My focus has always really been heavily on the front end development so even though I knew, you know, enough PHP to be dangerous and that kind of thing, my focus was definitely on front end as opposed to back end development.
How was the experience mentoring other people, especially in the web development back then?
I was actually a mentor for one of Wes Boss's classes so I got to sit and watch him teach the class and that was amazing.
Just seeing Wes Boss in person, in action, the way he explains things is so incredibly accessible for people, I think.
So it's really awesome to see some of the people who were my students are now, they have these amazing careers and some of them have focused in things like accessibility and other ones are really focused on, you know, back end or certain technology.
I was looking for a remote job. I was sort of sick of commuting into the city and so I was looking for and I was like, oh Shopify, this seems like a really interesting, you know, CMS to focus on.
I had done some builds. I was like, oh, I like the platform. This is this is good.
And you mentioned that you start doing Shopify since 2015, which is like how it will be like in the next year, it will be 10 years of experience.
One of the only of the Shopify space.
And what's probably kept me in the Shopify ecosystem is it's going to sound so corny to say, but it's the people.
Everybody is really welcoming and friendly and likes to share knowledge, you know, was a little bit more customizable and you could change things and you could really take control of your store without having to rely so heavily on a developer.
That was the pitch. And luckily, Trinity was like, yeah, that sounds really interesting. We should build that.
And so so we recently hit 100 reviews or maybe over 100 now. And so we got our little AI generated snippet from Shopify.
So we have just over almost almost 5000 users. A lot of them are just on the free plan. So yeah, it's 100% in house.
So if you contact us on support, you were talking to either myself or truly knock on wood who knows we'll get a ton of support tickets tomorrow.
So just focusing on the UX, a lot of apps do not focus on their UX. I wish they would.
Sometimes the decisions that you might make aren't the best ones, but you have to learn from that.
What are the mistakes that you did like I did in this, this, this switch that you might not make or do you think the mistake that you made should be made because it's part of the process.
That later on, as opposed to the regret of trying to build something like, oh, it didn't work, but at least I tried the two things I always recommend for people that are in development is tenacity and optimism.
As long as you have those two things, you can just keep going and just be optimistic about it that it will work out and just keep at it.
And so if you're building a product, if you're building an app, I think those are the two main things that I would recommend to keep in mind is tenacity and optimism.
Hi, welcome guys. Let's go podcast. A podcast will interview software engineer to share their entrepreneurial story.
And here we are on episode number five of season number two.
And we have Anna Thomas, the co-founder of this impact, and she will be sharing a story with us in this episode.
So let's catch up after this intro.
So Anna, can you introduce yourself to the audience?
Sure. So my name is Ann Thomas, and I'm based out just outside of Toronto, Canada.
And I am one of the co-founders of design packs, which is a Shopify app for adding new layouts and designs and templates to your existing Shopify store.
And I've been working in the Shopify space since about 2015, I guess. And yeah, I love it.
Awesome. So the first question that I usually ask to my guests is how did it get started in web development?
How was the first interaction with the computer? So how was your experience with that?
Yeah, so I was very lucky. While growing up, my first computer that I had was a Mac classic.
So this was like before iMacs and everything like that.
My dad was always really into computers. So I got into, you know, playing with iMovie at a fairly young age and that kind of thing.
But for university, I actually went to school for art history. So completely unrelated, didn't do computer science or anything like that.
But then I went back to school for interactive multimedia.
So I've been around long enough that I've been doing Flash and Macromedia and ActionScript and that kind of thing.
So my focus has always really been heavily on the front end development.
So even though I knew, you know, enough PHP to be dangerous and that kind of thing, my focus was definitely on front end as opposed to back end development.
And so I started working professionally on the web in 2008.
That's a long time ago. That's interesting.
A long time. Yes.
You study history in the Queen University in Canada, but you do like exchange that you will go to the UK to study history that I got from your LinkedIn profile?
Yeah, yeah, exactly. So yes, for first year university, Queens has an exchange program. Well, it's not really exchange program.
It's literally just they have a campus that's in England.
So I got to spend my first year of university learning in a castle.
They have an actual castle in England.
So that was a really great experience and then come back and do the rest of my studies in Kingston at Queens.
And so that's where I did art history.
So specifically the focus.
It was it was a bit of a let down.
I will say, you know, being in England and being able to travel to Europe and seeing all these amazing pieces of art directly at the museums and then coming back to Canada.
Although they do still have a very amazing collection at Queens.
But yeah, that's what got me interested in art history specifically.
Makes sense.
And how was the first experience working as professionally as an interactive web designer with development in 2008 2009?
How was the experience?
Yeah, so I was actually working for I right out of that it was a postgraduate course.
So I had already done my degree and then I went and did this postgraduate course.
The very first job that I was working at was they it was a Viva Next, which was this like transportation agency.
And it was a really small government organization, but they had a lot of really cool like ads that they would do.
So they was all in flash.
