In this episode of Commerce Famous, host Ben Marks sits down with Jim Herbert, the CEO of Patchworks, at Shoptalk EU in Barcelona. Jim shares insights from his extensive career in digital commerce, including his time as Senior Vice President of BigCommerce EMEA and his transition to leading Patchworks. They discuss the evolution of ecommerce technology, the growing importance of integration platforms, and how Patchworks is simplifying complex workflows with their innovative solutions. Jim also dives into the challenges of scaling businesses in Europe, the role of AI and low-code solutions in the ecommerce space, and what the future holds for platforms like Patchworks in a rapidly changing industry. Whether you're interested in ecommerce technology, integrations, or leadership in digital business, this conversation offers valuable insights from a true industry veteran. 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 Jim Herbert, the CEO of Patchworks, at Shoptalk EU in Barcelona. Jim shares insights from his extensive career in digital commerce, including his time as Senior Vice President of BigCommerce EMEA and his transition to leading Patchworks.
They discuss the evolution of ecommerce technology, the growing importance of integration platforms, and how Patchworks is simplifying complex workflows with their innovative solutions. Jim also dives into the challenges of scaling businesses in Europe, the role of AI and low-code solutions in the ecommerce space, and what the future holds for platforms like Patchworks in a rapidly changing industry.
Whether you're interested in ecommerce technology, integrations, or leadership in digital business, this conversation offers valuable insights from a true industry veteran.
Jim Herbert on LinkedIn
Patchworks on LinkedIn
Commerce Famous is proudly presented by Shopware, the leading open commerce platform for all your B2C and B2B needs.
Ben Marks [00:00:38]:
Welcome to Commerce Famous. This is your host, Ben Marks. I'm here at Shoptalk EU in Barcelona, and sitting across from me is Jim Herbert, and Jim was SVP of BigCommerce EMEA for a while, and he is currently CEO of Patchworks. Jim has a long and storied career in this business, so I'm really happy to meet and chat with him. SVP of bigcommerce in EMEA. You know, this is, this is, you know, you've moved on to Patchworks now, but that must have been an interesting opportunity for you given that, you know, you've been around this business since this business came into existence. Right? So you were doing it work in this area back in the nineties.
Jim Herbert [00:01:22]:
Yeah, when it happened.
Ben Marks [00:01:23]:
And so you were one of my favorite kinds of guests because, you know, kind of like me. You got to. You got to see it all take shape, for better or for worse.
Jim Herbert [00:01:31]:
Yep.
Ben Marks [00:01:32]:
You know, that was. But as a moment that kind of culminated for you, you know?
Jim Herbert [00:01:36]:
What was.
Ben Marks [00:01:37]:
What was that like? Is it just. Did it just feel natural or was it kind of like a. Holy shit, I got big responsibilities now.
Jim Herbert [00:01:44]:
Yeah. I can't talk about it without talking about how I got there a little bit. I think so. Yeah, you're right. I've been programming computers since I was eight years old. My dad turned up with a Sinclair ZX spectrum the day they came out. Right. The little microcomputer, the Timex in the US.
Jim Herbert [00:01:59]:
Yeah. So we had a kids news program. My dad had this kind of nerdy kid who didn't like sport, didn't know what to do with him. You know what, and he saw this thing in a shop, basically bought one, brought it home. I'd just seen it on this kid's news program, and it was like. It was a we are not worthy moment. Wow, dad, I can't believe you did that. And so, basic z 80 assembler not long after that, to be honest, because if you want to make it do stuff, you got to learn that stuff.
Jim Herbert [00:02:23]:
And it actually came with this little cassette. You know, all the stuff got loaded off cassettes that actually explained how the CPU and the ALU and, you know, all works. It was really cool. Right?
Ben Marks [00:02:33]:
No kidding.
Jim Herbert [00:02:33]:
I doubt many people watched it, but this eight year old nerd did, if you know what I mean.
Ben Marks [00:02:36]:
Yeah.
Jim Herbert [00:02:37]:
So, yeah, computer science degree after that, got into e commerce, late nineties. Like I said, I was sort of coding on ATG, and then I'm going to fast forward this. Don't worry, it's not the entire podcast about me.
Ben Marks [00:02:50]:
No one wants to hear about me.
Jim Herbert [00:02:52]:
Cut it down. Cut it down. Wow, you really sped that up. So I ended up running an agency called Syneric that I co founded with some friends, and they were all met doing e commerce, actually, kind of financial services. E commerce. But it's on ITG again. Right. It was a technology that kind of balanced together, and we started competing against a company called Portal Tech that was founded by Mark Adams.
Ben Marks [00:03:14]:
And they got bought by replay, they.
Jim Herbert [00:03:15]:
Got bought by reply, we got bought by LBI. And so. But we were competing against each other, and that's how I kind of came across Mark. Right. And then, you know, fast forward, we've both sold our businesses. We're in a hybris alumni event. We ended up doing loads of hybris together with the top two partners. We were telling Travis a couple of.
Ben Marks [00:03:31]:
Nights ago at the shop, 30 million a year and only seven years.
Jim Herbert [00:03:36]:
Yeah, pretty good. Pretty good. It was. It was. It was interesting. Publicis bought us, and then they bought sapient. And so I got to see all the sapient pitch decks, obviously, and they're like, these are pretty similar. I mean, there's a bit bigger than ours, to be fair, but, yeah, you know, we were able to say that, you know, well over 2 billion have been transacted through platforms that we'd built.
Jim Herbert [00:03:55]:
You know, we had big customers. Superdrug, goodyear tire, Lenovo laptops, some big luxury customers. I probably shouldn't mention Gucci, that we did the work for. And so it was really. But that's kind of what, you know, Mark and I sort of bonded in the bar afterwards. You know, like the kind of story of the checkpoint Charlie guards. The soviet guy and the us guy suddenly became friends because they had more in common than their superiors, sort of thing.
