In this episode of Commerce Famous, host Ben Marks sits down with Paul Rogers, co-founder of Vervaunt, a London-based ecommerce consultancy and performance marketing agency. Paul shares his journey through the ecommerce industry, starting from his early days in scrappy digital roles to leading major replatforming projects for luxury and premium brands. They dive into the challenges of building and scaling a business in the fast-evolving ecommerce landscape, discussing everything from the rise of AI and machine learning in digital marketing to the complexities of modern replatforming projects. Paul also opens up about the creation of Vervaunt Labs and the innovative digital products his team has developed to solve real-world client challenges. Tune in to hear insights from a seasoned expert who’s always pushing the boundaries of what’s possible in ecommerce. Commerce Famous is proudly presented by Shopware, the leading open commerce platform for all your B2C and B2B needs. Find out more at: www.shopware.com/en/
In this episode of Commerce Famous, host Ben Marks sits down with Paul Rogers, co-founder of Vervaunt, a London-based ecommerce consultancy and performance marketing agency. Paul shares his journey through the ecommerce industry, starting from his early days in scrappy digital roles to leading major replatforming projects for luxury and premium brands. They dive into the challenges of building and scaling a business in the fast-evolving ecommerce landscape, discussing everything from the rise of AI and machine learning in digital marketing to the complexities of modern replatforming projects. Paul also opens up about the creation of Vervaunt Labs and the innovative digital products his team has developed to solve real-world client challenges. Tune in to hear insights from a seasoned expert who’s always pushing the boundaries of what’s possible in ecommerce.
Paul Rogers on LinkedIn
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Commerce Famous is proudly presented by Shopware, the leading open commerce platform for all your B2C and B2B needs.
Ben Marks [00:00:40]:
Hey, everyone, welcome to commerce famous. This is your host, Ben Marks. My guest today is co founder of Vervant, a London based e commerce consultancy and performance marketing agency. Paul Rogers and I have been in the same orbit for almost the exact same amount of time, so it's a real pleasure to finally have him on and get a chance to chat with them. Paul, welcome to the show.
Paul Rogers [00:01:01]:
Thanks for inviting me on. Yeah, I've listened to this a few times and like you say, cross path. A lot of magenta events in the past and different things. So, yeah, excited to be on here.
Ben Marks [00:01:11]:
Almost a lifetime ago. It's. I guess it was kind of. I don't know if it's better that we had this brief punctuation. I had a kind of bookends there in 2020, but it's good to have you on. You've had a. You've had a pretty long career in this business. I mean, I think you and I kind of got our real formal start in the space at about the same time.
Ben Marks [00:01:33]:
Like 2008, right?
Paul Rogers [00:01:35]:
Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So I started in 2008 and then got more into e comm about two years after that and went and worked for a small kind of retail business in Oxford where I did lots of scrappy web builds and optimization stuff and. Yeah, kind of stuck it from there.
Ben Marks [00:01:54]:
Yeah, that was garden games, right?
Paul Rogers [00:01:56]:
Yeah, it's a funny business that. Yeah, I learned loads out. It's definitely the strangest place that I've worked. It was basically a really small team. We'd buy a container of product from China, buy a domain, do shed loads of black hat, SEO loads of comments, spam, everything you can think of, get three months out of it, sell the container, move on to the next one. And it was all quite niche product as well. So it was like playhouses, sand pits, anything you can think of that is an outdoor game or toy.
Ben Marks [00:02:27]:
But yeah, super interesting, man, that is like shotgun e commerce and back at a time when you could do stuff like that, when Googlebot actually would follow and rank comments, bam. And the like. So is that how you. Is that how you. I guess that's where you really sort of got into, oh, e commerce, analytics and the basis of what we have now. Is that a fair statement?
Paul Rogers [00:02:51]:
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. So before that, I wasn't an e comm. I was just doing, like, low level digital stuff, kind of website editing, that kind of stuff. Yeah. And then they focused me quite a lot on the SEO side and for a while I would kind of split my time between building these sites and then kind of owning that channel. And I kind of stayed in that world for a little bit, but then from there, I moved more into kind of general ecom kind of. Yeah, bits of strategy work.
Paul Rogers [00:03:18]:
Did a lot of magento from when I joined GPMDeh.
