Interview Interview

The Magento Story: How A Student Launched The Software That Powers Billions In Sales – With Roy Rubin

Posted on Jun 25, 2009 - 9:22 AM PST

Roy Rubin was a student trying to make extra money on the side when he founded Varien, the company that went on to launch Magento, an ecommerce platform that enables billions of dollars in online sales.

He came to Mixergy to talk about why Varien grew (it had a lot to do with focus) and how the company launched Magento (his developers pushed him to do it).

The FULL program


Full program includes

- Why Roy created phantom stocks instead of shares, and why YOU might want to use them in your business.

- Details of how a community built up around Magento before it was even built. Others on Mixergy have done the same thing, and you can too.

- Some discussion of how you can build a company when you have family obligations.

- More details. If you only read this summary, you might think that it was all simple. Listen to the full interview to get the full story.

Suggested comments

- I went longer with this post. Do you like it? Or do you prefer shorter posts?

- Do you use Magento? Tell me about it.

- How’s the transcription? Do you see any typos? Let me know.

- MOST IMPORTANTLY: Do you think this story belongs in the Mixergy book? If not, how can I improve it?

[Roy is a friend of mine, but for some reason I didn't think to ask him for an interview until Mosess suggested I interview him. Thanks Mosses!]

  • http://www.monocat.com monocat

    This was a nice interview. Wish there was more time to drill Roy about Magento. Thanks Roy for taking the time to answer few of my questions. As always, thank you too Andrew for Mixergy.com.

    Andrew, regarding your questions posted above:

    - Longer post of excerpts works for me.

    - I use Magento. Currently, I'm working on two projects using the Community Edition. The learning curve is steep, but once you get the hand of it, it becomes easier. Few important core features are still missing, but thankfully there's some talented programmers who are filling the gaps.

    - eCommerce plays a major role along with social sites and worth writing a chapter about it. Since Magento is also available as Open Source, I believe it qualifies more for entry in the book over proprietary ecommerce softwares.

  • Andy

    Magento has everything but lacks easy of use. And it's slow as hell, as a script is cluttered overkill. Reminded me of Gallery2 when it finally came out.

  • http://mixergy.com AndrewWarner

    Thanks.
    Your comment reminded me that I should thank you on this post. You're
    the one who suggested this interview. Thanks for that too.

  • http://mixergy.com AndrewWarner

    Thanks for your feedback.

  • Me

    Tried Magento. It was horrible. Do not recommend.

  • Michael

    Hi Andrew, Great Interview – Is it just me or is Roy's track overlapping with your track in the MP3 audio file? I thought at first you were always talking over the top of him but then realised lol.

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  • http://www.silverthemes.com/ Roy Andre

    Great interview with lots of great information about Magento plus around building up a successfull business! Thanks!

  • sameerb

    I have been using Magento very successfully for our online fitness equipment retailer: http://www.eFITology.com. I can vouch for it being better than the other open source products out there. What issues did you face?

  • Pingback: links for 2009-06-26 « Mandarine

  • Joel Spolsky

    Yes, the longer post is excellent. The more of your good notes you include, the better.

  • readycontacts

    Terrific interview. We have worked with Magento and can say that it is truly powerful. It can definitely be made easier to customize but I believe it is a work in process and will get there. Its better than most other ecommerce open source products and will evolve rapidly with a growing community.

  • http://rakeshparsoya.blogspot.com/ Rakesh Parsoya

    Vow, its fantastic interview opening the windows of my views and thoughts for not only in e commerce but in any aspects of creation. True commitments always brings results which change the world as the magento did it. I deeply love magento for it being a true e-commerce as it fulfill the need of today and have future for tomorrow. Also I would like to thanks deep from my heart to Roy and his team for creating this wonderful piece of products. Magento seems to be Magnet-to all as its attracting lots of lots of users daily.

    Hats off to Varien Company !!!

    Rakesh Parsoya

  • http://www.somculned.nl/joomla Daud

    Dear Magento users/producers

    Thank you for the wonderful interview about the Magento. I am interested as student to use for my upcoming company in web applications. Can anyone help to tell me where to start. I have a good command joomla, xoops, wordpress and drupal. My command of the cms applications is very limited I've to add that.

