026 | Paul Rogers | Hack, build, scale: shaping the future of ecommerce

Welcome to Commerce Famous, the biweekly podcast all about ecommerce and retail. In each episode, your host, Ben Marks, cuts through the clutter and takes you straight to the stories and experiences of those who shaped digital commerce as we know it today. While their names and faces might not be recognized on the street, each of Ben's guests are famous for commerce or commerce famous. Without further ado, your host, Ben Marks. Hey, Everyone, welcome to Commerce Famous.

This is your host, Ben Marks. My guest today is cofounder of Vivant, a London based e commerce consultancy and performance marketing agency. Paul Rogers and I have been in the same orbit for almost the exact same amount of time, so it's a real pleasure to finally have him on and get a chance to chat with him. Paul, welcome to the show. Thanks for inviting me on.

Yeah. I've I've listened to this a few times, and like you say, yeah, I crossed paths, a lot of Magento events in the past and different things. So, yeah, excited to be on here. Almost a lifetime ago. It's, I guess it was kind of I don't know if it's better that that we had this that that that brief punctuation.

I had a I kinda bookends there in 2020, but it's, it's good to have you on. You, you know, you've had a you've had a you've had a pretty, pretty long career in this business. I mean, I actually, I think you and I kind of got our our, you know, our real formal start in the space at about the same time, like 2008. Right? Yep.

Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. So, yeah, I started in 2008 and then got in more into ecom about two years after that. And, like, went and worked for a small kind of, retail business in Oxford where I did lots of scrappy web builds and, you know, optimization stuff and, yeah, I kind of stuck stuck it from there.

Yeah. That was that was, Garden Games. Right? Yeah. It's funny business.

Yeah. It's, I learned loads out. It's definitely the strangest place that I've worked. It was basically a really small team. We'd we'd buy a container of product from China, buy a domain, do shed loads of black SEO, loads of comments, spam, everything you can think of, get three months out of it, sell the container, move on to the next one.

And it was all quite niche product as well. So it was like playhouses, sandpits, anything you can think of that is an outdoor game or toy. But, yeah, super interesting. Man, that is like, that is like shotgun ecommerce. And back at a time when you could do stuff like that when when when when Googlebot actually would follow and rank comment spam and the like.

So is that how you is that how you I guess that's where you really sort of got into, oh, ecommerce analytics and the basis of what we have now. Is that a fair statement? Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah.

So, I before that, I wasn't in ecom. I was just doing, like, low level digital stuff, kind of website editing, that kind of stuff. Yeah. And then they focused me quite a lot on the SEO side. And for a while, I would kind of split my time between building these sites and then kind of owning that channel, and I kind of stayed in that, world for a little bit.

But then from there, I moved more into kind of general ecom, kind of, yeah, bits of strategy work, did a lot of Magento from when I joined GPMD. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And and, you know, GPMD, certainly friends of ours, great great team.

Everyone there, Mark Slocum. Every everyone I've met from the from the team over the years, always a delight to work with, just, you know, business to business. And then especially at events, you know, that's a that was also I mean, and you went straight to head of digital there, seems like for for a couple years. Yeah? Well, no, actually.

So, I went from my, like, very scrappy generalist role at gun games. And so my first ever job was for the potato council, which is an even stranger business, actually. So essentially, very well funded organization, that was designed to promote the consumption of British potatoes. And the agency that built that website, with GPMD. So Mark essentially used to invite me down to London all the time, like, teach me different things, you know, do lots of kind of CMS training and, you know, kind of give me more, or give me lots of advice around how we could, like, push the sides.

And then when I was at Garden Games, dropped him an email one day, and he basically said, come in, like, yeah, let's sit down and see if we can find you a job. So I went to work there, and I joined in a more junior role, but then I think, like, I yeah. I was fairly junior, but and I'm sure you've worked with people like us before, but I was the highest energy person in the business. But, yeah, I and I had some good experience, but it was, like, really scrappy. I had no discipline, no structure.

