Transcript

Thom, thanks for taking the time to meet with me here at The Lead Summit New York City 2024. Of course, I mean you and I go deep in this world of commerce. We've known each other since I started ATG in 2006, so almost coming on our twenty year anniversary, which is super exciting. And this is great to see so many familiar faces here. And you got a great name except for the H in there. But we will accept that. Fair enough, fair enough. I've been called Thom many times in my life. But you, you don't have to deal with that pain. Well, you don't know how many ways on McFadyen has been mispelled. So, Congrats on the new role. You are Director of Enterprise Sales at BigCommerce. Vice President, so I just promoted myself in real time here, but that's all good. Vice President, I'm sorry, I demoted you. Yeah, all good. So I've joined to continue BigCommerce momentum in the enterprise space. Like a lot of folks in this industry, BigCommerce started kind of working with mid market or smaller companies and we've continued to grow and expand into the enterprise space. And myself and Travis joined to kind of help build that a little bit more. Yeah, Travis. Congrats on that new President as well at BigCommerce. Very excited for him to be here. We've known him for 20 years as well. I know, he's in the club. He is, absolutely. And so BigCommerce has over 60,000 clients total and 4000 enterprise clients. Yeah. That's impressive. Exactly, so that you know we get the benefit of having so many folks on the platform and then obviously with myself and focus on enterprise just continue to expand customers that we're working with and that world as well. So going back in the way back machine as well BigCommerce and McFadyen Digital were some of the first companies to join the MACH Alliance after it was formed within three or four months back in 2020. So if you talk about how you're composable MACH architecture has led to some of your road map and some of your accelerators. Yeah, of course. So you know we've always been API first as a company. That's how we've been able to scale out all those 60,000 customers. And then in the enterprise space, we've seen a ton of traction in the world of headless and composable. So when the MACH Alliance was formed, it was a natural fit for us to join in that. At the time I was part of a separate company that was part of the MACH Alliance. I thought it was great to have all these like minded companies come together and it's been awesome. We just had the MACH 3 conference in New York recently, which I saw you at as well, we're happy to have four of our customers nominated for awards for the work they've done. Congratulations. Which is great. And yeah, so not only we are launching like great customers like the White Stuff out of the UK, which combines the Akeneo, Amplience, BigCommerce, Constructor done by Apply Digital, who's also in the MACH Alliance and using Vue Storefront. It's a testament to the, it's not just us hanging around doing things. We're combining our solutions together to offer maximum flexibility and a great customer experience for these folks. And what's great is it's starting to shape our road map because everyone loves the flexibility that you can have when it comes to running in a you know, headless or a composable world. But we want to make it as simple as possible. So we've actually we're super excited we've launched Catalyst this year that is our Next.js based storefront where we might make it as easy as possible for people to get off the ground and running, so it's a reference architecture, it's deployed into Vercel for now, so another MACH Alliance customer and we have out-of-the-box right away integrations for things like Algolia and others who are in the MACH Alliance. Starting place where you can have the flexibility that MACH provides, but also with the simplicity of saying, all right, I want to get things going and show results immediately because we saw, I think a lot of these projects are first like intrepid folks who went down that path. It was almost like recreating the wheel of what we saw at ATG. We have a multi year deployment. It's takes a lot and the end results aren't always justified. So we want to combine that flexibility with agility to get things started and that's where things like Catalyst are I think a direct result of what we see in the MACH, but making it as simple as possible, right? Yeah. That's, that's great. We love MACH and that's, that's the way of the future. Yeah. Believe that. Definitely. And IDC rated you highly and B2B, as well as other analysts. And you've got quite a few success stories there, some new features. I just saw announced that. Can you talk about BigCommerce for B2B? Yeah. And for me, it was one of the biggest pleasant surprises coming into the company. I've always known BigCommerce, you know, having worked in places like Demandware and ATG before as a formidable competitor from a B2C perspective and I honestly had no idea how vast and how comprehensive our capabilities were in B2B, you know folks like you know IDC as you mentioned have given us these high rankings just because we took that core product that we had that was always built on