Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Welcome to yet another edition of Within WordPress, the podcast you love listening to because it shows you who is inside this wonderful world of WordPress. With me today is Daniel. Hi, welcome.
[00:00:20] Speaker B: Nice to meet you.
[00:00:21] Speaker A: Nice to meet you too. My first question is always please introduce yourself. Who are you, where do you work and what is your connection with.
[00:00:33] Speaker B: An interesting question actually you'll understand why. Well my name is Danil and I'm from Lithuania actually and I work in Omniscient and this is just simple stuff but how am I related to WordPress is more complicated. Well actually I'm a happy father of a 13 years old and my wife is actually developing on WordPress. Okay, that's an interesting connection related to Omniscient actually. Yeah, I myself am not developing on WordPress. I am an ex developer.
[00:01:15] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:01:16] Speaker B: Nowadays I'm mostly a manager but we talk obviously at home a lot and it's interesting to see what the challenges she sometimes has, what are the solutions.
Yeah that being said from work perspective obviously Tony said well we have a product, we've been mostly developing it in another ecosystem with some new WordPress.
But that being said, we are trying to be meaningful here, provide and create value.
That's why I'm here today.
[00:01:54] Speaker A: Yeah, and that's exactly why we're talking. So this is probably the most interesting what do you do with WordPress and then the answer it'd be like if my wife was on the podcast and go like yeah, I work with WordPress but you really want to talk to my husband because he has the intel and the Omnisend. Not a lot of people know this just yet, I think I think you said that correctly. Do tell, what does the company do? Are you all based in Lithuania?
[00:02:30] Speaker B: No, we are actually based both in Lithuania and United States.
I believe it's quite common thing here in Lithuania we have basically development go to market is majority in the United States.
I think that's quite regular thing at least here locally many firms do that.
That being said, we are different in some cases we bootstrapped even though we are in America market well in global market actually but we don't have investors and we don't need to bend to all those.
[00:03:10] Speaker A: I think that's a good position to be in.
[00:03:12] Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely.
We are somewhat new in WordPress, that's for sure. We are not new in the market. We've been here for ten years now.
[00:03:25] Speaker A: Saw that.
[00:03:25] Speaker B: Yeah in WordPress rather than you let's say.
[00:03:30] Speaker A: So that's the amount of time that you've been here.
What I've seen so far is Omnisent being quite active in the WordPress project itself.
Inside work. Camp Europe, for instance. Organization you purposely have chosen to be on a path of contributing or giving back, not just here's a solution for WordPress WooCommerce specifically. We'll dive in a little deeper on what your solution actually does and specifically what your role is. But what I like about, which was the intriguing thing for me, like, okay, this is an interesting conversation. You're a company that is relatively new to the WordPress world. Relatively.
And you've seen the value of contributing back, right? So there's plenty of companies that have WordPress products, but it's just here it is. And giving back part is like, okay, maybe minimal, if at all. You've clearly chosen a different route. And I'm kind of curious about that. What can you share about that?
[00:04:45] Speaker B: Well, yeah, it's maybe not that straightforward, but there are places where it's just business.
[00:04:58] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:04:59] Speaker B: And there are places where you don't behave like that.
It's not okay. And we see like if you want to play in, let's say, shopify ecosystem there, it's business only very different. And so right.
In WordPress, we don't feel it that way. It's really a lot about community.
As far as we understand, the whole thing is highly decentralized and community driven. So it's just not appropriate way to behave.
You need to behave in appropriate way. So this is what we are trying.
[00:05:47] Speaker A: Well, I think it shows, like I said, it's one of the things where I always find it interesting to see new companies to the WordPress ecosphere that they go like, okay, so let me look around and see how this works. And then indeed, like you said, act accordingly.
I think the examples of companies not doing that are far greater than the examples that are doing that. So for that I applaud you.
Let's hear a bit more about Omnisense. So it's located both in the United States and Lithuania. What is your role and what does it actually do? Because I'm aware of the service as a thing, but I like how you solve things specifically. So let's hear a little bit about that.
[00:06:35] Speaker B: Okay, so my specific role is basically engineering manager. Okay. So we are if stepping a little bit backwards.
I'm absolutely not known in WordPress world, that's fair to say, but in Lithuanian agile world, I'm kind of well known. Okay. And this is how I appear.
[00:07:00] Speaker A: This is sounding like I'm kind of famous, but you don't know.
[00:07:07] Speaker B: Maybe not famous, but contributing to the community.
[00:07:10] Speaker A: Sure, okay.
