00:00:15: Welcome to the Shop Systems Decoded Podcast.

00:00:17: In this podcast, we will talk with the makers and the operators of today's greatest shop systems.

00:00:22: My name is Tim Niemeyer.

00:00:24: With me is Fabian Wesner.

00:00:26: Together, we are the founders of ROQ Technology.

00:00:28: About us, we are experts in e-commerce technology.

00:00:31: In the past years, we have launched shops across the globe for the youngest startups and the largest enterprises.

00:00:36: We have seen the most complex IT landscapes and requirements in B2C, B2B, and marketplace projects.

00:00:43: ROQ is not a software house or systems integrator, but a boutique strategic partner.

00:00:47: We support companies launching, enhancing, and replatforming e-commerce solutions.

00:00:51: We enable companies to crack the biggest challenges ideally with their own team.

00:00:59: In today's episode, we are excited to welcome David.

00:01:02: David is one of the minds behind the open source platform, Vendure David, it's great to have you.

00:01:07: Let's get started.

00:01:08: Please tell us a bit about your journey with Venger.

00:01:10: Of course, thank you for the invite Fabian and Tim.

00:01:12: It's a pleasure to be here.

00:01:14: Yeah, as you said, I'm one of the makers.

00:01:15: I'm the CEO and co-founder of Vendure I'm a software engineer myself, but I've started out in mechatronics engineering, so I took a completely different route.

00:01:25: Vendure is based in Austria.

00:01:27: We are living in Austria, my co-founder and me.

00:01:30: And yeah, I founded a...

00:01:34: digital agency five years ago, focused on enterprise digital commerce.

00:01:38: And on that path, I crossed the line with Michael, the original creator of Vendure.

00:01:45: And from 2022 on, we basically are a team that is leading Vendure and is growing Vendure.

00:01:52: Cool.

00:01:53: What does that name Vendure actually mean?

00:01:55: Vendure is Latin for selling, basically.

00:02:00: pretty simple story.

00:02:02: Actually, I didn't came up with the name.

00:02:04: It was Michael at the time.

00:02:06: And I think he was just doing the same as so many other founders, typing in a word that you basically know in your own language and then Google Translate switched through.

00:02:19: Greek and Latin and Esperanto and all these nice sounding languages.

00:02:24: And that's at least my thesis, how it came together.

00:02:29: But to be honest, I need to ask him and maybe we do a LinkedIn post on that in the future.

00:02:33: It's a great name.

00:02:34: It's easy to remember, it's easy to spell.

00:02:37: It's a good name.

00:02:38: Absolutely.

00:02:39: Okay, yeah, let's talk about Vendure a bit.

00:02:41: So what is Vendure about?

00:02:43: So who should use it, who should not use it?

00:02:46: And why is it different than other shops like Shopify or Magento or whatever?

00:02:52: Yeah, so I think I want to start with what is Vendure Vendure is an open source headless commerce platform that implies already two things.

00:03:03: We're open source, we're headless.

00:03:05: It means API driven.

00:03:07: Very important that I want to note here, headless doesn't mean composable.

00:03:10: That's a difference, although it's now used as an acronym already in the market.

00:03:16: It's two completely different things.

00:03:18: We are headless and we are proud to be headless.

00:03:21: We think that's the right architecture for e-commerce in the future.

00:03:26: Venture itself, we have like a phrase or a vision and that could be summarized for with the verge engineered at scale and that engineered scale doesn't only mean like engineered

00:03:41: for high order volumes, high traffic, high anything of these numbers that you see in your dashboards but also and that's more important for us actually the scale of your team that

00:03:53: is building

00:03:55: the commerce platform, your commerce solution.

00:03:58: Because that's actually very important, It makes a big difference if you have one or two developers working on a project, or if you have 20 developers working on your project.

00:04:08: Things like code architecture, code patterns, in general, the implementation approaches of things, keeping it maintainable, all these things.

00:04:21: are much more important when your team grows and also when team members change over time.

00:04:27: And I think that's a given in today's market.

00:04:30: Younger generations don't stick with you for 15 years anymore.

00:04:34: So you need to have a platform that enforces certain styles, certain ways of doing things to make it right by default.

00:04:45: And I think that's the greatest focus of our doing.

00:04:50: So we are very focused on the developer.

00:04:52: We are very focused on the developer experience and on code architecture.

00:04:57: And that matters to us so much because we are focused on these enterprise use cases of digital commerce.

00:05:03: So we are not focused on the t-shirt shop that is selling like three different kinds of t-shirts or like these smaller online shops that we all know.

00:05:16: We are really focused on

00:05:19: highly customized, multi-tenant, multi-language, multi-region, multi-everything basically, projects that are built by large enterprises around this globe.

00:05:30: And that's where we are focused on basically.

00:05:34: Why did you decide to go the headless way?

00:05:36: mean, whenever you want to start a project, you need a full solution.

00:05:40: Like, you need the front end as well as the back end, as well as database, et cetera.

00:05:43: So why did you say we don't do a certain part of the solution everyone is needing,

00:05:49: I think you always have to look at the other side, like what's non-headless.

00:05:53: Headless just means that the render engine is decoupled from your business logic, I would say, if you want to phrase it like that.

00:06:02: That already brings a lot of advantages, but also disadvantages, because it adds more overhead to your project, right?

00:06:09: But on the other side also, if everything is tightly coupled together,

00:06:13: that also leads to problems down the line, especially in commerce projects that are not just focused on the web or one single storefront, where you might want to add a POS

00:06:25: channel at a point of sale, or you want to add a mobile app to your commerce stack, you're starting to get a bit frustrated because these platforms that have the render engine

00:06:38: integrated with their platform are not made

00:06:42: to be like that their services or business logic is exposed as an API.

00:06:47: You mostly need to add some plugins.

00:06:49: A good example is WooCommerce and WP Graph.

00:06:52: Then you have like all these things that are coming together.

00:06:55: Shopify of course is also an API, but it's more built for the theming and template rendering engine.

00:07:04: that's what we have had in mind when

00:07:06: we chose to go headless because our vision is an e-commerce stack or an e-commerce engine needs to be independent of the channel.

00:07:15: It just needs to expose certain capabilities via APIs that can be used from the outside.

00:07:21: And of course, there are things that are different with each channel, but there just needs to be a logic within your platform.

00:07:30: that is capable of handling these use cases, these things, like multi-channel experiences.

00:07:37: the Headless architecture opens up so many possibilities.

00:07:39: Like you can build blazingly fast storefronts.

00:07:42: You can build mobile apps.

00:07:44: You can build internet of things integrations into like variables or anything else.

00:07:51: We have seen so many crazy things already built with Vendure.

00:07:55: So that opens up like a...

00:07:57: a whole new universe of possibilities.

