[/tatsu_text]
Episode Transcript:
Christie Chirinos:
We’re incredibly bummed. I’m not distraught and screaming. I’m excited to be chill for a while but I kind of got to this place where the virtual events just weren’t giving me the same thing.
Joe Howard:
What is up, WordPress people? Welcome back to the WPMRR WordPress Podcast. I’m Joe.
Christie Chirinos:
And I’m Christie.
Joe Howard:
And you’re listening to the WordPress Business Podcast. Christie, what’s going on this week?
Christie Chirinos:
Nothing much. I almost said, “And I’m Joe.”
Joe Howard:
Isn’t that funny how-
Christie Chirinos:
I had to stop myself.
Joe Howard:
How you focus so much on trying to remember your own name that you’re like, “Wait? Which one am I? I’m Christie.”
Christie Chirinos:
Which one am I? There’s two names on the script. Yeah, I almost said, “I am Joe.” But yeah, nothing much. Here we are. Another week, month, year, who knows, in the middle of a global pandemic. Just making digital content for your ears to consume while you also sit at home. Yeah, I don’t know, I’m here. I really think that I’m settling into life in Austin, Texas. Starting to see what is out there, adapting my wardrobe, you know?
Joe Howard:
Oh.
Christie Chirinos:
That’s been kind of fun. Yeah.
Joe Howard:
Did you find going from DC to Austin you had to make a shift in wardrobe?
Christie Chirinos:
Oh my God.
Joe Howard:
Yes, the slow nod.
Christie Chirinos:
It’s like everywhere I went I was overdressed. It didn’t matter what I was wearing.
Joe Howard:
Uh huh.
Christie Chirinos:
I was overdressed.
Joe Howard:
Yeah that sounds about right. That’s probably about what I would have guessed.
Christie Chirinos:
The DC to Austin fashion shift is crazy. Actually I think something that I’m going to do today after work is go shopping.
Joe Howard:
Oh nice.
Christie Chirinos:
Buy some biker shorts or something. No.
Joe Howard:
Yeah.
Christie Chirinos:
Yeah, you know? No, but seriously … I feel like I’ve now made so much content about my life in the last month.
Joe Howard:
Uh huh.
Christie Chirinos:
Part of that is that I’ve just moved around so much that in a way I feel very comfortable adapting to new places, meeting new people, figuring out the nuances and differences depending on where you are and fashion and the way that you dress has always been a part of that. It’s like every different place, people don’t want to admit it, but I can tell you having lived in seven different cities that every city kind of has a uniform. You want to figure out how to dress in the way that expresses yourself and is comfortable and all those things that we talk about being important in the way that we dress but you also kind of adapt to where you are.
Joe Howard:
Yeah.
Christie Chirinos:
I think that’s a big component definitely of being a person that lives among other people. That’s been fun. Yeah, I don’t know, work wise I’m still working on a ton of content for Nexus. We are really hitting the ground running now that we have really engaged in that half year process of bring over the Liquid Web products into that Nexus brand. Now we’re standing all these things up and it continues. We are, of course, working with the marketing team to figure out how to exist in this new reality where we don’t have-
Joe Howard:
Totally.
Christie Chirinos:
In person events anymore, right? That used to be such a big way to get your company’s name out there, whether you’re a small company or a large company or anywhere in between. Now we don’t have that so whether you’re big or large, we are thinking about how to adapt that and coming up with crazy ideas. I’ll talk a little bit more about those in today’s episode we’re going to talk about but that’s been a big chunk of my life lately and yeah, just figuring out other ways. We’re launching an E-commerce masterclass in an effort to be helpful, surrounding these uncertain times and hopefully that means that people will get value out of what we’re doing and think about us next time they need hosting. What about you?
Joe Howard:
Super cool. Yeah, what’s new with me? Well first I want to talk about it feels like a lot of companies and a lot of folks now that it’s like, no more WordPress official events through all of 2021. No WordCamp US this year. Everyone is going digital and I would be lying if I said I wasn’t a little nervous that this feels like a time where a lot of big companies can pour a lot of resources into doing a ton of content. That potentially puts us at a little bit of a disadvantage in some senses because we just don’t have the resources to dedicate to some, like the bigger companies. Like GoDaddy, they could put a million dollars a month into putting out a ton of content and stuff if they wanted to. Well, we can’t quite put those resources in so we’re thinking a lot about how we do digital at WPBoss while also doing it in a way that’s smart and unique and not necessarily as … Put as much out as we can but try to put out as much high quality stuff as we can instead, I guess. If that makes sense.