Ben Marks [00:03:22]:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And you know GPMD, certainly friends of ours. Great, great team, everyone there, Mark Slocum, everyone I've met from the team over the years, always a delight to work with. Just, you know, business to business. And then especially at events, you know, that's a. That was also. I mean. And you went straight to head of digital there, seems like for a couple years.
Ben Marks [00:03:45]:
Yeah.
Paul Rogers [00:03:45]:
Well, no, actually. So I went from my, like, very scrappy generalist role at guard and games and to my first ever job was for the potato council, which is an even stranger business, actually. So essentially very well funded organization that was designed to promote the consumption of british potatoes and the agency that built that website with GPMD. So Mark essentially used to invite me down to London all the time, like teach me different things, you know, do lots of kind of CMS training and, you know, kind of give me more or give me lots of advice around how we could, like, push the sites. And then when I was at garden games, dropped him an email one day and he basically said, come in, like, yeah, let's sit down and see if we can find you a job. So I went to work there and I joined in a more junior role. But then I think, like, yeah, I was fairly junior, but. And I'm sure you've worked with people like this before, but I was the highest energy person in the business.
Paul Rogers [00:04:45]:
But, yeah, and I had some good experience, but it was like really scrappy had no discipline, no structure. So, yeah, he spent about 18 months teaching me some of those things and then kind of moved up to head a digital, basically.
Ben Marks [00:05:00]:
It was, folks, it was a wild time back then. You really. The opportunity to wear many hats. I mean, there was almost an imperative to wear many hats. And for what it's worth, ten years ago, I was the guy with all the energy that definitely wanes. I can confirm now that I'm well on my way into my fifties. And so you spent time at GPMD. You also, I was interested to see, you were there at Invika and session digital.
Ben Marks [00:05:28]:
And I know over the years one of the people I looked up to in my career in the platform business was Alistair stead. Truly, just truly a great human being, but also an absolute genius both as a developer and on the business side of things. Now that must have, that was the Invika session days. There was a lot of talent there. So you were surrounded by, you were part of an organization that was very high functioning, very successful, and just chock a block with great people. What was that experience like?
Paul Rogers [00:06:05]:
Yeah, great. So I had known yair in particular for quite a lot longer before that, and even when I was at GPMD, we'd done some advisory bits for them, more around kind of the marketing side and strategy side. So I'd known him for a long time. Yair and I had talked about me going to work there for a long time and eventually I did go and work there, but yeah, I always saw them particularly sessions as like the equivalent of Man City these days. You know, they had so many like, yeah, elite level people and you know, I don't know, I think you knew them quite well. So like the Marcelo.
Ben Marks [00:06:39]:
Marcelo Duarte.
Paul Rogers [00:06:40]:
Yeah, just another, yeah, so many super smart people. But Alistair in particular I always like really looked up to, and I actually remember, so the year after I left, I went to imagine I did a talk and I was super nervous because I was really young. And then afterwards, so I was leaving to start a business called audited, which is an my LinkedIn, but I basically spent three months building this kind of marketplace for like niche audits. So I would go and find someone that worked in house for a business on SAP and then I would kind of build a framework with them and then offer SAP like performance orders or salesforce audits or whatever else across different areas. And it grew really quickly. It was a bit of a mess, but I remember I finished the talk, went and sat in bar with Alistair for like 5 hours and just drank like, I don't know, six beers or whatever. And he gave me so much advice and it was after that I was like, this guy is ridiculously sharp. Like loads of advice around how like to manage IP, how to like, you know, prevent risk of these kind of freelancers essentially going and building competition.
Paul Rogers [00:07:53]:
Like, yeah, he was super sharp and obviously technically as well, very sharpen commerce.
Female Narrator [00:07:58]:
Famous is proudly presented by Shopware, the leading open source e commerce platform for mid market and lower enterprise merchants. More than 50,000 clients already process over $25 billion in annual GMV through Shopware. Find out more about Shopware and the best value in e commerce@shopware.com.
