MageTalk Episode 147

Kalen: Hello, welcome to MageTalk, the Magento community podcast. I am joined by my good friend, Joshua Warren, with Creatuity. Josh, how the heck are ya?

Josh: Great, great. Glad to finally make it onto MageTalk.

Kalen: Amazing, man. So, I've been trying to get you on this podcast for probably about a year and a half. It's been a long journey, a long slog to finally get you here, so I'm very excited. What was it that finally got you to come on? I mean, your schedule is impossible, you've got a growing team that you're managing, but how did we finally get you?

Josh: You know, it's funny, I was teasing Phil about that, that he actually at Mage Titans came up to me and said, "Hey, I just heard how One Touch Ordering came about and I need to apologize for something." And then sure enough, not too long ago, one of the guys that was involved with that project for us, he told me he was listening to MageTalk and he - on his way into work he was listening to it, and he's sitting there behind the wheel going, "That's not what happened! That's not what happened at all!"

Kalen: Yeah, so, Phil is known for wildly speculating about things that he has no business speculating about, and I believe it was ... And by the way, we should mention, Phil is running late. He actually has a big client meeting, so he is gonna plan to join us probably in the next 20, 30 minutes, and then the next half of the show we'll have him in here. So, he'll have to apologize for being late in addition to all the other apologies, so we'll have apologies on top of apologies. And we can get into more detail on that side of things once he gets here. So, tell us a little bit about how you guys came up with the idea for the one click checkout and what that whole process looked like.

Josh: Yeah. So, I had heard earlier this year Amazon's one-click patent's expiring and I, like I think a lot of people, get frustrated about software patents. Like, that seems like something that ... especially now, you look at that and you're like, "How is that patentable?"

Kalen: Right.

Josh: So, it kind of stuck out in the back of my head, and around mid-August actually, it popped back up, and I was like, "Hey, I think that that patent, if it hasn't already expired, it expires soon." So I looked it up, and I saw that it expired in September, and I was like, "Okay, that's interesting." We had actually just, kind of at the start of August, started talking to Magento about the Community Engineering program, and the dots kind of connected in my head. I was like, "Hey, this could be an interesting way to kind of make a splash." It also worked out to where the patent was expiring I think a day or two before Mage Titans in Austin. So, I'm like, "Alright, this could be something that we contribute back, we could kind of engage with the Community Engineering team that way, and it's something that would be exciting to talk to people about at Mage Titans. So, I actually talked it over with one of our architects here, Chad. We kept talking through kind of how would this work, what would it look like? And we both kind of came to the conclusion, we're like, "This actually seems easy." When you think about it, we're not creating something totally- like a whole new payment integration or something, we're just kind of connecting things that are already there in the Magento core. So, we had that conversation, and as I often do ... My background is in development, I was a freelance developer before I started Creatuity, so I'm always looking for an excuse to actually get back in and code. So, I was talking to Chad and I was like, "Hey, we could work on this together. This could be a really fun project to do together, just me and you." And I kept saying that for about a week, and kind of every day I was like, "Yeah, we're gonna start on that soon." And just every day, stuff came up. The joys of running a business, you know? So at that point, we got to the end of August, and I was like, "I really still want to do this. We have less than two weeks." Pulled in another one of our architects and just said, "Hey, do you think there's any way that this could happen?" And at this point, we still haven't talked to Magento about it, we haven't said anything to anybody. It was a total under-the-radar sort of project. I honestly ... I don't know. I still think back to the

eBay days, when eBay owned Magento. I get nervous that if I call up somebody at Magento, especially back then, if I had called up and said, "Hey, there's this thing going on with Amazon, they have a patent expiring," the second you say the word "patent" ... lawyers. Lawyer after lawyers.

Kalen: Like, three guys in dark black suits show up at your front door within seven minutes or something.

Josh: Yup. So, it was like, I don't think that's how it works anymore with Magento, but it seems like this ... Especially, we were working on such a tight turnaround time, because I really wanted to be able to announce this on the day the patent expired. So, I was like, if we're gonna move fast, let's just keep this internal, let's build it, and then let's put it out there and just see what happens, and maybe we catch some flack for it. I did kind of feel bad because the whole point of the Community Engineering team is they're very collaborative. Like, they kept asking, giving us ideas to work on and things like that. So, hopefully I didn't offend any of those team members.

Kalen: Wait, why would you have offended them?

Josh: Well, just because, I don't know, I felt like ... It was kind of an internal debate I had of should we open this up? Should we let people know what we're doing, or should we kind of keep it under the radar? So, I just didn't know if we were gonna get some people ... You know, we show up with a relatively big pull request and kind of just drop it into GitHub and say, "Bam. There you go. Roll this into Magento 2.2."

Kalen: Right, right. Without asking beforehand, like, "Should we build this?" or "How should we build this?" or that kind of a thing?

Josh: Yeah. Exactly.

Kalen: Got it.

Josh: And that was a big risk, too. I was kind of nervous that we'd get to the end of the project, we'd submit it, and they'd be like, "Cool idea, but we don't like the way you built it."

Kalen: Cool pull request, bro.

Josh: Yeah, exactly.

Kalen: That's cool. I mean, so many things I want to jump off onto. Just the Community Engineering program in general. I mean, you mentioned the eBay days and just the difference with how things are being handled now, we'll jump into that in a sec. But just staying in the one click checkout. You know, as you mentioned, it's sort of a simple thing to build, but it's almost like the things around it are what are complicated. Like getting people used to the idea of doing a one click purchase, getting used to the idea that people would have to be logged in and already create an account. And it has power to the extent that, like Amazon, people are already logged in, visiting the site frequently. Have you guys been able to roll it out in production yet? Have you had discussions with clients around how to roll that out, how to market it, that kind of a thing? Or is it just really more kind of in the proof of concept stage?