Joe Howard:
This is stuff like we’re definitely thinking about and Allie and I are actually talking a lot about as she’s doing more community work around virtual events and that kind of thing. But I just wanted to touch on that because you mentioned it but yeah, not too much is new with me. We hired a head of growth, which is I guess big news for us. Yeah, Alec [Wines 00:05:58]. He was actually a Web Label partner before he joined so that’s how he got to know us. So it’s cool having someone who kind of already knows about what we do, especially from the having the pain point side of things. He ran an agency and now he’s kind of joined up with us. That’s been cool. We actually just did our resource onboarding call before we recorded today. So yeah, he’s starting this week and that’s gone really well so far. He’s started off … He’s hit the ground running so I’m happy with how that’s going so far. It’ll be nice to have someone come in and help with some of the growth stuff because I’d like some help with that area and it’ll be nice to have someone be able to handle more of that kind of work.
Joe Howard:
Yeah, that’s probably big with me. Other than that, we’ll talk more about summit stuff I guess here in a little bit but prepping the summit and yeah, just keeping on keeping on. All is well over here.
Christie Chirinos:
That is super exciting. Congratulations on that new hire.
Joe Howard:
Thank you.
Christie Chirinos:
Really signifying that you’re ready for big growth. That’s awesome.
Joe Howard:
Yeah, yeah, we just hit kind of the million dollar year mark so it’s like, this is the time. It’s like when we were smaller we didn’t really have the resources to kind of throw at problems and improve things. Now we have a little bit more. I just talked about how there are other companies with way more resources than we have but we are at the point where we have some money in the bank account, we have a little war chest. We have more to do more things with. I haven’t experienced this yet but a lot of people I’ve talked to who are farther along than we are say it’s easier to make your second million than it is to make your first million. Which I see why people would think that and I understand the concepts behind it because once you have a core audience, you have a business model that works, you could just like, pour more resources into it and grow it but a lot of things change as you grow a company as well so you have to adapt and change as well.
Joe Howard:
There’s a lot of stuff to think about. That’s actually what I’ve been thinking about a lot the last month or so is like, “What does this look like as a $2 million a year business? What does this look like as a $5 million a year business? What does this look like as a $10 million a year business?” It’s a little intimidating because we’re going to be so much bigger and different at those points if we get to that point, who knows, right? It’s a lot to think about. Yeah, yeah.
Christie Chirinos:
Allow me to comfort you with something that you already know.
Joe Howard:
Please, please.
Christie Chirinos:
But maybe our listeners don’t know. Actually, this is something everybody knows but allow me to remind you that yes, large companies have more resources to pour into lots of virtual content and events now that we’re all adapting to this new reality, which we’re going to talk about but also, large companies are slow. They’re slow. They’re slow. Even if they all notice that, “Oh hey, we’re living this new reality. We need to adapt and we need to create high quality content.” Getting 30 people to do that, it’s like, “Oh but we had all these targets and now we have to adjust the targets and what about the 2020 Q3 strategy plan? What about this? Oh my gosh, do we need to have a meeting to figure out our next thing? So and so’s on vacation and they need to …” You know? In that sense, yes, there’s more resources but large companies are going to have a harder time steering the ship towards interesting and fun and different virtual content for the next year than a smaller team that can just clearly so, “Oh, we need to do this, boom.” Right?
Joe Howard:
Yeah, totally. I totally agree with that. I think-
Christie Chirinos:
Not that that’s happening at Nexus at all.
Joe Howard:
Right. I’ve said that actually as well so I should maybe dog food it, eat my own dog food sort of thing. I think the … The biggest advantage smaller companies have is you can do it today. You can go out and experiment with a bunch of different stuff and there’s not a lot of risk to it. Even us, we can’t move as fast as we could two or three years ago but we can still … I could do new things next week if I wanted to, right? Like, “Allie, I’m starting this new YouTube series,” which we’ll talk more about in the coming weeks but we just decided, she was like, “I think this would be a cool idea,” like coming into the conference and to continue to promote YouTube stuff. I was just like, “Yeah.” That was it and she’s doing it. There’s not a lot of yellow or red tape there. So I totally agree. I think that’s good advice for folks that are not at a big company or running your own small business. You have advantages, too, so use those things like you’re agile, you can move fast, you can go do an experiment with differens stuff, you know? You do have a big bureaucracy of slow changing, like a battleship changing it’s course, right? By the time they change course, maybe a little bit too late to really take advantage of it. So yeah. I’m with you.
Christie Chirinos:
Yep, yep.
Joe Howard:
Cool, all right. That kind of shifts nicely into what we want to talk about today which is the big news that most people are talking about in the WordPress space that some people are like, “Okay,” and some people are like, “Oh my God, I can’t believe it. This is so crazy.” WordCamp US canceled.
Christie Chirinos:
Canceled.
Joe Howard:
For 2020. Totally canceled.
Christie Chirinos:
And 2021.