[00:07:11] Speaker B: We have a community. And this is why I know that contribution to communities are appreciated because I've been fostering agile community here a lot and contributing to that.
And this is how naturally I peered in Omnisend and how it is to some extent connects well to WordPress. In my view.
Omnisent is doing a lot of things in very product oriented way.
It's not just agile processes and stuff or Kumbaya agile where we love people together, all of that, but it's a lot of emphasis actually on product and how to make great stuff. All right.
And it's very hard.
What is it's very hard? I mean, proper product management is very hard.
And that's why we had a lot of efforts on building product but not much effort before on joining WordPress. WordPress has its additional challenges. It's very flexible, right?
[00:08:32] Speaker A: Maybe a little bit too much.
[00:08:35] Speaker B: Maybe a little bit too much. I mean, it's a strength of WordPress actually. It's very appreciated for that but it doesn't make it easy to integrate with this ecosystem. It requires just a little bit more effort.
[00:08:53] Speaker A: Right, yeah, I can see that.
[00:08:57] Speaker B: And six years ago when we were trying to do that it was a little bit too challenging for us in a sense.
We still need to work a lot on the product. Right. And then you need to solve those technical challenges as well. So we had to pick when you are bootstrapped you don't have a lot of money to waste. You need to prioritize.
[00:09:21] Speaker A: I'm very well aware of this.
[00:09:22] Speaker B: Yes, thank you.
And we focused on the product in one specific ecosystem and at that point it wasn't WordPress.
So we have developed marketing automation platform for people who sell online.
This is how we position ourselves basically.
And our target audience is actually small and medium business. Okay. Which I believe very well goes with WordPress.
[00:09:58] Speaker A: It does.
[00:10:00] Speaker B: Big companies, they usually have custom build site. Right? Usually a big thing.
I'm not sure how usually it is to base it on WordPress.
[00:10:14] Speaker A: More than you would know, actually. So a few podcasts back there have been on a few folks that work a lot with all the way up to full enterprise like proper enterprise.
Meaning there is a layer of people you have to get through to even get to the decision making unit.
But also from a high technical standpoint there are still more and more larger businesses choosing for WordPress. And I think it's mostly having to do with finding an agency that understands scaling as well as you have an understanding of what it is that you actually want. And usually that is so WordPress probably started with small companies, sort of bootstrapped in a way, as well. And then as it grew, you also saw that over the years, and I would say for the last let me say, what is it? Six, seven years, more and more mature sites have been entering into WordPress and staying with WordPress as well.
[00:11:27] Speaker B: What would you say? Is it more of exception or the rule today?
[00:11:36] Speaker A: Good question. I think it depends on the perspective. There are agencies out there and agencies like crowdfavored. Human made XWP insight from Germany. They have a very strong focus on the larger type clients. Right. So whether that's the larger small businesses all the way up to proper full on enterprise, fortune 500 companies, that sort of stuff.
So they will say look, there's a lot of high end market inside of the market of WordPress and we're servicing them.
So for them it's a lot. Having said that, there are also plenty of I think in the vast majority maybe this is the Pareto principle again like 80% of the sites are what you just said, but 20% is so large that it makes up so much more where it relatively looks like there's way more of it. I think it's a little bit of case of that as much as I I don't think I can find a better answer than that. From my perspective is that WordPress most certainly is very active in their small business, smaller sites. It's easy, right? It's free.
Your service caters mostly to WooCommerce, right. Is it also to be used without WooCommerce, Omnisend and just WordPress?
[00:13:13] Speaker B: As of today, not yet. Yeah.
[00:13:14] Speaker A: Okay, so then WooCommerce is a subsection of WordPress users, but you can see the same thing happening in WooCommerce.
[00:13:23] Speaker B: Right.
[00:13:23] Speaker A: So the first versions of WooCommerce were just stores, just anybody who wanted a store, they could have one. And as WooCommerce starts maturing, clients start maturing. So there are very large sites on WooCommerce now. Sites that possibly traditionally would have moved off to either Magento or shopify. And that is less and less a necessity, I would say.
Long answer, but I think that that's pretty much at least how I see it.
[00:13:54] Speaker B: All right, well, from our perspective, we are aiming at those 80% as I figured. Yeah. Because well, again, getting back to that bootstrap thingy, you really want to focus.
We have competitors with many more people working, but they have investors and so on. And yeah, they are looking broader. I'm happy for them, they can do that.
We like to be still self funded. That also brings us some competitive edge and fast.
But of course it has limitations as well. We cannot look everywhere we would like to and we are focusing on our client and that being small and medium businesses.
