MageTalk - Episode 148
Phillip: Hello and welcome to MageTalk, the Magento community podcast. I'm Phillip.
Kalen: And I'm Kalen.
Phillip: And for now I don't have a hair mullet, so that's good.
Kalen: But that's going to be changing very soon, my friend.
Phillip: If Kalen has his way it will be changing very, very soon.
Kalen: Very soon. So, quick recap, I posted a picture of Brent Peterson that I found on Facebook. I don't know if I broke protocol rules because I'm not a big Facebook user. I found this glorious photo of Brent with a mullet - or as he said - that was just normal hair back then, which I think was in the 80s - so. So per his clarification...
Phillip: Most people didn't know that your hair in the back actually grew longer, faster back then. It's just a thing with hormones and the way that they make bread and milk nowadays.
Kalen: They didn't have the information back then so it doesn't technically count and so [I] posted that and then somebody asked ... somebody along the chain referenced you because of course you have the most famous hair in the entire Magento community. And we then said, “How many likes would it take to get you to rock a mullet?” You then said a hundred thousand, and you made the mistake of not clarifying whether you're talking about organic likes or paid likes. And then David Gitman did a Go Fund Me to buy the likes. And then I donated 50 bucks. Eric [Hileman] donated $230. Joel got on board for a hundred ... We hit the goal within like two minutes flat. And if I were you I'd be worried because I think we were gonna hit it.
Phillip: You know what's funny is that I ... first of all the fact that people in this world would pay $395 to see me do something weird to my hair is in itself just crazy. But-
Kalen: It's a good problem to have.
Phillip: It is good, it is. The second thing that sort of makes me upset is that ... First of all - I hope that you're not spending $395 on likes for a thing I will never do with my hair. When you could do something charitable with that. It's-.
Kalen: wait wait wait wait. Are you saying you're not going to do it?.
Phillip: Do you see how short my hair is in the back? Do you know how long I'd have to let my hair grow? It's like a 2 year process.
Kalen: Are you trying to back out of this?
Phillip: No, I'm not. I’m not going to back out - never back down. Never surrender. That's my motto. But the Go Fund Me from now on and - Chris you're going have to bleep this - will be the "Go Fudge Me". So there you go. "Go Fudge Me". Go Fudge Me. Yes that's that's what I'm going to call it from now on. That’s the show title, “Go Fudge Me.”
Kalen: There you go, show title.
Kalen: We do have some more substantive items to get to.
Phillip: I mean the top story for me of course is how on-point the Commerce Hero/Jamersan/e-commerce-aholic live stream from Meet Magento New York was. That was awesome.
Kalen: Did you dig it? Did you like it?
Phillip: I dig it. It was awesome. You guys were awesome. Was that a total, like, was that insane amounts of work? Tell me about how that felt and who all did you talk to and where can people watch it?
Kalen: Yeah, it was fun. So, you can check it out on my YouTube channel. Where the heck is the URL for this? It's YouTube.com/c/commercehero - I think, I'm just checking it out right now. See if that works. Yup. And it was cool. So, TJ's been doing some livestreaming and things like that. Obviously you were busy doing seven hundred thousand things, so we couldn't do it together. As per usual. So, it was a fun thing to do. And we interviewed a bunch of people. Jeez, man, we probably did between both days, we probably did 20, 25 interviews.
Phillip: Wow.
Kalen: It was a little crazy. We weren't super organized about it, getting people in. But people were very gracious with coming in, and we put out a nice highlight reel, three minute recap which is kind of fun. So it was cool, it was cool.
Phillip: Tell me a little bit about the setup and, you know, what were some of things people were talking about? Because I saw the highlight reel looked really cool, and it looked like you had some pretty interesting guests.
Kalen: Yeah, there was - So, TJ has a nice setup as far as video and mics and things like that, so that was cool, we had that all set up. And man, we talked to pretty much everybody we could get our hands on. You dipped in for a little interview. You know, so we asked people about talks they gave, the people that spoke. We asked people how they liked the event, we spoke to a guy from Vertex, we spoke to Laura Folco, Ali Ahmed, the list goes on an on. Bunch of different people. And you know, talked some B2B. TJ's head was getting really big because everybody was giving him positive feedback on his talk. The only feedback on my talk was that my jokes weren't very funny, that's why nobody was laughing.