00:08:01: this idea of having different channels makes totally sense and probably the mobile app.

00:08:05: But when you open a shop, probably, 90 % of the cases need a regular storefront.

00:08:12: So does it mean that people have to build it themselves every time from scratch, which is a huge effort?

00:08:16: Or how do you solve that?

00:08:17: mean, it's a headless system.

00:08:18: So you're giving them the backend, but how do I get my storefront?

00:08:24: That's absolutely right.

00:08:25: 90 % don't need it, but we are not focused on these 90%.

00:08:28: I think that's important part.

00:08:31: We are focused on these 10 % or these 5 % who have that use case of having mobile apps in parallel with multiple storefronts for different regions.

00:08:42: We are not focused on these 90%.

00:08:44: But of course, I get your point that you need to start from scratch, of course.

00:08:48: But there are already great starter boilerplates out there.

00:08:54: But on the other hand, we saw the demand for, let's say, a unified solution that at least gives a starting point or an inspiration for developers to quickly get up to speed, like

00:09:08: hit the ground running basically, right?

00:09:10: And that's something that's on our roadmap for the next couple of months to build a sophisticated storefront that they can use as a template almost.

00:09:19: Or...

00:09:20: They can just take inspiration from it, copy parts of it.

00:09:24: that's the responsibility of us to provide them something like that.

00:09:28: I I think you have templates, right?

00:09:29: Storefront templates already.

00:09:31: Probably basic ones, but they exist, right?

00:09:32: Can you elaborate a bit about this?

00:09:34: Also the technology choices you give people for the storefront?

00:09:38: Yeah, basically with your storefront, you are completely independent in terms of technology.

00:09:44: You can choose whatever you want, fits your needs, whatever fits your skills.

00:09:48: I think that's also very important.

00:09:50: People always think about skills, but you also need to think about skill sets, or requirements and skill sets.

00:09:56: I think that's a different part because you always get pushed towards certain directions, like using Next.js or using something else.

00:10:04: But if you have a team full of Angular developers, that might not be the best option or route to go.

00:10:11: So we have starter or boilerplates, if you want to name it like that, for Angular, for Quick, for Remix.

00:10:22: That's pretty good, right?

00:10:23: Yeah, but you know, there's one big framework out there which is called Next.js, right?

00:10:29: And we are now, there needs to be bit of history.

00:10:34: Like, Venture is built on Node.js and Nest.js in the backend, like that's the backend framework.

00:10:42: And the Admin UI is built on Angular, right?

00:10:47: And Michael, my co-founder and our CTO, is an Angular lover.

00:10:51: He loves Angular, he thinks Angular is the best framework.

00:10:55: And that led to was that he never really touched React that much.

00:11:00: And we all know that Next.js and React are like, they are setting the benchmarks in front-end development right now.

00:11:09: They are the ones who have the highest adoption, the highest usage.

00:11:13: And he never really felt the importance to touching that because he was like really focused on

00:11:21: on Angular and the challenges.

00:11:24: But you have a remix starter kit, right?

00:11:26: It's React.

00:11:26: It's fine.

00:11:28: Let's talk about the technologies of your actual product.

00:11:34: Can you guide us a bit through the architecture?

00:11:36: You already mentioned the technologies, but maybe you can elaborate a bit more why you're using Nest with an S, not with an X, with Nest.js and the other technologies.

00:11:43: Maybe we can talk a bit about this.

00:11:45: Because this is when people use Vendure, they get a technology stack, right?

00:11:49: You give them a framework.

00:11:50: You give them a curated set of technologies.

00:11:52: You give them e-commerce features.

00:11:54: So what can people expect when they use Vendure?

00:11:59: So basically from the very basis, we are Node.js, a Node.js platform, right?

00:12:07: That's the engine that's underlying.

00:12:09: It's a great engine, developed great over the years, has its benefits, has its downsides, but overall I think it's something great.

00:12:17: And on top of that, we have like two central pillars in our product, which is on one side, the commerce engine.

00:12:27: which basically exposes two APIs, the shop and the admin API.

00:12:31: So one API for your storefront, one API for your management operations.

00:12:35: And then we have the admin UI, which is basically the interface for your users, for your admins, where you can view orders, customers, and do your operations, basically.

00:12:46: The admin UI is built on Angular.

00:12:49: I think we're using version 17 right now.

00:12:52: We always

00:12:52: trying to be as fast with delivering updates.

00:12:55: But of course, we are an enterprise software, so we feel the need for continuities.

00:13:00: It needs to be stable, it needs to be robust.

00:13:02: And that already implies that you cannot just hop on the latest version when it's coming out like the next day.

00:13:08: That's not working.

00:13:09: We are trying to bounce off of it.

00:13:11: In our commerce engine, we are using Nest.js And there are various different reasons why we chose that.

00:13:18: words about what NestJS is and why did you choose it?

00:13:24: Well, think Next.js is fairly popular, to be honest, in the JavaScript scene, I think.

00:13:29: right?

00:13:29: I think that's a different league in popularity.

00:13:32: Yeah, but I think that already that's not caused because it's like less popular.

00:13:38: I think it's just more people get started in front-end engineering or front-end development than back-end development.

00:13:44: Like back-end development is already a bit harder by default because you need to do databases and queues and caching and all that like nasty stuff that you don't have to do

00:13:54: with Next.js.

00:13:55: But yeah, NestJS is basically a framework that

00:14:00: already brings best practices into your code base, right?

00:14:05: I'm coming from a PHP, from a PHP universe.

00:14:09: I've worked a long time with Laravel, I've worked with Symfony 2, 3, 4, and all the other, like the newer ones, and I was always used to have like a framework where the best

00:14:19: practices were baked into it, like having a job queue

00:14:23: having controllers like the model view controller pattern, all these things.

00:14:28: And suddenly when you're going to the JavaScript world, you're basically left with a blank sheet of paper.

00:14:33: You need to start from scratch.

00:14:35: You can put everything together how you want it.

00:14:39: Exactly, with Express.

00:14:40: which is basically an MVC framework kind of, which just handles the controller part.

00:14:47: Put your code here.

00:14:48: Enjoy.

00:14:49: You can put it anywhere as long as your imports are working, it works.

00:14:53: But that's not best practice because once your code base grows, it's not maintainable anymore, especially when you have more developers.

00:15:02: And I just previously said that it's very important for us that we are engineered at scale and that scale also means team size.

00:15:08: So we thought we need to have a framework that delivers these best practices by default for ORM implementation, for...

00:15:17: job queues for caching, for scheduled tasks, scheduled jobs, things like that.

00:15:24: NestJS delivers a really, really sophisticated platform that's really stable.

00:15:29: It's in version 10 or 11 right now already.

00:15:32: Sorry if I'm not specific on the versions because that's not my daily doing, that's Michael's.

