I am Tommy Nguyen, and I call Nha Trang home, a Vietnamese coastal city that feels like the country’s own version of Long Beach, with white sand beaches, deep blue water, and breezy weather almost every day of the year.
It’s the kind of place that keeps you both grounded and energized, which probably says something about how I try to run a business.
Before WordPress ever entered the picture, I was deep into UI/UX design and spent a good chunk of my early digital life building games and interactive marketing tools on the Facebook platform. Back when Facebook offered an open API, we could collect user data and create all sorts of social experiences.
It was experimental, exciting, and honestly a little wild. That period shaped how I think about product design: start with the user, make it delightful, and never underestimate the power of a good interface.
Finding WordPress, and Staying
My path to WordPress was surprisingly organic. I was simply writing on a WordPress blog when I started wondering what lived underneath the hood. That curiosity led me to create my first custom plugin on wordpress.org, a small extension for Contact Form 7. It was modest, but it hooked me immediately. There was something deeply satisfying about contributing a piece of functionality that real people would actually use.
WordPress felt like a platform with an open invitation, and I never really looked back.
The Birth of YayCommerce
When I decided to build a suite of WooCommerce extensions, the market was already crowded. There were plenty of capable plugins out there, and I knew that functionality alone wouldn’t cut it. The brand had to mean something!
The “Woo” in WooCommerce always struck me as punchy and full of energy, and I wanted to match that spirit. “Yay” came naturally… it’s a greeting, an exclamation, a little burst of joy when something works exactly the way it should. That’s the feeling I want every merchant to have after setting up one of our plugins.
From that idea grew a whole family: YayMail, YayCurrency, YayPricing, YayBoost, Yay Wholesale B2B, and more. Naming them consistently wasn’t just branding, it was a commitment to a shared essence across everything we build.
Building in a Sea of Extensions
Crafting a recognizable brand among thousands of WooCommerce extensions is no small feat.
I often describe it as swimming in a huge shoal of fish, even if you’re a shrimp or a crab, you learn to move like a fish, so users can find and trust you. The real challenge isn’t just building something that works; it’s building something that *feels* like it belongs in a merchant’s toolkit for the long haul.
Our focus has always been on conversion-boosting features both in plugins and themes. Every tool we release is designed with one question in mind: Does this help a store sell more, more efficiently, and with less friction?
That lens keeps our team sharp and our roadmap honest.
A Team, a Community, and a Philosophy
We’re a tight-knit in-house team, and I’m genuinely proud of what we’ve built together. But I’ve never seen the broader WordPress ecosystem as competition. When I come across a plugin that solves a problem better than ours does, I say so.
I actively recommend plugins from Barn2, YITH, and products from Codecanyon through Envato’s affiliate program. To me, a thriving community lifts everyone. If merchants trust the WordPress ecosystem as a whole, they’re more likely to invest in it. And that’s good for all of us building within it.
Not only in eCommerce, but we also build powerful plugins for WordPress as a whole. Our portfolio includes tools like YaySMTP for reliable email delivery, Bookster for streamlined appointment scheduling on WordPress, and CatFolders WP Media Folders for better media organization.
And our upcoming WP Email Customizer is designed to give users full control over their WordPress email design.
WordCamps, Real People, and the Merchant Opportunity
We’ve attended WordCamps across Asia and Europe, and every single one has reinforced why this community is worth investing in.
One that sticks with me was in Vienna. I expected the room to be full of seasoned developers. And there were plenty.
But, what surprised me was how many attendees were solopreneurs who had just discovered WordPress. First-timers, small business owners, people figuring it all out. That moment reminded me that our job isn’t just to build great tools for developers; it’s to make WordPress approachable enough that new people don’t just arrive, but also stay.
What’s Next: AI, YayReviews, and the Merchant-First Future
The next chapter for YayCommerce is one I’m genuinely excited about. We’re weaving AI deeper into our upcoming releases, and our focus is squarely on making that intelligence practical for merchants, not just impressive on a demo screen.
One example we’re brewing is YayReviews, a plugin that leverages AI to help store owners collect, manage, and respond to customer reviews more intelligently. Think smarter review prompts, sentiment-aware responses, and insights that actually help merchants understand what their customers are saying. It’s one piece of a larger vision.
Looking further ahead, I believe WordPress and WooCommerce have enormous room to grow. Not just as developer tools, but as a genuine merchant-first platform!
WordPress has been carried by a small group of dedicated volunteers, adopted by millions, and shaped by passionate developers across the world. As long as that ecosystem holds, the growth will continue. My contribution to that process is to keep pushing the user experience forward: to make WordPress feel less like a developer’s sandbox and more like a merchant’s command center.
Shopify, for all its differences, is something I watch closely as a benchmark for how ecommerce UX should feel. If we can bring that level of polish and ease to the open-source world of WordPress, we’ll have achieved something meaningful.
Beyond the Screen
When I’m not building plugins or thinking about product roadmaps, you’ll find me at the gym or on a football pitch with the team. ;)
We work out together every weekday and play football every weekend. Not just as coworkers, but as friends who push each other to show up, both physically and professionally. Good nutrition, good fitness, good energy. It carries over into how we work.
I’ve also made it a personal mission to visit every continent. I’ve hit most of them, with the Americas still on the list for 2026. There’s something about being on a different continent that resets your perspective in a way no productivity hack ever could.
And at the end of a good week? We celebrate the way any self-respecting team should: good food, cold beer, and everyone around the same table. That’s the reward. That’s our culture.
