S3E02: Andy Hoar | B2B Midmarket Commerce

Welcome to Commerce Famous, a podcast that celebrates the celebrities of our industry. Join us for a conversation with the tastemakers in ecommerce. In their daily lives, these are just normal everyday people like you and me. But to us, they are commerce famous. Hello.

This is Jason Nyeus, and welcome to another edition of Commerce Famous. Today, we have a a very good example of someone who's Commerce Famous. After seeing him at all the shows, with all the people he knows, and all the b to b events, his name is Andy Hoare. Andy, welcome. Wait.

Did you say comas famous or infamous? Do I get a choice on that one? Well, well, I think if the if the fans vote, it's probably infamous. That's for sure. Certainly is for sure.

Yes. Absolutely. Yeah. Well, welcome to the welcome to the show. The format is actually quite simple.

This isn't really about, Paradigm b two b. It's definitely not about Shopware. It's not about any of our competitors. This is really about you, your journey, and kinda how you got to where you are. And then, well, you know, we'll end with a little bit about Paradigm and the research you put out and and why it's a valuable resource.

But, I would love maybe we'll start with a brief introduction. Andy, why don't you tell us, who you are, what you do, where you live, that kind of stuff, and we'll bust right into it. Yeah. So I've been doing this for fifteen years now, actually, which is shocking to me that I'll look back on it. But so the brief story about me is, I graduated from college with the work for an economic consulting firm.

Yes. They really existed. I did antitrust economic consulting, which I hope I had no idea what that was, but we worked on, we were known as the sports economists. So we had, Donald Fair from the major league baseball player association was in our office all the time. And so we were working with them to understand free you know, how the, the trade markets would work, etcetera.

And so that was interesting. Then I moved to Silicon Valley, and I worked, for a variety of companies. I was there for eleven years, mostly on the product marketing, product management end of things. Then decided to go to graduate school, moved to Chicago. So I went to Boston for a year, and I lived in Chicago.

My wife and I did for a year. And I now still live in Chicago. We never left. We liked it so much here in Evanston. We decided to stay.

And that was also when I started working for Forrester, which is how I started this whole gig. That was in 2011. Did that for seven years. I think that's where we first met. You were, at Digital River, I believe, back in the day, and that's how we first met.

So yeah. So did Forrester for seven years. Kinda built up the b two b commerce practice. Then in 2017, I decided to leave, start my own e my own practice, called Paradigm, which, again, we'll probably talk about later. And in the last seven years, I've done Paradigm, which is the research and consulting arm here of the business.

Also did a a little show called B2B next, before we ran head on into the, pandemic, which shut everything down for a good year. And then I started Master B2B with my, cofounder partner, Brian Beck. And, we are now the gotta be the world's largest community of B2B commerce professionals. We have a 100,000 people in the database. We have, 40,000 person reach on LinkedIn.

And I think next year, this year, we're gonna end up doing 75, 80 events and publishing maybe 10 research reports. So that's the deal now. So I like to joke with my wife. I spend supposed to spend 50% of my time on paradigm and 50% of my time on master B2B, but I ended up spending a 100% of my time on both of them. So if you can figure that math out, you can explain it to me.

Yeah. Perfect. Perfect. Well, I love that origin story. And you know what was really fascinating to me?

We didn't eat when you were at Forrester and I was at Digital River. And, you were the first guy to take such a hard position on on b two b and why it's so different and why it's so unique. And I think that's really, in my mind, what set you apart from everybody else is most of the analysts we talk to, we could kinda convince them that a b to c offering, if you squinted hard enough and applied different use cases, was the same. And you were the guy that said, no. No.

No. These are two very different solutions who sold very different customers. Can you talk a little bit more about kinda when you recognize that in your career and why you've why you've made this this hard pivot into b to b? I mean, you're pure b to b. Yeah.

All I do is b to b. I don't do windows or do anything else. I just do b two b. Now I was joking with people back in '20 I think it was 2011, early late twenty eleven, early twenty twelve. One of the research directors at Forrester, Andrew Stockwell, came to me and he said, Andy, we have this burgeoning area called B 2 B.

Nobody's doing it. Are you interested? At the time, Forrester had, I wanna say seven 18 analysts on the ecommerce team. As I recall, 17 of them were covering b to c, and I was the only one covering b to b, but nobody knew how large it was. So when I started sizing the market, I determined pretty quickly it was at least two times the size of b to c.

So at some point, it got a little silly where you had and things changed at Forrester, but why didn't we have 17 analysts covering b to c and one analyst covering the market that's twice the size? And so it was good for me because I didn't have any competition. Nobody else wanted to do it. And once I started doing it, I I sized the market for the first time. We did the first events.

