https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k1K-Cgf7dl4&t=3s
[00:00:00] Mark: Looking a lot more natural these days. Cool. Yeah. What's the goal? That's the dream. Like your old self, when you weren't yellow,
[00:00:07] Kalen: you're like, what happened? Did he get what's the thing that jaundice kids get? Yes. Yes. Yeah. Was ca and his whole YouTube channel got jaundice? Gotta
[00:00:18] Mark: put you under the blue light.
[00:00:20] Mark: Yeah.
[00:00:21] Kalen: Cool.
[00:00:22] Mark: We're recording now, right? We're
[00:00:24] Kalen: recording now. I can trim up the beginning part and stuff like that, but yeah. But yeah, we are recording back. We're back in business. Let me get this Google Doc thing opened up, but yeah. All right, man. We finally did it. I guess let's do, yeah, I don't know if this is a, what podcast this is.
[00:00:44] Kalen: I'm playing with the idea of maybe starting something through the new company or I don't know. I don't know.
[00:00:52] Mark: But this is just content right
[00:00:54] Kalen: now. Yeah. It's just content. It's just content. But I don't know how to intro it. It takes a while to get comfortable with the old intro sequence, so I don't know how to,
[00:01:03] Mark: yeah, how to start.
[00:01:05] Mark: Maybe we can start by, I'm actually going to interview you. Calin. Could you introduce yourself? What do you do? Yes. Yes. Why? Why are we
[00:01:13] Kalen: here? I can do that, I can do that. So I work for a company called Shop Pad now, and ma the product is called Mesa, which is workflow automation, Zapier for Shopify.
[00:01:26] Kalen: My boss is gonna hate me for describing it that way, but cuz they're also the competition. But Yeah. And I've been diving into Shopify land after having been in Magento for some time which is where we met. And yeah, so I've been just diving into Shopify the past few months and working on automation, try to find interesting use cases for automation stuff.
[00:01:53] Kalen: And yeah, that's my that's my deal, man. That's cool. What's yours? What, who are you, explain in, introduce yourself to the viewers and the listeners at home?
[00:02:05] Mark: That's a good question. Who am I? I am still Mark Lewis. I've been Mark Lewis for approximately 35 years.
[00:02:13] Kalen: Realize you were 35.
[00:02:15] Kalen: Dude, you're like, I feel like you're more mature than me most of the time, and I've got a couple, I've got a couple years on you.
[00:02:22] Mark: That's good. I think we have different strengths and weaknesses. True. Think so. Maturity is not one barometer like true. True. I have zero children, so I am probably a less mature father than you.
[00:02:35] Kalen: Yeah, that's probably the case. Yes.
[00:02:38] Mark: So I have to give you that. Yeah. Okay, so yeah, I'm Mark. I run an e-commerce agency NAICA Commerce, and our specialty is Shopify, Magento and BigCommerce In that order we're a full service agency except for, we don't do like growth or ppc. We're really focused on site ops, development, design keeping your site.
[00:03:05] Mark: Up and maintained and converting as best as possible. Most of our clients are between, three to 5,000 million in revenue. And we're basically like the e-commerce, like fractional team for our clients. Usually our clients do have like at least a marketing manager, maybe a design team, and we're interfacing and like filling in the gaps of what they do and don't have internally.
[00:03:30] Kalen: Nice. Yeah. Very nice. And any any recent, so I know topic wise we want to talk about, oh, I pulled up the entirely wrong. I pulled up a Google Doc with our notes. But then I accidentally pulled up my weekly update to my boss. I was like, let's talk about that calin to
[00:03:50] Mark: do that. That's a whole new one.
[00:03:51] Mark: Your weekly review.
[00:03:53] Kalen: Yeah, I know we want to talk about headless stuff. Because that's one of those things I think you, you did, you you were included in a modern retail article on the topic,
[00:04:04] Mark: yeah, modern retail kind of did a explainer on composable commerce and That's right.
[00:04:11] Mark: Trying to suss out the differences between headless. And composable. Which as you probably know, they're very interrelated. Composable being a bit more broad term of being like, Hey, we're gonna take all these different little pieces of parts and put 'em together. And not have, right.
[00:04:31] Mark: It's like the opposite of a monolith that we've been used to of like even Magento. I was just thinking the other day of we used to develop like reviews apps basically on Magento over and over. Like every client would be like, Hey, we want reviews where we just have to do it custom. Over and over now.
[00:04:50] Mark: No one thinks about, like when they're saying like, oh we need reviews on our e-commerce site. Even on Magento, they're not like, oh let's do reviews ourselves. It's always using some sort of system like, like a stamp or a yacht po that's like.
[00:05:05] Mark: That, that's composable commerce in a big way of like just basically breaking everything apart. Yeah, I think it's like the microservices stuff.
[00:05:15] Kalen: Uhhuh, the my my personal struggle with these topics is that I understand them enough, big picture to understand them.
[00:05:25] Kalen: Big picture, but I'm not, Close enough to them to really get into. I it just feels like every conversation around headless that I have with the level and composable with the level of detail that I get into them is headless can make sense if you have a very custom need and if not, then don't do it.