00:15:40: But NestJS delivers a great platform.

00:15:44: which also enabled our architecture basically because Vendure itself, the core is like really, it's very customizable.

00:15:53: Basically everything in Vendure is customizable and customization happens with Vendure plugins.

00:16:02: And now the great thing is there that a Vendure plugin is nothing more than a NestJS module.

00:16:10: So basically everything that it can do with NestJS, you can do within a Vendure plugin.

00:16:16: What does it mean?

00:16:18: You can just utilize a few things of Vendure, but you can build your own business logic within Vendure based on NestJS.

00:16:27: So if you need new API endpoints or like REST endpoints, if you would need them, could be, you add a controller.

00:16:35: If you need like new mutations, new queries, new anything,

00:16:40: You don't have to rely on what we thought is good.

00:16:45: No, can think, you can just look at the NestJS docs and see what like 60, 70, 90 or 80,000 developers thought is good and best practice.

00:16:55: And I think that's also quite a difference to other platforms in that space.

00:17:01: We are trying really hard to not reinvent the wheel, right?

00:17:05: We just try to put together the things

00:17:09: that have proven themselves.

00:17:13: We don't like to bet on our own intelligence, or only on our own intelligence.

00:17:20: Exactly, exactly, you have so many options to go wrong.

00:17:23: I actually have a question here for NestJS.

00:17:25: mean, you elaborate a lot on the technology, on the tech advantages and so on and so forth, but usually tech is serving a business purpose behind that.

00:17:33: So how would you put...

00:17:36: the benefits of having architecture based on NestJS, like modular architecture, how would you put that into business benefits?

00:17:43: Yeah, really easy to be honest because, you know, I've built projects myself with my team, not only as an agency owner, but as a CTO of an e-commerce startup before, like a really

00:17:55: fast growing e-commerce startup actually.

00:17:57: one thing is always very important.

00:17:59: How fast can I ramp up a developer from getting started to being productive?

00:18:05: And what input is needed from a...

00:18:08: like a management side in terms of training, docs and resources And with NestJS you have a really, really large community.

00:18:18: You have great resources, tutorials, like written form on YouTube.

00:18:25: You have community servers where you can join.

00:18:29: So basically what we are doing

00:18:32: What we always saying before you learn Vendure, please learn NestJS because then you know already 80 % of Vendure.

00:18:39: And that is not only a great business benefit for all people using Vendure, that's also a great benefit for us because we don't need to write crazy amounts of documentation because

00:18:52: that is already maintained and conserved in another area.

00:18:56: And I think that's very important for businesses actually.

00:19:00: also, what do you think of team size?

00:19:02: Like basically, modular architecture has the benefit that you can have larger teams working on the same code base.

00:19:08: What do you think is a healthy team size to work on a Vendure backend?

00:19:13: I mean, I would take out the front end, right?

00:19:15: Because that's very project specific.

00:19:17: You could have one front end, 10 front ends.

00:19:18: But let's focus on the backend parts.

00:19:20: Well, that always depends on scope and size of project and of course on requirements.

00:19:26: But usually, as I've said, we're very enterprisey.

00:19:31: Our use cases are mostly very integrated into third party systems like ERP system, PIM systems and stuff like that.

00:19:39: So usually I would say you have like a team of four to six or seven developers just working on the Vendure backend.

00:19:46: One or two that are very much focused on

00:19:49: the Vendure part, like building admin UI extensions, extending the API, building custom order processes, things like that.

00:19:58: And the other ones you could split up into like more into the integration part, like building these bridges, these connectors to your third party systems.

00:20:07: And usually what we also think what makes sense is to have a separate engineer that's just worrying about testing because writing tests is crucial.

00:20:18: especially when you have so many moving parts, know, like we are API driven, that means you have moving parts, like each module, each moving part has a, they have a contract

00:20:25: which is the API.

00:20:27: So you need to have someone who needs to check if the contract is still in place or if someone is not complying anymore.

00:20:35: And that's basically end-to-end testing, unit testing.

00:20:38: So that's usually a very good team size.

00:20:41: that is working on Vendure, but we already have seen like 20, 30, 40 developers working on Vendure projects.

00:20:48: And the great thing is, because it's so modular, you have Vendure plugins, you could have like little teams, little squads that are responsible for single Vendure plugins.

00:20:59: And as they behave like NestJS modules, you have a clear contract between these modules.

00:21:04: Like it's clear how...

00:21:06: You expose services to other modules, how you import things from other modules.

00:21:11: That's the great part when NestJS and Venture is coming together so good because it's just beneficial for both sides.

00:21:19: Okay, so I see that NestJS or the whole architecture is basically, it's a monolithic application, but it's very modular.

00:21:27: It's following or adheres to solid principles, I would say.

00:21:31: How would you agree or disagree with the following statement?

00:21:35: Microservices has as many advantages because it said so many teams can work in parallel.

00:21:41: You can work on different areas without having merge conflicts or the other problems due to

00:21:47: too many people working on the same code base.

00:21:49: Actually, what you're saying is that you can have a monolithic modular application with exactly the same benefits, because within the application, have clear boundaries, you have

00:21:58: contracts, and so on and so forth.

00:22:00: if you look at that, there would not be any of these advantages only applying to microservices, but they are fully also true for the kind of application we are looking at

00:22:11: here at Vendure.

00:22:12: Yeah, that's very true.

00:22:14: think there's actually the evolution of a, like there's a monolith, then you have, we call it modulith, a modular monolith, and the next level is microservices.

00:22:26: And now there's another great thing, I mean, I NestJS to be honest, because when we're starting out with a modulith, we think that fits 99 % of the use cases, because

00:22:36: microservices, they add another order of complexity to your project where,

00:22:42: Now so many companies who have started going at the route in 2015, 2016, or maybe earlier, which are not able to manage that complexity right now because it's overwhelming

00:22:52: basically.

00:22:53: You have so many APIs and so many things that you need to worry about.

00:22:57: Latency is a big, big problem in microservices architecture.

00:23:03: Having everything in sync is really hard.

00:23:06: But let's take the use case.

00:23:08: You have built a Vendure plugin.

00:23:11: That is integrating your ERP system or third party system into a Vendure And it does it by exposing certain API routes to an ERP to call some webhooks, stuff like that, right?

00:23:28: At the beginning stage, that's baked into Vendure as a Vendure plugin and it's directly calling these services of Vendure.

00:23:35: In case you think, I got so many problems here, I need a microservice for that.

00:23:40: It's because I'm running into issues because of memory management, I need to scale it differently, I need to have more instances of that running.

00:23:49: You could just use that Vendure plugin, remove the Vendure decorator, and basically what you have is an NestJS module.

00:23:59: So what you do is you just spin up an NestJS project.

