Why the WordCamp San Diego Business Track Matters

One of the more challenging developments that the WordPress Community has started talking about recently is how the Community can respond to the growing opportunities for entrepreneurs to build WordPress-based businesses.

Out of the 20,000 men and women making a living with WordPress, there’s a growing number of folks looking to build companies using WordPress. That means there is an growing need (and opportunity) for the Community to develop resources for those entrepreneurs to create and express with WordPress.

Yes, building a business is a creative expression. If you don’t believe me, just look around at the next WordCamp. You’ll see businesses of all shapes and sizes, each entity is a reflection of the entrepreneur and the employees.

As Brad and Dre asked in the Matt edition of the DradCast, “What does WordPress mean to you?” For a growing contingent of folks, WordPress means growing a scalable business that interacts with as many people as possible in addition to writing scalable code that also interacts with as many people as possible!

The Community is responding to this need by creating content around business lessons that leading WordPress entrepreneurs have learned. The Community is starting to share their business tips and tricks along with tips and tricks to build plugins and themes. Pressnomics was one example of this, and most recently, WordCamp San Diego featured an entire track of some of the best business-related talks I’ve seen in one afternoon.

If you missed the second day of WordCamp San Diego, you missed one of my favorite days of a WordCamp so far. The entire day, organized by Chris Lema, and called the Business Development Track, featured notable WordPress folks presenting on various aspects of growing successful, WordPress-based businesses.

The track was standing-room only, and I’ve personally never noticed such excitement during a Sunday Session. Part of that is due in no small part to the hard work of the organizers, who deserve credit for spending weeks and weeks to organize the event. But the content was so spot on, and filled such an important need for all the folks who pay their bills with WordPress.

Audience members ranged from freelance consultants who design and develop for a living, to larger agencies from Los Angeles who work with top brands on their entire web presence, to employees of WordPress companies growing rapidly just like WordPress itself.

Dre Armeda, one of the founders of Sucuri Security, a WordPress biz that is seeing incredible growth right now, was incredibly passionate about the event. Sucuri is providing Information Security monitoring for every WP Engine site, and thousand upon thousand of other sites, WordPress and otherwise.

Dre and I spent some time over scotch at the after party riffing on why the business presentations are so important to the Community, and I got him to offer a quote.

I think it’s an opportunity to build game changing, problem solving solutions with WordPress. But, the challenge is that many mom and pop WordPress businesses don’t know how to cultivate the great ideas into businesses beyond themselves.

The cool thing is it all comes back to community. We can learn these things together. As competitive as some segments in our Community are, the typical vibe is there is plenty to go around and there is a lot of help across the board, even between competitors. If we take that premise and use it to teach our creative/tech leaders to succeed beyond the code, we could be setting up a community that can dominate the likes of Facebook, Twitter, (name your web app of choice) alike.

There is bigger reward in building our community and validating ourselves as true players then to challenge each other so early.

The videos are already available online at Chris Lema’s blog, and they’re in the process of being submitted to WordPress.TV.

As WordPress establishes its own maturity, there is a need for more mature topics, and a new branch of topics at WordCamps, and the Community responded. Where previously it was enough to talk about building scalable WordPress and throwing in some PHP with your plugin talk, more expertise is now needed.

The WordPress Community needs to know how to write effective contracts, as well as how to to iterate and learn from business decisions on their way to success. Nobody, I don’t care who you are, really understands how to price their product or their work when they start out, but the entrepreneurs who stick with it have figured pricing out and can share their process with the rest of the Community. These are the lessons every entrepreneur must learn at each step of the success of their company. Each of these topics was covered in San Diego.

I soaked up the talks, and felt lucky to be there.

When I asked Chris Lema about it, and he had the following to say:

“I joined the organizing committee for WordCamp San Diego, not only to give my time back to the Community, but also to see if we could run an entire day focused on the business dynamics that freelancers, solopreneurs, startups, and agencies are challenged with daily in their businesses.
“WordCamps offer something you can’t get anywhere else in WordPress – a chance to learn best practices. So, I thought, couldn’t that also apply to business?

“With that question in mind, we crafted a business curriculum and then started calling in favors to get the right speakers to come share their stories. It was an amazing time and I think people really benefited from it.”

Check out the videos online here: http://chrislema.com/the-business-track/