[00:14:47] Speaker A: Yeah, I was going to say, when you say every you want to focus not everywhere, meaning you are focusing particularly on small business, but in ecommerce.
[00:14:59] Speaker B: Ecommerce and medium.
[00:15:01] Speaker A: Yeah. Okay.
Is then the focus that is your main focus. And then wherever they are, you are. Meaning WooCommerce shopify, possibly magento.
[00:15:13] Speaker B: We would like to be again, possibilities. Our wishes not always overlap. So yes, definitely we are present on Shopify e commerce as well. There are custom integrations, magenta to some extent, not that much, but we would definitely like to be more present on WooCommerce. Okay. I mean, we are there, but there is always a better way of doing it.
[00:15:51] Speaker A: So does that mean the product as you have it with the feature set that is available, has a limited representation in WooCommerce at the moment? Or are you referencing the market penetration that you have? The visibility.
[00:16:08] Speaker B: It's more about visibility.
Okay.
Feature set, that's the difference between broad look at this solution and narrow view at the solution. From our perspective, we believe that we add core features which are needed and as a result we maintain proper pricing.
It's not too low, but it's not at the highest end as well. Somewhere in the middle. Of course, if we would add more features, it's not for free. You need to develop, you need to maintain it. But then our price will have to be higher. We don't want that. We want to be somewhere in the middle. That's a proper place because we believe that is appropriate for SMB small and medium businesses. If we would like to go for corporate, that would be different, but we are not aiming for that.
[00:17:08] Speaker A: Yeah, that's a very different market.
[00:17:10] Speaker B: Sure.
[00:17:11] Speaker A: So tell us a little bit about those features. Because you do text marketing for Ecommerce.
I can sort of imagine what that means.
You do whole I think if I remember correctly, you do push notifications as well, customer matching, stuff like that. So tell us a little bit more about the product itself because if you are new to the WooCommerce world, now is a good time to tell them what you are about.
[00:17:43] Speaker B: All right.
[00:17:44] Speaker A: Also for my curiosity, but two birds, 1 st. There we go.
[00:17:49] Speaker B: Sure. I would like to do it from a little bit different perspective, if you mean yeah, sure.
We have been in the selling online business for a long while now. So we realize pretty well that there are some challenges the new business have. New typically eshop business have. And I would like to go not for like features but for problems that trying to even better then the features will go after that. Right. So basically when you start a new eshop, you need to consider at least three things when you want to communicate to your clients. Shoppers. Yeah, well, first, you do need to communicate to your shoppers. I mean, if you believe you don't, our numbers show you put yourself into disadvantage. Okay, then it's just a question how easy it is for you to do. How straightforward it is to do.
[00:19:00] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:19:01] Speaker B: And we have learned that there are three things that we highly recommend to focus on.
First, obviously you need to collect contacts of your audience. Right. So you need those contacts of shoppers if you want to communicate to them. It's not possible otherwise. I mean, it's straightforward when you think about it, but actually it's not obvious for newly established businesses. Okay, I have an example, just a young mom which is selling soap.
She really doesn't know what does it mean? Sell online.
And that's fair. That's okay.
[00:19:47] Speaker A: I guess we're all having to learn it somewhere at some point.
[00:19:50] Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely.
So please, please you do need to communicate to your clients. Okay. For that you need contacts.
That's one. So of course, Omnisent has forms functionality that allows you to communicate. Hey, would you like to leave your contact here? You might get a discount or added value. It really depends on you how you place what you place for added value, it might not only be a discount, information really depends on what you are selling.
[00:20:30] Speaker A: Yeah, but we've all seen those pop ups.
[00:20:32] Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely. They are sometimes annoying, but you have a lot of control here, a lot of templates as well. So no one wants irrelevant pop ups. No.
[00:20:45] Speaker A: That is the death of the Internet as we know it.
[00:20:47] Speaker B: Absolutely.
So that's one collect context.
[00:20:51] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:20:52] Speaker B: Second, you want the context to appreciate that you have collected, that you have an email now, or maybe even a phone number.
So typically we see that people shoppers are more engaged if you send some sort of welcome message to them. Okay, okay. Typically with that welcome message, you want already to provide some value to them.
[00:21:23] Speaker A: And would that be such a thing as a pop up or what is a welcome message?
[00:21:28] Speaker B: That would be typically an email and in email, again, depending on what you're selling, if it's just stuff, any online shop, typically that would be some sort of a discount, right. One time discount, maybe a limited time discount. Right.
[00:21:49] Speaker A: 10% off on your first purchase, that sort of stuff.