Josh: Yeah. So, we've been working on getting it rolled out for some of our clients before Black Friday. It's that fun time of year with all that. One of the best parts, I think, about contributing this back and working with Community Engineering is once we submitted the pull request, we got some technical feedback, but the majority of the feedback we got was actually from Magento's User Experience team. And they went through and they thought about all those things that, in our rush, we're like, "Hey, we're gonna build this really cool thing," and we put it together and we get it out there, and they're like, "Alright, well now let's make sure that users understand how it works. Let's make sure they know which card it's gonna charge," and things like that. Because there's definitely a lot of user

education around it, because yeah, you have to get people comfortable having that card on file, knowing how it's gonna work, getting them excited about using it. I think that commodity products, reorders, things like that, are where it's gonna really take off the fastest. Like, sites that already have people coming back to reorder the same things. But I'm interested to see, you know, one of the reasons we open sourced it is I want to see what people do with it, like the interesting ways it can now be used in other implementations.

Kalen: Right, totally. And you mentioned the decision between keeping this as maybe proprietary versus releasing it as open source, a lot of agencies face that decision when they build something. Also, I want to talk about Launch and some of the other product or productized things you guys have done in that past. So, what did that decision look like for you as to, "Hey, I have this idea, it fills a nice gap," what's the best way to release it?

Josh: So, we have tried quite a few different products. We've done some really interesting stuff and some fun projects, but at the core, I've realized that we are a service company, and that our strengths are around providing for the things that our clients need, they're not around building and selling extensions. So, I thought about that, and I also just thought about the fact that this is a fairly core e-commerce function. This is something that, as we've since seen in the industry press, some of the competing SAS platforms are talking about adding this as just a free base feature next year. So it's like, we could sell it, but for kind of the good of everyone in the Magento ecosystem, this needed to be a core feature so that it's not, when you're comparing Magento versus these other platforms, yeah Magento has this, you have to buy this extension and that extension. I was like, let's get this into core so that when people are making those comparisons they're like, "Alright, Magento has that feature."

Kalen: It is the kind of thing that just feels like it should be core. It's cool to be able to say, "Hey, Magento had this before all the other guys." Sometimes we see, you know, Shopify maybe innovating a little faster in like Facebook integration or different things that are kind of cool and shiny. So, it's cool, as a Magento guy to see, "Hey, we had this first." So, thanks for that. Much appreciated.

Josh: Definitely.

Kalen: So, tell us a little bit about Creatuity, how long you guys have been in business, what makes you guys unique, and things like that.

Josh: So, we've been in business it'll be 10 years this coming April, so we're very excited to hit that milestone.

Kalen: Amazing.

Josh: We are an Enterprise Solution Partner- Oh, thank you, thank you. I mean the first, really the first five years we were in business, we were very quiet. We didn't really market ourselves, we weren't really involved in the community, we kind of just ... My background's in development, so we actually were hiring nothing but developers for a long time. We were very much like a developer-focused agency, and that's where our strengths were. In the past five years as we've grown quite a bit and started working with some much larger clients, we kind of rounded out, and kind of provide a lot of different services. But that's kind of our background, and that's also where things like one click checkout come from. I look at these opportunities and I'm like, "That's some really cool technology." Like, that's something I'm excited to build and be involved in. And we're doing a lot of interesting work with new and different technologies. I actually have a goal now, I'm building out what I'm calling our innovation roadmap, where once a quarter I want us to have something on this level. And I'm still-

Kalen: Super sweet.

Josh: Thank you. I'm still deciding on each one, you know, are we gonna open source all of these? Are we gonna hold some of them back, what are we gonna do? I think you'll see

us open sourcing a lot of them. And part of that, too, is early on, with my dev background, I always thought if we have the cleanest, best code, that's gonna land us the big clients. People had to explain to me that unfortunately that's not the way it works.

Kalen: The sales guy had to bend your ear.

Josh: Yeah. So, I kind of came to a realization of if we have the cleanest code, that might not necessarily bring us a lot of new clients. If we build and sell this extension for One Touch Checkout, is that really gonna bring us new clients? You know, honestly, I don't think it would. I thought that putting it out there, open sourcing it, not only does that benefit everyone that's using Magento, but I felt like that would be kind of more of a benefit to our company than anything we'd make off of selling an extension. But yeah, kind of getting back to that quarterly idea, some of the things we're gonna do, I know we're gonna fizzle, but some I'm hoping will be really exciting. And it's kind of our chance to experiment, to innovate, and also just to give back. But I want to run all of them, and I'm still getting a little bit of pushback internally on this, but I want to run all of them kind of like that skunkworks projects of no one outside of Creatuity knows kind of what we're doing until we're polishing it up and ready to put it out there. And it gives us a chance, like, if we get halfway into something one quarter and realize it's terrible, we can junk it and move on to something else.

Kalen: Okay, okay. Yeah, I always have the complete opposite approach, which I think as you one time described charitably, what did you say? You said that I .... I can't remember the way you worded it, but I tend to just put stuff out there without a ton of thought or polish, and then I try to iterate as I go. But I can appreciate that approach of wanting to have things a little more polished by the time you put them out. And you guys made a really nice splash with this, so if you can continue to do that that'll be really smart. Such a nice splash that you got the MageTalk podcast to cover it inaccurately. You got fake news generated and all sorts of stuff.

Josh: There we go. Yeah, you haven't really made it till you have fake news about you.

Kalen: There you go. So, you guys have been around 10 years, I remember seeing you guys launch the - it was a couple years ago - there was the Magento Small Business Initiative. I don't know if that's what it was called exactly. And you guys did the - was it called Launch Or Launchpad?

Josh: Launchpad, yup.

Kalen: Launchpad. So, what was that about?

Josh: So, Launchpad. The original Magento Small Business program back in the day kind of had some goals of let's deliver kind of a productized version of Magento that someone could go up, they would pay $4,000 for it, and within, I think we were doing it in two business days, they'd have a Magento site live with all the basics that a small business would need. So that's what we were doing back then.