Joe Howard:
And as well, the more recent announcement that also 2021, all WordPress, all official WordPress events are canceled through 2021. So until January 2022 there will not be any more official WordPress IRL events. Everything will be digital. This is really big news for our community because we’re good at being digital, right? We’ve always been digital. We are a digital community but those like WordCamp US and WordCamp Europe, they were not only things we all looked forward to every year and smaller WordCamps, right? Our local WordCamps. Our local … They were not only things we looked forward to as WordPress people because as nice as being able to communicate in Zoom is, it’s also cool to hangout in real life.
Christie Chirinos:
Get coffee, get a drink.
Joe Howard:
Yeah, totally.
Christie Chirinos:
Some karaoke.
Joe Howard:
Yeah. There’s also like what happens to contributor days? What happens to people like businesses that go to WordPress events to do some business or find some new partners and stuff? Those things, a lot of times those stem from IRL meetups and so it’s a big change I think for a lot of us. So today we wanted to focus on two things I think. One, we each have a nice little list of virtual WordPress events that you can go to later this year, later in 2020 and then talk a little bit about how we can do this whole permanently remote and permanently virtual event thing responsibly. Try not to burn out on digital, trying to, I don’t know, not be sad and depressed and stressed all the time. I don’t know, it’s kind of hard these days but we got to try to find some strategies, myself included and I’m sure yourself included, right? We all have to try and do that together.
Joe Howard:
Yeah, so first, list of events coming up. We got a nice little list here, Christie. Do you want to start us off? Well, I’m going to start us off because the first event I had here is actually one that already passed but I wanted to see if you went to it or if you knew about it. It was a WordPress.com growth summit. That was August 11th through 13th so it’s actually, the last day is today. I don’t know if you attended any of that. I saw WordPress.com and I was like, “No, I’m probably not going to that.” So I didn’t know if you attended it or if you knew about it or anything like that.
Christie Chirinos:
I did know about it and I guess we can get into it now but I really struggle with virtual events. I don’t know, it’s not the same. I did know about it. I didn’t have a problem with it being WordPress.com. I thought it was really cool. The lineup looked really interesting but for me, I don’t think that I’m a huge attender of virtual events. I think I was really excited at the beginning and we’ll talk about some of the stuff that I’m really pumped to go to because it’ll be virtual and from places where I would have had to spend a lot of money traveling to go.
Joe Howard:
Yep.
Christie Chirinos:
But yeah, no. I didn’t. It’s just not the same for me to attend a virtual event. It’s so hard to focus, I don’t have the people connection and I don’t know, I think the announcement of WordCamps in 2021, I think that was the moment in which it hit that this isn’t over next month.
Joe Howard:
Yeah, for sure.
Christie Chirinos:
I think up until this point I had sort of been hoping that in two weeks we can go out to brunch again, you know?
Joe Howard:
Yeah.
Christie Chirinos:
When I saw that I think that was the first sort of like, funk. Like, “Okay, nope.”
Joe Howard:
Totally.
Christie Chirinos:
Not the case. We are going to be put for a while. Yeah.
Joe Howard:
Yeah, I agree. Before we keep going down the list I think I’ve heard people say if you want to really know how long this is going to go on or the extent to how serious this is, look at what the big tech businesses are doing. I don’t know how true that is but when you see Twitter saying, “You’re remote now. You can work remotely forever.” And Google being like, “We’re working remotely the rest of this year.” A ton of big businesses have said, “The rest of this year, no in office stuff.” A lot of big businesses, big tech businesses, have sold a lot of their or stopped rental on a lot of their offices. So again, I don’t know how true that is but I think it’s interesting concept. They do business and big businesses obviously do the financial part of business well and they know something. I agree and I think this was definitely a big wake up call for a lot of people like, “Oh, this is … 2021 will probably be COVID heavy, as well. It’ll be about COVID, too.”
Christie Chirinos:
Yeah.
Joe Howard:
But that’s cool to hear about the WordPress.com growth summit. I just didn’t … It didn’t really come across my plate early enough and it seemed more like WordPress.com centric so I was like … I just saw WordPress.com and I was like, “Oh, I guess it’s not for me.” So I didn’t really like-
Christie Chirinos:
Right.
Joe Howard:
Think about it again. But anyway, that one’s passed now. Hopefully it was a good event for people, I don’t know.
Christie Chirinos:
I hope you guys enjoyed it.
Joe Howard:
Yeah.
Christie Chirinos:
I will say though, I’m about to disagree with myself because I just said like, “Yeah, I don’t know, I saw it. I’m not really signing up for a lot of virtual events,” but the next one on our list is MicroConf Remote September 1st.
Joe Howard:
Yeah.
Christie Chirinos:
MicroConf is one of my favorite conferences just because the content is so good that I would pay $50 to go to MicroConf remote. I would, and just listen, especially if I was growing something new, right? Maybe not this year because I’m working on something established for an employer but if I was working on something new, $50 is a steal to get all that really high quality content and they usually do a really good job of creating engagement online before the event. I imagine you can just do that but better with the virtual sitting.
