[EP 12] Modern Merchant Podcast: Special Guest, Jay w/ Bold Commerce

Below, you will find a transcript of the episode.

Austin Rose:

All right. Thanks for jumping onto The Modern Merchant Podcast today. I’m your host, Austin. With me, as always, I have the CEO of FlexPoint, Travis, and we got a really special guest today and a really fun episode. So, today, our special guest is Jay from Bold Commerce. Just a quick little bio about Bold Commerce. Bold Commerce was named one of North America’s fastest-growing tech companies, and you guys provide apps to over 90,000 brands in 170 countries around the world. That’s awesome. Jay, thanks for jumping on. We really appreciate it.

Jay Myers:

Oh, man. Thanks for having me. It’s an honor to be here.

Austin Rose:

Yeah. And give us a quick little bio about yourself, a little plug about what Bold Commerce does.

Jay Myers:

Yeah. So we started in 2012. I’ve been a merchant, actually, since 1998. I launched my first store. I don’t look that old, I know, but … Then, around 2010, I started looking at building some solutions to actually work for our stores and our brands, and that turned into Bold in 2012. Well, the first app we launched, it was actually quite simple at the time. It was an upsell solution. It was very simple. You’d click add to cart, and an upsell comes up. You’re buying a leather jacket, recommending a leather treatment kit or something like that. Of course, that’s evolved and changed over the years a ton. I guess, long story short, we can get into some of that, but we’ve … So in 2012, we launched that. It went quite well, and we’ve built many more apps and solutions since then. We have close to 20 of them.

Jay Myers:

We really evolved into … We call ourselves a checkout experience company, so we build a lot of tools that around the checkout subscriptions is a big part of that. We have a checkout itself, price rules engines to handle dynamic pricing and really unique promotions for brands. Yeah, we’ve been very fortunate. Timing was good, and we started off in my basement, and I think, today, we’re close to 500. I don’t know exactly, but close to 500 people and spread out across … I’m in Canada, but we have staff now all over North America, and especially since this pandemic hit. Now, we’re hiring everywhere.

Austin Rose:

Nice. Yeah, and I listened to you … We’ll talk a little bit about your Own Your Commerce Podcast because you run a podcast as well. I was listening to when you had Harley on from Shopify.

Jay Myers:

Oh, nice.

Austin Rose:

It was funny. I love this story of both of you guys starting out as a merchant, and then that’s what exploded, him for Shopify and you guys for Bold Commerce. So take us back to that start. What did that look like? You hit on it a little bit, but let’s go into a little bit more detail. So you’re a merchant selling … What were you selling?

Jay Myers:

Archery supplies, of all things, right?

Austin Rose:

Cool.

Jay Myers:

I grew up in a family business. When I was 13, I got really big into archery. Well, I got big into archery when I was 11. When I was 13, my dad said, “Jay, how about I quit my job, remortgage the house,” and we started an archery store. So it had 24 lanes, and there was a pro shop, and we gave lessons, and we sold bows and arrows. It’s actually still around. The business is 30 years old. It’s still going.

Travis Mariea:

Nice.

Jay Myers:

So I grew up working in retail my whole life. When I was 18, this was 1998, people were starting to sell online. The first website I built was using Microsoft FrontPage. It didn’t even have a checkout. We put prices on things. I remember I bought a big cell phone, and I had the phone number on the website, and I’d bring the cellphone around to parties in case someone wanted to place an order. I remember the first order I got. Someone called and ordered a $600 bow over the phone. I jotted down the credit card information and address and shipped it out the next day. So fast forward a whole bunch, I’ve sold on almost every platform.

Jay Myers:

In 2009, I heard about Shopify, and coincidentally an email from MailChimp, said, “We’re now integrated with Shopify,” and now MailChimp is no longer integrated with Shopify. But, anyways, I kind of said, “Oh, what’s Shopify all about,” clicked, and I had a few different brands, so I migrated one onto Shopify just to play around with it because, at the time, the sites looked very modern. That was one of the things Shopify got right very early on. Their theme store was you could start a site and have a respectable-looking store and it stood out and that was helping brands win. Now, that’s kind of table stakes, but back then everything looked like those GeoCities with really long lists of categories down one side and very outdated.

