Talk Commerce

In this episode of Talk Commerce, Brent Peterson interviews Muliadi Jeo, the CTO of CirClo, about his role in organizing Meet Magento events in Southeast Asia. Muliadi shares his passion for e-commerce consulting and customer behavior experience. He explains how he started Meet Magento Indonesia and why he decided to expand to Malaysia. Muliadi discusses the importance of building a strong local community and the potential for smaller Meet Magento events in different regions. They also touch on the benefits of joining the Magento Association and the upcoming Meet Magento Malaysia event.

Talk Commerce, Magento, Meet Magento, e-commerce, Southeast Asia, community, Magento Association, Meet Magento Malaysia

takeaways
  • Muliadi Jeo has been involved in e-commerce consulting and organizing Meet Magento events for over 20 years.
  • He started Meet Magento Indonesia and is now expanding to Malaysia to fill the gap in e-commerce support and events in the region.
  • Muliadi emphasizes the importance of building a strong local community and tailoring events to the specific needs of each city.
  • He suggests the idea of smaller Meet Magento events in different regions, with the potential for a larger event in Southeast Asia.
  • Muliadi highlights the benefits of joining the Magento Association and the value of the Magento community in comparison to other e-commerce platforms.

Sound Bites
  • "I've been doing this e-commerce consulting for more than 20 years now. It's always my passion to always look into customer behavior experience."
  • "We try to change the event to be a bit neutral. And we work with the e-commerce association in Indonesia."
  • "There's a space for this sort of smaller event and maybe you call it Meet Magento Lite or Meet Magento Mini."
Chapters

00:00
Introduction and Background
03:19
Bringing Meet Magento to Malaysia
05:05
The Importance of Magento in Southeast Asia
08:13
The Value of the Magento Association
09:57
The Role of Meet Magento Events
11:21
Upcoming Meet Magento Events
12:22
Magento Jingle

What is Talk Commerce?

If you are seeking new ways to increase your ROI on marketing with your commerce platform, or you may be an entrepreneur who wants to grow your team and be more efficient with your online business.

Talk Commerce with Brent W. Peterson draws stories from merchants, marketers, and entrepreneurs who share their experiences in the trenches to help you learn what works and what may not in your business.

Keep up with the current news on commerce platforms, marketing trends, and what is new in the entrepreneurial world. Episodes drop every Tuesday with the occasional bonus episodes.

You can check out our daily blog post and signup for our newsletter here https://talk-commerce.com

Brent Peterson (00:02.498)
Welcome to this special Magento episode of Talk Commerce. Today I'm Mulati Goh. Mulati, go ahead, do an introduction for yourself. Tell us your day -to -day role now and one of your passions.

Muliadi Jeo (00:11.433)
Yeah.

Muliadi Jeo (00:14.879)
All right, hey everyone. My name is Mulyeri Geo. I'm currently as the CTO of a company called CirClo. Well, my day -to -day is just, yeah, I've been doing this e -commerce consulting for, I don't know, for more than 20 years now. It's always my passion to always look into customer behavior experience, looking at the tech gadgets, that's all the stuff that I always enjoy.

Brent Peterson (00:41.88)
That's awesome. Good. before we get started, we're today, we're going to talk a little bit about, meet Magento Malaysia, maybe give us a little history about how you, how you got there. I know, I know that you've put together meet Magento Indonesia as well. And then, we'll talk a little bit about, the Magento association and why people should join and we'll wrap it up. It will be a quick and easy episode today. but let's, let's do the joke first. I know that everybody's

Muliadi Jeo (00:49.364)
Mm -hmm.

Muliadi Jeo (00:56.659)
Mm -hmm

Muliadi Jeo (01:06.439)
Of course.

Brent Peterson (01:10.06)
dying to hear it and it's it's a good one today. So hey, all you. Yeah, just give me a rating of one through five when we're done. Here we go. I felt uncomfortable driving into the cemetery. The GPS blurted out. You've reached your final destination.

Muliadi Jeo (01:13.905)
Brand, brand joke is always good.

Muliadi Jeo (01:31.815)
That's a good pun. I like it. I'll give you four.

Brent Peterson (01:36.176)
good. All right. Excellent. Thank you. Yeah. Yeah. Your, your laughter is always very contagious on this end. thank you for

Muliadi Jeo (01:43.965)
Hahaha!

Brent Peterson (01:46.69)
All right, so let's jump right in to meet Magento's. We've both been in the Magento community for a long time. You were an early organizer for Indonesia and now you're moving to Malaysia. So tell us a little bit about

Muliadi Jeo (01:50.884)
Yeah, yeah.

