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In this episode of Second Acts, Krish is joined by Dirk Hoerig, founder of commercetools.
Dirk reflects on: coining “headless commerce” and the architectural decisions that let them stay ahead of wave after wave of platform shifts (including the recent agentic one), standardizing a consumption-based pricing model for wildly varying customer types, having a clear-eyed view of different eras of competition, handing off the CEO title after 14 years (plus scaling past $150m in ARR), staying obsessed with what’s next, and much more.
Dirk: "My experience on building companies and business models is that you have to monetize around what your buyers understand and what's driving value for your business. So you can have a great product that has a lot of customer demands. If your pricing isn't matching what the customer perceives as value driver, and you don't have clear KPIs that they are also able to track, then it will be challenging for you as a business to grow."
Krish: “The [gross margin] discipline that you are referring to—I think is even more applicable in today's world, because with AI, one of the things we are observing is every feature is becoming like a micro-product, and you have to be very conscious of the winners and your fillers... because it's going to cost you a lot more, and it can erode the gross margins.”
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Chapters:
(05:12) commercetools’ early insight
(06:46) Challenging legacy enterprise commerce vendors that monetized maintenance not innovation
(07:42) Wired magazine’s The Web Is Dead issue (and how it affirmed commercetools’ founding thesis)
(09:45) commercetools today: a composable ecommerce platform that serves every potential touchpoint (including AI agents)
(10:47) How commercetools defines their enterprise segment
(12:42) 200-item, two-year-old backlogs and the cost of dated enterprise systems
(19:14) Dirk's monetization philosophy (and why some value drivers remain hard to monetize)
(23:54) How commercetools iterated their way to a standard, order-consumption-based pricing model
(27:23) Conducting rigorous, gross margin analyses across customer tiers
(29:60) How AI features demand a similarly disciplined approach to costs
(31:55) Building with an unwaveringly counter-intuitive premise; "independent of the category"
(34:45) How a truly API-first architecture has paid off across several—from mobile to voice to agentic—technological shifts
(41:22) On competition: Legacy giants, segment-expanding players, and the coming AI-native wave
(50:28) A brief snapshot of commercetools’ Commerce MCP launch, from an internal prototype to a standard-defining release
(57:05) Dirk acknowledges the need to celebrate business milestones better, while there’s always the founder’s urge to move to the next thing
(59:32) Adapting org design and operating models for serving a sophisticated, at-scale enterprise motion
(01:03:16) Dirk’s transition to a Chief Innovation Officer role as commercetools prepares for its next decade
(01:08:36) Sports, crunch times, and Dirk’s central advice to founders: “don’t quit”
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Referenced/Resources:
The Web Is Dead. Long Live the Internet (Wired Magazine)
Why headless commerce will continue to boom after a decade of innovation
Customer Keynote: Path to Composable Commerce - John Lewis Migration Journey
Introducing the Model Context Protocol
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Connect with Dirk:
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Connect with Krish:
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