028 | Jim Herbert | Reflections on BigCommerce, Patchworks and beyond

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. Welcome to Commerce Famous.

This is your host, Ben Marks. I'm here at ShopTalk EU in Barcelona, and sitting across from me is Jim Herbert. And Jim was SVP of BigCommerce EMEA for a while and he's currently CEO of Patchworks. Jim has a long and storied career in this business, so I'm really happy to meet and chat with him. SVP of, big commerce in EMEA, you know, this is this is, you know, you've moved on to Patchworks now.

But that must have been an interesting opportunity for you given that, you know, you've been around this business since this business came into existence. Right? So you were you were doing IT, work in this area back in the nineties. Yep. When it happened.

And so you you were, one of my favorite kinds of guests cause, you know, kinda like me, you you got to you got to see it all take shape, for better or for worse. Yep. Yeah. That was but but as a moment that kinda culminated for you, you know, what was what was that like? Is it just did it just feel natural?

Or was it kind of like a, holy shit, I've I've got I've got big responsibilities now? Yeah. I I can't talk about it without talking about how I got there a little bit, I think. Please. So, yeah, you're right.

I've been programming computers since I was eight years old. My dad turned up with a Sinclair ZX Spectrum, the day they came out. Right? The little microcomputer, the Timex in The US. Yeah.

So we had we had a kid's news program. My dad had this kind of nerdy kid who didn't like sport, didn't know what to do with him, you know, what and, and he saw this thing in a in a shop, basically bought one, brought it home. I'd just seen it on this kid's news program, and it was like, it was a weird or not worthy moment. Wow, dad, I can't believe you did that. And so, you know, basic Z80 assembler not long after that, to be honest, because if you wanna make it do stuff, you gotta learn that stuff.

And it actually came with this little cassette, you know, all the stuff got loaded off cassettes. Yep. That actually explained how the CPU and the ALU and, you know, all worked. It was really cool, right? No kidding.

I doubt many people watched it, but this eight year old nerd did, if you know what I mean. Yeah. So, yeah, like a computer science degree after that. Got into, e commerce late nineties, like you said, I was sort of coding on ATG. And then I'm gonna fast forward this, don't worry.

There's not an entire podcast about me. No no one wants to hear about me, so Cut it down. Cut it down. Wow. You really spread that up.

So, but I ended up running an agency called Seneric, that I co founded with some friends. And, they would all met doing e commerce, actually kind of financial service e commerce, but it was on ITG again, right? It was a technology that kind of balanced together. And we were started competing against a company called Portal Tech that was founded by, Mark Adams. And they got bought by Reply.

Correct? They got bought by Reply, we got bought by LBI. And so but we we would compete against each other, and that's how I kinda came across Mark. Right? And then, you know, fast forward, we both sold our businesses.

We're in a high risk alumni event. We ended up doing loads of high risk together. We're the top two partners, we were telling Travis a couple of nights ago at the at the shop. 30,000,000 a year in only seven years. Yeah.

It's pretty good. Pretty good. Pretty good. It was, it was it was interesting. Publix bought us, and then they bought Sapien.

And, so I got to see all the Sapien pitch decks, obviously. And they're like, oh, these are pretty similar. I mean, these are a bit bigger than ours, to be fair. But Yeah. You know, we were able to say that well over 2,000,000,000 had been transacted through platforms that we'd built.

You know, we had big customers, Superdrug, Gucci attire, Lenovo laptops, some big luxury customers, I probably shouldn't mention Gucci, that we did the work for. And, and and so it was really good, but that's kind of where, you know, Mark and I sort of bonded in a bar afterwards. You know, like the the kind of story of the checkpoint charlie guards, the Soviet guy and the US guy who suddenly became friends because they had more in common than their superiors, sort of thing. Yeah. Yeah.

It was kind of like, oh, yeah, you know, actually we kind of get on alright. And it turns out he'd moved to live near me. So fast forward to 2020, COVID's happened, I'm at home. I've I've taken a few years off. It's really interesting that few years off.

I took five years off so I missed the rise of Magento. It was just coming in, we started to lose to it at the high risk days and then you know I kind of came into this this world of oh wow, like Deepak didn't even have a clue who I was And I didn't know who he was. Deepak Anand. Right? Yeah.

Well, this can't be right. He thought of some sort of snake oil salesman. But, but yeah, Mark, I was doing some network at, a, a hybrid partner called IATA Commerce. And, and a fluent commerce partner. And, I was sort of helping Shine, the founder who used to work for Mitsunarik, you know, get the business, they were, they were doing like £8,000,000 turnover.

Now they're a decent sized SI that no one's ever heard of. And, we'd been in, had a demo of BigCommerce, looked pretty good. And Mark rang me up and said, I've got an opportunity for you. And I was like, that's cool, brilliant. We're gonna get a lead out of BigCommerce.

So I told Shine, which is a mistake, because then I got on a call with him. He went, oh no, I'm leaving to become CEO of Attracts. I think you should interview for my job. So, ah, right. Slightly different type of opportunity.