I was the first keynote for B2B online. You know, I remember that show. It was in Phoenix and it was kind of a disaster and they weren't gonna do it the following year. But back in the day, you know, I I recall, these small events, nobody thought it was important, but I was talking to the people running e commerce at companies like Granger. So I don't know if you know Paul Miller or know that name, but back in the day, Paul Miller ran e commerce at Granger.

And he was like the only one who was speaking publicly about the potential here. And they saw, and it it was impressive. Their CEO got it. And so he invested in this. That's why Granger left ahead of everybody else.

But back then, even there there were people at Granger who thought, ah, this ecommerce thing's kind of a fad. I don't know. It's really sales driven, branch driven, etcetera. So there was a battle there. It's just they got to it early, but that was really my formative stage.

Talking with guys like Paul Miller, people at, places like HP, even three m in the early days, they were realizing that, wait. This is real. It's gonna be big, and it may take time in certain areas, but it is certainly, to your point, different. And if I've heard this once, I've heard a thousand times, oh, we do b to c and we have a platform and we'll just move over into b to b. I'm like, it doesn't work that way.

Exactly. Oh my god. They're so different. And and and frankly, I was a b to c guy that's been, that used to have that belief, and and that belief is gone. If you sit with a a distributor or a wholesaler and they talk through their use cases, it's night and day.

It's night and day. I mean, it's it's it's so different. 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 processed over $25,000,000,000 in annual GMV through Shopware. Find out more about Shopware and the best value in e commerce at shopware.com.

So let's go back. I love that you talked about 2011. Let's talk a little bit about who were the major players and the names of the commerce systems back in 2011. It's probably not a lot of the same ones from today. Well, they still exist.

They just have different names now. Yeah. That's true. Was IBM WebSphere. Remember those guys?

Well, it's Hell, yeah. ACL when they were sold several years ago, to an SI out of India called HCL. But, and they've actually as I understand it because I spoke with them recently, they were in my combine. There is no of the IBM web sphere code left. They just accomplished that objective a couple of months ago.

I think they sold the company five, six years ago. So it took them that long to kind of remove everything. And it wasn't necessary to remove everything, but that was a proud achievement that they've actually done this. So it was IBM WebSphere. It was this little company called Hybris.

The Hell, yeah. The little engine that could. I remember people chose Hybris because they weren't IBM or the other major player in the space, Oracle, who has essentially exited things. And then there were some other companies floating around the edge. SAP had a solution, but it wasn't very good.

In fact, I remember they had an ERP, and they had something on the front end, and there was this gaping hole in the middle. And I remember I met with them. I don't know what year this was. Maybe 2012, 2013. And this is back in the day when they would come to they'd trek to Forrester, and they would sit down with us, and we'd have a bunch of people in the room.

And I remember meeting with them saying, okay, talk well, let's walk through your solution. They explained it to me. It was horribly deficient in, like, key areas. And at the end, one of the guys sort of pulled me aside. He goes, under his breath, he says, in a couple of months, this is going to change.

And I said, what do you mean? He's like, I can't talk about it. Well, a couple of months later, they acquired Hybris. Uh-huh. SAP did.

And so they filled that gaping hole. But, yeah, to answer your question, it was SAP, the big three, SAP, Oracle, IBM. And there were some small companies, but nobody else besides them. And they had big monoliths. It was a classic on premise software, million dollar license fee, and it took, you know, five to 15 x that to implement.

Not to mention years. Boy, have things changed. This is pretty cloud too. So there wasn't even this notion of the cloud. In fact, about two years after that, I was at Dreamforce, I think it was, or one of the Salesforce events.

And they had that guy that that, mascot running around said no software. And Oh, yeah. And, I'm like, oh, wow. So this is this cloud thing you guys are talking about. And credit to Salesforce.

I don't know. We don't wanna probably talk about competitors here, but current No. Go ahead. They differentiated based on the cloud. That's what they had.

And, they bought Demandware, and then they bought Concries, but it was all about the cloud. That was the thing that separated them. But I remember other people laughing about the cloud. Like, that's never gonna happen. Nobody's gonna put their data up in the cloud, especially b to b companies.

I heard that a lot. Nobody's gonna trust, you know, putting that stuff up on the internet, you know? And I'm like, we're gonna have it behind a firewall in our servers forever. Well, that didn't happen. Yep.

Yep. I love actually that you brought up the the Granger story. So as you know, I was at Digital River for a very long time. That's how we met. And, at one point we were gonna acquire Hybris.

And I remember them coming in. This was pre SAP acquiring them. And, they were coming in and they were like, our CEO was like, yeah, we're meeting with with this high risk company. They're amazing. This is what they do.

