E154 – WordFest (July 23) & Mental Health for Remote Workers (Dan Maby, Big Orange Heart)

In today’s episode, Joe talks to Dan Maby of Big Orange Heart – a nonprofit organization that supports and promotes positive well-being and mental health within remote working communities. The Big Orange Heart Health Hubs are designed to provide holistic support for the individual.

Dan shares how Big Orange Heart came from the challenges he and his team faced while handling a digital marketing agency, and the organization’s mission to help support the mental health of workers in a remote setting. They also discussed the upcoming WordFest Live, a virtual event to be streamed in six continents in a 24-hour period.

What to Listen For:

• 00:00 Intro
• 03:01 Welcome to the pod, Dan!
• 03:20 The funny story at the WordCamp US 2019 
• 05:30 What’s keeping Dan busy
• 06:55 Big Orange Heart born from the challenges of handling an agency
• 08:36 Things take different priorities at different times of your life
• 10:34 Mental health is a challenging topic to talk about
• 14:26 Supporting as many network as possible
• 16:55 Varying levels of support for different groups of people
• 22:31 Getting a core group for individuals to get support together
• 25:35 Encourage the community in Slack to help
• 28:37 WordFest Live 2021: The festival of WordPress
• 36:12 WordFest 2021 to deliver within six continents in a 24-hour period
• 39:33 A diverse organizing team in the background across seven time zones
• 43:32 WordFest was supposed to be an annual event
• 48:11 The virtual setting has opened many more interesting environment
• 53:40 Live Streaming in-person previous events were leading to the hybrid event style
• 54:38 Find Dan online

Episode Resources:

• Big Orange Heart
• Big Orange Heart Support
• Dan Maby Website
• WordFest Live, register Here
• Leave an Apple podcast review or binge-watch past episodes
• Visit the WPMRR Community
• The 2021 WPMRR Virtual Summit

Podcast Transcript:

Joe Howard: [00:00:00] I already folks, Joe Howard here. All right. A little house keeping before today’s episode WP MRR, virtual summit coming up in September. If you want to attend an event that is a hundred percent focused on helping you grow your monthly recurring revenue, your subscription business. Feel free to sign up.

Then let’s do it. It is happening in September three-day event. Go over to community. P mrr.com to get signed up and registered for the summit, kind of leads me into my second point. WP, M R R community. Again, a community dot WP, mrr.com. If you want to take this podcast experience and really give them.

Involved. You’re not just listening to me on the podcast. You’re actually getting involved with other folks, all trying to grow their subscription businesses together. Join the community. We’ve got a 78 members as of when I’m recording this so small, but mighty for now, starting small, but accelerating pretty quickly.

I’m hoping to have more members in here doing their thing. Uh, feel free to join today. If you’re early in, you’ll get a cool badge on your profile of first 100 active members badge. So don’t wait too long or they might, they might run out. There’s some scarcity there. Cool. Last but not least let’s get into the intro.

The episode today, I was lucky enough to have Dan maybe on the podcast today. So Dan is an agency owner, but more people know him for the nonprofit organization. He runs in the WordPress space and now helping remote workers across the globe with mental health and mental wellbeing, uh, that our organization is called a big orange heart.

Um, most people have heard about it. And so I got to talk with him a lot about what it was like to start that organization. And. You mean, like to run that organization, helping people around the globe, be more mental health aware when it comes to their remote work. We also got to dive into word Fest, which is a now virtual summit, but has some in-person events as well, or at least it did before.

And demic came upon us and may in the future as well. We talked a little bit about in person and digital events. I, I got to pick his brain a lot about digital events that they are throwing. Soon, and it’s a 24 hour event. And I just want to give folks that date because I don’t think we actually got to mention it directly on the podcast dates of ward Fest.

Very soon. It is a 24 hour event on the 23rd of July. And that starts at midnight UTC. It’s really cool. Well, you can go on the homepage, just enter it automatically picks up your time zone. You can see when all the events are in your time zone, super easy. So you can just go to wordpress.live for that.

Cool. That is it for. Today, let’s get to it. Please give a warm, welcome to Dan. Maybe enjoy today’s episode. All right. We are live on the pod this week with Dan. Maybe. Am I saying your last name right? Is it may be, or Mobby.

Dan Maby: [00:03:09] Maybe is the one.

Joe Howard: [00:03:11] Cool. Maybe it is nailed it. All right. Sweet. Uh, Dan, welcome to the podcast.

I want to, for you to tell folks what you do with WordPress, but before you do that, I want you to tell a story. We talked about offline right before we started recording about your WordPress or excuse me, your, your word camp travel story.

Dan Maby: [00:03:30] Joe. Thanks really appreciate this very fishy. I just need to come and have a chat with you.

Um, yeah, I, it was flying into last, uh, what kept us in 2019, uh, or a bit of a bit of a blur from now, but so, uh, as I flew in, got a connecting flight and, uh, chatting to the, uh, chatting, chatting to the chat next to me, you sitting on the flight over. Um, it hadn’t connected having decided I hadn’t even actually spoken on names to one another, uh, got into a camp, the us into the sponsor’s hall and ran into the same, uh, same chapter.

Turns out to be a, your, your very own Nick.

Joe Howard: [00:04:05] Good. I do remember that story before you told it to me first started recording it. I love that WordPress is man, small world, right? It’s a big world out there. And. That’s open source people, I guess, tend to find each other. So did you like see each other across the event and you were like, Hey, are you back? Are you, Hey, what’s up?

Dan Maby: [00:04:26] It was, it was very cool and getting in there. And as you’re just saying, it’s a, it’s a, it’s a huge community yet. It’s such a tight knit or community. And, uh, you know, the idea of flying in from London and ending up in the seat next to next to Nick and chatting away about WordPress and what we’re doing. And then ending up in that same, uh, same conference.

Joe Howard: [00:04:44] Very cool. It’s one of those, it feels like one of those, like almost like faded things happen at a word camp. Cause word camps just like gives such like good positive energies. It’s just like, it starts when you like leave your front door. I think, you know?

Dan Maby: [00:04:55] Absolutely. Absolutely. I mean that, that for me, I mean, that’s the big one in terms of the, uh, the word camps is the hallway track, you know, get in, have those conversations. You just never know where those conversations are going to go. You never know where you’re going to end up. And, uh, yeah, there’s been some pretty special, pretty special places that have I’ve ended up off the back of those conversations.

So. Yeah. As much as I love, I work with, um, word camps and meet ups and, you know, events within our space, you know, around the content within them. I think those there’s something very special in that, uh, in the hallway.

