Latest / Talk Commerce / Scaling Magento SaaS and Building Community: A Chat with Vlad Stanescu
Transcript
- Brent Peterson (00:02.577) Welcome to this special Magento edition of Talk Commerce. Today I have Vlad Steniskew from Romanios. Vlad, and Vlad puts on Meet Magento Romania, but Vlad, go ahead, do an introduction for yourself. Tell us your day -to -day role. Tell us a little bit about the company that you work or that you run and one of your passions. Vlad Stanescu (00:26.222) Sure thing. So my name is Vlad. I currently am a co -founder and CEO of Zento, which is a Magento based software as a service product. And before that I've had an agency and I've been doing Magento since 2009. Most people know me as the organizer of Meet Magento Romania, which we've been organizing since 2014. So this year we've had our ninth edition. Brent Peterson (00:51.879) That's awesome and any passions? Vlad Stanescu (00:56.066) coding, but when you run a company you get to do your passion less and less and manage more and more. But I like to get back to it every now and then. Brent Peterson (01:04.711) All right, well before we get into content, I would like to talk about your SaaS company that you're running. But before we get into content, you have volunteered to be part of the Free Joke Project. I'm just gonna tell you a joke and just give me a rating one through five. So here we go. Incorrectly is the only word that when spelled correctly is still spelled incorrectly. Vlad Stanescu (01:13.557) Of course. Vlad Stanescu (01:27.822) That's one of the better ones. I think I'll give it a 5. Brent Peterson (01:30.983) All right. Thank you, Vlad. I appreciate that. All right. So in the green room, we were talking a little bit about that we met in one of the Imagine events back in 2018. I've also started my journey through the Magento community in 2009. And unfortunately, I've never made it to meet Magento, Romain, although I have a lot of friends that have gone. Tell us a little bit about, well, let's start with your SaaS company. Tell us about that. I'm interested in that. Vlad Stanescu (02:01.038) Sure, so as I've told you, we had a Magento development agency, the traditional model, people come to us with their problem, we develop a solution, and we kept noticing a lot of repetitive stuff that we were doing, the sort of thing that clients shouldn't pay for, they should be available out of the box, especially for a market like Romania. many of that boilerplate was repetitive. So then with my co -founders, we had the idea of creating a SaaS product, which is aimed at this Magento specific market. The types of customers who are too large to go for a basic Shopify implementation, which at least at that time was aimed at the smaller merchants. And so we created this product. We started out building it on Magento One because in 2015, Magento Two was nowhere near prime time but now with the Xanto iteration of the product we're running on Magento 2 and it's going great. We're helping merchants have a good solution without breaking the bank. Brent Peterson (03:03.771) That's awesome. is it similar to, is it a true SAS product that you're using Magento to multi -tenant the operating system? Vlad Stanescu (03:15.244) Yeah, so we have a cloud deployment and each customer is deployed in his own isolated environment. It's running on Kubernetes, so a lot of shared resources and lot of advantages between balancing other customers. We fully manage that for them. We also created a large suite of extensions tailored for the needs of the customers. We generally build everything in -house, we don't really use third -party extensions, just because as you well know, some of them aren't so reliable, especially on large scale. And then we're charging a subscription for this service. Brent Peterson (03:52.007) That's awesome. okay, so this has been going since, well, you said since 2015 in Magento 1, then you've now converted to Magento 2. Vlad Stanescu (03:58.552) Yeah. Yeah, since 2019 we're on magenta too, Brent Peterson (04:04.059) Can you think of, I mean, we all know about Magento Go, that went, and I know there's been some other people that have tried this. it more that it's focused to Romania or is there some, can you feel, like help us understand how you've been successful when some of these others have not been? Vlad Stanescu (04:07.587) Hmm Vlad Stanescu (04:19.66) You Vlad Stanescu (04:25.03) give you the secret sauce. Yeah, so Magento Go and possibly others with the SaaS approach are trying to build something that it's a complete product and nothing like an agency. So they don't want to speak to customers with customizations. They don't want to build tailored things for the customers. But we just embrace that it will never be a pure product thing, even on Shopify. It's product from the Shopify's perspective, but there's a large ecosystem of builders that are paid just like the Magento agencies to customize everything for the client. There's no such thing as do it yourself in e -commerce. So we embrace that part and we understand that this large D2C customers will need customizations and we just do the customizations and do it in a product form. So this of course is not as scalable as a traditional product would be, but it's what works for us and for our customers. Brent Peterson (05:21.381) Yeah. And it's kind of the best of both worlds because I know that specifically, you know, Shopify puts a lot of guardrails around what customers can, can't do, including how you want to customize the code or how you want to integrate things into that. So this kind of gives them that ability to not, not, not only customize their code, but not also not have to worry about the upgrades and the patches and things like that. Vlad Stanescu (05:35.768) Mm -hmm. Yeah. Vlad Stanescu (05:50.456) Yeah. Brent Peterson (05:50.511) Have you found since, let's just say since Adobe has stopped putting new features into Magento that the upgrade path and the patching path has been much easier for Magento in general? Vlad Stanescu (06:09.934) I think so, but it's not so much about the features, I think. It's more about the platform becoming more mature. So ever since the 2 .4 versions, it's been becoming more more mature, and