So I'd be making banner ads and little things like that a lot of games for the holidays actually a lot of little Christmas games in flash.
You know, drag and drop and having to do the score and everything.
And that was my first introduction to a content management system called Mod X, which I don't even know if it still exists now.
But that was my my first foray into content management systems.
And I was like, oh, I like how this works where, you know, you can build out things and then other people actually go in and they're the ones managing the content.
But you can build out what it looks like for them.
Yeah, that's true.
So you are always mostly on the front and the side of the story of the project.
As you mentioned throughout the multiple stuff that you mentioned in the story.
And what are the things that you love about front and development specifically?
And you you are not thinking to switch in or touching the back end.
Is it like you you always like the aesthetic of the website, the experience of the user?
Yeah, I think it's that immediate gratification and definitely the the experience of the user.
One of the other jobs that I had before I went back to school was at a stock image company out in Calgary called Veer.
And I got to know a lot of the UX people on that team.
And I just always found it really fascinating on how they would conduct these tests and how they would really pay close attention to how people were actually interacting with the website.
And so I think I always just found it so much more interesting than the databases.
Like databases are great and they're fantastic.
Like my partner, he's a, you know, data science and he loves all of the many rows and that sort of thing.
But for me, I've always preferred seeing how people are going to interact with it and building out that experience of the visual experience as opposed to how to actually store the data, collect the data,
make sure that it's all in the right spot.
That's just my, you know, preference and niche, I guess.
And after multiple like doing web development, you also did mentor at HackerU from 2014-2015.
How was the experience mentoring other people, especially in the web development back then?
It wasn't like the same hype as today.
Yes. So that was interesting because as I mentioned, I did the postgraduate certificate because back in at that time there were no boot camps.
That wasn't a thing that existed.
So you had to take, you know, like a full college course and this kind of thing.
So I was really lucky because I had been volunteering with an organization called Ladies Learning Code in Toronto.
And through that organization, I met Heather Payne who founded HackerU, which then turned into Juno.
And she asked me to be one of the mentors for the courses.
And one of the things that I, looking back, I'm like, wow, I didn't realize how significant it was at the time.
But I knew that, you know, mentoring, I was actually a mentor for one of Wes Boss's classes.
So I got to sit and watch him teach the class.
And that was amazing just seeing Wes Boss in person in action.
The way he explains things is so incredibly accessible for people, I think, to understand.
So that was fantastic. And I tried to take a lot of that.
Eventually I went from being a mentor to a teacher as well.
So I was teaching classes and always just trying to explain difficult concepts in the simplest way possible.
So that was something that I really, really enjoyed.
And it's neat too to, you know, I've been around since 2008.
So it's really awesome to see some of the people who were my students are now, they have these amazing careers.
And some of them have focused in things like accessibility and other ones are really focused on, you know,
back end or certain technologies, typescript or react and that kind of thing.
And everyone kind of goes in their different directions.
But it's neat to remember when, you know, everyone was first starting to learn, okay, CSS.
And back in that time we were still teaching floats and that sort of thing.
So yeah, it was a really great experience.
Yeah, when you, like you mentioned float, it gave me like a flashback when I was starting learning CSS
because I started with the float, the basic of float.
And after that, Plexbox, grade and all of that.
And you mentioned that Wes Boss was one of your teachers in some bootcamp.
Is it the same, the same time that you met Trudy, the other co-founder of Desamp Pack?
Because she also mentioned that he was like one of Wes Boss students.
Is it the same timeline that you met Trudy?
No, weirdly, so I was never actually a student at HackerU.
I only mentored and taught there.
So yeah.
So I actually met Trudy when she was working out of the co-working space at HackerU.
And I also taught, we did sort of a half and half.
We both taught the same JavaScript course.
So I met her through that.
And I knew that she had a special interest in back end.
And you know, I was talking about Ruby and this kind of thing.
And one of the things that I always remember when we were teaching this JavaScript class,
because what we would do is I would teach and then she would be mentoring and then we would sort of swap.
And she always at the beginning or the end of the class, she'd be like,
oh, do you want to see this thing that I'm working on?
And she always had this very like builder mentality,
like I'm just going to build this thing and that sort of stuff.
So I knew that she was always interested in these side projects and different things like that.
So that was always my first impression of Trudy.
She'd be like, wow, what are you working on these days?
Yeah, it makes sense.
Because I'm trying to connect the dots because I already heard about Trudy stories.
I'm connecting the dots between the different story.
And HackerU like a switch to be junior college of technology.
And you have been a lead instructor there.
But before that you have been working as a technical director out of sandbox from 2018 to 2020
for people who don't know out of sandbox.
It's one of the biggest Shopify team development agency.
And like, I would say library.
So they are having a lot of premium team.
Like one of the, the one known is like a deterable team,
which is one of the well known Shopify premium team.
Can you give the audience more insight about this experience working out of sandbox?
Yeah, absolutely.
That was, so I had previously built Shopify themes at an agency that I was working at.