00:24:03: copy your module from the Vendure project to an NestJS project, everything works out of the box and you have a microservice.

00:24:11: Right?

00:24:12: We're just copying the code.

00:24:15: And that's awesome.

00:24:16: right?

00:24:16: Because once you started with NestJS and go and Rust and so on, the other way is usually not possible.

00:24:24: Naturally.

00:24:25: IT in so many areas.

00:24:27: Like it's mostly a one-way street.

00:24:29: And I think that's where it's important to just make the right decisions and not be driven by hypes and by like some people who have very strong opinions, but just think about your

00:24:41: own requirements, your own restrictions, your own constraints.

00:24:43: David, I think we could talk lot about the technical.

00:24:46: You mentioned so many topics I would love to dig into with you.

00:24:49: But let's talk about things that are a higher level.

00:24:52: So, Vendure is not only a great architecture, it's also a shop system at the end of the day.

00:24:58: And you said it's intended for people, for development teams, right?

00:25:02: I mean, for teams who want to program, that's not possible with closed systems like Shopify, obviously.

00:25:07: how do you imagine your ICP, your perfect type of customer profile?

00:25:13: What kind of product is Is B2C, B2B?

00:25:15: Is it small teams, big teams?

00:25:17: Is it enterprises, is it startups?

00:25:20: So what's your thought on this?

00:25:22: Yeah, so we've clearly defined our ICP because I think it's very important for go-to-market.

00:25:29: We are focusing on enterprises in like the higher level of mid-size area or like this classic upmarket area.

00:25:38: Usually we say it's about a hundred million in annual revenue and upwards.

00:25:46: Yeah, I know because it's, yeah.

00:25:49: the small ones who cannot pay our license.

00:25:52: I think what is revenue is for me is a vanity metric to be honest.

00:25:58: Of course revenue implies certain budgets that you have in your company for your IT team for marketing.

00:26:04: So you need to have at least...

00:26:05: size, right, and has good IT, but he would still say it's your customers.

00:26:09: Exactly.

00:26:10: So we are more, we are focusing more on these quality metrics.

00:26:15: And for me, a quality metric is if a company is like really serious about their digital transformation.

00:26:21: So if I get a signal from a company, hey, we are taking the digital transformation really seriously.

00:26:27: And we want to, we have like really complex digital commerce needs, then it's naturally a good fit with, with Vendure.

00:26:35: Because we are open source.

00:26:37: because we have not hundreds of thousands of dollars every year in license fees.

00:26:44: It's also appealing to smaller companies, but as I've said, you need to have a budget.

00:26:50: You need to have some internal IT resources, capabilities.

00:26:55: Yes.

00:26:55: If you need six, seven, eight developers and the product owner and the tester, it's obviously a bigger budget, right?

00:27:00: This is not something you would do with 50,000 per year.

00:27:02: Is it more like B2C use cases or B2B or marketplaces?

00:27:06: What kind of types of e-commerce projects should look at Vendure?

00:27:13: Yeah, like we have two like areas that are very interesting to us right now is it's B2B.

00:27:20: We see a lot of traction in B2B.

00:27:22: We have some great projects that are built in the B2B space right now.

00:27:25: And also multi-vendor marketplaces.

00:27:27: That's also an area that's got, yeah, has quite some growth actually right now.

00:27:34: Predominantly in other areas than Europe, but anyway, these models are like really,

00:27:40: interesting right now to people, to companies.

00:27:43: We also think that D2C or B2C companies are like interesting for us, but only if their business model is not just like the classic D2C playbook, you know?

00:27:59: if you're selling socks in an online shop, go to Shopify.

00:28:03: if you need the arm, in B2B, you have pretty advanced, super hard features like quotation, approval management, hierarchies, organizations, price per customer, price per customer

00:28:13: group, all this stuff.

00:28:14: that something that the vendor can deliver or is it always customer development in the framework?

00:28:18: Right now, many projects and many companies actually built some of these things manually.

00:28:24: mean, something like role-based access control or quotation processes or configure price quotes, something like that.

00:28:33: can use parts of a Vendure to actually achieve that, but there is some customization that's needed.

00:28:40: We are right now working on a very, very sophisticated B2B suite that covers basically

00:28:46: Cool!

00:28:46: all features that's out there from organization architecture, like organization companies and customers, these hierarchies to different login methodologies like single sign-on with

00:29:00: Azure Active Directory.

00:29:01: customer specific pricing, such an important part to get that right.

00:29:05: You have so many different options to do that.

00:29:07: Like you can have a matrix.

00:29:10: which crosses your products with your customers.

00:29:12: All of these things will ship a B2B suite that consists of multiple smaller plugins, multiple smaller modules that you can then pick and choose for your use case to adopt.

00:29:26: But that will be an enterprise plugin because that also leads, exactly.

00:29:33: already, like I already had multiple times.

00:29:36: from agencies or from other like CTOs, why are we shipping certain features in the open source?

00:29:43: Why it's not paid?

00:29:44: And I said, yeah, that's because most of these decisions were done by Michael and Michael is a developer and very open.

00:29:53: He builds in public, he lives for the open source and he always thought about giving back but that's of course not how you build a company.

00:30:03: It's probably also project-driven, right?

00:30:04: mean, initially, the software was probably developed together with customers, right?

00:30:09: And then you probably, guess, I'm guessing, right?

00:30:11: customer wants Feature X, so we built Feature X at the core.

00:30:14: Actually, Vendure was built for the family business of Michael, my co-founder.

00:30:19: Basically, in the scratchy own itch style, he wanted something good, that's TypeScript based, NestJS, Headless, didn't find anything.

00:30:29: Let's build it myself.

00:30:30: And out of that, like Vendure originated basically.

00:30:35: How many projects are using Vendor right now?

00:30:37: Do know that?

00:30:39: is it...

00:30:40: Have you any numbers except the NPM downloads or something?

00:30:44: I can give you just a rough estimation to be honest why we currently don't have any telemetry built in.

00:30:50: That's something on the roadmap for version three that we're a roadmap of telemetry system to better analyze the usage and scale of each like the Vendure projects.

00:31:04: But we estimate that we have around like 10,000 installations out there, 10 to 15,000 installations and about like

00:31:14: Yeah, yeah, it is a lot, but

00:31:19: How many shops, how many real shops that you could go and buy something?

00:31:24: That's the question.

00:31:24: mean, there are so many popping up.

00:31:26: just, by accident, in June or in July, I discovered that Breitling is using Vendure for their China web shop.

00:31:35: By accident.

00:31:37: Yeah.

00:31:39: Of course, that's open source.

00:31:41: Exactly.

00:31:42: So we're working on that.

00:31:44: We, of course, get some feedback from certain, now with our license change that we did.

00:31:51: changed?