Joe Howard: [00:05:26] Yeah, I couldn’t agree more. And I definitely want to dive into all that today. Uh, I do want to start by just giving you a chance to introduce yourself and some of the things you do with WordPress folks who are watching on YouTube, they see us kind of repping with our hats here on video.

So yeah, they can probably guess at this point, and I’m sure a lot of people can, they don’t have to guess cause they already know who Dan is, but, uh, folks don’t know some of the things you do around. Community stuff with WordPress around events stuff with WordPress. Anything else I’m missing? Uh, tell Dallas a little bit about that.

Dan Maby: [00:05:57] Sure. I mean, I’ve, I’ve been, uh, in and around WordPress. Um, I’ve, I’m starting to lose count of the number of years now. Um, I was taking a look back at shit the 18th, uh, when it was 1854, uh, for WordPress, uh, and realized that I, uh, I’d started on version 1.5. So I think we’re going back. All technologies. Um, but now I just say I’m done maybe, uh, I am the founder of big orange hearts, a registered non-profit supporting and promoting positive wellbeing and mental health within remote working communities.

Uh, I also run a digital agency out of London in the UK, uh, complete 37. Um, I run a number of meetups, a number of events, uh, across the WordPress space. I’m a big, big fan of the community side of, uh, of what.

Joe Howard: [00:06:42] Yeah, very cool. My first question is, man, you do a lot of stuff because I see you so active in a big orange heart.

I see you active in the, in the slack community. I see you active in, uh, everywhere, online. How do you, how do you find time to do agency work and all your positive community work?

Dan Maby: [00:07:01] It’s been, um, it’s been an interesting journey. Uh, I’ll be honest. So it’s a big orange hall. It was actually born out. So my, my needs as an agency owner, and some of the challenges that I was facing in terms of the, uh, the kind of lone working and, you know, uh, that, that solopreneur experienced that I was going through and trying to, um, you know, figure out how.

Fit into this space, you know, I needed, I needed people to connect with. I needed to just have conversations with other like-minded people and, you know, people that were, um, you know, in the space and having an understanding of the experiences that I was going through. And that, so that was really, it was kind of off the back of the agency that, uh, the big orange heart was, uh, was born and yeah, certainly.

Keeping the two afloat has been, has been a, again, a, a really interesting challenge for me. And, um, there’s been moments through this journey where the agencies had, uh, had to take a bit of a backseat and equally have been times where the charities had to had to drop down a little bit, but in terms of my priority, but overall, um, I think we’ve, we’ve managed to get a good mix of the two.

Joe Howard: [00:08:01] Yeah, cool. I mean, I really liked that answer. I feel like sometimes people feel the pressure to say, like I work on both of them and, and concurrently, and I’m always. Pushing forward on them. Both. I had Pippin on the podcast recently too, and he was pretty honest about, you know, sometimes I’m focused on brewery stuff.

Sometimes I’m focused on, on, you know, software stuff and it’s it ebbs and flows. And you’ve had a similar answer there. I think that’s a, I think that’s a healthy answer, I guess, big charters helps you a little bit with some of that, that mental health. Cause that’s a, to me that’s a honest and transparent answer that.

Things take different priorities at different times of your life. And that’s cool.

Dan Maby: [00:08:39] Absolutely. Absolutely. And to be honest, they’ve got to, you know, if you try and continually run a hundred miles an hour, know a hundred percent all the time, um, you’re going to run into issues. You’re going to run into that, that burnout issue that I’ve.

Yeah, I’ve gotten to that point. I did get to a point of burnout. I was trying to focus on achieving, accomplishing too many things a year without the support network that really I needed around me. And that’s really where, um, you know, looking at things like the recurring revenue within the businesses, I mean, enables you to then enable me to then bring in additional staff and additional team members work with additional freelances, uh, to just, to, to relieve that.

So I can then focus my energies on the, on the areas that were important.

Joe Howard: [00:09:21] Yeah, I think that’s, uh, you know, going about things the right way. Seemingly as someone who has encountered some of these challenges and learn themselves, you know, I can’t go a hundred miles an hour all the time. You know, I have to have to slow and steady.

As the old adage goes, you know, wins the race. Uh, sometimes, sometimes it’s sometimes the hair beats the rabbit, maybe on the show, over the short term, but over the longterm Torres, you know, can come out ahead.

I would like to, I wanted to hear and just learn a little bit about the, um, name of the organization, big orange heart, uh, and the logo and stuff. One thing I really love about being in your, um, in your slide. Channel or in the slack community, which around a big orange heart, which I stole from WP for WP bus, slack group is you have the orange heart, custom emoji.

And I’ve seen some people with custom emojis out there, but that one was one that was really like, this is like all, like, you can like react to what someone said, like with this orange heart, like that’s such an on-brand thing. So I have our, we have our logo, both our colors. We actually like added our mission and our, like our mission customer Mogis and like value customer emoji.

So you’ve motivated a lot for me in terms of like, oh, what custom emojis can do, but love the big darn chart. Where did that all start in terms of like name branding, that kinda.

Dan Maby: [00:10:39] Awesome. Well, thank you. I really appreciate hearing that. Send a, and actually I’ve had a number of companies that have adopted the, uh, that the orange heart emoji within their own staff to, to support, you know, if staff were wanting to represent, you know, the talk about wellbeing or there’s a mental health discussion going on, then the, uh, the orange hall is making appearances in other slack.

Um, but yeah, the, the, the name was really, um, we, sorry, we started out as WP and L um, a very focused within specifically the WordPress community. Um, through that period, we were, we were, uh, using orange as our branding and actually the community adopted the orange heart emoji. We would find that just people were simply using that orange heart emoji a lot through our conversations in slack.

And, uh, we, we had always had an intention to. Evolve into something slightly larger and something slightly bigger than a than the, than what WPN app was initially. And, you know, at the start of the right on the beginning of when the, uh, the pandemic started, we actually took the decision to rebrand into, uh, big orange hearts, which was the.

Uh, the new brand, the new name for the organization that would break us out of solely the WordPress community and into the wider remote working community. And we didn’t have a name. Uh, you know, there was never, there was never a name set up for that transition from what was, and up into the next, uh, into the new, the new organizational, um, uh, identity.

And it just struck me. I was actually, I was getting a train from my home, going into London and I just saw this poster and on the poster, there was this orange heart, and it just absolutely struck me that the, you know, the community had adopted the name. And that’s really where big orange. Yeah. Big orange hearts sitting on this poster, um, and seeing it, you’re seeing it, they’re seeing it across the, across the community.

