The product and perspective that Killian brings to the podcast today are both very unique. First the approach of their product, offering installment options on WooCommerce while providing financial empowerment. Secondly, their work in the eCommerce space and how and why that led to WooCommerce.
The product and perspective that Killian brings to the podcast today are both very unique. First the approach of their product by offering installment options on WooCommerce while providing financial empowerment. Secondly, their work in the eCommerce space and how and why that led to WooCommerce.
In episode 63, Jonathan and I chat with Killian about:
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We start out the show learning about the unique option that Sezzle has brought to the installment payments model. Their mission is financially empowering customers and with the no interest, pay now, pay later method, it really brings some great opportunities to Woo shop owners.
From there, as is traditional with the podcast, we hear Killians’ own personal journey to Woo as well as how Sezzle ended up intergrating with WooCommerce. This part of the conversation also touches a lot on other platforms that have built their integration for and Killian reflects on those as well as what inspired him with WooCommerce.
Since he has used Woo earlier, we sought out his perspective of the Woo ecosystem then and his insights on it as it stands now. This part of the conversation also moved more into his thoughts on open source.
Interestingly, when Sezzle started, the cost-savings were for the shop owners, but they ended up shifting those to the consumer. Killian talks about how shop owners reacted to that and the reasons behind that move for Sezzle.
Jonathan enquires how they use education with their services and I bring up the fact that it’s not only a product that is appealing to the shop owner, but also agencies who can benefit by using it as a selling point.
We round it off with Killian sharing the level of confidence he has moving forward with WooCommerce as well as what he considers the cautionary side of Woo.
Get the Sezzle WooCommerce Payment plugin on WordPress.org
What’s Going on with Sezzle
The Conversation
Yes, this is the transcript. But not in the traditional sense, transcribed word for word. We do not speak as we write. Often the flow of transcribed content is hard to follow. So I have taken it a few steps further by seriously editing, at times, the conversation and even using my editorial freedom to clarify some points. So enjoy.
Transcript Email Download New TabJonathan: Welcome to Do the Woo, Episode 63. I'm Johnathan Wold and with me is my illustrious co-host Bob. Bob, how are you?
Bob: I'm doing excellent and yourself, Jonathan?
Jonathan: I'm doing really well. I'm enjoying summertime. It's starting to get nice and warm here but it's that perfect temperature where it's not too hot.
Bob: Yeah.
Jonathan: It almost makes me think that there's not a virus out there except that I still have to wear the mask all the time. I'm not complaining about it. It's all good.
Bob: Yeah, same here. I'm doing good. Weather's actually been pretty dry. We were talking beforehand how wet it is over here, but it has been some really clear days.
Jonathan: Nice.
Bob: Yeah, that's good, but anyway, I'm excited for our guest. I'm going to let you dive in here shortly. Why don't I quickly thank our sponsors.
Jonathan: Awesome.
Bob: WooCommerce.com, of course, our community sponsor. You may have seen that 4.3 came out last week. Hope everything is going cool and smooth with that. I did a little post on that, so good stuff on the WooCommerce front. Recapture.io, and email marketing and abandoned cart solution. Listen in, you can get a 60 day free trial to check them out.
And Mode Effect, Cody and his team over there, great agency. Whether you're running your own site or building sites, they're a great one to partner up to help you with optimization and speed of your site. Thanks to our sponsors and let's get on it, Jonathan.
Jonathan: Awesome. Well, Killian, welcome to the show. Thanks for joining us today.
Killian: Absolutely. It's a pleasure to be on the show with both of you.
Jonathan: Killian, we'll just going to jump into your introduction. Tell us how Do you do the Woo?
What is Sezzle?
Killian: Yeah. It's the way that we do just about all of our software development processes and it's just to keep it stupid and simple and we take it as simply as possible. In the office here at Sezzle, we've got a poster office that we don't necessarily go to, day in and day out right now, but everyone still knows that poster's up in the office. "The longer that something takes to launch, the less likely it is to succeed." And so, our approach is always to keep our integration in anything that we're doing, as simple as possible, get it out there and continue to iterate. And obviously, with WooCommerce, it's an open source platform and that's the approach there as well, is keep it simple and go one release at a time.