Ben Marks [00:08:15]:
Dot it's one of the things my experience, my career has largely been spent in this space. So I imagine it happens in other industries as well. I certainly say I can appreciate almost every episode of commerce famous. There's some element of community and the related mentorship aspect of it, whether it's a general, just a public contribution mentorship, or direct one to one mentorship, it seems to be part of this business. And I think that also is what helps drive this business forward, is people. What do you say you put the ladder behind you so that people can come up after you and move the whole thing forward. I mean, and then from there, you ended up advisor at Klevu. And I actually had the CTO Nirosh on season one.
Ben Marks [00:09:08]:
And also not the dumbest guy I've ever had on. He's incredibly, incredibly profoundly smart. And actually, that ended up being one of our most popular episodes. I was really impressed to see what was the experience like with Clayville.
Paul Rogers [00:09:24]:
Yeah, super interesting. So, yeah, started working with them. So actually, when I started audited, I basically did, I think it ran for about five months. I was borderline close to having a breakdown. It was so busy and badly managed. So I merged it with GPMD, went back a second time. So we basically split everything down the middle, 50 50. Built my side into consultancy and kept the audits, but focused it more on Magento and kept some of the freelancers, bought in some people as contractors, like, yeah, and did that for a while.
Paul Rogers [00:10:01]:
And then I did that for a year, basically. And then I left and went on my own. So that would have been about maybe eight years, get some of that. And then at that point, I started working with Clovis. So, yeah, they were about six people at the time. Yeah. Really small business. But, you know, so much passion for particularly kind of, you know, NLP and machine learning before that was, you know, at the core of a lot of these SaaS businesses.
Paul Rogers [00:10:29]:
Yeah. And it's super interesting working with Niraj and Neelay as well. He's the CEO. I really enjoyed it because that was the first, I guess, like, more product focused role I'd been in. And also it was like I learned a lot about, you know, SaaS and the tech partners and, you know, how they grow and, you know, kind of go to market. And I helped to build the partnership channel as well. Which grew a lot. So I was only ever working with them a day or two a week, but I got very, very invested.
Paul Rogers [00:11:01]:
And yeah, I worked with them for a long time. And even now, I still spend a lot of time chatting to Neelay and various people in the business.
Ben Marks [00:11:09]:
This is all in your journey to 2017, when you co founded for Vaunt. Let me just. I'm going to use your tagline, a London based e commerce consultancy and performance marketing agency. But I use the tagline because it's very clear, based on your experience, I had no idea buying just like, just random container shows up. Okay, how are we going to sell this stuff? That is what a brilliant way to get you focused on, you know, twisting knobs and dials and finding levers and finding the venues to get things moved along. And you think about that and the expertise that you bring in to then offer as a service. You've seen this industry change over the years. And then I particularly like your experience at Clayville, because as we are now well into this post, post introduction of chat, GPT.
Ben Marks [00:12:17]:
So basically, the era of GPT really gave people a chance to see what is possible with machine learning, with AI. And I always liked companies, though, because I remember in the earlier days, like mid 2010s, you had personalization companies, you had search, search, product recommendation. These were the big data companies that were really bringing AI in, AI and machine learning in. And I use AI very indelicately. Here is a term, but the discipline of this, having nuanced, targeted output based on large data sets, these were the businesses that were really doing this in our space. And I have to believe that has informed of, to a great degree, what you're doing at Vervant. Is that a fair way of putting it?
Paul Rogers [00:13:18]:
Yeah, absolutely. I definitely. I definitely learned a lot from working with Klavu, and I've also implemented a lot of those kind of original vendors in the space. Sli were massive, that at one point, they were a monopoly, pretty much, yeah. And I worked with some of the other ones, as I'm trying to remember. There's one that I always found fascinating. I can't remember the name. And then I think it's.
Paul Rogers [00:13:42]:
It's basically merged into other vendors, like four or five times now. But the original kind of personalization vendor, that was pretty big in the UK. And. Yeah, definitely took a lot from working with those, for sure. Yeah.
Ben Marks [00:13:59]:
So, yeah, I guarantee you someone is actually screaming into their headset right now, the name of this company, which I'm also blanking on. So this analytics expertise so you've been building up this brand for a while, service brand, and you have some pretty notable logos on your website. Did that come right away, or was that something that you built up after the fact? So is this coming from relationships you'd already built, or was it just the notoriety and word of mouth that got around?