then the path to upgrade was much better. Basic things like allowing for media files to be in AWS S3 and those sort of things were added into Magento, and then it became easier to use it out of the box and don't do a lot of workarounds and... patches and fixes on everything else. So now upgrading a Magento version even from 2 .6, 4 .6 to 2 .4 .7, it's much easier than it was in the past. So I think things do look much better. In terms of features, I think most of the developers are building their own features anyway, so they don't rely as much on Adobe to build out the features. But what we would love to see is more of the... of the basics of magento done right. Brent Peterson (07:13.381) Yeah, and I guess the thing that comes to my mind would be removing Luma completely and replacing it with a theme that's modern and happy. Vlad Stanescu (07:24.886) Yes, HuVA is the theme that now basically everybody who's technical enough to use it uses it and it's I think the best thing that happens to the Magento ecosystem in a while. It's the sort of thing that when you see it you ask yourself why it wasn't this Luma from the get -go. Brent Peterson (07:44.091) Yeah, exactly. And I can say that, you know, my family has been involved in Magento for a long time and my son is a front end programmer or developer. And, because he has been working with Hufa for the last, couple of years, he, his job, the jobs that he could get are much better than what he would if he didn't have that experience. think that merchants understand that those, that's an important thing to do is make your website fast. And it's hard to, harder to do with Luma, but as a developer, think just having, having that skillset is important for your future, maybe future job growth. Vlad Stanescu (08:27.202) Yes, I think Yuva did a really good job by starting with Clean Slate and cutting out everything that was inherited from the old theme and they built something that until I saw it I thought it was impossible. I thought that without PWAs you can't get those sort of performances out of Magento solution because we know Magento can be inefficient here and there and when I saw it it was a very pleasant surprise. We actually went for the painful PWA solution and now we switch to our thing being based on Hiva with rather pay that license for each of our customers than have to work on those PWA sort of approaches. Yeah. Brent Peterson (09:09.543) Yeah, let's switch gears a little bit. Let's talk about Meet Magento Romania. Again, I said I hadn't been yet, but tell us a little bit about what motivated you to first organize that first conference way back in 2014. Vlad Stanescu (09:24.834) Yeah, so. We've been working with Magento for five years. At that point, we started out building a shop for one of our close friends who was starting out the business. And then we saw how amazing that platform was and we kept building on it. Because up until that point with all the open source solutions, were just nowhere near good enough to develop on. So we've been using Magento and we've been quite happy with it. And then we thought, how can we start to get a bit more involved, know people and We went to Developers Paradise in Caproon first time in 2013, then we went to Meet Magento Spain, and then we knew we had to do our conference in Romania, and we did it in 2014, and have been doing it ever since, except for the pandemic here when we skipped a year. Brent Peterson (10:17.063) One of the unique things that I know that you were, or one of the innovative things that you did for your conference is that you invited sponsors that were outside of the traditional tech community. I can remember my friend Derek Harlick saying that he got picked up by a BMW i3 and maybe BMW helped support the conference. As an organizer, how have you been able to... Vlad Stanescu (10:29.514) Mm Brent Peterson (10:43.559) sort of go outside the box or even think outside the box of what those traditional sponsors have been. Vlad Stanescu (10:50.336) At that point in the market, all the companies were targeting a lot of the IT sector for promotion, because in most markets, but even more so here in Romania, the IT sector is in a league of its own when it comes to earning powers. So those types of sponsors were easy to attract to the conference in a partnership where they helped us out and we helped them out with some promotions. Brent Peterson (11:16.601) And the conference was this spring already, is that correct? Vlad Stanescu (11:19.776) Yes, it was in April this year. Brent Peterson (11:22.117) and you're planning again April of next year? Vlad Stanescu (11:25.322) Late April, early May, that's our time frame. A few years ago we've always been in September, October, but it's quite a busy period of the year, so we try to switch it up to spring and it's been working out well. So yeah, we're planning our 10th edition next year. Brent Peterson (11:39.879) Tell us some reasons why, well number one, why would a merchant attend a Meet Magento event? Vlad Stanescu (11:47.501) We actually have a pretty good split of merchants versus developers in this last couple of years. We're somewhere around 60 -40 in favor of developers, of course, but years ago it was something like 80 -20, 70 -30. So it's going in the right direction. Even as developers, but even as merchants, we invest a lot into this solution. So if you're a merchant, then your e -commerce platform might be even 100 % of your sales and it's running on a platform. That platform evolution is really important to you as a business as you put all your eggs into that basket with Magento. So then it makes a lot of sense for you to dedicate a day. to go to a conference, meet up other merchants, talk with them, meet developers, meet industry partners and get to know more about what's happening in the ecosystem. Our conference, especially on the business track for the merchants, is not really about Magento. So I think any merchant could be there and could learn a lot about recommendation engines, searching, doing marketing, pay -per -click, social media marketing. We've had Kuba with his great accessibility talk this year. So those sort of subjects are really important for any merchant. Brent Peterson (13:12.187) Yeah, I