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 MageTalk - Episode 148Phillip: 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 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."Kalen: So eat that.Phillip: So suck on that. So yeah, that's a thing. Actually, we're gonna talk a little bit about B2B in a bit. So, I just wanted to mention real quick. So, Ben Marks tweeted out ... Ben Marks, community evangelist, Magento says - and I have to believe somehow that he had something to do with this, but PHP Architect, or , they're the PHP magazine which I subscribed to like 10 years ago, they're an online-Kalen: Are you still subscribed to it?Phillip: I am.Kalen: Oh nice, I was subscribed to it a while back, but no longer.Phillip: Yeah, do you know how often I interact with PHP Architect?Kalen: How often?Phillip: Exactly as often as my credit card changes or expires and I have to there and update it.Kalen: Gotcha.Phillip: Okay, so-Kalen: You're one of those great customers.Phillip: I'm a great customer. It's like I've been supporting Jeffrey Way's Laracasts since it launched. Like, I was a six dollar subscriber or five dollar subscriber at launch, and I don't think I've watched a video in three and a half years.Kalen: That's funny.Phillip: But the November issue of PHP Architect is all about Magento, modern Magento.Kalen: And it's sponsored by Magento.Phillip: Well, it's sponsored by Magento, but it's all about Magento which I think is kind of cool. A, how did I not hear of this before it happened? B, probably doesn't bode well that the very first line is, "11 Debugging Tricks in Magento." Come on, guys.Kalen: You're gonna need a lot of debugging tricks.Phillip: Way more than 11.Kalen: That's true.Phillip: No, I love it. So, a lot of really neat content coming out of there. Also talking about PHP South Africa, which I know Ben Marks was at, so he, you know ... My sense is Magento and Ben had a hand in producing and guiding the content. But kind of cool to see that happen.Kalen: Got some cool topics. "Editing the Magento Core for Fun and Profit."Phillip: It's probably Community Engineering, right?Kalen: Yeah. "Command and Query API Design in Magento 2," "Headless-" I saw the greatest Halloween costume. It was Magento Headless, did you see that one? It was like a thing with its head cut off and it had a Magento logo on it. It was fantastic.Phillip: You gotta put that in the show notes or whatever. Paste that in the doc, we've got a doc.Kalen: Yeah, we'll get it in there.Phillip: Okay. So, you made this crazy cool announcement on Twitter the other day about Commerce Hero, like you hit a milestone. And you keep posting these amazing graphs that have no X or Y axis that nobody knows what they mean.Kalen: There's an X axis, no Y axis.Phillip: So tell me what's going on with Commerce Hero, you've got some pretty big news.Kalen: So, we crossed a million bucks in business that's gone through the platform. So, whether that's, you know, if somebody hires somebody for a $10,000 project, that's $10,000 going through the platform, and then you know, we don't get all that money, we get a percentage. Phillip: One day you're gonna accidentally slip up and say what the percentage is, and then everyone will know what your revenue is, but that's okay.Kalen: Well, yeah, I mean, the percentage is not very secretive, so people can reverse engineer that. But yeah, that was just a cool milestone to hit. And it's neat that that's money that's going to people in the community, whether a developer's getting hired or doing freelance or whatever agency. So, it's cool. That's exciting.Phillip: That's awesome, man. So, in that sales for developers talk, you sort of had a similar graph of the long, slow SAS ramp of death or something to that effect. How long did it take you to get to a similar milestone with your pair business?Kalen: Oh my gosh, dude, much longer. So the first, like, 14 months, I was at a couple hundred - I had three customers. I was at a couple hundred bucks a month for 14 months. And this is kind of what my whole talk is about, is that like, I built it, I tweeted it out, and I thought that everybody was gonna start using it, and it just didn't happen. So, it was probably about 14 months in when, like, we started the podcast. And that was a huge driver of growth, having it on there. And then just getting comfortable-Phillip: I'm so happy to hear you finally say that.Kalen: Getting comfortable with getting on the phone and, like, just calling people, just setting up phone calls. There's so many things that really are not rocket science, but they just gotta be done. So, probably, to get to a similar point, probably took like two years or something like that.Phillip: Dang. So when's the one year anniversary of Commerce Hero?Kalen: It's been a year, actually. LinkedIn automatically posted one like a week or two ago.Phillip: No way, really?Kalen: Yeah. So it's crazy how time flies.Phillip: Has it really been a year? Is that true? November 1st?Kalen: Yup.Phillip: Dang, well happy anniversary.Kalen: Thank you, good sir.Phillip: And many happy returns or whatever the heck people say these