Ben Marks [00:04:18]:
Yeah, yeah.
Jim Herbert [00:04:19]:
It was kind of like, oh, yeah. You know, actually, we kind of get on all right. And it turns out he'd moved to live near me. So fast forward to 2020. Covid's happened. I'm at home. I've taken a few years off. It's really interesting that few years off, I took five years off.
Jim Herbert [00:04:33]:
So I missed the rise of Magento. It was just coming in. We'd started to lose to it, hybrid days. And then, you know, I kind of came into this, this world of, oh wow. Deepak didn't even have a clue who I was and I didn't know who he was.
Ben Marks [00:04:45]:
Deepak and Anne, right? Yeah.
Jim Herbert [00:04:47]:
Well, this can't be right. He thought I was some sort of snake oil salesman. But yeah, Mark, I was doing some network at a hybrid partner called IATA Commerce and affluent commerce partner and I was sort of helping shine, the founder who used to work for me at seneric, get the business. They're doing like 8 million pound turnover now. They're a decent sized si that no one's ever heard of. And we'd been in, had a demo of bigcommerce, looked pretty good. And Mark rang me up and said, I've got an opportunity for you. And I was like, that's cool, brilliant.
Jim Herbert [00:05:16]:
We're going to get a lead out of bigcommerce. So I told Shine, which is a mistake because then I got on a call with him. He went, oh no, I'm leaving to become CEO of attract. I think you should interview for my job. So. Ah, right. Slightly different type of opportunity. So that's what got me in.
Jim Herbert [00:05:29]:
And to come back to your question, a lot of responsibility. Yeah, there was straight away. Right. It was interesting because you're inheriting a team that's doing quite well. Well, actually doing very well. But with an american piece of software coming into Europe, which always has interest. I've been through it with ATG right back in the day. There are interesting cultural things to learn around multi language, the differences in checkout, the difference in payment methods, all that kind of good stuff.
Jim Herbert [00:05:55]:
So you're a brand new leader in a pandemic. So a very young team at bigcommerce, loads of those guys were trapped in their flats in London, couldn't move. You know, I got to. I had a monthly one on one with Shannon in Australia. You know, they had police on the streets in Australia, so really odd time to be starting a new job from that perspective. So a lot of responsibility on my shoulders from that side and my first kind of full time gig for five years. So to answer your question, yeah, I was quite scared.
Ben Marks [00:06:23]:
Commerce 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. dot.
Ben Marks [00:06:44]:
Right. But that's, you know, you do hear these stories from time to time where you got a person needs to move on somewhere else and they, you know, they, they don't pull the ladder up behind them. They actually show you, hey, there's a ladder.
Jim Herbert [00:06:56]:
Yeah.
Ben Marks [00:06:56]:
And you come right in there and it's always a good sign for someone. Well, either they're trying to set you up for massive failure or most of.
Jim Herbert [00:07:03]:
The time wouldn't put it past him, to be fair. I'm kidding, Mark.
Ben Marks [00:07:06]:
I'm kidding, Mark. We'll have you on next. But this is. Right. So you end up in this role, this company. And obviously bigcommerce is, that business is still evolving, as we well know, with the very recent announcement of Travis coming in as president following on Steve's departure. In my day job, of course, we participate in this e commerce ecosystem with, among many others, bigcommerce. And I've always been a big fan and said many times of the bigcommerce's philosophy of openness, but also trying to, trying to make openness with the sort of the relatively de risked TCO of a SaaS product, it's a tough nut to crack.
Ben Marks [00:07:59]:
Right. Because I think you have this weird kind of newtonian principles of like, well, you know, if it's, if you, if you have this thing over here, you have an equal and opposite thing over here. And it's sort of, if you have this great advantage of reliability of SAS and SAS deployments.
Jim Herbert [00:08:17]:
Yeah.
Ben Marks [00:08:18]:
You, that, that is almost always mirrored with reduced flexibility. And so it's a, it's all then goes in my, in my way of thinking, it goes down to the agencies that have to, that have to figure out which platform with the right mix of curation and flexibility is the right solution.
Jim Herbert [00:08:43]:
Yep.
Ben Marks [00:08:44]:
And that's one thing I've also heard over the years with bigcommerce, just time and again, great things about the partner program over there. And so I think that's been a well curated part of the business and probably has served bigcommerce well. I'm not going to ask you comment too much on the big commerce business because it's amazing how quickly things move on in this industry. And you've been gone now since over a year, I guess. Is that right?
Jim Herbert [00:09:11]:
Yeah. Yeah. 15 months. I left last January.
Ben Marks [00:09:14]:
15 months. And then in the meantime, you are an investor at Cortical, which I'd love to hear about, but also you're on the advisory board at Mock alliance, our friends over there, and most importantly, and most currently, chief executive officer of Patchworks. Now, for those who don't know, tell me about. Tell me about patchworks and tell me why patchworks was a good choice for you.
Jim Herbert [00:09:40]:
Yeah. So Patchworks has been around since 2014, actually, and it was very much, it came out of. So Dave Wiltshire, the founder, founded a business. He had another business called Juno Mediataindeh. You know, as we record this, it's the anniversary of D Day. It's actually named after Juno beach. Oh, interesting. His granddad was one of the guys who ran up it, basically firing machine guns at the time.
Jim Herbert [00:10:01]:
So Juno was a Magento and Shopify agency. So they had Magento first and then started doing much more shopify, and they were often being asked to do integrations. So patchworks sort of spun out of that. They built some software. It's the classic iPad story, actually. We were chatting yesterday, right? There's quite a few of the guys on the floor agencies today that have their own platform, right? But they do both. And Patchworks did that for a long time. So took some investment.