[00:21:51] Speaker B: Yeah, that sort of on the other hand, if you're a specialty shop, you might provide some sort of interesting information.
For instance, if I'm a coffee shop, maybe I'm selling stuff for enthusiasts. Right. So in that case, maybe some interesting PDF may be appropriate. Right. You get some added value, so that engages you with your potential shoppers.
So that's second thing. Welcome again. Omnicent invested a lot in data deriven decisions. So this is not just our opinion. This is what we see from data. This is a benefit of having a lot of shops and seeing how they behave differently and what are the results.
[00:22:43] Speaker A: So your product, I'm assuming here, but it sounds like your product is constantly evolving what it advises to do or how it behaves based on the data it receives over time.
[00:22:56] Speaker B: Absolutely. Cool. That's what is a proper product management, I believe.
[00:23:02] Speaker A: Yeah, I would agree. It's not always easy to do. Not every situation lends itself for it. But if you are sitting on top of a huge bucket of data, there's wonderful things you can do. And I say that from my own experiences as I'm developing, together with my co founder, Bari Koi, developing a tool that is going to sit on a huge bucket of data as well. As soon as you realize how much data you have, you're almost obligated to then go, well, so what else can I do with this? This is what I had in mind. Wonderful. But how can I modulate this? Because I get intel now, throw in an algorithm, little bit of AI, and you can do predictive stuff and all of those things.
I like that. That's part of your core. This is our product. I usually see that as an afterthought, like, oh yeah, we can also do this.
[00:23:57] Speaker B: Yeah, that's a good thing, actually, because well, Omniscient is not the first business of our owners and they did have failures before, so learned from that. Yeah. Good.
[00:24:10] Speaker A: The alternative is you never learn. That's horrible.
Okay, so that's two things.
[00:24:19] Speaker B: Yeah, that's two things. The third thing recover lost sales.
Yeah, recover lost sales. There are several ways how to do that. Ultimately you would want to invest into it because people come and go.
I'm sorry to say, but your site is one of many sites I find.
[00:24:43] Speaker A: My site actually quite unique, but okay, thanks.
I'm kidding.
[00:24:50] Speaker B: Are unique.
[00:24:51] Speaker A: I'm kidding.
[00:24:53] Speaker B: Yeah. But nowadays it's so easy to search in the internet. There are all kind of aggregate sites which provide you instantly comparison of prices from here, here, here and there. Right? Yeah. So I'm not even talking about Google or other search engines, but I mean the whole site is dedicated to find better choices.
So that means that you really need to consider, okay, so if a person visited my site, how can I help him or her to get back?
And here basically again, you have major free choices.
So cart people place something into the cart.
They look like they're shopping around. Right.
That's first choice. Or maybe they're not putting things to carts, but they're looking at products.
Right.
So you see that okay.
The person engaged with this product or maybe another product which is from similar category or something. Right. And finally there's a checkout.
Okay, so person places something to the cart and starts a checkout.
So those are three major signals for you. Yeah.
Guess which signal you should invest in.
If you can only invest into one.
[00:26:31] Speaker A: I would guess the last one.
[00:26:33] Speaker B: Which one?
[00:26:34] Speaker A: Number three getting people back to you, the lost sales, so to speak. I would assume that there's an intent already to well, if we're at that stage, there has already been an intent to actually purchase in some way. So one of the things to get over sort of is that you start filling in your cart but you just don't ever check out. And maybe that's because you're distracted or whatever, but I would guess that that's the most interesting one. But do correct me if I'm wrong.
[00:27:14] Speaker B: Yeah. So it's actually interesting because yes, checkout is actually if you can only invest in one thing, invest in getting people back to checkout. Okay.
[00:27:25] Speaker A: So my guess was good.
[00:27:27] Speaker B: Absolutely.
Also you need to consider even though it's tempting to go for the cart or product, but you will be sending a lot of trash mails.
All right, sure. It's more complicated to send appropriate mail or SMS or push notification if you only have information about the card.
Well, first of all, if you don't have a contact of a person, any kind of it's just irrelevant. You cannot communicate to that person. Right. But if you do, you still need to be cautious about it. It should not be intrusive communication. Right. It should be gentle, relevant for the person. Yeah.
And this is what again, this is not our opinion. This is what we see from numbers.
And actually for us in the beginning it wasn't actually intuitive even though you can speculate about the intent and I like your line of thought, but trust me, there are many other lines of thought which sound reasonable. Yeah, but then numbers don't lie.
[00:28:48] Speaker A: Yeah, I was going to say but then the data doesn't back it up.