[00:05:44] Kalen: And that's the, yeah. The level at which it makes sense to me. But I'm sure you, you get into more detail as you're working with clients on builds and stuff like that,
[00:05:57] Mark: yeah, it's been interesting the past, I would say two years because I feel like there's been a push for headless for a while.
[00:06:03] Mark: Like even before the pandemic. It was, yeah, it's been the cool new thing of oh, You should go headless if you're really like, serious about e-commerce. Yeah. So either, even if you didn't have a specific need, it was just basically oh, that's the premium option. Like why? Why don't you buy the safari Ferrari, there's a lot of reasons. Even if you can afford the Ferrari maybe the Ferrari is a lot of maintenance. A lot of, yeah. Insurance, a lot of upkeep. Yeah. And I think now the market is leveling off a little bit and people, merchants are starting to more understand like like the downsides of going headless.
[00:06:41] Mark: So there's a more measured perspective, and. And to that point, like the downsides I would say is the maintenance the main maintenance of a Ferrari. Like once, if you're using Shopify, once you go headless, so many things don't work out of the box, like so many things are custom development.
[00:06:59] Mark: And even probably with Mesa, some integrations probably don't necessarily work because they're relying on some sort of inserting something into the front end. And so it's just it's possible you can still like, do everything, but it's way more work and more development.
[00:07:15] Kalen: Yeah. Yeah. And so I'm thinking of Glossier was one of the recent sites that launched on Shopify. And it had a lot of people were talking about it, but. I don't know. And they're using stock Shopify. Yeah. And it was one of those things where for a really high profile br brand, like like Glossier you would've probably may, maybe a year, two ago, you would've expected they'd launch headless, or maybe a lot of people still would expect somebody like them would launch headless. So it was a bit of a surprise. That they to certain people. Yeah. But then from the perspective you're coming from, it's just like it should be the default option to a choice to go stock.
[00:07:58] Kalen: Unless you have some very specificities, but people were going crazy on Twitter. I remember just I guess from a UX perspective about Glossier, everybody was losing their minds and yeah I thought it was cool. I don't know. I'm, I guess I I'm, there's, I'm trying to understand like I'm in a very much like a learning phase of, or like a beginner mind.
[00:08:19] Kalen: And so I'm like, not assuming I know everything about everything like I used to, but, so yeah, I, I saw it and I was like, oh, cool sight, like I, I'm assuming it's for a different demographic than me, so I probably, sh whatever. But I thought it was cool, but everybody was going nuts
[00:08:35] Mark: about it.
[00:08:35] Mark: I. Yeah, it, the interesting thing is you, you said like they didn't do headless and I think that was a big surprise and especially since Shopify has invested in hydrogen, they've invested in making headless, Better and more possible. But simultaneously they've really invested in the, online store 2.0 experience.
[00:08:59] Mark: And I think they've improved that so much that it, it's almost come to parody with doing something headless unless you really need to do something custom and integrate some, like other custom CMS or something else to control the front end. So I do think brands are like realizing oh, we don't have to go headless.
[00:09:20] Mark: And like you said, like it, na native needs to be the true default even. Even if you're a billion dollar brand,
[00:09:28] Kalen: and it's so interesting coming from the Magento perspective where. Thing and my perception of the Shopify ecosystem having been not super close to it, was that yeah, everything's easy with Shopify.
[00:09:40] Kalen: It's less custom, it's less work. Things just work. And so it's interesting coming from that perspective and then seeing in, in some ways like headless is like a reincarnation of Magento in, in, in the sense of having to do more. Custom work, more maintenance. You're getting a more of a custom site which has benefits to it.
[00:10:04] Kalen: Yep. So not that it's Magento, but it's a it's the same, it's a similar dynamic. It's a similar tradeoff co complexity with customization versus simplicity with less customization. Exactly. So it was interesting to see people fighting this similar battle in this other camp,
[00:10:22] Mark: yeah. And I don't think, I don't think merchants really knew what they were getting themselves into when they went headless initially like on Shopify, right?
[00:10:31] Mark: We've done a number of migrations from a headless Shopify build to the native theme and. Every time we do the merchants just fall in love with us forever because they're like, wow, you saved us so much money and like hassle. We were having to email our developer every time we wanted to add a product or do any little tweak, like just the perspective of going back, or for them, I think they never had the native experience at all. They were just, they got on Shopify headless and they were like, This is a lot of work. Like I thought Shopify was supposed to be easier. And they were a little di disillusioned. And then they got like the real Shopify experience and they're like, okay, like this is more like what I was promised.
[00:11:15] Kalen: Yeah, that makes sense. And then I think Dollar Shave Club just recently launched, which was a cool one.
[00:11:22] Mark: Also not headless.
[00:11:24] Kalen: And also not headless.
[00:11:25] Kalen: Yeah. Which, they're, they've gotta be mad. I don't know what their numbers
[00:11:29] Mark: are, but they've gotta be gigantic. They're they're a little infamous too, because I think they were down for At least a week. They had some sort of ca catastrophic like data data center issue or something like that.