00:31:51: Can you explain a bit about the license?

00:31:54: We basically had an MIT license, very permissive license, which is good for everyone.

00:32:02: Exactly, and that's a problem.

00:32:04: And now we have a GPL, which is a copyleft license, which is also used by various other champions and giants in this scene, like WordPress is GPL, Pimpcore is GPL, but it's

00:32:18: copyleft.

00:32:19: That already implies certain problems for enterprises.

00:32:25: for us, it's the perfect mix of balancing commercial interests with being open source and truly open source.

00:32:32: Not just inventing a new wacky open source license for ourselves that's kind of open source.

00:32:40: GPL is OSI approved.

00:32:42: It is an open source license.

00:32:44: But it gave us the opportunity to actually talk with our enterprise users.

00:32:51: Now so many companies are reaching out that are saying, hey, we read about your license change.

00:32:56: I think we might need to talk.

00:32:57: And I think, wow, what?

00:32:59: You're using our platform?

00:33:01: That's crazy, actually.

00:33:02: So it basically did what we wanted it to be.

00:33:06: And it doesn't hurt the community.

00:33:08: Actually, when we changed the license, we had the highest month of contributions afterwards.

00:33:14: So it didn't hurt the open source project in any case or in any way.

00:33:17: Because I think, you know, in the open source it's always about longevity of a project and sustainability of a project.

00:33:26: Using open source project is basically a bet, a bet that these maintainers do that forever, or at least for a certain amount of time in the future.

00:33:35: And with our GPL relicensing

00:33:40: We communicated that very transparent in our blog articles and newsletters and everything.

00:33:46: I think it sent a very strong signal to all the people working with Vendure, hey, there's really something cooking.

00:33:53: I think they take it really seriously.

00:33:55: That makes sense to us.

00:33:56: It's a strong and a positive signal to people that Vendure is becoming bigger and also commercially successful in the future, which of course results into

00:34:09: more features in the open source, more ecosystem, like a great NextJS storefront boilerplate, all the things that we are basically our open source users are also

00:34:20: benefiting from.

00:34:22: Let's dig deeper here into the commercial success of Vendure, as you just said.

00:34:26: How would you describe the business model of Vendure and how do you want to monetize in the future?

00:34:30: It's really hard to describe because we kind of follow the open core approach, but not only open core, right?

00:34:38: So we have a mix between dual license and open core.

00:34:42: That means we have the community edition, which is open source, which is the foundation for our product.

00:34:51: On top of that, we have enterprise editions, which are

00:34:54: licensed under our own commercial license that opens up various different options for redistribution, which is important for enterprise users especially.

00:35:04: But that's not just a different license.

00:35:06: There are also different plugins already included, like audit logging, SSO, advanced role-based access control, observability plugins, like open telemetry, that are very

00:35:18: important for enterprises.

00:35:19: What is very important there is that

00:35:21: when we are building an enterprise feature, we always think about what APIs do we need to open to achieve that?

00:35:28: Like what things do we need to change in the core to build that enterprise feature?

00:35:34: And what we do basically is we open up these APIs, these new capabilities in the open source edition for everyone and then build our own enterprise feature on top.

00:35:45: And that's the great thing about it because both sides are winning.

00:35:48: We are winning.

00:35:50: because we can build an enterprise feature.

00:35:52: Our open source community is winning because they get new capabilities and our enterprise users are winning because they get more out of the box, like greater features, better

00:36:01: features.

00:36:02: So that's like one side, that's like classic license selling on multi-year agreements in best case.

00:36:08: In worst case, it's just one year.

00:36:10: But we're in talks now with a of companies in that area.

00:36:13: And then we have a...

00:36:16: Currently very strong services related like revenue stream, course like dedicated support, especially for built and consulting That's one thing that we Where we know it's not that

00:36:28: scalable, but I think it's very important for the adoption in the enterprise segment right now So we just push through that and do and we love to do it actually because it's like

00:36:38: really interesting

00:36:39: but usually very profitable.

00:36:41: And that's also fine.

00:36:43: Yeah, that's basically funding a lot of what we do.

00:36:45: That's funding basically the Vendure conference this year, which is quite expensive to some degree.

00:36:52: yeah.

00:36:55: And then we have the App Store, or we call it the Vendure hub, our marketplace for plugins, which is right now like very little.

00:37:03: It's maybe doing a low four figure revenue per month.

00:37:10: That is thing like like you're selling currently small features like wishlist right for like some bucks per month I mean can that scale up?

00:37:20: no, but the idea is that that's the beta phase right now.

00:37:22: We're just testing because we built it ourselves.

00:37:25: built like the Vendure marketplace is powered by a Vendure instance in the background we have built a subscription plugin that is now also we always use our own stuff and we

00:37:36: discover also problems with using that.

00:37:39: But the idea is basically to build an ecosystem where we have like an assortment of

00:37:44: First party plugins that are developed by the Vendure core team and third party plugins by Vendure partners.

00:37:51: And we wanna give people the opportunity to basically just make time to market much shorter by just buying stuff because at the end everything's a make or buy decision.

00:38:04: But we also want to build like a new revenue stream almost for agencies like.

00:38:11: build a plugin, build it in a way that you can share it and then sell it through the Vendure marketplace.

00:38:16: Maybe there are some people who might need it.

00:38:18: And that's basically a project that we are currently testing.

00:38:24: are having already users from the US, even from Mongolia.

00:38:31: So from Asia to US, everything's in there.

00:38:34: And we're gonna ramp up.

00:38:37: the operations and the builds and increase the offering next year by a lot

00:38:44: so you basically try to build a big ecosystem where everyone can benefit from.

00:38:50: Exactly.

00:38:51: And for the integrations of the plugins for our marketplace, of course, the focus is not on providing 100 different variations of a wishlist plugin.

00:38:59: No.

00:39:00: For me, it's the focus to open up integrations to third party platforms.

00:39:06: And, you know, I've lived myself in the commerce world for several years and we always have problems with out-to-date plugins to...

00:39:15: an SAP or a Sage ERP system or a PIM system.

00:39:20: And it's not possible for us as a bootstrap company to build all these integrations and to keep them up to date.

00:39:27: That's just not possible.

00:39:29: And that's why we want our partners to build these integrations because there are certain agencies that are always working with SAP, always working with an Oracle ERP or whatever,

00:39:38: and they build these plugins, they keep it up to date.

00:39:42: But then they should also be allowed to sell it in on money because somebody needs to the development.

00:39:46: Right.

00:39:47: And that's our approach to the marketplace because there's nothing more annoying than installing a plugin for an ERP system that connects your shop to an ERP system or

00:39:58: warehouse management system, which is crucial.

00:40:00: It's very important.

00:40:02: And it doesn't work.

00:40:03: It just doesn't work.