But my main reason for looking for finding out of the sandbox honestly back in 2016 was I was looking for a remote job.
I was sort of sick of commuting into the city.
And so I was looking for, I was like, oh Shopify, this seems like a really interesting, you know, CMS to focus on.
I've done some builds.
I was like, oh, I like the platform.
This is, this is good.
And so in 2016, I found a job posting for out of the sandbox and I contacted Brad.
And I was the third full time employee hired.
So there was already a designer and someone on customer support who were amazing.
And yeah, later that year we launched Turbo.
And I think the thing that I really enjoyed the most at out of the sandbox was just being able to really have, I just, I like talking about like, oh, different ideas.
Oh, we could try this.
So we could do this.
Or do you see, you know, we could bring in, you know, responsive images.
We could try this to make sure it loads a little bit faster and these sort of things.
So having all of those planning discussions and being able to see them implemented and not having to wait for a really long time.
And you know, all these like red tape, like it was really, I'd worked at startups before, but to see the product go directly into market like that and to see things that you could have an impact on and make those changes.
That was the biggest, I think light bulb moment for me when I was working at the out of the sandbox.
The team was amazing.
Everybody was just, we just gelled so well together.
And then by the time that we were acquired by pixel union, there was I think 25 of us.
So we had grown to a good size.
So yeah, it was a wonderful experience.
I worked there for almost five years.
And it was fantastic.
Yeah, awesome.
So this is your first remote job.
And you mentioned a good thing about the startup mentality of like you are discussing some idea and your idea will be implemented.
Like you will see like a dissatisfaction that your work is out in the production, like a size or production level.
It's really satisfying to see that because sometimes even if you are working on a startup, you might suggest something that is worth discussing and might not be implemented.
So it will be in the backlog for a long time and no one will consider implementing that, which is does hurt a bit like how when you are pretty excited about your idea.
Exactly.
Exactly.
Like don't you love the fact that you have control over, you know, you can, you can, for your podcast, you can like, okay, I can change this.
I can ask this question and you have ultimate say in that there's something very, I don't know, just it's a good feeling that you don't always get in every single job.
But in every single job that you have.
Yeah, it makes sense.
I agree with you because this is I think also this one what make like a good starter because you will have opinion and you will have a lot of discussion about your opinion.
Maybe your opinion is not working for that the case, but at least you will get like some discussion about it, which is good that you will have some discussion about your idea.
And if it's implemented, it will be more, more good for you because you will see your impact in production site and then production level website.
Exactly.
Yeah.
And after that you switch to being a freelance web developer as shop critic.
If I'm not wrong, it's Shopify or e-commerce website or agency correct me if I'm wrong.
So we actually focused on audits.
So that was my when I first left and decided to go out on my own.
I teamed up actually I wasn't on my own because I teamed up with a friend of mine that was super is super talented in SEO, Jess Joyce.
She's also in Toronto and also super talented marketer, but also does site setups.
Laura Brisson who now does point B consulting.
Anyway, the three of us.
I, we had all kind of identified this need where there were all these stores that had spun up during 2020, but a lot of very new shop owners so they didn't really know what they were doing.
So the service that we offered was audits.
So we would go in and we would look at people Shopify stores from an SEO, a technical and a marketing perspective and say, Hey, here are some things that you're going to want to improve and update.
And here are some opportunities that we see and here are some things that really need to be fixed.
You know, your theme hasn't been updated a lot at that time.
A lot of people were still on 1.0 themes.
They weren't taking advantage of, you know, 2.0 and that sort of thing.
So that's what we delivered where these reports and audits and then they could then take those and get the fixes made or what have you.
In the end, we stopped doing them not because it wasn't profitable.
It was people loved it.
They love the service.
They loved everything about it, but it wasn't really where any of our passions lay.
It was very, it wasn't very interesting work at the end of the day.
And I think that's something that you need to have is like a little bit of interest that spark that keeps you going.
And this just didn't have that.
So we, we ended up not continuing that as much.
And so we kind of went our separate ways and then I continued to do some contract work and Jess and Laura still work in the space.
But the audits themselves, we close that down.
Makes sense.
I totally agree with you about the audit stuff that she mentioned is not exciting because back then when I was doing some Shopify speed.
Optimization, but it wasn't fun at all because there's a lot of different story.
And each case it was a lot of headache and a lot of time spent in figuring out what's causing the website to be slow, which is, which is a total headache.
Yeah.
And you know, there wasn't, there weren't as many AI tools back then either.
Honestly, I think it would have been a totally different scenario if we were able to automate a lot of it.
But I was manually going in and looking at every single app they had installed and seeing how that was affecting and finding all the code snippets and that kind of thing.
So yeah, it just, it felt like being an archaeologist and I, that's not really my, my preference.
So yeah, but it was interesting.
If anything, if nothing else, I had been in the theme world for so long that you kind of forget what it's like for a client that's experiencing their site on a day-to-day basis.