[00:11:43] Mark: Like a couple years ago, I remember, oh, basically before they were on Shopify they had a fully custom system and everything, and then they were just like totally down for it was at least a week. Oh,
[00:11:57] Kalen: wow. That's
[00:11:59] Mark: rough. I'm sure they're saving a lot of money and I'm sure like they scale back their dev team.
[00:12:05] Mark: Just having the simplicity of running on Shopify. Yeah, but I think once, once you start out so custom and like you have a big dev team, it's probably a little hard to scale that back. But that's what we've been seeing, especially like now that people are, like a little more concerned about the economy or more conservative, they're considering something like Shopify versus, like in the past they would probably do like a Salesforce commerce cloud or, some something way more enterprise. They're like, Oh maybe I can make it work. Maybe I can cut costs. Not just like platform costs, but like ongoing maintenance and development.
[00:12:44] Mark: If if I move to something simpler yeah. Can I make something simpler? Like work in my environment? Yeah.
[00:12:52] Kalen: I hadn't really made the connection to the economy, but that's like the headless to native transition happening at a similar time as the economies. Getting a crunch. Yeah. But yeah that's gotta be part of the factor.
[00:13:06] Kalen: But yeah, if you're, the e-commerce director that made the decision to go headless and it was that Ferrari, you said, Hey we have the money, we have an, we have a great brand, let's go for the Ferrari. And then you've got a team supporting it to then scale that back and go. Oh yeah, let's just go with the, like off the shelf, Shopify, even if you're getting plus or whatever, sure. And then it's oh, we don't need this, these, this in-house talent, or they can focus on certain other things. That's gotta be a tough decision to make. Yeah, and it's like the simple it's like a. It doesn't seem like a, in some senses, in some context, it doesn't seem like a sophisticated decision.
[00:13:46] Kalen: It seems like the sophisticated decision would be to do the bigger, more complicated thing.
[00:13:52] Mark: Sometimes simpler is better. Yeah. Yeah. And especially if you've already done maybe even a round of layoffs at your company and you're like, oh, we just laid off half the dev team. Like, how can we make their lives easier, the developers that we have left?
[00:14:08] Mark: I think it makes a lot more sense to start simplifying rather than just trying to like, invest in, maintaining the Ferrari. Yeah. Yeah.
[00:14:19] Kalen: Yeah, that's interesting.
[00:14:20] Mark: On more of the enterprise macro level, they, we have these startups like fabric and commerce tools, which are like only composable commerce, like they don't have a front end. I'm seeing like they're talking more of the companies that are using these old big monoliths like IBM WebSphere and they're saying, Hey get off this mono, a slow old monolith that it's so hard to develop on and use us.
[00:14:48] Mark: And then you can develop like with whatever tools that, that you want. But those companies already have, a huge dev team and basically they're. They're trying to simplify, coming from a really complex old system. And then headless is actually simpler than that old system, whereas Shopify's on the other side.
[00:15:09] Mark: It's like it's already simpler and so if you go headless, you get more complex.
[00:15:13] Kalen: That makes sense. That makes sense. Yeah. I've never seen WebSphere. I can only imagine. It's fairly enterprisey, yeah. A lot of these bigger systems have been around for a while. I was talking to somebody on Twitter about NetSuite and how they use it, but that it's not necessarily that smooth to work in.
[00:15:32] Mark: Yeah. Some of those systems like NetSuite and like even Salesforce Commerce Cloud, I think that they're pushing headless a bit because their front end isn't particularly sophisticated and honestly like Magento I think did a couple years ago when they're pushing like PWS and. Headless in p w studio they were pushing it because the front end theming of Magento was so bad and it was such a pain. It was like, oh, that was the antidote to that you just abandoned the theme altogether and Right. Headless. So I think the more complex systems even Magento to, to a point still is okay, headless is.
[00:16:15] Mark: The solution to that complexity or like that old, front end system. You can just write in whatever you want. You can write in React view
[00:16:24] Kalen: yeah. But even then, but even then, like the the Hiva theme picked up a lot of popularity. Yeah. And I would say amongst the, whatever the.
[00:16:34] Kalen: Community is versus there's certain segment of the community that it's the go-to choice. Yeah. And that's just, and I think that was a reaction to, like you're saying, issues with the default theme and also issues with pwa were, being super complicated. Yeah.
[00:16:50] Mark: But yeah, I don't think they got too far in Magento headless world. I haven't run across a ton of Magento, two sites that are headless. Yeah. And it does get even more complex, but at least like you could like theoretically separate your front end team. Like really they could write and react as opposed to learning magento's theming system, which is pretty complex. And it's XML and all that fun stuff.
[00:17:15] Kalen: Yeah, it's funny, I have a different I think, perceive all the Magento stuff a lot differently now, like being immersed in Shopify and stuff for a few months.
[00:17:26] Kalen: And it's funny because some things are obviously different that I, other things are similar that I didn't expect to be similar. Like for example the whole uptime thing, like where people are concerned about their site going down or being broken, which can mean different things.
[00:17:45] Kalen: Like sometimes that's the core Shopify infrastructure, like a very small sliver of the time. It's the core Shopify infrastructure. And just being aware of that for the uptime. Shopify app tracks all that. And then, but then there's maybe you broke something in your theme code. Maybe you have apps that are doing something weird, right?