Jonathan: Just to give folks some context, tell us a bit about Sezzle and the company as a whole, and then we'll start talking about Woo.
Killian: Yeah, absolutely. Sezzle is a payment company that is offering shopper's interest free installment payments. I imagine it as a payment option you see in checkout and we break up the purchase amount into four interest free installments over the course of six weeks. The company's mission, is financial empowering the next generation. Ultimately, with these payment options, we're looking to offer these installment payments to users that may or may not already have a credit card, coming out of the financial crisis and the Card Act of '09. A lot of younger consumers aren't necessarily getting access to credit cards or other credit products, either because they're not getting approved for them or there's an aversion to them.
So, we're looking to offer the service to people who are trying to figure out, "Hey, how do I get myself into a better space, financially? How do I get access to buy the things that I want today?" And for our retailers, we're offering a way to keep their shoppers engaged and offer this credit product. Our product is merchant funded so merchants do pay its additional processing costs for these purchases, but it enables us to offer these interest free to shoppers.
Giving the Consumer the Financial Empowerment
Jonathan: Why did you decide that? That's a pretty big switch, right? Typically, you put it on the consumer and charge them the interest, but you guys drew that line. I'm curious about what was the thinking behind that?
Killian: Yeah. I mean, obviously we're a eCommerce focused company and if you can offer free shipping, your conversion rates are going to be higher. I think anytime you tack on a larger cost of the purchase, that works its way into the product life cycle and the shopping life cycle for a user. But really, for us, the mission is the financial empowerment side of things and we know that our shoppers have an aversion to credit products and a lot of that is just a lack of education or a lack of training on some of those, right?
And so, what our product does is that if you had failed a payment, you can't use us again until you fix that failed payment. You can't use us for another order. We allow shoppers to reschedule their payments once for free per order as well. There are all of these penalty-free scenarios for shoppers in our product to really learn and work closely with us on making these installment payments work for them.
We're really trying to help them and the merchants who are really joining us in that mission. They're saying, "Hey, these are shared customers. We want to join you in trying to empower them into learning how to use these credit products and to ultimately, grow loyalty with us as a brand."
Jonathan: Yeah. And for them, it's a customer that they might not have been able to have otherwise, and it's worth paying that cost for being able to give access to the products that they're offering.
Killian: Exactly.
Killian’s Woo Journey, Personally and Through Sizzle
Jonathan: Cool. Excellent. Tell us about your journey to WooCommerce. When did Woo first come onto the radar for you, for the company? What's that journey look like?
Killian: I can talk about that in a couple of different dimensions. My own journey into open source and then Sezzle's journey into it as well. I started as a student out in New York but even at an early age, I've been a technologist lifelong, writing websites, basic C... Whenever you could program, I was trying to figure out a way to do it. At some point in that time period, I got into websites and into WordPress a little bit more and saw a lot of power in building a CMS platform that anyone could work with and enabled me to be flexible enough with things I was building.
But then I went off to school and you lose touch with some of those things and eventually, made my way to meet the other two cofounders at Sezzle and decided actually that what I was learning in the payments and eCommerce base was more relevant than what I was doing at school. I actually helped them join and build the original product out. At the time, I had also been working a lot of open source software, mostly for Docker and DevOps. My focus has often been on platform and how do you build a platform to enable anyone to build anything that they need to?
I saw Docker as being a very powerful tool there. And so, I came into Sezzle, helped build it out and asked the question, how do we enable the team to build a sustainable software here? And had to do a deep dive on the checkout and payments as a result of that. As Sezzle started building our platform out and started integrating with various eCommerce platforms.
WooCommerce wasn't the first platform we built for. We always have our ear to the ground and we're listening to our clients, our merchants, and our shoppers as our key stakeholders. And merchants wanted us on Shopify. That was the platform of choice at the time. And they had a quick, simple, easy API that enabled us, as a partner in their ecosystem, to build to it and they've been a great partner. And so, that was where our first integration point was.
And then we moved into Magento, because again, we had merchants that were demanding the Magento. It was a bit of a different approach, where they had a extension that we could build. We could list it on the marketplace, but it was code that was being packaged to work in the platform. Magento has been a great partner on getting this thing out there, but there are challenges in that platform with so many diverse versions and a lot of customization that goes into each platform version.