[00:28:52] Speaker B: Absolutely.
So if you can invest into one thing, invest in checkout. If you want to save your money, if you have a little bit bigger budget, then you should consider cart abandonment and only then go for product.
[00:29:08] Speaker A: All right, what does that mean? Only go for product?
[00:29:12] Speaker B: Product, okay, so someone engaged with the product. Yeah, you have a site, person is scrolling through the site but doesn't put anything to the cart, no placements, but it's obvious from the behavior he or she is interested in shoes, maybe hiking shoes.
So then you can follow that up, right? Yeah.
But again, if prioritizing and you want to be both effective and relevant, first checkout, then cart abundance. Basically people placing stuff to cart and then doing nothing about it and only then guesses about oh, this is probably interesting for that specific person.
That being said, there is also additional consideration.
Which channel should I contact person through? Yeah, there are basically three proven good channels.
So email, SMS and push, push notification.
So again here, numbers don't lie.
People tend to avoid to send SMS.
[00:30:38] Speaker A: That sphere, I can imagine that one because that feels the most intrusive and it is actually.
[00:30:47] Speaker B: Yeah.
What we do see from actual behavior, people send a lot of reasonable amount of emails and there are people who prefer sending SMS, but the people who win the most are the ones who send decent amount of both.
[00:31:12] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:31:13] Speaker B: So of course you do need to invest in being relevant.
That's absolutely a necessity. But then if you do so, it's more important to send both.
[00:31:27] Speaker A: So I get the name now. Omnisend. It's not just there's multiple things that we can do but there's multiple things that we should do.
[00:31:37] Speaker B: Yes, indeed.
[00:31:38] Speaker A: Interesting.
[00:31:38] Speaker B: And again we maybe would like it to be otherwise, but the numbers don't lie. Yeah.
[00:31:44] Speaker A: No, I get that. So what you're essentially saying is this is going to sound very negative, so I don't mean a negative. Sure, but you're essentially saying the data shows that if you're nagging a little bit more left and right you'll get a better result.
[00:32:02] Speaker B: That's true.
[00:32:03] Speaker A: Interesting.
[00:32:06] Speaker B: Think about it from person's life perspective. Yeah, I'm not always in front of the computer.
[00:32:15] Speaker A: I guess there's times that I sleep. There's times that I sleep. I get it.
[00:32:19] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:32:21] Speaker A: Look, I've been sitting behind a computer since I can tell you exactly why, when like almost a date.
February 1, 1996. That's when I got my broadband connection.
There has not been a laptop beside me since that day. All right, not kidding. But obviously the phone has replaced much of that as well.
[00:32:51] Speaker B: Yeah, that's true.
Still, different people have different preferences and it's not about just nagging, but it's about being convenient as well.
[00:33:01] Speaker A: Sure. Like I said, I know it's going to sound negative because I'm using a negative word. I understand that there's a positive intent when what it is that you're messaging about is actually in context.
You are curious about it because you have looked into it. That makes total sense.
[00:33:21] Speaker B: And this is actually why we have invested quite a lot in making plenty of possibilities how to set up, when actually to send or when not to send an email. Okay.
This is basically one of the core functionalities.
We try to segment Shoppers based on their behavior. Okay.
[00:33:52] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:33:53] Speaker B: I mean, if the person has been active for the past day or so, well, it makes sense. And it's not that intrusive to contact the person. Right. The person was not there for a week, it's already a different story.
It's probably not going to be nice anyhow.
[00:34:15] Speaker A: Interesting, when you're explaining it like that, it makes total sense.
[00:34:21] Speaker B: And this is why we create possibility to set up different workflows. We tend to use Word automations. It might be a little bit too technical, the word. Yeah, but actually it's like in case this happens, don't send. If in case that happens, do send. Okay, send what? SMS, email, bo? With what content do I want to apply a discount?
Is it a first letter? I'm sending that to that person.
[00:34:54] Speaker A: So high configurability with smart figuring out what it is that actually makes sense.
Okay, so here's an interesting question, at least in my head it's an interesting one. Since you're gathering so much data and you work with multiple platforms, I'm guessing Shopify being the largest.
Yeah, and WooCommerce a good second. So do you see any difference in behavior from platform to platform?
[00:35:30] Speaker B: From shopper's perspective.
[00:35:31] Speaker A: From technical perspective, any. I'm curious for any because I know there are technical differences.
[00:35:38] Speaker B: Absolutely.