Jay Myers:

So I moved a store onto there, and then they had this concept of an app store. I think they had maybe 20 apps in it. They were all integration apps. They were all integrated with UPS, integrated with QuickBooks, integrated with MailChimp, integrated with … So they were backend apps that would integrate Shopify to other software. I looked at that app store with a merchant mindset, and I wanted functionality. Shopify was very basic at the time. I think I was store number 6000-something, and now there are 1.8 million stores they have. So they didn’t have a lot of the features that they have now, and there were no apps for any promotional front-end stuff. It was all just integrations.

Jay Myers:

The first app I wanted … Not an app, the function I wanted to do was actually a product comparison. So you know how when you’re shopping and if you’re looking at a backpack, you can click three backpacks and they all come up and you can compare size, weight, whatever? I wanted to do that. There was no way to do that, so I started looking into building that. Turns out it was going to be quite complicated because the metadata structure in Shopify wasn’t quite ready for it yet. So, honestly, me and a couple friends, we said, “Well, hey, let’s get together and build … What’s the easiest thing we could build that would be really simple?” We thought, “Well, what about just an upsell app, a simple upsell app?”

Jay Myers:

So it was an experiment at first. I wanted to use the software we were building for our store. My buddies, one of them was best man at my wedding, one of the guys I played volleyball with at university, so it was a group of friends just trying something. All the apps we built early on, like the first one was an upsell app, the second one was for bulk pricing and promotions, the next one was for flash sales and store-wide discounts that you could flip a sale on your store off and on, all of these apps lived on the front-end of the store.

Jay Myers:

Actually, to be honest, when we first launched upsell, Shopify wasn’t really happy about it because it took down the platform multiple times because it lived on the front-end of the store and so there was a … What was their … The Chive. Keep Calm and Chive On. They were one of Shopify’s early big brands, and they used our upsell app, and every time they ran a sale, if there was 100,000 people on their site and there was 100,000 people clicking add to cart and it did an API call to check, “Oh, what products should be offered,” that took down Shopify’s servers. This happened a lot because there was no throttling to how many API calls could be done per minute or per second. I remember that Shopify, they actually said, “This is not the way that the APIs were designed to be used. They were done for backend batch jobs.”

Jay Myers:

So Shopify was actually quite torn on it, but merchants loved it. It was the number one ranked app, all five-star reviews, and it was getting crazy installs. So Shopify worked around that, and they came out with API throttling and different things to make sure that an app couldn’t take down the whole ecosystem, which definitely now is the case. Yeah, we just had this long list of cool things we wanted to build that would make stores more money because I was thinking of it like a merchant. We still have the stores. We ran the stores until 2016, or 2015, and then we ended up selling them and then just focused on software. But for a long time, we were store owners and app builders.

Travis Mariea:

Very cool. Nothing like a good Chive t-shirt sale to take down and stress-test an app in a platform.

Jay Myers:

Yeah. That was fun.

Travis Mariea:

Yeah. I mean, I think, as Austin kind of hit on, you have that merchant mentality and that background, and it sounds like you were just coding on the side or maybe you went to university for that. Did you just pick up the development side of it as well? Were you actually [crosstalk 00:09:35]-

Jay Myers:

No, so-

Travis Mariea:

Was your [crosstalk 00:09:36]-

Jay Myers:

So two of the partners … There were four of us, so two of them were developers, one was a designer, and I was the e-commerce marketing guy.

Travis Mariea:

Got it.

Jay Myers:

So between the four of us, we had the skill sets required to be successful, and I see that a lot. I see someone start developing, but they don’t have any concept of how to market the product, and you see them in forums all the time. It’s like, “Hey, I’ve got this idea for this app,” or people have great ideas, but they don’t know how to build it. So I’m a big proponent of partnerships. We had a four-way partnership, completely equal. I know partnership can have its pros and cons, but I don’t know if I would do a … I think a two-way partnership would be hard, but when it’s more than two, it’s never about you. There were times where my idea didn’t win, and that’s okay, and there were other times where someone else’s, but we always came to a consensus and discussed things and had healthy debates. But, yeah, my contribution was all the marketing and the ideas and then a lot of the business stuff. Then we had a fantastic designer and two great developers. So we were able to hit the ground running without having to hire developers for a while.

Travis Mariea:

That’s huge. And people you trusted, like you said, a good buddy of yours. Four people, really, it sounds like you guys had an A-team, really, having all those covered. I’m curious. I think you guys are coming up on 10 years in business, somewhere around there?

Jay Myers:

Yeah, pretty close. Yeah.

Travis Mariea:

Yep. 27 million dollars you guys just raised, right, 450 employees. How has your role evolved over this past decade? Obviously, startup life … Maybe talking through just some inflection points in Bold, whether it was raising or a big new hire that allowed you to focus on other things or you stepping into a new role. Just as another business owner myself, just curious to hear that journey and what those inflection points might be and how it related to how you added value to the company.