Muliadi Jeo (01:54.856)
Mm -hmm.

Muliadi Jeo (02:02.495)
Yeah, yeah. So I think a lot of people know me, creating the Meat Magento Indonesia. We were put together with Magento at that time. Since 2015, it's been quite a while. So, and then, yeah, we still do it. I think the last Meat Magento that we did is last year. So this year, it's something that just struck me when I was...

I'm visiting and actually having a booth in an event in Malaysia that quite a few of merchants asking, hey, we don't really have any support really here in Malaysia for Magento. There's a few merchants coming in and they feel like, okay, what's going on here? They always resort to go to Singapore for lot of the support in general for even e -commerce events and stuff like that. So I say,

why don't we do it here this year? And I'm just like, that's kind of like just blurting the mind. Because in Indonesia, we kind of not peopleing, but it's really because we try to cater more bigger audience. So we kind of like try to be, we change the event to be a bit neutral. And we work with the e -commerce association in Indonesia. So this year we just using the name e -commerce expo.

that's a good actual opportunity for me because there's the vacuum in the Mipadjentel. Kuala Lumpur is still very much clear near in the middle of Singapore and Indonesia. I think it's a perfect center for try it out and cater some of the need that I see in Malaysia. surprisingly, everything aligned. I met with mage store folks from Vietnam and they said, hey, I love to try it.

So I use this as mentoring them and hopefully they will just take on this for the future events, they can just do it themselves. So yeah, we have the very good opportunity to co -host together with Edge Store, the Smith Magina Malaysia on coming August 26th, I'm sorry, August 27th. So it's within

Brent Peterson (04:21.838)
That's awesome. And so the idea is we're maybe getting more into Southeast Asia, getting more interest. Is there still a big interest for Magento in your region?

Muliadi Jeo (04:36.507)
So it's very particular, I mean, particular industry and particular type of business. I think I would say that Magento is still strong in a business that is unique and have a very, very, very specific customizations and in control of how the user experience will be, the integration will be. It's still one of the better choice.

I personally still believe that myself

Brent Peterson (05:09.538)
And I know that meet me gentle Indonesia, you typically get seven, eight, even up to a thousand people. Are you expecting the same sort of attendance in Malaysia?

Muliadi Jeo (05:20.55)
Well, I try to make it just the same as we start in Indonesia, right? Something simple. I believe when I start, it's about 100 people. This year in Malaysia, I'm looking at starting the community strong, about 150, 200 that way. But it's the same strategy. always, when I go to this city, I like to make sure it's localized priority to that city first.

If we get audience from Indonesia and Singapore, that would be the bonus. We try to reach out with the merchant in Malaysia and all the local ecosystem in Malaysia, like the payment partner, shipping partner, and those kind of stuff. So the same kind of like a rhythm that we do with Indonesia. So try to build the local first, get it for the local needs, and then we amplify by adding the region into the picture.

Brent Peterson (06:13.486)
Yeah, I think for the, for the Magento Association leadership listening, I believe there's a space for this sort of smaller event and maybe you call it Meet Magento Lite or Meet Magento Mini, because I think that sometimes it is hard to get some traction around the event until the event has happened multiple times. And I know in the very beginning and 10 years ago when you started, we also started doing some Meet Magento events at the same

Muliadi Jeo (06:31.9)
Mm -hmm, mm -hmm.

Brent Peterson (06:40.366)
And was difficult to get, it was very difficult to get the kind of attendance that at the time Magento's, I think it was called Magento Association, whatever it was called before, they wanted to have at least 500 people or, and it was very difficult sometimes to meet those thresholds. And then it was also then a barrier for doing events.

Muliadi Jeo (06:57.993)
Yeah.

No, I completely agree. think I am part of the event comedy myself, the magenta association. I think at one point of the discussion, I said like, we should have a different size of the mid -magenta event. I don't know if we want to call it magenta, we can call it anything we want, but there should be a different sizes and maybe ultimately the largest one in we get it all together again in one country or something like that. Right. I think that would be

So that's my vision with Indonesia, Malaysia, something like that. We'll see the small event and maybe Southeast Asia can have one bigger event. I'll reach out to Smart OAC. Maybe we can have a meet -and to Asia properly at one

Brent Peterson (07:45.196)
Yeah, that would be good. imagine, just imagine if we did a really big event in Vegas, what would we call it? If it was an imagine, magento event, imagine what we could call it. I'm not sure. I'm just trying to imagine it in my head. So mini event, I think that Honolulu would be a great place as a central point for Asia and the U S.