Jim Herbert [00:10:27]:
So, obviously, with the e commerce boom of COVID coming back to the 2020, 2021 days, lots of people were now rushing to get online or to strengthen what they had online, because suddenly their store shut and they're going to go bust if they don't. So Patchworks was selling a lot of business, took some investment, therefore, because you need cash when you're suddenly growing that fast for the first time, but carried on sort of doing the work itself. It was an integration agency that happened to have some tech, ultimately. So we came across them at bigcommerce, therefore, because in my expansion role at bigcommerce, going back to it for a second, quite often, we'd go into a new country and it'd be like, oh, yeah, of course, you can integrate through to exact ERP, or you can integrate through to this Hobbes French OMS system that we've never heard of or whatever. And I say we've never heard of, obviously, in the US, we've never heard of it. I'd never come across it in the UK because why would I? It's kind of a local business. But, you know, France's economy is massive, Italy's economy is massive. They all support local solutions.
Jim Herbert [00:11:29]:
And so, you know, we would go to companies like patchworks and say, could you do the integration for us, ultimately? So that got, you know, that sort of started making it quite interesting. And we had some good relationships with patchworks, with some of my competitors now, like Allumio and Sego and people like that. Yeah, I. And so fast forward to. They got in touch, the investor got in touch saying, you know, we're looking for somebody to help with expansion. We've seen the job you did expanding big commerce into Europe. I'm sitting there going, well, integration is definitely an interesting place to be. And coming back to your point about the partner program, that was the thing I was thinking was, at the end of the day, the one problem we had at bigcommerce with patchworks was, you know, there's only so much you can do with your own team.
Ben Marks [00:12:10]:
Yep.
Jim Herbert [00:12:11]:
So I basically interviewed to use the old meme of 123 five money. I kind of said, look, there are 200,000 agencies around the world. If I can get 10% of them, give me one lead a month dot, dot dot money, right? And we can start implementing it and we can expand internationally more easily. So it's all about that partner program, right? And so last year came in, interestingly, then realized that the tech that was there didn't really support that, didn't support that partner program. It's difficult to get other partners to come in and use that tech, but our tech team, a lot of them are ex boomi and they're all based out in Belfast. And they said, we've got this alpha. We were building it for ourselves to make it easier so we could put more projects through. Gave me a demo and I thought, that is excellent.
Jim Herbert [00:12:55]:
It's no code, low code. It's got a fantastic user experience, which as a techie who only ever was handed designs to implement, I could understand. Cars have got a round steering wheel for a reason, right?
Ben Marks [00:13:07]:
Yeah.
Jim Herbert [00:13:08]:
There's a certain level of consistency and experience. That means that I like driving that I like using it. And I was like, that is excellent. I could use that as a techie and a non techie from that side of it. So we put into closed beta really quickly. They said, in three months we can have it going. So we got it into closed beta in May. Deepak had joined Shopline at the time, and actually they had no integration solutions because they were brand new to the market.
Jim Herbert [00:13:32]:
So we actually put somebody live and, you know, it was perfect. Small merchant, they built their own integration. One of the problems we'd had at Patchworks was with the old tech building a connector to a new system. It took about a month. Right. And you'd probably get a subset of APIs.
Ben Marks [00:13:46]:
Yeah, yeah.
Jim Herbert [00:13:47]:
So one of the first things we released was what we call connector builder. It's a web based interface for effectively ingesting APIs and then creating a productionized connector around it. Right. So now you can import a postman collection into it and build a fully featured connector and keep it updated really easily. So this small shopline merchant, Mirror Amazon came to zpack. Can we do that? I need you to connect to this thing called Linewheel WMS. We didn't have a connector for it, but this guy built the connector himself using the connector builder and built the flows from shopline orders into linewheel. And I was like, this is everything I needed from this platform in the very first account.
Jim Herbert [00:14:22]:
Did it in about a week.
Ben Marks [00:14:24]:
Incredible.
Jim Herbert [00:14:25]:
And got it live ultimately, and they're still live now where I was at IRX a couple of weeks ago and there was a little video thing on their stand and sure enough there was Nathan from mirror. Amazing talking about the great experience they've had with Shopline and its partners. So that's what we're now selling ultimately, and it's great to see that we are now getting more and more success with customers and partners. So that's us in a nutshell, really.
Ben Marks [00:14:49]:
Well, I think developers, which, you know, I at one point in time was, you know, one of the things that really always appealed to me is, you know, this whole idea of don't repeat yourself, basically don't do the same work twice.
Jim Herbert [00:15:04]:
Yeah.
Ben Marks [00:15:04]:
So I pass an integration platform always has always made made sense to me, you know, but for the. But you still have to have someone do the work.
Jim Herbert [00:15:13]:
Yeah.
Ben Marks [00:15:13]:
I do wonder these days, you know, as we, you know, as the generative tools coming out are able to better understand natural language documentation and we're able to throw these, and build these solutions around it. I do think we have an era of, we use the umbrella term AI AI driven because I have to use it at least once per podcast contractual. You know, you do see an era like where the questions around, I mean even with mock alliance.
Jim Herbert [00:15:47]:
Right.
