It's the day after Thanksgiving but I haven't quite finished thanking people yet. Yesterday I talked quite a bit about the awesome financial base my parents provided me today I want to focus on the people that inspire me. It took an army of people to get me fired up about life and simply put: without these people I wouldn't be where I am now.
At various points in my life I've felt like I'm on a conveyor belt.
And I think I've felt this because my life has been so… easy. It's weird to say that. It kind of makes it sound like I haven't done anything with my life. For most of your life you're in school. College is a thing people are doing now-a-days so I might as well go do that, and then after college I applied for a job and the manager graduated from the exact program several years earlier. Boom – first adult job just like that. It almost happened automatically. It feels like all I had to do was keep my arms and legs on the conveyor belt and I would have eventually wound up there.
A few years later I'm the product manager for WooCommerce, the most prolific e-commerce platform, holy shit – how did that happen!?
In the past year WooThemes has grown significantly. We've scaled up to the point where team members can focus on one aspect of the business and not have to pay attention to everything else going on. This brings some pretty huge advantages with a dedicated person pushing through projects that someone who's spread out on multiple projects could never do. But with it comes hyper-focus where someone will focus on their aspect of the business without knowing (or caring) how it affects other aspects of the business.
If you've been reading my blog for a while you might remember the Blogging for Benjamin challenge. It was a month long blogging competition organized by Daniel Espinoza to get you out of your comfort zone and I loved it. It was just challenging enough to post every day for an entire month and while it was a lot of work it was totally worth it. This year I'm participating in something slightly different. Our very own Bryce Adams set up Blogging for Hippo where we'll be blogging for an entire month leading up to the release of WooCommerce 2.3 – Handsome Hippo.
I'm just getting back into my groove after a wild time in San Francisco but before jumping back into the inbox I really want to share my thoughts on WooCommerce Conf. We had a wide variety of attendees, impressive speakers, the whole experience had a professional feel, and
The air is warm and the sun is shining as I'm writing this post on my last full day in San Francisco. I've had a wild ride the last sixteen days attending three conferences, meeting customers, and exploring San Francisco. While conferences and new cities are exciting it's not why we have the WooTrip. The best part of the WooTrip and the real value in it is meeting people that we work with everyday and learning to relate with each other. And that's pretty exciting.
Four months ago I joined the WooCommerce development team and I loved it. Lots of time to program cool extensions like Coupon Campaigns, Give Products, Ninja Forms Product Addons, updating the email functionality in WooCommerce, and auditing all of the extensions that go in the catalog. I loved every second of it. Working with awesome people, learning new things, and creating code that's used by hundreds of thousands of websites. My path however is changing a bit. Instead of a developer I'll be the WooCommerce Product Manager.
You've probably heard about startup weekends but have you heard of a startup week? Here in Colorado we have Denver Startup Week where instead of building a startup over a weekend you hear from local established startups about all of the lessons they learned along the way. A startup weekend is the act of creating something and the startup week is the abstract fundamentals about building something. Having gone to a startup weekend I really appreciated all of the fundamental lessons behind creating a startup. I went to a handful of sessions throughout the week and I wanted to share some of the lessons I learned in case you don't have your own startup week to attend.
I've had a lot of fun going over some of the most important features you should look for in an e-commerce platform this past week. Content marketing gets users to your site, newsletters sell them, intelligent recommendations increase order volume, and reports will help you refine and optimize your catalog. All of those are really important but they don't feel that e-commerce-y do they? That's why I want to talk about a topic that every e-commerce store manager can relate to – setting up shipping costs.
The past couple days I've been talking about getting more people to your site with epic content, keeping people interested with newsletters, and using intelligent recommendations to increase order size and volume. All of those help you get more orders which is what you need when you're just getting started. Once you've had your store up and running for a while it's time to take a look through your catalog and refine it. Are any products doing very well or very poorly? Which ones are just bad products and which need a marketing push to make them successful products? You can do all of this with reports.