days. Speaking of many happy returns ... Bunch of Magento news. The first of which, Magento has now released it's own security scanning tool.Kalen: So this is cool, this is basically to replace ... I mean, it's basically like a Mage Report.Phillip: Yeah, it's Mage Report, but delivered from Magento. So have you used it, have you checked it out?Kalen: I have not.Phillip: Okay, so, full disclosure, neither have I. However, what the internet was saying is it's a good first blush sort of - It's basically a lot of things that people were saying that they wished that they had with Mage Report. So, here's what the blogpost says: Real-time security status of the Magento store and how to fix potential vulnerabilities; 30 security tests to identify potential vulnerabilities, and that includes Magento patches, configuration issues, and failure to follow best security practices; so, so far so good. Historical security reports of Magento sites, so they can track the progress over time, which I think is awesome, that's what we need. Scan result reports that clearly show which checks passed or failed. Scheduling of scans for recurring dates and times or on-demand, which is baller. And then you know, remediation steps, which I think they've just ... I don't know, that feels like a rehash of a previous bullet, but they needed six bullets and not three. Okay, so here's the ... There's two things that I think make it differentiated. One, nobody can just use this tool, like, specifically just to check other people's sites. You have to prove ownership of the site via the one place that Magento is most actively hacked, which is the ... There is a field in Magento 1 and 2 in the backend that allows you to put ... it's called Miscellaneous Scripts in Magento 1 and I forget what it's called in Magento 2. But you can just put random script, and it's completely unescaped. You can put anything in there. So, what we used to put in there was tags, like site tags, like a meta tag for Google Webmaster Tools or something like that. So, the suggestion is you put this Magento tag in there and Magento scans the site to prove that you have ownership of it. The problem is is that particular field is the one that's always attacked in SQL injection or, you know, in any vulnerability that installs, you know, bad scripts on your site and compromises your security. So, Something Digital - I can only speak for our experience - we have stopped using that field and we actually actively lock it down. So we don't allow that field to be used anymore, which is sort of a shortcoming, so we can't use this tool. A DNS Check, which is, you know, usually a fallback, that doesn't require any code deployment, which is what it would require for us to install the code that Magento needs, would be a reasonable fallback. Kalen: Sounds like a great fallback.Phillip: Yeah, I wish Magento would do that. But, you know, if anything, if all I want is to see historical reports and scheduling scans or having recurring scans, this already wins. If it does all the same things that Mage Report does, and it has those, I will prefer this tool. So, I'm excited about that. Also, it looks like it should just hashtag just work, you know, provided that you own the store. So, I don't know.Kalen: Yeah, I think that ... Did Joel over at Mediotype, I think, worked on this?Phillip: I don't know.Kalen: I believe so, I'm not sure.Phillip: Oh yeah, you're just dropping that out of nowhere for no reason like you have no idea. You couldn't possibly have any inside knowledge about that.Kalen: Yeah, couldn't possibly have any inside knowledge. Uh, what else we got? Magento B2B commerce hub.Phillip: And yet, one more reason why Magento is signaling in not so uncertain ways to us that B2B is the next great evolution of Magento as a platform. They have launched something called the Magento B2B Resource Hub, and the hero graphic on the blogpost says, "Join the B2B commerce revolution." So, if you guys are reading all the hints here, this is a big deal and we should all be learning how to deploy B2B. So, some of the things that you'll get in the Resource Hub is "The Five Killer Features That B2B Buyers Expect," and so that is a white paper report that you'll need to download. The Gartner report about B2B and how Magento is killing it in B2B. And then "Four Key Ways That Merchants Can Stay Competitive and Grow Their Business," and that's yet another report. So, a bunch of a reports for you to read, and then basically like, here's all the stuff Magento Commerce B2B can do, and then you can watch the webinar. You can actually watch a B2B webinar, which is ...Kalen: It's funny, I remember a tweet that you put out ... You said something like, "If you don't know why people call websites portals in 2017, you're not responding to B2B RFPs." Which I think ... Was that targeted at me? Because I made fun of you for calling a website a portal.Phillip: Yeah. So, I just don't know what else to call it. So, when people say portals, you know, in business, they likely mean like a gated website for people to purchase from. Or a portal is place that's sort of gated. Thus, the word portal. Like, it's