Joe Howard:
Totally.
Christie Chirinos:
I don’t know.
Joe Howard:
Yeah, MicroConf Remote. You can go to MicroConf.com and sign up. I guess it’s $50 for a ticket, I didn’t know that, but totally worth the $50. Christie and I have both gone to MicroConfs IRL in the past. They’re great. You’re right, Christie, the content in itself is enough. It’s fantastic content, they’re really good at that. It really is probably like, 95th percentile content, all of it. I really do believe that. They’re great with their content, they really know what they’re doing there. The network piece is really good, too. Maybe won’t be as much about that in a remote conference. I think a lot of remote conferences struggle with that but who knows, they probably have some tricks up their sleeve since that’s such a big value add for them. MicroConf was the conference I went to where I really learned about subscription pricing and what’s monthly recurring revenue. I didn’t really know what that was, that it was a thing, until I went to MicroConf. Like, lifetime value to your customers, what’s your churn, what’s your RPU? All these basic things I didn’t know, I learned all at MicroConf and it really changed the way I approached how to grow my business.
Joe Howard:
I put enormous value in MicroConf and I think the remote conference will be awesome. It’s not WordPress specific but if you’re running a subscription business, MicroConf is a good place to go to learn from SaaS founders and product high service founders and people who have gone this route before and really just like, learn those foundational skills to be able to grow a subscription, kind of bootstrap sort of business.
Christie Chirinos:
Yeah, it’s not a WordPress specific conference but every WordPress business is a MicroConf business.
Joe Howard:
Yeah. That’s true.
Christie Chirinos:
Yeah.
Joe Howard:
Cool. Next up on the list, what do you know, WPMRR Virtual Summit. This is kind of our virtual summit. Obviously you’re listening to the WPMRR WordPress Podcast, this is the summit that WPMRR is throwing coming up. The dates are, huh, what are the dates? I have to look on my sheet for it. September 23rd through 24th. So coming up this Fall. It’s all about we talked about MicroConf helping you with your subscription business. WPMRR is kind of bringing a lot of those ideas into the WordPress space so it’s how to run and grow a successful subscription business in the WordPress space. Whether you’re an agency, a freelancer or you’re doing a productized service, like selling care plans like we do or if you’re doing more plug in work or a themed shop or even hosting. It’ll be helpful to think about how to do that a little better and be able to have a successful subscription business. Yeah, we’re excited for that. We’re going to be giving away a lot of money and raising a lot of money for Lawyers for Good Government so that’s exciting.
Joe Howard:
We’re going to give away a bunch of free merch. You’re speaking, Christie, as am I. No, you’re speaking. I’m not. I’m not even speaking so I’m just kind of hanging out. I’ll be hanging out in the hallway. Yeah, that’ll be cool. Are you excited?
Christie Chirinos:
I’m excited. It’s going to be fun. What am I going to talk about?
Joe Howard:
Still figuring out? Yes, we’re, I don’t know.
Christie Chirinos:
I’m taking suggestions.
Joe Howard:
Eight weeks out? Nine weeks? We’re still getting nice and talks together and all that stuff but Brian Richards is working on it with us. He does WooSesh and WordSesh so yeah, we’re hoping to throw an awesome conference with a little bit of his help.
Christie Chirinos:
It’s going to be fun.
Joe Howard:
Yeah. WPMRR.com to sign up for free. Yay, that’ll be cool. FemTechConf, September 25th, that is FemTechConf.com. That is, I don’t think you have to be a female to sign up and go for it, but I think it is focused on … It’s like the community conference for empowering women in tech world so if you’re a woman listening to this, this is a good conference to go to. On their website it says they’re expecting 30000 attendees.
Christie Chirinos:
That’s huge.
Joe Howard:
They have like, 50 plus speakers. Yeah, I’ve actually, I don’t know any other conferences that I’ve seen that have that many expected attendees. Maybe that’s a little bit of a marketing thing, I don’t know. But if they have 30000 attendees, I mean, that’s huge. They must have a super souped up version of whatever they’re hosting it with. Like, Vimeo Plus Plus or Zoom Plus Plus to host all those folks. Yeah, that’ll be a good one if you’re a female and you want to go to a conference that’s specifically to empower women in the technology space. That’s a good one.
Christie Chirinos:
We have October 13th and 14th, if you are working with WooCommerce you can come to WooSesh, another Brian Richards and Patrick Rauland production. It’ll be fun. It’ll be fun. I think I’m speaking at that one, too, maybe. I should ask.
Joe Howard:
Oh, sweet.
Christie Chirinos:
We’ll talk about WooCommerce and it will be a blast.
Joe Howard:
The life of being Christie Chirinos. “Oh, am I speaking at that? I don’t know.”
Christie Chirinos:
Oh God.
Joe Howard:
“I have to check. Maybe I am.”