And also how many apps people become reliant on and the sort of interaction between the apps and the themes and whatever Shopify is rolling out.
So in that way, it was amazing because it was sort of a crash course in, okay, here are the things that the clients are, that merchants are concerned about.
Here are the things that are losing the money.
Here are the things that they don't tend to think about.
So that was really great.
Just not the essay-esque life of doing audits.
Yeah, makes sense.
Yeah, I got your point.
This is a really good point because you will have another perspective of seeing your impact and your code.
For example, you might, when you are doing an audit, you will see maybe this code is not necessary to be loaded.
In the first thought, maybe load this just later on or like differ it until like something happened.
So it will give you another perspective of how your code will be impacted in the website and from a performance perspective.
And you will learn a lot just doing this.
It's like a QA quality insurance for your Shopify.
And you mentioned that you start doing Shopify since 2015, which is like how it will be like in the next year, it will be 10 years of experience.
One of the audio of the Shopify space, which I am glad to have you in my podcast.
So how was experience working with Shopify back then in 2015?
Oh, wow.
I mean, the first site that I built was based on Timber.
So that was really back in the day.
Yeah.
And I still actually, when I was, I think the same Shopify, you know, partner account that where you post on the forums and that kind of thing, which I don't post all that often.
But when I look back, I think I do still have one post where I couldn't figure out how to hide or show an image because I didn't realize the way that it was actually connected was with a checkbox.
And I was like, I don't understand why.
And it was just the idea that like, oh, you need to have an extra setting for the checkbox to hide or show the image.
So just things like that and getting used to, you know, the CMS and I don't know.
Yeah, it's just changed a ton over like, you know, there was no theme extensions.
There was the rise and fall of slate and you just see things come and go, you know, theme kit and now we have the CLI and yeah.
But one thing I think that that has stayed constant in those 10 years is and what's probably kept me in the Shopify ecosystem is it's going to sound so corny.
But it's the people, everybody is really welcoming and friendly and likes to share knowledge.
And I know that that's not the case for every single, you know, niche and web development.
So I think that's really, yeah.
So it's just been good.
I don't know if you found that with like, it's even though we're building on somebody else's, you know, platform, which is Shopify, they're so good about supporting the ecosystem and making sure that everybody's successful.
And I don't know if they do their best, I think.
Yeah, it makes sense.
I agree with you about the point that you mentioned.
And also I experienced a Shopify developer experience growth like from 2020 until like right now.
And I use Chamber, I use Slate, I use Shopify team kit, I use the new Shopify down team.
So it's been like a very rapidly growing and improving the experience for developer.
And what makes Shopify a great place for developer to like to be a Shopify developer is the community.
So everyone on Twitter, they are very like helping, they are very welcoming.
Like I usually ask or Twitter ask someone, even like the engineer team are like a pretty responsive.
And I think they are doing great job of improving the developer experience.
And I've seen a lot of progress that has been made to the Shopify developer experience in the last three or four years.
That has been like a very, very impactful.
And you will see that like in their docs, in their template, in their, like the content itself, the workshop that Shopify does, the event also,
which is I think what make a Shopify that we already like love to work with.
So I think it's the people around Shopify and people working at Shopify who make Shopify what we love right now.
Yeah, I agree. And you know, I think I've appreciated it more now that I have my own product, like that we have our two apps.
Because what I realize is, you know, when Shopify asks people for feedback and that kind of thing,
or they're like, oh, you know, can we get some, what did developers think about this new thing that we've rolled out?
I understand it a lot more now because feedback is such a gift when you're building a product.
It's so integral to making that product better.
So the fact that they're always so proactive about that.
And like, yeah, that's something that I also want to try to emulate.
Yeah, makes sense.
And the speed of development at Shopify is really insane.
I think I never seen other CMS e-commerce CMS that have like a rollout 150 updates every six months.
I think Shopify is the only one that does that, which is making pressure on the developer to be able to keep updating.
I mean, there's good things and bad things.
Yeah, for sure.
I'm sure you can speak to that a lot better in terms of the API changes.
Yeah, it's a lot of change, especially with like a Shopify moving out from REST and moving to GraphQL.
And there's a lot of changes to the Shopify team extension.
New extensions that are available right now, new function, new condition, there's a lot of things that has been changed,
which is, I don't see that a lot in other CMS.
We can compare that maybe to well-commerce, maybe big commerce, other platform that compete with Shopify.
I don't see that in other CMS, which is, as I mentioned, it's good and bad because it will make some pressure on the developer to keep updated.
But yeah, this is life.
Yeah, absolutely.
And how was the first meeting with Trudy to build up and found the design pack?
And also, you can give the audience what design pack is about so they can know more about it.
Yeah, for sure.
So I think when I first approached Trudy with the idea, she was like, I don't know if I totally get it.
The reason was that it was a new idea.
Now there's a ton of these section apps that exist, but this was back, we launched in 2021, the very big January 2021.
And this was before sections everywhere.
So it was very, very early days.