Then the next merchant group and a cohort came up and said, "Hey, it's time to build for WooCommerce." And so, I was like, "All right. I'm new to WooCommerce. Let's figure out what's going on with the platform." And my first blush reaction was, "Uh-oh, we've got another PHP thing source. There might be a lot of this customization out there." And I was like, "All right. Well yeah, let's dive in. Let's figure it out." And the team was able to build our integration in a single file in two days with WooCommerce and it worked for everyone. It didn't have a problem that we had on some other platforms in the past and that was where Woo first got me.
Jonathan: Yeah.
Killian: I was saying, "Hey, this is a powerful platform." With my background it's like, "How do you enable sustainable software? How do you enable a community? How do you enable it in a team?" I saw that as being very powerful in the tools, the hooks, the things that were open. I think it was very thoughtful and well designed and made really, really simple for us to get something up and running quickly. Granted, our extension is a lot more complex now than in a single file and that's where you learn and iterate.
Jonathan: Over the barrier of entry to be able to get it started.
Killian: Right.
Killian’s Thoughts on the Woo Ecosystem, Then and Now
Jonathan: I got one more question, Bob. This is super interesting. One of the things that I'm curious about, you have the advantage, from my point of view, of being newer to the Woo ecosystem. I'm curious about your perception. One of the things that I find with Woo, being open source, not having the same funding that Shopify has, having small team , is that people tend to both overlook and underestimate its size.
I'm curious, and you know a lot more about it now, but more around your perceptions through the journey. You mentioned one aspect of your perception was like, "Oh no, another PHP application." Any thoughts that you can share on how you felt about the ecosystem when you first started looking and how that's evolved to how you think about it now?
Killian: Yeah, absolutely. Maybe I'll back up a little bit. The way that I often think about eCommerce platforms, because at this point, Sezzle, we're integrated with a lot of them as a payment option, right?
Jonathan: Yes.
Killian: And so, I think about it often, and obviously there are a lot of ways to look at this. On a matrix that spans from merchant size and then platform type and customization within there. On that first axis, you have your SMB clients, your smallest client. I'm trying to sell some t-shirts that I'm making in my garage right now and I want to get a site up and running. And then you have your Fortune 500 enterprises who are on other platforms that are out there. And then on the other set of axis, you've got your licensed, API-driven, call them less flexible platforms, where you don't really have the ability to get in and work with them. And then at the very bottom you have, "Hey, I've built this from my own Ruby on Rails stack and I've built this completely custom.”
Looking at the Different Platforms
I think of all of these platforms, more or less, on that matrix and it's important for us because it's a measure of, "How hard is this for us to build? How hard is this for us to maintain?" But it also is "Who does this enable?" And I see WooCommerce, at the time as being very SMB focused and very custom. That is where I was coming from, just like Magento. Then as I got into it, I was like, "No, actually this is more of a democratized commerce platform."
It really sits at the middle of all of these things because it doesn't just tailor itself to SMB's. It does tailor itself to enterprise to an extent of flexibility. It doesn't just tailor itself to being a custom platform because there's a lot of great structure and a lot of really diverse platform ecosystem for installing extensions and for partners to work with it. I saw it in an interesting position, as being right in the middle of all of these, which is relatively rare in the eCommerce space where there's a lot of sprawl with platforms and a lot of different problems people are trying to solve.
Jonathan: The way that I think about this, when I compare Shopify... Don't get me wrong, I love what they've done. They've done some really good work in this space as a whole. At the end of the day, there's this rent versus own build paradigm and ultimately... Well, the way we tend to think of this is, and it's a quiet strategy because we don't have the same amount of resources, but it's like over time, you see the low end of the markets tend to gravitate towards open source because we democratize it. We take the things that are done on proprietary platforms and make it available to everyone. We tend to lower the barrier of entry as time goes on because we don't have the same driving factors.