Muliadi Jeo (07:51.443)
I know. We all miss that old days,

Muliadi Jeo (08:10.803)
Mm -hmm, mm -hmm, mm.

Brent Peterson (08:14.136)
to have a mini meat magento Honolulu this spring or this winter.

Muliadi Jeo (08:19.187)
Mm -hmm.

Muliadi Jeo (08:22.867)
Yep, I will be on board.

Hahaha!

That's definitely a good idea.

Muliadi Jeo (08:39.175)
No worries. Okay.

Brent Peterson (09:03.033)
All right, I don't know why Riverside's been doing this to me every once in a while. gives me an error. Okay, so let's, am I back? You can see me? Good, great. Let's talk a little bit about the Magento Association, why people should join, and what sort of benefits you think they would get from joining and just being a member.

Muliadi Jeo (09:08.531)
Like a freeze.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, I can see you.

Muliadi Jeo (09:26.941)
Yeah, no, think one of the strongest point of being part of Magento is the community, right? I think the event itself is just a facilitator to help this community to be able to get it together. But I don't want to say Adobe didn't do a good job on bringing up the community, but I think the Magento Association is the kind of the perfect forum.

for all of us to be able to be there and sharing and participate. I know it's still brand new and it take a while to get the association to be kind of like where they want to be. I'm glad we have Matthias now leading the associations in the day -to -day basis. I think we are still way underused.

very non -active in the association and there's still a lot of things that we can do together in

Brent Peterson (10:30.863)
Yeah, I think I've, I've gotten myself involved, involved in the Shopify community. And I can say that people say that there's this robust Shopify community, but it's nothing like the Magento community, especially like I've been reaching out to Shopify people and I say, what is your local events that are happening? And there isn't any, mean, I know that, you know, we had a good history of doing meet meetups for Magento. There's a good history of Magento meetups

You know, maybe meetups in general have kind of gotten by the wayside, but I think in general, you're right. There's a, it's a unique community that is strong still in the world. And I think you're putting on Malaysia is a good, really a great example of how we continue to grow and thrive within the magenta community, despite some of the external pressures that are stopping or, or, or not stopping, but you know, yeah, making.

Muliadi Jeo (11:24.239)
not stopping it's just slowing us

Brent Peterson (11:28.311)
Slowing us. Creating a little bit of friction to make it happen. there's a couple of so yours is coming up in August. I think Singapore as well is are they doing it

Muliadi Jeo (11:41.979)
Unfortunately, Singapore doesn't do it this year. So, Malaysia will be commanding all of the Asia, Southeast Asia activity this year.

Brent Peterson (11:50.543)
Okay, awesome, great. So the biggest one then will be your event in August. And then after that we'll have Meet Magento New York. Yeah. And then in February we'll have Meet Magento Florida, which I think is such a fantastic event and Ravi does a great, and Marsha does a great job for New York. Both of

Muliadi Jeo (11:54.572)
New York, October.

Muliadi Jeo (12:10.397)
Yeah, and London on June is, I heard it's fantastic. I miss that one. I would be in New York, I don't know about you. mean, you're gonna be there.

Brent Peterson (12:20.069)
Yeah, I'm planning on going. And I really wanted to go to meet Magento, the UK this year, but unfortunately, or fortunately, I've become a grandpa now. And my grandchild was born about the same time and travel was just not gonna happen. Thank you. So, you know, as

Muliadi Jeo (12:35.727)
Congratulations! That's lovely.

Brent Peterson (12:44.702)
Closeout, I give everybody a chance to do a shameless plug about anything you'd like. What would you like to plug today?

Brent Peterson (12:57.999)
You should plug Meet Magenta Malaysia. Tell us the website name, tell us how they can find you.

Muliadi Jeo (13:04.415)
Okay, okay, okay, yes, of course. Magento, I'm shamelessly gonna say, unfortunately I can't get the Malaysia domain, so I do the meetmagento .asia. That's maybe a vision to appear toward a unified event there. But yeah, go to meetmagento .asia. We're gonna open the registration soon by next Monday. So

Brent Peterson (13:17.401)
That's good, yeah.

Brent Peterson (13:34.043)
Perfect, yeah, I will make sure I get those on the notes and this will be live in my stream soon, very soon. So Mulati Geo, it's been such a great time talking to you and I look forward to seeing you in Honolulu this spring. Bye.

Muliadi Jeo (13:34.099)
Looking

Muliadi Jeo (13:48.681)
Same here. See ya.