[00:18:04] Kalen: Yeah. So like the anxiety around, is my site down or broken? I've been surprised by how common that is though. It's a completely different. Thing from with Magento where like your whole size is down. It's just broken. The server's down,
[00:18:24] Mark: it doesn't down load at all down.
[00:18:26] Kalen: Yeah. Yeah.
[00:18:26] Kalen: Yeah. So that's been a kind of a, that's been a surprise. But,
[00:18:30] Mark: And then with Magento, you could theoretically break the checkout and you could still break it. Like you can Yeah, break with Shopify, but there was another level of the server just not being available.
[00:18:40] Mark: But then sometimes it's the worst thing is like the server is available. Or, the site loads, but it doesn't work. You can't get to the checkout. Cause then you don't even have awareness of it. And that's why, these apps like uptime right time are like helping you test your site, like that, that's more important. That, that's just as important as the server being up. If you can browse and not check out like you're basically closed still.
[00:19:05] Kalen: And also it's as problems get solved in technology, then you care you have different problems, but things that would've been smaller issues.
[00:19:17] Kalen: Like your whole site being down because your servers are broken versus my add to cart button is broken because the developer did something. The job you would think the servers down is like by orders of magnitude, a bigger problem. But once that's out, out of the picture and it's not really within your frame of reference, now that add to cart button is just as bad.
[00:19:39] Kalen: From the business person's perspective, it's it's not working. Like them heads are gonna roll, one way or another.
[00:19:45] Mark: Exactly. So yeah, you're just like, different problems. There's still problems, but they just shift from the site being available versus like the site just functioning correctly.
[00:19:58] Mark: Yeah. It's
[00:20:00] Kalen: like that hierarchy of what is it, Maslow, it's like Maslow's hierarchy. But like the, the tech version,
[00:20:07] Mark: I think we've moved on to better problems of like, all right, yes. Can I buy something? Yes. But they don't go away completely. Yeah.
[00:20:15] Kalen: Yeah. And then seeing, like I saw, I see, I saw a lot of people who were really excited about like the Shopify functions.
[00:20:22] Kalen: Which allow, I still don't understand 'em too well, but every like developer I talk to is like super pumped about 'em and playing with them. But it seems like they let you, and along with functions, some of the checkout customization features that have launched more recently are Yeah. Are letting you do more customization in the checkout, which obviously it's taken Shopify a while to get there.
[00:20:49] Kalen: And they've had different types of customization options for plus and people, but they're getting more and more custom. But it's to do that while keeping your core infrastructure rock solid is a very hard thing to do. So that's been interesting to, to look at. And have you looked at the functions at all Shopify functions?
[00:21:11] Mark: Yeah. Yeah. It's a little similar to the Shopify script editor that they used to have, or they still have for Shopify Plus. Where you can tie into some native functionality. The script editor was written in Ruby. But there're definitely, there's sunsetting that, and there's more functionality in the function editor, and I think to your point, Shopify is slowly opening up like the kimono and like they've, they had a very walled garden approach, Apple. And I was watching this Blackberry documentary, which is, or actually is drama. It's really interesting. But I forgot that when the iPhone was first released, they didn't have an app store.
[00:21:52] Mark: It was just Apple's apps and then they had an app store. I can't that either. Very limited, very limited APIs and everything. And I think that's what Shopify has been going through of like, all right, we have apps and how can we open up the checkout? How can we open up the backend functionality?
[00:22:12] Mark: The primary thing is preserving the, the core, core stability of the platform. If we compromise that, if we go to the Android model, it's just like the wild west of you could have viruses on your site and, it gives you more rope to basically break your site.
[00:22:28] Mark: Versus there, there is a level of comfort that there's like less ways. To break a shop by site, it's still very possible, yeah. We have experience with that. Our clients have experience with breaking their own site as well. But I do sleep way better at night, the past couple years than the first couple years of, working primarily on Magento.
[00:22:50] Kalen: Yeah. Yeah. So
[00:22:51] Mark: you're the anxiety of what could go wrong?
[00:22:55] Kalen: Yeah. Yeah. It's it's like you're definitely sleeping easier and yet there's still is anxiety around some of those things. And, it just evolves. But the, and then the app store has been interesting to, to see how people, what issues people have with it.
[00:23:14] Kalen: And a lot of developers are super not thrilled with a lot of things about the App store. Which again, I thought everybody in sh in Shopify apps or everybody's happy, like you're not, you don't have code overlapping like with Magento, like code level break conflicts. But now it's like you have other types of conflicts between D, multiple SaaS apps, maybe it's front end or just, are they in integrating the way you'd want them to, whatever.
[00:23:47] Kalen: Yeah. And then there's the issue that there's like too many of them. So everybody is overloaded with all these apps. And then people are also frustrated about the expense of the apps. Because, SaaS is Basically as an, as a whole industry has is increasing prices all the time. And so you get apps that do well and they tend to, and then you're paying, 750 bucks a month for something and then you've got 15, yeah. So that's been interesting to. To see some of the dynamics there.