Uh, you know, the way the community was using the, uh, the emoji, it made absolute sense. It’s a big orange heart and it was all it fits fitted with the, the ethos. It fitted with the, the messaging about, you know, this is about us, you know, moving forward, pressing forward. Yeah in love and making sure that, you know, this isn’t, this is a really difficult, or can be a really difficult subject matter to touch on.

Uh, yeah. Th that when we’re getting into mental health and we’re getting into wellbeing, um, it can be really, really challenging as a topic. So we wanted something to have that kind of softer edge to it. Uh, hence the, the.

Joe Howard: [00:13:00] I love the it’s. So community driven, I mean, you know, it’s people sit in rooms for a hundred hours and try to figure out what their brand is going to be about.

Their logo is going to be what their company name is going to be. But, uh, you kind of went in a, in a different direction. And I think that it adds that much more credence in that much more like. Organic goodness of the brand, because it’s like, it’s not, you know, Dan that said, this is what our brand is, because this is what I think, you know, people do, people use that, you know, 10 times a day in the slack channel, it’s like, it’s almost like knocking on the door and knocking on your brain being like, Hey Dan, like, this is, this is what we’re all about.

And that’s, uh, why not take that feedback and run with, it seems like it’s been, been successful and to move outside of a WP name or like how to move. To a name that doesn’t have WP in your name is also interesting because like having WP in your name has advantages in some situations like for WP buffs, people are like, they do WordPress maintenance.

Like we don’t do website management in any other spaces. So like, to be fee makes sense. And for you, you’ve said, WordPress is a great space, but we want to help everybody. Who’s having mental health challenges, all the remote workers, not just WordPress. And if a juvenile person comes along or someone who works in any other open source software, they CWP.

Maybe that’s not for me, but big orange hearts, a little bit more welcoming, and if it has art in it, so of course it’s welcoming. So I think it all made sense.

Dan Maby: [00:14:25] Absolutely. And that was really the key. It was about how do we, how do we create something that has that appeal to, you know, to anybody that’s within the space?

Um, yeah, huge fans of open source, open source generally. And we wanted to make sure that we were opening ourselves. Oh, yeah. For as wide a community and as wide as wide as wide a, um, support network as we possibly could. And that’s really, yeah, that’s really where we wanted to take this. And it’s been a, again, a fantastic journey just over the last 18 months, two years, particularly through, uh, through the pandemic and through the, you know, the, the.

Really hard challenges that have been presented through that period. We right at the start just as we were going through that rebranding or starts that rebranded process, um, we saw more than a 300% increase in demand on the service. So here we are trying to juggle this, you know, this, if anybody’s going to go through that rebranding process before we, it can be, it can be quite a challenge sometimes trying to make sure you’re getting it right.

There’s a, there’s a lot of pieces to the jigsaw and make sure that they, you know, they’re in the right place at the right time. Um, but to do that at the same time, as we obviously had to, you know, to deal with that huge increase in terms of demand on to the charity, uh, it was, um, interesting and we we’ve certainly learned a lot through it.

Joe Howard: [00:15:38] Yeah. There’ll be food. Beth’s went through a rebrand last year and boy, you are right. It is complex. It doesn’t seem so complex when you’re at the beginning and you’re like, it’s like 10 steps or 20 steps. You don’t have them all written out. It’s like, oh, we’ll just do the things. And then that turns into like a hundred steps.

Except five turns into like 10 sub steps, you know, so I, and we weren’t even changing our name. We just changed. We just did new branding and a new website. So I’m sure at least at a base level, I understand the complexity of it. I did want to touch on the like services, have a big orange heart, too. So, I’m not sure how you would think about it, but I would, I think there probably some people who are maybe wanting to be proactive about their mental health, they know maybe they’re feeling some burnout.

They just want to have a good community of people to talk to, to surround themselves with, you know, right. You become the people you surround yourself with. So other people who are concerned about mental health and want to get ahead of it, you do too. It’s going to help you to be part of a community like that.

But there are definitely going to be people out there who need professional. Help around mental health. Um, so I actually don’t exactly know how a big orange heart works. Do people come to a big orange heart for like professional services? Is that something you can like connect them with people or they’re actually people who like work for, or maybe like contract with big orange heart to like provide it within the organization?

Um, I just, yeah, I’d love to learn a little bit more about like the services and what kinds of things you can offer to people who maybe are listening to this. And they’re like, Maybe they’re feeling burnt out or maybe they’re at the beginning. They’re like, I’m feel weird. Like, why do I feel not motivated to do stuff?

That’s maybe you start to feel burnout. What, what can people come to big horn charts for?

Dan Maby: [00:17:11] Absolutely. It was a great question. We actually have kind of varying levels of support that we deliver and it Starts out with that kind of very light touch, conversation so that what you just mentioned there and, I feel a bit weird or something’s not right.

Or, I’d normally be doing this not only really productive across it, but I’m not, certainly through the pandemic. I know I’ve experienced an awful lot of very weird emotions and very weird feelings. I’ve needed to just talk with other people about And so that’s where we start out.

We’ve got our, kind of a light-touch services that are available through our website. So in BigOrangeHeart.org you can hit, forward slash support on there. There’s, a chat box that actually runs through people, so run through various scenarios. So, if you’re dealing with, levels on diets, high levels of anxiety, or you’re dealing with a panic attack, there are various steps that you can run through with those chatbots.

We were hesitant about the use of chatbots initially. Um, we actually made sure that we ran both concurrently with the live chat and the chat bot. Um, we actually found that the chatbots were received really well. And the feedback we were getting from those that were prepared to provide feedback was that there was that level of anonymity with the chat bot that they felt more comfortable with, that people felt more comfortable with, so they could talk through.

And, um, the, you know, the, the bot would return some responses in relation to what was, uh, what was being delivered by the person visiting. Having said that we also on the site, we do still and always will have the live, live chat available on there as well. So, uh, we have volunteers and individuals that sit on the live chat.

Now these are not mental health professionals and we make it very clear that these are not mental health professionals at this point, but those are individuals that have, um, uh, experience within. The remote working environments that have had, um, experience of, you know, that they’re prepared to share and discuss, and then talk through with individuals.

Those volunteers are then supported by, we have a network of mental health professionals that we can tap into. So should an individual needs to progress their support. Then we have roadmaps that enable us to, uh, uh, signpost individuals to the most appropriate, uh, support that we have available to us. The kind of the core elements, if you like, of what we do in our community actually sits within our slack community and within our slack community, we have what we call life groups.

So our life groups are, very small, groups of individuals. So we limit it to around six people. Within each life group and the intention of these life groups is that individuals build up a confidence with that small group of individuals. Within that group, we try and pair up individuals with different experiences so that they can, connect with one another and really just support one another.