The mission is bigger. We have shareholders to make happy, but it's in a very different sense. And then on the high end, that's what's also interesting and often underestimated, is that we start to see more and more of these larger enterprises are saying, "We need the flexibility again," and/or they're motivated by, "We don't want to be given away so much of our margin to this proprietary platform." It's a very quiet, understated thing, but it's something that you see more and more, as time goes on. In my ideal state, there's a healthy balance between there being proprietary platforms that drive innovation, where they can do things more quickly, they have more resources available to them. But over time, I don't want to state where that's ever the dominant platform.
The Momentum of Open Source
It's interesting. I'll get off my little soap box, but it's very interesting to watch. It surprised me. I've been in WordPress for more than 14 years. I've watched Woo, but now that I'm part of Woo and seeing it from a different perspective, there's been a lot of surprises for me like, "Wow, it's a lot bigger than that." Open source momentum is hard to put your finger on, but then you see it and once it starts building, it's very hard to untangle that momentum.
Killian: Yeah, even as I'm building a team and really trying to find a really strong software engineer, that I talk about the development process of a software engineer, it's similar in the way that you're talking about the different rent versus buy in eCommerce platforms. And even how you'd get into something like WooCommerce. When I started with WooCommerce, that was like, "Okay, well, how do I install WooCommerce? How do I get WordPress up? I don't know anything about this. Can I find a blog post out there? Can I find a tutorial? Can I find some resource that just says, "I know nothing. How do I get from zero to something?"
And so, you go out and find that blog post and then you're like, "Okay, awesome. I've got this thing up and running, and now as I progress, I'm not a beginner on this thing anymore. I know how it works a little bit. Show me some documentation, right? I want to see some documentation on what I can do with it? What can I do with this system that I'm working with?" And then you start to work with that. You play with that and that's a pretty long part of the development phase as an engineer. You ask, "What can I work with and how do I build something on top of that?"
Then you get to the point where it doesn't work as expected, or it doesn't do what you need to, and your experienced developer is saying, "I don't really care what your documentation says. I don't necessarily trust it all the time. I want to read the source code. I want to figure out how this thing is really working." And then that's the important layer and barrier of, if you're going to be an expert, you really need to know how it works. You have that with WooCommerce. You can get into this source code. You can read the versioning of all this. You can expand it and I think that's that barrier that you can't break when you're just buying something.
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Now let’s head on back to the show.
How Shop Owners Felt About the Model of Installment Payments
Bob: Stepping back to what you were talking about before, when you were explaining what your service does, empowering the consumer to make these choices in payments. When you started bringing this to all the different platforms, and it sounds like everybody's embracing it now because they're saying, "Yeah, this is so cool what you're doing." But was there any reluctance on their part thinking, "Well, this is a little too flexible as far as payments. Okay, you can adjust these. You can do it this way." Or was it initially embraced like, "Yes, we understand what you're doing for the consumer here?"
Killian: Yeah. I think that in the stack of priorities as a retailer, and this actually came from the first product. We pivoted our company about a year in and the first idea another payment checkout option, but the benefits to the retailer was more of a cost savings thing. And everyone's like, "Yeah, I'd love to save on costs. That's super exciting." We're building a sales pipeline. We're building a product. We're super optimistic that it's going to launch and be successful.
And then we go live with folks and they say, "Well, cost savings is number five on my list right now. My number one thing right now is driving sales. Can you help me drive sales with this product?" And that was something that was harder for us. And so, I'd say that initially, we were able to drive ourselves in by just saying, "Really, our core value proposition to you as a retailer is that we can help you drive more sales.
We've got number of AB tests out there that show that having these installment options engage your shoppers more. It shows that there is flexibility in payment options, in purchasing options. You can show them 25% of the purchase price today and they'll pay that every time without additional cost. You're going to see higher basket sizes. You're going to see higher conversion rates."
Those are the ways that we were able to start getting into the market. And then we needed to be able to demonstrate those results before we could get a buy in on that mission. And that's really the direction that we're going now, and as a company actually, we just reincorporated as a benefits corporation.
Jonathan: Oh wow.
Killian: So we look at the world and the community as a whole, from a social good perspective and that was really the next stage. We didn't have to change anything we were doing. We just wanted to tell the world that and find a way to really solidify that into our founding docs.