    I am looking for to hear from you.

    Mr Daud Ahmed
    Chariman of
    Somali Cultural Association in the Netherlands
    Somatca somali air traffic controllers Association in Diasporra

  • http://www.neosofttech.com/ Poonam

    Hi Andrew,

    Overall interview with Roy Magento was okay…this is the firsttime i came across Mixergy … good way to be closer to the audience….

    What I would like to do is introduce ourselves.. is there a direct way to approach you please let us know..

    Poonam Lalka
    Skype: poonam.lalka
    http://www.neosofttech.com

  • http://www.webpayments.ie/ dave

    Hi,
    Great interview and Great site too. I only found it today but I will be subscribing to your RSS feed so I can keep up to date. I did a blog post on your interview which you can find here – http://www.webpayments.ie/blog/The-Magento-Stor…

  • Brian

    Magento is very powerful, and very complex. It has a very high learning curve. If you need to do any customization, other than just re-skinning the templates, then expect to spend many many hours learning the system. While it is free, they offer a commercial version and paid support, and in doing this have basically ignored the free support forums. Take a look at the forums and you'll see a large amount of threads with 1 or 0 replies. In my opinion they're losing a ton of potential customers and frustrating existing customers (if you call a free user a customer), which is giving them a bad name in general. They need to invest heavily in providing support for the unpaid version, otherwise their reputation will tank. Unfortunately it probably is the best free eCommerce package out there, but with horrid customer service.

  • http://www.diytacticalstore.com/ Mike

    Andrew, For me the audio was not synced properly with the video. Not sure if it was on my end or yours.

    I am using Magento for my shop I switched over from Zencart. Overall I am happy with it, there are a few things that need to be added and fixed but it is ok out of the box.

    My biggest gripe is the community or lack of. While it was noted in the interview that it has a strong community I will disagree, especially when compared to other open source projects.

    Take the forum for example, If you look, there are probably thousands of posts that simply go unanswered. Something as simple as how do I get the “product alerts” to work is just ignored by the development team. I realize that they are using support as a revenue model but for minor basic configuration issues there should be some participation from Varien in solving those problems. especially in the early stages of the project.

    One also wonders if they intentionally make things difficult to force someone to purchase support. If that is the case it's certainly not in the spirit of open source.

  • mike

    the overlapping audio makes me hate you

  • http://portal.cerebrum.com.br/ Marcelo Amorim

    The Magento is simply fantastic. Congratulations and much success …

  • green

    i try to use magento . first change you have to do make it easy to install like wordpress
    .make a video . what the puropse of software that you cannot install !

  • http://ballandbone.com/ Siobhan Oldham

    I built a dog boutique ecommerce store using Magento http://www.ballandbone.com
    Initially I was overwhelmed as I have zero software experience – It was really difficult to wrap my head around – I asked a lot of people for technical support and very few people knew the program, I even had several people try and convince me to change platforms- the bottom line – I stuck with it – i got technical support from a guy I found on craigslist who knew Magento, he did work on my site and also gave me tutorials to get over the hump – now when I have an issue I search the magento community forums and find solutions. I got my store up and running – ballandbone.com launched last week and I'm very happy with the way the store looks and the functionality on the back end. Thanks Andrew for being a great resource, I first learned of Magento at one of your mixergy events in Santa Monica.

  • http://mixergy.com AndrewWarner

    What a great example of what can be done with Magento. Thanks for
    posting this. I think it'll help my readers understand what this
    platform can do.

    Andrew Warner
    (sent from my mobile)

  • Mike Smith

    It's not just you. It seemed to be getting more and more out of sync as time went on.

    Andrew, listen to the mp3 starting at about 48:10 to see what we mean. I love the content of your interviews, but stopped listening at this point because it was just too difficult.

  • http://kshuk.com alexhoule

    I had never heard of Magento before.
    I love the idea of offering an open-source and a pro version. I also love how honest he is on his lifestyle.

    It's a great example of a company who, starting from nothing, found a niche to focus on.

    Can't wait to read it in your book.

  • suchinwebs
  • suchinwebs

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