00:40:04: There's something not syncing or something is out to date.

00:40:08: That's a pain.

00:40:09: And we don't want that.

00:40:10: a thought here from an agency perspective.

00:40:14: mean, agencies earn quite a lot of money with each project, much more than you earn per project.

00:40:20: So usually for these agencies, the marketing effect is bigger than the super small revenue stream.

00:40:27: Plus, when they sell it in your app store, they probably also have warranty issues, et cetera.

00:40:31: So I think you should definitely also have the offer to put

00:40:35: add-ons plugins in your app store under MIT license, because just the fact that customers are installing some plugin of them agency gives a big branding effect for the agency.

00:40:44: mean, is a lot of the world, right?

00:40:46: mean, there's this one agency called Sparse, I think, that everybody knows.

00:40:49: Everybody knows that one.

00:40:51: And they just put 1,000 plugins for free.

00:40:53: so you cannot, yeah, every Laravel project has something.

00:40:56: The rest of the PHP world, there's other things.

00:40:59: There are some names of single people that everybody of us know.

00:41:01: I do not want to repeat here.

00:41:03: It's marketing effect is...

00:41:05: pretty big.

00:41:06: And I think that has a higher value than owning some bucks, but that's just my thought.

00:41:11: Absolutely, but we are not excluding open source plugins, right?

00:41:15: If you look on our Vendure hub site, there are paid plugins and free plugins.

00:41:21: The one who builds it decides.

00:41:23: Of course, there are warranty issues that could come up with things like that, but we think the decision should be made by the one who builds it, not by us, and we wanna give

00:41:33: them the opportunity.

00:41:34: That's it, basically.

00:41:36: we are talking now about using Vendure.

00:41:38: Let's continue there.

00:41:40: What's your best practices, how to integrate Vendure into enterprise architectures?

00:41:47: Is there a pre-built kind of integrating layer or is it like basically depending upon the company which you're building for or what have you seen in the past, what would you

00:41:57: recommend?

00:41:57: We have seen a lot of different ways and approaches to integrating third party systems, mainly due to how these enterprise IT systems are hosted, because you could have Microsoft

00:42:12: Dynamics in the cloud, but you could also have an old Sage ERP instance on premise hosted on the bare metal server in their office, It's a crazy range of different, like,

00:42:24: arrangements.

00:42:25: So with with Vendure we're delivering an async approach to importing syncing data via our job queue.

00:42:35: That's also best practice like dispatching jobs either scheduled internally in Vendure or triggered by a webhook that is coming from the outside.

00:42:45: That's basically the the best practice.

00:42:48: You could either apply a push or pull principle

00:42:51: We saw people that are pushing data from the ERP or the external systems into a Vendure through an extended admin API or custom REST API endpoints, but we also saw

00:43:02: implementations where a webhook triggers an import and then a new job gets dispatched on our queue internally and then the logic for fetching new products or syncing a new order

00:43:13: or whatever takes place.

00:43:16: That's good, but that's a point-to-point integration, right?

00:43:20: And once you have like a lot of different enterprise systems like a CRM a CDP a PIM system an ERP that could get quite messy I'm coming from a mechatronics engineering background

00:43:33: and in the automotive industry you have the Kanbus system basically the bus system that drives all the cars and I really like that approach you have a standardized

00:43:44: like bus system where many like attendees or slaves can like consume messages on that bus system and publish messages.

00:43:54: And every consumer decides whether I want to process that message or not.

00:44:01: And you could also apply it to enterprise architecture.

00:44:04: And that's something that's called IPaaS.

00:44:07: So basically integration platform as a service.

00:44:10: And that's basically enough.

00:44:11: There's no difference.

00:44:12: It's also called enterprise service bus.

00:44:15: And I really liked that idea.

00:44:17: So basically Vendure just becomes another consumer and publisher of messages.

00:44:22: And you basically build one integration to your enterprise service bus.

00:44:26: And in Vendure, you build a logic like which messages you want to consume or not.

00:44:32: And also which messages you want to publish.

00:44:35: And then all your consumers can.

00:44:38: basically feed data into Vendure or get data out of Vendure.

00:44:42: we currently, there's a big project happening right now in the UK where they are doing some integration project with an enterprise service bus.

00:44:50: And it's great.

00:44:52: they basically with one integration of the service bus between mentioned service bus, they can attach it to their ERP system, to their PIM system.

00:45:00: They are now planning a CDP system and you.

00:45:04: basically just have to connect your system to the bus and not to Vendure itself.

00:45:08: And I think that's my recommendation for companies who have the resources to do that.

00:45:15: Right?

00:45:15: Because it's always a resource topic and that's another very important topic which also feeds into our ICP.

00:45:26: When I'm having a discovery call with a client, I'm always trying to figure out if a digital commerce project is for them.

00:45:33: a cost center or in an investment, right?

00:45:37: That's a different mindset.

00:45:40: And if somebody is talking about cost and expensive and blah, then I'm by far not that interested if he talks about, we are setting a return on investment on that, we're

00:45:51: thinking about a five-year plan, and note that that's also very important, and I think that's a very...

00:46:00: important part of a quality metric for us in the ICP.

00:46:04: Yeah, good.

00:46:05: these calls.

00:46:06: that like, because you obviously have a lot of knowledge about e-commerce, about technology.

00:46:10: actually, if I would start a new project, I would definitely love to have a talk with you.

00:46:13: So how can people talk to you?

00:46:15: They can reach out on LinkedIn, on Twitter, or if they reach out via the contact form on our website, they also get to me.

00:46:24: Yeah, I love e-commerce, I love these enterprise architectures, and the great thing, what I love about that, I'm always trying to similar concepts in the engineering and

00:46:36: mechatronics and industrial world, because so many issues have been solved there already.

00:46:42: and I'm trying to apply them in the digital world.

00:46:45: And that's basically my thinking.

00:46:48: And I think that already made some projects a success.

00:46:53: Of course, some a failure too,

00:46:55: could you please explain a bit about hosting options?

00:46:58: let's say somebody is building a project, right?

00:46:59: It runs locally, or I think NPM, NPME and NPM run dev and it's running.

00:47:06: good.

00:47:07: But then we need to operate it.

00:47:08: And hosting is like, what are the hosting options and also how would you do it with different countries?

00:47:12: Like let's say you want to have a shop in Germany, in France and in US.

00:47:16: So how would you, what would you tell people?

00:47:18: Yeah.

00:47:19: Hosting options are a big range.

00:47:21: Actually, I'm hosting a workshop at our Vendure conference this year on deploying Vendure and how to host it.

00:47:29: basically you have to...

00:47:31: No.

00:47:32: when you talk about business model, did not mention, because that's the typical open source business model, right?

00:47:35: You put some, like the Vercel model, right?