Ben Marks [00:15:47]:
And the question there, yeah, there's always a certain scale that's necessary if you are, if you're truly going for a microservices solution. And I do think that with the rise of generative and more broadly AI tech, you can see some of this orchestration overhead being deferred and then enabled handily by we'll say, generative tools for now. Do you, you've already seen the reduction in time to build an integration from a month down to a week. And I don't want to lose the thread on how all this seems to come about and businesses like patchworks, like Allumio, probably prismatic back in the day is, you know, these were, these were tools that were born in an entrepreneurial environment to solve a subset of problems for business. But then the founders turn around and go, shit, I just created a product, didn't I? I mean, this has happened. One of my favorite examples is with Oz, with Akuva, one of the hosts, the preeminent Magento host in the UK. It's exactly what he did. He just looked around, he couldn't find a suitable host for Magento back years ago and he.
Ben Marks [00:17:05]:
So he built what needed to be built and then realized, damn it, I've done it again and he's still doing it. Right. They're going to be title sponsor of. Title sponsor of meet Magento UK next week. I look forward to catch her couple weeks. I look forward to catching up with him. When you have these kind of tools coming out as opposed to someone. We're here at shop Talk Eudez.
Ben Marks [00:17:27]:
You were looking on a show floor and you see businesses that were created because someone had an idea, but maybe they don't know what they're doing these days. I think a lot of them have tacked sort of idea AI and you just hope that maybe you're throwing this AI at the wall and that it sticks. I like solutions that were sort of born out of necessity and born with that kind of, that information backdrop which it seems patchwork, patchworks is among them. Is it the case for patchworks? You, you have, once an integration is done that that then can be reused in multiple places.
Jim Herbert [00:18:11]:
So absolutely one of the. Because again, you know, Benetechi, right, been there myself. So, and we didn't quite do that scenario, right. We would often integrate hybrids into or ATG into dynamics or into one of the various oracle erps. I don't know which one because they're, I think probably all of them, but fusion, right?
Ben Marks [00:18:33]:
API the world.
Jim Herbert [00:18:34]:
API world, exactly. So we came up with some jar files, right, with some standard, standard java stuff that we could use effectively to go and do that. But we never productionized it to the point where when we sold the business, you look at it, it's like, here's all your kind of revenue numbers. Is there any value in that IP? No, not really. I know there is. And actually our internal confluence is amazing. You couldn't put a dollar number on it, if you know what I mean. So it didn't become part of a transaction.
Jim Herbert [00:19:02]:
So we never did that part of it. Right. But I understood therefore the importance of reusability, because it's all about efficiency in coding and in business in general. If you can do something more quickly, then you're probably going to do better out the other side of it. You'll get a better outcome. So we put the bold statement up in February, our partner sales kickoff. That was the first one we ever did, which was, we want to be the most partner focused iPads. And so ways of doing that are, yep, you can create an integration.
Jim Herbert [00:19:29]:
So you're right the first time you do it. So one of our mutual colleagues is building a netsuite integration right now over in the US.
Ben Marks [00:19:37]:
I'm sorry.
Jim Herbert [00:19:37]:
So. Yeah, I know, right? Because that's not going to go live in a week. ERP integration is a lot more complicated than a little OMS or WMS integration. But once that's been done, that template then exists. And so we can do one of two things with that template. You can wrap that up, assuming there's a certain level of standardization in it, into what we call private apps. So our agency partners can create their own standard integration templates and then they can install those with the marketing phrases. Clicks, not code.
Jim Herbert [00:20:07]:
But it's true. Right? There's a video, if you go and have a look on the. On the patchworks YouTube channel, you'll find it off our website of our lightspeed to Shopify integration, or our Shopify to peoplevox integration of the two videos we have. Yeah, it's about 15 clicks to get that done. And then you've got to go and configure the flow rates in, you know, how many times you want to go and check for orders or stuff like that, or whether. Whether it's web hook or whether it's a scheduled flow. But yeah, I mean, that's. That's unbelievably quick.
Jim Herbert [00:20:32]:
We had somebody sign this week, Monday morning. Well, Lee came in Monday morning. It was shopify to John Lewis, which is the UK man, UK shop that has a miracle market. Virtual stock, actually, and then signed up. That came in Monday morning, signed Monday lunchtime. It was live by Monday evening. And that's because of that reusability of those apps. Now that was a public app, because the other thing our agency partners can do then is publish that in what we call our app store.
Ben Marks [00:21:00]:
That was going to be my question. I was wondering, like, how do you, the people that do this work, you know, do you, do you just take it and give it away? No, you've created a marketplace.
Jim Herbert [00:21:07]:
Exactly. And then they get referral fee because actually, that's the only one difference, right? If you're building a Shopify app or big commerce app, you host it. And so there's a fee to list. In the art, in the marketplace, we actually host these apps. You know, it all runs on our infrastructure for security and within our wall garden, all that good stuff. So we bear the cost. So it's the other way around. We effectively pay a referral fee out for building it.
Ben Marks [00:21:27]:
And I guess part of the reason this works, you know, me coming from my background with the Magento extensions store, you have, you have independent vendors that can list apps, but essentially the relationship, whether it runs it has to then be implemented. There's always three parties involved, right? You have the merchant, you have the vendor who's created this integration, then it has to be hosted somewhere implemented. Actually, it's probably through four, because maybe you have a hosting company that's sitting there, you have this non standard architecture that seems like this arrangement solves that problem.
Jim Herbert [00:22:00]:
It's exactly the idea of it. It solves that problem.
Ben Marks [00:22:03]:
Now, how do you handle if. Is it ever the case that you have vendors, that you have two different businesses, let's say, on the agency side, and they decide to build an integration into a particular oms or something, but you have two of them building and you then would have two integrations, or do you curate that at all?
Jim Herbert [00:22:23]:
So we are curating them, without a doubt. And so it has to come through our app team. We have to make sure that it works. It deals with edge cases and all that good stuff. It hasn't happened yet, but we know it will happen. So the design of our app store, actually launching our self serve app store for integrations, hopefully this month. He says, fingers crossed, it's on the roadmap and it's on the road. But when you bring in the month, you'd hope it would happen, if you know what I mean.