So that's what got me in. And to come back to your question, a lot of responsibility. Yeah. There was straight away. Right?

It was interesting because you're inheriting a team that's doing quite well. Well, actually, doing very well, you know, but with an American piece of software coming into Europe, which always has interest. I've done I've been through it with ATG, right, back in the day. There are interesting kind of cultural things to learn around multi language, you know, the the differences in checkout, the difference in payment methods, all that kind of good stuff. So you're a brand new leader in a pandemic.

Right? So a very young team at BigCommerce. Loads of those guys are trapped in their flats in London, couldn't move. You know, I got to I had a monthly one on one with Shannon in Australia, you know, they had police on the streets in Australia. So really odd time to be starting a new job from that perspective.

So a lot of responsibility on my shoulders from that side. And my first kind of full time gig for five years. So to answer your question, yeah, I was, quite scared. 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. Right. But that that's, you know, you do hear these stories from time to time where you got if person needs to move on somewhere else, and they, you know, they they don't pull the ladder up behind them. They actually show you, hey. There's a ladder.

Yeah. And you you come right in there. And it's, it's always a good sign for someone. Well, either they're trying to set you up for massive failure or most of the time, they're trying Wouldn't put it past him, to be fair. I'm kidding, Mark.

I'm kidding. Kidding. Mark will have you on next. But this is, right. So you end up in this this role in this company.

And obviously, BigCommerce is, that that business is still evolving as we well know with the very recent announcement of Travis coming in Yeah. As, as president, following on Steve's departure. You know, I I in my my day job, we of course we participate in this e commerce ecosystem with, you know, with among many others, BigCommerce. And I've always been a big fan and have said many times, of you know, the big big commerce's philosophy of of of of openness, but also trying to to trying to to make openness with the, you know, sort of the the the d relatively derisked TCO of of a SaaS product. Yep.

It's still a it's a it's a it's a tough nut to crack. Right? Because I think you have this this weird kind of Newtonian, principles of like, well, you know, if if if it's if you if you have this thing over here, you have an equal and opposite thing over here. And it's sort of you have this great advantage of reliability of of SaaS and SaaS deployments Yeah. You that that that it almost always mirrored with, reduced flexibility.

And so it's a it's all then goes in my in my my way of thinking, it goes down to the agencies that have to, that have to figure out which platform with the right mix of of curation and and flexibility is is the right solution. Yep. And that's the one thing I've also heard over the years of BigCommerce just time and again, great things about the partner program over there. And so I think that's been, that's been a well well curated part of the business and probably has served BigCommerce well. I'm not gonna ask you to comment too much on the BigCommerce business, because it it is, it's amazing how quickly things move on in this industry.

And, you've been you've been gone now, you know, since, since over a year, I guess. Is that right? Yeah. Yes. Fifteen months.

I lived last January. Yeah. Fifteen months. And then in the meantime, you, you are an investor at Cortical, which I'd love to hear about, but also, you're on the advisory board at Mach Alliance Yep. Our friends over there.

And, most importantly and most most currently, chief executive officer of Patchworks. Yep. Now for those who don't know, tell me about tell me about Patchworks and tell me why Patchworks was a good choice for you. Yeah. So, Patchworks, it's been around since 2014, actually.

And it was very much it came out of so Dave Wilcher, the founder, founded the business. He had another business called Juno Media. Yeah. You know, as we record this, it's the anniversary of D Day. It's actually named after Juno Beach.

Oh, interesting. His granddad was one of the guys who ran up it, basically. Wow. Firing machine guns at the time. So Wow.

So, Juno was a Magento and Shopify agency. So Magento first and then started doing much more Shopify. And they were often being asked to do integrations. So Patchworks, sort of spun out of that. They built some software.

It's the classic iPad story actually. We were, chatting yesterday. Right? There's quite a few of the guys on the floor agencies today that have their own platform. Right?

But they do both and Patchwax did that for a long time. So, took some investments, so obviously with the e commerce boom of COVID coming back to the twenty twenty, twenty twenty one days, lots of people were now rushing, to get online or to strengthen what they had online because suddenly their store was shut and they're gonna go bust if they don't. So, so Patchworx was selling a lot of business, took some investment therefore because you need cash when you're suddenly growing that fast, you know, for the for the first time. And, but carried on sort of doing the work itself, you know. It was an integration agency that happened to have some tech.

So, we came across them at BigCommerce therefore because, you know, in my expansion role at BigCommerce, going back to it for a second, quite often we go into a new country and it'd be like, oh, yeah. Well, of course you can integrate through to exact ERP, right, or you can integrate through to this, you know, Hobbs French, OMS system that we've never heard of or whatever. And I say that we've never heard of. Obviously, in The US I've never heard of it, I'd never come across it in The UK because why would I? It's kind of a local business but you know France's economy is massive, Italy's economy is massive, they all support local solutions.

And so you know we would go to companies like Patchworks and say, look could you do the integration for us ultimately? So that got, you know, that sort of started making it quite interesting. And we have some good relationships with Patchworks, with some of my competitors now like Alumio and Sidigo and people like that. And so fast forward to they they got in touch. The investor got in touch saying, you know, we we're looking for somebody to help with expansion.