Paul Rogers [00:14:32]:
So, to be honest, when we set the vaunt up, so it's myself and my background is kind of ecom pre setting up a vaunt. I've moved more into replatforming, so I'd probably spend the last three or four years doing obsessing over the different platforms in the market and then gradually moving into more, like platform evaluation. And then that was kind of my background going into it. And then Josh, my best friend, had worked for some of the bigger media agencies and had some views on how these accounts should be managed and particularly the types of brands that I was working with. So I personally wanted to be working with the brands that people I really respected. So a lot of that was fashion brands, some lifestyle brands as well. And Josh worked on some of those types of accounts and felt that the big media agencies didn't really know how to manage or more grow these channels beyond just the fundamentals of paid. So we decided to set up a consultancy, initially targeting luxury premium brands.
Paul Rogers [00:15:38]:
And at that point, we would go and get two or three clients work from their office. Josh would go and work with the marketing team, the brand team. I would go and work with the it team, and then we would build out there at the time, like D two, C channel, and then over time. So initially we were quite well known for replatforming, and then paid was like a sub offering. And then over time, we moved that to be more like a traditional media agency, and that ended up growing way faster. And now it's 80% of our business.
Ben Marks [00:16:10]:
Yeah, I mean, you could almost have had a podcast about replatforming.
Paul Rogers [00:16:16]:
So it's funny that, as I, like James and I, for a long time, for good five years, were like the only replatforming consultants in the UK. And when there was a project, it would just be us two. And then someone else I knew left his agency. He moved into it, and then we ended up hiring him. But, yeah, so for a long time, that was our little nation. Now, obviously, it's huge, particularly after Covid, and there's so many independents and other consultancies that have got some really good people around it.
Ben Marks [00:16:48]:
Well, so, you know, do you? It's interesting because replatforming is of a keen interest for me and for my employer. Do you see? You know, it's weird, depending on who, who you're speaking with and where you're having the conversation, you may hear that, oh, well, yes, replatforming is heating up. People are spending, you know, wallets are opening up, or you might talk with someone, say, yeah, no one's replatforming right now. Do you have a, do you have a perspective on this? Because it seems like I could talk to ten different people and have an even split of whether the people really are replatforming or they aren't.
Paul Rogers [00:17:32]:
Yeah. So I have a view. I'd say people are definitely replatforming right now, but I think the projects have changed dramatically. So, as you say, a lot of our clients are kind of premium fashion brands. And one thing I would say is obviously, shopify become fairly dominant in that kind of little segment of the market. And I would say that there's a lot of replatforming projects now that three years ago might have had a much bigger budget for one, far more kind of inputs, so be that independent consultants, integration, vendor like, whatever else. And now I think there's a lot of projects that are happening where there's still an agency, but even the role of the agency is smaller than it was. So I think essentially the bottom 60% of replatforming projects, I think the scope's smaller and they're being managed internally and via an agency.
Paul Rogers [00:18:31]:
And then I think the larger projects, they are still there. And we've definitely worked on some really big kind of change projects over the last few years, but there's fewer of them, I would say. And I think right now there's a lot of people planning replatforming projects, but they're struggling to get the budget signed off. And it's more of like, they're changing their minds on timing different priorities because they haven't been spending money for the last year, 18 months. So, yeah, that's my view. But I do think there are, you know, there are some big ones, but just not as many now.
Ben Marks [00:19:04]:
Just. And maybe just to go just a touch deeper on it, I'm curious if I'll throw something out there. I'm curious if the nature, if. Let me back up. Up. I wonder if the scope of. So the relationship for an e commerce business, I get this feeling that, or I've had this feeling that the e commerce platform was the center of the universe, certainly for an e commerce business, or even a business with substantial e commerce and the systems around that were almost subject to e commerce platform.
Paul Rogers [00:19:49]:
Totally. Yeah.
Ben Marks [00:19:51]:
But now what we've seen, and this is another recent theme among just conference conversations and even this podcast, is that the e commerce platform is just another important piece in a stack full of important pieces, whether, you know, whether it be the ERP or the PIM or customer engagement platform, these are businesses that have all been, are all now mature. Those verticals are all a bit commodified. So everyone has this big scope. And these platforms that used to do will pick on, like customer engagement. So I think of the, and I've been using the mailer example because it was mailer, now it's digital. And six years ago I'm at their headquarters in London and they're showing me this entire command line interface, this whole data, essentially customer data platform instead of utilities. And I'm thinking, wow, okay, they've grown up. And so now you have these systems that all have a lot to say and think and do with the entities in any kind of e commerce environment.