Phillip: Who said that? I was laughing.
Kalen: Were you? That room was weird. That room was very big. People were sitting sort of towards the back. I don't know, I wasn't getting very much feedback. But yeah, it was cool. It was fun.
Phillip: And you've given that talk since, at the L.A. Meetup ... the L.A. Magento Meetup, and they kind of relaunched it into the new Magento offices, right?
Kalen: Yeah, so the sales for developers talk, I gave that at the L.A. Meetup just last week or so, and yeah, it was at the new offices, so we got to see the new offices. Got to see Sherrie, Mosses, and a bunch of people of there which was cool.
Phillip: Sherrie Rohde, community manager for Magento. Mosses Akizian, who is the former community manager for Magento.
Kalen: Yes, and he runs the L.A. Meetup. So yeah, it was cool. It was really cool.
Phillip: Where is Mosses these days? What is he doing?
Kalen: I think he's doing some consulting. So, still in the L.A. area and I believe he's doing some Magento consulting.
Phillip: Oh, that's baller.
Kalen: People stay in the ecosystem, man. Nobody leaves. Nobody leaves the ecosystem.
Phillip: It's so true. And you know what? That's actually what I like. Actually sometimes they go right to competitors.
Kalen: That can also happen.
Phillip: They don't leave the ecosystem but they go right into competition with Magento. No, I find that really, really funny. Actually, speaking of which, I haven't looked recently because - full disclosure - I sold all of my Shopify stock.
Kalen: Did you?
Phillip: Yeah, I 3x'd my Shopify investment and I dumped it. And I dumped it right before the massive sell-off of the news.
Kalen: Really?
Phillip: I don't think we ever talked about that on the show. Did we talk about that?
Kalen: I talked about it with ... Oh, I think I talked about it with Josh, briefly, in the first segment before you jumped on. We should ... I have so many thoughts about that.
Phillip: Yeah, just briefly, there was basically an editorial that came out that accused Shopify of falsifying numbers, of running basically a Ponzi scheme of, you know, any schmuck that has a Shopify store is an entrepreneur and you know, is basically ... all the stuff that everybody on Wall Street, I think, does. But it harkens back to something that I said a long time ago, which is I listened to one of their earnings calls and the number of deployed Shopify sites to what BuiltWith says was like orders of magnitude different. They weren't on the same level at all. Oh yeah, like, Shopify on an earnings call said in the same breath A, we're no longer going to report deployed numbers of stores, and then B, we have 2800 Shopify Plus sites out in the wild. And my response was BuiltWith says there's 700, so what's the deal with that? And just as another aside, I knew specifically, specifically of some Shopify Plus sites that were like Magento transplants, that, you know, basically took like 9, 10, 11, 12 months to go up, some that have already left Shopify for like Episerver and some other platforms. So, it was kind of a mess, and so I wasn't surprised at all.
Kalen: That's interesting. It's funny because like, I love to hate on Shopify as much as the next Magento guy, right? And I don't own any shares. But that article had a bunch of stuff in it, including, like, using the word millionaire in an ad and things that were just nonsense. The one thing that I think is a valid critique is if they were fudging their numbers. That article was so weird, did you read that article?
Phillip: Yeah.
Kalen: Like, just the formatting was like weird, it had lots of all caps and red letters and it read like a marketing sales letter and it had a bunch of madness in it. But I totally agree. That's the thing, if they're fudging those numbers, that's definitely not good.
Phillip: Yeah, I mean, Citron called them a get-rich-quick scheme. Which is like, a ton of the news that they were putting out - and again, this is the same thing I think pretty much everybody does in Wall Street, which is just to game up the stock price. And there was a lot of salacious claims in that. Anyway, aside from that, I've always had a little bit of doubt about the way that Shopify's counted how many people are actually successful on their platform. Anyway. Remember a year and a half ago, we had Tim Schulz, I think, from BigCommerce on the show? Or I did it, you disavowed any knowledge of that interview happening.