We've seen the the job you did expanding BigCommerce into Europe. I'm sitting there going, well, integration is definitely an interesting place to be. Yep. And coming back to your point about the partner program, that was the thing I was thinking was that at the end of the day, the one problem we had at BigCommerce with PatrickWorks was, you know, there's only so much you can do with your own team. Yep.

So So I basically interviewed my my, you know, to use the old meme of 123..5money, I kind of said, look, there are 200,000 agencies around the world, if I can get 10% of them, give me one lead a month, ...money, right, for that reason. Right. Right. And we can start implementing it and we can expand internationally more easily. So it's all about it's all about that partner program, right?

And so last year came in, interestingly then realized that the the tech that was there didn't really support that didn't support that partner program. It's difficult to get other partners to come in and and use that tech. But the our tech team, a lot of them are ex Boomi, and they're all based out in Belfast. And they said, well, we've got this alpha. We were building it for ourselves to make it easier so we could put more projects through.

Gave me a demo and I was like that is excellent, you know, there's no code, low code, it's got a fantastic user experience which as a techie who only ever, you know, was handed designs to implement, I could understand, you know, cars have got a round steering wheel for a reason, right? Yeah. Yeah. There's a certain level of consistency and experience that that means that I like driving that, I like using it, and I was like, that's that is excellent. You know, I I could use that as a techie and a non techie from that side of it.

So, so we put it into closed beta really quickly. This is within three months we can have it going. So we got it into closed beta in May. Deepak had joined ShopLine at the time. Yep.

Yep. And actually, they had no integration solutions. Right? Because they were brand new to the market. Yep.

So, we actually put somebody live. And do you know what? It was perfect. Small merchant. They built their own integration.

One of the problems we had at Patchworks was with the old tech, building a connector to a new system. It took about a month. Right? And you'd probably get a subset of APIs. Yeah.

Yeah. So one of the first things we released was what we call Connector Builder. It's a web based interface for effectively ingesting APIs and then creating a productionized connector around it. Right? So so now you can import Postman collection, into it and build a fully featured connector and and keep it updated really easily.

So this this small shop line merchant, MirrorMason, came to Zpac, can we do that? I need you to connect to this thing called LineWheel WMS. We didn't have a connector for it, but this guy built the connector himself using the connector builder and built the flows from shop line orders into LineWheel. And I was like, this is everything I needed from this platform in the very first account. Did it in about a week.

Incredible. And and got it live, ultimately. And they're still live now. I was at IRX a couple of weeks ago and there was a little video thing on their stand and sure enough there was Nathan from Mirror Maze and talking about the the the great, you know, experience they've had with with, Shopland and its partners. So so that that's what we're now selling, ultimately.

And it's and it's great to see that, you know, we are now getting more and more success with with customers and partners. So, that that's us in a nutshell, really. Well, I think I think, you know, that that developers, which, you know, I I at one one point in time was, you know, one of the things that that really always appealed to me is, you know, this whole this whole idea of don't repeat yourself. Basically, don't do the same work twice. Yeah.

So iPaaS, an integration platform always has always made made sense to me, you know, but for the but you still have to have someone do the work. Yeah. I do wonder these days, you know, as we, you know, as the generative tools coming out, you know, are able to better understand, you know, sort of natural language documentation. Yeah. And, you know, we're able to to sort of throw these and build these solutions around.

And I do think we have an an era of of, oh, we use the the umbrella term AI, AI driven, because I have to use it at least once per per podcast. It's good traffic. You know, you do see you do see an error, like, where the questions around I mean, even with mock alliance. Right? And and the question there, you know, there's all there's a certain scale that's necessary if you are if you're truly going for a microservices solution.

And I do think that, with the rise of generative and, you know, more broadly, AI tech, you you can see some of this orchestration overhead Yeah. Being, being deferred and and and enabled, handily by, by, we'll say, generative tools for now. Yeah. You know, do you you've already seen, you know, the the reduction in time to build an integration from a month down to a week. And I don't wanna I don't wanna lose the thread on on sort of how all this seems to come about.

And, you know, businesses like like like Patchworks, like Illumio, probably Prismatic back in the day, I I is is, you know, these were these were tools that were born in an entrepreneurial environment to solve a subset of problems Yeah. For business. But then the founders turn around and go, shit. I just created a product, didn't I? I mean, this has happened.

My one of my favorite examples is, is with Oz, with Akuva. Yeah. One of the hosts, you know, the preeminent Magento host in The UK. It's exactly what he did. He just looked around.

He couldn't find a suitable host for, for Magento back, you know Yeah. You know, years ago. And he so he built what needed to be built and then realized, damn it. I've done it again. And and and he's still doing it.

Right? There's still they're gonna be title sponsor of, title sponsor of Meet Magento UK next week. I look forward to, to catch our yeah. Couple weeks, I look forward to catching up with them. When you have when you have these kind of tools coming out, as opposed to someone you know, we're here at Chop Talk EU.