Ben Marks [00:21:08]:
But sort of like everything is now a big first class citizen and it wants to control these things. So it would seem to me that you could actually then start to narrow the scope of the e commerce platform and really start to compact it into essential ecommerce functions while you have these, all this constellation of apps around it. If what I said was at all decipherable, can you comment on if my intuition there might be correct or not?
Paul Rogers [00:21:40]:
Yeah, definitely. I mean, I think back in the days that I was way more focused on Magenta, and at the time, you were obviously very focused on Magenta, you would go to an sihe, that SI would be entirely accountable for the project. Like, you know, they would cover the full scope. You know, they would then, you know, you would sign up to Magento, you would select your modules that you would buy, and then the agency would build everything else, and they would take on integrations. You know, they would deliver the project, whereas now I think even that side, like, you know, our average or a lot of our projects, you know, they will have an SI, but they're responsible for the front end migrating some data. You will probably, in a lot of cases, you would have an independent creative or designer agency. You might then use a separate third party for integration. Yeah.
Paul Rogers [00:22:28]:
And, you know, you maybe bring in another partner for analytics and data. Yeah. And, you know, then, like you say, you've then got potentially CDP or just a CRM. Yeah, you might have a PIm. If you're going down the head of the fruit you've got all of the front end technologies, like, yeah, definitely. The projects are more complex. The only thing I would say is I do think at the moment there's like, you've got this half over here which are more complex. And I think that's in line with what you're saying and what I'm saying.
Paul Rogers [00:22:59]:
And I think down here you've then got. I almost feel like Shopify is kind of going a little bit more back towards the older days where Magento had a really big role and everything was kind of within their ecosystem. And I do feel like Shopify is definitely simplifying projects in places and then, yeah, definitely going more and the way they're going with their roadmap, they're trying to put more into the core of the platform. It's kind of almost going back a little bit.
Ben Marks [00:23:29]:
Okay. Yeah, I can see all of this as I consume the analyst output, the blog posts, and where we are now is, I mean, the good news is for, you know, for the, for the technology buyers and probably even for the agencies to a degree, is that I think that the lanes are becoming, the lanes are becoming the lanes and the roles are becoming clearer and clearer. You know, again, feel free to, feel free to disagree with me because you have a, you know, you're on the agency side of things and you have a perspective on it, but, you know, we're, you know, you no longer, I think an agency no longer has to be the jack of all trades and be the expert in all things. Hopefully, agencies are still partners in success with their customers. I always love the relationship aspect of at least the agencies that did that were the ones that I strongly identified with. But I think it was always, you know, you might have to stretch your skills a good bit, but now you get to be an expert at something and you get to be a good reference and a good, and a good artisan on behalf of your customers. So when, you know, you all, but you all aren't simply taking orders at Vermont, you have vervant labs, so you have your R and D area. I'd love to know more about that because I have a feeling that that is probably going to be a good story to tell.
Paul Rogers [00:25:03]:
Yeah, definitely. So to be honest, I think our business, there's a few businesses you mentioned session earlier, there's another one called distilled, which is from the SEO world, a few others that did certain things really well. And I've taken inspiration from all of them. Like you say, session the community side, Vica did a lot of cool R and D stuff. So fairly early on, it's something that I wanted to do, just build out digital products. And part of it, to be perfectly honest, part of it was to solve problems for our clients. And part of it was more for team engagement because our team loves this stuff. So now we've got, we've got about eight products, of which three are big or bigger, I would say.
Paul Rogers [00:25:45]:
We've then got a full time person that's pretty much head of product. So he's our technical director, but he's now very focused on the product. And then we've got a couple of contractors that essentially build the products and our developers. So we've got one solution called Census, which is a post purchase surveys app, essentially currently for shopify. But we will broaden it. It's got about 300 brands using it. And essentially you ask different questions based on variables. So you might say to a new customer, where did you first see or hear about the brand? Or you might say to customers in a certain market, like, what were specific blockers or were the right carriers available? Or you could say, collect data.