Kalen: Right, right. I mean, a lot of people were trying to productize in that way. You've got the Zoey, which kind of went a little bit in a different direction with something kind of similar. So, it was interesting to see that effort that you guys put out there. But I guess that didn't quite pick up traction in the way you guys had hoped, or ...?

Josh: Yeah, we ended up getting a good number of those built out, and it was actually ... Phil was one of the people that pointed out at the time back then that productizing e-commerce is challenging, because you really need to have a more personalized solution. Like, in this day and age, you can't just launch an ecommerce site that has the same features and does the same things as every other e-commerce site. The sites that are surviving and thriving are doing unique things, and to do unique things, you have to kind of start with a unique base. So, that was where we kind of saw ... we ran into that. And we also just ran into people that - kind of the press around Shopify lately got me thinking about this again - people expected that, "Hey, I'm gonna pay 4k and then I'm gonna be

an instant millionaire. I'm gonna launch an ecommerce business and get rich." That just wasn't something I necessarily wanted to be involved in.

Kalen: Right. But I think it was a really interesting effort and kind of along the lines of what you're saying with the innovation roadmap is that you try different things. You know, you try productizing, you kind of learn, you make some tweaks. I love the idea of putting out some kind of innovation every quarter. And you know, who knows? Maybe something picks up traction, different things have different levels of traction. So, I always love to see people getting out there and trying things. And it's funny because-

Josh: Well ...

Kalen: Oh, I'm sorry, go ahead.

Josh: I was just gonna say, with Launchpad we learned that instead of trying to build a one size fits all Magento implementation at 4k and productize it, let's just lower the complexity and cost of building a Magento site. And the other thing with Launchpad is it was kind of at the end of Magento 1's life. We were already looking at Magento 2, so we kind of just switched our focus. And I challenged our team and said, "Let's find a way to just drive the number of hours and therefore the cost it takes to build a Magento 2 site as low as we can." So, instead of saying we're gonna productize it, it's always gonna be 4k, we can at least say, "We're gonna build you a custom site, but it's gonna be for a lot less than you might other wise have paid in the past."

Kalen: Right, right. In terms of the things that allow you to speed up implementations or whether that's internal tooling or extensions, things like that, what are some of things that you guys have in place to help you accelerate your launch times? To the extent that, you know, they're not secret sauce.

Josh: Yeah. No, they don't always let me around all the technical details of these things anymore, because yeah, I would probably just tell everybody how they all work.

Kalen: Yeah, right, you go on a podcast and tell everybody.

Josh: Yeah, exactly. A lot of it is around internal tooling. We actually, when we started doing Magento 2 builds, I basically said, "Hey, I want to do as many of these with as few extensions as possible." Like, the early days at M1, you had to have a lot of extensions. Now, not as much. So, we really focused more ... I know a lot of people will do, like, prepackaged combinations of extensions, but we focused more on the internal tooling and processes. So, we have custom deployment workflows, custom dev workflows. We have a couple of guys that are just some of the best developers that I've ever worked with, just on a whole other level that put a lot of hours, even before Magento 2 was out there, put a lot of internal hours into experimenting, finding the best ways to do things, and building out tooling around that, and then training the rest of team on it. And we're basically always doing that. At the start of the summer, we were looking at kind of average build times and we were hoping we could reduce it by a small amount by the end of the summer, just from the experience that they gained as well, and kind of seeing, especially with migrations, seeing all the different ways that we needed to build out tooling around migrations. We were able to shave quite a bit of time off of how long those builds were taking.

Kalen: Okay, any specifics as far as the time you were able to shave?

Josh: We had a migration that came in at, I want to say it like 100, 120 hours, which just blew me away. I didn't think it would be that fast this early kind of into Magento 2's life.

Kalen: Nice, man. So, with Magento 2, if I recall, you guys jumped in real early to Magento 2. I've been a pretty outspoken skeptic for a while now. I've started to really see the tides kind of turning, and I'm seeing that happen now. But I think you jumped in super early with Magento 2 and just started to do all your new builds. What was the time frame for you guys as far as moving over to M2?

Josh: So, basically, the entire year leading up to Magento 2's release, I was out doing conference presentations and other things like that about Magento 2, trying to get more developers interested in it, and then taking their feedback and taking what I was learning from other devs that were doing similar things back into our team. So, we held back and we didn't start a build until 2.0 was released and ready to use. I know there are some people kind of playing with the dev beta and things like that, but we didn't go that far. We basically got to the point to where the second 2.0.0 was available. That's what we were using for everything. I don't want our team members to have to know Magento 1 and Magento 2, I want them as quickly as possible be able to just focus on Magento 2. So, yeah, we jumped pretty early.

Kalen: Yeah. I've heard people say they're different enough, it might even be easier for somebody that doesn't know M1 to come in fresh to M2, and just the learning curve is pretty steep. With Commerce Hero, we got a lot of people that are looking to hire Magento 2 people, so that's super interesting. How do you spend your time? Like, you run an agency, you've done a lot of speaking, you know, the skunkworks thing. I'm always interested in how you're spending your time, because you're super busy doing a lot of stuff, and as your company's grown, how has role your changed and what do you like to focus on?

Josh: I think it's almost a cliche to hear kind of a founder say this, but I have really had to learn to delegate. And we've made some changes recently, where I'm trying to not jump into every little detail on every project just because that's not really my role. And that's been one of the most helpful things. It's one of the hardest things for me to learn, because I want to jump in and know everything that's going on and kind of try to help out with everything. But I have been focusing more on vision and more on basically thinking about where is e-commerce going. One of the interesting things, I've gotten a little introspective thinking about the company as we approach the 10-year mark, and one thing that hit me was that over the past 10 years, we've had a lot of really great employees. We've been in the right place and done the right things, but we've also grown a lot just because Magento's grown. I mean, if you look at Magento when we first started versus now, it's just insane, the increase in demand. And that's obviously had a great impact on our business. So, I've started thinking about, okay, going forward, what can we do so that Magento is also growing because of us? Like, we're not just kind of riding on Magento's coattails, but we're expanding what Magento can do and how it performs out there in the marketplace. So, that's required a big shift in my average day. I'm doing a lot more of just trying to get the word out about everything that Magento can do, and then also push the boundaries on what it can do. I'm doing a lot more reading. Reading from a lot of different sources, too. Like, it's kind of all over the place. It's a little scary sometimes, the number of ideas that'll be sparked off of random things I read on reddit, of like people complaining about an experience somewhere.