So it becomes a peer to peer support network, for those community members that have decided to join. And we’ve had some phenomenal success with this, where. People are able to build up that trust and communicate and have a safe space to be able to turn to. And that safe space covers a wide variety of, topics.

So, uh, we hear. Conversations where people go in and talk about, um, you know, challenges in relation to their business in that moment, you know, they may have a client that isn’t settling their invoice, so they just want some advice on, Hey, you know, what, what have other people done in this experience? How to work through that right through to, you know, the slightly more challenging, you know, the topics around me, maybe struggling with, uh, uh, poor mental health.

And of course that that group is really intended to be, uh, the ability, um, support network for, for those individual. So it’s been a really phenomenal experience going through this and, and, and seeing these grow.

Joe Howard: [00:21:07] Wow. Really cool. And I think the, I want to dive more into this because I think clearly it’s helpful to have a really trusting space, a place you can go to where, you know, you’ll have support that you know, is going to encourage you, that you’ll know is going to have your back in the situations when it comes to.

Tough difficult things to talk about, like mental health WP MRR, just launched a community around helping folks grow subscription businesses. Clearly mental health is going to take priority in this case, but I think that some of the things that make your group. Small groups so successful could help me make our groups more successful because I want to be successful too.

I want our small community groups and spaces to be successful in what they do. So I want to like, pick your brain a little bit into like maybe what made some of these small groups successful. Like how you, maybe we can even back up a little bit, like how, how do you even form these groups? Cause I’m at the point right now in the community where it’s kind of a morphous, like people are coming in and ensuring each other.

However, these core spaces. You know, marketing and sales and content like operations and systems, like all the, all the things I think people will want to talk about in terms of growing subscription businesses. But I’m now at this place where like, okay, how do I get, how do I like group people together to like, create their own energies so that I’m not like having to like run every group.

Right? Like, yeah. So what, uh, what are those first steps of like getting core groups together of individuals and like, how did, how did that. Sure.

Dan Maby: [00:22:38] So initially this was a very organic process for us. Um, so it was something that started very early on in the state, in the process for us, where we just, we wanted to figure out how can we create a network to support one another?

Because this, you know, we’re talking about global community, uh, that we’re trying to, to deliver support into, um, and. Best willing to intentions in the world and, and as much funding as we possibly can. We’re never going to be able to support every single person. So we needed to find a way that we could scale up, um, the, the ability for people to receive some level of support.

Um, and that’s really where this kind of the concept of these life groups came and the life groups, um, Uh, some of the life groups. Yes. Yeah. Yep. And the, they were really born out of the need of the individuals that we had at a very small scale. And it’s really born grown from that point. we’re very intentional about making sure that we’ve got different skill sets within those groups.

So that’s something that we need. We’re very mindful of this, issue, because if you’ve got, let’s say you’ve got six people that are all talking about the same thing. they all Let’s say they’re all designers and they’re all going to have potentially very similar experience or similar experiences in their working environment.

What we want to try and encourage is that diversity within those conversations, we want to make sure that different people with different experiences are able to chime in and have that conversation and share, you know what, I’m coming from a perspective of a marketer. And I’m talking to somebody who, maybe, a virtual assistant that has no experience of marketing at all.

And those two individuals can come at the same problem. With very different perspectives. So it really is all about creating that, just a very diverse conversation for them. within those groups.

Joe Howard: [00:24:31] I call that one plus one equals three. And like, to me, diversity creates that ecosystem in which you can get one plus one equals three.

If you have two people who are exactly the same, you’re going to get one plus one equals two every time. Oh, you said that. Yep. I agree with that. You have two different people. Someone says something, someone else says, I actually think a little bit differently than that. Of course, as long as both those people are respectfully coming together and trusting conversation, you can say, Hey, I actually think something a little different, like, and this was my experience.

So actually it’s very, totally differently. The first person’s like, oh my God, like that’s actually, sometimes that’s can be. Life altering. It can be like all trained to the, your whole opinion about something happens to me all the time. When I’m talking to people from different places in the world, from different backgrounds in me, it’s like, oh, like, I almost didn’t even know you.

Like, people think that like, oh wow, that’s really eye opening to me. And that creates this like environment where people in your case in these life groups can overcome really big challenges and help each other out because. Almost have their eyes opened in a sense, not that I’m trying to say it in a way that’s like people, of course everyone has their own set of experiences, but you can gain more experiences by talking to a more diverse set of people.

I think that diversity piece is, sounds like it was pretty key to making these groups successful.

Dan Maby: [00:25:44] Very much so, and again, that, that, that, um, uh, the conversation around diversity has been, has been at the core of everything that we do across big orange hearts. And it really has been, you know, from, from the very beginning from the, you know, the foundations of this, we wanted to make sure that because we’re dealing with a global community, there are so many issues in relation to wellbeing and mental health, you know, from a, from a cultural perspective, mental health and wellbeing.

Dealt with and handled, handled in incredibly different ways and, and, uh, viewed upon in very different ways. So we, we didn’t want to come at this from a, you know, here’s a, here’s a UK centric or here’s a us centric perspective on this. Um, so we’ve tried to, we’ve tried to, uh, throw things that we’ve done.

We’ve tried to incorporate, um, the, you know, the, the views and the opinions. Of of individuals from across our global community. And we’re very open to, um, you know, welcoming more individuals, uh, into, uh, you know, our leadership, uh, across the organization as well. Encouraging the community itself to have a part of within that leadership of the organization.

And that’s, that’s where again, we use a lot of the communication within the slack to, to encourage the community, to help with decision making processes and to be part of it.

Joe Howard: [00:27:02] Yeah, love it, man. Okay. So big orange heart.org. Uh, if people are feeling like they’re challenged right now, big orange heart.org forward slash support.

You can talk to a, a, a, a, uh, a bot there that can help you if you want to feel a little, uh, anonymous, but did they have live chat there as well? So whatever you need, it sounds like they have the support there to help you. I want to share. Focus a little bit actually, based on something that you said a couple of times here, Dan, which is just focus on this global community and serving everyone around the world with their mental health or in terms of remote workers.

Um, so I want to shift our focus a little bit into a word Fest. This is something I, I, you, you, you booked this yesterday. So I’ve had about 24 hours to like, think about what kind of questions I want to ask Dan about, and the big thing about word Fest. I’ve got a ton of things I want to ask you, but the one of the things is definitely you go onto the word Fest website, just word Fest.