[00:35:39] Speaker A: So I'm pretty sure there are differences there that might pop up on your radar. But I'm also curious about Shoppers, like people who shop at WooCommerce stores, do they behave differently for whatever reason? I can't think of any. But you're sitting on a big bucket of data. I'd imagine this be an interesting one that would pop up if there is a correlation like that. What can you say about that?
[00:36:06] Speaker B: So there are not many major differences. Actually, I wouldn't think of any major one, but you need to understand that there are some, but they're interconnected with technical capabilities.
[00:36:20] Speaker A: Sure.
[00:36:21] Speaker B: It's not everything that you can do in WordPress that you can do in Shopify and vice versa, of course.
[00:36:29] Speaker A: Do you have an example?
[00:36:32] Speaker B: Yeah, for instance, in Shopify, your order, the way you can change it.
Well, it's not linear, but it's well defined.
Okay.
First you place an order, then it's pending for the payment and it's paid, then it's fulfilled and so on in WooCommerce. It's not that strict actually.
[00:37:02] Speaker A: Basically here's the flexibility again. Yeah.
[00:37:06] Speaker B: Here we go. Here we go. Exactly.
Unfortunately.
[00:37:13] Speaker A: Never ends well if you start a sentence like that.
[00:37:16] Speaker B: Yeah. The focusability is great, but it doesn't create a clear understanding what's going on. Yeah, right. For instance, we have situations where the order was fulfilled and then goes back to placed stated.
What does that mean?
[00:37:39] Speaker A: No clue.
[00:37:40] Speaker B: No clue, exactly.
Those additional capabilities they create for us, additional challenges, at least in this specific case.
[00:37:51] Speaker A: Yeah. Well, this is exactly what I'm curious about.
[00:37:55] Speaker B: Yeah. And this is why I would say that we don't see major differences from shoppers perspective.
The differences are more from if it's a big shop or a small shop. Right. If it's from a specific industry or it's a general shop. So then you can see difference in behavior, but platform, not that much. Okay.
If we would go to technical difficulties or challenges, there are of course more, for instance, one interesting thing, WordPress is highly decentralized and that is great. Okay.
[00:38:50] Speaker A: It's also a choice we no longer have.
[00:38:55] Speaker B: What do you mean by that? Interesting.
[00:38:59] Speaker A: By it being decentralized, that brings both positive and negative consequences. Some of the things I would say if we were to have that centralized, it will probably help.
So I sent out a post on X yesterday asking if there's one thing in WordPress you would like to change, what would it be? Now, if I ask a question like that, I know I'm going to get a lot of people being very negative about WordPress, but one of the things that I think would benefit WordPress is if we do a better systems architecture. So bring the code base as modern as possible, have dependency management, that sort of stuff. Right. So because it is distributed, it's very tough to get everybody behind in the speed that you would like. If it was a centralized version of some part of it would be centralized. I'm guessing there'd be more push in that direction, if that makes sense. So if we can combine both worlds, we cannot it would solve certain problems, if that makes any sense.
[00:40:15] Speaker B: Absolutely. Again, I don't like to look at things from negative perspective.
[00:40:23] Speaker A: I agree.
[00:40:23] Speaker B: Kind of thing that stands out, there is a reason for it.
[00:40:30] Speaker A: And in the case of WordPress, the word is called backwards compatibility.
Yeah.
Well, this is exactly what I'm referring to. Right.
You have an ultra modern application, right. It's built from scratch. I'm sure in ten years I think you're ten years old or something like that.
[00:40:50] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:40:51] Speaker A: So in ten years you maybe have some technical debt here and there. Sure.
[00:40:56] Speaker B: You think so?
[00:40:58] Speaker A: Possibly.
[00:40:59] Speaker B: But there is a possibility, yes.
[00:41:01] Speaker A: Yeah.
In a company like yours, I would imagine that there's. A constant attempt at modernizing meaning by modernizing, you don't do it for the sake of doing it, you do it for the sake of improvement, right? Performance improvement, maintainability improvement, the global loading footprint, all those sort of things that are just becoming better once you start using newer technologies or newer versions of technologies. When you're a company which you control the code base. If there is technical debt, still stuff that you built ten years ago that's still in there, there's a very low chance of it because you can see the obvious gains by being modern. So in two or three years you'll do a minor rewrite and you'll focus on that, that sort of thing. WordPress has none of that, and that's a black and white position. But there is some but WordPress doesn't have it in the way where you would want it. So we're closing in on the next PHP release and we're still catering for very old versions of PHP. So that is a too big of a chasm between the two. So that means we're waiting for a very long time to find optimized versions of our software. And that's essentially what I mean.