Kalen: Reddit can be a good source of inspiration, surprisingly. But so, a little more detail, like, what does your day look like? I mean, you're talking about vision and things like that, what does an average day look like for you?

Josh: So, I've tried to keep it a little bit more freeform, so that I can be a little bit more creative. So, I'll come in, and I used to ... I did everything wrong as far as, like, I'd go through all my emails, I'd get bogged down in other things. And I really try to block off the mornings now, where I'm thinking through kind of what should we be focusing on? What's happening in the industry? Is there any big changes that have occurred? We moved into a new office earlier this year, and I have, I think, five different white boards now in my office, to where I'm just like always scrawling things out on them, of kind of thinking through different ideas and thinking through where the technology's going and what we can do with the technology. So, I'll spend a good bit of time usually in the mornings on that, and I'm either working through a new idea or maybe I'm spending some time talking to one of our clients about what they're doing. Because one of the kind of strategic and vision items I've been wrestling with is I want to make sure that we are able to do anything and everything an e-commerce merchant might need. So, we're kind of unique in that all we do is Magento. We don't work with any other e-commerce platform. So, as

we grow, a lot of other agencies, the way they grow is they add another platform. They're like, "Okay, we'll also sell this platform and that platform." So, I've kind of flipped it, and we're looking at okay, let's work with PIM. I had a lot of clients basically say, "Hey, we're struggling with really bad product data. We're struggling with ... Our Google feed needs our product data in this format. We need this on our website. We need this in our stores." And so, I would spend a lot of my time thinking through, okay, we need to learn a PIM. We need to find a really good PIM, and we need to build it in to where basically, when we go out there and we're setting somebody up on Magento for the first time, we can also be setting them up on a PIM like Akeneo at the same time. So, I spend a lot of time, again kind of going back to my dev background, I didn't call somebody at Akeneo. I downloaded the open source version and I poked at it. I saw if I could install it, kind of got a feel for it, and that's actually kind of how we got started with that. So, I'm doing similar things now around CRM, around ERP, different technologies like that. So, it'll be a mix of I'm either talking to clients to hear what their pain points are, what they're looking for in those things, or maybe I'm actually experimenting with deploying one of those and trying to get a sense for how it works. But then I also, even though I'm trying to delegate more and rely on our team more, I spend a lot of time doing the whole management by walking around. So, by the afternoon, I like to kind of walk out around the office and just see how everything's going, see if there's anything popping up.

Kalen: That's really cool, man. I really love the role that you've carved out for yourself. I think, you know, a lot of times the agency owner just moves into, like, doing sales full time. I'm sure you're involved in sales, but I love how you just kind of carve out time, whether you're tinkering with something as a developer or just talking to a client or brainstorming stuff, or doing things on 17 white boards. That's a cool role that you've carved out, and congrats on all the success. And we're back. We're joined here by the one and only Phillip Jackson, joining us here for the second half. How's it going, man?

Phillip: Hey. Yeah, thank you so much. Sorry about that, I wanted to be in from the beginning. I trust that you said only nice things about me.

Kalen: Mostly. Mostly nice things is how I would characterize it.

Phillip: You know who doesn't always say very nice things about people? Is me. That's become part of my M.O. Which is said actually, and it shouldn't be, and that's kind of part of the reason why we had Josh on. Thanks for coming on the show, Josh.

Josh: Oh yeah, man, I'm glad to be here. Like I was telling Kalen, it's been way too long since y'all first invited me. So, I'm glad to sync up.

Kalen: Beautiful.

Phillip: Did you guys talk about Launchpad at all yet? Did we get to talk about that?

Kalen: We did.

Phillip: That's awesome.

Kalen: We covered Launchpad a little bit.

Phillip: I can't wait to hear it. Real excited about that.

Kalen: We talked a little bit about the one click checkout and your mischaracterization of it a little bit.

Phillip: Oh, did you? That's awesome.

Kalen: And a couple other things. Did you have any specific-

Phillip: No, no. So, I kind of wanted to chime in a little bit, which is ... There's two things that I think Creatuity has come up on the show that's sort of central around Creatuity in the past, or three things. One is your great work in community contribution, especially around the Pinterest work that you did in enabling Magento to be able to be an order management platform, or order repository from Pinterest.

Kalen: We hadn't even talked about that yet. Yeah, that was also huge.

Phillip: Which I think was just a huge thing. You know, I think it really recharacterized Magento for a lot of people, and I think it was really key. So, you guys came up in a very positive way there. I have this problem where, I don't know why I do this, and I think this is where we kind of shift the conversation a bit to sort of more me over three years sort of being a bad actor to some degree, where my cynicism comes through, is that I think things like Launchpad and the product that you built there is actually amazing and transformative, but it gets overshadowed and sometimes by my larger cynicism around things that are happening in the community. And I think that that's ... we're poorer for that. And I've not been in the past aware that I've done that. So, when we started talking again about the one click, or what are we- One Touch, sorry. You can't say one click, because then we're gonna get sued or something.

Josh: Oh, don't worry, I learned that One Touch is also trademarked.

Phillip: Oh, awesome. One swipe checkout, which sounds more like a Charmin or a Cottonelle. One swipe, that's what you need. I'll bet that's trademarked as well.

Kalen: It's not that kind of swipe, folks.

