The People Behind Ecommerce Camp
Building Ecommerce Camp has been one of the most rewarding projects of my career, and it would not exist without the incredible people who have helped bring it to life. I want to take a moment to publicly thank Maddie Wood and the Mollie team for their support and contribution to what we are building. In a world where most business relationships are transactional, finding people who genuinely share your vision and are willing to invest their time and energy into making it real is rare and precious.
Why the Right Partners Change Everything
When I first started talking about Ecommerce Camp — the idea of creating a community-driven ecommerce event that prioritised merchant value over sponsor revenue — most people in the industry were politely sceptical. The standard model for ecommerce events is well-established: sell sponsorship packages, fill the programme with sponsor-friendly content, and measure success by attendance numbers and sponsor satisfaction. Building something different required partners who believed in the vision strongly enough to take a different approach. Maddie and the Mollie team were among the first to say yes, and their support has been instrumental in proving that a merchant-first model can work.
What Good Partnership Looks Like
The partnership with Mollie exemplifies what I believe every business relationship should be. It is not about logos on a banner or mentions in a newsletter. It is about genuine alignment on values and goals. They want to support the ecommerce community in meaningful ways, and we want to create events and content that actually help merchants grow. When those two motivations align, the partnership creates value for everyone — for the merchants who attend our events, for Mollie as a company embedded in the community, and for Ecommerce Camp as a platform that can deliver more and better experiences because of the support.
Building Together
The lesson I take from this partnership, and from every meaningful collaboration I have been part of at MageCloud, is that the best results come from working with people who care about the same things you care about. Not just people who can write a cheque or fill a slot, but people who wake up thinking about the same problems and who light up when they talk about the same opportunities. If you are building something in ecommerce and you are looking for partners, my advice is to prioritise alignment over everything else. The right partners will amplify your vision in ways that money alone never can, and they will stick with you through the difficult early stages when the concept is still unproven and the audience is still small.