very API friendly approaches and integration and working with other systems and that fits very well into the world of B2B where you have instead of all these consumer facing like front-end apps like ratings and reviews or whatever you just got a tremendous amount of systems and back-ends to hit into. Right. And that's where we've seen a ton of traction. Where, you know, working with these folks who in a lot of ways the B2B wave has been, you know, people have been saying that's coming for a while. And I think we're finally starting to see these investments where people are embarking on a digital transformation of the B2B space. And what's great is that we can use all this amazing learnings we've had from the B2C world over the past 10 plus years and apply that there. So they're really in my mind getting the benefit of skipping that like missing, messy part that we had and now we're able to deploy this whole composable solution in the world of B2B. One of the things I'm super excited about, we most recently open sourced our buyer portal. So similar to Catalysts being a storefront starting place to accelerate timelines, being able to open-source as buyer portal, we're gonna have folks like yourselves and our agency world be able to customize and create bespoke experiences because the world of B2B doesn't really fit into cookie cutter boxes. Right. You need the ability to customize, you need to extensibility. Those have always been four tenants of the platform. But we also want to be as open as possible. We've always prided ourselves in this term, that was new to me when I joined, but I really like it called Open SaaS, right? We want the benefits of SaaS, but with the openness of open standards and open-source technology and the B2B portal, I feel like it's gonna be a game changer for a lot of folks that we talked about. That's great you open-source that because that is one of the concerns about SaaS is it's all behind the walled garden. You can access through, but the MACH architecture, composable and open-source components of that architecture make it really, really great option. 100%, and that's why folks end up coming to BigCommerce, they can do B2C they can do B2B. Obviously you spoke with Andy earlier and you know, we have a great story with Feedonomics and then we have a huge partnership system. So if we're if it's something it's not our core competency, we're always happy to have a big tent and have lots of partners help us create solutions for the customers we have. Great. We're happy to be in that tent. Yeah. And you mentioned Andy from Feedonomics, which was acquired by BigCommerce, I think three or four years ago, which is really the marketplace out meaning syndicating feeding market content from the BigCommerce store to Amazon or Walmart or other sites. But BigCommerce now also can operate a marketplace for retailer that wants to run their own marketplace. In January you announced the partnership with Marketplacer, software platform and integration there. Yeah, great company, a fellow Australians as well. So BigCommerce's heritage, if you don't know it actually started in Australia and moved to the States and yeah, it just as I said, right, we have a huge partner ecosystem for things that maybe it doesn't make sense to be our core competency, but we know our customers are gonna be looking for us to open that up. So the Marketplacer folks are great, it's a great overused term synergy between like we do all the commerce bits quite well, they do the marketplace stuff extremely well and they're able to just accept that accelerate the timeline so people can get out and try new things, right. Marketplacer are certainly having their day in the sun where folks are testing and trialing those out there and working with best and breed solutions like Marketplacer this almost seems like a no brainer, right? We want to be able to offer that flexibility to our clients. And really the new message for retailers and B2B organizations is that you have to have multiple channels to sell that could be out on Amazon, on eBay, etcetera or running your own marketplace. Yeah. It's great, you have both options available. Totally. And then obviously the Feedonomics piece is great because commerce happens not on the four walls of your .com anymore. Obviously the marketplace option expands the depth and breadth of what you can sell, but being able to syndicate the products, the content that you have into these other channels and then the exciting stuff we're doing around instant commerce and kind of tying that together, it's great. So it really complements the story really well and it's another pleasant surprise when folks, we've done a good job of keeping Feedonomics and BigCommerce, you know, teams a little bit separate because there is a little bit of we work with a lot of different folks in different commerce platforms in the Feedonomics side, but the end of the day, it's just offering that flexibility that people need. And it is an ecosystem. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Well, great. Thanks again, Thom, for taking the time. Yeah, Tom, always a pleasure. Congrats on the role of VP at BigCommerce. Thanks so much. Thank you.