Phillip: Yeah, it's a different swipe. This one's like left to right, front to back. Anyway. So, I said this whole - and that's actually, it's coming through there a little bit, too. I'm not always aware that I'm doing it. And this sort of larger cynicism feeds into the larger conspiracy theories that I develop, which is like, how Magento's trying to be strategic. And I give Magento, I think maybe to some degree, not enough credit, and then to another degree maybe too much credit. And I think that's where this story came in, which is what should have been ostensibly one of the largest stories in our community, which is that the community's actually working the way that we say it does. Not in a way that we're trying to market it that it does, but in the way that it really should, which is Josh Warren and a team at Creatuity, who is incredibly capable, is building this incredible thing that will power commerce for tomorrow. It's the stuff I stand on stages and talk about. About how checkout-less, cart-less commerce is the future, and it's changing. And the only thing I can muster to say is - and I'll bet this is all just marketing hype-

Kalen: I bet there's a conspiracy there.

Phillip: Yeah, there's some sort of conspiracy to, you know, be able to promote community engineering. And I think that that's completely wrong and false and something that I shouldn't have done, and I'm really, really sorry about that, because the focus should've been on the positive nature of, A, what you're doing; B, that it is selfless, because you're contributing to the community in the same way we are; and then, C, then we lose sight of what the real important thing is, and that is you're enabling the future of the platform, which enables all of us. I'm gonna build sites with that feature and that functionality, and that is the future of the platform, and that's what makes Magento different and better than everybody else. And I lost sight of that, and so I'm really, really sorry about that. I just apologize with no qualification.

Kalen: Let the man accept the apology already.

Josh: Definitely appreciate the apology, but one thing I've always valued from you, Phillip, is I will never forget IRC many years ago, you kind of cornering me and Jenna, and just being open and honest with your opinions. Because there's a lot of people that don't do that, and I think especially then, when we were getting a little more involved with Magento and with the community, it was just great to hear kind of the unfiltered,

unabashed straight talk from Phillip. So, I definitely, while I know sometimes you see that as a weakness or something you shouldn't do, there's definitely some strength to that as well. So, no worries. Thank you for setting the record straight. I was telling Kalen earlier that one of our team members that's an avid listener was telling me that he was basically yelling at his car radio as he was driving and he was like, "That's not how it happened!"

Kalen: The number of car radios that Phil has caused to be yelled at as a result of the podcast ... There's probably gonna be a class action suit by car radios against him at some point.

Phillip: We stopped counting a long time ago how many car radios have been damaged by MageTalk. If anything, it's just even, like, speakers and the frequency response of Kalen's wheezy laugh that comes through from time to time.

Kalen: The wheezy laugh is dangerous. It's very pitchy.

Phillip: Beware the wheezy laugh.

Kalen: Beware ... Show title.

Phillip: I do want to say one other thing if you don't mind. There are people who sort of over a period of time have - not that anyone needs to prove anything to me, because I'm nobody - but my sense is that I do the thing that I hate that other people do, and I don't always know it when I'm doing it. But you kind of get to this point where there's some elitism where you think, "Oh, I know everybody in this community, I know who's doing what." And then you meet someone like Josh, who has been grinding it out for six, seven years without being public about it, and they come in and they're looking for shepherding and guidance on, like, where can they plug in, you know? And instead of being welcoming, it's like as if you have to prove something to us. Like, let's see what you can do, let's see what you can contribute, let's see what kind of value you bring to Stack Exchange, or what kind of value you bring to Community Engineering. And I would like us to be better than that. I just want people to join our community because they have nothing to offer, just because they want to be part of it, right? Why does there have to be a qualifier there? And so, that's another area where I feel like I've fallen down in the past, where it's like, if Josh and Jenna are busy, and they're off doing their thing, then they've stopped contributing, that's just such a cynical mindset. It means that they did all the right things, they got busy, and that's a good thing. Good for them. They're heads down, making it happen for a bunch of merchants. You know, God bless 'em for it.

Kalen: Yeah. One of the things actually, I don't know if you'd heard about this, Josh just mentioned it in the first half, that I think you're gonna be kind of pumped about. He's starting to build what he's calling an Innovation Roadmap, where every quarter, they're gonna try to release something like what they did with Pinterest, one step checkout. Anyway, Josh, I'll let you describe it, but I love the idea, I love the name of it, Innovation Roadmap, I love the concept, and I think it's really smart.

Phillip: Yeah, but that's awesome. And this is what blows my mind, and Josh, I'd love to hear more from you, but this is, I think, Magento's vision, which is that they cast the vision of things like what does innovation mean to Magento? It doesn't mean has a lab where a bunch of people are blowing up stuff with chemicals and artificial intelligence, it means that the community is their lab, right? And I've heard Andrea Ward say, you know, leveraging the ingenuity of this community that we have, and I think that's an amazing way of saying it, because people like Creatuity, that company is ingenious. They have something really awesome. So, like, if there is an innovation lab in this community, it's people like Creatuity who are writing out a roadmap. It's not guided, it's not being guided by Magento in their roadmap, it's a roadmap for all of us. And I'd like to see things like that transcend into larger community efforts, because I feel like there's more people than just us, and there's more people than who listen to this podcast who are participating in that way but they just don't have the broader platform. Sorry. Okay, now I'll shut up. Go ahead, Josh.

Josh: Alright.

Kalen: Josh is too polite, he lets you talk for too long.

Josh: Don't want to end up having to apologize on top of the other apologies. I appreciate all that. One of the reasons ... Kalen was asking me earlier why we open sourced this with the one touch, one click, one swipe, one whatever, and one of the reasons I didn't mention earlier is that yeah, I want other companies to see this. When I was doing a whole lot of speaking at developer conferences, I would get feedback from the frontline developers of, "I have this cool idea but my boss won't let me do it," or "I want to contribute to open source, but my boss doesn't see the value," or "That's not something our company does." So, I'm hoping if we're out there and people see that, you know, we've been around for almost 10 years now, we're successful, and yet we're open sourcing some of these big things we're doing, that gives an example people can point to. They can go to their boss and say, "I have this cool idea, I want to build it, I want to contribute it back to the community, I want to power these innovative ideas for Magento, and look, there's other companies that are doing it and they're successful with it." So, it's just another way of thinking and trying to effect some change around the way agencies compete and the way agencies cooperate in the Magento space. Because you know, this isn't a SAS platform where, you know, we're all kind of doing the exact same things and have the exact same things to offer. Like, this is a very different experience where we can definitely help each other and all still benefit from it.