00:47:37: You have Next.js, you have done hosting for Next.js, but that's not what you're doing, correct?

00:47:41: if you look at the nature of our product, we are very code driven.

00:47:44: Our configurations happens in TypeScript and that already implies so many problems with having a cloud hosted offering.

00:47:52: Of course we could build another Vercel like thing, but there are so many options out there.

00:47:58: It's like building another chat client like WhatsApp.

00:48:03: If we want to build a cloud offering, it should be like really unique and must have some USPs.

00:48:09: Otherwise we don't do it because there are better ones out there.

00:48:13: So usually I'm a big fan of hosting on bare metal servers, to be honest.

00:48:21: Hetzner, I love Hetzner.

00:48:23: I think you know DHH, the creator of Ruby and Rails.

00:48:28: I love his approach to hosting because it's not that complicated.

00:48:34: Like build your Docker images.

00:48:37: create a Docker swarm or use Docker compose, Docker compose up and let's go.

00:48:42: It's not that complicated.

00:48:43: So you can start really easy with Vendure, just use the Docker files that we give you in our docs and you can spin it up.

00:48:53: There's always of course a build process that needs to happen, usually with the build script that we provide or you just have your own webpack configuration.

00:49:03: And then you basically decide whether you want to go like bare metal as I described, or you want to use a public cloud like AWS, or what you also see a lot is like these delivery

00:49:13: platforms, full stack cloud platforms like a railway or North flank or these ones that pass basic platform as a service, right?

00:49:23: Heroku, yeah.

00:49:24: just a Node.js application, right?

00:49:25: You can probably deploy anywhere without any issues.

00:49:31: That's probably not what I recommend people.

00:49:33: No, of course not.

00:49:34: I mean depending on your traffic and where you want to serve but Absolutely or for an internal or for an internal shop system when you are selling Hardware Secondhand hardware

00:49:48: to your employees.

00:49:49: Why should you host it on a public server just hosted internally?

00:49:53: Could be could be away.

00:49:55: But anyway, you've asked for for for larger enterprises countries.

00:50:00: Yeah

00:50:00: also, mean, what's your, mean, I'm putting some Node.js application on a PaaS or server is not the biggest deal, but how do you scale internationally?

00:50:09: You have several shops in Europe, maybe one in US.

00:50:14: yeah.

00:50:14: So usually the problem is never the application itself.

00:50:19: It's usually the cache and the database, right?

00:50:22: Because we prefer Postgres for our database, but we have integration from MySQL, SQLite, and also Mongo.

00:50:32: It's TypeORM every database is supported by TypeORM correct?

00:50:36: TypeORM.

00:50:40: so usually what we do is we just tell people, let's say we take the case you have North America and Europe, just deploy your, like, deploy your, because Vendure itself, when you

00:50:53: deploy it, you have two instances of it.

00:50:55: You have the worker and the server.

00:50:56: The server is basically serving the incoming requests from the public web, and the worker is a separate process.

00:51:03: that can be scaled independently from the server that is basically handing all these asynchronous background processes, right?

00:51:11: Synching data, pushing data to different systems, stuff like that.

00:51:16: So we usually say, look, just deploy your server, your server instance, your Docker container, something else, deploy it in those regions where your users are as near as

00:51:29: possible.

00:51:30: But don't go crazy with it.

00:51:31: Set up your database depending on where your headquarter of your business is because if you have a business within the EU, you might want to keep the database also within the EU.

00:51:42: Maybe set up some read replica in the second or third region where you are.

00:51:49: The faster read operations because these are the most important ones usually.

00:51:56: When you write data, there's no problem when it takes like 500 milliseconds or 700 milliseconds longer than reading data.

00:52:03: That's not the issue mostly.

00:52:05: And.

00:52:05: The second step optimizing for speed and performance is to use, like when you use Next.js, use the edge cloud basically, use the edge functions of them.

00:52:17: Don't send requests directly from your client to Vendure, but rather go through an API endpoint of Next.js, for example, and then route it to Vendure.

00:52:29: Because then you're able to cache it directly at the user's region or at the user's edge, basically.

00:52:35: That's speed question.

00:52:36: mean, also from a business logic point of view, let's say you have different payment methods in France than you have in Austria.

00:52:44: Your company from Austria, right?

00:52:45: So how would you do that?

00:52:46: Is it the same code base?

00:52:47: You have some switcher somewhere?

00:52:48: would it be two code bases?

00:52:51: you just have different channels for these regions.

00:52:54: And you can just activate, you have a channel for example for the US, a channel for France, or you make a channel for the EU, and then you could just say, okay, in this

00:53:03: channel in North America you use PayPal and Stripe, and for the EU you use Molly and Klarna, whatever.

00:53:12: So that's a built-in feature, everything's channel aware.

00:53:16: The channel is a database entity, right?

00:53:17: And then you can have foreign keys from your payment methods, say that payment method in the channel.

00:53:22: And you just sent it from the front end, that's important.

00:53:24: So you have a channel token, you just set it on your front end and Vendure knows, that request is coming from the US, that request is coming from the EU or from France or

00:53:34: whatever.

00:53:35: David, I have one more question about the business model.

00:53:38: So we need to go one step back.

00:53:39: So what you're building here is a business with multiple revenue streams.

00:53:43: And I can imagine it's very attractive also for external investors.

00:53:47: For what I've seen, I think you don't have any seed funding.

00:53:50: Could you just elaborate a little bit on why not?

00:53:52: I mean, this could actually be a very good case for investors.

00:53:55: Yeah, of course, that's what we thought also end of 2023.

00:54:00: So basically, we were in the process, we started raising February, March this year, and had three term sheets by the end of May, roughly.

00:54:14: But yeah, it's good, there's the but is always, there's always something that's not

00:54:22: like you thought it would be at the beginning.

00:54:25: And my co-founder and I, we are thinking long-term, right?

00:54:30: For us, it's not just about growing really fast.

00:54:33: We wanna have impact.

00:54:34: And we love the open source.

00:54:37: are software engineers.

00:54:38: We wanna be there in 20 years and are still in the scene.

00:54:43: And Vendure should become an evergreen that should live there.

00:54:49: Is it a hundred million business at that point?

00:54:51: Maybe, if not, also not a problem for us.

00:54:54: If it's serving our users and our customers and it's doing a good job, we are happy, So we never had that vision of building a hundred million business that much.

00:55:09: just was pushed into us by the VCs because we get so many inbound inquiries.

00:55:16: Yeah.

00:55:17: As you can see, I would like to invest into you, obviously, because it's growing.

00:55:20: It's great.

00:55:22: Great feelings, great enthusiasm.

00:55:26: Obvious use case.

00:55:26: we stopped the round and why we killed all these endeavors into getting funding was that everyone said to us, look.

