WordCamp London: That’s A Wrap!

WP Engine’s EMEA team spent the last couple of days at WordCamp London, listening to various tracks, and speaking with the WordPress community. It’s great to be around so many people who are as passionate about WordPress as we are; wanting to learn, understand, get best practice advice, access talent, and receive quality content (and have a few drinks on the Saturday evening it seems)!

I think it’s safe to say the WordPress community is truly unique. It’s full of genuine people wanting to help – whether that’s developers, users, agencies, or freelancers. This was third WordCamp London, and it was great to see so many friendly faces!

Aside from the WP Engine team spending valuable time with the community, on Sunday morning to I presented an overview on how to approach selling into the enterprise market.

If there’s one thing people took away from my session, it’s that there is no harm in starting with smaller deals – it’s important to build a loyal customer base and ensure the product is right before going after the enterprise market. It’s not about testing on the smaller businesses, but about understanding the market before it’s scaled up into these bigger businesses.

And, even when you do break into the enterprise market, you may need to start with deals as part of a toehold strategy. This means starting with the initial project and proving yourself, which will then build a deeper relationship that may be expanded in the future. One of our customers, Manifesto, is a great example of this. Manifesto also spent some time at WordCamp London telling their story alongside one of their customers, Cancer Research UK. They’ve established a good relationship through successfully managing the Cancer Research Science Blog. This is a campaign site that now receives as many as 250,000 visitors per month!

We love spending time with the WordPress community to better understand what they want and what their pain points are – we had lots of questions about security, scaling, and service so it’s great we are able to discuss these in person to see how we can help.

So until next time WordCamp London, that’s a wrap! Next up are WordCamp Seattle and WordCamp San Diego – we’ll see you there!

Fabio Torlini is Managing Director for WP Engine. Based in London’s Tech City, his main role is helping WP Engine launch their services into Europe. With over 15 years’ experience in the hosting and cloud industry, he has a thorough understanding of all aspects of IT B2B marketing, branding, PR, channel and management. Most notably in his career, Fabio helped build Rackspace to what it has become today – a leader in the cloud industry with revenues of $1.5 billion.