So the whole idea behind design packs and any of these other apps is that when you install your theme, you want to make it look exactly how you want.
But and this is again, this has changed a little bit since then, but at the time you'd really only get 10 to 15 sections.
And that's it.
That's all that would come included in your theme.
Now there's themes that have quite a few more sections and that's great.
But the idea was that, hey, what if you could have these sections that are now available on every page, you know, and you could add them to anything?
Didn't matter the theme and you could just put them in and you could configure them so that it's as if they existed there all the all along.
So it would take normally in order to do that someone would go out and hire a developer and build out that custom section.
So the idea was, hey, what if we just have these agnostic sections that we could add anywhere and had functionality that, you know, was a little bit more customizable and you could change things and you could really take control of your store
without having to rely so heavily on a developer.
That was the pitch.
And luckily, Trinity was like, yeah, that sounds really interesting.
We should build that.
And so we did and we launched it in 2021.
And since then we've grown it out to a huge amount of sections.
I think we have over 200, but it's not necessarily the number of sections.
I think that's the important thing about the app.
It's more about the quality of the code and how we've actually taken the approach that these can be very easily integrated with your existing theme because we use a lot of things like CSS variables.
We make sure that the performance is really great.
These aren't just like AI generated code snippets that are being like shoved in your theme.
They're built with the same air as if you had paid a professional developer to build them.
Not only that, but we also really pride ourselves on our customer support and almost feeling like we're not a full agency, obviously.
But on support, if someone asks us, oh, you know, could you make this tweak or can you change the CSS slightly or make it fit better in our theme?
Yes, we do that.
We fully, you know, we like to see how people are using the sections and we'll build them out.
And then it's kind of like, oh, now we built enough customization that they can go off and have control themselves without having to, you know, contact us all the time.
So that's the idea behind design packs.
And 2025 we have we're completely revamping the UI of the app and just coming up with some really interesting, exciting things for 2025.
But yeah, again, the idea is that we're always just going to try to make it as performant as possible and to really integrate directly into your existing theme and not seem like, oh, it sticks out like a sore thumb.
It's just as if it's always been there.
So design pack is mostly like your Shopify team designer partner that you would like to use to be able to extend the functionality of your Shopify team.
And it will be agnostic to any Shopify team and it will not have CSS conflict with the Shopify existing team.
So we don't have like a different style for each team because you might have like a maybe you are using the same class name or using the same variable and they will have some conflict or you will have some performance issue.
So this is what design pack is about.
It's solving this issue and making it pretty customizable and pretty easy for any Shopify immersion to be able to customize their Shopify team without knowing how to go.
Yes, exactly.
Yeah.
And we try to be very, that again, I have a passion for UX.
So what we've seen some people do is they go down the road of just having every single thing be a setting, which that might be great for, you know, their target audience.
But what we want to do is make it extendable for developers.
So we don't want to have everything opened up so that the merchant can go in and completely, you know, because in the end, sometimes that cannot look so great.
So it's a fine balance between the two.
Obviously, we want things to be customizable, but we also don't want it to be overwhelming for someone where, you know, if they need to set the border radius on a button that they then need to go change it in 15 different places if they ever decide to change that.
So we want it to be more available to be like global styling as opposed to that individual approach.
It's also a good point because when you offer a lot of customers sometimes it will be overwhelming to the Shopify immersion and it will be confusing to them because you will have a lot of options and you will change a lot of things.
And you will end up with a different style that you don't like.
So we end up like a resetting everything to the initial state.
Can we get some number about the Shopify app if you would like to share, like active install, whatever you need, Shopify review, anything that you would like to share with the audience, you can share it.
If not, if not a problem.
Sure.
So we actually just hit, we aren't super aggressive about getting reviews, we honestly just kind of wait until people have good will towards us and leave us a review.
So we recently hit 100 reviews or maybe over 100 now.
And so we got our little AI generated snippet from Shopify.
So that was quite fun.
Yeah.
So congrats on that.
So thank you.
Thank you.
Yeah, I was really excited to see that come through because we
I love that.
That's great.
And then in terms of our, our installs, it's worth noting we have three free sections.
So we have like a free plan and then we have a premium plan.
So we have just over almost, almost 5,000 users.
A lot of them are just on the free plan.
So, you know, I always have to coach that.
But it's, it's just, it's been really, I don't know, one of my favorite things about I worked in an agency world for a very long time.
And so moving to product, it's been so great just to see people using it.
I just love seeing it on people's sites.
That is by far my favorite thing.
Even when I'm online shopping and I see a section and I think to myself, I'm like, oh, that looks really familiar.
And then I, you know, inspect the code.
And sure enough, it's a design pack section or they're using a bunch of design packs on their site.
And it just makes me so happy about that.
Yeah, it's really satisfying to see your work in other people's business that are making money off it, which is really good.
So it's really a satisfying moment.
Yeah. And I think it's a really affordable app too.
That's the thing.
I mean, some, some merchants are like, oh, I don't know if I can, you know, that's, that's a bit too much.