not just open for the whole world to get to, it's one-Kalen: That's what portals used to be, like, when Yahoo was a portal.Phillip: Well, I don't know, maybe. Oh my gosh. Yeah, Yahoo was an aggregator, but okay. So, basically, that's the new normal is they all want digital, you know, they all want to do digital commerce because the way that they're doing it today, I kid you not, is they still like send people a ... Or they have a form, it's probably a form that's on their website somewhere, and they print it out, and it's a big grid of all the skews that they have, and it's, you know, quantities on the X and Y axis, and you can just go and you can order certain quantities of certain sizes and colors of things, and it's actually easier for the merchant to just take that piece of paper and go boom boom boom, and then fax it. Or take a picture of it on their phone and just email it. So it's not like these people aren't already engaged with the business, but it's a pain for the business, because the business has to key in the order; the business is required to make sure that the order's correct, then they have to figure out how to pay for it, and there's net payment terms and all that garbage. So, the businesses are trying to get better.Kalen: So, I was gonna ask you, as somebody that is bidding on B2B projects and implementing them, like, in the context of all of this educational material that's out there to kind of help, you know, solution partners, agencies sell these projects, what's the process looking like for you? What tips would you give people that are trying to bid on B2B jobs? Like, what resources have been the most helpful? What types of ... Like, are there questions that clients are asking that are difficult to answer? What are some of the nuggets that you've extracted in your exploits?Phillip: So, if you read ... Well, the first thing I would say is if you've never delivered a B2B site, there's really-Kalen: Good luck?Phillip: No, no. First of all, to win any website build, you need to sound knowledgeable and you need to come off as smarter than the people that are asking for your help. If they were capable of building it themselves, they would already have built it, right? So they're looking to you for guidance.Kalen: Step number one, be smart.Phillip: Well, and the way to be smart is to educate yourself. So, one, you can look at all the materials that Magento already has. Two, you can do some research about what B2B ordering looks like, or B2B commerce looks like. And go look at some of the competitive platforms out there and see what it is they say are their differentiators. If you go to OroCommerce right now, they'll tell you, "We're native B2B," and they'll tell you the 12 things that they have that Magento didn't have a year ago. You know, some of those things ... And there's some new language that we're having to learn. So, what is a requisition list? A requisition list is basically like a wishlist, to put it in B2C terms, but it's like a wishlist that is persistent that you can repopulate a shopping cart with over and over and over again. So, it's to say, like, I have a monthly order that I always order from you as a customer of yours, I always want that same order every month, but I want to be the one who controls when it goes in. So, I have a template for an order that I can populate a shopping cart with, and that's called a requisition list. You know, then there's another concept which is a quote, which is I'm gonna populate a shopping cart with some items, and then send it to you to say, "Give me your best price on these items," and basically bid back to me how low I could pay. And that is a process that happens a lot. Then there's another thing that Magento calls ... Oh, I always forget the name, the actual name. Not segmented catalog ... Something like that. They have another feature that basically allows you to set up on a per-customer basis negotiated price terms. So, customer A pays $5 for this, customer B pays $5.50, right? Instead of having to put them all into groups, you might have ten thousand customers that all have different negotiated prices, this facilitates that. And then you can hide certain - I think they call it gated catalog, actually - then you can hide and show some certain parts of the catalog or you can hide products from certain customers and show them to others. So, those are all things that are ... Oh, and then at the end of the day, basically what I said about portals is a lot of times you don't want the site to be shoppable without you having approved their customer account. And if you go way back to 2010, 2009, what is the very first module that Vinai Kopp released that gained popularity? It was a customer account approval module on Magento 1. So, these are requirements that have been around for a long time, but unless you were specifically building sites like this, you probably didn't encounter them. So there's some new language to learn, a bunch of new techniques, and if you can ask your customers whether they need those things, you're gonna sound really smart. I don't think it, at the end of the day, it matters whether you've ... I do think there's a chicken and egg problem, which is the reason why I'm so hyped on B2B right now, which is there's only three partners in the Magento community that have, you know, experience delivering B2B right now, and that's Optaros and, you know, Corra, and Blue Acorn. Kalen: It's funny because everybody ... Like, when we were interviewing people you'll ask, like, "What does your agency specialize in? What makes you guys ... Everybody, B2B, B2B. We're a B2B agency, B2B agency, you know? So people are starting to catch onto that.Phillip: Well, you're seeing it, right? I think you're seeing it. So, anyway, it's interesting. I think this gives the core platform ... As long as you know Magento now, I think you could deliver B2B. I think because it's an Enterprise only feature - and I'm at this new place where I refuse to call it Magento Commerce, it's still Enterprise. And fight me. Just fight me, I don't care. I'm just gonna call it Enterprise.Kalen: I'm with you, dude. I was trying to use the new language and it's ... I think you're right. I think I'm declaring new language bankruptcy and we're just going back.Phillip: Yup. I'm going right back to it. It's Magento Enterprise and Magento Community, and if you don't like it, you know, shirts and skins, let's go. Kalen: That brings us into Squashtoberfest. Phillip: Dude, yes. Hit this up. Kalen: Which Magento Community Engineering encouraged people to squash issues, do PRs against the GitHub repo in October, and big shout out to Interactiv4. If you're a long-time listener, they were almost the first company we shouted out on Episode 1 of MageTalk for some unrelated things. But they have been really hitting it hard, 143 pull requests created, 60 merged. And then followed by the next is Experius, 36 created, 13 merged. So, Interactiv4 has been hitting it hard so congrats to them for that.Phillip: Dang. That's unreal. 114 different unique developers submitting pull requests. I'm super proud of that. Something Digital's on that list somewhere.Kalen: So, 394 pull requests total from 114 devs for Squashtoberfest. That's hard to say without laughing.Phillip: That's an average of about 3.45 a piece, so some like Interactiv4 are, you know, putting in like dozens. But it's really awesome to see this much participation. That's crazy. And they're getting t-shirts, right? Like, Magento's rewarding them, they're sending them t-shirts, which is kind of cool.Kalen: Sending swag and stuff, it's great, yeah.Phillip: Did you get any swag when you went to the new Magento office in L.A.?Kalen: I did. I got a cup holder ... or a cup warmer ... Phillip: Koozie?Kalen: Whatever those things are that keep your ... Yes. And that's all I got. There was other swag to be had, I think, but I didn't grab it, nobody offered it, so I don't know what to tell you. But the koozie was well worth it.Phillip: I'm getting rid of this next one, it's kind of pointless. So, you went to the new L.A. office, what do you think of the new L.A. office?Kalen: It's cool. It's cool, man. It's big. I'm trying to think ... Yeah, I did, I went to the old office a couple times. A lot of cool branding, like cool orange stuff and Magento signs. You just gotta look at it. I'm not gonna do a very good job of describing it. But it looks good. I got to hang out at Sherrie's desk for a little bit. That's where the official afterparty was of the meetup. So, that was cool. It was funny, they mentioned that Roy Rubin walked in, I guess, for the open house or whatever they were having, and, like, he walked across the whole floor of the place, and literally nobody recognized him because it's an entirely different crew from back then.Phillip: Sure, yeah, nobody knew who he was, right?Kalen: Nobody knew, on the floor, like ... So that was interesting.Phillip: And this is how you do shows like Undercover Boss. Like, that right there is ... I've always wondered to myself like, "How do you not know who the CEO of your company is?" But I guess that's just, it's a thing. Kalen: Well, in this case ex-CEO.Phillip: Isn't Roy like an ultrarunner, too? I don't think he always was. Maybe he was, I don't know.Kalen: He's not on your level, but he's very decent.Phillip: Very few people are on the fitness level that I'm on.Kalen: You're killing it.Phillip: Hey, as an aside, one thing I want to applaud Magento for - and you know, I hope I'm not speaking out of turn - but I visited their office, their new L.A. office before they had the open house and all that. So they were almost done, but they weren't quite done with it. And they offered me coffee, and I said, "Oh, I'll take coffee." They were like, "Do you want iced coffee?" I'm like, "I want iced coffee, of course. Every day I want iced coffee." So we went over to this keg that had iced coffee and kombucha, right? And only those two things. Didn't have beer, right? They didn't have a keg of beer, they had iced coffee and kombucha. And I was like, you know what? Props. Because we don't need the, you know, the continual plugging of the ... You know, alcoholics are gonna be alcoholics whether or not you give them free alcohol, right? But you know, people that