00:55:37: If I look at the Headless Commerce space, almost everyone is cloud hosted, is a software as a service platform, or at least has a cloud offering.

00:55:47: You guys want to tell me that a cloud offering is not what your product fits.

00:55:51: Either you push your product more into the SaaS side of things, like having a cloud-hosted offering as the primary product, and the open source thing is basically a byproduct,

00:56:03: like...

00:56:04: almost the waste of your daily doing is the open source product.

00:56:09: That's what the narrative was when we were talking with the VCs.

00:56:13: And at the beginning of February, we sat down and said, we have a vision where we are in control, where the open source is the center of everything of what we're doing, and we

00:56:27: won't bend our vision just to get funding.

00:56:30: And in April,

00:56:32: or the beginning of May, sat in the office, Michael and me sat in the office, and we were thinking, like, how can we change things to be more attractive for VCs to get into the

00:56:42: next stage?

00:56:43: And suddenly we realized we are just doing what we would have never wanted to be, basically.

00:56:50: We are becoming something where we said we don't want to be.

00:56:54: And that's what we realized, basically, no, that's not the right path for us right now.

00:57:01: And we just said, look, it's fine, we just stop it.

00:57:04: We just tell them honestly what we think.

00:57:07: I believe in honesty and being public and being transparent.

00:57:12: We said to them, look, we wanna bootstrap the next 12 months to prove that our model works.

00:57:19: And if you're still interested in 12 months into our way of doing things, there's nothing stopping you from giving us money.

00:57:28: that will make them really nervous.

00:57:30: know that if you tell, no, I don't know what your money, let's talk again in one year.

00:57:33: That's exactly what they usually tell you, not what you tell them.

00:57:36: the great thing is, Vendure is backed by the digital agency that I founded five years ago.

00:57:43: So we are doing things like really, exactly, exactly, we're independent.

00:57:50: want to give you an analogy here.

00:57:51: It's like with a microservice example.

00:57:53: When you have a modelizing application, you can always spin out microservices.

00:57:58: But not the other way back.

00:57:59: If you have a microservice different languages, you cannot insource them.

00:58:03: Same with companies.

00:58:04: If you have bootstrap company, you can always take money.

00:58:07: But if you took the rocket fuel, hmm.

00:58:10: then it's hard to return back to become a bootstrap company.

00:58:15: David, last question for today.

00:58:17: I think it's already over an hour we're talking now and you mentioned the conference several times.

00:58:22: And I think people who listen to this may want to meet you in person and maybe you can say a few words about it.

00:58:28: I hope it's not sold out already.

00:58:29: That would be very unlucky, but maybe you can say a few words about the conference and what your plans are.

00:58:34: Absolutely.

00:58:34: mean, it's not sold out because we just announced it an hour ago publicly, but I already got like 10 notifications of ticket sales or something the last hour.

00:58:45: So basically it's a conference style event, two days in our office in Vienna.

00:58:51: We have a very nice office in the center of Vienna, Altbau style, really nice area.

00:58:56: And we have a separate event room, meetup room there because we also want to like...

00:59:02: give the tech scene in Vienna a bit more momentum in the future to host more meetups and stuff.

00:59:08: So yeah, it's a two day event.

00:59:09: First day is classic conference style day.

00:59:13: We have talks by me and my co-founder.

00:59:18: We have two community talks of our, like some really long-term users of Vendure.

00:59:22: And we have also four lightning talks from really excellent speakers from great guys out of the open source world.

00:59:31: I can already announce one, one of the founders of Sentry, I think one of the greatest businesses in observability and generally, yeah, and we also have another one lined up

00:59:46: because that's the benefit of open source, know.

00:59:50: People love to speak about what they're doing.

00:59:52: That's the first day, we have everything covered, lunch, drinks in the evening, it's a great day, but everything's kept to 50 in person.

01:00:01: Like 15 person tickets, just 50 people in person.

01:00:04: There will be a live stream for free for everyone.

01:00:08: Just need to buy a free ticket that we can send you the link.

01:00:11: And the second day are two master classes that are paid.

01:00:16: Michael will talk about advanced enterprise architectures with Vendure.

01:00:21: So basically what we talk about, like really large applications, how you structure your code, how you define responsibilities and.

01:00:29: and limitations within your plugins, things like that.

01:00:33: And I will talk about deployment, how to get Vendure life, how to host it, what are the downsides and benefits of each approach.

01:00:42: That's the second day.

01:00:43: And the whole reason why we do it is last year, we thought, let's do a meetup in mid of November.

01:00:52: And Michael said, yeah, let's do it.

01:00:54: Like 10 people, we get 10 people for sure.

01:00:57: And I said, no, 10 people is too less.

01:00:59: For 10 people, I'm not doing a meetup.

01:01:01: So I basically said, let's do a developer day.

01:01:03: We announced it in mid of November.

01:01:07: The event was early December, I think, same time as this year's conference.

01:01:12: And we had almost 40 people joining this event.

01:01:15: We had one guy flying in from Atlanta, USA, and there was a snowstorm happening.

01:01:21: So he traveled like one day just to meet us.

01:01:24: We had people coming from nine different countries and two continents.

01:01:28: And that shows the commitment of the community.

01:01:32: And I love to be around people.

01:01:35: And I think that's very important to build a solid foundation of a community to also meet them in person, exchange ideas, being authentic, being there for them.

01:01:47: That's how we think and that's how we work.

01:01:49: And that's the whole reason why we're doing that.

01:01:51: Fantastic.

01:01:53: David, thank you very much.

01:01:56: Thank you much for your time with us today and all the information about Vendure.

01:02:00: It's an amazing project, amazing story.

01:02:03: And I hope it will grow and grow and grow and become one of the main players in the market.

01:02:09: I hope so too, I give my best, or we give our best, our team.

01:02:12: Thank you guys.

01:02:13: Thank you.

01:02:14: Have a good day.

01:02:15: Bye.

01:02:29: Thank you so much for tuning into this episode.

01:02:31: It was a pleasure having David from Vendure on the show.

01:02:34: We hope you enjoyed learning about his journey, when and how to use Vendure and the mission behind Vendure and why they chose to stay true to their vision rather than taking

01:02:43: VC funding.

01:02:44: You could clearly feel the passion for what they're building.

01:02:47: If you're looking to dive deeper into e-commerce technology, make sure to visit our Knowledge Base where you can compare all platforms we discuss, including Vendure

01:02:55: Looking ahead, we've got some exciting guests lined up.

01:02:58: Next up, we'll be talking to Seb from MedusaJS, another very popular open-source shop system.

01:03:04: Following that, we have a conversation with the team at Spryker, who will provide a commercial perspective on shop systems and e-commerce technology.

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01:03:17: Thanks again for tuning in and listening.