But it, when you do our annual plan, it breaks down to be 1658 a month, which considering how much it would cost to hire a developer to build any of those custom sections.
It just ended level of support that they get.
I don't know.
I think it just makes a ton of sense for a lot of people.
Yeah, makes sense.
Talking about support, how did you handle support?
Is it like in-house or you have a team that you outsource to them or how the process of support is handled?
Yeah, it's 100% in-house.
So if you contact us on support, you were talking to either myself or Trudy and we handle everything.
That's really amazing.
Is it a lot of support ticket?
I hopefully it's not because it's a lot of your time.
No.
That's great.
I know eventually we may have to hire someone, but at the moment we're able to handle it, which is great.
No, we actually don't get that many support tickets.
And I think that's because of the documentation, also just the, how clear it is in terms of the settings and that sort of thing.
Knock on wood, who knows, we'll get a ton of support tickets tomorrow.
But I think overall it's a fairly straightforward app to use.
And because it works right in the theme editor, you're not having to have a completely separate app experience or anything like that.
It's not overly complicated.
It just kind of works and people can just, you can start using it day one and it doesn't involve a lot of complicated setup.
What are your recommendations for someone who have a Shopify app to have a great experience so they can have less customership?
Yeah.
And I, so I have, we also do, again, I've done some contract work and we'll do builds for clients where we're actually using design packs, but we're also using other apps as well.
And so I have a very, like, I've definitely dealt with a lot of different apps.
And I think my biggest recommendation would be making it super duper clear what the app does, the main benefits of it and try not to add on extra features and extra things.
Or if you do make sure that you are making the app, like, you know, when you're, when you're just installing the app and you're going through the process of, of how it actually works, make sure that you're catering both to day one users.
So people who may not even be sure, you know, what Shopify is, like they're just still setting things up and also power users, because both are probably going to be depending on your app.
So good documentation is also really key and also accessibility of support.
So whether that is live chat, or whether that is, you know, just like quick email turnaround times being available on different social media platforms, that kind of thing.
I think that makes a lot of sense.
But yeah, just focusing on the UX, a lot of apps do not focus on their UX, I wish they would.
Do you use a Shopify polarized design system, or like you have like a custom design system for the Shopify app?
No, we've been we've been Polaris since day one.
Yeah.
Oh, because I'm awesome.
So that's a good point for Polaris.
Yes.
So currently you only have design pack, which is Shopify app.
And how was the first idea come out about having this design section, like what was the reason behind building this Shopify app?
Is it like some, like a merchant that you already have who requests some custom Shopify section?
What was the reason behind it thinking that this Shopify app have some market to like a penetrate or like a to to work on?
Yeah, I mean, honestly, it was just from being working in themes for for such a long time.
And I have a sandbox had seven themes.
And so oftentimes, I mean, it didn't come up that often, but people would say, Oh, you know, there's this section in this one theme.
Oh, I'd really like it if it could also be in this other theme.
So it just kind of made sense.
Well, okay, yeah, why can't we have the ability to mix and match sections into different themes?
It just seems like a logical thing to do.
But I think at the time, it was everyone was so tied to this idea of having one single CSS file to rule them all.
And so, you know, being able to separate out things like and also making sure that things like JavaScript libraries were being, you know, loaded in the proper way for performance,
making sure that you weren't have loading too much CSS when you have that separate componentized section, things like that were just stuff that we had to work through.
Because a lot of other page builders at the time, they were loading like these massive JS scripts for every single page.
And so what we did was instead, we're like, okay, we're only going to load the libraries when they're needed, they're also going to always be deferred, things like that.
But the actual idea itself was really this, this, this coming from a very theme heavy background.
And, you know, not coming from it from the perspective of, oh, we'll just be like a, you know, we'll build focus on something like a discount app or do something with reviews or what have you.
It was something new to the space where it's like, okay, let's, let's take that, you know, Lego approach where you already have your existing Lego set.
Let's add new Lego pieces in that will click into place and we'll just work.
This is good approach to think about it.
And I think we cover a lot of ground for design pack.
So we will switch up to the founder mode.
So how and spend their day like managing design pack.
Yeah.
So as I mentioned, we do support.
So very first thing always in the morning is just to check the email we this might be a helpful hint for anyone that's looking for a shared email.
Inbox solution.
So we at the time we're first starting out, we didn't necessarily want because it's just the two of us.
So we didn't want to invest into, you know, using Zen desk or help desk or like a really, you know, like a fully solution.
So we ended up using something called missive.
They're a company out of Montreal.
And it's been a really handy tool.
We can add kind of comments on different email threads and that sort of thing.
So that's good.
Then I might have some meetings.
So I do all of our demo calls.
So I'll hop on calls with people show them the app answer any questions they might have anything like that.
And then it's building sections.
So we sections and templates as well.
And then from there, we have like our, it's not that exciting to take calls and that kind of thing.