By the way people should go and register right now just takes a couple seconds, super easy. 24 hours, seven continents, 3000 attendees, the 24 hours pieces of what I want to touch on because man throwing a 24 hour festival of WordPress. I mean that itself is a enormous feat. We’re throwing this WP MRR virtual summit later this year and it’s, you know, three days and it’s.

It’s it’s it’s, you know, it’s like, I actually forget the exact times. We haven’t totally decided, but it’s like 10 to like two 30 or something middle of the day Eastern time, which in itself has been like a lot. You’re throwing your 24 hour award Fest. That’s crazy, man. So tell me a little bit about like the gears that are turning in the backend to make something like that.

Dan Maby: [00:28:46] Yeah, absolutely. It’s again, this is, this is where we had a lot of conversations around the concept of word Fest. And this event was born out of we’ve. We’ve been delivering events for a very long time. Um, and again, it’s all about.

Joe Howard: [00:29:04] I you go on our websites. Like if they’re second year, like it’s okay, it’s fine.

It’s better than last year, but still it’s okay. You guys, I come to your website, I’m like these, they are event folks right here.

Dan Maby: [00:29:14] This idea of during these events has been, you know, it’s about reducing social isolation. So it’s about bringing people together. That’s really where they’re kind of the core elements of our, of events fit within, uh, within big orange hearts.

And, um, of course the, the. Pandemic had a huge impact in terms of our delivery of events. How do we, how do we continue to do that? Um, so we, yeah, we set out to, uh, continue to do our monthly events. Um, the, you know, the first, so we actually stopped delivering our in-person events in the February of, um, uh, 20, 20, so one, a little over a month before the UK government said that we could no longer be in person together.

The, uh, the, so we stopped in the February, the March. We decided to deliver our first event, uh, our first virtual event. And we jumped on zoom as so many organizers did. And within about 30 seconds realized that zoom was entirely the wrong solution for us to be able to deliver any kind of a virtual event.

It’s great. As a business communication tool, it’s just not, especially now. People are like zoomed out. They’re like going to zoom for a fun conference. Zoom is not fun anymore to do. It was like where I go to have like my business calls, but it’s like no longer a fun space, you know? Absolutely. So we set out to build a custom solution.

Um, and again, being big, big proponents of open source, uh, we looked into the open-source space. What was there and we’ve, we’ve actually got a solution that we’ve built. Um, we’ve been delivering events on now for, uh, I think we’re about 14, 15 months, maybe a bit longer than that.

Joe Howard: [00:30:51] It’s house built.

Dan Maby: [00:30:52] Yeah, absolutely. Totally.

Joe Howard: [00:30:55] That’s awesome. I mean, I think someone told me this before, because I think, I think I was at word Fest last year and I was like, this platform is awesome. Like what platform they using? I tried like ask around and stuff. Someone told, I can’t remember who it was, but someone was like, they made it.

And now I’m remembering because you just told me about it and that’s awesome. I mean, it’s an amazing plant. It’s like it’s like event it’s like clearly like the perfect, like digital. Platform. I remember that so nice. That’s really.

Dan Maby: [00:31:20] It’s been, yeah, it’s been, it’s been awesome actually to go through this and it’s been a case of we as organizers, know what we want, we know what we enjoy and you know, what we need to deliver.

And we, as I say, we really wanted to focus on open source. We’ve actually the, the platform. We built a custom app that we were then able to embed within a WordPress site. So we’ve actually now. Just, we just finished the work to convert that into a, um, WordPress plugin. So in fact, the entire system now is running within a WordPress instance and we’ve got this awful functionality within it.

And we’re, you know, we’re excited to be able to release the WordPress plugin fairly soon. We had hoped to have it ready before. Uh, well, we’re looking to, we’re actually, what we’re looking to do is deliver this into the community to enable more communities to come together.

Joe Howard: [00:32:08] Sure. So it’s a product, but maybe not a paid product. It’s a, but it’s paid being packaged so other people can use it.

Dan Maby: [00:32:14] Exactly.

Joe Howard: [00:32:15] Yes. Okay. So looking at it, man.

Dan Maby: [00:32:17] Okay. For, to getting that one out. Um, but that, that, that really just that journey has been incredible. So we, we, um, In the first 12 months we had a round, I think we were around 12, 13,000 attendees come through that platform.

Um, and it just meant that we can continue to iterate. We can continually develop if anybody, uh, there’s been several people that have attended lots of our events regularly over the past, uh, over the past year. And it became a bit of a running joke. Every time they come into the next event, what, what else has changed?

There’s some things being adjusted because we were constantly adapting, uh, to the needs of the community. Um, so can we circling back to your original question about the 24 hour format? We sat there and said, look, we’ve got this platform, we’re doing these monthly events. We actually open the platform up to other communities.

Um, so the community, other communities that were struggling to come together during the pandemic, we said, look, we’ve got a platform, provided your, um, your meetup or your organization or your event fits with the ethos of the charity. Donate the platform to you. So we’ve actually run a number of other regular events through that plant.

So we S we S we sat down at a meeting and said, look, we’ve got this platform. It’s, it’s, you know, we’re getting some phenomenal feedback from it. Uh, from the community we had always wanted to deliver a larger scale in-person event through the, through the organization. Simply can’t do that right now, obviously, because of the pandemic.

So we said, look, let’s, let’s do something virtual. We can do a larger scale virtual event. And of course the conversations then led on to, right. How do we make sure that this is inclusive? How do we ensure that. Across. Yeah, we can include all of the time zones across the event. Do we do it across multiple days?

I mean, that was the first point. Do we do it, you know, do we do a 3, 4, 5 day events so we can make sure that there’s a time slot, that every individual across every different time zone can participate in something. And we ended up out all the CA running through my mind was the, um, the very first couple of, um, word sessions that were delivered way back, which again were both, uh, 24 hour format events.

Um, and I, the very first one, I actually attended the full 24 hours of the event. And it just always stuck with me that memory of that event. And I figured that this is. If we do it across 1 24 hour period, there’s a T there is a, we’re offering an opportunity across every single time zone for, um, every community member to get involved at some point.

So this, this issue of, you know, we, we run into problems of, you know, do you attend these events in your work day? Is this a work thing, or do you attend this in your personal time offering over a 24 hour period means that we’re taking away those, uh, those questions in relation to when, uh, when somebody.

Joe Howard: [00:35:03] Uh, I like that piece because that is Brian is working on WP MRR, virtual summit with me. So we’re totally working on this together. So I’ve had that exact conversation we were talking about, like work is doing 24 hours. Like, is that even an option? I don’t even know. That was a thing. Brian was like, yeah, we’ve done that before.