Kalen: No, I was on that interview.
Phillip: Are you sure?
Kalen: Wait a second. Was I? I feel like I was. We'll have to listen back.
Phillip: The problem with that interview was, you know, he's sitting there claiming like, "Oh, here's all the stuff we're doing in R&D, and it'll all be out by the end of the year," and like one thing on his list of 20 things was done. And I think that Shopify suffers from the same thing, and all SAS platforms to some degree. It's like, "Our roadmap is insane and we're gonna get stuff done in a year," and they just grossly overestimate their ability to ... You know, it's like, it's feature feature feature feature, agile agile agile, and not, like, what does the merchant need? And what cadence do they need from us to make them successful? I think once you hit ... there's a plateau that you hit of enablement of features in the platform, where are you really ... they just become box-tickers. Actually ... I don't know, that's a whole separate conversation, because I think we talked about that to some degree before. But at some point, you're making stuff that almost nobody needs. Like, the upper echelon, the 1% of the 1% needs that feature, but you're just doing it for the headline, right? And I don't even know if sometimes it's well thought out. Like, Shopify's working on multi-language multi-site right now, and the way that they do it is more of a hack and a workaround than it is native to the platform. It's kind of a joke. But at the same time, they've got Flow, which is transformative and cool, right?
Kalen: But, the other thing with Flow, it was one of the things I thought was like one of the coolest features they'd launched at their conference, and I still don't know if it's out or not. I've talked to several people that are into Shopify, and they're like, "I don't even know what Flow is." So, I don't know how, like, fully released that feature is. And actually, I was talking to somebody, they were saying that the multi-store was gonna come out and that - because I think that is one of the big things that holds people up from using Shopify. Do you know ... You're saying that feature is already out but it's a little hacky?
Phillip: See, it depends on who you talk to. If they're answering an RFP that says we need to be able to do multi-store, they will say we natively do multi-store.
Kalen: Really? Like agencies? Shopify agencies?
Phillip: Oh yeah. And they'll tell you, "Oh you can do it," but actually it's a site clone. It's like you have to manage it separately, it's not like true multi-store, right? And then what happens is, they'll tell you, "Yeah, we do multi-site," but they don't. But then they have, you know, press releases like "Shopify to release multi-site." It's a very confused thing. Like, you can't - Just because you can do something with a hack doesn't mean it's a core feature of the platform. It's the same thing that I said a year and a half ago about Magento and B2B. Just because you can do B2B on Magento or you've got three agencies that have intellectual property that allow you to have B2B features from them and them alone, doesn't make Magento a B2B platform, right?
Kalen: And that's an interesting one though. It's funny, I was talking to an Oro agency today-
Phillip: OroCommerce.
Kalen: And so, talking a little bit about B2B and stuff. I've heard - And you know I think I'm on record as being a skeptic on Magento 2 and lots of stuff - I've heard a lot of people that are really excited about the B2B features for Magento. I've heard that from multiple different angles. So, I think that that's pretty interesting. Before I was like, look, Oro is approaching B2B from the ground up, that's their only focus, I think they're gonna kill it, and I'm starting to lean, like, a little bit more towards the Magento side on that, just because of the feedback on those features.
Phillip: Yeah, exactly. And I agree with that. It's sort of ... It's also something that I had said myself I think in the last episode or two, which was that we're sitting on, you know, a new explosion in ecommerce growth in the revenue bands that a lot of us all work in. Which is in the 2 to 25 million range, and they're all B2B companies, and they've never had public facing websites. Or they never will. Like, it's just for enabling business to business, and you know what? The prognosticator of prognosticators in the Magento community, Brendan Falkowski, got on this train three years ago. He saw this coming three years ago, and we're all sitting over here like, "Let's make fashion sites," and he's like, "I'm rolling in my Uncle Scrooge money bin over here doing B2B, and it's terribly unsexy and nobody cares about it, but you know what? I'm backpacking in South Korea for four weeks."