Christie Chirinos:
No, that’s not how I-
Joe Howard:
You should speak. Brian, if you’re listening, Christie should obviously be speaking at that [crosstalk 00:23:59].
Christie Chirinos:
Why am I like this? No, I think-
Joe Howard:
WooSesh.
Christie Chirinos:
I think it’ll be fun. I spoke at WooSesh for the first time last year. WooSesh is an event that has always been virtual and it’s a blast. The content’s really high quality, too. It is all focused on WooCommerce, right?
Joe Howard:
Yeah.
Christie Chirinos:
So the crowd is small and niche but it’s fun and the chat’s pretty lively. Yeah, that’s a good one to work on if you’re interested in WooCommerce.
Joe Howard:
Yeah, that’s why I got Brian’s help doing WPMRR VS because WooSesh and WordSesh are both so great. I was like, “I want to do something like that.”
Christie Chirinos:
Yeah.
Joe Howard:
Hopefully our virtual summit will be similar in experience to those. But WooSesh, if you’re all about WooCommerce, definitely check out WooSesh.com. Also, WordSesh EMEA is coming up. That is September 22nd so that’s actually, is that-
Christie Chirinos:
Oh, was that out of order?
Joe Howard:
Did we get that right?
Christie Chirinos:
Sorry, everybody.
Joe Howard:
No.
Christie Chirinos:
No, that can’t be right.
Joe Howard:
That’s okay, no. It’s the 2nd of September. I wrote it down wrote. I’ll take the hit. 2nd of September. So sorry everyone, that was a little out of order but hey, another one to add to your calendar. WordSesh EMEA is September 2nd.
Christie Chirinos:
All right, in between [crosstalk 00:25:14] MicroConf Remote and WPMRR Virtual Summit.
Joe Howard:
Yes, so go back on your calendar and add that one. WordSesh EMEA. Also, a virtual conf, always has been a virtual conference. I think it’s developer specific but if you’re not a developer I think you’d still get value from it. I think it is to get WordPress, it says here on the homepage, “Join WordPress developers from around the world for this must attend virtual conference on the 2nd of September.” Yeah, it’s definitely one that if you’re a developer or probably more of an agency or a freelance or like building websites or designing websites, you’d probably find a lot of value from WordSesh. Definitely check it out. Have you spoken at that one, Christie?
Christie Chirinos:
I spoke at WordSesh Americas earlier this year. That was a ton of fun also. Yeah, really well done, lots of high quality content and yeah. I think the regional ideas really cool with doing a virtual event to sort of feature the sort of big regions of the world.
Joe Howard:
Yeah.
Christie Chirinos:
I think is actually kind of really interesting. Yeah.
Joe Howard:
Yeah, very cool. I remember when we were starting the WPMRR Virtual Summit, we were getting help from Brian and I was like, you did this multiple events for different timezones, which I think is super cool. This year, we’re going to do one because I just want to get one right but I like this idea of you doing different events for different timezones because if you throw it, it’s good for US and Europe but it may not be good for Asia or Eastern Europe or down in Australia. I think it’s interesting to do different timezones, specific ones, just so everyone can get a piece of the action. That is-
Christie Chirinos:
I also just love the idea of focusing on featuring different speakers from different regions, right?
Joe Howard:
Yeah, totally.
Christie Chirinos:
When you put the whole world up against each other on figuring out speakers for a global thing like WordPress, it’s like you eventually just end up with a bunch of American and Western European representation.
Joe Howard:
Yeah.
Christie Chirinos:
It’s just like, “Can we break this down a little more? There’s a lot of other things going on in the world.”
Joe Howard:
Totally. Totally, I mean, we struggled a little bit with that in our speaker selection. It’s hard to recruit speakers. You have to put a lot of time into recruiting speakers from really diverse backgrounds like location but also like 10 different factors. Yeah, it’s hard but I think that the way Brian does things with WordSesh and WooSesh or I guess WordSesh specifically and doing different timezones and having speakers from those areas speak at that, it allows it to … It almost automatically allows for a more diverse speaker lineup across all of the WordSesh’s. I dig that very much and I think that’s cool.
Joe Howard:
WP Agency Summit, October 12th through 16th. This is a longer event. So 12, 13, 14, 15, 16. Five day event at WPAgencySummit.com. WordSesh we talked about is kind of WordPress developers. WP Agency Summit is for agencies, freelancers, people building a WordPress business like that. Throw by our friend Jan Koch. I think this is his third or fourth year running it. I actually don’t know but always one of the ones that I see out there that I’m like, I would recommend for people trying to build WordPress agencies. Good speaker lineup, good content and something I usually say, like if people are looking for a virtual event for agency folks I’m like, “Oh yeah, that’s a go to.”
Christie Chirinos:
Cool.
Joe Howard:
Central. Central, that WordCamp.org.