would echo that in the sense that it's not just about Magento, it's about e -commerce. And in this case, the underlying platform is Magento, but it allows for a merchant to see what are your options out there. And I think one thing unique about Magento is that there are so many things you can do that if you're on another platform, it's always good to attend just to make sure that you're kind of keeping up with what's happening in the world and even You know, maybe people on Shopify aren't looking at Google Lighthouse scores because you don't have as much control over those parts of that as you would in Magento. But you can learn about some of those performance things or use like you said, Cuba with with his accessibility talk. There's just so many things that you can learn from attending any meet Magento event. So meet Magento is supported by the Magento Association. Vlad Stanescu (13:47.854) Mm Brent Peterson (14:10.207) And we've been involved with some sort of this association for a long time. It became formal when Adobe purchased Magento and now it was the Meet Magento Association. Now it's the Magento Association. And they actually own the logo or they control the licensing for the logo. And we're trying to get attendance or not attendance, we're trying to get a membership for that. What encouragement can you give to people to join the Magento Association? Vlad Stanescu (14:46.712) basically the same reason as you would attend a conference. So you are very invested in that platform and being part of the association allows you to stay connected to the open source part of this ecosystem. We talked about the merchant side, but it's the same for the developer side. So as a developer, you become very specialized in a platform like Magento. You dedicate years in order to become proficient at it. And then for you not to be part of this ecosystem, able to talk to developers to be able to talk to other opinion leaders, it's something that you're missing out a lot on. So that's why I would encourage everybody, whether a merchant, an agency, or a developer, to be part of the association, get news about the events, go to as many events as they can. There's a lot of value in going for the big events like the New Yorks, the Londons, the Indias, the Floridas, but also the smaller local events where there's content tailored to that market which you might be in. Kuba has done over the years a great job with the Polish market. It's a conference where I've been to as many times as I've could. We're making a comeback for events like the Netherlands, which is one of the founding events of Meet Magento and Took a Break, then Germany. So being involved in the association gives you a chance to stay connected with everything that's happening. And Magento... has been bought by Adobe and Adobe has built its Adobe Commerce product and obviously that's a commercial product but Adobe relies a lot on Magento Association to promote the open source part of it and we've been working hard, me in the events committee, you in the membership committee and others in terms of open source and content to bring more and more value to people who've been part of this community. Vlad Stanescu (16:47.138) The association had its hard start because it was a big changeover from the small independent company that Magento was before the acquisition to something as large as a corporation as Adobe is. But I think the progress we've made over the last two years is really good and going in the right direction. Brent Peterson (17:08.839) We have a few minutes left, but tell us a little bit about Romania and why we should be not only just attending Meet Magento Romania, but what kind of fun things would we look to as an attendee? Because I think a lot of people go to these conferences not only just to attend the conference, but in New York or Florida or Las Vegas, there's some appeal around the conference as well. Tell us a little bit about, tell us some of the things that... Vlad Stanescu (17:25.304) Mm Brent Peterson (17:38.053) that people would want to see in Romania. Vlad Stanescu (17:41.338) So our conference is organized in Cluj -Napoca. We've done a year in Bucharest, but all the rest of the editions were in Cluj. And Cluj is a smaller and yet very, very nice European town, which is worth visiting. So it has a great city life and all the attendees who've come, all the speakers I've invited from abroad have enjoyed it a lot. In terms of people who are not necessarily looking to come for conferences, in terms of business, it's also a very good place to do business in. We have a very big and thriving IT sector with talented developers and it's a really good place to do business for anybody who's looking to expand. Brent Peterson (18:26.759) That's awesome. Vlad, as we close out, I give everybody a chance to do a shameless plug about anything they'd want to plug, which just means you can promote anything. What would you like to promote today? Vlad Stanescu (18:33.08) you Vlad Stanescu (18:39.916) Well, nothing except the Meet Magento conference from next year. So follow us on Twitter, on LinkedIn, and get notified when the next conference is happening and try to make it out wherever you are here in Europe or the US. It'll be a fun experience. Other than that, I would like to encourage people to join the Magento Association and be an active member of this community. Brent Peterson (19:04.731) That's awesome. Thank you so much. We do have Meet Magento New York coming up on October 10th. And then we have the Netherlands and Poland this fall and then Meet Magento Florida in the spring. And I will say that it's been if you want to do an Imagine Like conference, Meet Magento Florida does encapsulate that it's at a casino and it is Vlad Stanescu (19:14.988) Yes. Brent Peterson (19:31.503) really a fun time. And also it's in February and you get out of the, if you're in the northern parts of the world like a lot of us are, you get out of that cold and into this Miami heat. Vlad Stanescu (19:39.907) Yeah. Vlad Stanescu (19:44.768) Yes, sounds great, sounds great. Brent Peterson (19:46.817) Vlad Staniske, it's been such a great pleasure speaking to you today. Thank you. Vlad Stanescu (19:51.064) Thank you, Brett. Thank you.