Jay Myers:

Yeah. It’s been an interesting learning journey and really learning about yourself. When you start a business, you do everything. You find ways, you wear multiple hats. You do the accounting, you do the hiring, you do the support, you do the marketing, you do the software development, you do the legal, you do the sales. You literally do everything. Then, piece by piece, as you hire, you keep replacing a little bit of what you do. Some people have a hard time with that, and I’ll be honest, there were certain things I had a hard time replacing something I did with someone else doing it because each time you’re giving up a little bit of control.

Jay Myers:

But I think what I’ve learnt over the years is control isn’t what makes a business successful. A business is an asset, and if you have an asset, like if you invest in a company in the stock market, you would want the best people running that company. You want the best CEO, the best CFO, the best product managers, the best CMOs. You wouldn’t want to run it. Just because you start a company, nothing in that qualifies you to be the best person to do any of it. It’s like you had a good idea, you started it, and I think that’s really hard for a lot of founders. You often see they don’t want to let go of reins of certain areas and that ends up being the downfall. I think everyone struggles with that a little bit through the years. I certainly did. I think the other founders did.

Jay Myers:

But we fortunately all got to a headspace where we wanted to do what was absolutely best for the company, and I think we all, one time, looked at each other and said, “At some point, we’re all going to be replaced. There’s going to be someone better. There’s going to be a better CMO. There’s going to be a better CTO. There’s going to be a better CEO.” It’s not about us, it’s about the company, and we had to decide to always do what was best for the company. The company is an asset. We want to grow it. By growing it, it serves our customers better and helps brands. It may or may not be us, but I think it’s really, really important to have that mentality and, if you partner with someone, to make sure they have that mentality as well, too. Because, otherwise, there’ll be a ceiling, and the ceiling will be you. The ceiling will be your level of expertise or how much you can do, but you’ll be the bottleneck.

Jay Myers:

We kind of hit that, I remember, early on, actually, around 60 employees. We were still doing everything, but we actually didn’t even give ourselves titles. We wanted to just be the directors because we thought, “We don’t need a CEO or CTO or CMO. We’re just four dudes starting a business.” That was cool for a while, but it actually got confusing for our staff after a while because they didn’t know who to talk to and people didn’t know … You have to divide and conquer, and it’s like an army. You have different troops doing different things. So then we went through, “Oh, well, who’s going to be the CEO, or who’s going to be this?” Then there was that stage that’s hard. Yeah, so, anyways, at around 60 or 70 people on, I remember that, and we got through that. I could see that breaking apart at that point, where some founders start it and you’re just friends and you’re just co-founders and you don’t have titles, but at some point you have to get past that. So that was critical for us.

Travis Mariea:

Yeah. And I completely agree, right? That’s the only way you can scale a business, is to hire good, smart people around you, ideally better than you, every time you do, right? Going to 450 people from four, I’m curious. We’re going through some hiring. We’ve been hiring for a while now. Any secrets, any tips, tricks? I know you brought on a CEO. You brought on some high-level executive type talent. I’m curious. Where do you find them? How do you vet them? Any kind of tips and tricks for other business owners out there?

Jay Myers:

It’s probably something that we learnt early on, you try to hire based on skill and qualification and you try to hire the smartest person and maybe someone who’s affordable. The last couple years, we’ve really been hiring for personality and people who are curious. We hire for potential. We hire people who do a lot of extracurricular stuff. We actually don’t even necessarily care if they have a degree in software development or not. But if they’ve been coding since they were a kid and they built the software for their high school basketball team to track stats, that’s more interesting to us than maybe the project that they got an A on in university or something. It really is a team sport, and we have a … I would actually encourage anyone listening to just Google Bold BUILDERS Code. We call it our BUILDERS Code. It’s essentially our values and principles that we live by. It’s how we hire, how we fire, how we grow, how we make decisions. It’s kind of like a slide deck.

Jay Myers:

But one of the things we say in it is it’s a team sport. Great teams win Super Bowls, players don’t. We’ve had a few really, really good players, actually, that we’ve had to let go of over the years because they may have been the strongest developer in the city but they talked down to everyone around them or they made people around them feel smaller, feel stupid, or feel … I don’t care how great someone is. This is a team sport. So keep that in mind. Just keep that you have to be a team, and so when you’re hiring, look for traits that you think will make someone a good team member. They don’t necessarily have to be the absolute best, and that’s okay. But how will they be on the team?