Phillip: Have you ever thought about - this is kind of an outlandish and sort of crazy idea. I guess, let me not ask you in a way that sort of puts you on the spot. You know what I wish existed? I wish there was like a capital fund that could invest in those companies that have those kind of interesting ideas. Where you could take someone like Gene Commerce, who doesn't have to come out of nowhere, with talents like Dave Macaulay, and be able to fund them to just work on that sort of stuff for a year. It's like venture capital for Magento.

Kalen: I was just thinking about this this morning.

Phillip: Like, what could Creatuity do? What kind of contribution could they make, and what kind of products could come out of that that could be beneficial, not just from a community and open source sort of point of view, but things that could actually be commercially successful for you and for the investor, if you could just dedicate a single developer to do nothing but 40 hours a week crush it for open source, right? What could you do? I mean, I feel like that's where we need to move is something broader like that, and I feel like if anyone could do it, it's you guys who consistently put out great open source work. And sort of very selfless with your time, too. I mean, a couple years ago, I feel like you were at every single conference that existed in the PHP and Magento space, you know?

Josh: It definitely felt like it. That was a long but fun year.

Kalen: Yeah, it's funny, I was- Oh, sorry, go ahead.

Josh: I just gonna say, that is an awesome idea, and I know that there's been other technology platforms - no one's done it in e-commerce that I've seen - but other tech platforms that have launched kind of incubators and innovation funds and things like that. It's just a matter of it sounds easy, well, if you have a lot of money, it sounds easy of, "Let's just toss some money out there," but I think that it takes some community infrastructure and mentoring. Yeah, there's a lot that would have to go in that, but I think that could be incredibly powerful for Magento and for all of us.

Kalen: What do you think, Josh, about ... I feel like the innovation lab stuff that they're doing is kind of interesting, getting people to submit things and then maybe they'll bring them into core, maybe they'll whatever. I feel like they should just put out, like, I don't know $20,000 prize, $50,000 prize, something like that and give people that kind of an incentive or something like that. What do you think about that kind of a model? Do you

think there'd be pros and cons to doing that? Do you think that would incentivize the right people?

Phillip: Yeah, would that have incentivized you? I mean, obviously you had no incentive to do what you did with the one click, but is that incentive for you?

Kalen: I don't know that that would be an incentive for you because you're making that Enterprise Solution Partner money, so it would probably have to be higher than that. But the question is like, would that be incentive maybe for an individual freelancer or maybe should the numbers be higher than that? What are your thoughts on that?

Josh: I honestly think, even at kind of the level we're working at, which I wish we were making as much money as everyone thinks that Enterprise Solution Partners make. Maybe then I could start this fund.

Phillip: You gotta make that Corra money, man. You gotta go after that Corra money. That's what you gotta get.

Josh: There you go. But even a relatively small amount, just having that prize, because I was telling Kalen earlier that we're not a product company. We don't want to sell products, we aren't good at that. We're good at delivering services, we're good at building these customizations. So, if Magento in the Innovation Lab or some fund came to us and said, hey, we really like this thing that you're working on, and we're gonna give you this even relatively small amount of money for it and then build it into the core, or somehow distribute it to where a lot of people can benefit from it, we'd do that in a heartbeat.

Phillip: So, can we shift this a little bit? I know we didn't plan it, but you are part of the Enterprise Partner Program, right?

Josh: Yes.

Phillip: And Kalen, I hope this doesn't put you out in any way, but-

Kalen: I know all about the Partner Program.

Phillip: I know you do, I know you do. You know everything.

Kalen: I'm so far into it, so deep in the Partner Program.

Phillip: I just want to touch on a couple things real quick, and maybe it's more taking your temperature, I sense sort of a shift. So, what it used to be is to be successful in the Enterprise Partner Program in Magento, you had to fight for big deals, right? Because really, the sort of Magento sales lead flow wasn't a deluge, it was more of a trickle, and if you were a very good partner it was a stream. But I sense that there is a big shift happening in the B2B space that is opening up a flood of new opportunity, and I'm curious what you think, if you could build a successful, a big and successful Enterprise Partner business but never close million-dollar deals, if you could just do it on ... Like, what's your take on how that works and do you think it's shifting and do you think it's changing going forward?

Josh: There's definitely a shift. There's definitely been a shift in the past couple of years in the program. I have been a big advocate for change in the partner program for many years. There's actually a story that I love to tell that I am still to this day amazed that Mark Lavelle doesn't just run the other way when he sees me at Imagine, because very first Imagine that he's at, and I corner him at a partner event. And probably 30 minutes kind of outline, this is where the Partner Program is just totally failing us right now. And I didn't even really fully realize, like, I saw he was someone from Magento, and it wasn't until later that it kind of sunk in of, "Oh, that's what I just did."

Phillip: That's so funny.

Josh: And, to his credit, we were not kicked out of the program. But yeah, so, I've definitely seen that shift over the years, and I feel like the program ... I think lately everyone's very excited about B2B. The B2B merchants are excited about moving to e-commerce, so obviously there's a lot of agencies that are doing some just massive projects of B2B. I mean, the revenue numbers that are involved for some of those B2B businesses just enable you to have ... They have so many more resources than a lot of other e-commerce merchants. I feel like the shift is beyond that. That it's a change in focus, you know, the theme of Imagine a couple years ago of "We are Magento" and things like that, I know that the end of the day, Magento has to make money. They're not a non-profit, they're not completely altruistic. But I feel like there has been a shift over the past few years kind of under the current leadership of realizing that what sets Magento apart in a lot of ways is the community, and it is people that are contributing back, people that are focusing on how do I make my business better, but also make Magento's business better? And that's where, you know, it's sometimes slower than we'd like the change to be, but that's where we've seen the most change. Years ago, like, just the thought of the Community Engineering Program working with the Partner Program and there being a way that Solution partners are encouraged to contribute to the Magento core, like that. I never would've imagined that a few years ago. So that's an incredible shift.