Christie Chirinos:
[crosstalk 00:29:15] Yeah I mean, so those are like sort of the big virtual events that we have going on that we’ve seen that we think are relevant but then there’s also all the WordCamps that have moved online, right?
Joe Howard:
Yeah.
Christie Chirinos:
The WordCamp Central website is now updated and it tells us which events are online and what’s going on there. I’m looking at it now, I wonder if I can share my screen. No, I can’t. I mean, it’s cool. We’re participating in WordCamp Minneapolis, Nexus is, so we’ll be doing that. That’s coming up August 21st so by the time this episode comes out it’ll be a few days after that, I think.
Joe Howard:
Cool, I think we’re sponsoring, too.
Christie Chirinos:
Yeah, cool. There’s going to be a WordCamp Austin that is fully online. That’s happening October 9th.
Joe Howard:
I think that’s a newer one. I didn’t see that one maybe last time I checked but that was recently announced. Yeah.
Christie Chirinos:
Yep, recently announced. That’s kind of cool.
Joe Howard:
Let’s go, okay, Minneapolis, you can go to Central.WordCamp.org for all this stuff, /schedule. It’ll have all of the online events. So there are still WordCamps to go to, they’re just virtual which means you can maybe apply to speak at some of the ones you couldn’t travel to before or you could attend some of the ones that you couldn’t travel to before. Minneapolis, Ogijima, Asheville, Sao Paulo, Lima, Philadelphia, Rochester, Austin, Los Angeles. So looks like there are about 10 here right now. No matter where you are, you can attend regardless of where you are in the world. Yeah, there’s some more also not really in like, exact order for this podcast but it’s all there on the schedule if you want to go check out what’s coming out.
Christie Chirinos:
There’s one that catches my attention. We have a fully online WordCamp Lima, September 25th and 26th. That’s kind of cool. I had always wanted to go to an in person WordCamp Lima. I feel like that would be a curious and different way to experience my city of birth. For the listeners who don’t know, I was born in Lima, Peru and I was raised there until I was nine years old. So I have lots of memories of it. I’ve been back a couple times after moving to the United States. Yeah, I always kind of wanted to engage with the WordPress community there but just never really happened. There were a couple of Peruvian events that were in the works and they haven’t happened yet. So that’s really interesting and they’re looking for speakers.
Joe Howard:
Yeah, very cool. You should apply if you want to.
Christie Chirinos:
Do some WooCommerce in Spanish.
Joe Howard:
Yeah. Oh you have to give your talk in Spanish to speak there?
Christie Chirinos:
Oh, I don’t know. I mean, I would assume so.
Joe Howard:
I guess probably. Yeah.
Christie Chirinos:
Yeah, I see some English language stuff on the sponsors page.
Joe Howard:
Okay.
Christie Chirinos:
But that’s cool. I think that’s the thing that is a silver lining to me about all the virtual events, right, like even if I struggle to really feel excited and engaged for one is that we can go to ones that maybe would be farther or more prohibitively expensive to attend and get that experience of that local community. That’s something I’m really pumped about. Yeah, I mean, other than that it can be tough.
Joe Howard:
Yeah, I hear you. All right, last but not least local meetups. No matter where you are in the world, you probably have a local ish WordPress meetup and actually now that everything’s remote you can go to whatever local meetup you want to. If you go to Meetup.com and search WordPress there are a bunch of WordPress meetups, a lot of which are doing online content. I got an email from the folks up in Baltimore who, I’ve been to their meetup every once in a while. Actually I haven’t been in a little while but I used to go somewhat frequently. They did an AMA Zoom call where you could ask questions to the people who run it. “I have a WordPress issue, I have a CO issue,” whatever. You can ask someone and get answers to your questions. I thought that was cool. We do a happiness bar event in the WordPress DC meetup every four or five meetups so that people can come and just get questions answered. Check out some local ones. I bet there’s some people still trying to do some local cool events that are now not local anymore. They’re kind of global. Definitely go there to check out.
Christie Chirinos:
Yep. So yeah.
Joe Howard:
All right. Those are our [crosstalk 00:34:00].
Christie Chirinos:
Anyone might have …
Joe Howard:
Yeah, I was just going to say that’s our list of 2020 events coming up. I’m sure there will be more in 2021. Maybe we’ll do another episode when the next year starts or part of the way through next year so we can talk about what’s going on then. But I wanted to talk a little bit about, you mentioned kind of at the beginning of this episode, you’re not a super big online events person and I think there are probably a lot of other people out there that are sad and disappointed and were ready for finally WordCamp US and now no in person events for the next year and a half really. I want to dig more into that because it’s going to be challenge for a lot of people I think and how we’re going to tackle this, even though we’re a digital community, it’s going to be hard not to be able to really see each other at least at larger events.
Christie Chirinos:
Yeah. My opinion has changed over time.
Joe Howard:
Yeah.