Jay Myers:

One other thing I’ll say on hiring that we went through and struggled with and overcame was … I don’t know. Depending what stage people are listening at, but if you have five employees or 10 employees or even just a couple, the thing that sometimes goes through your head early on when you’re starting is you grow a little bit, you’re starting to make a little bit of money, and then it’s like, “Oh, shoot, I got to hire someone, and that’s going to eat up those profits.” Then you grow a little bit more and you grow a little bit more, and you’re like, “Ah, I got to hire someone,” unless you raise a whole bunch of capital early on and you have to hire 100 people in the first year. But this was our growth story. It was like we started to bring in some revenue and then we hired. Every time we hired someone, it kind of hurt because we never paid ourselves any more for the first five years because we just kept hiring. I remember one day we said, “Man, are we going to just keep hiring, or are we going to make money at this?”

Jay Myers:

You have to know what type of business you are, and I know people that run a three or five-person agency or team, and they’re very profitable, and they have no ambition to grow crazy. Maybe it’s 10 or 12 people. But they’re kind of like, “This is it. I don’t have to hire multiple leaders. I know everybody reports to me, and we’re very profitable, and if we make extra profits, I’ll just say no to business. This is as high as we want to go.” Or you put everything back in the company and don’t worry about necessarily being profitable now to extend that out later, and that was the approach we took. We said, “Let’s grow this as big as we can, so every time we can afford, we hire more people because people equal growth.” We could build more products, we could support more merchants. “Let’s build this company as big as we can.”

Jay Myers:

Every single person at Bold is also an owner, from the receptionist … Every single person owns a piece of it, and we wanted to see how big of an impact we could make in the lives of as many people as possible. So our customers are one thing, but our employees, we also wanted to make a big impact in their lives. Everyone’s onboard, and we’re delaying gratification now for gratification later and pumping it all back in. But every single time we hired someone, there was that painful conversation, “Oh, do we need to hire this person, wow, we can profit” … You just have to decide, “Okay, what type of company are we?” Both are perfectly fine. I know 10 people who are doing really well. They’ll never be bigger than that, but they’re doing fantastic, super profitable. Then there’s other people that put it all in. It’s important just to decide that.

Travis Mariea:

Sure. Yeah. Having that long-term vision, if that makes sense for you guys to be a long-term business. Like you said, grow as big as possible. That was the goal, the mission that you guys set forth. Everyone was on the same page. I mean, that’s such a tool, and it’s a really competitive advantage in the business to be able to get everyone on the same page and then make things so much easier on those decisions, like you said, not be second-guessing on them. It seems like you guys have done a great job with that. I just Googled the BUILDERS Code and you’re doing everything to reinforce that, right?

Travis Mariea:

It’s not just saying, “We want to be the biggest company tomorrow.” It’s putting in things like the Bold BUILDERS Code. I see you guys do a lot of giving back. That’s a big part. It’s right there in your navigation on your homepage. I’m curious. I might as well skip down to this question. I’m curious. Share some ideas or some thoughts or some stories in general around giving back. I’d love to hear more about that. We don’t see that as prominent as it is on your website and in your culture.

Jay Myers:

Yeah. We just decided early on that if this company … There were a few tenets that we had to live by. It’s like if it’s not going to be a fun place to work, if we’re not going to be able to give back to our community around us, if we’re not going to be able to impact the lives of our employees, then why do it? Because, at the time, we all could’ve actually made more money by working somewhere else. We all had great jobs. It wasn’t like the story where we were in college eating macaroni and trying to start this. We all had wives and kids and were doing fine. So we had to have some values that if we’re going to do this, this is how we’re going to do it. Giving back to the community was really important to us, and I think it’s important for people to decide that early on. It’s an easy decision to make when you’re making a couple thousand bucks a month or whatever, but it’s a really hard decision to make when the numbers are high and early on.

Jay Myers:

So we kind of have this 1-1-1 pledge. We do a lot of stuff, but one of them was early on … It’s one percent of profits, one percent of people, and one percent of product. So what that means is one percent of our profit every year we donate. One percent of people is one percent of their time. It works out to 20 hours, roughly, per staff because there’s roughly 2000 working hours in the year. But 450 staff each volunteer 20 hours a year, that’s two and a half full days. We have a person who just coordinates volunteering because it’s a full-time job. People are building houses and they’re in soup kitchens and they’re painting park benches. It’s actually hard to sometimes find enough things to volunteer for. Then product is there’s a lot of charities that maybe need help with their website or with … Subscriptions are a big thing for us, and subscriptions also work for donations, recurring donations, so a lot of times charities want to accept recurring donations, and our software can do that, so that falls under the product category.