appreciate a good nonalcoholic drink love it. So, I was like ... Super props to Magento. I don't know, like, it set them apart for me. I was like, "That's pretty cool."Kalen: That is cool. Phillip: Anyway, I don't know why I even mentioned that. Kalen: My cowork space has beer, so ... bunch of heathens. Phillip: Yeah, I'm sitting in my cowork space right now and, you know, we've got a big beer keg, too. Oh, and speaking of new offices, Magento opened their Austin office recently, so I'm pretty excited about that. Magento's like opening offices everywhere.Kalen: Lot of new offices opening. They're hiring a bunch of people, not through Commerce Hero notably, unfortunately. Driving me crazy.Phillip: Do you hire salespeople through Commerce Hero?Kalen: I've tried. I haven't placed anybody yet but, you know, we have people that sign up and they're in sales, so ...Phillip: They're just in sales, that's awesome.Kalen: We've tried.Phillip: You know what's funny, and I never knew this, salespeople make a lot of money. Did you know that?Kalen: I do know that.Phillip: I didn't know that. I had no idea. I just thought sales was like a really dumb job. But salespeople make a lot of money.Kalen: Yup. Phillip: That's a thing.Kalen: That's a typical developer point of view. Like, those dumb salespeople.Phillip: No, I feel like developers have always been high on the horse of like, these are idiots that don't know anything, and they don't make ... You know, like it's a lame job that ... I don't know, maybe I just didn't-Kalen: Exactly. I mean, yeah. That's one of the things that I kind of ... And, you know, not to get on too much of a rant here, but-Phillip: Please. Please rant.Kalen: Like, it would be interesting if as a developer ... We get paid well as developers. We don't have anything really to complain about.Phillip: Uh, speak for yourself. No, I'm just kidding.Kalen: Phil needs a raise, that's for sure.Phillip: I'm not a developer.Kalen: Phil deserves a raise.Phillip: You hear that, Something Digital? No, I'm just kidding. I'm very well paid, thank you very much.Kalen: I can confirm that. But it'd be cool if you could get ... because salespeople get a percentage in some shape or fashion, they get some commission, right? And it would be cool if developers could get that. But it's a tricky thing to be able to measure that. You know, the whole question of like, how do you measure productivity is like impossible. I think we've talked about that a few different times. But it would be cool if you could. And you know, I mean for people that are maybe kind of straddling a sales-ish role, like, you know, you get involved in a lot of biz dev and a lot of, you know, presales type calls, and probably there's other people in that kind of a role. Maybe they're an architect or whatever. Like, get a percentage, man. Why not? You know what I'm saying? That's all I'm saying. I'm a fan of the percentage.Phillip: You love the percentage. You're Mr. Wonderful from Shark Tank. The percentage in perpetuity, that's your bag, baby.Kalen: That's my jam. Phillip: Well, one last thing about that, okay? Which is my take on it is measuring productivity is probably a bunch of hooey. I think we do need KPIs, so that we always know whether we're getting better or ... Like, I think we need personal goals, which I'm down with. But the idea that we're ... I think we should be measured as a group, right? So, not any one person measured in particular, but as a group. And I think at an agency - and I don't know how you do this anywhere else - but as a developer at an agency, if you were to ... The agency has to hit a certain margin to be profitable, which means that you sell a developer's time for a percentage more than what you pay them, which is how companies stay in business, right? So, if you're hitting a certain margin collectively as a group, meaning we're making more money than what we're paying, which means that we're delivering ... You hit a good balance between A, what you pay developers for their time and you retain them, so you pay them well, right? You keep them for a long time, so you pay them well, you don't pay them poorly. But you put enough things in place to where you can deliver projects quickly, and maybe quicker than ... You know, the longer that a project strings on, the longer that you're paying a developer, and they can't focus on another project. So, yeah, the margin is important. And if you focus on that, right? If you as a group are transparent and open about what the margin is across, like, the entire business, like our margin was 28% on this particular project and that was really bad, and it was 51% on this one and that was really good, then we have goals to hit. And then we know when we're performing well, instead of waiting until December 31st to find out that we're not gonna get a bonus of some kind, you know what I mean? So we can make proactive decisions as developers whether we want to put in a little extra time or try to develop something on the side to make our process more effective or all that stuff.Kalen: Yeah, totally. And those are great, you know, structures when you get some kind of