James Kemp, welcome to the WP Minute.
Thank you very much. Thank you for having me.
you and I, we've seen each other in passing, right? I think on Twitter and post status and other areas. This is gonna be a, a first time conversation, lots to get into. this is not a gotcha you podcast by any stretch of the imagination, but I do want to get stuck into some of the things around automatic and, WordPress and WooCommerce. But for the folks that don't know. Who you are. what's your storied tale in WordPress?
I, I, I always knew you as a guy that was like launching a bunch of products, but now you're at Woo. us the picture of James.
Yeah, I think you summarized it pretty well.
I.
yeah, always, always been keen to kind of dive in and build stuff. since. 2009. We'll, we'll go back a fair bit. 2009 I got like a web design job at an agency. we started using WordPress at that point. WooCommerce wasn't really a thing back then. I think JO Shop may not have even been a thing back then. but Magento was, and we used Magento a lot. and I, I spent some time. My, my first kind of plugin, experience was building a plugin to integrate Magento into WordPress.
so you could bring across like the cart data and, the navigation and stuff from, from Magento to kind of make the, the experience of building a Magento site with a content managed, experience as well. More, simple, more cohesive. So I did that. I, I built a plugin back then. like I say, that was my first experience dabbling in the, the world of WordPress and, and the plugin ecosystem. which I believe was quite early on, like comparatively to, to now, where there's a plugin for everything.
Back then there, there wasn't really, too many plugins and that there definitely wasn't an environment of. bigger plugins that were like solutions, like, like lifter, LMS and like that kind of thing. Give Wp you know, that there weren't these like solution based products. It was, it was very much, utility based plugins, which is the world that, that I kind of went into and, and, you know, spent my time in. Was, was these utility based products. so after some time.
WooCommerce came about, I think it was 2011, I built my first WooCommerce plugin, which was called multiple Images per Variation. so very like. Feature relevant plugin name. I wasn't particularly, a marketer back then. started selling that on Code Canyon. and then just kind of doubled down on the, the WooCommerce side of things, and, and built a ton of, you know, different utility style WooCommerce plugins. that one was renamed as Woo Thumbs, which is still around today.
I eventually like, stopped doing anything except WooCommerce plugins. And I think by maybe 2017, I decided to stop what I was doing elsewhere, which was working, running my own agency with a friend, or a colleague at the time, I should say, building websites for people and, you know, using WooCommerce, using WordPress, not really using Magento. I, I. Got out of that as soon as I could.
and yeah, that, that allowed me, the, the agency side of things to build up a collection of products that, that I had built, you know, because clients needed that functionality. and it got to a point where I, I wasn't particularly enjoying the client work, but I was enjoying the product work. So I rebranded, as iconic iconic wp.com. released all the plugins over there, you know, you know, created product pages and, and, and all that kind of stuff.
changed it from being under my own name to, to being iconic. shifted off of Co Canyon onto FIUs. I think I was one of the, the first FIUs users, or one of the, the first successful FIUs users, I guess. and then in 2021. Iconic was acquired by Liquid Web Stellar wp, where it still resides today with, I believe all of my team that were also acquired at the time, are still over there working on it.
and I worked there for a couple of years and then I reached out to Paul, who was the, the CEO of WooCommerce at the time, and just said, you know, I, I feel like I've taken. Iconic as far as I can take it. with it being utility based, you know, that it's not, it's not an easy sell, particularly in, in the, the market as of today where there's so much competition for, for all of these utility based products.
but I have like a very deep understanding of WooCommerce and also, you know, what merchants and what clients are actually looking for from. WooCommerce site. and I just said, you know, is there any role there that would suit me? and we, we probably discussed it for maybe a year on and off. I met with Beau, who is now the, the CEO of WooCommerce, at WordCamp Athens, maybe. Yeah. A, a word Camp Europe, I can't recall which one.
and we had a chat about what I could do, and then eventually we settled on, product manager. So I joined WooCommerce as a product manager after two years of, or two years after my acquisition, acquisition with Stellar. and after about a year of being at WooCommerce, I've, so I've been there. Maybe a year and a half, just over a year and a half now.
my role was shifted from product manager where I was focused on like one specific thing, which for me was order management, to now being core product manager, which means I kind of touch all sorts of different areas of WooCommerce and, and try and have an impact, on what the overall product. is, you know, what we include, what we don't include. and I work alongside the other product managers that we have, and that is essentially my life story.