[00:24:18] Mark: I bet with Mesa more of those dynamics of there's so many copycat apps for basically everything, so it's how do you stand out in the App store? I've heard it's very expensive to try to use like their advertising on the app store.
[00:24:33] Mark: You'll get like an install and like you pay per install. You might pay like a hundred or $200 for an install, and then someone uninstall it like two, two minutes later and it's just like like I just paid $200 for a conversion, but it didn't really go anywhere.
[00:24:49] Mark: Yeah.
[00:24:51] Kalen: I've seen people talk about that a lot on Twitter. I don't, I haven't dealt with any of the, our. App store stuff. I do think we, I have done some searches and I see Mesa come up, so I'm guessing we do good. Have some ads running there. I should ask the team about that. But I've seen people post about the like Gil and Green Greenberg, Gil Greenberg?
[00:25:12] Mark: I think so. Just,
[00:25:13] Kalen: he's just Gil to me. And Dennis Hegstad I think too. But Yeah, it seems like it's, and then I think a lot of like if you're a newer, like last couple years, fund, like well-funded app, a lot of 'em, it seems like they don't really even care that much about the app store or they're going after the plus market or the, somewhere towards the higher end of the Shopify market.
[00:25:36] Kalen: And like you'll see, they'll have one review or two reviews or something and and they're out here, liquid IV as a customer and a whole bunch of others and stuff like that. And that's the. The direction that they go.
[00:25:50] Mark: Yeah. Cuz I think the app store serves two functions for those kinds of merchants.
[00:25:55] Mark: It's one, it's a possible install channel, like you could find out about the app. And that's probably not super useful for enterprise level sales. But two, it's. Just a quick way to be able to install, like once you've done the due diligence and done the sales process for weeks and weeks on the enterprise level.
[00:26:15] Mark: Yeah. It's just okay, now it's very easy for your team to install it. Yeah. So you need to be on the app store, even if you're not like really leveraging like the marketplace functionality of, people discovering you. Totally.
[00:26:30] Kalen: And then they just recently, I think I wanna say maybe it was Friday launched the updates to the relevance ranking for reviews in the app store.
[00:26:40] Kalen: Yeah. Which was interesting. Pretty cool. Any changes? Yeah. So I looked at Mesa and actually the top like three were all really good, longer, more meaty reviews. Nice. And it had pulled in a couple of older ones cause it used to just sort by recency. Yeah. But I went in and it pulled in a couple older ones that were, but I looked and I was like, oh, they're all, they all look really good actually.
[00:27:04] Kalen: But I think one of our other apps somebody told me had the same problem that other people are seeing, which is some of the things that floats to the top are not super flattering. And in some cases a couple people said they're floating stuff at the top that doesn't even necessarily look very high quality.
[00:27:23] Kalen: Yeah. So that, I would def that's definitely frustrating if that's, if that is happening to you. But I like the idea a lot.
[00:27:30] Mark: Yeah. I think they're trying to optimize. I think they are aware. It's a problem. And I know they added at some point install time. Like, how long have you used this app?
[00:27:41] Mark: Months or like seconds, basically. And I'm assuming they're factoring that into the relevance as well of someone that's used the app for a couple months is gonna have a much more relevant review than someone that used it for one day, basically.
[00:27:54] Kalen: Yeah. And then like I saw somebody posting about how people will do, customers will do stuff like, they'll give you a one star and then they're emailing support and they're asking you for some new feature, and then they're like I'll update it to a five star if you do the new feature.
[00:28:08] Kalen: And I was like, that is so manipulative. And so then we, I was looking at the the the rules of what you're allowed to do, what you're not allowed to do with ratings. Yeah. And I was like, you know what? I'm gonna write a bullet point for this type of thing because this should be like it should be across the boards that you can't do that.
[00:28:27] Kalen: Yeah. But then as I was like writing it, I was thinking it through and I went if to them as a merchant, Your app is a one star without this new feature, then that's how they feel. It's a one star, like it's in a way it is how they feel. You know what? Indeed it's well, like it's shitty,
[00:28:51] Mark: but if you buy like an apple and you're like, ah, this doesn't taste, this doesn't taste like an orange.
[00:28:58] Mark: It's whose fault is that? You like, okay, yeah, I get, if it's like false advertising in the app's description, they say that they're gonna do something and they don't. Yeah. But like sometimes it's just merchants are just. Angry that it just doesn't read their mind. Yeah. Like it doesn't do exactly what they want.
[00:29:14] Mark: And it's just try another app. Or I'm sorry. There is no app that exists. Yeah. That doesn't
[00:29:19] Kalen: Yeah. Yeah. Like they're just asking for a brand new feature. Yeah. And if you give it to, yeah. And I was going man, that's so crazy that Shopify lets them do that. I would think that there should be a way to report those and, yeah.
[00:29:34] Kalen: Even if I think they're only, the reporting process is just manual currently. I think really, I think you'd have to email some, somebody to report, a review that breaks the guidelines, but it seems like it'd be good to have that option and what they do with those reports. Of course, they could figure that out, but just having the ability to go, come on man, this is not cool.
[00:29:55] Kalen: And then start to categorize the different types of reports. Seems like it would help, but
[00:30:01] Mark: Yeah. Yeah, I'm sure like it's a lot of work. If they're doing it very manually right now.