Jim Herbert [00:22:47]:
The ultimate designs for it do cater for that because there might be slight differences there. So it could be, it's shopware to netsuite for bonded warehousing and wine. That could be very different.
Ben Marks [00:22:59]:
Right, right. Yeah.
Jim Herbert [00:23:00]:
So there would be a good reason for doing it, but I quite, you know, at the end of the day, I'm a businessman, so I'm probably on the left side of capitalism, but I'm definitely part of it, if you know what I mean. And I think the more choices there are commercially out there is probably a good thing. Right?
Ben Marks [00:23:15]:
Yeah.
Jim Herbert [00:23:15]:
So that's the idea, is we could support that. You know, it could just be a standard platform X to Oms. Yeah. And there's three versions of it. But as long as we clearly differentiate why the differences are there, it's a bit more like the shop file. Bigcommerce app stores in that regards.
Ben Marks [00:23:32]:
Yeah. Because I guess you mean it's really. It's a decision philosophically of whether you want chaos and confusion. Like, again, back in the old Magento example, you would go and look like adding a Facebook like button to a product page. There were. At one point, there were like 30 or 50 of these things, and this actually became a paralyzing choice for. They're like, wait, why would there be this many? And so you have to swing back over to, well, let's. Let's have some curation here.
Ben Marks [00:24:00]:
Let's say, okay, these now. But I assume that, you know, this is not just a. Not necessarily a one time thing, because you and I have been working in tech for long enough that, you know, we know breaking changes are not ideal.
Jim Herbert [00:24:14]:
Yeah.
Ben Marks [00:24:15]:
But they are sometimes necessary, whether it's. Whether it's time to, you know, knock the cruft out of a code base or simply business has changed. And you realize, wow, we actually really have to update how some of these, some of these endpoints work. So are the vendors then that have created some of these? We'll say the public apps, are they responsible for updating, maintaining and updating? Or does patchworks take on some of that?
Jim Herbert [00:24:42]:
On the apps themselves? It's down to the vendor, without a doubt. So they support the flows, so we support our platform, and we do support the connectors. Right. If we built them ourselves. So, yeah, you know, if we've imported a postman collection, we'll, you know, basically all those kind of things have, like a listener somewhere. I was gonna say RSS feed, but to show my age. Right. But, you know, you can.
Jim Herbert [00:25:02]:
Age still works.
Ben Marks [00:25:03]:
What do you think drives the podcast?
Jim Herbert [00:25:07]:
I remember when Dell computer put out their RSS feed for, you know, out of date stock or whatever, and it started doing a million a week.
Ben Marks [00:25:14]:
Yeah.
Jim Herbert [00:25:14]:
You know, this thing still. There's still a good idea there, right? You know what I mean? So you can listen for changes and so we can import those in, but they don't automatically get deployed. So, you know, someone's got to go in and say, let's take those changes because you don't want to deploy a breaking change automatically. Right, right. But potentially breaking change. So these.
Ben Marks [00:25:30]:
So each of these public apps, they are then maybe versioned somehow.
Jim Herbert [00:25:33]:
Exactly.
Ben Marks [00:25:34]:
Okay, well, this is the this is the, you know, v one.
Jim Herbert [00:25:36]:
Yeah.
Ben Marks [00:25:37]:
Here's v two. And this is it over here.
Jim Herbert [00:25:39]:
Spot on. Spot on. Because if within the actual flows themselves, like every time you make a change, it gets version that gets updated so you can roll back, you can deploy different versions again. It's been built by techies. Right.
Ben Marks [00:25:49]:
Well, and then what does it look like with the sort of the end buy situation where you have the integration, with the integration and sort of the real solution is the group of integrations working together. What does that look like in your world?
Jim Herbert [00:26:06]:
So what, you mean like a reference architecture kind of thing?
Ben Marks [00:26:09]:
I mean, yes, sort of. I guess I'm just thinking if you have a, let's say you have a, you know, a set of business needs.
Jim Herbert [00:26:16]:
Yeah.
Ben Marks [00:26:17]:
And then those that business need relies on, you know, these four integrations and a combination thereof. Is it easy to make four public apps in your world, like, sort of start to talk to each other?
Jim Herbert [00:26:31]:
Yeah, without doubt. So when you. When you install an app, all you're doing, really, is installing some flows and connectors.
Ben Marks [00:26:36]:
Right.
Jim Herbert [00:26:36]:
So connector for us is effectively our representation of the APIs for that system. You know what I mean? And you can obviously have multiple instances of it because you've got staging, production, whatever. Or you might have Shopify and bigcommerce world. You quite often, for different territories, have different stores. Right. So we've got customer stove. I think it's got 14 Shopify stores at the front end. Ultimately, they've got 14 instances of that connector.
Jim Herbert [00:27:00]:
So if I installed the. In fact, Connor, our CTO, did a great job with this on stage live. He actually did a 15 minutes integration of five systems.
Ben Marks [00:27:08]:
Are you talking about a live demo?
Jim Herbert [00:27:10]:
Oh, yeah, man, I've never seen a man more scared. And Connor, if you're listening, you got to admit it. But fair play, I mean. And so he started off by installing the shopify to lightspeed app, and then he installed a template, which is basically like a single flow to netsuite for doing orders. And all that did, of course, was install some more flows. So effectively, what all the apps do is build is add more flows into your customer account, effectively. Then he built a connector to gorgeous because he pretended we didn't have one by using the postman importer, created a gorgeous account. And so by the end of the 15 minutes, we were taking Shopify orders, pushing them through to peoplevox, pushing them into Netsuite as well, and then raising a ticket in gorgeous to tell somebody to go and provision an account.