a profit share or things like that. But, I mean when you open this up, you're like, salespeople get paid a lot, and the reason for that is because they individually get a percentage of whatever deals they ... or whatever the structure is, but they're getting a percentage of the deals that they sort of own, you know? And you know, that starts to add up.Phillip: You can't argue with, you know, the reason that developers have jobs is because people are paying for projects to be done, so you can't argue with the way that the funnel works, right? Like, the top of the funnel, the lead generation and the closing of the deal is fundamentally important for the business. It's the one thing that you can't really skimp on, right?Kalen: Yeah, I mean, you don't want to skimp on any of it, but yeah, it is. And you know, I'm sure everybody listening to this is bored by now. Most developers don't really care, they want to work on cool stuff, they don't care about getting commissioned. Phillip: Well, you made a whole sales talk, so now it's your fault. Kalen: Yeah, it's my fault. Everybody's gonna get mad at me.Phillip: Anyway, who cares? You're bored, let's move on.Kalen: What was the next ... Oh, the next ... Oh yeah, Magento-Phillip: So, Magento-Kalen: You just deleted that?Phillip: Yeah.Kalen: I was like all ready to hit that one.Phillip: Oh, are you really? Okay, cool. So Magento just ... They keep kind of pushing the forums forward, which is awesome, I know a lot of people use it. I don't really use the forums and I'd really like to hear your thoughts about that. But the Magento 2 Solution Specialist badges just landed on the forum. They're a nice blue color, which is kind of interesting and different. So, there were three new forum moderators that were just brought on, Damian Culotta, which we have mentioned on the show in the past, so shout out to our boy Damian.Kalen: Hailing from Argentina.Phillip: And then Andreas and Roman, who are new forum moderators specifically for Germany, which is just nuts, that they need two additional forum moderators just in the German language, which is crazy cool. Kalen: Germany, man. Oh my gosh.Phillip: They're crushing it. And we'll talk a little bit about some stuff here in a minute. Actually, I'm good to keep going if you are. I'm stoked today. Kalen: Yeah, I could go a little bit longer.Phillip: So, the forums. Do you ever use the forums? Do you know people that use the forums?Kalen: I used them a little bit ago, I dipped in. And I do get email notifications from time to time and I'll pop in. Not as active as I'd like to be. But, doing a great job there with the forums.Phillip: Do you remember like three years ago we were like, "Why can't Magento just get the forums back up?" Kalen: Yeah.Phillip: And now three years later we're like, "Who cares about the forums? There's three new moderators, hundreds of thousands of people using it. I don't use it."Kalen: I know, typical.Phillip: I do go to the forums once a week for the Magento Monday-Kalen: Community Digest.Phillip: I'm into that. Kalen: Yes. The other thing I remember, Sherrie would start a thread for like when Imagine is coming up and be like, "Hey, introduce yourself if you're going to Imagine," and things like that, and I thought that was a good one. And there's lots of cool stuff she's doing with that. So, I think it's awesome.Phillip: That's baller. So, we're getting close to time, people are bored, we've been talking about sales, we've been talking about B2B, everyone's throwing up in their mouth. So let's talk about something cool. I have this idea of a new talk that I want to give in 2018. I want to throw it by you so you can tell me what you think.Kalen: Okay, okay.Phillip: I have this idea of ... it's called The Deployed Open Source Stack. Everything in the world right now, with the exception of Magento, and even Magento now, to some degree, is a SAS cloud-based application. However, if you wanted to build an ecommerce operation, and you wanted to do it on only freely available open source software, could you conceivably build a store that is holistic, that does everything that anyone else can do, but it 100% deployed free software? That is the challenge.Kalen: That's a cool idea.Phillip: Right? That's a cool idea, right? So, Magento Open Source obviously - no, I refuse - Magento Community and you guys suck it. Okay, so it's called - I'm changing it in the doc - Magento Community FO EVA. That's what it's gonna say in the show notes.Kalen: You did put Magento Open Source in the doc though, so part of you ...Phillip: I did. Well, now it says Magento Community. Okay. So, Magento Community right at the center, okay? And then you would have to create an ecosystem around it. And I think about all the things that we usually ask about. And when I started to think about it, there are open source alternatives for everything in the ecosystem. So I just wanted to quick run down them and see what you think and if you've heard of them and if you have any experience with them, okay? Real quick. So, ERP. Open ERP was the obvious one for me. I know a company that we're currently working with that's using it