Jay Myers:

I just think the reason that you do business is to affect the lives of people around you. Sorry, I got to take a sip of water here.

Travis Mariea:

Sure. Yeah. No, it makes a lot of sense. I mean, it’s great, especially if … Yeah, you kind of make excuses where, “I’m so busy, we’ve got so much going on.” If you just put that 1-1-1 kind of pledge in place, then it holds people accountable.

Jay Myers:

And we didn’t invent that. That was Marc Benioff from Salesforce. They started that, and I remember he said the same thing. He started it early because he knew that once Salesforce grew, it would be hard to implement something like that, but he got it passed through the board early on, and that was an important thing to him. I remember seeing somewhere he challenged businesses to also take this 1-1-1 pledge. You can Google it. They’ve got a page dedicated to it, and you can sign that you’re doing it. They had some crazy stats. It was like if every business in America took this 1-1-1 pledge, the impact that it would have was enormous. Anyways, so, yeah, giving back is core to who we are.

Travis Mariea:

Very cool. Very cool. All right. I want to shift gears just a little bit. There’s one question I really wanted to get to, I was super interested in. You guys started as an app company, right? You’re known for your apps. You had this collection of apps. Each had their own name and branding to some extent, but everyone knew it was Bold. There seems to be a shift to headless and the branding behind that. I think you guys use modular commerce as the branding. I’m curious about your go-to-market, how that’s shifted your thoughts on headless and how that’s a core strategy of yours versus being an app company. Love to hear that, be the fly on the wall in those decisions that were made.

Jay Myers:

Yeah. It really started at the request of our customers, to be honest. So we started getting more and more brands looking to build … I use the word modular sometimes more than headless. Headless is essentially just extending your front-end experience to somewhere else. Oftentimes, it’s referred to as your ecommerce platform’s one thing and you use a different content management system for your front-end, but I think it also is extending it to voice or to SMS or to chat or to iOS or mobile apps. It’s just extending the front-end of your shopping experience somewhere else. Then modular commerce is this aspect of leveraging … If you think about e-commerce, there’s a bunch of core components you need to do commerce. You need order management software. You need something to manage your orders. You need a CRM, your customer relationship management software. You need a CMS. You need something to design the front-end of your store, whatever it is. You need a PIM, your product information management software. A lot of brands have ERP, where all their databases and products live.

Jay Myers:

Anyways, there’s these core modules, and so we started to see … This happens even when, I would say … Brands using an e-commerce platform, I would say, they’re still modular in some aspects. They might be using Shopify for their products and their storefront, but they might be using ShipStation or Orderbot or you name it for order management, and that’s quite common, that people don’t use Shopify’s order management, they use … So that’s a a module. They might be using something else to design the front-end of their store. That’s a module. So we started to see there’s this decoupling, and this happens in software. If you look at anything, things are coupled and decoupled, and that’s how software goes over years. It goes-

Travis Mariea:

A continuum, right?

Jay Myers:

Yep. Everything comes together-

Travis Mariea:

ERP to apps to an operations platform back to connectors.

Jay Myers:

Yeah. And I think we’re just starting to see this again in e-commerce. So larger brands kept approaching us and wanting to have … They might be on some legacy software that they’re using, but they want to move out certain sections of it. They don’t want to fully migrate because it’s so integrated into their 3000 retail stores across the US. They can’t just migrate to Shopify. It’s not that easy. They want to move a component of it. They want to now layer in another component. It’s really a great way to approach large enterprise brands, to approach upgrading their stack in a modular piece by piece way.

Jay Myers:

So we’ve really focused in the last couple years at making all of our products, specifically around the checkout experience, to make them modular so that they’re all API-first. Let’s just take our subscription app as an example. You can use it out of the box. You can install it in Shopify and have a subscription on your products in probably seconds. It installs automatically, there’s a default widget on the front-end, there’s a default customer portal. Or you could install it and use nothing of the front-end of our app. You could have an e-commerce experience that was 100% SMS. It doesn’t even have a front-end, or maybe it’s only … Actually, we have a very, very large brand right now with thousands of retail locations building out subscriptions and extending it to point of sale because they want their customers to be able to subscribe on their website but also if they’re in the store. As long as they give the email, the cashier can say, “Oh, do you want to add this to your quarterly subscription we’re sending you every month,” if you’re …

Jay Myers:

So, anyways, we never want brands to feel like they’re locked into the experience that the app gives them. They could build any front-end. For the subscription engine, that experience can live anywhere. Same thing for checkout. Our checkout is completely API-first, has a default look and feel, but you look at Staples, you look at Vera Bradley, you look at Pepsi, they’re all using our checkout very differently. They’ve completely built their own front-ends for it, but in the backend we handle the PCI compliance, the tax, the fraud, a lot of the nuts and bolts, and then they build the experience they want on the front.