And I lived in a little shell. I had never heard of them. And what I realized about them, number one, they were amazing in B2B, which is not something we were strong in. Number two, they were incredibly partner driven, which means that the agencies were bringing these guys in and making the recommendations. So and then number three, they had an ecosystem.

So to me, that was really where my eyes kinda opened up that said, oh my gosh. There's a really big world out here that I don't really understand. And I love that you connected it to Grainger because when Hybris really won Grainger, that basically the world found out how strong Hybris was at the time. You remember those days? Oh, yeah.

No. And in fact, it made the company. If Hybris had not been selected at Granger, it may have gone a very different path. And so that was one of those magic moments for them. But you wanna hear a funny story.

I don't know if many people know this, but I found this out from the hybrid skies later. A couple years earlier, like in '20 2009, 2010, it was a rough time. Remember we had the housing crisis. It was kind of global recession, etcetera. And startup companies were not held in high favor at that point.

They needed money to survive. So I had to be profitable, and they had to do whatever it took. Well, guess what, Hybris did to stay alive in 2010? No clue. A PIN solution.

They were an early PIN solution. That's what they were selling to everybody was PIM. And so they re they pivoted away from ecommerce, which wasn't doing very well at the time, to being kind of a back end PIM, stayed alive long enough for the wave to come back, which it did in 2011, 2012. And then he Thanks to you. Well, maybe.

Did it things took off. But I also remember the first event I went to in 2012. Hybris reached out to me and said, we're doing this big event in Chicago. We're gonna have, like, 70 to 80 people. We want you to be the the speaker.

And I'm like, okay, great. I live in Chicago. It's very easy me for me to go to. So I show up. There's, like, seven people there.

And they're like, no. We're expecting more. They didn't show up. Had nothing to do with me because nobody knew I was speaking, at least I think. But, or they found out.

Yeah. Nobody was willing to tell me. But I remember them being very we started a great session. It was, like, maybe nine people that showed up. Had a great session, but I remember them telling me like, oh, we're so sorry.

We expected far more people. Maybe we misjudged this. And I just knew enough at the time based on my conversations or just instinct. And I said, you know what? Don't worry about it because in a couple of years, this thing's going to take off.

You're just early. And boy, was that right? Because two years later, they did something called game plan, which was the SAP's big e commerce event. They had like 500 people there, but two years later. So it was true.

They just they got there early, but, you know, much rather it'd be early than late because because they were early, they ended up getting acquired by SAP and then things took off. But if they'd been, life is about timing. If they'd been two years earlier, they probably would have failed because the pin wasn't even being bought at that point. If they'd been two years later, somebody else probably would have been acquired by SAP and then they would have been one of these companies on the outside looking in. So good.

Yep. Good timing. Well, let's go back and look. So I'm looking at the Gartner m q from 2010. Here are some of the here are some of the names on there.

ATG, which became Oracle. Google. Yeah. And now they're and now they're out. And, actually, one of the best thing that came out of that was Kelly Goetzsch.

I mean Yeah. He's, yep. You've got, let's see. Who else is on there? IBM WebSphere, we talked about that, HCL.

Venda, which I think is now Oracle NetSuite. That's a b to c play. Wow. I'm just trying to even know what MarketLive, which is now part of of, Tivo. Yeah.

Icon go, which I think is Technically not. It was part of and then they ended up using it. They wrote it out, I believe. So it they bought it out in a section essentially killed it as I recall, man. Got it.

Broadvision. Oh. Sterling. Yeah. So it's an interesting it has a chance.

Like, if you look yep. Yep. But if you look at the 2010 and few, I don't think there's a single company still doing ecommerce the way they did it in 2010. It's only been fifteen years. So in that window of time, the world has completely turned over.

No. It it's completely it's absolutely true. And a couple of things came along that really changed the market. One was cloud for sure. And then probably that's the most substantial change.

And the reason why is because it lowered the cost of, you know, doing business and it sped up the time frame. Those were two things that I just thought were ridiculous back in the day. There was no alternative, but millions of dollars, sometimes tens of millions of dollars just to sell online and then years of time. And it's like, wait a minute. And then, you know, the cloud came along and there were companies that embraced it and the companies that didn't.

And the ones that embraced it found that is, like, multi tenant SaaS environments. All of a sudden, you could, like, distribute this computing power across multiple clients, and you could update things quickly. So both those equations change. The total cost of ownership and the total time to market, those things completely change because of cloud. And the companies that embrace that did well.

The companies that didn't, didn't. And then there were a group of companies that grew up after all of that. They were cloud native companies. I think of companies like Shopify, for example, that really took it to another level. So that was the big change in the teens.

I think we're seeing an equally substantial change now. Yes. Yes. It's a perfect segue. I mean, if you like if like I said, fifteen years ago, it has more than 100% turned over.