So, yeah, he spent about eighteen months teaching me some of those things and then kind of moved up to head of digital, basically. It was folks, it was a wild time back then. You really you you the opportunity to wear many hats, I mean, there was almost an imperative to wear many hats. And for what it's worth, ten years ago, I was the guy with all the energy, that that that definitely wanes. I can confirm now that I'm well on my well on my way into my fifties.

You know, and and so you've also you spent time at, GPMD. You've, you also I was I was interested to see, you know, you were there at, Envika and Session Digital. And I know, you know, over the years, I, you know, one of the people I looked up to, in my in my career in the platform business was Alastair Stead. Yeah. You know, truly just truly a a a just a great human being, but also an absolute genius.

Yeah. Both both as, you know, as a developer and on the business side of things. Now that must've that was the the Invika session days. There was there was a lot of talent there. So you were surrounded by you were part of an organization that was, you know, very high functioning, very successful, and and just just chockablock with with with great people.

What was that experience like? Yeah. It's great. So, so I'd known Yair in particular for quite a lot longer before that. And, like, even when I was at GPMD, we'd done like some advisory bits for them more around kind of the marketing side and strategy side.

So I'd known him for a long time. Yair and I had talked about me going to work there for a long time, and eventually I did go and work there. But, yeah, I always saw them, particularly Session, as, like, the equivalent of Mancini these days. You know, they have so many, like, yeah, elite level people and, you know, I don't know. I think you knew them quite well.

So like the Marcellos, the Yeah. Marcello Duarte. Yeah. Just another. And, yeah, so many super smart people.

But Alastair in particular, I always, like, really looked up to. And I I actually remember so the year after I left, I went to Imagine. I did a talk, and I was super nervous because I was really young. And then afterwards so I was leaving to start a business called Audited, which isn't on my LinkedIn, but I basically spent three months building this, kind of, marketplace for, like, niche audits. So that I would go and find someone that worked in house for a business on SAP, and then I would, like, kind of build a framework with them and then offer SAP, like, performance orders or, you know, Salesforce, audits or whatever else across different areas.

And it grew really quickly. It was a bit of a mess. But I remember I finished the talk, when we sat in bar with Alastair for, like, five hours, and just drank, like, I don't know, six beers or whatever. And he gave me so much advice. And it was after that that I was like, this guy is ridiculously sharp.

Like, loads of advice around how, like, to manage IP, how to, like, you know, prevent risk of these, kind of freelancers essentially going and, building competition. Like, yeah, he was super sharp and obviously technically as well, very sharp. Commerce famous is proudly presented by Shopware, the leading open source ecommerce platform for mid market and lower enterprise merchants. More than 50,000 clients already process over $25,000,000,000 in annual GMV through Shopware. Find out more about Shopware and the best value in ecommerce at shopware.com.

It's one of the things I've I've the you know, I've my experience, you know, my career has largely been spent in this space, but, you know, so I can't I I imagine it happens in other industries as well, but I I I certainly say I I can appreciate, almost every episode of Commerce AM as there's some element of community, you know, and and the related, mentorship aspect of it, whether it's a general, you know, just a just a public contribution mentorship or direct one to one mentorship. It seems to be part of part of this business, and I think that also is what helps drive this business forward is, you know, people, you know, when you say you you you you put the ladder behind you so that people can come up after you and and and move the whole thing forward. I mean and then from there, you you ended up, you were an adviser at Klevu, and I actually had, the CTO on Naresh on Right. Season one. And, that's not also, not not the dumbest guy I've ever had on.

He's incredibly, incredibly, profoundly, smart. And and, actually, that ended up being one of our one of our most popular episodes I was, I was really impressed to see. And what was what was that what was the experience like with, with Klevu? Yeah. Super interesting.

So, yeah, I started working with them. So, actually, when I started audited, I basically did I think it ran for about five months. I was borderline, you know, close to having a breakdown. It was so, like, busy and badly managed. So I merged it with gcomedy, went back a second time.

So we basically split up and down the middle fifty fifty, built my side into consultancy and, you know, kept the audits, but focused it more on Magento and kept some of the freelancers, bought in some people's contractors, like, yeah, and did that for a while. And then I did I did that for a year, basically, and then I left and went on my own, so that would have been about maybe eight years ago, except for that. And then at that point, I started working with Klaviyo. So, yeah, there were about six people at the time. Yeah, really small business, but, you know, so much passion for particularly kind of, you know, NLP and machine learning before that was, you know, the core of a lot of these SaaS businesses.