Travis Mariea:

Yeah. The API-first approach is obviously the best way when you can do it, when it makes the most sense. In our business, we’re the same way, where our value is in the core engine and then we can’t customize everything for you. Luckily, we’re in a world now where there’s a ton of open APIs, everything can basically be connected, a ton of really smart developers out there that can do all that customization, which wasn’t really the case 10 years ago. So this shift to API-first and headless, it seems like a natural one. Just that continuum you bring up, which is interesting because we’ve talked about this on a couple podcasts, it seems to come up a lot, where it very much was everything in one spot. People made it an ERP, and this was everything. Then moved to apps, and people loved apps, best in breed apps for each business function. But then you had to work in different areas for each different thing, and people didn’t like that. There’s been Zapier and Alloy and things like that that help slowly start connecting those apps, sync with ERP.

Travis Mariea:

I’m really curious to see, does that continuum just keep on forever? Does it keep on breaking out and coming back and breaking out and coming back? I’m just curious on what the next iteration of that is in your thought because there’s … I guess, to maybe bring it home, there’s very much a need to want to work in one spot for one thing, and then at the same time there’s a need to want … You’re not going to be the best at everything in one app. So being able to sync those together can work to some extent, but there’s obviously logging in to other places. I’m just curious. It seems like we’re at that point today. Is there a next frontier of how to work better between [crosstalk 00:33:38]-

Jay Myers:

I think we’re still getting there. I think there’s still a lot ahead for the modular approach. If you think about your office suite of products, so email, you have a calendar, you have video software. So, right now, we’re using Zoom. What do you use for email?

Travis Mariea:

Yeah. Gmail, Google.

Jay Myers:

What do you use for a calendar?

Travis Mariea:

Yeah. Google as well, calendar.

Jay Myers:

Okay. What do you use for documents?

Travis Mariea:

Google.

Jay Myers:

Same thing for sheets?

Travis Mariea:

Yeah. And some people use Excel, yeah.

Jay Myers:

Okay. So why aren’t you using Meet for this, for Google-

Travis Mariea:

Yeah, exactly. Right, best in breed. Right.

Jay Myers:

So you have a modular approach to your office stack right now, and it’s not a huge hassle for you probably. I’m the same way. I actually have the Zoom integration with my Google Calendar. When I send someone a link or send an invite, I can choose if I want the Google Meet link or if I want the Zoom link. I typically use Google for my docs and sheets, but if it’s a massive spreadsheet, I use Excel. It seems to handle large spreadsheets better. I use Gmail for … Anyways, I have a stack of tools that creates my solution, and I don’t do everything in Microsoft, I don’t do everything in Google. But, now, in office, in the office life, they’re ahead of, I would say, where we are. Things are pretty smooth. Things integrate. You can open up a Microsoft Word doc in Google Docs and it works just fine. You can open up Sheets in Excel and Excel in Sheets, and things move a lot …

Jay Myers:

So I still think we have a little ways to go before things are really seamless, but we are getting there. I think that will be when you can just unplug … I want to use different order management, I unplug this, plug in another one, or swap out … I want to switch this checkout with this or my product management because you’re going into a different country, you’re going to a different continent, or you’re going to a different currency or different things and you need different solutions, that’s where I think … Now, I think there will always be a place for the monolith closed ecosystem.

Travis Mariea:

Under one roof, kind of.

Jay Myers:

Yeah, totally.

Travis Mariea:

Yeah, everything.

Jay Myers:

People want and a large percentage of brands want just everything seamless, work together, and that works for probably 80%. That’s why Shopify is very successful. People do-

Travis Mariea:

So more or less, kind of where we’re getting to is both will probably coexist next to each other for the continued … I have an iPhone, but I use Google Maps, and it doesn’t work as … It always tries to get me to go into Apple Maps, and I have to go a couple of extra steps to go to Google Maps. But I’m sure if I just committed to Apple Maps, my life would be a lot more seamless. I could easily bring it up, right, whatever. But I guess there’s probably a flavor for each person and it’s really a preference thing, and it seems like that’ll probably continue.