In fact, there's been people who've come up and gone in that window of time. In fifteen years, the same thing will be true. It's almost a universal truth. So let's, we'll come back to that in a moment, but you were at Forrester for a, a very successful career. You really put B2B on the map.

You made it a primary area of investment and research at site inside of Forrester, and then you left. Why'd you do that? There's the honest answer and there's the rhetorical answer. The honest answer is I really did enjoy my time at Forrester. I learned a lot there, but, I felt a bit constrained if I'm being honest.

You know, they they really focus on the research part of this. And I noticed that people were reading less. They wanted more consulting and they wanted stuff that was more specific to them and targeted. Plots. The big reason why is I had multiple companies come to me and say, there's no B2B e commerce show.

There's no conference. And there was B2B online. But it B2B online is, is produced by a company called WBR, and they do multiple event a a year. And they do a fine job, but nobody's exclusively focused on this. And there was nobody who had domain expertise who was doing that.

So I literally have one company who will go nameless, came to me and said at, I wanna say IRCE, that event, came to me and said, we will write a check-in the 6 figure range if you will produce, an event. And so I went back to the ports for people and I said, hey, Let's do this event. And initially, they got excited and then they came back and said, we don't really have the bandwidth to do it. We can't really fit it in. I don't know if that was code for.

We don't know how important this is. I don't know. But they said they said no. So a year goes by same company comes back plus another company comes back and says independently the same thing. We wanna do another event.

We will sponsor it. Here's a 6 figure check. I went back to Forrester again. I said, hey, guys, this is the second year in a row. I don't know.

This is a pretty strong market signal. Maybe we should do this. I said, I'll lead it. And they said, oh, well, let's run up the flagpole again. And they ran up the flagpole and it was basically the same idea came back.

Well, so we know something we do. And so I was thinking about leaving because I wanted more autonomy. And I also had two companies that were willing to write several $100,000 checks to to produce, an event that I wanted to do too. And that Forrester, for probably some good reasons and maybe some not so good reasons, decided not to do. I'm like, wait a minute.

I don't need to be hit in the face three times. So that's that's why I left. That's the honest reason I left. And, I had a non compete, which I honored scrupulously. I didn't take any clients, but people I didn't even know came up to me later and said, Hey, we'd like to work with you.

So I've been able to put together a book of business for a year based on people who weren't even clients of mine at Forrester. That was the other thing. It indicated to me that there was another market out there in particular, a mid market, which was, you know, Forrester, Gardner, FOCUS, have way IDC on the enterprise. That's who their clients are. They're expensive research services and consulting services.

And I said, wait a minute. So what billion dollar plus companies? What about the 900, 900, you know, $999,000,000,000 company? Are we just ignoring them? And they actually had a policy that we weren't supposed to be talking to them.

Like, so we're gonna walk away from a 500,000,000 company that could be doing 80% of their business online in a couple years, and we could help them. And we're not gonna do that. So, again, it was part of their policy, but, like, all things. Right? You know this, Jason.

You know, a lot of companies are created not not because other companies couldn't do it, but because other company chose not to do it. I mean, you don't think Blockbuster could have been Netflix? We know they could have been. They just chose not to do it. Therefore, Netflix did it.

I'm not liking myself to that, but I will say there was nobody covering the mid market. And by mid market, I just defined that up to a billion dollars in revenue, which is not small. And, and there wasn't anybody who was, like, exclusively focused on this. So I just followed the market signals and where where it took. I could not love that anymore.

I, I think you're just simply responding to what the market is telling you. I mean, b to b was underserved. Mid market is underserved. There was no event strategy for b to b. The frankly, we're gonna get into this with Paradigm and the way that you think about metals and capability is very different than the way that people are plotting things out on a grid.

And so that's actually part of the reason I joined Shopware is because nobody was serving the mid market. Everybody's trying to charge rev share. Every everybody's trying to make a b to c product into a b to b one. Like, these are these are opportunities that market signals that people listen to. So let's let's talk a little bit about where you got the inspiration for Paradigm and how you do, your your metals and your research around b to b.

You wanna maybe share that? Yes. I'm really proud of the the the combine. So this is my equivalent. I I hate to compare, but people know these things.

So Paradigm's B2B combine is like the Gartner Magic Quadrant or the Forrester Wave or the IGC market scape with one very important difference. All three of those I mentioned are they leveraged two by two boxes, essentially. They have four quadrants where you got a leader in the upper right hand quadrant. It's always the upper right hand corner. And then you've got three other possibilities.