It's a fantastic life story, by the way.
Thank very much.
when I say the phrase, 800 pound gorilla in the room, that doesn't get any attention. How does that make you feel about WooCommerce? And let me frame it and we will talk, more deeply about culture and, and the current vibe of things. But I've often looked at WooCommerce as that 800 pound gorilla in the room from the looking in, especially when you compare it to say, a more commercialized Shopify, it's easy to wonder like.
Why aren't we seeing more happen with, with Woo its, you know, core offering and its marketing and it's just overall consumer appeal like a Shopify and I even argue a square space 'cause they often lean into the e-commerce side, 800 pound gorilla in the room. That doesn't get the attention. Your thoughts?
I have a variety of thoughts on the subject. I personally believe that the audience of WooCommerce versus something like Shopify or Wix is slightly different. I think Shopify, if they do marketing, they're targeting the merchant. And, you know, you can, you can jump in, you can build a site very quickly. you, you can, you know, you just sign up and, and then your site is kind of there to start building.
WooCommerce has a challenge in that respect, where if the, the merchant, if we were targeting the same, you know, type of customer, needs to make a decision before they've even touched WooCommerce, they have to decide. Where they're gonna host it. They have to figure out what hosting is, that they probably don't even, you know, have that kind of technical understanding of what that means. they probably need to think about a domain name before they've even spun anything up.
and I think that's a challenge, and I think that is a challenge when it comes to marketing as well, because. It's, it's hard to direct them somewhere. You know, we can direct 'em to a landing page, but then they still have to make this dec decision on, you know, how am I gonna get started? And that's something I, I've brought up quite a lot recently, and I think's something that we plan to tackle is to, right now we offer, like if you go to start, on the WooCommerce website.
You kind of get presented with these different hosts that we partner with. but to the person looking like all you see is the host name, like you don't know why you would choose whichever one you go for. and that's, I think, a touch point that we need to really focus on and make very smooth, like, and it can still be, you know, fair across the different hosts where maybe there's some kind of pre.
survey or like pre-questions that they populate that then narrow them down to a specific host, which they can then click a button and it spins up a, a working WooCommerce. so that's one of the issues. I think another potential issue is with something like WooCommerce, there's also learning that has to happen. to kind of learn WordPress, you're not just learning WooCommerce. You need to understand how WordPress works. and on these closed systems, you don't have that issue.
Like they, they can very much tailor it, to be the same for everyone. and the third issue that we have is every environment can be completely different. You know, they could have a different set of plugins, they could have different hosting. the host themselves can, you know, modify how WordPress and WooCommerce look once it's installed. which is a challenge and I dunno whether that answers all of your questions, but those are like issues that I see, that make marketing harder for us.
but I will say that marketing, since obviously you saw the, the rebrand that we, we did recently. it's like a stage one of, of our new marketing, efforts and we have some really nice, like, really modern looking marketing efforts that are, are gonna be rolling out over the course of this year.
I do like the rebrand. I think the, the logo is great. It does, it does look really good. I. One of the predictions I made at the start of the year, of course off the heels of a lot of the WordPress, or automatic V versus WP engine drama was that, I think in order for automatic to really perform and compete, that they, things would have to happen. One, they would have to cut the fat It's a poorly chosen phrase after, a 16% roughly layoff of automatic employees.
But I think that automatic just has a ton of products, Like when you look@wordpress.com, you know, investing time into WordPress core, when that was a thing. Simple note, Tumblr video press, jet pack, like, you know, the, the list goes on. WooCommerce of course, and that was my other thing was to other prediction was like they, they, they have to get rid of, all these products that are just not part of that experience.
The experience you just mentioned, which was, listen, the customer has to understand all this technical overhead. They have to understand Woo Commerce, and oh, by, by the way, because they're in Woo Commerce, they're also having to learn this WordPress thing. So there's all these particular challenges.