What Does Education Look Like for Sizzle
Jonathan: Okay. I'm still learning about Sezzle as an organization. How far do you go in terms of consumer education because you alluded to focusing on folks who maybe don't have credit or haven't really used those products yet. How do you guys think about, with this focus on empowerment, you have the initial interface with Sezzle via the ability to access a product by offering installments. Do you also then focus on trying to educate folks? What does that look like for you? How do you carry that out?
Killian: Yeah, those are part of our roadmap because you look at, "How do we build an educational platform into our core platform?" I think that the focus for us now is that some of the best learning is from practice. As a developer, it's like, "Well, I need to write some code. I need to figure out how to build something on a platform." And then as you think about consumer and consumer behavior, it's, "I need to use this thing and I need that thing in the way that it works to enforce positive behavior."
The way that we look at it right now is that our product does that and by just using it, you're learning the right way to budget, the right way to have payment cycles, but we're not throwing penalties on top. It's more of a slap on the hand, "Hey, let's fix it. Let's work together. Let's work this thing out." As we look into the future, that's where we're looking at building more of our educational modules into the product as a way of keeping you engaged and also sharing some of that educational information.
Jonathan: Your starting point though, is that the practice itself, the way you've structured, it is itself educational in nature, because it's like, "We're not penalizing you." If you split it out over time and you're giving them access to the ability to do things they might not have been able to do otherwise.
Killian: Yeah. The other thing that we're excited about moving into the future as well, is right now, when you think of credit products, you generally think, "Well, how does that affect my credit score?" Right? That's a really important thing for the consumer as well. And you don't need a credit score to use Sezzle as a consumer and we don't affect your credit score as a consumer. And so, it's a really low touch way for people to learn here as well. And the other thing that we're working on building and partnering with the bureaus is starting to record repayment behavior for users that are in a separate, upgraded version of our product.
That really helps us fulfill that mission of financial empowerment because ultimately, you still need your credit score in order to go out and get more traditional finance products, right? And so, if we want to help shoppers on that mission, but we want to get them in without the burden of, "Well, how does that affect me," and "Should I use this and how does this thing work?" We want shoppers to really start building that experience and then say, "Hey, I'm ready to make that next step. I want to start building my score, building my future.”
A Win-Win for Both Store Owners and Store Builders
Bob: It seems to me that your product is so beneficial for both the store owner and agencies, and it's a no brainer where the store owner singly says, "Yes, this is a great option, makes sense. I'm going to be able to do conversions." But then the agencies that are starting to sell out and add or bring that in as an option and they can look like the smart ones and say, "Hey, how you can increase conversions? Have you ever thought about payments?" You've got a real win-win situation on both sides of the coin there.
Killian: Yeah, absolutely. And I think one of the most important parts of the integration with our product is not just the checkout part of it, because often as a consumer, once you're at checkout, you're pretty close to making that purchase decision and you've already gone through that mental math of, "Should I buy this thing today or not?"
One of the more important parts of the integration is actually the product detail page widgets that we put up, right? If you imagine you're shopping for a backpack and it's a hundred dollar backpack. Under that price, we put a JavaScript widget on the page there that says, "Or for interest free installment payments of $25 with Sezzle." And you can click into that and you get a popup that will walk you through a little bit more about that value proposition to you as a shopper.
That's really where the value comes for retailers is when you can put that onto the page, because now it's part of that buying process, right? You're browsing and it's higher up in that purchase funnel, where now you're saying, "Hey, I may not have done this thing today. I might've waited for a bit. I might've shopped around a little bit more." I might have figured out, "Well, is this the best backpack for me," but hey, I like what this Sezzle brand is doing. I like what this product is doing, or maybe I already know it. I like this brand. I'm going to make this purchase here today.”
Installment Payments Incentivizing Upsells
Bob: When you were talking about filling the cart too, I can see the same way that this is almost an added tool for upsells, for the store owner, because you get in there and you see this option suddenly in front of you and you think, "Wow, I'm only spending this much today," and "Ooh, doesn't that look cool? That'd be easy to drop into the cart," and "Oh, how about that thing too," because that's psychological. Look at that price you're putting out right then. Even though people get it and no down the road you're paying for it, it seems like a great add on to not only more sales, like you said, but conversions and everything. It's that upsell that it could really benefit.