And we once a quarter, we have like a big sort of summit brainstorming session where we just talk about, you know, things that we have accomplished and things that we're looking to accomplish how we can focus more on marketing,
which neither of us are that great at.
So we bring an extra help for that.
And overall, just kind of focus on ways to make design facts better and better.
Awesome.
You mentioned that you have some exciting news for Twitter for the next year.
Can you share some hint about the exciting news if you would like to share with us?
Yeah, absolutely.
So two of the things that I'm really excited about are we are.
Fully, I say we it is Trudy has been fully rebuilding the back end of the app and sort of the the we're updating to making sure everything is moved over to GraphQL so no more REST API and that kind of thing.
And so we've also made some improvements in the actual UX of the app.
So, for instance, one of the things right now when you're installing a section, you have to we because when we started it wasn't that big of an issue because we didn't have that many sections.
So you had to click you click when you're in the app you click into the actual section.
And if you've paginated through it won't take you back to the page that you were at was kind of annoying you had to go through, whereas now we've switched to a modal approach.
So that way you can stay on the page that you're currently at you can have the modal.
So we're also just investing more time into like tutorials we have a design workshop that we're going to be doing.
We've got really interesting things that are going to be done with the blogs as well which is sort of a forgotten part of Shopify.
So we have come up with a solution where you can actually embed sections with so sections into article content and then kind of move them around, which will be really cool.
The other exciting thing is I'm working on a library of full CSS snippets for each theme so that when you actually apply these CSS snippets, it will apply the styles of the theme directly to the sections that you're using.
So that way you can have more global button styles.
So we already have it for dawn in case anyone is using dawn.
But the idea being that at the moment you would go in and you would change you can change the background color at the border radius to match dawn.
But with this snippet you would apply you can just copy and paste it globally just works like that.
And then if you change the settings in dawn, it'll apply automatically to any of the design pack sections.
So you don't have to change it in two places basically.
Yeah, makes sense. So it will inherit the style from the Shopify team section, team settings.
Yes, exactly.
Okay, makes sense.
I'm pretty excited to see that in production.
So and big congrats on launching all of this stuff because I know it's pretty hard.
So could use on that.
Yeah.
And the next question is, what are the challenges and the lesson that you learned during the experience switching from like a working in a Shopify team agency, but the Shopify team going and doing audit.
Like with the freelance contracts work that you did.
And after that switching to being a founder of this impact, what was the experience going from this side to the other side.
Yeah, oh gosh, it was quite the experience.
I think I think one of the things that I've always had regardless of whether I'm working on my own with someone or in the larger company is that I don't know at what point I adopted this.
I've always had that kind of ownership mentality. Like if I'm working on something, I really want it to be good to the point where sometimes it's bad because it can be a little bit perfectionist.
But I always really care about whatever I'm working on.
And so what I found the most striking moving from working within a company versus being like a co founder is that it's like, it's scary, but it's also very liberating at the same time.
Because like what we were talking about before where, you know, if I have an idea and or a treaty has an idea, we can just do it.
We don't have to have a huge amount of, you know, approval process or anything like that.
And so that is incredible.
But also it's like Spider-Man with great responsibility with great power comes great responsibility.
Because sometimes the decisions that you might make aren't the best ones, but you have to learn from that.
And so I think that's been the biggest interesting thing is that it's, we don't have a massive team of resources either, although I don't like the resources word.
We don't have a massive team of people to rely on.
It's really just the two of us and then contractors that we hire and that sort of thing.
So I think that has also been an interesting experience is just figuring out and there's also no accountability just only from within.
So you have to find that internal motivation to sort of figure out what the next steps are, what are the best decisions and that can be really tricky.
So I'm still kind of figuring that that process out.
Trudy has been a sort of a founder and an entrepreneur longer than I have.
So it's a bit newer for me.
So I'm working through that.
But yeah, that's that's been the the biggest, I think, takeaway for me.
Makes sense.
Yeah, that's your point.
And what are the basic that you did, like I did in this, this, this switch that you might not make, or do you think the mistake that you made should be made because it's part of the process.
If that makes sense.
Oh, yeah, I think that does make sense.
I think it is part of the process.
I think as much as we would like to analyze every single decision from every possible, you know, way and know, is this going to be the right thing.
At a certain point, you have to just, you know, try it and see if that works, which again, I'm not great about.
I do have that perfectionist tendency where I, you know, I'm going to think about it for a really long time.
And that's why I think actually Trudy and I are very good balance.
Okay, makes sense.
That's your point.
Because sometimes you are making a mistake and you are thinking that if I didn't do this mistake, I might be better.
But I don't think this mistake is part of the process that you are currently in because if you didn't mistake, it will like a redirect or switch up the results for you.
Yeah.
And honestly, I think that when I was thinking about actually, you know, oh, design packs, you know, should I move from doing audits and try to build a product?
I think that what really stuck in my mind was I would regret not doing it, at least try it.