Jay Myers:

And that’s a little bit on Apple. Apple wants you to use their maps, they want you to use their … They default open things in Safari, they default … There’s different platforms. Different platforms all have different opinions on this because, really, what an e-commerce platform is is an opinionated stack. They’re saying, “This is what you need to use.” We work a lot with commercetools. I don’t know if you’re familiar with them or not, but they are essentially … Actually, if you’re speaking of our podcast, there’s an episode with commercetools. I can’t remember which number it is, but it’s with Kelly Goetsch. He’s the CTO at commercetools. They have a really, really interesting philosophy on headless and modular. They actually were the ones that started the MACH Alliance, which is M-A-C-H, Modular, API-first, cloud-based, and headless.

Jay Myers:

They are a suite of APIs to enable commerce in the cloud. They have no opinion on what modules are used. If you use AWS or Google Cloud for your server environment, when you set up an environment, you have all these different tools for security and for load-balancing and different things, and you enable them. It’s like the tools are there, you can choose which ones you want to enable. They essentially are the same thing but for commerce, which they have 350 different tools that you enable. There is no front-end. They’re cloud-based API tools to enable commerce anywhere. So, for example, Audi uses them in their dashboard, and you can subscribe to heated seats or you can sell things. They literally can enable commerce anywhere. So they have no opinion on how it’s done.

Jay Myers:

Now imagine a phone had no opinion and Google Maps worked just as good as Apple Maps and Google Maps could access the home screen the same way Apple Maps can access the home screen. Anyways, it’ll be interesting to see. I don’t know the answer to it, but platforms like commercetools that are saying, “We have no opinion,” how they succeed … And we did a build with them, Harry Rosen. They’re a really big Canadian men’s clothing line. I’m not sure if they’re down there in the US.

Travis Mariea:

I saw them on your site, yeah.

Jay Myers:

Yeah, and they are on commercetools. It’s really allowed them to do some really cool things that would’ve been very hard no matter what platform you used.

Travis Mariea:

Yeah. Yeah. That’s interesting, like an agnostic platform. Don’t let the walled garden temptation get in your way. An agonistic platform, that could end up being a better model long-term if there’s obviously demand there and there’s a lot of efficiency in doing it. But that’s more about the orchestration and making sure things work together nicely and letting other people focus on their microservices and being the best in breed there. I like that.

Jay Myers:

Yeah, and both are good. Both are good. There isn’t a right or wrong in this. I have friends that are all in on the Apple ecosystem, Apple Music, Apple TV, Apple Watch, and Apple Maps. They’re like, “Oh, it just works better together.” That’s completely fine. Apple Email, whatever. But I don’t like using Apple Sheets. I don’t even know what it’s called because I don’t use it, but it’s horrible.

Travis Mariea:

[inaudible 00:40:18].

Jay Myers:

Apple Numbers, that’s it. Yeah.

Travis Mariea:

Yeah. I always know because it pops up all the time and I have to close it back out.

Jay Myers:

Yeah. So both are … But there will be that approach. They’re just two different approaches, and I think there’s space for both. I don’t think one wins and one doesn’t.

Travis Mariea:

For sure. Completely agree. Well, cool. This has been amazing. I could probably go on much longer, but before we wrap up, Austin, is there anything we didn’t touch on that we probably should’ve?

Austin Rose:

I definitely wanted to get into just a quick little overview of Own Your Commerce. That seems like a podcast you’ve been doing for a good bit now. Obviously, we’re on a podcast right now. What does Own Your Commerce mean to you, and what’s maybe a couple episodes that you can shout out that you just had a good time on? Obviously, we want to make sure the listeners go and subscribe and follow you as well. So what does that podcast mean to you?

Jay Myers:

Awesome. I appreciate you giving me the chance to call it out.

Austin Rose:

Yeah, plug it.

Jay Myers:

You know what? It’s been one of the … Well, you guys probably know this. Running a podcast, it’s one of the … It takes 10 times more time than you think it does when you’re starting it. Recording the podcast is the fun part. You get to talk to people you may have never met otherwise. But then the landing pages, the transcriptions, creating the Audiograms, creating the ads, creating the banners, getting the bios, collecting head shots from the guests. There’s going to be a whole industry, and there probably is, to help automate all these … You know how we have virtual assistants? There’s going to be podcast assistants, someone who knows exactly what you need to publish an episode.