It’s a little crazy. We have decided not to go that direction, but in the future, I actually remember saying to me, When we, maybe we forget once you have a little more like support or like volunteers. Cause I know you have some volunteers helping with, with your summit. So it’s just me and Brian right now.

So we thought 24 hours will be tough to pull off. But I like that idea a lot. Now I do like that. You have people have the option of like, do I attend during work or do I attend outside of work? I think what we kind of thought was like, most people. Like they can get away with working like half a day. And our event is only like four hours in a day, so they can like do the work first thing in the morning and then maybe they’ll show up and watch a couple of things or whatever.

And maybe that’s not everybody, but that was kind of like, that’s how I, that’s how I would attend probably. Um, so I think that we made somewhat of an assumption there, but it would be great to not have to make a choice between like OEN work days or outside of work days later, whenever you want. It’s like not an asynchronous event, but it like adds some level of asynchronicity in which you can like show up any time during the 24 hour period and get something out of it.

Dan Maby: [00:36:25] So, absolutely. And that, that, again, it was, there was a, there were several elements to this. It was about, again, talking about, uh, um, wanting to ensure that our event was as diverse as it possibly could be. And this idea of doing a 24 hours. Following the continents. So we start off in Australia. We go into Asia, Africa, Europe, south America, north America.

Um, for those Eli listening, we’ve got, we’ve actually got seven continents. Uh, we can only deliver six. So our chill out teams are community TNTs and tacos. For for the day, so I can go and chill out in our community tent. Um, but the, the idea of those six months it’s meant that we can, we want, we’ve been at actively trying to encourage speakers from those continents.

So we want individuals that represent those spaces, those, those, uh, those locations to be part of the event. And we, we are actively looking for MCs, um, volunteers. People that represent those locales as we move around that, uh, that global community. This is a, this is a global celebration of WordPress.

Joe Howard: [00:37:27] Yeah. I, I, I like that a lot because it’s not just you saying like, you want to like help people around the world. It’s like every, like facet of the summit points towards that. It’s like, we want to help everyone. Okay. That means we’re going to do this 24. Period. So, uh, you know, events where everyone can come at, which means we’re going to try and have speakers from those places, which adds to the diversity of the speaker list, which again, points towards helping people from every single area.

Um, because you have like someone from south America helping south America, you have someone from like Europe helping Europe, you have someone from, you know, uh, you know, Thailand helping people from Thailand. So this is just so it’s like really like. Personalized to everyone. So I think that’s like a, I think that’s a cool idea because our event is it’s like, it’s about helping people grow subscription businesses.

It’s easy to not have a diverse as diverse of a like speaker panel because. Uh, we, we’re not coming from a place of, we need people from all these continents let’s reach like that. Okay. Now we have a baseline of like, you know, where we need speakers from some just like whatever, quote, unquote, like experts around like subscription revenue.

They could be from a, a small subset. And in fact, I feel pretty confident saying. That, that may be true, uh, depending on your definition of, of, you know, what the experts are, who knows. But I think the, I like that your whole event, it almost like forces you just to have like the most diverse, the most helpful to as many people kind of event as possible, obviously.

This is only our second year doing our summit. So we’re still learning. That’s why I’m having you on the podcast, because I want to learn from you. I want to hear all the stuff you’re doing. So these are things I’m definitely going to be thinking about that I’m already thinking about, but we’ll continue to iterate as the years go on so that we can keep throwing events that are as helpful as possible for the greatest amount of people.

I think that’s, it’s easier said than done. You’re like doing it. So it’s really cool to hear, hear about that.

Dan Maby: [00:39:30] It is, it’s it? I think for us, it comes down to the wall. An element of is, is the speaker selection process. So, uh, and also the, you know, the team behind it. So we’ve got, um, Uh, a core team of, uh, where we cigar 16 individuals that make up the core organizing team at this, uh, this time around, um, I believe of those 16.

We’ve got, I think it’s something like seven times zones across those, uh, those individuals. Yeah, there’s a, there’s a diverse organizing team in the background, um, speaker selection process. So, uh, we put an open call for speakers outside. Um, the, uh, initial, uh, action process is a blind selection process.

So we remove all identifiable information from the speakers, um, submissions, uh, and then, uh, run that through. So every single team member is invited to then go through and say, yeah, Uh, between one and five, this is a, this is a five. I would absolutely be in the room. If that session was running, this is a one it’s not for me.

And that gives us a basis to start building off. But of course there’s when it comes to diversity, there’s so much more in relation to that process. And I’m a true believer. There is no. Um, know no magic bullet at this stage at the moment. There’s no really perfect way of finding a truly diverse mix of speakers.

You know, we can work as hard as we can, but there’s, there’s always going to be, um, more that we can do in terms of, um, you know, making sure that, uh, is a more diverse.

Joe Howard: [00:41:04] Yeah. I think the, the fact that you do opens speaker submissions and do that blind first round is a great one way to diversify your, your list of speakers.

You’d probably have to do some recruitment on the front end to entice more applications from them. Folks, but that entire process sounds great. We still at WP MRR summitter are doing outreach to folks for speakers because it’s Brian and I, because it’s two people. So I think that it’s an interesting concept of like, I go on.

Your website. I see like your list of volunteers who are helping out, I think, to, to do all of the things that you’re doing. I think it just takes a pretty good amount of bandwidth and resources. And like people just like dedicating that to make something like this happen. If like Brian and I were to try and do this all ourselves.

We become an IB on big horn chart, like live chat right now, talking about it because I’d be overwhelmed. Right. So I think that as WPM, our summit grows, I like this idea of doing speaker selection. Like I I’d rather, I mean, excuse me of speaker open speeds. Uh, submission. I love that idea, but it’s just like, man, do I have time to like, do all, like there’s so much to do for the summit.

So I think the future looks something like what you’re doing and which is like having volunteers or maybe even if we can like, do well enough with like sponsorships to do like even some paid positions for people. I don’t know exact what it looks like, but I think at the end of the day, More people doing more stuff to like help in certain areas of the summit to like, make it a reality in order to make it not only like more attendees or more speakers or more sponsors, like how can we help more people?

Well, we can help more people by like making all the things we’re doing even better for everybody. So I like this idea of like, when I see all your volunteers, I’m like, oh, so like, Damn. I mean, it’s hard to understand because you have to like manage all those people, but it’s easier in a sense, cause you don’t have to like I’m D I’m I’m online doing all this stuff right now.

Like not having to do all of that would also be. Probably there’d be less there’s some things will be less challenging for sure. Nevertheless township would I be able to do more and do things better? You know, there is.

