Happy middle of August, everybody, and welcome to a tank top diary without a tank top. 

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Apologies – it’s a bit too hot.

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The idea of these videos is just to give you a sense of what we think is really going on in the market.

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So, on the customer side – retailers, ecom people – it feels like it’s starting to wake up! Which is good news for everybody, I think.

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One of the things that I think is probably happening is that the acceleration of Shopify (as we all know) into that middle market area is just unprecedented. I think everybody will put Shopify on the list to at least look at now. And that’s everybody – big, small – everybody. Interestingly, I think the place that we see it not performing or not going to win as well as everywhere else, is where ecommerce isn’t the biggest deal. So, where customer data is the biggest and most important area, like FMCG for example. I feel like some of the other platforms will score far more heavily there. But yeah, the mid-market is theirs to lose at the moment.

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On the vendor and sort of SaaS side, obviously, VC has been very hard to come by for the last 18 months or so. And that’s been evident in our own commercial performance. But what’s interesting now, I think, is that the budgets are starting to be unlocked, and people are starting to really look for things to do that are slightly more ambitious than they were earlier this year. And partnerships, because of the way that the market has worked, have become really, really critical. So we’re seeing far more uptick in activity in the SaaS vendor and agency land than we have done for at least the last year, which is again great news.

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So we’re going to work hard over the course of the rest of the year to put ourselves into a great position for next year. Got some exciting events coming up and a lot of very hard work for the rest of the year. But then same old, same old, right?

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Anyway, have a lovely time on the beach everybody and I’ll talk to you in a couple of weeks.

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