We're we're looking on a show floor, and you see businesses that were created because someone had an idea, but maybe they don't know what they're doing. Yeah. These days, I think a lot of them have tact, you know, sort of idea dot AI. Yeah. And you just hope that maybe, you know, you're throwing this AI at the wall and that it sticks.

I like solutions that were sort of born out of necessity and born with that kind of that that information backdrop, which, it seems, it seems Patchwork Patchworks is is among is among them. Is it the case for Patchworks that, you you have once an integration is done, that that then can be reused in multiple places? So, absolutely. One of the because again, you know, been a techie. Right?

Been there myself. So, and and and we didn't quite do that at Syneric. Right? We we would often integrate Hybris into, or ATG into Dynamics or into one of the various Oracle ERPs. I don't know which one because they're, I think, probably all of them.

But Fusion, right, in inverted commas. API of the world. API of the world, exactly. So we came up with some JAR files, right, with some standard, you know, standard jar stuff that we could use effectively to go and do that. But we never productionized it to the point where when we sold the business, you know, you look at it, it's like, here's here's all your kind of revenue numbers.

Is there any value in that IP? No, not really. Yeah. I know there is. And actually our our our internal confluence is amazing.

But, you couldn't put a dollar number on it if you know what I mean. So it didn't become part of the transaction. So we never did that part of it. Right? But I understood therefore the importance of reusability, you know, because it's it's all about efficiency in coding and and and in and in business in general.

Right? If you can do something more quickly, then you're probably gonna do better out the other side of it. You know, you you you'll get a better outcome. So we, put the bold statement up in February, our partner sales kickoff, that was the first one we ever did, which was we wanna be the most partner focused iPads. And so ways of doing that are, yep, you can create an integration.

So you're right, the first time we do it, so, one of our mutual, colleagues is is building a NetSuite integration right now, over in The US. Oh, okay. I'm sorry. So yeah. I know.

Right? Just because that's not gonna go live in a week. Yeah. ERP integration is a lot more complicated than a little little OMS or WMS integration. But once that's been done, that template then exists.

And so we can do one of two things with that template. You can wrap that up, assuming there's a certain level of standardization in it, into what we call private apps. So our agency partners can create their own standard integration templates. And then they can install those with, the the the marketing phrase is clicks not not code, but it's true. Right?

There's a video. If you're gonna have a look on the on the Patchworks YouTube channel, you'll find it off our website, of our Lightspeed to Shopify integration or our Shopify to Peoplebox integration, the other two videos we have. Yeah. It's about 15 clicks to get that done. And then you gotta go and configure the flow rates and, you know, how many times you wanna go and check for orders or stuff like that or whether it'll be whether it's webhook or whether it's a a a scheduled flow.

But, yeah. I mean, that's that's unbelievably quick. We had somebody sign this week, Monday morning. Well, the lead came in Monday morning. It was Shopify to John Lewis, which is The UK, man The UK, shop that has a miracle marketplace.

Mhmm. It's virtual stock, actually. And then signed up they came in on Monday morning, signed Monday lunchtime. It was live by Monday evening, and that's because of that reusability of those apps. Now that was a public app because the other thing that our agency partners can do then is publish that in what we call our App Store.

That was gonna be my question. I was wondering, like, how do the people that do this work, you know, do you do you just take it and give it away? No. You've created a marketplace. Exactly.

And then they get referral for it. Because actually, that's the only one difference. Right? If you're building a Shopify app or BigCommerce app, you host it. And so there's a feed of listing the in the marketplace.

We actually host these apps, you know. It all runs on our infrastructure, all of, you know, for security and within our wall guard and all that good stuff. So we bear the cost. So it's the other way around. We effectively pay a referral fee out for for building it.

And I guess part of the reason this works, you know, me me coming from my my background with the Magento, extensions, you know, extensions, you know, store, you have you have independent vendors that can list apps. Yep. But essentially, the relationship, the whether it runs, it has to then be implemented. It it there's always three parties involved. Right?

You have the merchant. You have the, you have the the vendor who's created this this integration. Then you it has to be hosted somewhere, implemented. Actually, it's probably through four because maybe you have a hosting company that's sitting there. You have this Yeah.

Nonstandard architecture. That is that seems like this arrangement solves that problem. That's exactly the idea of it. It solves that problem. So Now how do you handle if, is is it ever the case that you have vendors that, you know, you have two two different businesses, let's say, on the agency side, and they decide to build an integration into a particular OMS or something, but you have two of them building, and you then would have two integrations.

Yeah. Or do you or do you curate that at all? So we we are curating them without a doubt. And so it has to come through our app team. We have to make sure that they work.

It works. It deals with edge cases, all that good stuff. It hasn't happened yet, but we know it will happen. So the design of our app store, actually launching our self serve app store, for for integrations, hopefully this month. He says, fingers crossed, it's on the road map.

And, it's on the road map. When you bring in the in the month, you'd hope it would happen if you know what I mean. The the ultimate designs for it do cater for that because, you know, there might be slight differences there. Right? So it could be it's, Shopware to, NetSuite for bonded warehousing and wine.