Christie Chirinos:
I think at the beginning of this, maybe in March or whatever, I might have even talked about it on this podcast. I was actually pretty excited for this, right? I was like, “Oh my gosh,” I’ve been popping into meetups that aren’t my own and engaging with people out there and popping into people’s happy hours and Zooms.
Joe Howard:
Yeah.
Christie Chirinos:
I’m so excited to go to these WordCamps overseas but not really, right? Then now it’s August.
Joe Howard:
Yeah, exactly.
Christie Chirinos:
I do love traveling and I love seeing people in person and now I’m just like, “Ugh.”
Joe Howard:
There are so many WordPress people I just want to hug for four minutes and I can’t and it is tough.
Christie Chirinos:
Exactly, exactly. I mean, we’re kind of talking about this before the episode, too, right, which in a way it does feel nice because one of the other things is I moved. I’m kind of like, “Okay.” I’m going to get a nice, long chunk of time to really get to know the city where I live because so much of my life has been, yeah, I live somewhere and I travel every other weekend to somewhere else and even when the shutdowns really started in DC it was actually kind of nice to just like, buckled down in DC for a minute and really just sort of get to know my monuments, my neighborhood, the things around me, you know? Then everything shut down. I’m not like, super incredibly bummed. I’m not distraught and screaming. I’m excited to be chill for a while but I kind of got to this place where the virtual events just weren’t giving me the same thing.
Joe Howard:
Totally, yeah. I think if I’m being honest, although we’re throwing this WPMRR virtual event, I’m not a super big virtual event attender myself. I think probably part of that is like, where I am in my business and my WordPress journey. I’m almost 10 years into my WordPress journey and so the value I get is from like, when I go to WordCamps, I don’t really go to do a lot of business stuff. I go to see friends, I go to hang out. It’s my fun time. I find it hilarious that work pays for me to go to WordCamps. This is a vacation, this isn’t a business trip but I think that just based on where I am, the virtual events don’t … I don’t really get to see my friends at the virtual events. The virtual events are much better for content absorbing, not as good for the hallway trek, as we call it.
Christie Chirinos:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Joe Howard:
Some people use it for networking and stuff but a lot of people just go chat and shoot the shit about WordPress. That’s what I like to do. That’s where a lot of my learning happens as like a WordPress professional. I think I’m kind of with you in that boat. Our event is for people who want to get that content, who want to get it all at one place and want to improve their businesses based on that. A lot of people will attend our event for that reason and we’re trying to find ways to do more hallway chat stuff but it just totally like, it’s not the same as IRL. Yeah. I think it’s a little bit of a struggle for me, too. I’d probably put myself in the same boat as you. I was looking forward to WordCamp US and some more in person meetups. From a business standpoint, I’m kind of like, “Okay, we’re a remote company. Okay, I guess no one is really using their travel budget right now.” From a business perspective I’m like, “Cool, we’re probably saving $20 to $30000 this year for people’s travel budgets.” That’s fine. Good, that’s good for us, the business has a little better cash flow. We’re doing most of the same stuff.
Joe Howard:
But those $20 to $30000 we spent for our travel budget for folks to like, go to WordCamps and have fun and go learn new things and professional development and all of these things. So there’s a loss there, as well. I know that because I feel the same way. I would love to go to some more … See people at these events. I do find myself missing them a lot. But I got a lot of other stuff to do, you know? I’ve got an eight month old at home, the family’s doing well and there’s always a lot of work to do on WP Boston stuff. It’s not the end of the world for me but I know there were people who were really upset about the fact that they won’t be able to literally do this for a while because WordPress really is core to their, not maybe only their work but their social circle.
Christie Chirinos:
Right.
Joe Howard:
Maybe even core to their belief structure. A lot of people do WordPress because they’re open source, this is what I do. Now I can’t do that with people in person and I understand that challenge. I think Joe Casabona wrote an interesting article recently, it’s on I think Casabona.org about virtual events burnout. I think that attending virtual events is one way to get your fix for work, hanging out with other people, being in chat with folks, just hanging out in Zoom and doing some Zoom calls and setting up some Zoom happy hours with people is also good. But other than that it is kind of a struggle. I don’t know if there’s any other ways to making sure you’re avoiding burnout and stuff. Probably turning off technology that’s not specific to this time of our lives. It should probably be always you should be focusing on that but take times away from the internet and online and do responsible hangouts with people. A lot of places you can still go outside, right? Go on a hike with some friends and if you feel comfortable doing that, you can stay six feet apart and go hiking. We’ve done that a few times with friends. I think that’s a good way to have those connections without necessarily going to a concern with a bunch of people, right?
Christie Chirinos:
Yeah. I think you kind of hit the nail right on the head there where you said there are people in our community for whom these in person WordPress events constitute a lot of social needs and a lot of belief and spirituality needs and I think it can actually be … This is totally real, right? It can be really damaging to somebody in that category to have this taken away and I don’t know, that’s not me. I love WordPress but I think most of my social needs are met through my non WordPress group of friends that don’t fully understand this weird WordPress thing I do.