Yeah. And it's super interesting working with Neeraj and Nilay as well. He's the CEO. I really enjoyed it because that was the first, I guess, like, more product focused role I'd been in. And also, it was like I learned a lot about, you know, SaaS and the tech partners and, you know, how they grow and, you know, kind of go to market.

And I helped to build a partnership channel as well, which, you know, grew a lot. So I was only ever working with them kind of a day or two a week, but I got very, very invested. And, yeah, I worked with them for a long time. And even now, like, you know, I still spend a lot of time chatting to Nilay and various people in the business. And that's this, you know, this is all in your journey, to, you know, 2017 where you when you cofounded, for VonT.

Let me just I'm gonna I'm gonna use your tagline, a Yeah. London based ecommerce consultancy and performance marketing agency. I but I I use the tagline because, you know, it's very clear based on, you know, on your experience. I still I had no idea buying just like just random container shows up. Okay.

How are we gonna sell this stuff? That is what a brilliant way to get you focused on, you know, on, you know, twisting knobs and dials and finding levers and finding the venues to get things moved along. And and, you know, you you think about that and the expertise that you bring in, to then, you know, to then offer as a as a as a service. You've seen this industry change over the years, and then, and I I particularly like your experience at Klayvo because, you know, as we as we are now well into this, you know, post post introduction of ChatGPT. So so, basically, the the era of GPT really gives people know, gave people a chance to see, the what is possible with with with machine learning, with AI.

And I always liked companies, though, because I remember, you know, in the early earlier days, like mid twenty tens, you had personalization companies. You had search, search product recommendation. These were the these were the big data companies that were really bringing AI in AI and machine learning in, and I use I use AI very indelicately here as a term, but but the discipline of this this, you know, having having having nuanced nuanced targeted output based on large datasets. These were the businesses that were really doing this in our space, and I have to believe that has informed, to a great degree what you're doing at Vermont. Is that is that a fair fair way of putting it?

Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. Definitely. I definitely learned a lot, from working with Klayvoo, and I've also, you know, implemented a lot of those, kind of original vendors in the space.

SLI, you know, were massive. At one point, they were a monopoly pretty much. Yeah. Yeah. And I worked with some of the other ones as well.

I'm trying to remember there's one that I always, like, found fascinating. I can't remember the name, and then it's I think it's it's basically merged into other vendors, like, four or five times now, but the original kind of personalization, vendor that was pretty big in The UK and, yeah, definitely took a lot of a lot from working with those, for sure. Yeah. So, yeah, I guarantee you someone is actually screaming into their headset right now the name of this company, it's which I'm also blanking on. So this this, you know, this analytics expertise, you know, so this you've been building up this brand for a while, this service brand, and you've you you have some you have some pretty note notable notable logos on your website.

Did that come right away, or was that something that you built up, built up after the fact? Is this so is this coming from relationships you'd already built, or was it just the notoriety and word-of-mouth that that that got around? So to be honest, so, when we set the Avon up, so it's myself and my background is kind of ecom. Pre setting up Avon, I'd moved more into replatforming. So I'd probably spent the last three or four years doing obsessing over the different platforms in market and then gradually moving into more, like, platform evaluation.

And then so that that was kind of my background going into it. And then Josh, my best friend, had worked for kind of some of the bigger media agencies and, had some views on, like, how these accounts should be managed and particularly the types of brands that I was working with. So I personally wanted to be working with the brands that people, like, really respected. So, a lot of that was fashion brands, some lifestyle brands as well. And, you know, Josh worked on some of those types of accounts and felt that the big media agencies didn't really know how to manage or more kinda grow these channels, beyond just the kind of fundamentals of paid.

So we decided to set up a consultancy initially, yet targeting luxury premium brands. And at that point, we would go and, you know, get two or three clients work from their office. Josh would go and work with the marketing team, the brand team. I would go and work with the IT team, and then we would build out there, at the time, like, d two c channel. Yep.