You know, at least try it and see what happens as opposed to, okay, I'm going to play it safe and not try to build anything and then regret that later on as opposed to the regret of trying to build something and like, oh, it didn't work, but at least I tried.
Yeah, makes sense.
Yeah, that's the good point is to try it and don't know what to expect.
If it doesn't work, you already know that it's not working for you, so I already have experience, so you will not have regret about that decision later on.
Yes, exactly.
And you probably learned something in the process and hopefully don't repeat it.
Yeah.
Yeah, exactly.
And the last question will be about stuff and resources, all our resources, book, anything that you would like to share with us so people can know more about.
It can be either like UX, accessibility, how to build a successful product or something to do like with being a founder, the lifestyle of being a founder, not the lifestyle, but the life of being a founder and the other stuff that is related to entrepreneurship.
Yeah, absolutely.
You know, the one that always sort of sticks out in my mind is, and ironically, it's not necessarily related to entrepreneurship, it's actually almost the opposite of entrepreneurship.
But it made me realize that I didn't want to continue sort of in a larger company situation.
And that is, I think it's called the Managers Path by Camille Fournier, I believe.
It's a little bit older now, but essentially it goes through, you know, when you start out, you're a junior developer and then you might move and you kind of have this decision where you might move into a more senior management position or you're going to be an individual contributor and I see path.
And then eventually you'll get to be a manager of managers and so on and so forth.
And I think for me when I read that book, I read it because I was doing a talk on sort of learning leadership, because I was managing people at the time.
And it kind of made me sit back and realize like, oh, I don't know if that's necessarily the road that I want to go down.
And so that was more of a revelation where I think, you know, I like this, I like the startup mentality.
I like building things. I like having the brainstorming meetings, as opposed to encouraging people to, like, live the best they can, like, you know, grow people's careers and that sort of thing.
So that was the difference between the two, I would say.
But yeah, it's a great read and I recommend it.
Do you have any other recommendation like an article, website, podcast that you listen to that you would like to share with us?
Yeah, so, I mean, Westboss's Syntax is always great, Syntax FM.
I think I've actually been kind of getting, I had to immerse myself in e-commerce because I was coming from a web development background and I didn't really know that much about e-commerce.
So I listened to Kurt's podcast, the unofficial Shopify podcast for a while, and that was so good to get the merchant mindset.
But I'm actually kind of coming back now and listening more to front-end podcasts and also just looking at a lot more like traditional front-end websites,
as opposed to, like, specifically Shopify ones, because I think when I originally came into the Shopify space, I was, and it's like you can kind of bring new things in.
So I'm getting back to that a little bit more.
So, you know, classic things like looking, like, CoDrops is one of my favorites.
They always have such really cool stuff that they're showcasing.
Yeah.
So, like, like, experimental things, I just think it's so interesting.
I mean, I remember back in the day when, like, they were replacing videos with Flash, with HTML5 video elements, and everyone was like, oh, this is amazing.
So I really like to see what's coming down, right?
So, yeah.
Yeah, makes sense.
The best thing that I love about CoDrop is their CSS animation are, like, very nailed down.
It's one of the best CSS animation that I ever saw in a website.
They are, like, a pretty good, with good tutorial, and it's like a mind blowing for me, like, seeing that as a, like, I would say more like a back-and-focus developer, but seeing, like, this CSS animation, it's pretty dope.
Yeah, it's beautiful.
Yeah, it's just so beautiful.
Yeah.
Yes.
Do you have anything that you would like to share with the audience?
So we can start with your social media and the website for DesignPak.
And after that, anything that you would like to share with us?
Sure.
Yeah, so social media.
I am on Twitter.
I don't really post that often, but my Twitter handle, well, there's DesignPaks, which is DesignPaks app.
That's our handle on all socials.
So we're on Instagram, Twitter.
My own personal one is alfalfa and it's a double A and really difficult to spell, but it's alfalfa, like the, like the hey, not, not like a L, P, H, A, L, F, A, L, F, A, A, and E.
Again, very difficult to spell.
But yeah, we, DesignPaks is kind of, that's something we're else we're going to focus on or drive to for 2025.
I'm also hanging out in the Shopify partners Slack, so I'm there.
Yeah, in terms of like a final message, I don't know, you've had some really heavy hitters on here for your podcast already.
I don't really know what else I can add.
I guess some advice that I would give, and this is the advice I gave way back when I was teaching web development at college is, I think one of the key, the two things that I always recommend for people that are in development is tenacity and
optimism.
As long as you have those two things, you can just keep going and just be optimistic about it that it will work out and just keep at it.
And so if you're building a product, if you're building an app, I think those are the two main things that I would recommend to keep in mind is tenacity and optimism.
Okay, makes sense.
So thank you so much, Anne, for being in my podcast and accepting my invitation.
It was a pleasure to have you in this podcast, and I think you are the first female in this season number two, which is a pleasure hosting you for today's episode.
And thank you so much.
Oh, thank you for having me.
You're a great interviewer.
It was really nice to chat with you.