Jim Herbert [00:27:57]:
And, yeah, it was pretty impressive. There were people who didn't believe it was real, but I could absolutely, honestly handle hard tell you it was.
Ben Marks [00:28:03]:
Well, as someone who has, in fact, seen or been party to a demo, a live demo being pre recorded and then acted in real time, when you have people at the end of a live demo saying, that wasn't real and say, oh, yes, it was, that is damn impressive.
Jim Herbert [00:28:21]:
Yeah. Yeah.
Ben Marks [00:28:22]:
Wow. So it seems like this is. I would assume this is going to be the only way that this kind of work, you know, can or should be done outside of a few, you know, just truly bespoke, solute.
Jim Herbert [00:28:35]:
Yeah.
Ben Marks [00:28:36]:
Solutions, stacks, whatever you want to say. Maybe a merchant who is truly large enough that, you know, they don't. They don't need to bother with this. But almost. I can't even imagine. I can only think of that as a hypothetical. It seems like a really, really good idea.
Jim Herbert [00:28:49]:
Yeah. I think there are some, like, really, maybe really, really high transaction levels where we might become too costly, because think about the computer science kind of angle on it. You know, we're building a generalist integration platform.
Ben Marks [00:29:00]:
Right, right.
Jim Herbert [00:29:01]:
So if you were doing. I spent a year doing integrations in an investment bank in c to the, you know, the stock exchanges, basically. London stock Exchange, New York Stock Exchange, using swift messaging, EDI, all that kind of stuff. Right. That has to be quick, you know, really quick. So there are kind of niches around that. But if you're talking about generalist e commerce is what we're really talking about. Yeah, it.
Jim Herbert [00:29:22]:
You know, it's. There's a slightly different way of thinking. My old business partner, Wylock, we got him in to help build the product, and he was a bit cynical, to be honest, of ipass in general. And I've come across that with kind of techies who've been around, and because it's easier for me to probably build a node, you know, integration than it is to start playing with iPad. But about a month in, Walt was like, actually, I'll get it now. This is really good.
Ben Marks [00:29:45]:
Yeah. Well, you know, man, you and I have seen this and heard there's been part of the discussion, oh, well, if you do this, you're indexing will go through, you know. You know, but the reality is, no matter what the solution, in my experience and what the. What the what the approach behind it, whether it's, you know, SaaS or open source, whatever, you cannot build something for all eventualities. You can try and build for the. All the use cases and up to certain degrees of scale. But any business that is even the simplest e commerce business, if it is big enough, there will be a dimension of scale that will require special handling. And that's okay.
Jim Herbert [00:30:23]:
Yeah.
Ben Marks [00:30:24]:
The question is, how easy is it to handle those edge cases? And so you're right, building for the generalist is much, much more, in the end, much more productive and efficient than building for hoping that Amazon decides to use your infrastructure.
Jim Herbert [00:30:40]:
Exactly. Exactly right.
Ben Marks [00:30:41]:
Which in the end would be great for you, I'm sure.
Jim Herbert [00:30:44]:
Oh.
Ben Marks [00:30:46]:
Well, now that we've talked a bit about the business and we had a couple days here at shop talk in Barcelona, what are your impressions of the industry right now, given again? Travis just joined a bigcommerce and, and looking around, I noticed several businesses that aren't here. And then you and Sandra and I were talking about, like, how are all these new commerce platforms coming from? And why is anyone making a new commerce platform today?
Jim Herbert [00:31:17]:
It's an interesting one, that. Right. I mean, back in the hybris days, actually, obviously Magento taken off one of my old contractors in eastern Europe, had built a new platform. It was basically, it wasn't a copy of Hybris, but he took a lot of the architectural ideas and he came around looking for investment. Man, why are you building a new commerce platform? And that was eight years ago and it wasn't SaaS. I was like, man, you probably want to get on the SaaS for you. Although maybe not. There is still a space for not SaaS.
Jim Herbert [00:31:41]:
Coming back to the optionality and choices we were talking about big time. It's all about what works for you and getting an agency to help you choose it would be my recommendation. Yeah. But I don't really understand why. I mean, I can understand why scale exists ultimately because it's come out of a very, very successful multi billion euro business and it's running that business and actually it's probably good alternative to salesforce from that perspective. It's composable, pre composed, if that makes sense.
Ben Marks [00:32:10]:
Well, yeah, absolutely.
Jim Herbert [00:32:12]:
Yeah. And look, they've got a great client in Man United that they're delivering in the UK. So looking forward to seeing that one go live because, you know, there's a. Well, just because I'm a big football fan, I'm not a Man united fan, but I love seeing the way e commerce works in those businesses because I've worked in those businesses. They're quite odd. They're multi, multi million pound, you know, 700 million, 800 million, a billion in some cases, businesses that are run like family businesses. It's just so interesting from that perspective.
Ben Marks [00:32:40]:
Yeah. You know, for me it's actually back to the point of businesses being born of necessity and maybe unintentionally. Yeah. This is actually the story behind several of the successful commerce platforms Spriiker came out of. Was it the rocket web project or something? Was commerce tools also born that way?
Jim Herbert [00:33:04]:
I think it was, I think there.
Ben Marks [00:33:06]:
Was an origin story that had to do with, we made this thing for a specific use case, but they had, they built it, you know, sort of in, in such a way that it was a, they were able to pull it out.
Jim Herbert [00:33:17]:
Yeah.
Ben Marks [00:33:17]:
And Magento wasn't quite the same. It wasn't quite the same because Roy and Yoav intentionally built it, but they built it because they knew that they were, at the time, they were, they were building on OS commerce, which was, you know, back then, the language PHP wasn't sophisticated enough to have, to really allow you to have an efficient workflow. You couldn't touch one part of the system without having these knock on effects all through. So they basically said, hey, let's get some Java developers and have them write. But in this language of the people. Yeah, the language of the have the.