And then over time, so initially, we were quite well known for replatforming, and then paid was like a sub offering. And then over time, we moved that to be more like a traditional media agency, and that ended up growing way faster, and now it's 80% of our business. Yeah. I mean, you you could almost have had a a podcast about replatforming. Well, yeah.

I'll see James now. So it's funny that as well. Like, so James and I, for a long time, for a good five years, were, like, the only replatforming consultants in The UK. Yeah. And when that was a a project, you know, it would just be us two.

And then then someone else I knew left his agency. He moved into it, and then we ended up hiring him. But yeah. So for a long time, that was our little nation now. Obviously, it's huge, particularly after COVID, and there's so many, like, independents and other consultancies that have got some really good, people around there.

What so, you know, do you it's it's interesting because replatforming is is of of a keen keen interest for for me and for for my employer. Do you see you know, I I it's weird. Depending on who who you're speaking with and and where you're having the conversation, You you may hear that, oh, well, yes. Replatforming is heating up. People are spending you know, wallets are opening up.

Or you might start with someone and say, yeah. No one's replatforming right now. Yeah. Do you have a do you have a perspective on this? Because it it it it does it seems like I can I could go I could talk to 10 different people and, you know, have an even split of whether the people really are replatforming or they aren't?

Yeah. So I have a view. I'd say people are definitely replatforming right now, but I think the projects have changed dramatically. So as you say, a lot of our clients are kind of premium fashion brands. And one thing I would say is obviously Shopify have become fairly dominant, in that kind of little segment of the market.

And I would say that there's a lot of replatforming projects now that three years ago might have had, you know, a bit a much bigger budget for one, far more kind of inputs, so be that, independent consultants, you know, integration vendor, like, whatever else. And now I think there's a lot of projects that are happening where, I've there's still an agency, but even the role of the agency is smaller than it was. So I think essentially the bottom 60% of replatforming projects, I think the scope's smaller and they're being managed internally and by an agency. Yeah. And then in the larger projects, they're they are still there, and we've definitely worked on some really big kind of change projects over the last few years.

But there's fewer of them, I would say. And I think right now, there's a lot of people planning, replatforming projects, but they're struggling to get the budget signed off. And it's more of, like, they're changing their minds on timing. There's Yep. You know, different priorities because they haven't been spending money for the last year or eighteen months.

So, yeah, that's my view. But I do think there are, you know, there are some big ones, but just not as many. Now just and and maybe just to go, just a a touch deeper on it, one I'm I'm curious if I I'll throw something out there. I'm curious if if the nature if if let me back up. I I wonder if, I wonder if the the the scope of the well, so the relationship of of for an ecommerce business, I I feel I get this feeling that or I have I've had this feeling that the ecommerce platform was the center of the universe, right, for for for an e certainly for an ecommerce business or even a business with substantial ecommerce.

And the systems around that were were almost subject to ecommerce platform. Totally. Yeah. And and then and but but now, you know, what we've seen, and this is a this is another recent theme, among just conference conversations and even this this podcast, is that the the ecommerce platform is just another important piece in a stack full of important pieces, whether, you know, whether it be, the the ERP or the PIM or, or customer engagement platform. These these, you know, these are businesses that have all been are all now more mature.

They're you know, those verticals are are all a bit commodified. So everyone has this this big scope, and these these platforms that used to do will take will pick on will pick on, like, customer engagement. So I I think of the and I've been using the dot mailer example because it was dot mailer. Now it's dot digital. And, you know, and six years ago, I'm at their headquarters in London, and they're showing me this entire, like, command line interface, this whole, like, data, you know, essentially, customer customer data platform instead of utilities.

And I'm thinking, wow. Okay. They've they've grown up. And so now you have these these systems that all have a lot to say and think and do with the entities in any kind of ecommerce environment. But sort of, like, everything is now a big first class citizen, and it wants to control these things.

So it would it would seem to me that you could actually then start to narrow the scope of the ecommerce platform and really start to compact it into essential ecommerce functions while you have these all this this this constellation of apps around it. If if what I said was at all decipherable, can you comment on if my intuition there might be correct or not? Yeah. Definitely. I mean, I think, you know, back in the days that I was way more focused on Magento, and at the time, you were obviously very focused on Magento.