That could be very different if you're interested. Right. Right. Yeah. So so there there would be a good reason for doing it.

But I quite you know, at the end of the day, I'm a businessman. So I'm probably on the left side of capitalism, but I'm definitely part of it, if you know what I mean. And I think the the more choices there are commercially out there is probably a good thing. Right? Yeah.

So, so so that's the the idea is we could support that, you know, it could just be a standard, you know, platform x to OMS y. Yeah. And there's three versions of it. But as long as we please differentiate why the differences are there, it's a bit more like the Shopify become as app stores in that regard. Yeah.

Because I guess, you mean, it's really it's it's a decision philosophically of where they want, you know, chaos and confusion. Yeah. Like, again, back in the old Magento example, you would go and look like adding a Facebook like button to a product page. There were at one point, there were, like, 30 or 50 Yeah. Of these things.

And this all this actually became a paralyzing choice Yep. For they're like, wait. Why why would there be this many? And so you you have to you have to swing back, over to, well, let's let's have some curation here. Let's say, okay.

These these now but I assume that that, you know, this is not just a a not necessarily a one time thing. Because you and I have been working in in in in tech for long enough that, you know, we know breaking changes are not ideal Yeah. But they are sometimes necessary, whether it's whether it's time to, you know, knock the cruft out of a code base or simply, business has changed and you realize, wow, we actually really have to update how some of these, some of these endpoints work. Yeah. So are the vendors then that have created some of these, we'll say the public apps, are they responsible for updating, maintaining and updating, or does does does Patchworks take on some of that?

On the apps themselves. It's down to the vendor. Okay. Without a doubt. So they support the flows.

So we support our platform, and and we do support the connectors, right, if if we built them ourselves. So Yeah. You know, if we've imported a post band collection, we'll, you know, basically, all those kind of things have, like, a listener somewhere. I was gonna say RSS feed, but to show my age. Right?

But, you know, you can you can it still works. What what do you think drives the podcast? Drew, I remember when Dell computer put out their RSS feed for for out, you know, out of date stock or whatever, and it started doing a million a week. Yeah. You know, this thing's still that's still a good idea there.

Right? You know what I mean? And, so you can listen for changes, and so we can import those in. But they don't automatically get deployed. So, you know, someone's got to go in and say, let's take those changes.

Because you don't want to deploy a breaking change automatically, right? But not potentially breaking change. So these so each of these public apps, they are then maybe versioned somehow. And you can tell, well, this is the this is the, you know, v dot one Yeah. Here's v dot two, and this is it over here.

Spot on. Spot on. Because if and within the actual flows themselves, like every time you make a change, it gets versioned, it gets updated. Yeah. So you can roll back, you can deploy different versions.

It's, again, it's been built by Checkatrade. Right? So Well, and then what does it look like with the, you you know, the the sort of the the end buy situation where you have the integration with the integration and sort of the the the real solution is the is a is a is a group of integrations working together. Yeah. How do what does that look like in your world?

So well, you mean like a like a reference architecture kind of thing? I I mean, yeah, sort of. I guess if I'm just thinking in in, you know, if you have a let's say you have a, you know, a a a set of business needs Yeah. And then those that business need relies on, you know, these four integrations and a combination thereof. Is it is it easy to make, you know, four four public apps in your world, like, sort of start to talk with each other?

Yeah. Well, that does. So it's a when you when you install an app, all you're doing really is installing some flows and connectors. Right? So a connector for us is effectively our, our, representation of the APIs for that system.

You get what I mean? And you can obviously have multiple instances of it because you've got staging production, whatever. Or you might have, the Shopify and BigCommerce world, you quite often for different territories have different stores. Right? So we've got customer Stuv that I think has got 14 Shopify stores at the front end.

Gotcha. They've got 14 instances of that connector. Yeah. So if I installed the, in fact Connor, our CTO did a great job of this. On stage live, he he actually did a fifteen minute integration of five systems.

Are you talking about a live demo? Oh, yeah, man. Here I've never seen a man more scared. And Connor, if you're listening, you you you gotta admit it, but fair play. I mean, and, so he started off by installing the Shopify to Lightspeed app, and then he installed a template, which is basically like a single flow to NetSuite for doing orders.

And all that did of course was install some more flows. So effectively what is all the apps do is build, is add more flows into your, you know, customer account effectively. Yeah. Then he built a connector to Gorgias because he pretended we didn't have one by using the Postman importer, created a Gorgias account. And so, by the end of the fifteen minutes, we were taking Shopify orders, pushing them through to Peoplevox, pushing them into NetSuite as well, and then raising a ticket in Gorgias to tell somebody to go and provision an account.

And, yeah, it was pretty impressive. Yes. There were people who didn't believe it was real, but it I can I can absolutely honestly handle and tell you what it was? Well, as as someone who has who has, in fact, seen, or been party to a demo, a live demo being prerecorded Right. And then acted in real time, when you have people at the end of a live demo saying, well, that wasn't real and say, oh, yes.

It was. That that is damn impressive. Yeah. Yeah. Wow.