Jim Herbert [00:33:59]:
Right.
Ben Marks [00:33:59]:
And PHP, of course, then you had all these PHP guys, myself included, like going, what the hell's a front controller? Like, like, oh, Martin Fowler, I guess you're my best friend now, Java enterprise patterns, learn them all. So, you know, that was, it was, you know, that was intentionally built, but really, again, built out of necessity. And there were, you know, there are some other tools. So again, we see that, we see that pattern repeat. And, you know, I do try and resist. I don't want to be, I don't want to be the old, old guy in the room just, just, you know, all dyspeptic and scowling at the newcomers. But I do feel like we are outside of a few niche businesses. One of the platforms that's here is actually, it was built, built, I think built and run out of turkey.
Jim Herbert [00:34:49]:
Yeah.
Ben Marks [00:34:50]:
It has specific relevance and judging from the logos in their booth, success in the Middle east. And I can see, you know what, this was probably an underserved niche. You have businesses like shopline which are coming here now into Europe and UK. I would expect we'll start to see them at some point, assuming they have success here, because they're huge, hugely successful in Southeast Asia. Exactly right. So they have this, this war chest and then they come over and if they do well here, Deepak will be happy and they'll expand into the US. Hell, even Shopware. I mean, that was Shopware's origin story was the two brothers providing tech services and they built an e commerce store in the early two thousands for a furniture company.
Ben Marks [00:35:38]:
And then all of a sudden, all the german businessmen and business women with businesses said, hey, we need this too. And that gives you shopware. So we see these recurring patterns. What is old is new again, is old is new again. This industry that we've managed to continue to find ourselves in, you know, what do you think? Five, as we kind of wrap this up, what do you think? Five to ten years? What does it look like?
Jim Herbert [00:36:04]:
It's an inch. So the one thing I'm not seeing a lot of the show here, but I did see Irex in the UK a couple of weeks ago, is social selling. It was massive last year. So TikTok selling Instagram marketplaces to a certain extent. Right. But again, there's only one marketplace vendor with a stand here this year. But that could be down to the way shop talks built out if you're not.
Ben Marks [00:36:23]:
Yeah.
Jim Herbert [00:36:24]:
Rather than the actual. Everyone's here are the people who are walking the floor if you're not necessarily have a stand. Because that, for me, I've seen a lot, a lot of traction in ultimately there are, there are brands now, though. They'll get a Shopify store or a shop line store or a big commerce store. It's a SaaS small store. They can buy it online, put a thing in. If they get the right influencer, they got the right products, suddenly they're doing a million a year, which if you're 22 years old, what's interesting is then you have to think about, I want taxes and I've got to do what I've got, file what returns. They basically start a really successful business without knowing what they actually have to do.
Jim Herbert [00:36:55]:
So I'm seeing that a little bit on the small side as well. But it does raise the question, do you need a platform? To a certain extent? Because if you're only selling on a social platform and it can do your orders and returns for you, and you could put that directly through to a warehouse somewhere, bang. You know, I don't even need to go down that route. So five to ten years, that is one of the questions ultimately, I think, is, you know, you've kind of put the basket in the cloud to a certain extent. Yeah. So. But I don't like making bold predictions because I'm almost certainly wrong from that side. And actually coming back to what we were discussing earlier.
Jim Herbert [00:37:27]:
Right, sas or non SaaS, there's still a really good place for non SaaS software. You get to a certain size or you need a certain level of functionality or a certain level of control over the code that you cannot get. When the code is sat in a wall garden that you're not allowed to touch, then yeah, there you go. There's the answer. Right. It just makes perfect sense. And those use cases aren't as uncommon as the SAS vendors would like you to believe. Says the CEO of a SAS vendor.
Ben Marks [00:37:53]:
Well, again, you know, you can play both sides because you have the orchestration piece. You can say, hey, you can for them, you can make them more flexible and more immediate for the, we'll use the dirty terminal on Prem.
Jim Herbert [00:38:03]:
Yeah.
Ben Marks [00:38:04]:
Or self managed as we like to, like to shroud it these days. You know, you also, you make you again de risking the TCO and ensuring robust push. You can push deploy on Friday and feel good about it.
Jim Herbert [00:38:20]:
Right.
Ben Marks [00:38:21]:
And bang, you have the latest, the latest and greatest integration. I guess the last thing I'd love to, love to hit on is one of the things that I have seen in the, and I'm sure you've noticed as well, is over time we have these businesses in different spaces that have grown up quite a bit. And like a good example for me, it's just, it's too easy. My buddy, our buddy tink over it. Well, it was mailer and then it became digital. And this was not just a capricious renaming because I went over there to their office in London back in the day. I think I've already maybe told this story on the podcast before, but, you know, and they're showing me essentially like a command line interface with like a data, like a customer data platform and everything. And I'm like, wow, this is very powerful.
Ben Marks [00:39:07]:
And I'm thinking, but wait, I know, you know, at the time I think Magenta had already been bought by Adobe and we're looking at, but Adobe does this. And wait, who's, and so what you've started to see is these businesses that started in sort of a niche area like, you know, email marketing grow over the years into, you know, full suites in their own right.
Jim Herbert [00:39:27]:
Yeah.
Ben Marks [00:39:27]:
And so you have a suite of suites.
Jim Herbert [00:39:30]:
Yes.