Yeah. You know, you would go to an SI. That SI would be entirely accountable for the project. Like, you know, they would cover the full scope. You know, they would then you know, you would sign up to Magento.

You would select your modules that you would buy, and then the agency would build everything else, and they would take on integrations, you know, they would deliver the project. Whereas now, I think even that side, like, you know, our average or a lot of our projects, you know, they will have an SI, but they're responsible for the front end, migrating some data. You will probably in a lot of cases, you would have an independent creative or design agency. You might then use a separate third party for integration. Yeah.

And, you know, you maybe bring in another partner for analytics and data. Yeah. And, you know, then like you say, you've then got potentially a CDP or just a CRM. Yeah. You might have a PIM.

You if you're going down the head of the three, you've got all of the front end technologies. Like, yeah, definitely the projects are more complex. The only thing I would say is I do think at the moment, there's, like, you got this half over here, which are, you know, more complex, and I think that's, in line with what you're saying and why I'm saying. And I think, down here, you've then got I almost feel like Shopify is kind of going a little bit more back towards the older days where, you know, Magento had a really big role and, you know, everything was kind of within their ecosystem. And I do feel like Shopify is definitely simplifying projects in places and then, yeah, definitely going more and, you know, the way they're going with their roadmap, they're trying to put more into the core of the platform.

Okay. Yeah. I can I can see all of this as, you know, as I as I consume, the analyst output, the the blog posts? And, you know, where we are now is I mean, the good news is for, you know, for the for the technology buyers, and and probably even for the agencies to a degree, is that, I I think the the lanes are becoming the lanes are becoming the lanes and the roles are becoming clearer and clearer. You know, again, feel free to, feel free to disagree with me because you have a you know, you're on the agency side of things and you have a a perspective on it.

But, you know, we're we're you know, you no longer I think an agency no longer has to be the the the jack of all trades and and be the expert in all things, that that, you know, that I think I think age hopefully, agencies are still partners in success with their customers. I always I always love the relationship aspect of, at least the the agencies that did that were the ones that that I always I strongly identified with. But I think, it was always you know, you you might have to stretch your skills a good bit, but now you get to be an expert at something and you get to be a good reference and a good and and and and a good artisan on behalf of your customers. So, when you know, you all you know, but you all aren't simply taking orders at at Vermont. You you, you have a you have an r you have a Vermont Labs, so you have your r and d area.

I'd I'd love to know more about that because I have a feeling that that that is probably gonna be a good story to tell. Yeah. Definitely. Yeah. So, to be honest, I think that our business there's a few businesses you mentioned, Session earlier.

There's another one called Distilled, which is from the SEO world, few others that did certain things really well, and I've taken inspiration from all of them. You know, like you say, Session, the community side, and Vika did a lot of cool r and d stuff. So fairly early on, you know, it's something that I wanted to do, like, just build out, digital products. And part of it, to be perfectly honest, was, part of it was to sell phones for our clients, and part of it was more for team engagement because our team loves this stuff. So now we've got we've got about eight products of which three are big, so or bigger, I would say.

We've then got a full time person that's pretty much head of product. So he's our technical director, but he's now very focused on the product. And then we've got a couple of contractors that essentially build the products and our developers. So we've got one solution called, Census, which is a post purchase surveys app, essentially, currently for Shopify, but we will broaden it. It's got about 300 brands using it, and, essentially, you ask different questions based on variables.

So you might say to a new customer, where did you first see or hear about the brand? Or you might say to customers in a certain market, like, you know, what were specific blockers or, you know, were the right carriers available? Or you could say, you know, collapse data, you know, was this a gift? We've got one streetwear brand which asked about age range, and then all of that's pushed into their CDP. So that's one, which is, probably the one that's most external, I would say.

And then my favorite one, so we had a client, say Pangaea. So earlier you talked about our growth in the brand. So we worked with, Pangaea super early into their journey. They blew up. Like, they were like a global phenomenon phenomenal.