So it seems like this is I I would assume this is gonna be the only way that this kind of work, you know, can or should be done outside of a few, you know, just truly bespoke salute yeah. Yeah. Solutions, stacks, whatever you wanna say. Maybe a a merchant who is truly large enough that, you know, they don't they don't need to bother with this. But almost I can't even imagine it.

I can only think of that as a hypothetical. It seems like a really, really good idea. Yeah. Yeah. I think I think there are some, like, really, maybe really, really high transaction levels where we might become too costly.

Because think about the the the the computer science kind of angle on it. You know, we're building a generalist integration platform. Right? So if you were doing I I spent a year doing, integrations in an investment bank in C plus plus to, the, you know, the stock exchanges, basically. London Stock Exchange and New York Stock Exchange using swift messaging, EDIO, that kind of stuff.

Right? That has to be quick, you know, really quick. So there are kind of niches around that. But if you're talking about generalist e commerce, which is what we're really talking about, it it, you know, it's there's a slightly different way of thinking. My old business partner, Ylock, we got him in to help build the product and he was a bit, cynical to be honest, of of iPaaS in general and and I've come across that with kind of techies who've been around and because it's easier for me to probably build a node, you know, integration than it is to start playing with iPaaS.

But about a month in, well, I was like, actually, I get it now. This is really good. Yeah. Well, you know, and I man, I you and I have seen this and heard some part of the discussion. Oh, well, if you do this, you your indexing will go through, you know, you Yeah.

You know, but the reality is no matter what the solution in my experience, and and what the what the what the approach behind it, whether it's, you know, SaaS or open source, whatever, you you cannot build something for all eventualities. You can try and build for the all the use cases and up to certain degrees of scale. Yeah. But any business that is even the the simplest e commerce business, if it is big enough, there will be a dimension of scale Yeah. That will require special handling.

And that's okay. Yeah. Exactly. The question is how easy is it to handle those edge cases? Yeah.

And and so you're right. Building for the generalist is much much more, in the end, much more productive and efficient than building for, you know, hoping that you Amazon decides to use your infrastructure. Exactly. Yeah. Exactly right.

Yeah. Which in the end, might be great for you, I'm sure. Oh, it would be lovely. Well, you know, now that we've talked a bit about the, business and, you know, we've had we had a couple days here at ShopTalk in Barcelona. You know, what are your impressions of, of the industry right now given well, again, you know, Travis just joined BigCommerce.

And looking around, I I noticed I noticed several businesses that aren't here. Yeah. And then I I you know, you and Sander and I were talking about, like, where the hell are all these new commerce platforms coming from? And why is anyone making a new commerce platform today? It's an interesting one, that.

Right? I mean, we we, back in the Hybris days, actually, obviously, Magento had taken off. One of my old contractors in Eastern Europe had built a new platform. It was basic it wasn't a copy of Hybris, but he took a lot of the architectural ideas. Yeah.

And he came around looking for investments. I was like, man, why are you building a new commerce platform? And that was eight years ago. And, and it wasn't SaaS. I was like, man, you probably wanna go down the SaaS route, although maybe not.

Right? There is still a space for not SaaS coming back to the optionality and choices we were talking about. Right? Big time. It's all about what works for you, and getting an agency to help you choose it would be my recommendation.

Yeah. It's a I I don't really understand why. I mean, I can understand why scale exists ultimately because it's come out of a very, very successful, you know, multibillion euro business. Yep. And it's running that business.

And actually, it's probably a good alternative to Salesforce from that perspective. Right? You know, it's it's composable, pre composed, if that makes sense. Well, yep. Absolutely.

Yeah. So so and and look, they've got a great client in Man United that they're delivering in The UK. So looking forward to seeing that one go live, because you know, there's a well, just because I'm a big football fan. I'm not a Man United fan, but, I love seeing the way e commerce works in those businesses because they're they're I've worked in those businesses. They're quite odd.

They're multi multi million pound, you know, 700,000,000, 800,000,000, 1,000,000,000 in some cases, businesses Yeah. That are run like family businesses. It's it's just so interesting from that perspective. Yeah. You know, for me, it's it's actually back to the point of of of, businesses being born of an of necessity Yeah.

And maybe unintentionally. Yeah. This this is actually the story behind several of the successful, commerce platforms. Yeah. Right?

I mean, you had, I know, Spryker came out of, was it the Rocket Web project or something? Yeah. Right. Was commerce tools also born that way? I think it was.

So I think there was an origin story that had to do with Yeah. We made this thing, for a specific use case, but they had they built it, you know, sort of in in such a way that it was a they were able to pull it out. Yeah. And, yeah, Magento wasn't quite the same. It wasn't quite the same because Roy and Yoav intentionally built it.

But they built it because, they knew that they were at the time, they were building on OS commerce, Of course. Which was, you know, back then, the language PHP wasn't sophisticated enough to have to to really allow you to have a an efficient workflow. You you couldn't you couldn't touch one part of the system without having these Yeah. Knock on effects all through. So they basically said, hey.