Ben Marks [00:39:30]:
In your, in your stack. And they all sort of want to be system of record for various entities. They want to control certain operations and certain flows and then you end up classic problem data here, data there. Who owns the data? Who's transforming the data? How do we make sure that all, all this is together? And it seems like, outside of a brilliant and bespoke orchestration, you need a system, perhaps like a patchworks, that's able to be aware of what's going across the wire, give people that sort of. That no code, that visual interface into how the data is flowing and what's happening and where it gets transformed and how. And then it's not hard to imagine using machine learning generative, taking a generative approach to then make sure you have the full picture of. Of all this data and you're able to actually do the salient performance, salient operations with it.
Jim Herbert [00:40:32]:
Yep.
Ben Marks [00:40:33]:
In the business.
Jim Herbert [00:40:34]:
Yeah.
Ben Marks [00:40:34]:
Does that seem like. Does that seem like a fair picture of things going forward?
Jim Herbert [00:40:38]:
Do you know? Yeah. Yes, it does. And it's a. And you sort of sit there like, is it a risk, you know, sitting there with an orchestration engine? I don't think it is. We're running at it, actually. Yeah. We did a bit of internal work last week with impact works and, you know, with a consultant saying, what are we, what we really here for? What's our vision? What's our purpose? There's a great. There's a comedian in the US called Doug Stanhope.
Jim Herbert [00:41:00]:
Don't know if you know Doug. Right. So he used to be on Charlie Brooker in the UK and he did this great sketch. He's normally quite down on America, you know, but in a fun way.
Ben Marks [00:41:07]:
Oh, we're fun to kick around.
Jim Herbert [00:41:08]:
Yeah. Yeah. But we won the world. Great sketch, which was against type, was like, come to America. It's great. He does it. You british people won't understand it. Come down, go to the beach hut, you know.
Jim Herbert [00:41:18]:
Do you know what we get in America for breakfast? Choices. That's what we get.
Ben Marks [00:41:22]:
You can.
Jim Herbert [00:41:23]:
You can have your eggs any way you like, you know, beans on toast. Exactly. And that was kind of what we came to us. Do you know what we're giving people? We're giving them optionality and choices. If you can integrate to a system quickly, like to a trial account, see if it works for you, then we give you it. Now, the downside of that and the downside of the democratization of e commerce with it being easier to get live and integrate all these systems is what you just described. Right. It's like, well, what if you've got a suite of suites in there? You know, I've got sort of tink software being able to do all these things, but I've also got this.
Jim Herbert [00:41:52]:
That can do a bit of it and that. Which bit should do what? So, coming back to my. You know my comment only about agencies. That's where you need next expert. But what's AI doing? It's industrializing expertise. Right. So without a doubt we could, we could see it that way. You know, we are looking at my old business partner George from seneric.
Jim Herbert [00:42:09]:
We were talking, you know, he was a bit worried about patchworks because surely it'd be really easy to write the code and like, well it's, yeah, it is. And actually we've already got in, you know, my team in beta, we've got a scripting engine piece.
Ben Marks [00:42:18]:
Yep.
Jim Herbert [00:42:18]:
It wasn't hard to add a button that says write the script for me. Yeah, because actually that's, that's easy. Right. That's a great story.
Ben Marks [00:42:23]:
If the API documentation is fine.
Jim Herbert [00:42:25]:
Exactly.
Ben Marks [00:42:25]:
Then it's there.
Jim Herbert [00:42:27]:
Exactly. And so, and yeah, our mapping shape, we used to do the mapping, you know, that's another thing we're looking at is exactly that large learning model. It's like throw the JSON packets and the two different APIs at it and map that for me. You know, why wouldn't you go down that route? The hard part for an AI to do is then deploy it. Make sure it's ISO 27,001 compliant, make sure it sits in a wall garden. And then that's where we're trying to sort of run out that and ditto coming back to, you know, the, okay, you've got these systems. That's where the generative AIP slash, you know, machine learning could be quite interesting, I think, because of the way your data is flowing through the system. Maybe this should actually be better sat over there if it can actually learn about the different capabilities via the API documentation via the way other companies are using it.
Jim Herbert [00:43:07]:
We're not there yet. Right. But that's kind of part of the vision for the roadmap at some point in the future, right, is how can we use AI to better optimize what's going through? Because actually I'll see, I see new business benefits from it because, you know, it'd be interesting. People want that might be competitive mine, but it might not be unique. And we talked about in the podcast. But also, let's be honest, I'll probably be able to save some money in hosting and back end as well because the AI be able to optimize the way that our system is running for all our customers. So I'm a big believer in win wins. I think I've seen so many in my business career.
Jim Herbert [00:43:37]:
People don't trust you when you say that or do or trust people. It's like, nah, of course there isn't because so many, you know, people do exist that try and take, take it off you, if you know what I mean. But look, just be open, transparent, honest. Tell people what your business reasons for doing things are. Ask them what their business reasons for doing things are. Can we win together? Yes, we can. And let's go and do it right. That's the way to do it, man.
Ben Marks [00:43:58]:
That's the way you end a show.
Jim Herbert [00:44:00]:
Mic drop.
Ben Marks [00:44:01]:
Please don't. Please don't go find someone else's mic to drop. Jim, I really appreciate you taking time early in the spanish morning to talk about these things. It's been a pleasure to have this conversation. I hope if you can make it over to the show in a couple weeks in London, it would be great to see you. But rare chance where I actually get to shake a hand. Also at the end of a podcast. Yeah, and we'll have to do this again.
Ben Marks [00:44:28]:
Maybe we'll do this in a year and see where some of these predictions and thoughts have shaken out.
Jim Herbert [00:44:34]:
I'd love that. And hope to see you in a couple of weeks, man. Nice one.
Ben Marks [00:44:36]:
Cheers, mate.
Jim Herbert [00:44:37]:
Cheers. It.