And then and then off the back of that, we definitely that definitely kind of elevated us, and we ended up getting a lot of other brands organically. But when we were working with them at their peak, they were essentially spending $30 a month on this product, which took all it did was you'd build a template, and it would take, content from the catalog, and then it would build these dynamic product ads, just using different elements of the catalog. So you might have, like, image one, image two, and then a number of attributes, and then it would build it for the whole catalog. And then that would be so you know when you're going through Facebook or Instagram, you've got the catalog ads and it just shows an image, a fly image. Instead of that, you would have, like, a really nice curated ad across each item of the catalog.

So it was really simple. So I was like, it's $30. Like, let's build it, and I will build the equivalent. Give us three months, you cancel your contract, and we'll give it to all our clients. And then, yeah, that one's basically taken off.

So we've done some really cool stuff with that, and we've now got quite a lot of brands using it, and we support video and we've done, you know, like, category level templates, and we've done cool stuff around, like, matching the tone of the product and all that kind of stuff. Yeah. So that one's really cool. And then we've got a creative reporting product, and then we've got various other things like inventory logging because so that we can track the impact of inventory against conversion rate. We've got price monitoring, yeah, various other things.

But I would say now that's, like, right at the core of our business, and I think I've always been very wary of distractions because the thing that I didn't mention when I was talking about some of those early jobs is I've had about 10,000 side projects as well. So I had a Magento SEO module. I've had about four, ecommerce businesses, and none of them have done anything. So I'm kind of trying to stay, you know, focused. But I do like the fact that the product is right at the heart of the company and, like, everyone in our company loves it.

Our clients are, you know, quite bought into Labs, and it's also really good from, like, a marketing perspective as well. What it, you know, certainly grabbed my attention and it and it, I have to imagine it keeps things feeling very fresh on the inside. You know, again, I mentioned this you know, that's one of the things about this business is it has come become so commoditized, and you can't just sit there and say, you know, well, here's, you know, here's, you know, some other feature that we're releasing that is an ecommerce feature that's really boring. I mean, it's necessary. I'm not saying it's not I'm not saying that we we are all we platforms are all free from from further innovation, but, you know, finding these new spaces and sort of stretching out and finding where it's natural to stretch out and also where the hell to stay away from.

I mean, there are there are places like, you know, I'm, you know, certainly a shop where we are not going to we're not going to do certain things that other other businesses have been doing really well and have evolved into over, you know, over the last ten years. But finding, you know, finding those the spaces in between, I think, is is, is essential for for keeping things fresh. Now you you recently actually got to visit my my fair city, you know, here at Charleston, South Carolina. You were you were actually with one of my old Blue Acorn colleagues, Brad Redding, who has gone on to, Brad, frustratingly handsome and successful, hard worker, but he's, you know, he's built Elevar, which, you know, doesn't it it it fantastic tool in the especially in the Shopify world. But, you know, he's having this conference.

I mentioned I would have been there if I hadn't had to go over to Europe. But, what was that experience like? I mean, I'm not even sure if this is if this is totally relevant for everyone in the, you know, in the audience, but, but it is it is nice to see the evolution. And by the way, there's a local commerce monthly commerce professionals meetup here in Charleston, and it is about 70% Blue Acorn alums. Oh, yeah.

But but the the Elavar the Elavar experience, you know, they've he's built a big team over there. And, yeah, I'm just curious what what your what your, what your time there was like. Yeah. So I love the city for one. Like, I'm a massive fan of The US.

I come over all the time at any opportunity. I think, obviously, you travel a lot, and I would imagine you've got a similar view to me, and, you know, I love it and I particularly love going over to US. But but I've never been to Charleston. So, I've spent quite a lot of time in, yeah, different, states. I've been to some all the kind of most common places and then a few niche places, but I've never kind of, I guess, either I'd come across Charleston, but I'd never thought about visiting it.

But I was so I was really impressed. Like, I think, yeah, on the Saturday when we got there, we went to Brad's house. We did a a workout in his garden, with some of his neighbors and his wife, And, yeah, definitely felt like he's living the American dream over there. He's got a lovely house just off the water. Yep.

