Post Status Publish – A Great Event And Must Go!

A day before WordCamp US we had the great pleasure to attend to Post Status Publish! An awesome opportunity to meet and network, at a smaller scale, great people and WordPress professionals. Additionally to it we were able to see really great sessions with awesome insights.

If you like to participate the next time, or you want to network with many other WordPress professionals all year round, then go ahead and become a member of Post Status.

Also a special thank you to Brian Krogsgard and his team, who did an amazing job, making this such a great and smooth experience.

Here are a few pics of the event and a quick overview what you might have missed, we hope you enjoy as everyone enjoyed the event and if anyone wanna have some photos in the original size, don’t hesitate to ask. 🙂

Mergers, Acquisitions and Hosting In The WordPress Ecosystem

The first talk with Steve Lee and Josh Strebel of Pagely was about selling your business and what steps to consider and what to take care of if you’re thinking about selling your business. One of the suggestions and advices Steve had, that you should be prepared and know your numbers. Expect that this will need quite a lot of time from putting your business on the market and actually selling it. Also if you have 3-5 serious buyers, just focus on one and get the deal done. Because going all the way with several candidates, it will cost a lot of money and time.

It was really interesting to listen to Steve’s experience and also funny what kind of reason some clients have sometimes, why they are selling their business, for example because of their horrible wife. Josh had some really good questions and it was a great conversation to listen to. By no means, we are thinking to sell our business, but if we would, I could imagine that Steve would be the guy you can trust and he knows his business very well. It was a pleasure listening to him. He didn’t have some buzz word talking, instead he explained everything very well and you knew immediately what he was talking about.

Marketing Success In WordPress: A Case Study Of SiteGround

The next session was held by Tina Kesova of SiteGround, where she had some great insight what measurements you have to do, to be successful in the WordPress industry.

One of their experience was, don’t show up only one or two times on events and other occasions, be consistent and it will pay off after a while. After around 1 year of being active in the WordPress community, the outcome wasn’t too great and they were on the edge to stop doing it in the future. But they made the right decision to continue and it paid off. It takes a while to be recognized on WordCamps and win the trust of people in the WordPress community. Expect that it requires a long time to have the results you are aiming for.

She revealed 5 points of measures that made SiteGround so successful:

1. Get your feet into the WordPress Community. Don’t expect to be successful just because you have a great product or service. Give the love back, you are receiving from the WordPress community. It’s a giving and taking.
2. Start having meaningful and authentic relationships, instead of just trying to make the next sales pitch, it’s the right way to win the trust of influencers. If they follow you, it’s easier to win the trust of others.
3. Support shouldn’t be just for your product. You should also take care of any related problems. The client doesn’t wanna hear “it is not our fault or our problem”. They need a solution and if you can give them a solution even though the reason of the problem wasn’t your fault, they will always appreciate that and you will have a loyal customer forever. Good is not enough anymore, having an outstanding customer service should be your goal and you shouldn’t mind going the extra mile. In the long run it is always worth it.
4. Also it is important to offer, especially for developers, the right tools and possibilities to work with.
5. Last but not least, consistently work on the quality of your product and service. Without taking care of this, the other 4 points won’t help you at all!

Building A SaaS Using WordPress: The Story Of Metorik

Bryce Adams, who was working for WooThemes and Automattic, developed a cool SaaS, which is called Metorik. We probably will check it out and consider it for our latest project wildcat.co.uk, which is built on a multisite for several languages with WooCommerce including SAP integration.

Interesting thing he said is, that the future is not in Plugins but SaaS. The future of WordPress is not in a ZIP-File! I think, he is absolutely right. He lists all the advantages of having SaaS, like using WordPress REST API, everyone has the latest version immediately, it doesn’t matter which WordPress or PHP version the customer has and so on. And also the service is performing faster.

Keynote: WordPress & Publishing In A Startup Context

Christina Warren, senior writer at Gizmodo & Brian Krogsgard had also a great conversation. Brian had some interesting questions and Christina was talking about things like how her writing impacts other people’s life and the responsibility she has coming along with her writing. Like one example she had, that she wrote an article about a plugin, which paid off a new car for the developer, just by her post. One of her advices was to charge what you’re worth. WordPress solutions are usually under priced.

Core Conversations

Helen Hou-Sandi & Gary Pendergast were talking about what’s happening in the core teams, and how they handle things on a daily basis. Good to have a chance to listen to their conversation and see how things are done. They were also talking about having changes in their way of working and trying out new tools, like instead of trac using Phabricator or instead of SVN using git in the future.

Getting To Product Market Fit

Chris Lema had, as always, a really great session. He talked about having empathy with your clients. It’s important to get into the shoes of your client to understand their needs. Don’t talk about yourself, but get to know what your client needs. I get this Chris, I guess we need to change our claim right under our logo on our website inpsyde.com 🙂  Thanks for making a change in our mindset!

WordPress & The Law

Paul Sieminski General Counsel at Automattic was talking about things you have to consider and pay attention to. Unfortunately I didn’t watch his session because I had some great conversation outside the room, where great networking happened all day. Sorry Paul, but I heard it was very interesting.I will watch it later on video, which will be provided on Post Status soon.

Inside Life At An Agency

Tom Willmot and Scott Basgaard also had a great conversation about how they handle things in an agency and what kind of problems they face and how to cope with them. It was especially interesting since Scott worked for Tom for several years until he started his own agency one year ago. It was a very fun, pleasant session, where I did see that our agency is having the same problems or handles things the same way they do. It is always good to hear how things are done by other agencies. Publish was a great possibility to exchange our experience with other agencies. Chats I love to have, where we help each other making our work place even better for our team.

It was great to meet and talk to so many fun, nice and experienced people, having the same passion for WordPress and eager to learn from each other. Just like I started my post, I can’t say it enough times: Post Status Publish – A great event and must go!