Phillip: Yeah. I want to kind of keep in this vein. Yeah, in the years past, it felt like you could've contributed and we had contributed massive platform updates, right? And they get lost somewhere, it happens. But if one of the big global partners, who shall be unnamed, if one of those big global partners committed it then it was like, it was a headline story at Imagine. Partners like X, X, and X are core contributors to the platform. I'm like, uh, we took the catalog indexer or the category indexer from a million skew, 10-hour index time down to three and a half minutes, so, thank you very much, Something Digital. But we don't get pat on the back for that. Not that we need that. We solved it for our client, so we contributed it to the core and it was part of the ethos. But I do think that there are, especially agencies I don't know the names of, they're not every day names for us, that are, you know, doing great work that are incentivized by getting rewarded. Whether it's through public visibility because there's a leaderboard or a scoreboard, or because they can actually ... Instead of just having to close deals and deals and deals and sell licenses for Magento, which has always been just the only qualifier, now they can actually contribute to the core and turn that into part of their partner metrics for meeting what's required of them. I also want to kind of talk a little bit about - because I know that we have a big sort of developer and ecommerce director sort of audience that probably yawns and rolls their eyes at the Partner Program inside baseball talk. But one of the things that I think Magento has changed, and I'm loving this, is that it went from a here's the highwater marker, the bar to clear so that you qualify. And I think what changed was the sense is no longer what do you need to do to qualify to be a partner, and the change is now more in the spirit of our best partner's look like this, what can we do to get you to look like them? What do we need to do to enable you to make you perform the way they perform, right? And for us, it was making a couple strategic hires, it was changing the way that we deliver projects. For us, it was we Seven X'd our business, I'm not kidding, we Seven X'd our Magento business in the past two years. But how do you do that? You need to have-

Kalen: It's called the Phil Winkle effect, that's what I call it.

Phillip: It's the Winkle effect. That's what I'm talking about. But it's just about - and that's more on the Enterprise business space. But it's like, instead of just saying, "You must be this tall to ride the ride," it's now what can we do to help you grow so that you get there, so that you're behaving like the best performers? And I feel like for us, that was more conducive to the way we want to work. I don't know what your experience is, you're in a different territory, and I think we sense that shift.

Josh: Yeah. And you know, the inside baseball part, I think what a lot of people don't realize, both on the dev side and on the merchant side, is this shift in the Partner Program is huge in that I think it's creating more of the right kind of jobs for developers. Like,

there's more of a focus now on okay, let's train our developers well, let's get them certified, let's make sure projects are successful, more than let's just see how many deals we can close this month. And that benefits the employees, that benefits the merchants. Like, this shift is one that is really helping everyone. I better stop now with talking about how great the Partner program is, I don't want another blog article calling me the Magento apologist. I'd rather leave that title to someone else. But I will say that yeah, I am seeing those shifts as well, and it's a good time to be involved in the Partner Program. And it's exciting, too, because there's an owner of an agency in Pakistan that I've met with at Imagine for two years now. And meeting with someone who's starting a new agency way back when, back in the old days, the questions will be, well, how many leads do you get from Magento, and how much business do you get, and things like that. And now the questions are, "Hey, I saw there's this Community Engineering Program, how do I connect with them so that when my developers have a good idea, I can contribute it back? And how can I use those sort of contributions to become an official Magento partner?" And again, that helps everyone; that puts the focus on the right thing.

Phillip: Yeah, as an aside, though, if I had to sort of use my crystal ball here for a second, if there ever were a time - and I can't say anymore than this - if there were ever a time where you're on the fence of whether you should commit to being a Magento partner or not, if it's feasible for you to do, now is the time. Now is the time. Get off the fence and get in. I think, and again, it's not like I have some crazy inside information, I really, truly am convinced that the B2B opportunity is so great that, like, you would have to triple the footprint of the Partner network in the Magento space to handle the volume that's about to come. I'm not kidding. Because, if you just look at - I don't know. I really can't say much more than that. I really feel like we're just sitting right at the cusp with so many businesses who are having huge shifts in digital enablement in their business. And if you had asked me three years ago - If I heard myself three years ago talking the way that I talk now, I would've hated my guts. Like, I sound the biggest douchebag right now, but I'm just saying, if you do it, if you listen to me, just trust me. If you've ever listened to anything that I've said, and I hope you haven't, this it the time. The partnership with Magento has been so rewarding for Something Digital. It's been very hard at times, there are a lot of pains-

Kalen: I'm getting the distinct impression that you've got inside information and that's what this is based off of.

Phillip: No, I can't tell you that I have inside information. That's certainly not it.

Josh: This is obviously a conspiracy, where Phillip is in with Magento and he's trying to promote a new initiative.

Phillip: It's a conspiracy. So, the reason I believe this is no more information than what I see in the partnership channel itself. I see Magento producing more marketing materials for partners to go into sales opportunities with. Magento's investing heavily. They're hiring sales people left, right, and center. You don't hire sales people that sit around and don't close deals, right? You don't have marketing fixated on producing decks and decks and decks and decks for B2B that you don't think you can justify. Nobody's sitting around twiddling their thumbs right now, people are like pulling their hair out, they're so busy at Magento just trying to enable partners to be able to handle something, right? So, that's my sense.