My other prediction is that in order for Automatic to Succeed as well throughout this year, the only way I say the only, but the only way achieve that to make wordpress.com or A better experience, that hosted experience by automatic air quotes will be the West best way to experience WordPress and WooCommerce. Do you think that is a direction we're headed in where has the best experience, whatever that might be, and then open source world.
We can just do whatever we want over here in the wild West, you know, third party ecosystem, et cetera, et cetera. But maybe the core initiative is to make the experience better at automatic.
Yeah, I completely agree that that should be the case. Like, you know, if you spin up a a WordPress site on wordpress.com, that should be like, this is the prime example of WordPress. I. At its finest. and I think there is some work that is currently undergoing to, to make that the case, to kind of bring.com back to what WordPress is, because they have like their own admin experience, on on.com that I guess sat on top of WordPress. so yeah, there's definitely work happening there.
And we had, We were expressed for a while, which was meant to be there and also acted, I would say more directly as a competitor to, you know, Shopify. The, the, the platform. There was a lot, closer in, in spec in, you know, how it, how it functioned to what Shopify, and other providers, you know, offered. obviously that.
It was wound down a bit and kind of bundled into this, commerce package on.com, which I think already existed, but I, I think they took some of what Woo Express was and put it into that package. I would like to see that kind of come back a bit. And I think the reason for that winding down made sense. The, the people working on that were. WooCommerce developers, you know, they, they were part of the WooCommerce team.
and the idea of winding that down was that we didn't want to be, as a, as a company, as WooCommerce, we didn't want to be building stuff that only benefited us, you know, within WooCommerce core. Like if we're building stuff that that could benefit everyone, then we want to do that in, in a more.
global way and, and that's, you know, part of this Be the host help, the host stuff that, I can't remember when it came out, but sometime last year, that was like a shift in thinking that anything we're building should be able to benefit any host and not just Woo Express. but I also think, and I also agree, that we should have as a company, as automatic. The best, you know, managed solution of WooCommerce specifically.
whether that comes back or not, I'm not sure, but I, I personally would like to see it.
Automatic needs to survive. It needs to be a healthy company regardless of what any of the critics might say. I don't envy the position of being an aian these days. It must be a little tough to get some criticism, especially when it's stuff that's sort of like outside of, out, outside of your control and. Largely not based on like the product experience. I mean, I think everybody complains about every product ever made.
Like this is, you know, and especially if you're on Twitter, you know, you're, you're always gonna see, you know, complaints about a product, right? It, it's just a never ending thing, right? I, I work at Gravity Forms fulltime. we've been doing this now for 15 years and we get complaints every single day. So it's like, like I totally get it. but the. But how is the culture, right? How is the culture? How do you feel reporting for duty? every day under the Woo brand,
Yeah, I mean, obviously, you know, we've, we've got that. WP Engine thing kind of hanging over us. there's, there's negative connotations from that on, on Twitter, but honestly to, to me personally, there's not that much negative. And I, I think because most of the people that I interact with on Twitter were aware of my journey, you know, up until that point, they're kind of aware of me as a person. has helped, but I have seen.
Other people who maybe don't have that history, not, you know, have as good of experience. so we've got that. We've also got the, the layoffs that you mentioned, as of last week I think it was, which has definitely had an impact on people. But leaving them aside, which is, you know, tricky. I, I personally love the experience. you know, the, the, the people I work with are all deeply, invested in making WooCommerce as good as it can be. there's, there's tons of collaboration like across.
The product team, which, you know, I'm, I'm primarily in, engineering, design, marketing, developer advocacy. Like, it, it feels very tight knit. but obviously these things, these things have, have an impact. and it's typical, most impactful when they've just happened. and I'm hoping that. it leads to us being able to put things out more quickly or even, you know, focus on priorities more easily rather than trying to do everything we have to, you know, really think about what the priorities are.
and we've, we've just gotta make the best of that situation. Like you say, I think automatic is a. Is a big asset to the WordPress and, and obviously WooCommerce space. and we need to make sure that thrives. And if this is the way to do that, then I, I hope it works. But yeah, for, for me personally, like the satisfaction of working on, on WooCommerce when it's the stuff that I'm putting in or like advocating for within WooCommerce is impacting so many people.