And, yes, there are three other possibilities. Yes. Technically, you can be one of in one of four quadrants, but I've always joked, and I knew this when I was at Forrester, that the truth of the matter is I call it the leader loser metaphor. Either you're in the leader quadrant or, effectively, the buyers look at you as not a leader, which I just jokingly call loser. Doesn't mean these companies are losers.

I don't mean that literally, but I've talked to too many practitioners to know they use the magic quadrant. They use the way to be able to say these guys were designated a leader, and they go back to their people internally when they're shortlisting. They say, oh, Gartner, Forrester, IDC called these guys leaders. Nobody goes back and says, hey. We wanna put them in because Gartner called them a niche company, or it just doesn't happen that way, which I think is a flaw in the process.

So I'm like, well, first of all, I don't wanna do the fourth version of what everybody else is doing. And I've got this problem, which I called at the time, and I can say this safely now. I call it the IBM WebSphere problem. You might ask what that is? Well No.

I'm definitely gonna ask what that is. IBM WebSphere was pretty good at many things, but not great at anything. Well, guess what? They always ended up showing in the leader quadrant. So if you had 10 categories and they got a score of a four or a three out of five in 10 categories, they would eke it out.

But, you know, say they didn't say they got a five in anything. In some cases, they didn't get a four. They got a three, which is essentially in the middle. But if you average all that together as one composite score, you can eke it out and end up in the leader category. So they sometimes would barely cross the lines.

And I would say to myself, why does IBM in the leader category when they're pretty good at many things, but not great at anything? Isn't this for the great stuff? So when I was conceiving of my version of this, how I wanted to rate companies for practitioners, I said, you know what? Let's have a different metaphor. And so I'm a sports fan.

You probably are too. I noticed that every sports team, every, every sport to be to be candid, every major professional sport, hockey, basketball, football, baseball, they all have something called a combine where they measure your skills. And I thought, wait a minute. This seems like a better metaphor. And they'd have, like, several categories, and they'd identify the world class people in each category.

This is key. So I always say that I think the other research, which I don't have a problem with, you know, I don't have a problem with what Forrester, Gartner, IDC do. I think there's a lot of value in that. I think they do a lot of, analysis on the back end, but they cram it into a two by two box that creates that leader loser metaphor, in my opinion. And, what's missing is they're identifying the best decathlete in the world.

They're not identifying the world champion. So decathletes are amazing athletes. Right? But the guy who runs the one hundred as a decathlete, we might run an eleven three, 100 meter dash. Usain Bolt's run a nine six nine.

I wanna find the Usain Bolt. I I I I laud the decathlete who can do multiple things, but I'm looking for the people who specialize in certain areas. And by the way, did this not become even more important as we moved to microservices based architectures where you could plug in best of breeds? So, really, I think and they'll hate that I'm saying this, but I think their metaphor, and they'll just disagree with it. But I think it was patterned after any legacy of the monolith where you had all this different functionality put in together, again, the decathlete, and they produce a leader or loser kind of solution.

I wanted I wanna identify the company that was great at promotions, but maybe didn't have a great partner network. Well, guess what? If you don't care about the partner network, then why do you care about that? But if it's a composite score, then it's gonna drag down that score and they'll end up in the loser quadrant even though they're world class at, say, promotions. Well, couple of points I wanna respond.

I I think it is a real breath of fresh air, to take a different approach. I really, really do. And one of the things I've noticed being at Shopware is we rebuilt the product in 2019 and frankly took a lot of capability out of the platform and then made them plugins that people can use if they need them to get the utility they need. And then that effect of it is a significantly more performant product because you're not having to carry all that weight for utility you're not gonna use. The the other methodology basically incents bloatware where you have to have all the utility in the product to check every box so that you win every RFP and or analyst relations.

K? So I love the approach because it it allows people to be really focused and great in certain aspects as opposed to trying to be the serve all the masters approach. You agree with my my feedback on that first point? I do. And I like that you said what you said because I think it it it more accommodates what people are actually doing.

I mean, we can talk about them now, but, like, Magento, back in the day before it was part of Adobe, they had this metaphor of we're not gonna build everything. We're gonna build core functionality, and we're gonna let you go to our app marketplace and download what you want. Now there were questions about whether it was really plug and play or whether it was configurable or customizable. But the reality is if you didn't like Magento's search capability, you could just go get something from the marketplace. In some cases, for $500, and you could get a much better search technology.

That was really the way things were going. And but I but is inconsistent with this idea of doing, you know, a monolithic decathlete approach to looking at a whole system. Because I I remember one funny thing that always stood out to me that illustrated this problem where they were sort of schizophrenic. Back in the day when I was at Forrester, I don't know what year it was, but one of the years we were doing the wave and IBM shows up. And I walk in the room and there are, like, six or seven people in the room.