Jay Myers:

So it’s been a challenge, but it’s been really fun. The reason we started it is probably similar to yours. We wanted people who were forward-thinking in e-commerce, so it’s not really super how to, I don’t know, run AdWords for your e-commerce store or how to do this. There’s a lot of great podcasts out there if you’re starting an e-commerce store and you want to get tips on how to source products, how to build the best product page, or how to make sure you back-link everywhere on your site. That’s not Own Your Commerce. I felt there were a lot of those out there. So most of the conversations, we just say that they’re thoughtful conversations with e-commerce thought leaders on what’s happening in e-commerce.

Jay Myers:

I’ve really, really enjoyed it. We’ve been fortunate to have some great guests on. We’re probably going to wrap up season one. I think we’re at episode 23. We’ll do 24, and then we’ll have a second season. If I had to say some of the ones … Well, that one with commercetools is a really good one. I think Kelly, he’s got a lot of really interesting thoughts on e-commerce that are completely different from how we might think about it. I don’t know the episode numbers, but one with Robbie Kellman Baxter. She’s consulted with Netflix, Oracle. She’s a subscription speaker. She’s written a book called The Membership Economy, The Forever Transaction. So we really dove into what makes subscriptions valuable. I learnt a lot on that one as well, too, and I consider myself to know a lot about subscriptions. So I’d probably call out those two.

Austin Rose:

Yeah. I listened. The Harley one was a good one. He’s at my-

Jay Myers:

And the Harley one was great. Yes. Yeah.

Austin Rose:

Any time I see him, it’s like … And it was you guys, and I was like, “I got to listen to this one. This is one that caught me.” But, yeah, your-

Jay Myers:

Harley’s a … He’s just a great speaker, fun guy. Harley, we go way back. He helped us get started with Shopify in 2012. When we were just getting started and we were just four of us, I remember one day he was like, “What can I do to help you guys?” Shopify was struggling for money back then, too. They were probably 60 or 70 employees. He said something like, “Would a $15,000 loan help you guys or what?”

Travis Mariea:

Wow.

Jay Myers:

He really went out of his way. It’s only 15,000 bucks, but four guys, hey, that pays for another couple months of our salary. We were at that stage. He’s been a big proponent of the partner ecosystem over the years, and it probably wouldn’t be what it is without him.

Austin Rose:

Yeah, that’s a good point, and I feel like we’re starting to see that more and more of these enemies and frenemies and partners and that we all mix in the system of SaaS. It’s great to see that it seems like a lot of those conversations of just helping each other regardless of if there’s some overlap in what we do is still a thing. It seems like that’s happening a lot.

Travis Mariea:

Yeah. Just the fact that Shopify has really doubled down the partner ecosystem with that first million dollars before they start taking a rev share. I mean, that was an awesome move on their part.

Austin Rose:

Yeah.

Jay Myers:

Yeah.

Travis Mariea:

Really good stuff. Anything else, Jay, that we didn’t touch on that we probably should’ve or …

Jay Myers:

Well, I’ll just say on the partner side of things, you know what? E-commerce is still very much a rising tide. As a percentage of total retail in the US, it’s around 18 or 19%. It jumped up a lot last year with COVID, of course. But there’s a ton of room for growth in e-commerce, and there isn’t a single … We have competitors, but they’re also our friends. If there’s anyone in this space listening, you’ll be 10 times ahead by working with people. It’s not a pie that if your piece is bigger, someone else’s piece is smaller. E-commerce is growing, and it’s a rising tide, and rising tides rise all boats, right?

Travis Mariea:

Yeah.

Austin Rose:

Yeah. Yeah, there you go. All right, well, Jay, appreciate your time, man. A lot of good content here. We agree. I think it’s great to have this knowledge leader. We just come in, have good conversations. So we really appreciate your time, and hopefully we can get you back on soon.

Jay Myers:

Yeah, my pleasure.

Austin Rose:

And maybe we’ll get on Own Your Commerce.

Jay Myers:

Ah, I was thinking that. I was thinking that. Yep.

Austin Rose:

No, that’s great. Thanks for jumping on, Jay. Appreciate it. And everybody out there listening, make sure to subscribe and follow us. We’re on Spotify and iTunes and Stitcher. We upload to YouTube. And, obviously, go check out Jay, Bold Commerce, Own Your Commerce. Subscribe to their podcast. As always, thanks, Jay, thanks, Travis, and stay tuned for the next one.