Which is something that I could never really do prior to this. You know, I could impact our own customers, but the, the kind of scope of people that interact with stuff that I've had a say in or, or that I can advocate for is, is much larger. and that's really, you know, what I want to do. Like, I want to make this product as good as it can be. And to do that, you know, I, I listen to a lot of people. I do a lot of research.
I physically like ask the questions, and, and try and bring a lot of stuff that was previously behind the scenes, you know, out into the, into the public for people to see. and I, I love doing it, so I hope I can continue to do it. but yeah, it's, it's challenging times and we just have to. Do the best with, with what we've got. I tend to stay out of the, you know, the discourse online on these topics, because I don't think it adds anything. Like there's, there's nothing I can do about it.
all I can do is just make sure WooCommerce is as good as it can be. And you know, that we're, we're focusing on stuff that people actually want. and listen to what people are saying. So.
There's nothing a lot of critics can do about it, just that either. But they, but, but they also, weigh in. But hey, that's, that's the internet for you. pop culture, the Doge effect, it's really affecting, everyone. And, and you know, when, know, lose, use that term loosely because it, it gets, thrown around as something that is, is bad, but. Cutting the fat, optimizing what have you, for, any organization to, to have a moment to reflect. It's not a, a clean thing. It's never a clean thing.
It's never an easy thing, and, and it's something that must be done. I was on the way here to the office listening to, I also follow the podcast industry fairly, deeply like I do with WordPress. And I was listening to some, real high level, ad executives talking about sponsorship on podcasts and by sponsorships on podcasts. Certainly not this podcast, but the ones that like, are made by celebrities, athletes, you know, news personalities, et
Yeah.
And they were talking about host red ads, and that's when the host reads an ad and they're talking about how those are the best ads, obviously. And, you know, for some sales executive out there who is selling this ad spot on whomever celebrity podcast it is, they were saying it took 80 touchpoint to get from when the, when the buyer from a brand, let's say WooCommerce says, I want Kevin Hart to read. The WooCommerce ad on his podcast, it took 80 touch points to get that done right.
And they were just like, why does it take that much? And they're having like this real deep conversation about how they need technology to solve this. And I'm like, technology, you get the ad. The guy says, yes, he reads the ad, you listen. That's it, you know, very easy. but there's always these complexities that come into play with big organizations, which, which brings me to one of Woo's competitors, again, Shopify. also in the news air quotes, for, you know, talking about embracing ai.
Paraphrasing Toby put out his, social media post that look, just like mul, Matt Mullenweg had said, a few years ago, we gotta learn AI deeply. We gotta start to embrace this stuff. I've seen automations more publicly talking about ai, doing things with ai. My friend Rich Tabor, quite often, he and I have a little chatter back and forth on Twitter about using ai. I have been using ai.
But I am cautiously optimistic about it, especially when I hear leadership, not, not just Matt, but from other CEOs. a little, little uneasy what, what embracing AI means,
Mm.
especially when there's no real plan. Hey team, go learn this thing. 'cause if you don't. You'll be the one that's gonna be gone next. And I just look at that and I go, Hmm, what are we optimizing here? Are we optimizing the workflow or are we optimizing the company's expenditures? Your thoughts on ai, how are you using it? Where are we heading with it for? Woo. And one other tidbit.
I did just get the email from wordpress.com that they launched their AI builder, which I've yet to try out 'cause it was literally a few hours ago before I hit record with you ai. Everyone's favorite two letter, acronym thoughts.
I love ai. yeah, I will. I. I prefix, whatever I say by saying that Matt has basically, you know, said the same thing as, as Toby revealed the other day to people at Automatic, as far back as last year sometime. you know, that, that he encourages people within the company to experiment with ai, to expense ai, to explore the options that are out there. We had a, we had an AI team actually for, for WooCommerce for a while where we were just focusing on what can we do with ai?