[00:30:07] Kalen: I think so. Yeah. I think
they're,
[00:30:10] Mark: I like a lot of that is why I haven't really been interested in doing an app.
[00:30:15] Mark: A lot of people ask. Agency is just oh, you could do Shopify apps. Like what? Why don't you just do it? And I'm like first off, we have to develop it the first time, which a lot of times we have to do it one off for one merchant, which is fine. But then like those customer service requests and it's just if we're charging $10 a month, they send in like one customer service request. Yeah. And then the time. And money it takes to fulfill that request or just even respond to it as there's all your profit gone.
[00:30:44] Kalen: Yeah. Yeah. It's it's brutal. Yeah, once, once you get going and the economics are working out, then it's Hey man, that's a great business model, but can be tricky to get there.
[00:30:56] Kalen: It seems like you're very much like. Comfortable with the agency model. Like it's what? It's like your, it's your expertise. You're not trying to do a bunch of different random things. Yeah, you found your sweet
[00:31:09] Mark: spot. We like dabble in the background with fun projects. But I think in terms of like actual, like where the business are business is going, I think it's smarter to focus on the service side.
[00:31:24] Mark: Because a lot of apps and Partners and everything they have the opposite problem. Like they're very focused on the product, but they're really bad at services. So there's a lot of times like synergies between us and partners because they, like a recharge or a Klaviyo.
[00:31:40] Mark: They're like, we wanna sell our thing, we don't wanna do customer development, or we. Our business isn't really set up to serve customers in that way, and I think I think it works the other way around as well. We're not set up to, provide like product ties support to something, because basically we're like a little too expensive.
[00:32:00] Mark: We don't have those layers of like customer service of okay, like this first tier, second tier. Everything would probably just go to a developer immediately, and then it's it just doesn't make sense time wise.
[00:32:12] Kalen: Yeah. And then, yeah.
[00:32:13] Mark: Sorry, go ahead. I was just gonna say I have invested in things in the ecosystem and I think for agency owners it's probably like smarter if you want to be involved in more of the ecosystem and have some skin in the game, like to, invest or something. Yeah. But if you try to do it yourself I've seen a lot of agencies try to do it and it seems like a huge waste of time.
[00:32:37] Kalen: Yeah, man, my timing is so bad within I haven't done a lot of investing into just like a little bit, but I was just thinking over the weekend about like how bad my timing is with most things. E even with Tesla I had been a fan of Tesla forever, and then I finally got one and like right after I got one that.
[00:32:58] Kalen: A model y like the prices went down by 18%. Oh my God.
[00:33:03] Mark: You bought on the way down.
[00:33:05] Kalen: Yeah. And yeah. Just, it is, it's it, and I feel like I'm not bad at Seeing a need in the market or yeah, seeing a like something and going, oh, that looks like a, a good thing. But then in terms of pulling the trigger on it at the right time, I'm horrendous at it. Yes. So I guess you just have to know your strengths and your weaknesses and playing your strengths,
[00:33:29] Mark: I think timing is everything. When Yeah, when you're seeing things at an early stage it's hard to have the confidence to go through with it. Yes. But that's probably like the time that you need to start.
[00:33:41] Mark: Otherwise, if you're just a me too, six months. 12 months later, like you were already behind the people that did that, have that same idea that time. Yeah.
[00:33:52] Kalen: I think it's like I see the things and then it's easier for me to put my time into doing something related to that versus putting money in.
[00:34:03] Kalen: I end up being too hesitant and then even, and then too slow, and then I, Do it at the wrong time, basically.
[00:34:11] Mark: But Yeah, investing in general unless you're just investing in like an index fund, it's probably like a losing game anyway, right? If you're doing angel investing or even stock picking, Yeah.
[00:34:23] Mark: There's hedge funds that like they get 18% returns or something and that's like amazing. So if if they have like thousands employees and quants and PhDs and everything, and. That's their bar. Like I really don't think that, the ordinary person is going to achieve that.
[00:34:39] Mark: Gambling. Yeah.
[00:34:40] Kalen: Yeah. I think I saw somebody tweet about it that, and I think they had, I don't know, some large number of angel investments in SaaS and tech, like maybe it was 30 or something, and I think they said that. Only one has really made any money. And there's somebody, and I forget who it was, but there was somebody that's yes, I think it was yes.
[00:35:00] Kalen: And like he's like super plugged in, and.
[00:35:03] Mark: So yeah, I think it's just, it's also a very long horizon of I think he was talking about the last two years and in angel investing. Okay. That's so early. Like basically you have to give yourself about 10 years to see how you really did and 10 years later it's you've moved on so much. Probably is so you're really like shooting in the dark and you just, see what comes of it.
[00:35:26] Kalen: Yeah. Yeah. I talked to this dude Daniel, and he has an app called Abra. It's a discounts app. And when I talked to him before I saw this, it crossed my radar.
[00:35:39] Kalen: I was talking to an agency owner buddy of mine, and he was saying that certain things in Shopify are hard to do with discounts like, I don't know, multiple coupons at a time. He had a couple things and I was surprised. I was like, that doesn't seem like it should be that. I was like, there has to be something out there for that.