Dan Maby: [00:43:32] There is. So, um, the, the, the first event, so we were only six months ago, six months ago, we delivered the first event, the first word Fest, um, only six months ago, only six months ago.

Yeah. We, we actually initially set out that we were going to deliver, deliver this as an annual event. Um, but based off the feedback that we received from the first event, um, We stupidly put the opportunity, the option to do annually, uh, by annually or monthly. And we actually had 23% of those that submitted, asked for it monthly.

Joe Howard: [00:44:04] I show up every time, man. Yeah.

Dan Maby: [00:44:08] We decided actually, you know, there was such a, there was such a buzz and it really did, um, uh, on, on so many levels, it felt like a, you know, a really successful. Uh, event for many different reasons. So we decided we’d do it again this time around, uh, uh, six months. Uh, so twice a year.

Um, and the initial team that volunteered to support this and just to be clear, every individual across this event is a volunteer. Um, the initial team, there’s a core team of, uh, was it six or seven of us? That have progressed that continued on to deliver this second event. The second event we actually set out and said, look, we’re going to, uh, we want to try and simplify things a bit.

We want to be more focused on the content. You know, we had a fantastic response in relation to the content last time, but we just wanted to level it up, uh, you know, take it up another level this time around. Yeah. Learn from the experiences of what we’ve got, what we’ve gone through. Um, um, you know, part of the, the mantra that we kept saying at the, you know, as we were talking about doing the native name was simplify things.

We’ve got to simplify, everything’s got to be simplified. Well, The last, the first event we delivered 48 sessions. Uh, initially it started out as 24, that group of 36 and eventually to 48, just because we’d had such a high quality in terms of speaker application. This time around, we’re actually delivering 66 sessions.

So we’ve gone from 48 to 66. And yet we’ve said we’re going to simplify, but we just there’s so much good stuff coming through that. We know so many things that we’re wanting to deliver. Um, the volunteers are just, I mean, I need to give a big shout out to all the volunteers, every is giving into this event.

Um, the, you know, there’s a particular core of, of, of people that are, uh, you’ll find on the website on wordpress.live. Uh, the likes of Michelle for sheds Paul smart, Kate de Rosa, uh, how they’re just, uh, just a really special. Group of people there that have formed an incredible bond across this summer. Um, I’m going to be honest.

See, I shared some of our experiences in terms of organizers had the, the, the conversations that we were having in the, how we deliver a 24 hour event, um, as a team and the use of discord in the background was a key tool for us. And it just created this really kind of magical moment as we were delivering this event live, um, But these, these, these people, these volunteers that are giving time, um, yeah.

Are taking on an incredible amount of responsibility. I mean, Michelle or Frechette is leading the speaker’s team for example, and you were dealing with 66 sessions. The organizing of that is, is really quite phenomenal. And the fact that these individuals are taking these on in their spare time, um, and it’s really quite a Testament to, uh, to their dedication, to big orders.

Joe Howard: [00:46:56] Yeah. I was chatting with Michelle in slack, uh, the other day. Cause I I’m doing a podcast like interview with some folks for Ford Fest, which is really cool. I was chatting with her a little bit like, Hey, just need some iconic information for these people. Like no rush. I know you’re probably busy. And she was like, yeah, I’m like really busy, like work fast.

Whoo. This is crazy. So I think the, uh, uh, the T like, and everything. Like I go on to word festival live and I see the team in OB-GYN. I’m like, like some of my favorite people in the WordPress space, you know, so clearly a really good core group of folks. Um, I did want to start wrapping up a little bit by asking you about live events, um, because as 2021 soldiers on, and obviously you go into 2022, there will probably be a resurgent of live events.

There are a lot of people probably who are. Getting more used to digital events. So I like that we’re doing digital events. I think there should, we should make them, you know, continue to make them available for people. A lot of people will like to attend those, but there are also going to be a good amount of people who are like, I want to go fly out to go do this event.

Or I want to like, you know, get together. Even if it’s just like 15 people do a little like mastermind a weekend or something. Like, I think that will re surge as this year goes on and next year, you know, starts. Um, what do you think word Fest is, is going to do in terms of. IRL events. You think you’ll do a little bit of both, a little digital and little, uh, a little bit of, uh, uh, in person or is it going to go more towards in-person? Maybe you haven’t thought too much.

Dan Maby: [00:48:28] We’ve we’ve we’ve actually thought quite a lot of bouncy it. So when we built the platform, the platform really was, we wanted to focus on, uh, the concept of a hybrid event. So we really want to make sure that we’re able, we have the opportunity with the platform that we’ve built to enable us to have both that combination of in-person and, um, digital.

Yeah, the really special thing about the virtual events is it’s, it’s opened up the opportunity for, and I know I’ve mentioned it many times, but this, this idea of a much more diverse community, because we can all speak opportunities and the ability for people to attend events. We, you know, we run our WordPress London meetup every single month through running it twice a month, uh, for quite some time through the pandemic.

And we were seeing, you know, we had, we had, um, uh, members joined from 96. Different global territories into our WordPress London meetup. Now our in person were Paris London, me. So as fantastic as it is almost all of those individuals that are in the room at our Paris, London meetup are from London. So having the, you know, this virtual environment has really just opened up so many more interesting conversations and sessions and, you know, we’ve been able to bring in speakers internationally without having to think about visas.

We don’t have to think about travel costs. And so there’s a huge benefit to the virtual environment, but equally there’s something really special about the in-person side of things. Uh, um, I think as I mentioned in the hallway track for me, Is incredibly special. You know, that time, that time I run into Nick in the, in the sponsor’s hall at work at us.

So there’s conversations that just happen spontaneously, uh, in person are incredibly special. With WordPress live. There’s been some thoughts around the idea of do we deliver a 24 hour event in multiple locations at the same time? Um, we, we, we’re not quite sure. Yeah. There’s again, there’s these sorts of things take huge amounts of organization.

Yeah. We think it’s challenging doing it in a virtual environment. When we get to the in person, it just, just dials out easier. So we will see on that one, there is a desire for us to have a combination of both in-person and, um, and digital as we move forward. Uh, but the, the, uh, the exact delivery of that, um, is obviously is still very much.

Joe Howard: [00:50:44] Yeah, very interesting. I know that, um, I’m a member, a big member of the indie hackers community. It’s like an online community for mostly people who have like bootstrap businesses, people who have, you know, have revenue funded businesses, you know, some fun stuff, but it’s more like how do I take a thousand bucks and start a business that can be successful.