And this was probably this time last year. and, you know, you'll be aware like how dramatically AI has evolved since then. so yeah, we, we, we had a team that was focused on ai, at WooCommerce specifically. And we were able to ship that into Wu Express, which is another barrier that doesn't exist anymore. we, we kind of wound that team up a little bit because we didn't have a clear path to deliver ai.
you know, whereas something like Shopify, people are paying for that plan, so they're kind of covering the costs of ai, whereas WooCommerce can be hosted anywhere. It's not something that we could really ship in core, as it were. Maybe we could have some sort of extension, but, yeah, we, we, we wanted to explore that a bit further and, and we weren't quite ready, I don't think to, to push anything out there.
we did have some cool stuff in, in WordPress, but yeah, I guess that's AI at a product level. And I should note that we are revisiting WooCommerce AI and what that means, and, and how we can deliver that. with, you, you may have seen James, the page joined Automatic, who's very, heavy on ai, has built a ton of cool AI products. so he's, he's now leading the, the Wu AI initiative as well. so that'll be cool, but me personally. Yeah, I use AI all the time.
I use it to just experiment and build stuff that I couldn't build before. so, you know, games, what, what they call vibe coding now. experimented a little bit with the, the WooCommerce API and like pulling that into a, a game environment. I, I built like a, an art gallery experience for my photography prints, so you can kind of walk through a gallery and, and click through to a product, which is just a, a photo print.
but really that's, that's like hobby, you know, I'm just doing it in the background 'cause I wanna see what these tools are capable of and, you know, having been a developer, it's just fun to do I think any, any developer enjoys coding. So that, that's why I do that. but in the day to day, I use AI a lot for, multiple things. So I would use AI to kind of take my ideas and formulate them into something presentable.
For example, I would use ai, as like a, a partner to just talk to and just talk through ideas with that, you know, perhaps. Frees up someone else's time, you know, comes back with ideas that aren't solely based on two people's imaginations, but they're, you know, widely based on the breadth of the internet essentially. I use AI to help me rephrase things that I've written. I use AI for research.
You know, so if if I have a, an idea for a feature within WooCommerce, then I might, ask AI to kind of do some research on that and find examples of people, you know, requesting that functionality, whether it's in WooCommerce or somewhere else. so yeah, at at the product level, the, the, you know, product role level, I, I use AI all the time, and I find it very useful.
What I don't want to see with AI is, I guess, having AI do the work for you without you then, you know, analyzing what it's actually saying and, and thinking it through. and the same with codes. Like I, I know people, talk a lot about AI taking your job, as a, as a developer or whatever. But I see AI as a, a tool.
I think the people who use it best, and who produce the best results with it, know what it's doing and like know how to interact with it and why something maybe isn't working, and how they can kind of reframe their question to make it work in an optimum way. and I, yeah, I think it's, it's very powerful. I, I think you can. Solve problems a lot more quickly, and yeah, I, I'm all for it.
I want to end, Our conversation on a more positive outlook, I hope, than a lot of the, deeper questions we've been going through and, and asking ourselves through this conversation. I do think that one of the North stars, and maybe this is more for the WordPress side and, and. You know, hearing you answer some of these questions. I, I do. It's interesting to hear how, I mean, there's woo, there's woo woo commerce and, and then, you know, automatic, and of course WordPress.
But I think the North Star for a lot of WordPress future success is going to be through the playground. This is my prediction, playground.wordpress.net For those of you that, are not familiar with it. You can check out, some of the videos I've done on the YouTube channel about playground. It's fantastic. You just load up WordPress. It's right in your browser. You don't have to install anything. you know, you can learn how to use WordPress. You can start to learn how to code WordPress.
You can test out a plugin. It's fantastic. And I think that's going to be, the starting point for a lot of users in the future. And maybe woo. And. wordpress.com and automatic proper like that, that more automatic experience might have their own iterations of, of playground. But I think that's the great starting point. getting your hands with the tools and features, your thoughts on getting the users to start experiencing this stuff straight away. And is playground poised to be like.
Entry point for the future of Woo or W or WordPress.
Yeah, I completely agree. And it, it touches on what I was saying earlier about WooCommerce's entry point. you know, it's very, it's very technical at the moment. and it's something we've discussed maybe that maybe the first touch point of the, the WooCommerce experience is that you can spin up a, a word, WordPress slash WooCommerce site on playground, you know, start.
Building out a site there and maybe, we, we didn't touch on it too much, but maybe integrates somehow with the, the AI builder that, that was rolled out earlier today by automatic, that you can spin up a, a WooCommerce site, tailor it to your needs, and then from there, you know, click a button to then host it somewhere. The, the challenge we face is that we don't want to lead people to our hosting.