[00:42:32] Speaker B: Yeah, I hear you here. We've been quite radical for the many years actually. Now I can provide an example. Think it's not a secret.
[00:42:47] Speaker A: If it is a secret, it's a good time to share.
[00:42:50] Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely.
For instance, we've had an integration with one of, let's say, major social media sites.
We have written that integration three times and data showed up, showed us that it doesn't work to do it. Okay? So after the first time we've written it many years ago, we threw it away.
Second time we'd written it from scratch again, we threw it again out.
After third time we threw it again out. And we don't have it right now. Okay, so what I'm saying here, we do throw out code if it's not needed. You need to get rid yeah, maybe big companies have a luxury of having legacy code that maybe will be capable to sell that future to someone.
[00:43:59] Speaker A: That's good.
Legacy code is hard.
So a few comments on the, on the post I did on X were along the line of just we would love to see better systems architecture.
And then the obvious answer still is yes, but we're having this problem and it's, it there's two things. On the one hand, if we didn't have backwards compatibility the way we had, we wouldn't have grown the way we have.
So what is it? 43% is what is being thrown around now. That's an incredibly high percentage. When I was starting to get invested into WordPress, which is end of 2005, early 2006, it was single digits. So from that perspective, the amount of growth that we've seen, certainly percentage wise is insane to now say, look, we don't like where we are. That doesn't make a lot of sense because there's a reason why we are where we are, and there's a reason that everything that comes with it now is where we are.
So I get the mentality, I get the idea, especially from a pure development standpoint. There's a lot of stuff in WordPress that doesn't make a sense, make a lot of sense. And that's fine, because if you want to, you can build your own auto load dependency management system inside of WordPress. You can, you just need to spend time doing it and rejig a few things that are just not something you do in a week.
But if you wanted to, you can build the most modern solution inside of WordPress and it'll work just fine. Will it be as optimized as you can possibly want it to be? No, of course not, because you're still depending on old stuff.
But it can be fast, it can be performant, it can be flexible, it can be all of those things and that's a conscious decision. So if you're building Omnisend to integrate with WooCommerce WordPress, I'm assuming you're not sticking to the old reasons of why we need to have backwards compatibility version. I don't know, 5.6? I don't even know what it is currently. 77172. I don't care if you're not building for eight two, then in my mind you're doing something wrong. Or at least from eight and upwards, like, have a little bit of legacy.
[00:46:31] Speaker B: Sure.
[00:46:31] Speaker A: But you build for the modern world, you don't build for the old world. And I think that's a mentality. I like hearing from you guys that there's a goal to not have old redundant stuff still lying around doing something.
Again, buddy and I are building Scanfully and it is to fully integrate with WordPress. Yes. And we have a plugin. Yes. As modern as we can make it, we are, but every single code that we're using inside the application self is whatever suits the business, right.
Doesn't matter if that's rust or golang or just react or it really doesn't matter.
The end goal is what it's about, right. Solving solutions.
Yeah. Sorry, a long rant, but that's essentially how I look at the we want to have modern code, but we also want to complain about a platform that we're using and building off of. Like pick one. Right.
It's not going to be possible to always get your way.
You can build it your own. You can use a CMS that is far more modern. Sure. But then you lose a lot of market and then you lose a lot of flexibility.
There's a whole array of stuff that you don't have.
Sorry, I'm making the rant even longer.
So what are the biggest challenges that you face when building with Webpage? Is it around these types of things?
[00:48:09] Speaker B: Two things that was quick for a long while before our conversation.
If it would be possible that Webhooks would work really reliably and fast, that would be amazing.
[00:48:27] Speaker A: Interesting.
[00:48:28] Speaker B: Yeah, because this is one thing that we see different in WordPress as compared to other ecosystems. Like all the ecosystems have webhooks, but because some ecosystems are centralized, there is a centralized body which makes sure the quality of those services is well maintained.
If something happens in the site, there is a service back end that will fire a webhook. SLAs are going to be well maintained and so on.
If you have custom host of Word with WooCommerce, it's obviously more difficult to establish any sort of quality baseline for those webhooks.
[00:49:27] Speaker A: Sure.
[00:49:29] Speaker B: And that is actually in case of ecom, a challenge because we need relevant.
[00:49:36] Speaker A: Data, timely data, reliable and relevant.
[00:49:42] Speaker B: It's very sad when you should really not send communication to the client because he or she already bought the product.
If you receive that notification too late, you cannot cancel that message because time is ticking and you oh, I should send reminder. Yeah, but in fact it's already finished. You just don't know about it yet.
[00:50:10] Speaker A: You're a little too late, buddy.