So, uh, and they do meet ups. They have like indie hackers meetups that are like volunteer, run. People different cities. So they’ve got like, if you go onto their website, you can go onto their meetups. And it’s like, may not now, obviously, but later the Sheila probably start back up where they have these just like in-person meetups.

And it’s not like a hundred people at each maybe, but it’s, you know, there are like five people from one city or maybe like 25 from another, and the people get together. And I know that the founder, like he went around, like traveled around the U S going to like all these different cities, meetups, which I thought was so cool.

So I agree, definitely a model for that. I also. I’m thinking more about your, um, loving spaces. I think that’s what you were calling them, that the, the in your community, the, I I’ve been to events that are just like 15 people for the weekend and it’s kind of like masterminding, but sometimes it’s more informal than that.

It’s just like these great conversations happen about business. When you have. People who are like really obsessed with like, wanting to make their businesses better. It’s a lot of times you don’t need the formal, like mastermind, you just need to get people in the same room and they just like, woo. Let’s talk about this stuff.

So yeah, those weekends have been very interesting to me. So I’ve, I’ve thought a little bit about like, Hm, WP MRR live. Like it was there like, uh, maybe early 2022, like, would it be cool to do like a. Even just a small thing, you know, um, I want to help as many people as possible, but I also want to have the biggest impact possible.

So if I can have a big impact on 15 people, as opposed to not very much of an impact on a hundred people, I may go in the fewer people direction, but anyway, lots of stuff to think about, but it’s very interesting.

Dan Maby: [00:52:37] There is. I think one of the, one of the things that we had to really, really careful of, of this concept of hybrid is making sure that we don’t deliver the worst of both worlds, because I think there’s that issue of, you know, It is.

Absolutely. Do you deteriorate the experience for the in-person by having to think about the virtual and vice versa? So it’s definitely as there’s another set of learning, uh, learning experiences to go through.

Joe Howard: [00:53:00] I like, I like your idea of like every six months, like I could see a world in which like, Hey, you do sick, you know, a few months to prep for the in-person and you do the in-person and then a few months to prep for the virtual.

You never overlapped them. And that’s sounds like it would work, but I totally agree with you. You divide you in essence, if you do an in-person event and a virtual event, you are dividing your attention into, although similar, maybe around content, like very different to actually like pull those both off successfully.

So it’s really splitting your attention into two different things. So I agree. You gotta be careful around that. You gotta make sure that you do it in a way that. Leading you to burnout city.

Dan Maby: [00:53:38] Yeah, that’s right. That’s right. I mean, our in person events way going way back, we have live streams, the content of our in-person events for many years.

And you know, that the requirements to do that is, you know, we have to bring in a lot of equipment, new cameras, microphones, lighting, all the equipment to go with it. And that, you know, on a monthly basis, trying to deliver those events is it’s quite a big task, uh, particularly of volunteers. But it meant that we were already delivering an element of this kind of hybrid style event.

But I think there’s definitely things we can do to, to make a better experience across the.

Joe Howard: [00:54:14] Very cool. Dan dude, this has been awesome conversation. I really appreciate you coming on the podcast. I’ve been wanting to have you on for a little while and I’m super glad we finally got the chance to talk. I got to pick your brain a little bit, so, uh, let’s start wrapping up.

I do want, I have two final things to go through though. One is, I just want folks to know where they can find you online, big orange heart, online, um, word fast, online, social media, any of that stuff.

Dan Maby: [00:54:38] Sure. Thank you. Well, if you, if you want to connect with myself, uh, I’m Dan, maybe, maybe Y pretty much everywhere.

Uh, the DMS are open across the board. So do do connect. Um, if you’re looking to connect with bigger chart, big orange heart.org. Uh, if you are looking for support, uh, hit our support page, hit our contact page. If you want to chat with any of us, uh, any of the team live, uh, if you are interested in word Fest, live a 24 hour festival of WordPress taking place on the Twitter.

3rd of July, uh, that can be found@wordfest.live forward slash register. And of course, just be aware. Time zones are always challenging. So we are starting the event at midnight UTC, which we know can be a challenge in terms of calculating those times, those hit the website, wordpress.live. You will find that the, um, times on the homepage are set in your local time automatically, but you can change into UTC as well.

Joe Howard: [00:55:35] Yeah, I love that on the homepage. So word Festa live. You can go on, you can, it has your home, your local time zone set automatically, and you can change it in a little, um, menu item, or it’s like a, it’s a little tab. You click to change the time zone and it’ll. Real time, change everything, to know exactly like what time things are happening in your time zone.

So a complex 24 hour event, but easy for us. The attendees.

Dan Maby: [00:55:59] Yes. I’ve got to just quickly say a big shout out to Brian at WP sessions. He actually created that plugin, uh, that we are using there.

Joe Howard: [00:56:07] Oh, I’m not surprised at all. Brian is like, if you need Brian to do something technical, like I’m literally not surprised.

It’s like, you could ask me to guess, but like, whoops, that sounds like something Brian would have done. Nailed it. So shout out to Brian too. Nice job, Brian.

Dan Maby: [00:56:21] Absolutely.

Joe Howard: [00:56:22] Cool. Last but not least. I do like to ask our guests to ask our listeners here for a little apple podcast review. So if you wouldn’t mind asking folks to leave us a review, I’d appreciate it, Dan.

Dan Maby: [00:56:32] Sure. Absolutely. If you’ve enjoyed this podcast, if you’ve enjoyed any of these. Please do drop us a review on apple. We would love to hear from you. Uh, we’d love to know what you think. We’d love to hope you’ve enjoyed this. So please do give it a five star if you’ve enjoyed your time with us. Thank you very much.

Joe Howard: [00:56:48] There you go. WP M R r.com forward slash review. Uh, redirects you right there. If you’re on a Mac or an apple device, uh, if you are a new listener to the show, you can go and binge some old episodes. WP mrr.com forward slash podcast. Got some old episodes, 150 years. Old episodes. So go and use the search bar search for whatever you’re having a challenge with right now, and listen to some older episodes, the WP MRR community, community dot WP, mrr.com.

If you want to take the podcast experience and you actually want to get involved, you want to not just listen to that. You want to like talk with other people in this. Folks who are here, we’re all trying to grow our subscription businesses together. Feel free to join in. And the WP MRR virtual summit, uh, was coming up in September later this year.

If you sign up for the community, you are basically registered for it. Um, so more details again about that summit WP mrr.com. That is all for this week on the podcast. We will be in your ear buds again next Tuesday, Dan. Thanks again for being on man.

Dan Maby: [00:57:57] Joe really appreciate it. Thank you so much for your time.

Joe Howard: [00:58:00] See everyone.