Yeah. And, so that was really cool. And then, yeah, I had some really fun nights out, you know, ate really good food. Yep. Weather perfect.

We played golf, actually, a couple of times, and that was just perfect as well. And then the the the conference itself, now what what were you speaking on there? Yeah. So, basically, Josh and I never talk together because, like, we've got such and the other thing about us as well is, like, we've got as our business has grown, we've just stayed in the day to day. So we stayed with the client, stayed you know, I will still spend half my time messing about in the back end of ecom platforms, and Josh is very much the equivalent.

And then we've had other people that then come in and, you know, run the team, run the business. And so we were talking essentially about, like, where things are going across, and I was talking about, kind of some of the data pieces, kind of on-site experience, you know, where budget is being invested as well and, like, the shifts around that stuff. And then Josh was talking more around how businesses are investing more in brand building and, you know, how attribution has changed as a result of all the privacy stuff and some of the new, things that some of the networks are investing in there. So it's quite an interesting talk. I would say it's quite interesting.

So we've got our conference next week, which both of us are pretty terrified about because it's got a lot bigger this year. And that was a bit of a warm up for us, And I think we took a lot of learnings away from it. So we had about three hours of material that we fitted into about twenty five minutes. I think the audience probably really follow really struggled to follow a lot of what we were talking about. We didn't deliver it particularly well, to be honest.

You know, we're both a bit critical afterwards. I think there's some good content in there, but we've definitely learned quite a lot from it. But the conference itself is solid as well. I think there aren't enough conferences. There's a you get a lot of digital marketing conferences at fairly high level.

You get a lot of ecom conferences, but there's very few that are focused on, you know, data and tracking. Yeah. The ecom analytics, you know, focus, which, yeah, you and you call I think you called that out on LinkedIn, which is, you're right, which is which is, more and more essential as the, you know, as as, again, as as platforms all begin to offer, you know, similar capabilities, you know, it really comes down to, you know, your your your data collection, your data, and your basically, how you unlock that data and and develop the insights across. You know, and as we before we wrap up, I do wanna call out, you know, you you have been, you you guys have been hosting a a podcast. It was Replatform Podcast.

You recently was it this year that you rebranded it to InsideCommerce? Yeah. Yeah. Very recently. And we did it very quickly, and it's it was done in a very scrappy way.

We need to improve it all as well. Yeah. I wanna, like, get it to a point where the branding's a bit more Like, you know, so so so it's fine because the most important thing is that you are you're still you're still doing it. You've got the content. You've got a regular cadence.

I mean, you're on like, you're somewhere in the two hundreds now. I think with Inside Commerce, I mean, I I would have to say if I had the the favorite, it would be episode one fifty nine. Just saying. Serial one. No.

It was so nice of you all to have us on, especially at right after I joined Shopware. But a lot of good content in there. And and but but I I wanna I wanna call out something that is that is implicit in in this entire throughout this entire conversation. You'd never seem quite satisfied with everything that you've done, and I love it because I think that is a big part of what is, you know, pushing you forward to keep doing the next thing, keep building the next thing, and ultimately for the benefit of, you know, the businesses that you're working with. And I think that's that's pretty darn cool.

Yeah. It's awesome. Yeah. Totally. Yeah.

And I think the podcast has been really like, everyone that knows me is shocked that I've stuck at it that long. I think that was entirely James. Like, James is hyper organized. He will drag me onto an episode whether I'm, you know, distracted or hungover or whatever else. And, yeah, it's great doing it with him, actually.

When he pitched it to me, at the time, I always thought I'm gonna really struggle with this, like, you know, time and everything else. But, yeah, I'm really glad I did it. And, yeah, I think, it's fun, and it pushes me out of my comfort zone. I'm not a natural with that kind of stuff, whereas he actually definitely is. So, yeah, it's been really good.

We've had some really good guests and stuff, so enjoyed it. Well, Paul, I really appreciate you making time for us, twice actually because of the late training yesterday. Really nice, especially late on a on a Friday there in The UK. Folks, you could find, find out more about Paul and his team over at, at vervant.com. That's vervaunt.com.

Paul Rogers, real pleasure having you on. Great. Thanks for having me on.