Joe Howard:
“What do you do?” Yeah. WordPress.
Christie Chirinos:
Joe, you’re like, one of my special exceptions that you’re both. And sort of same thing with recreation, belief and things like that. Now that I’m in Austin I’ve been going outside a lot more and doing all of the different parks and springs and things like that that are here and meeting new people and I just sort of tend to be that very active sort of person and so for me, it’s not going to hit me as hard as someone who very much has a different type of relationship to be at a WordCamp every single weekend. I say this to people, I would say this to people then, I know people who are at WordCamp every single weekend. That’s where you see a ton of your friends, that’s where you see the bulk of your work. If that’s you, you got to take care of yourself. This is a significant change and downplaying it in any way is unfair to you. It’s just WordCamps? No, if your life was that deeply entrenched in WordCamps, mine wasn’t. This could get serious, right and taking care of your emotional wellbeing and the way that you have your needs for friendship and going out and things like that met in other ways for the next year, year and a half, is going to have to be really intentional, and it’s just so hard. I don’t know how to help.
Joe Howard:
Yeah. Yeah, I mean, we talked last week about Matt Cromwell’s Tweet about this and I brought up Joe’s article about this that Allie actually told me about. If people have suggestions about how to do virtual events and WordPress community itself as a digital first community better, I want to hear them. I don’t know, we don’t have all the answers here on this podcast. Sorry, listeners, if you were listening for the exact answer. We’re looking for them, too. I think that there’s more … There’s always more video conferences we can do and video calls and maybe eventually some smaller non WordPress official meetups that we could do at some point when things get a little safer. If they do, hopefully, fingers crossed. For now, we’re kind of stuck in this and if people have some ideas about how we can do online WordPress better, I’m all ears. Tweet at us, hit us up in Slack DMs. I want to hear some ideas because we’re trying our best with WPMRR Virtual Conf and other people are doing online hangouts and events and that’s great. But do they need to change now that we’re all online? Is there a different way that we could do them? Is there more we could do? Probably [crosstalk 00:45:43].
Christie Chirinos:
Does it look different when we’re doing this for two years instead of two months? That’s the question that I think we all need to ask.
Joe Howard:
Yeah, totally.
Christie Chirinos:
Because the answer is always yes. Nothing looks the same in a two year timeline compared to a two month timeline and a big part of that is going to be a lot of the really important, like you said, social and spiritual values that come from attending WordCamps for a lot of people who attend WordCamps.
Joe Howard:
Yep, for sure. Cool, I think that’s probably a good place to wrap up for the day. We had a nice list, though, of virtual conferences coming up so if nothing else, sign up for them. Go hangout in chat, watch some talks if you want to. If not, it’s a good time to chat. Allie is our community person and she’s going to be going to all these events and really just to like make the events enjoyable. She’ll be in chat, she wants to hangout with people and we can find more time to hangout as a WordPress community, that would be excellent. So if people want to leave us reviews, they should do that, because we always read them and they’re nice to read, especially when they’re five stars. They help give us new ideas for what we want to do in the future for the show. If someone really liked an episode, “Oh, we’ll do more episodes like that.” Folks can go to WPMRR.com/iTunes, redirects you right there if you want to leave us a nice little review. Q and A episodes, Christie-
Christie Chirinos:
A nice little, pretty-
Joe Howard:
You want to do some more?
Christie Chirinos:
Review. Send us questions. Send us your questions to yo, that’s Y-O, at WPMRR.com. I love Q and A episodes, I think they’re super fun and I would love to do another one.
Joe Howard:
Yes, we always like to do that and we’ll do some more in the future. We’ve got some more questions in the bank so we’ll do some more episodes coming up there, as well. If you are a new listener, go back and binge some old episodes. We’ve got a bunch of older episodes. We’ve done over 100 so there’s definitely some goodies back there. So instead of binging your new show that you found that’s not really doing anything to add value to your life except a little bit of entertainment, why don’t you do something that’ll help you build a business or build more MRR content.
Christie Chirinos:
[crosstalk 00:48:04]. Instead of wasting your time, why don’t you add more value to your business by binging our podcast? Agreed, cosigned.
Joe Howard:
I should have been just transparent about that. Yeah, don’t waste your time, people. COVID times are hard, you know? It’s easy to fall into Netflix or Hulu but schedule your time, listen to some episodes, that’s the best thing you could do. That’s all. WPMRR.com for the WPMRR Virtual Conference if you want to sign up for free. We’ll be doing that and that’ll be cool. We’ll be doing a podcast by us again next Tuesday. Thanks again for listening/watching. See you guys.
Christie Chirinos:
Thank you, bye.