Paul Rogers [00:26:27]:
Was this a gift? We've got one street web, Brown, which asks about age range. And then all of that's pushed into the CDP. So that's one which is probably the one that's most external, I would say. And then my favorite one. So we had a client, Pangaya. So earlier you talked about our growth and the brand. So we worked with Pangaya super early into their journey. They blew up.
Paul Rogers [00:26:53]:
They were like a global phenomenon. And then off the back of that definitely kind of elevated us. And we ended up getting a lot of other brands organically. But when we were working with them, at their peak, they were essentially spending 30 grand a month on this product, which took, all it did was you'd build a template and it would take content from the catalog and then it would build these dynamic product ads just using different elements of the catalog. So you might have like, image one, image two, and then a number of attributes, and then it would build it for the whole catalog. And then that would be. So, you know, when you're going through Facebook or Instagram, you've got the catalog ads and it just shows an image, a flat image. Instead of that, you would have, like, a really nice curated ad across each item of the catalog.
Paul Rogers [00:27:43]:
So it was really simple. So I was like, 30 grand, let's build it. We'll build the equivalent. Give us three months. You cancel your contract and we'll give it to all our clients. And then yeah, that one's basically taken off. So we've done some really cool stuff with that and we've now got quite a lot of brands using it and we support video and we've done category level templates and we've done cool stuff around matching the tone of the product and all that kind of stuff. So that one's really cool.
Paul Rogers [00:28:13]:
And then we've got a creative reporting product and then we've got various other things like inventory logging, so that we can track the impact of inventory against conversion rate. We've got price monitoring. Yeah, various other things. But I would say now that's like right at the core of our business. And I think I've always been very wary of distractions because is the thing that I didn't mention when I was talking about some of those early jobs is that I've had about 10,000 side projects as well. So I had a magenta SEO module. I've had about four e commerce businesses and none of them have done anything. So I'm kind of trying to stay focused.
Paul Rogers [00:28:52]:
But I do like the fact that the product is right at the heart of the company and everyone in our company loves it. Our clients are quite bought into labs and it's also really good from a marketing perspective as well.
Ben Marks [00:29:05]:
Certainly it grabbed my attention and I have to imagine it keeps things feeling very fresh on the inside. Again, I mentioned that's one of the things about this business is it has become so commoditized and you can't just sit there and say, well, here's some other feature that we're releasing that is an e commerce feature that's really boring. It's necessary. I'm not saying that we platforms are all free from further innovation, you know, finding these new spaces and sort of stretching out and finding where it's natural to stretch out and also where the hell to stay away from. I mean, there are, there are places like, you know, I'm, you know, certainly a shop where we are not going to. We're not going to do certain things that other, other businesses have been doing really well and have evolved into over, you know, over the last ten years. But finding, you know, finding those, the spaces in between, I think is essential for keeping things fresh. Now, you recently actually got to visit my fair city here at Charleston, South Carolina.
Ben Marks [00:30:09]:
You were actually with one of my old blue Acorn colleagues, Brad Redding, who has gone on to Brad, frustratingly handsome and successful hard worker, but he's built elevar, which fantastic tool, especially in the shopify world. But he's having this conference I mentioned. I would have been there if I hadn't had to go over to Europe. But what was that experience like? I mean, I'm not even sure if this is totally relevant for everyone in the audience, but it is nice to see the evolution. And by the way, there's a local commerce monthly commerce professionals meetup here in Charleston, and it is about 70% blue acorn alums. But the elevar experience, he's built a big team over there and, yeah, I'm just curious what your time there was like.
Paul Rogers [00:31:04]:
Yeah. So I love the city, for one. I'm a massive fan of the US. I come over all the time, any opportunity. I think, obviously, you travel a lot, and I'd imagine you've got a similar view to me, and I love it and particularly love going over to us. But I've never been to Charleston, so I've spent quite a lot of time in different states, been to some, all the kind of most common places and then a few niche places, but I'd never kind of. I guess I'd come across Charleston, but I'd never thought about visiting it. But I was really impressed, I think.
Paul Rogers [00:31:38]:
Yeah. On the Saturday when we got there, we went to Brad's house. We did a workout in his garden with some of his neighbors and his wife. And, yeah, definitely felt like he's living the american dream over there. He's got a lovely house just off the water. Yeah. And so that was really cool. And then, yeah, I had some really fun nights out, you know, ate really good food, weather perfect.