[00:35:56] Kalen: But he, he knows that. He's looked into it and. And he was thinking about building something similar. And then and then I think Albert handles some of those UK use cases or his planning too, or I don't know, but when I but what, but this is an example of an app I see and I go, yeah, I think this is gonna, I think this is gonna take off.
[00:36:14] Kalen: And the founding team, they were in house with Shopify for a while and stuff, and they seem like they know what they're doing, but. Yeah, but did that, I had that thought the other day after talking to him, I was like, yeah, this is going, this app is gonna gonna go somewhere, kind of thing.
[00:36:29] Kalen: Which you know, sometimes, go ahead. Oh no. You go ahead.
[00:36:33] Mark: I was gonna say, the problem is like, as we were just touching on in the app store, is there's so many apps that do like the same thing. And basically you release an app and then someone clones you. It's hard if your entire business model relies on the app store versus Like a Klaviyo or, I don't know, I'm trying to think of another example. Like a yacht PO or stamp, like they are on the app store. But they're they're more of, there's a SaaS product that's leveraging the app store for maybe a channel, but more of just easy install.
[00:37:07] Mark: I'm like, I'm not too like optimistic about, individual apps that basically oh, I, it just fixes a Shopify problem, I think. Other competitors are gonna come and compete to death or Shopify can just fix it too Shopify does support multiple yeah.
[00:37:25] Mark: Coupons now. Oh, okay.
[00:37:27] Kalen: Yeah. Yeah. That was a recent thing actually, right? Yeah. Remember, I remember, yeah, I remember telling him that. And then I can't remember what the, I can't remember the specifics. But yeah. No it's that's the deal. It's and I think that's why.
[00:37:41] Kalen: Everybody's building out their partnership channels, that's the way to develop a competitive moat versus just the, I think you could almost say that if you're just relying on the app store there, there probably was a time that it would work, but that time's probably gone.
[00:37:59] Kalen: Yeah. And this is another one of those interesting Magento parallels because when I built, started building my extension for Magento, it was just after that, probably three, four, a year, five year timeframe of when you could just launch an extension in the marketplace. Marketplace, what we call it, the extension.
[00:38:20] Kalen: Yeah. Marketplace. Yeah. And a, and there was a whole like generation of people that did that. And and then it just took off. And then I got into the tail end of that and I had to do it different ways. And so it's probably a similar thing with Shopify that's why everybody's doing partnership channels and yeah,
[00:38:38] Mark: stuff like that.
[00:38:39] Mark: What's interesting about the Magento marketplace is what I actually feel like it never really took off in the same way of the Shopify marketplace where plenty of extension providers like just opted out of it, may, maybe they would list it, but like it wasn't, I don't think it's been like the main source of sales for a lot of, magento. Extensions and integrations and I think probably it's just a bit of a numbers game. Like I don't think that there was enough like merchant traffic to the marketplace where it made sense for, extension vendors to really focus on, marketing their apps there.
[00:39:18] Mark: Because also I think they, they probably lose a cut. So it's like, all right, maybe we optimize our SEO so that when people. Google. Yeah. This problem on Magento, they go to our website versus competing with our marketplace listing.
[00:39:31] Kalen: Yeah. And then of course with Magento you didn't you didn't have to go through the marketplace because it was, it's open source.
[00:39:38] Kalen: You could do it yeah. Separately.
[00:39:41] Mark: And they really never solved the quality problem too. Like it theoretically should have been like a stamp of quality of you're approved on the marketplace. But my opinion is that th it, there was really no difference if I didn't trust an extension on the marketplace any more than I just getting it straight from the merchant.
[00:40:01] Kalen: Sure. Better. But would you say that the same exists in the sh with the Shopify app store? Like you don't trust something? Just for being there?
[00:40:12] Mark: That's a good question. I think it least it has more like volume in terms of like reviews. So you have more data points of okay, there's 30 reviews that are positive.
[00:40:24] Mark: But the Magento marketplace didn't really have the volume of reviews to be able to make that assessment. And I do think that Shopify does keep a pretty close eye on the quality. Like I've heard that the app store approval process is actually pretty pretty hard.
[00:40:41] Mark: Like it's just a bit of a pain. Sometimes that's true. That's true. So it's a high bar.
[00:40:47] Kalen: Yeah, that's true. And that's another complaint you hear about is that is that, it can be difficult or it can be like random, like the, what you may have to do to get approval is could, depending on who's reviewing which individual is dealing with, it could be different.
[00:41:04] Kalen: Yeah. Your mile, your mileage can vary and then that could be frustrating. But
[00:41:09] Mark: yeah, I haven't had to deal with. Yeah, back in the day I've done some iOS apps and it was the same way with Apple Some, sometimes you could submit something and it was like, all right. Got through sometimes like a random reviewer just flagged something random and it's just this was in the last version and the last reviewer didn't care about it.
[00:41:28] Mark: So what are you bringing up now? That was always like anxiety producing of submitting a new version to the apple.
[00:41:35] Kalen: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Totally. Haven't had to deal with that too much, so fingers crossed.