You know, we, we want, we wanna be fair to all of the hosting providers out there, but specifically the, the ones that partner with us and, and feature on, on the WooCommerce website. so I'm not sure what that looks like. Maybe it just randomly chooses one of them and, and leads you off in that direction. Or maybe it's tailored to whatever the, the site is. You know, how many products they're gonna host, how many orders they expect, like, all of that kind of information.
but yeah, I, I do think getting someone into WordPress, into WooCommerce as quick as possible is going to be key to, to solving adoption, you know, solving the issue of just getting started without having to think, what's my domain gonna be? Where am I gonna host it? You know, all that kind of stuff that. You have to think about that. You don't have to think about on, other hosted solutions.
I think we'll see a resurgence, my prediction for the rest of the year, especially through whatever economic thing we're running through right now,
Yeah,
that, that we'll a resurgence of, WordPress services based businesses. I. So for the freelancer or small agency listening, what, what are the opportunities for WooCommerce now? Like obviously we know we can go after and clients that are wanting to sell things, is there something from your vantage point you could share with the freelancer agency owner listening to this? This is, this is the best opportunity for you right now to word, WooCommerce in in your client solutions.
Yeah, it's a tricky one to answer because I, I think the, the biggest thing about WooCommerce and WordPress in general is how flexible it is. And I think that's probably the main, or at least one of the main selling points of using WooCommerce over something else is, there, there comes a point where you can just do anything with WooCommerce. I, I. Can't envision many scenarios that you couldn't achieve using WooCommerce.
one of the things that we're gonna be focusing on a lot is builder tools, which is something that we have some, you know, form of builder tools currently, but we're, we are really kind of doubling down on that because we're aware that these more technical WooCommerce builds. and. You know, the people using WooCommerce aren't necessarily the merchant directly like they would be on these other platforms. typically they're, they're a, a builder assisted merchant.
So the, the builder creates the site, hands it over to the merchant in some way, and then maybe they continue to maintain it. so yeah, there's, there's a, a real big focus on builder tools that, that we want to, you know, lean into, Some of that is gonna be like better import export tools right at the beginning of, of the project. being able to import, products, customers orders, like all of that stuff that you can't currently, easily import without building your own solution to do that.
but also we're experimenting with like blueprint data, which is kind of heavily influenced by playground where. Maybe to spin up a, a WooCommerce site, you just give it A-J-S-O-N file of, you know, these are the settings that I want to pre-configure. these are the, you know, whatever products or categories that I want. You click a button and it's kind of done and, and completes that process a lot more quickly. And yeah, I, I think performance is a big focus for us at the moment.
I think that's something that we hear about a lot and something else that we want to tackle, is the kind of, I think one of the main issues with WordPress and WooCommerce is the compatibility layer and like the, the update layer where, because of all the different scenarios where WooCommerce can be, installed.
with all the different plugins that may be run alongside it, we, we want to figure out a way to prevent issues or to, to kind of pre-warn or early warn people that issues have arisen or might arise, to just try and make that experience of updating and, and, you know, plugging compatibility more, more seamless.
So, yeah, all of that to say like the, the builder experience and the compatibility experience and the update experiences, and the performance experience is something that we're like heavily focused on. and I would suffix that with just saying that, you know, the, the WooCommerce team in general is pretty open to feedback and, me specifically like.
I welcome feedback and suggestions and I regularly talk to, mostly agencies and builders that are working with WooCommerce and hear them out and, you know, implement their feedback and advocate for their feedback. So hopefully that answers the question, but I know I talked on a lot of points there.
James Kemp woocommerce.com. also check out developer.woocommerce.com has been a great source of, inf information, especially for me. Where else can folks go to say thanks either to you or to learn more about WooCommerce? I.
obviously woocommerce.com. There's, there's the Twitter accounts. there's two actually. There's one for WooCommerce, which I believe is just at WooCommerce. and there's one for the developer side of things, which I think is. something like develop Woo, I, I should know this really, and then me on Twitter, James C. Kemp is the, the best place to reach out to me. and yeah, just do it. You know, if you've, if you've got questions, you've got suggestions, just, DM me.
I'm pretty sure my dms are open, or do it publicly and I will respond or direct you to the right place.