Paul Rogers [00:32:00]:
We played golf, actually, a couple of times, and that was just perfect as well.
Ben Marks [00:32:05]:
And then the conference itself. Now, what were you speaking on there?
Paul Rogers [00:32:09]:
Yeah, so basically, Josh and I never talk together because we've got such. And the other thing about us as well is like, we've got, as our business has grown, we've just stayed in the day to day. So we stayed with the client, stayed. I would still spend half my time messing about in the backend of ecommerce platforms. And Josh is very much the equivalent. And then we've had other people that then come in and run the team, run the business. And so we were talking essentially about where things are going across, and I was talking about some of the data pieces on site experience, where budget is being invested as well, and the shifts around that stuff. And then Josh was talking more around how businesses are investing more in brand building and how attribution has changed as a result of all the privacy stuff and some of the new things that some of the networks are investing in there.
Paul Rogers [00:33:08]:
So it's quite an interesting talk. I would say it's quite interesting. So we've got our conference next week, which both of us are pretty terrified about because it's got a lot bigger this year and that was a bit of a warm up for us and I think we took a lot of learning away from it. So we had about 3 hours of material that we fitted into about 25 minutes. I think the audience probably really struggled to follow a lot of what we were talking about. We didn't deliver it particularly well, to be honest. I think we're both a bit critical afterwards. I think there's some good content in there, but we've definitely learned quite a lot from it.
Paul Rogers [00:33:45]:
But the conference itself is solid as well. I think there aren't enough conferences. You get a lot of, of digital marketing conferences are fairly high level, you get a lot of Ecom conferences, but there's very few that are focused on.
Ben Marks [00:33:58]:
Data and tracking the e comm analytics focus. I think you called that out on LinkedIn, which is more and more essential. Again, as platforms all begin to offer similar capabilities, it really comes down to your, your data collection your data and basically how you unlock that data and develop the insights across. Before we wrap up, I do want to call out, you guys have been hosting a podcast. It was replatformed podcasts recently. Was it this year that you rebranded it to inside commerce?
Paul Rogers [00:34:38]:
Very recently. We did it very quickly and it was done in a very scrappy way. We need to improve it as well. Yeah, I want to like get it to a point where the branding's a.
Ben Marks [00:34:49]:
Bit more, but, you know, so that, so it's fine because the most important thing is that you are still, you're still doing it. You've got the content, you've got a regular cadence. I mean, you're on like you're somewhere in the 200s now, I think with inside commerce, I mean, I would have to say if I had a favorite, it would be episode 159. Just saying. No, it was so nice of you all to have us on, especially right after I joined Shopware. But a lot of good content in there. But I want to call out something that is implicit in this entire. Throughout this entire conversation.
Ben Marks [00:35:24]:
You never seem quite satisfied with everything that you've done. And I love it because I think that is a big part of what is pushing you forward to keep doing the next thing, keep building the next thing, and ultimately for the benefit of the businesses that you're working with and I think that's pretty darn.
Paul Rogers [00:35:42]:
Yeah, it's awesome. Yeah, totally. And I think the podcast been really like, everyone that knows me is shocked that I've stuck at it that long. And I think that was entirely James. Like, James is hyper organized. He will drag me onto an episode whether I'm, you know, distracted or hungover or whatever else. And yeah, it's great doing it for him. Actually, when he pitched it to me at the time, I was like, I'm going to really struggle with this, like, you know, time and I everything else.
Paul Rogers [00:36:10]:
But yeah, I'm really glad I did it. And yeah, I think it's fun and it pushes me out of my comfort zone. I'm not a natural with that kind of stuff, whereas he actually definitely is. So yeah, it's been really good. We've had some really good guests and stuff, so enjoyed it.
Ben Marks [00:36:24]:
Well, Paul, I really appreciate you making time for us. Twice actually because of the late train yesterday. Really nice. Especially late on a Friday there in the UK, folks. You could find and find out more about Paul and his team over@vervant.com. that's vervaunt.com. paul Rogers, real pleasure having you on.
Paul Rogers [00:36:45]:
Great, thanks for having me on.