[00:41:41] Mark: You're more of an Android man, so are you gonna get the Vision Pro though, or the Oculus?
[00:41:46] Mark: Ah,
[00:41:47] Kalen: the vision man. I got, I have an Oculus, that's only 300 bucks. But I haven't used it much. I got it. And I did some of the exercise apps, which are surprisingly good. There's this boxing one. Where you're like, pun these things are coming at you and punching them.
[00:42:02] Kalen: But you, it, it yet gross cuz you get real like sweaty, which is the point. But you'd really Yeah. Get like a decent workout, but then everything just gets like nasty. Okay. And so yeah. But as things get better, man, it's gonna be pretty cool. But the Vision Pro dude, that thing looks.
[00:42:21] Kalen: Ooh. Looks super interesting, man. The price tag is quite a bit higher, but yeah, but I saw you tweet about it and I was like, oh dang. He got one. But then I realized you were probably just joking.
[00:42:32] Mark: I will get one as soon as it, release it, but,
[00:42:35] Kalen: Nice.
[00:42:36] Mark: I. It's I do think it's actually gonna be pretty significant, even though it's priced, it's priced even more expensive than a computer.
[00:42:44] Mark: Theoretically, you could replace like your MacBook with it. Yeah, because it's supposed to have the apps and it's designed to be your monitor, your computer. Yeah. And then I think as opposed to the Oculus tried to pr create a product that like it was at a price point that people would actually buy, like in mass.
[00:43:04] Mark: Apple's we need to create the best version. Yeah. And then we'll see where the price is and then Yeah. We'll just convince people it's worth it.
[00:43:12] Kalen: Yeah. It's Inelastic demand for Apple products, but Exactly. Yeah, dude, I like at, there's gonna be a point where you, it's gonna be possible to work.
[00:43:23] Kalen: And then eventually we're, you'll be able to spend most of your day in vr. So it's just a question of like, when that's gonna happen, but, there'll be a tipping point. This might be it. And that's pretty. That's pretty huge. I tried one of the like computer screen mirror things in Oculus, but it was just horrible.
[00:43:40] Kalen: It was pixelated and, yeah. But yeah, to the point where they really get the sweet spot of comfort and resolution and stuff to where you can work in there. Man, that's gonna be so cool. I have a
[00:43:52] Mark: feeling, I think I heard feeling, yeah. Sorry. Go ahead. I was gonna say, I have a feeling they've done some testing and they've brought the displays so like to high level that like they probably solved the problem, like fatigue. I think that's a problem with a lot of displays like the Oculus is like it's low enough quality that you can't use it for a while. Yeah. But my feeling is that Apple's figured that out basically.
[00:44:18] Kalen: Probably. At 3,500, they better have man.
[00:44:22] Kalen: Yeah. They better
[00:44:23] Mark: have. If I only use it an hour a day, I'm not sure if it's worth it,
[00:44:26] Kalen: yeah. But I heard I think I heard Zuckerberg on a podcast talk about how they do their meetings. They're, they're dogfooding the meetings app and that it's like, You can you can have like side conver, like you're, like, if you're doing a meeting, you're in a room and you can have a side conversation with the person to the side of you, which is like a very natural thing that would happen in a real meeting.
[00:44:49] Kalen: Like you would say. Little comments and yeah, and just some of the other like subtle things that you would be able to do. And I wanna try to find a way to do that, like with work meetings. Cuz I think there's something there. Zoom calls are like, everybody's sick of Zoom calls, but I think it'll get better with VR at some point.
[00:45:10] Mark: Yeah, I think it is still like a bit of a ways off, but I think this is like a step in the right direction and, technology gets cheaper and better over time. So even though like it's super, the Apple version is super expensive now. I anticipate that's because it's just the first version.
[00:45:28] Mark: Over time they'll, the, they'll, this is the pro, and then they'll have the regular version, yeah. They have the iPad Pro, iPad, air, Yeah. A little confusing with the old versions. Yeah. And I think they'll have different price points of this, but they needed to go go all the way first.
[00:45:44] Kalen: Yeah. Oh yeah. No, they probably just had to, It must have been so hard to cross some of the thresholds of comfort and fatigue and all that kind of stuff, because Yeah, like the Oculus, it's like amazing. It's definitely you're like, wow, I've never experienced this kind of a visual, thing.
[00:46:00] Kalen: Before, but then it's just still, it's just it's uncomfortable after a certain point, yeah. But Yeah, man. I think we mostly covered it. We haven't talked too much about airplane wifi, but that's okay. I
[00:46:13] Mark: don't think that's we relevant for Yeah, that's a personal gripe.
[00:46:20] Mark: Like a first world problem mark problems.
[00:46:23] Kalen: Why can't they type you if you have wifi
[00:46:26] Mark: or not? That's all we, I'm gonna, maybe I need to start an app, like a flight searcher that will very high, very much highlight that ability or not.
[00:46:36] Kalen: Yeah. Yeah. Cool, man. This is fine dude. Thanks for joining and totally.
[00:46:41] Kalen: Now I gotta figure out how to end this thing. Just crop, I'll just crop it off at some point. Yeah.