Jonathan: I also like the responsibility loop that you're implying there because by saying... To Bob's point, yeah, you allow them to be able to make more of a purchase, but they're also seeing that, "Okay, I can budget for it." We tend to index towards wanting that instant gratification, right? And that's great, or especially, if you're looking at "I want to get a new juicer," or you get into musical instruments so I can start learning something, and then you still have to continue paying it and finish that process out. But you're opening up more opportunities that they just wouldn't have otherwise and that's great. I love that.
Killian’s Confidence in Moving Ahead with Woo
One of the things I'm curious about. You're in a number of platforms. I think you're in a great spot to be able to see what's happening and get a sense of what's going on in the different platforms. What gives you confidence? You talked about the quadrants, the idea of the axis and what you can see is for Woo in the middle. Anything more that you can say about what gives you confidence in Woo as a platform, as it is today, that warrants investment and energy into it. Where does that confidence coming from for you right now?
Killian: Yeah, I think that looking at the story of Sezzle, we originally built our company on a lot of small and midsize businesses. Obviously, as we've grown, that's changed and we've been able to get ourselves installed into larger brands and I think that what is very interesting about Woo as a platform. I think that within eCommerce, not just for consumers, we're indexed toward instant gratification, but even as a seller, we do, right? As someone that's running your own site, you're saying, "Hey, how quickly can I get this thing up and running and working for me as a business so I can focus on running my business?"
For us, the way that we've designed our integrations and tried to build these integrations out and make it easy for these retailers is, "How do we make that application process easy for you? How do we make the integration? How quickly can you get up and running with our platform and with our option for your shoppers?" And the ease of that in flexibility across multiple retailers and not just a single, one off integration, helping that integration support time and time again, with retailers, Woo is one of the best and most straightforward platforms for us on that.
I think that it's important as you're looking at the health of a platform and the reason to invest in that platform. If that's the ecosystem for partners and agencies to interact in, there's going to be a lot of success there. Because any sort of business problem, anything that's cutting edge that someone's going to go out there and launch something like Sezzle, they're going to be able to do that and be part of that ecosystem quickly and enable you, as a business owner, to quickly implement and move and make those moves within the market.
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And now, back to our conversation.
Cautionary Tales When Looking at the Future of Woo
Jonathan: That's awesome. Given your experience in the space, I always like to contrast that with the other side. Is there any cautionary tales. When you look at the future of Woo as a platform, are there things that to you would be negative indicators or things that you've seen in other places?
Killian: Having not done this necessarily myself, I'd be speaking a little bit out of turn, but anytime platforms that are not necessarily set up for horizontal scaling, meaning they can just, "Hey, I just had a great ad placement. I just hit a hundred thousand users on my site that are trying to make a purchase today." The ability to quickly auto-scale those things, that's where sometimes the challenge does come in here. And I think that's something to continue to improve on. That's something that everyone's trying to figure out is, "How do we horizontally scale our system, particularly when we've got limited resources, right? We have limited inventory. We have limited things here."
So I think that's just a cautionary tale for any system. You could host it on your own. It could be more a single tenant and not horizontally scaling. I think that's a challenge as you grow, that you always need to be working through.
Jonathan: One of the general challenges with Woo is because it's open and because at this point, there's so much momentum behind it, it takes longer to work on some of those things. Before this, I was in an enterprise agency so we did a lot of big WordPress stuff and you see these cycles where enterprises would get tired of WordPress and move to proprietary platform. But then about two years later, they're back, more often than not. In general, as a rule of thumb, open source tends to have about a two year lag. In my experience, once it gets that figured out though, then that momentum just continues to build.
I think that is one of the challenges right now with Woo. There's a lot of ways that you could host it. Again, your experience can vary quite a bit from one place to the next. Some places are fantastic. Others don't really know how to deal with it. Because it's a different beast. With WordPress you can over-index on caching and be, "All right, don't worry about it." Whereas with commerce, you have all this live interaction.
Jonathan: To your point, when suddenly, you spike in traffic and people are looking for all that live interaction experiencit can really suffer. I feel confident it's going to get figured out. That's not to be taken for granted because doing so in an open source way, you have to do it differently. You can't force it on people. It's trickier to do but I think once you get that, it's powerful. There's momentum. It just goes from there.