And I say, hi. I'm Andy Horro with Forrester. And each person stands up and says, hi, I'm so and so from, from Sterling. I'm so and so from Coremetrics. I'm so and so from, you whoever.

But it was all these companies that IBM had acquired. And I joked after they were done, I said, does anybody here work for IBM? And that's like rattling this fence where they're like, on the one hand, is IBM WebSphere. On the other hand, it's all these pieces and parts. Now funny thing is you might be tempted to say, well, they're just ahead of their time in that they were bringing these pieces together.

Yes. They were bringing the pieces together, but they were forming a monolith of it. And what they had to do was kinda deconstruct it back, which is what everybody has done now. But my problem with this was, what was I evaluating exactly? Several different component parts or one integrated system?

I think what's great about microservices, what's great about the the theory of composability is that you can bring all these things together. Some of which you probably do, some of which you want partners to do, that's more consistent with what people are buying. And so, again, I think my evaluation is more consistent with that. Mine isn't perfect either. I've struggled with this too, where I have a site search thing and somebody says, hey, our site search isn't great.

So I give them no metal for site search. So what I started letting companies do is include partner functionality. Now I make them take the hit on it because if they're gonna put a partner in there, like a Klayvoo or an Algolia, then that's gonna increase the total their TCO. So that to me is the push pull here. You can include a partner, but it's gonna increase your TCO.

And I've had some people complain, well, we wanna include the partner's functionality, but we wanna be, you know, still a low TCO. I'm like, that's not the way it works. I look at it from the buyer's perspective. So it's a struggle though. What happens when it's all partner functionality?

What happens when it's all sort of configurable? Then what am I evaluating? A network of ISVs? I mean, what is it? Right?

So I I'm I think about this a lot. I'm heading in that direction. I do wonder, and I curious about your take on it, where are these platforms going, especially in the age of agentic AI where now not only can these pieces be componentized, but the agents can do all the work. So is it gonna be like an agent network now that masquerades as a platform? For next year, I'm actually big announcement.

I'm changing the combine. I haven't figured out what it's going to be yet, but the approach is gonna require a heavy dose of agentic AI because I think we're at a point where this is just like back in the day with the cloud and maybe a few years ago with composability. I think this is composability two point zero, agentic AI platforming. I mean, there are people, this might be a scary thought, who are not sure that companies are gonna have websites in a couple of years. And so if that's the case, then you've got a CMS.

What's your CMS producing exactly? A bunch of content that nobody's looking at because the boss are doing all the buying. But there's always gonna be the need to monetize and transact. And so that's what I'm gonna be focused on next year. So for those of you out there listening and you have a platform, and I wanna hear what you have to say about this, Jason, because you're one of the companies I get ready because next year I'm plowing the ground.

I love it. Well, I have I have two pieces of feedback. The first is I I think things are moving to almost like a use case, an agentic use case model as opposed to do you have this capability? So in our world, we're leaning into AgenTic huge. In fact, we founded the AgenTic Commerce Association.

We've got a bunch of tier one members who are a part of it, and we're basically trying to together write the standard at which AgenTic Commerce should be done and can be done so that everyone can work and cooperate and make things better. So that's number one. Question for you. Is that agent is it called the AgenTek Commerce Association? Yes.

Yep. It just launched two it just launched two weeks ago. I didn't even know. That's fascinating. Is that, like, an alternative to mock?

Well, it's different than mock. I mean, mock's it it it's definitely it definitely is is inspired by some of the great work done in the mock alliance, but it's meant to be more open and more inclusive and and really writing the definitions around, what greatness looks like what greatness looks like in in in the world of agentic. So in a lot of ways, it's similar. I was gonna say, I wonder what you can say about that. It feels like mock, a mock, competitor, which I have I have no problem with.

Let everybody get out there and figure it out. But, yeah, I didn't know about that. That's kind of fascinating. Okay. Yeah.

Well, it just launched two weeks ago, and, yeah, we're having a hard time keeping up with demand. So we're not we're not really promoting the heck out of it yet because we've been overwhelmed and kinda, in response. So that's number one. Number two, I was on-site with a partner. I think you'll appreciate this.

I was on-site with a partner in Chicago, and I was meeting with the co founders who are brothers. And we were talking about when Shopware is a good fit and when, people should just go Shopify or or other alternatives. And, I had said to them that we are really strong with B2B distributors and here's all the reasons. And they literally said, what does Andy Boor say about this? Wow.

And I said, well, here's here's the Paradigm report that just came out. And they said, where do they say you're strong and where do they say you didn't get medals? And we picked out the three places that that we either were weak or didn't get medals. And they said, perfect. Those are not use cases that our customers really care about.