and they're pretty happy with it. Have you ever messed with that?Kalen: I don't know that I've run across that one. Is Odoo an open source ERP? I'll have to check that. Yeah, open source ERP and CRM.Phillip: Odoo. Yeah, O-D-O-O. Kalen: Odoo. Yeah, that one I've heard about, I've had some clients looking for help with that. Actually, I met somebody at the L.A. meetup that does a lot of Odoo stuff. Phillip: Okay, so we've got Odoo, we've got open ERP. Okay, interesting. And I had never heard of this one before, I'm really excited about that. I want to check it out. So then, obviously, you know, two that we've talked about on the show at length, Akeneo, which is a PIM, which is built on the Oro platform. And, you know, Oro CRM which is a CRM tool. So, we have customer insights, we have reporting for customers. And Oro is an ecommerce CRM first, so that makes a lot of sense, right? So it's not Salesforce, which is what you would typically deploy, and from a PIM perspective, there's so many people who just use their ERP as the PIM, but they have a purpose built tool and it's open source and it's free. Heck yeah.Kalen: There's also PimCore is one that I've heard about as well. PimCore is another open source PIM. Phillip: I'm loving this right now.Kalen: You didn't know I was gonna have anything for you here.Phillip: I didn't. PimCore, I'm looking up PimCore right now. It's the leading open source enterprise software platform for PIM. Oh my gosh.Kalen: It's got a few things. It apparently has CMS, PIM, and DAM, oh, data management, so I don't know exactly what that ... So it's an interesting blend of functionality.Phillip: It is a PHP-based - oh my gosh, this is blowing my mind. Okay PimCore. I'm loving that we're doing this right now. Okay. So then, Oro for CRM, do you have an alternative for Oro? Kalen: Now you've got your SugarCRMs, but those probably aren't the same caliber. Phillip: I put those in the same category of the Magento Open Source place and they can suck it. Kalen: Put them in the "they can suck it" category? Okay, agreed. Phillip: I've worked with SugarCRM in the past, and gosh, it is a hot pile of garbage. So we're not gonna touch that. It works from a, like, if you're just managing like a call center and you want to do some stuff with CRM, then you know, you could use Sugar. Anyway. So, the two that kind of baffled me, which I'm really excited about that I found, which have come up in the past - I'd heard of them but I'd not looked into them at all. And this is crazy, so analytics is this one little piece where everybody has the sense, especially from Google analytics point of view, that it is just a cloud ... It is fundamentally a cloud third party data warehouse service. Kalen: Who would even dare to do their own analytics?Phillip: Yeah, why would you ever build your own analytics or host your own analytics?Kalen: The datas are too big, they can't-Phillip: The datas are big, why would you ever do it? Well, if you ever did want to do it, and there are reasons why you might. There are reasons why you might want to do it. For instance, if you live in a region like Germany or somewhere else in the European Union that has very strict data privacy laws and you're very concerned about your compliance in that area and you still want to have actionable analytics for your business, but you don't want to have to disclose to your customers in a privacy policy or some other means that would, you know, maybe turn them off. Instead, you could use something called Piwik. Kalen: I don't know how to pronounce it.Phillip: I don't know. Piwik. It's an open source analytics platform, which just ... I cannot even believe it exists. It's a thing. It is PHP, which again, can't believe that exists, it's a thing. It's just amazing that that is even a thing. Okay, so that's the first one. I thought that we would never ever find something like that. Then the other one, which blows my mind, is an email service provider, and ESP. Also fundamentally-Kalen: This is an interesting one.Phillip: Yeah, a fundamentally cloud-based platform, right? Why would you ever run your email? Why would you run your own email? And I think that, you know, you would have an answer to this, right?Kalen: And it's called Mautic, M-A-U-T-I-C. I ran across this a little bit ago, I was like, "Holy cow." Like, it looks pretty robust. I think I did ... I can't remember who I talked to about this, but somebody that was using it and they said, "You know, it's like anything with open source. You're gonna have some support time needed to manage it." Actually, this is interesting. is open source marketing automation and then it links to , which the tagline is "The world's first open marketing cloud," which is interesting. I think they might be bundling even more stuff beyond just email marketing into that. So, this is an interesting idea, this whole open ... like, have an entire ecosystem of open tools and products.Phillip: Well, what's incredible about Mautic or mowtic - God, I wish I knew how to say it -Kalen: Like, literally none of these we can pronounce properly. Leave it to like open source products to be unpronounceable