[00:50:12] Speaker B: Yep.
And it's very sad because I mean, it's a technical challenge.
[00:50:19] Speaker A: There are various components within WordPress that are interesting to approach from a reliability perspective. The same goes with Cron.
Cron works, but barely. Yeah, exactly. That's exactly the hand gesture that goes with that.
There are solutions out there that provide a better crown version for WordPress.
Human made have a version, it's called Calvicade, I think. But that requires something to be installed on server level as well, so that's not as easy to use.
Not every host is willing to have anything installed.
So my go to advice is disable WordPress Cron and rely on server Cron.
[00:51:06] Speaker B: Simple.
[00:51:07] Speaker A: That's already tenfold better, if not more in terms of pure reliability because that Cron will run every single minute.
[00:51:18] Speaker B: This is probably something that needs to be done by the owner of the.
[00:51:21] Speaker A: Site on the hosting platform. Usually, yeah.
[00:51:26] Speaker B: Difficult.
We cannot change it, unfortunately.
[00:51:30] Speaker A: No.
[00:51:31] Speaker B: I hear your pain, but it's very good that a lot of your listeners are capable to do that because, well, they are one way or the other, either owners of the sites or creators at least, so they can account for that. But I mean, for us, makers of tools and plugins would be big help. I mean, if those web hooks would fire timely and lively, that would be awesome.
[00:51:58] Speaker A: So what's the second thing?
[00:52:00] Speaker B: The second thing is related to that backward compatibility thingy and multiple plugins installed at the same time and not always behaving well in respect to each other.
So that is all understandable, that is part of flexibility.
But as a consequence there is a behavior of people who are creating the sites. They have a portfolio of tools and plugins that they use.
And you set up a site, you build it, you ship it, you forget about.
Now in many cases you forget about because, well, the one who bought the site did not buy the support for the site. Sure yeah so I mean right it's reasonable for you to forget about but what does that mean for us?
That the plugin that was installed is never going to be updated.
I mean if the creator set the auto update that's amazing but people in many cases don't do that and there are good reasons for it. You don't know what's going to happen after the auto update.
Yeah I mean maybe it will break the site.
[00:53:28] Speaker A: Quite possible.
[00:53:29] Speaker B: Yeah, quite possible. Yeah.
And that means that what we see actually again from data. In many cases, when we need to bring out new version of plugin, we have a challenge with people not updating that newest version.
I don't really see a good way how to solve that actually.
So what we are trying to do, we are trying to make that plugin as lean as possible so there is less and less functionality in it.
[00:54:02] Speaker A: Yeah, makes sense basically so there is.
[00:54:06] Speaker B: Less and less need for us make a new version of it if we want to make a new version I understand make a new version of product which is then connected.
[00:54:21] Speaker A: Good one.
[00:54:22] Speaker B: That's the second biggest challenge for us.
[00:54:24] Speaker A: Yeah, I understand that one. The backwards compatibility and compatibility both are historically always have been an issue and you can build the most solid well tested version of a plugin that you can possibly think of in the most siloed way. Right. So you're only doing everything in your namespace and public classes? Private classes, everything perfectly done.
And then somebody else just sort of just injects whatever they think is most convenient for them, and it meddles with your global variables in ways that you couldn't conceive. It was possible, but somebody not fully understanding, they can. That's still a possibility.
It's a risk, it's a risk at all and yet we still love the project, we still love WordPress and I.
[00:55:19] Speaker B: Mean again, it's a flexibility, there is a reason for it and we understand that.
Good thing about Omniscient that there are a lot of senior people working here.
[00:55:32] Speaker A: How many people are working depends on.
[00:55:36] Speaker B: What you're asking for.
Totality, the development it's a couple of hundred people in total.
[00:55:45] Speaker A: Oh wow.
[00:55:46] Speaker B: Somewhat 100 ish product and development. So people who are developing the product.
[00:55:53] Speaker A: That'S a lot larger than I thought. Nothing on your site says we're a couple of hundred folks big or maybe I missed the paste.
[00:56:02] Speaker B: I mean probably this is not that much important. It's much more important if the product is good.
[00:56:13] Speaker A: Two ways there is that and then the other way is like it's a signal of how well you're succeeding in a way I guess makes sense.
Oh it actually says on your about page I glossed by it 200 plus team members.
[00:56:34] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:56:37] Speaker A: Well I want to thank you for sharing your story, your challenges us as somebody coming in from the outside world of WordPress and now fully jumping in.
Thank you for being candid and sharing that with us.
Thanks so much.