And so it was absolutely perfect because marketplace was one and we use a third party tech and yada yada yada. So, the way that they use your, report is basically how well does it fit with the merchants that we serve. And so I can share the names after. Do you know them very well? I no.

I I like that you shared that because it does fit. I mean and by the way, in the age of AgenTek, it's gonna be even more the case what I sort of thought years ago. You're right. If you don't have a use case for a marketplace or site search, then why do you care about that? But in in the magic quadrant and everything else, they rate you on those things, and there's no way to opt out of it.

So yeah. And by the way, you can, like, use the the spreadsheet. You can behind the scenes, you can manipulate things, and you can create your own version of it. But that's not what the world sees. The world sees that two by two quadrant, and they'd see you're not in a leader quadrant.

Nobody says, wait a minute. Is that because they've been exempted from marketplaces? So I I just think I I just gotta be honest here. I think it doesn't fit the world we currently live in. And so not that I would really get my advice, but I would advise them to think a little bit differently about the two by two quadrant, especially in the age of agentic AI.

But, hey, I'm not sure they're gonna listen to me. Yep. Well, you that's just the power of you having your own pen on you how you can write about the world as you see it through your research, through your master b two b stuff. Maybe plug that for a moment. Ryan Beck's a superstar, a plus human.

How did you get connected to him? That's not good too far on them. Wow. I've only interacted with him a dozen times, so I would have it's not real deep. But why don't why don't you talk a little bit about how that partnership came to be and what Master b two b, and then we can wrap it up?

Yeah. So, 2021, I'm talking to Brian. We have known for years. Like, you know, I would do the keynote. He would do the close.

He was working for an SI SI guidance at the time. He'd written a book called billion dollar b two b commerce. I'd written a foreword for it, so we knew each other. And so I it's the middle of the pandemic. I said, hey, Brian.

Are you getting asked to do a bunch of stupid webinars? And he goes, yeah. I'm like, me too. I have an idea. What if we flip the script?

What about if you and I form a webinar series, and then we invite companies to sponsor it as opposed to the opposite? And he goes, I like it. So the key to that was how large is our database? Because we could send email 25 people, and we're gonna have seven people show up, and it's not gonna be much of a webinar series. So it turned out that we compiled we we put our stuff together.

And by the way, it took a lot of trust because I didn't know him that well, and he didn't know me that well. But we, sir, just said, hey. We gotta trust each other. So we put, two databases together, and it'd be a pretty sizable number. I wanna say it was, like, eighteen, twenty thousand or something like that.

And since then, it's grown to a 100,000. And we did only online stuff then. We're now doing offline. We do research. And by the way, the online roundtables we're dealing, we've reached a critical mass now that we do what I've called in market round tables.

I'm not even sure I've talked to you about this, but, we started noticing based on our profiling that x number of people said I'm gonna be buying an ecommerce platform this year, or I'm gonna be purchasing a PIM, or, data is a really important issue for me. So what we're doing now is we're doing thematic in market online round tables, where we invite people to join. And all we do for ninety minutes is talk about best practices, pitfalls to avoid, etcetera, around filling the blade, buying an ecommerce platform, etcetera. And these are people who are in the process of doing so, which is a win win win. Because when we invite somebody to join, we call them subject matter experts.

They have to be a subject matter expert. And, and they're the ones who are going to share the God view as I call it. So for example, if you were with us as a subject matter expert, I would say, just Jason, you guys said how many implementations last year? How many customers do you have? This particular issue around getting your data ready to be uploaded into the system, what have you seen as a principal problem here?

What's a solution that you see that's working? So it's not a cell session. We get together and we talk like peers would about how can we do this better. And so we weren't able to do that because we weren't able to funnelize enough people. But now in the just in the last couple of months, we've done a couple of these.

And I gotta say, we this is not hyperbole. We we've nailed this thing. I mean, we did one recently with another company that you might know, in your space, and they couldn't stop singing our praises. Like, every single person here was looking for a platform. And all the people, we had to kick them off after ninety minutes.

Sometimes when we invite people, they thank us. I couldn't believe this. We're doing one for PIM, next week or two weeks. And we invited these people, so we're having this conversation. If you'd like to attend, we knew from our research that they were in market for one.

And I have people writing back saying, Andy, this is the most important thing we're talking right now. Thank you so much for inviting me. I don't ever get emails like that for other stuff. And I had at least I think we have 10 people. We have, like, six of those 10 people thank us for inviting them.

So there's something about this peer sharing network idea where, you know, we're all trying to get through this together. We bring in experts, but I think it's I've always felt it was a broken process whereby, you know, this on your side where you're out there selling technology to people, and you guys have solutions. They have problems, but there's all this baggage in between you. Right? Like, they think you're trying to sell them stuff they don't need.