Let's get a let's get some Java developers, and have them write, but in this language of the people. Yeah. The language of the we'll have them write in PHP. Of course, then you had all these PHP guys, myself included, like, going, what the hell is a front controller? Like, like, who oh, Martin Fowler.

I guess you're you're you're my best friend now. Java enterprise patterns, learn them all. So, you know, that was it was, you know, that was intentionally built, but but really, again, built out of necessity. And there were, you know, there there there are some other tools. So I'm again, we see that we see that pattern repeat.

Yeah. And, you know, I I do try and resist. I don't wanna be the I don't wanna be the old old guy in the room just just, you know, all dyspeptic and scowling at the at the the newcomers. But, I do feel like we are, you know, outside of a few niche businesses. One of the one of the platforms that's here Yeah.

Is actually it was built, built I think built and run out of Turkey. Yeah. I agree. It has specific relevance and judging from the logos in their booth, success Yeah. In The Middle East.

Yeah. And I can see, you know what? This was probably this was probably an underserved niche. Yeah. You have businesses like, Shop Line, which are coming here now into, into Europe and UK.

I would expect we'll start to see them at some point, assuming they have success here because they're huge, hugely successful in Southeast Asia. Exactly. Right? So they have this this war chest, and then they come over, and I if they do well here, Deepak will be happy and they'll expand into The US. Hell, even Shopware.

I mean, that was Shopware's origin story was, you know, the two brothers providing tech services and they built a they built a, an e commerce store in the early two thousands for a furniture company. Yeah. And then all of a sudden, all the all the German, you know, businessmen and businesswomen with businesses said, hey, we need this too. And that gives you that gives you shopware. So we see these these these recurring patterns.

What is old is new again, is old is new again. This industry, that we've managed to continue to find ourselves in, you know, what what do you think? Five, five we kinda wrap this up. What do you think five to ten years? What does it look like?

It's an inch so the one thing I'm not seeing a lot of the show, here, but I did see it at iRx in The UK a couple weeks ago. It was social selling. It was massive last year, so TikTok selling, Instagram, Facebook. Yeah. Marketplaces to a certain extent.

Right? But again, there's only one marketplace vendor with a stand here this year, but that could be down to the way ShopTalk's built out if you're not Yeah. Other than the actual everyone's here. Other people are walking the floor, if you're not Yeah. Necessarily have a stand.

Because that, for me, I've seen a lot a lot of traction in, ultimately. There are there are brands now they'll they'll get a Shopify store, or a Shopline store or a BigCommerce store. It's a SaaS small store. They can buy it online, put a thing in. If they get the right influencer, they got the right product, suddenly they're doing 1,000,000 a year, which if you're twenty two years old, what's interesting is then you have to think about, oh, what taxes?

And I've got to do what? I've got to file what returns? You know, they they basically start a really successful business without knowing what they actually have to do. So I'm seeing that a little bit on the small side as well. But it does raise the question, do you need a platform?

Right? To a certain extent. Because if if you're only selling on a social platform and it can do your orders and returns for you and you can put that directly through to a warehouse somewhere Yeah. Bang, you know, I don't even need to go down that route. So in five to ten years, that's that is one of the questions ultimately I think is, you know, you've kind of put the basket in the cloud to a certain extent.

Yeah. So, but I don't like making bold predictions because I'm almost certainly wrong from that side. And actually coming back to what we were discussing earlier. Right? SAS or non SAS, there's still a really good place for non SAS software.

You get to a certain size or you need a certain level of functionality or a certain level of control over the code, that you cannot get when the code is sat in a walled garden that you're not allowed to touch. Yep. Then, yeah, there you go. There's there's the answer. Right?

It it just makes perfect sense. Yeah. Those use cases aren't as uncommon as, as the SaaS vendors would like you to believe, says the CEO of a SaaS vendor. But again, you you know, you you can you can play both sides because you have the orchestration piece. You can say, hey, you can for for them, you can make them, more flexible and more immediate for the for the, you know, we'll use the dirty term on prem Yeah.

Or self managed as we like to, like we like to shroud it these days. You know, you you also you you you make you again, it's de risking the TCO. Right? And and and ensuring robust you push you can push deploy on Friday and feel good about it. Right?

Yeah. And bang, you have the latest the latest and greatest integration. I guess the last thing I'd love to love to hit on is, one of the things that I have seen in in and I'm I'm sure you've noticed as well is over time, we have these businesses, in different spaces that, have have grown up quite a bit. And, like, a good example for me, it just it's too easy. My buddy, our buddy, Tink, over at, well, it was dot mailer Yeah.

And digital. And there's not this was not a just a a capricious renaming because I went over there to their office in London back in the day. I think I've already maybe told this story on the podcast before, but, you know, and they're showing me essentially like a command line interface with like a data like a customer data platform and everything. And like, wow, this is very powerful. Then I'm thinking, but wait.

I know, you know, at the time, I think Magento had already been bought by Adobe. And we're looking at, but Adobe does this. And wait. Who's and so what you've started to see is these businesses that started in sort of a niche area like, you know, email marketing Yeah. Grow over the years into, you know, full suites in their own right.