Kalen: I'll give the counterpoint just so we're not too biased here. You're in a unique position being a really well established partner, and you're personally keynoting at events and things like that, so I'd imagine your experience as a partner - And Josh as well, very well established. Goes up to Lavelle, tells him whatever he wants to tell him. But in terms of talking to people to join the Partner Program, I bet their mileage will vary a little bit if they're just trying to get in. I'm not saying it's not a good opportunity, but I think you gotta state the counterpoint there. I don't even know if it's even possible to get into the Partner program, I know that it's kind of a tricky thing to get into still, it's not like a clear path for how you get in.

Phillip: Yeah, I'm not asking for competition by any means ...

Kalen: You kind of are, you kind of are.

Phillip: But I want you to go look, 'kay? Because listen, we can't take every single ... We're not gonna win every deal, right? I don't know what your close rate is, Josh, but we're not gonna win every single thing that comes in the door. Somebody wins it, right? Somebody's gonna get it. So, my sense is, if you just did a little recon, the people that keep coming to me and say ... I don't hear people saying, "I can't get into the Partner Program" anymore, it used to be that. What I hear now is "Is it worth it?" It's like what Josh just said. Is it worth it? Or is it pay to play? Well, it depends on how you want to characterize that. I see Magento as being very enabling these days to help us. And we weren't always the best partner. I have been the one that's sort of crapped all over Magento, you know, and I've said things in the past that haven't helped our partnership. And we also, we made a big business at Something Digital of focusing on rescues. Do you think Magento likes that characterization, that people need rescued on their platform? You know, like, that's been a tough thing. So, anyway. I get the sense like, especially with seeing Creatuity grow - and you guys have a beautiful new office, just seeing the pictures I can't wait to see it in person - but just seeing you grow, I feel like the pie is getting bigger for everybody and there's plenty of room for everybody, and that's really what I want to encourage, you know?

Josh: Yeah. And I will say - building off your counterpoint there, Kalen - that sometimes people here how excited that we are about the Partner Program, whether it's at Creatuity or Something Digital, and they think that it's like this amazing gravy train of just immediate awesome success. And it's definitely a struggle. You have to put in work.

Kalen: Absolutely.

Josh: So definitely just understand that. And it goes back to that. You can't approach the Partner Program or any partnership, really of "Well, what are you gonna do for me? How are you going to make my business grow?" And I think that was an attitude a lot of people had, and that's not gonna be successful. It takes a lot of work. I mean, there have been times that we're trying to grow the business, we're trying to get some things done, and it's just not happening. There's definitely the frustrations and the disappointments. We're glad that the program's improved and it is where it is, but it's not a magical money fairy. I have yet to find one of those.

Phillip: I wish I had a magical money fairy. So, let me put it this way. Kalen, you put this thing out on Twitter the other day about when you hire somebody, do you give them a trial project, right? Do you give them a first go that sort of lets them test the waters or not? I would characterize the same thing.

Kalen: Cutting in and out a tiny bit here.

Phillip: Oh, sorry. Well, at any rate, do you remember that thing you tweeted?

Kalen: Oh sorry, you sort of cut off the past ten seconds. Are you talking about the trial project?

Phillip: Oh. Yeah, the trial project for hiring a new person. So, when you hire a new person, you give them a trial, right?

Kalen: It looks like Phil's cutting off a little bit. I think he was asking a question about doing trial projects when hiring people. So, I don't know if we can hear you now, Phil ...

Phillip: Yeah, I don't know.

Kalen: I can hear you.

Phillip: Can you hear me? Okay. I'm just saying when you hire somebody for a trial project-

Kalen: Every time I say I can hear you then it starts fidgeting out a little bit. That's bad. Sorry about that. Well, if you want to type your question in, I'll try to get it but I'm having a hard time getting that. Well, we've had a wide-ranging interview. Been very enjoyable. We're about here at the end of our time. Josh, any questions that you want to ask? You want to turn the tables, put us in the hot seat, you can feel free to do that. If you don't have any burning questions, you can give a plug to let the people know where they can find you.

Josh: Yeah. I think my only question for y'all is just, how do you find the energy and the motivation? Like, you guys do so much in the community. And then also, I know that at times you find yourselves in pretty hard situations and you push through it, you make the apologies you need to make, that sort of thing. What is it that makes that happen?

Kalen: You know, I think that for me at least, the podcast is a nice format where we just spend an hour a week pretty much just kind of talking and recapping things that have gone on. I really just enjoy it. We have a good time, we have fun, and Phil's a great person to chat with and we always have things to talk about. So, yeah, it's funny, I was thinking about it just today because we've had different ups and downs and things like that, but we've just kept at it. I think it's been about three years now. So, it's been a lot of fun, and having Phil and Chris help with producing and editing the audio has been huge. So, I don't know if that answers the question. It would be cool if Phil was here but he just dropped off. May be a problem with Zencastr, which we're using to record this episode, so hopefully that wasn't the issue.

Josh: Yeah, I think Phil sends his apologies for dropping off as well, so I can say that for him.

Kalen: It's funny, because what I think is even harder than doing a weekly podcast is like what you do, like traveling around and speaking everywhere. For me, that seems like it takes so much more effort and work than just sitting down for an hour and chatting once a week.

Josh: Yeah. It's definitely ... I look around at all of the dev conferences and Magento conferences and it's a room full of introverts trying to be extroverts, and it's challenging for us. It takes energy, but it also ... I get so many ideas from those events. It's pretty enjoyable.

Kalen: Now, speaking of traveling to events, you're getting ready to head off to Japan here any day now?

Josh: Yup. I'm headed out to meet Magento Japan. All the mentions of how much traveling I like back in 2015 for conferences, I'm actually trying to ramp back up into that. So, hopefully you will see me at an event near you in 2018. And I'm kind of starting that off with Meet Magento Japan next month, so I'm really excited about that.

Kalen: Awesome, man. Super excited. Can't wait to hear how that goes. And again, thanks for so much for joining us. If you want to check out Creatuity, you can find them at Creatuity.com, and you can hit Josh on Twitter at ... What's your handle, is it just @JoshuaSWarren?

Josh: That is it.

Kalen: And thanks again, we will see you guys next week.

Josh: Thanks, guys.