You think that they're jerking your chain because they're not really interested. And you guys play this game where you have a really awkward dance, like a high school or grade school dance. And it's like, can we improve this? So that's my overarching goal is to tear down those walls so that you guys and people buyers and sellers can actually trust one another and have a productive conversation. I love it.

Well, you know, it's interesting just to create the the the the difference between b to c and b to b. The b to c customer or companies, really, it's like they wanna brag about how great they do, but they don't wanna share any other secrets. K? In b to b, I see almost the exact opposite. It's like, hey.

We did this. It worked. We hired this vendor. We love these people. I talked to Andy Hoare.

I went to these dinners, and they share, share, share, share, share. It's like this massively underserved segment that's just simply prying for support. And so here's the shameless plug for for you and what you do. First, you and Brian, I think you guys have a weekly That's right. Dave, whatever.

You have a weekly podcast, that I I recommend people subscribe to. What's it called and where do people find out about it? Yeah. Friday '15. You can go to our website, masterb2b.com, and we do a different topic every week.

It's fifteen minutes. Sometimes it goes long. We joke about that. Never more than about twenty two minutes, but we take one topic. We we we address it.

We provide some research, and we have Brian and Andy conversations that are serious, no fluff, etcetera. But, yeah, thank you for mentioning that because, anywhere you get your podcast, you can get this. And who doesn't have fifteen minutes to listen to something, especially if you're on b to b? And by the way, I like your other point too. I wanna congratulate you on saying this.

It is true in b to b, they're different from b to c. I'm not gonna suggest that everybody in b to b is is willing to share everything, and then everybody in b to c is not. But I've been to both conferences over the years. The b to c conferences feel a lot different from the b to b ones. The b to b ones, it's collegial.

Everybody's looking at each other saying the enemy is customer attention. It's not each other. Whereas in b to c, I feel it's a more cutthroat. I don't know. I can probably have a whole conversation about that, but in b to b, I'll talk to people and they're like, gosh, I know Bob.

And, yeah, we compete, but we also talk about stuff because we're struggling with the same issues. Yep. Yep. So the podcast is a really good resource. It's in my it's in my, must listen to every I probably every other week.

The second thing is you guys, if you're a b to b merchant, you guys do these amazing dinners and you travel to different cities. If people are a merchant, they wanna learn more, they wanna maybe get on the invite list. How do they do that, Andy? Same thing. You've probably gotten an email from us.

So if you're, in the master b b community, which, by the way, it costs nothing to join. In fact, it does it has nothing to join the mailing list. So you can join the mailing list and get our email. You can also, if you're qualified, join our private community called the Master B2B Mindshare Forum, which is just for practitioners. We set it up.

We're not trying to monetize it. We just let people go in there and ask questions like a bulletin board, but more sophisticated. We have 700 of the best of the best people in ecommerce there. If you are a practitioner or manufacturer or distributor and you wanna do it, you apply to join. And if you qualify, we'll let you in.

So, yeah, there's a lot of different ways to interact with us. But, yeah, you should always get on the mailing list because then you'll get invites. And if you live in one of, say, eight cities in The US, including New York, Minneapolis. So we're doing a Minneapolis in October. We already have we already have people signed up for that.

We're almost, like, half full at this point, and it's three months. Good. I'm a I'm a sponsor. Good. I'm a sponsor.

We're a sponsor too. Right? So we do Minneapolis. We do Milwaukee. We do Chicago.

We've done Dallas, Denver, Atlanta. There's several cities that we go to. And I think we're the only ones that go to the cities. And we started doing that because there were people who just don't have the ability for whatever reason to go to the big conferences. Right.

They coach their kids' baseball team and over the summer or whatever in the spring, they just can't take off for three days and go to a conference. So if we come to them, they come. So we went to Minneapolis. We had companies I'd never heard of before billion dollar plus companies in Minneapolis who have never come to anybody else's conference because for them, it was just a fifteen minute drive. And they got a lot of information out of it and they love it.

So that's why we set that up. So thank you for mentioning that. We go out to people instead of making them just come to us. Yep. Another theme, and you're just you're just responding to market demand that there's these underserved segments of people, and you find ways to serve them.

So I I really recommend people go to, Master b two b and to Paradigm, digest your market research, sign up to be on your newsletter because what, Andy, ultimately, what you're trying to do is build a community of B 2 b, and I applaud you for it. So thank you for being my guest today. Yeah. Well, thanks for doing, having me on. And, you know, I really appreciate getting to chat with you about Stone.

Yeah. We could probably go for hours, but in the sake of the listeners, we'll we'll we'll cut it off here. Thanks for being on Commerce Famous. Great to be here.