words.Phillip: Yeah. So, then okay ... And just to wrap this little segment up, and sort of what got me thinking about it before, is if you were to do loyalty, a loyalty program, right? We'd now have a solution for that. And that's kind of what spurred my thought about this, about creating an entire ... So, openloyalty.io is a new ... is from-Kalen: The guys over at Divante in Poland. So I met Tom, one of the founders, out there in New York, and they're doing a lot of stuff, but this is pretty interesting looking. Phillip: Yeah, like, you could run a loyalty program of your own with a platform that's purpose built to do that, and you don't have to contract a third party to do it. I'm not saying that these are even good ideas. Like, this puts a lot on your business to manage and to own, and there's a lot, admittedly, a lot there. But if you look at Mautic, let's go back to Mautic for one second. Which is , it's not just email marketing automation, also has something called Maestro, which is marketing operations, which is probably like team management, and Maven, which is marketing intelligence, which sounds a lot like business intelligence. So if you ... This is where we get feedback from our listeners. What I still need is a business intelligence tool which is free or open source. I need a ... what else do I need? There was something I needed and it's not coming to me. Warehouse management, that's what it was.Kalen: Oh, okay, good one.Phillip: So, shipping, right? Shipping. Things that are around shipping, which is either stock management, things that do bin and aisle location, pick lists, and all of that. So if you have a tool-Kalen: What about point of sale?Phillip: Oh, point of sale! Oh my gosh.Kalen: There you go, help us out.Phillip: Okay, so if you know a business intelligence tool, warehouse management tool, and point of sale, that are open source, freely available, then we would ... I'd love to know what they are, I want to check them out, and I'm gonna roll them into this talk which I'm calling The Deployed Open Source Stack.Kalen: This is a cool talk, I'm kind of into this.Phillip: Are you getting into it? You're loving the idea. I just love the idea. It's not that you would ever do it, I don't know that it's even a good idea. Kalen: So is it developer track or business track?Phillip: I think it could be both, that's why I like it so much. Kalen: Because business track, like, you can't just say "Use them 'cause they're all open." Well, you can. But you have to say, like, "Use them because this is the best for x, y, and z," which remains to be seen.Phillip: Right. And if you had a true ... Like, oh, Chat Bot. What's that called? Help desk. What's an open source help desk software?Kalen: Well, there's like Redmine, which is like project management and that's-Phillip: But that's not ... Is that free? Is that open source?Kalen: I think so, yeah. That one, I think, is a little old and crusty. Phillip: Yeah, it's Ruby, right?Kalen: There's gotta be something that's ... It's interesting how PHP is overtaking Ruby in Rails.Phillip: Right?Kalen: I saw a thing on that recently how there's like more innovation happening now. Because PHP was kind of the ... Like, people still ... Like, I met somebody at New York who was a Rails or Node guy and he was like, "Ah, PHP is ..." And so it's interesting. PHP is-Phillip: Well, I'm interested in hearing, maybe there's pieces of the enablement stack that allows you to be a really successful merchant. Maybe there's a piece of that stack that we haven't talked about. I can't believe I forgot about point of sale. But if there's a piece of that stack, which I guess you could say to some degree Magento could act as a point of sale, but whatever, I don't know. If there's something I'm missing, let me know. If there's another suggestion that you have. They don't even have to natively have integrations to Magento. I think the idea for me is what does the ecosystem look like and where are the gaps? And when we identify gaps, we identify potential disruptors in the marketplace. Places where we don't have ... Whenever there is a void - and I'll kind of end it with this, and we can wrap the show or whatever - whenever there is a void, whatever is crappy but is ubiquitous expands to fill the space. And I feel like disruption occurs when you have a crappy vendor that everybody has to rely upon because there's nothing better, and if you can come in with an open source product, you could disrupt the whole system. We just gotta find what that is, we gotta identify it, and the only way to do that is to think about things like this.Kalen: I love it. I love it. Very nice. I like that, very excited about that.Phillip: Thank you. I'm pretty proud of myself.Kalen: Well, you should be. We are at our time for today, so we want to thank you for tuning in. Again, love to hear feedback on that topic, anything in general, but particularly that would be great if you got any tools in those categories. And we hope you have a great week. We will see you again next week, same time, same place. Phillip: Peace. ................
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