Yeah. And so you have a suite of suites Yes. In your in your stack. And they all sort of want to be system of record for various entities. They want to control certain operations and certain flows.

And then you end up with a classic problem, data here. Data there. Who owns the data? Who's transforming the data? How do we make sure that all of this is together?

And it seems like outside of a of a brilliant and bespoke orchestration, you need a system Yep. Perhaps like, like a Patchworks that's able to be aware of what's what's going across the wire, give people that sort of that note that no code, that visual interface into how the data is flowing and what's happening and where it gets transformed and how. And then, it's not hard to imagine, using machine learning Yeah. Generative, a generative taking a generative approach to then make sure you have the full picture of of all of this data, and you're able to actually do the the salient perform salient operations with it Yep. In in the business.

Yep. Does that seem like a does that seem like a fair picture of things going forward? Do you know? Yeah. Yes.

It does. And it's, and you sort of sit there, like, is it a risk, you know, sitting there with an orchestration engine? I don't even think it is. We're running at it, actually. We we did a bit of internal work last week with Impactworks, and, you know, with with a consultant saying, what are we what are we really here for?

What's our vision? What's our purpose? There's a great, there's a comedian in The US called Doug Stanhope. Don't know if you know Doug Stanhope. Yep.

Yep. Yep. So he used to be on Charlie Brooker in The UK and he did this great sketch. He's normally quite down on America, you know, but in a in a fun way. Oh, we're fun to kick around, I know.

Yeah. Yeah. But, we won the war. Sketch which was against type. It was like, come to America, it's great.

You British people won't understand it. Come down, go to the beach hut, you know. Do you know what we get in America for breakfast? Choices. That's all we get.

You can have your eggs any way you like, you know. Have beans on toast. Exactly. And that was kind of what we came up with. Do you know what we're giving people?

We're giving them optionality and choices. If you can integrate to a system quickly, like to a trial account, see if it works for you, then then we give you it. Now the the the downside of that and the downside of the democratization of ecommerce with it being easier to get live and integrate all these systems is what you just described. Right? It's like, well, what if you've got a suite of suites in there, you know, I've got sort of Tink Software being able to do all these things, but I've also got this that can do a bit of it, and that which bit should do what.

So coming back to my, you know, my common comment on about agencies, that's where you need an expert. But what's AI doing? It's industrializing expertise. Right? So without a doubt, we could we could see it that way.

You know, we are looking at, my old business partner, George, from Syneric, we were talking, you know, he's, I'm a bit worried about Patchworks because, surely, it'd be really easy to write the code. And, like, well, it's yeah, it is. And actually, we've already got in, you know, my team in beta, we've got a scripting engine piece. Yep. It wasn't hard to add a button that says write the script for me.

Yeah. Because actually that's that's easy, right? That's a great story. Well, if the API documentation is is fine Exactly. Then it's it's there.

Exactly. And so and, yeah, our mapping shape, we used to do the mapping. You know, that's another thing we're looking at. It's exactly that large learning model. It's like throw the JSON packets from the two different APIs of it and map that for me.

You know, why wouldn't you go down that route? The hard part for an AI to do is then deploy it, make sure it's ISO 27,001 compliant, make sure it sits in a walled garden. And then that's where we're trying to sort of run out that and ditto coming back to, you know, the the okay. You've got these systems. That's where the generative AI piece slash, you know, machine learning could be quite interesting, I think.

But, for your particular because of the way your data is flowing through the system, maybe this should actually be better sat over there. We can actually learn about different capabilities via the API documentation via the way other companies are using it. We're not there yet. Right? Right?

But that's kind of part of the vision for for for the road map at some point in the future. Right? Is how can we use AI to better optimize what's going through? Because actually, I'll see I'll see new business benefits from it because, you know, it'd be interesting. People want that might be competitive, might be not.

Now it might not be unique, and we've talked about it in the podcast. But also, let's be honest, I'll probably be able to save some money in hosting in back end as well because the AI be able to optimize the way that our system's running, for all our customers. So I'm I'm a big believer in win wins. I think it's I've seen so many in my business career. People don't trust you when you say that or do it or trust people.

It's like, no. Of course, there isn't because so many, you know, people do exist that try and take take it off you, if you know what I mean. But, look, just be open, transparent, honest. Tell people what your business reasons for doing things are. Ask them what their business thing reason for doing things are.

Can we win together? Yes, we can. And let's go and do it. Right? That's that's the way to do it.

And that's the way you end a show. Mic drop. Please please don't. Please don't. Please don't.

Go find someone else's mic to drop. Yeah. Jim, I really appreciate you taking time, early early in a Spanish morning, to, to talk about these things. It's been a pleasure to have this conversation. I hope, if you can make it over to the show, a couple weeks Yeah.

In London, it would be great to see you. But, rare chance where I actually get to shake a hand Awesome. At the end of the podcast. Yeah. And, we'll have to do this again.

Maybe we'll do this in a year and see, see where some of these predictions and thoughts have, shaken out. I'd love that and hope to see you in a couple of weeks, man. Nice one. Cheers, mate. Cheers.