Bob: And scaling does come up a lot in this podcast. In fact, I'm thinking from here on in, we should have the drinking game with scaling because you're guaranteed at least one shot during the podcast. You're going to have to take at least one, if not more, every time scaling is mentioned.
Jonathan: It's a good indicator though isn't it, Bob? If that's the question people are asking, it means there's the desire to scale, right?
Bob: Yeah, exactly. Really good stuff. It's one thing to say, "Okay, we have a system here that we'll break it up into payments, but the concept behind it and your whole goal is amazing." I think we'll move right into the announcements and I know that, Killian, you have an announcement as far Sezzle that I'd like you to share.
What’s Happening at Sizzle
Killian: Yeah, absolutely. I think one of them we're excited to announce, the Public Benefits Corporation and the reincorporation as it pertains to our mission. I think that's one of them.
We also, very excitingly, recently closed a 55 million US dollar placement. We are a public listed company in Australia. It's own entire conversation of its own, if you want to understand why we did that.
But we're very excited about that and we also recently had a new executive join, our new chief revenue officer, who is bringing a lot of great experience from her 11 years at PayPal, and most recently it was their vice president of global accounts over there so excited to have her come in and we'll be working.
One of the things she will be working on for us is one of the core things that she worked with over there. That was their customer advisory board and really getting a voice of the customer there. If you think about payments and eCommerce and alternative payments, obviously PayPal is as a big name in that space. We're really excited to have Veronica join our team and learn from her experience and bring that to our Sezzle customers.
Bob: Wow. Good stuff going on at Sezzle. How about you, Jonathan? Anything you want to pull out that's going on in the Woo world?
Jonathan: Man, there's so many things happening. A lot of good stuff happened on the release side, you already mentioned. I can't remember it. Is it WooCommerce 4.3, I think we're up?
Bob: Yeah.
WooCommerce Live on Facebook
Jonathan: I should know this really well, but there's a lot happening there. One of the fun experiments that I've been involved in recently is WooCommerce Live and just working on helping just connect more folks in the community and our communities are growing fast.
As some folks would know, I'm really involved in the meetup side of things and what's happening across that. And to me, it's been so gratifying to see. more and more people coming out and saying, "Hey, I want to get started. What do I do?" And it's given us a chance to really live out that mission. Democratizing commerce is not just the platform. It's also the education. It's also the empowerment and helping inspire people with what's possible and then equipping them to actually do things. And we're seeing that happen in the community. It's been great.
The First Hint and New Things Coming to Do the Woo
Bob: All right. Excellent. Lots going on at Woo. And regarding my announcement. Okay, people are probably going to say, "Bob, are you at it again?"
Jonathan: Oh, Bob.
Bob: I'm doing some big changes to Do the Woo. I mean, the whole site, and not changes in the sense that it's going to be, Do the Something Else. It's still going to be Do the Woo. I thought what I'd do is I would just drop these tiny little hints. This is all going to happen in September. So some tiny little hints in each show, in the announcements, real brief, something just to tease you with and have you think about something.
I'm going to just throw out three words; connections, insights, perspectives.
Think about it. Talk amongst yourselves as some people would say. That is it.
That's my announcement and yeah, let's go ahead, and I'm going to close this out. First, Killian, where's a good place for people to connect with you on the web?
Where You Can Find Killian
Killian: Yeah, absolutely. I am generally most active on LinkedIn. And so, given that placement, the team's going to continue to grow. If you're looking for opportunities, looking to connect people, connect with me at Killian Brackey on LinkedIn and happy to learn more about what you're doing and connect.
Bob: Excellent. Make sure you connect with Killian over on LinkedIn. And again, like to thank our sponsors, WooCommerce.com for everything WooCommerce. Recapture.io for your email, marketing and cart abandonment and Mode Effect.com where Cody and his team will help you speed up and optimize your Woo shop and of course, Recapture, an email marketing and cart abandonment solution.
Great stuff. Again, thank you Killian for being on the show and I’d like everyone for listening in and please consider subscribing to our podcast. And until next week, Do the Woo.
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