in learning more about you, what’s the best way for them to do so?

Beau: Well, I wish I could say I blogged more frequently. I do have beau.blog, so B-E-A-U.blog. You can go there. And then, I don’t know, you can find me on GitHub, on Twitter. All of those things are linked from that site. So that’s probably the best place to start.

Jonathan: Excellent. Well, Beau, thanks so much for joining us. And good luck. We’re looking forward to seeing what happens with Woo Express and the upcoming community day, and we’ll talk to you again.

Beau: Yeah, thank you so much. It’s been a pleasure.